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Comment by aswanson | Hacker News Reader

What happens to a society when it loses communal organizations and faith, and becomes increasingly atomized? Is this good or bad?

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We don't need faith in God to have a community, only faith in one another. The premise that community cannot exist without a religious basis is a false one.

I would argue that this would be a new event in human history. I can't think of a single major civilization that was not religious in some capacity.

I liken this event to the Enlightenment, when societies began to view religion as something which could be separated from science, scholarship and law, as the concept of "secularity" emerged. Religion still exists in some capacity, obviously the US is very much a "christian nation," but generally people are moving away from an explicitly orthodox, rigidly dogmatic, supernaturalist interpretation of religion.

A literate society no longer needs someone standing at a pulpit telling them what the Bible says, nor should an educated society believe that humans were literally molded out of clay in the Garden of Eden. As societies change, religion must also change because religion is an expression of society.

There was a pretty good podcast[0] (Hidden Brain) a while back that explores one possibility for why religions sprang up all over the world. The idea was that once communities grew too large for folks to know everyone, there needed to be something which two complete strangers in a community could relate to, with sufficient punishment for committing moral, ethical, etc crimes, for those communities to function. They also discuss how modern communities have less of a need for this. It's definitely an interesting topic, and my description didn't really do it justice.

0. https://www.npr.org/2018/07/16/628792048/creating-god

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