/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.5340370]

Is there any reason to think, as some do, that traditional religion will disappear as time goes on?
There has been a revival of theology in the last couple of decades and a materialist view of the world is much less academically prevalent than it used to be, and people identifying with a religion have only increased in some parts of the world instead of going down.

Personally studying philosophy is what made me take theism seriously and I see it in no way threatened in the future, especially Christian theology.
This viee seems very naive.

[Anonymous No.5340410]

The masses will always have their opiate. Both the average individual and the crowd as a phenomenon unto itself are fucking dumb, or at least not conducive to the kind of reflection needed for "true" atheism. Reddit atheists are just deifying scientism and their dishonest faith in scientific materialism, in the same way the Underground Man gripes about what Russian nihilists are doing in the preamble. Husserl wrote about it.

Whether paganism or Christianity or Islam disappear or not, you're always going to have Einsteins whose deism is impossible to classify and basically spurious under certain definitions of faith, Hayy ibn Yaqzan educated elite types whose theosophy (whether individual, or shared between them and other elites) essentially makes their religion's prescriptions a non-issue in practice, and then a whole lot of herd behaviour where people are just doing what they're doing because that's what you do.

You can see it really clearly in Communism, especially Soviet and Chinese. Most forms of Communism were virulently atheistic to the point of eradicating religious practice and open belief. But it's an old, old joke that Communists were basically cultists, justifying everything according to 'Marxist science' and 'dialectic' in ways that look extremely shallow to us now, when we read them. Ideology was (and in some places remains) controlled right up to the highest echelons of scholarship in the USSR and PRC. So you get weird things like Soviet historians and sociologists and such, real scholars mirroring their Western professional equivalents, the still living of whom are now 'reformed' and simply 'normal' professors today, but they're describing everything according to this rigid, cult-like Marxian rhetoric. And then when the curtain falls, the whole ideology dissolves overnight without the state there to enforce it, and within a few years only a few radicals or antiquated fogies still give a fuck about the old language. But if you talk to professors who grew up, lived, and even taught under the Soviet system, they'll tell you: there were masses who believed in the rhetoric simply because it was the culture; there were scholars who believed it because they were simply unreflective, functionary priests of state ideology; there were 'atheistic' scholars who worked around the rhetoric while still giving the appearance of adhering to it; and there were scholars who believed in the 'big picture' of the rhetoric (i.e. actual Marxists) but who often said things in its service that were so off-rhetoric that they were practically heterodox anyway. Same thing anywhere, any time.

We're doing the same thing in the West with our fetish for materialism and scientism. It's reflected in all the disciplines and it will be clear in hindsight to future generations. Just another zeitgeist, same shit different day.

[Anonymous No.5341510]

Badump

[Anonymous No.5341516]

>>5340410
oh cool we're doing the "political philosophy i don't like is just like a religion!" thing again

[Anonymous No.5341524]

>>5340410
Basically this. There is always going to be a religion. The only question is what kind of religion.

[Anonymous No.5341536]

>>5341516
Probably because it is

[Anonymous No.5341543]

>>5341536
Atheism is a religion too

[Anonymous No.5341547]

>>5341543
Some forms of it, not all.