People are finding different ways to obtain what church has traditionally provided.
Instead of going to church every Sunday, they might go to a book club meeting where they take turns hosting with four other people.
They might scratch their itch for community service by volunteering for the school PTA or organizing the food drive at work.
Instead of tithing at church, they donate money on a recurring basis to charity.
Instead of attending Bible study to analyze and debate scriptural text, they discuss current events with other members of online communities they’ve been a part of for years. Like many of us.
My husband used to be a devout Christian. When he felt his faith faltering that, he tried to at least enjoy church for the community aspect. But it just left him cold and lonely. Surrounded by people who spoke of beliefs and spiritual experiences that he didn’t have made him feel like an alien. And that was my experience too.
Except… fraternal organizations aren’t really secular social organizations as far as I know. All of the ‘lodge’ organizations I’ve looked into have a strong religious component, and require belief in God and prayers said as part of their rituals, which disqualifies them as being really ‘secular’ in my opinion. A lot of them are sex segregated or were until very recently, were officially racially segregated until and still seem to have issues on that front, and have a history of not being very friendly to LGBT people. There are exceptions and improvements, of course, but I don’t think that thinking of them as a completely different type of organization as a church is really accurate, and a lot of the issues that they have mirror the issues that a lot of younger people have with traditional churches.
Well damn. All these years since my time in Iraq, I’ve been responding to the claim that there were no atheists in foxholes by revealing that I was the first. I guess there was one before me.
I saw Hamilton a couple of weeks ago. I don’t know if what I felt was “spiritual”, but I certainly felt something life-affirming that I never experienced all those years sitting in boring-ass church services.
If church offers something that no secular activity can match, you gotta wonder why so many people find it so easy not to go. It’s free. There are churches all over the place. People know when services are going to be held. And yet you don’t see long lines of people waiting to pack every single church every Sunday.
I think it’s because people know that church isn’t all spiritual awesomeness. Church is not only ritual and beautiful music. It’s also the dry sermons that leave you feeling guilty and confused more than filled with wisdom. It’s also bible readings that make little sense because of all the thous and thees. It’s also the congregation–the gossips, the Judgey Judgersons, the butt-in-skis, the sanctimoniousness and manufactured piety and anti-intellectualism. It’s also the incessant guilt trip over tithes and offerings. To get to the cool stuff that church has to offer, a person has got to endure a lot.
If a person wants to get experience a feeling of connectedness and awe, they can find other outlets that don’t require such a big outlay of patience. Even if those secular activity don’t match the magic and wonder of church, they still provide a better bargain when you factor in all the costs.
Really, why it’s so hard for some people to understand that you can get feelings of awesomeness without a religious POV? I have no religious bone in my body and have been an atheist my whole conscious life, but what I most liked about church when I still went as a child was the music (especially the music), the lights and the whole, well, show (I was raised in a German Catholic church), But I can easily satisfy those needs by listening to secular music, heck, even to religious/spiritual music (I love me some Van Morrison, one of the most transcendental musicians I know, and he almost always brings some spirituality into his songs). I can shiver in my innermost when I think of some of the realities of the universe, and the mystery most of it is still to us (and the potential for endless future scientific research). I can read books by someone like Kafka and be shaken to my bones. And lastly, not to be forgotten, sex beats every spiritual experience I ever had anyway.
I think a return to your granddad’s Christianity is unlikely. I do, however, think that people in general will remain susceptible to religious claims just as they are to a wide range of pseudo-science and spiritualistic mumbo-jumbo.
Old religions may morph, in keeping with the trend from old Canaanite religions with their pantheon, henotheistic YHWH worship, to modern monotheistic Judaism, to Christianity, to Islam and Mormonism.
Likewise, new religions will arise, like Scientology, perhaps even cloaking their system of belief in the trappings of science (and not just the name) and yet still arriving at unwarranted conclusions of a spiritual or supernatural nature.
If we can have anti-vaxxers in a country where measles (used to be) eradicated, we can have theists arise again from the ranks of secular society. The tendency to want to point to an answer that is comforting or fills a gap in scientific understanding won’t go away with religion as we know it. And so religion will inevitably be born again, perhaps aided by the lack of hard skepticism among future atheists. Because it’s one thing to be born into a religious family and to arrive at atheism after careful consideration, or even to be born into an atheist family amidst a sea of religions all trying to tell you you’re damned and nevertheless persevering, but it’s something else completely to be born an atheist amid people who have minimal understanding of religion, why it’s unlikely to lead to truth, and why the arguments in its favor are fallacious. It’d be like measles returning to a cluster of non-immunized people. Before you know it, measles is no longer eradicated, and you’ve got to start the war against it all over again. From scratch.
My father was a member of the Elks when I was a teenager (and that’s the sort of fraternal organization I was referring to), and while the Elks require members to have “a belief in God,” I never had any impression, at all, that they were a particularly, or overtly, religious organization – it seems like that requirement, as well as requirements that they’ve had (at least in the past) to not be a Communist, and to honor the Flag, are more about meeting their definition of being an “upstanding American.” (I admit, I have no idea if they say prayers as part of meetings.)
If you visit the Elks website, while you see lots of patriotic imagery, if there’s anything religious (other than mention of “belief in God” as a requirement for being an Elk), I’m not finding it. In essence, from what I remember, the Elks was (and, AFAIK, still is) a place where men could gather to socialize together (drinking beer, smoking cigars, bowling, etc.), and occasionally bring the family along (the Elks lodge where my dad was a member had a restaurant, where members could bring the family for Sunday brunch, and Friday night fish fries).
From what I can see about the Moose, they appear to be a bit more religious, as they apparently have a ritual of a nightly prayer; it looks like the Odd Fellows are more explictly non-religious.
Those don’t seem, to me, to have “a strong religious component,” or be anything like the overt religious orientation of, say, the Knights of Columbus. But, I can see that, if one is an atheist or agnostic, an organization that says “you must believe in God to be a member” comes across as a religious organization.
I think the point where your analogy fails is the contagiousness of religion. In contrast to the measles virus, the religious virus has become less and less contagious in Western societies. More slowly in the US, because of historical and societal reasons, but articles like that in the OP show that the US follows the trends of other nations.
An interesting point of view. If I understand what you’re saying, atheism is likely born from and in reaction to religion. With no religion, it is probable that there would also be no atheists. We all need something to react to.
It’s not meant to be a perfect analogy, only to highlight the extent to which religion’s ability to spread may, paradoxically, grow as atheism becomes the norm. Consider, for instance, how much of this thread has discussed the move away from religion as a reaction to more toxic elements of religion. Supposing all those toxic religions die. After a few years, a generation maybe, the taint of it is gone and the world is primed for a new religion. Skepticism helps get you out of religion, but being non-religious doesn’t make you a skeptic.
I’m not saying atheism is born from or in reaction to religion, only that in its current state, in America, atheism exists alongside religion, not in a vacuum. If, however, atheism ever should exist in a vacuum, if it’s just the sort of thing you are born into and without much exposure to religious skepticism, then I see no less reason for new religious movements to arise than I do for a myriad of pseudo-scientific groups like Flat Earthers, Young Earth Creationists, and Anti-vaxxers.
When you aren’t primed to be skeptical about a subject, when you just take it for granted without understanding why it’s the appropriate position to take, you are easy pickings for those with weak arguments to pull aside and into an ever deepening canyon of false or unwarranted beliefs.
ETAM: If, for example, you’ve never been exposed to the various arguments that purport to prove the existence of a deistic creator god, for instance, you may have a hard time picking out thE subtle ways in which their logic fails or their premises are unfounded and so allow yourself to be convinced by some huckster, who then lumps on a bunch of other garbage about how not only does this creator god exist, but they actually ha e a way of telling what this god wants, and specifically what this god wants for you. Whenever two or more people gather in this fashion, voila! there is a new religion.
Wrong, obviously, in that I’ve found uplift outside religion:
Studying science gives me wonder at how amazing reality is. Any fiction pales in comparison to the simple fact quantum particles are governed by the same mathematics as guitar strings, and if you can’t understand that, you have no place to deride it.
Being with my friends and family is mutual aid and support, to the extent we need it. I don’t need externally-mandated friendship.
You’re grasping. You’re trying to demand that religion is uniquely necessary and it simply isn’t. A demand is a poor, impotent substitute for an argument.
I disagree with this viewpoint. To me, this is no deeper than if we were talking about a declining trend in college fraternity and sorority participation. It wouldn’t make sense to say not joining a frat is a reaction to the Greek system. Its simply the default state if pledging, paying dues, and tradition isn’t your thing. Same thing with religion.
That’s quite a big “suppose” aint it? If we ever get to the point that this happens, then religion as we know won’t exist at all anymore. And neither will society. Something catastrophic would need to happen to wipe out these institutions.
I actually believe if there is a massive exodus from religion, one of two things will happen. Either churches will become more liberal and secular-like to reflect changing societal norms, or they will become more traditional and rigid as the proportion of diehard fundamentalists rises. If the latter occurs more frequently than the former, the culture war between believers and non-believers will get larger. Religion will lose even more appeal, as believers become harder and harder to relate to.
Yes, I agree that the potential is there for people to pick up pseudo-scientific spiritualism and run crazy with it. Since these type of believers aren’t very organized or devoted, I question how consequential this might be in the long term. Like, how many people really are into the Secret nowadays? Remember that was all the talk 15 years ago?
That doesn’t make any sense to me. If there were no religion, then everybody would be atheists. I grant that we then wouldn’t need a word for atheism – just like we didn’t need a word for analog watches before there were digital watches. But there were plenty of analog watches.
My prediction: Either only the former, or, for a number of denominations, first the latter, then the former.
The religions which really take the mandate to be a source of morality seriously will take the second path, they’ll burn themselves out, and then the survivors of those groups will enter the rest of the world.
The religions which are more, for lack of a better term, institutional, will be happier to follow the secular world’s lead on morality and end up being gently guided to having the same moral universe as the rest of the sane world.
So the groups which can’t stand being lead around by the secular world will eject anyone who doesn’t want to be in a Christ-flavored death cult (now in Blue Raspberry, Cherry, and Guyana Grape!) and drift off the edge into, for some of them, outright violence. The flip side is that cults are like diseases: The most dangerous among them burn themselves out quickly. Sometimes with an actual burning building.
It’s impossible to be sure which groups will do which, I suppose, but I also can’t imagine the Anglicans being allowed to drift off the edge as long as they’re the Established Church. That’s the flip side of religion merging with politics.
“A-theism” literally means “no God.” But you still need a concept of God to be against. Atheism is not the same thing as ignorance. It is a deliberate choice in my experience.
You do not need to be aware of a god claim in order to lack a belief in a god. I am atheistic not only with respect to the god claims I am aware of, but also to all those that I am unaware of.
Theism doesn’t mean god, it means belief in a god. So I agree with thorny locust - we’d all be atheists, though we wouldn’t have a word for it and would think about it no more than we are almost all people with a lack of belief in magical pixies today.
Atheism is only a deliberate choice because of the amount of religion in the world and the indoctrination most of us get in religion as kids.
Lack of belief in Santa is a deliberate choice also, after all.
Atheism is not the same thing as ignorance, but no one said it was ignorance.
The only difference between a Christian and an atheist is that the former believes in one more god than the latter does. Both lack belief in all the thousands of others.
Maybe it’s not so much a difference in percentages of people who don’t believe as much as it is people feeling less social stigma about not going. My paternal grandfather (born in 1890) was not, as my father tells it, particularly religious* - German Evangelical, if I remember correctly - but nonetheless went to church regularly because that’s what you did. Were he alive today I doubt he’d bother.
*In fact his 3 sons and all but one of his grandchildren are firm atheists. It’s like we’re missing the religious gene or something.
