I’m in my mid 20s, and an atheist. I remember back in 2014, when I was an edgy little shit, I thought once people lost religion, as per the trend, people would be nicer to each other and science would rule the day. Probably a naive thought.
Yet, it feels like nothing is sacred anymore. Everywhere you look it’s just people trying to get their slice of the pie, ethics be damned. Everything feels like it’s going badly. I’ve just graduated and the job market is full of time wasting rituals. It just feels like people have lost touch with decency and community. No one has any pride in what they do.
Correlation != causation of course, and so the decline in religion may not be the cause. Still I wonder if for a certain segment of the population, those that seem to thrive and filter to the top of our wonderful society, the fear of damnation was check on their base impulses.
Or if perhaps this is a part of the process, perhaps the reasonable people have all left the churches leaving an ever growing concentration of barbarous individuals holding the reins of that decrepit institution.
Or it’s just the lack of community that religion once forced upon us, to see and be civil, if not caring for those in our immediate geographic community that hold differing opinions from us. A moderating influence if you will.
I’m not going to go into too much detail, as I don’t really have the time for an in depth explanation. But suffice it to say from a sociological perspective, organized religion formed along with more complex societies because complex societies need more rules to manage a higher population that came about because of agriculture and the rise of city states.
it’s not a coincidence that hunter-gatherers worshipped fertility goddesses and totemic gods, and that actual “organized” pantheons came into being alongside the concept of “nations”.
Organized religion was a tool that was invented to exert control and prevent chaos when societies were in their infancy and still figuring out how to live together and share resources. (ie. who are we and who are “others”. Who gets to share our wealth and who doesn’t, etc… etc…)
We don’t need it anymore, and yet it sticks around causing all kinds of trouble.
In my experience religious people have not been the nicest. Very religious people of certain religions can be but some other religions make them nastier and the casually religious tend to have a morality of convenience.
People have never needed religion, it is just a tool for the people in power to prevent uprisings
religion was never the issue. the issue is people being stupid and lacking morals, which they will do and justify regardless of the situation.
Depends on the type of religion. One that preaches peace and tolerance and service and is against greed could be beneficial.
But the type of Christian fascists that elected Trump are not beneficial to society. They’re the ones that either want you kiss dear leader’s ass or die.
I’d use Nietzsche’s quote, “God is dead” to explain why we don’t need religion and how Nietzsche used it to explain why we need to look for other sources of morality and ethics, but I’m too lazy to type rn.
Is faith your last resort?
It should never be “Do we need religion?”, it should be “Do I need religion?”. Some people might need it, but it doesn’t need to be pressed upon others.
Also religion or no religion, assholes will be assholes. Even if all religion disappeared from the world like it was never there, number of assholes in the world won’t change.
Assholes don’t need an excuse to be one.
That’s also very true, unfortunately.
You alraedy say it yourself in as many words, but we need more community. Where I am from, our country was ‘columnized’ up until the 1970s. You had a catholic ‘column’, a protestant ‘column’ and a socialist ‘column’, each with their own clubs. So you had a catholic football club, a protestant football club and a more public football club simultaneously. The same went for schools, pubs, etc.
For all the good and bad that gave us, people were shoehorned into their own communities (note my explicit use of ‘shoehorned’).
About 50 years ago, our society got ‘decolumnized’ and people got more individualistic. Add to it the rampant neoliberalism of the latest decades and well here we are: people do not know how to find each other anymore. I notice that many yourger people have similar questions like yours.
Do we need religion as in something to believe in or to have faith in? Possibly? However, I do not know what to believe in to be honest. Progress? Not going to live to see that anymore. It will get very ugly very soon. Maybe my kids will see things get better / more enligtened/ etc, but only after getting screwed over for a few decades I fear.
I do think that religion is not the answer. Men running around in dresses trying to force the ideas of mistranslated books written by goat herders several thousands of years ago are not to be taken seriously.
Did you notice all the harm Trump has caused in his first 24h because evangelical christo-fascists love and vote for him?
No. Religion is toxic.
My interest you in the gospel of solar punk? Praise the sun!
Religion is a tool. We just need to fix the message.
Unless you’re George Carlin worshipping Joe Pesci, religion sucks for society.
I’m a Preacher’s kid, now an atheist. But I have been wondering the same thing. It’s interesting I am not alone in that. In the last week I have seen the subject come up twice, once in this post and once at The Free Press.
I’d say it’s about time for the Age of Enlightenment to begin. For us to do liberty, progress, tolerance, use science and technology to our advantage. Invest in education. Maybe overturn the monarchs and billionaires.
Maybe a different form of religion. Not based on a guy with a long white beard but a force that created and keeps order in the universe.
religion = smarmy cruel assholes
Flaws in human nature will always be a problem and you will find them no matter what religion and/or political systems any society adopts. It’s as simple as that.
