> the religion-shaped hole in western morality
Religion and morality aren't distinct concepts. What's lost in the west is the stability of having an orthodoxy.
Religion and morality aren't distinct concepts. What's lost in the west is the stability of having an orthodoxy.
How so? They seem pretty orthogonal to me.
(as long as you aren't targeting the Q-Anon or KKK crowd)
So it seems the definition of sacred is simply changing. (luckily)
At the time around '69 it maybe was like nothing was sacred anymore, and everything was being questioned, but i don't think you can apply this anymore. People later settled on some moral progressions, which are now being defended.
Growing up I had a mathematics teacher that told me that if companies could get away with it, they would just show real murders all day on the TV. In that way, popular culture is like a barometer for morality of a population.
I don't think anyone here is arguing for gender or racial inequality.
Really? As much as nudity in television content has grown, I think showing genitals is still pretty much not done. For example, Narcos didn't do it, as far as I watched it.
I can't really see why this is bad, which is kind of what we're talking about. I can see why full-frontal nudity is a tactical error in some contexts, in that you shouldn't do it because you'll end up in a worse position if you do, but I really don't get the apparent moral revulsion some people have regarding the naked human form.
This is part of what we're talking about because it signals that the traditionalists can't impose their revulsion on the rest of us. The recent successes of the Queer Rights movement also prove this: Same-sex marriage has gone from unthinkable to unremarkable. So has transitioning. The people who are most opposed to those things were utterly incapable of making cogent arguments sufficient to sway the societies in which they lived, so now they're widely accepted.
> Growing up I had a mathematics teacher that told me that if companies could get away with it, they would just show real murders all day on the TV.
No. Most people don't want to see that. Most people have a serious aversion to seeing real death and gore and so on, and it isn't feigned "virtue signalling" or similar.
> I don't think anyone here is arguing for gender or racial inequality.
Except the arguments against, say, nudity on TV come down to "I don't like it, so it's immoral" and that exact same argument has been used to argue against social equality of all kinds.
This is only true if you define the "Religion" out of religion; that is, shear it of any dogma or faith claims or even the "funny hats social club" cultural aspect, and then say that all of the remaining guidance is the religion. This isn't what religion means to most people, regardless of whether they have one or not.
For example, look at the scandal from some years back in which some European (Spanish?) meat products were found to include horse meat. Everyone agreed that (1) there was no risk of any kind involved in eating the "contaminated" products; (2) you could not taste the difference; (3) a recall was in order; (4) this was and deserved to be a HUGE scandal.
I'm saying that the modern Western prohibition on eating horse is a religious phenomenon, regardless of whether people are comfortable calling it one. If you are using a definition of "religion" that doesn't include things like this, your terms do not carve reality at the joints.
And this is contrary to what people understand as religion, which seems to avoid carving reality at the joints: All of a sudden you can dispute the notion that people can be irreligious by pointing to some social conventions they follow, and demanding that those conventions are religion. That does not seem very respectful to personal self-identity.
It's not. It matches exactly what people understand as religion in any context that doesn't involve themselves.
Compare the Roman Emperor, who was never referred to as a "king" -- by the Romans -- because the concept was taboo. The Greeks went ahead and referred to him as a king. Who was right? What would we gain by excluding imperial Rome from a study of monarchical societies?