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Jenny F.'s avatar

I think it's very Protestant to write as you do here that *belief* in "ancient stories" or "metaphysical claims" are what characterize any religion. I don't know any Hindus who try to persuade non-Hindu people to assent to set of precepts or visit their temple with them or whatever. I don't know any Jewish people who try to "convert" others - trying to persuade them to give cognitive and affective assent to a set of statements about the nature of reality - they don't seek converts, actually. I mean, do Catholics actually give a shit about orthodoxy - look at Santa Muerte; did medieval illiterate peasants care about what the Bible "said" or did they care about the Passion plays and the liturgies; do Buddhists necessarily believe in a being who "judges all of us on how devout and moral we are"??

Not so much - because the liturgy is the point, the behavior is the point, the culture is the point, the embodiment is the point, the family is the point, the good smells and dim lights and great music are the point, just as much as you might say "belief" in something or anything is the point. More than anything, what it does for you and to you is the point. If it works, you're going to keep doing it. American religion and religious culture is obviously broken and impoverished, which is why it produces atheists.

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paul h.'s avatar

I'm mostly convinced that the deeply religious will have the last laugh, just given demographic projections (see Kaufman's "Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?") due to hormonal birth control and abortion-on-demand. We already see this happening in Israel, for example.

As someone who has read far too many European philosophers writing about the death of God (from Hegel, who was the lantern that Nietzsche's madman was holding, to Heidegger and the rest), I have to say that it's incredibly amusing to think that this supposed end of history and endgame of Western thought will just fizzle out in a century or two due to secular Europeans contracepting and aborting themselves out of existence. (I mean, I suppose it's also sad at some level, but after all they're choosing to do it ...?)

When you think about all of the autumnal and vaguely melodramatic things written about this topic, from Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," to Eliot's line about "these fragments I have shored against my ruins," Heidegger spending a decade desperately trying to find some way to revive European religious life (through his 1930s writings on the "last god" etc.), it turns out that this was just a temporary condition, a case of certain people in certain cities in America and Western Europe turning away from God for a couple centuries, until they simply fade out of existence and humanity returns to its usual religious orientation. And the beauty of it is that even if religious populations slowly 'moderate' or secularize over time -- for example, Europe will almost certainly be majority Muslim by 2080, but let's say that these Muslims slowly secularize -- the cycle will start again; believers will have children, secularists will stop having children, etc.

Popular/nerd culture (and Vox et al.) seem to accept it as a given that the inevitable endgame of history is, like, the Starfleet Federation Council in 2342 A.D., a super-U.N. where culture is irrelevant, no one is religious, everyone is a scientist, etc., but this may not necessarily be the case . . . hormonal birth control is a hell of a drug.

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