Short: This essay looks at the incompatability of social sciences in general, and sociology in particular, with religiousness. An incoherence so strong, that being adept in sociological thinking negates the plausibility of realistic religiousness.

This is a “Hot Take” post. Meaning that this post might be viewed as more provocant than my other posts.

In general these posts are intended to force you to engage in some thought patterns that you might like to ignore normaly. Skip these posts if you don’t feel like this is what you are looking for.

Heads-up! This will read like a self-adulation of a sociologist; for himself and his domain. It isn’t intended as such, and it is in the very least as much of a challange to sociologists that think they are good sociologists, while at the same time claiming they were religious.

The biggest part of the studies and qualifications for social scientists is the skill to be able to shift your thinking about social domains. This is very time consuming and does at least take two of either talent, effort, and good teachers; to get a hang of. This is hard. You have to be aware that social scientists are always also part of the very thing, they study!

When you finally start to become more aware of social structures, you will begin to ask follow-up questions about the “why’s” and the “how’s” of these social structures. The answers you will find will invariably have you see different other domains interact with the social sciences. For example inventions or discoveries that had strong societal implications. “Visible” (invention of black powder or the theory of evolution) or “invisible” (leaded gasoline or climate change).

If your social science domain is tightly focussed, this intersection might not be all encompassing. But if your domain has you have - at least in concept - a regard for the whole ‘society’, you will gather torturous partial knowledge across VERY many different domains, in answering your first questions on social structure. This, in turn, will allow you to ask deeper questions about social structure.

I conjecture that this “asking of deeper questions on social structures” is what makes you a good sociologist. At this point you will have an intuitive skeptisism on social structures based on the answers you already found. You will have a agonizing amount of knowledge, that just lets you know if something is in conflict with scientific findings of other domains, without having you be able to ad-hoc produce the correct answer. You are too aware of agenda, power, debate, public discourse, biology, etc. to ever think it would be reasonably likely that there actually was some form of god rather than there was social actors fabricating and perpetuating religious narratives to achieve their respective goals. Mainly securing power over others and easily soothing their own fears.

Hot Take #1 - Conclusion:

In my mind you are either:

1) Too irrationally biased to believe in religion to be a good sociologist, if you are religious.

2) Trying to achieve your own goals by proclaiming you were religious, while not actually being pious. (This would still allow you to be a good sociologist, while not necessarily making you one.)

3) A good sociologist and at heart an atheist.

4) None of the above and no good sociologist.

Thanks for reading. Stay beautiful <3