However, teachers have been implicated in plenty of child abuse cases, and school districts regularly try to cover up and settle these cases — Count Timothy von Icarus

Rank amateurs against the Catholic church. And are you committing an equivocation fallacy? So what if others were/are also abusers? Your original point was that Religion curbes child abuse. This does not appear to be the case. As our Hillsong (Protestant) Church in Australia has also recently discovered.

Because for religion to be regressive, it would seem to imply that irreligion promotes progress, and that doesn't seem particularly easy to justify. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not really the point. Some secular culture may also be regressive, which does not let religion off the hook. IMO that's not the salient argument. The point is there is nothing special about religion, no appalling crime or regression going that it hasn't enthusiastically supported.

Look, I don't think we can say that the percentage of religious people with regressive ideas are the majority of all believers on earth. It may only be 30% of them. That's roughly the percentage of fundamentalists in the Christian world, according to Pew Research. Islam? Who knows? I won't even hold Trump (and his regressive, nascent fascism) against all those evangelicals who form the bulk of his base. But I can say that it is far from clear how progressive religions are around the world. And we can see very clearly the mess many of them are making in god's name.

And we can see very clearly the mess many of them are making in god's name. — Tom Storm

Indeed. Global warming denial tends to be big among the religious.

To make such a claim, you'll need to, at least, leave out the Catholic church and its international legacy of systematic child abuse and continuing criminal cover ups. — Tom Storm

:100: "Amen!" (says this raised, observant & educated ex-Catholic).

:up:

Religion is a tool, and like any tool can be used to build and create or destroy and break things, all depending on how a person utilizes it. — Vaskane

I fully agree.

But...

Nihilism is in fact more regressive than religion, hence Nietzsche and the birth of existentialism. — Vaskane

I don't get your point here. What do you mean 'regressive' when you compare existentialism with religion? You want to mean that nihilism or existentialism are just a deconstruction of ourselves, or what exactly?

I don't want to criticise your opinion, but just to understand it, because I got surprised after reading it.
On the other hand, I guess we can't consider Kierkegaard as a 'regressive' towards religion when he clearly suffered 'humanisation' in the interpretation of the Gospels...

I don't want to get sidetracked. My point was merely that, according to peer reviewed findings in the social sciences, the gold standard of evidence in the scientist framework, religion seems to be more a progressive force, at least within wealthy countries. Of course, this analysis is extremely complicated, because one might assume that only certain kinds of people have the wherewithal to get up early on weekend mornings to hear what, in most traditions, is going amount to a moralizing lecture. That said, time series data also shows a marked improvement in the behaviors we tend to take an interest in (namely crime) with increased religious attendance.

So, my point would be,by what standard do we say religion is regressive if this is what our gold standard is telling us? Our feelings? Our anger that people deny what we think is solid, blatant evidence for the way the world is? The fact that we can anecdotally point to "some people of group x" are terrible? But if our data tells us that religious attendance will tend to make them better, couldn't we suppose they would be even worse if they didn't go to religious services?

And indeed, that's what the research on the plunge in evangelical church attendance and its ties to radical right-wing beliefs and support for violence seems to suggest. People already in the "far-right" space don't tend to "get better" when they leave church. They tend to get more paranoid, more supportive of violence, etc.

Because in general, throwing out anger-laced anecdotes, appeals to "the lower intelligence of that whole group," etc., the stuff of PF's threads on religion, is generally not taken as sound reasoning.

Many posts seem to me to ignore or misunderstand the OP.
Let me try again with a simple example.

2,000 years ago, many people believed sin and demons cause disease.
This belief found its way into stories about a certain miracle worker, Jesus.
By one count, Jesus performed 34 miracles and 23 of them concern healing.
How did Jesus heal?
By forgiving sin and casting out demons (although once he used some supernatural spittle to cure a blind man.)

Since then, we've learned that bacteria and viruses cause disease.
But the false teachings of Jesus are enshrined in scripture.
The result? Google “Christian parent deny medical treatment child dies"

Old beliefs (which may have seemed rational at the time) find their way into scripture where they are preserved and propagated even today. Some results: disbelief in evolution; belief in an young Earth; and children dying of curable disease because their deluded religious parents deny them medical treatment.

To cite another example, a Jehovah Witnesses may refuse a blood transfusion even at the cost of their own life due to words written in a book that has a talking serpent, a mythological worldwide flood, and a flight of Jews from Egypt that even Israeli archeologists say never happened.

There are some good teachings enshrined in scripture. And there are some very bad teachings, as well. The enshrining occurs because of religion's childish epistemology where because some book or alleged prophet or god-man said something, it must be true.

And indeed, that's what the research on the plunge in evangelical church attendance and its ties to radical right-wing beliefs and support for violence seems to suggest. People already in the "far-right" space don't tend to "get better" when they leave church. They tend to get more paranoid, more supportive of violence, etc — Count Timothy von Icarus

Abandoning ties to institutions such as churches has been a symptom of the descent into dysfunction of many rural communities around the world due to economic decline , as books like Hillbilly Elegy have documented. This social dysfunction is especially true among men, reflected in higher rates of suicide, depression, addiction and violence.

Does this signal a loss of religious faith, or a loss of institutional connection? For conservative writers like David Brooks it doesnt matter. His argument is that severing the social ties that bind us together in mutual obligation and moral commitment is what leads to violence and despair. I disagree with him. I do agree that religiosity is about ties that bind us to something larger than ourselves, but this doesn’t have to correlate with church attendance. I suggest that dysfunctional right wing rural residents who are not connected to any institutions are very much driven by ties that bind them to something transcendent.

What I mean by this is faith in something that remains absolutely immutable and self-present, something pure that we can depend on to ground all of the relative, contingent changing phenomena of experience. Purity, persistent self-identity and self-presence are all tropes of what certain philosophers call a metaphysics of presence. We see a metaphysical of presence not only in fundamentalist religions with absolutist views about morality and truth, but also in modern science and humanism. When God was jettisoned in favor of the human subject, we exchanged a divine self-presence for the self-presence of subjective human consciousness and its ability to represent within itself empirically objective truth.

So why do I have problems with the idea of binding ourselves to a pure something outside ourselves (God, nirvana, antinatalist nothingness, objective truth) or within ourselves ( consciousness, self-actualization, authenticity)?

It’s just this: The more pure, the more fixedly absolute the ground, the more polarizing and violent is its relation to what it grounds. For instance, the religious or traditionalist belief in the free will of the autonomous, morally responsible subject implies a harsher and more ‘blameful' view of justice than deterministic-based modernist approaches and postmodern accounts, which rest on shaping influences (bodily-affective and social) outside of an agent's control.

If we ask why the agent endowed with free will chose to perform a certain action , the only explanation we can give is that it made sense to them given their own desires and whims. If we instead inquire why the individual ensconced within a modernist deterministic or postmodern relativist world performed the same action, we would be able to make use of the wider explanatory framework of the natural or discursive order in situating the causes of behavior. In other words, the more we are able to decenter the purity of our grounding of moral and empirical truth, the more we can see our relation to each other on dimensions of connection, similarity and belonging rather than opposition and blameful justice. To the extent that religiosity ( or a certain modernist view of science) is ‘regressive’ , it is in the extent to which it gives us over to notions of the pure, the true , the absolute which cannot help but alienate and blame in the same gesture in which it binds.

Many Scientist deny vaccines too because DNA is a fractal and splicing shit into and out of a fractal necessarily ruin said fractal unless developed specifically for that DNA. — Vaskane

Can you cite any articles in scientific journals saying anything like that?

:up: :up: :up:

A Christian "friend" once said to me, "A truth that doesn't condemn the one who speaks it is no truth at all."

Does religion perpetuate and promote a regressive worldview? — Art48

If by "a regressive worldview" you mean consisting of evidence-free, miraculous, death-denial stories (in contrast to secular evidence-based, dialectical, this life-affirming stories), then I agree that "religion" is guilty as charged.

:100:

A Christian "friend" once said to me, "A truth that doesn't condemn [call-into-question] the one who speaks it is no truth at all." — baker

Yes, all preachers, including Christian evangelists and proselytes, are liars. :clap:

The Apophatics are right!

I agree with what you're saying, although I don't think religion has a straightforward relationship to the promotion of a libertarian and voluntarist conception of free will and responsibility. It's quite the opposite in Calvinism. Man is "totally depraved," and he does only evil, but for the workings of God. Actions are predestined and subject to divine foreknowledge, leading to fatalism or compatibilism (Romans 8, etc.) People cannot boast in their moral actions or in their salvation, for these are "through grace alone," in the form of "unconditional election." That is, nothing about us, as individuals, determines that we shall be moral, only God's free choice.


What you're describing sounds more like the Pelagian position, which, while common in Christianity through the ages, was also considered a heresy even by the early church. Bonaventure might talk about the world as a "ladder up to God," but it is a ladder only given and climbed by "grace," a free gift from the divine.

Yet is religious grounding always bad? I would say no. The thing we are grounded to in Platonism and the panentheistic vision of God displayed in Patristic theologians is transcendence, knowledge, freedom, and goodness itself. We are always drawn on to "go beyond" our initial desires, drives, instincts, biases, and beliefs. Christianity was, in this form, a much more universal religion. Johannine Logos Theology claims the intellectual insights of Plato and Aristotle (and in modern forms Zen, etc.) as its own, since all human knowledge springs from the same source, man's desire for "what is truly good," not what merely "appears to be good and brings pleasure."

Building on the vision of reflexive freedom — freedom as rational, unified self-determination — laid out in Romans 7, the idea was that we are free to the extent that understand our motivations and the world. We are free to the extent that we transcend our initial finiteness in reaching outwards, beyond our limits, in knowledge and self-identifying love. Or, "we are free to the extent that we are 'in' God, who is in 'all things'" since we then identify with the totality of the self-determining whole. But this idea, less clearly articulated but still present in Plato, developed by the early Patristics, and then re-paganized by folks like Plotinus, who drew on orthodox, Jewish, and Gnostic thinking, was first challenged by Islam, wounding the tendency towards universalism, and later shattered in the Reformation. You see a similar thing in Islam, where violent struggles against Pagan steppe nomads and crusading Christians caused the religion to become less universal and less focused on the role of knowledge, gnosis, in morality, or the identification of the self in "other" of love.


That said, such sentiment still stuck around, and you can still see it in modern settings. But this gets back to the "No True Scotsmanesque" problem of "you shall know them by their fruit." Do you take the legalism, the focus on the letter of the law versus the spirit of it to be primarily a historical narration of what happened during Christ's earthly ministry, or do you take it as a warning to all believers. What is meant by "I desire mercy not sacrifice?"

Yet is religious grounding always bad?
The thing we are grounded to in Platonism and the panentheistic vision of God displayed in Patristic theologians is transcendence, knowledge, freedom, and goodness itself… all human knowledge springs from the same source, man's desire for "what is truly good," not what merely "appears to be good and brings pleasure." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Let’s try a deconstrucrive exercise:
By deconstructive I mean locating two hidden gestures operating together within the terms of a discourse. First, whenever a discourse makes claims for a boundary of opposition between two meanings, such as rational and irrational, love and hate, true and false, knowledge and ignorance, or good and evil, based on the assumption of a true quality intrinsic to each term, one can reveal that the sense of ‘goodness’ and ‘evil’ are themselves contingent, changeable and relative. The second deconstructive gesture is parasitic on the first. If supposedly reliably true, self-consistently grounded senses of terms like good and evil are themselves multiple and various, then the strict opposition between good and evil can no longer be justified. That is, dissolving the purity of categorical meanings ( or better yet, showing how they already dissolve themselves in practice) dissolves the violent sharpness of the oppositions they supposedly justify.

How does your notion of the good exclude those who you deem bad, how does your idea of the true banish those you deem false, how does your conception of the moral exclude those who appear to you as immoral? The religious gesture of grounding and binding always presents the danger of erasing the differences within its categorical terms, and as a result creating and hypostesizing oppositions that harmfully separate off groups of people from one another.

I think I agree, if I'm understanding you correctly. The term "good," taken alone, without the possibility of anything being "bad," is contentless. Our understanding of the terms advances, but this in no way makes the term contentless in all contexts. On the contrary, it's the dialectical advance that gives the terms content in the first place.

But, without answering questions about the relationship between the universal and the particular, the many and the one, I don't know how well we can pronounce judgement on the opposition between such apparent opposites, except that such opposition cannot be "strict" or "absolute," in a naive sense.

Returning to the topic on hand, where exactly did this sort of idea come from? As best I can trace it, it seems first to spring from Eriugena, a monk writing theology, at least in terms of the dialectical aspects of change. And then Hegel, following similar ideas (probably through Boheme and Eckhart) popularizes a move towards a less naive analysis that navigates the gap between the Scylla of naive Platonism and the Charybdis of strict nominalism. This is, to my mind, a great example of religious thought being progressive.

Of course, religion is highly regressive in many contexts (in the sense the term is used in the OP.) My point would be that "the general principles by which theologies, philosophies, and ideologies become either progressive or regressive seems to transcend the secular/religious divide." You can compare on the one hand the old indulgence system, or Protestant justifications for African slavery in the United States, and on the other the centrality of churches to the Civil Rights Movement or religion's key role in promoting the first universal education systems and universal literacy (e.g. Puritans and the Massachusetts Bay Colony). Nor are individual groups always one or the other. The Puritans set up highly progressive educational and welfare systems, and were the first to ban slavery, but they also executed people for witchcraft and drove people into exile over theological differences.

This is, to my mind, a great example of religious thought being progressive. Of course, religion is highly regressive in many contexts, in the sense used in the OP. My point would be that "the general principles by which theologies, philosophies, and ideologies become either progressive or regressive seems to transcend the secular/religious divide." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree completely. If at a certain point in history the use of the term religious fades away it will be the result of a progressive impetus within, but not unique to, the history of religion itself.

Since then, we've learned that bacteria and viruses cause disease.
But the false teachings of Jesus are enshrined in scripture.
The result? Google “Christian parent deny medical treatment child dies" — Art48

This sounds like a rather modern phenomenon.

There are characteristic differences between Christians of the Old World and Christians of the New World.

Refusing medications, denial of evolution, and such on "religious grounds" are unheard of in Europe, until very recently.
It's in the Americas that Christians can be extremely strict in following religious rules.

In Europe, if a Catholic priest has a girlfriend and children (even though he is supposed to be celibate), nobody bats an eyelid; or at least until very recently it's been like that. If a Catholic woman uses contraceptives or has an abortion, nothing happens, even though those are grounds for excommunication. In the US, however, they seem to actually follow the rules, though, and they excommunicate people for such things.

Because of these differences, I wouldn't blame religion itself like the OP; something else is going on. I don't know what exactly that is, but something needs to account for the way religiosity is practiced "the old way" vs. "the new way".

I don't want to get sidetracked. My point was merely that, according to peer reviewed findings in the social sciences, the gold standard of evidence in the scientist framework, religion seems to be more a progressive force, at least within wealthy countries. — Count Timothy von Icarus

No. The point we were exploring was the point you made about religion curbing child abuse. Which seems somewhat risible given church history.

So, my point would be, by what standard do we say religion is regressive if this is what our gold standard is telling us? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Isn't this an easy one? And I think we agree on these, Religions regularly provide strong opposition to progressive ideas like women's rights, environmentalism, euthanasia, gay and trans rights, drug law reform, teaching science (evolution) in the classroom, stem cell research, contraception, is an advocate of capital punishment and against gun law reform. That's enough to be getting on with.

My point would be that "the general principles by which theologies, philosophies, and ideologies become either progressive or regressive seems to transcend the secular/religious divide." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think this is accurate. And I wouldn’t argue that religion is the only source of regressive or bad ideas on Earth.

By deconstructive I mean locating two hidden gestures operating together within the terms of a discourse. First, whenever a discourse makes claims for a boundary of opposition between two meanings, such as rational and irrational, love and hate, true and false, knowledge and ignorance, or good and evil, based on the assumption of a true quality intrinsic to each term, one can reveal that the sense of ‘goodness’ and ‘evil’ are themselves contingent, changeable and relative. The second deconstructive gesture is parasitic on the first. If supposedly reliably true, self-consistently grounded senses of terms like good and evil are themselves multiple and various, then the strict opposition between good and evil can no longer be justified. That is, dissolving the purity of categorical meanings ( or better yet, showing how they already dissolve themselves in practice) dissolves the violent sharpness of the oppositions they supposedly justify.

How does your notion of the good exclude those who you deem bad, how does your idea of the true banish those you deem false, how does your conception of the moral exclude those who appear to you as immoral? The religious gesture of grounding and binding always presents the danger of erasing the differences within its categorical terms, and as a result creating and hypostesizing oppositions that harmfully separate off groups of people from one another. — Joshs

I like it. But this is hard to put into practice. Particularly if the world largely rejects this. Speaking personally, I like to blame and judge (to some extent) and the way I make sense of the world has been shaped irrevocably by concepts I can't transcend. How could one escape? Because even in recognizing the accuracy of your account, the temptation to stick with familiar patterns is irresistible. I wonder how one can be a human being and not be bound by a bunch of contingent and culturally constructed bullshit?

I like it. But this is hard to put into practice. Particularly if the world largely rejects this. Speaking personally, I like to blame and judge (to some extent) and the way I make sense of the world has been shaped irrevocably by concepts I can't transcend. How could one escape? Because even in recognizing the accuracy of your account, the temptation to stick with familiar patterns is irresistible. I wonder how one can be a human being and not be bound by a bunch of contingent and culturally constructed bullshit? — Tom Storm

Why should it be otherwise?
What is the ideal you're trying to live up to?
And why?

Religions regularly provide strong opposition to progressive ideas — Tom Storm

Progressive toward what?
What are those ideas (that religions tend to oppose) progressing to, leading to?

An untreated disease can also be said to "progress", as in 'worsen the person's health status' but we don't view that "progress" positively.

Deleted

Progressive toward what? — baker

I provided a list of examples of traditionally held progressive issues. I wasn’t aware progress was a journey. Is that how you see it? If we hold women's rights or gay rights up as progressive issues we support, I don't think the next question should be, 'But where will that lead us?'

Actually something that might or might not have been mentioned in this thread already, is that there’s a school of thought amongst historians that the entire ‘idea of progress’ was very much a consequence of the Christian expectation of ‘the second coming’. It grew out of the narrative that history was determined by the period between the incarnation and the second coming, This perspective suggests that the Christian eschatological belief in a future event where Christ returns underlay an idealized future which provided the impetus for the original concept of progress. This idea of progress is characterized by a continual improvement over time, contrasting with cultures that idealize a past Golden Age, leading to a more conservative and backward-looking philosophy.

In many ancient and non-Western cultures, the concept of time and progress was by contrast often cyclical or regressive, focusing on a lost era of perfection. The idea of a ‘Golden Age’ in the past, from which humanity has declined, is found in various cultures, including Greek, Roman, and Hindu mythologies.

The Christian eschatological view, in contrast, introduces a linear conception of time, which has a definitive beginning and an end. This view posits that history moves towards a specific goal, the Second Coming of Christ, where a new, idealized state of the world will be established. This forward-looking perspective has contributed to a cultural and philosophical environment in the West that favors progress and continual improvement in contrast to the cyclical or regressive views of time and history found in other cultures. This left its mark even when secular culture abandoned the original impetus.

Not by any means the only factor in the debate, but one worth mentioning. Another re-framing is provided by David Bentley Hart in his book Atheist Delusions. He highlights the significant impact of Christianity on social reforms and cultural transformations throughout history. His argument is that many social norms and values now taken for granted in the modern world, particularly in Western societies, have roots in Christian principles that were quite radical compared to the prevailing norms of the culture into which they were introduced.

Some of these included:

1. Value of the Individual: Christianity emphasized the intrinsic worth of every individual, which was a departure from the class-based or hierarchical value systems prevalent in many ancient cultures.
2. Charity and Care for the Needy: The Christian emphasis on charity and caring for the poor, sick, and marginalized was a notable shift from the more limited forms of social welfare that existed in the pagan world.
3. Concepts of Forgiveness and Redemption: These were also relatively novel in a world where honor cultures often demanded retribution and where a concept of personal redemption was not as developed.
4. Transformation of Family and Sexual Ethics: Christianity brought new ideas about marriage, chastity, and family life, often challenging existing practices and norms.
5. Universalism: The Christian message was universal, aimed at all of humanity, transcending ethnic, national, and social boundaries, which contrasted with the more localized religious practices of the time.

Much of this has been absorbed into the rubric of Western culture in such a way that their specifically Christian origins are obscured or forgotten, but for an example of a culture that developed without them, consider the People’s Republic of China, where the idea of the sovereignty of individual rights is completely absent, with often dire political consequences.

Why should it be otherwise?
What is the ideal you're trying to live up to?
And why? — baker

Deleted previous somewhat ruder answer. I'm asking Joshs a hypothetical question, not subscribing to any ideal or suggesting it need be otherwise.

Why would we think otherwise, given the utter dominance of religion for centuries? Free-thought as a belief system is a comparatively recent thing: it is nascent.

One of the problems with the idea of progress is that some people (often secular types) consider it an inevitability, a kind of historical process, leading to a brave new world - almost as if progress is a transcendent phenomenon. I don't know what you think about that, but I consider progress to be the word we use to describe a preferred personal or social change. Such a change has to be understood subject to some criteria of value. No doubt Trump being elected in 2024 will be seen as progress by the 81% of evangelicals who support him.

That aside - there are some traditional progressive causes I listed earlier which I believe represent his matter reasonably well.

Why would we think otherwise, given the utter dominance of religion for centuries? — Tom Storm

Not all religious cultures gave rise to the idea of progress, and considering the title of the OP I thought it significant.

I consider the idea that our culture’s quest for interstellar travel is really the sublimated longing for immortality. Having substituted material progress for spiritual liberation, only by ‘slipping the surely bonds of earth’ is freedom to be found (pace Elon Musk’s desire to populate Mars).