Unironically, the only path forward is a re-embracement of religion. Not the leftists ideological cult that tries to act like a religion, the established theology of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam etc.
Why? Because the majority at large cannot cope without a structure and the prospect that this is the only life that you have. It drives them mad, want to experience everything to the point they dive deeper into a depravity. Whether it's the truth or a lie, the prospect of some kind of afterlife keeps most in check and the West has shown you take that away, you remove a lot of the moral checks that come with it.
FYI, I'm on the empirical atheism side and I SEE this as a reason for a lot of the fucking problems happening now!
They were out-competed by societies that do not practice those things. I'd compare them to the dodo bird, except they have not been eradicated and can easily be resurrected at any time.
The problem with empirical atheism is that no one is able to construct a self-consistant and viable moral framework that accounts for reality within their own lifetime.
The people who can do that are called "Messiah" and they're less than one in a million.
The Peterson/Harris debate showed, pretty clearly, that the most dedicated atheists still derive their core values from religious doctrine or spiritual assumptions, whether they realize it or not.
I have no respect for any "atheist" who hasn't made a serious attempt at following at least two religions because it means they're essentially talking out their ass like an edgy teenager.
Why construct it from scratch? We have a pretty good idea of what morality leads to a healthy society. The fact that it takes supernatural threats to make people follow it is irrelevant.
If you abandon religious ideas, you are constructing from scratch.
Everything that leads to a healthy society, right down to not murdering, is based in religious doctrine. The very idea of making the judgement that "healthy" is desireable, even before agreeing what "healthy" is, is based on the religious idea that we should pursue things that are "good". There is no difference, in a purely mechanical universe, between good and evil and, really, they don't exist in that framework.
Further, religion isn't supernatural, it's subnatural; it's is the idea that the mechanical reality we interact with was created (and likely maintained) by a concious being that exists outside of it, and the universe is therefore "good".
This is actually supported by our current understanding of quantum mechanics and string theory. In the book The Cosmic Landscape, Leonard Susskind discusses the idea that all potential realities can be represented by an n-th dimentional topography (think a plane with hills and valleys) where n represents the cosmological constants we are aware of (speed of light, Planks length, etc). I can't recall the exact number, and there may be some we haven't discovered yet, but I believe there are at least ten.
The universes that can exist are represented by n-th dimentional "valleys" in the Landscape, where all constants are at local minimums. The vast majority of the Landscape is "inhospitable" to reality itself.
Of the valleys that can exist, almost all of them are unstable; they either immediately expand until entropy, or they collapse.
The precise combination of constants that allow our universe to exist, to have actual time is vanishingly rare. Changing any of them, by even a tiny amount, would result in our universe not existing. Further, AFAIK, we don't have any other combinations that would work, either.
The odds that our universe exists make a trillion to one shot look like a sure thing. And I don't mean "there are trillions of potential valleys and ours is one of them", I mean the odds that any single valley, across the entire Cosmic Landscape, is as stable as a universe would need to be to support anything like life, is something like 1x10^100:1. And that's before you consider the odds of life existing within our stable universe.
It is actually more plausible, statistically, that God exists and created our universe, than our universe coming into existance spontaneously.
Unironically, the only path forward is a re-embracement of religion. Not the leftists ideological cult that tries to act like a religion, the established theology of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam etc.
Why? Because the majority at large cannot cope without a structure and the prospect that this is the only life that you have. It drives them mad, want to experience everything to the point they dive deeper into a depravity. Whether it's the truth or a lie, the prospect of some kind of afterlife keeps most in check and the West has shown you take that away, you remove a lot of the moral checks that come with it.
FYI, I'm on the empirical atheism side and I SEE this as a reason for a lot of the fucking problems happening now!
As an agnostic myself, I say think of it this way:
Even if God might not exist, NATURE does. And there's thousands of years of evidence to prove what natural human life should be like.
What does nature prove human life should be like?
Cannibalism? Polygamy? Slavery? These are all totally natural phenomenon that were stamped out via societal institutions, based on religion.
Natural selection.
They were out-competed by societies that do not practice those things. I'd compare them to the dodo bird, except they have not been eradicated and can easily be resurrected at any time.
The problem with empirical atheism is that no one is able to construct a self-consistant and viable moral framework that accounts for reality within their own lifetime.
The people who can do that are called "Messiah" and they're less than one in a million.
The Peterson/Harris debate showed, pretty clearly, that the most dedicated atheists still derive their core values from religious doctrine or spiritual assumptions, whether they realize it or not.
I have no respect for any "atheist" who hasn't made a serious attempt at following at least two religions because it means they're essentially talking out their ass like an edgy teenager.
Why construct it from scratch? We have a pretty good idea of what morality leads to a healthy society. The fact that it takes supernatural threats to make people follow it is irrelevant.
If you abandon religious ideas, you are constructing from scratch.
Everything that leads to a healthy society, right down to not murdering, is based in religious doctrine. The very idea of making the judgement that "healthy" is desireable, even before agreeing what "healthy" is, is based on the religious idea that we should pursue things that are "good". There is no difference, in a purely mechanical universe, between good and evil and, really, they don't exist in that framework.
Further, religion isn't supernatural, it's subnatural; it's is the idea that the mechanical reality we interact with was created (and likely maintained) by a concious being that exists outside of it, and the universe is therefore "good".
This is actually supported by our current understanding of quantum mechanics and string theory. In the book The Cosmic Landscape, Leonard Susskind discusses the idea that all potential realities can be represented by an n-th dimentional topography (think a plane with hills and valleys) where n represents the cosmological constants we are aware of (speed of light, Planks length, etc). I can't recall the exact number, and there may be some we haven't discovered yet, but I believe there are at least ten.
The universes that can exist are represented by n-th dimentional "valleys" in the Landscape, where all constants are at local minimums. The vast majority of the Landscape is "inhospitable" to reality itself.
Of the valleys that can exist, almost all of them are unstable; they either immediately expand until entropy, or they collapse.
The precise combination of constants that allow our universe to exist, to have actual time is vanishingly rare. Changing any of them, by even a tiny amount, would result in our universe not existing. Further, AFAIK, we don't have any other combinations that would work, either.
The odds that our universe exists make a trillion to one shot look like a sure thing. And I don't mean "there are trillions of potential valleys and ours is one of them", I mean the odds that any single valley, across the entire Cosmic Landscape, is as stable as a universe would need to be to support anything like life, is something like 1x10^100:1. And that's before you consider the odds of life existing within our stable universe.
It is actually more plausible, statistically, that God exists and created our universe, than our universe coming into existance spontaneously.