Canadian Politics Today

So, atheists, what do you miss about Religion?

It's a cheeky question, based on the general themes of Dr Jordan Peterson.  Hegel believed that past times had elements that were worth recovering.

What are we missing?

I will start:
-humility
-forgiveness
-sharing
-connection
-non-materialism
-pluralism

These things were preached and are declining IMO.  I believe it's at least correlated to the decline of religion.

This is, as with capitalism, a bad-with-the-good texture.  We are fed and clothed by capitalism and can live with it even if we hate the system, as a pragmatic response to its utility.

What are the best things about religion and how can we restore them?

Well, I think we have to remember what some of the best features of religion are, and recognize that there can be secular alternatives. Religions, for example, remind us of our common humanity, a humanity shared across races and geographical boundaries. There are hints of this within Christianity, and there are hints of this in Buddhism and Islam.

The tribalism is obviously problematic, but I think at their best what religions do is present the stranger in a new light. They offer us a kind of universality, a cosmopolitanism of the mind. This is a move that can take place outside of religion.

Churches and synagogues and mosques are seen as safe places where once you are in them, things can happen that wouldn’t happen outside of the precincts of this space. So they’ve become spaces where the stranger is welcomed, where all kinds of things that might be frowned upon outside are acceptable within, and in that sense, religion acts as a kind of host introducing humans to one another, humanizing them in each other’s eyes.

This seems to me a very valuable exercise, because secular modernity is anonymous. It’s built on the concept of anonymity and that the family is hugely important and the lover is hugely important, but beyond that other forms of association don’t really exist.