Don't worry about it if some members of a group you self-identify with are assholes. It's a problem when most of them do, and then you have to disassociate yourself with a different label.
Hell, I'm atheist, and I still call out other "atheists" who tell others "your god doesn't exist", or who refuse to wish others "Merry Christmas", etc.
If too many atheists are militant about others' belief system, I'm going to stop calling myself atheist and identify as something else ("Member of the religion of 'We don't care who is up there or if they exist'", although that's quite a mouthful).
Me: I'm an agnostic.
Atheist: So you believe there might be a god?
Me: Not at all!
Atheist: So you're an atheist! Just embrace it!
Me: You're right! The Abrahamic God almost surely [1] does not exist. I am an atheist!
Atheist: What do you mean almost surely?! What's with the equivocation?
Me: It's a mathematical term. Probability converges toward 1.
Atheist: You think there is a remote possibility Santa Claus exists, too?
Everything regarding the real world is 'almost surely'. I 'almost surely' have a job, a house, a brother and two cats. Any of those might be falsified at any time, but it's a pointless waste of time to faff about it and pedantically make it explicit how I'm pretty sure I'm still employed, but I can't exclude the possibility that maybe I'm not anymore.
I get why you would make an unqualified rejection of the concept of a Sky Daddy. In practice I do, too. We human beings have so much ahead of us, and arbitrary lifestyle demands and fevered imaginings of desert nomads dead over 2000 years don't have a place in our present, much less our future.
Of the infinite set of all possible assertions about the nature of the cosmos, Sky Daddy is almost surely wrong. But then, I believe all assertions about the nature of the cosmos are all almost surely wrong.
I'm a Christian and have no problem with Atheist's or what have you. There's a strong chance that there isn't a heaven/hell/72 virgins/what have you waiting "on the other side". I can still be confident in the tactile important parts (IE: Do unto others, love they neighbor, etc) without having my worldview destroyed by a "might" or a "maybe".
It amazes me when someone can say with 100% confidence that it does or doesn't exist.
All societies function on the 10 commandments without them being explicitly written. Convergent evolution of the concept of society leans towards that. Lying, coveting, and laying all result in the same outcomes.
I also tend to follow JBPetersons line of thinking in that "religion" is a result of hundreds of thousands of years of "evolution". "religions" codify, as you've said, the important parts of life (Don't steal, kill, that's not your wife, etc).
There is physical truth - an apple weighs this much, an atom has these parts, etc.
And then there is Truth - don't lie. Don't steal. Don't screw your neighbor or your neighbors wife. Those aren't "true" like the weight of an atom is true... but it is true as in life is better if you live with those "rules".
Religions give a basis of reference - and yes, that comes with some of the baggage (IE: Catholic priests, holy rollers in churches getting caught in bath houses, etc). It is hard - and at times impossible - to separate the Church from the Truth at the core.
Like you said, all religions have similar cores... but there ARE differences - Jesus was a carpenter... Muhamad was a warlord. Buddha was a scholar. Their cores are very similar but there are differences in and out of the religions.
Bit of a ramble as it's hard to pack a complicated conversation in a few paragraphs.
As with any ideology, there are of course those who wish to exploit it to their own ends, which is where we get the atrocities that have happened through human history.
I hope we can survive as a species long enough to figure a solution.
"Police are infallible!" is now "police are infallible?", thanks to activists and media attention on the very real problems faced by minorities in the US. The people who were previously sitting very comfortably and safe on top of the pile are feeling their position threatened, so of course they're afraid of the world becoming more equitable. That's just too bad for them.
The extremists will move to another cause or mellow out, but that spark of activism is needed to effect real social change.
You didn't notice hundreds of millions in damage in multiple states? I think the number may be in the billions... Court houses destroyed... people killed... ran over.. 4 years of violence. Flash mobs against people who go against the Woke tenants and Woke Crusaders to burn the heathens at the stake.
Overblown? Violence and destruction continues by "peaceful activists" as they spread Love and Tolerance by destroying those who disagree.
"Police are infallible" thanks to people willing to lie and destroy to get their ways. And while the violence escalates and police get more "infallible?"... people around the country are more unsafe than ever... the cities that are defunding police are seeing spikes in violence, murder, robberies, etc.
Because idiots focus on a couple bad apples and ignore the millions of good interactions and positive things police provide.
"too bad for them" I like how your basic premise is "they aren't violent or intolerant" yet it's fear and violence that are making "them" scared.
Too bad for them? Too bad for the hypocrites that use hate to fight hate and racism to fight racism and violence to support lies.
Do you think it might be possible, at all, that those who fear the woke might know some things about which you are unaware? Incidents, details or facts that, if you yourself knew them, would change your mind? Yes, no...?
(Yes, I'm also in camp "philosophically, no probability estimate can ever be exactly 0 or 1" ;-)
(This is cleanly visible if you try to transform probabilities to log-odds representation - of the extremes, one becomes undefined, and the other infinite.)
My belief is that human understanding of the cosmos is much more limited than we generally understand it to be. Relative to what (I believe) the cosmos contains, human beings have no more, and no less, capacity to understand it than any arbitrary animal. We can explain only that which is important and relevant to ourselves, and vast arenas are foreclosed even to our perception.
The problem is that the US is an aggressively authoritarian country, and the default tone is violent narcissistic bullying.
Unlike other authoritarian countries this isn't explicitly state sanctioned.
It's more of a continually dramatised and modelled mode of relationship which is so ingrained in so many public interactions - from school to work to "self help" to corporate culture to mainstream media to social media to large parts of elected government - that it sinks into the background as a kind of unavoidable noise.
It would be deafening if you'd never experienced it before. Because it's so common it's tuned out consciously, but still dominant unconsciously.
The "woke" part isn't the problem. It's the copying of the dominant emotional ideology that leads to both left and right extremism, and also justifies excess corporate power and other horrors.
It's all part of the same issue, but both left and right are only looking at small parts of it - and getting angry about those while missing the underlying issue.
This realization is basically how the "NPC" meme was born. It predated the "no inner voice" study, that's just how most people seem to have come across the idea because the study half-jokingly caused a "wait a minute, we were right?" moment.
If you ask a religious person "what do you think is the chance that god exists?". A rational person will never say 100%, because objectively you cannot be 100% sure.
But a religious person is wired in a way were they are unable to admit this fact. It is a lie people tell themselves because somehow they think it benefits them.
Now whether it really benefits them or not, I'm not sure. But I would think nothing can beat the objective truth, and that truth might include probabilities.
Besides, aren't all your actions based on beliefs that are are less than 100% certain? I don't know that the line of code I'm writing is going to compile, or that the company I'm working for isn't going to go under tomorrow, or that the relationships I'm investing time into are going to last forever, but I'm certain enough that I proceed with them. Believing in God isn't so different.
Beliefs are a house of cards.
This religious person can. I am not 100% on anything via reason, I just don’t think reason is the only way of knowing. I can’t be certain that my dad loves me via reason but I know he loves me via human faith because I know my father, I don’t simply know about him. Authentic Christian faith in God is similar to that.
Thankfully not all non-religious people are wired to make such sophomoric sweeping generalizations as you.
I gave up on Christians specifically when I discovered that Christians all believe different things. I would literally ask in chat rooms for a group to define one thing they all agreed on, and then watch as fights broke out - because when pushed they all disagreed violently on core ethics and dogma, and yet they also believed they were right and other people with different views "Weren't real Christians."
It turns out there is no real content to that kind of religion. It's all meta-justification for a person's existing moral leanings, and meta-interpretation of a "sacred text" which is broad enough to rationalise pretty much anything, including some appalling and terrible things. (History has plenty to say about that.)
The only true common belief is that religious self-justification is a valid and respectable process. That was the one thing they had in common.
Specifics and details were wildly variable window dressing, and heavily customised to personal taste.
There is a vibrant and ancient school of Christian moral teaching that still permeates to the core of western law and governance. Talking to strangers in chatrooms is not a serious confrontation of this reality nor any basis for dismissing it all.
> interpretation of a "sacred text" which is broad enough to rationalise pretty much anything, including some appalling and terrible things. (History has plenty to say about that.)
Interestingly, those Christians who did appalling things used the same cherry picking strategy with Scripture that you use with history.
Good people will justify their deeds through their religion, and bad people will justify their deeds through religion.
So I'm guessing you are Christian because you were raised in an environment like that.
If you were raised in Pakistan, you would have been a Muslim.
So how much chance would you give each religion to be the correct one? Because they all contradict each other, and believing in one basically states that the other can't be true.
Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Atheism & others.
Naturally, I was one of the non-religious people and therefore better. Instead of defining what I believed in, I could just attack the things I didn't believe in. It was easy. I never had to play defense. I might not win every time but I could never lose. I could rattle cages but had no cage of my own.
The way you're describing yourself is how everyone thinks. Faith and doubt are two sides of the same coin. I consider faith worthless without doubt.
> [They]...are not only attempts to fill the emptiness left by the decay of Christian theology and Christian dogma. They are themselves a kind of substitute theology. They are systems of belief and argument which may be savagely antireligious (...) but whose structure, whose aspirations, whose claims on the believer, are profoundly religious in strategy and in effect.
> (...) Those great gestures of imagination, which have tried to replace religion in the West, and Christianity in particular, are very much like the churches, like the theology, they want to replace.
> The convinced Marxist, the practising psychoanalyst, the structural anthropologist, will be outraged at the thought that his beliefs, that his analyses of the human situation, are mythologies and allegoric constructs directly derivative from the religious world-image which he has sought to replace. He will be furious at that idea. And his rage has its justification.
> Something must be understood: I do not mean that these people’s ideology is “like” a religion. I seek no rhetorical snap in the comparison. I mean that it actually is a religion. A naïve anthropologist would see no difference in type between Mormonism and this new form of antiracism.
https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-elect-neoracists-po...
1 Culturally, at least, if not really religiously. I'm about as much of a Mormon as Larry David is a Jew.
EDIT: the article linked does partially answer my question:
> There is what we could think of as a triple-Testament tome, consisting of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, and Ibram Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist. A box set of the three would take its place on coffeetables and mantlepieces nationwide.
I don't think the heart of a religion is a belief in a Prophet. Hindiusm is a religion, no one will dispute that, but that Hindus don't have the concept of a Prophet (big 'P'). Same goes for many other commonly accepted religions.
The only thing that all religions have in common is "A core set of beliefs, agreed upon among their followers".
What is the core set of beliefs agreed upon by Woke adherents?
And when the truths change, you have to remember that we were never at war with Oceania?
You can just read McWhorter, he draws a lot of parallels between Woke as a religion and Christian religion. It is somewhat amusing as an allegory. He's actually a fairly level headed critic.
Of course, if conservatives were more welcoming to atheism this wouldn't be an issue to begin with.
From the outside of the asylum, it looks like:
"Discrimination against $GROUP_THAT_IS_NOT_MALE_AND_NOT_WHITE is active and alive and is the most important fight we have".
Maybe there's others, but I'm not part of the religion so it's difficult for me to tell why the followers hold the beliefs they do, because I don't share their beliefs.
If one were to talk about religion in general, the definition would probably be close to encompassing nation states and corporations too: an intersubjective idea, that exists as long as people believe in it, and that evolves independently of any individual or group of believers.
Now that's a useful insight. Needs more thought before replying further.
Faith is realizing existence.