Religion hs been with us from the start, why do people today think its suddenly passe?

The fact religion has always been a part of our lives and the fact that the bible has had immense influence on western society.
The bible was a certain outlook at life by an ancient civilization and includes in itself the different ways of expresing and thinking about life.
Prose, history, poetry, metaphysics, episteme etc..
Sure it was all mixed up and muddled but that was the nature of thought back then. It is valueable exactly because it is a window to how our cultural ancestors thought. We obviously think differentely and in a much more compartmentalized way but our way of living and thinking is not more true in some absolute way, it is simply relativly more true because it is more appropriate for our time and realities.

>It is valueable exactly because it is a window to how our cultural ancestors thought
I agree here, but nothing more. I am not going to accept it as true just because people have in the past thought it was true. there is so much we know now that makes faith illogical. no, I am not talking about the big bang, etc. archeology tells a much different story than the bible in areas that are undisputed among christian denominations to be real history: exodus, judges, samuel, even parts of kings/chronicles.

you just don't understand religion. literalist interpretations are literally the most low tier pleb form of religion possible. its meant to be that way. stupid people can't comprehend the deeper meaning of scripture, but they can still feel the emotional and moral content of it.

the genius of the bible is that it's not some science book that is meant to be proven or disproven by people's observations. it's allegories and symbolism intertwined with myths and history, meant to help you grasp higher truths that can't easily be expressed in words and promote a lifestyle that's healthy and fulfilling. you literally can't prove the bible wrong, it's a lifestyle philosophy and the truths it offers can only be grasped by becoming a practicing christian.

>Do not take the literal, for it is the Hydra that the Hercules had slain in his tales of glory.

>Augustine

His view on literalism was his own personal view, separate from the catechism of the Church establishment, which certainly advocated a literal reading. Even then, Aquinas maintained the literal truth of certain passages but not that of others based on nothing but on arbitrary factors. Anything that sounded like it could lead to contention was a metaphor: everything else was literal.

An example is that of Noah's Ark: Catholics continued to hold the Deluge and the Ark account as a literal event until the rise of modern geological study, at which point they declared it to be a metaphorical story. Backpedaling.

You claimed that Christians believed in literalist interpretations up until the 19th century when they fabricated these allegorical meanings in order to "backpedal".

Non-literal interpretations have been there from the beginning. You being unaware of the history of Christian theology doesn't suddenly mean Christians have only ever been literalists. Now that you're going to try to backpedal and say "I didn't mean ALL christians", I'm going to call you out on it preemptively: unless you're talking about Christianity as some monolithic literalist belief system, your contentions don't make any sense.

Simply put: Why point to literalists as a reason to reject Christianity if you're aware that major Christian figures have denounced explicitly literal interpretations of the Bible? (Augustine is a pretty huge figure to overlook). The answer is that you're uninformed and had absolutely no idea. GGNORE. Time to go to church, young man.

But so what if the church before or even now thinks this way?
Academia is studying and uncovering everything surrounding the biblical writings. It does not matter if the writers were mistaken about certain things. It would not matter if they got more or less right either. They thought it was right or thought it was right to present things a certain way and this can tell us things about them.
Not only that but we can parallel their ways of thinking to certain things we do. Everyone has biases and our understandings will be looked upon as silly in the future as well.
I dont see how showing something the bible has in it to be factually wrong means its not worth contemplating.
No matter what is written in it and if it conforms to our modern views of history should matter on the question of its importance and relevance.
Why would you let mistaken and archaic understandings of the bible to make you dismiss it? Just deal with the intelligent academic understandings of the bible.

>But reading the bible literally is silly. It focuses on the parts that are taken from the time of writing but ignores all the important social and moral conundrems
Protestant cucks got obsessed with the bible, so when it turned out to be fairy tales they lost their faith.

The overwhelming part of humanity used to produce their own food

Religion isn't really passe, though. The same impulses can be seen in the "celebrity scientist" culture that venerates Neil DeGrasse Tyson et al., as well as the reception and recitation of the ridiculous interpretations of "scientific studies" in the news media as opposed to actual scientific rigor, and in the push to produce new organizing structures of morality based on faith alone, e.g. veganism.

I have a hard time taking seriously the ridicule and disdain people these days show toward religious systems they have not even attempted to learn the most basic facts about, while at the same time holding to so many ridiculous notions of their own. Being on the right side of a question, but for entirely the wrong reasons, doesn't make you intelligent.

It's already heavily declined though. Tons of atheists exist now, far more than ever in the past.
If so many people can explicitly reject all religious beliefs and get on with their lives just fine when the right conditions are met, who's to say near enough the whole world couldn't be like that if those conditions arose everywhere?

Though I'm not sure those conditions ever would arise everywhere.
If it did ever happen there would probably always be a few hangers-on, yeah, but it could get to the point where any religious belief is no more respected than belief in ghosts or ancient aliens or a worldwide conspiracy spanning tens of thousands of years orchestrated by reptilian aliens in disguise.

That's just special pleading mysticism, comes across as delusional.

>It's already heavily declined though. Tons of atheists exist now, far more than ever in the past.

False.

People have been saying this shit since the 1970's that religion was going to become obsolete in the next decade but it wasn't true then and it isn't true now. Atheists have and always will be a minority, that dogma doesn't appeal to the common man.

This

Science in modern times has come to be a new religion. A reflection of the intellectual decline of the field and a consequence of removing philosophy from the discipline.

Religion being believed as literal is something new though

What would you call someone who believed the earth was less than 10,000 years old, that Adam and Eve literally existed, that God literally flooded the Earth and only Noah's family and a pair of every animal survived on a boat, and that the damned will literally burn in hell?

A Fundamentalist

Religion isn't passe. It quickly becomes useless when people don't feel as vulnerable as they usually are in the teeth of nature. That is a good canoe sir, but we are at 8000 feet above sea level and rewuire climbing equipment.
Human sacrifice, the spilling of blood to placate our anxiety, was turned into the Eucharist, serving the same need without reinforcing brutality. Bullfighting is the exact halfway point between the two.
By making human sacrifice completely abstract we recognise the basic primitive need and sublimate it, without rejecting it and letting it hide and twist everything else.
So yeah, we have almost completely abandoned human sacrifice, cage fighting and all blood sports are regressive for that reason. Looking at videos of car accidents and murders allows us to temporarily make the anxiety of the human condition someone else's problem.
Once you realise why you do things, you don't have to do them anymore, it's like you've spotted the invisible strings that control you.
Damn right "they know not what they do." Jesus said some truly radical things for his time, amazing understanding of human nature.

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>Religion hs been with us from the start, why do people today think its suddenly passe?

What is the difference between believing in the Jewish sandgod and Zeus?

Nothing, and yet billions of people think they are.

think they are different*

Just because superstition is excised from religion doesn't mean religion won't continue to exist.

It's a bias people hold that religion needs to explain creation and have a catechism, because they live in a world were most of the major religions have them.

As long as we don't know what happens after death and what there was before the Big Bang, religion will continue to exist, because "where do we go" and "where do we come from" are the most fundamental questions humanity asks itself.

Religious Studies Graduate here. (the secular study of religion)

The new data points towards secularization theory being wrong. The world is becoming more religious.

I myself am not a theologian, but I can't deny the new data. Religion is not going anywhere.

This is what I think. The psychological and neurological traits of our brain make us suspectable to religious thought.

I by the way do not see a difference between ideology and religion. Take communism, I find it very a-like a religion.

Isn't Western Europe an exception?

Indeed, pockets are declining, but not as much as you would think.

As a whole, the world is growing in religiosity.

Do you happen to know which ones? I thought the Orthodox church in Russia was especially growing.

Augustine is a fundamentalist then

According to the 2010 Eurobarometer Poll, the percentage of those polled who agreed with the statement "you don't believe there is any sort of spirit, God or life force" varied from: France (40%), Czech Republic (37%), Sweden (34%), Netherlands (30%), and Estonia (29%), down to Poland (5%), Greece (4%), Cyprus (3%), Malta (2%), and Romania (1%), with the European Union as a whole at 20%.[28] In a 2012 Eurobarometer poll on discrimination in the European Union, 16% of those polled considered themselves non believers/agnostics and 7% considered themselves atheists.[214]

According to a Pew Research Center survey in 2012 religiously unaffiliated (including agnostics and atheists) make up about 18% of Europeans.[215] According to the same survey, the religiously unaffiliated are the majority of the population only in two European countries: Czech Republic (75%) and Estonia (60%).[215] There are another four countries where the unaffiliated make up a majority of the population: North Korea (71%), Japan (57%), Hong Kong (56%), and China (52%).[215]

In the US, there was a 1% to 5% increase in self-reported atheism from 2005 to 2012, and a larger drop in those who self-identified as "religious", down by 13%, from 73% to 60%.[217] According to the World Values Survey, 4.4% of Americans self-identified as atheists in 2014.[218] However, the same survey showed that 11.1% of all respondents stated "no" when asked if they believed in God.[218] In 1984, these same figures were 1.1% and 2.2%, respectively. According to a 2015 report by the Pew Research Center, 3.1% of the US adult population identify as atheist, up from 1.6% in 2007, and within the religiously unaffiliated (or "no religion") demographic, atheists made up 13.6%.[219]

In recent years, the profile of atheism has risen substantially in the Arab world.[221] In major cities across the region, such as Cairo, atheists have been organizing in cafés and social media, despite regular crackdowns from authoritarian governments.[221] A 2012 poll by Gallup International revealed that 5% of Saudis considered themselves to be "convinced atheists."[221] However, very few young people in the Arab world have atheists in their circle of friends or acquaintances. According to one study, less than 1% did in Morocco, Egypt, Saudia Arabia, or Jordan; only 3% to 7% in the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Palestine.[222

Entirely due to demographic changes which the west has already experienced.

The human mind cannot fathom the idea of a spiritual void, that there is no divine and life after death. It terrifies the average person that's why atheism is so repulsive to many people.

>I by the way do not see a difference between ideology and religion. Take communism, I find it very a-like a religion.

The whole of human existence has been an attempt to touch the divine. In modern times this need manifests itself through many different outlets ranging from hedonism to ideology. Even atheists worship the gods of materialism even if they will never admit to it.

Proving that atheists are the minority. There are historical precedents why some countries have higher rates of atheists than others ranging from rampant materialism to communist occupation.

>According to a Pew Research Center survey in 2012 religiously unaffiliated (including agnostics and atheists) make up about 18% of Europeans.

Agnosticism is not atheism therefore the data is flawed.

Augustine is a product of his time.

Atheism is undoubtedly more popular now than it was thousands, hundreds and probably even tens of years ago, regardless of the fact that atheists remain a minority.