True Believers

Re: https://quillette.com/2018/12/27/from-astrology-to-cult-politics-the-many-ways-we-try-and-fail-to-replace-religion/

Humans have certainly used religion as a reason for hatred and extremism, but without religion, Communism turned to fanatic dedication to ideology, as have so many other “isms“. Atheists who like to blame religion for humanity’s problems, somehow seem to forget that the real cause of all of humanity’s suffering very often stems from the simple fact of being human.

> When people turn away from one source of meaning, such as religion, they don’t abandon the search for meaning altogether. They simply look for it in different forms. < > And if you imagine that secular ideologies and political movements now seem to exhibit faux-religious characteristics, you aren’t alone. “We have the cult of Trump on the right, a demigod who, among his worshippers, can do no wrong,” wrote Andrew Sullivan recently in New York magazine. “And we have the cult of social justice on the left, a religion whose followers show the same zeal as any born-again Evangelical. They are filling the void that Christianity once owned, without any of the wisdom and culture and restraint that Christianity once provided.”<

Well, the wisdom and culture and restraint that Christianity provided on occasion. I didn’t notice any of those three elements as a significant part of either the Protestant Discipline or the Spanish Inquisition.