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satt comments on Stupid Questions March 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Why does everybody seem to be so worked up about whether religion is true or not and call it theism or atheism? My Central European experience is that it is largely an institution, custom, habit, social expectation, identity, a way of expressing things and all that, but people did not really believe for 150 years at least, so it is not really something meant to be true for a long time now. I know there are people in the US Bible Belt who still mean it, and they have angry atheist children, but how comes the majority of Internet discussion kinda revolves around them? How many people on LW want to approach the topic from the angle Max Weber and similar scholars did?
I'd assumed that was a side effect of North American hegemony of the Anglophone Internet.
But now I notice I don't actually know how people talk about religion on websites not dominated by Americans or Anglophones. Is there more focus on analysis or on normative judgement? If the latter, do people judge local religious institutions rather than American religion? Or is the target still mainly the Bible Belt and the like? (I could just Google things like "Slovenian atheist forum", run the results through Google Translate, and see what people are posting. But it's probably hard to get a representative view that way.)
An atheist forum would be the same, but the whole point is that mostly they would not debate religion as theism vs. atheism.
People would be more likely to be anti-clerical than atheist, hating the church as an institution in society, that spreads conservative ideas and props up authoritarian regimes.
On the other side, people would be talking about "Christian values" not about faith or belief. Not even belief in belief (of factual statements), but belief in that the values, the norms, the prescriptions are useful. They would also talk about identity, like a "national christian identity"