Established Religion Is So Evil ...

[AiliailiA]

Seems you came into this thread saying the Church shouldn't change, and it's great that the Catholic Church hasn't changed ...

but now you're saying the 2VC changed the attitude of the church "in a pretty huge way" ?

You are confusing me.

I came into this thread saying that anyone who dismisses established religion as evil is not someone I'd bother to have a conversation with...

I'll be charitable and take that as an "honest mistake". You have read the OP now and realize that I'm suggesting the opposite of what the thread title says ... don't you?

Not sure what the hell is going on there in Vietnam ...

I find the stats for Israel more amusing, what with what it is.

Amusing? Pleasing really. The majority seem to be paranoid nationalists who see no problem with killing a hundred foreigners for each Israeli killed because "they started it" ... even while their borders expand onto Arab land ... but there are significant minorities in Israel who are absolutely opposed to that. The Jewish holy books are crazy bloodthirsty shit but the Jewish religious traditions have some admirable qualities like respect for book learning and respect for life. Secular Jews are well represented in academia around the world, as well as in the charities and the arts.

Then you have the Orthodox, some of whom refuse to work. They expect to be supported by the State because they're so "pure" ... I don't know how they get by but they do use the public roads to hold protests on so it's not like they're independent of everyone else who does work and pay taxes. It's a quite jaw-dropping example of religious entitlement. If it was my country, I'd be calling for a Beard Tax: if they won't work then we should shear 'em like sheep. This is a joke, bodily sovereignty and all that.

Then there would be quite a few who really are Atheist. And Arab Israelis who just don't want to tick any box saying they are Muslims.

[AiliailiA]

.
The Church of England is one of the most tolerant and progressive Christian Churches.

This is the Church that so many people emigrated to get away from. In the US, still wary of it when it came time to do the Constitution.

The CoE has gotten better.

Has it been a drag on the political liberalization of Britain? ... doesn't look that way.

Anybody who knows much about the Church of Sweden, etc, is invited to give other examples.

Or counter-examples.

Maybe Establishment of the Church isn't actually such an evil after all?

There's a joke made by secularists at times: 'If we wanted an atheist country, we'd make it a Christian country first/we'd be asking for an established national church', or something like that.
I think you're making a bad comparison.
A non-secular state is not much of a problem when the established religion is not much of a problem itself. In the various European countries where this is the case that's because 1) there's great religious diversity, and 2) religiosity is low, and for these reasons the established religion has little reason to be intrusive. However, in countries where there is less religious diversity and people are more religious, the established religion is more likely, even almost certain, to be intrusive. Add to this the decreased tolerance towards people of other religions or none at all by the religious majority which one can expect, and you've got a recipe for disaster.

Meanwhile, in our hypothetical secular state where we can also vary whatever parameter we want, it doesn't really matter how religious everyone is and how diverse all the religions are. The government is free from religious interference, and while in a more religious country like the United states you'll have people getting upset about it and trying their utmost to get rid of it, even denying it outright, you're still just as free to practice whatever religion you happen to or none at all and nobody can really do anything about it just as in those liberal non-secular places. However, you're a lot better of than in the more conservative non-secular countries. And as I've said, that's regardless of who's the majority and how big that majority is.

In other words, a secular state and a good non-secular state are largely indistiguishable, and perhaps a non-secular state is even preferable in that respect. Only when one considers all non-secular states though is it clear that a secular state is overall preferable.

Good analysis. I like the observation that differing strengths of religiosity between different countries is a more significant difference than whether the country has an Established Church or not.

My initial example was about changes-over-time, while you're making comparisons at-one-time between different countries. This is perfectly valid, it's how we should look at everything really: in at least two dimensions. The world is not a simple place and what appears "the same" social driver of change plays out differently in different countries.

Just to return to my first example (because I really don't know enough about established Buddhism or even Islam to try and generalize) ... is there anything to the idea that the 'pressure release valve' blowing and England being relieved of all those Quakers and Shakers and Cuckoo-Clock Makers is what moderated the Church of England? Not so much that those pilgrims were aggressive ... in fact, leaving because they don't like it is not aggressive at all ... but that without their dissent the Church had less reason to cling to it's Established position and oppress other religions. Well, it's just a thought.

[Leepaidamba]

There's a joke made by secularists at times: 'If we wanted an atheist country, we'd make it a Christian country first/we'd be asking for an established national church', or something like that.
I think you're making a bad comparison.
A non-secular state is not much of a problem when the established religion is not much of a problem itself. In the various European countries where this is the case that's because 1) there's great religious diversity, and 2) religiosity is low, and for these reasons the established religion has little reason to be intrusive. However, in countries where there is less religious diversity and people are more religious, the established religion is more likely, even almost certain, to be intrusive. Add to this the decreased tolerance towards people of other religions or none at all by the religious majority which one can expect, and you've got a recipe for disaster.

Meanwhile, in our hypothetical secular state where we can also vary whatever parameter we want, it doesn't really matter how religious everyone is and how diverse all the religions are. The government is free from religious interference, and while in a more religious country like the United states you'll have people getting upset about it and trying their utmost to get rid of it, even denying it outright, you're still just as free to practice whatever religion you happen to or none at all and nobody can really do anything about it just as in those liberal non-secular places. However, you're a lot better of than in the more conservative non-secular countries. And as I've said, that's regardless of who's the majority and how big that majority is.

In other words, a secular state and a good non-secular state are largely indistiguishable, and perhaps a non-secular state is even preferable in that respect. Only when one considers all non-secular states though is it clear that a secular state is overall preferable.

Good analysis. I like the observation that differing strengths of religiosity between different countries is a more significant difference than whether the country has an Established Church or not.

My initial example was about changes-over-time, while you're making comparisons at-one-time between different countries. This is perfectly valid, it's how we should look at everything really: in at least two dimensions. The world is not a simple place and what appears "the same" social driver of change plays out differently in different countries.

Just to return to my first example (because I really don't know enough about established Buddhism or even Islam to try and generalize) ... is there anything to the idea that the 'pressure release valve' blowing and England being relieved of all those Quakers and Shakers and Cuckoo-Clock Makers is what moderated the Church of England? Not so much that those pilgrims were aggressive ... in fact, leaving because they don't like it is not aggressive at all ... but that without their dissent the Church had less reason to cling to it's Established position and oppress other religions. Well, it's just a thought.

While it might have been a contributing factor, I doubt it is really of such importance. Take Sweden for instance. Very few people have fled from religious persecution as far as I know. That's of course not very remarkable given that Sweden's dominance never went beyond the Baltic much. Clearly then religious groups finding a new home overseas is not so much a factor in Sweden's case.
I think it's more the arrival of enlightenment era values and ideas like tolerance, liberty and equality that have been a greater factor. These have been thoroughly engrained across Europe, less so in the US and only sparsely in the "Middle East". I am doubtful that it's a coincidence that religiosity and oppressiveness of the religious towards other religions is inversely related to how strongly these Enlightenment era values and ideas have become a part of the culture.

[Forsakia]

[

Good analysis. I like the observation that differing strengths of religiosity between different countries is a more significant difference than whether the country has an Established Church or not.

My initial example was about changes-over-time, while you're making comparisons at-one-time between different countries. This is perfectly valid, it's how we should look at everything really: in at least two dimensions. The world is not a simple place and what appears "the same" social driver of change plays out differently in different countries.

Just to return to my first example (because I really don't know enough about established Buddhism or even Islam to try and generalize) ... is there anything to the idea that the 'pressure release valve' blowing and England being relieved of all those Quakers and Shakers and Cuckoo-Clock Makers is what moderated the Church of England? Not so much that those pilgrims were aggressive ... in fact, leaving because they don't like it is not aggressive at all ... but that without their dissent the Church had less reason to cling to it's Established position and oppress other religions. Well, it's just a thought.

Many of the pilgrims were intolerant and aggressive, who emigrated because they felt the Anglican church was too moderate in its positions. Cromwell was probably on the more extreme end of the spectrum but not a complete outlier, and during the interregnum puritans (caveat, this was a pejorative and they were more generally known as 'the hotter sort of protestant') did aggressively try to force the rest of the country into following their religious and moral judgements. A significant part of the immigration came when they failed to uphold this in the long term and so they moved to America in the hope of setting up a more perfect congregation there (for this read persecute anyone who didn't agree with them). (Second caveat, I was generalising fearlessly in that last paragraph).

There's a long history of non-conformism in Britain, not all the Quakers etc left and there were significant populations of methodists, etc particularly in the more Celtic regions through the 19th century (often forming close alliances with the Liberal party).

One nice theory is that through the Wars of religion and persecution that raged through from the Tudors, through Edward, Mary, Cromwell, etc was that everything was so bad that people just wanted it to stop generally. They they were willing to 'hold their peace' and give people a measure of religious freedom (mainly based on 'just do it quietly and we won't look too hard') for resulting in the fairly laid back Anglican church that eventually came about.

Likewise the bringing of the church under the power of the monarch largely neutered the church's independent power and so there wasn't the same drive for senior churchmen to express their power by religious crusades.

[AiliailiA]

Good analysis. I like the observation that differing strengths of religiosity between different countries is a more significant difference than whether the country has an Established Church or not.

My initial example was about changes-over-time, while you're making comparisons at-one-time between different countries. This is perfectly valid, it's how we should look at everything really: in at least two dimensions. The world is not a simple place and what appears "the same" social driver of change plays out differently in different countries.

Just to return to my first example (because I really don't know enough about established Buddhism or even Islam to try and generalize) ... is there anything to the idea that the 'pressure release valve' blowing and England being relieved of all those Quakers and Shakers and Cuckoo-Clock Makers is what moderated the Church of England? Not so much that those pilgrims were aggressive ... in fact, leaving because they don't like it is not aggressive at all ... but that without their dissent the Church had less reason to cling to it's Established position and oppress other religions. Well, it's just a thought.

While it might have been a contributing factor, I doubt it is really of such importance. Take Sweden for instance. Very few people have fled from religious persecution as far as I know. That's of course not very remarkable given that Sweden's dominance never went beyond the Baltic much. Clearly then religious groups finding a new home overseas is not so much a factor in Sweden's case.

Sweden does seem to bear out the idea that an Established Church will follow changes in the secular nation which establishes it, more than other churches in the nation.

Stockholm Syndrome

But still, like I said, I don't know that much about Buddhism or Islam, which are the other main Established Churches. This could be a European phenomenon: the churches being established, or escaping disestablishment, because they were already fairly innocuous to the state.

I think it's more the arrival of enlightenment era values and ideas like tolerance, liberty and equality that have been a greater factor. These have been thoroughly engrained across Europe, less so in the US and only sparsely in the "Middle East". I am doubtful that it's a coincidence that religiosity and oppressiveness of the religious towards other religions is inversely related to how strongly these Enlightenment era values and ideas have become a part of the culture.

Hard to separate the Enlightenment from the effects of industrial development, in my opinion. Those values (of liberalism and science) were not new, they simply hadn't been practical before. Most people were just too busy threshing wheat or guarding against their neighbor. No time to think.

Or maybe, it's precisely the oppressiveness of monotheism (have no other gods) which made the dramatic break-out of the Enlightenment possible. While more inclusive religions (polytheist ones) subdue dissent by giving strange beliefs a place within them, more peaceful perhaps but restraining "social movements" from getting on a roll.

I'm totally for the Enlightenment, it must have been a very exciting time to live in (born in the right place, to the right family of course) but a great deal of it was rediscovery of old ideals and principles ... most obviously Greek and Roman ones but there is nothing miraculous about Ancient Greece. Certainly a high point but any kind of good idea has surely been had before.

Very broadly, the Enlightenment ideals are a luxury which follow the individual empowerment of an efficient means of production. There have been great civilizations before, but never with such means to spread so widely.

[Socialdemokraterne]

(Image)

This stuff about the Nordic countries, I already knew. This trend in Vietnam...I did not know this. But you know what they say about correlations and causation, right? We haven't quite yet established that a state church causes higher rates of Atheism or absence of a religious affiliation in one's population.

[Holy Nordic Empire]

(Image)

This stuff about the Nordic countries, I already knew. This trend in Vietnam...I did not know this. But you know what they say about correlations and causation, right? We haven't quite yet established that a state church causes higher rates of Atheism or absence of a religious affiliation in one's population.

That's what makes me ashamed of being a Scandinavian. It's the most decadent place on Earth.
Only atheists, homosexuals, lazy immigrants and feminists can support our ridiculous government.

[Jafas United]

This stuff about the Nordic countries, I already knew. This trend in Vietnam...I did not know this. But you know what they say about correlations and causation, right? We haven't quite yet established that a state church causes higher rates of Atheism or absence of a religious affiliation in one's population.

That's what makes me ashamed of being a Scandinavian. It's the most decadent place on Earth.
Only atheists, homosexuals, lazy immigrants and feminists can support our ridiculous government.

If it makes you feel better, Sverigedemokraterna are looking like they'll be the third largest party after the next election.

[Holy Nordic Empire]

That's what makes me ashamed of being a Scandinavian. It's the most decadent place on Earth.
Only atheists, homosexuals, lazy immigrants and feminists can support our ridiculous government.

If it makes you feel better, Sverigedemokraterna are looking like they'll be the third largest party after the next election.

That would make me happy on behalf of the Swedes.

[Free South Califas]

This stuff about the Nordic countries, I already knew. This trend in Vietnam...I did not know this. But you know what they say about correlations and causation, right? We haven't quite yet established that a state church causes higher rates of Atheism or absence of a religious affiliation in one's population.

That's what makes me ashamed of being a Scandinavian. It's the most decadent place on Earth.
Only atheists, homosexuals, lazy immigrants and feminists can support our ridiculous government.

Only most people, then?

[Free South Califas]

Not sure what the hell is going on there in Vietnam ...

I find the stats for Israel more amusing, what with what it is.

It isn't nearly as paradoxical as it seems. "True Torah Jews", as they're called, oppose the State of Israel. Proud Israelis are more likely to be irreligious. A couple of sayings I heard in Eretz Yisrael illuminate this

"There are two ways to be Jewish, one is buying Coke in Hebrew"

"Relax, we're in Israel. You don't have to be Jewish anymore." (said to an Orthodox Jew who was shocked to arrive at a pig-farming kibbutz)

Edit: Also, there's the whole genocide/land-grabbing/water-hoarding thing