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// other aspects of homeschooling were just a fig leaf over a whole lot of religious indoctrination I was raised totally secular but I now understand that reli

// other aspects of homeschooling were just a fig leaf over a whole lot of religious indoctrination 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.

ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
The question ”what kind of person should I be?” could be answered by god, I guess, but the alternative would be to answer it yourself, and/or consult society, possibly friends and family. Not "anything goes". 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.
- ksenzee 3y ago
  Not necessarily. For me it’s a subset of “answer it yourself”: it’s a way of asking myself “what is my potential? What was I put here for? If I had a perfect parent, what would they expect of me?”
  - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
    It's the same for me, since none of those questions require a god or religion to answer. So, I'll have to disagree again with the premise that the alternative is "anything goes, you can be whatever you feel like and there's no judgement of any of your actions". 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).
    - ksenzee 3y ago
      Sorry, my “not necessarily” was too broadly scoped. I agree with you that “it’s either God or anything goes” is a false premise. It’s taught from the pulpit, which is why you hear it so often: people accept it without thinking it through and realizing it makes no sense. 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.
      - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
        Gotcha. Well, if you're asking yourself, and your answer is biased/affected by religion, then you have to first trust that society encoded the proper set of values and morals into the religion, and then trust that the religion encoded the proper set of values and morals into you. 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.
drw3 3y ago
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- FredPret 3y ago
  We should start a new, more useful religion
  - jandrese 3y ago
    All hail the Flying Spaghetti Monster!
  - seti0Cha 3y ago
    19th century Germany was way ahead of you. We're still arguing about their usefulness today.
- ksenzee 3y ago
  I was raised in a conservative Christian denomination and left it for a progressive one, and I’ve learned you can’t say “Christianity is ___” and be at all accurate. There are too many different Christianities. There are denominations that are pro-debate, pro-introspection, pro-logic, pro-science. They’re aiming for exactly what the GP is getting at: how best to live out the commandment to love one another, to build a society on earth where we care for each other and live up to our potential. 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.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- bluGill 3y ago
  As a christian I already have a region that is not debatable. That helps me be more willing to debate all the things outside. Communist, capitalist, jew, muslim, hindu, cannibal, republican, democrat, green, other sect of christian - all the same to me, something I'm not religiously attached to so I can try to understand. Some of those I understand enough to conclude they are wrong. 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.
AlexandrB 3y ago
> "what kind of man does G-d want me to be?" 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.
- austhrow743 3y ago
  I dont see the distinction between sect choice vs religious or not religious at all. If you're indoctrinated good and hard you're likely to be religious in the way the sect you were brought up in is. Choice elimination is the whole idea.
  - kelnos 3y ago
    I hear this a lot, but I just don't agree. Being indoctrinated into a particular system of belief is very different from not being indoctrinated into any belief system at all. 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).
    - strken 3y ago
      My mother's mother was religious but her father was an atheist. My mother's religious but my father's an atheist. I'm an atheist. 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.
addicted 3y ago
Your ideas of secularism and religiousness does not match anything in my personal experience whatsoever (I have friends of any different religions including many most haven’t heard of…I was raised in 1 major religion and followed 1 other major religion for a few years before turning to atheism and non-religousness almost 2 decades ago). 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.
chaostheory 3y ago
> I used to think religion was about deep fear, now I see it more as about deep care. 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 very short and limited personal experience. (I’m also not saying that the other side is free of any fault either.) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-liberal-brains-might-have-some-real-differences https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-... https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/liberals-are-from-the-acc-conservatives-are-from-the-amygdala https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/liberals-are-f...
- bigstrat2003 3y ago
  > 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. 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.
  - chaostheory 3y ago
    One of the main tenants of religion is to make it clear that the people who aren’t adherents are wrong and that they will end up in that respective religion’s hell. Religion is a large part of it.
    - c0pium 3y ago
      This is explicitly not what the Catholic Church teaches. There is a commonly used rhetorical device in Catholic education asking whether, in fact, anyone has gone to hell (the answer being that we can’t know but it’s very possible that it’s no). This is well summed up by Mother Teresa in her famous response that we are not called to be successful, but faithful. 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.
jkestner 3y ago
> the current mode of "anything goes, you can be whatever you feel like and there's no judgement of any of your actions." 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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- xyzelement 3y ago
  I meant something different by "anything goes." I am ~40 and was born in Eastern Europe -- but even in the US, back then there was still a strong value that a good life a combination of having a family and raising the next generation, ability to work to support your family and contribution to society through your work. 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"
  - axlee 3y ago
    > I meant something different by "anything goes." I am ~40 and was born in Eastern Europe -- but even in the US, back then there was still a strong value that a good life a combination of having a family and raising the next generation, ability to work to support your family and contribution to society through your work. 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. I'm not aware of that class in the curriculum. Is it supposed to be taught during math, history, geology or sports?
Teever 3y ago
If the purpose of religion is to align yourself to the highest aspirations why do so many large religious organizations get caught up stuff like this: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mormon-church-ensign-peak-whistleblower-david-nielsen-allegations-60-minutes-2023-05-14/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mormon-church-ensign-peak-whist...
- c0pium 3y ago
  I know this is bait, however Romans 3:23-24 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
  - Teever 3y ago
    It's not bait, it's a serious issue. 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.
  - tomrod 3y ago
    Aye, Paul felt this. But Jesus taught by their fruits shall ye know them. AFAICT, all Christians know the Jesus trumps Paul. Under such a calculus, the variance of Christians living their standards en masse is sufficient evidence of mission failure, not simply internal inconsistency. 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.
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  It’s the same reason every institution has corruption: health care, insurance, wall st., etc.
  - 3y ago
golergka 3y ago
We secular Jews have completely different first-hand experience of religion than most of other people on the planet, so while I completely understand and share your perspective, I'm not in the least surprised by the reaction your comment got.
jackmott42 3y ago
Hard to look at the current state of American Christianity and think of it as deep care.
- HybridCurve 3y ago
  American Evangelicals seem to gravitate toward their belief as a form of authoritarianism. It's less about compassion and more about incontestable moral authority over others.
  - seti0Cha 3y ago
    American Evangelical political influence has greatly waned in recent years and very little of our political discourse is now explicitly religious, yet our discourse is every bit as full of moralizing and condemnation as it ever was. I would suggest that strongly held moral beliefs always tend towards authoritarianism. Things we consider to be truly wrong we don't want being done, even when we aren't personally involved.
underwater 3y ago
What a weird take. Religions ability to influence behaviour works because of our lizard brain, not despite it. 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.
- xyzelement 3y ago
  // Religions ability to influence behaviour works because of our lizard brain 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.
  - JackMorgan 3y ago
    I don't see this as evidence of the contrary. Church attenders want to fit in with their peers at the church who are all doing the same thing. This is why there are so many hundreds of Christian sects, they are all trying to follow their local church's interpretation of the Bible. Individuals who read the Bible and come to even slightly different conclusions get kicked out of that church, so there is little incentive to read and think for one's self. Everyone is expected to read and come the same conclusions as their local leadership, or they will be browbeat and excommunicated.
- seti0Cha 3y ago
  You have a greatly simplified understanding of what religion is and how it operates. Many religions, for instance, encourage people to act against social norms. Also, strange that you would characterize conformity as an artifact of our lizard brains. Reptiles are not generally noted for being highly social creatures. Conformity seems like it'd be situated closer to what makes us human than what makes us animal-like.
rhuru 3y ago
[flagged]
kelnos 3y ago
I was raised very Catholic (and decided by my early teens that I didn't believe in any of it), and I completely disagree with your conclusion. Organized religion (at least Christianity) absolutely is about deep fear. "Do this or you'll go to hell!" "Believe this or you'll go to hell!" Repeat ad infinitum. 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. Oh, and as an atheist who knows and hangs out with a lot of other atheists, I can assure you that "anything goes, you can be whatever you feel like and there's no judgement of any of your actions" is not a thing. Or, rather, it very much is a thing, but that attitude comes from just as many religious people as it comes from the non-religious. And there are quite a few actions that religious people take that I think are disgusting and immoral, but somehow "anything goes" as long they can justify it in the pages of their made-up fantasy holy book. I don't consider things moral or immoral based on what a storybook tells me; I decide based on how I think my actions will affect others. My system is certainly not a perfect one, but I dare say it's miles ahead of the religious process.
- kulahan 3y ago
  You've misunderstood Catholicism. The entire reason Christianity is so radical is because it's the first major religion of purely love. There is no need to sacrifice anyone, you get infinite forgiveness, so long as you truly repent, and nearly every facet of Catholicism is based around the idea of love. 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.
wayfinder 3y ago
Religion isn’t about any one thing. For some, it’s a sense of community and meeting people. For others, it’s doing right by a greater power. Then there are those who do it because they’ve always done it. Some do it because it gives a dependable source of meaning. And some do it because they actually live in deep fear. 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.
- fellowniusmonk 3y ago
  Yeah, it's very weird the way people act as if the religious aren't choosing how to live, what to think and what action to take, moment by moment any more or less than the irreligious. 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.
fellowniusmonk 3y ago
As someone who was raised in religious communities, that "higher aspirations" is only the position "in principle" in reality working with people in the religious community was just scams and moral self justification of despicable behavior hidden behind soft language and terrible behavior. So much contention, so much gossip, so much backbiting behavior and hidden evils against children so that communities wouldn't "lose face". The worst behaviors, the least faith, the most fear, all hidden by duplicity and a weekly practice of virtue signaling. This is not isolated, my parents were involved in the church in many states and internationally, it was everywhere. 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 inherent 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.)
- chlodwig 3y ago
  This is not isolated, my parents were involved in the church in many states and internationally, it was everywhere. Which church?
  - throwoutway 3y ago
    This was my immediate thought. "The church" sounds like a specific cult, sect, or denomination. There's a wide spectrum of beliefs across these and one cannot act like they've been to them all
    - 3y ago
mattmaroon 3y ago
I think they care, I just wish they could better decouple that from Sky daddy mythology and all of the poor logic that flows from treating as your epistemological foundation the words of people who don’t didn’t even know what atoms were.
pkulak 3y ago
> anything goes, you can be whatever you feel like and there's no judgement of any of your actions 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?
- hyperbovine 3y ago
  For want of a better expression, amen. We're a couple million child sex abuse scandals past the point of pretending like organized religion has anything remotely resembling a monopoly on "moral" behavior.
- ragestorm 3y ago
  I hate that take too. If the fear of eternal damnation is the only reason you arent out murdering people, then you are a jerk (in kinder words).
- dasil003 3y ago
  Yeah, secular vs religious is not any basis for judging a value system. We've certainly seen horrible things done by fundamentalists of all stripes, religious or not! There is a lot of very beautiful religious thought over the millenia, and its very beauty is what enables its abuse by bad actors. We must always judge people as individuals by their actions in context, and never allow any form of ideology (whether religious or not) to be used as a shield against individual scrutiny. Morality is unfortunately not black and white, and the moment we try to make it so, we open the door to the greatest evils.
- umvi 3y ago
  > But even if I wasn't, I would know what's right and what's wrong. 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).
croes 3y ago
>"what kind of man does G-d want me to be?" 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.
- hunta2097 3y ago
  Statistically, the US prison population is mostly made up of religious people. https://www.statista.com/statistics/234653/religious-affiliation-of-us-prisoners/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/234653/religious-affilia...
  - mensetmanusman 3y ago
    90% had absent fathers. Statistically, the only communities with positive demographics are religious.
    - etchalon 3y ago
      That's a hell of a claim. Link?
    - croes 3y ago
      How do you define positive demographic? Is divorce allowed? What is the status of women's rights?
IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
I think what you meant to say instead of "anything goes", was lack of duty. That's what seems to be missing, that organized religion did bring to the table. 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.
- etchalon 3y ago
  The duty to stone someone working on the Sabbath? Gone.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    It was religious adherents who dispensed with that 'duty', not atheist reformers. Jesus himself said that you should not cast stones unless you are without sin (nobody is, therefore nobody may cast stones.) Jesus brought this and other reforms to the jewish religion and was murdered for it.
    - etchalon 3y ago
      The same religious adherents told slaves to be obedient to their masters, even when their masters were monsters, so let's not give them too much credit.
melagonster 3y ago
but they are talk about some parents makesure their kids never learn evolution and other science/history fact. this is a very very small subset of religion people. I don't think these opinion conflict with your experience.
iosystem 3y ago
> I was raised totally secular 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.
- nostrademons 3y ago
  There are many secular Jews in the U.S. - people for whom Judaism is a culture and ethnicity that's part of their background, but who don't believe in a higher power or any of the scriptures. I remember asking a friend's dad "So are you Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform?" and he was like "We're kinda beyond Reform."
- tomrod 3y ago
  I think you answered your own question to a degree. As I was being raised in an extremely high cost religion, I remember converts were given a very special glow and respect. Oh, they may never be full members of the tribe nor expected to lead very often, but their stories were affirmations that our religion must be right to convince people to join. 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.
thfuran 3y ago
>You may still disagree with what they care about but I find that harder and harder to do, personally. Maybe you need to read more about Jehovah's Witnesses, Haredi, and Wahhabism.
wredue 3y ago
[flagged]
- xyzelement 3y ago
  // 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.
  - wredue 3y ago
    Point is, You’re VERY clearly not a secular individual.
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      Eat your hat.
somenameforme 3y ago
The one thing I'd observe about near to all religions is that the values suggested tend to be about optimizing the overall outcome of a society. The most controversial topics are ones related to sexuality. But there's an utterly trivial, and even perfectly reasonable, explanation for why so many different religions look down on any form of sex except man+woman+babies. As one looks back in the past, the 'effective fertility' rates had to have been just barely hanging on by a thread. By 'effective fertility' I mean having children who also have children. Having 80 kids, but where only 1 succeeds in having kids, would be an 'effective fertility' of 1. 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. --- 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.
- xyzelement 3y ago
  I glazed over on the math but I agree with your statement. And I think the cause and effect are enmeshed... Do religious people have more kids? Yes. Do the kinds of people who are willing to take on the serious work of having many kids more likely to also take on other responsibility (ie be religious)? I think also yes. 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.
safety1st 3y ago
While Nietzsche was generally construed to be anti-religious he had some observations along these lines. He famously said - "God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown" and what he meant by it was that while science had eroded the moral supremacy of religion, we now faced a dilemma where nihilism would consume society, and we'd likely proceed to do bad stuff without God's help. Sure enough as a species we have gone on to commit all sorts of horrifying atrocities without the help of religious dogma, last century's mass murders under Nazi and Communist regimes being prime examples, no God required as a justification, it may be even scarier when all the justification you need for murder is the words of some charismatic strong men in politics. 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.
david-gpu 3y ago
> 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" 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.

ImPostingOnHN 3y ago

The question ”what kind of person should I be?” could be answered by god, I guess, but the alternative would be to answer it yourself, and/or consult society, possibly friends and family. Not "anything goes". 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.

ksenzee 3y ago
Not necessarily. For me it’s a subset of “answer it yourself”: it’s a way of asking myself “what is my potential? What was I put here for? If I had a perfect parent, what would they expect of me?”
- ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
  It's the same for me, since none of those questions require a god or religion to answer. So, I'll have to disagree again with the premise that the alternative is "anything goes, you can be whatever you feel like and there's no judgement of any of your actions". 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).
  - ksenzee 3y ago
    Sorry, my “not necessarily” was too broadly scoped. I agree with you that “it’s either God or anything goes” is a false premise. It’s taught from the pulpit, which is why you hear it so often: people accept it without thinking it through and realizing it makes no sense. 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.
    - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
      Gotcha. Well, if you're asking yourself, and your answer is biased/affected by religion, then you have to first trust that society encoded the proper set of values and morals into the religion, and then trust that the religion encoded the proper set of values and morals into you. 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.

drw3 3y ago

[deleted]

FredPret 3y ago
We should start a new, more useful religion
- jandrese 3y ago
  All hail the Flying Spaghetti Monster!
- seti0Cha 3y ago
  19th century Germany was way ahead of you. We're still arguing about their usefulness today.
ksenzee 3y ago
I was raised in a conservative Christian denomination and left it for a progressive one, and I’ve learned you can’t say “Christianity is ___” and be at all accurate. There are too many different Christianities. There are denominations that are pro-debate, pro-introspection, pro-logic, pro-science. They’re aiming for exactly what the GP is getting at: how best to live out the commandment to love one another, to build a society on earth where we care for each other and live up to our potential. 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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
bluGill 3y ago
As a christian I already have a region that is not debatable. That helps me be more willing to debate all the things outside. Communist, capitalist, jew, muslim, hindu, cannibal, republican, democrat, green, other sect of christian - all the same to me, something I'm not religiously attached to so I can try to understand. Some of those I understand enough to conclude they are wrong. 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.

AlexandrB 3y ago

> "what kind of man does G-d want me to be?" 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.

austhrow743 3y ago
I dont see the distinction between sect choice vs religious or not religious at all. If you're indoctrinated good and hard you're likely to be religious in the way the sect you were brought up in is. Choice elimination is the whole idea.
- kelnos 3y ago
  I hear this a lot, but I just don't agree. Being indoctrinated into a particular system of belief is very different from not being indoctrinated into any belief system at all. 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).
  - strken 3y ago
    My mother's mother was religious but her father was an atheist. My mother's religious but my father's an atheist. I'm an atheist. 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.

addicted 3y ago

Your ideas of secularism and religiousness does not match anything in my personal experience whatsoever (I have friends of any different religions including many most haven’t heard of…I was raised in 1 major religion and followed 1 other major religion for a few years before turning to atheism and non-religousness almost 2 decades ago). 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.

chaostheory 3y ago

> I used to think religion was about deep fear, now I see it more as about deep care. 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 very short and limited personal experience. (I’m also not saying that the other side is free of any fault either.) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-liberal-brains-might-have-some-real-differences https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-... https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/liberals-are-from-the-acc-conservatives-are-from-the-amygdala https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/liberals-are-f...

bigstrat2003 3y ago
> 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. 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.
- chaostheory 3y ago
  One of the main tenants of religion is to make it clear that the people who aren’t adherents are wrong and that they will end up in that respective religion’s hell. Religion is a large part of it.
  - c0pium 3y ago
    This is explicitly not what the Catholic Church teaches. There is a commonly used rhetorical device in Catholic education asking whether, in fact, anyone has gone to hell (the answer being that we can’t know but it’s very possible that it’s no). This is well summed up by Mother Teresa in her famous response that we are not called to be successful, but faithful. 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.

jkestner 3y ago

> the current mode of "anything goes, you can be whatever you feel like and there's no judgement of any of your actions." 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.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
xyzelement 3y ago
I meant something different by "anything goes." I am ~40 and was born in Eastern Europe -- but even in the US, back then there was still a strong value that a good life a combination of having a family and raising the next generation, ability to work to support your family and contribution to society through your work. 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"
- axlee 3y ago
  > I meant something different by "anything goes." I am ~40 and was born in Eastern Europe -- but even in the US, back then there was still a strong value that a good life a combination of having a family and raising the next generation, ability to work to support your family and contribution to society through your work. 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. I'm not aware of that class in the curriculum. Is it supposed to be taught during math, history, geology or sports?

Teever 3y ago

If the purpose of religion is to align yourself to the highest aspirations why do so many large religious organizations get caught up stuff like this: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mormon-church-ensign-peak-whistleblower-david-nielsen-allegations-60-minutes-2023-05-14/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mormon-church-ensign-peak-whist...

c0pium 3y ago
I know this is bait, however Romans 3:23-24 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
- Teever 3y ago
  It's not bait, it's a serious issue. 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.
- tomrod 3y ago
  Aye, Paul felt this. But Jesus taught by their fruits shall ye know them. AFAICT, all Christians know the Jesus trumps Paul. Under such a calculus, the variance of Christians living their standards en masse is sufficient evidence of mission failure, not simply internal inconsistency. 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.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
It’s the same reason every institution has corruption: health care, insurance, wall st., etc.
- 3y ago

golergka 3y ago

We secular Jews have completely different first-hand experience of religion than most of other people on the planet, so while I completely understand and share your perspective, I'm not in the least surprised by the reaction your comment got.

jackmott42 3y ago

Hard to look at the current state of American Christianity and think of it as deep care.

HybridCurve 3y ago
American Evangelicals seem to gravitate toward their belief as a form of authoritarianism. It's less about compassion and more about incontestable moral authority over others.
- seti0Cha 3y ago
  American Evangelical political influence has greatly waned in recent years and very little of our political discourse is now explicitly religious, yet our discourse is every bit as full of moralizing and condemnation as it ever was. I would suggest that strongly held moral beliefs always tend towards authoritarianism. Things we consider to be truly wrong we don't want being done, even when we aren't personally involved.

underwater 3y ago

What a weird take. Religions ability to influence behaviour works because of our lizard brain, not despite it. 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.

xyzelement 3y ago
// Religions ability to influence behaviour works because of our lizard brain 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.
- JackMorgan 3y ago
  I don't see this as evidence of the contrary. Church attenders want to fit in with their peers at the church who are all doing the same thing. This is why there are so many hundreds of Christian sects, they are all trying to follow their local church's interpretation of the Bible. Individuals who read the Bible and come to even slightly different conclusions get kicked out of that church, so there is little incentive to read and think for one's self. Everyone is expected to read and come the same conclusions as their local leadership, or they will be browbeat and excommunicated.
seti0Cha 3y ago
You have a greatly simplified understanding of what religion is and how it operates. Many religions, for instance, encourage people to act against social norms. Also, strange that you would characterize conformity as an artifact of our lizard brains. Reptiles are not generally noted for being highly social creatures. Conformity seems like it'd be situated closer to what makes us human than what makes us animal-like.

rhuru 3y ago

[flagged]

kelnos 3y ago

I was raised very Catholic (and decided by my early teens that I didn't believe in any of it), and I completely disagree with your conclusion. Organized religion (at least Christianity) absolutely is about deep fear. "Do this or you'll go to hell!" "Believe this or you'll go to hell!" Repeat ad infinitum. 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. Oh, and as an atheist who knows and hangs out with a lot of other atheists, I can assure you that "anything goes, you can be whatever you feel like and there's no judgement of any of your actions" is not a thing. Or, rather, it very much is a thing, but that attitude comes from just as many religious people as it comes from the non-religious. And there are quite a few actions that religious people take that I think are disgusting and immoral, but somehow "anything goes" as long they can justify it in the pages of their made-up fantasy holy book. I don't consider things moral or immoral based on what a storybook tells me; I decide based on how I think my actions will affect others. My system is certainly not a perfect one, but I dare say it's miles ahead of the religious process.

kulahan 3y ago
You've misunderstood Catholicism. The entire reason Christianity is so radical is because it's the first major religion of purely love. There is no need to sacrifice anyone, you get infinite forgiveness, so long as you truly repent, and nearly every facet of Catholicism is based around the idea of love. 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.

wayfinder 3y ago

Religion isn’t about any one thing. For some, it’s a sense of community and meeting people. For others, it’s doing right by a greater power. Then there are those who do it because they’ve always done it. Some do it because it gives a dependable source of meaning. And some do it because they actually live in deep fear. 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.

fellowniusmonk 3y ago
Yeah, it's very weird the way people act as if the religious aren't choosing how to live, what to think and what action to take, moment by moment any more or less than the irreligious. 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.

fellowniusmonk 3y ago

As someone who was raised in religious communities, that "higher aspirations" is only the position "in principle" in reality working with people in the religious community was just scams and moral self justification of despicable behavior hidden behind soft language and terrible behavior. So much contention, so much gossip, so much backbiting behavior and hidden evils against children so that communities wouldn't "lose face". The worst behaviors, the least faith, the most fear, all hidden by duplicity and a weekly practice of virtue signaling. This is not isolated, my parents were involved in the church in many states and internationally, it was everywhere. 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 inherent 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.)

chlodwig 3y ago
This is not isolated, my parents were involved in the church in many states and internationally, it was everywhere. Which church?
- throwoutway 3y ago
  This was my immediate thought. "The church" sounds like a specific cult, sect, or denomination. There's a wide spectrum of beliefs across these and one cannot act like they've been to them all
  - 3y ago

mattmaroon 3y ago

I think they care, I just wish they could better decouple that from Sky daddy mythology and all of the poor logic that flows from treating as your epistemological foundation the words of people who don’t didn’t even know what atoms were.

pkulak 3y ago

> anything goes, you can be whatever you feel like and there's no judgement of any of your actions 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?

hyperbovine 3y ago
For want of a better expression, amen. We're a couple million child sex abuse scandals past the point of pretending like organized religion has anything remotely resembling a monopoly on "moral" behavior.
ragestorm 3y ago
I hate that take too. If the fear of eternal damnation is the only reason you arent out murdering people, then you are a jerk (in kinder words).
dasil003 3y ago
Yeah, secular vs religious is not any basis for judging a value system. We've certainly seen horrible things done by fundamentalists of all stripes, religious or not! There is a lot of very beautiful religious thought over the millenia, and its very beauty is what enables its abuse by bad actors. We must always judge people as individuals by their actions in context, and never allow any form of ideology (whether religious or not) to be used as a shield against individual scrutiny. Morality is unfortunately not black and white, and the moment we try to make it so, we open the door to the greatest evils.
umvi 3y ago
> But even if I wasn't, I would know what's right and what's wrong. 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).

croes 3y ago

>"what kind of man does G-d want me to be?" 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.

hunta2097 3y ago
Statistically, the US prison population is mostly made up of religious people. https://www.statista.com/statistics/234653/religious-affiliation-of-us-prisoners/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/234653/religious-affilia...
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  90% had absent fathers. Statistically, the only communities with positive demographics are religious.
  - etchalon 3y ago
    That's a hell of a claim. Link?
  - croes 3y ago
    How do you define positive demographic? Is divorce allowed? What is the status of women's rights?

IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago

I think what you meant to say instead of "anything goes", was lack of duty. That's what seems to be missing, that organized religion did bring to the table. 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.

etchalon 3y ago
The duty to stone someone working on the Sabbath? Gone.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  It was religious adherents who dispensed with that 'duty', not atheist reformers. Jesus himself said that you should not cast stones unless you are without sin (nobody is, therefore nobody may cast stones.) Jesus brought this and other reforms to the jewish religion and was murdered for it.
  - etchalon 3y ago
    The same religious adherents told slaves to be obedient to their masters, even when their masters were monsters, so let's not give them too much credit.

melagonster 3y ago

but they are talk about some parents makesure their kids never learn evolution and other science/history fact. this is a very very small subset of religion people. I don't think these opinion conflict with your experience.

iosystem 3y ago

> I was raised totally secular 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.

nostrademons 3y ago
There are many secular Jews in the U.S. - people for whom Judaism is a culture and ethnicity that's part of their background, but who don't believe in a higher power or any of the scriptures. I remember asking a friend's dad "So are you Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform?" and he was like "We're kinda beyond Reform."
tomrod 3y ago
I think you answered your own question to a degree. As I was being raised in an extremely high cost religion, I remember converts were given a very special glow and respect. Oh, they may never be full members of the tribe nor expected to lead very often, but their stories were affirmations that our religion must be right to convince people to join. 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.

thfuran 3y ago

>You may still disagree with what they care about but I find that harder and harder to do, personally. Maybe you need to read more about Jehovah's Witnesses, Haredi, and Wahhabism.

wredue 3y ago

[flagged]

xyzelement 3y ago
// 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.
- wredue 3y ago
  Point is, You’re VERY clearly not a secular individual.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    Eat your hat.

somenameforme 3y ago

The one thing I'd observe about near to all religions is that the values suggested tend to be about optimizing the overall outcome of a society. The most controversial topics are ones related to sexuality. But there's an utterly trivial, and even perfectly reasonable, explanation for why so many different religions look down on any form of sex except man+woman+babies. As one looks back in the past, the 'effective fertility' rates had to have been just barely hanging on by a thread. By 'effective fertility' I mean having children who also have children. Having 80 kids, but where only 1 succeeds in having kids, would be an 'effective fertility' of 1. 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. --- 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.

xyzelement 3y ago
I glazed over on the math but I agree with your statement. And I think the cause and effect are enmeshed... Do religious people have more kids? Yes. Do the kinds of people who are willing to take on the serious work of having many kids more likely to also take on other responsibility (ie be religious)? I think also yes. 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.

safety1st 3y ago

While Nietzsche was generally construed to be anti-religious he had some observations along these lines. He famously said - "God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown" and what he meant by it was that while science had eroded the moral supremacy of religion, we now faced a dilemma where nihilism would consume society, and we'd likely proceed to do bad stuff without God's help. Sure enough as a species we have gone on to commit all sorts of horrifying atrocities without the help of religious dogma, last century's mass murders under Nazi and Communist regimes being prime examples, no God required as a justification, it may be even scarier when all the justification you need for murder is the words of some charismatic strong men in politics. 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.

david-gpu 3y ago

> 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" 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.