I don't want to support this idea because it goes against my worldview as an atheist from a very conservative society. I grew up on Hitchens and Dawkins.

But the YouGov poll [1] that the WaPo article is based seems to support this idea: 30% of Agnostics answered yes to the following question: "Do you believe in astrology, or that the position of the stars and planets influence people’s lives?"

[1]: https://today.yougov.com/topics/entertainment/articles-repor...

Dawkins [1] and Hitchens’ works on religion are pop-science/culture books, not serious academic studies. Virtually no scholars in philosophy, religious studies, etc. agree with the narratives they present.

Instead, I would read Taylor, Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution, and maybe Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality.

1. His non-biological work, that is.

(As an atheist who found The God Delusion to be one of the most important books I've ever read, as it gave me a solid framework of arguing in what I already considered to be true)

It's okay to read more digestible books, and not serious academic studies. In fact it's more than okay -- in order to understand an academic study you likely need to do a lot of reading on the topic before hand. A pop sci/culture book is very self contained. I can assure you that very few people in the world can read The Genealogy of Morals and understand much of it without having read a significant amount of philosophy before.

Personally, I read Thus Spoke Zarathustra before reading The God Delusion. I can't remember much of the Nietzsche book, but The God Delusion's arguments are forever etched into my brain. It doesn't matter if I didn't get the Russell's teapot argument from a primary source, it matters that I got it.

It’s not so much about accessibility, just quality of argument. As I said, basically no one that has read and thought significantly about religion thinks that Dawkins’ works are anything other than simple-minded polemics.

It’s the equivalent of watching a 5-hour YouTube video about programming and thinking you understand computer science, except that books by Dawkins et al are not even very good, impartial introductions to the topic. All I can say is: if the topic of religion is interesting to you, these are not good books to start with.

I also really don’t think Genealogy of Morality is all that complicated.

Edit: I just remembered this excellent book by Julian Young, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion. I really recommend that if you’re looking for a more nuanced but modern take of what Nietzsche thought about religion.

The more the nuanced the take, the less people will be drawn to it. Hence the popularity of the Bible and the Koran etc.

The Bible has over fifty books and is perhaps one of the most nuanced works of all time, hence the wide variety of Christian denominations.

I'm not familiar enough with the Qur'an to comment on it.

The Bible isn't nuanced because it's not even coherent. It's pretty much all over the place.

This is a feature for its followers, because they can and do pick and choose the parts they like and ignore the rest.

I don't think the Bible is as popular as you make it out to be.

Its really the songs / performances that carry the Christian belief; few people actually read the bible but they can all re-iterate to you that Christ was born in a manager because there was no room in the inn (not in the Bible).

Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality might not be complicated to read. And while all this stuff about good and evil is valuable context to understand religion, all the other slave morality babble feels pretty close to a YoutTube rant video.

The challenge with books like The God Delusion is that it's barely one step above strawman arguments.

It attacks claims made by some simple lay people, based on their half-baked understanding of their own faiths (which they never really dug into). However, people well versed in the religion don't actually make any such claims.

The arguments being debunked are ones that religious scholars themselves would have disagreed with. Such misrepresentations don't guide anyone

It doesn't matter how sophisticated your argument is if it's resting on something as flimsy as "I believe in god because god says he's real".

Sounds like you aren't familiar with any of the arguments in question. This comment is dripping in ignorance.

Very few real world practitioners of these religions would recognize “religious scholars” or “academic experts” as being authoritative arbiters of their religious beliefs.

And atheists don't generally recognise Richard Dawkins as the arbiter of their beliefs either.

If someone were to attack the arguments for atheism in good faith I would hope they would fight its strongest arguments and not just tackle a hack like Dawkins. I'd like to extend the arguments for God the same courtesy.

> people well versed in the religion don't actually make any such claims

What is a good example?

As a Muslim, I've seen Dawkins make very basic and laughably incorrect claims about Islam. It clearly shows he has extremely shallow knowledge about what he claims to criticize. Niel DeGrasse Tyson is also guilty of the same.

Here's a short clip of Dr. Sami Ameri, a published author and expert, discussing but one of Dawkin's fallacies in his book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsNpvZN76zU

Ok, I just suffered through the 13 minutes of nonsens from this "expert".

One problem is that he doesn't understand what he is arguing against. Dawkins doesn't argue that, because people tend to have similar beliefs as those around them, he has disproved those beliefs. He just uses it to illustrate the close minded way some people take the supremacy of their particular religion for granted. The question "What if you are wrong?" comes with a lot of assumptions.

It's also laughable for an expert (for a number of reasons) to claim that C.S. Lewis has disproved atheism.

And the counter argument that Dawkins himself he is an atheist because he was born in the UK in the 20th century just proves Dawkins point. I think Dawkins himself would agree that the likelihood of him being atheist would have been far lower if he would have been born in Pakistan or in 17th century England.

The point he's making is that the fallacious argument can apply both ways, so it is not something that can be used to argue for either side.

This was just a short clip that has English captions. He refuted Dawkins' book in a longer series on his main channel, but I don't think it has English captions. He is an expert, no need to be dismissive.

Does it matter all that much that they get some nuances to Islam, or other religions, incorrect when the central tenant is that there is no God / spiritual being? Like arguing over the cake decorations instead of tackling the central issue of the sponge being made of chocolate or turds.

It's not just nuances, it's entire straw man fallacies. They don't understand basic Islamic tenants and claims, let alone advanced topics like Kalam, and then they attempt to argue against it, making a mockery out of themselves.

Details do matter, because they lump all religions together and attempt to argue against them as a whole, not realizing that there exist core differences among them, even if there is potentially large overlap between say Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Disregarding these facts is doing an injustice to themselves and to their audience, and spreads ignorance and malice.

While I agree that it's bad to spread misinformation that may be harmful, I'll again appeal to you that it doesn't matter a great deal to the audience of this particular book. If the argument is that the fundamental underpinning of all these religions is untrue, unreasonable, or directionally opposite to modern science then the details are not important.

To put it another way, if you read the book and you are religious then it probably matters to you in a way that other's just don't give a damn about. For example, I remember at uni some Christians in my class debating the holy spirit / God / Jesus and the distinction or lack thereof. But if you're not Christian then it doesn't matter, that detail has no bearing on you at all. In the same way that if you are Christian then a book discussing whether Jesus was a mythical figure and retelling of an older story or a real person, that detail is just outside your belief system, it doesn't have any bearing on you and there's no point engaging with that detail.

> If the argument is that the fundamental underpinning of all these religions is untrue, unreasonable, or directionally opposite to modern science then the details are not important.

And that argument is fundamentally flawed, and is the point I'm trying to make. While it may apply to other religions, it does not apply to Islam. This is where Dawkins and his ilk show their ignorance and fall flat, and falsifies their entire approach. What appears to them as (or them falsely assuming to be) underpinnings, isn't, if I can put it in another way.

I don't see the parallel to the example you gave. Once you're inside a religion, then you can discuss its details and nuances like the examples you gave. That's a completely orthogonal discussion however. Dawkins and the neo-atheist movement are arguing core basics like the existence of God, then using some fallacies that some religions commit to discredit every religion. See the problem there?

Sorry you've kind of lost me. Islam has a god and heaven as a fundamental part doesn't it? The argument is not that there's no Christian God, it's that there are no gods of any kind and the preposition of humanity to make up mythological religions for various reasons. All religions fall into this argument.

Just because Islam has God and Paradise as a fundamental aspect does not mean that you can conflate its presentation of God with the rest of the religions, which is my point. His argument is extremely brittle and laughable.

The so-called expert and Dawkings have a fundamental disagreement over the definition of truth.

For Dawkings, truth is something that can be empirically proven. Truth for Dr. Ameri seems to be a logically sound argument.

Meaningful discourse can't happen if there is no agreement over the words being used.

logically sound derived from made up premises

We know that truth extends beyond what can be empirically proven. Meaning that just because something cannot be proven empirically, does not mean that it is not true. Furthermore, truth is not limited to what can only be empirically proven. This is what the neo-atheists/scientism followers seem to always fall for, and something that even philisophers know not to be true. I believe Godel's incompleteness theorem has something to say about the matter as well. And Dr. Ameri is an expert, you can read up about his credentials. Unlike say Dawkins who was referred to as a journalist by an academic in his field.

This is a decent book and the reviews highlight a few examples of what you’re looking for:

https://www.amazon.com/God-New-Atheism-Critical-Response/dp/...

In addition to the book linked to by the other poster, a lot of the work of David Bentley Hart addresses the fallacies of materialist arguments:

https://www.amazon.com/Experience-God-Being-Consciousness-Bl...

I haven't read this one, but seems on point: https://www.amazon.com/Atheist-Delusions-Christian-Revolutio...

To be clear, Hart's own religious views seem pretty eclectic, and he is much less dogmatically Christian than blurbs and marketing of his books suggest.

My experience with religion in the public sphere is that ~all of the religious arguments that are actually advanced in that sphere have nothing to do with ones made by religious scholars.

Attacking a strawman is perfectly appropriate in this case, because the strawman is what actually drives policy.

I've always been curious about serious scholarship of religion.

I've wondered whether it is possible to be both, say, a Christian and an atheist simultaneously (e.g., not believing that Christ existed physically, but at the same time believing that following the tenets in the religion is the right thing to do for the greater good, or perhaps interpreting the Bible completely metaphorically).

I imagine that scholars can have serious disagreements over the meaning of the Bible or even its provenance without necessarily leaving the religion.

> Christian and an atheist simultaneously (e.g., not believing that Christ existed physically, but at the same time believing that following the tenets in the religion is the right thing to do for the greater good, or perhaps interpreting the Bible completely metaphorically).

Yes, this happens.

> not believing that Christ existed physically

The vast majority of historians, including atheist ones, think that someone answering to that general description _did_ exist, though they obviously don't think he was the son of God.

> not believing that Christ existed physically, but at the same time believing that following the tenets in the religion is the right thing to do for the greater good

Substitute 'God' for 'Christ', and yeah, that's common. Many people are also purely _culturally_ religious; they don't believe in a god (or at least not the one their religion mandates), and do not accept many of the teachings or beliefs of their religion, but do _identify_ as being a member of a religion. In Ireland, say, 70% of people identified as Catholic on the most recent census (in the 90s this was closer to 90%; younger people _are_ less likely to engage in this practice and the child abuse scandals also caused many older people to break away), but in polling the majority of Irish Catholics do not believe in, well, Catholic stuff (a personal god, hell, transubstantiation, the virgin birth, etc), or accept the Church's moral worldview (see outcomes of referendums on abortion, equal marriage etc).

I'm an atheist but wouldn't mind seeing a religion based on Jesus' teachings flourish. I think most people are dumb and need something/someone to encourage them to act rationally and civilly. Not me, of course; I try my best and don't need further encouragement. Current Christianity isn't sufficient; one can easily see how un-Jesus-like many Christians are.

> people well versed in the religion don't actually make any such claims

No true religious people in scotland?

But I guess most people are not really interested in religous studies. The useful thing to understand is that thought rooted in religon can be discarded out of hand.

Agnostic isn't a consistent belief position though: if you claim you don't know if a higher power exists, the question is which one and how is the impact of this different to being an atheist.

So that bucket collecting random other beliefs isn't too surprising.

Agnostic is just a pussy version of atheist.

Nope, any scientist should be agnostic ;). Since the existence of a god can not be proven nor disproven. Do I have an elephant in my living room? Chances are incredibly low, but can you prove it?

While you are technically correct about the logic, there is no scientific reason to even consider the existence of any higher power.

Please remember that polls are often inaccurate. Internet polls are especially inaccurate.

YouGov is a British international Internet-based market research and data analytics firm.

https://www.pewresearch.org/2010/12/29/how-accurate-are-onli...

_Good quality_ internet polls these days are fairly comparable in accuracy to high quality traditional polling. This isn't the CEO of Yougov posting a twitter poll; there's a process.

I don't think the poll supports the idea of spiritual morphing. The 30% of agnostics is not much different from the population average of 27% and less than catholics at 31%, while atheists believe in astrology less (10%) than any of the other groups.

If abandoning religious beliefs of yesteryear really just morphed them into others like astrology, those new beliefs should be much more common among people who've abandoned the old.

I think a better explanation of the data is that some people have strong opinions on spirituality, ranging from dismissing it all to holding up some particular scripture as the single source of truth, which then informs their stance on astrology, while others just go with whatever, so they're distributed across denominations at roughly the base rate and believe in astrology at roughly the base rate.

Maybe I'm reading it too literally, but I think the question is just badly formulated. Of course the position of the stars and planets influence people's lives, that's called the seasons.

I think the same when they ask people if they think dinosaurs co-existed with humans, of course the answer is yes, as birds are dinosaurs.

I can easily argue the opposite of your assertions, simply by picking different definitions.

The "stars and planets" do not influence peoples' lives through the seasons, only the Earth and its relative position to the Sun do, and when someone talks about the "stars and planets" in the context of astrology, they mean other stars and planets besides the Earth and Sun.

Dinosaurs do not co-exist with humans, and never have: "birds" are the distant descendants of some of the "dinosaurs", but are not part of the same group. (I'm pretty sure any dictionary definition of "dinosaur" does not include modern-day "birds".)

From Wikipedia:

> Birds are feathered theropod dinosaurs and constitute the only known living dinosaurs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird

Bird are in the dinosaur clade, ie the biological group defined by the dinosaur family.

Birds are dinosaurs in the same way that humans are mammals.

I'm not going to argue with your clear reference but I will reference this article: https://askabiologist.asu.edu/questions/birds-dinosaurs-rept... which adds a bit of useful context.

"So a reptile is any animal descended from the original group called reptiles. Both birds and mammals share ancestors sometimes referred to as reptile-like animals (Reptiliomorpha), but it's not very common for people to talk about mammals as reptiles."

That’s because mammals aren’t reptiles:

Mammals are from Synapsids[0] and dinosaurs (and modern reptiles) are from Sauropsida[1] — with the commonality being that amphibians split off first [2]. We can draw disjoint clades, which we cannot do for birds and dinosaurs. Beyond that, you’re just talking about tetrapods in general [3]. Reptiliomorpha has multiple names, precisely due to this — eg, pan-amniota.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synapsid

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauropsida

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amniote

3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrapod

> Maybe I'm reading it too literally, but I think the question is just badly formulated.

It's not. The definition of astrology is literally the study of how bodies in space affect life on earth.

And if you don't believe in astrology, how exactly do you explain tides?

This is silly. Astronomy and physics perfectly explain the tides. Just because there's another belief system that also claims to explain the influence of celestial bodies on the earth, doesn't mean I need to believe in it to explain the tides.

Astrology is a subset of astronomy, since astronomy is the study of things in space. But the part of astronomy that deals with how things in space affect life on earth is astrology. It's literally the definition. You can't just attribute a bunch of random bad things to astrology and then change the definition to make it fit your preconceptions. Literally just type "astrology definition" into Google.

If birds are dinosaurs, aren't some dinosaurs birds? So we can claim that birds existed 200 million years ago.

Your logic is flawed, it is true that birds are dinosaurs, and it is also true that some dinosaurs are birds (literally birds). But it is not true that birds existed 200 millions years ago. The oldest known bird fossils are around 160 million years old.

Why? If birds are dinosaurs then some dinosaurs are birds. So the ancestors of those dinosaurs are also birds and we can go further and further until the first living thing which was also a bird. So its descendants were also birds. So every living thing is a bird.

If humans are vertebrates, then some vertebrates are human. It is wholly possible (and indeed true) that a specific subset of vertebrates (those that existed 200 million years ago) and another subset (humans) are disjoint.

It seems like these people should be required to read Douglas Adams. Though they'd likely miss the point.

Conspiracy theories and pseudoscience in all its forms might also be aspects of this fake industrialized religiosity!!

From the popularity of astrology, piercing and tattoos it feels like rather than becoming more secular we’re moving back to paganism

This is why I think that it is perhaps beneficial to not completely remove religion, but replace it with something that is more aligned to the 21st century. Let's be honest, humans are very flawed and prone to succumb to religious thinking; regardless of how smart/dumb you are. Superstitious thinking can arise from simple day to day observation.

So it is much better to fill in the void with something dull like "do good, because mother Gaia watches over you" than to let some random beliefs to fill it. I personally belief that the self-introspection, consciousness-obsessed cultures like Hindu and Buddhism actually have one. Consciousness is the one thing in this world that is actually mysterious. So let's start mysticism from there.

What's the point if this mysticism doesn't make "better" people than any random superstition or religion? I fear it's more dangerous than most basic superstitions.

I mean, these "self-introspection, consciousness-obsessed cultures like Hindu and Buddhism" are a source of hatred and violence. The Hindu majority is India is on this brutal trend. And in Burma-Birmania-Myanmar, the Buddhist population was almost unanimous in supporting the discrimination against muslims and the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya. People feel they belong to a religion and that those who do not are unenlightened strangers. The phenomena is well known and studied: religion leads to intolerance.

Astrology is stupid, but at least it does not create that feeling of community, so it won't spread intolerance and xenophobia.

Regarding the last point, that's true. Notice how there aren't any forums/communities/Discord channels centered on a single astrological sign.

It would be amusing though, to stumble upon a, say, Pisces forum where members try to figure out their behavior.

I’d be surprised if it’s not co-opted to do so. We saw what happened with vaccines: global tribes with half-baked ideas all swirling around crazy leaders. Only way it’s not going to be co-opted is if it can’t be due to some fundamental reason.

> I mean, these "self-introspection, consciousness-obsessed cultures like Hindu and Buddhism" are a source of hatred and violence. The Hindu majority is India is on this brutal trend. And in Burma-Birmania-Myanmar, the Buddhist population was almost unanimous in supporting the discrimination against muslims and the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya. People feel they belong to a religion and that those who do not are unenlightened strangers. The phenomena is well known and studied: religion leads to intolerance.

That is why it is important to fill these void with fluff. But that fluff requires some mythos otherwise it wouldn't hold the fluff together. There's a subset of these 2 religions that doesn't require you to believe in anything aside from the fact that "consciousness exist". However, this concept is quite hard for common folk to grasp. This is why I think that it is important to create a layer on top of this that the masses can feed unto.

The problem with using astrology as the basis for religion is that it doesn't correspond to reality at all. Simple statistical analysis would yield weird results that doesn't match with reality. How do you reconcile being bad at something X despite being born at month Y that supposedly makes you better at X. Or why does X today when my horoscope is Y?

The problem with this is that you as a non practitioner think you can look in and decide which parts of the religion are fluff and which are true. You really can’t, and that’s one of the biggest failures of secular Buddhism. Without significant training on the path there is no way for you to tell what is bs and what is the true deep stuff. I don’t really get this pattern of random westerners coming into Buddhism and thinking they immediately know exactly which things the Buddha made up and which he didn’t

> Without significant training on the path there is no way for you to tell what is bs and what is the true deep stuff. I don’t really get this pattern of random westerners coming into Buddhism and thinking they immediately know exactly which things the Buddha made up and which he didn’t

Why not? I just read it like any other book. When the Bhagavad Ghita says that there's nothing before and after my existence, that is true as far as I am concerned. I don't read the whole thing like a gospel nor do I think Buddha was correct on everything. He was just another person trying to make sense of things like the rest of us. When the Dhammphada says that I shouldn't dwell on emotions and that I am not my emotions; I can easily get the intuition by using the simulation hypothesis which is something that the people of old didn't have the luxury of.

Because the book literally says that you don’t have the training or insight to decide what is true or false in it. An explicitly laid out aspect of Buddhism is that you can’t tell yet. Sure you can ignore that part if you want to feel like you know what’s right, but the Buddha already saw people do this to much failure and gave teachings to try and prevent it

this makes buddhism sound like the mod of an edgy IRC channel: "lurk moar"

Well, it is! It’s a training. It’s like someone coming in to lifting weights and saying “squats are useless and no one should do them”. Without training you might not know that’s wrong. Buddhism is just like this

That's not religion.

That's just sociology playing out.

Like it or not, the replacement is politics. Atheists have edged out Jews as the most politically active group in the US, even when controlling for education. Because they donate money to politicians at incredible rates, expect more messaging aimed at this group.

that's pretty messed up take from parent's suggestion... and I don't agree a zilch, politics cater to other aspects of our (often irrational) needs compared to what religions aim for

> politics cater to other aspects of our (often irrational) needs compared to what religions aim for

It’s a team to bat for and even comes with its own dogma for you to blindly believe in.

Usually lead by charismatic leaders providing/promising simple and easy to understand explanations/solutions to complex problems.

To quote H L Mencken,

“Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”

Organised Religion is good for people, because it keeps them from believing even crazier ideas, and still tells you to see a doctor when you're sick

Most of the people who go to Organised Religion don't really believe in God, they're just in it for the tea and biscuits, ie it's a social club.

If you really believed in God and Heaven you'd become a monk or nun, logically you'd spend your finite life maximising your chance of infinite reward

Without Organised Religion you get antivax people, way more dangerous than people who spend 500 years building a cool building

I agree, but is it important for the "religion" to be effectively neutered.

>If you really believed in God and Heaven you'd become a monk or nun, logically you'd spend your finite life maximising your chance of infinite reward

I think the story is not as simple as that. The problem is that people actually _do_ believe in Heaven/Hell and they _wish_ that they have the devotion to match their faith. That is to say that people wish they can become a nun or a monk. Which is why when people do become nun/monk/suicide bombers, they don't condemn them but wish they are brave enough to do it themselves (why not every religious person is suicidal) or even admit to wanting to do it (why it doesn't show up as much in polls).

You had to patch the religion to avoid the suicide bug, telling people that it was bad.

You only want really old religions that have been around long enough they're not doing anything mad, but most people aren't going around doing mad things if they have a comfortable life, they just need someone to tell them they're on the right path, people crave leaders

I’m far from being antivax but if you look at the thousands / millions of deaths caused by religious wars and / or strict societal control in history and up to today I’m not sure I agree with your statement that antivax people are way more dangerous than organized religion.

Religious wars are rarely about religion. And hopefully mostly in the past.

Usually about colonisation, control, who has political power, who's getting the best land.

You can trick the true believers into fighting for you of course, but what's the difference between Nazis and Christians invading the Middle East?

> Without Organised Religion you get antivax people

Antivax people have been around since 1798 when the first vaccine was invented (arguably even _before_ that; some of the same arguments were made about variolation).

and with organised religion you get the crusades and the inquisition.

Current day catholicism is pretty nice, because we've had a good 300+ years of post-englightenment/rationalism in society to balance out the violent intolerance religion zealots can dish out.

agree that religious/spiritual groups can be good for social ties.

To be fair, playing badmington every tuesday night is also good for social ties, and less likely to make you feel justified in violently disembowelling someone for heresy. Or flying planes into tall building in the name of God.

You know, given the choice between ISIS and antivaxxers, I think I'll take the anitvaxxers.

> You know, given the choice between ISIS and antivaxxers, I think I'll take the anitvaxxers.

Say Christian nationalism rose to it's post-reconstruction prominence. Where would you put it?

> agree that religious/spiritual groups can be good for social ties.

Further: Religious humanitarian projects aren't insignificant and it's not like they're competing with non-religious aid. If aiding religions disappeared, nothing would fill the vacuum - because the vacuum is far from filled now.

> Say Christian nationalism rose to it's post-reconstruction prominence. Where would you put it?

I had to look up what this meant, so if I'm mis-interpreting it, please correct me.

But from what I understand it's just ISIS but swap the Quran for the Bible? Not a huge fan of that idea. Really any fundamentalist religion ramming it's morality down my throat grinds my gears. Still prefer the anti-vaxxers. At least they're not going to tell me how to live my life. They're more like drunk drivers - I have to deal with their stupidity endangering my life, but with religious freaks I have to deal with their stupidity endangering my life (because the Pope declared that vaccines weren't kosher, or that the new cancer treatment is heresy, or stem cell research displeases the Prophet, and you can't argue with that because it's religion, it is by definition arbitrary, disagree and the Pope sends you off to get burned at the stake for heresy), and them controlling every minute detail of my life (prayer mandated, dress code mandated, etc).

> If aiding religions disappeared, nothing would fill the vacuum - because the vacuum is far from filled now.

that's a strong claim and and I don't think your reasoning adequately supports it.

Still, I suppose it's possible that if all religious groups disappeared tomorrow secular sources of aid would not move to compensate. shrug

Nevethless, I don't think "there isn't enough aid now, ergo if religions disappear there will be even less" is a logically sound argument, perhaps there are some intermediate steps to your reasoning that I'm missing, if so please explain them :)

Religious groups have been disappearing, and in their place is a rise in new age woo that's worse than the previous solution.

The problem with Anti Vax is it's fine until a threshold is reached and then everyone gets diseases

>> If aiding religions disappeared, nothing would fill the vacuum - because the vacuum is far from filled now.

>that's a strong claim and and I don't think your reasoning adequately supports it.

This puzzles me. My claim is self-evident. The vacuum of human need exists; only a tiny portion is filled.

Anyone who wants to supplant a religious outreach effort can form up now and achieve the good they seek. In other words, if you want to compete and put religions out of the service game, please do.

> But from what I understand it's just ISIS but swap the Quran for the Bible? Not a huge fan of that idea.

Christian nationalism grew and pervaded America in the decades during and after reconstruction. The Klan was probably the most visible facet of that and but it was everywhere, organized and not.

I do a fair amount of genealogy and in my perception, there are many parallels between now and the early 20th century.

A lot of anti vaxxers seem to advertise themselves as Christian. I think the actual problem (when it comes to anti vaxx, incels, and similar cults) is the internet unfortunately.

I wish religion would dissuade antivaxism. I'm active in a faith and every antivaxer I know is some stripe of Christian. They're a small minority, thank Glob.

the social part - as I get older I realize why people go to church even if they're astrophyscists

To put it succinctly: Culture abhors a vacuum.

Thankfully you are here to dictate what is and isn't an acceptable 21st century belief.

Just take cult of Stalin, Mao and Kims. Perfect examples.

See also near-religious faith in narrow, unexamined concepts of growth, progress and technology

Any other books you can recommend?

I am just getting into reading about this stuff.

It has made me realize that I am not as rational as I once thought I was.

There are a lot of great suggestions here: https://fivebooks.com/category/religion/

But other than Taylor, I recommend Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution, William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, and most books by Nietzsche, but specifically Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morality. You might want to pick up an anthology of papers / topics, like Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology by Pojman. Max Weber and Durkheim are also considered to be foundational thinkers in religious sociology. If you get through all that and are looking for something a bit more obscure but super interesting, I would also check out "process philosophy" or "process theology", which addresses a lot of the traditional issues with religious arguments.