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"American democracy is under attack from an authoritarian movement."

The thesis:

"The development in the American religious landscape that often attracts media interest is the rise of the “nones”—those who do not identify with any religion. But more attention should be paid to a countervailing trend: fast-growing varieties of reactionary forms of American Christianity that frequently claim to be engaged in “spiritual warfare.” These varieties share several key features: They are essentially dualistic, in that their adherents are encouraged to believe in the reality of a principle of evil in the world that takes the form of demons or unholy spirits. And they are very much religions of “the here and now,” as the author Elle Hardy put it. That is, they read the struggles between good and evil in the daily headlines, and they promise earthly, material rewards to those who join the struggle on their side."

https://substack.com/home/post/p-166169334

When has religion NOT tried to take over everything?

And, for a while, they were pretty successful. There were kings, but most didn't want to cross the Church.

In much of the world, that has been waning for a couple of centuries. I think it is surviving here longer, ironically, because of the 1st Amendment. We have no state-sponsored religion, deliberately. But that allows lots of religions to flourish, and some of them are dominionistic. And they see the 1st Amendment as saying "freedom to practice only our religion".

They need to be slapped-down, but that won't happen until we have Dems in control for a couple of terms. Dominionists have infiltrated the Reps, and are attacking separation of church and state from within.

And MAGA is, according to the demographics, mostly uneducated (mostly males) that don't know any better. Yeah, that sounds condescending. I don't mean it to, but it's a fact.

When has religion NOT tried to take over everything?

And, for a while, they were pretty successful. There were kings, but most didn't want to cross the Church.

In much of the world, that has been waning for a couple of centuries. I think it is surviving here longer, ironically, because of the 1st Amendment. We have no state-sponsored religion, deliberately.

I don't regard "freedom of speech" as the culprit. Beliefs are stand-ins for ignorance – deficits of verifiable understanding.

Human evolutionary mechanisms are enormously challenged to accommodate the recent rapidly accelerating evolution of technology that is enabling dramatically expanding influence of social media on scales ranging from local to global. A recent study suggests that a majority of the US population now gets their news from scatter-shot social media rather than respected and at least to some extent disciplined sources.

"The proportion accessing news via social media and video networks in the United States (54%) is sharply up, overtaking both TV news (50%) and news websites/apps (48%) for the first time." So if you were wondering why divisive, angst-inducing, fear-mongering content continues to dominate news cycles, this is probably why.

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/reuters-digi...

Over countless millennia we've evolved from lifelong tribal persuasions to national identities and religious affiliations to globally contagious perspectives via social-media. And now, the emergence of AI is bound to amplify this trend, for better or worse.

Here's a Perplexity.AI response to the prompt "belief versus knowledge" [I hope this link works for others. If not, simply go to Perplexity.AI (Pro) and search for "Belief versus knowledge".]:

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/belief-versus-kno...

The included table labeled Key Distinctions is of particular interest.

Tom

I don't regard "freedom of speech" as the culprit.

The 1st Amendment is more than freedom of speech. It's also freedom of religion and freedom of the press. I was referring to freedom of religion.

But I do agree about Americans getting information from social media. On another board, a particular poster is always linking to "X". X is not a news source, but he persists. I won't even click on a link to X (Twitter). Sadly, I am now in the minority.

But, then, as an atheist, I'm used to be in a minority. Maybe I should try to emigrate to Denmark. About 80% of their population is atheist.

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