Religion is a cultural construct to address certain issues like morality, cosmology, etc. It didn't fill any void, its just an outward expression of culture. Current culture is to handle these things inwardly and via some level of rational inquiry. We don't need a turn-key replacement. The only turn-key replacement for religion is more religion. Religion as a category and part of human experience needs to be eliminated. There's nothing to fill past that point.
This is like saying, "Now that we don't have phrenology, we need a new phrenology." No, we just accept we can't figure out how people work or what kind of people they are by feeling their skulls. We live with the ambiguity and use other tools to determine what people do via personality testing, statistics, psychology, etc which do not have the false certitude the pseudoscience of phrenology did the same way modern understanding of the world does not have the false certitude that religion delivers.
>Gordon Gecko was a fictional villain in 1987 cinema
Gecko and non-fictional villains of that age were all baby boomer monotheists, if not extremely faithful churchgoers, and often justified their negative aspects via faith. Or on a more everday front, see the Prosperity Gospel, The Secret, etc. George Bush still justifies a lot of his disastrous decisions in office via faith, including the invasion of Iraq which has killed at least 120k innocent civilians. Pardon me if I find the "but without religion we're lost morally" argument unconvincing. If anything, religion lets us act immorally without consequence.
>>This is like saying, "Now that we don't have phrenology, we need a new phrenology." No, we just accept we can't figure out how people work or what kind of people they are by feeling their skulls. We live with the ambiguity and...
But that's the whole point: a lot of people simply cannot live with the ambiguity. For them, ambiguity means uncertainty, and uncertainty means fear and a lack of stability in general. Instead, they need to be told what to do and think and how to live their lives. They need some sort of compass, ideally one they share with a lot of others.
That is why religion has been so massively popular: some figures in the sky say, "this is how shit works and you can't question me/us about it" and that is sufficient for most people. They now have that area of their life handled and can comfortably think about other stuff. They can sleep well at night knowing that some omnipotent being is protecting them, and if shit goes wrong they have something they can attribute it to, like "we must have angered such and such omnipotent being."
Phrenology never played such an important role in people's lives, so its going away never created the type of vacuum that lack of religion creates for people.
That is a very good question. But it appears religion (even atheist religions) manifests itself in just about every society so it probably is a need of most people to a certain extent.
Maybe the answer is to keep inventing better religions. The old ones keep appearing more and more ridiculous and pernicious. I suppose this trial and error produces lots of cults and casualties.
Or maybe the answer is for people to grow up and take personal responsibility and truthfully examine what we really know about life and stop trying to hide from reality. That's the path I personally have chosen. But I think the first might be easier on a mass scale. IDK.
People are not told they need certainty, but they are subject to a great deal of emotional violence to get them to conform to systems. You bring up the topic of social belonging - being ostracized is the primary form of shaming that is used.
Having been wounded in this way, people seek any path out of their suffering.
Spiritual experience is observable in the brain, but it is certainly not understood, nor are the mechanisms. This is equally true of psychedelic experiences caused by drugs.
You seem to forget that we, as a species, are wired for religion. Remove it and it will leave a void, a god-shaped hole, that is going to be filled with something, no matter what. You can't just leave it empty in the general case, you need to replace it with a powerful heavy NOP, like an Indiana Jones switch. Otherwise you're just going to have a really bad time.
Sure there's people that can be secular on their own selves, without too much conflict about it. But I believe most of them have put something to fill that behavioural slot. And even if they didn't, you have to see that the majority of people are never going to bear that vacuum and be taken advantage, of the moment their belief-system is vacant.
Living in a country where religiosity is low (France), I can attest I don't feel any void. What I often see however is other people pretending I have a void. Some even say I don't believe in anything. Well, I believe in the potential of Science, I believe in a small hope of actual immortality (if not for me, maybe for later generations), I believe in love, and lots of other fine things in life.
But if I were to out as an atheist in a deep corner of Religious America… I guess the resulting ostracism would leave a void.
As for being wired for religion, I don't believe it. Granted, we have some biases, like our tendency to see sentient agents everywhere, that tend to favour religious interpretations of our observations. To suggest however that more accurate interpretations leave a void is a stretch. If I have a God shaped hole, it is mostly filled with physics. Any remaining void just fuels my curiosity.
We are also wired for racism and magical thinking but we tend to just avoid it with the use of education, not debating how we are left with racistm-shaped hole.
Good point. I'm not an expert on racism, but it would seem that racism does have positive attributes, especially for the "in" group - social cohesion first among them. I'd argue that the racist hole left in Americans, anyway, was filled with it's opposite: tolerance. The only thing we don't tolerate anymore is intolerance (which, BTW, is a very good change).
The "shape" of the hole left by religion is more complex. I suppose the best way to describe it would be to compare all extant religions and see what they have in common. My lay-opinion is that they almost all give the adherent two things: a) an almost Newtonian, absolutist world-view, in which b) some sort of father or mother figure that will make everything all right (in the long run). So, it's a kind of certainty about one's own personal insignificance. It's an excuse to "let go".
From this perspective, ignoring differences in specific dogma, religion is actually far more realistic than humanism, which usually tends to stress individual importance. But most people (and I include myself in this) are not important. Heck, think of any of the most important people in history - will they be remembered in 1000 years? 10,000? On an even somewhat long (human) time scale, almost none of us matter.
It's hard for me to see how a belief that you can have a personal relationship with creator of the universe can make you more aware of your insignificance. Scientific view that places you on speck of dust for barely a moment in universes time, until you dissolve into nothing leaving at best some memories in your culture is much more humbling.
People use religion mostly to keep disbelieving in injustice of physical world and to combat loneliness and meaninglessness.
You are spot on that in USA intolerance towards intolerant replaced racism. Nowadays people get fired over careless comments that can be percieved as racially loaded. It's almost funny when observed from a country that has 99.9% of population of one skin color and nationality and where racism by pople who hate it is perceived more of a sheer stupidity than capital offence.
Religion is a cultural construct to address certain issues like morality, cosmology, etc. It didn't fill any void, its just an outward expression of culture. Current culture is to handle these things inwardly and via some level of rational inquiry. We don't need a turn-key replacement. The only turn-key replacement for religion is more religion. Religion as a category and part of human experience needs to be eliminated. There's nothing to fill past that point.
This is like saying, "Now that we don't have phrenology, we need a new phrenology." No, we just accept we can't figure out how people work or what kind of people they are by feeling their skulls. We live with the ambiguity and use other tools to determine what people do via personality testing, statistics, psychology, etc which do not have the false certitude the pseudoscience of phrenology did the same way modern understanding of the world does not have the false certitude that religion delivers.
>Gordon Gecko was a fictional villain in 1987 cinema
Gecko and non-fictional villains of that age were all baby boomer monotheists, if not extremely faithful churchgoers, and often justified their negative aspects via faith. Or on a more everday front, see the Prosperity Gospel, The Secret, etc. George Bush still justifies a lot of his disastrous decisions in office via faith, including the invasion of Iraq which has killed at least 120k innocent civilians. Pardon me if I find the "but without religion we're lost morally" argument unconvincing. If anything, religion lets us act immorally without consequence.