Non-believers often ask themselves, "what god would have the ability to eliminate suffering and choose not to?" We should also ask, "What religious institution and followers, having amassed the riches of the world, would choose not to eliminate suffering when they could?"
The weight of these contradictions eventually breaks belief. There's one way to win back believers and it's to eliminate in-group/out-group dynamics and replace it with material acts of benevolence - akin to large scale public works projects to eliminate suffering.
That would make me think more of the organisations in question, but I don’t understand why it would affect belief. It has no bearing on the correctness of the claims they make.
It has bearing on the veracity of those making the claims.
Why *believe* claims from those whose actions prove they don't really believe it themselves? If they did truly *believe*, they would certainly be acting much differently.
"Do as I say, not as a I do" is not a convincing argument to most rational people.
Christianity is falling apart because all groups are falling apart in traditional Christian countries, including other religions, including everything from Tennis clubs to Latin study groups.
This seems accurate to me. To wit: https://principiadiscordia.com/book/45.php
But instead of 'just stopped caring' I might substitute 'realize they don't have the resources or power to fix the root cause and are resigned to reducing suffering on a small scale'.
Of course, their kids saw this as immediately, obviously wrong and disassociated from their parents. Then they proceeded to join the Democratic Party, bringing all of their entirely ineffectual political tools along with them. This was, again, very useful for helping a certain subset of elites[1] retain position in the social hierarchy but not useful at achieving any of our stated goals. Don't worry, @jointheresistance2016, once we've cancelled enough old fogeys in Hollywood and found someone who can pass all of our purity tests, we can totally have our Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communist utopia.
The answer to "OH. WELL, THEN STOP." is "But if we do that, then the bad guys win!" We've been drowning ourselves in outrage, accelerated by new communications technologies[2], as the people who actually run the show are plotting to see how quickly they can get everyone else to kill each other. Everyone is vying to grab as much power as they can as quickly as they can to impose their ideas upon everyone.
Free societies are built on a bedrock of decentralization, trustworthiness, and humanity[3]. Whether the institutions have the word "government" or "religion" (or "union") written on them matters less than if they're able to meaningfully resist attempts to divide and conquer the public. The more an institution focuses on gaining power, the less they care about eliminating suffering. I mean, why would they? That suffering is the point. It both eliminates a group of people as potential competing powers as well as creates a justification for you continuing to centralize power.
[0] I am perfectly aware that using this adjective is going to make many a Marxist's heads spin. Bear with me.
[1] Us (as in, the average tech worker) and our bosses (who have fucked off to the Trump Train)
[2] Specifically, cable TV and social media. The relative political harmony of the 1950s was aided by a deep and pervasive government censorship regime, whose harms are unrelated to this rant but were arguably worse.
[3] Or if your particular political ideolect prefers, "diversity, equity, and inclusion".
"God exists and he is good" is mentioned as fact. The evidence of the existence of God would be his goodness - call it miracles if you will.
In a world where you perceive the absence of this goodness removes the only evidence provided. The logical consequence is not that god exists and is malevolent, the logical consequence is that the goodness is not there because God does not exist.
So if someone says "god exists and he is good" and all you end up doing is disputing the second statement... you didn't even touch the first.
Telling. (Me, I could definitely use even less.)
I think GP has a point, but it kinda works the other way around. (Which is common among unexamined intuitions.)
Basically, you can't represent any data with just ones, or just zeros. And the most basic unit of meaningful sensory data is "suffering/not suffering".
As long as there's any difference between "more preferable" and "less preferable" states of being (and not a uniform homogeneous universe, or alternatively a universe free from subjects able to prefer -- neither of which would not be much of a universe anyway), there will exist suffering caused by being in the less preferable state; and, conversely, the striving towards the more preferable one will be experienced as meaningful.
(And once you're in the most preferable state available to you, "meaning" becomes somehow unimportant. It's why they say "struggle builds character" -- "character" is one name for the ability to discern personally relevant meaning. It's also why it's easy for "personal fulfillment" to make a person kinda dumb -- unless they keep challenging themselves in actually meaningful ways.)
The evident paradox of "why would God not prevent suffering" is therefore a bit nonsensical, like most Christian doctrine (if you look at the history of Christianity past the point of being made state religion of the very empire that persecuted it -- no mean feat! -- you can see how it's pretty much designed by committee). Among extant religions, Buddhism seems to have the most no-nonsense treatment of the question.
On a practical scale one can see something similar in the concept of the "first world problem". Someone cooked your food wrong? There are people starving somewhere, you are in a vastly more preferable position to those -- but the knowledge that someone else is suffering from starvation does not in any way diminish your experience of (admittedly tiny) suffering caused by the unpleasant food. (That one takes a basic degree of self-control -- the "character" again.)
(Someone's taking away some privilege of yours in order to ensure more equitable conditions for others who never had that privilege? Well, pretty much the same thing. Which is why you see people hanging on to ill-gotten gains for dear life...)
So, that's why suffering and meaning are so often juxtaposed. What do we say to people throwing a tantrum over a minor inconvenience? We tell them to "grow up", i.e. that their suffering is not meaningful to us, and they should learn to extinguish that suffering in themselves.
Is it just to tell someone who is experiencing any suffering at all (even that of the minor inconvenience) to just, like, not suffer? That question also has no practical bearing. Ending suffering in oneself is the only end to suffering there can ever be. (Other than death, I guess. In death one is free from all suffering, striving, and meaning. I've heard that the ancient Thracians used to celebrate passings and mourn births, which I find much more logical than the ritually prescribed emotions of our culture. On the other hand, maybe that's why they're gone now :D)
Doesn't mean we shouldn't improve the world and end poverty, injustice, disease, stupidity, and other pretty obviously fixable forms of suffering. We just deserve a more meaningful teleology for that than just "ending suffering". Because I don't think "ending suffering" is a thing that can ever be done in light of the above. Even by an omnipotent being, since "potent" assumes power to change stuff, and "change" assumes the existence of "more preferable" and "less preferable" states. Might as well ask why there's something instead of nothing...
I suspect a large number of people leaving religions aren't militant atheists convinced by the logic of Dawkins/Hitchens/Harris et al. Instead they are people who believe in some kind of higher power or spiritual unity in a way that is totally compatible with deism (or even light theism).
However, the traditional religions have left a lot of progressive minded individuals behind. Rigid dogmas and suspicious meta-physical commitments seem to turn people off.
This is an interesting space to explore. Many of these people would happily affiliate if there was some organization that met their needs.
> In short, these age patterns might be signs of secularization... However, it’s also possible that some of the age differences in religious affiliation revealed in a single survey could result from people becoming more religious as they grow older.
Here's an article from the same research firm last month that examines a different measurement: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/decline-of-c...
The fundamental thing that I think many people need to understand is that many of these "changes" are merely an outward reflection of an inward problem. Meaning a large majority of these individuals were often pursuing Christianity due to some external factor. Take, for example, cultural Christianity. I've sat in rooms with people who have literally been in crisis because they don't understand why people don't stay for the potlucks anymore. The entire foundation of their faith was on the culture surrounding Christianity in America. With that now (as the article points out) fading quite rapidly, they are joining their peers in leaving (or, worse in my opinion, becoming Christian Nationalists).
Many of us have seen this coming for a long time. Heck, if you go back and read Francis Schaeffer's writings, especially his later ones, it's almost uncomfortable how accurate his predictions were.
Some 30 years later, we had a class reunion. And I found out that there was only one other "cradle Catholic" besides me who had never stopped actively practicing Catholicism. There were about six or seven who had stopped at one point and then returned, often when they had kids.
But that still means about 80% of our class are no longer actively Catholic.
To what do I attribute this decline?
I actually think it started two generations before mine. Back then, parents sent their kids to Catholic school to reinforce the faith they were exposed to at home. In the following generation, many parents sent their kids to Catholic school to teach the faith because they weren't exposed to it at home. But obviously, if that faith isn't being practiced at home, it's going to be unlikely to stick.
The horrible sex abuse scandals absolutely hastened this decline, but the ball was already rolling decades beforehand.
> The U.S. and Kenya have the highest levels of “accession,” or entrance, into Islam, with 20% of U.S. Muslims and 11% of Kenyan Muslims saying they were raised in another religion or with no religion. That said, overall, Muslims are a minority in both places: About 1% of U.S. adults and 11% of Kenyans currently identify as Muslim.
I don't think every religion is like that. I think there are approaches to Judaism and Buddhism that you can participate in that don't demand true faith in the "spooky side," as one of my friends puts it. And I don't just mean being ethnically or culturally linked with a religion, I mean actively engaging with it in a regular and organized way. Christianity doesn't offer that, and I don't know if it could or ever will. (I tried the Unitarians.) If it did, I'd probably enjoy being "Christian" again, at least with quote marks. As it is, if I was forced to affiliate myself with an organized religion and participate in weekly ritual services, I'd probably choose my local Zen center or see if my Jewish friends thought it would make sense for me to join them. Going to a Christian church without believing in capital-G God would be unpleasant and unrewarding.
I think that the gnostics with the idea of a malevolent creator god would fit our world better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_C#Evolution_of_animal_...
Many, many scientists start gravitating back towards religion. I’ll never understand the cocky approach with this topic.
For a physicist for instance, being in god is symptomatic of a mental disease, probably multiple personalities disorder -- because these two concepts cannot live together in one brain that believes both.
But I have read selections of the bible, as well as a bunch of other religious texts like selections from the vedas and sutras.
The first parable in the gospel of Mark, the oldest gospel known, is Jesus talking about a farmer sowing seeds. Some of the seeds end up on rocks and birds eat them. Some seeds end up in shallow soil and wither quickly. Some end up surrounded by thorns and are choked out. Only a few land in fertile soil. But the crop that results from the grain grown from the fertile soil is massive, enough to feed people and leave over seeds to repeat the process.
The entire point of the literal first teaching of Jesus is: most people won't actually do what is taught. For various reasons, they will hear the teaching but it won't stick in them. But it doesn't matter because the few people who actually listen to the teaching and actually change their lives will be enough for goodness to spread.
So the criticism of "some (or even most) believers don't act as they profess to believe" is accounted for in the teaching pretty explicitly. Jesus even states later on how at the time of judgement many people will call his name and he will tell them that they never knew him.
My main issue is how a lot of people I see that are strongly religious also don't seem to accept the core tenets of the religion in their hearts. As an example, Christianity is a religion that professes love, but many practitioners are quick to hate others, etc.
Religions help keep destructive people in check. There are people who readily admit that the ONLY reason they haven’t gone on a shooting spree ending with blowing their brains out is their religious faith.
Weirdly though, my mom took my sister and I to a Quaker meeting when we were 10, 11 years old and I thought it was kind of cool. Still didn't believe in a god or whatever but I liked the people and the kind of lack of hierarchy of Quakerism (no priest, just people sitting in silence facing one another, etc.).
I was surprised to find myself seeking out a Quaker meeting again recently — here now 50 or so years since. Perhaps memories of that time came back when reflecting on the past after my mother's death a couple years ago. Perhaps the times we are living in caused me to look for "community".
And I have enjoyed finding the small group of Friends I could in Omaha. When I told one of the regulars that I was atheist, he was cool with it. "Atheism is a necessary step on the way to enlightenment," he told me.
Still puzzling over that.
Quakers like as much as anyone else to be taken as having had some special revelation, especially if they can get that to happen without having to show so bold as to overtly seek to claim it. Don't go thinking they're really so ahierarchical as all that, or that the names they call themselves are any truer by default than anyone else's.
I completely understand that some places bring the kind of inner peace someone needs. I like to sit in churches to think because they are nice, cool and silent. I aml also an "active" atheist and these things do not clash. It is just that churches in my country (France) are great places for this kind of meditation, but it could also be a Buddhist temple or anything else not related to religion.
I wonder if the same thing will happen with China.
Though the trait originates in the useless prejudices of the useless English, in a pluralistic, liberty-oriented culture it is a habit coincidentally serving several valuable purposes, none of which will require the clarification two decades hence that they would need just now. Unfortunately, liberty itself being entirely out of fashion among the nonces for the nonce to the fore, there is not much point either elaborating on or expecting the sorts of reforms which an aficionado of liberty, not at all the same as a soi-disant "libertarian," would appreciate.
I’m 38 now and in the process of becoming Catholic. I’ve started going to mass every day. I’m not really sure why but I feel really great.
Our goal is to inoculate our children from atheism. We knew a lot of people who killed themselves over the years who were part of the “atheist church” we went to in our 20s. I’ve stopped caring about being right, and don’t really care to argue about religion with people. Instead care about living a life I find meaningful. I want the same for my children. After exploring the other options, I think a religious framework is what makes that possible.
The Mormons I know were warned against an "unhealthy" level of interest in theology. Very different from Catholicism, where they assume it's normal and healthy to be interested in theological questions, some people will go deeper than others, and the church should embrace it. The only Mormon I know who persisted in his interest despite official warnings was pretty racist and was convinced that racism, like polygamy, was still part of the faith and was only denied for political and social reasons. He got crosswise with some school officials (at BYU) because they wouldn't discuss it with him and temporarily lost his temple recommend. According to him, what they said he needed to correct was his excessive interest in theology.
I am sure there are bad experiences out there too, but there are plenty of good ones.
We do not need someone to tell you how the wrote is - we can see it ourselves. What we see in life is explained by science, that brings in new progress - we do not need a group that claims that gif dud everything, to tell later that it was just allegoric when science explained it.
We do not need the mud of religion to cover for what it cannot explain - you mention how an insufferable edgelird you were, but religion is this, plus no will to change our learn.
