[flir]

I think the people saying "religion" actually mean "belief system" (philosophy, religion, political ideology, economic system, scientific paradigm) but they don't have the right language so they're reaching for "religion" as the most obvious example of a belief system. It's just woolly language hiding a very obvious observation: people tend to adopt cohesive ideological packages rather than assembling personalized belief systems à la carte.

For example there's no particular reason why "pro-choice" and "climate change" should be bundled together (if anything you'd expect conservatives to be the ones trying to conserve the environment, and progressives to be the ones trying to tarmac the planet) but they have a pretty strong correlation in US politics.

[nvm0n2]

It's more precise than that. Pro-choice/climate being bundled together is just the ordinary left/right (or non-left) divide, nothing special there. Progressives see motherhood as conservative-coded and anti-feminist, so control over that to be progress, they also assume anything academics say must be true because they're fellow progressives and "scientists" who thus personify Progress itself.

But the people talking about religion mean something more than just an arbitrary ideological package, they mean it has specific elements that are surprisingly close to the beliefs found in Christianity, rebranded. Like the elements in my list.

[flir]

> Pro-choice/climate being bundled together is just the ordinary left/right (or non-left) divide, nothing special there.

Are you sure? They don't track together nearly so strongly in, say, France. They don't naturally, or necessarily, go together IMO.

In your list, items 1 and 3 contradict each other. Item 4 I read as Cartesian dualism. Mind and body, no soul required (I also seriously doubt your interpretation). Item 5... the Parable of the Good Samaritan isn't about being meek and mild, it's about obeying the Golden Rule, and the Good Samaritan is atypical: he doesn't represent all Samartians. Jesus wasn't making a point about the virtue of Samartians in general.

Honestly, I think you're building a straw man here.

[nvm0n2]

Of course not in France, different cultures have different hot button political issues at any given time. In France the equivalent would be support for the EU or mass immigration.

For three you're right, I should have said "non white people". Their belief system is that "white" men are born into sin and other types are born pure then corrupted. More or less. I mean, I wouldn't expect an emerging religion to be internally consistent.

Mind is the same thing as soul in this context. They believe you can have a genetically male brain but the soul (or mind if you prefer) of a woman or vice versa.

For five, yes my sketch is rough and I appreciate the clarifications you're forcing on me here. It's the first time I've written down these thoughts, others have done so better. What I was getting at was the focus on the supposedly weakest members of society as a justification for attacking the strongest (tax collectors, the rich etc).

[stakhanov]

I don't know about others, but when I compare environmentalism, wokism, social justice warriordom, etc. to religions, I definitely do mean more than just "belief system". If I meant belief system, I would use that expression. My vocabulary is not that poor.

I took care not to strictly subsume them under the term of "religion". Specifically, in my initial post I said "overlap with psychology behind religion", I said that people who hold these beliefs are "religious" -- the use of the noun "religion" as an adjective lessens the character of the subsumption so that one reading is that it's just pointing out an analogy or similarity rather than stating a strict subsumption.

And I also predicted that these things all have the potential to undergo a similar historical development as religions did, that they have the potential to bring about something similar to the Spanish Inquisition, or the witch hunts. Not all belief systems have that potency.

So what I'm doing is pointing out an analogy that comes with lots of implications, not all of which I strictly believe to be true, but all of them are things that I find at least interesting to consider. For example, using the Wikipedia definition of "religion", besides implying a belief system, a religion also comes with behaviours, practices, morals, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations. -- Environmentalism, wokism and social justice warriordom definitely all come with practices as well as just beliefs. Morals and ethics are more than just beliefs. Environmentalism, for example, clearly has prophecies ("doomsday cult" would be an interesting analogy), and it's interesting to think about what that does to the human psyche.

There is a lot in religion that trumps rationality in terms of its salience and psychological potency. And precisely this ability to trump rationality makes religions quite a different animal from belief systems that are strictly grounded in rationality.

For example, if the divide between the political right and left were just about "free market economy vs communist-style planned economy with redistribution" or "low taxes" vs "high taxes" or "small government" vs "big government", it would be about belief systems strictly grounded in rationality. But now add into the mix the thought that many on the political right are associated with established religions and on the political left things like environmentalism, wokism and social justice warriordom increasingly start looking like religions. Now the distinction between the political right and the left starts looking like a religious divide, and that's a whole other level. It used to be "We can't agree on the proper economic system." Now it's "Help! My identity is under attack!"

When I was young, I saw most religious people as bigots, while the message I mostly got from areligious people was that they were preaching tolerance, pluralism, minority protection, etc.

But now, doing my best to adopt a stance of tolerance myself, my impression is that the people who think of themselves as areligious have constructed grand narratives that increasingly look like religions, without even noticing that particular analogy, and have increasingly taken to bigotry themselves. That's my central thesis here.

[flir]

> that they have the potential to bring about something similar to the Spanish Inquisition, or the witch hunts. Not all belief systems have that potency.

McCarthy, pogroms, Dreyfus Affair, Armenian genocide, Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, Lavender Scare, Khmer Rouge, Operation Condor, Aktion T4, Rwandan genocide. Holocaust.

Not all religions produce witch hunts.

> Environmentalism, for example, clearly has prophecies

Predictions. You know, the heart of a testable hypothesis? Science?

Your definition of religion is out of whack.

[stakhanov]

> Predictions. You know, the heart of a testable hypothesis? Science?

I think, getting a Ph.D. in a field that calls itself a science from a top university should have given me a passing familiarity with that thing called science.

Environmentalist "prophecies" may be intertwined with pieces of science that have implications on what to expect for the future, but they add an element of psychological framing to the facts that does not itself stand on scientific ground but is instead culturally ingrained and ultimately simply "made up".

One possible framing might be "nature wants me dead": You can think "With all those cold nights, lack of food in the winter, pathogens, etc. it looks a lot to me like nature wants me dead, and I'm lucky to have civilization to protect me from nature's violence." You can emphasize to yourself that nature has been there for billions of years before man came around. Now, for what is just a brief blip in natural history called the "anthropocene", man has become a weirdly dominant force, and the anthropocene will very likely end by man making the planet uninhabitable to himself in some way or another. The question is not whether it will happen, but when and how exactly. But regardless of the specifics of the when and how, the duration of the anthropocene will be dwarfed by the billions of years that the planet will happily go on producing life after man is long gone.

Another framing might be the "mother nature" framing, where nature is a fragile harmony, and any disturbance of that harmony cuts life off from what nurtures it. You can further go on to think that all life is sacred, and killing a fly is not morally any different from killing a man. Currently, the greatest disturbance to the harmony of nature is man, and it happens every time you turn on a light bulb, for that consumes energy, and takes something away from nature that would otherwise sustain life somewhere on the planet. Wasting energy, even if it's just a light bulb that you don't strictly need, is therefore a great sin.

Now, both of these framings are compatible with the same scientific facts about nature, but under the "mother nature" framing your behaviours will start to look like those of an environmentalist, while under the "nature wants me dead" framing, they will not. Neither of those two framings are themselves in any way grounded in science.

[flir]

> Neither of those two framings are themselves in any way grounded in science.

Neither of those two framings are religions, either.

> You can further go on to think that all life is sacred, and killing a fly is not morally any different from killing a man.

I don't recognise environmentalism in your description of it. I still think this is straw manning. I admit it's a broad church, and you could probably find somebody that thinks like this, but you're not describing any kind of mainstream.

(Feel free to reply, but I'm out. But I just wanted to say you've been completely reasonable while putting forth your viewpoint.)