I think more people being religious is good on the margin and basically don’t think that religion is a signifiant barrier to spread and advance of good ideas and practices.
I think your mistake is your crux not including the broader social benefits that religion brings. Religion is maybe the only, or at least one of very few, forces that can bring large numbers of different people from within a community together on a regular basis and, in Europe and probably the US this has enormous benefits. What research on happiness and well-being tell us is that, assuming you have your base material needs met, your social realations become the most important factor in your happiness. This I am very confident about.
What I am less confident about but I think is still important is that having good institutions for working and middle class people to organise around has historically been very important for them achieving good politcal outcomes, and socially desirable outcomes in the form of inclusive economic instituions to use Acemoglu and Robinson’s framework. I think the success of Christian democratic parties in building the social democractic state in Northern and Western Europe and their taking the place of the aristocratic conservative parties is an example of this being relevent in the context of high income democratic political economy. The other very prominant example is the importance of black churches in the African-American political movement.This is very important if you think that technology is endogenous to political and economic institutions.
The other piece I am less confident about is that religion is in general a positive socialising force and a good way of making young men who would otherwise have poor life outcomes and cause social harm, to be turned into better citizens. Examples of this are the pretty robust evidence that students at Catholic Schools have better exam results, the success in intellectual fields of the European and American Jewry, and the importance of the Catholic Church in the rehabilitation of latin Americans involved gang crime.
The other key part I disagree about is the degree to which religion stops people from adopting Good ideas and Good practices. My argument for this is that religion is a major force in very few peoples lives in rich democracies. Very few people are observant of the religion that they say that they belive in. Church attendances are very low in all Christian countries except the US, and even there it’s quite low. I have much less evidence for this applying today, but historically individuals who’ve wanted to adopt ideas that their religion would seem to prohibit have been able to find ways of making it work. For the great Enlightenment thinkers of Laplace, Paine, Lagrange, Locke this was a belief in a God that existed but had no impact on Earth, for the Slave owners of the US South it was that God was fine with slavery, for the emerging middle classes of Europe in the long 19th century it was Calvinism, for Democratic polticians representing 2nd and 3rd genneration of immigrants in the North East it was the switch from pro-life to pro-choice.
The bit of your argument that I buy, is that it seems very plausible that a very smart Hindu devotes his life to the study of Sanskrit rather than something you and I would consider more useful (as Aymrata Sen nearly did), and there’s a lower probability that Ben Shapiro is a conservative and potentially that more Americans belive in climate change.
I’ve purposefully restcrited this to thinking about rich democracies because I think that’s what your post was about. Hinduism in Indian is a different ball game and Islam in low income unstable countries again seems outside the scope of your post.
I think your point about the importance of Christian churches as a center of community to the rural USA is underappreciated in liberal cities. There are good arguments that the breakdown of Christianity equals the breakdown of Middle America.
I was thinking about the various services and ministries provided by my small-city church, and to reconstruct its social impact, you’d have to have at least these things:
a community center where children are, weekly, taught morality and good behavior from nursery through high school, and then graduated into adult morality study classes
a social club where the members donate ten percent of their (sometimes not inconsiderable) income for the good of the community
a TV studio with live audience seating and up-to-date A/V equipment where professional speakers and singers can perform live for an audience, and have their content recorded and published to the web
Increasing its positive impact on the city would be easier without having to avoid certain rulings which would (especially in light of the narrowness of the Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission ruling) require us to host events for people antithetical to our core purpose as a church: pointing people to Jesus. And because Cthulu swims left and Moloch consumes all, we’re caught between the Charybdis of relaxing our standards and the Scylla of dying off before enough new members show up to repopulate the church.
None of this seems cruxy to me—I could grant that all of your claims here are true and it wouldn’t much affect my argument. I’m not advocating that everyone abandon their church communities and throw out their bibles.
Don’t these religions (the large incumbent ones of the western world) need to reform in light of new opportunities and challenges of the 21st century? (Not least of all anti-aging, gene editing, space colonization, psychedelic research, neuroscience, and powerful AI).
Don’t the inertia and epistemic standards of incumbents like Mormonism pose an obstacle to more modern religions Mormon Transhumanism? And isn’t that bad?
I think more people being religious is good on the margin and basically don’t think that religion is a signifiant barrier to spread and advance of good ideas and practices.
I think your mistake is your crux not including the broader social benefits that religion brings. Religion is maybe the only, or at least one of very few, forces that can bring large numbers of different people from within a community together on a regular basis and, in Europe and probably the US this has enormous benefits. What research on happiness and well-being tell us is that, assuming you have your base material needs met, your social realations become the most important factor in your happiness. This I am very confident about.
What I am less confident about but I think is still important is that having good institutions for working and middle class people to organise around has historically been very important for them achieving good politcal outcomes, and socially desirable outcomes in the form of inclusive economic instituions to use Acemoglu and Robinson’s framework. I think the success of Christian democratic parties in building the social democractic state in Northern and Western Europe and their taking the place of the aristocratic conservative parties is an example of this being relevent in the context of high income democratic political economy. The other very prominant example is the importance of black churches in the African-American political movement.This is very important if you think that technology is endogenous to political and economic institutions.
The other piece I am less confident about is that religion is in general a positive socialising force and a good way of making young men who would otherwise have poor life outcomes and cause social harm, to be turned into better citizens. Examples of this are the pretty robust evidence that students at Catholic Schools have better exam results, the success in intellectual fields of the European and American Jewry, and the importance of the Catholic Church in the rehabilitation of latin Americans involved gang crime.
The other key part I disagree about is the degree to which religion stops people from adopting Good ideas and Good practices. My argument for this is that religion is a major force in very few peoples lives in rich democracies. Very few people are observant of the religion that they say that they belive in. Church attendances are very low in all Christian countries except the US, and even there it’s quite low. I have much less evidence for this applying today, but historically individuals who’ve wanted to adopt ideas that their religion would seem to prohibit have been able to find ways of making it work. For the great Enlightenment thinkers of Laplace, Paine, Lagrange, Locke this was a belief in a God that existed but had no impact on Earth, for the Slave owners of the US South it was that God was fine with slavery, for the emerging middle classes of Europe in the long 19th century it was Calvinism, for Democratic polticians representing 2nd and 3rd genneration of immigrants in the North East it was the switch from pro-life to pro-choice.
The bit of your argument that I buy, is that it seems very plausible that a very smart Hindu devotes his life to the study of Sanskrit rather than something you and I would consider more useful (as Aymrata Sen nearly did), and there’s a lower probability that Ben Shapiro is a conservative and potentially that more Americans belive in climate change.
I’ve purposefully restcrited this to thinking about rich democracies because I think that’s what your post was about. Hinduism in Indian is a different ball game and Islam in low income unstable countries again seems outside the scope of your post.
I think your point about the importance of Christian churches as a center of community to the rural USA is underappreciated in liberal cities. There are good arguments that the breakdown of Christianity equals the breakdown of Middle America.
I was thinking about the various services and ministries provided by my small-city church, and to reconstruct its social impact, you’d have to have at least these things:
a community center where children are, weekly, taught morality and good behavior from nursery through high school, and then graduated into adult morality study classes
a social club where the members donate ten percent of their (sometimes not inconsiderable) income for the good of the community
a TV studio with live audience seating and up-to-date A/V equipment where professional speakers and singers can perform live for an audience, and have their content recorded and published to the web
Increasing its positive impact on the city would be easier without having to avoid certain rulings which would (especially in light of the narrowness of the Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission ruling) require us to host events for people antithetical to our core purpose as a church: pointing people to Jesus. And because Cthulu swims left and Moloch consumes all, we’re caught between the Charybdis of relaxing our standards and the Scylla of dying off before enough new members show up to repopulate the church.
None of this seems cruxy to me—I could grant that all of your claims here are true and it wouldn’t much affect my argument. I’m not advocating that everyone abandon their church communities and throw out their bibles.
Don’t these religions (the large incumbent ones of the western world) need to reform in light of new opportunities and challenges of the 21st century? (Not least of all anti-aging, gene editing, space colonization, psychedelic research, neuroscience, and powerful AI).
Don’t the inertia and epistemic standards of incumbents like Mormonism pose an obstacle to more modern religions Mormon Transhumanism? And isn’t that bad?