The end of Religion is inevitable?

[Aiken_Drumn]

There are probably more religious people alive now than at any point in history.

Because there are more humans overall, or because more as a percentage, are turning to belief?

 

[Plains-Cow]

Why don't we start our own religion here in civfanatics?

I would make a wonderful Papal-Caliph-Guru-Rabbi. Yes, a...Pacalgura.

Moo.

 

[Joij21]

Yes, the process of testing and observing, and producing replicable results is science, even if it was 15,000 years ago. The pyramids and the roads that connected Aztec cities and the walls of Jericho were all built using engineering. In some cases, engineering so advanced, we don't even know how they did it without the machines we would use to do the same thing today. Wikipedia says the earliest recorded mathematics dates to 3000 BCE.

All science.

I wouldn't call anything before the official adoption of the scientific method "science".

Remember chemistry was alchemy before that and used to be filled with all manner of mystical woo woo.

Therefore in my opinion science really doesn't start until the enlightenment when they were finally able to strip away the woo woo and refine it into a much more methodological discipline with strict standards, international correspondence, and verification.

 

[Gorbles]

It is not a stretch to suggest those not getting married in a church.. are not Christian.

But this is insanity. Religion is decreasing, this is verifiable fact. My question is will it thus end completely.

shrugs

I wasn't ever talking about people not getting married in a church. I was just objecting to this focus on churches when a) people get married in them despite not being practising Christians, and now that I'm trying to consolidate the point b) there are plenty of other places of worship, especially in the UK.

Anyhow, I don't think "religion" is decreasing. Christianity might be in developed nations, but there are other religions and other countries to consider. Do we have any kind of actual statistics on this, across the world? Can we evidence this "verifiable fact", globally?

And beyond that, does that mean it will therefore end completely, and how long will that take? How can we predict any of this? Or is this all just "feels"? In which case, no, I don't feel it will ever end completely. Not without some kind of transcendental change in humanity itself. We could end up on different planets and still take some form of religion with us (or start new ones rooted in the old).

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Hi Valka. Maybe property taxes work different there. Here, real estate taxes would destroy all the little urban churches. But a bunch of ***holes would wind up with new property for the capitalist machine!

Don't worry, I only laugh at eye rolling when, yeah. It was a laugh worthy conclusion from where I sit, but I clarified. If you take issue with the idea that people get better at the things they practice, well, I guess that's a stance. Either way, it's nice you found people who share your social outlook on people. Kudos.

If a way could be found to give the small ones a break - the ones that are genuinely doing good deeds for people, not using their premises to preach politics or anti-vaxxer or anti-LGBT rhetoric - that would be okay. But the large, flashy ones that are obscenely wealthy, and still try to guilt low-income people into donating, or the ones that do preach politics, anti-vaxxer and hide behind their religious status to spread hate speech? I have no sympathy for them or their followers. The ones here who defied the social distancing rules during the pandemic and openly supported the freedumb convoys and spread hate speech? NO SYMPATHY. They are NOT the victims.

I have no idea what you're talking about, saying I take issue with people getting better at the things they practice. Is that from some post I either didn't see, misread, or are you doing your unique brand of metaphor that only you understand? You're going to have to explain that, because I am only partially fluent in "Farm Boy" when you get going in threads like these.

If you think atheist groups are bastions of groupthink and we're all on the same page, think again. The only thing we share in common is the lack of belief in deities, spirits, paranormal, etc. Otherwise, there are plenty of different opinions on a lot of things.

I wouldn't call anything before the official adoption of the scientific method "science".

Remember chemistry was alchemy before that and used to be filled with all manner of mystical woo woo.

Therefore in my opinion science really doesn't start until the enlightenment when they were finally able to strip away the woo woo and refine it into a much more methodological discipline with strict standards, international correspondence, and verification.

Of course not. It just wouldn't do to give credit to anyone in classical times who did experiments and used math and physics to figure things out, would it?

A quick google gave me multiple dates for the beginning of the scientific method, and there were plenty that occurred before the Enlightenment. Or are you going to tell us that Galileo wasn't doing science? Was Copernicus not doing science? Yes, Kepler made more money at astrology than astronomy, but he did figure out the laws of planetary motion.

Oh, and about that guy who figured out a near-accurate calculation of the circumference of Earth... hmm. Eratosthenes, in the 3rd century BCE:

He started out with a question, went on to a hypothesis, assembled what he needed, obtained the data, did the calculations, and came to a conclusion. That's the basics of the scientific method. The fact that the scientific method wasn't formalized until many centuries later is irrelevant.

 

[Farm Boy]

saying I take issue with people getting better at the things they practice.

Like wtf valka. You quote the part about rolling eyes but lose the context? Or you don't care about the point. Or you didn't read it? It's exhausting to constantly catch people up to every exchange they want to painbody on.

 

[Harv]

Latecomer to the conversation and cannot track all of the conversations going on, and going to the question posed by the thread title with a short answer: NO.
Nature abhors a vacuum. So when one is created, something will rush in to replace it.

An interesting theory I read about on Quora (a mix of sense and nonsense answers to questions) is religion is like a glue that holds a society together. Without a religion, we cannot exceed the Dunbar number of approximately 150. A society without its religion will die off in three generations and leave a vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum and something will rush in and replace it. The society will be in the image of the dominant religion. (Added note - in the absence of a religion, it will resemble the religion used to grab the moral code.)

 

[PPQ_Purple]

Religion will newer die because it is simply too useful. Religion is an instrument of control whose purpose is to be the force through which those with power keep those without power convinced that the current state of affairs is not just normal but in fact desirable.

"Why rise up?", the starving masses will ask, "when salvation awaits us in heaven."
"Why revolt?", cry the oppressed, "when we know the great leader is all knowing."
"Why rebel?", rebuke the exploited, "when all our suffering is but the price we must pay for our freedom."
"Why fight the power?", ask the powerless, "when we have people of different genders, race or other to fight instead."

Blinded by their faith, be that in god, ideology, the glorious leader or the modern liberal agenda the oppressed majority will welcome their oppression. And they will do so with a smile on their face and thanks on their lips to those oppressing them. Religion, by any other name will persist for as long as there are those with power and those without. Or at least those who dream them self such. It's just too useful a tool not to.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Like wtf valka. You quote the part about rolling eyes but lose the context? Or you don't care about the point. Or you didn't read it? It's exhausting to constantly catch people up to every exchange they want to painbody on.

The pertinent part of that post of yours was you being condescending to a fellow forum member and addressing him as "boy." That's rude.

I can go back and re-read the post if you want me to find something else to criticize.

Latecomer to the conversation and cannot track all of the conversations going on, and going to the question posed by the thread title with a short answer: NO.
Nature abhors a vacuum. So when one is created, something will rush in to replace it.

An interesting theory I read about on Quora (a mix of sense and nonsense answers to questions) is religion is like a glue that holds a society together. Without a religion, we cannot exceed the Dunbar number of approximately 150. A society without its religion will die off in three generations and leave a vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum and something will rush in and replace it. The society will be in the image of the dominant religion. (Added note - in the absence of a religion, it will resemble the religion used to grab the moral code.)

Huh. At this point I have to wonder how far one of my own metaphors has reached on the 'net. Comparing religion to a "social glue that helps hold a society together" is something I started saying online over 15 years ago, and before that when I had my anthropologist's hat on in discussing religion. I guess I've said it enough times that it's out there now.

Kind of like "Reform-Conservative/Reformed Conservative" on the political comment pages on CBC. I coined that term for two reasons - first, to avoid getting my comment reported and pinked for using the more common term "Reformacon" and second, to distinguish the different kinds of Conservatives we have here. The ones that grew out of the Reform Party are not the same as the older, more traditional Progressive Conservatives that no longer exist either federally or in my province of Alberta.

 

[Moriarte]

"mass immigration" of Catholics and Muslims from elsewhere...

China, biggest nation of the world, also one of the least religious..

China protects itself pretty well, the West has resurgence of religiosity due to immigration, in the Russian territories there have been a resurgence of religiosity due to other reasons: partly economic, partly ideological. In the Soviet Union, just like in modern China, state atheism prevented excessive construction of new churches of any religions - that's just how communist ideology treated mystical thinking - "Opium for the masses". In the 90-ies the economic course in RF was changed, the state religious lobbying returned and the wave of investment started flowing: Islam competed with Eastern Orthodoxy and other religions for the souls and wallets of new acolytes by constructing new places of worship and by working with the masses through media to return those that could be returned to the fold. All this accompanied by a rapid fall in the quality of education, by economic privatisation - religious immersion became a soothing element within the long awaited (by some) return to economic Middle Ages.

To answer the question put forward in the OP - Yes, the end of organised religion is inevitable. But fanatics can easily have another 1000 years of Disco, if those in charge keep neglecting education, which they probably will. Education does not guarantee immediate release from religious oppression. However, it has been demonstrated abundantly: when education is neglected, the minds slowly gravitate back towards mysticism.

 

[Farm Boy]

The pertinent part of that post of yours was you being condescending to a fellow forum member and addressing him as "boy." That's rude.

<shrugs> The keeper of the "Farm Boy language" is pretty indifferent at trying to predict what you will think is rude. It's like trying to draw the face of God. Either way, Farm Boy considers calling somebody "boy" to be in-group language.

But it does help my responses to know you aren't actually following along. I am legit glad you found good people to talk to.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Aren't actually following what along? I do read your posts. I just don't reply to all your points.

 

[Joij21]

He started out with a question, went on to a hypothesis, assembled what he needed, obtained the data, did the calculations, and came to a conclusion. That's the basics of the scientific method. The fact that the scientific method wasn't formalized until many centuries later is irrelevant.

Well maybe that's just the need of some to stretch the definition of science so as to increase the amount of past great people within the discipline, otherwise you only have great individuals of science spanning the last three hundred years. Not very impressive if your goal is to prove the superiority of one discipline over organized religion which has existed in one form or another for at least the last 12,000 years (would be even older if we consider tribal/totemic religions as "organized")

To answer the question put forward in the OP - Yes, the end of organised religion is inevitable.

No. People still have needs for religious beliefs, just not everybody. Plus I'm pretty skeptical that people would somehow not have some kind of organized religion in the future.

Seems like you'd need some kind of global government with mandated state enforcement of atheism with a socialist slant. U.S.S.R. but gone global. Maybe possible if the future of the world is a Chinese hegemony over all the nations. Nevertheless this would require either the dissolution of the West or the West simply imitating a future successful (theoretically I must add) C.C.P. style of governance if it's demonstrated they can pull ahead economically and educationally whereby that specific style of management (the one party socialist, quasi capitalist, authoritarian, centralized apparatus) becomes idolized by future Western intellectuals and leaders as something worth mimicry.

A lot politically could go down whereby none of the above actually happens. And I would say because what I mentioned is a very specific scenario that requires specific things to go down in a specific manner, I'd say it pretty much won't happen. Or at least it's very unlikely. Not to mention the West is democratic rather than authoritarian so there'd at least be substantial populist resistance by the general electorates of the respective Western nations whereby it would be difficult for said intellectuals to attempt reform which would produce a replication of the Chinese Socialist system, thus it would probably take civil wars with successful intellectual lead revolutionary governments to come to power with the populists losing of course.

Religion will newer die because it is simply too useful. Religion is an instrument of control whose purpose is to be the force through which those with power keep those without power convinced that the current state of affairs is not just normal but in fact desirable.

I'm not sure it's always about control. In many cases yes, but in some it's more personal or about being content in a reality whereby most individuals don't really have much power to change anything at all, be it death, getting screwed over by someone else, etc.

 

[Lexicus]

There is no such thing as "religion" per se. I believe, but cannot prove, that the idea of religion as a separable sphere of human activity emerged in the West due to the specific history of the Christian church(es) existing as "corporations" in the Roman legal sense, thus it began to make sense to speak of "religious" affairs as their own thing. For virtually all of human history, "religion" blended seamlessly with all other areas of human activity. This is still kind of how it works outside the West today where people have household gods etc.

It is also a mistake to view all "religion" through a lens of Abrahamic monotheism. Most people in history would find the distinction between, like, empirical knowledge and religion that was posited earlier in this thread to be nonsensical.

A very good series of blog posts on "practical polytheism" which talks about how people in polytheistic cultures thought about this stuff (tl;dr is in contrast with monotheism where god is concieved of as completely remote from human & indeed all physical existence, polytheist practice is intimately connected with empirical knowledge & experience and tends to be geared toward immediate practical ends).

Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part I: Knowledge

Today we’re going to start looking at one facet of how polytheistic religions function, their practicality. This is going to be a four-part series (II, III, IV) looking at some of the general…

acoup.blog

 

[PPQ_Purple]

China protects itself pretty well, the West has resurgence of religiosity due to immigration, in the Russian territories there have been a resurgence of religiosity due to other reasons: partly economic, partly ideological. In the Soviet Union, just like in modern China, state atheism prevented excessive construction of new churches of any religions - that's just how communist ideology treated mystical thinking - "Opium for the masses". In the 90-ies the economic course in RF was changed, the state religious lobbying returned and the wave of investment started flowing: Islam competed with Eastern Orthodoxy and other religions for the souls and wallets of new acolytes by constructing new places of worship and by working with the masses through media to return those that could be returned to the fold. All this accompanied by a rapid fall in the quality of education, by economic privatisation - religious immersion became a soothing element within the long awaited (by some) return to economic Middle Ages.

To answer the question put forward in the OP - Yes, the end of organised religion is inevitable. But fanatics can easily have another 1000 years of Disco, if those in charge keep neglecting education, which they probably will. Education does not guarantee immediate release from religious oppression. However, it has been demonstrated abundantly: when education is neglected, the minds slowly gravitate back towards mysticism.

Communism is just a secular religion though.

 

[Gorbles]

Communism is just a secular religion though.

Capitalism says ayyyyyyyyy.

 

[Farm Boy]

There is no such thing as "religion" per se. I believe, but cannot prove, that the idea of religion as a separable sphere of human activity emerged in the West due to the specific history of the Christian church(es) existing as "corporations" in the Roman legal sense, thus it began to make sense to speak of "religious" affairs as their own thing. For virtually all of human history, "religion" blended seamlessly with all other areas of human activity. This is still kind of how it works outside the West today where people have household gods etc.

It is also a mistake to view all "religion" through a lens of Abrahamic monotheism. Most people in history would find the distinction between, like, empirical knowledge and religion that was posited earlier in this thread to be nonsensical.

A very good series of blog posts on "practical polytheism" which talks about how people in polytheistic cultures thought about this stuff (tl;dr is in contrast with monotheism where god is concieved of as completely remote from human & indeed all physical existence, polytheist practice is intimately connected with empirical knowledge & experience and tends to be geared toward immediate practical ends).

Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part I: Knowledge

Today we’re going to start looking at one facet of how polytheistic religions function, their practicality. This is going to be a four-part series (II, III, IV) looking at some of the general…

acoup.blog

God doesn't feel so remote the more he touches your life. Your hair will grey in fits and spurts like Moses, too, aging isn't a gentle slide, it's more like a lazy river theme park ride with erratic fatal rapids. God's touch hurts. God's touch is change. Still the only thing worth living for. Something has to be. Especially if you are going to create mortal children to sacrifice to the world. May all of everyone's here add beauty to the dance.

 

[PPQ_Purple]

Capitalism says ayyyyyyyyy.

The ideology of western liberal capitalism is also a religion. You need only look at how the people advocating it are doing so from a perspective of faith rather than sanity.
When you hear the poor arguing minimal wage laws are bad you can't but draw a parallel to the poor dying of the plague who cling to the notion that god has a plan.

God doesn't feel so remote the more he touches your life. Your hair will grey in fits and spurts like Moses, too, aging isn't a gentle slide, it's more like a lazy river theme park ride with erratic fatal rapids. God's touch hurts. God's touch is change. Still the only thing worth living for. Something has to be. Especially if you are going to create mortal children to sacrifice to the world. May all of everyone's here add beauty to the dance.

Why does something have to be worth living for? Why do you need a purpose higher than simply existing?

 

[Joij21]

In Ancient Egypt there was no word whatsoever for the term "religion". Religious belief and reality were considered on and the same.

The Greeks were the first to separate between that which is mystical and that which is material. Thus the difference between religiosity and secularity was made, with differing legal responsibilities of the state when it comes to supporting the temples and it's more worldly responsibilities such as day to day governance and tax collection.

 

[Lexicus]

The Greeks were the first to separate between that which is mystical and that which is material.

Wrong!