Jonathan Haidt: “The Age of Outrage”
city-journal.org
city-journal.org
Martin Luther King Jr famously appealed to the Bible and founding documents of America as the basis for civil rights. Now that those two have been trashed by current society, to what broadly agreed upon standard will the civil rights reformers of today appeal?
But you don't need old documents to inspire a movement. Greta Thunberg is doing fine without.
In this framing, I rephrase your question: how can we leverage nihilism to engender compassion, personal and societal growth?
When speaking of societal trends it literally doesn't matter what I think. Common interpretations, be they misconceptions or perversions of an academic philosophy, are what actually matter.
The intent behind the above statements is clearly to imply, through the chain of inference presented, that the source of the "culture of nihilism" is the "widespread adoption of (your) base philosophy" which was "atheism and anarchy.", and that, therefore atheism and anarchy (as opposed to the Constitution and Bible) have led, at a widespread (cultural) scale, to nihilism.
>Or are you concluding that I'm an idiot because you over-interpreted an anecdotal observation to be a statement of absolute necessity?
I'm not calling you an idiot, and my interpretation was straightforward. However your comment does make it seem that you aren't aware neither anarchy nor atheism are nihilistic in nature, and that your "observation" about their effect in producing a culture of nihilism, however anecdotal, is likely based on commonly held misconceptions about both. Namely that atheism is nihilistic because meaning and morality can only be found relative to a belief in a higher power, and that anarchy equates to chaos.
If that's not the case, then by all means let's have an intelligent conversation about the nature of morality and ethics in a post-religious and post-statist society. Otherwise, I'm going to assume you're a troll and just ignore you from this point forward. Good day.
Atheists and the non-religious follow the Bible because it does offer useful moral and ethical teachings (along with many other religious and non-religious texts.) and because many modern (primarily American Southern) Christians have adopted a literalist interpretation of the Bible, and it's easier to ridicule such people by pointing out how little coherence and sense the Bible actually has when read from that perspective.
Where atheists, non-Christians and the non-religious disagree with Christians is in the insistence of the latter that the Bible is the only valid source of morality, that it is perfect, inerrant and immutable (in other words, that Biblical morality cannot evolve as societies progress, despite the fact that it does) and that morality presupposes Christian theism (the oft-repeated but utterly false narrative that atheism is nihilism and atheists are incapable of morality.)