I guess religion, being so heavily based on interpretation and divination of various kinds is also more flexible when it comes to adapting to a changing environment. Backtracking, re-interpreting, etc. might be big in politics, but it's even easier in Religion. This fits in nicely with your point about uncertainty regarding how religion impacts morality.

After all, the factors that make the impact of religion on various social phenomena uncertain also make it easy for religion to adapt to changing social, political or economical conditions... (although not infinitely so, as Darwinism has shown...)

Aspects of the environmental movement can mirror religious ideas pretty well, if they are, indeed, not the same thing. Awe of natural forces is the original religion certainly, but when people says it's "wrong" to let species go extinct or even that pollution is a "sin," you know less than cold headed materialism is at work.

P.S. I myself am an eco-freak, but solely on aesthetic grounds. Letting the ivory-billed woodpecker go extinct is akin to volitionally burning down the Louvre. It won't shorten my lifespan, but it's just so goddamn stupid.

More important than the mortality of a Castro, is the fact that socialism promises a this-worldly utopia, and is therefore easily falsifiable, whereas religion generally promises an other-worldly utopia, and is therefore not as easily subject to the evidence of our "lying eyes."

Ah yes, but the Bolshevik doctrine was always that "We are building Socialism, which will pave the way for a Communist utopia some day in the future." (In direct contradiction to Marx, whose theory stated a fully developed capitalist economy is a necessary prerequisite for socialism and communism).

In Marxist theory, Communism was alluded to in only the most vague terms and was completely different from any socialist system in existence. For instance, Marx thought Communism would replace the division of labor with a more free-flowing work programme where a person could fish one day and work in a factory another.

The American-libertarian trope that "Communism doesn't work" is off the mark, since nobody claimed to actually practice Communism.

Lenin and Stalin were more like Marxist Constantines. Marxism itself depended on some kind of invisible dialectical hand of history based on material conditions. I think you're on the money: religion is a way to get poor people organized and active as a mass movement, in contrast to rich people (who simply enjoy their abundance of stuff). Materialist religion doesn't work too well.

The most effective "political religions" are not those that revere an individual, but those that revere an institution. Or, even more, revere a principle, and declare some institution a fundamental expression of that principle.

Castro, for example, is not a Castroist. People who are loyal to Castro don't think of themselves as Castroists, either. They think of themselves as believing in Communism and in Cuba, and by "Cuba" they mean the specific institution which is the Cuban Communist Party and the government it controls.

Leader worship is a fairly minor aspect of 19th and 20th century political religion. Its main focus has been reverence of the large corporate institutions we call "nations."

Nation-worship (nationalism) strikes me as quite durable indeed. And the only political religion that threatens to replace it, transnational universalism, is even scarier.

How's Unionism doing? Are you a Unionist? Is anyone you know not a Unionist? Do they believe, like Lincoln, that the United States is a mystical and eternal pact between generations? Or do they believe, like me, that it's a gigantic corporation whose principal asset is a couple hundred million serfs, whose separation of agent and principal is nonexistent, whose balance sheet makes Enron look like Google, and which needs restructuring the way Britney Spears needs a new wardrobe?

The fall of the Soviet Union is a minor, if encouraging, exception. But it certainly would be difficult to look at the last two centuries and say that "churches" have been more successful than "nations" at seizing, holding, and manipulating large populations of hominids.

when people says it's "wrong" to let species go extinct or even that pollution is a "sin," you know less than cold headed materialism is at work.

Yes, though an atheist I felt nuclear war was "blasphemous" and I could not find a better word.

Holland's Post-Secular Future

I wonder if anyone here has read "The God Theory" by Bernard Haisch. It is written by a scientist with impressive credentials who believes that religion and science can coexist, and that it is even rational to believe in a God. Although his main arugments are that the laws of Physics are "just right" for life to even exist, his other arguments are still convincing.

I recall traveling in a minority region of China (Kashgar) about 20 years ago. The locals would tell you that religion is a drug. But if you ask them what happens in the afterlife, they tell you that you'll meet Mao, sitting on a throne.

Not sure how widespread that particular belief is.

Mencius,

Here is an easy way to test the strength of religion versus nationalism in the contemporary USA.

Go up to fifty randomly chosen people in the USA and tell them you hate Christianity and that you hope it is wiped off the face of the earth.

Then go up to another fifty randomly chosen people in the US and tell them that you hate the USA and you hope it is wiped off the map as an independent nation.

Count how many times you get beat up in each experiment.

I have, in effect, done the first experiment: my hatred of Christianity is not appreciated, but no one has hit me (yet). A sweet demure Christian girl did tell me that I was "full of s**t."

I'm afriad to try the second experiemnt: I think some redneck might kill me.

Anyone have more courage than I do and want to test if religion or nationalism is stronger in the USA?

DM,

Your experiment sounds like apples and oranges, but it isn't.

For reference, try the same experiment with pizza. Say you hate pizza and you want it to be wiped off the face of the earth.

No one will take you seriously. But this is not evidence of a lack of pro-pizza sentiment. It does not show that of your 50 people, few or none eat pizza.

And the same is the case for your US example. It is not the case for Christianity, which (in the sense that Americans use that term) is fighting for its life against a generally hostile government.

In other words, the fact that a threat to A can invoke strong emotions, whereas a threat to B cannot, does not mean that A is stronger than B. It may mean just the reverse.

Furthermore, most people who harbor bad feelings against the USA are not decentralists, who want to shut the thing down and transfer its powers back to the 50 states.

Rather, in general, they are universalists and transnationalists, and their complaint is that the USA is not living up to "its own values." (Which they probably hold because the USA or its allies conquered their country at some point.) Instead, they fear that the USA is acting not in the interests of the world at large, but only in the interests of Americans.

Quelle surprise! If only the charge had a little more truth to it...

Mencius,

Well, personally, I want to transfer the power back to the fifty states and then transfer the power from each state back to the counties, and then... well, you get the idea.

But the fondness that you and I seem to share for decentralism is not really relevant to razib's initial post.

I was trying to address your earlier comment about the strength of nationalism. My own experience is that most Americans have much deeper emotional feelings for the American “nation” than for their own religion.

My proposed experiment (which I lack the guts to actually carry out) was a possible way to test this feeling.

Surely, someone must have more solid data than my gut feelings as to whether most Americans are more committed to their nation or to their religion?

Instead, they fear that the USA is acting not in the interests of the world at large, but only in the interests of Americans.

Quelle surprise! If only the charge had a little more truth to it...

Huh?
Do you mean that you believe that "the USA is acting in the interests of the world at large" ?

Actually I think that the "USA" is not acting in the interests of Americans (apart for a few of them and even this is not sure in the long run...)

I suppose you could try burning either a flag or a bible in public to see which would create more of a stir. My sense is that people became much less tolerant of anti-US rhetoric in the US post 9/11. I assume this is because of the sense of us being under attack or threat, and the sort of "you're with us or against us" feelings that brings out. Movements try to stir up the feeling of being under siege because that feeling makes people more loyal, more generous, more committed. If the Islamic terrorists are a few random nuts who can occasionally kill a few hundred people, somewhat less of a threat to most of us than street crime, then we don't necessarily all unify to fight them. If it's a Clash of Cultures, the West vs. the Muslims, then maybe we all need to pull together and fight. It's not hard to see which one of these you'd rather convince everyone of, if you were in the white house....

DM,

I share your decentralist perspective, but the point is that most people consider our views nuts. As such you can't really expect them to elicit an emotional reaction.

My point was that emotional attachment, as measured by the experiment you propose, is a measure of how controversial the institution is, not how powerful it is. Most people in AD1400 did not consider the Catholic Church controversial, and so would not have had a strong emotional response to the idea of getting rid of it - they would have simply dismissed it as wacky. As, again, they do with decentralists today.

In fact it is very easy to imagine what the US would look like if Dawkins had his way and "religion" were done away with by administrative fiat. It would be very similar to what it is now. Whereas if you imagine North America with a self-described Christian church that exacted 40% tithes, administered almost everything that can be described as "education," etc, etc, you are very much in Margaret Atwood territory.

Kevembuangga: the US definitely is acting in what it, or at least a certain set of its officials, perceives to be the best interests of the world. They also believe that, fortuitously, this happens also to correspond to the best interests of Americans, but that is not really the context in which they think. Obviously I would dispute both of these propositions.