> Consider, for example, the obsession in Christian countries with equality. They almost fall over themselves to welcome people from different ethnic backgrounds. I suspect this has something to do with Christianity’s origins as a Jewish religion adopted by the Gentiles
My experiences are almost the complete opposite to yours, I suspect there are major differences between congregations that can't be applied to the nation at large. Churches in the US are weirdly segregated by ethnicity, at least in the south[0] where you find black churches,white churches, Korean churches, etc.
I am African, and had the misfortune of attending a church that's part of the Southern Baptist Convention. I got the distinct sense that they are warm and welcoming to people requiring charity or to rake on as a "project"; not equals. Almost everyone who saw me volunteer assumed I was a poor student at the affiliated Theological college, and would be very warm, but when I'd let them know I was a software engineer and much closer to them socio-economically than they had assumed, they didn't know quite how to act, it was weird,and it happened multiple times.
Trump's presidency was a bad time to be black in an SBC church. I never felt quite comfortable, and my faith intensely tested. It came to a head when I encountered incidents of passive and active racism[1],and I came to the conclusion that we could not possibly be worshipping the same God. Then again, the southern churches could reconcile Christianity and slavery, so perhaps all ethnicities are welcome, with the long-lived exception of blacks. YMMV
0. As a point of comparison: South Africa has more integrated churches, just 1 generation since the end of apartheid.
1. Why aren't you going to a black church? Oh, the other black member, he's intelligent and articulate, he's practically white!
> Religions get to do things that normal people cannot do.
In the past, people used their religions to oppose things like interracial relationships, and even judges[1] in the US would use religion to defend discrimination against interracial couples.
Turns out that people don't get to use religion to discriminate[2]:
> Instances of institutions and individuals claiming a right to discriminate in the name of religion are not new. In the 1960s, we saw objections to laws requiring integration in restaurants because of sincerely held beliefs that God wanted the races to be separate. We saw religiously affiliated universities refuse to admit students who engaged in interracial dating. In those cases, we recognized that requiring integration was not about violating religious liberty; it was about ensuring fairness. It is no different today.
Do you have sources to back that up? I'm genuinely curious. My understanding was that marriage was always a social contract, but that society and religion used to be more intertwined thus 'religious marriage'.
I don't disagree with the idea of separating the religious and civil/cultural aspects of marriage. But I think you'll find non religious folk resistant to calling civil/cultural partnerships something other than marriage. It's a deeply embedded cultural concept not just a religious concept.
> It looks almost like there are 2 religions that do not like each other on all levels.
I’ve seen it this way for a long time, ever since I came upon the comparison between the public patriotic display (the Pledge of Allegiance) and public prayer. The treatment of the flag even closely resembles that of a religious icon.
It seems to only be getting more intense with each passing season. The left and right have each latched on to what they see as being “American values” and while they are not entirely incompatible, their adherents are polarizing much like my understanding of the Reformation in England.
>Religion, for example, has always been good at dividing us into sects with competing narrative beliefs. A lot of the emotion, tension and conflict that results from a church schism
Usually it was the opposite: emotion, tension and conflict for political and national/group interest reasons, were translated into church language.
That's why the religion divisions were seldom, if ever, within the same demographic, but between groups that already had historical grievances or were beginning to have something to divide (as nations, classes, cultural groups, private interests, and so on).
Of course it's never 100% clean, as there would also be a feedback loop - but the underlying cause were almost always some interest, not theological.
> Why do you want to keep people from spedific religions stick together? It's for a society always better if groups mix instead of this ghettoization. I know that still many try to stay with their folks which is ok but why to enforce it?
They are not forcing anyone to do anything. They are giving people an option.
If a Muslim wants to marry another Muslim, and this helps them accomplish that better than Tinder or any other apps, that's great. Why is that such a problem for you? Why do you even suppose it's any of your business?
> I think you may be confusing Western society with the US. It's not a tenet, fundamental or otherwise, of many Western societies
It's a fairly common element of Western societies, though the particular expression varies; ranging from broad tolerance despite a formally established religion through a firm secularism in the public square; the US, though it professes a reasonably strong though not extreme form that amounts to neutrality actually has fairly weak separation between privileged religious communities and government power in practice.
> Some proponents of gay marriage are christian, but all opponents of gay marriage are christian (or Muslim, or some other fundamentalist or foreign group) and are against homosexuality because of their Christianity.
You’re just observing that American politics occurs between Christians (or at least people who were raised Christian). Internationally, acceptance of homosexuality, especially homosexual marriage, is a distinctive feature of countries that have a thousand plus years of Christian history.
In the US, there is a sharp distinction between what foreign groups accept as to laws they perceive as governing “Americans,” and what they accept in their own communities. My extended family is from a Muslim country, but are college educated and highly secular. My dad rants about religion being the opiate of the masses and stuff like that. But it would be completely unthinkable for anyone in our community to come out as gay. As far as I can tell, the same is true of south Asian communities from a Hindu background, even though the religious tradition is completely different. There is something distinctive about Christian and secularism evolved from a foundation of Christianity.
> I am not sure I buy this idea of state atheism as presented. State atheism is forced. Western atheism is chosen. I think there is a world of difference, one has it's philosophical basis in reason, the other in dominance.
The Chinese are hyper-rational. That’s how they managed to revolutionize the living standard of their people in such a short time. The difference between Chinese atheism and western atheism is that the latter clings to the notion of individuals having inherent dignity and rights. That’s not a notion rooted in “reason.” That’s not an evidence-based idea rooted in biological reality. That’s a metaphysical assumption that comes from the Christian view that each individual is created in God’s image. Christian societies spent a thousand years developing all these ideas about the nature of the individual, based on Christianity. And they kept those underlying ideas even as they stopped overtly worshiping God.
You’re correct that Christianity posits submission to God. But the implication of that is that God is above the temporal government. That was, in fact, one of the big themes of the Protestant Reformation. In China, they never had that concept. When they had too many people, they just killed the extra babies that were born in violation of the one child policy. That was perfectly rational. If the experts decided that overpopulation was harmful to the whole society, and the baby was just a not-yet sentient meat organism, what was wrong about fixing the problem?
> Is it really as bad as it's made out in this article or on Reddit?
It probably depends on where you live. Here in PA, it's been a non-issue for me.
But then, be careful. America is much larger than Europe, and while we are all part of the same country, we aren't the same people. There are big difference among the different parts of the country, and making them out to be all the same would be like me using a single country and extrapolating that out to all countries in Europe.
Even still, I have religious friends, and non-religious friends. It's never come up, and never been an issue.
> Obsession about equality as a central tenet in Christianity? You may want to read up on the crusades, slavery, the 30 year war, how even other Christian immigrants (Irish, Italian, etc) were welcomed into the US etc.
You may want to read up on slavery. Abolition in Christian societies was mainly a religious movement. Arab societies practiced it extensively as well, but kept going until the 20th century, and only really stopped because of international pressure from Christian countries.
The crusades? Both Muslims and Christians engaged in offensive military campaigns during the crusades. Only in Christian countries do any appreciable number of people feel bad about it.
Likewise, the speed at which Irish and Italians were integrated into American society is pretty much unparalleled by anything in any non-Christian society. I’m Bangladeshi on both sides back into the the dim reaches of history. But if I went back I would be “bideshi” (foreigner) because I was raised in American. My white wife and mixed kids would never be considered Bangladeshi, no matter how long they lived there. (It’s an ethnostate: a country for people of ancertsin
> It's usually tough and with some heated arguments, but it is indeed possible.
Sure, but both the Communist and the Nazi will judge each other's ideology, and very openly tell them apart from "the rest" of possible ideologies. A catholic from one catholic sect will usually have fewer issues with somebody from another catholic sect or even a protestant, than a pagan.
I don't think there is a place or point in time where everybody is essentially saying "that's your opinion, okay, whatever" with regards to ideologies and religions that aren't their own. Whether that discrimination will lead to oppression and violence is another issue, but surely everyone has an opinion on whether something is (factually and/or morally) wrong or right, and when they feel safe enough, they will say so.
I agree with your perception that it seems to have become harder to tolerate people of different convictions, though I don't think the US is unique in that way, it's just more in the open there, and their much more pronounced idea of freedom of speech and fewer labor laws make it easier to "cancel" someone, which in turn makes increases the frequency of it being tried.
It feels like a wealth thing. The poor in any society have larger problems than policing each others thoughts, and the better-off use it to play social power games.
> Maybe its because rates of marriage and church attendance are on the decline.
The importance of both are relative to your culture. Going to church doesn't make for a better society; have you forgotten all the wars started via leadership from religious institutions? Have you ignored how much more statisitically peaceful your atheistic counterparts are?
Plenty of cultures have been just fine and happy for hundreds of years without having marriages weighted as heavily as ours. Hell, male exclusively led marriages used to be a thing that was on the decline that conservatives used to lambast also. Do you think we should return to that?
> Maybe its because of the debasement of our culture
Good; there are plenty of people that were killed and marginalised because of modern western cultures. LGBTQ violence is still a major issue because of certain western cultures.
Frankly it's not too hard to envision a recursive philosophy where you don't worry about what others are doing so long as they are not interfering with the pursuit of happiness of others. It shouldn't be that difficult to realize that western cultures are not the only means to be happiness and that other cultures have been just as happy for hundreds of years with institutions that directly contradict ours.
Your culture is as welcome and significant to outsiders as much as some mormon's religion is to you on a weekend morning. Don't force it on us because you've grown fond of it; if it was such a great idea for us, we would have bought into it at some point during the first 10,000 times it was mentioned during our childhoods.
> How will a non Christian “integrate” into rural America and “share their values”, by converting to Christianity? How will either a gay couple or an interracial couple “integrate” where some Christians think their “lifestyle” is a sin?
Probably better than a gay in rural iraq, iran, syria, jordan, isreal, china, japan, india, africa and many other countries.
> does religion play a major rile in politics in the rest of the western world?
Hasn’t the growth of Islam in Europe been a large and growing political issue for the past decade?
France in particular has had lot of debates about religious clothing at schools, what kind of criticism of religious ideas is and isn’t acceptable, etc.
From my POV, it looks like religion is a bigger deal in European than American politics. In America, politics are the religion for many and marrying across political lines now carries more opposition than across religious ones, for the majority of people. Things have changed quite a bit since the 80s.
> In modern no-religion societies, where is the pull for good old family values? What we are seeing is better rights and fairness for individuals (same-sex marriage, etc) but is that good for society as a whole?
I understand where you are coming from, I struggle with my atheism/beliefs too.
But without doubt, this is good for society. Think about it, we had slavery because bible and other religions, approved of slavery. Then women had no rights because of religion, finally they do. These are good things. I believe homosexuality is next big step for humanity. Once this is accepted, no one would even think about questioning it.
As for old old family values, I am not really sure what it means, but if it means close family ties, then I have seen non-religious families who are very close and religious families who fight all the time. And vice versa.
> From the outside religion seems more about hate than love.
I'd wager the view is different from the inside. Communities of any kind can be condemned one way or another from the outside. The weekly potlucks and choirs still exist and I'll bet you way fewer Christian parents (of whatever denomination) see a gay child as a sin than whenever it was that you grew up.
> I don't think that as a society we have figured out what the next evolution of community looks like.
Honestly, it might look like a society in which people go back to church.
Not clear at all. Catholics for example are the most likely group to marry interracially.
Religiously, I don't see the christian sects as very divided, despite their many differences. There seems to be a large set of common ground.
Even amongst religions, there is a lot of good will. I can't think of any widespread religious riot in the US (I could totally be wrong though).
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