There is still a very wide margin though. My wife was homeschooled because she did gymnastics at a fairly high level when she was young and so scheduling was easier for her that way. Her older sister wasn't homeschooled hardly at all though.

...and why do those groups create so many resources? Because they tend to be people trying hard to replicate the traditional schooling experience, with high academic standards and expectations. Evangelicals are rarely the ones doing unschooling.

Source: was mostly unschooled as a kid, but spent a lot of time around evangelical Christian homeschoolers because we'd go to the gym classes and other organized events they ran. The evangelicals didn't seem to have any issues with the fact that I was 100% an atheist.

indoctrination is a given. Do you prefer your secular type, the religious type or the government type?

Indoctrination is not a given and should never be acceptable in education.

What is indoctrination? Here's one dictionary definition:

    indoctrination: the process of repeating an idea or belief to someone until they accept it without criticism or question

Does the scientific method tell you this? It couldn’t have, because this is a philosophical belief not a scientific one. Very likely, you were indoctrinated to believe this.

Not all “doctrine” (teaching) is wrong and not all indoctrination is wrong. But everyone undergoes some form of indoctrination.

This isn't bad. I don't think it is worth you while to research cannibalism, or a number of other things that people have done/believed in over time. Even if you come to the "right conclusion" there is just too much too research to look into everything people have come up with. My life is worse because I - a non-doctor - had to research all the anti-vaccination claims to see if they really were baseless (they were, but I know from history experts are not always right and once in a while a conspiracy really does occur)

Of course it’s not. Indoctrination is encouraging belief and adherence without question, the scientific method is to only accept after rigorously questioning. It’s trivially easy to apply that recursively. One who questions the scientific method is then by definition not indoctrinated and has not reached their belief via indoctrination.

If you're thinking critically about it (i.e. testing it, questioning its predictions and assumptions, et cetera), it's not indoctrination. If it is, then you've broadened the definition of indoctrination to be equivalent to thought, which is a useless overgeneralization.

And to be clear, you can be religious and not be indoctrinated.

No, you are shown how the ancient Greeks did things, and how they had a lot of ridiculous ideas. Then they introduced Galileo Galilei that showed how experiments can rat out many bad ideas and used them to disprove many of the things written by the ancient Greeks.

That is how we know the scientific method is valuable, nobody has to indoctrinate you to it you can see it yourself. The reason the scientific method is so popular is because you don't have to get indoctrinated into it, it is so obvious that it is a great method.

The problem in all cases is that the criticism and question is more apparent than real, and it does not extend to a whole lot of shared assumptions.

Questioning deeply rooted social norms will get you thrown out of most social groups. Well, questioning social norms held by that group will generally get you thrown out. Questioning deeply held social norms of a different group that the group you're in doesn't like will get you elevated in status, but you aren't actually questioning that group's social norms.

I can't find any definition of known quantity otherwise given how extremely wide the variations on religious teaching is only focusing on science let alone other topics like history.

Let alone that there isn't only one religion in the world.

If your perspective is "if the parent says it is correct it is correct" you cannot say that is different in any meaningful way.

I disagree on both counts, but it seems like the claims there are pretty different in how extreme they are.

How do you know that? "He wrote it in this book"

In education: "Gravity is about 9.8m/s/s"

How do you know that? "Well do this pendulum experiment with me and see for yourself."

Anything can be characterised well or badly.

> In education: "The earth accumulated matter together after a previous supernova."

> How do you know that? "It's written in this book."

In the vast majority of cases, that is literally how the teacher knows it: they don't actually know the evidence or the chain of reasoning that science took to get to where the current theory is, nor how one could actually go about gathering the evidence oneself to prove it true or false.

We were taught basic nuclear physics in middle school and were shown the valley of stability.

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

Atoms larger than iron came from atoms crashing together like in an atom bomb ie super novas and similar, while atoms smaller than iron can come from regular decaying processes. Doesn't take much to explain that.

Does it explain exactly how the nuclear energy was calculated? No, but we can see how people figured out that parts of earth came from a super nova. This is very different from just "it was written in a book".

If you say that is the same thing as religion, then I ask you what steps do I have to take to meet God? I know how to replicate the physics steps, but nobody tells me how to replicate anything that religious people believe in. That makes them inherently different and not at all similar.

It’s written in a book.

As an agnostic, I don't really have a dog in this fight, but science has no better explanation for our origin that the religious people do. It just sounds fancier.

Science doesn't try to explain our origin. Science is a tool to help us understand how the world works, it isn't there to replace religion.

The big bang is just as far as our explanations can take us. We know a lot about how many things works, by using that knowledge and looking at possible processes that would result in our current state we arrived at the big bang if we look far enough back. There is no belief there, its just us observing the world.

Anything that can help us figure out ways the past played out can help us understand the future. For example, if we see that many stars have likely gone supernova in the past, we can look at our own star, the sun, and figure out when or if it will go supernova as well. We can't test stars and supernovas because we don't have control over them, but studying those things means we will have a more accurate understanding of the topic than if we didn't.

Gathering data and making theories about that data is science. The scientific method with experiments is the most important signal and it trumps everything else, but when we lack the ability to do experiments then extrapolating what we know from those experiments is the next best thing and it is still science.

Anyway, I'm not sure why you are so anti-science here. Can you explain why you feel you need to put the big bang on the same level as "God did it"? Do you really think that those two things are on the same level here? The big bang comes from extrapolating what we know from experiments and applying it to the universe and then looking at what happens if we play that backwards. It is a very mundane thing.

Edit: An example that is similar to big bang:

You stand on an open field. You feel something hitting your head. You look down and see a ball. You turn around and see a person standing there, nobody else in sight. Do you think these two are the same level:

"God created the ball and dropped it on your head"

"The person you see had the ball and threw it at your head"

You would say "We can't know for sure which is true, they are equally valid beliefs!", right? If not, why do you think this is different?

The first time I remember hearing that theory was as an adult in a public lecture by an astrophysicist at a local university. (It sounds like I may be a decade or more older than you.) The speaker recited the theory, followed by "at least, that's our current best model", as though they were a Sunday-school teacher reciting some pat explanation for "Why did God made the snake?" that they weren't entirely convinced by.

Which is pretty much exactly my point: real scientists think in terms of evidence and possible models, which are challenged and revised all the time. The lecture wasn't about the development of matter in the universe, so the speaker didn't go into the details, but presumably they knew all the problems with that model.

What's taught to children isn't typically evidence and various models. It's not even typically the most recent best model; at best it will be the best model at the time the textbook came out. At worst it might be the best model at the time the textbook's author left university.

But you know what? That's OK. Middle schoolers don't yet need to have a 100% accurate picture of how the elements formed. They more need to know that the universe is predictable and comprehensible; they need to be given a "big picture" to either decide to learn more about, if they become scientists or engineers, or to talk with scientists and engineers if they instead become managers or politicians (or even stay-at-home parents deciding whether to give their children vaccines).

In the same vein, the people at the time Genesis was written didn't need to be taught astrophysics. They needed to be given an alternate to the Babylonian creation myth.

Go look up the Babylonian creation myth on Wikipedia. The earth and humans were formed from the carcass and blood of various gods after epic battles, more or less by accident; until the gods noticed the humans and thought they'd look like good slaves. Now think about how that story answers these questions: "What is the universe like, and what is my place in it as a normal human being?"

Now read the Genesis account, where God intentionally, step by step creates things in a logical progression, bringing order from chaos. At each step he "saw that it was good", and at the end he "saw that it was very good". How does the Genesis story answer those questions differently than the Babylonian story?

That is what the original readers of Genesis needed to know, and so that's what God told them. How the elements and the planets formed is something we've been allowed to work out on our own.

Not all religious people have the same views as American Christian or Middle Eastern Muslim fundamentalists. For most the books are not literal, and personal experience (of self or others) matters more.

What is secular indoctrination? Kids who grow up without a religion doesn't get told anything, all you have to do is to not indoctrinate the kid into a religion.

There is still school etc, but removing religious indoctrination doesn't add anything else, its just less indoctrination overall.

I work in edtech with a bunch of former teachers, and this is absolutely untrue. Many elementary and middle school teachers see part of their role (regardless of the subject they're officially teaching) as being to teach morals to their students, and the morality that they choose to teach is every bit as subjective as the morality that comes out of a religion.

And if it's not their teachers teaching them morals, then it's their parents. You can't raise a child without intentionally or unintentionally instilling in them your own value system.

The biggest factor in whether someone feels that something is "indoctrination" isn't whether it originates from a religion but whether they agree with the principles being taught.

> There is still school etc, but removing religious indoctrination doesn't add anything else, its just less indoctrination overall.

I should probably have clarified it in the first bit that I meant that the kids weren't told anything about religion, not that the kids aren't told anything at all. My point is that there is no indoctrination required to raise a kid without religion, it is the natural state. I and most people I grew up with were raised that way, religion was stories we read about in school, not some magical thing.

If that is what you mean then I'm pretty sure that even religious homes teaches secular values.

The teachers generally push an empathy based approach to morality, which is absolutely not subjective.

Adopting empathy can cause a number of objective moral pronouncements on a good foundation.

I will take empathy based moral pronouncements over “the bible says so” any day of the week.

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.

It’s a refuge for indoctrination, meaning you aren’t allowed to truly question. In my experiences at many Christian churches across the US, the people there don’t care about introspection or intellectual debate. Everyone already “knows” their religion is correct and is not actually willing to challenge that because it’s scary.

I know you just said “religion,” but I can only speak about Christianity as I’m deeply familiar with it. I believe Christianity is mostly horrible for society and celebrate every year as I see the numbers drop. It’s slowly dying in every developed country because it doesn’t make sense when logic and science are applied.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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 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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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?

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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

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 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 are 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.

This is a low quality and bigoted comment.

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.

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.

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).

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 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.

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.

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.

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

I'll never again outsource my morality.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

They're a mostly atheist population.

See also Estonia, Japan.

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.

Japan is #4 @ 40% religious.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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 personal views. (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...

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.

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.

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.

To classify your argumentation, this 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.

Ok, back up your claim

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.

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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?

"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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

So be better.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Catholicism absolutely has sins that are unforgivable.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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?

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).

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.

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.

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 inherit 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.)

Which church?

[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...

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.

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.

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.

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

There are mental health diagnoses available for people who hear internal voices that cause them to deny reality.

It's not perfectly true, but that doesn't invalidate the natural and normal case.

Of course not. No good person would claim otherwise.

But it does not invalidate those people, to make the claim that humans, as a biological classification, are bipedal.

I ask as here in Australia we eliminated a straight binary [ M | F ] choice on passports 12+ years ago so that people who were neither M nor F no longer had to commit fraud and lie on official state documents:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/15/australian-pas...

https://ihra.org.au/21597/ten-years-of-x-passports-and-no-pr...

You'll note your error in a peer comment where you incorrectly state that humans are either Male OR Female I trust.

It's an unnecessary data point for the purpose of a passport

I mean that's the history of passports, which started out with an indication of the person, but it's a fair question to ask why the hell are there passports anyway.

( * Sure, you could start with limited issue by King Henry V of England in 1414 but that's really getting in the weeds here. )

As an example, gay people are perfectly normal and natural.

No. It is normal to have a penis or a vagina. So, humans are either male or female. This can be stated as truth, just as a scientist would claim that humans are bipedal, even while acknowledging exceptions do exist.

False logic - you might want to work on your syllogisms there.

By normal you mean common place.

It's normal for crust material to not be gold.

Statistically it's more likely for a human to be neither male nor female than it is for crustal matter to be gold.

We do not, however, conclude that the crust does not contain gold.

Indeed we value the rare.

Normal: conforming to a type, standard, or regular pattern : characterized by that which is considered usual, typical, or routine.

Gold is not normal material in the crust. The crust is not gold. Gold is not the crust. And it is normal to have a penis (male) or a vagina (female).

This has nothing to do with what we value, be it rare or otherwise, it has to do with biological facts.

This runs contrary to your claim.

I am principally chiding you for your sloppy logic and poor grasp of facts here, to be clear.

Intersex people are more common than gold.

And it is a fact that humans have zero, one, two, or more legs. But you would never argue with the scientific claim that humans are a bipedal mammal. The exceptions do not invalidate the norm.

> This runs contrary to your claim.

It does not run contrary to my claim. My claim is that humans are either male or female. And this is wildly, overwhelmingly true.

I don't feel any need to qualify the statement that humans are two-legged creatures either.

There are exceptions in both cases, but they're not the norm.

> Intersex people are more common than gold.

It was your damn analogy, not mine.

What about a man who loses his penis in an accident? Is he no longer a man? Would he still be allowed to identify as a man? Would a woman born without a vagina still be allowed to identify as a woman?

As a rough approximation, yes.

> What about a man who loses his penis in an accident?

He's a man who lost his penis. Statistically insignificant and doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of humans, by far, have either a penis or a vagina.

Again, the exceptions do not invalidate the norm that we all know is true. For thousands of years we've understood human reproduction and the role of males with penises, and females with vaginas.

The strongest argument about why it matters is women's sports which conservatives always derided and still deride. But weirdly now people like you care about the purity of women's sports.

Maybe ask yourself why you give a s** about putting people into category A or B?

Or go read one of the famous blog posts about the assumptions that programmers make about people's names and then apply that to gender

How that translates to the social realm is really a separate issue.

Is it? Seems like very literally the realm in which you brought up this topic in the first place:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38094098

People generally don’t assign moral implications to unusual genetic conditions like Albinism which are described as abnormal even though they are literally natural.

Homosexual exists across the animal kingdom, it’s literally both natural and abnormal mammalian behavior. That isn’t normally seen as being relevant to people’s acceptance of it.

Words matter.

We're talking about the language of science here. Biologists often talk about humans in terms of their biological characteristics. There is no judgement, only classification.

And acknowledging what is normal, is not a value judgement. It's not meant in a hurtful way.

Intent matters.

I don't think that's natural at all. "Natural" would be simply dying from cancer in your leg, after it metastasizes to the rest of your body. Amputation isn't natural, nor is any other human medicine. All medicine is unnatural, and working against what would happen in nature. Just putting a bandage on a small cut to avoid infection is unnatural: to be natural, you should let it get infected and then die from it.

Are you looking for some kind of deity to define English words for you?

That's irrelevant. There's nothing natural about extracting some chemical compounds from a plant on the other side of the world and using it to improve a medical problem you have.

>Many animals use their saliva to avoid infection.

Sure, that's fine. That's not the same as extracting chemical compounds from some plant somewhere else. Animals aren't doing anything like that.

Even ancient medicines, where they dug up some root somewhere and boiled it into a tea, is unnatural. Animals don't know how to do that, and even ancient humans had to figure it out with a long trial-and-error process that probably took thousands of years. They certainly didn't know about this stuff instinctively.

Saying "plant-based medicine is natural!" is like saying that concrete-and-steel buildings are "natural" because they're made with materials found in Earth's crust. It makes no sense at all.

Excepting "other side of the world", the rest is very natural. It is one of the methods of getting poisons for some organisms - eating plants that already contain them. For example, monarch caterpillars accumulate certain toxic glycosides acquired from plants, and use them to make themselves poisonous to predators. So do other insect species - feeding on plants toxic to their potential predators and then keeping the toxins is a common defense mechanism. One that humans borrowed too - e.g. poisonous dart frogs (people don't feed on them, usually, just take their poison, but the principle is similar).

Animals also been observed consuming certain plants when sick, though I am not sure about the efficiency of those methods. Chimps certainly are known to use some plants as anti-parasitic, etc. agents, and other simians too. There's evidence of elephants doing the same. I'm not sure where would we make a boundary between purposeful behavior of "smart" animals like chimps and pretty much the same behavior of humans, only at larger scale, but if we declare chimps being "natural", using plant medicines, at least a primitive ones, should be included.

Personally, I would not use ether unnatural or abnormal because they have negative connotations even though, by definition, they might be correct.

If I had to chose a word for this purpose today, I would chose the word atypical.

To my knowledge, there is not a negative connotation to the word atypical, but if we start using any word to refer to any specific group of people then the word we chose could, in time, develop its own connotations.

Yet left-handed people exist. It's just a regular variation of human existence, so can you really say calling it "unnatural" and "abnormal" is factually correct?

However, culturally they have been treated as unlucky and evil, and left-handed children were until very recently forced to write with their right hand. Turns out words actually do matter, and calling it "unnatural" can lead to a lot of harm.

Should we also call white people unnatural and abnormal, considering that the vast majority of humans aren't white?

Sure, why not? Looking at the world population, skin color is normally darker than a typical white European. Not sure why anyone should feel bad about that.

Not sure how many different ways to say this. If there is an overwhelming physical characteristic, that the vast majority of humans exhibit, it's not hurtful to acknowledge it as normal, and deviation from that norm, by definition, as abnormal.

People treating each other poorly is a completely separate issue. And you shouldn't treat someone poorly, just because they're not normal in some characteristic. Most of us aren't normal, in one way or another. And it's okay that we're not all the same, and there's no reason to pretend we are.

It just flies in the face of what we know about human behaviour across recorded history.

You're right, human behavior is often abhorrent and focused on differences.

But trying to solve that problem by pretending that scientific taxonomy is the cause, is counterproductive. People want an easy answer, and it's easier to warp science than change the hearts of men. But it's an insidious "solution" that has untold corrosive effects and impairs our ability to inspect reality with integrity and honesty.

In the exact sense and in the exact same proportions as we may say the following:

    As the vast majority of atoms in the universe are either Hydrogen or Helium, it's not hurtful to acknowledge these as normal, and deviation from that norm, by definition, as abnormal.

Of course that does sound pretty silly.

Humans are 98% Male or Female with a long tail of variations in chromoosones.

Elements are 98% Hydrogen of Helium with a long tail of variations in the nucleus and electron shells.

The elements have atypical clusterings on planets, humans have atypical clusterings in various cities.

It appears to be a sound comparison.

If the your whole point is that you want to say intersex people are abnormal in the sense that they are drawn from a portion of the distribution with small support, I guess that is fine, but if you use that language in an ordinary context, prepare to be misunderstood.

You may want to scroll up parent to parent - ta8645 is the user that I initially responded to and the person who first stated that humans were only either M or F and then moved to suggest that those who didn't fit the M or the F definitions (physically, at birth) were abnormal and outsiders.

My point, such as it is, is that when representing the world as we understand it through science we are faced with a flood of important long tail outliers - eg: collectively every element in the universe that is not Hydrogen and not Helium is proportional to the collection of every human that is neither not perfectly male (by physical birth reproductive biology definitions) nor perfectly female.

I regard the non H and non He elements as significant despite their rarity and it always strikes me as odd that some people make such a song and dance about humans that are born every year with the same frequency.

Regarding the English language, it's a normal common occurrence that { not perfect male, not perfect female } are born every year - a bookie can number their occurrance within a tight window as an example of how regular, precise, and predictable these numbers are.

And

> Humans are right-handed.

Not quite the same thing at all and hardly comparable due to pretty obvious reasons

Flying them fashy colors proudly, aren't we?

At least have the guts to say degenerates like the Nazis did

Most of these are millenia+ old traditions. Of course the people belonging to those traditions have accounted for the things they have experienced in that time. How could they not?

There’s also a very easy to spot social contagion aspect to all of this that would seem to confirm the fears of home school parents who see the public schools as a danger to their children’s healthy development.

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

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.

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.

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

Or female rapists who rape other females with females?

Your morality stops at protecting females against males?

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?"

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

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

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.

> 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.

>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!

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".

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?"

> 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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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?

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Empiricism is blind to most of human experience.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 ...". No argument. But is morality just about the feels? No, it isn't.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)?

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.

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.”

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

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.

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.

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.

I, for one, made no such comment.

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

> 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Statistically, the only communities with positive demographics are religious.

Is divorce allowed?

What is the status of women's rights?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

If you’re not a Deep South religious person, I’ll eat my hat.

LOL. I am a New Yorker with dual (EU/US) citizenship and two graduate degrees. So you can eat that hat if you'd lile.

Like I said, I grew up secular and have developed a deeper understanding of religion and its benefits in my late 30s.

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.

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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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

In my experience not only is OP correct that there are different kinds of homeschooling, but the people involved in the different segments don't really interact at all. My wife and I were both homeschooled, living less than a mile away from each other for 10 years, but we didn't meet until we were adults. Her circle was much like you describe, but ours was far more secular, and there was very little overlap.

If you accidentally found your way into the local religious-homeschooling circles, I can understand how it would be eyebrow-raising, but that doesn't mean that the other circle isn't close by.

While this may technically fit the definition of "indoctrination", that's a pretty loaded way to describe what parents teach their own children.

// they thought the public schools were too secular and were teaching "sinful" sciences like evolution.

Really? In 2021, the hot-button issue among religious parents was evolution?

For the parental fears to center on evolution either suggests either that the parents were censoring their larger concerns for OP, or it's an anachronism that brings the chronology into question.

Could be evolution in the science side of things, the legacy of slavery or colonization in the history side of things.

Math is generally pretty safe, although I do see a steady stream of "I'm so glad I'm homeschooling my kids, I can't believe what $currentEducationalBogeyman is trying to pass off as education" when presented with some way to understand math that I had to teach myself, in college, to do the math faster in my head.

Composition is pretty safe, but as its frequently combined with literature (that is, the study of rhetoric in other people's writing) which also has a lot of self-censorship. It's also unsteady ground, as the Bible should be study as literature as well as religious tome, but that can lead to kids thinking about the humans who wrote the bible and what rhetorical outcome they were reaching towards.

Physical education is safe so long as it limits itself to exercise, but health topics like human sexuality are obviously going to raise some hackles.

I think it really depends on the parent what is the absolute bogeyman of public schooling, but evolution has posed the most consistent existential threat to the stereotypical fundamentalist who is looking to avoid "sinful" public schools.

I don't think that the theory of evolution was the issue in 2021...

Here's an example that happened in France: parents disgusted by a performance where an adult male performer was pretending, in front of kids, to eat vegetables in a garden, naked, in front of kids "because ecological art" (or whatever that performance was called) [1]

I'm sure I'm the evil, close minded, one, who refuses to see the "art" and the "ecology" in that performance and who sees instead the perversion of kids.

But while I'm the evil one who is seeing perversion, there were people involved in showing an adult male, on all fours, balls and dick out, ass spread, because he had an important message to pass (certainly).

Do that to my kid, and my kid is getting homeschooled the next day.

I don't have a problem with anyone but I do have a problem with proselytism.

[1] the art performance (call it what you want) is now forbidden to be shown to kids (so there's still some sanity out there)... Video of the performance kids saw (the one inside the tweet):

https://actu.fr/auvergne-rhone-alpes/lyon_69123/artistes-nus...

Note that I don't know and don't care if the person who revealed that is an ultra-fundamentalist christian, a neo-nazi, or an alien from outer space... You are not showing that to my kid without repercussion.

This is where public schooling is hypocritical. There are various forms of education about race, gender, etc., but almost no mandatory education on religion?

I'm not saying indoctrination, but education. Shouldn't everyone have a basic understanding of the history and tenets of Buddhism? Atheism? Hinduism? And so on? I think so. Even if the prism of importance is postmodern and focuses on respect fo others' self-identification, religion is clearly a major aspect in self-identification or we wouldn't treat the subject as controversial.

Teaching a kid about the variety of beliefs across the globe and the option of none is likely to make the kid less attached to the bubble of the religion of their parents.

In my country, religion is a 1h/week class from 1'st to 12'th grade and parents have to explicitly opt-out of it if they do not want kids to take part. Opting out is also slightly detrimental to a kids scores. What is thought is pure indoctrination and there is no element of multi-religious sociology and anthropology.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/01/03/republica...

I'm a former homeschooler that had to watch countless Ken Ham and Kent Hovind videos. These videos were filled with strawmen and faulty logic. I distinctly remember one of them tearing into Lamarckism, a theory discredited in the 1930's, as if it were something that people actually believe in today. Indoctrination is exactly how I'd describe it.

Sure it's largely wrong, but it's a strange sort of indoctrination to care about. Sort of like how we tell children the story about electrons being balls that orbit the nucleus. Wrong, but only important for physicists and chemists.

If there wasn’t a literal Adam and Eve, then Adam and Eve never sinned by eating fruit from the wrong tree, and thus they never passed that sin down to all of humanity, meaning we aren’t all born with “original sin” for which we need to be forgiven and saved from being sent to hell when we die.

It's also kind of a boring question because there's no experiment we could run to explain how creation miracles worked. It's definitely a fountain of controversy, though.

Almost everyone isn't going to do a deep dive into how it all works/become professionals in that area, so even the science is effectively just a story for them. If parents want to tell their kids a different story, it doesn't really matter much. Public school k-12 science is so basic that as has been said elsewhere in the comments, you can learn it all from Wikipedia in a few days anyway. The important topics are reading, writing, and math/logic. Ideally history and political philosophy, but it's not clear that schools meaningfully teach that anyway.

Some science is wrong, but not science in itself.

And mate, you don't need to go into religion or anything to find out that governments willingly lie to you. Also scientists, plenty of times, willingly or not.

> That doesn’t set you up to get far and do well in the world as it is.

There are loads of highly successful and relevant Christian people in every area, including science, right now and throughout history.

That was just one example of a particularly egregious strawman. It made "evolutionists" out to be a lot dumber than they actually are by misrepresenting what they believe. They made similar arguments against some of Darwin's since discredited theories, again, as if they were things that modern scientists believe. And there were plenty of other untruths and logical errors, so much so that I think it's very likely these people were not arguing in good faith.

I agree that it's not a very important subject for everyday life or for most careers, but that kind of intellectual dishonesty being presented as the absolute divine truth is not good for developing a child's reasoning abilities imo.

And as another sibling comment points out, creationism tends to pit people against science and intellectualism in general. The only thing that can be truly known is the absolute truth of the Bible.

All this to say who cares? People choose to believe what they want to believe. And for historical reasons there's this belief common that may or may not align with current scientific thought. Let's not make this a hill to die on if it drives parents away.

In my area it certainly was. Vaccines were probably hotter at that time, but they tend to not be a major part of the curriculum, and transgender issues in public schools was just getting on parents radar here when COVID interrupted things.

We were aware of families homeschooling for religious reasons, but not in the Bay Area.

Not believing in evolution isn't a morality issue, a lot of the stuff that those folks are probably trying to avoid by homeschooling is. In other words, I wouldn't be worried about my kids spending the night at the house with the very conservative non-evolution believing family. That definitely counts for something.

Multiple studies show religious people are happier, healthier, and have greater civic engagement. Mormons, who you probably consider extremely “indoctrinated,” live 5-10 years longer than other whites, are tied with Jews for happiest, and have among the highest upward social mobility of anyone in the US. So those kids are probably in better shape than the public school kids.

If people want to homeschool because public school won't reinforce in their kids that God is great, that's their right as long as they also clear the geography requirements.

And just like that, a discussion about homeschooling veers wildly off-topic into a flame war.

Kids shielded from this kind of actual reality tend, IMHO, are never really then equipped for going out into society of the workplace, where teaching evolution is small change compared to the kind of "sinning" going on all about.

Admittedly some public school systems are just a mess, and private schools are out of the budget for most folks, so home schooling becomes the default. However, unless there's a social education alongside lots of other kids, this is just kicking problems down the road.

Also, the growth probably comes from a more representative cross section of society.