Religion is anti-fragile. The more persecution and negative press it gets, the more certainty we feel in our faiths. I would point out that nihilism is the opposite of religious faith, so the author is a little bit confused on that point.
This is only true for some religions. Since the author mentions Nietzsche, it feels fair to pull in On the Genealogy of Morality.
Many religions today have this feature because they out-competed religions that didn't, but it's not a universal feature of religions by a long shot. If anything, religions that have this feature are inextricably connected to social coping mechanisms(evidently due the persecution).
If you define religion to include all possible religions, even those that have few adherents, or those that have disappeared or even those not yet created, that’s not a very useful definition. I use “religion” like most people, to refer to Abrahamic religions and large eastern religions like Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, etc
I don’t think you are using it in the usual sense, as I stated, but maybe I just need an example of what you mean. I gave examples of what I think most people think of when they consider religion. Few people think of say, Athenians, to cite one of my own favorite out competed religions.
Correlation does not equal causation. I think people don’t participate in religion because it asks of them. Many people are lazy, greedy or hedonistic. It takes effort and “practice” to be virtuous or religious.
Before Christianity took off there was plenty of “bad press,” to put mildly. Yet here we are.
I guess another way I might restate my point is to invoke the Streisand effect, or note the haters “doth protest too much” or similar notions. YMMV but repeated cathedral burnings and church and synagogue massacres had a remarkable effect on my perception of good and evil. Shooting toddlers at their morning mass; if that ain’t evil then nothing else makes any sense to me.
> I think people don’t participate in religion because it asks of them. Many people are lazy, greedy or hedonistic. It takes effort and “practice” to be virtuous or religious.
Say what you will of "wokeism" but it is an ethic that asks plenty of people. It constantly demands one to evaluate virtuous action or inaction. I don't think people are turning away from religion because it takes work. Because it requires real moral deliberation, it's actually more work than mere obedience to scripture.
My mileage does vary. Countless crimes of abuse and co-option of moral authority enabled by religion has proven to me that evil does exist and the presence of religion or the lack thereof is orthogonal to building a moral society.
Wokism, if there is such a thing, is like a “me religion” —- it has no group consensus so to one person being properly woke means murdering a CEO in cold blood, to another it means feminism, to another it means bringing your own shopping bag to Trader Joe’s.
