Devil's advocate, pun intended, but I don't see how that's the core issue. Science is also supposed to be secular, and yet with leftism dominating academia, here we have leftists using "female" to describe a man. Leftist dehumanization campaigns against political opponents allow them to justify not sticking to their alleged principles. The problem is that weak and/or malicious leftists in charge put politics ahead of principles in whatever form those principles take. As a result, they engage us and other dissidents with hypocrisy, a lack of fairness, contempt, and complete insincerity. Religious people can behave that way too -- look at the pope.
I think that what we're seeing is that it turns out it's not as easy to create an irreligious society as Dawkins may have hoped. In fact, it may even be impossible. You root out the trappings of religion, and something else that doesn't call itself a religion takes its place... but it turns out the new thing sure behaves a lot like a religion, and now it's what's shaping your society's mores. Christianity, whether you believe in it or not, mostly produced a reasonable, well-ordered society. Leftism... not so much.
Religion represents the formalization of our interactions with the world which is larger than us. Science was developed as a tool to further that relationship, yet has been hijacked by (p)rofessionals to be abused as a source of power. They deceived themselves into believing that it was actually possible to "fool" the whole world because it just took a few generations until the consequences of deriving power from such pure hearted work manifested in their eyes with nuclear weapons.
No God, no objective morality. No objective morality and we're left with things our group likes and things our group doesn't like. As groups fragment, we're eventually left with individuals determining what's right for themselves, and the utter collapse of civilization.
If you truly understood how incredibly depraved a universe without God would be, you would do everything in your power to convince people that God existed just so that you could eke out a tolerable life before the heat death of the universe inevitably destroyed all traces of your existence. Luckily, you live in an ordered universe where good and evil exist and there are both physical and spiritual repercussions for violating said order.
If you truly believe there is no God, stop worrying about the fate of your nation. It doesn't matter in the end anyway. Instead, embrace your loved ones before they cease to exist. Enjoy what little pleasure you can before you succumb to the void. Or don't, I guess. Once you expire and the universe eventually resets itself, it will be as if you never existed in the first place anyway.
Greece and Rome had very advanced moral frameworks long before Christianity came along. The educated classes didn't by and large believe their culture's polytheistic deities to be real, and morality was separate from religion considering that said deities were portrayed as behaving abominably anyways.
Over in the East, Confucianism was the prevailing moral framework, and it was secular. The Taoists combined religion with morality, as did the Buddhists, but neither managed to achieve the same level of hegemony in any large Eastern country like Christianity did for Western countries.
Dharmic religions resemble Abrahamic religions in terms of meticulously tying together a specific metaphysics, cosmology, epistemology, ethics, and even politics together into an all-encompassing system of thought. Plus you have monotheistic traditions like Zoroastrianism to contend with, not to mention Gnosticism.
Once a religion of the magnitude of Christianity starts falling, it might not be possible to stop it. Dawkins may be a materialist fool, but maybe we're at a historical moment akin to the fall of European "pagan" religions.
Maybe Mormonism or Gnosticism or Buddhism or Zoroastrianism or something we've never heard of will become the next big thing for Western societies in the coming millennia. People are becoming more curious about esotericism and the occult as well, though I strongly advise caution for anyone thinking of going down that path.
Let me ask you this -- has everyone and everything who's called themselves Christian been good and not evil? Has every nation founded on Christianity been a success?
The USA is an extreme rarity. I also think it's impossible to tease out whether its success is ultimately due to Christianity or due to its extremely robust constitutional protections over individual liberty. And while the two are related, they are unmistakably distinct.
Also, if adherence to Christianity is the perfect antidote to leftism, why deviate from its commandments at all? Should Christians denounce the incredible power of the American constitution in favour of the lessons in the Bible? If Christianity is the perfect answer, then any deviation from it is anti-God, including virtually all American law. Sticking to those laws is a tacit admission that the Bible doesn't have all the answers.
That isn't really what I said. I said Christianity produced a mostly functional society, not that it was perfect or immune to leftism or any of the other stuff you said.
Not really. Plenty of nations and powerful empires have lasted for 250 years, just fine, on both more stable and on shakier grounds than the USA.
Don't get me wrong, a nation lasting more than one leader's lifetime is impressive, for sure, but that's like living past the infant mortality rate: Once you account for and ignore that part, there's a real long lifespan period afterwards where the failure rate is pretty low.
This can be done well, a grand ideal should be able to serve and unite disperate religious beliefs, that's my ideal as it were, Hitler had the right idea there (Yes I'm aware he had his Positive Christian stuff, but he had support from all around the religious spectrum)
Dawkins believed that people should be free to discover the meaning and purpose of their own lives free from religious constraint or dogma. No doubt he believed this would result in people taking the same sort of rationalist approach to life as he espoused, but the thing about allowing people to search for their own meaning is that you lose the ability to control where they end up.
People are now searching for their own meaning much more than they used to, and Dawkins is discovering that with increasing frequency they are doing so in a way which leaves no room for his "antiquated" views. Whoops.
That was a mistake, as any theologist will tell you humanity is nothing compared to God, and any atheologist will tell you humans operate on selfish hedonistic pleasure-feedback systems with minimal self-control and basically no delayed gratification (or in other words, humans kinda suck).
I like your response but I think this is oversimplified. Leftist Dawkins opponents don't operate with a "[freedom] to discover the meaning and purpose of their own lives free from religious constraint or dogma," they operate with deliberate censorship and coercion regimes. There are unnatural pressures in place that dissuade true freedom of discovery and expression and especially the unpopular, traditional rationalist approach you mentioned. That kind of objectivity is white supremacy these days.
What stifles that kind of nonsense are the absolute protections in American constitutional law. 1A, 2A, etc. The foundations of all other "Christian" nations are crumbling under leftist assault because their civil liberties are nowhere near as fortified. They were still Christian nations though, at least at one point.
It's worse with less people believing in religion. Simple as. It's kind of like the economists at the voting booth. You want everyone else to believe in religion.. For the self its just a delusion
Humans as individuals are not necessarily dependent on religion to behave in a moral fashion. Humanity as a whole and human societies require a religion.
Leftists that have abandoned traditional religion, replace it with modern dogma.
How's that uprooted atheist society working out for you Mr. Dawkins?
/Do the church bells still ring?
Devil's advocate, pun intended, but I don't see how that's the core issue. Science is also supposed to be secular, and yet with leftism dominating academia, here we have leftists using "female" to describe a man. Leftist dehumanization campaigns against political opponents allow them to justify not sticking to their alleged principles. The problem is that weak and/or malicious leftists in charge put politics ahead of principles in whatever form those principles take. As a result, they engage us and other dissidents with hypocrisy, a lack of fairness, contempt, and complete insincerity. Religious people can behave that way too -- look at the pope.
I think that what we're seeing is that it turns out it's not as easy to create an irreligious society as Dawkins may have hoped. In fact, it may even be impossible. You root out the trappings of religion, and something else that doesn't call itself a religion takes its place... but it turns out the new thing sure behaves a lot like a religion, and now it's what's shaping your society's mores. Christianity, whether you believe in it or not, mostly produced a reasonable, well-ordered society. Leftism... not so much.
Religion represents the formalization of our interactions with the world which is larger than us. Science was developed as a tool to further that relationship, yet has been hijacked by (p)rofessionals to be abused as a source of power. They deceived themselves into believing that it was actually possible to "fool" the whole world because it just took a few generations until the consequences of deriving power from such pure hearted work manifested in their eyes with nuclear weapons.
No God, no objective morality. No objective morality and we're left with things our group likes and things our group doesn't like. As groups fragment, we're eventually left with individuals determining what's right for themselves, and the utter collapse of civilization.
If you truly understood how incredibly depraved a universe without God would be, you would do everything in your power to convince people that God existed just so that you could eke out a tolerable life before the heat death of the universe inevitably destroyed all traces of your existence. Luckily, you live in an ordered universe where good and evil exist and there are both physical and spiritual repercussions for violating said order.
If you truly believe there is no God, stop worrying about the fate of your nation. It doesn't matter in the end anyway. Instead, embrace your loved ones before they cease to exist. Enjoy what little pleasure you can before you succumb to the void. Or don't, I guess. Once you expire and the universe eventually resets itself, it will be as if you never existed in the first place anyway.
Serious question: Why emphasize the P in professionals? I don't get it.
Greece and Rome had very advanced moral frameworks long before Christianity came along. The educated classes didn't by and large believe their culture's polytheistic deities to be real, and morality was separate from religion considering that said deities were portrayed as behaving abominably anyways.
Over in the East, Confucianism was the prevailing moral framework, and it was secular. The Taoists combined religion with morality, as did the Buddhists, but neither managed to achieve the same level of hegemony in any large Eastern country like Christianity did for Western countries.
Dharmic religions resemble Abrahamic religions in terms of meticulously tying together a specific metaphysics, cosmology, epistemology, ethics, and even politics together into an all-encompassing system of thought. Plus you have monotheistic traditions like Zoroastrianism to contend with, not to mention Gnosticism.
Once a religion of the magnitude of Christianity starts falling, it might not be possible to stop it. Dawkins may be a materialist fool, but maybe we're at a historical moment akin to the fall of European "pagan" religions.
Maybe Mormonism or Gnosticism or Buddhism or Zoroastrianism or something we've never heard of will become the next big thing for Western societies in the coming millennia. People are becoming more curious about esotericism and the occult as well, though I strongly advise caution for anyone thinking of going down that path.
Let me ask you this -- has everyone and everything who's called themselves Christian been good and not evil? Has every nation founded on Christianity been a success?
The USA is an extreme rarity. I also think it's impossible to tease out whether its success is ultimately due to Christianity or due to its extremely robust constitutional protections over individual liberty. And while the two are related, they are unmistakably distinct.
Also, if adherence to Christianity is the perfect antidote to leftism, why deviate from its commandments at all? Should Christians denounce the incredible power of the American constitution in favour of the lessons in the Bible? If Christianity is the perfect answer, then any deviation from it is anti-God, including virtually all American law. Sticking to those laws is a tacit admission that the Bible doesn't have all the answers.
That isn't really what I said. I said Christianity produced a mostly functional society, not that it was perfect or immune to leftism or any of the other stuff you said.
Not really. Plenty of nations and powerful empires have lasted for 250 years, just fine, on both more stable and on shakier grounds than the USA.
Don't get me wrong, a nation lasting more than one leader's lifetime is impressive, for sure, but that's like living past the infant mortality rate: Once you account for and ignore that part, there's a real long lifespan period afterwards where the failure rate is pretty low.
Mark 10:18
This can be done well, a grand ideal should be able to serve and unite disperate religious beliefs, that's my ideal as it were, Hitler had the right idea there (Yes I'm aware he had his Positive Christian stuff, but he had support from all around the religious spectrum)
Dawkins believed that people should be free to discover the meaning and purpose of their own lives free from religious constraint or dogma. No doubt he believed this would result in people taking the same sort of rationalist approach to life as he espoused, but the thing about allowing people to search for their own meaning is that you lose the ability to control where they end up.
People are now searching for their own meaning much more than they used to, and Dawkins is discovering that with increasing frequency they are doing so in a way which leaves no room for his "antiquated" views. Whoops.
Dawkins had faith... in humanity.
That was a mistake, as any theologist will tell you humanity is nothing compared to God, and any atheologist will tell you humans operate on selfish hedonistic pleasure-feedback systems with minimal self-control and basically no delayed gratification (or in other words, humans kinda suck).
I like your response but I think this is oversimplified. Leftist Dawkins opponents don't operate with a "[freedom] to discover the meaning and purpose of their own lives free from religious constraint or dogma," they operate with deliberate censorship and coercion regimes. There are unnatural pressures in place that dissuade true freedom of discovery and expression and especially the unpopular, traditional rationalist approach you mentioned. That kind of objectivity is white supremacy these days.
What stifles that kind of nonsense are the absolute protections in American constitutional law. 1A, 2A, etc. The foundations of all other "Christian" nations are crumbling under leftist assault because their civil liberties are nowhere near as fortified. They were still Christian nations though, at least at one point.
It's worse with less people believing in religion. Simple as. It's kind of like the economists at the voting booth. You want everyone else to believe in religion.. For the self its just a delusion
Humans as individuals are not necessarily dependent on religion to behave in a moral fashion. Humanity as a whole and human societies require a religion.
Leftists that have abandoned traditional religion, replace it with modern dogma.
I guess to some here non-religious right-wingers who hate everything woke, like me, don't exist.
If that's what you read from my post you may well be retarded.
Objective study of natural laws and relationships took place well before Jesus Christ was born.
They sure did. But how does that disprove Christianity? People observed the laws of gravity well before anyone defined it scientifically.
It absolutely makes sense that if morality exists it could be discovered through reason
He got everything he wanted and is more miserable than ever.
Richard Dawkins confirmed woman.