Christianity was the north star for our societies, it organized people, align them to work together, put the future(love) before personal interest(excess pleasures, sins)
Without religion we are going to fail. There never was a working society without religion. Yes we are in a different time, we have to update our stories, but if we throw them out we are going to collapse.
Ex: does a doctor does what is good for him or for his patient? What about a regulator in the government or a scientific working at Pfizer, Twitter a bank or Google?
If people stop putting truth and love on top(christianity) and put personal gain higher not much of what we have will keep on working for long.
Personal side: we have never been more materialy comfortable yet we are more depressed, more anxious, more medicamented.
Family: We no longer have enough kids or manage to keep a couple long enough to bring kids into adulthood. Kids to single parent household do worse in almost every metric yet we don’t care or don’t look.
On the flip side a lot of people are looking for the missing pieces, are trying to reintegrate the wisdom that we had in an modern framework: Jordan Peterson, Verdake, Jonathan Pageau and others.
It’s very hard to reverse. If people no longer believe to higher power (truth and love) we default to a lower version of ourselves, our animals instincts and we don’t know how low we will go: should successful men have only one woman? Why not? People are free to do whatever they want. Could a billionaire have a huge harem of thousand of women ala Genghis Khan? If not, why not?
There is no rules anymore (beside obvious immediate harm). We have discarded our ancient wisdom as useless, so we create all the harms that are on a longer timescale: trust, family, society.
The downvotes are showing that you're right. People have lost faith.
Today people believe science. It explains that humans are born not because of love, but cells interaction when people have sex. Science explains way more things than religion.
At the same time (and paradoxically) people have stopped respecting the truth. The power is what matters. Because people with power are those who create the truth that affects you and your life.
The consequence is that societies are transforming into hierarchies, where top levels feed on lower levels. Just like in the animal world. Just like what we do with cattle.
Thus, the modern sense of life is to reach the higher position in hierarchy. To raise your status. The ever expanding gap between rich and poor only catalyzes this primal meaning of life, causes everyone else to follow it. Otherwise, you and your descendants are doomed to stay low for many generations ahead, and extinct in the case of cataclysms.
For example, in Ukraine many civilians have died because they couldn't leave their homes in the war zone - they have nowhere to go and no resources to afford living elsewhere. At the same time, some deputies and oligarchs are freely travel to Dubai or other luxury places, while there is still war in Ukraine.
I find more and more that downvote of HN are a sign of a good post.
I was on the leftist side all my life without knowing it, it was the water I was swimming in.
I agree that love/truth in the christian sense is what is missing. The secret ingredient that make everything work much better.
People think that without religion we will just be rational good humans and we will create an utopia. It turn out we become closer to our animal part that is more ready to grab and fight then self sacrifice for future generations or for the other humans.
I'm curious how you explain Japan. Their traditional religions have never been very big on moral instruction, certainly not the way Christianity is, and today a supermajority of the population doesn't take religion seriously at all. And yet you have a generally well-behaved populace, low crime, very low rates of out-of-wedlock births, and so on. They have their own problems, of course, but not so much these particular problems.
I guess you could argue that a particular self-reinforcing system of social norms could be considered a sort of orthopractic religion, but that would be a bit of a definitional stretch.
I don’t know much about Japan. I know they have a huge problem of low birth rate, they could be on a path of extinction.
For sure there is a mix of cultural norms that are mixed with religions.
I see religion as knowledge that span multiple generations, saving the new ones from falling in the same mistakes as the previous ones. The religions that produced productive and resilient (and combative) cultures thrived, they others disappeared.
In a sense like our dna they are evolutive adaptations, but they can evolve much faster and can spread horizontally.
I think they all end up reflecting patterns from reality in a way that is transmissible between humans of different level of education and cognition.
Now, we look at them with very skepticals eyes (for good reasons) but they contain wisdom that we cannot get in one human live. I think we have gone too far in pushing them away, now we need to look at them with humility, just like we wouldn’t modify our dna without care.
Christianity was the north star for our societies, it organized people, align them to work together, put the future(love) before personal interest(excess pleasures, sins)
Without religion we are going to fail. There never was a working society without religion. Yes we are in a different time, we have to update our stories, but if we throw them out we are going to collapse.
Ex: does a doctor does what is good for him or for his patient? What about a regulator in the government or a scientific working at Pfizer, Twitter a bank or Google?
If people stop putting truth and love on top(christianity) and put personal gain higher not much of what we have will keep on working for long.
Personal side: we have never been more materialy comfortable yet we are more depressed, more anxious, more medicamented.
Family: We no longer have enough kids or manage to keep a couple long enough to bring kids into adulthood. Kids to single parent household do worse in almost every metric yet we don’t care or don’t look.
On the flip side a lot of people are looking for the missing pieces, are trying to reintegrate the wisdom that we had in an modern framework: Jordan Peterson, Verdake, Jonathan Pageau and others.
It’s very hard to reverse. If people no longer believe to higher power (truth and love) we default to a lower version of ourselves, our animals instincts and we don’t know how low we will go: should successful men have only one woman? Why not? People are free to do whatever they want. Could a billionaire have a huge harem of thousand of women ala Genghis Khan? If not, why not?
There is no rules anymore (beside obvious immediate harm). We have discarded our ancient wisdom as useless, so we create all the harms that are on a longer timescale: trust, family, society.