Why does everybody seem to be so worked up about whether religion is true or not and call it theism or atheism? My Central European experience is that it is largely an institution, custom, habit, social expectation, identity, a way of expressing things and all that, but people did not really believe for 150 years at least, so it is not really something meant to be true for a long time now. I know there are people in the US Bible Belt who still mean it, and they have angry atheist children, but how comes the majority of Internet discussion kinda revolves around them? How many people on LW want to approach the topic from the angle Max Weber and similar scholars did?
I think the “everybody” is really an American-centric thing. As far as I can tell, all of the New Atheist types are non-European, or who focus most of their polemics on American audiences.
I’ve never lived in Europe, but this was my experience growing up in the US:
“You don’t believe in Jesus/God? I must not have raised you right”
“You’ve treated me better than all of my previous boyfriends/girlfriends, but you don’t believe in Jesus so I’m breaking up with you”
“You’re new to the area? Where did you move from? Oh, Nowhereville, Alabahoma? I’m from Otherplace, Nevexico. So what church do you go to?”
“How come you’re not going to the prayer breakfast/luncheon?”
“You didn’t get the job/your car broke down/lost your wallet/etc.? Don’t worry, god has a plan for you”
“Can you believe these scientists and their evolution/global warming/sciency science talk? They’ll say anything to reject god, right? My pastor says XYZ so therefore it’s true”
I’ve lived in a lot of places in the US and in my experience the places where this sort of stuff doesn’t happen are mainly large cities like NYC or San Francisco. And even then, it has to be the parts of those cities that are leaning on the more affluent side of things. It’s not just a USA Bible-Belt phenomenon… I’ve actually never lived in or visited the Bible Belt so it must be a lot worse there.
The funny thing is that everything I read (mainly fiction) or watch (movie) about the “cowboy” culture of rural America does not seem to reflect it much. OK it is clear that religion tends to ebb and flow, have low and high tides and there was a sort of a high one after 1970 (“moral majority”), still. Random example: Axl Rose from Guns’n’Roses. He is such a typical rural guy, in fact, he kind of revolutionized rock fashion by doing away with leathers and chains and basically dressing on stage like like a rural US agricultural tractor driver. There is hardly any reference to either religiousness or atheism in the songs. Just seems to not care. The whole rock and roll culture does not seem to care much and apparently never did, no matter how much I go back in time, Easy Riders, or even further. That matters, because that is the most popular aspect of America over here :) Many an aging Euro guy imitates all this ride choppers, wear cowboy boots and hats, indian jewelry, booorn to be wiiild kind of thing and it is authentic so far that at the very least the American musicians whose songs get listened to really don’t seem to care either way.
(Although of course there is one confounding factor: all this kind of thing feels very American but is often surprisingly not so, Born to be Wild is actually a Canadian song and so on, these things have a prairie-cowboy-freedom feel, but not really sure to what extent do the reflect actual American experiences or aspirations. This may be a different topic, but I think it is relevant to understanding. There is an America-as-a-concept many an aging Euro guy loves and religion does not seem to play much a role in it. It is based on various things. Like westerns. Who makes the westerns? Surprisingly, Italians like Mario Girotti!
How does it look like with American eyes—completely fake? Or normal?
It looks like a very exaggerated version of one particular America. There are shops that sell this kind of merchandise in the Western US, but they sell as much to tourists as to folks who actually dress like this.
What you need to understand is that there is more than one distinctively American subculture in the US. In particular, there are at least two major poor, rural, white American cultures: the high-religiosity country music culture, and the low-religiosity rock/metal culture. Though they can often be found side by side in the same trailer park, the same home, or even sometimes the same individual, there is also some real tension between them. Rock/metal appeals more to teenage rebellion, rejection of responsibility and civilization, rootless adventure. Country is more aspirational and its adherents see themselves as salt-of-the-earth folks who love their family, flag, and God. I guess that doesn’t go over so much in Europe, so we mostly export rock culture. (Even in the US, urban upper-middle-class people tend to get the two cultures confused since they both equally reject things like suits and liberal arts degrees and clever hipster music.)
Even in the US, urban upper-middle-class people tend to get the two cultures confused since they both equally reject things like suits and liberal arts degrees and clever hipster music.
(European here. Also an amateur rock musician, FWIW.)
It sounds like American urban upper-middle-class culture (you mean the one which Mencius Moldbug calls Optimates, Yvain calls Blue Tribe, Christian Lander calls SWPL, etc., right?) is even more foreign to me than I thought: I’m mildly surprised they find rockers outgroupish enough to lump them with country music folks. I’m also surprised by the association of rock/metal with “rural”—the first place in the US that springs to my mind when I hear about rock would be somewhere like Los Angeles.
No, it’s not that all rockers are poor, rural, and white, it’s that one of the poor, rural, white subcultures likes rock and metal more than country music.
There are roughly four prototypical white American regions/cultures, which correspond to fairly clear demographic events. Two of these are distinct white “rural” cultures (crudely: the western cowboy and the southern redneck) but these are often misleadingly combined into a unified “rural” stereotype that doesn’t really describe many actual people. This makes about as much sense as combining New York and San Francisco to create the archetypal “urban” American. Alas, the media is based in big coastal cities, and so even many Americans conflate the two.
So I think what you’ve noticed is that the cowboy culture has this individualist current, that leads to fewer public displays of religion, even though the people tended to be privately religious. Whereas the redneck culture has a more group-based history, with an theological approach (Evangelicalism) that requires more public displays of faith.
The huge region of self-identified German ancestry is centered on historically cowboy culture areas, and the Grey region labeled “American” is redneck culture. The “American” self-identification usually means Northern England / Southern Scotland / Northern Ireland, but far in the past.
The Grey region is the so-called Bible Belt, sometimes just referred to as “the South”, or as Appalachia. The lower-class whites in this area are the basis for the redneck stereotype (see Google images for pictures), but the area really doesn’t have the cowboy flavor. The cowboy or frontier rural culture historically spread out over the modern-day-German-ancestry areas in waves. The modern impact of this is complicated, but it’s sufficient to say that the rural cultures of the West are rather different from the rural culture of the South.
So I’m not too surprised if aspects of cowboy culture appeal more to Europeans today than redneck culture, because the modern areas where cowboy cultural flourished were inhabited by the descents of immigrants who were closer to modern Europe (culturally and temporally) than the people who founded redneck culture.
This makes about as much sense as combining New York and San Francisco to create the archetypal “urban” American
Why, wouldn’t both be “Blue Tribe” ?
The huge region of self-identified German ancestry is centered on historically cowboy culture areas
This is very, very interesting! The romantic interest in the Wild West in Europe was started by a German writer, Karl May, who never even travelled to America… could there be a possible connection i.e. part of that culture is a German import he could observe around him in the original version near Dresden? On the superficial level, clearly no, the whole horse-and-saddle thing is Mexican in the origin and goes back to Spain actually. Its ancestry is still visible in the richly embroidered boots that give up a clearly Mexican vibe. But maybe some kind of a deeper connection?
About the South: if it is so distinct from the West, here is what I am wondering. AFAIK the culture of the South was dominated by rather aristocratic, kinda French-styled (esp. in Louisiana) slave-owners and their slaves. Poor whites, as far as I can tell, did not play an important role in the South’s economy around, say, 1830. How would that dynamic work out? In the West, the poor white could become an indepenent farmer, shopkeeper, rather quickly, hence the individualistic ethic. In the South, he would always feel playing second, or rather fourth fiddle to the plantation owners. Am I reasoning right and if yes what were its consequences?
Looking at people around me (EDIT: Central Europe), there are not so many hardcore believers (although I have already met a few of those, too), but there are many… I would call them “half-believers”. People who believe they believe, and who follow the commands of the religious leaders when doing it is cheap. For example, despite what religion says about sex, they have as much sex as the atheists, only they later ask God to forgive them. They visit church once in a long time, for example only for Christmas, weddings, and funerals. Etc.
But in my opinion, even those half-believers can do a lot of damage. For example, they obey their religious leaders when the cost is paid by someone else. Does my pastor tell me to avoid premarital sex? Uhm, I will pretend I want to avoid it… then I will do it… and then I will confess my sins and ask forgiveness, just like all my friends do. Does my pastor tell me that homosexual marriage offends God? Well, since I am not a homosexual, I will follow God’s will at this point.
Church tries to infuence politics, to get money from state, and to teach religion at schools. -- It is especially the last part which makes me extremely angry (as a former teacher): If we don’t teach imaginary animals, or imaginary continents at school, why the fuck do we teach imaginary fairy-tale creatures? If I knew I had a colleague who teaches children that 2+2=5, I would consider it my ethical duty to get them fired, but when I have a colleague who teaches the same children about gods and angels, I am supposed to shut up a pretend that nothing weird is happening? Fuck no.
Just because our problems are not as big as in the Bible Belt, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
This is all true, but to stick to your examples, the don’t seem to be working very hard on this kind of thing around here apparently were are almost at full equality already, and the second, if done well, is largely just values and morality education, not much mythology.
Now, on the plus side, I do see half-believer churches trying to give people moral education where there is no secular alternative or it does not really motivate them. Look, talking about universalistic ethics based on either rational logic or a generic feeling of universal empathy works only for some people, largely for people who feel they have a surplus, they live in safety, and their upbringing was not very traumatic either. For the rest you need to make it emotionally more motivating and more relatable. Very often, you need to drop the universalistic aspect as it is very, very hard to understand, from that background and angle i.e. why care about someone just because he is human, they find it easier to do it tribal. Very, very often I see people who were raised to care only about themselves, and even the idea to look out for your tribe (fellow compatriots, fellow coreligionists, whatever) is an improvement.
All too often I see kids from Budapest or Bratislava having horribly broken values, basically nothing you would realize as ethics, respecting nothing but money and power, having an every man for himself, rob or get robbed view, and I do see religious ethics having an improvement there. One thing that is working fairly well even in America is prison conversions. I do not have stats and hand, but my impression is they do prevent recidivism. The more a whole society looks like deteriorating into gangsta mores, the more useful religion looks like. I have read 50 Cents autobio and basically he was saying in between the lines that in the most desperate black ghettos in America generally only kids from religious families have what it takes to resist the allure of criminality. That many a black mother things there it is either the church or the prison. And yes, over here, I saw “gypsy pastoring” working, i.e. priests working over Roma subcultures, village-end favellas practically, where every second male was an ex-convict and yes, recidivism improved, finding work and sticking to it improved, alchoholism improved, wife-beating improved, things like this improved. Or look into how the Irish in America went from a universally hated underclass to respected people - it was priests, the good kinds of priests, the kinds of priests who focus more on training everybody to behave functionally than on mythology: there are plenty a situation where lies like “stop getting drunk all the time and beating the wife or the devil will take you away” DOES result in increased utility for all.
Intellectuals are better off atheists. But I am not at all sure it is ideal for all, at this current stage of human development. Some people really need that sort of a “if the police does not catch you in this life the devil will in the next” kind of message.
The ideal solution for the short term would be designer religions, carefully engineered by skeptical intellectuals as Plato-style noble lies. In the long term, everybody should be intellectual and then we can drop the whole thing but that requires economic plenty, economic safety, non-traumatic upbringing, functional families etc.
All too often I see kids from Budapest or Bratislava having horribly broken values, basically nothing you would realize as ethics, respecting nothing but money and power, having an every man for himself, rob or get robbed view, and I do see religious ethics having an improvement there.
Seems to me this happens mostly at dysfunctional families. But there are many of them. Otherwise, there is this “what would my parents think of me?” factor.
In a society where families are fragmented, religion can serve a role of a substitute family.
Church tries to infuence politics, to get money from state, and to teach religion at schools. -- It is especially the last part which makes me extremely angry (as a former teacher): If we don’t teach imaginary animals, or imaginary continents at school, why the fuck do we teach imaginary fairy-tale creatures?
Do you really think that this is currently an issue in the US public schools? If so, what sort of examples have you encountered? My kids are in public schools in a bible-belt state, and I have not seen anything of a religious nature in their schoolwork or materials. If churches are trying to get religion into the classroom, they don’t seem to be very successful, as far as I can tell.
Edit: as soon as I submitted, I thought of an example, thankfully not from the school district that my kids go to—some school districts require disclaimers in the biology textbooks stating that the theory of evolution is only a theory (or something like that). Is this the sort of thing that you mean? Are there examples other than this?
Do you really think that this is currently an issue in the US public schools?
Sorry, I was speaking about Central Europe, or more specifically Slovakia. Edited the comment. We do not have the bible-belt situation here, but on the other hand, we also never had the official state and church separation. So the boundaries are flexible, and recently the church is gaining power.
Interesting. I think that a lot of people assume that religion is more likely to encroach on public life in the US than in Europe. However, based on your experience, it sounds like that may not be universally true. Even in the bible-belt, US schools are quite free of religious dogma (with the relatively uncommon exception of an evolution disclaimer).
In USA there is a long history of “fight” between religion and state, so the situation seems stable, both sides protect their trenches.
In Europe, it totally depends on country. In post-Communist countries, during communism the religion was kinda illegal (unfortunately, atheism doesn’t automatically imply rationality), so now people don’t have the “antibodies”; but the degree of religiousness varies a lot. For example, Slovakia and Poland are highly religious, while Czech Republic is mostly atheistic.
It probably also depends on the political system. When there are multiple political parties, there is usually a larger coalition necessary to win the election. And there is usually one religious political party, which sometimes gets to the parliament, which allows them to make laws favouring the church.
(To give you a realistic example, imagine that the political powers at some moment are something like: 40% Communists, 9% Nazis, 5% Catholics, and the remaining 46% are a few small “sane and civilized” political parties together. Communists and Nazis are natural allies. Catholics can go either way, but for the sake of long-term image they would rather associate with the civilized side. However, their price for joining is that the winning coalition must sign a treaty with Vatican, giving various advantages to the church, financial and in education. In situations like this, keeping church and state separate is impossible.)
This bothers me as well. I don’t see why rejecting the mythology should be grounds for rejecting the institution and its many social functions that have yet to be replicated in any capacity by secular organisations.
My point is about understanding and analysis, not approval or rejection.
But if you mention the rejection angle, there I have a different fear: the general low sanity waterline means destroying other-wordly religion generates this-worldly ones and they are more dangerous. If people need to have wishful thinking, better put it into an other-world box and not apply it to the real world.
E.g. I think moderately religious people tend to be politically sane because they not need to invest their wishful thinking, hope, etc. into politics. They have a handy box called afterlife they can invest them into. Thus, they can afford to see politics in a sober way, not expecting much from it. They don’t expect political saviors etc.
Some religious social functions are denied to people who do not believe, or are unwilling to lie to their loved ones about their disbelief. It’s one thing to attend church services, quite another to participate in a baptism wherein you swear to the best of your ability to raise the baptized child in a belief you think is a flat lie.
Some religious social functions may be deemed socially harmful, for instance the inculcation of false material or social beliefs in children. (I don’t mean false beliefs of the form “Jesus loves you”, but of the form “experiencing lust corrupts your mind”, “listening to the Beatles will cause you to join a cult”, or “yoga is an occult practice and doing it will cause to become insane”.)
In many cases, the institution uses its access to members to advocate specific political and social positions which are opposed to humanist values; thus, the atheist humanist may see the organization as a political opponent.
or are unwilling to lie to their loved ones about their disbelief
I think this, again, is some kind of a very conservative Bible Belt thing. Outside that area in the Western world very few people do it because of real belief. For example my grandpa (Central Europe) went to church because everybody did, because it was the custom in the village. Nobody cared if he believes or not. How to put it… they were not as egalitarian as to ask a rural blacksmith to ponder about the mysteries of theism and atheism. It was more like, shut up and do the moves, and leave high thoughts to high ranking people. He never spent five minutes thinking if he is theist or atheist. He went to church, then had some kind of fallout with the priest, he disliked drunk people and the priest was drinking or something, and then just did not go anymore, basically withstood the social pressure from that on saying I don’t go there that guy is an ass. But beliefs never came into question. They were not exactly expected to think, only to behave as said. He did not think it is lie or truth. He was not supposed to think and did not care about thinking about it at all he literally said “The paternoster is the priest’s job. Mine is working with iron.”
In many cases, the institution uses its access to members to advocate specific political and social positions which are opposed to humanist values;
Humanism sounds like a dangerous thing. I am not entirely sure what it entails, however I have seen cases where people who were no longer able to pour their wishful thinking and hopefulness into other-wordly religions have invested them into this Earth and life and thus ended up making utopias and forcing and fighting others to comply to them, replaying the whole crap of religion: fighting heretics and unbeliveres, establishing theocracy etc. the most obvious example is communism.
Another issue was that for example when people stopped believing in original sin they started to believe in crap like “human nature is good only society makes us bad” which is obivously hugely unscientific. This went back as far as Rousseau and influenced modern history a lot.
So I would not base my values on the explicit rejection of religious values. If anything, I would borrow some out of it, like not investing much hope and wishful thinking into the world and society, considering it largely unredeemable and seeing society as something easily broken, and seeing human nature as something rife with factory bugs and not trusting much in the goodness of people.
I am afraid that humanism teaches optimism and that is the worst mistake of them all, because it leads to underestimating the costs of mistakes.
If anything, I would try to go back to pre-Christian value systems, like Stoicism.
This is generally a good idea. Christianity was originally a fringe utopian universalist pacifist world-hating, society-hating hippie stuff. Jesus was an SJW :-) The whole reason it could become solid, functional, and build the rather magnificent and efficiently organized Middle Ages is that it calmed down and learn a lot from pagan philosophy and pagan practices and customs. If pagans could make crazy Christians become wise and functional, maybe they can also make atheists become wise and functional. So that is where I would look for values—pagans.
very few people do it because of real belief [...] beliefs never came into question. They were not exactly expected to think
I think LW participants are probably much more troubled than the average about making public declarations that they believe something that they don’t actually believe. (I’m not sure I have very good reason for this, beyond the fact that I’m fairly sure it’s true of me and it seems handwavily like I’m fairly typical of LWers in this area.)
So if people here—or others who resemble people here—are more worked up about (ir)religion than you expect, this may be part of why: the attitude you describe that would make it easier not to get worked up doesn’t come naturally to those people.
Some religious social functions are denied to people who do not believe, or are unwilling to lie to their loved ones about their disbelief.
The exact same thing could be said about secular-humanist organisations—suggesting that there’s nothing inherently wrong about such a standard even from your perspective. Sure, they outwardly profess being much more open and accepting than institutions of traditional organised religion, but the overwhelming majority probably wouldn’t accept a creationist baptist or a wahhabi, for good reason—and the same goes for religious institutions. I don’t think anyone should be forced to associate with people who openly reject and oppose their world-view, which seems to be what you’re proposing.
I know there are people in the US Bible Belt who still mean it, and they have angry atheist children, but how comes the majority of Internet discussion kinda revolves around them?
I’d assumed that was a side effect of North American hegemony of the Anglophone Internet.
But now I notice I don’t actually know how people talk about religion on websites not dominated by Americans or Anglophones. Is there more focus on analysis or on normative judgement? If the latter, do people judge local religious institutions rather than American religion? Or is the target still mainly the Bible Belt and the like? (I could just Google things like “Slovenian atheist forum”, run the results through Google Translate, and see what people are posting. But it’s probably hard to get a representative view that way.)
An atheist forum would be the same, but the whole point is that mostly they would not debate religion as theism vs. atheism.
People would be more likely to be anti-clerical than atheist, hating the church as an institution in society, that spreads conservative ideas and props up authoritarian regimes.
On the other side, people would be talking about “Christian values” not about faith or belief. Not even belief in belief (of factual statements), but belief in that the values, the norms, the prescriptions are useful. They would also talk about identity, like a “national christian identity”
Why does everybody seem to be so worked up about whether religion is true or not and call it theism or atheism? My Central European experience is that it is largely an institution, custom, habit, social expectation, identity, a way of expressing things and all that, but people did not really believe for 150 years at least, so it is not really something meant to be true for a long time now. I know there are people in the US Bible Belt who still mean it, and they have angry atheist children, but how comes the majority of Internet discussion kinda revolves around them? How many people on LW want to approach the topic from the angle Max Weber and similar scholars did?
I think the “everybody” is really an American-centric thing. As far as I can tell, all of the New Atheist types are non-European, or who focus most of their polemics on American audiences.
I’ve never lived in Europe, but this was my experience growing up in the US:
“You don’t believe in Jesus/God? I must not have raised you right”
“You’ve treated me better than all of my previous boyfriends/girlfriends, but you don’t believe in Jesus so I’m breaking up with you”
“You’re new to the area? Where did you move from? Oh, Nowhereville, Alabahoma? I’m from Otherplace, Nevexico. So what church do you go to?”
“How come you’re not going to the prayer breakfast/luncheon?”
“You didn’t get the job/your car broke down/lost your wallet/etc.? Don’t worry, god has a plan for you”
“Can you believe these scientists and their evolution/global warming/sciency science talk? They’ll say anything to reject god, right? My pastor says XYZ so therefore it’s true”
I’ve lived in a lot of places in the US and in my experience the places where this sort of stuff doesn’t happen are mainly large cities like NYC or San Francisco. And even then, it has to be the parts of those cities that are leaning on the more affluent side of things. It’s not just a USA Bible-Belt phenomenon… I’ve actually never lived in or visited the Bible Belt so it must be a lot worse there.
The funny thing is that everything I read (mainly fiction) or watch (movie) about the “cowboy” culture of rural America does not seem to reflect it much. OK it is clear that religion tends to ebb and flow, have low and high tides and there was a sort of a high one after 1970 (“moral majority”), still. Random example: Axl Rose from Guns’n’Roses. He is such a typical rural guy, in fact, he kind of revolutionized rock fashion by doing away with leathers and chains and basically dressing on stage like like a rural US agricultural tractor driver. There is hardly any reference to either religiousness or atheism in the songs. Just seems to not care. The whole rock and roll culture does not seem to care much and apparently never did, no matter how much I go back in time, Easy Riders, or even further. That matters, because that is the most popular aspect of America over here :) Many an aging Euro guy imitates all this ride choppers, wear cowboy boots and hats, indian jewelry, booorn to be wiiild kind of thing and it is authentic so far that at the very least the American musicians whose songs get listened to really don’t seem to care either way.
(Although of course there is one confounding factor: all this kind of thing feels very American but is often surprisingly not so, Born to be Wild is actually a Canadian song and so on, these things have a prairie-cowboy-freedom feel, but not really sure to what extent do the reflect actual American experiences or aspirations. This may be a different topic, but I think it is relevant to understanding. There is an America-as-a-concept many an aging Euro guy loves and religion does not seem to play much a role in it. It is based on various things. Like westerns. Who makes the westerns? Surprisingly, Italians like Mario Girotti!
Let’s test this! I love this shop, and wear some things from here, and it is not out of place at all for an older Euro guy esp. a bit outside cities. How does it look like with American eyes—completely fake? Or normal? http://www.world-of-western.at/ and especially: http://www.world-of-western.com/shop?00000000000000fa04720fdc0000004a26150000&&kcc&navid=23007&kat=%5BSchmuck%5D&currblock=1&suche1=& )
My point is, is this “real America” AND I should imagine religion as part of it, or is the whole thing completely off?)
It looks like a very exaggerated version of one particular America. There are shops that sell this kind of merchandise in the Western US, but they sell as much to tourists as to folks who actually dress like this.
What you need to understand is that there is more than one distinctively American subculture in the US. In particular, there are at least two major poor, rural, white American cultures: the high-religiosity country music culture, and the low-religiosity rock/metal culture. Though they can often be found side by side in the same trailer park, the same home, or even sometimes the same individual, there is also some real tension between them. Rock/metal appeals more to teenage rebellion, rejection of responsibility and civilization, rootless adventure. Country is more aspirational and its adherents see themselves as salt-of-the-earth folks who love their family, flag, and God. I guess that doesn’t go over so much in Europe, so we mostly export rock culture. (Even in the US, urban upper-middle-class people tend to get the two cultures confused since they both equally reject things like suits and liberal arts degrees and clever hipster music.)
(European here. Also an amateur rock musician, FWIW.)
It sounds like American urban upper-middle-class culture (you mean the one which Mencius Moldbug calls Optimates, Yvain calls Blue Tribe, Christian Lander calls SWPL, etc., right?) is even more foreign to me than I thought: I’m mildly surprised they find rockers outgroupish enough to lump them with country music folks. I’m also surprised by the association of rock/metal with “rural”—the first place in the US that springs to my mind when I hear about rock would be somewhere like Los Angeles.
No, it’s not that all rockers are poor, rural, and white, it’s that one of the poor, rural, white subcultures likes rock and metal more than country music.
There are roughly four prototypical white American regions/cultures, which correspond to fairly clear demographic events. Two of these are distinct white “rural” cultures (crudely: the western cowboy and the southern redneck) but these are often misleadingly combined into a unified “rural” stereotype that doesn’t really describe many actual people. This makes about as much sense as combining New York and San Francisco to create the archetypal “urban” American. Alas, the media is based in big coastal cities, and so even many Americans conflate the two.
So I think what you’ve noticed is that the cowboy culture has this individualist current, that leads to fewer public displays of religion, even though the people tended to be privately religious. Whereas the redneck culture has a more group-based history, with an theological approach (Evangelicalism) that requires more public displays of faith.
For the immigration element, look at this is map of self-reported ancestry.
The huge region of self-identified German ancestry is centered on historically cowboy culture areas, and the Grey region labeled “American” is redneck culture. The “American” self-identification usually means Northern England / Southern Scotland / Northern Ireland, but far in the past.
The Grey region is the so-called Bible Belt, sometimes just referred to as “the South”, or as Appalachia. The lower-class whites in this area are the basis for the redneck stereotype (see Google images for pictures), but the area really doesn’t have the cowboy flavor. The cowboy or frontier rural culture historically spread out over the modern-day-German-ancestry areas in waves. The modern impact of this is complicated, but it’s sufficient to say that the rural cultures of the West are rather different from the rural culture of the South.
So I’m not too surprised if aspects of cowboy culture appeal more to Europeans today than redneck culture, because the modern areas where cowboy cultural flourished were inhabited by the descents of immigrants who were closer to modern Europe (culturally and temporally) than the people who founded redneck culture.
Why, wouldn’t both be “Blue Tribe” ?
This is very, very interesting! The romantic interest in the Wild West in Europe was started by a German writer, Karl May, who never even travelled to America… could there be a possible connection i.e. part of that culture is a German import he could observe around him in the original version near Dresden? On the superficial level, clearly no, the whole horse-and-saddle thing is Mexican in the origin and goes back to Spain actually. Its ancestry is still visible in the richly embroidered boots that give up a clearly Mexican vibe. But maybe some kind of a deeper connection?
About the South: if it is so distinct from the West, here is what I am wondering. AFAIK the culture of the South was dominated by rather aristocratic, kinda French-styled (esp. in Louisiana) slave-owners and their slaves. Poor whites, as far as I can tell, did not play an important role in the South’s economy around, say, 1830. How would that dynamic work out? In the West, the poor white could become an indepenent farmer, shopkeeper, rather quickly, hence the individualistic ethic. In the South, he would always feel playing second, or rather fourth fiddle to the plantation owners. Am I reasoning right and if yes what were its consequences?
Looking at people around me (EDIT: Central Europe), there are not so many hardcore believers (although I have already met a few of those, too), but there are many… I would call them “half-believers”. People who believe they believe, and who follow the commands of the religious leaders when doing it is cheap. For example, despite what religion says about sex, they have as much sex as the atheists, only they later ask God to forgive them. They visit church once in a long time, for example only for Christmas, weddings, and funerals. Etc.
But in my opinion, even those half-believers can do a lot of damage. For example, they obey their religious leaders when the cost is paid by someone else. Does my pastor tell me to avoid premarital sex? Uhm, I will pretend I want to avoid it… then I will do it… and then I will confess my sins and ask forgiveness, just like all my friends do. Does my pastor tell me that homosexual marriage offends God? Well, since I am not a homosexual, I will follow God’s will at this point.
Church tries to infuence politics, to get money from state, and to teach religion at schools. -- It is especially the last part which makes me extremely angry (as a former teacher): If we don’t teach imaginary animals, or imaginary continents at school, why the fuck do we teach imaginary fairy-tale creatures? If I knew I had a colleague who teaches children that 2+2=5, I would consider it my ethical duty to get them fired, but when I have a colleague who teaches the same children about gods and angels, I am supposed to shut up a pretend that nothing weird is happening? Fuck no.
Just because our problems are not as big as in the Bible Belt, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
This is all true, but to stick to your examples, the don’t seem to be working very hard on this kind of thing around here apparently were are almost at full equality already, and the second, if done well, is largely just values and morality education, not much mythology.
Now, on the plus side, I do see half-believer churches trying to give people moral education where there is no secular alternative or it does not really motivate them. Look, talking about universalistic ethics based on either rational logic or a generic feeling of universal empathy works only for some people, largely for people who feel they have a surplus, they live in safety, and their upbringing was not very traumatic either. For the rest you need to make it emotionally more motivating and more relatable. Very often, you need to drop the universalistic aspect as it is very, very hard to understand, from that background and angle i.e. why care about someone just because he is human, they find it easier to do it tribal. Very, very often I see people who were raised to care only about themselves, and even the idea to look out for your tribe (fellow compatriots, fellow coreligionists, whatever) is an improvement.
All too often I see kids from Budapest or Bratislava having horribly broken values, basically nothing you would realize as ethics, respecting nothing but money and power, having an every man for himself, rob or get robbed view, and I do see religious ethics having an improvement there. One thing that is working fairly well even in America is prison conversions. I do not have stats and hand, but my impression is they do prevent recidivism. The more a whole society looks like deteriorating into gangsta mores, the more useful religion looks like. I have read 50 Cents autobio and basically he was saying in between the lines that in the most desperate black ghettos in America generally only kids from religious families have what it takes to resist the allure of criminality. That many a black mother things there it is either the church or the prison. And yes, over here, I saw “gypsy pastoring” working, i.e. priests working over Roma subcultures, village-end favellas practically, where every second male was an ex-convict and yes, recidivism improved, finding work and sticking to it improved, alchoholism improved, wife-beating improved, things like this improved. Or look into how the Irish in America went from a universally hated underclass to respected people - it was priests, the good kinds of priests, the kinds of priests who focus more on training everybody to behave functionally than on mythology: there are plenty a situation where lies like “stop getting drunk all the time and beating the wife or the devil will take you away” DOES result in increased utility for all.
Intellectuals are better off atheists. But I am not at all sure it is ideal for all, at this current stage of human development. Some people really need that sort of a “if the police does not catch you in this life the devil will in the next” kind of message.
The ideal solution for the short term would be designer religions, carefully engineered by skeptical intellectuals as Plato-style noble lies. In the long term, everybody should be intellectual and then we can drop the whole thing but that requires economic plenty, economic safety, non-traumatic upbringing, functional families etc.
Seems to me this happens mostly at dysfunctional families. But there are many of them. Otherwise, there is this “what would my parents think of me?” factor.
In a society where families are fragmented, religion can serve a role of a substitute family.
Do you really think that this is currently an issue in the US public schools? If so, what sort of examples have you encountered? My kids are in public schools in a bible-belt state, and I have not seen anything of a religious nature in their schoolwork or materials. If churches are trying to get religion into the classroom, they don’t seem to be very successful, as far as I can tell.
Edit: as soon as I submitted, I thought of an example, thankfully not from the school district that my kids go to—some school districts require disclaimers in the biology textbooks stating that the theory of evolution is only a theory (or something like that). Is this the sort of thing that you mean? Are there examples other than this?
Sorry, I was speaking about Central Europe, or more specifically Slovakia. Edited the comment. We do not have the bible-belt situation here, but on the other hand, we also never had the official state and church separation. So the boundaries are flexible, and recently the church is gaining power.
Interesting. I think that a lot of people assume that religion is more likely to encroach on public life in the US than in Europe. However, based on your experience, it sounds like that may not be universally true. Even in the bible-belt, US schools are quite free of religious dogma (with the relatively uncommon exception of an evolution disclaimer).
In USA there is a long history of “fight” between religion and state, so the situation seems stable, both sides protect their trenches.
In Europe, it totally depends on country. In post-Communist countries, during communism the religion was kinda illegal (unfortunately, atheism doesn’t automatically imply rationality), so now people don’t have the “antibodies”; but the degree of religiousness varies a lot. For example, Slovakia and Poland are highly religious, while Czech Republic is mostly atheistic.
It probably also depends on the political system. When there are multiple political parties, there is usually a larger coalition necessary to win the election. And there is usually one religious political party, which sometimes gets to the parliament, which allows them to make laws favouring the church.
(To give you a realistic example, imagine that the political powers at some moment are something like: 40% Communists, 9% Nazis, 5% Catholics, and the remaining 46% are a few small “sane and civilized” political parties together. Communists and Nazis are natural allies. Catholics can go either way, but for the sake of long-term image they would rather associate with the civilized side. However, their price for joining is that the winning coalition must sign a treaty with Vatican, giving various advantages to the church, financial and in education. In situations like this, keeping church and state separate is impossible.)
Just because your closest circle of friends and acquaintances think like what you just described, you should not generalize.
Your closest circle does not represent the entirety of society, because it is heavily defined by your profession, political views and other factors.
This bothers me as well. I don’t see why rejecting the mythology should be grounds for rejecting the institution and its many social functions that have yet to be replicated in any capacity by secular organisations.
My point is about understanding and analysis, not approval or rejection.
But if you mention the rejection angle, there I have a different fear: the general low sanity waterline means destroying other-wordly religion generates this-worldly ones and they are more dangerous. If people need to have wishful thinking, better put it into an other-world box and not apply it to the real world.
E.g. I think moderately religious people tend to be politically sane because they not need to invest their wishful thinking, hope, etc. into politics. They have a handy box called afterlife they can invest them into. Thus, they can afford to see politics in a sober way, not expecting much from it. They don’t expect political saviors etc.
Some religious social functions are denied to people who do not believe, or are unwilling to lie to their loved ones about their disbelief. It’s one thing to attend church services, quite another to participate in a baptism wherein you swear to the best of your ability to raise the baptized child in a belief you think is a flat lie.
Some religious social functions may be deemed socially harmful, for instance the inculcation of false material or social beliefs in children. (I don’t mean false beliefs of the form “Jesus loves you”, but of the form “experiencing lust corrupts your mind”, “listening to the Beatles will cause you to join a cult”, or “yoga is an occult practice and doing it will cause to become insane”.)
In many cases, the institution uses its access to members to advocate specific political and social positions which are opposed to humanist values; thus, the atheist humanist may see the organization as a political opponent.
I think this, again, is some kind of a very conservative Bible Belt thing. Outside that area in the Western world very few people do it because of real belief. For example my grandpa (Central Europe) went to church because everybody did, because it was the custom in the village. Nobody cared if he believes or not. How to put it… they were not as egalitarian as to ask a rural blacksmith to ponder about the mysteries of theism and atheism. It was more like, shut up and do the moves, and leave high thoughts to high ranking people. He never spent five minutes thinking if he is theist or atheist. He went to church, then had some kind of fallout with the priest, he disliked drunk people and the priest was drinking or something, and then just did not go anymore, basically withstood the social pressure from that on saying I don’t go there that guy is an ass. But beliefs never came into question. They were not exactly expected to think, only to behave as said. He did not think it is lie or truth. He was not supposed to think and did not care about thinking about it at all he literally said “The paternoster is the priest’s job. Mine is working with iron.”
Humanism sounds like a dangerous thing. I am not entirely sure what it entails, however I have seen cases where people who were no longer able to pour their wishful thinking and hopefulness into other-wordly religions have invested them into this Earth and life and thus ended up making utopias and forcing and fighting others to comply to them, replaying the whole crap of religion: fighting heretics and unbeliveres, establishing theocracy etc. the most obvious example is communism.
Another issue was that for example when people stopped believing in original sin they started to believe in crap like “human nature is good only society makes us bad” which is obivously hugely unscientific. This went back as far as Rousseau and influenced modern history a lot.
So I would not base my values on the explicit rejection of religious values. If anything, I would borrow some out of it, like not investing much hope and wishful thinking into the world and society, considering it largely unredeemable and seeing society as something easily broken, and seeing human nature as something rife with factory bugs and not trusting much in the goodness of people.
I am afraid that humanism teaches optimism and that is the worst mistake of them all, because it leads to underestimating the costs of mistakes.
If anything, I would try to go back to pre-Christian value systems, like Stoicism.
This is generally a good idea. Christianity was originally a fringe utopian universalist pacifist world-hating, society-hating hippie stuff. Jesus was an SJW :-) The whole reason it could become solid, functional, and build the rather magnificent and efficiently organized Middle Ages is that it calmed down and learn a lot from pagan philosophy and pagan practices and customs. If pagans could make crazy Christians become wise and functional, maybe they can also make atheists become wise and functional. So that is where I would look for values—pagans.
I think LW participants are probably much more troubled than the average about making public declarations that they believe something that they don’t actually believe. (I’m not sure I have very good reason for this, beyond the fact that I’m fairly sure it’s true of me and it seems handwavily like I’m fairly typical of LWers in this area.)
So if people here—or others who resemble people here—are more worked up about (ir)religion than you expect, this may be part of why: the attitude you describe that would make it easier not to get worked up doesn’t come naturally to those people.
The exact same thing could be said about secular-humanist organisations—suggesting that there’s nothing inherently wrong about such a standard even from your perspective. Sure, they outwardly profess being much more open and accepting than institutions of traditional organised religion, but the overwhelming majority probably wouldn’t accept a creationist baptist or a wahhabi, for good reason—and the same goes for religious institutions. I don’t think anyone should be forced to associate with people who openly reject and oppose their world-view, which seems to be what you’re proposing.
I’d assumed that was a side effect of North American hegemony of the Anglophone Internet.
But now I notice I don’t actually know how people talk about religion on websites not dominated by Americans or Anglophones. Is there more focus on analysis or on normative judgement? If the latter, do people judge local religious institutions rather than American religion? Or is the target still mainly the Bible Belt and the like? (I could just Google things like “Slovenian atheist forum”, run the results through Google Translate, and see what people are posting. But it’s probably hard to get a representative view that way.)
An atheist forum would be the same, but the whole point is that mostly they would not debate religion as theism vs. atheism.
People would be more likely to be anti-clerical than atheist, hating the church as an institution in society, that spreads conservative ideas and props up authoritarian regimes.
On the other side, people would be talking about “Christian values” not about faith or belief. Not even belief in belief (of factual statements), but belief in that the values, the norms, the prescriptions are useful. They would also talk about identity, like a “national christian identity”
Related.