I don't there's much, if any, evidence for this claim. Religion is in a steep decline in Europe but there's little evidence for more anti-social behavior. The American mid-west, where your quote comes from, in contrast is especially religious for an advance industrial area and it's noted for it's horrific social problem.
On religion and social health I do have to ask which way the arrow of causation goes. Is Europe healthier in many ways because people are less religious, or are people less religious because they experience less crises and dysfunctions that drive them toward religion?
When someone's father just died of an overdose or their marriage is failing and their family is breaking apart, which secular philosopher would you recommend that they read?
I understood you as "entertaining the possibility" of your original quote. I don't think that you can take such a statement in terms of "big if true" without looking at a larger context.
On religion and social health I do have to ask which way the arrow of causation goes. Is Europe healthier in many ways because people are less religious, or are people less religious because they experience less crises and dysfunctions that drive them toward religion?
I don't think there's a strong arrow of causation either way. The US is very religious (for a developed nation) for it's historical/social and economic reasons and Europe less-so similarly. The one thing I'd say is that, statistically, there's little plausible evidence that "turning to religion" helps the US' problems.
When someone's father just died of an overdose or their marriage is failing and their family is breaking apart, which secular philosopher would you recommend that they read?
It seems half this thread has been riding the strawman of "secular philosophers". I could mention a variety of secular sources that make an effort to provide hope or reconciliation or whatever from the Sartre and Camus to the latest self-help, non-religious stuff claims to provide a lot.
But the real way these argument are faulty is that they assume religious approaches are somehow the tried and true approach for dealing with tragedy and that assumption is just unjustified. If we throw the gates open to discussion of how to deal with all of life's difficulties it's a big topic and one I'm going to claim I have all the answers to. But I don't want let the assumption "religious is well known for dealing well this stuff" just slip in. That's not my experience. I've seen religious people spend a lot of time blaming the people who've experienced these tragedies. I've seen people turn away from religion and not find it useful and I've with a variety of personal tragedies without religion and done just fine. That's anecdotal but it's mostly refusing to accept your presupposition.
Religion may be the opium of the masses but opium isn't usually isn't a cure for what ails it's average user.
To be honest, I've never heard of the midwest referred to anything other than boring, which seems like it would be a strong contradiction to "horrific social problems"
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwestern_United_States
The top Midwest state is South Dakota, in 12th place.
There are deep and rigorously rational and ethical reasons to be against the current vaccine narratives promulgated by this administration. It's ignorant and disingenuous to dismiss the arguments as equivalent to the "vaccines are made of mercury, cause autism, the lord is my vaccine,etc" single digit iq cretins.
It got politicized because apparently both parties decided it was OK to fuck with America's pandemic response, because it justifies expansion of power and control. Never let a crisis go to waste.
Everyone I talked to believed in one or in most cases many conspiracies up and down the list. There was alot of anti joe-biden pro trump activity and a lot of Evangelical Christian crap (main speaker led everyone in Christian prayer).
Lots of Bill Gates and Fauci hate and lots of 5g is a world domination conspiracy.
I don't deny there may be some people only there about the mandate. But I've found that , that sort of person seems to be rare
Also, orthodox Jews are idiot conspiracy theorists? Yes, I guess so. People neglect to include Jews when they criticize religious people because they have their favorite demonized religion (Christianity) and somehow venerate the others.
There are zillions of ordinary people living ordinary lives all over the world who are largely areligious, especially in industrialized countries so this doesn't seem very accurate beside coming off as somewhat condescending. Additionally, for most ordinary people over many of the thousands of years in question, participation in the dominant religion of the time and place was compulsory.
> Additionally, for most ordinary people over many of the thousands of years in question, participation in the dominant religion of the time and place was compulsory.
This is kind of a weird statement; for most of human history there was no line between religion and culture. So if participation in human culture is "compulsory" then I suppose you are technically correct, but then your statement is vacuously true.
The thing is, it won't.
Remove "religious" from this sentence and it is still true. Now the question remains whether a religious community is better than other communities. I doubt it, because religion usually comes with a lot of extra baggage and can become outright dangerous.
Religious community members have far more reason to avoid acknowledging their drug problem in a way that might make that information public.
This is whataboutism to an absurd degree.
"Yeah, religion is not perfect, but atheism is not perfect either, so they're both on par".
No, they're not.
> and I don't see any evidence that people who abandon religion automatically become more rational.
They just abandoned an irrational belief, so by definition, they are immediately more rational.
Can you please give one example of secular philosophy promoting irrational thinking?
So, here is my example, up until the mid 90’s it was widely believed in the medical community that babies could not feel pain. Anyone who has ever spent time around newborns knows that these little humans can indeed feel pain. Yet somehow, secular men of science came to the conclusion that no, they could not, and what we thought were pain responses were just reflexes. Besides, the infant wouldn’t remember it. They would perform surgeries without anesthesia on babies up to a year old.
Part of the problem as to why this profoundly wrong notion held on for so long was that there really wasn’t a good way to quantify infant pain. Eventually some researchers finally got around to devising some kind of measurement and the science eventually came around. But for a good part of the 20th century an incredible amount of pain was inflicted because a scientific notion couldn’t be refuted by a non-scientific argument (of course that baby feels pain, just look at him).
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3523036
This isn’t a scathing indictment of secular values, but rather, a cautionary tale. Not everything needs to be proven via peer-reviewed papers. A lot of the human experience can still be asserted and known using unscientific or pre-scientific reasoning.
> there’s this pervasive notion that you can’t assert anything without some citation or study to prove your point
Yes. That's to prevent people from making false assertions. I can't believe you're arguing that people shouldn't need facts to back up their statements.
I never said people shouldn’t need facts to back up their statements. I am trying to say that there are other ways to make assertions without having to cite peer reviewed studies.
And, that when people get stuck in a mindset of dismissing any idea that doesn’t have a citation to justify it, when subjects come up that aren’t easily studied empirically you end up with a blind spot. In my example the blind spot was infant pain. In my mind, any rational person would look at a crying baby and come to the conclusion that the little baby feels pain. But, if you demanded I bring a fact to back that assertion up, for the longest time I couldn’t provide you with one.
https://dictionary.apa.org/learned-response
Anyway, my point is that a religious framework isn't needed to have a gut feeling about something.
> (knowledge from) an ability to understand or know something immediately based on your feelings rather than facts
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/intui...
I know plenty of religious people also like the scientific method and empiricism, but probably only as much as where it won’t conflict with their beliefs. I’m sure a pious doctor would easily dismiss a paper refuting the efficacy of prayer. So to me, at least, this kind of scientific worldview is not really a feature of religious thinking, but the two can coexist up to a point.
Scientific theories carry with them the premise that they are merely the best theory so far and are subject to revision as new data comes to light. Some may jealously guard the fruits of their labor against newer better understanding and people both lie and fail to do the proper due diligence but the process though flawed because it is carried out by flawed humans is fundamentally different and better.
Daniel Kolak claims that only one person actually exists (open individualism), and everyone is the same person, it is just that most of us haven't realised this fact yet. Graham Priest rejects the law of non-contradiction, and argues that it is possible for a proposition to be equally true and false, at exactly the same time and in exactly the same way (dialetheism), and has even suggested that these true contradictions may exist in the real physical world, not just in abstract thought about paradoxes. Nick Bostrom argues that we may be living in a computer simulation, and if we are not, that's bad news, it is evidence that humanity is doomed, or at least that our prospects as a species are not as bright as many hope (the simulation argument). David Chalmers argues that conscious awareness is a property not just of humans and (higher?) animals, but rather that everything in the universe is conscious, even inanimate objects such as rocks, stars, planets, galaxies, even cells and molecules and atoms and subatomic particles (panpsychism).
Are these ideas "irrational"? Rationality is in the eye of the beholder. But they are just as much "out there" as those of many of the great religious philosophers–whether Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, etc.
I think this highlights that while the specific claims of religion (on the age of the earth, origin of species, existence of God, etc) may well be false, religion nevertheless can be a useful social technology.
But this is a problem, because:
(1) many people who might otherwise become religious adherents can't be expected to beleive what to them is silly bafflegab (they could always just pretend to, but that has its own costs too)
and (2) religions tends to be really keen that new adherents actually do belief in their belief systems.
One solution might be an idea Scott Alexander had, of separating true-with-respect-to-external-reality from true-with-respect-to-human-psychology (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/15/raikoth-history-religi...):
>Raikothin religion, sumurhe in its own language, recognizes two aspects of God, called Truth and Beauty. The existing world is a poorly ordered mishmash of these two aspects, whereas God is the two aspects artfully and perfectly combined.
>Truth includes everything that actually objectively exists, in the exact way that it actually exists. This aspect is mathematical, precise, and completely devoid of subjectivity. It is symbolically associated with winter, stars, the colors blue and silver, and all the hard sciences as well as math.
>Beauty includes feelings, dreams, hopes, personality, meaning. This aspect is numinous, charged with emotion, and fantastic. It is symbolically associated with summer, roses, the colors green and gold, and all the arts, especially poetry and especially especially music.
>This philosophy cashes out into a formalization of two different ways of looking at things, the Elith-mirta and Ainai-mirta (Perspective of Truth and Perspective of Beauty). The sumurhe religion itself is a perfect example. In the Elith-mirta, it is a useful metaphor for the fact that some things are easier to understand using mathematics and other things are easy to understand using native anthropomorphic intuitions, as well as a recognition that religion promotes psychic health and strengthens community ties. In the Ainai-mirta, Truth and Beauty are literal anthropomorphic deities (the god Elith and the goddess Ainai) who are worshiped through prayer and sacrifice and invoked for strength in times of need.
To compare apples to apples somebody should start a church of secular philosophy.
"Creationism is true if it will keep my kids off oxycontin."
(I'm guessing the poster was from the rural Midwestern US.)
I'm not saying I agree with that statement, but I can see where they are coming from. I found it to be one of the more profoundly honest and deep statements I've ever encountered.
Secular philosophy has failed to produce enough value for ordinary people living ordinary lives embedded in the ordinary matrix of threats and opportunities presented by every day life. Religion has done that for thousands of years. Sometimes it does that quite well and sometimes it does it very badly, but at least it tries.
Yes sometimes religion is full of shit, but secular philosophy and ideology is sometimes full of shit as well. One can find examples of both religion and secular philosophy promoting irrational thinking. I think things like antivax and Qanon can be blamed as much on postmodernism as religion, and I don't see any evidence that people who abandon religion automatically become more rational. Many just glom onto other forms of superstition or secular but totally insane ideas.
Go read some academic philosophy. The older stuff is deeply abstract, looking down at the world from orbit and drawing a lot of deep but distant conclusions. The newer stuff is completely impenetrable to someone who has not studied the subject in depth. Very little of it is relevant to someone working a regular job and trying to raise kids.
Speaking of kids... much secular philosophy barely mentions children at all, or seems indifferent to them. The fact that the central generative process of all organic life gets barely a mention in secular philosophy is to me a profound indicator of something very deeply wrong. It's like physics avoiding the subjects of electromagnetism or gravity and trying to make sense of everything else.
The marketplace of ideas is like any other marketplace. If your store does not stock what people need they will shop elsewhere. If you don't like where they are shopping, it's your problem for not producing the right products. The customer is always right.