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Comment by xelxebar | Hacker News Reader

> This is just a sort of tautological argument, wherein you adopt that "to be religious" is the same as "to have a belief system".

Not OP, but I think this is a pretty narrow reading of their statement. Personally, I read it to be more about value and community dynamics.

Institutionalized religions often are very explicit about their (supposed) terminal values and arrange social situations to explicitly work toward or reinforce those values. I believe OP is pointing out that secular groups (at least those within view of OP's demographics) mostly fail to have explicitly defined value systems.

There is a difference between why we perform and action and the reasons we give for performing the same action [citation needed]. I think OP suggests that religions have structures useful for cognating about the former more sharply than secularism does.

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> I believe OP is pointing out that secular groups (at least those within view of OP's demographics) mostly fail to have explicitly defined value systems.

I read it like that as well. I've seen this idea illustrated this way: a kid raised in a religious community gets drilled from an early age about morals as an umbrella abstraction (in the form of allegories from religious texts), so they don't need to be micromanaged about the moral implications of every individual scenario under the sun ("don't run in the supermarket!", "don't push your sister!", "don't yell in the hallway!", etc etc) because they are explicitly exposed to an underlying set of values to govern every scenario.

That's is an obviously religious leaning take (I heard it from a jewish person, though I'm not jewish myself), but I think there's a certain grain of truth in the sense that non-religious people don't have a standardized way of talking to kids about morals as an umbrella abstraction on a weekly basis, in a way that church goers do.

Plenty of people prove this not to be working at all.

Plenty of priests have fucked kids.

Religoius people are often enough the same amount of assholes or more. I have not fought over a city for ages due to some believe.

Religious types often say the same of the non-religious. Here's other analogies to illustrate the reductio ad absurdum: plenty of people prove school not to be working (by getting failing grades, passing by cheating, etc), plenty of people prove entrepreneurship not to be working (by going bankrupt), etc. All this line of observation shows us is that variability exists everywhere.

Something to keep in mind is that religious societies have existed for millennia, whereas societies that are openly non-religious are a relatively recent development, so comparing the two ought to account for a potential lack of historical hindsight on one of the sides.

Thats not my point i was making.

The parent mentioned specifically religious believes as a tool for good child upbringing.

My counter argument shows, that religious upbringing doesn't necessarily mean a good moral & ethics.

> The parent mentioned specifically religious believes as a tool for good child upbringing.

No, I merely pointed out that religious upbringing is explicit about some topics in ways that non-religious one usually aren't.

Your counter argument can be flipped around into "religious upbringing doesn't necessarily mean bad morals & ethics", so in effect it's not really saying anything meaningful.

You mention it though to bring it up as an argument or a point for religion otherwise you wouldn't do it.

Not everything must necessarily be a religion-vs-atheism competition (in fact it's tiresome that some people insist on putting every religion-related discussion in that light). I believe I was clear enough when I indicated that I'm open minded to ideas from religious groups, but I don't subscribe to their faith, so I don't understand the insinuation that I'd get brownie points or something for "shilling".

If you're seeing a factual argument exclusively as some sort of attack on your belief system, then you're missing the point that self-improvements efforts shouldn't be discriminating against an idea solely due to the source of insight.

In other words, if a statement is "you don't talk to your kids about morals as much as [insert religion] people do", it's petty to respond by saying "well the religious group you belong to has people that do poopy pants stuff" (even more so if some atheists also do said poopy pants stuff); it's more productive to instead say "huh, how then could I talk to my kids about morals more often?"

I believe OP is pointing out that secular groups (at least those within view of OP's demographics) mostly fail to have explicitly defined value systems.

You could say that secular groups may have implicit value systems, may even implicitly enforce but because they haven't made these values explicit, they allow to explicate, question and change them - whereas religion is about maintain an explicit and unchanging set of values.

So there's more to the not-explicitness of a secular process than "a religion that doesn't say it's a religion".

> I believe OP is pointing out that secular groups (at least those within view of OP's demographics) mostly fail to have explicitly defined value systems.

And there are good reasons for that. The currently dominating set of progressive views is inherently dynamic and based on the Overton moving in one direction. This is in direct opposition to religion where the basic set of values is normally fixex, often by a sacred book containing the words believed to be spoken by the founder or a deity.

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