This is something I've thought about a lot, and I say this as a diehard atheist. Historically (and even now), religion has served two useful purposes:
1. As a provider of community. There are of course other ways to socialize with wider groups. Sports clubs, going to the pub, classes, that sort of thing. But it's a lot more interest-driven and haphazard.
2. As a provider of and enforcer for a moral code.
Here are some things I believe to be true:
1. A lot of people like being told what to do. This isn't necessarily unhealthy or bad. I also believe in decision fatigue. We defer decisions to others all the time;
2. Fear is an easier tool for keeping people in line than any alternative. There's a carrot and a stick with religion. The carrot is paradise in the afterlife (depending on your flavour of religion). The stick is partly eternal damnation but much more important than that, it's the fear of losing that community.
3. The majority of people only act in an ethical manner out of fear of the consequences.
Now looking at the political situation in the US, we have the rise of Christian conservatives. Just the name "conservative" is worth examining. It is of course derived from "conserve". The intent is obvious: it is to resist change, to maintain traditions and generally to keep doing things the way we "always" have. It almost seems like to be a conservative requires you to believe things were better in the past and changes are just making everything worse. At least that's how it seems.
It shouldn't really surprise anyone that religion and conservatism tend to be correlated but does one cause the other? I honestly don't know.
But what I find fascinating is that the desire to be told what to do combined with the mistrust in government fomented by religions (as in, the person is to put their faith in [deity] and the church rather than government) means these people are so easily manipulated.
Take the Covid vaccine (and masks). Every current and former president (including Trump), every governor, every Senator and all but a handful of Congressmen are vaccinated. I'm also sure every Fox News host is too. Yet these same vaccinated people are quite happy and willing to pander to whack job conspiracies as a means of control.
I find it ironic that the people who I'm sure genuinely think they're standing up for "freedom" by fighting against mask mandates are in fact least free because they're so easily manipulated.
So I guess my point is, I'm not sure these problems go away if, say, religion goes away.
I'm not sure the bottom part of your argument makes sense. Religious people trust God, but I don't see a reason they would trust or distrust any specific government or news organization unless that government or news organization claimed to be divinely backed. I don't see why religion would cause someone to be more likely to blindly trust a news organization over the government. There's been a lot of US patriotism tied to religion ("In God we trust.", "God bless America.", "endowed by their Creator").
It's the authority to interpret the word of god. The authority is delegated by people you already trust to people they are trust themselves. It creates a hierarchy of power. It's easy to manipulate millions of people if you are at the top of that hierarchy. Especially when the people we're talking about have their sense of truthfulness broken at a very young age by forcing them to believe in an entity they can't see
Is Fox News part of a hierarchy of power interpreting the word of God? Is QAnon? I'm not really seeing how your comment supports cletus's comment about Fox News and wack job conspiracies.
>forcing them to believe in an entity they can't see
People can't see the big bang either, at least at a young age. In my mind there's a pretty clear argument for God's existence from the laws of thermodynamics. You can define God to be whatever caused mass and energy to exist, and more foundationally whatever caused the laws of the universe to exist.
You could also said that the conservative are looking at understanding was worked in the past and not throwing everything out the window for the newest fad.
To me, it seems like a precautionary principle, let’s take our time and not throw the baby with the bathwater, things a changing fast, we must preserve what was good or we risk falling into some traps like communism/fascism (that where secular endeavours)
Ultimately, we need to find out what was great about our roots and also what need to change to face up modern problems.
A problem we have now, is that these stories were written in the bible which prevented them from being updated as they would have been in an oral tradition, and now the update is way overdue.
1. As a provider of community. There are of course other ways to socialize with wider groups. Sports clubs, going to the pub, classes, that sort of thing. But it's a lot more interest-driven and haphazard.
2. As a provider of and enforcer for a moral code.
Here are some things I believe to be true:
1. A lot of people like being told what to do. This isn't necessarily unhealthy or bad. I also believe in decision fatigue. We defer decisions to others all the time;
2. Fear is an easier tool for keeping people in line than any alternative. There's a carrot and a stick with religion. The carrot is paradise in the afterlife (depending on your flavour of religion). The stick is partly eternal damnation but much more important than that, it's the fear of losing that community.
3. The majority of people only act in an ethical manner out of fear of the consequences.
Now looking at the political situation in the US, we have the rise of Christian conservatives. Just the name "conservative" is worth examining. It is of course derived from "conserve". The intent is obvious: it is to resist change, to maintain traditions and generally to keep doing things the way we "always" have. It almost seems like to be a conservative requires you to believe things were better in the past and changes are just making everything worse. At least that's how it seems.
It shouldn't really surprise anyone that religion and conservatism tend to be correlated but does one cause the other? I honestly don't know.
But what I find fascinating is that the desire to be told what to do combined with the mistrust in government fomented by religions (as in, the person is to put their faith in [deity] and the church rather than government) means these people are so easily manipulated.
Take the Covid vaccine (and masks). Every current and former president (including Trump), every governor, every Senator and all but a handful of Congressmen are vaccinated. I'm also sure every Fox News host is too. Yet these same vaccinated people are quite happy and willing to pander to whack job conspiracies as a means of control.
I find it ironic that the people who I'm sure genuinely think they're standing up for "freedom" by fighting against mask mandates are in fact least free because they're so easily manipulated.
So I guess my point is, I'm not sure these problems go away if, say, religion goes away.