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I feel like the current discourse advocating religion is pretty similar to the current discourse advocating wokeness. People probably know it's bullshit, but push it anyway because they think lying the right way will bring us a better world. A type of person thinks that sure, it's bullshit, but it's our good sort of bullshit that keeps the queers and the degenerates down instead of elevating them and will lead to prosperity and clean cities. Only you're still lying about important things, you know you are, and the same dynamics that broke down the consensus religion of previous generations will hit you as well.
What do you make of God not being a viable concept to appeal to in public discourse? We're living in a sort of mixed postmodern picture where everything is real and truths don't matter when it's about the dignity of religious people, but then if there is a global pandemic the alternative truth that microbes don't exist and sickness arises from peoples' chakras being spiritually misaligned will not be given equal hearing. Right now metaphysical beliefs from any religion seem to have no purchase in the sort of consensus reality discourse that says things like "our ongoing pandemic is caused by contagious microbes". If the place of religion in society is that the secular morlocks go "that's very nice dear, now go play in the corner, we've got three nuclear power plants to build and an mRNA vaccine to sequence against the latest pandemic", how does that look for religion's claimed capability to ascertain very important things about existence? People who like religions seem to want to generally to downplay this instead of honestly thinking what it entails. Fighting science hasn't gone very well, religious people enthusiastically tried, got trounced, and then developed sophisticated ideas about "separate magisteria" and coexisting with science. Coexisting with science is tricky as well, since science keeps moving. You can go "but consciousness!" today, but what if we get a broadly accepted scientific theory of consciousness in 2038? People who wanted to keep space for religion could go "but élan vital!" in 1910 but that one was doing significantly worse 50 years later. Doesn't stop people from still trying though.
The public discourse thing seems to not be just about the rise of science, it's also about the rise of cosmopolitanism. It's hard to ignore that there have been multiple very different world religions that all have had significant civilizations associated with them. "Why are you convinced it's specifically the religion you were raised in that's right" is a tough question. It's not a question asking you to tell you what you like specifically about your own religion. It's asking that if you think your own religion gets something specifically right that other religions don't, isn't it a bit suspicious it's mostly people who were raised in that religion who think so, and people who were raised with other world religions by and large happy there. If you take the consciousness and quantum physics thing seriously instead of just dishonestly dishing it out as apologetics for your pre-existing bottom line, this is a problem, because you're fishing for something that's the same in everyone's reality, not just a nice story of cultural tradition. Even if you think something like a first mover argument is convincing, it doesn't specify the God of Abraham who is particularly disgusted by the sight of human feces. If you take religions at face value, at most one can be right, but religious people who claim inner conviction of the truth of their own religion specifically seem to be happy with their own thing and there's no widespread movement of Sikhs, Shintoists, Catholics, Orthodox Zoroastrians and Jains going "so I looked into this American Mormonism thing and turns out my inner conviction of the truth of God now feels like the Mormons got a better picture of things than the thing I was raised with." So if there's one correct religion, religious people seem to not be very good at discovering it, and if you want to think that the religions all point to the same thing, then you run afoul with many religions themselves saying, nope, our specific picture is correct, people who think otherwise are damned heathens. If you think the first mover is valid but are agnostic about everything past that, you can't very honestly commit to an existing religion like Christianity that demands adherence to all sorts of specific things beyond that, and you lose the social cohesion angle. And if you want to stick with your one specific religion while ignoring this part, you've sunken pretty well into the woke-equivalent "we know it's bullshit but we'll lie to everyone that it's true to reap social benefits" thing again.
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