Because they did in 2023
In some religions walking away from the church means being excluded from family, social, and business contacts. So cutting ties with everyone you know basically.
So better start believing in some magic men.
You can just like, say you do. I think a lot of people who check “Christian” in the US have little to no involvement in it beyond saying “thank God” occasionally.
I remember reading a story in my Spanish lit class about a guy who wasn’t attending church, and his mother was freaking out, so the family priest went to talk to him. And the priest was like, “I totally get it. After all the evil I’ve seen I don’t really believe either. But I continue in this because it is my life, and I can provide comfort to people. Consider attending because you love your mother and it will help her.”
It’s a good coping mechanism.
It’s really a shitty coping mechanism.
The Opium of the Masses
This and Parents
Oh what, those pesky moral agents who created you in their image? and to think they’re just monkeys from the muck!!
Ignoring the inherit assumption that religion is de facto an issue or backwards, and ignoring the fallacy that “progress” is co-liniar with the passage of time, logic is not in of itself a perfect humanistic process of thought, rather it has been developed by humans over the millennia.
There is great comfort in the process of growing into and exploring one’s faith. Growing up in a theologically liberal Christian church, I was invited to find ways to meld the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man is such a way that I find purpose and vocation within my life. Religion also offers a place for community among people committed to a mission, be it good or bad. These communities preserve and honor cultural traditions, again, the good and the bad. These are just a few reasons I think people are now, and will remain well into the future, religious.
I definitely get the sense of community aspect of religion.
Ignoring the inherit assumption that religion is de facto an issue or backwards
When it’s overwhelmingly the cause of intolerance of LGBTQ rights and opposition of minorities, it arguably is.
Is religiosity the cause of an overwhelming intolerance, or is it, religiosity, the overwhelming citation of the pious bigot?
Both lol
How do you account for tolerance found within religion and religious communities throughout the world and throughout history, then? How can intolerance be inherent to religion if it is not universally observed?
And for clarity, I’m not trying to no-true-scotsman out religious communities that harbor hatred and shut off diversity and the like. They totally exist and they are a problem. But to suggest religiosity itself is the issue, to me at least, is missing a sound foundation.
The text they rally behind as a fundamental part of their religion, in no uncertain terms, promotes violence against gay men and tells you women are worth a fraction of men and can’t be trusted to preach. Not to mention the endorsement and regulation of slavery.
It’s not that they’re a monolith of bigotry or anything, it’s that they start from a pretty messed up place and have to mould that out of their understanding of their religion, and plenty of them don’t.
But the real issue is that you can justify just about any sort of prejudice when that is your foundation. There’s no shortage of Christians who cite Leviticus to tell me my sexuality is an abomination, yet they dismiss the parts about slavery because “that’s the old testament.” The Bible also doesn’t say anything about trans people and it doesn’t oppose abortion rights, yet the majority of the Christians in my state are opposed to both.
Firstly, I am assuming that “they” is referring to Christians, which the op did not specify, and my subsequent commentary is interpreted to generalizing to all presentations of religion. While I explicitly pointed to Christianity, that was because I was referencing my personal faith journey.
Secondly, we are in agreement that the Pentateuch, in its literal form, calls for and endorses a society which does not privilege equality for all races, genders, or creeds. I would assume we are also in agreement that the epistles of Paul and Timothy and other early Christian writers have some pretty messed up opinions of who God is and what God wants.
But you yourself drew attention to the agency Christians, and all other faithful people, have. There is choice, and people do choose, to interpret scripture as non-literal. By the virtue of this existence, one cannot simply label all religious expressions as backwards or at issue, as I originally posited.
That’s true, they can mould their interpretation however they need to so it conforms to their own morality, but that doesn’t come from the religion.
If you gave an alien any of the abrahamic holy texts and then dropped it on earth it’d probably behave pretty abhorrently. In order to behave more civilly it’d have to learn from the society it was dropped into, not the religion.
Most churches and other theists do a pretty good job of doing that and that’s a great thing, but the way I see it, the religion itself is inherently problematic until people mould it into something resembling secular morality.
People can have a rich spiritual life and not believe in religion.
Because they have enough evidence to satisfy them that they should, if they’re rational; because they were taught to and never questioned it through self-examination, if they’re not.
Note that evidence is not the same as proof; other users have pointed out examples of evidence such as ‘testimony from trusted authorities such as parents’ and ‘personal spiritual experiences’ and since those answers were very detailed I won’t repeat them here.
you can be spiritual and religious without believing in structured religion like the church.
i’m wiccan and spiritual and it means a great deal to me.
Sure you can, why though?
You’re a what?
You heard him he said he’s wicked spiritual these days
Wicca (English: /ˈwɪkə/), also known as “The Craft”,[1] is a modern pagan, syncretic, earth-centered religion.
Because belief is intrinsic to humanity even if we don’t believe in religion.
I believe in a lot of human concepts, including kindness, altruism, democracy and humanism. They are all still effectively made up human ideas.
I also believe when I sit down that the chair below me really exists but I cannot truly trust my own senses 100% either. So effectively I “believe” what my sensory organs and brain interpretation tell me, but the reality is the brain and its interpretations can be wrong.
Look at the USA, the founders of the nation are often treated with a reverence akin to that of religious figures.
People have all kinds of delusions. People worship all kinds of weird things. Religion is just one of many.
Finally, someone like Ayn Rand shows that a human can have pretty reprehensible and hypocritical beliefs even if they are an atheist. She promoted bullshit “great men” theories of humanity and argued that selfishness could be used for good.
She also died penniless and on government benefits while spending her whole life preaching against things like government benefits.
People are deeply irrational even without religion.
I believe in a lot of human concepts, …
We believe in those things because they’re practices we can observe and measure. The real question is why do theists not have the same standard of evidence for theistic claims.
I also believe when I sit down that the chair below me really exists …
Your trust (or “faith”) in the chair existing and supporting your weight is because of your experience with chairs in the past. I don’t think many people would say they have “absolute certainty” the chair exists and would hold them.
If you had a history of hallucinating you might have a higher standard of evidence, but it’s still there to be tested. The problem with religion is it seems like you need a standard of “none at all” to accept theistic claims.
Finally, someone like Ayn Rand shows …
“They do it too” doesn’t really get us to an answer, just another “why” question. She believes her claims with little to no evidence, theists believe their claims with little to no evidence, but like…why?
As an atheist who is not anti-religion, I wholeheartedly agree. The religious do not have a monopoly on irrationality, or weaponizing ideology.
I see many atheists on forums proposing the idea that if we could only just get rid of religion, the world would be a harmonious and rational place. As if human beings wouldn’t still be perfectly able to come up with new and interesting ways to rationalize conflict and division amongst themselves.
I like to say “Humans aren’t rational creatures, humans are rationalizing creatures.”
We can rationalize nearly anything and justify it, in our own minds.
Thank you for being honest.
Humans are emotional creatures. We can’t change that. Even when we’re being rational we’re still basing every decision we make on emotions. “I’ve researched this and I feel this is the right decision.”
I like this explanation most
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I left my church because they wouldn’t just let me attend. They wanted me to commit to actively proseletyzing outside the church, to bring more people in.
It didn’t feel right. I think if a thing is good enough, nobody else needs to nag you to sell it. You just want to tell people about it because it’s been so good for you.
We’ve proved the popular religions wrong definitively, but the truth’s turned out to be unbearably horrifying for most people.
It is very difficult to accept mortality if you don’t believe in an afterlife. Religion brings comfort, and comfort improves mental health (at the cost of some delusion).
Man believes in stories. Such as religion, or money, or companies.
Ref. Yuval Noah Harari.
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Since here the answers are split between edgy kids and people repeating a bland, stale narrative about comfort and fear of death, I will try to bring a different perspective.
For context: I grew up in a Catholic country but in a very secular family and in a very secular region. I’ve had an edgy atheist phase that lasted between 8yo and probably around 30yo.
I studied a STEM discipline and have always been surrounded by mostly atheist or agnostic people.
I was afraid of death up until I was 27/28yo, but the cope was gnostic transhumanism, not Abrahamitic religions. At some point I took acid, my gf at the time told me I was going to die, I cried my eyes out for a few minutes and then I was fine and I’m still fine. I had a near-death experience in the hospital that further consolidated the idea that I’m going to die, and it’s chill: if you’re sick, you have a bunch of people looking after you, everybody gives you attention, you spend all your day chilling in bed on drugs. Dream
lifedeath.I was still agnostic at that point. I started approaching spirituality later on, not much because of an emotional need, but because further studies both in STEM disciplines and Philosophy highlighted the limit of reason to explain and understand the world. Reason is a tool among others, with its limits. Limits that can be reasoned about using reason itself. You cannot investigate or explain what lies outside though, let alone change it, something for which you need different tools: faith, spirituality, trust. I got closer to what Erik Davis calls “Cyborg Spiritualism”, but it doesn’t mean much since it’s not an organized movement, but more of a shared intuition and meaning-making process to which, in the last 60 years, more and more people arrived. Especially people dealing with disciplines like system theory, cybernetics, system design, and information theory, but also people disillusioned with the New Age movement or other Western Gnostic practices. Mixed in it there’s plenty of animism.
Atheists believe that all religions are about speaking to God, and hoping for an answer, while many religions are about listening to God because they are already talking to us all the time.
I think there’s something that always seems to get left out of these conversations and that’s that “when I practice my religion, I feel something that I don’t feel otherwise” is frequently a true statement for the religious.
I’ve often heard self-described atheists say that, often when conversing/debating with religious folks about why they believe, the conversation comes to a point where the religious person will say “I’ve just had a personal experience” and the atheist, unable to relate to that, really has no way to advance the conversation beyond that.
Were I opposite some fundamentalist Christian or something in such a situation, my response would be “yeah, me too! That’s totally normal.”
I think the beligerantly nonreligious either can’t relate to religious experiences or don’t want to admit to having had them for fear of embarassment or maybe rhetorical concessions. And the religious typically haven’t had such experiences outside the context of their religious practices, or if they have they still attribute it to their religious beliefs, and so take it as proof of their beliefs.
And these religious experiences are very real and very normal. Probably some people are more prone to such experiences than others. But despite how the religious tend to interpret them they have little to no relationship to one’s beliefs. One can have experiences of anatta (“no-self” in Theravada Buddhism) or satori (sudden, typically-temporary, enlightenment in Japanese Zen Buddhism) or recollection (a term from Christian mysticism) or kavana (Jewish mysticism) or whatever without accepting any particular belief system. There are secularized mindfulness and meditation practices that can increase one’s chances and frequency of experiencing these states.
But, unfortunately, the history of these experiences has been one of large religious organizations claiming and mostly exercising a monopoly on such experiences.
These experiences feel very deep and profound and can be a very positive (or negative!) thing, even affecting the overall course of one’s life. And they can be kindof addictive in a good way.
All that to say that I think any conversation about why people believe in religions today is incomplete without taking into account that for many people, their religion is their means of connection with some extremely profound and beautiful experiences. Though people only accept beliefs along with those experiences because they don’t know these experiences aren’t actually exclusive to any one religion or any set of beliefs. And those experiences are 100% real and tangible to them. (Whether they correspond to anything real in consensus reality is a whole other conversation, but the experiences themselves are a normal human phenomenon like orgasm or schadenfreude.)
Just some followup thoughts:
- Like I alluded to earlier, meditation can be dangerous. Do your research first and know the risks.
- There are a ton of good books on these topics. “Stealing Fire” by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal is a good place to start if you’re interested in the science of it or The Science of Enlightenment if you want to get a little deeper into the practice.
- If you want to know my personal beliefs, my beliefs are that beliefs don’t matter. Personal experience does. “But do you believe god exists?” Honestly it’d take me a good hour or more to give a proper answer to that question. Let’s go with “neither yes nor no” for the short version.
- Every culture has these experiences. Humans likely have had them since humans have existed.
Thanks, I had the same hunch but I didn’t yet put into proper words and ideas.
Do you think, should we extrapolate those experiences to something beyond or just accept it as part of human nature?
There’s a western meditation guy named “Daniel Ingram” who I have a certain amount of respect for. He readily answers questions about the risks and benefits of meditation-related things as well as the subjective experience of them. But any time he is asked about the “real world” (like, the metaphysical implications of these experiences), he responds that he’s “a pragmatist” and won’t speculate about the nature of reality or the existence/nonexistence of entities or powers.
(That said, there is one and only one story he tells that seems to have made him believe certain supernatural claims about the real world. He was “practicing magic” and drew an amber pentagram in the air and someone who hadn’t been present at the time later walked into the room and said “you just drew an amber pentagram in the air right here.” Or at least that’s roughly how he tells the story. And he does seem to believe there’s something to that beyond the natural.)
I’m not quite the purist he is. I don’t think it’s necessary to straight up refuse to believe anything about the real world or the nature of reality. And I don’t think that there’s nothing that can/should be gleaned about metaphysics from subjective (“religious”) experiences. (My experiences with contemplative practices has definitely changed my mind about some metaphysical things. The nature of conscious and of reality, the existence of capital-G-“God” (though the answer I find most compelling now definitely isn’t “yes” or “no”), etc.)
But it’s also important to keep it in perspective. Some of these experiences can feel like the most important thing every to happen to anyone. (That’s probably how many/most religions start, honestly. Someone has a mind-blowing experience and tells everybody about it and everybody else grossly misinterprets it because these experiences are ineffable – can’t be put into words – and before you know it you have the crusades and witch burnings and abstinance-only sex ed.) But a contemplative practice, done well, will tell you not to hold too closely to, well, anything really (potentially “except god”). Coming to some belief and holding it as the most important thing ever or basing your whole personality on it is absolutely problematic.
My advice is to hold any beliefs you come to from a religious experience (and any other beliefs you have for that matter) “loosely”. And I think this is helped by not restricting yourself to one religious system. Borrow from both western and eastern religious traditions. Monotheistic, pantheistic, pagan, etc. Indigenous spiritual practices. Even left-hand-path stuff. The more you do that, the better you drive home to your reptilian brain the point that nobody has a monopoly on religious experience and often those experiences even contradict each other.
I guess one other thing to mention is that adpting a particular set of religious beliefs can potentially be a boon to one’s contemplative practice. But for the reasons above, it can be dangerous.
Thank you for taking the time to write this out, I probably would’ve been busy for a couple of hours trying to formulate my fairly similar take!
Maybe to add another aspect for - I think that the sheer ability of humans to have religious experiences in all denominations, which are often described as feelings of connectedness, does not necessarily mean that there is a higher being or reality “out there” that is being connected to in those moments.
But it does mean that our brains have religious experience as an in-built function (which, as you described, has been needlessly enshrined in religious institutions), which might mean that being able to have these experiences is an important part of being able to survive, or maybe even to thrive, as a human being, which also means as a community.
But it does mean that our brains have religious experience as an in-built function (which, as you described, has been needlessly enshrined in religious institutions), which might mean that being able to have these experiences is an important part of being able to survive, or maybe even to thrive, as a human being, which also means as a community.
And that’s a take that I couldn’t have put as well as you did, and I wholeheartedly agree with.
I think whatever cognitive faculties separate us from “the animals” (or at least some animals) comes at a cost. Most animals live very in the moment. We’re largely the only creatures that have panic attacks because of some imagined future event, and we worry constantly. The default mode network and the internal monologue let us plan for the future, but also makes us worry for the future, which is definitely maladaptive.
Religious experiences let us greatly mitigate that by showing us, even if only temporarily (and sometimes people can achieve permanence in this), by suspending the DMN and internal monologue.
Suspending worry for the future might be a plausible function for religious experience as an evolved feature of the human mind, yes.
I would also point towards the biological fact that while the existence of a higher being, consciousness or reality, is still ineffable, even after having had an experience that felt like there might be one, there is also an empirically true, measurable interconnectedness for humans that can be tapped into.
We live, and have evolved, in and through ecosystems that highly depend on interconnected species and processes that are so complex and intricate that we are still working on fully grasping them, and still discovering new connections (unfortunately, it’s becoming more and more because we have disrupted the connections by environmental damage, and the ecosystems start to fail due to that, making the connection obvious only after it ceased to exist). Connection between humans in the form of love in its many forms is also the ultimate glue that keeps societies together, and if that capacity diminishes due to circumstances, bad things tend to happen.
The myriad of connections we need to live, and to thrive and to feel like we are whole - all of this fully seen and experienced in their abstracted totality could in my eyes be one of the bases for religious experience.
And if that is true, it gives also another function - then, religious experience is the anchor and has a rebalancing function that makes sure that we don’t get lost in our own heads and human constructs, and keeps reminding us that we are part of the ecosystem, too, and keeps us from using it in a self-destructive manner. There are several deeply spiritual, nature-connected societies that only became so after a local environmental crisis caused by themselves. Tapping into the interconnectedness through religious experience has helped them find another, arguably better way.
(Of course, it doesn’t seem to be a hard, global fail-safe in human history, given the current state of the world, so I don’t know how direct this function would be.)
