Are religions fads just like certain hairstyles and clothes but instead of lasting a couple of years they usually last centuries or even millenniums. I mean they always change and maybe that’s why some people are finally seeing sense nowadays and have very little interest in following them.
How are you defining “fad”?
A fad is any form of behavior that develops among a large population and is collectively followed with enthusiasm for some period, generally as a result of the behavior’s being perceived as novel in some way.
Would “some period” include a couple of thousand years?
In my OP I happened to clarify that point.
Some people? Which “some people” would those be? There is, at least in the US, not much of a decline of religiosity generally. Plus, we have seen a rise of what I would loosely call religious ‘fads’ in the form of megachurches and (ugh) “prosperity gospel”. There are similar ‘fads’ to the latter in Asia, though I can neither recall the name nor google it successfully right now. Arguably, militant Islam is a ‘fad’ as well; my limited knowledge is that for a good chunk of Islamic history, they were fairly tolerant of Jews and Christians in their lands and ‘militant’ only in more or less the same way that everybody else was at the time.
I meant in regards to a nations governments because a lot of countries are becoming, are or at least claim to be secular.
The popular term for this is “meme”. Of course, “meme” is a meme.
Yes, I would say that the way that some religious traditions catch on widely, whereas others die out very quickly, is very much akin to fads. In the early Roman Empire there were all sorts of competing religious ideas, coming from all over the large and diverse empire, and vying to replace the worship of the traditional Roman gods, that now seemed absurd and obsolete. For no very good reason (that I have ever heard of*) Christianity was the one that caught on fastest, and eventually overwhelmed all its rivals. It was the Rubik’s cube of its day, only more so.
I would expect that much the same could be said about Islam, teh Buddha, and other relious movements that caught on, but in those cases I know relatively little about the actual historical circumstances.
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*I know scholars (those who don’t just think it caught on and won out because it is THE TRUTH) have come up with all sorts of reasons. It is just that either they are not very convincing, or there generally seems to have been no particular reason why the factors suggested affected Christianity as opposed to one or more of the many other rival religions of the era. I am just saying that there was a large factor of random chance involved both in Christianity originally catching on, and in it winning out.
It really just comes down to sheer dumb luck. I mean religions are nothing special in themselves, its the people who choose to follow them that influence their growth and/or demise. If the religion of the flying spaghetti monster had been around at the time of Christianity’s beginning its just as possible that TFSM religion would be one of the top religions now instead. People don’t generally seem to care all that much about the religions beliefs but about tradition and political possibilities, that the religion could aid the individual with.
I agree with you about fads. There have been a couple of Great Awakenings and Revivals in the US, for instance. But I doubt an FSM cult would have caught on. Christianity triumphed for a reason - and that reason is not that it was correct. It alone out of religions back then was both exclusive and evangelistic. Judaism was exclusive but had no major interest in spreading. The pagan religions were not exclusive. Not only did Christianity try to convert rulers, it tried to convince them to suppress other religions. Islam worked the same way, and also had success because of this.
So, unless Pastafarians would have started to whip heretics with wet noodles, it would have lost out too.
Fair point, after all the Indian religions like Hinduism and Buddhism have existed far longer than the Abrahamic ones, but haven’t spread extremely far from their roots in the Indian subcontinent. Probably something to do with the fact that they didn’t generally try to convert so aggressively.
This seems to be a poorly disguised rant.
Could you elaborate?
This seems to be an excuse for you to pooh-pooh religion (not that I have a problem with that, but we’ve had thousands of similar threads with more valid premises.)
Damn, I wish my username was Longshanks.
It’s a rant wearing Groucho glasses.
We’ve had kazillions of threads about religious beliefs. If you want to call them “fads,” then I’d say that EVERY religion is a fad, if you get far enough away from it, in time or space.
But a religious person may point out that reason, logic, science and secularity are also fads. They are largely valued by our society, but weren’t always, and may not be at some point in the future.
So . . . by your definition, you could call just about anything a fad. Nothing in the universe is permanent; we’re all just passing through.
Religions are not fads by any stretch of the imagination. Variations of these same religions or group suddenly becomming attracted to them might be called fads.
I believe religion addresses all areas of our lives and the problems we encounter. Fads usually encompass a much smaller part of our identity.
Another thing, fads will quickly give into another fad as opposed to religion actually staying with a person over thier entire lives. And it actually works for them depending on how hard they work it. It offers them piece of mind. A way of accepting themselves fr who they are. It assists them in making sound decisions based on clean motives etc. It has a lot to offer.The ones that would be considered fads get called cults rather than religions.