I'm glad to see religion go, but I'm afraid if we remove religion and don't replace the moral component, we will see more societal dysfunction like school shootings. We need to replace the moral teachings in the schools. I recommend a high level law class in high school, maybe combine government, law, and economics.
IMHO, the greater loss is that of community. Religious institutions fostered social, business, and civic community. That in itself helps reinforce ethical and moral norms as you don't want to screw over your neighbor and become ostracized. Community also helps people not slip through the cracks of loneliness and mental illness. Frankly, as a kid I remember the number of people at my church who would have otherwise been unlikely to find friends or a marriage who were able to do so because church brought them together.
None of what you mention requires religion, however. One doesn't need religion to reinforce ethical and moral norms, or punish bad behavior through social pressure. One can have community without requiring that community maintain ritual adherence to an orthodoxy based on some ancient text and belief in the supernatural.
I would argue that the loss of Christian faith can be a benefit to human society. The Bible has been used to justify rape and abuse, racism, slavery, violence against non heterosexuals, opposition to HIV testing and contraception, opposition to scientific teaching, and many other objectively terrible things. Maybe it's best to be rid of it, and the assumption that morality and ethics require believing in it.
Yup. In Austin, churches are closing left and right due to endlessly rising property taxes. Want to know what one of them is being converted into? A co-working space.
Are you sure they're not closing due to declining attendance? I cannot imagine a healthy church being forced to close because it can't get enough donations to match a quarter-percentage-point property tax increase.
I’m an atheist as well, but was raised in the Lutheran church and still recognize that there were / are good things about organized religion. I generally agree with the sentiment that our social system has not caught up with its decline.
School shootings aren't due to moral failings, they're due to dysfunctional or non existent gun control laws giving mentally ill people guns. 83% of Americans, compared to 47% of Britons, said religion was very or fairly important to them [1], whereas school shootings are clearly more common there than in the UK. (I can't find a source comparing them they're so uncommon in the UK. The last one in the UK was in 1996)
> School shootings aren't due to moral failings, they're due to dysfunctional or non existent gun control laws giving mentally ill people guns
That seems unlikely. The mentally ill have been around for all of US history and firearms are more controlled now than they ever have been. Yet these sorts of things seem to be rising, not declining.
I get that maybe you just want all the guns gone and don't really care whether or not there's an underlying cause for why people feel the need to self-destruct in this way, and while not having access to firearms may make these things less like and/or less deadly, I worry that people like you will mistake that for actually having solved the problem.
They seem to be rising because reporting of the events and public awareness of them are rising. They are actually declining, according to what I have seen.
To determine the rate in previous years, researchers have had to comb through hundreds of local papers, and verify with local police reports, to find past incidents of criminal use of guns in schools. Nowadays, those are more likely to make national news, and also be reported in aggregate by the state police.
To reiterate, gun violence in the US has apparently been in decline for decades--just like other kinds of violence. Now that awareness of gun violence is rising, we have a real chance at driving it into the ground and keeping it there, even without mass disarmament. Between genuine enforcement of existing laws--rather than the salutary neglect of those laws promoted at the enforcement end by gun-oriented lobbyists--and suicide prevention efforts, I think we are approaching a time when an acceptable compromise is possible that would put our rates of violent crime within a reasonable distance of more disarmed societies.
But as recently demonstrated in Austin, availability of guns is not the ultimate problem. The problem is that defense-in-depth is hard. A determined attacker can always cause some damage, with whatever tools he may have at his disposal. It is very difficult to recognize a threat and then stop it before it is realized.
It is a known fact that human societies degrade to chaos when religion is not present in the day to day affairs </irony>.
You only have to look at USA where religion is very present vs Czech Republic, in which one do you think there are more mass shootings per capita? If you want my 2 cents, religion has nothing to do with societal dysfunction, there has to be something else.
Where did you see that? According to the sources I looked at Belgium has a rate about 20% that of the US. The US's peers in murder rate seem to be Turkmenistan, Albania, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Yemen:
Belgium has a mainly white population, at least 92%.
Much of the intentional homicide rate in the USA is African-American (often gang violence), plus drug trade MS13 and Mara 18 violence.
Drop that out to match the demographics and the difference disappears.
EDIT to add: the reason I think this is more valid, is that "dangerous gang areas" of the USA are well known and few people from outside, go there. When in Chicago, for instance, I simply never drive through the areas that have gun violence (and likely neither would any other HN reader).
(My own personal view, is that there is/was basically a conspiracy against the African-American population in the USA which created a great deal of dysfunction, including a lot of gang violence and murder. )
I live across the street from Austin in Chicago and drive through Lawndale to get to my office. People bike through there every day to get to work. Well-off people live in Woodlawn, walking distance from some of the roughest parts of the South Side. For that matter, Beverly is aggressively white and middle class and very close to rough parts of the South Side, and the side-street drive to the Loop from Beverly goes through all the roughest parts of the city. The reality is: if you don't live in the worst parts of Chicago, Chicago gun violence isn't going to impact you. We get to treat it as something external to us. :(
The available evidence does not indicate a strong correlation between irreligiosity and criminality. Some studies have found that religious beliefs inhibit criminal behaviour, but systematic studies do not indicate that atheists or agnostics commit more crime. It is worth noting that only 0.2% of the US prison population identify as being atheist. Globally, there is a strong negative correlation between religiousity and homicide, although this is substantially confounded by levels of economic development.
School shootings are almost entirely a US phenomenon. No other country in the world, religious or not, experience them enough to consider them a problem.
Mexico, one of the most religious countries in the world, where murder is a daily occurrence and the bodies are displayed on the streets in many towns as a deterrent from opposition to the cartels doesn't have a school shooting problem.
And after seeing the display of "morality" of evangelical christians in recent years, I'm not sure religion and morality are connected in any way.
The generation of my grandparents were the last in my family to be religious, in the Netherlands.
Loss of the moral component isn't what I see, that's not what I'm afraid of. I don't think Christian kids are less likely to commit that sort of crime.
But I feel a sense of community has been lost, people used to know each other from church, used to celebrate important life events from birth to marriage to death together. Now I only know a few people in my city.
I agree with loss of community and generally speaking those important life event celebrations are what make a community, but have you ever considered that what made those life events important to begin with is the religion itself? Non-religious societies can likely establish new important events and celebrations for those. I'm not necessarily in favor of religious decline but I'm happy to see that people live in a society with a real choice. Most of the world isn't like that still.
> but have you ever considered that what made those life events important to begin with is the religion itself?
We should invent new events, but it's hard to get to get strangers involved celebrating the same ones. Especially if people have real choice -- then everybody invents something else!
I mean, by itself the choice is fantastic of course, but we do lose something.
The US on average tends to lean more religious than Australia, yet Australia has had an infinitely smaller amount of school shootings during the past ten years.
And you believe that schools are the place where children should be taught morals? Allowing a government, or any other controlling group of people, to teach moral values is a surefire way to increase authoritarianism. The wisest way to go about things is to expose a child to as many different types of people as possible, and let them form their own views.
I live in probably one of the most irreligious countries in the world and we don't really have a problem with school shootings.
Consider the idea that the decline of religion might be an indication that it is being replaced by other convictions that will guide people's morality. Most people hold things for true that they'll happily defend, never question but can't prove right or wrong. For example, in embracing capitalism, socialism, humanism or whatever we'd already have made a huge ideology out of some arbitrary assumptions about what is morally ideal, what's right and what's wrong. These ideologies have their own rather abstract symbols and virtues, and their own stories of how things was, what they are and what they should be. Who needs Jehovah when you have invisible hands, proletariats, knowledge and similar higher order social concepts?
I don't really believe that a nietzschean death of God where loss of religion is necessarily followed by the death of moral standards could happen unless you somehow kill off a widespread ideology in an instant.
> I'm glad to see religion go, but I'm afraid if we remove religion and don't replace the moral component, we will see more societal dysfunction like school shootings.
The US is one of the most religious countries in the developed West and has an atypically high incidence of “social dysfunction like school shootings”.
Absence of religion is not the source of the problem.
Government, law, and economics certainly behave like religion so that makes sense. All require collective faith in the abstract 'good' and when one pillar falls, the others bear more weight.
If not from religion, from where do you hope to get the moral component?
Natural law itself doesn’t prove God or gods. But without them, your options for a moral basis seem to be human idealism or “everyone is free to do as they wish, strength is progress.” I see no others.
Everyone struggles to believe sin exists, but everyone believes they have been sinned against at one time or another. If it’s possible to be right, why?
Government can enforce right and wrong behavior as they see it, but they must not be the ones who ordain what right and wrong behavior are. If they were, then Japanese internment was “right.” At one time or another, bad men have used government, law and economics (and religion) as the basis for their worst conquests.
The world we are both longing for will not come from the law.
