this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2024
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Most people are not religious - https://news.gallup.com/poll/511133/identify-religious-spiritual.aspx#:~:text=WASHINGTON%2C%20D.C.%20%2D%2D%20Nearly%20half,say%20they%20are%20neither%20religious
"nearly half" is not "most".
That's if you're including spiritual as non-religious.
Only 18% of people in that poll were described as neither (Atheist).
I believe he was getting at religion as the problem, not spirituality. If you look at the BITE model, which is used to determine if a group displays cult like behavior, both flat earthers and many religions fall into the category of cults. Spirituality does not, as it is not organized.
As someone who grew up in a part spiritual household I heavily disagree. Flat earthers and traditional spiritualists like Neo-Pagans, Wiccans, etc, have the exact same amount of organization, if flat earthers are a cult, then so are most spiritualist groups.
Most flat earthers aren't in some organized cult, they get their misinformation from Facebook posts and YouTube videos, with there being a couple of small actually organized groups. The exact same can be said about spiritualists, just generally they used to get their spiritual beliefs from books instead of the internet (though that's changed now for spiritualists too).
If anything, I'd bet there's more people in actually organized spiritualist groups than there are in actually organized flat earther groups.
Yes, that's still and organization. Wicca is a religion, by definition.
Also, cults do not have to be organized by a leader, they can simply be a loose group. The BITE model accounts for this.
I suppose what I was getting to is personal spirituality. Any group that is working to push/enforce their ideas and world view could easily become a cult. Flat earthers, yoga moms, whatever.
You're going to nit pick spiritual vs religious? If we're being pedantic, you're citing us population, the world is much different. Also even if we accept it's only about half, my point still stands.
I think spiritual vs religious can be an important difference. Generally speaking it's organized religions that are causing major harm not the individuals who believe their is something beyond our physical reality.
But isn't the argument about critical thinking skills? I'm sure it's nice to believe in Gaia but there is demonstratively no evidence for it.
The question of harm done is independent to that of gullibility.
Isn't manipulating and preying on the gullible the main way that religion causes harm?
Gulliblity isn't binary. I'd argue that those buying into organized religion are more gullible than people who identify as "spiritual." If I asked you to rank people from least to most gullible based only on their religion, would you not rank a person that considers themselves spiritual but not drawn to a particular church higher than a member of a pentecostal church that regularly attends faith healing events?
Finally, this part is anecdotal but, the majority of people I know that consider themselves spiritual but not religious are people that attended one or more churches for a while but questioned or took issues with parts of those churches teachings. They may believe that there is some form sky daddy watching over us but, by they have displayed a degree of critical thinking. I can't present concrete proof that sky daddy isn't real so, as long as they aren't using that belief to cause harm, I see no reason to immediately distrust someone simply for considering themselves spiritual.
We all agree that people who organize religions can do so goe nefarious reasons. But the argument was that you can't trust religious people because they are irrational...but then if they call themselves spiritual, well that doesn't really count.