Karl Popper on Religion

[Eric the Green]

(07-20-2016, 10:05 PM)radind Wrote:

(07-20-2016, 07:48 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(07-10-2016, 08:31 AM)radind Wrote: Joseph Bottum tries to show that most mainline Protestant churches now have a veneer of Christianity, without Christ and without God.

Quote:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volo...f-america/
… "The collapse of this religious-moral consensus has been most pronounced among American elites, who have turned largely indifferent to formal religious belief. And in some leftist elite circles it has turned to outright hostility toward religion”…
… “it seems that often their religious dogma is reverse-engineered–they start from wanting to make sure that they hold the correct cutting-edge political and social views, then they retrofit a thin veil of religious belief over those social and political opinions.”…

The Religious Right in contrast offers God and Jesus -- but God as an enforcer of the will of economic elites and Jesus as Pie in the Sky When You Die. Such is consistent with an eternal 3T except without the mass hedonism. Most people are to live miserably by material standards, heavily in debt and thus in thrall to plutocrats and their bureaucratic enforcers. The Religious Right offers traditional values on economics (if without the overt racism -- minorities are mostly to be oppressed because they are poor... but most white people are also to be so oppressed because of their poverty).  The Religious Right is compatible with a high birth rate, all the better for churning out cannon fodder in the wars for profit and copious cheap labor for the economic equivalents of the 'dark satanic mills' of the early-capitalist era that Karl Marx used as his strawman for the vile capitalist order that he saw as doomed as well as despicable. Other religions can't push the high birth rate. Catholic families used to have high birth rates to support a society partially parallel to the WASP world -- the ideal family large enough to provide a priest (likely the brightest male mind in the family, one ill-suited to mindless toil once characteristic of fresh immigrants and their families), a monk, two nuns (one of those the brightest female mind in the family, most likely dedicated to teaching in a Catholic school or nursing in a Catholic society), and a daughter who would be a caretaker for the decrepit elders. Most sons would become laborers and support it all. That was Polish-American life (where I live the Catholics were largely Polish-American) eighty years ago, and it is no longer like that.

Such a middle class as exists exists largely as technicians and enforcers -- the school teacher, the cop, the engineer, the accountant, the tax collector, the salesman -- who is to be underpaid and heavily in debt. A little privilege is to make some modern form of debt bondage tolerable. The middle class is smart enough to recognize the mindlessness of the Religious Right as a sham, the privilege being a white-collar job that allows one to use one's mind instead of one's muscle. Its education must be practical, and not for its own sake, as such education must be financed with heavy debt.

Mainline Protestantism has gone from attempt to perfect morality to letting people do what they can within the economic milieu. Consumerism (which includes entertainment, mostly mindless), and not religious faith, has become the equivalent of Marx' opiate of the masses. Its members pay little attention to theology, but theology has become largely a practical exercise for clergy.  The Religious Right offers a simple theology of command and control characteristic of a chain restaurant.

The economic elites may promote the Religious Right for the masses, fully understanding that the material deprivations that it demands are not for the economic elites who demonstrate hedonism at its most lavish as the reward for being the economic elite. They also recognize that the mindlessness of the Religious Right is incompatible with technological competence and even the creativity necessary for churning out advertising (most creative people who earn a living from their creative talent work in advertising) and entertainment. If fear of Hell can control the semi-literate, under-educated masses, fear of poverty can control the middle class.

The biggest break in the Old Morality is the recent acceptance of homosexuality into the mainstream. The economic elites may have found homosexuality incompatible with a high birth rate that fosters low wages, resource depletion, high rents, and copious troops (for wars for profit and control of foreign markets) -- but nobody can explain why it exists and why it is otherwise 'harmful'. Gays and lesbians fit their desires for marriage and children to the parallel in the 'straight' world, and they won mainstream acceptance when they proved as hostile to the exploitative perverts as the rest of us. But even the acceptance of homosexuality comes in a time that is otherwise increasingly repressive on sexuality, especially involving minors.  

...Our economic order is both vile and despicable. We have the means for a post-scarcity society, but we have a dominant ideology in most of America best described as hierarchical, repressive, and exploitative, an acceptance of the Marxist stereotype of early capitalism. That reactionary ethos supports growth, but growth that relies heavily upon population growth which creates greater hardships for most people -- higher rents, more fuel use in commutes, and lower real pay. Elites can profiteer from the economic competition that they compel upon non-elites, perhaps even returning to the economic realities of the early capitalism that Marx saw largely for its depravity.

...If God is plutocracy, then what is Jesus? The reward. Cheap grace for the nastiness that one does in the dehumanizing competition that is American life. Pie in the Sky as the ultimate purpose of a deprived and precarious existence.

With the collapse of Protestant Christianity and the rise of the religion of Secular Humanism , there is a new dynamic in the USA. We have churches without Christ( the cheap grace as defined by Bonhoeffer). The Secular Humanists are already the majority, but this change does not seem to have sunk in yet. This will take some time( may take another 10 years). In the meantime, Christians continue to be blamed even though they are not the dominant faith in the USA. 
At some point, the Secular Humanists will need a new scapegoat  after it is clear that Secular Humanists are in control( not the minority Christians).

Secular humanism has been around since at least the time of Darwin, but gained new followers in the 1920s and 30s. The Scopes Trial and the Humanist Manifesto were turning points that helped its rise. "Secular humanists" could also be defined as believers in "scientism," the idea that modern empirical/rational science as we know it today can provide all knowledge, except perhaps in the realm of moral, ethical and/or aesthetic judgements.

Christians are still the vast majority in the USA, and the most conservative branches dominate the Republican Party, which seeks to impose its doctrines on America in a heavy-handed and non-democratic way. The religious right is sheer religious repression and dogma. Conservative Islamic fundamentalism has revived along with the religious right, its mirror image, and is even more repressive in the Middle East. Meanwhile, just the fact that radind can quote stats on how Protestant Churches feel about the election show they are far from "collapsed." But the evangelical churches have gained a larger following in recent decades, while Catholicism and Protestantism decline. These branches of Christianity are down but not out.

Secular humanism, scientism and agnostic/atheism in their various shades dominate the academic world and the intelligencia. Although most Americans are not secular-humanists, science and its interpretation by skeptics and humanists have shaped our world view now for 3 centuries, and is now the defacto worldview of educated people, as Sheldrake calls it. It is dogmatic, even while insisting that science must be open to the facts and therefore subject to change. But they still claim that their method is the best or the only way to gain knowledge about the world, and that nothing can be true if it's not scientifically and empirically verified. Positivism insists that statements that can't be verified are nonsense.

But secular humanists tend to insist on freedom of religion and separation of church and state, even including humanism and state, and as usual radind is wrong to suggest otherwise. Religious people disguise their desire to impose their views on us with claims that they uphold religious freedom, which amounts to the freedom of businessmen to refuse service to gays and for government to deny women's rights by force, as well as to impose their unscientific doctrines on our public schools and deny science as a valid source of information on subjects like climate change. The religious right upholds unquestioning belief above rational thought.

Even while the secular humanist kinds of worldview have gained new adherents among millennials, since at least the late sixties it has been strongly challenged by the new romantic and new age counter-culture and human potential movements. The "new paradigm" rejects BOTH dogmatic secular-humanist scientism, AND traditional dogmatic religions that insist that theirs is the only way and claim to have the literal truth according to its scriptures. The New Paradigm is the way forward toward a world view that is open, broad, expansive and open to mysticism, which is the truth at the heart of all religions, and which is found within our own souls and in all being(s), and in our experience of reality, and not ultimately in rules or books. New spiritual seekers have arisen who have added a Buddhist/oriental kind of awakening folk to our society.