Here's an interesting thing. Samuel Perry recently posted a chart from his 2022 book about Christian nationalism. It basically asks if you'd be OK with manipulating election laws to ensure that your side has an easier time winning. By far the biggest agreement came from Christian nationalists:
Curiously, the second highest agreement came from their exact opposites, atheists. Apparently both ends of the religion spectrum feel under threat from our current electoral system.
The least likely to approve of fiddling with elections is those who don't just pay little attention to the news, but don't even know if they follow the news. That's some serious ignorance.
What a ridiculous question on that poll.
I absolutely support changing election laws to make victory easier next election, and I am right to do so. Voting should be easy, simple, and relatively barrier-free, with absentee and mail-in voting for anyone who wants it and a very wide and permissive voting window. Oregon has it about right in this regard, but we can still do better.
These changes would absolutely make it easier for my preferred political coalition to win elections, but that is straight-up irrelevant as to whether or not they're good ideas. Or is the case being made here that you can advocate for election law changes if they have downsides for your preferred ideology? By this logic merely advocating for your own voting rights is suspect, because you being able to vote makes it easier for you to win.
"Or is the case being made here that you can advocate for election law changes if they have downsides for your preferred ideology?"
You have two options. You can believe in an ideology, or you can be doing your best to understand reality, in which case you don't believe in an ideology.
"Anyone who values truth should stop worshiping reason." - Jonathan Haidt
Translation: Start by understanding that the interest being served is not what's good for me or what's good for you, but what's good for us. Then, and only then, can you take the "reason" tool out of the toolbox and expect it to be useful.
I'm not sure this is true. In fact, I know it isn't true. The notion that trying to understand objective reality precludes ideology is not only wrong, it's a strongly ideological position in and of itself.
Depends on your definition of ideology. If you are almost certain you're right, then I call that an explanatory hypothesis. If you can refute the null hypothesis (the idea that the explanatory hypothesis is false) beyond a reasonable doubt, then I call that a theory. If you're absolutely certain that you're right, then I call that an ideology.
There is something you can be absolutely certain of, and that is that you can't be absolutely certain of anything. If I'm forced to call that an ideology, then I have to plead guilty.
Exactly, I don't think the two groups are even answering the same question!
BINGO it's a clown poll question. Like the stupid polls about Obamacare, some were cool on it because it did not go far enough in reforming the system!
Right?
That was my sense of it as well. Christian nationalists basically want to disenfranchise everyone but themselves because they know their ideas and policies are broadly unpopular and would never survive contact with a truly democratic election. I suspect the atheists represented here are not advocating, e.g,, for all voting to be done during a short window on Sunday mornings when conservative Christians are all in church or something, but rather want, as Murc suggests, for changes that would perhaps lead to more progressive outcomes, but which would also make things fairer overall.
Of course unlike Christians, atheists are the least supported by the general public and don't have large organizations (churches) to act as advocates. Just check out listed preferences for political leaders' ideology and you can see that atheists are usually near the bottom.
This chart seems very odd. What does the "Age" category mean? Older people? What's the cutoff?
What is considered "Educational Attainment"?
And is the "Did not say" in relation to income or religion? If religion, how is it different from "Nothing in particular"? What does "Religiosity index" mean?
It means that age as a category is not predictive of support for cheating at elections.
Or at least that's how I read the chart.
I think that's right. It's which things correlate more or less with wanting voting changes to favor your party. Age doesn't seem to matter much, but being a Christian nationalist does.
My reading is that age is the second strongest predictor (second to Christian nationalism) because it’s the second furthest away from zero. But in the absence of actual information about how the chart was constructed, we are both just guessing.
"Who wants to cheat" at any anything is people that don't trust the people they're cheating. Christianity is about trusting your neighbor as yourself (even those Samaritans), and Christian Nationalism is about not trusting your neighbor unless they go to the same church.
Science, by the way, is about trusting the scientific method to resolve conflicting perception of reality, and from my perspective as a recovering atheist, atheism is the "I'm right, anyone who disagrees with me is wrong, and this conversation is over" religion (and of course all you atheists are going to think I'm wrong).
You're wrong. 😉
Where in the world did you get that theory about atheists? THIS atheist is happy to have an extended discussion on the topic, but finds that the religious are the ones who eventually resort to “I’m right and everyone who disagrees is wrong…” Except it takes the form of “My book is right…”
WRT way too many religions people, what you say is sad, but true.
WRT atheists, just my personal experience. If you're willing to have an extended discussion on the subject, good for you, but that's not my experience.
This is not a good format for an extended discussion, but this is something you can do on your own.
Science "involves careful observation, applying rigorous skepticism about what is observed, given that cognitive assumptions can distort how one interprets the observation." Ref: Wikipedia's article on the scientific method.
Christianity involves two principles. The first is listening to your heart and your mind, but not following one or the other when they conflict, and instead resolving the conflict. The second is listening to yourself and your neighbor, but not following one or the other when they conflict, and instead resolving the conflict. Ref: Matthew 7:12 & 22:34-40, Mark 12:28-34, Luke 6:31 & 10:25-37, John 14:12 & 15:12.
To me, based on those references alone, someone who is being a good scientist is being a good Christian, and vice versa.
Just because someone doesn't agrees with me doesn't mean their wrong, but instead of giving me the impression I'm saying something wrong, they give me the impression I'm saying something they don't want to know. And that's where in the world I get that theory from.
That's your Christianity, not a general definition.
And you seem to not be willing to listen to your neighbor when they're an atheist, so you already violate the second tenet.
Again, when it gets to the point that the word "Christian" means whatever people who refer to themselves as Christian do, even when they're violating the founding tenets of the religion, then the word is meaningless.
Likewise, if people who refuse to listen to a legitimate opposing views refer to themselves as scientists, that doesn't mean that science is what people who refer to themselves as scientist do.
One of us isn't listening to the other. If it's me, I don't see it.
“my perspective as a recovering atheist”
Getting older? My perspective is “recovering atheist” is a person who didn’t believe but wants to because they fear the nothing of death. I fully understand this, but I can’t get over the fact that all religions are just magical thinking.
And why Christianity? What convinced you that God decided everyone on earth was crap except Noah so he killed them all and threw in the animals too because “tough luck hippos, people are crap so I’m killing them all and all you animals too!” What was it about Jesus killing the fig tree because he was hungry and it didn’t have any fruit that made you think “wow, he is God?”
First, there are a lot of "recovering atheists" who go into polytheist or pagan spaces and seem to recognize that most of the prominent objections to religion only really apply to the main 3 monotheisms.
Second, some one can be religious without being a mythical literalist and jumping straight to the mockery point without asking questions about what the person actually believes or how they got there is basically the exemplar of an atheist pulling the "I'm right, anyone who disagrees is wrong, and the conversation is over." It's the atheist tactic of signaling that the following exchange will be conducted in bad faith for the purpose of ridiculing other people to shame? them into the atheist position. That is a near perfect summation of most conversations I've had with atheists. They seem to have the conversation with the same person over and over and just project that on to whoever is actually in front of them.
We're talking about Jim, though, who specifically chose Christianity.
Literally all words suffer that problem, Jim. People break all systems that people create.
You literally called atheism a religion. You're doing the thing you said you shouldn't: breaking a definition. Also, you're breaking your tenet of listening the neighbors by ignoring atheists telling you your definitions around them are wrong.
"I'm right, anyone who disagrees with me is wrong, and this conversation is over"
'I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6)
Who is this "John" you quote? Why should I believe anything he writes?
A lot in the polytheist community are ahead of you on that. We get annoyed with the evangelical christians and the evangelical atheists.
There's evangelical atheists?
They get mad when you call them that but it's a reasonable description of their behavior. They're also called anti-theists because they hold to the principle that all religions are false beliefs that need to be removed because any false belief is inherently destructive. Most I've talked to also hold the idea that personal experience is meaningless and only things that can be empirically proven are valid.
You're not just wrong, you're wrong in a way that can be demonstrated and proved.
Well, yes, science *is* about trusting the scientific method. What science isn't is accepting arguments from authority over arguments from evidence, whether the authority is a scientist, a clergy or a neighbor.
And no, atheism isn't a religion. Atheism literally means without a god, ergo without religion. I don't think you're wrong, I know you're wrong, and I just showed you why.
Depends on your definition of religion. If religion is what people who refer to themselves a religious do, then we might as well be talking chimpanzee because it's a meaningless word, and the appearance of being more sophisticated than a chimp dominance display is an illusion.
My definition is from the origin meaning of the word, which is from the Latin words for ligament, which is to bind, and redo, as in to do so repetitively.
So, in science, you come up with a hypothesis, and then you reconnect with your peers and allow them to challenge your hypothesis, and then everyone uses it if it's useful, or you're back at the drawing board trying again. Seems like a re-ligion to me.
I mean sure, if you want to have your own definition of religion then you can make any argument work. Just don't expect a lot of other folks to go along.
Fuck you, Jim.
Did I say something to offend you? It was unintentional.
Your replies showed intent.
Christians and atheists come in two general flavors: 1) the humanists who are fairly quiet about their beliefs and kind about others' viewpoints on many matters, 2) the rigid devotees who won't shut up about their side's superiority.
A lot of people who call themselves atheist aren't necessarily all that into science. They just dislike organized religion. (Yes, the "spiritual but not religious" crowd is probably bigger, and while they may not believe in a "God," many do not self identify as atheist either.) You can be atheist and pretty opposed to standard western science. I seem to know quite a few of these people - but they aren't constantly lecturing others, so they don't fit your definition of atheist rigidity.
Sometimes it feels weird to be the regular church-goer trying to gently encourage the woo-woo atheist to get that covid shot. But humans are very complicated!
You don't have this right. Core ideas in Christianity are trusting God and loving your neighbor. The concept of loving someone, but not trusting them, makes sense to me.
But what I see as a failure here is the lack of trust in God. An all-powerful God is the being you worship and things are going a certain way. It goes against everything that is preached to try to do Gods will by sinning. And yes, bearing false witness against one's neighbor is a sin, and something Donald Trump does all the time.
What does "manipulate election laws" mean? If it means making people stand in line for hours and then literally making them jump through hoops, then I'm kinda against that sort of thing. If it means changing the law to use, say, rank-choiced voting, woo-hoo! Let's manipulate some election laws!
Right? I don't even think the two groups are answering the same question.
That's how I read it too. One group wants to make it easier to vote and have valid representation. The other one wants to make it harder to vote (for certain people.) Yes both groups want to change the law in ways that favor their political party. But one side is most emphatically cheating (and want to cheat harder), the other group is not.
+1
Maybe those who identify with the most outlier categories - atheist, non-binary, Christian Nationalist (how many people know what that is?) - are most willing to endorse the more radical means. Radical people propose radical methods?
While the older you get, the more likely you are to prefer the status quo?
I’d suspect the leading factor is the degree to which one feels their numbers are not proportionally represented by current elected officials.
Of course some of those perceptions are more accurate than others. Atheists might expect that based on their actual numbers a good 5-10% of senators and congressmen would be openly disavowing the existence of a god. I’ve not heard of a single one doing so. The religious on the other hand have a virtual monopoly on public office and loudly and repeatedly assert their beliefs.
The error bars are huge, but what’s with “non-binary” being a bit so distant third?
The differences between groups are probably not meaningful, although obviously the Christian Nationalist response - however it was arrived at - is the most likely to be meaningful.
This is the type of result that has to be repeated before it should have any credibility.
Conjecture: the atheists in question are economic conservatives who wish to break the two-party stranglehold so they don't have to vote for religious Republicans.
I wonder what people think when they hear this question. I'm in favor of election laws that I think reflect the fairness required for representative democracy, but those laws would also likely benefit my own preferred party. For example, I would like to see legal immigrants able to vote in local elections (school board, mayor, etc). I would also like to see laws that make it easier to engage in the act of voting. My state is already pretty good in terms of voting laws, but if I lived in some other states, I'd have a long list of changes I would want.
Not every law I want would likely help my party, though. I want to make sure people in nursing homes or who are homebound are able to get help voting or have ballots dropped off. They are probably more conservative on average than I am.
Legal immigrants can vote already, after they've completed the legal process. It's those who aren't immigrated who can't.
If by "completed the legal process" you mean "have become a naturalized citizen" you're quite right. However, there are lots of legal immigrants who have not yet qualified for citizenship but still fall under "no taxation without representation".
I see xtian nationalists all by themselves in this chart, and a three-way tie for second place. Why pick on atheists?
I question the premise that christian nationalists are the exact opposites of atheists.
Neither side believes in a god.
That has to be faked data. How does religiosity have low probability but regardless of religiosity, have an above zero probability?
The error bars sizes on the different groups look off. The poll must include a large number of Agnostics and Atheists (as separate groups!) for the error bars to be that small compared to the other religious groupings. Seem implausible.
Through history and now religious believers always find a way to justify the worst behavior. Whether it’s slavery, segregation, homophobia, antisemitism, misogyny, male dominance, abuse of women and children, wars, holocausts, genocides, white supremacy,… you name it and there will be a bible banker expounding on the justification or simply helping by looking the other way. Nothing new here.
It was noted by no less a luminary than Mitch McConnell that making it easier to register as a voter and easier to vote would confer a substantial, possibly insurmountable, advantage on the Democrats. Despite that, I don't think Democrats are attempting to cheat when they seek to make it easier to register and to vote.