Am I better than or worse than others? (4-27-22)

Religion in Secular Society: https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=141986

* Religious thinking, religious practices and religious institutions were once at the very centre of the life of Western society, as indeed of all societies. That there were, even in the seventeenth, and certainly in the eighteenth and nineteenth, centuries many unchurched people to whom religious practices and places were alien, and whose religious thinking was a mixture of odd piety, good intentions, rationalizations and superstitions, does not gainsay the dominance of religion. It was entrenched, if not always strictly by law, then by some of the institutions of society, in the customs of the people and by the precepts of the ruling classes. That there were other countervailing forces, economic or political necessity, which frequently overrode God’s will, or churchmen’s apprehension of it, does not contradict the fact that religious motives, religious sanctions and religious professionals were all of them socially of very great influence indeed.
In the twentieth century that situation has manifestly changed, and the process of change continues.

* People’s religious orientations to the world occur within a wider social context with which they interact in highly complex ways. It would be impossible to ignore the growth of new channels for emotional expression, new prospects for the realization of wishes, and new agencies which function for people in ways which, in the past, have been more or less a monopoly of religious agencies. Thus, to choose almost at random, if we look at political movements, we see that the development of industrial society and the emergence of democratic patterns of political behaviour have had diverse consequences of importance for religion. The very conception that social arrangements, distributions of power, wealth, prestige, life chances and the general pattern of life circumstances can be affected by instrumental action, and primarily by mass decision-making (or decision-making in the name of the masses), has in itself gradually altered people’s recourse to demands for supernatural intervention in their affairs. The widespread religious teaching that we must show contentment with our lot, and fulfil our obligations, or, alternatively, the religious hope that God will enter the human scene (again) and impose a new dispensation, are both orientations which diminish in strength as realistic political possibilities are increasingly apprehended. The change of focus from the afterlife to this one has obviously been strongly associated with this development of the sense of social self-direction.

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