Gods or police or ???

[leo9]

Nice stuff, leo9. You're far more versed in the history of religions than I am, that's for sure!

OK, no need for sarcasm, I read a bit, that's all. I'm sorry if it came over as pontificating.

I'm confused by this statement. Which "heartland" are you talking about? If you mean the US, it's my understanding that the largest growing segment of religious belief are the "Nones", not atheist, though that segment is slowly growing too, but people not affiliating with any religion. Theists, perhaps, but not religious. If you're talking about Russia, I think a lot of that is rebound from the Soviet era of anti-religion. Can you clarify this?

I was thinking of Western Europe, which is the focus of the author's dated view of atheism as the "evolutionary" end of the process of philosophical maturity. Europe, after all, was the birthplace of the Enlightenment, which began the process which the author sees as ending logically in atheism. But it is also more recently the birthplace of modern Paganism, as well as all the spiritual schools and vague tendencies which people lump together as "New Age." I do not admire or recommend these - I am among those cynics who pronounce "New Age" to rhyme with "sewage" - but the more flaky they are, the more they contradict the author's core thesis of a natural evolution away from spirituality of any kind. There is a probably optimistic estimate of a quarter of a million Pagans in the UK; I know of no figures for the Continent, but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest similar levels elsewhere, and unlike the established faiths (apart from Islam, which is growing almost purely by population growth) there are more every year. All the more remarkable since no path that I know of actively seeks converts, and many still keep themselves secret and have to be sought out.

As I noted, the simplest explanation for the complete absence of this from the author's thesis is that - like the authorities with whom UK Pagans have argued over official recognition - he cannot recognise something as a religion if it doesn't have such signifiers as a Holy Book, a prophet (preferably long dead) and a priestly hierarchy.

I've always been under the impression that religions tend to grow most effectively when linked with the threat of death. "You worship as we tell you or we'll kill you" tends to send a particularly pointed message.

And yet, there are still Jews in Europe after a thousand years of persecution and pogroms, and there are still Christians in the most fundamentalist Islamic theocracies despite the same sort of pressures. It's not that simple.

Again, I see it differently. Christianity "evolved" because people would no longer allow the Church to kill apostates and infidels, because the needs of the industrial revolution required higher levels of education in the common people, and because it quickly became apparent that the teachings of Christianity were markedly diverging from reality. The story I always liked was about the local church getting struck by lightning while the local brothel was not. Didn't take too long for the churches to accept the "revelation" that God really likes lightning rods!

Not strictly relevant, but my mother told me of how their local vicarage got a television in the days when it was still highly unreliable technology, and her father enjoyed pointing out the roof with a cross on one peak and a TV aerial on the other and calling them "Faith and Hope." But I digress...

But we still see the effects of religion on the ruling class. In the US in particular, with very few exceptions, it's almost impossible for an atheist to get elected to any position in government. And any politician who doesn't end a speech with "God Bless America" is almost begging to be impeached.

The author rightly notes that America is a complete contradiction of his thesis, then carries on as if that makes no difference at all. Here, as in most European countries, nobody knows how many atheists there are in politics because nobody cares, but they tend to be suspicious of any politician who talks too much about their faith. One of the things that spelt the end of Tony Blair's political career was when he started to make what most people saw as an embarrassing fuss about his Christian convictions; it wasn't, people felt, the English way, he sounded almost American! Meanwhile, the Boy Scouts recently joined the growing number of organisations to have dropped God from their pledges of allegiance and other ceremonies, to no more protest than the inevitable two or three pensioners complaining that the country was going to the dogs.

So, yes, in terms of the historic faiths, religion is being rationalised away, and it is highly likely that in a few generations European Muslims too will treat the faith of their fathers as just a nostalgic tradition like the Church of England. And yet, it's exactly the people at the cutting edge of materialist rationalism, the highly educated, the IT guys and engineers and technical writers and the like, who are most likely to have a shrine to the Triple Goddess in their living room or a besom by the front door. If it is an evolutionary process, then evolution, as any biologist could have told the author, is a more complicated business than a simple trend from "primitive" to "advanced."