
Is Religious Belief in Decline? - andrenth
https://quillette.com/2019/01/09/is-religious-belief-in-decline/
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ilaksh
I remember having a conversation like this with a friend of mine when I was a
teenager. He grew up in a somewhat religious family and so believed in God. He
contended that my atheist "scientific" worldview was just as much a "religion"
to me as his worldview was to him.

At the time I believe I acknowledged that he had a point to a certain degree,
but I probably put an asterisk next to it, since I considered my atheist
beliefs to be in a similar but still different and superior category.

In my opinion this was mostly incorrect and so is the article. I have come to
the conclusion that every human being does have a strong worldview, and
worldviews and beliefs all operate the same way, regardless of how religious
or non-religious or anti-religious they are. There is no such thing as a
worldview that operates in a truly rational manner. People such as myself who
consider their perspective to be informed by science do not actually perform a
rational or scientific analysis of our core beliefs or generally form them
from scientific experiments. When it comes to core, broad, conceptual aspects
of worldview, we believe what we were taught in school and what our
communities want us to believe.

Two groups of people are on a slight hill facing east looking at a distant
horizon. Visibility is OK for about ten miles but then things start to get
very tiny and hazy. One group thinks whats on the horizon is generally a good
place to go. The other group thinks that its dangerous. However, no one has
any binoculars or a telescope. In fact in this scenario those things don't
exist. Because when you are talking about things that are so distant in the
past as how the universe was formed, or so broad that it attempts to put
millions of people in a category (for example, democrats versus republicans),
these are things that you may need to have an explanation or generalization
for, but it is totally possible to operate with completely different beliefs
about them and no one can prove otherwise. Because the topics are so broad or
distant.

