Yeah, it doesn’t seem like the best time to visit. It isn’t like they’re just being more strict, they don’t give a shit about following the rules.
One aspect of this is that adults don’t get much pushback for being atheist except in the most backward parts of the US, but school children can and do have negative experiences. So anyone like me (and presumably Der Trihs) who knew they were an atheist as a schoolkid probably racked up a few uncomfortable-to-nasty experiences in the past, and that colors our views.
It’s this. There are places, like where I live, where nobody gives a crap what your religion is, it’s none of anyone else’s business. And as long as you’re not being an ass about your religion and shoving it in everyone face, as in literally standing on a corner trying to preach to people and shove pamphlets in their hand and confront them about it (which I’ve also seen happen though it’s fortunately rare) you can display your religion or lack of it and it’s fine.
And there are other places where people will ask what church you go to, because they assume everyone is a Christian and can’t fathom someone who isn’t except in some scary nebulous places faraway full of depravity and evil. (Generally these tend to me more rural places.)
But at least the places where you see more people gathered are the more open and accepting places. Places that aren’t shitholes. The only kinds of places you actually want to spend any time in if you are in the US. Places who actually understand that freedom of religion as guaranteed in the US Constitution doesn’t mean freedom to pick from a select few “proper” churches.
what I thought when I first read it (and haven’t changed my mind) is that it is very sad.
Well, lots of people are lots of messed up and that’s one small example.
and, sadly, among the most messed up are now in power. OH wait, we are in the pit
fucked up!
That’s a shame. And even if it’s not true any more, it doesn’t change the past for either you or @Der_Trihs. I’m not sure how old either of you are, but presumably not young.
Lol. Guess to them I live in a faraway place full of depravity and evil. But surely nowhere in America can really be that isolated? Everyone has had internet access for decades at this point.
Yeah, I agree.
Sure, they see it, but again to them that’s “those other people” far away. The people they interact with day-to-day aren’t very different. You can have insular communities without being completely isolated from the world, information-wise at least.
And these people self-curate their information pretty well. Listening to only certain kinds of music, watching only certain kinds of media, and so on. I mean, everyone does that to an extent really.
unless you are really working hard not to.
same as everyone lets AI determine what’s in their “feed” rather than decide for themselves what they want to look at.
I think YouTube only shows you things that you “liked”, subscribed to, or searched on before, but people just passively let their phones decide what news (or “news”) they are scrolling through and choosing from rather than ACTIVELY decide what they want to look at.
I think this is important enough it deserves it’s own thread, but someone else can do it. I need to go outside. 
I wish this was true. YouTube is constantly showing me shit I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.
(My subscribed channels list is very carefully curated.)
FQ response on the pit!
I was curious about the atheism stuff, so I did a brief search for recent polls.
This one from Gallup asked people “If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be [characteristic], would you vote for that person?”
Only 60% of respondents would be willing to vote for an atheist. The only worse characteristic is socialist. For atheism, that is a big change from 40 years ago, when only 15% would be willing to vote for an atheist.
A Pew poll from 2021 asked about people’s religions. They found 4% responded atheist, 5% agnostic, and 20% “nothing in particular”, which they counted as 29% of people being non-religious. A record high for as long as they’ve been conducting this poll.
Absolutely this. Better to call myself a Jew, because at least that occasionally would stop the proselytizing being directed at me, and was an answer even antisemitic people could understand. Saying atheist or agnostic was like declaring the world was flat, or that the governor of Arkansa’s wife was a lizard person saying some kind of total nonsense that could not possibly be believed..
Things might not be as bad as when we were all kids, but atheism is still generally viewed poorly in the US.
Yeah, I think it’s a mix and really, that’s how it should be. It wants you to see things you like (so that you keep using the site) but it tries to show you new things too, so you don’t get bored just seeing the same things over and over again, and maybe you’ll discover something new that you like but haven’t seen before.
My guess (and this is really just a WAG) is that it mixes things similar to videos you’ve previously watched, given a “like” to, and commented on, with other videos that are generally popular on the platform. At least, that seems like a sensible way to do it.
My original point though was that we all curate things to an extent, because we know what we like and seek it out. We also know what we dislike and what we know is bullshit. I don’t watch Fox News or country music videos, for example. But I don’t carefully restrict myself to narrow things to the exclusion of all else.
Some people do though. I feel like those are people who tend to be in rural areas and lean very much to the right, but that might also be an inherent bias on my part. I have experienced people in insular areas (rural areas around here where I live in the Pacific Northwest and especially in the south where my oldest daughter lives) but I don’t want to suggest that every place like that is the same.
For my own religious background, I did go to a Lutheran preschool as a child, mostly out of convenience. My parents weren’t particularly religious. Once I got into Kindergarten, I rarely had any interaction with any religious institutions. I have vague memories of going to a Sunday school briefly at some church that I think my mom was going to on Sundays but that didn’t last very long. Pretty early on I started to bounce between being agnostic and atheist.
It wasn’t until early adulthood that I got really interested in Christianity, got into a Bible study group through some friends, and then had something of a spiritual awakening. I wasn’t a full-on religious zealot at any point (though the study of theology was interesting enough that I flirted with the idea of going to school to be a pastor, yeah that’s insane to think about now) and ended up being a non-denominational Christian, which I continue to be today.
True. And then your choices serve to reinforce your views, because you see some stories and don’t see others, are exposed to some beliefs and attitudes and not to others, and different events are reported positively or negatively depending on your chosen media.
Thanks for digging that up. And that is indeed a huge change over 40 years, but 40% of people being unwilling to vote for an atheist is still pretty big.
The number of non-religious in the UK would be higher, but I think it would similarly be mostly composed of ‘nothing in particular’ rather than atheist. It makes me wonder whether people answering these surveys are reading something more into the term ‘atheist’ than just ‘not a religious believer’? Perhaps that it means someone aggressively opposed to religion? Would the same 40% also refuse to vote for someone who believes ‘nothing in particular’ but doesn’t call themself an atheist?
It’s a whole different world. I’ve never in my life been asked what church I go to. I can count the times I’ve been proselytised to on the fingers of one hand. It’s just not something that comes up, and if anything, it’s overtly religious people who are looked at with suspicion.
In the US, at least, usually being an atheist generally means “convinced there is no higher power”. Which is not the same as being agnostic, where you’re not sure if there is a higher power or not, and if there is what nature it is. I know that technically, agnostics are a subset of atheists, and not all atheists affirmatively believe that no deities exist. But most often those who identify as atheists in the US seem to be adamant about the nonexistence of a deity. Certainly, that was my stance when I identified that way.
Though it doesn’t necessarily mean “opposed” to religion, the two often do go hand-in-hand. And for me, that wasn’t the case, but it seems like atheists often become that way because they reject religion after a bad experience. I never had a bad experience from organized religion (probably because I wasn’t exposed to it much as a kid, and honestly even later in life I never frequented churches or other institutions and still don’t) so that might be why.
I’ve had atheist friends who really despise religion, and after knowing what they went through I don’t blame them, even if I don’t agree with them.
I think Facebook activitely discourages me from going to places (groups, especially) that I like the best and instead want me to join new groups.
this annoys me.
I don’t disagree. But I remember seeing somewhere (so I can’t give a cite!) that people are MUCH more likely not to “seek” because they are used to passively ingesting whatever their feeds show them, especially the younger they are.
And this is much worse than just making money off us, but for actively shaping what we watch instead of just giving us options and making money from that.
It’s insidious, it trains people to be passive.
Is it OK to go off topic in the pit or is this a hijack? If I could find the podcast that makes me want to talk about this, I’d start a new thread.
Heh, a lot of things about Facebook annoy me. I have an account merely to stay in contact with a few people, otherwise I don’t use it. And yeah, the group thing is part of that. I also don’t like how spammy the notifications got after a while.
I don’t think you’d need a cite, I think anyone with experience with humans would accept this to be common sense. 
Yeah. Like you, I wasn’t raised religious by my parents and never went to church, but (as is still common here in the UK) the local primary school was a CoE one, so we were told Bible stories at school, did a nativity play at Christmas etc. And I read a lot as a kid, including old books where Christianity was an important part of life and the plot.
Heh, and now I recall that one time some type of Christian group from America came to our village to convert us. 
They ran a series of classes for kids, and nearly all the parents sent their children along - in retrospect maybe mainly for the free babysitting. We sang songs, listened to stories, and I remember they had a book that had no words or pictures, just a colour on each page, which IIRC they used to tell the story of Jesus. I wonder who they were?
So I did end up with vague Christian beliefs as a child. And then as a teen I read books on evolution and cosmology and a lot more, and it became clear there wasn’t really a need or even space for a god in that worldview, and I gradually became an atheist without having any particular moment of revelation.
And again like you, I never had a bad experience from organised religion, so although I am pretty convinced there is no higher power, I don’t despise religion or have any particular animus against it. I understand why some people do, though, because I’ve heard enough stories of people who were rejected and cut off by their friends and family for admitting they no longer believed, or even for questioning important beliefs. And it’s also easy to see why religious people would dislike avowed atheists, if they have encountered the ones who have a grudge against religion and crusade against it.
I used to believe it would be good thing to persuade more people to become atheist and abandon religion, but I no longer do. We as humans seem to have a need to believe in something; take away the religion and instead people turn to radical ideologies, conspiracy theories, idolising celebrities - or worse, politicians, and/or to magical thinking like crystal healing. And the atrocities attributed to religion are better blamed on dangerous aspects of human psychology, with religion merely being one channel through which they can be expressed.
Better to stick with a tried-and-tested mainstream religion that we know we can live with, and has other benefits like providing community support. Unfortunately, I don’t think we will get the choice, as it is exactly the more reasonable and easygoing religions that are declining fastest.
Keep the religion and people still believe in radical ideologies, conspiracy theories, idolising celebrities - or worse, politicians, and/or to magical thinking like crystal healing.
This is, uh, startling.
Not that you’d make that prediction–it’s a very obvious prediction–but that you think this response is notable.
We’ve got ancient Greeks telling myths about welcoming hungry travelers into their house. We’ve got possibly the most statue in America welcoming poor, tired, huddled masses.. We’ve got the leader of our nation’s most popular religion reminding us that if you do not feed the hungry and clothe the naked and visit the imprisoned, you’re wicked.
From ancient Greece to Christianity to the symbols of our nation, “Helping vulnerable groups is the right thing to do” is the basis of all major axes of our moral society. (In case it needs saying, it’s the basis of most other cultures’ moral codes as well). Of course people will say that when confronted with a fascist movement that rejects the idea of helping the vulnerable.
Anyone who denies that helping vulnerable groups is the right thing to do IS a bad person. That’s kind of the entire brief.
This is something I’d give as an example of how religious belief can be better than no religious belief. The religious right, in the firm of George W Bush, acted to save people in poor countries from dying of Aids. The post-religious right, in the form of Trump and Musk, doesn’t give a damn that kids are dying due to their actions. Most religions stress giving charity, helping the poor and needy etc. Some people will do that anyway. Others won’t. (Even with religion, some people will find excuses not to, but it’s at least a push in the right direction.)
But the issue is not whether helping vulnerable groups is the right thing to do. The issue is
If you’re doing pretty well in life, as I think is true of most Dopers, then it’s natural to put the interests of other people - those who aren’t doing so well - first. You’re in the top level of Maslow’s hierarchy. But if you are struggling yourself, you are going to want to know what politicians will do for you.
When working class people formed unions, it wasn’t to help ‘the poor’; it was to help themselves. When they voted for left-wing parties, it was primarily to make life better for them and for people like them. That doesn’t mean they don’t care about anyone else, but they are not going to be enthusiastic about a party that puts them and their needs at the end of a long list of other priorities.
Seems to me there is some acceptance that rich people voting to cut their taxes is bad, but it doesn’t put them beyond the pale of polite society. But the social justice left does not have that same acceptance of people putting their own interests first in social issues, eg by opposing affirmative action, wanting to lock up more criminals to reduce crime, or stop homeless people camping in city centres.
And tried to ensure that as many people as possible died from it, outside of whatever isolated incident you are recalling. They felt that AIDS was God’s Wrath, and anyone who caught it deserved to die. And that’s hardly the only disease they’ve taken that stance towards.
I don’t believe any such religion exists, or can exist. Religion is innately anti-human in my opinion.
Correlation/causation uncertainty. It’s not shown that the influence of religious belief is actually what caused many mainstream conservatives back in the day to show some decency about helping the poor and suffering. It may well be that it was the other way around: their basic impulses of decency were what led them to self-identify with religious belief that advocated helping the poor and suffering.
Also, plenty of self-identified Christians back in the day didn’t lift a finger to care for people with HIV, so I think pointing to the Bush 43 administration’s actions as evidence for the humane benefits of religious faith may be somewhat selective.