Religion In US 'Worth More Than Google and Apple Combined' (theguardian.com) 539
A new study says religion in the United States is worth $1.2 trillion per year. Not only is that equivalent to the 15th largest national economy in the world, but it's more than the combined revenues of the top 10 technology companies in the U.S., including Apple, Amazon and Google. The study, "The Socioeconomic Contributions of Religion To American Society: An Empirical Analysis," was conducted by Brian J. Grim from Georgetown University and Melissa E. Grim from Newseum Institute. The Guardian reports: The Socioeconomic Contributions of Religion to American Society: An Empirical Analysis calculated the $1.2 trillion figure by estimating the value of religious institutions, including healthcare facilities, schools, daycare and charities; media; businesses with faith backgrounds; the kosher and halal food markets; social and philanthropic programs; and staff and overheads for congregations. Co-author Brian Grim said it was a conservative estimate. More than 344,000 congregations across the U.S. collectively employ hundreds of thousands of staff and buy billions of dollars worth of goods and services. More than 150 million Americans, almost half the population, are members of faith congregations, according to the report. Although numbers are declining, the sums spent by religious organizations on social programs have tripled in the past 15 years, to $9 billion. The report points to analysis by the Pew Research Center which shows that two-thirds of highly religious adults had donated money, time or goods to the poor in the previous week, compared with 41% of adults who said they were not highly religious. The analysis didn't account for the value of financial or physical assets held by religious groups, or for "the negative impacts that occur in some religious communities, including [...] such things as the abuse of children by some clergy, cases of fraud, and the possibility of being recruitment sites for violent extremism."
Tax (Score:2, Insightful)
But Apple and Google pay more tax than religion in US....
Re:Tax (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting thought; I'm genuinely curious: Who contributes more to doling out welfare: private funded charities (including religions) or the government?
Re: Tax (Score:3)
This question is interesting, but I feel the better question is which group has more of an impact regardless of the amount spent?
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Indeed.
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when government ensures that everyone can get power, and mail, and water and sewage (etc etc) - are they doing it with some alterior motives? strings attached? join 'our club' or else?
the government, in the ideal sense, exists to empower people with a higher standard of living that they can achieve collectively, that they could not individually. we have roads and utilities and all that - NOT because its a 'good business profit' reason, but because its what is Right and Good and what everyone knows down
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Compare the Catholic Church when it was a government to when it wasn't. The Inquisition was just a part of it. Clearly in that example the "government" part was a net negative, pretty obviously because of that "all governments have become evil and corrupt" part.
religion has a motive. and it makes selective 'gifts'. to get the soup, you have to listen to the BS sermon. no listen, no soup. that's not a group of people I want running things.
100 years ago that was very true for Christians (and it still is for Islam), but modern Christian charities do a lot of normal, no strings attached charity work. Plus, religious people are just a lot more likely to give to charities of all sorts.
So
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It all depends on what branch of religion you're talking about. Most of the christians I know personally in the US found Bernie Sanders to be too conservative for them.
Re:Tax (Score:4, Insightful)
... and also a correlation between being progressive and donating.
Yes, there is a correlation, and it is negative. Republicans donate more than Democrats [downtrend.com].
Which combined would make me believe that atheists donate more than religious people.
Since your reasoning is based on a false premise, I doubt if this is true.
Re:Tax (Score:5, Insightful)
You're making this assumption thanks to the fact that the conservative religious are the noisiest (and the noisiest about their "charity"). The most charitable successful person I ever met was an extremely liberal Episcopalian who gave a ton of her money away to charity (like 20%) and never took a single tax deduction for it. I didn't even know about her giving until after she died and I was the executor of her estate and found letters.
Remember, the hard-core conservative members of the "American Civil Religion" are really a minority, and in most cases, even their charity is just charity to their own mega-churches where the money ends up going to a campaign to keep gays from basic human rights or to bogus "feed the children" charity scams.
Re:Tax (Score:5, Informative)
If by that second point you meant an inverse relationship, then yes [amzn.to]. Amazon's description:
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Government exists to represent (in some sense or another) the collective will of the people. The collective will of the people is not always a good thing.
As for roads specifically, Eisenhower supported the road system as a way to improve military transport. Other roads (such as the avenues of the saints) was built to improve commerce (which you call 'good profit reason'). Maybe some road in the world was built because i
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I think you start off with a fairy tale definition of government, when you consider that historically and still in many cases today the people weren't involved in the process at all. The government was the ruler's organization whether it was a king or emperor or pharaoh or some other non-elected circle, where any interest they had in keeping the peace or any other public service was auxiliary to taxing their subjects, drafting them for armies or any other task their sovereign wanted them for.
What you're tal
Re:Tax (Score:4, Insightful)
Government has a motive, too. To be profitable to the people in control of the government.
I would believe that atheists had my best interests at heart, trying to "free" the masses from controlling religions if more of them became extreme libertarians rather than authoritarians. The vast bulk of atheists just want to replace people's individualist religions with their collectivist religion: the state.
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What's not to like about a tax exempt and legal way to swindle people out of money? The only thing I wonder is why there ain't more people inventing one and finding idiots to squeeze dry.
Re: Tax (Score:5, Insightful)
How about religious group Hobby Lobby, who wants to allow their employees to have health insurance, with the string attached that the health insurance not cover birth control pills?
How about religious group Salvation Army, who wants to allow their employees to have spousal benefits, with the string attached that those employees not be gay?
How about religious schools such as InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, who employ people with the string attached that they not get divorced (but only if they're women)?
These few examples are but a drop in the bucket. True, they're not "religions", they're only organizations run by religious people. But they all claim to be exempt from the law because of religion. Also, you can find as many and more examples of religions doing the same. Religions attach strings to their money because they feel it is their moral duty (in the most generous interpretation). Do not pretend that they're just helping people; they're helping the deserving people, and they get to decide which ones are deserving. Also, do not read this as a defense of government as the highest good; there are plenty of problems there, as well.
out side of the us jobs don't control your health (Score:2)
out side of the us jobs don't control your health insurance
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If only that were also true within the US. Clearly, we have much to learn about how to do modern civilization. But so do many other countries with strong religious leadership: in Saudi Arabia, women cannot drive because they're women. In Pakistan, women are killed because they have dishonored the family. In the UK, conflict between Catholics and Protestants has caused extensive problems.
Health insurance is only a small part of this problem
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Yea most people who are anti religion or really anti anything really doesn't understand the thing they are so against.
They base their hate off of some small group nuts who miss the point of the religion trying to teach. Based off the childhood understanding of the religion. Or just from media or news which likes to find bad examples and show it off.
Don't get me wrong religions have their problems and they have a tendency of turning a blind eye to them. But they are also do a lot of good and try to do good
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I'm mildly curious I want to think private charities but the first result for "welfare us budget" snippet shows $1.03 trillion in 2011 but TFS says that the religious organizations are spending only about $9 billion that's a pretty big gap.
Re:Tax (Score:5, Interesting)
I think a lot of that, for the religious orgs, goes into building massive churches. LDS is insanely wealthy and spares practically no expense in making huge, ornate temples. When they're about to re-dedicate one, us "impure" commonfolk can go inside, and I did that one time and saw some life-size oxen made out of what appeared to be gold surrounding a big ornate pool presumably used for baptisms, and then some expensive looking theaters (practically a multiplex) used for displaying religious propaganda to the public, and practically all of the floors and walls adorned with either granite or marble in pretty much the entire temple, with each room (and there are many rooms) being about two stories in height with really big chandeliers. I guess another way of describing it would be something four times as big, expensive, and decorated as the whitehouse. And in spite of the massive size of this thing, very few people even go inside, and they have about 170 of them throughout the entire US.
And for some reason they see fit to ask that their members pay all of the expenses for their own missionary work, even though people of that age typically don't make much at all and it takes them years to save up for that. (My dad was required to save up for it by his parents for about 5 years, and then when he turned 17 he moved away from home and spent it on college and pretty much just ignored the church for the rest of his life.)
Roughly the same order of magnitude (Score:2)
You can come up with different numbers depending on how you want to calculate each, but the two are roughly equal. Very roughly.
You said "private funded charities (including religions)". The summary says religious *organizations* $9 billion, and religious *people* are almost twice as likely to engage in charity, often at the behest of their religious leaders or texts. So we can guesstimate that "religion" is responsible for roughly $18 billion or so. A reasonable guess would be that non-religious privat
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Big government and established faiths can do a lot. Cults or new faiths with religious tax findings have to be seen to do more with much less.
The cradle to retirement welfare state was to only be for a nations own. The math of life expectancy, number of tax payers, average numbers of fully eligible citizens who lived long a few extra years on average to collect. For how long into retirement w
Re:Tax (Score:5, Funny)
Following recent EC rulings, Apple is considering registering as a religion for tax purposes. They may succeed, as people have been calling them a religion for years.
Google, on the other hand, having achieved both omniscience and omnipresence, is more a God than a religion.
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Following recent EC rulings, Apple is considering registering as a religion for tax purposes. They may succeed, as people have been calling them a religion for years.
You wouldn't be mocking it if you hadn't been touched by His Reality Distortion Field.
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It offsets all the tax they don't pay in Europe, Australia, etc.
Re:Tax (Score:5, Interesting)
tech (Score:2)
I sorta missed how this is related to technology?
Can someone point it out for me?
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I don't really see how it's news either.
It just seems to be a statistic.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The headline says Google and Apple.
Re: (Score:2)
News - 2. New information of any kind: The requirement was news to him. (https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9659441&op=Reply&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=nested&pid=52898017). Dude it was new information for me ;).
So it is all about the future. The impact of religions on the economy and the resources those religions are consuming and what exactly are they providing in return. Some do considerable charity work and have a beneficial psychological impact for those who can not to
because (Score:2, Informative)
there are a number of non-religious people who hangout on Slashdot who do not understand a basic right called "freedom of association", and who have been propagandized into not knowing the difference between a tax exemption and a subsidy.
On the first point:
Churches are voluntary associations. The church is a collection of people who all pay their taxes on their income and property like anybody else, but who then gather together and chip-in some of their post-tax money for use by the group. Even the people
Marx nailed it 200 years ago: opium for the masses (Score:2, Interesting)
At the time, medical opium was a "good" thing. It allowed the populace to deal with inequality, financial hardship due to lack of labor rights, and uncertainty due to lack of social security more easily. When the same shit crops up again, no wonder the same mechanisms get traction.
In God we trust (Score:4, Funny)
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Thanks for the unit (Score:2)
Who pays more taxes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Apple isn't a religion?
Seriously I hate the differentiation of political ideology and religion - especially since Islam totally is political and "equal value", feminism, "social justice", "diversity", the new good racism, sexism and inequality and so on are just strong beliefs and not facts or truths at all.
Re: (Score:2)
Apple isn't a religion?
Please, you really don't have to give them ideas on how to dodge tax, they're already very good at it.
Islam is a $12B industry (Score:2)
Not accurate enough (Score:2)
Many of these things do not account for the money that would be spent anyway such as food.
Please calculate using the premium vs average cost. Not optimal but simple and more accurate.
Hmmm (Score:2)
So what's "spirituality but not religion" worth?
A fool and his money... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course religions are a great way to make money. You're basically selling a promise you never have to fulfill. Show me one other industry where you can sell something, never deliver and the whole shit is considered legal and even morally ok.
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Re:A fool and his money... (Score:5, Insightful)
> Show me one other industry where you can sell something, never deliver and the whole shit is considered legal and even morally ok.
Politics -- "Hope" and "Change" are routinely sold to the public who fall for it. Every. Time.
Lawyers.
Insurance -- most are a Ponzi scheme.
The NSA's and/or FBI's budget.
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It's an old political slogan.
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Better economy, huge job gains, good stock market performance. Scaled down the wars. No new ones. Not batshit crazy.
When you first started listing stuff, I thought you were listing more stupid propaganda techniques that typically work on people with no memories and understanding. The president doesn't control the economy, mate, and they all started new wars.
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Politics -- "Hope" and "Change" are routinely sold to the public who fall for it. Every. Time.
Hope and Change aren't sold. They are attempted promises. If Politics wasn't a hamstrung process you would see massive changes. Every. Time. Fortunately it is a hamstrung process which makes democracy a democracy rather than a tyranny of the majority electing a narcissist. And even then you can't argue that America has had no change in the past 6 years.
Lawyers.
Lawyers sell representation by someone who is capable of arguing the law. They deliver on that quite well.
Insurance -- most are a Ponzi scheme.
I'm not sure if you don't understand Insurance or i
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Go read the definition of what a Ponzi Scheme is again.
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Well... not really, since if you don't deliver in politics you at least get thrown away in favor of the next snakeoil peddler, so you should be prepared to deliver.
Hence communism failed. They promised the paradise in this world, and that's unfortunately something people can actually verify.
They also do the most Charity (Score:3, Insightful)
Myth: Re:They also do the most Charity (Score:4, Insightful)
> Churches also do the most Charity.
Any data for this claim?
Compared to what?
I assume other local charities like soup kitchens have a greater local impact.
And how would church charitable activities compare to welfare provided by the government
A very small percentage of money given to a church actually goes to charity. Most goes to the institution of the church.
The church itself is not a charity. It is a non-profit, like GoodWill.
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Something that al but disappeared here in N-W Europe when we installed tax sponsored social help like unemployment benefits, good universal health care and pensions for all.
Real charity doesnt come with strings attached (Score:3, Insightful)
You dont get any soup until you listen to their sermon about how you're going to be tortured for eternity.
Thats not charity. Thats carrot & stick.
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Churches also do the most Charity, real Charity too in the local areas,
Churches do real harm in those areas by pushing their religion. I know personally people who have been thrown out of shelters for refusing to pray or otherwise subject themselves to brainwashing. If it were really about helping people it would come without strings attached. It isn't. It's about brainwashing.
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In my area most charity is non-denominational. There are indeed churches that do charity, but the MAJORITY of them do not and a lot of them only do 'charity' for their own or if you join their services or whatever (Rice Christians).
The majority of churches are there to line their own pockets and that of their leaders. France tried to crack down on churches that did not do charity but still got tax breaks, suddenly all sorts of churches were joined together and got the EU to rule it's illegal for France to t
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I recommend going and volunteering at a catholic shelter. No, you don't have to be catholic to volunteer there. And most of the homeless will never follow them, as a lot of them are severely mentally ill. You really want something eye opening, go specifically to a Franciscan shelter. These people help those that are less fortunate then them despite the fact that they get a lot of abuse sent there way by the people they're trying to help. How do I know this? Because I used to volunteer at one. I could
Well, let's see (Score:4, Insightful)
How in God's name ... (Score:5, Insightful)
... is this "news for nerds"? Pun intended, but still. This pisses me off more than any other story I've seen posted here since the new regime took over.
Slashdot editors, I know you have to pay the bills. I know the temptation is there to post clickbait headlines. I know the Taboola ads are easy money for a lot of sites and if it helps keep the servers running, fine, I can ignore them. But this is enough already. This is pandering. This is such a blatant effort to prop up your ad impressions that it's laughable. What really pisses me off that a site that's supposed to be a forum for tech news — which is why I came here, and why (despite my better judgment) I've stuck around all these years — can't even make an effort to pander while staying on the technology theme of a gorram technology site. This is the worst yet.
Posting this story to /. is guaranteed to get the flamers and trolls in a tizzy — and I'm sure I'll get modded down to the very depths of frozen Dis for calling a spade a spade, along with the "Stuff that Matters" apologists who'll jump in to point out the second half of what was always this site's slogan. And I'm generally fine with non-tech news when it's actually breaking news, like the "10 dead at Oregon community college" headline that the algorithm seems to think is "relevant" to half the stories on the site. But this is not news on tech. This is not really even news. It's a big, juicy bone for the trolls to fight over, just in time for the weekend. And it's fucking sad. If I wanted to see people get in pissing contests about religion, I'd go hang out on Reddit or, I dunno, the Catholic Answers forums. But that's not why I come to Slashdot, and if this keeps up, I'm going to have less and less reason to come back.
This is worthless. (Score:5, Insightful)
1. They count Halal and Kosher foods as religious benefits. But if the followers of those religions were not followers, they would eat just as much meat - it would just come from non-religious suppliers.
2. They count 'business with faith backgrounds' - which is broad enough to include pretty much every business that has a religious owner. Well done, chick-fil-a and Hobby Lobby get to count as economic gains from religion.
3. Schools and daycare facilities? So if the religion were erased, all those children would just no longer go to school? Any economic activity by these as religious organisations is exactly balanced by activity lost to non-religious organisations, because demand is inelastic.
I've no doubt that religion in the US is worth a vast amount of money, but this does feel like someone is trying to inflate the numbers.
Oh, and the authors? Brian Grim and Melissa Grim? Brian actually gives his email as 'Brian@religiousfreedomandbusiness.org' where Melissa is a research fellow. An organisation which describes their purpose this: "The Religious Freedom & Business Foundation educates the global business community about how religious freedom is good for business, and engages the business community in joining forces with government and non-government organizations in promoting respect for freedom of religion or belief."
Melissa also lists her education as the "Newseum Institute." Which is a political pressure group, not an academic organisation.
And Brian Grim is president of the "Religious Freedom and Business Foundation" -
Yeah, sounds totally unbiased and trustworthy.
So, what I see here are two researchers employed by organisations with the stated goal of making religion look good for business who then write a report in which they very broadly define religion in order to make it look good for business.
This study should be taken with a giant heap of salt.
Re: This is worthless. (Score:2)
This.
Basically this is the equivalent of McDonald's saying yes.. They checked.. Big Mac's really are great for us all.. Time to change your diets!!
Except if course it uses the common American trick of hiding behind impressive sounding organisations who stand up to almost no scrutiny but usually don't have to because an uneducated public swallow their bs hook line and sinker.
The real follow the money moment here is there has to be a reason they are trying to push this pile of bs.. And as usual it looks like,
If true, why are we subsidizing it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Tax-deductions for donations to ~10% of the GDP? That just means the rest of us have to pay more taxes. Absurd.
Re:If true, why are we subsidizing it? (Score:4, Informative)
Religious institutions, such as the Salvation Army and religious hospitals and shelters, fill many gaps that the government would otherwise have to fund. Religious institutions, as a rule, do so much more efficiently than the government. I believe that if you removed religious charities from the picture, the government would experience a significant net loss trying to deal with the most needy of our citizens. Religion may be tax exempt, but they more than pay their debt to society.
Are there some frauds in religion? Of course! But there is far more good than bad going on. And let's not kid ourselves, the government has its fair share of frauds as well.
Re:If true, why are we subsidizing it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you have any data to back up that statement? There are plenty if not more non-religious groups that do fund hospitals, shelters, donations, charities etc.
Most of the religious groups do NOT pay back what they get from society, not even in the slightest, most of them don't even do charity. I'd be all for giving any organization that does charity a tax break (which those tax breaks already exists by the way), but if an organization is run like a business and acts like a business, it should be taxed like a business.
now imagine (Score:4, Insightful)
if they paid tax
Religion is cross-cutting (Score:2)
Not that I would personally be offended by this post -nor am I a big fan of PC talk or safe spaces - but don't you think it's a bit funny to compare the monetary value of such a cross-cutting, personal and protected area of life to that of companies? How is this different from doing a similar statistic on races and comparing the value of "blackness" to the value of companies?
Absolute proof positive... (Score:2, Insightful)
...that there's a sucker born every minute.
Religion as a category (Score:3)
I get that there's some value to see the scale of the economics, but isn't bundling all religion into one category and comparing it to individual tech businesses like comparing all companies remotely involved with food to GM? Religion is a pretty massive category containing a crapload of competition.
As far as good works and all the "is it good or bad" talk, it's ultimately pointless. Like porn, religion ain't going anywhere. The world would be a far, far better place without it, but given human nature it would be replaced with someone equally idiotic, deceitful and hypocritical.
Do I hate religious practitioners? Naw, not as a group, some are really decent people that feel the need to join a club in order to frame their life. I don't care about that unless they can't keep it out of interactions with others.
Mark Twain Explained Religion (Score:5, Insightful)
...of EVERY religiously affilated hospital, etc. (Score:3)
I'm religious or anything, but this is not only combining all religions, but all religiously affiliated things in the US. So that means all those hospitals that start with "St." That means a number of universities that seem pretty secular, but actually are actually owned by the Catholic Church. This doesn't just mean the money people put in the basket at Church.
So understand what this number is before you panic about it.
Re: (Score:2)
Well that life isn't eternal. A corps lasts at most a few hundred thousand years, after which it is ether completely gone or the skeleton becomes a stone fossil. And if you're cremated, well it kind of ends right there.
Nonetheless, I don't think I care too much about an eternity of being even less than a vegetable, because at least vegetables still have photosynthesis.
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A racket is a racket.
Short of breaking up Apple and Google, I'm not sure what you could do about that.
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Funny how people are quick to point out "the negative impacts that occur in some religious communities" without saying much about the positive. Some religious communities (it can be hard to separate the religion from the community) are clearly doing something right.
I can't find good current stats on household income by religion, but this 2009 survey [pewforum.org] breaks it down pretty well.
Hindus come out on top, as they have for some time now: evidence that the more gods you believe in, the more successful you are in l
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"religions are recipes for life"
The worst people I have ever met in my life are religious. I'd give examples, mainly from my childhood, but given the sheer excrement you wrote it would fall on deaf ears. That said I have decided about 20 years ago to completely cut off all religious nutjobs from my life, and I have never been happier.
Re:Thelema (Score:5, Interesting)
"religions are recipes for life"
The worst people I have ever met in my life are religious.
That's not a contradiction, you know? Some recipes are, well, quite bad.
Re:Thelema (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Don't be an idiot. You don't need a recipe to boil water, but you do need a good freezer.
Re:Thelema (Score:4, Interesting)
LGW, we don't agree on much, but we agree on this. Some of the best people I've known in life have been believers, and by "best", I mean, really walked the best meaning of their faith. I'm talking about Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Jews. The whole lot. People whose first response to others was, "What can I do to help?" Now, I've also known some really wonderful non-believers, but it almost seems as if they are more susceptible to the worst impulses of humanity: Objectivism, neoliberalism, and the faux-Libertarianism that is infecting current discourse. If you should encounter a really horrible person online, say on a forum or Twitter or something, chances are very good that they're atheists. Not because atheism made them that way, but because being horrible almost requires non-belief. While there are horrible people of faith (Family Research Council and Westboro Baptist Jackoffs, for example), they tend to stick out because they tend to make a spectacle of themselves.
Now, people of faith have their own pitfalls to watch for. One is the "blessings on me but not thee" kind of tribalism which ends up in an evangelical Trump supporter, who has to twist their faith into knots to justify their actions in the world and the "American Civil Religion" which is the "God & Country" horseshit. You will not find any instance in the Bible of Christ displaying nationalism, in fact, just the opposite. For Him, the pilgrims & refugees went to the head of the line.
As you say, there are bad recipes and good recipes, but belief seems to have the properties of a good ingredient. [Note: while I'm not a particularly religious person, I've encountered a lot of Daoism in my work and martial arts study, and I guess it's a spiritual system in which I find congruence, especially the more esoteric aspects of what's sometimes referred to as Chinese alchemy. Oh yeah, that reminds me, I've also met several really first-rate human beings who have belief systems way outside of the mainstream. It's almost as if the part that makes you better is the process, more than the specifics of any faith tradition.]
Re:Thelema (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of the best people I've known in life have been believers
Likewise - and from a similar range of backgrounds. However, to the extent that their beliefs contain things I find abhorrent, I see their 'native' generosity as being constrained by religion, not the result of it. Certainly many of those I know who started as believers and came to reject the beliefs they were raised on did so from the dissonance between principles and expression, internal inconsistencies or an internal growth that left the original belief system behind.
More, some of the most dangerous and damaging people I have met have been fervent believers. Some have used their belief system to justify behaviour that is essentially self-serving. Others, from genuine belief that what they were doing was 'right', have caused more harm than the first group.
If you should encounter a really horrible person online, say on a forum or Twitter or something, chances are very good that they're atheists
There are certainly a lot of nasty, self-important people who are atheists. Just as there are plenty who are Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu ... I suspect a degree of confirmation bias in your assertion.
but because being horrible almost requires non-belief
As T.S. Eliot observed “Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.” Belief can be, and often is, used to justify action that would otherwise be clearly horrible.
they tend to stick out because they tend to make a spectacle of themselves
As do your online atheists, above. How can you tell an atheist who doesn't loudly announce it at every opportunity?
but belief seems to have the properties of a good ingredient.
Unquestioning belief can be blind. Unchallenged belief is limiting. Unexamined belief can be stagnating. In as much as it's easier to co-operate with people with whom you share a common belief, belief builds communities - but it's a short-cut to really understanding and acceptance of an individual. As you say, all too often it becomes tribalism by another name. Just because some people can be amazing and also believe says little about the worth of belief.
It's almost as if the part that makes you better is the process, more than the specifics of any faith tradition.
With this I am in total agreement.
Re:Thelema (Score:4, Insightful)
From a scientific perspective, I think the emergence or religion in societies is quite a fascinating topic. Virtually all societies have independently birthed religions. That doesn't happen by chance, or by virtue of a scheme. That happens because there is a real social benefit. Of course, that does not mean there are no negatives.
On a lighter note, religion has provide us with some really awesome music, and a great excuse for extra holidays.
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Re:Thelema (Score:5, Insightful)
From a scientific perspective, I think the emergence or religion in societies is quite a fascinating topic. Virtually all societies have independently birthed religions. That doesn't happen by chance, or by virtue of a scheme. That happens because there is a real social benefit.
No, no it does not. It only means that it is a successful and viable strategy. It doesn't have to benefit humanity to be widespread. After all, advertising exists.
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He was also the founder of the Spanish Inquisition.
I didn't expect that.
Re:Thelema (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not American, so take this for what you will, but I would say that the absolute worst people I have met in my life are religious, and the absolute best people I have met in my life are religious.
Best I can make out is that religion is the great amplifier. If you're a good person, it makes you the best of the best, and if you're a bad person, it makes you the worst of the worst.
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Or the correlation between religion and income is a lot like that between pirates and global warming. In my line of work I'm usually the one white guy in a sea of asians, most of whom are the Hindu variety. My field pays well above average, and the people I work with were deliberately prodded into this field by decidedly secular sources.
Re:Thelema (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't so much the moral codes (which tend to be similar among great religions and also humanism) that make slashdotters hate on religion, nor even the traditions. Getting together to sing songs, asking parents for permission to marry..etc...whatever.
What really gets erudites upset is this business of presenting myths as facts. Religious adherents don't think of their sacred teachings as myths, despite the fact that they are all of ancient origin, they all include unsubstantiated supernatural events, and they all make untestable statements about reality focusing on the existence of supernatural beings, their relationship to us, and what we can expect from them when we die. They are all myths by any meaningful definition of the term, and religious teachers adamantly insist that they are absolute facts.
The claim to have such special knowledge of the universe is plainly arrogant. Scientists must back up their claims with evidence, whereas religious teachers back up their claims with more claims in more ancient texts. This insistence that they are right, with not a shred of solid evidence to back it up, is an insult to humanity's progress in the enterprise of determining facts from falsehoods.
The debate over whether religion causes more good than harm is entirely separate, but commonly gets convoluted with this basic point. Religious teachers claim an unwarranted exemption from the need to demonstrate their claims, and the scientific/philosophically educated among us find that repugnant.
Re:Thelema (Score:5, Interesting)
What really gets erudites upset is this business of presenting myths as facts. Religious adherents don't think of their sacred teachings as myths, despite the fact that they are all of ancient origin, they all include unsubstantiated supernatural events, and they all make untestable statements about reality focusing on the existence of supernatural beings, their relationship to us, and what we can expect from them when we die. They are all myths by any meaningful definition of the term, and religious teachers adamantly insist that they are absolute facts.
What's much worse, they also regularly abuse children by forcing these memes down their throats. Otherwise these claims would stand a lesser chance of survival if only developed adults were confronted with them.
One up (Score:5, Insightful)
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Hypocrite.
I'm going to skip over the abortion debate, because that's a separate issue (is all human life worth equal protection under the law, or isn't it?).
But you present a caricature of religious people, "I don't like gay marriage, no gay shall get a marriage license." And no doubt there are some of those out there. But most religious people say, at least these days, "I don't agree with gay marriage, so I don't wan't to have anything to do with it." And then the gay marriage patrol comes out and "imposes
Re: Thelema (Score:3, Interesting)
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> Scientists must back up their claims with evidence,
Except for Dark Matter, Dark Energy, String Theory, ... yup, plenty of evidence. NOT.
Marking you troll was terrible /. moderation. You seem sincere here. You're also quite wrong.
Dark matter and dark energy are observed "facts" that can't be explained by accepted theories. We know a little about each form those observations.
Dark matter has been found three different ways: in galactic rotation rates, in gravitational lensing where there's no visible matter, and in the balance of mass to electron count in the early universe, as observed via the CMBR. The observed ratio of familiar matter t
Hindus in US... (Score:5, Informative)
Hindus come out on top, as they have for some time now: evidence that the more gods you believe in, the more successful you are in life.
A majority of Hindus in US will the upper caste (start from Brahmins) upper class who had the advantages of traveling to US for study (or work) and settled down. They are generically called "caste Hindus", they would be materially wealthy whether in US or India.
The right wing Hindu movement (not all of them are bat-shit evil, though quite ignorant) has a lot of support from US, so when the Indian PM Modi shows up at Madison Square Garden, he gets a full house. http://time.com/3442490/india-narendra-modi-madison-square-garden/ [time.com]
In India, they assert their power forcing down vegetarianism (this is a complex issue, which can be argued on moral, ethical and functional terms, here is a primer http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/on-diet-in-india-and-western-arguments-against/article7440854.ece [thehindu.com], the usual fear of minorities, which includes Christians, lower caste Hindu's themselves, and other standard issue conservative and regressive ideals.
In USA, they will be seen as archaic with the next generation and the current Millenials, who had the fortune to study in secular American schools which promote some version of tolerance and humanism, which is closer to the core tenets of Hinduism in its truest essence...Tat Tvam Asi.
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It's good to see Jehova's Witnesses are the second poorest. A little bit of karmic retribution.
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As soon as the churches' income goes back into government budgets, we'll talk.
Re:US religion... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're getting your ideas about religion from TV preachers, then I don't blame you for feeling the way you do. But TV preachers aren't actually religious, they are just using religion to make money. They are no different from politicians who claim to care about you, in order to get elected.
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It would appear that atheists are another subject you know nothing of, along with gender dysphoria and politics and feminism.