[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.)

[stakhanov]

> and you could probably find somebody that thinks like this

I think, on a generous reading of Kierkegaard's "Three stages of life" [1], I could probably say that Kierkegaard probably thought that way.

Also, interestingly, people like Dawkins himself seem to be waking up to this way of thinking. Right there on his YouTube channel [2] he has a video called "Is Religion Inevitable?" In it, Peter Boghossian states the "substitution hypothesis": As one form of deranged belief (of which he thinks religion is one kind) recedes, another (like wokism) expands to fill the void. Dawkins says he hadn't really thought of that before. He thinks it's plausible, and hopes it's wrong, because it would mean he has wasted his life. Of course there's a few steps missing to get from there to my position.

The first is that they call it "deranged belief", where I call it "religion". But it would make a lot more sense, if the substitution hypothesis simply was: As one form of religion recedes, another expands to fill the void.

The second element that's missing is that they can't get themselves to be optimistic about it, which I am. I believe, religion can be a good thing if it's done well, which, usually, it's not, which is where I too am a pessimist, so the two positions aren't that far apart after all.

And third: If it were me debating Dawkins, and I wanted to make the debate really interesting, I would confront him with the idea that the hypothesis might apply to individuals. As one person denies his religiosity, a new religiosity will take hold within him to fill the void, that he may not even recognize as such. And by implication Dawkins himself has been religious all his life without knowing it. There is even a word for what Dawkins' religion would be if that were the case, and that word is "scientism" [3].

Finally, I want to mention the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams who is a heavy hitter not just as a religious leader but also a public intellectual with strong ties to academia, including science. I recall him saying in a sermon that religion, if it's treated as if it were science, makes for very bad science. That's how you get stupid beliefs like creationism that seem to be the thing that people like Dawkins are primarily bothered by. But also: Science, if it's treated as if it were a religion, makes for a very bad religion. And, in my mind, that's an interesting way of characterizing a lot of the problems facing society at the moment.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_S%C3%B8ren_Kierk...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgJ9-othjJk 3:09

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism

[flir]

I know I said I was cutting and running, but I think this is worth your time.

Check out our conversation in the light of functional (maximalist) and substantive (minimalist) definitions of religion: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concept-religion/

Eg "Famously, a functional approach can hold that even atheistic forms of capitalism, nationalism, and Marxism function as religions" vs "all three of these versions are “substantive” definitions of religion because they determine membership in the category in terms of the presence of a belief in a [supernatural, transcendent or superempirical] reality".