Thoughts on religion

For Jews, community is more important than belief. Rituals are mainly used to keep the community together. Many religious Jews who immigrated to Israel actually stopped being religious because they did not feel they needed religion when everyone around them is Jewish.

The Israeli society has developed some of its own secular (but still Jewish) rituals.

I'm tired but I thought I'd put something down. In the UK religion is very strange. We've got a very strong Christian heritage, and as a Christian nation our laws remain impacted - Schools must hold regular Christian assemblies, the Queen must be Protestant, all sorts of funny things. We've got a shitload of Churches, and our monarch is the Head!

But at the same time, we're far less Christian than our secular friend America. Religion doesn't enter Politics as blatantly, many Christians don't go to Church or advertise their beliefs or even pray. Related to something on Tildes a short while back, swearing under God is optional in the Scouts here, mandatory in the US. I'd say we're generally very tolerant of other religons as well, though unfortunately racism leaking over into anti-Muslim attitudes seems to be a popular past-time for some of the population.

I feel like the definition of a religion is particularly fluid. It's more than a set of beliefs, traditions, and stories that people participate in; it's the community that religion brings together.

Religious communities define the 'God' that its people worship, and dictates how they can worship Him/Her/It. Without a community around a religion, there is no way to participate in it. And when it is impossible to participate in something as fluid and intangible as a religion, how can anyone prove they believe in anything?

A religion's community is fundamental, so much so that it can be hard to separate a person's place in it and their unique individual beliefs. Communities are the only things that make belief legitimate, and so people can only legitimately claim to believe in things with established communities. Without a community around a belief, then it suddenly becomes madness - yet there is no fundamental difference between belief with and without a community around it.

So in a way, I think religion is just legitimized madness - it's the kernel of insanity that people are allowed to have without consequence, just because other people can also claim to be similarly insane.

At the same time though, belief does not need to be recognized by a community to be legitimate to an individual. The only question then is if a belief without a community can be a religion - whether it can also act as the same justified, 'safe,' madness.

This is what the US mostly deals with. Almost all forms of Christian belief is thrown under a cross so the believer can partake in a community and feel justified in their beliefs, no matter how different those beliefs may be from person to person. The same is probably true for Judaic or Islamic beliefs. As long as people take part in a community's traditions, like Communion or the Sabbath, they can feel justified in their 'connection with God' no matter how real or fake it may be.

The reason religion is so important in the US is because its individualist culture precludes the development of community beneath it. It is hard for a community to develop in the same way it does in France or other countries, around political or social ideals. But since religion is bigger than any nation, people come together more easily under it, and so many different beliefs are hung under the same symbols in the US and it is heralded as a 'true' way to feel connected to the people around you.

Which country are you from? Those percentages seem very low so I'm curious.

"The greatest destroyer of worlds is the belief in an afterlife"

• Nietzsche

Something that is to be noted, in America, people often say they are x or y religion but don't follow it at all. There are plenty of people that actually practice but it isn't even close to the 50% or so that the polls or whatever say are religious. The number is a bit smaller.

I personally am Christian, practice or whatever you want to call it. I see some other posts here talking about hatred and bigotry, Christianity tells us to love one another. I might not like some of the things they do or believe in its legality but we are called to love one another so bigotry and hatred shouldn't exist in the Christian church...so when I see stuff like that, I think of all the people that think they are Christians but are just going to church on Sunday and think that is what gets them into heaven...such poor theology/worldview.

I grew up in a religious family, but I am not religious. I'm 48 and have seen religion seriously start to wane in the US.

When people ask me "why are you not religious?", my reply is "Because I've read the Bible, the Tora, the Koran. Multiple versions of them and many other religious texts. The contradictions within each and between different versions and even different religions is striking.".

Humans are a social creature by nature. And we almost need to fit into a group. Doesn't really matter what group, and sometimes we want to fit into many groups. But we are driven to do so. Heck, you even see anti-socialites grouping together :)

We are also inquisitive and driven to believe that our lives have a purpose. Due to that, we want someone to make our lives better when we can't AND to blame when we can't. We want someone to take responsibility for our actions, so we convince ourselves that what we are doing is because THEY want us to do it.

Add to this that mankind is naturally driven to exert power over everything else. It's survival at it's base. And what better way for someone physically unable to do so, than to convince others that something more powerful exists and wants it... or else.

Tie all that together and you start to create larger groupings of like minded people. People who work together and strive towards common goals. All the while, bettering THEIR lives... in some manner.

Now, take all that and think about why it worked for so long. People were told "god" wants you to not kill each other in our group. But we need to kill people not in our group. Why? Because God said so. In reality, it's because they want what we have and we want what they have.

Or, people are getting sick. Why? The priest is smarter than the average person in the group and sees that whomever drinks from THAT stream gets sick. So god tells him to tell everyone to stop drinking from that stream, and people listen. Because they want to make god happy. Or, don't drink downstream from where the soldiers bathe/piss...

Or, we need you to farm. Or collect money for the church. Or go to war. Or take care of the old (because priests want to get old and be taken care of. But they can't just expect everyone to only take care of them, so they create a new group and god says everyone in that group must be cared for).

Or, science is bad. Why? Because god said so, that's why. The real reason is because science is a threat to the power structure of the priests and those others in power who leverage the religion for power.

What I find really interesting about religion is that many of the rules are good ideas even if you exclude god. Don't kill your neighbor. Why? Because if someone attacks your village, you want your neighbor to help defend it. Don't steal. Why? Because then you have no excuse if someone steals something from you. Don't eat pigs. Why? Well, because we were too stupid to understand that "wallowing in mud" doesn't always make the meat unclean. Don't eat cows? Why? Because way back then, there were lots of scary predators that instead of going after all those cows, would go after easier prey - those hunting the cows. Don't drink too much alcohol. Why? Because it was likely to kill you back then. And you're not productive the next day.

So, religion is to empower the few, group people together for a better chance at survival, control the masses and to teach them rules for better survival.

Except for war...

Here, in Australia, the dominant religious heritage is Christianity: mostly a combination of Protestant denominations, with Anglican being the largest because we used to be an English colony, but with Catholics being the largest single denomination. However, the influence of religion here - individually, politically, and culturally - is declining sharply.

For starters, the number of religious people has decreased. 50 years ago, about 83% of people identified as religious. 25 years ago, that dropped to about 76%. Now it's only 60%. Over the same period, the number of people who identify as not religious has increased from 1% to 13% to 30%. (Source.) The only religions that have grown over the past 50 years are minor ones like Buddhism and Islam (and even they're at only 2.4% and 2.6% respectively).

In day to day life, religious is almost invisible. Even people who are religious often don't do anything about it. Only 16% of Christians attend church once per month (not even every week). There is a small actively religious minority here, but most people simply don't care. A lot of people are only nominally religious: they say they're Christian because their parents baptised them and they have some vague belief in God and Jesus, but they don't really let that belief influence them much in their lives.

As a culture, we tend to get very suspicious of politicians who announce that they are religious. We do not like religion in our politics. Even most of our religious people believe strongly in a secular society and a strict separation of church and state. If a political candidate started campaigning on a religious platform, they would pick up some votes from the small religious minority, but most voters in their electorate would actively avoid voting for that sort of nutcase/fanatic.

There's currently a lot of noise about Muslim immigrants trying to change our country, but it's not really based in facts - they're only about 2-3% of our total population. And, even they tend to follow the same pattern as our Christians: a small minority of very actively religious people, with a larger group of quietly religious but mostly secular people.

Mostly... we're not a religious bunch, and we don't really trust people who are strongly religious. "We don't mind what they do in the privacy of their own homes, but we don't want them flaunting their lifestyle in public." :)

My family is European Polytheist... one side is Hexerei (Pa German polythiestic), the other is Latvian Dīevturiba (sort-of Baltic Druidic, but more its own thing.)

For the past hundred years the legality of being non-Christian or being misinterpreted as 'evil' has been a serious problem for both sides of my family and others of similar cultural upbringing...so I earned my degree in Theology to become a legally recognised chaplain to give European polytheism more credibility.

Then...The marvel "Thor" movies happened, as did GoT, and ''Vikings". Now our issues are not polytheism being accepted, but rather, our indiginous cultures bring erased by loose fictions and poorly researched neopaganism based on popular media.

There so so abysmally few left of the indigenous cultures from which I was raised our voices get lost and lumped in unfairly with the Asatru.😑

"Let's debate religion"? It's a pretty fundamental part of life for those who were raised in it or choose it for themselves, but it seems like this totally ancillary and pointless thing to you, so let's debate it?

Do you have any specific questions that you might like a more traditionally spiritual person to answer for you?

In Switzerland it varies cantonally, in my canton, while there are churches and like 60 % believe, it isn’t that big a deal (apart from some irritating organisations that preach on the streets or put bible quotes on posters around).

The biggest issue by far is the “spread” of Islam which a lot of people care about.

I was raised in a not-particularly-strict-but-still-Christian household, but never really believed in the Jesus/God thing. Even as a kid it just seemed like a bunch of weird stories that didn't make much sense and contradicted each other a lot. Still, my parents and their church friends are good people. They're pretty much the live-and-let-live sort, no bigotry, no imposing their beliefs on people who don't share them, etc., and for the most part I viewed the whole thing as a bit misguided but if believing gives people a sense of purpose, or makes them feel good, or whatever, I was fine with it.

However, between the hatred/bigotry/racism, etc. and the idolization of extremist characters like Alex Jones and his ilk I've seen coming from the religious right in America post-Trump... these days I'm more wary of religion/religious people than I used to be.

I have an experience that you might be interested in. I go to a large public university in the United States, and as someone who is not religious, one of the biggest religious impacts on my life are campus preachers.

There are some campus preachers who just stand around quietly, sometimes handing out pamphlets or pocket New Testaments. But, more interesting are the guys who yell. They like to find the most visible place they can stand, set up whatever sign they've got with them, and yell about how we're all going to hell. The most annoying ones also like to point at anyone who doesn't meet their standards of dress (mostly women) and heckle them specifically in some way.

Now since this is a public university, as long as the preachers don't physically harm anyone, and as long as they don't cross over the line to hate speech, the administration cannot remove them without at least getting a big 1st Amendment backlash. The preachers are very careful to toe this line.

The best part, I think, is that really they're just there to get a rise out of people. They're sponsored by some weird conservative christian, and to keep that funding they really just want a crowd to form so it looks like they're doing something. Whether the crowd is listening and agreeing or trying to shout them down is largely irrelevant. And as much as I sigh and shake my head as I pass, there's always a group who takes the bait.

I was kinda taken aback by "let's debate religion" at first. But then I read along and saw the comments, and felt fortunate it wasn't really about having a debate.

From my observation, I think religion is not just about faith, but also a way of organizing both private and community life. A religiosity disembodied from community living would be something very strange and even harmful.

Personally, I consider myself irreligious but spiritual. I don't belong to a religious congregation. I read spiritual texts from various traditions, writings by theologians, works about religions, humanism, and atheism. I value the inner experience of contemplation. I am very interested in the spiritual aspects of human relations and humankind's relation with the nature.

In many ways my identity has been that of an outsider, and on religion/spirituality it's not very different. My upbringing is irreligious, with rare outbursts of bigotry from the parental generation. My own spiritual orientation is perhaps close to Unitarian Universalism, but I'm not a member of any UU church (I'm not aware if there is one nearby).

In my country there is severely limited religious freedom, manifest in both the governmental ideology and governance practices. One thing about life under authoritarianism is isolation, apathy, lack of open and honest discourse, and the difficulty to organize. Among the consequences is the hostility to religions. In our particular case, it's not a blessing in the sense of less hold by religious bodies onto the society. It simply means we're bound by other powers and institutions.

My country has practically no visible religion - about 10-15% of our population is religious (mostly seniors) - and just a fraction of them does those religious thing like going to church. Religion basically doesn't exist here. We have a lot of nice churches, but they mostly aren't used.

What are the immigration laws like over there, and is there work for experienced software developers? Being an atheist, it's tempting to think I belong where you are, and not in the United States.