The two most destructive regimes of the twentieth century were explicitly secular. The stability of modern Western Europe is more of a historical consequence of Pax Americana and the Cold War than secularism.

Not sure whether you intended this or not, but your statement could be extended to imply that secular societies become destructive ones? Which would be quite a stretch - there are many secular stable countries and many unstable, highly religious ones as well.

No, that isn't what my comment says and it's not what I intended. Please, read what I actually wrote.

Fair enough.

... and what exactly are these two destructive regimes?

Do I really need to point that out? Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

If one wants to play "edgy contrarian" and argue that the United States was somehow worse than either of those, well...the U.S. is technically secular too.

Believing that the communist countries were not religious countries is a common fallacy of the Westerners.

In reality communism was a religion and more precisely a variant of the Christian religion, but this fact was disguised by changing the names of all things related to the Christian religion.

Just a few of the correspondences between Christianity and Communism (shown as traditional word => communist word for the same concept):

Christian => atheist

Pagan => Christian

Prophets => Marx, Engels & Lenin

Holy Scriptures => the published works of Marx, Engels & Lenin

Christian martyrs => communist illegalists

Pope => general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Cardinals/patriarchs => general secretaries of communist parties

Priests => members of the communist parties having functions in the party hierarchy

Religious teaching in schools => Political teaching in schools

Priest of a military unit => Political second-in-command of a military unit

Heretics => oppositionists to the party leadership

Happy life in the afterlife => happy life in the future truly communist society

Holy Inquisition => Committee for State Security

... and so on.

Writing a complete dictionary about all the words used by Christianity with their replacements in Communism would take a very long time.

While the communist vocabulary looks very different, the meanings are exactly the same as in Christianity.

All the communist countries were not countries free of religion, but on the contrary, they were countries were a monotheistic-like religion was intermingled with all the administrative & government institutions and where all the other religions were aggressively persecuted, including the true atheists or agnostics (i.e. not the communist atheists, which was the code name for the believers in the communist religion).

The claim that the communist countries were not religious was just propaganda, they were countries where there was no separation between the religion and the state.

Likewise false was the claim that the communist countries had a different economic system, in reality their economic system was an extreme form of capitalism, where everything was dominated by monopolies.

It's not that you are wrong, per se, because communism is indeed descended from a Christian culture and full of many Christian ideas. Overall, it functioned as a quasi-religious system.

However, the Soviets actively rooted every religion during their rule, especially Orthodox Christianity. So if we are to consider Soviet communism a form of Christianity, it's unclear how useful this actually is.

Your counter-argument does not work. It actually provides one more similarity between Communism and the various variants of Christianity and it makes stronger my analogy.

Yes the communists persecuted the other religions, inclusive by imprisoning and/or killing many Catholic priests and many Orthodox priests.

However, this is exactly what was previously done by some kinds of Christians against other kinds of Christians, e.g. during the many conflicts between Protestants and Catholics and between Catholics and Orthodox Christians.

Some people downvoted me, but this also just validates my affirmation that most Westerners are not aware of these facts and they do not understand Communism.

I have grown in a country occupied by communists, so I know from direct experience how Communism works, not from the fantastic depictions typical for the Western movies or novels.

When I was in school, there was nothing that I hated more than the mandatory classes of communist religion, the so-called Political teachings.

Also, due to the stupidity of one of my colleagues, a teacher discovered that I had a Bible and, because of that, I was almost expelled from High School a short time before the final exam, but I was very lucky due to some special circumstances and I could avoid the expulsion.

Many years later, after communism failed, I believed that the new generations of students will escape my fate and they will no longer waste time with the mandatory religion classes.

Unfortunately, my hope was wrong, because the mandatory Political teachings classes were not deleted from the curriculum, but they were replaced by mandatory Christian religion classes.

So nothing has changed, when the Communist religion was mandatory, I had almost lost my career because it was supposed that I might be Christian, but if I were a student today, I would have similar problems if I would attempt to criticize in school the Christian religion, for exactly the same reasons that were applicable to Communism.

But again the thing is, if you're going to take this line of thought, then secularism itself is really just a variation of Christianity. And at that point, of what use are the distinctions we are making? If Soviet communism is a kind of Christianity, it's certainly a kind significantly different enough to notice and bracket off. Certainly it has little use for say, The Bible, or priest-like figures, or various other things that do tie together the different branches of Christianity.

No, there are tremendous differences between secularism and Christianity, while Christianity and Communism have identical consequences for the life of a typical citizen.

Communism, Christianity, and also the other monotheist religions, are extremely intolerant against the believers of any other religion.

Secularism is the opposite, at most you could say that secularism is like many polytheistic religions, where it was considered normal that everyone believes in their own gods and for the other people it does not matter which are those gods.

The life of a normal citizen of a communist country was very similar, for example, to the life in Italy or Spain 600 years ago, when the Church was more powerful. It might have actually been worse, because the Communist Party might have been more powerful than the Catholic Church ever was.

Permanently you had to be very careful with everything you said, because if you ever contradicted some dogma written in the Holy Communist Scriptures or some interpretation given by a High Communist Priest, you could be singled out as an heretic and be excommunicated, with very bad consequences.

Regarding the Communist dogmas, everything was based on "have faith and do not doubt". It was absolutely impossible to have any discussion about communism based on rational arguments or on experiment results.

Like Christianity, Communism blocked any kind of scientific research that could contradict in any way its Holy Scriptures. To make progress in any career, you had to either be or simulate that you are a true believer and you had to display frequently your faith in the Communist religion.

It does not matter what words are used by Christianity or Communism, wherever any of them succeeded to control the state institutions, the consequences were the same for the citizens, no freedom of speech and severe discrimination between believers and non-believers.

Secularism was precisely the reaction against this, having the purpose of allowing the freedom of speech and religion.

People wonder if they are only temporarily stable, since the only subset groups that are reproducing at replacement rates are the religious.

Religion isn't a genetically inherited.

Cultural inheritance...

It’s not binary is the point.

Depends on how you define secular. Most secular states are simply neutral and promote plurality of culture and religion, i.e. allowing choice. The other type of secular state is one which is openly hostile to religion.

The US is becoming openly hostile to religion, as many of the comments in this thread evidence, which is distinct from neutrality. I agree with religious freedom as such, with everyone being on equal standing.

If you define secularism as the USSR or China, I would disagree with their long term stability, or even with liking their regimes.

The evidence doesn't support your claim. The least religious countries are among the most stable and most peaceful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_coun...

Their crime and imprisonment rates are far below those of the US. Even on an individual level, the presence of non-religious individuals is assocated with a series of positive societal effects: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227616923_Atheism_S...

Religion isn't necessary for public morality, and as America has shown, is often actively harmful. America is full of people who assume that they are good people BECAUSE they go to church rather than because of their acts. By and large, these are generally not good people. Instead, they're among the most judgmental and least helpful members of society.

To paraphrase Gandhi, "I like your Christ, not your Christians". The religious in modern society can't even be bothered to read the Cliff Notes of their own book, otherwise they'd be focused on helping the poor and remembering that rich people have trouble getting to heaven rather than going around promoting guns, no taxes, and slashing social safety nets.

I am trying to avoid a flaming discussion here but am also trying to moderate your comment. I am trying to promote guns, no taxes, and slashing social safety nets but am also spending much time, talent, treasure on helping of those needy. I am disagreeing with state force but am also disagreeing with selfishing. I hope that the comment here is clarifying your view on the generalised population.

Same here. Frankly if the GP's "Cliff Notes" version tells them that the Bible says to agitate politically for taking away other people's means of self-defense, or for seizing other people's property by force to be redistributed to the GP's preferred causes, then the GP really needs to put down the abridged version and read the original. Pacifism and charity are portrayed as virtues, to be sure, but it says nothing about forcing those virtues on others, and doing so strays about as far from the core message as it's possible to get.

The Bible's thoughts on self defense, taxation, and even "forced charity" aren't obscure - they're well known direct quotes.

https://biblehub.com/context/matthew/5-38.htm

https://biblehub.com/mark/12-17.htm

Yes, these quotes are indeed very well known. Thank you for reinforcing my point.

Matthew 5:38 — He advises his followers not to retaliate when attacked. He does not tell them to go out and disarm anyone else, or petition the Roman government to hypocritically do so on their behalf.

Mark 12:17 — When the Pharisees attempted to entrap Him with a question when could not be answered either "yes" or "no" without enraging either the Romans or the religious leaders, He evades the original question and turns it into an admonition to give people (and God) what they are due. Note that he never actual said that the coin was owed to Caesar, though many people seem to assume so. He only asked whose face was on the coin. The idea that not just the tax being demanded but all coins actually belonged to Caesar just because his face was stamped on them would rightly have been considered ludicrous. And no matter how you take that conversation, the fact remains that he never made any comment on the merit of the taxes themselves. There aren't any statements in support of the practice of taxation, and all the points about providing for others, supporting the poor, etc. involve personal contributions, not political action.

Jesus teach importance of forgivenes but also realise there exist bad people. Luke 22:36 "Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one."

On tax, Jesus was giving that response to an entraping question from Pharisees they asked because He had in past criticised of harsh tax policy. Force tithing is not a thing of New Testament but old.

I think the argument could be made that most of the top countries you mentioned are linguistically and racially homogenous. I don't really have a conclusion on whether religion helps or hurts a more racially diverse population but just something worth pointing out.

I don't think China is racially homogenous.

A Gallop poll serves as your evidence for religion's impact on stability and peace? This is pie-in-the-sky cherry picked data, stylized as a scientific inquiry.

> The US is becoming openly hostile to religion

I don't think the US is becoming openly hostile to religion.

It is becoming hostile to religion in the public sphere, a good thing if there ever was one.

Just like your sexual practices, keep your religion at home and please stop bothering other people with it.

How about church membership

Funnily enough, one of the most secular countries, Sweden, has a 50%+ church membership. But it's an anomaly; church membership is still a good litmus test for secularity everywhere else.

> Sweden, has a 50%+ church membership.

Could it be that in Sweden, you get some sort of tax rebate or discounts at supermarkets if you are officially registered with some religion?

If it’s anything like Iceland people get auto-registered as members. Much better to look at things like church attendance rates.