There are parts of Europe that have far more community and where people are far more social but far less religious than the US.
Religion is just a long surviving irrational belief system. It may serve a more social purpose or a less social purpose. Oppositely, the purpose of unifying a community can be served by a number of things, religion isn't necessary for that. As other mention, extreme religiosity is rising in the US even as average religion is declining but that's naturally ideological.
This is an extremely ignorant position that trivializes "religion". First of all, as I have written elsewhere, everyone is religious. The question is: how good and true is your religion? To call it merely irrational is to show a total lack of understanding of the subject. And because religions are many, it makes little sense to speak of "religion" categorically in this way because they often have little or nothing in common. You have to address and criticize particular religions for particular reasons.
Furthermore, those who defect from the religious faith on which their society or civilization was built often ride the coat tails of that religious faith without working out the logical consequences of their rejection. That is, it is better to describe the rejector as a heretic or an apostate than someone who has somehow freed himself from the faith in question and all its trappings. Many of these ideologies we're seeing are profound distortions or perversions of some selected element of Christianity or previous heretical position. That's one reason heresy was always regarded as dangerous. It comes from the Greek hairesis meaning "a taking or choosing for oneself, a choice"[0] meaning taking a cafeteria approach toward the dogmas of the faith which exist as a coherent whole. Any distortion or selectivity produces severe downstream consequences like ideology. Secularism and liberalism are examples. They are Christian heresies and cannot be comprehended apart from the Christian context within which they emerged.
Nietzsche, who was an atheist, was smart enough to see this. The "Twilight of the Idols" is all about how silly this secular triumphalism, or even just contentment, is because it fails to see that the consequences of having "killed God" are not yet fully made manifest, but eventually will be made manifest because this state of affairs is unsustainable, and that this will result ultimately in total disorientation and chaos (I disagree with Nietzsche that God was merely an instrumental idea, but he did at least grasp the parochial and myopic nature of so many atheists and secular people; for him, atheism was a terrible thing). Intellectually serious atheists are all in agreement about how terrible atheism is (i.e., not the provincial variety like Dawkins). This state produces a fertile ground for ideology, i.e., irrational half-assed false religions.
This is an extremely ignorant position that trivializes "religion". First of all, as I have written elsewhere, everyone is religious.
-- I can't see how that statement doesn't trivialize religion at least as much. IE, if everyone is "religious", you've set a very low bar for what qualifies as religious
I think made it clear you have religious beliefs, which involve ... clearly false views of the cosmos (with the possible exception of Buddhism) and you have religious institutions, which serve a variety of social, economic and psychological purposes. A church can be club with a few nods to God or it can be something like a political party hell bent on power or it can be other things. Many American Unitarians maintain the form of religion while dropping all the God part and that's as fine as anything as far as I'm concerned.
> if everyone is "religious", you've set a very low bar for what qualifies as religious
And if everyone has “beliefs” then you have set a very low bar for what qualifies as belief which makes everyone a believer.
You are playing a silly power game where you dismiss other people’s conceptual schemes so you can peddle your own.
My view of the cosmos is that it is a computer simulation.
It isn’t clearly false. But it is clearly a religion. Even though it is backed up by the fact that all asymmetrical/equational reasoning (all of the Mathematics supporting Physics/Cosmology) is computational.
And if everyone has “beliefs” then you have set a very low bad for what qualifies as belief.
Sure, if you look at what qualifies as a belief, it's pretty random.
My view of the cosmos is that it is a computer simulation.
It seems like the main thing this shares with religion is that it's wholly unverifiable. If you develop it in common with others and perhaps add rituals, you could qualify it along with Pastafarians [1]. But Pastafarian know it's a joke.
I might have some wholly unverifiable beliefs but I don't have a commitment to maintain such beliefs. That's where I'd locate the difference.
You can verify that Physics is captured in Mathematics.
Mathematics is a Turing-recognisable language.
If the universe is Physical then it is computable. This is a trivially true belief (see Church-Turing-Deutsch principle).
You can falsify my belief by producing Physics in language other than Mathematics.
Of course, as an instrumentalist/physicist, I don’t care if my beliefs are “actually true” as long as they work.
Religion is just a long surviving irrational belief system. It may serve a more social purpose or a less social purpose. Oppositely, the purpose of unifying a community can be served by a number of things, religion isn't necessary for that. As other mention, extreme religiosity is rising in the US even as average religion is declining but that's naturally ideological.