Indoctrinated parents indoctrinate kids.
See also: religion.
I’m just perplexed how kids are still religious in 2024 with vast amount of free information out there. I thought this cult bullshit was about to end with my generation when we got free, unrestricted information exchange invented.
I guess you can’t fix irrationality with rationality huh
From my perspective its because people won’t change their beliefs unless they stop benefiting the believer. For people who live in a religious community, there church’s sunday social event is enjoyable, there friends are all religious, there denomination provides a entire moral framework and worldview they don’t even need to think about. Confirmation bias plays a major role in preventing alternate thought to block out other worldviews.
Only when someone does not gain much benefit from there religion or has a important part of there religion proven wrong, can they process alternative ideologies and either switch to a more useful denomination or stop believing entirely.
Yep I have a friend who joined a church after not going to one for years because of the social aspects of it. Lots of people their age to relate to.
We just need better secular groups to join with those benefits that aren’t tied to religion. It’s one of the reasons I’m always apprehensive about volunteering because I don’t want the connection to religion. I know it doesn’t matter my intent for those who benefit/what benefits from the volunteering, but it affects my long term commitment to the cause.
But being closer to more “true” metaphysics and rationality is benefiting, though I guess that’s probably not obviously apparent to everyone.
A lot of them need to be actively exposed to other views and opinions to break free. So usually when they go to college.
but internet does all that too. Especially more immersive social media like Youtube or podcasts. I’m generally very optimistic but the progress of our information network as someone who lived through it turned out much weaker than we thought it’d be. Maybe that human exposure of college is much more powerful thant basically infinite knowledge at your fingertips.
That’s taking it too far, in my opinion. I realize it’s supremely unpopular to be a person of faith nowadays, especially online, but you can’t say that anyone with faith is stupid and it’s all bullshit as a blanket statement. You don’t know what happens after we die, and neither do I. I can’t prove that God definitely exists and I’ll probably never convince you of it, but by the same token, you can’t prove that God doesn’t exist.
Where we diverge is I think it’s okay that you believe that. And yes, of course you can point out the shitty people that use religion to persecute and restrict others’ rights, to punish, and worse. Many people do this, but they are still the vocal minority we hear about. And it’s not like there haven’t been terrible atheists/agnostics who have done awful things not motivated by religion…
Me, personally, I also won’t attend any church that tries to be political or tell its members how to vote. I am a Christian, but I try to model my religious activity on the Sikhs: quiet, respectful, loving outreach to improve the world. So I can acknowledge the problems, but no, I don’t think all religion is bad nor every person of faith stupid…
Edit: spelling
They didn’t say stupid, you did. They said irrational, which it is. You’re right no one can prove that there is no afterlife, but believing in something that there is no evidence for is the definition of irrational. That doesn’t mean I’m saying you’re stupid, I’m just saying that it’s irrational. No need to get offended, that’s just what words mean.
It’s not the belief that makes you “stupid” is the irrationality of the whole package. If you’re looking for metaphysics answers - we got them. People tried to figure out this stuff since the beginning of time with rationality and logic and even experiments rather than blind faith to words they never even heard personally. That’s the difference.
I don’t discriminate against the religious but it’s really easy to argue that reglious approach is taking the easy approach to metaphysics and it’s something important to consider here.
Most people are not actually people, they are people-like imposter automatons and they are dumb as hell and can be manipulated like clay.
By bro still believes because they get you so early. I basically tell him he’s an idiot for being a christian, also fucking his kids up, but jesus says it’s cool. So that is how it happens.
My friend got sucked into it because of a girl. His parents weren’t religious. I don’t think he had gone to church more than twice in his life by high school, and he, just like the rest of us, trash talked our school’s requirements to have a ‘chapel’ hour once a week. He was as blasé as they come about religion, perhaps an agnostic in the christian hemisphere at best, but when he started dating a christian girl, he went to church with her, made friends with her friends at church, etc. Now 15 years later he’s indoctrinating his kids with her, and a deacon at his church. The power of social influence is enormous. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to break free, or even just consider information that is contradictory, if you have the combination of early influence and the later social influence from family, friends, and the wider social circle that is part and parcel of a church.
I’m a Zoomer, and one of my best friends is very religious precisely because of the internet. He reads the Bible online a lot, and is in a bunch of Christian Discord servers, and often reads up theology. To be fair, he is very progressive on pretty much all issues except birth control, he isn’t a blind authority-obeyer, and is totally fine with me being agnostic.
Religion is not always a cult. All religions are not like Christianity.
See Hinduism, Buddhism, confussionism
Nah they’re still cults. People have this morphed view that religion is not a cult when it is by the very definition of it:
cult n: followers of an exclusive system of religious beliefs and practices
Not to say that cults can’t be net good in some form but once they grow past local community I think it’s just impossible to not lose the mission to bad actors.
Hinduism is the textbook definition of a cult. It’s just old AF, so we give it a pass.
Nah, religion is always a cult.
Imo cults have more to do with in-groups and out-groups and their relation in your mental space.
If your in-group is worth more to you than the total sum of all out-groups; you are in a cult.
Humanity is one race, subdividing it and labelling all the chunks is where we went wrong. The fact we have a word to describe this outcome shows we are pretty far down this tube.
If you’re reading this and think to yourself “surely this person is misled, they’re not a part of (insert religion) so wouldn’t know anything about what they say” congratulations, you’re right (and also in a cult).
Exactly. My nephews seem to complain about the shit their dad told them to vote for. It’s rather hilarious.
The fuck happened to the rebelliousness of youth?
Should kids be doing exactly not whatever their parents tell them to?
Kids these days… GET ON MY LAWN!!
The fuck happened to the rebelliousness of youth?
Pure propaganda. Kids are more than happy to follow behind their older peers and always have been.
It’s “rebellion” if the kids literally anything at all. Speak up? Question anything? Show any kind of agency? Mimic what your elders are doing? You’re out of control.
Yep. They were taught to hate people and that “Trumps” voting to improve things, or bring down costs…
The hate and negativity is such a big part of it. It’s kind of the foundation, really. It sounds simple, but it is the main thing I had to train out of my brain while figuring out wtf I want out of life and how to enjoy the journey.
If I’m hanging out with family still stuck in that mindset and discussing an acquaintance? You bet I’m going to hear what race they are (if not white, which is the default human in their minds), how big of a house they have, how much money they make, and of course how stupid they are. Nothing of substance.
All that negativity, paranoia, and anger makes it much easier to get the conservative base to not spend time thinking about the suffering of others, and instead think about how much stuff they’ve acquired and how the “other” people want to steal it.
It’s a strange position for me to be in, personally. I can see how somebody would stay immersed in that shitty mindset for life without exposure to the wider world, because I know the feeling of living in that mindset (let’s call it high school). However, I also have eyes and ears and access to the internet, and I think all available information should be considered even if reality has a liberal bias.
Well, if you question it, you are a bad person and going to hell. It’s not that God doesn’t love you, but you are forcing God to send you to hell because you are choosing to question.
See also: reactionary movements.
I sometimes really want to show those reactionary gamers a trial version of the authoritarian society they stive for…
So send them a documentary on what happened in NAZI Germany.
But don’t be surprised when they tell you that’s exactly what they want because they’re white men and it puts them at the top of the heirarchy.
Being born into a conservative household can be a hard hurdle to clear. I grew up with the unquestioning belief that the left was straight-up evil (shocker: that was projection) but then moved around a ton and worked alongside a huge diversity of people after highschool cuz I joined the military and didn’t have a choice: that exposure was a real shock, but since our brains don’t like being wrong, I resisted it for a good while before finally acknowledging that I was acting like a moron and started thinking more critically about politics and what political decisions meant for my community.
Not everyone gets that healthy slap-to-their-senses. Doesn’t excuse shit, but that’s the ‘why’.
It’d be interesting to see some actual political metrics on other service members. The military is always seen as being SOLID red, and while yes it does lean that way, the tiny bubble of the military that was my personal field of view seemed maybe a 60-40 split; and I personally went in red, and separated borderline radical blue. I know at least a handful of others who did the same… no idea if it’s always been that way, or if this is a developing trend. Or if I happened to be stationed in an uncharacteristically blue slice of military. /shrug.
This is my exact story to a “t”. I grew up in a heavily conservative household, joined the military as a conservative, and 15 years later I’m pretty fucking blue.
I think it’s a combination of a few things that does it to us more often than not:
1 - Exposure to people from all walks of life/escaping your “bubble” 2 - Access to tax payer funded social programs that the rest of America desperately fucking needs and going “Why can’t taxes do this for EVERYONE!?” 3 - If you’ve been deployed to certain sections of the world, you see first-hand what unfettered religious extremism can potentially do to a country.
I’m happy to say, that at least for the Air Force, I’ve run into far, far more Active Duty Dems/Libs than I have any Repubs. Now, when the retired veteran GS employees come in, it’s a completely different story. My whole circle save one is fairly left-leaning, and the one who isnt is…fucking weird/all over the place on his stances.
30% of your time being red. 30% of your time coming to your senses. 40% of your time trending towards borderline radical blue.
There is your 60/40 split.
Anecdotally, this was somewhat my experience as well, except my parents didn’t talk politics much and they certainly didn’t show the extreme hate towards the left that fox and rush have since incited. I went more from voting on surface level attributes (speaking ability, apparent warmth, etc) and social pressure, to actually [eventually] looking at policy. I was a registered independent when I joined, but I didn’t know enough about actual politics to understand the details of what I was voting for. I.e., I was going with the flow. It has the same effect at the ballot box though.
what was the red/blue percent (in your opinion) if you only included officers and above?
No clue. I was enlisted - talking politics at all was taboo, but rules like that are only ever followed while in management’s field of view.
I’d assume officers behaved similarly - tending to keep certain topics locked up around enlisted, but talking more openly when it’s just them.
Well put.
I think a lot of your political beliefs start with your parents and people around you, but then are shaped by what happens to you. If you get hit with the hard reality of life in some way (debt, health, etc) it tends to push you to be more progressive/empathetic toward others because you see just how truly cold and cruel the bottom of our society gets treated. If you have coasted through life and have parents and friends supporting you financially and we’re lucky enough to get a good job and have relatively good health and such then you may not know the horrors of what can happen if you hit a few rough patches.
Similarly in military service, if you get injured and now have to go to the VA and fight to receive the most basic of medical care you were promised and denied it tends to push you left/progressive because you want things to be better. If you are still in the service or left it relatively undamaged then you could easily still see things from a conservative and right leaning perspective.
When you or people close to you get (denied medical care, denied housing, denied work, pushed into poverty and/or homelessness, used by the system and then discarded like trash) you tend to see things more progressive and want to provide some basic levels of support and humanity and empathy toward others as opposed to exploiting them for profit.
It’s embarrassing for everyone gen x and after. It’s especially disappointing to see in gen z
For men, a lot of it has to do with personal frustration and several “sources” or “influencers” pointing to communism, cultural marxism, feminism, etc, as the culprits of everything bad going on. Attacking a scapegoat you’ve been led to believe is “the reason” you can’t get a job or a girlfriend is easy and emotionally satisfying.
Thinking, rationalizing and realizing how and why shit’s fucked up, down, left and right doesn’t fill you with good vibes.
If you want an honest answer, it’s that young boys are feeling left behind, and in many ways they are right. This is a longer video (~30min) but it seems in line with much of what I’ve been seeing, that the boys are not alright.
Essentially, as any system begins to give equality to all, it will appear as a loss for those who used to solely benefit from it. That said this is still something to take seriously.
The gender gap is reversed in several areas: in education girls do better than boys. There are more women in university than men. Real wealth of women has been rising while in many demographics (especially poor young men of color) wealth has been decreasing. This is not a 0 sum game, so these are real concerns. 75% of suicides are men, and in their notes it is common to see words like “useless” “unwanted” and “worthless”. They feel that the world is leaving them behind.
This trend is not happening to those in the elite class- that is still very much male dominated, however for many poor men without college degrees, their lives are no longer looking like what they were raised to expect. That same demographic is who you are more likely to see at a trump rally.
This is fertile ground for people like Tucker Carlson and Andrew Tate to bring these young men into their world view that women are taking away their futures.
This is where I would say men who are in places of being role models (teachers, mentors, fathers, coaches, pastors, etc…) need to come in and show that there is a new reality for men and that it’s not only okay, it’s better. Being a stay at home dad can be freeing as you may be able to pursue other interests. Showing what leadership is is important, but also showing how to work as a team and under the leadership of a woman is important too and can be fulfilling.
I’m an educator, and one thing I think about is that I want to teach the girls that men are not to be feared, and to teach the boys not to be men to be afraid of. There is a better future ahead, but only if we take action and support the next generation of boys as well as girls. Without this support, we are handing a large portion of disaffected youth to a toxic mindset that will have horrible consequences.
Oddly enough, I could see one of these boys looking at this post and thinking “the left doesn’t care about me, so why would I care about them?”
I really needed to read this this is the best comment I’ve read on this platform and it hits right home. I fell within those circles of alt-right the only thing that saved me was my willingness to accept being wrong and my pragmatism.
I’m an educator, and one thing I think about is that I want to teach the girls that men are not to be feared, and to teach the boys not to be men to be afraid of.
Thank you. I’m sick of seeing “white men need to step back”. “Oh god, another white man trying to force his opinions on us.” This stuff would be horribly racist if you replace white with black. (except for the black people can’t be racist meme…)
cultural marxism
As someone who lost a friend to that rabbit hole, I really think we should put that far right conspiracy theory between quotation marks when named alongside things that actually exist. Communism and feminism are real (even if they are perceived as demonic by these people, they still at least exist). “Cultural marxism” doesn’t even have entity, it’s just bullshit entirely made up by the usual grifters
It’s a Nazi dogwhistle.
But you don’t need a scapegoat. The problem is literally the billionaires. You only need a scapegoat to justify white supremacist hierarchy building.
Or are the billionaires the scapegoat caused by a system we helped create? They lobby and use greed to get where they have gotten but we enable all of it. If we believe capitalism is beneficial to society we have to accept regulations to keep the money flowing back down. EVERY person that votes against such should be afraid for their lives at every moment period. If they are not it is our failure, not theirs. The lives of the majority are suffering not because Elon Musk is a douche, but because we created a system a douche could take advantage of.
Did… did you just copy their comment word for word and posted it as a reply‽
Why? (And now don’t anyone suggest a bot, because that’s stupid programming for a bot so unlikely, hopefully)
Why? (And now don’t anyone suggest a bot, because that’s stupid programming for a bot so unlikely, hopefully)
Actually it’s not stupid programming.
AI bot models have to be created from something. It’s not just a human being explicitly telling a bot to do X or Y, they study how other humans make posts, and then mimic them based on their models.
Bots are studying how certain people here on Lemmy (and elsewhere) do comments, and then mimic what they’re doing, to try to blend in. You’ll even see bots replying to bots in like kind, to try to add credibility to the original comment being replied to.
To be fair if you’re anything past Boomer, at this point you should be too embarrassed to vote for any GOP candidate. When the party decided to support Trump—a guy with proven sexual assault charges, pending fraud charges, pending classified document charges, a penchant for insurrection that he happily acknowledges, and more and more video surfacing of him unable to be coherent, hopefully most everyone with any connection to reality has realized it’s time to kick him and the GOP to the curb.
The Boomers should be mortified. Their parents were the one who sacrificed their young adulthood to eliminate the Nazis 80 years ago. They’re spitting on their parents’ graves by supporting Trump.
The problem is, boomers are the most selfish generation. The other name for their generation is the Me Generation, because after the war, after the depression, their parents had done all the hard work, been through all the hard times, and started to get money and financial security and so they gave their children everything they wanted creating the absolute selfishness we see today. They don’t care a lick about their parents sacrifices because they had everything they ever wanted and for them it’s all about “me, me , me!”