philosophy, cultural-identity, science-and-religion, ethics, fundamentalismPresumably your mileage is going to vary depending on where you are writing, but I want to pose this question globally insofar as that is possible. How far have we come in terms of moving beyond God as a species and what metric do you use to qualify your claim?
In other words, is the world still basically as religious as it has ever been? Has there been progress moving beyond theistic images of thought?
One of the original Apple employees had a hypothesis they termed the “Law of Constant Misery”—basically, there was a fixed amount of misery on the planet, no matter what people did to alleviate it, and the best you could hope for was to spread it around equally. It sounds like you’re taking a stab at a similar concept.
I’d guess that religion is on the wane, local backsliding notwithstanding. In most countries, you can’t be dragged before the secular authorities and tortured into confessing thoughtcrime against clerical authority, and we know that wasn’t the case in Europe 500 years ago.
Some places will still kill you for being a witch, but I expect they were doing that 500 years ago as well.
There’s no military cult kidnapping and murdering people to cut out their hearts to appease a flying serpent in Latin America, as there was 500 years ago.
Most American religious worship today is just as lax and feel-good as the indigenous religions that were wiped out to make room for modern practice.
The Middle East is, of course, more devout now than it was 200 years ago, but it’s also pretty easy to blame that on the negative influence of imperialism more than any positive religious action.
In lots of places in Asia (and the rest of the world), the monarch was also quite literally treated as God-on-earth 500 years ago. There’s only one place on Earth that’s still the case, and it’s very obviously a global pariah for it.
I’d like to think that globally, we’ve made progress since 500 years ago. I think the places stuck in a religious dark age are fewer now.
In the US I think we may have slipped on the religious front compared to 200 years ago, when the country was founded with a group largely consisting of freethinkers at the helm. In the 50s “God” became an important component of patriotism for lazy minds, and more recently we’ve seen the rise of the religious right in politics.
Still, I think things are getting better. Just not as quickly as we’d like.
I’m skeptical when people say that religion is waning in power and importance to a lot of people. There were two events within the past decade that lead me to this conclusion.
The first is the events of the 11th of September, 2001. In that horrible day we saw firsthand the dangers of adhering to a fundamentalist doctrine, how decidedly immoral and just plain wrong it can be to allow religion to dominate your thoughts and your mind. I remember thinking at the time that the religious fervor that led those nineteen people to take control of those planes and then cause the destruction and carnage would be exposed for what it is, and more people should move away from religion. I regret that I was wrong in that expectation and feel deeply saddened that more people didn’t regard it as such.
The other event took place over the course of about a week, beginning on the 2nd of April, 2005. It was virtually impossible, at that time, to turn on the TV and not see the huge throngs of mourners over the recently-deceased Pope John Paul II. The cynic in me saw all of the news coverage as basically a continual confirmation and reconfirmation that he was, in fact, still dead. But you can’t deny the sheer numbers of people who turned out to pay their respects and mourn his passing. And this in the supposedly secular Europe.
There, of course, have been other incidents – smaller in scope than a terrorist attack that claims more than 3000 lives or the death of a religious leader – over the course of the past decade that either
This list includes, but is certainly not limited to, the terrorist attacks in London, Madrid, and Mumbai; the assassination of Theo Van Gogh; the very public conversion to Catholicism of Tony Blair; the publication of The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins; the construction of the Creation Museum in Kentucky and the ongoing attempts to build a new theme park with a giant Ark; the sheer number of people who believe Barack Obama is a muslim; the sheer number of people who claim the United States is a Christian nation; religiously-motivated lawmaking around the world, especially in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa; the list goes on….
I think this question needs a book to answer it. And that book is inconclusive. It does conclude that the dominant idea of 40 years ago, that modernization would lead to secularism is dead. But there is no clear new theory on where we are headed. Each culture needs to be examined individually. France for instance secularized as a reaction to what was there before its revolution.
I heard an interesting thought from Scott Atran, an anthropologist, that the secular empires of the last few hundred years still have the same sense of a mission to "save the world". Whether saving it from capitalism or from communism, the idea of having a notion of right that needs to be taken to the rest of the world stems from monotheism, as it developed a few thousand years ago.
Questioning a few old books is just the beginning. We need to get comfortable with not having answers. Politics is another way we make decisions when we don't have complete evidence and look at how dysfunctional that is. What isn't quite dead is the idea that science will provide all the answers or that a brilliant leader will appear. The idea that a savior will appear from heaven is pretty much on life support, but the cultural need to be saved is still very much alive.
No, God isn’t dead. But there certainly has been “progress” as you would see it. I think some of the best evidence of this is the extreme rise in sin. Whatever the people may say about their beliefs in God, if they go on living like unbelievers they are revealing the truth that they are counterfeit. America is no longer a Christian nation; make no mistake about that.
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