It does to secular Jews or recovering Catholics who like the tradition but don’t really feel a spiritual connection to their former faith.
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I disagree; I think it makes more sense for an atheist or agnostic who isn’t convinced by any one view. Religious practice can have real value without needing any spiritual reality behind it. I don’t celebrate the Eucharist, but if I did it would have the significance that the group is gathered together, sharing food and drink and all on the same level. Social status, gender, race, age and any other status marker were meaningless, and everyone is to serve each other. It’s like the stone soup story: people build valuable cultural practices around their religious books and their idea of the supernatural, but I think you can take the central element away without throwing the soup out.
In many ways this is easier with Judaism and more problematic with something like Evangelicalism; I was discussing this a while ago with @bibliophile20, so he can probably be clearer about his perspective. Three main identities that people have are identifying with your culture, your beliefs and your family. For me, my culture and my beliefs were very close, and there are a number of parts of the New Testament that teach that Christians can see the Jewish history up to Jesus as their own history; that they are in a spiritual but real sense the children of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David and many others through Jesus. My family is very religious too, and the church was like an extended family – we were all brothers and sisters in Christ and there was a very close relationship with other Christians that I just didn’t have outside of the church.
When I left, I lost all three in an important sense; while I still have my biological family and friends in the church, there’s a division as a lot of the ties were through belief. I’m not allowed to celebrate Communion, to pray or do many other things in church. The religious parts of family life are slightly awkward, and I’m an outside observer to some extent. Similarly, the Christian culture means a lot less, since I no longer have any sense in which I can associate myself with Jewish history (of course most Jewish people would deny that I had any such claim, but that’s beside the point). Faith is hugely important for inclusion in that culture too.
In Judaism, there’s less of a sense that religion is based on faith rather than works. If you stop believing in the Jewish god, you are still a literal descendant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. You can still keep kosher and other religious practices, because this is your cultural heritage. You’ve lost an important part of the belief element of your identity, but not necessarily all of it at all, and it’s not disingenuous to be religious but not spiritual in this sense. I remember hearing a Jewish archaeologist explain why he celebrated Passover without believing that the events surrounding the story actually happened. He and his family were connecting with a practice that his ancestors had followed for generations stretching back thousands of years. This has a huge amount of significance, and in many ways the veracity of the original story itself was secondary to this.
Incidentally, it’s interesting to see some Evangelicals moving away from a kind of “spiritual but not religious” idea of their belief, where history, liturgy and other elements are not valued, and authenticity is seen to mean original and spontaneous action. Sometimes following a well-worn path has a different kind of authenticity that is lacking in the churches they grew up in.
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I think Richard Dawkins did rationalism a huge disservice by allowing so many people to say “see, that’s what atheists are like - entitled superior jerks trying to push their disbelief into your face.”
And yes, I strongly agree with your post. I come from a long line of atheists on my father’s side and agnostics on my mother’s side; I had to read theology at U in order to clarify my own thinking and my belief is that religious thinking is an evolutionary mechanism that helps us to learn behaviour with survival value. But I can’t expect everybody else to spend years trying to understand the anthropology, sociology and psychology of religion. A car mechanic fixes cars without understanding thermodynamics except in the most general terms; a religion can help people get through life with fewer problems than they might otherwise experience.
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Why is this even news?. If anyone is being an atheist for any other reason then philosophical conviction, and that reached after long and informed contemplation, you are doing it wrong. In fact, you are being ignorant and gullible, if you have been convinced there is no god SIMPLY, because it is a subject of some complexity.
Only the superstitious “believe” things because other people believe them. Good luck to Mr Zuckerberg, but his belief system is as valuable as anyone elses . . . i.e. not the least value at all.
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You were not exposed to a whole family proselytising to you from infancy. So reason was able to take its seat in your mind.
If we do not [quote=“jsroberts, post:67, topic:92102”]
critique problematic parts of religions
[/quote] we are simply abandoning the cultures mental strength to those despicable people who think it is proper behaviour to force dogma into their children’s minds. The religious need saving from their own worse selves. Religion is a false world view, and the cause of much of the distress and destruction in the world. It is the essence of probity to speak out against it.
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That wasn’t me (I never use the American word “critique”). I’m not sure who you are replying to.
Like I give a schidt what god (other than money) Zuck worships. If he’s really pandering to the Trump Base he should convert to Christianity. The Jack Chick brigade are all for protecting Israel as the seat of the Apocalypse, but the Jews will have to convert or go to the hot squat.
“Lotto for Jesus” is a good description. Prosperity Gospel preachers draw a direct line between wealth and holiness. It’s a grand American tradition: the fantasy that the rich beoame wealthy by righteous hard work is blended with the conviction that everyone is born a piece of crap and only by trying really really really hard to please the Big J does one stand a chance for a Golden Ticket.
It reminds me of the troublesome conclusion of Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels: the way to deal with human misery is to sell distraction to the miserable.
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I’ve gone the other way. As I’ve gotten older, my interest in spirituality has waned, whereas once I was quite fascinated by it. Even by the time I’d reached my late 20’s, I’d picked up the very few useful spiritual tools I found not to be wishful thinking, and most of those came from Zen Buddhism. Existentialism and other non-spiritual philosophical frameworks turned out to be far more useful than any spirituality and had the advantage of not relying on made-up cosmogonies.
That said, I have no quarrel with spirituality as long as its adherents aren’t militant. There’s also no love lost between me and militant atheism.
If I were going to follow a religion, it would be Satanism.
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Yep, the quote system here confused me, will fix it.
Religion doesn’t require spirituality in the sense of relating to spirit or supernatural. Deism, Humanism and (I believe) Scientology aren’t spiritual. Heck, I know practicing atheist Jews who go to shul who are religious but not spiritual.
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Virtually all your post applies to me, too. Rather than Satanism, how about starting a Church of the Mildly Existentialist Somewhat Religiously Apathetic Syncretists, now the Church of England has stopped doing that job? No attendance at services needed.
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I think thats certainly part of it. A good deal of those sorts seem to be more angry at religion and God than anything else. Even to the point where it doesn’t really sound like they disbelieve. And I certainly went through a period of that when I was quite young. Seems most common with people who had bad experiences with religion. And particularly common in the Gay community, for obvious reasons. but I think there’s a couple other things going on.
First is simple exasperation. You see it a lot in skeptic circles. After certain span of time dealing with endless nonsense claims and a harassment and attacks front true believers a lot of skeptical writers seen to simply dismiss claims with spite. Turning back in towards their own group. New Atheism is/was deeply connected to the skeptic movement such as it was. When you predicate your atheism on disproving god and other’s beliefs you’re bound to run into the same sort of debunkers fatigue.
More so though I think it’s pure tribalism. We’ve seen really similar shake ups in skeptic circles (directly connected) And various enthusiast/ fan communities at around the same time. You got a relatively small group of very vocal members who build identity and social club like “movement” around their interest in the subject. The sneering, attack dog approach is a social signifier signally membership. And superiority. Sometimes superiority through membership.
Now intellectual atheism has always had that sort of problem. You can look at major atheist writing from the 30’s through the 70s and see the same sort of bad faith arguments, easily debunked claims, and embedded biases already there. But you toss that into one of those bubble like enthusiast groups and you get a very rigid, socially enforced idea of what this thing is within a very homogeneous group of people. The Internets and social change bring more people to the subject. Different people with different ideas. And there’s a backlash and doubling down on the nastier aspects of the group. Essentially the same thing that happened with gamergate and the sick puppies. A smaller but far more vocal and organized subset asserting itself as the real atheists.
And that dove tails nicely with one of the weird things about the new atheist movement. There was curiously little movement to the movement. When there were legal or political moves to the benefit of atheists, separation of church and state, science education etc. It always seemed to come from groups tangential to them. Science based medicine groups, the ACLU, Satanic Temple, various religious groups, and older Atheist groups that have quietly been doing it all along. I’ve taken to thinking of the movement/new Atheist thing as Atheist Fandom. Likewise much of what defines the skeptical movement. The focus always seemed so focused on associating with people who already agree with you, attending large events to hob knob with your favorite writers. It’s looks so much more to me like an enthusiast community than it does a socio-political movement.
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I can get moderately behind that 
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I spent my teens and twenties as a neopagan hippy, happy to buy into any bit of crystal/herbal/woo nonsense I came across. These days, I’m an atheist and empiricist.
Working in medical research, you get too much exposure to the damage done by faith-based reasoning. Superstition is deadly when it interacts with medicine.
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G K Chesterton made this point in some detail early in the 20th century. He also pointed out that people who attacked the Catholic Church for corruption could be regarded as starting from the assumption that it had a job to do, but which it was not filling properly.
But I’m not sure what “bad faith arguments” consist of in terms of atheism. Are you referring to the attempt to identify atheism with a higher level of intellectual development, which is the Dawkins position, or do you have something else in mind?
But not too strongly so. It was the academic theologian David Edwards who suggested that the main rule of the Church of England was “Come early and get a back seat.”
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Yeah. Influence. Subtle twists in the platform.
If the world is heading back to religion, there’s more hard rain a’comin. Blood, guts, death and war - they say some skygod or prophet is always the key backer in the game.
Let’s please allow those of us who wish to remain devoutly atheist plenty of breathing space. By god.
I kind of think the term can be read in more than one way: many of the more vocal people are probably newly atheists rather than raised as such, and there’s a kind of eternal September of people with the same arguments hoping to demolish religion. The centre of gravity seems to have shifted quite far to the right too. After a while they settle down in their anti-religious zeal and move on to attacking feminism…
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I would have a hard time calling Zen Buddhism a non-spiritual framework. I mean, reincarnation, enlightenment and karma are a pretty darn spiritual beliefs.
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Certainly, which is why I’m always careful to explain that I’m not a Buddhist. But there are some non-superstitious aspects to Zen Buddhism that I’ve found very useful. I wasn’t really even looking in that direction, but a lot of the people in the kendo community I used to be very active in hewed to Buddhism, and I realized there were tools there that were useful well beyond fencing and martial arts.
ETA: I always find it a bit ridiculous when people look down on others for taking elements from religion or philosophy or politics without fully joining the club, so to speak. So someone likes a lot of what Jesus purportedly said but doesn’t believe he was divine. So someone finds the practices of Zen useful but doesn’t believe in the reality of reincarnation or karma. So someone likes safety nets but isn’t a card-carrying socialist. So someone calls them self a bleeding-heart libertarian without the crazy parts. So what? Wisdom isn’t a field of fortresses with bouncers. (Not saying you were doing that, but there’s a lot of holier-than-thou in every believe space.
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I wasn’t, but no worries. I understand what you mean. If you took the teachings of Jesus, dropped the supernatural parts and distilled it down to what he spent most of his life doing, they were pretty good ideals. Help the poor, feed the hungry, heal the sick, pacifism, the golden rule and a heavy dose of forgiveness.
Unfortunately it seems like there is no shortage of faiths that go the other direction instead and dig deep around searching for parts which let them abuse their fellow man instead.
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