«This parodies the suggestion from some religious groups that the high numbers of disasters, famines, and wars in the world is due to the lack of respect and worship toward their deity.»
Assuming there is direct causation here rather than simple correlation I'll take it. The long term harms of religion far outweigh these items. You don't have to look much further than the death toll in the middle east for an example.
One of the services a church provides is a community. For some religions it’s wielded as a weapon though.
Leave, and lose everything. Take a peek at /r/exmormon for a bunch of examples.
What people need is a secular community to replace it, and not all find it. Some of the things listed above are exacerbated by feelings of isolation or lack of purpose.
A lie is best concealed between two truths. Churches know how to organize people. It’s a rare set of people management skills that has nothing specific to do with the Divine. They’ve just had more opportunity to hone those skills.
But as humans we often trust people who show expertise in multiple areas to be telling us the truth about other things as well. There are plenty of good things that happen at churches, but they don’t have to happen at a church. And the more they happen in the secular world, the more people figure out they can pick and chose things that make them feel like decent human beings without signing up for the others. That’s either a terrifying or comforting statement, depending on which way you are coming from.
To take your point further, gangs also provide community, in a very negative way to the rest of society.
So do volunteer organizations and other secular institutions and groups like book clubs, fitness groups, tabletop game players, Pokemon Go players, etc.
Back to my own speculation, I'd surmise that a lot of people who go to church may go for the community or personal connections, and may not even believe in the dogma. Many times I've been to church enough times to have listened to frequent sermons about maintaining faith, and those sermons always puzzle me - why do these churchgoers have such difficulty maintaining faith to the point where the preacher has to bring it up regularly?
I absolutely agree. America really needs some mandatory citizen participation program. Force everyone to work 5 hours a month towards some project while increasing social cohesion.
Christianity had their issue and politicized Christianity had done enormous damage to our society trough bigotry, segregation and straight up wars, but it got better in the recent decades and meanwhile it's by no means perfect we're throwing away the only western moral framework with no replacement in sight. this will do a number on society coesion and it's already visibile in certain aspects.
The Middle-East was actually pretty Ok until the secular West decided to interfere and upset the balance of powers.
As for harm more generally, historically religious wars are at 7% of the total.
But it's also arguable that religion has suppressed more wars than caused. For instance, most of the religions are strong on self-control, against anger and intemperate behaviour. Christianity has "Love your enemies and pray for them", "Do good to those who do ill to you" "Never stop forgiving...." "Do not judge and you will not be judged" "Mercy will be show to the merciful" etc etc etc. It was famous for a list of such principles and behaviour, but somehow seems to have been forgotten and instead has become the religion of hate?!?!
Religious principles and morality laws, and especially Christian ones as above which are quotes, also enhance community stability and harmony. They're a recipe for happy families, peaceful communities....
Yeah, it’s almost as if a Christian-backed conservative political coalition dismantled the welfare state and stopped new services from being put in place or something...
A few reasons I suppose: the first comment was already dinged by the community; the second comment upped the ante considerably; and I was insufficiently aware of how inflammatory the topic is. By which I mean: I was well aware of how inflammatory the topic is, and even that was not enough. So I learned something in this thread.
dang was right to ding me. I was bullied as a kid by right-wing Christians espousing these kinds of talking points and projected that lingering resentment into this conversation. Apologies.
In general, replace all of the social and infrastructure with themselves at the center and then there's nothing to replace when the churches fail to serve the people - so people leave.
(I've never been a member of any - I just study - as a hobby - "conversion era" in Europe. Be aware that some of what the church replaced was toxic, and some was not. It's an interesting set of eras to study....)
The churches have failed though, largely. And finding out why can be informative.
(this is not a religious failure, this is a social one. Don't blame peoples' beliefs for this, that's not the right target).
Besides the other replies to you discussing correlation not being causation - is the purpose of your comment to disseminate truth or convince others to join a religion? And why don't you link to us religious missions of non-Christian religions like Islam or Judaism?
Let's (easily) debunk each of your sources to demonstrate their complete irrelevance to this topic:
- The Mass Killings article you post describes mass shootings, which are a specific type of homicide with a narrow definition. Homicides overall are down dramatically since the early 1990s. Mass shootings are aided by poor gun control policies and mass availability of guns in the United States. Mass shootings are not prevalent in developed countries that are not the United States in significant numbers.
- The Violent Crime article you've cited only talks about the past two consecutive years, not the decade-long time period cited by the religious affiliation trends in this article.
- Homeless populations probably aren't sampled in this phone survey, so the homelessness rate can't be correlated with the information given here.
Your weak correlation to religion is entirely debunked by choosing just about any Western/Northern European country, or much of Asia like China, South Korea, and Japan, and noticing that their religious affiliation numbers are far lower than the US has ever been, along with their violent crime rate.
What do Christian churches do? They certainly don't pay property taxes, so they don't fund public schools, police, or mental health services, like a normal business or resident would if they occupied the property.
> The Mass Killings article you post describes mass shootings, which are a specific type of homicide with a narrow definition. Homicides overall are down dramatically since the early 1990s. Mass shootings are aided by poor gun control policies and mass availability of guns in the United States. Mass shootings are not prevalent in developed countries that are not the United States in significant numbers.
Homicides are indeed down, and that includes firearm homicides as well. When people mention any recent rise in firearm deaths, what they are are really saying is that firearm suicides are on the rise.
As for prevalence, it's not as uneven as you would think.
>In one study by the Crime Prevention Research Center, the United States actually ranked 66th among other world nations when it came to the frequency mass public shootings per capita.
>And when just comparing European countries with the United States and Canada, the U.S. ranked 12th in a comparative study between 2009-2015.
This is also correlated with the rise of a new and powerful religion, informally called progressism.
If you don't think it's a religion, try to speak publicly against it, and observe the kind of protest it's going to evoke. Most of it will not be a calm rational discussion, or even a light-hearted dismissal. For many, you would appear attacking the holy.
The experiment above is dangerous; I'd suggest studying preivous experimental data first.
If we are indulging in causation and correlation mixup, have you noticed that some of the most ruthless public service cutting politicians and outsourcing CEOs are devout church going folks ? You have cut social services and mental support services , branded those who need such services as freeloaders and you are blaming secularism.
This is exactly the main issue I see right now, politicians who use Christianity as a banner to do less for people. Which is very confusing to me but somehow they get away with it. This is turning people away from Christianity before they can find out that its purpose is to serve people especially the mentally ill, homeless, poor, etc.
Turn Christianity into a vehicle for conservative identity politics instead of a community and moral framework, and the people victimized by it will cease to identify as it. Simple as that.
> Catholicism has never been that, and it's declining too.
In the U.S. you are likely correct. But in Spain, Portugal, Argentina and many parts of Latin America it was a strong supporter of fascist/authoritarian regimes up until the 70's and 80's. Also, up until the 19th century Catholicism was the foundation of very authoritarian and absolutist monarchies.
Will be interesting to see what happens when the country trades the Protestant worth ethic, concepts of morality, duty to family, for .... whatever is adopted as faith instead.
Identity politics seems to be the new religion for many.
Should people really be able to discuss things they don't have the discipline to understand? Should average Americans be able to discuss race relations or economic matters or should they simply... rightly receive superior accounts from those who engage in empiricism?
Those who "engage in empiricism" might want to look empirically at the effects their "superior accounts" tend to have on others. It's not so clear that this approach is working.
To be specific about this site: on HN we have a clear mandate—intellectual curiosity—and a set of principles based on what serves that (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Discussion that stays within those guidelines is welcome, and conversely, when it isn't able to stay within those guidelines, we intervene. There are different degrees of intervention depending on how badly the guidelines are being violated. But intervention, or moderation, or whatever you want to call it, is indispensable. The system doesn't reliably stay within the guidelines on its own.
Actually, there is almost no topic that degenerates into flamewar and (frankly) inanity as rapidly as the topic of religion does on HN, and probably anywhere on the internet. Can you think of one?
Even if it does descend into a flame war at some point, I feel that it's interesting to observe people's viewpoints.
Personally, I'm not religious and I tend to view the tech world through that filter. I forget that some tech people might have other philosophical or religious beliefs.
At some level, I assume that Tech people are smart, and thus don't believe in religious.
This is obviously untrue, so now I'm curious to see if people's religious beliefs, or lack of them, impacts the tech work that they do.
i.e. is there any crossover in the venn diagram of religion and tech, or are they entirely isolated from each other.
Historically, religious groups sometimes funded purely scientific endeavors. Of course, sometimes religious groups went after science that was inconvenient to belief... But both actions indicate a precedent.
> Even if it does descend into a flame war at some point, I feel that it's interesting to observe people's viewpoints.
The problem is that, just like fires in a city, flamewars aren't cost-free. It only takes so many before users don't want to be here anymore—except users who like flamewars. That's how internet communities destroy themselves, so trying to contain that risk is a big part of what we do.
True, religion is certainly the worst offender, but it's clearly not a one item list.
At the moment, anything related to Richard Stallman seems to bring out the worst in a lot of people. And anything related to a particular gender isn't likely to go well.
And to be fair to HN, what tends to happens is that the initial set of low-value comments gets replaced over time by better ones. Even the worst of threads can have good conversations in them, it's just sometimes difficult to find.
Wow that's the sort of comment that usually gets removed. An unnecessary slur on an entire group of people with no supporting argument. Being disagreeable for the sake of being disagreeable. I'm disappointed.
I'm sorry your comment confuses me. Isn't it us users that downweight comments with our votes? I thought you reacted on flags and heavy downvotes.
I know you do a lions share of work dang, but I think you were a little to fast here. Good comments were being posted (and pushed below you comment) as you wrote that.
For sure, users downweight (and up-weight!) comments. That's the most important factor. But moderators also downweight subthreads, for example if they're off topic. It's a combo of the two.
Same for stories: the ranking is determined by votes, flags, software, and moderation. Users are the most important factor, but alas not a sufficient one. Without moderation, the system gets into unstable states and can't stay within its mandate.
It's partly strategic. The presence of a moderation comment like that in a thread often seems to evoke higher-quality comments. I'd bet that it such had an effect in this case—the thread improved almost immediately—but who knows.
You're right that I should have written something longer and not in haste. But I'm a bit surprised by the strong reaction to that one; it's atypical. Perhaps to some readers it felt like a disparagement of their own view on religion—which of course it was not.
1. Which community does? The Christian community? If so, do you have an intuition over the proportion of HN people who were raised in Abrahamic faiths? Do you presume that the voices which monitor the conversation aren't personally experienced?
2. Or the academic community formed by the Abrahamic faiths? Did you reserve some expectation that secular scholars in academia are about to pop in?
3. And if people cannot discuss these matters, are they to receive the truth from a better source? Which source should we receive it from?
4. If most discussions never reaches into data-driven conversation, does that put them all in the same bin for you? Aspirational speech, perhaps?
I don't know which community does, but I suspect there's no large public internet forum that does. The topic is too activating.
To get substantive discussion of religion, you probably need smaller groups that have a certain amount of cohesion. A group can be cohesive even if it disagrees. But a large group with weak cohesion discussing a provocative topic is probably always going to plummet to lowest-common-denominator quickly.
You wrote that after a mere twenty minutes. Compared to how you've treated other inflammatory topics, one can't help but wonder if this is a sore spot for you. In any case, it's amusing because I'm in that set that would prefer Hacker News to actually discuss computer topics and not those such as this. My computing related articles usually go ignored, since you need to read more than the headline before you vomit forth your personal opinions, though, and the topic means not everyone is equally underqualified to give their opinion to start with.
You're right that there's a sore spot for me, but it isn't religion—it's long experience with how wretched HN threads become as soon as religion is mentioned. But I should have been more careful and not posted hastily and vaguely.
If I hadn't intervened by posting and doing other standard moderation things, though, the thread would likely have become more of a flamewar. These things don't self-correct; would that they did. I made this case more complicated by posting in a way that stirred up additional waves—it was not a splash-free dive, like we usually try for. I was distracted and my irritation managed to grab the steering wheel.
I am a Christian, and I believe this is caused directly by a few factors:
1. The history of actions taken by theocracies is not good. There is a strong modern social justice movement, and even saying something bad 10 years ago is enough to cancel someone. Now imagine a group that committed multiple genocides over the centuries.
2. A growing rise of "spiritual but not religious" has led young people to eschew attending church. These young people grow up and have young people of their own who are now never exposed to Christianity.
3. Relegation of religion to personal matters alone, taboo in public.
4. Christians have allowed the book of Leviticus to overwhelm their message. Because of what is said about LGBTQ, Christian == bigot in many people's minds.
I'm sure there are fellow Christians who visit HN. I think these are the primary obstacles that must be overcome in order to grow the cause. All the mission work and happy Easter messages in the world won't make a lick of difference against these 4 issues.
The intolerance of Christian groups for non-Christian is a part too. I think it has to do with the myth of being persecuted that hasn't been true since Constantine.
Tell that to the Catholics in England and colonial America, or the Protestants in Ireland, or the Jacobites in Scotland, or churches of various denominations in many Islamic countries or territories, such as the Congo.
Of course. Even subgroups within the Christian church itself have been guilty of such atrocities at various points in history. But to say that all organized persecution of Christians ended with Constantine is just historically wrong.
I'm not personally religious, but it always struck me as odd that modern churches don't take more of an socially progressive activism role. The historical Jesus was quite the rabble-rouser, activist, and not conservative in the least.
From my personal observations, the religious groups that seem to be activists tend to be activists with puritanical and conservative motivations (i.e., yell at people who they perceive are doing ungodly things even though modern society has deemed those things to be acceptable)
The other side is religious groups that are socially progressive (be kind and open, pray for people, provide services to those who need it, etc) but tend to be more of a passive supporter of equality.
Churches have had their "brand" tarnished because a few extremist religious groups wrapped up bigotry and social conservatism in a cloth of "religious freedom" and were really loud about it. The more progressive churches didn't speak up to fight back and counter it, and now the whole religious community is tainted. The "abusive priest" controversies didn't help matters either.
If there were churches that supported and encouraged the social justice that actually resonates with today's population, especially the young population, they would find a far more receptive audience.
I would consider going to a church if it was leading Extinction Rebellion marches, organizing protests against businesses that were bigoted, pushing their members to support the community and vote for new libraries, citizen investigation boards in police departments, fair elections, progressive drug treatment diversions instead of prosecution, etc.
Some side effects of this that are worth thinking about...
As churches see less membership, at some point congregations merge and one church is shut down.
Many churches do outreach and provide services to the community, the poor, and the homeless. This often includes shelter from the elements, soup kitchens, food pantries, meeting places for groups like AA/NA/etc.
When a church shuts down, the distance that the population has to travel can increase, and there might not be enough room to provide the same resources to those populations.
Additionally, it's not necessarily a problem, but more of a musing... What happens to all those old churches? The impact on the property market has to have local effects...
I wonder how many churches are shut down, but are just maintained by a skeleton crew of maintenance people in the hope that their customer base will increase enough one day to restart their services and reopen the property.
I assume churches don't pay property tax, so as long as the church is in hibernation mode and not actually totally dissolved, could they hold onto the property indefinitely for just the cost of maintenance? Or would them not providing religious services anymore cause them to lose the exemption?
I would think that many churches sell the property. I know people who live in an apartment building that used to be a church.
While churches do provide services and outreach to the poor, I've always wondered about what happens when they're serving the opposite effect by not paying property taxes. Property taxes are the public education base in the USA, and quality education is the way out of poverty.
Churches' outreach programs will also discriminate against causes they don't agree with based on their own teachings - i.e., Christian churches might not recommend that someone use contraception or get an abortion even if those options are the best logical course of action.
You know how some people have pointed out that McDonalds wasn't in the food business, it was in the real estate business to franchise owners? They often hold prime real estate locations.
The Post Office also has prime real estate locations.
I think that Churches, collectively, hold some of the most desireable property locations in our communities. Especially older churches in city centers have been there and grown organically since cities were founded so now they're very valuable.
Religion is the most conservative institution ever created. It does not adapt (well, almost..) it doesn't change (also, almost..) and it's no wonder that with developments in science and culture, religion doesn't seem as important as it used to be.
It's been going on for a while, in suburbia the main purpose of religion has nothing to do with religion, it's mostly about community, church is the place when you meet a talk with your neighbors. That's it.
Well, strong economy is also there to "blame", one talks to God only when one needs something, nothing wrong with that just to make a point that when everything is good religion is on decline.
If the trend continues, we can expect parity in Christianity and religiously unaffiliated by roughly 2040. However I would expect the decline to increase in rate at some point, as the network effects due to the ubiquity of the Christian community start to fall apart.
What's disheartening to me, a life-long agnostic, is that this change doesn't seem to correspond to an increase in rational, scientific materialism. Indeed, it seems like science is on the outs as well with increasingly common denial of basic scientific facts when they conflict with ideology. Instead, this seems to be a change of aesthetics - trading one set of pseudoscientific beliefs (Christianity) for another (new age mysticism, astrology, goop.com).
Depends what version of Christianity you're thinking of.
After all, the inventor of the Big Bang theory was a Catholic priest (top physicist first), and the father of modern genetics was a Catholic monk (biologist also). It's also
That covers 50% of Christianity. And since none of Christianity has ever had a dogma that the Bible has to be literally interpreted, really it's just the Christians who don't know they don't have to be creationist who are pseudo-scientfic.
Despite stating the facts, it's inevitable that this post will be downvoted by the agressively anti-religious.
Good! I come from a family that is split between A) secular/atheist people and B) deeply religious people from the South. Group A has done well, all have happy families, and are overall good people. Group B are, to put it nicely, uneducated bigots who blame a lifetime of bad decisions on everyone besides themselves, oh, and they are also some of the most hateful people you will ever meet. The only people in group B who turned out okay were the ones who rejected religion or turned out gay (and newsflash, they were exiled by their so loving families).
"I lucked into the most fortuitous, warm, constructive kind of family context imaginable. My father was a top scholar, a Phi Beta Kappa. My mother was a voice coach and accompanist of singers in the concert and opera fields. We didn't have the term "liberated woman", but my mother certainly was ... They were brought up, both, in the state of Indiana, which is now called the Bible Belt. They were wholesome, they neither smoked nor drank, and they never used the Lord's name in vain. I never heard a four-letter word. It didn't exist in my wholesome family setting."
The decline of religiosity is a global trend, strongly correlated with economic development. The US has historically been an outlier and remains unusually religious. The relevant question isn't really why religion is declining in the US, but why it hasn't declined sooner.
Claims that the decline in religiosity are related to increases in crime or social problems are not strongly supported by the evidence; there is not a consistent relationship between religiosity and criminality or wellbeing.
> The relevant question isn't really why religion is declining in the US, but why it hasn't declined sooner.
I believe the reason is that religion has been very different in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world. Few countries have the great variety of religious denominations the U.S. has and the relative peace between said religions.
> The relevant question isn't really why religion is declining in the US, but why it hasn't declined sooner.
It's possible that religion is treating the symptom of another problem. Assuming someone religious attends an organized function related to that religion, it's making them part of a community and might be helping them feel less lonely.
2018 study shows that half of Americans feel lonely. [1], but a similar kind of study on people in europe surveying if people had anyone to ask for help or discuss personal matters has a much smaller amount [2]
The European study indicates that income inequality has an effect on social isolation, with the lowest incomes having twice the amount of isolation.
The income inequality in America is even more pronounced, and geographically, many of the areas with the highest levels of religious beliefs seem (on a map) to line up pretty well with levels of poverty and income inequality.
Usual disclaimer about correlation/causation and everything... But perhaps economic conditions that cause people to tend to be socially isolated are being self-treated by pursuit of religious groups because the community it gathers results in a decrease in the isolation symptom?
A great sorrow I think. Not for Christianity per se but all that comes with it.
What is most essentially "home" in the world is the set of rituals you make for yourself and others, things that allow you to dwell more poetically in place. Traditional rituals, like those found in religions, enhance our sense of belonging in the world, or if the world is a rough and scary place, at least within a society. I think we do not have the words for all the good parts of religion and ritual, and because they are not easily articulated, they are easily dismissed as irrational or nonexistent.
People instead will attack any religion, or any set of rituals that are not easily explained with a dollar value, gleefully as things that need to die, in service of a more rational world, by which they only mean a world more easily explainable to them. Since they cannot easily explain what's lost, they assume it must be nothing. I think this is a mistake due to a lack of attention.
People do not think about this, for that matter I fear people hardly think of our sense of dwelling and belonging at all. Culturally, the idea of "belonging" anywhere has been entirely subsumed by "wandering"[note]. This makes for a more consumer-friendly world, but a much less nice one to live in day to day. I fear that until we have the easy words to properly describe what it is we have lost, people will simply continue to cheer its loss, perhaps pausing once in a while to wonder aloud why they feel somewhat lost.
[note] ask people about their aspirational hobbies, they are amost always quick to point to "travel", and "experiences". Weirdly a lot of the "experiences" wording people use comes from a study commissioned by LivingSocial ("millennials prefer experiences over things", as if that's the dichotomy) to hawk the selling of experiences. The pseudostudy seems to be outliving the failed company.
I would guess that the high level of religious affiliation in the United States is somewhat abnormal for a developed and wealthy country.
Can you find another Western nation out there with similar levels of religious affiliation?
I think I see this decline as a correction. It's not actually normal to have so many people finding religion important to their lives in a large, connected, developed society. The USA's unique history and geography lent itself to high levels of religious affiliation, but since the Internet has connected us all a little closer, it's been harder for religious institutions and religious parents to prevent younger people from obtaining unfiltered information.
Enjoyable secular rituals are also easy to find if you look right in front of you - the Thanksgiving Day parade, the SuperBowl, Halloween and Trick-or-Treating, Valentine's Day, city-wide marathons, County Fairs, street festivals, etc...the list is nearly endless.
And tradition itself isn't a religion or belief in something. The fact that the Catholic church has you cross yourself, stand and sit at specific times, or eat a cracker are not examples a belief in anything, they are physical ritual and tradition. One can partake in all those activities without having a thought in their mind. There are also secular traditions that have no root in surviving religions, like putting a tree in your house during the holiday season. Plenty of atheists put up "Christmas trees" because it's fun!
There are so many implied claims in what you say, it is difficult to give a response. We would almost certainly be talking past each other.
> I think I see this decline as a correction. It's not actually normal to have so many people finding religion important to their lives in a ...
Why use that as your normative base? Why not say that everything after, say, Descartes or Jesus or the printing press is abnormal level of religion, and that we are in a lull of divinity? Why do you think anything about the religiosity of anyone in the last 1-30 centuries is normal?
> in a large, connected ... but since the Internet has connected us all ...
Are we in a large, connected society? Has the internet really done as you say?
The United States is one of the most religious countries for being as wealthy and developed as it is. Many of the similarly developed nations that remain religious are the oil theocracies.
As I mentioned, the Internet has allowed people to read opinions beyond their own filtered literature. A religious school or household won’t buy books that question religion. But an entire generation (the millennials shown in the article) grew up with Internet connections that largely took them beyond those filters.
I know that part is speculation on my end, but eliminating the Internet’s role in inter-connectivity as a possibility is an odd hypothesis. I have friends in Japan in shared interest groups for Japanese pop stars, how would that have happened before the Internet? Writing letters?
I haven't found any good source of religious affiliation data, but if instead we go by what percentage of the population say that religion is important in their life, a lot of Western nations had a higher percentage than the US according to a 2009 Gallup poll [1].
Not many. You’ve got Italy, the seat of the Catholic Church, and Portugal. The rest that are higher are not in the same class in terms of development or wealth, like Greece and Moldova.
As someone that has lived in 4 countries, gone through 2 nationalities, 3 languages and 3 professional careers, I strongly disagree.
I suspect your "sense of belonging" is just lazy accommodation or fear of change. Culture, social or personal, can't evolve without changing. You don't become a better person if you don't change your habits, rituals and your deep rooted mental frameworks.
True, a mind too open doesn't hold nothing of value. But a closed mind is stale, stagnant. And, in a world that changes faster each year, stagnation is danger, it is not safe.
I suggest you to embrace change with all its dangers and opportunities.
> You don't become a better person if you don't change your habits, rituals and your deep rooted mental frameworks.
You think, say, monks or rabbis are worse persons, then? Certainly to you they are stale, as you say?
What about Homer, whose rituals you may imagine never changed in his lifetime. Was he a worse person, and lazier, than someone modern, who changes them often?
> You think, say, monks or rabbis are worse persons, then?
I don't know any rabbi, only catholic monks. These monks I met are lovely people, in a moral sense. In an intellectual or cultural level not so much. The world and culture has become much bigger than their ancient readings.
However, I suspect their character and good nature is not so much a result of their "belonging". After all they "belong" to the same Catholic church that was, for so long, a shelter for pedophiles.
> What about Homer, whose rituals you may imagine never changed in his lifetime.
With all respect for Homer and classic Greek culture I need to stress that the pace of change today is much more accelerated than in ancient cultures.
Classic Greek culture is indeed the foundation of all western culture and certainly deserves to be studied by anyone seeking enlightment. But the logic, political philosophy and worldview we have today is an huge improvement over them. Every year are adding much more to our knowledge than within Homer's lifetime.
I think some people _have_ found that though in other places. I look at music and going to shows and the community I’m a part of there and do see the sense of belonging and care that you might find in a religious setting.. hell when we go see our favorite artists, I call it “going to church”.
Wonder what will replace the community for a lot of people in the near future. In a lot of places the church is a de facto community place. There usually a lot of posts in HN about the modern life, loneliness, depression, isolation etc. and I think if you strip away the outward trappings and dogma, this is what religion is good for. Not in a "believe in Jesus" or "trust in God" kind of way, but in a "how to orient your life" kind of way. Which is to say, the actually useful portion of religion generally teaches that your best life is probably not focused on you. It isn't about finding yourself, or being true to yourself, or really thinking about yourself at all. It's in being of benefit to the human beings around you. And in serving those around you, you become something that is worth being. There are parentless children, drug addicts, parks that need cleaning etc. And not christianity per se but local churches do a great deal of job in these. We will see what the future holds.
96 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 51.7 ms ] threadand mass killings https://news.wttw.com/2019/08/13/northwestern-research-shows...
and violent crime https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/us/violent-crime-murder-c...
and homelessness https://www.cbsnews.com/news/homelessness-on-the-rise-in-som...
What do Christian churches do? (quick Google search random).
https://www.uchristianchurch.org/mission-and-outreach/ https://www.diamondcanyon.org/missions https://www.newhopechristianchurch.com/missions http://northridge.online/about/missions
Or, mayhaps, there are more mundane, economic explanations for them...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster#Pirat...
What people need is a secular community to replace it, and not all find it. Some of the things listed above are exacerbated by feelings of isolation or lack of purpose.
A lie is best concealed between two truths. Churches know how to organize people. It’s a rare set of people management skills that has nothing specific to do with the Divine. They’ve just had more opportunity to hone those skills.
But as humans we often trust people who show expertise in multiple areas to be telling us the truth about other things as well. There are plenty of good things that happen at churches, but they don’t have to happen at a church. And the more they happen in the secular world, the more people figure out they can pick and chose things that make them feel like decent human beings without signing up for the others. That’s either a terrifying or comforting statement, depending on which way you are coming from.
So do volunteer organizations and other secular institutions and groups like book clubs, fitness groups, tabletop game players, Pokemon Go players, etc.
Back to my own speculation, I'd surmise that a lot of people who go to church may go for the community or personal connections, and may not even believe in the dogma. Many times I've been to church enough times to have listened to frequent sermons about maintaining faith, and those sermons always puzzle me - why do these churchgoers have such difficulty maintaining faith to the point where the preacher has to bring it up regularly?
As for harm more generally, historically religious wars are at 7% of the total.
But it's also arguable that religion has suppressed more wars than caused. For instance, most of the religions are strong on self-control, against anger and intemperate behaviour. Christianity has "Love your enemies and pray for them", "Do good to those who do ill to you" "Never stop forgiving...." "Do not judge and you will not be judged" "Mercy will be show to the merciful" etc etc etc. It was famous for a list of such principles and behaviour, but somehow seems to have been forgotten and instead has become the religion of hate?!?!
Religious principles and morality laws, and especially Christian ones as above which are quotes, also enhance community stability and harmony. They're a recipe for happy families, peaceful communities....
Europe has been though a similar de-religion phase without many of the problems you stated.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Arguably the second blow does more damage to the container.
(I've never been a member of any - I just study - as a hobby - "conversion era" in Europe. Be aware that some of what the church replaced was toxic, and some was not. It's an interesting set of eras to study....)
The churches have failed though, largely. And finding out why can be informative. (this is not a religious failure, this is a social one. Don't blame peoples' beliefs for this, that's not the right target).
Let's (easily) debunk each of your sources to demonstrate their complete irrelevance to this topic:
- The Mass Killings article you post describes mass shootings, which are a specific type of homicide with a narrow definition. Homicides overall are down dramatically since the early 1990s. Mass shootings are aided by poor gun control policies and mass availability of guns in the United States. Mass shootings are not prevalent in developed countries that are not the United States in significant numbers.
- The Violent Crime article you've cited only talks about the past two consecutive years, not the decade-long time period cited by the religious affiliation trends in this article.
- Homeless populations probably aren't sampled in this phone survey, so the homelessness rate can't be correlated with the information given here.
Your weak correlation to religion is entirely debunked by choosing just about any Western/Northern European country, or much of Asia like China, South Korea, and Japan, and noticing that their religious affiliation numbers are far lower than the US has ever been, along with their violent crime rate.
What do Christian churches do? They certainly don't pay property taxes, so they don't fund public schools, police, or mental health services, like a normal business or resident would if they occupied the property.
Homicides are indeed down, and that includes firearm homicides as well. When people mention any recent rise in firearm deaths, what they are are really saying is that firearm suicides are on the rise.
As for prevalence, it's not as uneven as you would think.
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2019/aug/05...
>In one study by the Crime Prevention Research Center, the United States actually ranked 66th among other world nations when it came to the frequency mass public shootings per capita.
>And when just comparing European countries with the United States and Canada, the U.S. ranked 12th in a comparative study between 2009-2015.
https://crimeresearch.org/2015/06/comparing-death-rates-from...
If you don't think it's a religion, try to speak publicly against it, and observe the kind of protest it's going to evoke. Most of it will not be a calm rational discussion, or even a light-hearted dismissal. For many, you would appear attacking the holy.
The experiment above is dangerous; I'd suggest studying preivous experimental data first.
In the U.S. you are likely correct. But in Spain, Portugal, Argentina and many parts of Latin America it was a strong supporter of fascist/authoritarian regimes up until the 70's and 80's. Also, up until the 19th century Catholicism was the foundation of very authoritarian and absolutist monarchies.
Identity politics seems to be the new religion for many.
Edit: ok you guys, message received. I won't do it this way again.
To be specific about this site: on HN we have a clear mandate—intellectual curiosity—and a set of principles based on what serves that (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Discussion that stays within those guidelines is welcome, and conversely, when it isn't able to stay within those guidelines, we intervene. There are different degrees of intervention depending on how badly the guidelines are being violated. But intervention, or moderation, or whatever you want to call it, is indispensable. The system doesn't reliably stay within the guidelines on its own.
Personally, I'm not religious and I tend to view the tech world through that filter. I forget that some tech people might have other philosophical or religious beliefs.
At some level, I assume that Tech people are smart, and thus don't believe in religious.
This is obviously untrue, so now I'm curious to see if people's religious beliefs, or lack of them, impacts the tech work that they do.
i.e. is there any crossover in the venn diagram of religion and tech, or are they entirely isolated from each other.
Historically, religious groups sometimes funded purely scientific endeavors. Of course, sometimes religious groups went after science that was inconvenient to belief... But both actions indicate a precedent.
The problem is that, just like fires in a city, flamewars aren't cost-free. It only takes so many before users don't want to be here anymore—except users who like flamewars. That's how internet communities destroy themselves, so trying to contain that risk is a big part of what we do.
At the moment, anything related to Richard Stallman seems to bring out the worst in a lot of people. And anything related to a particular gender isn't likely to go well.
And to be fair to HN, what tends to happens is that the initial set of low-value comments gets replaced over time by better ones. Even the worst of threads can have good conversations in them, it's just sometimes difficult to find.
I know you do a lions share of work dang, but I think you were a little to fast here. Good comments were being posted (and pushed below you comment) as you wrote that.
Same for stories: the ranking is determined by votes, flags, software, and moderation. Users are the most important factor, but alas not a sufficient one. Without moderation, the system gets into unstable states and can't stay within its mandate.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You're right that I should have written something longer and not in haste. But I'm a bit surprised by the strong reaction to that one; it's atypical. Perhaps to some readers it felt like a disparagement of their own view on religion—which of course it was not.
Personally I like to avoid such threads. You can't really be understood, whatever you contribute.
2. Or the academic community formed by the Abrahamic faiths? Did you reserve some expectation that secular scholars in academia are about to pop in?
3. And if people cannot discuss these matters, are they to receive the truth from a better source? Which source should we receive it from?
4. If most discussions never reaches into data-driven conversation, does that put them all in the same bin for you? Aspirational speech, perhaps?
To get substantive discussion of religion, you probably need smaller groups that have a certain amount of cohesion. A group can be cohesive even if it disagrees. But a large group with weak cohesion discussing a provocative topic is probably always going to plummet to lowest-common-denominator quickly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21284379
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21284381
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21284266
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21284355
You're right that there's a sore spot for me, but it isn't religion—it's long experience with how wretched HN threads become as soon as religion is mentioned. But I should have been more careful and not posted hastily and vaguely.
If I hadn't intervened by posting and doing other standard moderation things, though, the thread would likely have become more of a flamewar. These things don't self-correct; would that they did. I made this case more complicated by posting in a way that stirred up additional waves—it was not a splash-free dive, like we usually try for. I was distracted and my irritation managed to grab the steering wheel.
1. The history of actions taken by theocracies is not good. There is a strong modern social justice movement, and even saying something bad 10 years ago is enough to cancel someone. Now imagine a group that committed multiple genocides over the centuries.
2. A growing rise of "spiritual but not religious" has led young people to eschew attending church. These young people grow up and have young people of their own who are now never exposed to Christianity.
3. Relegation of religion to personal matters alone, taboo in public.
4. Christians have allowed the book of Leviticus to overwhelm their message. Because of what is said about LGBTQ, Christian == bigot in many people's minds.
I'm sure there are fellow Christians who visit HN. I think these are the primary obstacles that must be overcome in order to grow the cause. All the mission work and happy Easter messages in the world won't make a lick of difference against these 4 issues.
The larger and more coordinate the group, the more likely. It doesn't need religion. It needs humans, organising, to happen.
From my personal observations, the religious groups that seem to be activists tend to be activists with puritanical and conservative motivations (i.e., yell at people who they perceive are doing ungodly things even though modern society has deemed those things to be acceptable)
The other side is religious groups that are socially progressive (be kind and open, pray for people, provide services to those who need it, etc) but tend to be more of a passive supporter of equality.
Churches have had their "brand" tarnished because a few extremist religious groups wrapped up bigotry and social conservatism in a cloth of "religious freedom" and were really loud about it. The more progressive churches didn't speak up to fight back and counter it, and now the whole religious community is tainted. The "abusive priest" controversies didn't help matters either.
If there were churches that supported and encouraged the social justice that actually resonates with today's population, especially the young population, they would find a far more receptive audience.
I would consider going to a church if it was leading Extinction Rebellion marches, organizing protests against businesses that were bigoted, pushing their members to support the community and vote for new libraries, citizen investigation boards in police departments, fair elections, progressive drug treatment diversions instead of prosecution, etc.
As churches see less membership, at some point congregations merge and one church is shut down.
Many churches do outreach and provide services to the community, the poor, and the homeless. This often includes shelter from the elements, soup kitchens, food pantries, meeting places for groups like AA/NA/etc.
When a church shuts down, the distance that the population has to travel can increase, and there might not be enough room to provide the same resources to those populations.
Additionally, it's not necessarily a problem, but more of a musing... What happens to all those old churches? The impact on the property market has to have local effects...
I wonder how many churches are shut down, but are just maintained by a skeleton crew of maintenance people in the hope that their customer base will increase enough one day to restart their services and reopen the property.
I assume churches don't pay property tax, so as long as the church is in hibernation mode and not actually totally dissolved, could they hold onto the property indefinitely for just the cost of maintenance? Or would them not providing religious services anymore cause them to lose the exemption?
While churches do provide services and outreach to the poor, I've always wondered about what happens when they're serving the opposite effect by not paying property taxes. Property taxes are the public education base in the USA, and quality education is the way out of poverty.
Churches' outreach programs will also discriminate against causes they don't agree with based on their own teachings - i.e., Christian churches might not recommend that someone use contraception or get an abortion even if those options are the best logical course of action.
You know how some people have pointed out that McDonalds wasn't in the food business, it was in the real estate business to franchise owners? They often hold prime real estate locations.
The Post Office also has prime real estate locations.
I think that Churches, collectively, hold some of the most desireable property locations in our communities. Especially older churches in city centers have been there and grown organically since cities were founded so now they're very valuable.
Religion is the most conservative institution ever created. It does not adapt (well, almost..) it doesn't change (also, almost..) and it's no wonder that with developments in science and culture, religion doesn't seem as important as it used to be.
It's been going on for a while, in suburbia the main purpose of religion has nothing to do with religion, it's mostly about community, church is the place when you meet a talk with your neighbors. That's it.
Well, strong economy is also there to "blame", one talks to God only when one needs something, nothing wrong with that just to make a point that when everything is good religion is on decline.
G.K. Chesterton, circa 1924
And really not true.
After all, the inventor of the Big Bang theory was a Catholic priest (top physicist first), and the father of modern genetics was a Catholic monk (biologist also). It's also
That covers 50% of Christianity. And since none of Christianity has ever had a dogma that the Bible has to be literally interpreted, really it's just the Christians who don't know they don't have to be creationist who are pseudo-scientfic.
Despite stating the facts, it's inevitable that this post will be downvoted by the agressively anti-religious.
Statistically, Christians live longer than non-believers.
"I lucked into the most fortuitous, warm, constructive kind of family context imaginable. My father was a top scholar, a Phi Beta Kappa. My mother was a voice coach and accompanist of singers in the concert and opera fields. We didn't have the term "liberated woman", but my mother certainly was ... They were brought up, both, in the state of Indiana, which is now called the Bible Belt. They were wholesome, they neither smoked nor drank, and they never used the Lord's name in vain. I never heard a four-letter word. It didn't exist in my wholesome family setting."
The decline of religiosity is a global trend, strongly correlated with economic development. The US has historically been an outlier and remains unusually religious. The relevant question isn't really why religion is declining in the US, but why it hasn't declined sooner.
Claims that the decline in religiosity are related to increases in crime or social problems are not strongly supported by the evidence; there is not a consistent relationship between religiosity and criminality or wellbeing.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/142727/religiosity-highest-worl...
https://web.archive.org/web/20131021065544/http://www.wingia...
https://sci-hub.tw/10.1111/j.1751-9020.2009.00247.x
I believe the reason is that religion has been very different in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world. Few countries have the great variety of religious denominations the U.S. has and the relative peace between said religions.
But I agree with your perspective.
It's possible that religion is treating the symptom of another problem. Assuming someone religious attends an organized function related to that religion, it's making them part of a community and might be helping them feel less lonely.
2018 study shows that half of Americans feel lonely. [1], but a similar kind of study on people in europe surveying if people had anyone to ask for help or discuss personal matters has a much smaller amount [2]
The European study indicates that income inequality has an effect on social isolation, with the lowest incomes having twice the amount of isolation.
The income inequality in America is even more pronounced, and geographically, many of the areas with the highest levels of religious beliefs seem (on a map) to line up pretty well with levels of poverty and income inequality.
Usual disclaimer about correlation/causation and everything... But perhaps economic conditions that cause people to tend to be socially isolated are being self-treated by pursuit of religious groups because the community it gathers results in a decrease in the isolation symptom?
[1] https://fortune.com/2018/05/01/americans-lonely-cigna-study/ [2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/D...
What is most essentially "home" in the world is the set of rituals you make for yourself and others, things that allow you to dwell more poetically in place. Traditional rituals, like those found in religions, enhance our sense of belonging in the world, or if the world is a rough and scary place, at least within a society. I think we do not have the words for all the good parts of religion and ritual, and because they are not easily articulated, they are easily dismissed as irrational or nonexistent.
People instead will attack any religion, or any set of rituals that are not easily explained with a dollar value, gleefully as things that need to die, in service of a more rational world, by which they only mean a world more easily explainable to them. Since they cannot easily explain what's lost, they assume it must be nothing. I think this is a mistake due to a lack of attention.
People do not think about this, for that matter I fear people hardly think of our sense of dwelling and belonging at all. Culturally, the idea of "belonging" anywhere has been entirely subsumed by "wandering"[note]. This makes for a more consumer-friendly world, but a much less nice one to live in day to day. I fear that until we have the easy words to properly describe what it is we have lost, people will simply continue to cheer its loss, perhaps pausing once in a while to wonder aloud why they feel somewhat lost.
[note] ask people about their aspirational hobbies, they are amost always quick to point to "travel", and "experiences". Weirdly a lot of the "experiences" wording people use comes from a study commissioned by LivingSocial ("millennials prefer experiences over things", as if that's the dichotomy) to hawk the selling of experiences. The pseudostudy seems to be outliving the failed company.
Can you find another Western nation out there with similar levels of religious affiliation?
I think I see this decline as a correction. It's not actually normal to have so many people finding religion important to their lives in a large, connected, developed society. The USA's unique history and geography lent itself to high levels of religious affiliation, but since the Internet has connected us all a little closer, it's been harder for religious institutions and religious parents to prevent younger people from obtaining unfiltered information.
Enjoyable secular rituals are also easy to find if you look right in front of you - the Thanksgiving Day parade, the SuperBowl, Halloween and Trick-or-Treating, Valentine's Day, city-wide marathons, County Fairs, street festivals, etc...the list is nearly endless.
And tradition itself isn't a religion or belief in something. The fact that the Catholic church has you cross yourself, stand and sit at specific times, or eat a cracker are not examples a belief in anything, they are physical ritual and tradition. One can partake in all those activities without having a thought in their mind. There are also secular traditions that have no root in surviving religions, like putting a tree in your house during the holiday season. Plenty of atheists put up "Christmas trees" because it's fun!
> I think I see this decline as a correction. It's not actually normal to have so many people finding religion important to their lives in a ...
Why use that as your normative base? Why not say that everything after, say, Descartes or Jesus or the printing press is abnormal level of religion, and that we are in a lull of divinity? Why do you think anything about the religiosity of anyone in the last 1-30 centuries is normal?
> in a large, connected ... but since the Internet has connected us all ...
Are we in a large, connected society? Has the internet really done as you say?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_coun...
The United States is one of the most religious countries for being as wealthy and developed as it is. Many of the similarly developed nations that remain religious are the oil theocracies.
As I mentioned, the Internet has allowed people to read opinions beyond their own filtered literature. A religious school or household won’t buy books that question religion. But an entire generation (the millennials shown in the article) grew up with Internet connections that largely took them beyond those filters.
I know that part is speculation on my end, but eliminating the Internet’s role in inter-connectivity as a possibility is an odd hypothesis. I have friends in Japan in shared interest groups for Japanese pop stars, how would that have happened before the Internet? Writing letters?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_coun...
I suspect your "sense of belonging" is just lazy accommodation or fear of change. Culture, social or personal, can't evolve without changing. You don't become a better person if you don't change your habits, rituals and your deep rooted mental frameworks.
True, a mind too open doesn't hold nothing of value. But a closed mind is stale, stagnant. And, in a world that changes faster each year, stagnation is danger, it is not safe.
I suggest you to embrace change with all its dangers and opportunities.
> You don't become a better person if you don't change your habits, rituals and your deep rooted mental frameworks.
You think, say, monks or rabbis are worse persons, then? Certainly to you they are stale, as you say?
What about Homer, whose rituals you may imagine never changed in his lifetime. Was he a worse person, and lazier, than someone modern, who changes them often?
I don't know any rabbi, only catholic monks. These monks I met are lovely people, in a moral sense. In an intellectual or cultural level not so much. The world and culture has become much bigger than their ancient readings.
However, I suspect their character and good nature is not so much a result of their "belonging". After all they "belong" to the same Catholic church that was, for so long, a shelter for pedophiles.
> What about Homer, whose rituals you may imagine never changed in his lifetime.
With all respect for Homer and classic Greek culture I need to stress that the pace of change today is much more accelerated than in ancient cultures.
Classic Greek culture is indeed the foundation of all western culture and certainly deserves to be studied by anyone seeking enlightment. But the logic, political philosophy and worldview we have today is an huge improvement over them. Every year are adding much more to our knowledge than within Homer's lifetime.