I’ve always seen American evangelism as a political movement first and a religious one second.
This impression has strengthened quite a bit in recent years as it’s become clear that political movements and politicians that are diametrically opposed to the teachings of Jesus are perfectly okay if they align on other more immediate secular political issues.
There’s always been a claim that the US is an outlier compared to other developed nations in terms of religiosity. I don’t really believe this anymore. I think we have a lot of politics with heavy religious veneer, but if you look only at sincere belief in the tenets of a faith I don’t think the US is much more religious than the UK for example.
It’s a legit religion. People go every Sunday for prayer, worship, etc.
Political movements tend to be ecumenical - across religious boundaries. The Civil Rights movement was a political movement, as was the labor movement, etc.
> I think the religiosity of the US is an illusion.
I grew up in the Bible Belt around Baptists and Evangelicals and even a few Pentecostals. I assure you it isn't an illusion.
While there may be some outliers and grifters, particularly where religion intersects with politics (I doubt Trump believes in God half as much as Evangelicals believe in him) the vast majority of these people absolutely do believe what they say, and that they're right with God.
When I lived in the bible belt, I had a hilarious idea for a "student film" project on the life and times of Jesus. Stuff like using little-kids' floaties on his ankles to walk on water, accidentally raising an undead zombie, etc. My good friend told me he couldn't morally participate in the project.
We were 18 and he should have been able to laugh at a funny project but he saw it as insulting an important deity. What a sad and limited life organized religion constructed around him.
I also remember when my father started dating and he complained to me that he always made it clear that he was an atheist but then a few dates in the women would start talking about their faith and getting all Christy. I was incredulous and explained that it had always been that way since we moved there. He just wasn't divorced yet, so he didn't notice.
These people's lives are all about their faith. It's a fucking brain rot. It's a sickness and it greatly contributes to the misery of others.
I can understand your POV. My parents were atheists. Then, in college, it was just assumed everyone was one. So, I just accepted that as truth. I went on to read all the philosophy and religions. I always avoided Jesus though because honestly his name was a "bad word" in my crowd. Then, a few years ago I picked up the Gospel (nothing else) and decided to read it for informational purposes. And, it stuck with me. Then, I kept reading more and more, and realized that it was all cohesive and coherent. And, for years I tried to find flaws, but it was just too good and life changing and real.
What I mean is that for some people, the Gospel toggle some previously unknown bits in the brain that activates and transforms them. And, worship just becomes what they do. It's the freedom of it - they become unshackled. I really don't know how to describe it in a way that my previous atheist self would understand.
You seem to have an almost religious devotion to your worldview. Which makes sense: it works for you and you feel compelled to convince others. You also limit yourself to thoughts and practices that align with these views. Imagine for a moment that this is also true of other people for other beliefs.
If you read about early christianity (which I did for 18months), you will see that the "gospel" is a mess.
If you couldn't find flaws, you are clearly biased. Even religious institutions have found flaws. The contradictions are so well published that you have to ignore them to not know about them,
I don't think you have any true knowledge of the history of your faith (said the atheist).
I can’t speak for your friend, but as a former atheist who brcame a Christian (albeit a very mediocre one) I feel like I can see both sides of this so perhaps I can offer a perspective that might help you understand each other better.
When I was an atheist, I assumed that anyone who didn’t care for the kinds of jokes you mentioned was worried that God would zap them with a lightning bolt.
Now I see it a little differently: if you see something as being of great importance, then it simply feels off / wrong / weird / missing the point to treat it as if it’s of little or no importance. In a word, it feels cringe. If such a project holds no allure for you, then you’re not missing much by sitting it out.
Not to harsh on your sense of humor, but I hope it might help to understand your friend better.
If an atheist has a weak explanation of religiosity, perhaps that atheist gets infected with religion.
It shouldn't come as great revelation, to an atheist, that to those infected with a mind virus it "feels cringe" when anything attacks the virus. That's its whole mechanism of action, its fangs. Besides, there's things like faith healing, and gospel churches, and the phrase "religious ecstacy", and all these other signs of the religious getting off on religion, so it should be obvious that they're defending something that feels precious, and are not merely terrorized.
However, if the atheist instead made a shallow assumption that religiosity is simple fear of a smiting bogeyman god, then it would come as a revelation that the religious are in fact having euphoric feelings, and this might be mistaken by the now ex-atheist for divine revelation of the way and the truth and the light, as the fangs sink in.
Using the "mind virus" language of the Right isn't helpful. We know it's a disease. They claim treating people with respect is a disease. Don't reinforce that.
> ...he should have been able to laugh at a funny project but he saw it as
> insulting an important deity.
He may have been an outlier. I know that I've heard god-jokes from the pulpits of evangelical (using that in the sense it was used 30 years ago). The one I remember best is about the difference between a dog and a cat (based on evidence of how their master treats them, the dog thinks its owner is god, the cat thinks he is god--that's a synopsis, it was much funnier in the full version).
No. My mother also told me I shouldn't joke about Jesus when I relayed a pretty harmless joke to her. It's a thing in the midwest.
I recognize the pet-God joke. I shared a meme pic with my partner that had that. Regarding cats and dogs, it's completely accurate. Our cats are in charge more than we are (or so they think).
What the fuck are you talking about? My mother didn't laugh at a joke because Jesus was in it. That's the kind of adherence that leads to hurting people because they disagree with you. Religion is stupid, it hurts people.
> I grew up in the Bible Belt around Baptists and Evangelicals and even a few Pentecostals. I assure you it isn't an illusion.
The religiosity might be an illusion, but in many cases the religion is drifting away from Christianity. It has certainly very different from traditional Christianity in the rest of the world. Many fundamentalists themselves will say that the major churches are not really Christians, which implies they are not the same religion as the major churches. Other American groups have broken with Christian theology in major ways, such as rejecting the trinity of the incarnation. Some have their own scriptures. Many have beliefs that are not taken from either Christian scriptures or tradition.
> I doubt Trump believes in God half as much as Evangelicals believe in him
Again, if he does, his beliefs are significantly different from traditional Christianity. He seems to know very little about what Christians believe - he once tweeted "Happy Good Friday"!
Then again the Bible has a lot to say about the rich, none of it good.
If you took Jesus' teachings and stripped the name off, would most of these people agree with them? Things like welcoming the foreigner and treating them as one of your own, not judging others, etc.?
I don't think using the name and trappings of a religion as a cultural label and dog whistle is the same as sincere belief.
Scripture is pretty clear the name of Christ matters. The genealogies refer to a specific individual, not a message. The Epistles even single out Christ’s name as worthy of praise.
The messages of the gospel aren’t obvious, or obviously good. Without an actual man-god preaching them, I don’t see why we should love our enemies as we love ourselves.
They sincerely believe what they consider to be the teachings of Jesus. They aren't just using the name and trappings of a religion as a cultural label.
You can call them hypocrites, and maybe that's fair (most Christians are) but they are sincere.
It was an agency of the Spanish monarchy that aimed to strengthen the state, motivated by a history of being occupied by an empire, and fearing the the descendents of the former conquerors would be disloyal to the new state.
Short form video content in general is ludicrously addictive. All infinite scroll is addictive but there’s something particularly strong when it’s short videos that each deliver some kind of hook or punch line.
I landed on YouTube shorts once and started scrolling. Hours later I genuinely felt like I’d been drugged. It was shocking and surreal how powerful the effect was. Made it a point since then to never go there. I’ve never touched TikTok but I’ve heard stories of people spending every waking second on that thing.
Obviously some people are going to be more prone to it than others.
The best are the one trick doctors don’t tell you or the thing THEY don’t want you to know about.
A lot of scams and cons are deliberately stupid looking and absurd to pre-select for gullible marks.
It’s also why goofy conspiritainment shows are loaded with ads for quack medicines. Anyone who thinks we didn’t go to the moon will probably buy herbal dick pills.
I was always a bit confused by the "doctors don't want you to know about" line until I understood that it's in a rather US-centric cultural context where doctors are seen as just wanting your money. Though there's probably also the idea that practitioners of mainstream Western medicine are hostile to "alternative" remedies and don't want you to try the latter even assuming that they're actually effective.
I suppose that, ironically, well-intentioned doctors would indeed prefer that people not know about these "tricks" and other medical scams.
I tried clicking one of those just to see and it didn’t even go to the alleged product but instead a landing page with even more of those ads! Shocking, I know :)
100% if you go back a little further. Large hominids aren’t native to this continent.
BTW have you ever thought about what incredible bad asses people had to be to cross the Bering strait during the ice age with Stone Age tech? We could definitely settle space if we had the will. It’d probably be more comfortable, safer, and easier, even in the early days, than that.
The comment saying immigrants are 98% of the population of the US is not useful because they are people whose ancestors have been their for many generations.
Defining anyone who has immigrant ancestry as an immigrant is pointless. Sometimes it is useful to talk about, say, second generation immigrants, but not endlessly.
For one thing, after a generation or two the culture of people descended from immigrants diverges from that of their ancestors, even if their ancestry is limited to just one culture.
Why is that only a problem for democracy? It’s one of the central problems of civilization and has been discussed by philosophers since the Greeks.
In monarchies you’d often end up with kings and people in line for the throne being murdered and all kinds of palace intrigue to select for the most conniving psychopath.
In theocratic systems you get hypocrite self dealing priests.
In socialist and communist systems you get an aristocracy of political pull where high ranking bureaucrats are basically identical to our billionaires and political elites.
I’m not aware of any system that durably protects against being taken over by deranged dark triad personalities. Democracy’s virtue is that it provides some way to clean house without destroying the stability of the whole system, at least when it works.
Because democracy at least pretends to give power to the people. Except letting a few individuals wield enough wealth and power to buy media, politicians and judges is completely antagonistic to the basic ideals of democracy, and not many realize this (yet).
> I’m not aware of any system that [...]
Liberal democracy is better than feudalism, I see no reason why our systems of governance can't be improved further. And, at least to me, the obvious path forward is to keep any of those "deranged dark triad personalities" from gaining too much power, maybe by limiting the amount of wealth any single individual can hold unto.
> It took a disease killing a massive portion of the working population to weaken feudalism in Western Europe.
Erm... sure, but I don't see what that has to do with my comment? Transitions between political systems are rarely pleasant and are usually motivated by crisis.
> And don’t underestimate the portion of population that yearn to be peasants.
I don't buy that. People learn submission, it is not inherent to the human mind.
I see things the same way as you do. Human behaviour and conflict can never be solved, and especially not by any kind of "system", which is just thin air of imagination.
The closest we can get is striving to elevate our cultural and spiritual level as individuals, family, friends, neighbours and strangers.
The entire power of the psychopaths in charge all stem from corrupting normal people, and the more that can be avoided, the less power they have.
But it is difficult, because they corrupt our strongest feelings: fear, greed, pride, laziness, desire, community.
Millions of young men have died in senseless wars because they didn't want to be seen as "cowards", they thought of their "honour". Who remembers them now?
Who even thinks about the thousands of young soldiers dying in the battlefields in Ukraine? Why is Trump the only leader who talks about their deaths?
Billions of people are paying taxes to support their psychopath rulers, because of simple fear. If everybody stopped tomorrow, the world would be liberated. But people are held in fear.
Anger also comes from many retirees whose retirement savings tanked. Everyday people lost a lot of money, many their homes, and no one bailed them out. It appears to many that those responsible were above the law. It's the same reason people are furious about the Epstein Files, where the only person in jail for what happened is a woman. We see our neighbors dragged out of their houses or cars without a warrant because they don't look "white" and may have committed the misdemeanor of not having proper documentation. And yet, not a single CEO was held accountable for far worse crimes committed -- in fact, they kept their bonuses! These people recklessly inflicted a huge amount of pain on the public, through lost investments, millions of people losing their homes, most young people not being able to buy homes, and creating an even greater divide between the 1% and the rest of us. It is truly weird to read comments that seem to defend them.
It’s a recession being masked by two things: inflation making nominal numbers not go down, and the fact that stock markets have fully decoupled from the actual economy. They are just casinos now.
I don't know any more. Even the small subs I previously visited for good content have turned into their own little echo chambers, along with a lot of drive-by posts because small subs get recommended in other people's feeds now.
In some of the hobby subreddits where I had good discussions in the past it's now just one big echo chamber of people parroting the same information around, whether it's true or not. If you want to participate you either need to toe the line of the accepted brands/methods/techniques or keep your mouth shut. Most of us just get tired and give up
Yeah that's really the issue with all social media. If you restrict yourself to just checking what friends post on Facebook, or what people you subscribe to post on YouTube, those platforms are pretty healthy too. It's when you go to the infinite content feed that sites become an issue.
It’s not really social media at all and we should stop calling it that. I call them chum feeds or scrollers. There’s no social component. It’s just addictive short form infinite scroll brain rot.
Social media deserving of the name is almost dead. It’s not that profitable and the sites are expensive to run.
I get where you and parent are coming from. It's social in the way that anti-social behavior is social.
The content is generated by users but the consumer of the content is served whatever user content drives engagement. People aren't really having conversations on these platforms.
The only places where you can really have a conversation are places where engagement is low enough that the odds off a set very high engagement comments can't shove everything else down the page.
Not if there's no reputation. If you see someone liked your post and then you go check out their posts, or if people recognize commenters and remember things about them, then it's social. Think engaging with friends on Facebook or participating in a hobby forum. But there's nothing social about engaging with a popular Reddit post or some celebrity's Twitter feed.
This impression has strengthened quite a bit in recent years as it’s become clear that political movements and politicians that are diametrically opposed to the teachings of Jesus are perfectly okay if they align on other more immediate secular political issues.
There’s always been a claim that the US is an outlier compared to other developed nations in terms of religiosity. I don’t really believe this anymore. I think we have a lot of politics with heavy religious veneer, but if you look only at sincere belief in the tenets of a faith I don’t think the US is much more religious than the UK for example.
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