Two thoughts immediately cross my mind. 1. You are not European, but more likely American. And 2. You didn't get the raw uncensored version of history.

Show me a temple, a Playboy mansion or a church. And I'll show you a place whose sole purpose is sexual abuse.

In Europe we've had to deconstruct organised religion not because it was so different from the Playboy Mansion, but because it was the same. A scam of power to enable sexual abuse.

When Bill Clinton had sex with a young intern the question some people had was 'why would he jepordize his career for sex with a young girl?'. Whereas the honest question would be the reverse: 'why would he have ambition to become president if he couldn't?'

The understanding of just how we are repressed by our own evolution is not making things worse -- just less hidden.

We no longer sell a 12 year to an adult for ownership/sexual-abuse/marriage in a legal contract overseen by the Church.

The world is actually a better place now. Not because everything is okidoki right now, but because the power structures of the past were not as glamorous or sinfree as you may seem to think. At the height of Christianity in the Roman empire having a little boy to abuse was the default.

Seriously, Hugh Heffner, although not very interesting isn't anywhere near the perversion of organized religion.

Im an athestic/agnostic American. I think you are missing the gist of what the GP is saying. Abuses aside (which will happen in any institution with humans and power assymmetry), the aspirations of these beliefs were motivational, socially constructive foundations for mass culture. To immediately dismiss all of why they were so powerful and prevalent in the first place could have unpredicted negative consequence.

I think there's something to both sides here. I often think this is the fundamental issue that America faces: does it want to be the country it was for the last 400 years, or the country it told itself it was?

AFAICT most of American politics is explainable through that prism.

I feel like part of the issue is there's not an either/or or a before/after. There's not the past and then progress, it's a long continual climb. There's also not the country the US told itself it was and then the country it was; the US for the entirety of its history was both a progressive, positive force for good in the world and ahead of other countries in some aspects, while being backwards and evil in others.

For example, in 1945 while the US was helping Europe to liberate itself from the Nazis, segregation and Jim Crow laws were still in effect back home. So we have a very difficult task of trying to sort through the past and figure out what "American" qualities are good and worth keeping, and which are negative and worth throwing away.

Progress isn't inherently good, we've got this dichotomy in the US where some people are like fuck it let's just throw everything at the wall and we'll assume that's for the better vs things are pretty good so we shouldn't do anything at all. Both are tribal and not really realistic.

Europe is mostly free of control by religious organisations. Even Ireland is shaking off the shackles.

Compare Europe (mostly atheist) with the US (mostly religious) to discover the consequences of dismissing religion in society.

This is overstating it. In Europe you still have state sponsored churches which were shunned from the earliest days of the US (at least partially). The church attendance rate in some parts of Europe is still very high. Poland is 60%, Ireland is 50%, Italy is 30%. Those rates are very comparable to the most religious states in the US (Poland tops all but Utah).

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

You also don't realize how a lot of church attendance in the US is mostly cultural/social. Not to mention, Europe isn't without flaw, so it's hard to "compare" anything objectively.

Echoing the person you are responding to: the OP's original point is more about the abandonment of some guiding framework for morality, not necessarily about religious institutions.

Sorry, I meant to say Western Europe, where Ireland is an outlier. And church attendance is VERY generational - the vast majority of attendees are over 50.

Western European morals and philosophy are no longer influenced or controlled by religious considerations. I wish I could say the same for Australia.

While Western Europe is far from perfect, it's also not a morality-free wasteland of depravation and selfishness. This is what happens if you abandon religious moral guidance: nothing.

First off, just a bit of a nitpick, but as I understand it the Evangelical/pentecostal side of Christianity is doing pretty well, or at least it's not suffering from its members literally dying off (far from it, in fact). That was also my experience from about five to ten years ago.

Second, I'd argue it's way to early to conclude that abandoning religious moral guidance is a success. At most it's an (unprecedented?) experiment that so far seems to work.

Hi. Thanks for responsing, but I think you are misunderstanding me, and jumping to conclusions. You're responding to an argument about the relative value and crimes of the church vs the playboy mansion.

Another of your arguments is about culture during a specific time, geographically particular place. It was also only relevant to certain social classes in the Roman Empire. Then you took that and compared it to Western culture of today. However, I have made no such argument!?

Please read my comment again. Those were not my arguments.

I think that's an egregiously one-sided view of 'the church', and I'm saying that as an ex-religious person with both a friend and family that have suffered severely from sexual abuse (church in the former case).

There's a lot to criticize about churches, but having lived and breathed church life until my mid-twenties, there's also a lot to admire. A lot that I would argue we have not found a good replacement for in our secular environments, which sort of pains me to admit because I'd rather not find some vaguely liberal church environment one day.

That said, I don't mourn the fact that the power of the church has waned significantly. I think church, or at least Christianity, works best in an underdog position.

"young girl" and "young intern" are odd ways to describe a 21 year old.

The beneficial aspects of organised religion are overshadowed by the abuses they enable. It continues to segregate based on race, sex, culture, sexual orientation, not to forget other religions. It restricted knowledge to those deemed acceptable, until inventions like the printing press enabled dissemination of knowledge far and wide.

If you want to see a modern example of the effects of organised religion (more to the point, theocracy), you don't have to look any further than the Iranian Revolution in the 1970s. Iran went from a secular, pro-science society to one ruled purely through fear induced by the dominant religion.

I have always tried to maintain a dialogue with people, no matter their way of thinking. However, in recent times I've come to realise that unless you subscribe to a person's religion, any respect they give you is false. They think, by definition, that you are going to a different place to them in an afterlife that nobody truly knows exists. It doesn't become apparent until you come into conflict with the tenets of their belief (sexual orientation being a current one) - then watch them try to politely tell you wrong.

The truth is organised religion is more a burden than a boon, and the quicker we move past it as a species, the quicker we can move on to things that actually matter.

As a separate anecdote, I've been watching porn since I was 11, but have had a healthy monogamous relationship with my now wife for 11 years now.

Anecdotally I can say the same, but I think it's important to keep in mind that it can take at least a full generation to see the effects of changes like this.

Traditional religious may be feeling a decline, but religion as a trait, the unquestioning faith and zeal, has not gone anywhere. For examples, look at the modern political movements.

I completely agree with this, and it is an under-rated and under-investigated idea.

This is the main reason I'm often bothered by lack of nuance and sometimes outright 'religious' anti-religious sentiment I find in 'rational' circles.

Dismissing religion as some kind of overpowered source of evil, even in the unlikely case that this might be true, strikes me as a waste of some very valuable lessons in human behavior.

Picking out one thread from here: I'm one of those extremists who believes hard drugs should be legalised. I also believe they can be extremely damaging and would not want to be friends with a habitual meth user.

And, in all honesty, pornography's like that too. I find it hard to say it should be illegal, but it's not good for you. Not even in small controlled doses.

And yes, I drink alcohol.