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Comment by xyzelement | Hacker News Reader

// other aspects of homeschooling were just a fig leaf over a whole lot of religious indoctrination

I was raised totally secular but I now understand that religion is about fundamentally aligning yourself to the highest aspirations ("what kind of man does G-d want me to be?") and even w/o actual faith, I am starting to think that's preferable to the current mode of "anything goes, you can be whatever you feel like and there's no judgement of any of your actions." So yeah I am not surprised that parents aren't dying to throw their kids into an environment that fosters the latter.

I used to think religion was about deep fear, now I see it more as about deep care. You may still disagree with what they care about but I find that harder and harder to do, personally.

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As someone who was raised in religious communities, that "higher aspirations" is only the position "in principle" in reality working with people in the religious community was just scams and moral self justification of despicable behavior hidden behind soft language and terrible behavior. So much contention, so much gossip, so much backbiting behavior and hidden evils against children so that communities wouldn't "lose face". The worst behaviors, the least faith, the most fear, all hidden by duplicity and a weekly practice of virtue signaling. This is not isolated, my parents were involved in the church in many states and internationally, it was everywhere.

I am old enough now that I have seen the outcomes projecting into peoples 30s. I know so many poorly educated homeschoolers whose lives have been destroyed with no hope of recovery by the complete lack of skills their hyper religious parents imparted them with, in jail, broke, unable to hack it in college and too lacking in common sense to make it in the trades or professional work, with living standards insanely far below their parents. That being said, I am not against homeschooling personally and may do it myself.

I think your outsider perspective makes sense since you didn't see the self-righteousness and persecution complex inherent in the system. It's like a northerner taking "bless your heart" at face value because they're dealing with a degree of cowardice and dishonest duplicity they haven't experienced before. All the best people I have known have been atheists or "religious" people who don't take it seriously and just follow their own inherent internal moral guidance (which is all the religious people are doing as well, as at core everyone acts as they choose to act.)

This is not isolated, my parents were involved in the church in many states and internationally, it was everywhere.

Which church?

This was my immediate thought. "The church" sounds like a specific cult, sect, or denomination. There's a wide spectrum of beliefs across these and one cannot act like they've been to them all

Not necessarily: in much of American Christianity, "the church" just means the collection of all Christian believers [0][1][2]. It would typically be read to exclude non-Christians, but include all mainstream sects and denominations.

[0] https://www.biblestudytools.com/bible-study/topical-studies/...

[1] https://www.gotquestions.org/what-is-the-church.html

[2] https://www.christianity.com/church/what-is-the-church-its-p...

Baptists are very different from Catholics which are very different from Protestants which are very different from Church of Christ. Sure they’re all Christian, but the beliefs/cultures vary a lot between different denominations which is what I assume the two parent comments are pointing out. If you think you can collectively call American Christianity one religion, then you haven’t experienced different sects of the church. Believing in Jesus is the only common denominator.

All I'm saying is that when the grandparent used the phrase "the church" they probably meant it in the broader "followers of Christ" sense and not a specific denomination as OP assumes.

I'm very aware of the differences between denominations, and the degree to which the grandparent comment generalized across these disparate denominations is definitely problematic, but what I said is accurate: much of American Christianity uses the phrase "the church" in a highly inclusive way that is different than what OP assumed was meant.

It’s not inherent in the system though, although you experienced some disorder.

I’ve seen far more contention, gossip, and backbiting behavior in secular groups, saying this as someone who didn’t go back to religion until only a few years ago. Let’s not pretend that being secular somehow makes you levitate or something. Check out the “new atheists” and their démise.

The funny part is that everyone is talking about this sort of inherent internal moral guidance, which flies in the face of the modern scientific thought.

What science contradicts internal moral guidance?

I'll bite.

Many school curriculums teach that science proves that gender isn't a binary and is divorced from sex, and they often implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) also go further to say that it is hateful to believe otherwise.

So anyone who has an internal moral voice that speaks to this issue, may be contradicted by science.

Individuals beliefs are often contradicted by science. Citations for the point you replied to would be welcome.

> What science contradicts internal moral guidance?

> Individuals beliefs are often contradicted by science.

Not sure why you asked the first question, given your belief in the second.

Sorry, I thought in the context it was obvious that I meant the existence of internal moral guidance.

Well, the science does lean that way, and there is a shit-ton of hate for trans folk -- so trying to nip it in the bud is a good thing.

And those morals might not be entirely internal if they're regularly preached to.

Could you clarify what exactly your internal moral voice objects to?

The school curriculums basically boil down to "Most people are either men or women. Some people aren't, and that's okay - you should still treat them like anyone else." Does your internal moral voice object to any part of that, or is it something else I am missing here?

Do you also disagree with schools teaching kids in a similar fashion about the existence of left-handed people, redheaded people, or handicapped people?

> Could you clarify what exactly your internal moral voice objects to?

I'm arguing the point, not my own conviction.

The inner moral voice I was defending was someone who believes that it's important to acknowledge and respect the differing roles of the sexes. And object to the scientific insistence that we should concentrate as much on the exceptions as on the normal case.

And I don't think you've accurately depicted the typical stance of schools today, where sex is not based on biology, but instead on social construction. If you need any proof of that, look through this thread and see how many people object to the idea that the physical characteristic of say a penis, and its insemination role in reproduction, is a defining characteristic of a male of the species. People aren't even pretending to make a distinction between gender and sex, they literally have a problem with defining human sexual roles via genitalia.

> "Most people are either men or women. Some people aren't, and that's okay - you should still treat them like anyone else."

Is that what they're just teaching, or are they saying that a) human nature is fundamentally gendered, and b) men and women are gender rather than sex classes - that how you look, think and feel relative to socially constructed and recognised gender stereotypes determines what sex you actually are, and that early medical intervention may be necessary to put your mind in the correct type of body?

I agree that society shouldn't police gender non-conformity (perhaps what many home-schoolers would actually like society to do) but as a 'people are a collection of unique individuals, differentiated by sex for the narrow purposes of biological reproduction' kind of person I also object to the 'viewing society through the prism of innate gender' position - which some schools seem to be teaching as scientifically correct when it's actually much more like a ideological and / or metaphysical belief.

I'll bite again. My inner moral voice objects to putting male rapists in a female prison because they claim they are trans.

No, that is not a strawman https://nypost.com/2022/04/25/transgender-rikers-inmate-gets...

But you are okay with putting male rapists who rape out males with males?

Or female rapists who rape other females with females?

Your morality stops at protecting females against males?

My point is more that if this outcome wasn't entirely predictable to the people in the courts system who set this situation up, it's indicative of deeper problems with their assumptions. I'm happy to go into what I think those problems are (though it would be an essay) but a single shocking example is often enough to act as an intuition pump.

Even if their morality stops there, ot's a good first step to separate a natural class of physically more powerful rapists (men rapists), from a natural class of physically less powerful potential victims (women), no?

Or should our morality stop at: "since we can't or don't protect everybody let's leave an obvious, extremely vulnerable, and much more common (male-> female rape vs male->male rape) victim class unprotected?"

No-one is okay with any of this but it makes no sense whatsoever to try to solve a problem within men's prisons, i.e. men raping men, by moving some of these men to women's prisons.

Women's prisons do not exist for the purpose of forcing women to be human shields against male-on-male sexual violence.

Women raping women was the other key point.

You don't fix prisons by moving inmates. Having inmates socially interact with large groups of other inmates doesn't sound healthy or wise gender not withstanding. You can't put a group together who's only common interest is crime. Each criminal should be housed separately and socialized with trained pros who can help them work through why they are there. It would pay for itself when criminals don't return to crime. At least make it available for the last 6 months

If we're going to use single digit instances of sexual abuse to delegitimize things I'd love to know your feelings on the Catholic Church, Boy Scouts, and high school sports teams.

Are those doing those things as legally mandated acts, or merely as illegal acts (some of which were eventually uncovered)?

Because illegal abuse will probably always exist - some humans will treat others like craps, illegally. People still understand that those things are wrong.

The act of putting actual perpetrators with a class of much less physically strong victims into the same confined space, however, points to specific mindset where doing wrong is thought as doing right, and not just by one or more wicked persons, but also with state power to support it.

I'm confused, you think that the sexual assault in the jail was mandated and legal? Do you believe all the regular prison rape is legally mandated as well?

> The act of putting actual perpetrators with a class of much less physically strong victims into the same confined space, however, points to specific mindset where doing wrong is thought as doing right, and not just by one or more wicked persons, but also with state power to support it.

I'm fairly certain regular prisons don't sort by size either, and not all men or women are built the same.

No, I believe that what the parent described is putting rape perpetrators in the same confined spaces with physically much weaker class of potential victims as "mandated and legal".

>I'm fairly certain regular prisons they don't sort by size either, and not all men are built the same.

Yes, so let's put women prisoners and biologically stronger male rapists together then, until we also seperate all prisoners by height and strength in the general case...

AKA: there's bad happening already in prisons, so adding bad to it, even if it's a stupidly predictable to foresee and prevent bad, is fine!

What is the rate of occurrence of trans women raping women in prison? What is the rate of occurrence of men raping trans women in prison?

I'd argue that we need to actually look at the rate of occurrences for these things and not look at a NY Post article about a single occurrence and our own internal biases and intuition around "biological strength".

I'd say the important question is, 'what is the rate of self-declared trans women raping cis women going to be once every man before a court figures out that he can get put into women's prison with a single unfalsifiable lie?'.

Bad stuff happens in prison, we're all agreed, the issue I see is that a much worse outcome is entirely predictable but many people are afraid they're committing a hate crime unless they blind themselves to that eventuality. And the really important question is, "What else does this luxury belief require blindness to?"

If the volume becomes sufficient why not put trans women with trans women? This is only a problem while the numbers are small so your scenario where this ends in a deluge of scheming rapists would backfire.

> And the really important question is, "What else does this luxury belief require blindness to?"

Good question - this whole conversation is based upon the idea that trans women aren't valid and if they are sexually assaulted in prison at a hugely higher rate (13x)[1] that's acceptable because we need to stop a hypothetical legion of rapists.

[1] https://cpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com/sites.uci.edu/dist/0/1149/file...

> this whole conversation is based upon the idea that trans women aren't valid

Exactly. They aren't. A 'trans woman' is a type of man and needs to be treated as such when his demands and desires come into conflict with women's needs.

Do you have an account created strictly to deny the existence of trans women? Interesting.

>why not put trans women with trans women?

I don't know, why didn't the judge do that in this case? Why not do that with trans athletes? Seems like an obvious solution, yet it wasn't taken. That's the kind of willful blindness (or weakness to social pressure) I'm pointing to.

>this whole conversation is based upon the idea that trans women aren't valid

It really isn't. Some people really have gender dysphoria (I was one so I'm not just talking out of my ass here) and some people really have strong incentives to claim they have gender dysphoria when they don't. Both can be true. What led to this story is that we can't bring ourselves to investigate whether one particular person could be lying.

The problem I'm pointing to isn't that some people have gender dysphoria (some do) or that it's a difficult condition to accommodate (it's really not) or even that our medical system is shit at treating it (it is, but that's a separate problem). The problem is that elements of our culture prioritize helping victims over preventing victimization. Because of their awful health outcomes, trans people today are held as a special class of victim and their desires - not their health outcomes be it noted - are held paramount. Well meaning people would rather prevent trans prisoners today from being raped than ciswomen prisoners tomorrow, despite the obvious asymmetry of suffering in those scenarios. Trans people matter more because they're suffering more, never mind how much suffering would be caused by 'simply affirming their right to exist'.

That's what mainstream curricula are teaching and that's what my moral sense objects to.

> Well meaning people would rather prevent trans prisoners today from being raped than ciswomen prisoners tomorrow, despite the obvious asymmetry of suffering in those scenarios.

What asymmetry is that? I provided a statistic for the abuse trans women currently suffer in the system, but no one else has provided anything but anecdotes and appeals to some sort of common sense. It, and correct me if I'm wrong, feels like you're giving a similar sort of special reverence to cis women who suffer sexual assault than trans.

To be clear, I think sexual assault is bad all around and I hate the idea of abusers slipping being enabled, but it's somehow acceptable that many many trans women are abused instead of the potential for even one more cis woman to be sexually abused in prison than there already are (let's not kid ourselves here, scads of abuse already happens).

I guess the answer to this particular trolley problem for many people is to not even consider pulling the lever because it's 5 trans women but one cis.

If there were no gender segregated prisons, ciswomen's rates of assault would be like transwomen's today, I don't need to point to a study to convince a neutral bystander of that. Given the percentage of women who are Trans in the US is about 1%, the trolly problem at hand is more like 1 trans woman and 99 ciswomen. Damn right I wouldn't consider pulling that lever.

This story is the result of two widely accepted proposals:

-Transwomen belong in women's spaces. -The only moral response to someone coming out as trans is to affirm their new identity.

If you agree with both proposals, and many people do, that means in practice you believe one transgender woman is worth >99 cisgender women. No one says that out loud, but prioritizing victimhood means that's the calculus they deal in. Adding more exceptions to problematic examples like this one doesn't address the root problem with that hierarchy of values.

You're saying by allowing trans women into prisons 99 ciswomen will be raped for every trans woman right now (who are sexually assaulted at 13x the average prison population)?

If we want to have this discussion, please provide some actual data about the rate trans women sexually assault women in women's prisons.

You keep conflating transwomen with men lying about being transwomen. Do you not believe that a male rapist would lie about being a transwomen if it gave him access to a large population of vulnerable women?

At least in the UK, data from the Ministry of Justice shows that trans-identifying male prisoners are significantly more likely than other men to be incarcerated for sex offences.

There is also no data whatsoever indicating that if a man calls himself a woman, then he poses any less risk to women than other men.

I agree that prisons need to stay sex-segregated, or revert back to being so where authorities have made this abominable ideological error of incarcerating men in the women's prisons.

That's not science, that's scientism, which replaces traditional religion for many, and usually not with better results.

I think you are being a bit hyperbolic. I think it's quite reasonable to say that a way a person perceives themselves is complex and poorly described by categories. This is separate from describing the physical attributes a person possesses. It's rather unreasonable to state anything other than this because there's very little evidence towards the claimed lack of complexity of the human experience. So any moral argument ends up coming across as rather anti intellectual.

"which flies in the face of the modern scientific thought"

citations. please. show me the researchers who claim to have empirical knowledge of human morality.

I would have rather had that discussion than the one that appeared instead. For one, Steven Pinker addresses topics relevant to your post and mine in:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...

I am reminded of people who grew up in the USA, became familiar with all its faults, and now think Scandinavia or Asia has all the right answers, because they've never observed those faults in everyday life over many years.

Presumably, for all your religious upbringing, you are right-minded enough to not have all those faults. So either you are an amazing exception, or you are not.

There is good and bad in the USA, and in Scandinavia or Asia. And of course there are genuine and false religious people and non-religious people. Indeed, there are both in each of us.

> I know so many poorly educated homeschoolers whose lives have been destroyed with no hope of recovery by the complete lack of skills their hyper religious parents imparted them with, in jail, broke, unable to hack it in college and too lacking in common sense to make it in the trades or professional work, with living standards insanely far below their parents.

As long as we're trading samples from a single observer's recollections: mine are different. I never homeschooled myself, but I had several friends in high school who had homeschooled until then who were well-educated, were in advanced science and math etc. They've been fine since then, too. Not all parents are good teachers, but many do quite fine.

I’ll add my anecdote. One of my relatives homeschools their two children. They are part of a commonwealth(?), and follow the Thomas Jefferson method which I think is kind of popular? One of their children who is 8 cannot read. The other is 6 and is far behind in all disciplines. My relative loves their children and wants the best for them, but is failing. Won’t send their kids to school for religious reasons. I’d like to know the chances of a single adult being a good teacher vs. at least one of multiple trained adults being a good teacher. I’d also like to see the downside of lack of socialization.

Is this legal in US? I'm pretty sure this would be classified as neglect in many/most European countries.

The vast majority of states have little oversight on homeschooling, some have none whatsoever. There’s a powerful lobby called the Homeschooling Legal Defense Association that led massive deregulation since the 80s.

In some states people who are under investigation for child abuse are allowed to take their kids out of school (the place that abuse is usually reported). The situation is pretty bad.

There was a whole John Oliver episode about it just weeks ago.

> As someone who was raised in religious communities, that "higher aspirations" is only the position "in principle" in reality working with people in the religious community was just scams and moral self justification of despicable behavior hidden behind soft language and terrible behavior. So much contention, so much gossip, so much backbiting behavior and hidden evils against children so that communities wouldn't "lose face". The worst behaviors, the least faith, the most fear, all hidden by duplicity and a weekly practice of virtue signaling. This is not isolated, my parents were involved in the church in many states and internationally, it was everywhere.

As someone who has lived amongst several different communities and denominations, some are worse than others.

I'm guessing you're a former Witness? They're hard to beat.

Nah, normal mainline and evangelical denominations. Both "high church" and "low church" denominations. Both in the context of church organizations, para-church organizations and cross denominational christian universities + Oxford. In the US and Internationally.

In pretty much all studies, homeschooled children on average fare the same or better than kids who go to normal schools.

While it's certainly the case that people with fringe views are more eager to homeschool their children, anti-homeschooling sentiments are really not backed by anything of substance.

>In pretty much all studies

Any citations? I believe you, but would want to look at the methodology. If they're opt-in studies, then obviously the ones neglecting their kids in homeschool aren't going to join a study where they are scrutinized.

> hidden evils against children so that communities wouldn't "lose face"

> dealing with a degree of cowardice and dishonest duplicity they haven't experienced before

Grew up in a religious community, seen this first hand. Only public appearences matter.

The same person that chastises people for having sex without marriage could be a weekly visitor at the whore house.

Yeah, but at least there's a defined goal that they're failing at and you can point it out to them with a 30% chance they'll feel shame.

In the secular world it's just free form open world. People have no anchor to cling to or example to fail to aspire to. It's just Elon Musk one week and Kylie Jenner the next.

> anything goes, you can be whatever you feel like and there's no judgement of any of your actions

Wow, what a terrible take. If anyone needs religion to live a moral life, I'm glad they have found it and hope they never lose it.

I'm judged by my peers, my family, my community, and my country. But even if I wasn't, I would know what's right and what's wrong. Moreover, I guess it's good that amoral people can find ethics from 2000 years ago (when women were without worth, slavery was acceptable, etc), because maybe that's better than nothing (only maybe!), but can we all start a religion based on everything we have learned since then?

For want of a better expression, amen. We're a couple million child sex abuse scandals past the point of pretending like organized religion has anything remotely resembling a monopoly on "moral" behavior.

I hate that take too. If the fear of eternal damnation is the only reason you arent out murdering people, then you are a jerk (in kinder words).

Yeah, secular vs religious is not any basis for judging a value system. We've certainly seen horrible things done by fundamentalists of all stripes, religious or not! There is a lot of very beautiful religious thought over the millenia, and its very beauty is what enables its abuse by bad actors. We must always judge people as individuals by their actions in context, and never allow any form of ideology (whether religious or not) to be used as a shield against individual scrutiny. Morality is unfortunately not black and white, and the moment we try to make it so, we open the door to the greatest evils.

> But even if I wasn't, I would know what's right and what's wrong.

Is it right or wrong to act on homosexual urges? Is it right or wrong to use abortion as a form of birth control?

Have your answers to those questions remained consistent your entire life or did they change at exactly the same time they changed for the rest of western society ~20 years ago? If your moral stance has been unwavering, kudos. Otherwise, I would argue you don't actually know what's right and wrong; at least not on the "corner" (aka controversial) cases. For those you simply synchronize your moral compass to society's, which itself is not fixed or absolute (stances on abortion, LGBTQ, euthanasia, capital punishment, etc. have shifted a lot in the past few decades).

> If your moral stance has been unwavering

On these topics, yes. I independently worked through the moral questions of capital punishment in middle school, wrote long papers on euthanasia when I was 15. I explored the morality of abortion deeply also in high school, LGBTQ was never a moral question for me at all and I truly don't understand why it is for anyone outside of their religion telling them its bad without any justification.

I think people should be capable of exploring these topics deeply at a young age.

All of these (apart from abortion as birth control which is IMHO complicated) are very black & white issues.

But I don't see a problem when people change their opinions during their lifetime, with new experiences and better understanding. Much better than blindly following some specific dogma.

Ah, moral relativism. I believe there is no way around the idea that without religion, there is no such thing as morality. It all comes down to the question: how do you know what's right and wrong? If you don't have an external moral code, that is, you decide what is right and wrong, then the odds are stacked against you, 1 out of every individual with a unique opinion to ever exist; it is conceited for anyone to believe they are the one. Not even the majority is always correct; at one point in time the majority of the Earth believed slavery was fine, yet today we are so comfortable to say that was evil. I couldn't agree more strongly that it is evil, but what will the majority of society think about our morals in a millennium? Why start "the 21st century popular culture religion" when it is inevitably fallible to time? The only possible solution is an external moral code. That is what the Bible, the Koran, etc... are: absolute right and absolute wrong. If that doesn't exist, why should I believe I'm any better than Hitler? He believed he was right. You wouldn't even be able to reason that murder is evil. Ultimately, there is no other basis for an atheist than: "That's what I feel is right, so that's what I believe."

Sidenote: I am a Christian, so I'd like to briefly correct the "(when women were without worth, slavery was acceptable, etc)" phrase pertaining to Christianity solely. At its core, the Bible teaches the very opposite of sexism and racism, however, misconstrued verses and nominal Christians distort the message.

I think your analysis fails at the step where you propose a universalized, objectively correct morality. Please show me the empirical test for this. Or is it just about whether you feel your actions accord with the word of God? Because even then you're just practicing moral relativism and waving your hands at a book composed by fallible humans, all of whom were doing the same, all the way back to before the canons were written. Is it because the book is supposedly divinely-inspired? How do you know the correct divinity inspired the correct people in the correct way? even standing on the soapbox of "well uh uh uh of course my religion is the correct one you smelly heretic" you literally have nothing to go off of except your own feelings and perspective.

So, in short, I don't find your position very convincing. Also, if Christians were some sort of uniquely enlightened group with special access to the metaphysical groups of the universe, why do they keep falling into the same patterns of behavior as all the other humans who don't have this divine guarantee? Like, if religion was actually some special basis upon which to erect a human morality, why does it achieve such similar outcomes as every other basis? If it's because "humans are fallible and don't always accord perfectly to the perfect divine plan allocated to them," then, again, how is that exactly non-relativistic? Is it because the book exists as some sort of measuring stick by which to determine the essential goodness of someone? Because even that depends on the fallible interpretation of the interpreter, unless you presuppose some special person who is blessed with divine discernment to determine the actual divinely-approved interpretation.

It all ultimately devolves to "you just gotta have faith bro." I do not have faith in an entire group of people thumbing their noses at everyone else like their shit doesn't stink. Antisemitism and hate is literally built into every canonical version of Christianity by way of the Churchfathers.

Maybe we should judge Christianity on the outcomes of Christians, instead of on the most compassionate and kindest way they beg us to take their positions. Actually looking at the facts reveals something most priests blush about... we're all equally clueless. The major difference between me and a Christian is that I don't actively look forward to dying, in the hopes I'll get The Good Ending and have an infinitely good time after I've perished in service to people who have an incentive to get me to live my life in service to them.

tips fedora

Ah yes, mockery, did Samson not have a good comeback line recorded in the canons for you to lift? After all, I suppose if those of weak minds aren't told that a comeback line has been divinely approved, then how can they know it is in fact a sick burn? curious

Your reply presupposes that "empirical tests" are the only way to establish truth, which is inadequate. What is the "empirical test" for a mother's love for her child? Or a teacher's love for a student? What is the empirical test for someone being the mayor? What is the empirical test for whether someone is in a relationship with someone else?

Empiricism is blind to most of human experience.

The empirical test for my subjective experience is my experiencing it, what a mind blowing revelation that things can exist in gradations. Shocking. I never said empirical tests are the only way to establish truth, but if you're presupposing an objective and universalized "correct morality" then it doesn't seem stupid to suppose that such a universal thing might be empirical. Or, failing something you can point to that exists in external objective space, that maybe you're just practicing the same kind of moral relativism an entire group of people are practicing and all loudly crying that "boo it's not relativism because sky daddy loves us :'("

There are many things that are true and real that you can't point to in external objective space. Categories. Concepts. Language. Grammar. Numbers. Something doesn't have to be physical or empirical to be real or useful to human experience. So I repeat: empiricism is inadequate for capturing what is true or real. Check out the writings of David Hume. The needful distinction between physical and metaphysical goes all the way back to Aristotle, to be fair.

Categories are concepts in the mind. Concepts are constructs in the mind. Language is a construct in the mind. Grammar is a construct in the mind. Numbers are constructs in the mind. They're nice easy ways to divide things that like actually exist in external objective space into easy-to-deal-with buckets. The existence of the subjective doesn't make the subjective somehow an objective, externalizable phenomenon, nor does it necessarily imply anything metaphysical.

I'm still waiting to hear how outsourcing your moral judgments to external human artifacts somehow implies moral absolutism, as opposed to self-reinforcing intersubjective moral relativism.

Any concept is metaphysical. It maps onto physical reality, but is above it, separate from it. Same with numbers. Same with everything else I said. They are all metaphysical. When I say "metaphysical" I'm not using it to refer to ghosts or to paranormal stuff. I'm using it with the philosophical definition of being "above the physical". Categories map onto reality, but they are not physical.

I don't have any idea what your last sentence means. But I am making the case that something can be real and objective without being empirical.

Concepts aren't "above" reality, they're just configurations of internal subjective spaces, which is carried out on the computational substrate of the human brain... unless you mean to make the claim that the mind is non-local to the brain, and that the physical realities of the brain have no impact on subjectivity (which would be wild.)

My last sentence is thus: just because you take your morals from a book doesn't somehow imply that there is a universal, correct morality. Christians are all still moral relativists, their morality is just relative to a human artifact and reinforced by the intersubjectivity of the other people who also take moral cues from that book. The only case one can make otherwise is, "Look, I have no evidence for an objective morality, I have no particularly good reason to believe it exists, but I have faith that it does and so should you." Which is fine, even if I find it personally stupid, but I can not imagine a single Christian argument for an objective morality that doesn't necessarily require faith as an axiom. I do not have that faith, yet I am a moral person. Religion is not required to have a conscience or to treat your fellow humans well. Therefore, I will not pay any attention to Christian claims towards uniquely privileged knowledge of the divinely mandated correct morality; instead, I will treat them the same as any other person, based on what they actually do.

Check out a book called Dominion by Tom Holland and you might be surprised to find the true source of your current moral structure. He discusses Roman history and contrasts it to Christian culture, which developed out of the carcass of a fallen Western Rome and flourished for a thousand years in the Eastern Roman Empire. so much of what we think of as "universal human values" are actually Christian values. Your adopted morality is a result of centuries of relative peace and the complete domination of Christian ethics in the Western world.

Yeah lmfao you're literally proving my point, of course there's no such thing as "universal human values," because it's all relative to the individual... hence moral relativism, as opposed to the idea that there is some sort of divinely mandated "correct" universal morality. I certainly do take some moral cues from the Judeo-Abrahamic religions, because even kooky cults can be right every now and then. That doesn't mean the rest of it is sensible, nor even that most people who call themselves Christian are capable of acting like decent people.

EDIT: I also like how not once do you even try to make a clear distinction between absolutism and relativism, nor do you try to explain how outsourcing your conscience to a religious book somehow implies universal absolutism.

We should take what makes sense from religions, cherry picking the parts of social progress that was somehow made under such an authoritarian and mind-numbing mental opium, and discard the rest. Any claims of moral superiority on the basis of religion should be outright rejected. The metaphysics are likewise senseless in my opinion, so I choose to ignore them.

> I am a Christian, so I'd like to briefly correct the ..

With no disrespect toward yourself, just a wry acknowledgement of a plain truth - the essential issue with <Some Text> as the external guidebook is that despite it being "conceited for anyone to believe they are the one" this is more or less the sharding issue of the many many many differing interpretations of (choose your own) <Some Book>.

I've travelled the world a lot in the past six deacades and lost count of how many clearly distinct groups of Christians I've encountered.

The Christian on Christian wars over differing takes on the same material have torn kingdoms asunder.

You're exactly right.

> without religion, there is no such thing as morality.

Would you agree that non-human animals aren’t religious? Because we see moral behavior in animals. For example [1]:

> In another experiment with rats, researchers find that if a rat is given the choice between two containers—one holding chocolate and one holding a trapped rat who appears to be suffering—the rat will try to help the suffering rat first before seeking the chocolate. Experiments like these show that animals make moral choices and that their behavior cannot be explained through natural selection alone.

There are lots of other examples, like animals that call out to warn their group of an approaching predator, placing themselves at higher risk.

Also, it seems like you’re arguing that an “external” moral code is The Only Way but then excusing people in biblical times for owning slaves because “that was a long time ago.” But shouldn’t their supposed access to this special moral code have been sufficient to conclude that owning humans as property is immoral?

> You wouldn't even be able to reason that murder is evil.

This is just downright silly. As a rational, thinking person, it’s easy to reason why murdering fellow human beings is not good.

> the Bible teaches the very opposite of sexism

Anyone can search for “sexism in the bible” to see what it has to say in its own words. For convenience, here’s one such link [2].

[1] https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/morality_anima...

[2] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Biblical_sexism

Would you say that you behave in a moral way because you fear the threat of hell (extrinsic, negative motivation), or because you follow the example of Jesus Christ in your heart (intrinsic, positive motivation)?

That take presumes that the morals you've been taught came directly from the lips of God. Otherwise, it's other people making stuff up.

The Golden Rule is pretty self-explanatory and is a solid foundation for moral behavior. I don't rape, murder, steal, etc., not because I'm afraid of God's wrath, or that of the police -- it's because I wouldn't want those things to happen to me or my loved ones and am able to understand that others feel this way too.

Meanwhile, that moral absolutism give license to kill people for blasphemy. And there's plenty more horrible things that are done to others because God said so.

Everybody's entitled to have their own relationship with God (even as an atheist I do in my own way), and I acknowledge that there's plenty of good that comes from people practicing their faith, but that is easily countered by very bad stuff that is morally justified by their interpretations of scripture.

And this concern is everybody's -- because there's ongoing efforts to make the US into a theocracy and that would be a very bad thing.

Well said!

Are you, by "scripture" referring to the Bible, or just in general for religious texts?

I acknowledge that a lot of people do very bad things and supposedly justify them with the Bible. But I suggest that if they did something bad, then their justification is wrong, and can't truly be based on the Bible.

I also suggest that when someone justified something bad through the Bible, it can most definitely be countered and corrected with the Bible itself.

> I also suggest that when someone justified something bad through the Bible, it can most definitely be countered and corrected with the Bible itself

Then you're down to opinion vs opinion. Add into that the work that Bart Erhman has done on the veracity of the texts themselves, as well as the fact that the bible was assembled by committee (of men).

We're all entitled to our own beliefs, so I normally wouldn't care, except there are active factions trying to make the US be ruled by biblical law. So in that context, this act of interpretation is very much of everybody's interest.

No one needs religion to lead a moral life. That's not the argument.

But without the transcendent, without a higher power, we have no grounding for our morality. Everything becomes subjective and "post-modern". Actions then become "justifiable" - if there is such a thing - by whatever criteria suits us: the greater good, the good of the nation, whatever. But essentially self-interest takes over completely.

The more we move away from God the worse our societies will become.

> But essentially self-interest takes over completely.

Orrrrrrrr... maybe... it doesn't? Maybe even when we're all alone and have to figure things out for ourselves we can come to understand ourselves in genuine relation to those around us and discover a kind and empathetic morality built from logical first principles? Even without the fear of the judgement of almighty sky daddy?

Humans are nothing if not self interested. But that's beside the point here.

Why "kind and empathetic"? Who said that's how we should be?

If we are nothing more than an arbitrary arrangement of matter, formed according to arbitrary laws of physics, and only for a relative moment, then what is "kind" and "empathetic"?

In a godless universe, you are no more significant than a rock. The only sound position you can then take is that there is no such thing as morality.

People feel good when they help others and feel bad when they get scolded by their peers. That is our inner moral compass and is the core to all morals even religious ones. Religion doesn't make it better, at best it is as good. Humans are pack animals, we put in a lot of effort to help the pack.

What I'm trying to get across is that a sense of morality is with us all. We have a generally shared understand of goodness, justice, etc. My point is that that morality is impossible to justify in a godless universe.

"People feel good when they help ...". No argument. But is morality just about the feels? No, it isn't.

In order for morality to have any worth at all, it has to be an intrinsic truth (or rational determination) separate from god anyway. If the only reason something is moral is because an original creator declared it so then I don’t personally see the difference to us attempting to determine our own sense of morality based on what feels right. If it’s just an appeal to authority, why does it make a difference if that authority is god or human?

Now, if one believes in a creator that is many orders of magnitude (or infinitely) more intelligent than a human, sure, saying that they probably have a better insight into morality and we should listen to them makes sense. But it would be because of their greater ability to understand what is moral, not them being the law maker of morality.

>If the only reason something is moral is because an original creator declared it so then I don’t personally see the difference to us attempting to determine our own sense of morality based on what feels right. If it’s just an appeal to authority, why does it make a difference if that authority is god or human?

Well, because the god can stick you in a fire for all eternity if you follow the human's moral code instead. That's not really a great case for the soundness of their moral teachings but nonetheless presents a compelling argument for obedience.

> My point is that that morality is impossible to justify in a godless universe.

You say that, and it's good that you did because the arguments you're making don't work together to prove your point in the way that you think they do. What about a godless universe makes morality impossible to justify? Is it that god is the only possible source of morality or meaning or value or something? Because you haven't proven that and can't just take it as axiom.

>feel bad when they get scolded by their peers.

This is the way it ought to work, but often does not. Or, when your peer group associates criminal or antisocial behavior with positive attributes.

Shaming does not work in a large population of antisocial people. Religion is not THE answer however for a large population of people it is necessary (currently).

Ok, so then if we all follow the Quran we should be good, right? It is the official word of God, right?

> In a godless universe, you are no more significant than a rock.

Can you think of anything in between? Why the extreme jump to “it’s either all or nothing”?

To state that The Only way to not be a meaningless hunk of rock is to worship your god seems like a pretty big lack of imagination.

I don’t need your god or your god’s rules to appreciate that you’re probably an amazing person in many ways. My partner is “godless” and she’s far more amazing than a rock.

If you want to argue that certain people need religion and that it may provide more benefit to society when those people personally worship their god I can see how this may be a sound argument. Some people really do need jesus, but this hardly means everyone needs jesus or some other sky god to see the value of other people.

This is such a good example of why I push back on organized religions and their foot soldier bible thumpers… this all or nothing thing. I don’t want your god, I don’t want your religious prudery. I thinks it’s amazing that you find meaning there, i really genuinely do. But it isn’t for me. No. I don’t want your god. I still see your value and still care—and, honestly it’s not a wild impossibility that I see value in others and that I do this without a god.

The argument would work better if the Abrahamic god wasn't so clearly immoral, like in the example of Sodom and Gomorrah, killing of Uzzah, the Flood. The god appears to be a narcissist (the faith in him is the most important quality in a person), putting reverence and obedience above all (commanding Abraham to murder his son for no good reason). God as described in bible is a morally despicable person and surely no example to follow.

This is God’s world, we just live in it. To think that you exist purely for your own sake is pure hubris.

By which standard are you (blasphemously) attempting (and failing to) judge God by, though?

Because you clearly don't understand the context or reasoning behind any of the situations you listed, you resort to simply condemning God upon your own authority.

You think of yourself as better than God.

And that is what sin is.

Try acknowledging God as the authority, as He is your maker, and then you might even get to understand all the events you are ignorantly referring to.

> By which standard are you (blasphemously) attempting (and failing to) judge God by, though?

I think most people would agree that mass murders are morally wrong.

> You think of yourself as better than God.

I have my own problems, but otherwise I don't murder people.

> Try acknowledging God as the authority, as He is your maker, and then you might even get to understand all the events you are ignorantly referring to.

Fortunately the god doesn't exist, and the bible is just poorly written fiction.

But even if I was convinced that the Abrahamic god exists, it wouldn't change my opinion that the god is a narcissist psychopath.

In a godless universe, you are no more significant than a rock.

That's a rough approximation of my beliefs. The universe is massive and long-lived. I am neither.

I want to leave the world a better place than when I entered it. That trickles down to my daily life - are things better or worse when I go to bed than when I awoke? Being as insignificant as a rock doesn't preclude that desire.

And frankly, it's kind of offensive when Christians tell me I'm less-than-moral because I don't need their scripture to decide what's good or bad.

"And frankly, it's kind of offensive when Christians tell me I'm less-than-moral because I don't need their scripture to decide what's good or bad."

The moral argument isn't telling you that. You people (HN readers) seem intent on misunderstanding my initial statements.

It's not that atheists are not moral. Not even less moral than religious people.

The point I am trying, and failing, to express is that morality must come from a higher, non-human source. If it does not, then it is just a product of fallible human minds and is entirely meaningless. That's it.

...entirely meaningless...

At the scale of the universe, everything we do is meaningless. We simply are what we are and that's that. Realizing this causes me no small amount of existential angst. So I try to live in the moment as best I can and leave the world ever so slightly better than I found it.

So maybe we actually agree (on what lack of religion means, not on what we personally believe about morality or existence)?

> without a higher power, we have no grounding for our morality.

This might be more convincing if we had empirical evidence that this “higher power” even exists and could discern (and thus agree on) what it wants and why what it wants is good.

You know what’s funny about this?

I got $1000 that says that I could name several “Godly” (greater than 90% abrahamic affiliation) that you would immediately label “a shithole country”, but if I were to name the most secular ones, you’d most likely state that “theyre great, beautiful places to live with good people.”

Read Cicero.

Read Elizabeth Anscombe or Alasdair MacIntyre.

(I'm trying to point out that your comment isn't helpful to the discussion.)

The suggestion of Cicero as a counter to the expressed neccesity to have religion in order to have grounding for morals is sufficient to establish the existence of moral grounds not resting on religion.

Countering with two Catholic moral | ethical philosophers doesn't negate the suggestion of Cicero, it seems to be just an attempt to make the first proposition a second time.

That's just my drive by two cents worth, FWiW.

Cicero might have a good point, but the curt words saying "Read Cicero" by themselves aren't very helpful.

It's going to take more time commitment than people reading random forum posts will give to do that. It would be better to try summarising some aspect of his ideas (which is of course a task that would demand time from whoever wishes to promote him). That's why I said the comment isn't helpful.

Would you be willing to give the hours+ time commitment if a random stranger said the two words "Read [name]" with no further elaboration or would you ignore it? It would be more helpful in a discussion to bring actual ideas to the table, or else the discussion would consist of no more than reading recommendations.

I had an Oxbridge type education, it was common practice for reading to be suggested with no further expansion.

In a thread about education, I expect the responses of the educated.

When an absolute position is taken a single exception rebuts the absolute.

If a comment is made regarding the absolute necessity of religion as grounding for morals and virtue and a simple response is given "Read X" then I expect that X addresses either supoort or raises an exception.

Cicero is sufficiently well known for many to be aware of the material, those that are unaware (in a thread about education) should be curious enough to learn more and advance their own position as to why Cicero may or may not be a suitable rebuttal.

FWiW I felt the comment given re: Cicero to be neccesary and sufficient and I'd tip my hat to the user if I had a hat, were to cross paths, and recognised them as such.

But this is just me, a random drive by HN commenter.

Each to their own.

"If a comment is made regarding the absolute necessity of religion as grounding for morals and virtue ..."

I, for one, made no such comment.

I've been attempting to express the moral argument for God. Religion doesn't feature, as such.

Nothing I've seen from either of them counters Cicero's famous secular philosophical basis for ethics?

Wait, we don't need religion for morality but without it, it has no grounding? Perhaps for you and others indoctrinated to think in such a manner, but for others we do just fine.

> The more we move away from God the worse our societies will become.

Whose God? How well is it working in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan?

The Bard makes an excellent point: "The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose." We could find countless "justifiable" actions that are based on "God told me to", so ignoring that aspect is dishonest.

Was society better in the past when it was more religious? If you think so, maybe you could give a hint about how far back we might look. 50 years? 100 years? 250 years?

Is there a threshold for belief in God that you think is necessary for a healthy society? 50%? 75%?

It's not true at all to state that morality has no grounding without a "higher power". (See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics)

For example: belief in a higher power simply isn't required to allow people to make their own medical decisions. Belief in a higher power isn't required to give someone food.

It's absolutely fine to propose religion as an ethical framework, but I don't think it can possibly make sense to propose it as the only ethical framework, or to propose that society will become worse if humans "move away from God".

There are plenty of good alternatives.

You're missing the point. You're in good company though. I watched Christopher Hitchens make the same mistake in a similar discussion with Dennis Prager. A number of others in this thread are also doing it. The video link [1] below lays it out pretty well (also points out that A. C. Grayling had the same misunderstanding). Anyway ...

It's not that you need God to be moral. It's that you need an objective "higher power" as the source of that morality.

So I totally agree with what you wrote there, but you can't make a sound argument for a moral position without God or some objective higher power.

> "Belief in a higher power isn't required to give someone food."

So it's a moral duty to give a hungry person food. OK. I agree. Now we could have an exchange where you try to make a strong rational case for that, during which I will ask "why?" an annoying number of times until we get to the part where it's clear there is no basis for the moral duty absent a higher, non-human, source.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cp9Nl6OUEJ0

My own moral duty in that case is rationalized quite simply with the thought that if I were in that position, I would want other people to offer me food.

Why is that better than being selfish?

Giving someone in need some food lestens suffering. That lestening of suffering is an observable and easily mentally modeled outcome rooted in the mundane world.

Acting so that we decrease suffering, increase wellbeing, and otherwise reduce harm is moral in and of itself without any higher source.

> until we get to the part where it's clear there is no basis for the moral duty absent a higher, non-human, source.

Casual sneaking in of "non-human" here, when a powerful human would fit just as well.

Your issue is that there often isn't a basis for anything at all except "seems to work". That's why we have the joke about the 5-year-old who keeps asking "why", exasperating its parents.

That we don't have a complete rationally-grounded framework doesn't imply the existence of God or even that it's good to act as if such a being exists. Insisting otherwise is basically a god-of-the-gaps argument.

You don't need any ethical framework, religion or otherwise, to allow people to make their own medical decisions. Not to give a hungry person food, nor to do anything to improve anyone's life.

I do understand your argument, and I definitely agree that some set of non-self "objective higher-power" can be very helpful. Like a personal or societal code of ethics. Bodies of law are an attempt at that.

I simply don't agree that our society will become worse the more we "move away from God". It's totally fine if "God" is how you want to do it. But not everyone wants this, and the development of secular philosophy, laws, professional ethics, and personal ethics are excellent substitutes for people who don't believe.

Not to mention, secular alternatives still allow people to practice their religious-based ethical framework without forcing others to do so.

Avoiding eternal damnation is kinda the definition of self interest.

I am not a Christian to avoid eternal damnation. That's just a very good consequence.

I am a Christian because Christ is God. This is bigger than me. This is outside, and regardless of me.

> I'm judged by my peers, my family, my community, and my country. But even if I wasn't, I would know what's right and what's wrong.

The first sentence is True. It is at the foundation of community, co-operation, and yes, conformity. You may resent some things about living in a community, but you benefit from and become human through others. [1]

The second sentence is... not a certitude.

[1] _ The real meaning of Ubuntu. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_philosophy

> the current mode of "anything goes, you can be whatever you feel like and there's no judgement of any of your actions."

That doesn't match reality. Do you have kids in public school? Of course they judge actions—especially those that harm others. Sometimes that's called social-emotional learning, one of the things that Florida politicians have tried to make a boogeyman. We're certainly willing to punish kids based on their actions.

I meant something different by "anything goes." I am ~40 and was born in Eastern Europe -- but even in the US, back then there was still a strong value that a good life a combination of having a family and raising the next generation, ability to work to support your family and contribution to society through your work.

Whereas even in "my time" these values would have resonated with the tone in a public school, I am pretty sure that's not going to be the case today. But these values remain for me very central, and I would sacrifice a lot to ensure my kids are educated in an environment that supports them. A religious school that frames these values along the lines of "what G-d expects of me" would totally work for me separate from whether I literally believed in the religion. "Anything goes" by contrast to this is the vibe that it's fine to not do any of these things.

It's funny/sad to see eg on HN folks saying "oh, I don't see why it's important to have children, or to have my work matter." Right, but the fact that you "don't see it" is sad to me (you do you but I don't have to think it's great) and I don't want my kids to "not see it"

> I meant something different by "anything goes." I am ~40 and was born in Eastern Europe -- but even in the US, back then there was still a strong value that a good life a combination of having a family and raising the next generation, ability to work to support your family and contribution to society through your work. Whereas even in "my time" these values would have resonated with the tone in a public school, I am pretty sure that's not going to be the case today.

I'm not aware of that class in the curriculum. Is it supposed to be taught during math, history, geology or sports?

// I'm not aware of that class in the curriculum.

These topics come up at the very least in: literature, history, social studies, sex ed, etc...

This is a very typical opinion that many religious people have about non-religious people, but I think it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding. You get your values from religion but this is not the only source of values. People readily receive values via tradition, culture, example, etc. And then there are those thoughtful (and often somewhat tortured, like myself) people who engage in a lot of soul-searching in order to develop their own set of values. A lack of religion does not mean a lack of values. In fact, judging by the behaviour of many religious people, it often seems to be the opposite.

In terms of the values you cited, such as raising the next generation and contributing to society, these are extremely common values found in a wide spectrum of society and indeed, are heavily emphasized in virtually any education system you care to examine!

I agree with your point.

One of the primary benefits (and drawbacks) of religion is that it provides a set of packaged values that are straightforward and generally work pretty well for a lot of people. Thousands of years of refinement went into the development of those packages.

They're mostly effective and convenient for a lot of people.

Determining values from first principles is hard, and there are a lot of easy mistakes along the way. You can easily find yourself trapped in nihilism or moral relativity or one of the other common philosophy potholes.

It's kind of like a happy meal vs cooking from scratch. We all know cooking is healthier and cheaper, but sometimes we just don't have time, and there's no guarantee on how it will turn out.

Did not expect a philosophical comparison of happy meals coming with toys versus having to wash your own dishes, but here we are.

> Determining values from first principles is hard, and there are a lot of easy mistakes along the way.

It's a shame they decided to put a bunch of weird stuff in Happy Meals because I think you're right about this.

Not providing guidance to children is at least as bad as providing overly dogmatic guidance.

> A religious school that frames these values along the lines of "what G-d expects of me" would totally work for me

As a gay man who grew up religious (in public schools), “what god expects of me” was not only oppressing but also the source of a lot of self-doubt, self-hate, depression, and anxiety. (Thankfully I quickly ditched the religion and paved my own path - very content with life now!)

> I don't want my kids to "not see it"

I get where you’re coming from. But also, you can’t force kids to see things a certain way. There’s no amount of schooling or indoctrination that can force them to adopt the outcome you’re expecting of them.

Setting a good example yourself by how and with whom you parent is probably 10x more impactful than the school you sent them to.

> As a gay man who grew up religious (in public schools), “what god expects of me” was not only oppressing but also the source of a lot of self-doubt, self-hate, depression, and anxiety. (Thankfully I quickly ditched the religion and paved my own path - very content with life now!)

Okay, for you, but what about the 90% of the population that shouldn’t forge their own path? Society actually needs them to do what’s expected of them.

That's what capitalism's for.

>90% population that shouldn’t forge their own path?

Who decides who these 90% are?

>Society actually needs them to do what’s expected of them.

You would be surprised how many people do what society needs without forcing them.

> Who decides who these 90% are?

Elders.

> You would be surprised how many people do what society needs without forcing them.

It’s surprising how many don’t. TFR for white people in LA (to use an example of a place where social norms have been upended quite thoroughly) is just over 1, and more than half the adults are unmarried. Without immigration from more religious and rigid Latin American countries, LA would be shrinking in half each generation.

>Without immigration from more religious and rigid Latin American countries, LA would be shrinking in half each generation.

i'm sure that religion is the only reason why immigrants into the United States would want to have kids.

/s There's definitely no US-centric financial/legal/immigration-related reasons, right? /s

Comparing different immigrant groups suggests it’s religious. Muslim Americans have similar fertility rates to Latinos, but East Asians have similar fertility rates to secular whites. But Muslims and East Asians have similarly high levels of education and income to each other, in contrast to Latinos.

This is a phenomenon across the developed world. Permissive western societies are outsourcing the job of perpetuating the population to Catholics and Muslims, just like they outsource industrial production to China. Permissive societies don’t appear to be sustainable without that arbitrage.

> Permissive western societies are outsourcing the job of perpetuating the population

Why does the job of perpetuating the population need to be done at all? At what levels? Why those levels? Does it matter where that population lives or their quality of life? Why or why not?

The best bet for fragments of culture, beliefs, way of life, world view, sense of morality, genetic variations, etc to exist as an average person is to have kids and instill the best parts of those values into them as a child.

If you're fine with your people's history just disappearing from the world, feel free to never reproduce.

Sure, but like, that's not what we're talking about. OP says western society is "outsourcing the job of perpetuating the population," as if there is some shirking of responsibility going on, or we all need to care about this for some reason. That's macro-level, not the personal choice to have children or not. No one is asking them to do that, so it's unreasonable to foist responsibility back on western society and then shame them for not fulfilling that responsibility.

Why is maintaining the human population at or above present levels something that so obviously needs to be done?

Probably to fund Social Security as life expectancy increases.

Maintaining a stable population in the steady state is something that needs to be done for society to continue existing. You can decide that, okay, maybe the target should be half the current population, but that just means that within a generation, those people in LA need to be having twice as many kids as their parents, which doesn’t seem plausible to me. Whatever the target is, the lifestyle of American secular whites (where the TFR is around half the sustainable rate) can either only be temporary, or must be propped up by immigration that only exists due to accidents of history and colonialism.

I’m only here with my three kids because the British colonized the country I’m from. The Latinos in LA—who are doing the grunt work of society as well the work of raising the next generation, while white people have dogs instead of kids—are only there because the Spanish were worse colonizers than the British. Secular white people tell me how wonderful their permissive, individualistic values are. But it’s like saying how great a job a government is doing when they’re running massive, unsustainable budget deficits. A value system can’t be “good,” in my view, if it can only exist because of an immigrant servant class.

>Comparing different immigrant groups suggests it’s religious. Muslim Americans have similar fertility rates to Latinos, but East Asians have similar fertility rates to secular whites

Are those Muslims from the same countries/cultures as the East Asians or is religiosity only one of a host of differences between the cohorts?

By "shouldn't forge their own path", I assume you mean something other than "should continue to ostracize and oppress 10% here, 50% there", so what do you mean?

It may be funny to you, but consider that many Americans have encountered "men of God" who've turned out to be your garden-variety dickhead using religious fervor as a fig leaf to mask their bad actions.

How do we judge harm? And over what timeline? Is a coach who drives the team in practice, making them suffer, in preparation for a game: is that harmful? The athletes are suffering! Is a parent harming their child when they ground the child for being late multiple times? Is that harm? The child is suffering! Is short-term harm in the interest of long-term benefit still harmful? What if you are unaware of the harm of your actions? Are you still justified?

"Do no harm" is a terrible metric to use for guiding one's actions. Libertarianism (which is the source of the "no harm" principle) is completely oblivious to the notion that humans are complex, interdependent, and not purely self-determined.

I was raised very Catholic (and decided by my early teens that I didn't believe in any of it), and I completely disagree with your conclusion. Organized religion (at least Christianity) absolutely is about deep fear. "Do this or you'll go to hell!" "Believe this or you'll go to hell!" Repeat ad infinitum.

I won't deny that some churches (as in, specific people, not the system as a whole) can do good in the world; one church I attended with my parents as a kid had some great community outreach programs that helped a lot of people who had fallen through the cracks. And some clergy members are good people who are trying to help.

But overall, religion is about control (for the religious leadership, and politicians who use religion to gain power), and about belonging and feeling less lost and alone (for practicioners) in an uncertain world.

Oh, and as an atheist who knows and hangs out with a lot of other atheists, I can assure you that "anything goes, you can be whatever you feel like and there's no judgement of any of your actions" is not a thing. Or, rather, it very much is a thing, but that attitude comes from just as many religious people as it comes from the non-religious. And there are quite a few actions that religious people take that I think are disgusting and immoral, but somehow "anything goes" as long they can justify it in the pages of their made-up fantasy holy book. I don't consider things moral or immoral based on what a storybook tells me; I decide based on how I think my actions will affect others. My system is certainly not a perfect one, but I dare say it's miles ahead of the religious process.

You've misunderstood Catholicism. The entire reason Christianity is so radical is because it's the first major religion of purely love. There is no need to sacrifice anyone, you get infinite forgiveness, so long as you truly repent, and nearly every facet of Catholicism is based around the idea of love.

A fine example is the incredibly important Corinthians 13:13: And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

When we die, there is no need for faith. We have the answer. When we die, we have no need for hope - again, we have the answer. The Catholic church places love above all else.

The idea that you only think "specific people" can do good in the world is pretty nuts - the Catholic Church alone is the largest non-governmental provider of healthcare in the world.

I also don't understand why books are somehow bad places to get information, even if they're completely fictional. Can you not learn lessons from cartoons, even? Do you truly think every moral issue is so simply black and white that it doesn't require practice and debate?

I am not going to say religion is perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but much of what you're complaining about simply is not true.

> You've misunderstood Catholicism

To be fair, Catholics at even rather high ranks in the heirarchy have fairly radically divergent views of Catholicism.

Yes, but the things he's discussing are rather fundamental and core, not anachronisms of thousand-year-old interpretations

> first major religion of purely love.

Hinduism is much older than Christianity. Specifically the Shiva sects. Shiva means compassionate one. God is seen as immanent love and transcendent reality.

This is a bit of stretch. Shiva is the god of destruction and is frequently avatared carrying weapons. While the scriptures may preach compassion, this is not what the majority of adherents see and observe.

There are many scriptures related to shiva, you are just picking one aspect to suit your agenda.

so you know about Noah's arc and sodom and gemorra, right?

And do you? Do you actually understand what and why it happened?

You are grossly misinformed about the history and practice of Hinduism and Saivism. You're repeating stereotypes.

Please cite your sources. Tell this to the South Indian Tamil who say Anbe Sivamayam, Satyame Parasivam (God is immanent love and transcendent reality).

The "Siva as destroyer" is imagery is perpetuated by firstly Hindus who don't worship God as Siva (e.g. Vaishnava, who worship God as Kristna), secondly by the "spiritual but non religious" people of both Hindu heritage and not, and finally by e.g. Christians.

In Saivism there is one aspect of Siva that is "destruction" but it is a synonym for "dissolution" and is not a scary aspect.

Unfortunately sometimes the "love" in Catholicism is excessive and we see it in all these sad stories of pedophilia.

> ...you get infinite forgiveness, so long as you truly repent...

Thinking back to an earlier comment up the chain (from someone else) about how being nonreligious doesn't offer enough moral guidance, and I kinda think the "infinite forgiveness" thing is exponentially more fraught than even the most detached "nothing really matters" atheist.

Being able to do literally anything and not face cosmic consequences so long as you say you're sorry is mind-boggling to me. I wonder if it's partly why so many convicted murderers get born-again when they're in prison.

It's pragmatic. Being religious checks a box when they want to apply for parole.

In many stripes of Christianity, Divine forgiveness is given freely in response to repentance.

Genuine repentance is marked by sorrow over the harms and wrongs you have done, and sincere efforts to make amends where you can.

It's also marked by an understanding that your actions may have ramifications here and now and a willingness to bear the consequences of what you have wrought, insofar as you are able - "Take up your cross and follow Me," in the vernacular of the religion.

Forgiveness is freely given, in the sense that you cannot earn it and God extends it to you, but it's recognized that even accepting forgiveness requires admission of wrong and actively renouncing your pattern of wrongdoing.

You can't accept forgivenwas for something you think was just fine.

shrug I'm not sure how widely this perspective inn it is shared in modern Christianity.

It's where I wound up when I experienced Jesus' love and kindness firmly dragging my besetting sins in front of me to be dealt with, but since that day I've certainly noticed Christians who don't seem to share this perspective.

> In many stripes of Christianity, Divine forgiveness is given freely in response to repentance.

Many? I would say it was the central message of Christianity.

> It's where I wound up when I experienced Jesus' love and kindness firmly dragging my besetting sins in front of me to be dealt with, but since that day I've certainly noticed Christians who don't seem to share this perspective.

Sadly that happens.

> Many? I would say it was the central message of Christianity.

I would agree, but I don't see it treated or discussed that way in practice by plenty of self-identified Christians.

I think you laid a very good explanation of one of the essences of the Gospel here, the forgiveness from God, so essentially the true message of Christianity.

Real repentance only comes through God:

John 14:6 Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.

Sadly you are right, for many reasons this is not necessarily widely understood by everyone that nominally identifies as a Christian.

I think the other essential part of Christianity is then extending that same forgiveness and mercy to those around us. Even our enemies. This is the especially unpopular aspect of Christianity, even within Christianity.

agreed.

Though with the important caveats that _forgiveness_ is not identical to _reconciliation_, and that extending mercy to the unrepentant is dangerous and borderline incoherent ("I assure you, he will by no means get out of there before he has paid the last penny").

I've seen those concepts misunderstood, missed, or forgotten far too often in Christian circles.

The alternative is never being able to be forgiven.

In the real world we see the consequences of feeling like you can't be forgiven with kids and teens who get labeled as "trouble makers". As soon as that label starts to become permanent and precede them, they live down to other people's expectations of them. When they start feeling like nothing they do will ever be good enough, and that no matter what they do they will be in trouble or someone will find fault with them, they stop trying to improve or stay out of trouble. See also the concept of stereotype threat.

It's not (as I understand it) about "not facing consequences" so much as it is about being possible to be forgiven at all and therefore there is a reason to try to change and to try and make amends and to try to seek forgiveness.

It also isn't enough in any interpretation I've seen to just "say you're sorry". You have to repent, and even secular definitions, let alone religious ones don't seem to interpret "repenting" as simply saying you're sorry.

> The alternative is never being able to be forgiven.

No it isn't, there is a whole spectrum between "forgiving everything" and "forgiving nothing".

Yes, obviously there's a spectrum between those points. That's not what I'm talking about though. I'm talking about the consequences of being unforgivable, no matter where the line is. If something is unforgivable, you're setting a line in the sand beyond which a person has no reason or incentive to not continue behaving in that way because it doesn't matter, they're going to continue being punished.

Oh, I personally know one.

He murdered an assistant professor because she had second thoughts about divorcing her husband when she was going to get a fat divorce check and it ruined his (the murderer's) dreams of training to become a pro golfer. He shot her, threw her body in a hole at a wildlife management area (they found her body after the police interviewed his father and discovered he had a life-long fascination with said hole), drove her car back to her apartment, and then took her credit card and ordered thousands of dollars worth of golf gear before driving to his parents' house 7 hours away.

This was a Catholic altar boy growing up. But Catholicism doesn't like mortal sins too much, so low and behold, his redemption streak began by becoming magically "born again" so that it would be rude for people to ask him questions about his obvious guilt. He's now a luthier and prayer leader at Angola State Penn in Louisiana... and as I've known the guy since I was in diapers, I know that he is categorically full of shit from the interviews I've seen.

I am friends with his sisters and didn't even realize he had a daughter who must have been a toddler at the time that he murdered that woman until I saw her in some of her LSU graduation photos. Didn't look like her aunts, and then I realized the child was the spitting image of her daddy. Sad that he robbed her of a dad over some childish bullshit.

> Being able to do literally anything and not face cosmic consequences so long as you say you're sorry is mind-boggling to me.

If it truly was like that, wouldn't everyone be doing it? There is, however, a bit more to it:

Acts 3:19 - Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord,

Turn to God.

> I wonder if it's partly why so many convicted murderers get born-again when they're in prison.

Convicted murderers get a very real chance to see just how evil people can be.

The worse the symptoms you have, the easier it is to find out you have an illness.

Sadly not everyone wants to acknowledge the illness and accept the remedy.

Turn to God.

The reality of the Catholic Church and its history is far and away divorced from the teachings of Jesus. Like the OP, I was also raised in a devout Catholic household, and while, yes, there is plenty of talk of love, there is, and traditionally has been plenty of fear-mongering.

You need to constantly be on the look out for Satan and his temptations. There's a laundry list of things you shouldn't do or think about. If you do, you should feel guilty and repent. God is always watching, so be good.

Every individual church is different, and your mileage will vary, but I found them to be similar to office spaces in the level of bickering and gossip as their best, and deeply dysfunctional institutions at worse.

I would also disagree that Christianity was the first major religion of purely love when Buddhism had been around for centuries and had the practice of forsaking one's own enlightenment in order to save all being from suffering.

I am not Catholic, but I have studied the history of various religions, and it's pretty clear that the RC Church definitely deviated from the teachings it claimed to follow, for literally centuries. In fact, for centuries it was actually illegal for lay people (people who weren't priests/clergy) to read the Bible, and it was forbidden to translate it into other languages. There are many such examples, such as the selling of indulgences (buy salvation instead of it being free).

But: just because that Catholic Church deviated from its own teachings doesn't mean that at least some of those teachings weren't correct. Teachings like "love one another" resonate in any language.

> there is plenty of talk of love, there is, and traditionally has been plenty of fear-mongering.

Which is perfectly consistent. The idea is that love is better than fear, but fear is still better than lack of contrition. Accepting this fear as an intermediate step, instead of immediately expecting perfection, is an important psychological step.

You need to read your catechism.

Catholicism absolutely has sins that are unforgivable.

This is incorrect. The only "unforgivable" sin is one you carry to your death.

Introspection can be hard. It's worthwhile to spend time understanding and even incorporating external critique for improvement of self and community.

The catholic church sure seems to love little kids and the protecting the priests from the consequences of loving those kids.

Yeah, at their worst, they were slightly worse than teachers at one point. Thankfully, the Catholic church has been working on massive reforms and almost all of these issues are from 50+ years ago. Now, they're significantly safer than any random adult.

> But overall, religion is about control

how many religions do you know and have experience with, in order to make such a claim? don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

I am quite sure that most religious people would not even take offense at the idea that their religion is at least partially about control or related to control. That's actually kind of the point of a lot of it. "Trust in God and follow his commandments" and all that stuff sort of implies that there are rules you should be following and that you have accepted the responsibility to try and follow them.

I guess I don't see why control is necessarily a bad thing. Most people would say that something like self-control is (in moderation like all things) a virtue. Certainly I see a lot more people that could use more control than I see people that are so controlled (by either themselves or others) that they could use less.

I think you mean very different things by "control." He's talking about "control of man over man" facilitated by religion. I think that totally happens and bad when it doesn't.

You're talking about "man consciously accepting his obligation to G-d". That is very positive and in fact to chose to live this way is the highest exercise of free will.

How many religions do you know where its adherents are just fine with you leaving the faith behind?

Because if they aren't, then they're about control.

Well I was raised Catholic and went to Catholic school all the way up and through high school, decided I was a hardcore atheist around 8th grade (long since pure agnostic btw), butted heads and debated constantly in Theology class, and I disagree with you.

Very few of my Catholic friends and family seem to be motivated by fear, and even at my most annoying and confrontational no one ever tried to “scare” me back into believing.

ymmv, of course.

"Catholic Guilt" is a stereotype for a reason. The scare is: a) not going to church and being a social outcast, b) duty to go to church, to pray every day, or go to hell.

Is not limited to Catholicism but religion in general, but the stereotype is there for a reason. Maybe the teachings? Maybe anecdotally your group were outliers?

Every single Catholic I know is religiously motivated by fear, and I know literally hundreds. And the older they get, the worse it gets, especially after they lose a parent.

All trying to buy that time away from hell and purgatory and flooding the living crap out of my social media feeds with nonsensical prayers to saints and statues. And they are utterly hypocritical with their proselytizing too. They want to be free to spam that nonsense but post something critical or contradictory and they lose their fucking minds.

> But overall, religion is about control (for the religious leadership, and politicians who use religion to gain power), and about belonging and feeling less lost and alone (for practicioners) in an uncertain world.

Can I ask an earnest question, out of curiosity? What do you think is the role of government in people's lives? Do you believe we should have UBI?

Not my experience at all, and I know a lot of Catholics in two countries (two continents, in fact).

I suspect it is an American, and possibly Irish thing - the guilt thing is a stereotype in the UK too (but not true in practice).

What a weird take. Religions ability to influence behaviour works because of our lizard brain, not despite it.

The idea of God judging people from afar is an extension of the important humans place on social conformity. We are hard wired to care about what other people think of us. If you remove the religious decorarions then that underlying trait still exists.

// Religions ability to influence behaviour works because of our lizard brain

Totally not my experience. My lizard brain doesn't want to keep the Sabbath, or spend an hour at the temple, or to donate a lot (or anything) to charity, it doesn't really want to bother raising my kids a certain way, or to be discriminant in my diet, sexual behavior, etc.

It is my higher-level self that sees the elevating function of these things and struggles to override my lizard brain for daily control. When it succeeds, it's glorious. When it fails, I am still happy to have fought.

I don't see this as evidence of the contrary. Church attenders want to fit in with their peers at the church who are all doing the same thing. This is why there are so many hundreds of Christian sects, they are all trying to follow their local church's interpretation of the Bible. Individuals who read the Bible and come to even slightly different conclusions get kicked out of that church, so there is little incentive to read and think for one's self. Everyone is expected to read and come the same conclusions as their local leadership, or they will be browbeat and excommunicated.

You have a greatly simplified understanding of what religion is and how it operates. Many religions, for instance, encourage people to act against social norms. Also, strange that you would characterize conformity as an artifact of our lizard brains. Reptiles are not generally noted for being highly social creatures. Conformity seems like it'd be situated closer to what makes us human than what makes us animal-like.

Yeah exactly. Especially today when being religious, much less "virtuous" is totally against the cultural grain.

> "what kind of man does G-d want me to be?"

Unfortunately, there is not a singular answer to this question. You still have to choose which religion/sect you want to answer this question for you. You can't really delegate your morals to a deity because the choice of which interpretation of that deity's teachings you want to follow is still yours to make.

I dont see the distinction between sect choice vs religious or not religious at all. If you're indoctrinated good and hard you're likely to be religious in the way the sect you were brought up in is. Choice elimination is the whole idea.

I hear this a lot, but I just don't agree. Being indoctrinated into a particular system of belief is very different from not being indoctrinated into any belief system at all.

Yes, certainly there are some atheists who are "religious" about it, and will vehemently teach their children that there is no possibility of any deities or afterlife, and that anyone who tries to tell them otherwise is mentally defective somehow. But I would agree that's just as tragic as indoctrinating someone into any religion, and that certainly isn't the only kind of atheist. But if you're going to be a part of your religion, and teach your children to believe in it, that's always going to be some degree of indoctrination.

I do really appreciate parents who are religious, but do their best to let their kids find their own way. I suspect that's a much rarer phenomenon than the atheist parents who do the same, though.

Let's also not get into an atheist vs. agnostic debate. My take on it is that if you are not agnostic, at best, you're a "religious atheist" who presents belief (that there are no deities) as fact, and that's just as dishonest as teaching someone the "fact" of a god and heaven and hell (or whatever).

My mother's mother was religious but her father was an atheist. My mother's religious but my father's an atheist. I'm an atheist.

From what I understand, you would say that my mother was indoctrinated and I wasn't, despite both of us growing up in nearly identical households with parents who had the same spread of opinions. This seems like an obvious double standard to me.

She's religious because her school had really good religious role models who taught Mendelian genetics and seemed like respectable adults, and I'm an atheist because I grew up in the Richard Dawkins vs creationism slapfight and didn't get a good impression of religious people during it. It's got nothing to do with indoctrination. Her religious education was arguably less of an indoctrination, since mine was administered by Access Ministries and wasn't particularly nuanced, while hers involved something pretty close to comparative theology.

I think arguably your story is somewhat exceptional. While there are certainly many households with mixed atheist/theist parents, I don't think that's all that common. Most common would be religious indoctrination from two religious parents.

I don't have a good handle on what's more common on the atheist side: indoctrination into the "be against religion at all costs" camp, or the "we don't believe in that stuff, but we're happy to answer questions and help you find answers and learn about religion if you want to" camp (the latter of which I certainly wouldn't classify as indoctrination).

My hope is that the latter type of atheist family is more common. But that may just be naive wishful thinking.

But I think your situation, with one atheist parent and one theist parent (and same for one set of grandparents), is likely less common than all three categories above. And I would also expect that your mother's situation, where she was introduced to religion during early school years and allowed to make up her own mind, isn't all that common either. But even then, I question how much she really got to make up her own mind. I suspect if she had attended a secular school with no religious role models, she may would have ended up an atheist.

I think the point I'm trying to get across is that I think agnostic atheism is generally born out of a lack of indoctrination. Both theism and strong atheism usually come from being indoctrinated into that sort of thing. The fact that your family is different -- and IMHO fairly rare -- doesn't really invalidate that. It just means there are exceptions, which... well... welcome to our messy universe, where precious little is absolute.

I think you're simplifying it too much. Kids -- and often adults -- follow the example set by other people without any particular attempt to indoctrinate them. I don't think you need to encourage uncritical belief from your kids when the majority of the people around them believe the same thing.

Not to downplay the fact that indoctrination does frequently happen. I just don't think it always happens, and exceptions seem to be quite common for the people around me, though I don't live in the US.

I honestly have no idea what any of this means let alone what point of mine you’re disagreeing with.

Re-reading your comment, I'm actually confused now too. I suppose it's possible I clicked reply on the wrong comment? But I can't find a more appropriate parent comment, given a quick scan. Sorry about that.

> My take on it is that if you are not agnostic, at best, you're a "religious atheist" who presents belief (that there are no deities) as fact

No, the main non-agnostic atheist belief is "The current religions are bullshit" which there is plenty of evidence for, so it is a much more rational belief than belief in any religion. Therefore it can't be classified as a religion since there are strong rational arguments behind it.

That's not my experience at all. The main non-agnostic atheism I've seen has been pretty hard to the "deities don't exist, full stop" side of the spectrum.

Also you don't need to be agnostic or non-agnostic, or even an atheist, to believe that the current religions are bullshit.

Until someone can prove that a deity exists, I don't have any need to go looking for one. Their absence in a world that cries out to them every day speaks volumes about their existence.

You succinctly explained how I feel. I was very religious earlier in life, giving my life and scant monies, raising my family to the same. Now, after evolving my views quite a bit due to firsthand observation and third hand research regarding the absolute bullshit religious pour on real marginalized communities, I'm apatheist (lean agnostic atheist). I legitimately don't care if there is a diety. If there is and they have need of my fealty, fine, but I'm not going to claim adherence nor follow belief to satisfy the whims of mortals claiming to be mouthpieces when a real deity has capacity to reveal themselves.

I'll never again outsource my morality.

That's the problem with relying on our observations only. It biases us to reality.

It’s not rational to believe in free will either, so nothing is rational.

Rationality is defined as choices being able to be made that are both complete (all options under consideration can be understood) and transitive (if I choose A over B, and B over C, then I choose A over C).

Most often people exhibit bounded rationality, as "completeness" is a heavy cognitive burden and transitivity is hard on the margins.

Neither components of rationality require belief, and both recognize that choices (free will) can be made, suggesting more nuance to your argument is needed.

If there’s a deity, the odds that any particular religion gets it right are near 0.

One can simply observe vehement followers of conflicting religions to determine that someone must be wrong, and it’s more likely that everyone is wrong than not.

There's a bit in one of the early episodes of the TV series "The Good Place", where one of the afterlife people points out that pretty much every religion only gets a few percent right about what's going on (except for one random guy who somehow got 90-something % of it).

But yes, this is the thing that always gets me. It takes a mind-blowing amount of arrogance to believe that your religion -- out of all the thousands that currently or used to be practiced -- is the right one, and everyone else -- billions of people -- just absolutely must be wrong.

And if you don't have that arrogance (but are nonetheless religious), the only reasonable stance to take is that you believe there is a god, or many gods, or perhaps some sort of supernatural universal force; and that there is maybe (but maybe not) some kind of afterlife, or reincarnation system, or... who knows. But I meet precious few religious people who think like this; I guess most people who fall into this category would tick the "spiritual, but not affiliated with a religion" box.

> If there’s a deity, the odds that any particular religion gets it right are near 0.

What if that deity has made itself directly known to, and has had direct contact with, humankind?

Everyone is raised with a system of beliefs, even if those beliefs are no about god. I was raised atheist (and hadn’t even heard the word “god” until I was about 4 or 5), but I definitely recognise that my moral beliefs have been strongly influenced by those of my parents, community and wider culture.

Fair. But I'm not sure it's fair to necessarily characterize all beliefs as "religious beliefs". To use your example, morality need have nothing to do with religion. Granted, I'm sure my morality was influenced by my religious upbringing. I've certainly re-examined a lot of my moral stances throughout my life (after deciding I was an atheist), but I'm sure I still have some biases because of the religious teaching I was forced to endure when I was young.

What’s unfortunate about that? Free will is a good thing. It doesn’t sound like gp is delegating anything, that sounds pretty thoughtful.

I understand what you mean, but I find that men who are able to truly humbly embrace that there's a higher power and purpose beyond their own whim and limited perception are a certain breed - and whichever framework they engage with this higher power through is a secondary choice.

EG - a devout Jew and a devout Hindu maybe very different in the practices they follow and the words they use, but they would not be very different in the kind of morality they follow, the kinds of family life they lead, etc.

Finland is one of the most orderly and happy countries, they seem to do fine without religious guidance.

They're a mostly atheist population.

See also Estonia, Japan.

Wait, Japan is one of the few countries where the majority of the people are members of two religions (Buddhism and Shintoism)!

https://www.statista.com/statistics/237609/religions-in-japa...

I do think those religions are safe refuge for "atheist" tendencies and would agree with your point.

It's funny that I attended a Christian school when I lived in Japan as a high school student, but never spoke the language well enough to have any really deep spiritual discussions, sadly.

The main Buddhist sect in Japan is Jodo Shinshu which was almost outlawed for anti nomianism

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/least-rel...

Japan is #4 @ 40% religious.

My understanding is that the Japanese are rather keen on following (or adopting) religious rites without being believers. A modern Japanese person may have a Shinto coming-of-age ceremony, marry at Christian church, and have a Buddhist funeral. All without really being Shinto, Christian or Buddhist in any meaningful sense of the word. In fact, I would argue this superficial syncretism happens precisely because of their lack of belief in any of it.

Sure, if you look for them you will find some devout Japanese, but they are very much in the minority. In every practical sense, the Japanese are exceptionally secular compared to e.g. the US.

The Japanese are very traditional and their traditions are rooted in religion.

Finland... something like 65% of the population is Lutheran, and that number was 90% in the 1980s. So it seems like the bulk of the current happy adults were raised in a religious environment even if they are now losing it a bit. Interesting to see how well they will persist in the future.

> something like 65% of the population is Lutheran

Most of those entered a church a handful times in their life, they aren't practicing Christians they don't believe in any god and don't care about it in their lives. Churches remains empty most of the time in Scandinavia, they are everywhere and welcome people but nobody goes there since they don't care.

The reason people registers with the church is that it gives them an place to marry in and it pays for their burial. It is a transaction and not a religion nowadays, the church owns all these huge buildings that exists everywhere, often the largest gathering place in town.

We even have practicing priests here who doesn't believe in God, for example 25% of priests doesn't believe that Jesus resurrected. Their job is to take care of the church and preach to the choir, not to believe in anything. There aren't enough believers to fill all the priest positions, that is how low our belief is.

Same in the UK, Church attendance has gotten a bit of a boost due to immigration but they are generally on the decline, and many are converted into houses or businesses.

> I was raised totally secular

How come your comment history says otherwise (Judaism). I'm perplexed that the new approach to selling religion is pretending to be raised secular and or have others perceive oneself to once be an atheist but then later found the truth in life. Religion was the worst, the worst thing for me to experience in life, and I wish everyone could've experienced similar to me. Since religious people tend to not care about people that have been greatly harmed in life by what they continue to practice, keeping it alive to harm more people. A lot of members of LGBTQ+ classification know what the harm is truly like.

There are many secular Jews in the U.S. - people for whom Judaism is a culture and ethnicity that's part of their background, but who don't believe in a higher power or any of the scriptures.

I remember asking a friend's dad "So are you Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform?" and he was like "We're kinda beyond Reform."

I think you answered your own question to a degree. As I was being raised in an extremely high cost religion, I remember converts were given a very special glow and respect. Oh, they may never be full members of the tribe nor expected to lead very often, but their stories were affirmations that our religion must be right to convince people to join.

Also, these converts were used in proselyting from the populations they came from.

I've noticed most atheists are by default "converts" in a sense, and the now-religious conversion parallels appear to have a few dimensions to it.

Religion isn’t about any one thing. For some, it’s a sense of community and meeting people. For others, it’s doing right by a greater power. Then there are those who do it because they’ve always done it. Some do it because it gives a dependable source of meaning. And some do it because they actually live in deep fear.

When you talk about living in deep care, that’s because that’s your path. Ask someone else and it might be completely different.

You still have to choose your own adventure.

Yeah, it's very weird the way people act as if the religious aren't choosing how to live, what to think and what action to take, moment by moment any more or less than the irreligious.

In my experience in North America I've found that those raised irreligious are generally far more in touch with living an inherent "do unto others" than people that have exceptions and biases against that rule due to a holy writ they can selectively pluck from.

Your ideas of secularism and religiousness does not match anything in my personal experience whatsoever (I have friends of any different religions including many most haven’t heard of…I was raised in 1 major religion and followed 1 other major religion for a few years before turning to atheism and non-religousness almost 2 decades ago).

Of course it’s probably true for certain individuals, but you’re talking about religion and secularism (which isn’t the opposite of religion, btw, so I don’t even understand what it means to be raised “secular”, and in fact secularism is essential for a society with multiple religions) broadly, and you only need to see what’s happening in the world right now to observe that your generalization is almost certainly wrong.

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We should start a new, more useful religion

All hail the Flying Spaghetti Monster!

19th century Germany was way ahead of you. We're still arguing about their usefulness today.

I was raised in a conservative Christian denomination and left it for a progressive one, and I’ve learned you can’t say “Christianity is ___” and be at all accurate. There are too many different Christianities. There are denominations that are pro-debate, pro-introspection, pro-logic, pro-science. They’re aiming for exactly what the GP is getting at: how best to live out the commandment to love one another, to build a society on earth where we care for each other and live up to our potential.

I bring this up not because I want to wave my “not all Christians” flag, but because it is really important for our common civic life that post-religious people understand there is more to religion than the sad toxic morass they grew up with. Society doesn’t need religion to die off. It needs religion to evolve. It needs people who are naturally religious (and there are a lot of us, we’ve evolved that way) to come together for the common good, not get shoved into a back closet to worship illegally in secret.

As a christian I already have a region that is not debatable. That helps me be more willing to debate all the things outside. Communist, capitalist, jew, muslim, hindu, cannibal, republican, democrat, green, other sect of christian - all the same to me, something I'm not religiously attached to so I can try to understand. Some of those I understand enough to conclude they are wrong.

I know some who are strongly religious about their political party. I was treasurer of my local Republican party for a while, but I was able to leave them when the party it self starting going off of the things I supported them for (the local party is still pretty good). I might return in the future, we will see.

> Some of those I understand enough to conclude they are wrong.

Sounds like you may be justifying your conclusions instead of the other way around.

There is no objective way to measure most of the above. Cannibals really did exist - not in large numbers. People really did sacrifice their kids to the gods. I'm willing to state both of the above are wrong.

Note that I didn't state everything on my list is wrong.

Genuinely curious what your personal approach is to "picking" a religion to believe in. Generally I know most people don't pick a faith and just have the one they grew up with, but you strike me as someone who actually critically examines their beliefs (based on your comments).

I've had a lot of great conversations with religious people about the nature of their faith, but I have never gotten a good answer on why they chose their particular organized/named faith. Other religions have people who believe just as much as you do that their religion is the "right" one and all the others are wrong. How did you come to choose your particular form of Christianity over the dozens of other named faiths you could choose that have equal levels of historical correlation to their religious texts?

Not OP, but I am a Christian convert. I was raised an agnostic/atheist, but converted due to a combination of philosophical and emotional reasons. Contrary to what is commonly believed, there are not that many intellectually serious religions to chose from. If you are curious about it, I would suggest you check out The Experience of God, by David Bentley Hart (https://www.amazon.com/Experience-God-Being-Consciousness-Bl...).

This is clear in Christianity if you pay attention to apologetics (I’m not Christian, but I find some of that stuff interesting)

When various sects happen to go head to head, it’s like watching an MMA tournament where a very few competitors are well-trained in BJJ and most of the rest seem to hold a white belt in karate from the nearest strip mall. It’s usually not a competition, but a one-sided beating. Caring about some amount of intellectual seriousness would clearly narrow one’s options down a lot.

I chose Pure Land Buddhism (Jodo Shinshu) over Christianity as I found the former to be morally superior and with a higher aim

Interestingly you're having the same experience as the person you are replying to, but you haven't reached the understanding they've reached.

If all those people you say refuse to question their beliefs are actually chasing a higher form of good for themselves, why would they engage in any kind of activity that would undermine that pursuit? It doesn't make sense unless you propose to replace it with a structure that is more strongly aligned to with the goal of achieving a higher form of themselves. Which nobody ever actually is when they argue against religion, they just got hurt by somebody's interpretation of it and are trying to find validation for that hurt.

> I know you just said “religion,” but I can only speak about Christianity as I’m deeply familiar with it.

I believe you when you speak of the bad experiences you had, but you seem to think that what you've seen is the only (or at least the typical) manifestation of Christianity. But that isn't true, and if you do indeed believe it's true I respectfully suggest you aren't deeply familiar with Christianity the way you believe.

I am a Christian, and I was raised Christian. I have never once seen a community such as you describe. I realize they exist (everyone knows about the WBC, for instance), but they aren't the norm. Christians I have known aren't trying to indoctrinate anyone, and they are quite happy to entertain respectful discussion and debate about their faith. They are only human, of course, and like all humans they don't wish to constantly debate things they settled for themselves ages ago (so you are sometimes going to get individuals who shut you down). But on the whole Christians are perfectly willing to engage in introspection or intellectual debate to the same extent anyone else is (because let's not forget, many people don't do introspection or intellectual debate of any topic).

> It’s slowly dying in every developed country because it doesn’t make sense when logic and science are applied.

You are welcome to your opinion, but it stands at odds with the fact that there have been many Christian intellectuals throughout history. Scientists, theologians, and philosophers have all found that their faith still makes perfect sense in the context of their intellectual pursuits.

Christianity is not one singular entity. There are many different sects that can drastically vary from each other. Fundamentalist Christians like the Southern Baptists are not going to be as accepting or open minded as the more liberal Christian sects such as Catholicism.

It's odd that you describe Catholicism as liberal, when so many of its characteristics are heavily rooted in tradition.

It's really only Pope Francis from this past decade who stopped shunning homosexuality and describing it as an illness (even if he upholds the church's teachings that same-sex marriage is an abomination), expressed openness to ordaining married men as priests, and suggested forgiveness for divorcees who have since remarried, but even he has his limits.

He still views gender transition as a sin, upholds the Catholic Church's longstanding opposition to birth control (the pill, condoms) in favor of abstinence, and opposes abortion.

And there are many Catholics in the US who do not view him as their pope, preferring Benedict XVI and especially John Paul II. There are cardinals in the US who have advocated for denying the current US president communion due to his support for abortion (he claims that he does not personally support abortion due to his faith, but would not impose his belief system on others).

Yes, Catholicism might not be as unyielding as Christian evangelism or fundamentalism. But it's by no means the most accepting of faiths.

You’re not wrong and I agree with a lot of your points. When I refer to Catholicism as “liberal” I am comparing it to other Christian sects and even other monotheistic religions such as Islam. For example, unlike other Christian sects, Catholicism accepts concepts such as evolution.

> Yes, Catholicism might not be as unyielding as Christian evangelism or fundamentalism.

Maybe you meant to direct your comment to someone else because it sounds like we agree?

My point was that there are Christian denominations that are accepting of others as they are, and aren't trying to impose their narrow worldview on others. Catholicism isn't one of them.

For instance: Episcopalians support gender and racial equality, as do the Anglicans they're an offshoot of. Presbyterians are similarly accepting, even if they haven't made an official statement on that front. Reform Judaism similarly is an attempt at reconciling historical traditions with the need to exist in a modern world.

It's hard to ascribe a particular ideology to Islam because it varies widely based on its practitioners and their interpretations (as is the case with Baptists, Lutherans, and many other religions where there is not a central authority). Certainly we see very oppressive policies in a number of Middle Eastern countries, but in the US, especially in the past decades we've seen an alignment of American Muslims with the Democratic party and more liberal / progressive policies (largely due to anti-Muslim rhetoric from the right post-9/11).

A few surveys from Pew:

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/12/21/where-chr...

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/12/02/religious...

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/06/21/where-maj...

> Episcopalians support gender and racial equality, as do the Anglicans they're an offshoot of. Presbyterians are similarly accepting

If my memory is still ok, I remember those sects splitting due to differences in those beliefs among their members

>Scientists, theologians, and philosophers have all found that their faith still makes perfect sense in the context of their intellectual pursuits.

Because their is a simple trick: God made it so. But most of the time they ignore the flaws of their believe of god's characteristics like Omnipresence, Omnipotence, Omniscience etc.

The world is in pretty bad shape if it's created by an omnipotent omniscient deity. Greek mythology would be a more fitting explanation.

Who are we to judge? Our consciousness exists for a blink of time.

We are the only ones who can judge and exercise moral reasoning, as we are the universe experiencing itself.

> The world is in pretty bad shape if it's created by an omnipotent omniscient deity.

Not like we would have anything to do with it?

If I handcraft a beautiful wooden toy and I give it as a present to a 5-year-old, and they have a tantrum and break it (accident or not), is the state of the toy a testimony to my identity or ability as a craftsman?

Or maybe I should have never given the toy as a present?

If you are omniscient, and knew what would happen before you gave the present to the 5-year-old, even knew before you got the present, even knew before the kid was born then it's definitely your fault.

Why dies the kid behaves like that in the first place and why is the toy breakable. Shouldn't higher standards apply to an omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient being?

If the world was created by greek gods, ok. They are full of human traits and errors, jealous, vain etc. But the perfect abrahamic god?

I fundamentally disagree. I give toys to my 1-year-old even knowing that he'll accidentally mistreat them because he doesn't know better. I love him, and I want him to live, learn, grow.

This is obviously a poor comparison when speaking about God's purpose in everything, but I think it begins to hint a certain perspective.

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." Isaiah 55:8-9

>Isaiah 55:8-9

That's just a complicated way for: Why? Because!

>I love him, and I want him to live, learn, grow. Because you aren't omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient. So whole mythology and the way we are makes more sense if god isn't omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient.

> That's just a complicated way for: Why? Because!

No, it's not. What this means is that you yourself are not the measure of reality, and that there are things that you will not understand, because they are bigger than you. And you not understanding or knowing something is irrelevant to reality. To refuse this is to be like the little child who doesn't want to obey or listen to a wise father that is lovingly giving them instructions for their own good.

> Because you aren't omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient. So whole mythology and the way we are makes more sense if god isn't omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient.

I really don't follow the reasoning behind this. We don't need God to be messed up in order to explain why we, and everything around us, is messed up.

> Christians I have known aren't trying to indoctrinate anyone

Every Christian who was ever born was indoctrinated to become one. Except Paul, who was the bronze age equivalent of Jim Bakker.

> That’s what religious people want you to believe, but if you watch how they act, how they vote, and how they discriminate it could not be farther from the truth.

While your deep understanding of a few people around you is your own, Christianity alone has over a billion people from all cultures and walks of life ascribing to it. I don't think you can realistically claim to treat them as a bloc, and to attempt to might cast doubt on your ability to even judge well the people you do know.

But you can treat religious believers as a bloc because they hold a core set of beliefs, and those beliefs cause them to act a certain way. In fact, the whole point of a religion is to bind a "bloc" of people to a common set of beliefs.

The same way you can associate conspiracy theory nationalism with Qanon believers, you can associate supernatural supremacism (i.e. "chosen by god") with Christians, Muslims, and Jews. While these religions may promote healthy behavior for "in group" morality e.g. community, family, etc. the effects on a geopolitical scale are catastrophic.

Can you list the beliefs and actions you're saying are common for all Christians?

> they hold a core set of beliefs, and those beliefs cause them to act a certain way

Do they? I'll grant you the first part, as that's the point of a religion, but it doesn't seem to automatically imply the second.

The earliest Christians, very famously, went to their deaths voluntarily while publicly forgiving their accusers. While medieval Christians slaughtered thousands trying to retake the holy-land. It's pretty reasonable to argue that those two groups had relatively similar core beliefs, but hard to argue that they had the same actions.

Unless you want to count farming as an action, the vast majority of adherents to basically every religion were, historically, farmers whose lives we know very little about.

It seems much more likely that a group being in power causes the effects that you see. Basically every group has an in-group bias.

> Everyone already “knows” their religion is correct and is not actually willing to challenge that because it’s scary.

1 Peter 3:15-16 literally commands us to do exactly that.

  But sanctify the Lord Christ in your hearts, being ready always to satisfy every one that asketh you a reason of that hope which is in you.

  But with modesty and fear, having a good conscience: that whereas they speak evil of you, they may be ashamed who falsely accuse your good conversation in Christ.

Believe it or not, the ignorant bible thumpers are actually a minority of Christians worldwide. There is a rich apologetic tradition going back centuries and odds are good every one of your objections was answered in the middle ages at the latest.

// It’s a refuge for indoctrination, meaning you aren’t allowed to truly question.

The idea that religion has any kind of market cornered on THAT concept in the last 7-10 years is a non-starter.

If you want an example of current events as it applies to the danger of religion take a simple look at the Israel/Hamas war.

1) Hamas jihadists cultivate decades of repression of the Palestinian populace into a spectacular terrorist strike on Oct 7th.

2) Israel, an apartheid ethnostate, where Rabbis call for extermination of Palestinians in response to the Hamas strike (after decades of dehumanization), drops a nuclear payload worth of bombs on Gaza - which kills thousands of Palestinians (but only a few dozen Hamas soldiers).

3) In the US, Christianist pastors and churches back the Israeli government's push to ethnically cleanse Gaza - primarily because apocalyptic prophesy requires Jews to be in the "holy land" - all of whom are prophesied to perish.

In all of these cases, all of the involved religions make the conflict unavoidable. There were steps to peace in previous decades but religious extremists assassinated key figures to prevent peace.

This isn't exclusive to this region or these religions, of course.

That'd be a great counter example if any of it were factually true.

Hamas is the elected government of the Palestinians and it's planks include the extermination of the Jews wholesale, whether in Israel or elsewhere. Part of why Israel was created is because.. a large group of Muslims was attempting to enact an extermination of the Jews (and did kill quite a few).

Israel is not an apartheid ethnostate in any sense of those words and you do dishonor to actual apartheid and ethnic conflicts even by a comparison. Gaza itself has a luxury car dealership[1]!

Not only do non-Jews have equal rights in Israel but it's one of the few countries in the middle east where Arab women have a legal right to vote and free travel without an escort.

I have no idea where you got three from but it's not actually in the Christian Bible or the Torah.

[1]: https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/mena/libyan-luxury-car...

Did they not have luxury cars in apartheid South Africa? Does having a dealership make the whole shit show in both countries okay?

Presumably in SA the luxury cars were for the whites and not for the blacks, so they would actually be relevant to the apartheid conversation. The fact that Gaza has them goes counter to the open air prison conversation.

> Hamas is the elected government of the Palestinians

Hamas won under 50% of one election in 2006, then murdered the opposing party and halted all future elections.

Your presentation makes it sound as if rabbinic approval / directives / whatever somehow pushed the response to hamas. Following the English and Hebrew news I see none of that.

You're probably conflating the general fact that the nationalist and religious factions overlap (though there are a great many religious groups in Israel that are not nationalist at all - pretty much all the ultra orthodox), and said nationalists have made extreme statements in the past. But the response to hamas has little to do with that.

(this is my most relevant response to the point you're making, so I'll hold off on the otber incorrect assumptions/statements).

It's not even exclusive to religions. Ethnic tension with and without religious difference. In fact, religious conflicts are not infrequently dressed up ethnic conflicts. People are tribal, and religious affiliation is just one means for defining tribes.

> It’s slowly dying in every developed country because it doesn’t make sense when logic and science are applied.

It's not just the contradictions (with science, logic, it's own doctrine) that is hurting their numbers. Almost all the Christians I know have distanced themselves from the church and are embarrassed to be associated with the faith because of the way they see other "Christians" behave. If more Christians really lived their faith they couldn't act/vote/discriminate the way that they do. I can't blame my Christian friends and family for not wanting to be associated with that.

I suspect that the number of Christians is higher than the falling numbers suggest, because many just don't want to be grouped in with the loud people who plainly act in ways that violate the basic message of the faith.

> but if you watch how they act, how they vote, and how they discriminate it could not be farther from the truth.

This is a low quality and bigoted comment.

> I used to think religion was about deep fear, now I see it more as about deep care.

As someone who has grown up in a religious, conservative household, I strongly disagree. Sure, there are many good values that a religious conservative household can foster such as independence and self accountability. However, you cannot its ignore downside either. The same culture promotes fear of the “other” ie different religion, different ethnicity / race, different political ideology, et al. Whether or not these fears are justified is beside the point. I’m just pointing out that they exist which runs counter to your very short and limited personal experience. (I’m also not saying that the other side is free of any fault either.)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-...

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/liberals-are-f...

> However, you cannot its ignore downside either. The same culture promotes fear of the “other” ie different religion, different ethnicity / race, different political ideology, et al.

That has nothing to do with religion. These are facets of human nature which find a way to express themselves in all societies regardless of religion.

One of the main tenants of religion is to make it clear that the people who aren’t adherents are wrong and that they will end up in that respective religion’s hell. Religion is a large part of it.

This is explicitly not what the Catholic Church teaches. There is a commonly used rhetorical device in Catholic education asking whether, in fact, anyone has gone to hell (the answer being that we can’t know but it’s very possible that it’s no). This is well summed up by Mother Teresa in her famous response that we are not called to be successful, but faithful.

There are a lot other religions which are similar in this regard. The real issue is that some (many?) who outwardly profess to adhere to a particular religion are totally ignorant of that religions teachings.

The Catholic Church is a liberal outlier. It’s so far away from the median that many if not most Christian sects do not consider it as “Christian”. One major difference is that Catholicism acknowledges evolution as a truth so it’s no surprise that they consider us as heretics.

For context, I was raised as a Catholic, had well over a decade of theological study (including university level classes), and I’ve had significant contact and relationships with other Christians in the Southern US.

Most religious people do not have the privilege to attend a more intellectual leaning parochial school. Weekly 30 min sermons are not enough, but that is the norm for most religious people.

Being an educated Catholic, you're probably already aware that the Catholic church makes up about 50% of Christians. Throw in the Orthodox church, which says it knows where the church is, but doesn't know where it is not, and you're up to 60%. Throw in the Anglicans and the Methodists, who certainly share the relevant opinions regarding salvation, and now you're over 65%. The remaining denominations are a mixed bag but even ignoring the rest, it's hard to say how you could describe the Catholic church as a Christian outlier. Rather, it is all these tiny denominations which are outliers.

I was referring to only the US since the news article is also US centric, and I’m sure that most of the commenters are also referring to their experience in North America, since HN is primarily a US centric website.

Your statistics are global for Christianity which includes a lot of developing countries. In the US, Catholics only make up 20% of Christians in America.

Are you? Elsewhere you describe this beliefs as "one of the main tenants of religion" and say "The crux of Christianity is that if you don't accept Jesus...". It sounds like you are making claims not just about Christianity as a whole, but about religion in general. If you're trying to make claims about what Americans believe about Christianity, you're expressing yourself very poorly.

My points are clear and to the point where as you keep making claims that you fail to support. Yes, I was only referring to the US for all the reasons I’ve already listed.

Not just the Catholic church, but Christianity in general. It is very much standard Christian doctrine that everyone is flawed, nobody has earned salvation, and that it is a freely given gift from God out of love. To criticize Christianity as being mainly about "if you don't follow these rules you'll go to hell" (as chaostheory has) is to demonstrate a lack of understanding of Christianity.

The crux of Christianity is that if you don’t accept Jesus Christ as your Savior, you’re going to hell (or purgatory for Catholics). How am I wrong? What exactly am I missing that you’re alluding to but fail to elaborate?

Nothing, this is one of those rhetorical devices for which one sacrifices their moral agency to the collective. Your read is of a clear phrase even a child understands, its the sensitive adult that seeks to deny what is clear in front of them due to distaste.

Bad take. The Christian faith, outside of fundamentalist sects, is not built around clear-to-a-child interpretations of individual phrases in the bible. The bible is a product of the Christian faith, not it's source. In other words, it's teachings are defined by those sensitive adults, not the naive childlike readers of things they wrote.

> The Christian faith, outside of fundamentalist sects, is not built around clear-to-a-child interpretations of individual phrases in the bible.

To classify your argumentation, this is a "No-True-Scotsman."

Not even remotely. I'm disagreeing with your characterization of the Christian faith, not changing mine to exclude unwanted elements. Disagreeing on the meanings of terms is not the no true Scotsman fallacy.

Yet, I still see the characterization of your comment is spot on. "No real Christian sect interprets things as a child can" is a clear reading of your verbiage. Logically applying your definition results in understanding why it is a no true scotsman.

With that, I'm three comments deep and thus have made my point sufficiently and it will either be accepted or never can be. Good rule of thumb I picked up from religious subreddits and serves well with topics that are always flame wars. Have a good day.

I can respect cutting off conversations before they devolve into endless back and forths. However, I'm still going to take advantage of you giving me the last word to say: the fact that you can rephrase what I said to turn it into a no true scotsman statement doesn't mean that the argument I actually made was an example of one. I did not claim or imply that anyone who disagrees with this position is not a true Christian. I claimed that Christianity is not adequately defined as what some relatively small subset of Christians commonly believe. You would like to characterize the whole (Christianity) by the part (certain fundamentalist sects), which is actually the fallacy of composition. It may be that you won't read this response (I hope not, your resolution really is sensible) but I had to write it up anyway to get it off my chest. Enjoy your day as well.

I read your comment, appreciate the thought, and will do my best to enjoy the day!

> I claimed that Christianity is not adequately defined as what some relatively small subset of Christians commonly believe

Ok, back up your claim

This is true of a straw man religion, yes.

The one thing I'd observe about near to all religions is that the values suggested tend to be about optimizing the overall outcome of a society. The most controversial topics are ones related to sexuality. But there's an utterly trivial, and even perfectly reasonable, explanation for why so many different religions look down on any form of sex except man+woman+babies. As one looks back in the past, the 'effective fertility' rates had to have been just barely hanging on by a thread. By 'effective fertility' I mean having children who also have children. Having 80 kids, but where only 1 succeeds in having kids, would be an 'effective fertility' of 1.

So let's consider some numbers for effective fertility. Imagine it was 4. That means each generation (which we'll call 30 years, even though it was probably close to 20) would be twice as large as the one prior. And this could be reversed (to see how big your parents' generation was) by multiplying by 0.5. So let's look back to see what the population would have been 2100 years ago, or 70 generations, using various effective fertility rates.

---

4 effective fertility => 8 billion people today * 0.5 (reversible fertility factor) ^ 70 (total generations) = global population in 100BC of... 0!

3 effective fertility => 8 billion * 0.66^70 = global population in 100BC of... 0!

2.5 effective fertility => 8 billion * 0.8^70 = global population in 100BC of... 1316.

---

So we can say that effective fertility rates had to be lower than 2.5 on average! Average being important since we probably went through cycles of higher and lower effective fertility, but that only makes this scarier. There were probably times in the past where humanity's effective fertility dipped below 2, which means we're on our way to extinction. Anybody seeing this, and thinking about the future of humanity, would have realized how fundamentally critical to our survival simply producing more children was. And what's the lowest hanging fruit there? People having non-reproductive sex.

I glazed over on the math but I agree with your statement. And I think the cause and effect are enmeshed... Do religious people have more kids? Yes. Do the kinds of people who are willing to take on the serious work of having many kids more likely to also take on other responsibility (ie be religious)? I think also yes.

And on the flip side, secular society prides itself on how smart, objective, no "sky daddy" fantasies, etc it is as it marches towards self-selected extinction.

Exactly. But I want to also quickly clarify the math, because I realize I put lots of numbers out there - but it's all pretty straight forward and very helpful for modeling and understanding where things are headed. There are two main components to the math:

1) An effectively fertility rate of "N" will result in the next generation being N/2 times as large. So a fertility of 2 means the next generation will be exactly the same size (2 people, having 2 kids who have 2 kids...) while a fertility rate of 4 would result in a doubling of size, and a fertility rate of 1 would result in the next generation being half as large.

2) To reverse the multiplication of some value by "X", you simply multiply by 1/X. So if our population increases by 1.5 in a generation, then to reverse that and get from the new population, back to where we started, we'd multiply by 1/1.5 or 0.66. So for instance 100 * 1.5 = 150. And 150 * 0.66 = 100.

---

So taking the most complex example. Fertility rate of 2.5 = a population increasing factor of 1.25. Reversing that means multiplying by 0.8

So if our parent's generation had a fertility rate of 2.5, that would mean that their population would be 0.8 times the size of our population, which I take as the global population which is about 8 billion. And if their parents also had a fertility rate of 2.5, then the exact same would follow for another multiplication of 0.8. So if we go back "N" generations, we'd end up with a population, for that generation, of 8 billion * 0.8^N.

So going back 70 generations with a fertility rate of 2.5, we finally get the original formula: 8 billion * 0.8^70 = world population 70 generations ago. You end up with this problem that if you don't have a really low effective fertility rate, the population approaches 0 far too quickly, and that's only going back 2100 years!

> I am starting to think that's preferable to the current mode of "anything goes, you can be whatever you feel like and there's no judgement of any of your actions"

Can you provide any specific examples?

What I see is that in a modern secular society there is plenty of judgement against anti-social behavior. I.e. people are largely allowed to do as they please as long as it doesn't cause direct harm to others. Our laws largely reflect that.

An example would be our societies' increasing tolerance for homosexuality. It harms nobody, and yet it experienced massive stigma for centuries, at least in areas where the majority followed Abrahamic religiona.

The question ”what kind of person should I be?” could be answered by god, I guess, but the alternative would be to answer it yourself, and/or consult society, possibly friends and family. Not "anything goes".

Putting it in the hands of god means anything goes, and you just say that's how you thought god wanted you to be. You'd have to trust that society encoded the proper set of values and morals into the religion. Which sounds like "ask society" but with extra steps, and also you're asking the society of 1,000+ years ago instead of the society of today.

Not necessarily. For me it’s a subset of “answer it yourself”: it’s a way of asking myself “what is my potential? What was I put here for? If I had a perfect parent, what would they expect of me?”

It's the same for me, since none of those questions require a god or religion to answer. So, I'll have to disagree again with the premise that the alternative is "anything goes, you can be whatever you feel like and there's no judgement of any of your actions".

If anything, that is more representative of religion, as long as you say that's what god wanted (e.g. discriminating against LGBT people, trying to overthrow the government, etc.)

In contrast to non-theists, you simply employ a different way to ask yourself and society (albeit a subset of society which more rarely evolves their belief system to comport with the rest of society).

Sorry, my “not necessarily” was too broadly scoped. I agree with you that “it’s either God or anything goes” is a false premise. It’s taught from the pulpit, which is why you hear it so often: people accept it without thinking it through and realizing it makes no sense.

My “not necessarily” was intended for “You’d have to trust that society encoded the proper set of values and morals into the religion. Which sounds like ‘ask society’ but with extra steps, and also you’re asking the society of 1,000+ years ago instead of the society of today.” You don’t have to be asking society; you can ask yourself. As, I think, any sensible person does, regardless of their beliefs.

Gotcha. Well, if you're asking yourself, and your answer is biased/affected by religion, then you have to first trust that society encoded the proper set of values and morals into the religion, and then trust that the religion encoded the proper set of values and morals into you.

On the other hand, if you're asking yourself, and your answer isn't biased/affected by religion, then religion is by definition extraneous to your values and morals, which was my position in the first place.

The other side of the coin is, some of the worst atrocities in history were committed by people who asked themselves, and concluded that god wanted them to do it. Others were committed by people who asked themselves, and concluded that they wanted to do it. So religion doesn't seem to be either a good encouragement of good behavior or a good discouragement of bad.

I think what you meant to say instead of "anything goes", was lack of duty. That's what seems to be missing, that organized religion did bring to the table.

Duty.

The duty of the teacher to protect the student from bullying? Gone.

The duty of the parent to stay in an unfulfilling relationship for the sake of the children.

The duty of the professional (cop? doctor?) to serve and protect the public.

The duty of the prosecutors to enforce the written rules.

The duty of the politician to send our soldier-youths into just wars.

And on and on.

The duty to stone someone working on the Sabbath? Gone.

It was religious adherents who dispensed with that 'duty', not atheist reformers. Jesus himself said that you should not cast stones unless you are without sin (nobody is, therefore nobody may cast stones.) Jesus brought this and other reforms to the jewish religion and was murdered for it.

The same religious adherents told slaves to be obedient to their masters, even when their masters were monsters, so let's not give them too much credit.

If the purpose of religion is to align yourself to the highest aspirations why do so many large religious organizations get caught up stuff like this:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mormon-church-ensign-peak-whist...

I know this is bait, however Romans 3:23-24

23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus

It's not bait, it's a serious issue.

Religious organizations are free-riding in society and not paying their fair share. This is criminal and should be prosecuted. Render unto Caesar and all that.

Aye, Paul felt this. But Jesus taught by their fruits shall ye know them. AFAICT, all Christians know the Jesus trumps Paul. Under such a calculus, the variance of Christians living their standards en masse is sufficient evidence of mission failure, not simply internal inconsistency.

As an example, consider how many religious organizations not only ban LGBT (despite teaching god made them as they are) but outright actively work to disenfranchise them (tolerance failure).

I believe it is reasonable that organizations should not be tolerated when they are corrupt subcommunities cancerously siphoning resources from the body of a community. Whether that organization is commercial, civic, or religious shouldn't affect the determination.

It’s the same reason every institution has corruption: health care, insurance, wall st., etc.

What is that reason?

Why do we fail to live up to our own personal standards? Is it a surprise that a large group of people fails to do what even the best person fails to do? You get all kinds of people in a religious group: the legalists, the people who think they believe but actually have a higher priority, the immature people, and the mature self-givers. Legalism has inherent contradictions that can easily end up treating people poorly. The people who have a higher priority that than the values of the group are likely to act outside the values of the group, which is especially noticeable if they are in leadership. The immature people want to do the right thing, but fear, emotional issues, etc. exert a stronger pull.

I don't think the purpose of religion is to "align yourself to the highest aspirations", though, but rather to make sense of our place in the world and how to rightly live within it. They have rather different views of this, of course. Traditional Christianity says our place in the world is as children of God who are intended to be the image of God in the world and shepherd it with God's self-giving love. (Getting saved to go to heaven is a relatively new simplification.) Buddhism, in contrast, observes that all composed things are impermanent, so nothing is actually real and forming attachments to things causes pain. The ethics flow out of the views of our relationship within/to the world.

It's not about my standards, it's about the standards of society and the organization.

These are crimes, from an organization that purports to be intrinsically different and better than other organizations.

So be better.

This is a big nothingburger. If you only look at the enrollment at LDS church owned universities, then that fund would be a much smaller "endowment" than other comparable private universities have. Not to mention that the church heavily subsidizes tuition, tuition at LDS schools is unbelievably cheap. But also, the LDS church does way more than just run schools.

Hard to look at the current state of American Christianity and think of it as deep care.

American Evangelicals seem to gravitate toward their belief as a form of authoritarianism. It's less about compassion and more about incontestable moral authority over others.

American Evangelical political influence has greatly waned in recent years and very little of our political discourse is now explicitly religious, yet our discourse is every bit as full of moralizing and condemnation as it ever was. I would suggest that strongly held moral beliefs always tend towards authoritarianism. Things we consider to be truly wrong we don't want being done, even when we aren't personally involved.

>You may still disagree with what they care about but I find that harder and harder to do, personally.

Maybe you need to read more about Jehovah's Witnesses, Haredi, and Wahhabism.

>"what kind of man does G-d want me to be?"

I just remember how religious people fought against gay marriage as if it would ban straight marriages.

God seems to want those people be hateful people.

>anything goes, you can be whatever you feel like and there's no judgement of any of your actions.

First of all, there is judgement as soon as you actions hurt others. Beside that you can be and feel like you want.

And I remember questions like "What stops atheists from murdering people or raping kids?"

Sorry, but if the only things that prevents you from being a bad person is that you are being watched over by a higher being, then you are still a bad person.

Statistically, the US prison population is mostly made up of religious people.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/234653/religious-affilia...

90% had absent fathers.

Statistically, the only communities with positive demographics are religious.

That's a hell of a claim. Link?

How do you define positive demographic?

Is divorce allowed?

What is the status of women's rights?

While Nietzsche was generally construed to be anti-religious he had some observations along these lines. He famously said - "God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown" and what he meant by it was that while science had eroded the moral supremacy of religion, we now faced a dilemma where nihilism would consume society, and we'd likely proceed to do bad stuff without God's help. Sure enough as a species we have gone on to commit all sorts of horrifying atrocities without the help of religious dogma, last century's mass murders under Nazi and Communist regimes being prime examples, no God required as a justification, it may be even scarier when all the justification you need for murder is the words of some charismatic strong men in politics.

He still really didn't like religion and the morality associated with it, but it seems he was correct when he predicted that getting rid of it would leave a vacuum in people's lives. His solution to all this, the ubermensch stuff, was a sort of radical self-actualization which I feel we've barely scratched the surface of understanding and applying.

but they are talk about some parents makesure their kids never learn evolution and other science/history fact. this is a very very small subset of religion people. I don't think these opinion conflict with your experience.

We secular Jews have completely different first-hand experience of religion than most of other people on the planet, so while I completely understand and share your perspective, I'm not in the least surprised by the reaction your comment got.

I think they care, I just wish they could better decouple that from Sky daddy mythology and all of the poor logic that flows from treating as your epistemological foundation the words of people who don’t didn’t even know what atoms were.

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