The trouble with pronouns is that there's no way to politely sidestep around the issue at hand. A Christian would take far more offense at a Jew saying "Jesus was a false messiah" than "that's not my religion" to them when declining an invitation to a Christmas party or some such, even though the actual meaning of both statements is the same. We probably wouldn't have the Peace of Westphalia if declarations of religious faith were literally baked into our language.
I feel like your modern history here is a bit too US-centric, and specifically too liberal-US-Internet-centric. In your comments in the podcast and implicitly in the last part of this post, you draw a direct line from New Atheism to reduced religiosity to Wokism (SJP).
Like it was inevitable that once enough people had lost Christianity, they would replace it with something worse.
From a European perspective that's not clear to me at all. The most atheistic places are East Germany and the Czech Republic. Neither place is particularly hospitable to SJP and there is nothing else in its place.
If you only look at places that were not behind the Iron Curtain, then it's France and that also stands out as resisting SJP. Sweden and the Netherlands are less Christian than France, but have many more spiritual agnostics than atheists and seem superficially more susceptible to SJP. So maybe you could argue that it's people who stopped being religious, but didn't adopt an atheistic materialistic worldview that are the more likely converts. Though now I'm at pure speculation and that would have to be checked further.
So I do want to absolve a bit of your guilt. Atheism does not inevitably lead to worse semi-religions.
Also, I somewhat doubt that New Atheism was even big enough to cause the big drop in religiosity in the last 2 decades in the US. How many average people ever even heard of it or were convinced by it anyway?
So where did SJP come from? There's various theories out there and I like some of them more than others, but in the end it might just be somewhat random. Why does the Zeitgeist do what it does? Who really knows? We don't have parallel universes to observe to check if they also developed liberalism, christian revivals (the original Awakenings), romanticism, socialism, corporatism, feminism, the counterculture, and many other big mass movements.
I think it's possible to have religious passion and the peace, I get the impression that's basically how Asia does it (or did it, since the world is secularizing). India in particular has a great diversity of religious positions, and it's really only the Muslims that made it tricky, because, like Christians, they're Abrahamic, which means they take the view the Truth can be contained in a single doctrine, which is the sort of thing that can get you bloody wars of religion.
Henry Kissinger has a long section in his book /World Order/ on the Peace of Westphalia. He credited the POW with creating a new world order, not so much by the terms of the treaties allowing Christian freedom (you could be Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist), but by the precedent set by the proceedings, which was to keep religion out of international affairs, to set recognized boundaries and set aside claims of inheritance, ancestry, history, etc., to tacitly accept that henceforth politics would be balance-of-power politics, and to respect the principle that it wasn't cool to invade another country just because you could. IIRC he said it was Frederick the Great who busted up the Westphalian peace by invading neighbors for purely strategic reasons. I think Kissinger wrote that it was Cardinal Richelieu of France who was the groundbreaker in ignoring religion and morality in diplomacy.
The trouble with pronouns is that there's no way to politely sidestep around the issue at hand. A Christian would take far more offense at a Jew saying "Jesus was a false messiah" than "that's not my religion" to them when declining an invitation to a Christmas party or some such, even though the actual meaning of both statements is the same. We probably wouldn't have the Peace of Westphalia if declarations of religious faith were literally baked into our language.
I feel like your modern history here is a bit too US-centric, and specifically too liberal-US-Internet-centric. In your comments in the podcast and implicitly in the last part of this post, you draw a direct line from New Atheism to reduced religiosity to Wokism (SJP).
Like it was inevitable that once enough people had lost Christianity, they would replace it with something worse.
From a European perspective that's not clear to me at all. The most atheistic places are East Germany and the Czech Republic. Neither place is particularly hospitable to SJP and there is nothing else in its place.
If you only look at places that were not behind the Iron Curtain, then it's France and that also stands out as resisting SJP. Sweden and the Netherlands are less Christian than France, but have many more spiritual agnostics than atheists and seem superficially more susceptible to SJP. So maybe you could argue that it's people who stopped being religious, but didn't adopt an atheistic materialistic worldview that are the more likely converts. Though now I'm at pure speculation and that would have to be checked further.
So I do want to absolve a bit of your guilt. Atheism does not inevitably lead to worse semi-religions.
Also, I somewhat doubt that New Atheism was even big enough to cause the big drop in religiosity in the last 2 decades in the US. How many average people ever even heard of it or were convinced by it anyway?
So where did SJP come from? There's various theories out there and I like some of them more than others, but in the end it might just be somewhat random. Why does the Zeitgeist do what it does? Who really knows? We don't have parallel universes to observe to check if they also developed liberalism, christian revivals (the original Awakenings), romanticism, socialism, corporatism, feminism, the counterculture, and many other big mass movements.
As you have said, the rationalist sphere (including post rats!) just have to religion harder :D
Multi-voice AI reading of this post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/askwhocastsai/p/the-peace-of-westphalia-and-the-war
You rock!
I think it's possible to have religious passion and the peace, I get the impression that's basically how Asia does it (or did it, since the world is secularizing). India in particular has a great diversity of religious positions, and it's really only the Muslims that made it tricky, because, like Christians, they're Abrahamic, which means they take the view the Truth can be contained in a single doctrine, which is the sort of thing that can get you bloody wars of religion.
Henry Kissinger has a long section in his book /World Order/ on the Peace of Westphalia. He credited the POW with creating a new world order, not so much by the terms of the treaties allowing Christian freedom (you could be Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist), but by the precedent set by the proceedings, which was to keep religion out of international affairs, to set recognized boundaries and set aside claims of inheritance, ancestry, history, etc., to tacitly accept that henceforth politics would be balance-of-power politics, and to respect the principle that it wasn't cool to invade another country just because you could. IIRC he said it was Frederick the Great who busted up the Westphalian peace by invading neighbors for purely strategic reasons. I think Kissinger wrote that it was Cardinal Richelieu of France who was the groundbreaker in ignoring religion and morality in diplomacy.