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I'm curious how you explain Japan. Their traditional religions have never been very big on moral instruction, certainly not the way Christianity is, and today a

I'm curious how you explain Japan. Their traditional religions have never been very big on moral instruction, certainly not the way Christianity is, and today a supermajority of the population doesn't take religion seriously at all. And yet you have a generally well-behaved populace, low crime, very low rates of out-of-wedlock births, and so on. They have their own problems, of course, but not so much these particular problems. I guess you could argue that a particular self-reinforcing system of social norms could be considered a sort of orthopractic religion, but that would be a bit of a definitional stretch.

alfor 4y ago
I don’t know much about Japan. I know they have a huge problem of low birth rate, they could be on a path of extinction. For sure there is a mix of cultural norms that are mixed with religions. I see religion as knowledge that span multiple generations, saving the new ones from falling in the same mistakes as the previous ones. The religions that produced productive and resilient (and combative) cultures thrived, they others disappeared. In a sense like our dna they are evolutive adaptations, but they can evolve much faster and can spread horizontally. I think they all end up reflecting patterns from reality in a way that is transmissible between humans of different level of education and cognition. Now, we look at them with very skepticals eyes (for good reasons) but they contain wisdom that we cannot get in one human live. I think we have gone too far in pushing them away, now we need to look at them with humility, just like we wouldn’t modify our dna without care.