How nonbelief is stickier than belief. Plus: Fox News lied! Who would have thought? And: how UFOs and CRT go together; the number of respectable Republicans.
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OnlySky, Andrew Fiala, 15 Feb 2023: What the stickiness of nonbelief says about the ‘religious instinct’, subtitled “As nonbelief is normalized, the assumption that human beings have a natural religious instinct no longer makes sense.”
Article overview:
If the religious instinct is so deeply natural and nonbelief so unnatural, why does research show the lack of religion to be far more sticky and contagious than religion itself?
Off hand, I’d say that lack of religion has the reality of the world to back it up, religion has only traditions and stories — often in defiance the real world — to back it up. Where they clash, more and more people are coming to realize that reality is robust, while religion, with its fantastic stories that prey on the vulnerabilities of human nature, is frail.
But let’s see what the article says.
A recent article in the Guardian suggested several reasons for the general decline in religion. It may have something to do with the hypocritical moralizing of religious patriarchs and the changing values of a younger generation. The mandatory church closures of the Covid pandemic seem to have accelerated church attrition. But non-religion is not a passing fad. Non-religion is both sticky and contagious. As a critical mass of people come out of the nonreligious closet, others will follow, and will likely stay out. Social scientists suggest that people who become nonreligious tend to stay that way and pass their nonreligion on to the next generation.
If this is true, then our way of understanding religion as a natural function of human experience needs to be revised. Religious belief was once taken for granted as fulfilling a kind of natural human instinct. But as nonbelief is normalized, the assumption that human beings have a natural religious instinct no longer makes sense.
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Sociologists have been studying the rise of the nones for a couple of decades. Studies of “nonversion” (conversion away from religion) remind us that there are lots of individual stories and no single cause for the decline of religion. And yet, non-religion seems to be both contagious and sticky.
To say it is contagious means that it catches on. When people are exposed to non-religion and realize it is an option, they may choose it. To say it is sticky means that once people become nonreligious, they tend to stay that way. Linda Woodhead, professor of sociology of religion, explains the generational stickiness of religion as follows: “For people who say they were raised Christian, there is a 45 percent chance they will end up identifying as nones, but for those raised with ‘no religion’ there is a 95 percent probability that they will stay that way. Thus, ‘no religion’ is currently ‘sticky’ in a way Christianity is not.”
And there’s background on the idea of religion as a “natural” feature of human thought, as Pascal Boyer thought, a “faith instinct” as Nicholas Wade called it. Clues from Psalms, the Greeks, and someone named Tim Whitmarsh with whom I am not familiar. Finally the challenges that remain, what with a Supreme Court sympathetic to (Christian) religion. At least “nonreligious people need not fear being burned at the stake as they once were.” At least in most countries.
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Significant news today, covered everywhere (except perhaps Fox News).
NYT: Fox Stars Privately Expressed Disbelief About Election Fraud Claims. ‘Crazy Stuff.’, subtitled “The comments, by Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and others, were released as part of a defamation suit against Fox News by Dominion Voter Systems.”
WaPo: Fox News hosts, execs privately doubted 2020 conspiracy claims shared on air, subtitled “Rupert Murdoch called election conspiracy theories ‘really crazy stuff,’ according to new legal filings in Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit”
Slate: Tucker Carlson’s Dominion Text Messages Are a Thing of Beauty
Fox News knew the truth but lied to their audience! What a surprise!
Just one little quote from the last item, which has a timeline of various statements among Fox colleagues.
On Nov. 5, Carlson seemed to acknowledge that there was a financial incentive for Fox News to go along with Trump’s fraudulent claims about the election, while also acknowledging just how dangerous they were.
“Financial incentive” to play to a paranoid base that believes anything Trump said. It goes on and on.
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Re: that paranoid base:
Salon, Chauncey DeVega, 17 Feb 2023: UFOs and CRT: Republicans are in a constant state of panic about the “other”, subtitled “It’s all about scaring gullible, racist white people and feeding off of that dark energy as a way of holding power”
These people don’t realize how they are being played.
Oddly, the article is mostly about the writer’s recollections of an obscure 1992 story by Derrick Bell called “The Space Traders”.
— I looked it up at ISFDB: the only thing this writer has ever published (at least within isfdb’s purview), albeit in a well-received anthology edited by Sheree R. Thomas called Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, which won a World Fantasy Award, which has apparently gathered much attention in legal venues, according to this Salon article. —
And the Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” which in fact I vividly remember, reading it first in one of those early ’60s collections of TZ story adaptations, later seeing the TZ episode in reruns.
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Finally this:
Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin, 17 Feb 2023: Opinion | Who are the most respectable Republicans in office? Jennifer Rubin answered your questions.
She comes up with two.
Guest:
Who are the most respectable Republicans in office?
Each day seems to bring another disgraceful act by a prominent Republican. Who in your opinion are the most responsible and respectable Republican politicians at both the state and federal levels?
Jennifer Rubin:
At the state level, I would have to go with New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu. At the federal level, I would say Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), who defended the Affordable Care Act and voted to convict Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial and to establish an independent Jan. 6 commission. She has also done a better job of defending abortion access than other Republicans, though she still voted to confirm Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. Put it this way: Others are worse than her!
