The problem with modern substitutes seems to be that they are extremely narrow and probably very temporal (Keto diet fanatics, cross-fit buffs, even gay bars seem to be past their glory days). Much of the unity of the church body comes from a connection to ancestors and a sense that one is, cultural differences aside, a part of the same thing.
I agree with this. Church communities also tend to be geographically local, which can be important.
As an Atheist, I have no desire to encourage people back to religion, but I do think society needs a replacement for the community created by religious groups.
I see a reinforcement of a group identity that can follow to new churches, often simply requiring attendance... opportunities to practice values through volunteering... the holy leaders' quasi-authoritative councilor/networking facilitator/self-improvement/social policing role... and more...
Hut how would we fulfill religion's roles without the leaps of faith and dogma that defines religion?
Religious families are big on family and I this day and age, they're smaller than ever. Gone are the days, in my case, of communing for a large family dinner almost every week. I barely even see my parents.
All of which to say I think our social needs were met in large part by family, and Church was a convenient vehicle to bring it together. There's no substitute for family. However, between a plethora of possible social obligations given our leisure time, I think loneliness can be abated.
In my experience churches and families are not independent things. Basically every healthy church spends a significant amount of time encouraging healthy families in both direct and indirect ways.
And most healthy churches aren't all that convenient. There are too many people involved for church to be convenient.
I'd say they're totally independent even if you perceive they may benefit families; lots of institutions can.
This kind of thing is actually more common in more conservative churches in my experience. More progressive groups don't focus on evangelism/conversion as much.
Religion is just an excuse, anything you can extract moral from is ripe from being abused as a justification for the worst human behavior.
We used communism and eugenism for the same purpose. We had a book, we had a leader, and we had a genocide.
There are plenty of toxic communities. Belonging to them may salve loneliness without being healthy. If for example the community is built around resentment, revenge, purity, a charismatic leader, etc., fellowship may still provide a strong attraction ... that is best fulfilled elsewhere.
If nothing else, better to get a dog than a cult.
The way to drive toxic communities back to the fringes of society is to build and support healthy ones.
Also useful gardening advice.
Plenty of people prefer to be victims in group than alone though. We are weird creatures.
It's not precise science, it's subjective, and sometimes hard to identify.
Same with abusing relationships.
I don't think I'm a moral relativist, but this is a non-sequitur. It's possible for morality to be relative, but still have guiding principals.
>we're only a decade or two into mainstream moral relativism.
No, people have always found a way to justify what want to be right regardless of the underlying ideology. We've just become more explicit about it in some cases. People's beliefs about what is right tend to be very convenient for them regardless of what they claim their beliefs to be.
I think it's the equivalent of a 'code smell' if you find yourself going through life without being challenged about what you think is right and wrong. I think it usually means you have come up with a convenient set of rules that allows you to ignore nuance and details so that you don't have to constantly struggle with what's good and bad.
Of course, I'm speculating too.
This is probably true in cases. But I suspect that widespread cultural alignment to a general perspective/worldview must have an overall mass effect.
At an individual level, I agree. But I stipulated "at a cultural level", by which I mean something like "if the culture is morally relativistic, I don't think you'll see a critical mass of principled individuals that would prop up a principled culture". I don't think moral relativism is compatible with a principled culture, at least not given the parameters of human psychology.
> No, people have always found a way to justify what want to be right regardless of the underlying ideology.
To be clear, I didn't claim moral absolutism generally or religion in particular is a panacea against this sort of self-dishonesty, but I think you see less of it and instances are less pronounced if only because that individual will lose credibility with his peers. In a morally relativistic culture, the offender only needs to argue "that's your morality, not mine" or "that's your truth, not mine", which is roughly what we see today.
> We've just become more explicit about it in some cases. People's beliefs about what is right tend to be very convenient for them regardless of what they claim their beliefs to be.
I think there's always a temptation to convince oneself that what they want is moral, but I think that temptation is inhibited because he knows his community won't let him get away with it (his reputation would be damaged if he advocated for a few overtly immoral things or many subtly immoral things, consistently). Further, with religions in particular, there is often a text that lays out the morality and there is only so much word lawyering someone can do without overtly running afoul of it. It further constrains the impulse. And with religions like Christianity in particular, a central activity is reflecting on one's selfishness and working against it (the concept of "dying to oneself").
Like I said before, it's not a panacea (there are many religious people and indeed Christians who subvert it), but I think it is a bulwark that we tear down at our own peril.
As much as you defend organized religion, it seems to evolve into bigotry quite often, if not always.
But in the end, we are so dependent on the idea of a God, that we will end making an actual one.
Long live our robot overlords.
In a morally relativistic society, credibility is distributed along tribal lines because there are no higher principles. Everyone is motivated to look out for oneself and the best avenue for that is a tribal alliance (as you point out "you treat nice people nicely and bad people badly", however, "nice" and "bad" devolve almost immediately into proxies for "benefits me" or "does not benefit me"). Things that would otherwise be absolutely wrong (like sexual assault or political violence) now vary morally depending on what is convenient to our tribe in the moment. Science can be swiftly rejected as racist or sexist (or whatever sin our tribe is immediately obsessed with) if it supports an inconvenient finding, but it will be back in favor next week when it produces convenient results.
In a morally absolute society, universal principles resist these selfish, tribalistic tendencies (although not completely or perfectly in all places at all times--remember we're describing a bulwark and not a panacea). We agree that sexual assault and political violence are very bad and we condemn people even in our own tribe who commit such acts. Empiricism is also venerated above personal or tribal convenience (although sophisticated empirical findings may take time to trickle down the chain of trust to the layperson).
Anyway, there are lots of holes to punch here since the topic is highly subjective and I didn't draw all of the connecting details (due to time constraints), but that's the general model.
There is widespread disagreement about the use of force, who should care for the sick and poor and when, and so many other things.
So maybe I don't understand what you mean by a morally absolute society.
I don't understand your point of "that's your truth, you can't impose that on me." That's literally how most of us have to get along. If we were unable to accept moral differences in other people, we would be completely unable to function as a society. I don't believe there has ever been two people who have completely agreed on what's moral or not.
Is it wrong to be gay as a christian? You're going to find hundreds of different christian opinions on this, with their own scripture to back it up.
Are you saved by words or actions? Again, you're going to find many many different answers, all with their own scripture and reasoning.
You claim that christianity is about reflecting on one's selfishness and working against it, but can you say that about the prosperity gospel? Trump is about as self-centered as a person can get, but he's held up as a saint by millions of christians in this country.
But perhaps you just mean within a single church community, and not christianity at large? I was a PK, though, so I know how church politics can go and the infighting and selfishness that can be exhibited within the community.
Basically the most we can hope for when it comes to morality is some general agreement about right and wrong, and that agreement is always shifting. There has never been a community or religion in the history of the world that hasn't exhibited this.
The thing that is probably most valid and damaging to my model is the bit about evangelicals accepting Trump. I genuinely don’t know about this, but I’m inclined to say that it’s due to the absorbtion of post-Truth mindset from the broader culture. I don’t think you would see anything like it 15 or 20 years ago.
FWIW, I’m sorry we’re being downvoted. I think we’re having quite an interesting conversation. :)
15 or 20 years ago, the same type of thing was happening, just on a smaller scale. Good examples are some of the Televangelists like Peter Popoff.
Perhaps the thing we're disagreeing about is the extent that a "principled culture" protects against this kind of self-indulgence. Based on my personal experiences with the church, I've found the moral framework that it provides does not usually play an active role in the behavior of it's members, and is more often wielded as a tool of judgement against others than as a tool of self-reflection and self-improvement. But I can also recognize that my experiences with the church are not necessarily typical.
I'm not sure that there is a utility to moral authoritarianism beyond the ability to quell disagreements. History has shown that "god says" is an extremely powerful motivating force.
Especially since Christianity tends to downplay ritual and effort-based holiness, comparatively speaking. You don't achieve level 100 in Christian by donating, passing theology tests, travelling, conquering, converting people, or being sin free. Of course actual Christian practice will be all over the place. None of it is explicitly mandatory. Morality is fairly explicit, but actual enforcement of morality isn't the job of Christians outside of particular scenarios.
I wasn't trying to say that it's unhelpful, just make the point that it's not uniform. If someone says "we should follow christian values" the necessary followup question is "which christian values?"
"""And one of them, a lawyer, asked [Jesus] a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets."""
Most people have a hard enough time with those. But, you might say, what about the details? What about white lies and second donuts? That was also covered by Jesus:
"""Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others."""
The details might seem inconsistent and controversial, but the basic morality isn't all that convoluted or up for discussion. People just don't like thinking about how everyone is bad at the fundamental stuff.
Anyway, Christian philosophy is pretty coherent even if the people aren't. And it's not clear that your expectations of consistency are required for there to be social benefits to Christian belief in particular or religious belief more generally.
You're right about my expectation of consistency for there to be social benefit. I just have an expectation of consistency from those claiming to have a monopoly on fundamental truth in the universe. My expectation has nothing to do with social good in that case.
About The Greatest Commandment and the Golden Rule? As directly quoted from Jesus? If so, this definition of "Christian" is far too encompassing to be useful in this discussion.
> But yeah sure, clearly you're the one person in the world who has it right!
What I'm quoting is even less controversial than the Nicene Creed, which is unanimous among major Christian denominations. They can't even agree on what day of the week is the sabbath and what day of the year is Easter, but they all agree on The Nicene Creed. And they absolutely agree on The Greatest Commandment.
There is not as much controversy about the basics as you seem to think there is.
1800 years later: humans finally develop the germ theory of disease and can stop dying of easily preventable illnesses
This sounds like a rather Protestant-centric viewpoint.
Non-protestants are still rather light on compulsory behavior on the whole. Compare to orthodox branches of other major religions. No particular rules on clothing, cleanliness, charity, gender separation, pilgrimages, prayer times, need to attain spiritual states, etc. No karma to optimize. No hidden knowledge to uncover.
Some churches eat a bit of cracker and juice/wine on a regular basis. Some get a person wet as a one time initiation ceremony. That's pretty light ritual on the whole.
And while various High Mass clothes and rituals are certainly there, there's no particular requirement of parishioners to give one, attend any particular mass, or even attend a minimum number of them.
> No karma to optimize
but I actually had the more karmic things in mind, i.e the importance of Works vs importance of Faith, which certainly does vary between different Christian sects.
> No hidden knowledge to uncover.
There are gnostic types of things. If perhaps less so today than in the Renaissance. But it's not as if it's absent.
So I still think this is a rather Protestant perspective.
Edit to say: Also, in fact even or perhaps even especially, Protestants were engaged in gnosticism/Christian mysticism in the Renaissance period.
You've confused absence of moral relativism with religion; the former does not require the latter, and most non-religious people are not moral relativists, at least in the sense of the strong meta-ethical relativism which would justify the claim above.
And as a reminder, this is all speculation and I completely understand that you may not agree (I may not agree by the end of this thread!).
First you're going to have to explain how religious populations avoid those.
Hint: they don't.
Anyway, they do; that they do so imperfectly is not a counterargument, since (as I've mentioned several times), religion serves as a bulwark in this regard, not a panacea.
Religion doesn't have a monopoly on those ideals. They are not even solely human ideals. Many mammals display them in certain scenarios.
> (at a cultural level, anyway).
Many of the least religious countries are the best places to live, and the most religious, the worst. I went to Norway (the least religious country in western Europe), and they often don't check tickets on the train or at the entrances of places. When you ask someone why not, because people could lie, you get an answer like.. "because one wouldn't do that" (ie cheat the system). I got so used to it that I would lose my train tickets in my bag because I didn't need them. The only place I needed them was getting off the train at the airport because there was a machine that checked it.
> because as soon as you decide morality is relative then everyone is free to choose the morality that is most convenient for them/their tribe.
Religions do this. There are many sects with different rules. People pick and choose what rules to obey all the time.
Not being religious doesn't make one a moral relativist. Ethics and morality can be reasoned about.
> I think this explains much of our political divide and the "post-Truth" era generally
The post-truth era in the West is clearly a product of the religious right: https://youtu.be/xnhJWusyj4I
Or, you know, a million years of evolution baking the instinct into our primate brains
There is one matrilineal society with a culture that some anthropologists describe in terms you describe -- the Mosou people. However, more recent anthropological data indicates that this too is not the whole truth. While the Mosou are undoubtedly matrilineal, they typically know who the father is and children with involved fathers (rather than just involved uncles) do better. Moreover, Mosou society is not spontaneous. It developed as the result of a lower class being subjugated by a very patrilineal upper class nobility. The lower class was socially engineered to be compliant, while the upper class taxed them. The upper class was eventually disbanded by communist china, and the Mosou are now mistakenly used as an example of a stable matriarchal society. Nevertheless, even this fails to stand to scrutiny as exposure to the patrilineal mainstream Chinese society means most men just leave for greener pastures in mainstream Chinese society. Were it not for gawking tourists to prop up their economy, it's unlikely they'd be around still.
The smallish nuclear family is a very modern invention. Going to high school (and the natural consequence of parents not educating their own children) is even more recent.
Which really means: Encouraging families that don't work to stay together, no matter how much it hurts the people involved.
Helping people to resolve conflicts so they want to stay together is a completely different thing than just encouraging people to stay together.
Apart from the chicken-and-egg problems, probably the bigger problem with that is that naturally the populations you are comparing are extremely biased. So, even if it is not an artifact of social policies that children in two-parent households do better than children of single parents, there is no reason to think that the number of parents is actually the determining factor.
It might just as well be that people who are bad at maintaining relationships are also bad at raising children, so forcing two of them to raise a child together will not give you any of the benefits that you get from people who are good at maintaining relationships raising a child, and you will instead just draw down the average outcomes of two-parent households.
> I'm sure there's all sorts of chicken-and-egg problems in the data
Pretty much that.
If society disadvantages people who build support structures that do not fit a very strict set of requirements, then you can't really draw any useful conclusions about whether those support structures are good based on observing that society, because it is very likely that negative effects you see are simply effects of the discriminatory policies, and thus are useless for justifying the discrimination.
> Trying to get the parents to want to stay together is a worthy effort, but when you've decided to make children I socially expect you to put their needs first
But trying to get people to stay together who don't want to is very unlikely to be putting the child's needs first. If you can make people want to stay together (and not due to outside pressure/threats), that might well be worth it, but if you can't, you probably will be hurting the child if you try to force them, in particular if they get to resent the child because it's what is keeping them in a relationship they don't want to be in.
You can not force people to like other people, and forcing people to be with people they dislike is a recipe for disaster. It's really as simple as that.
> I don't think it's unreasonable to encourage people to stay in an unhappy marriage rather than leaving their kids with a broken home, assuming the current home wouldn't be worse for the kids than the broken one.
How is an unhappy marriage not a broken home? Either the parents will be displaying their dislike for each other, or they have to constantly live a lie, constantly be dishonest to their child about their emotional state ... neither sounds like a nurturing environment for a child.
I said people should not stay together if they can't work out their differences, you say they should not stay together if they have unworkable differences ... which seems to be the same idea?
But then, the overall impression is not like you are intending to agree with me.
I am confused.
That is why people say 'family is the building block of civilization'.
Seriously though, I'm sure we can attribute our urge to procreate to 4,500,000,000 years of evolution, not to churches.
I suggest you read up on Unitarian Universalist and Sunday Assembly churches, which you may not have heard of, but they exist all over the world, and echo exactly what you're saying.
This is so contrary to a century of results from social research from multiple disciplines from all over the world it would be hard to know where to start to counter it. Community is fundamental to humanity, the nuclear 'family' a local and occasionally useful innovation.
Please do try. I don't think what you are saying is true at all and it certainly isn't any thing like a universally accepted scientific truth.
And if they do find someone, won't the loneliness be cured already without having kids?
I strongly suspect that being lonely in a marriage is worse than being lonely and single.
Try a gym that doesn't even have a treadmill.
I like that observation! Also the point that leaders matter a lot - or rather the community culture they manage to create (or not).
The point is not to find a sure receipe for a community generation machine, but what are importants ingredients to have more chance of one.
And work is less and less a good place for that, because of policies, specialisation, compartimenting, but also because of lack of meaning .
Meaning is a very important component for a group, and religions sell plenty of it, which make them strong people binders.
A lot of other factors like common values, language, symbolism and stories reinforce this effect, but you can find that elsewhere, although it is very natural for spiritual groups to include all of it.