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So much of the US population cruises along unconsciously on an implicit set of Judeo-Christian values and morals. Increasingly many citizens claim to have left

So much of the US population cruises along unconsciously on an implicit set of Judeo-Christian values and morals. Increasingly many citizens claim to have left religion behind and subscribe to an exclusively scientific worldview, but the majority of their upstanding behavior still stems from religious beliefs. Pressed to reveal its true character, a purely scientific worldview produces no inherent sense of meaning, morality, or right v. wrong. Sure, you get the hemming and hawing about evolutionary hunter-gatherer behavior and other various strains of pseudo-scientific bullshit, but all of those are equally as faith-bound as religion given that there is no possible way to devise reasonable (or ethical) experimentation on how past humanity might have evolved various senses of "right and wrong" or even a capacity for wanting meaning. It's entirely rational to glean from religion what continues to influence a large portion of our success and stop pretending like science is our new "one true god" and all of the churches need to be burnt to the ground in favor of some absolute separation of church and state.

VictorPath 5y ago
> evolutionary hunter-gatherer behavior and other various strains of pseudo-scientific bullshit, but all of those are equally as faith-bound as religion given that there is no possible way to devise reasonable (or ethical) experimentation on how past humanity What past humanity? There are hunter gatherer bands roaming around the Amazon right now. They seem to exhibit at least as much "upstanding behavior" as the evangelicals sloshing around the US. Scandinavia is fairly secular and has many nice attributes, the US is off the charts in terms of religion, violent behavior, gun deaths etc. I don't see how irrational beliefs about burning bushes, virgin births, walking on water, resurrections result in "upstanding behavior". If this were the case evangelicals would be the epitome of "upstanding behavior", but they are not.
- xyzzyz 5y ago
  > There are hunter gatherer bands roaming around the Amazon right now. They seem to exhibit at least as much "upstanding behavior" as the evangelicals sloshing around the US. Considering how violent are cultures of hunter-gatherers, I’d say that they are much less morally upstanding. But, they provide a good data point here: the hunter gatherers are typically highly religious. It’s just their religions are pretty bad at creating positive societal outcomes. Not all religions are created equal in that aspect. > Scandinavia is fairly secular and has many nice attributes, the US is off the charts in terms of religion, violent behavior, gun deaths etc. If you look at the reality instead of aggregated statistics and packaged narratives, you will find that gun deaths in US very much are not of the charts in places where religiosity is off the chart. If anything, these two things are negatively correlated: the more religious a place is, the fewer gun deaths (despite no scarcity of firearms among the religious).
  - ggggtez 5y ago
    >how violent are cultures of hunter-gatherer WW2 killed 75 million people. Tell me again, who has the more violent culture?
    - michaelmrose 5y ago
      Context matters. The proper tool to use is to compare what percentage of lives met a violent end annually. Normally in the US it's about 1 in 17,000 according to the CDC https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/datasources/nvdrs/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/datasources/nvdrs/ind... In Sweden its more like 1 in 83,000 Ancient stats are a little hard to come by and different groups were more or less warlike losing between an estimated 1 in 100 to 1 in 3000 Big events like WW2 are very noticeable but ancient people were in fact very violent because not shockingly people are violent. As importantly is the context in which violence appears in ancient society driven not my large scale political movements but by resource scarcity. A continually expanding human population in the absence of modern civilization would not have achieved present population size but they would certainly have continued to grow leading to greater scarcity and increasing conflict. That is to say that they were more violent on average already and they would be more so in the modern context.
      - ggggtez 5y ago
        It's a lot of facts and figures, but it kind of misses the mark. Wars today are also from resource scarcity. Leibingsraum was explicitly part of the reasoning for invading France. I know it's a natural instinct to defend modern living as more peaceful, and to some extent that may be true. But modern society has also created atrocities that ancient people could never dream of.
  - apatry 5y ago
    > If you look at the reality instead of aggregated statistics and packaged narratives, you will find that gun deaths in US very much are not of the charts in places where religiosity is off the chart. If anything, these two things are negatively correlated: the more religious a place is, the fewer gun deaths (despite no scarcity of firearms among the religious). We can debate what off-the-chart means, but when we cross-reference the states with the highest gun death per capita (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/firearm.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/...) with the states that are the most religious (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/02/29/how-religious-is-your-state/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/02/29/how-religio...), we find a lot of overlap. Correlation is not causation, but I can't see how we can claim these two are negatively correlated.
dragonwriter 5y ago
Science deals with “is” and thus cannot answer “ought”, which has to come from elsewhere, but moral precepts don't need to come from religion (and arguably ultimately don’t, instead, religions are invented as rationalizations and tools for communicating moral principles rather than existing independently and providing them.)
gaganyaan 5y ago
> Judeo-Christian values and morals Just no. Normal human values were co-opted by various religion-based memeplexes to justify themselves. > a purely scientific worldview produces no inherent sense of meaning, morality, or right v. wrong. Absolute morality does not exist. Fundamentally, morality is selfish (i.e. relative). I don't murder someone because I don't want to live in a society where I myself can be murdered. That's what all the religious bloviating boils down to. That's it. That's all that really is.
- dQw4w9WgXcQ 5y ago
  >Absolute morality does not exist. >Claims to have a statement about what morality ultimately boils down to. Pick one bro. You can't even stay consistent within your own supposedly relative belief system. Morality clearly cannot boil down to some simple statement if its truly relative.
afpx 5y ago
Well, there are a couple billion people who didn't grow up in a Judeo-Christian societies. And, yet, they seem to have morality and life meaning. So, I think you mean, religion in general. Also, I'm not aware of record of hunter gatherer societies that didn't have religion. Religion is probably something baked in. At least I know that it's baked into me, so I run with it and enjoy it. It's possible to be both rational and religious.
- 4512124672456 5y ago
  > It's possible to be both rational and religious. Except the person who is religious will always have a limit to their rationality, because they choose "believe in magic" instead of "knowing and not knowing".
  - zzo38computer 5y ago
    > Except the person who is religious will always have a limit to their rationality, because they choose "believe in magic" instead of "knowing and not knowing". I do not agree. Being religious does not necessarily mean that you will be "magic" instead of rational. One who is rational can do and figure out things fully rationally, independently from the relgious things and from "magic", just as much as you can speak two languages without having to speak both languages at the same time, or liking a book without having to believe that it is a true story.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      A person might believe and be rational, but it seems like believing makes being rational harder, so you have less rational people among believers. Whenever you can shut down any discussion with "god willed this" or similar then rationality will suffer. How do you get around that problem? I feel the only way to fix that is to remove that ability from them, ie state that God is just nonsense and they can't just invoke his name to shut down discussions since people don't care about God. People are still dumb even without God, but they seem a bit less dumb.
bmicraft 5y ago
Judeo-Christian values are just that, values. Many of those values have existed before that kind of religion and many will long after those religions have seized to exist in thair current form. One could even argue that some form of values is genetically ingrained in us as a social species, as they are in many other species
derac 5y ago
Our culture / morality are clearly influenced by Judeo-Christian morals. I don't think churches need to be burnt. However, IMO morality has a deeper source than organized religion. Human beings experience pain, hunger, will to live, and so on. We want to live in a society that allows us to thrive and we can deduce that if we were to kill people randomly then the same could happen to us. This applies to any other moral issue as well. This is social contract theory. Edit: prior to the development of this philosophy along with liberalism, many people (in the West) were still Christian, but I'd say society was constructed in a less moral manner.
- ThrowawayR2 5y ago
  > "However, IMO morality has a deeper source than organized religion." Toxicity on social and other online media, the prevalence of scams in online marketplaces, the willingness of people (even on HN) to be employed by businesses that cause environmental and social ills as an externality, etc. all point there being a very limited radius of innate human morality, even among modern civilization. While that isn't to say that religion is a good solution, it's hard to argue that some powerful mechanism to reinforce feelings of human fellowship and community at from the individual level to the societal level wouldn't be beneficial.
oh_sigh 5y ago
Why is religion the stopping point for those beliefs? What if religion is just an expression of something fairly benign relating to social cohesiveness(against external threats) and hierarchy(against internal threats). Morality can be bootstrapped from selfish means. I don't need religion to understanding that punching someone in the face may end up with me getting punched in the face, and I don't like getting punched in the face. Primates exhibit similar behaviors without religion and merely having a developed sense of cause and effect.
jwally 5y ago
From my naive perspective, the Bible itself has a lot of warts that are pretty indefensible. This isn’t to say the Bible has nothing of value to contribute to society; but as an authority on morality there’s a lot of amoral things god does. Easy example: Exodus and the plagues. God wants to free His people from Egypt (why aren’t all people his people if he created them?) so he tells Moses to tell Aaron to tell Pharaoh that if he doesn’t free the Israelites God will punish the Egyptians - and eventually kill a bunch of kids. Wouldn’t a better solution be to just teleport the Israelites to the Holy land and not kill children? Or possess Pharaoh and make him issue a decree. Put yourself in Gods shoes and see if you can’t come up with a better solution that doesn’t involve a bunch of innocents dying. Ditto Noah’s arc, sodom and Gomorrah. Even in the New Testament he tells Joseph to hide from Herod to avoid the slaughter of the innocents but doesn’t stop the innocents being slaughtered.

VictorPath 5y ago

> evolutionary hunter-gatherer behavior and other various strains of pseudo-scientific bullshit, but all of those are equally as faith-bound as religion given that there is no possible way to devise reasonable (or ethical) experimentation on how past humanity What past humanity? There are hunter gatherer bands roaming around the Amazon right now. They seem to exhibit at least as much "upstanding behavior" as the evangelicals sloshing around the US. Scandinavia is fairly secular and has many nice attributes, the US is off the charts in terms of religion, violent behavior, gun deaths etc. I don't see how irrational beliefs about burning bushes, virgin births, walking on water, resurrections result in "upstanding behavior". If this were the case evangelicals would be the epitome of "upstanding behavior", but they are not.

xyzzyz 5y ago
> There are hunter gatherer bands roaming around the Amazon right now. They seem to exhibit at least as much "upstanding behavior" as the evangelicals sloshing around the US. Considering how violent are cultures of hunter-gatherers, I’d say that they are much less morally upstanding. But, they provide a good data point here: the hunter gatherers are typically highly religious. It’s just their religions are pretty bad at creating positive societal outcomes. Not all religions are created equal in that aspect. > Scandinavia is fairly secular and has many nice attributes, the US is off the charts in terms of religion, violent behavior, gun deaths etc. If you look at the reality instead of aggregated statistics and packaged narratives, you will find that gun deaths in US very much are not of the charts in places where religiosity is off the chart. If anything, these two things are negatively correlated: the more religious a place is, the fewer gun deaths (despite no scarcity of firearms among the religious).
- ggggtez 5y ago
  >how violent are cultures of hunter-gatherer WW2 killed 75 million people. Tell me again, who has the more violent culture?
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    Context matters. The proper tool to use is to compare what percentage of lives met a violent end annually. Normally in the US it's about 1 in 17,000 according to the CDC https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/datasources/nvdrs/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/datasources/nvdrs/ind... In Sweden its more like 1 in 83,000 Ancient stats are a little hard to come by and different groups were more or less warlike losing between an estimated 1 in 100 to 1 in 3000 Big events like WW2 are very noticeable but ancient people were in fact very violent because not shockingly people are violent. As importantly is the context in which violence appears in ancient society driven not my large scale political movements but by resource scarcity. A continually expanding human population in the absence of modern civilization would not have achieved present population size but they would certainly have continued to grow leading to greater scarcity and increasing conflict. That is to say that they were more violent on average already and they would be more so in the modern context.
    - ggggtez 5y ago
      It's a lot of facts and figures, but it kind of misses the mark. Wars today are also from resource scarcity. Leibingsraum was explicitly part of the reasoning for invading France. I know it's a natural instinct to defend modern living as more peaceful, and to some extent that may be true. But modern society has also created atrocities that ancient people could never dream of.
- apatry 5y ago
  > If you look at the reality instead of aggregated statistics and packaged narratives, you will find that gun deaths in US very much are not of the charts in places where religiosity is off the chart. If anything, these two things are negatively correlated: the more religious a place is, the fewer gun deaths (despite no scarcity of firearms among the religious). We can debate what off-the-chart means, but when we cross-reference the states with the highest gun death per capita (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/firearm.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/...) with the states that are the most religious (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/02/29/how-religious-is-your-state/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/02/29/how-religio...), we find a lot of overlap. Correlation is not causation, but I can't see how we can claim these two are negatively correlated.

dragonwriter 5y ago

Science deals with “is” and thus cannot answer “ought”, which has to come from elsewhere, but moral precepts don't need to come from religion (and arguably ultimately don’t, instead, religions are invented as rationalizations and tools for communicating moral principles rather than existing independently and providing them.)

gaganyaan 5y ago

> Judeo-Christian values and morals Just no. Normal human values were co-opted by various religion-based memeplexes to justify themselves. > a purely scientific worldview produces no inherent sense of meaning, morality, or right v. wrong. Absolute morality does not exist. Fundamentally, morality is selfish (i.e. relative). I don't murder someone because I don't want to live in a society where I myself can be murdered. That's what all the religious bloviating boils down to. That's it. That's all that really is.

dQw4w9WgXcQ 5y ago
>Absolute morality does not exist. >Claims to have a statement about what morality ultimately boils down to. Pick one bro. You can't even stay consistent within your own supposedly relative belief system. Morality clearly cannot boil down to some simple statement if its truly relative.

afpx 5y ago

Well, there are a couple billion people who didn't grow up in a Judeo-Christian societies. And, yet, they seem to have morality and life meaning. So, I think you mean, religion in general. Also, I'm not aware of record of hunter gatherer societies that didn't have religion. Religion is probably something baked in. At least I know that it's baked into me, so I run with it and enjoy it. It's possible to be both rational and religious.

4512124672456 5y ago
> It's possible to be both rational and religious. Except the person who is religious will always have a limit to their rationality, because they choose "believe in magic" instead of "knowing and not knowing".
- zzo38computer 5y ago
  > Except the person who is religious will always have a limit to their rationality, because they choose "believe in magic" instead of "knowing and not knowing". I do not agree. Being religious does not necessarily mean that you will be "magic" instead of rational. One who is rational can do and figure out things fully rationally, independently from the relgious things and from "magic", just as much as you can speak two languages without having to speak both languages at the same time, or liking a book without having to believe that it is a true story.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    A person might believe and be rational, but it seems like believing makes being rational harder, so you have less rational people among believers. Whenever you can shut down any discussion with "god willed this" or similar then rationality will suffer. How do you get around that problem? I feel the only way to fix that is to remove that ability from them, ie state that God is just nonsense and they can't just invoke his name to shut down discussions since people don't care about God. People are still dumb even without God, but they seem a bit less dumb.

bmicraft 5y ago

Judeo-Christian values are just that, values. Many of those values have existed before that kind of religion and many will long after those religions have seized to exist in thair current form. One could even argue that some form of values is genetically ingrained in us as a social species, as they are in many other species

derac 5y ago

Our culture / morality are clearly influenced by Judeo-Christian morals. I don't think churches need to be burnt. However, IMO morality has a deeper source than organized religion. Human beings experience pain, hunger, will to live, and so on. We want to live in a society that allows us to thrive and we can deduce that if we were to kill people randomly then the same could happen to us. This applies to any other moral issue as well. This is social contract theory. Edit: prior to the development of this philosophy along with liberalism, many people (in the West) were still Christian, but I'd say society was constructed in a less moral manner.

ThrowawayR2 5y ago
> "However, IMO morality has a deeper source than organized religion." Toxicity on social and other online media, the prevalence of scams in online marketplaces, the willingness of people (even on HN) to be employed by businesses that cause environmental and social ills as an externality, etc. all point there being a very limited radius of innate human morality, even among modern civilization. While that isn't to say that religion is a good solution, it's hard to argue that some powerful mechanism to reinforce feelings of human fellowship and community at from the individual level to the societal level wouldn't be beneficial.

oh_sigh 5y ago

Why is religion the stopping point for those beliefs? What if religion is just an expression of something fairly benign relating to social cohesiveness(against external threats) and hierarchy(against internal threats). Morality can be bootstrapped from selfish means. I don't need religion to understanding that punching someone in the face may end up with me getting punched in the face, and I don't like getting punched in the face. Primates exhibit similar behaviors without religion and merely having a developed sense of cause and effect.

jwally 5y ago

From my naive perspective, the Bible itself has a lot of warts that are pretty indefensible. This isn’t to say the Bible has nothing of value to contribute to society; but as an authority on morality there’s a lot of amoral things god does. Easy example: Exodus and the plagues. God wants to free His people from Egypt (why aren’t all people his people if he created them?) so he tells Moses to tell Aaron to tell Pharaoh that if he doesn’t free the Israelites God will punish the Egyptians - and eventually kill a bunch of kids. Wouldn’t a better solution be to just teleport the Israelites to the Holy land and not kill children? Or possess Pharaoh and make him issue a decree. Put yourself in Gods shoes and see if you can’t come up with a better solution that doesn’t involve a bunch of innocents dying. Ditto Noah’s arc, sodom and Gomorrah. Even in the New Testament he tells Joseph to hide from Herod to avoid the slaughter of the innocents but doesn’t stop the innocents being slaughtered.