Shermer thinks that in general as a species we are becoming increasingly moral. He argues that most of the moral development of the past several centuries has been the result of secular not religious forces and that the most important of these that emerged from the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment are science and reason by which he means reasoning through a series of arguments and then confirming that the conclusions are true through empirical verification.
It is a shame that this topic has been reduced to science versus religion, which was not my intention. We need to get out of that argument and talk about the decline of the West or put up arguments against that proposal. I just have to answer a few things I found curious.
Which is precisely what I am also saying, except that I see a multitude of people using statements from scientists to decide that their values needn’t match up to the values that have brought us so far. The world was never easy to cope with and people have always struggled to form and maintain standards of morality, dignity, religious belief, honour, discipline or governability. The militant (new) atheists have taken the atrocities of the world, which were always accompanying mankind throughout history, and associating them only with religion. The fact is that mankind hasn’t needed a supposed divine authority to tell it how to massacre people.
The second perspective is that, despite scientific breakthroughs, the West has put their discoveries to deadly use, and the industrial use of many discoveries has increased pollution of water, soil and air. In consequence, vegetation and animals have been affected too. We know too about the insidious experiments done on animals, although results had already been achieved. The question that should be asked is a moral one: should we do this or that? Instead, it was only asked whether we can. Similar to the way the West has gone into armed conflicts without a strategy to withdraw, science has delivered numerous possibilities without the warning of what the outcome could be. Yes, there have been upsides to scientific discoveries and inventions but unfortunately, the downsides were not taken into account.
Your answer is strange, I had always found the scientific method the best thing about science. The scientific method is a series of steps followed by scientific investigators to answer specific questions about the natural world. It involves making observations, formulating a hypothesis, and conducting scientific experiments. Scientific inquiry starts with an observation followed by the formulation of a question about what has been observed. The steps of the scientific method are as follows:
- Observation, 2. Question, 3. Hypothesis, 4. Experiment, 5. Results, 6. Conclusion
You obviously haven’t looked into mythology and haven’t seen the need of understanding how advanced thinkers have been in the past. Their use of symbols and metaphors were used for lack of our modern symbols and metaphors, which science uses freely. Take for example the “The Selfish Gene” of Richard Dawkins, which quite obviously doesn’t have that attribute. Another metaphor is the machine metaphor:
But our experience of the world is that it is indeed organic, and the more we know, the more the organic nature of our world becomes apparent. It is an abundance of organisms, which are self-organising; they form and maintain themselves and have their own ends or goals. We have seen that the application of mechanical theory to the treatment of human ailments is catastrophic and has caused unquantified misery.
We are continuing to find structures all over the world that reveal an ancient knowledge of geometry and mathematics, a knowledge of the movement of stars and planets, the measurements of the earth, the distance to the moon, etc. We ask why these people didn’t achieve what we have achieved, as though it would be self-explanatory, but besides the fact that scientific invention is a process, there may also be the moral question of whether one should.
The phrase “dispensed with” is not considered for what it means. It means for many people “to get rid of; do away with” and we are talking about the motivation for life, for the struggle people go through, for the social structure of societies. It is this dispensing with that causes as many conflicts as is claimed that religion causes, but the fact is, that people faced with a power that is prepared to “dispense with” the meaning they have found in life and not take it into consideration may fight against it with what means they have. It has happened in the colonies, and those threatened were considered savages, but they were defending with the little means they had their meaning of life. We don’t take this aspect into consideration, because we have dispensed with it, “and others should too!” That’s bigotry, pood. Out and out bigotry.
Unfortunately, this isn’t proven by current affairs. There is always a moral instance being invoked when people take responsibility, even if it isn’t conscious. It may be a set of rules, a romantic idea, a feeling, a poem or story that invokes the wholesome idea of moral behaviour, but it doesn’t come from pure confrontation. Human beings have reasons for doing what they “should”, unless they are told that their reasons are to be “dispensed” with. Then you might find that they get depressed and become inactive, rather than addressing an issue.
There is no doubt that science and industry has done a lot to improve the yield from the earth, and it has led to an increase of the population. But it is an increase in numbers that requires even more produce, and has led to one-sided dietary habits, so that obesity has spread all over the globe. Of course, you can say that science only provided the possibility, and that society has produced the bad habits, but that is really what the topic is about. The decline of the west is partially due to the fact that people are not asking whether one should do something, or not. Sometimes I find the tragic story of children finding a gun in a cupboard and one shooting the other exemplary for our situation.
What some people have claimed as their right, whether it harms them or not, is often something that not only harms them. The freedom that was claimed in the seventies has also caused untold damage and millions have lived appalling lives in addiction, passed on their addiction to their children and died horrendous deaths. I’m not only talking about drugs. Addiction has many faces, as you will know. I have nursed people who have been found neglected, unkempt and run-down in squalid flats, which were infested with rats and flies, and who had lost all will to live. Every kindness they received was an affront and they lashed out, preferring to die than to live. It has been this image that has motivated me in many ways to help people find meaning in their lives, by whatever means they chose – including religion. I have used any method I could find to comfort people dying, rather than “dispensing” with them.
It depends on what you are talking about when you speak about religion, because there is a prevalent fundamentalistic approach that is ideology rather than religion and spreads across all religions. The unfortunate aspect of this is that they fall prey to a materialistic interpretation of the mythologies they read. The ability to read scriptures in the way they were conceived has been lost to many people since the 17th century, unless people with an inspired approach were able to show that these stories are vehicles of the imagination, like dreams, that take you on a journey in your mind, proposing situations that enable you to learn from them. There is also a symbolic language in religious texts, which we are no longer accustomed to. This makes Christianity, for example, a mixed bag of influences. On the one side you have the loving Gospel, and on the other side you have the wrathful tyrant. On one side you should love you enemies and on the other you should wipe them out. No wonder then that there is confusion.
Ideologies arise when individuals, groups or cultures form socio-political theories and concepts about human life or culture, especially when they feel threatened. As a reaction they begin theorizing, constituting and patterning how human beings should live their lives. Ideologies are stricter than religions in many cases and have been rampant in the twentieth century in Naziism and Communism, causing the deaths of tens of millions of people and displacement of even more. However, the ideologies that have arisen out of religions have been deadly, although not quite so deadly as the Communism. However, people live under ideologies even today in threat of death if they do not comply, whether it be in North Korea, or in Islamic fundamentalistic states.
I’m sure there are others here that could add to this description.
According to Spengler in The Decline of the West, the meaningful units for history are not epochs but whole cultures which evolve as organisms. Cultures have a lifespan of about a thousand years of flourishing, and a thousand years of decline.
The final stage of each culture is, in Spengler’s word use, a “civilization”. For him, civilization is what a culture becomes once its creative impulses wane and become overwhelmed by critical impulses. Culture is the becoming, civilization is the thing become.
Per Spengler, the Western world is ending and we are witnessing the final season, the “winter” of Faustian Civilization. Spengler explained that he did not mean to describe a catastrophic occurrence, but rather a protracted fall—a twilight or sunset. He predicted that in the final stage of Western civilization, “Caesarism”, a new and overpowering leadership would arise, replacing individualism, liberalism and democracy.
I think the problem with this is that you misunderstand the motivations of these people. The people who are militant about abortions see human life beginning at conception and abortion therefore as murder. That doesn’t have to be religiously motivated. Equally so the treatment of women in patriarchal societies, which is equivalent to the rapists in secular societies who have an opinion of women that is misogynist in nature. It is well documented that many men are nervous about women, especially if they know what they want and are educated. It is a threat to such men. It is curious that in a Hollywood film a heroine is seen committing a suicide bomb attack in an alien vessel, which seems acceptable, whereas someone who sees himself as a resistance fighter is a religious fanatic, and, as you said, it had a lot to do with politics.
It is the motivation to do these things that we must address, and not just assume that it has to do with their religion. As you say, most believers are peaceful and deplore violence, but some feel violated and endangered by the powers that be, and globalisation is seen by many as a threat. Think about the Indian farmers that have taken their lives (despite Karma) because globalisation has taken their livelihood away, but also in other countries including the West, there have been a rise in suicides because of the same reason. These people aren’t all religious fanatics, and some have taken their lives despite being Hindus.
I think that this depends on what we regard as moral. Many people become altruistic after something has happened in their lives that has changed their opinion. Sometimes it is a bad experience, sometimes it is a good experience. Many are blissfully ignorant until something enters their lives that they hadn’t reckoned with. I have seen that when relatives become in need of care, and their daughters (sometimes their sons) come looking for help. Many have said that they had despised the thought of care homes until they needed one.
I also think that the argument that God is the commanding force in religious morality is wrong. The best way to portray meaning in life is to tell stories or anecdotes of situations that motivated one to use these experiences as examples of exemplary behaviour (or the opposite) that one should (or not) imitate. To take the Bible or a similar source as inspirational is to take an anthology of examples which illustrate an exemplary behaviour (or the opposite). Thereby, we are taking previous (perhaps fictional) experiences as examples and orientate ourselves on the outcomes.
Of course, there are some who claim that the Bible is divinely inspired and should therefore be followed for that reason alone, but that eliminates the process of inspiration and the personal choice of following or not following the example given, which I find important. As an extreme, I could envisage the pious admirer opening a random page and using a finger to point out a sentence which they would follow that day, and it having disastrous consequences. That isn’t how devotional or contemplative reading works.
Therefore, the lessons to be had can arise from personal experience with other people, or from reading about such experiences. At no time is common sense or reason to be ignored in the process.
I believe too that there is an organic development in history, and a process of becoming and decaying, much like in every human life. Just as in human lives, the point at which the decay begins is hard to discern and there are perhaps reasons to deny that it has begun. However, all of us who are older know that we notice the switch when we try to imitate our younger selves. I think that you find that also in cultures, when the achievements cannot be imitated that were accomplished in earlier phases. The Egyptians are a good example, in particular the Temples. The oldest temples are said to be the most sophisticated and the younger just bad copies of the older. We tend to believe in things getting better as they get older, but that is often only in certain areas.
Spengler foresees a development away from democracy, which, although there was a struggle in the twentieth century to overcome fascism and communism, the twenty first century seems to show that many people are now willing to relinquish the rights they had attained as citizens of democracies in favour of a “strong man” who will solve their problems for them. Democracy is, of course, dependent upon people actively taking part in the discussion, but it is too complex for many people, and they want people who they can trust to take over. It is easier to “hail Caesar” than engage in politics, even at layman level, but whether those people are willing to give up their individualism for that remains to be seen. We have had a period of goosestepping and it wasn’t pretty.
Nobody likes the simple lost truth:
Not only is the West is in decline but the East is as well, appearently
The conflicts caused by territorial constriction of rapidly increasing population, causing immigration, the adoption of Darwinism with the result of losses of faith, the abstraction of idealismerodingmutual trust between regional, national and international relations, the overbearance of the material focus as a means to value - diminishing spiritual and eschotological traditions, the diminishing of food, the increase of pollution effecting the environment, and the huge differences of appreciating democratic values world wide - all factor into the SYMBOL of the disaffectations with the progressive NWO agenda
How to get there with the diminishing cognative returns over the phenomenally expanding material wealth; most of which is concentrated in fewer and few hands.
I only addressed the decline of the West because I can see many influences in the West that I can’t distinguish in the East. However, those indications of decline you mention are visible, varying on which country you live in, in degree. Many people in Europe seem to have other things on their mind, which preoccupy them, and many just haven’t got the global picture.
There are enough investigative reporters out there discovering the clandestine operations of the CIA and allied intelligence services, that have been trying to destabilise certain countries, but the whole thing has been repeating on them. Apparently, there have been forces of evil at work for some time, not just outside of our societies, but in them, working to enforce some system change, probably to an oligarchy, which seems to be the most prevalent type of preferred system although they have often been tyrannical, relying on public obedience or oppression to exist.
The modern United States has also been said to be turning into an oligarchy because the literature has shown that economic elites and organised groups representing special interests have significant independent influence on US government policy, while average citizens and mass interest groups have little or no independent influence.
Of course, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the privatisation of the economy in December 1991, privately owned multinational companies based in Russia, including oil, gas and metal producers, have led to the rise of Russian oligarchs, according to many analysts. Most of them are directly linked to the highest government officials, such as President Putin. Others, who have opposed him have found themselves in prison or killed.
Well, you did put this thread in the religion and spirituality forum, and you yourself brought up contrasts between religion and science. Given those two facts, I’m surprised that you are surprised, or disappointed, that someone has focused on that. It doesn’t need to be the exclusive focus, of course, but your post is pretty general and anyone has the right to pick what to discuss from it.
Which values? Religious values? Also, there is nothing necessarily wrong with rejecting past values, if those values have outlived their usefulness. Times change. The bible recommends stoning wayward teens; I doubt most people today embrace that “value.”
Well, yes, but how to do these things varies over time and place. Also, many of us don’t feel that religious values are helpful, but instead are, generally, harmful.
Only with religion? Do you have a cite for this? Can you name a specific person that says this? Because I don’t think a single member of the so-called new atheists has ever said that ALL the atrocities of human history have been associated ONLY with religion. I, myself, am skeptical of the associations between atrocities and religious belief. As I mentioned upthread, I think it is, for example, the case that the terrorists who flew planes into the twin towers were NOT motivated ONLY by militant Islam, or even primarily by it. I think that they and their backers had political grievances. I think a lot of damage done by people in the name of religion are done by those who are only using religion as an excuse for their atrocities, in the same way that the old Confederacy used Biblical verses as an excuse to justify the enslavement of blacks, when really what they just wanted to do was enslave blacks because it was immensely profitable for them. But they calculated if they slapped a coat of religious paint on their atrocities it would make them more palatable among the devout.
Correct. See Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and many others throughout history. But I think you are attacking a strawman here because I don’t think anyone, not even the odious Sam Harris, thinks ONLY religion is to blame for current and past atrocities.
Well, yeah … I already said that, when I noted that science showed us how to split the atom, but didn’t say we SHOULD build nukes, and that science showed us how to take fossil fuels out of the ground and then dump their waste products into the sky to trigger global warming, but never said that we SHOULD do that. Individuals and societies use or misuse science.
Well, I think that’s just wrong. Scientists DO give us warnings about the uses of their findings. Probably most people don’t realize that the first warnings of global warming occurred in the 19th century, by scientists.
There is no such thing as THE scientific method. Read Feyerabend’s “Against Method,” for example.
Well, as a matter of fact, I have looked into mythology, and as I noted earlier, things like genes and electrons can be taken as metaphors, not descriptions of anything real “out there.” Science consists of overlapping modern mythologies. Of course it must be understood that mythology does not mean a lie or a tall tale, but a coherent narrative or meta-narrative that structures how we think about the world. The “selfish gene” is indeed a metaphor. Post-modernists deny the very need for such narratives or meta-narratives, though.
That may be true, but so what? First, I do not think that the metaphor of the machine is applicable to modern scientific mythology. The machine metaphor gained its zenith with the idea of Laplacean clockwork determinism, which has been supplanted by quantum mechanics. I don’t know that science has an overarching metaphor today, but the machine certainly isn’ it. We know that many early scientists were theists, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they were Christians, either (see Islamic science). I do think, on reflection, we are increasingly seeing the use of the computer, a specific machine, as a metaphor for modern science — that the universe, for instance, is a gigantic self-programming and self-executing computer. But it’s still a metaphor, and its instructive to note that as metaphors change, each new metaphor reflects some predominant cultural idea that existed in the time and place the metaphor arose. This means we should treat metaphors as metaphors — and not as reality. Finally, many people think of living organisms as biological machines. But evolution shows us that these biological machines are not designed and did not have a designer. So we can see that a metaphorical machine doesn’t need to be designed.
Not sure what you mean by “catastrophic” here — example? In any case, the machine is and was a metaphor, and is no longer widely used now that the clockwork of Laplace has been discredited by further scientific understanding.
Sure, but these were all products of proto-scientific thinking.
I agree. I’d also note that there are cultural influences at play. The ancient Greeks had a working steam engine, but took it no farther than a toy. Why? I don’t know, but they lacked the culture of science that we have today and probably thought other things were much more important, like how to live a good and wise life.
I’m sorry, Bob you apparently failed to read what I wrote in context. As I wrote, we generate meanings from within. This is true, actually, whether we are religious or not. Religious people may pray for guidance, but they themselves have to decide who to marry, what job to take, what goals and values to pursue. The meaning, or telos, I was referring to is something that is not employed in scientific theories. That’s all, full stop. It has nothing to do with any broader application of meaning or non-meaning. It derives from the famous story of when Napoleon asked Laplace where God fit into his mathematics and he replied, “I have no need of that hypothesis.”
It could have been otherwise. We could have found “Made by God for this purpose” stamped on our DNA or in the microwave hiss of the Big Bang a coded message saying, “Universe Made by God for this purpose,” but we have found no such thing. As Steven Weinberg wrote, “The more the universe is comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.” This doesn’t mean that human life is pointless, though; however, we are the ones who give it a point or not. Nothing external will help us do that.
Well, there again, Bob, you misconstrue my meaning. “Dispensing with meaning” refers only to the structure of scientific theories (See above, Napoleon and Laplace) and NOT with how we should order our lives. And yes, I do think my point is proven by current affairs. I noted that it is the evangelical Christians who are most resistant, for example, to vaccinating to deter Covid, or to do something about global warming. It is the secularits who are taking the lead in the fight to vaccinate and to deter climate change (though there are non-fundy religious people participating in these struggles too). Again, I’m not trying to tie you to fundy Christianity, but to use this as a counterexample to your claim that the ebbing of religious feeling somehow promotes personal or societal irresponsibility. I don’t see this at all. The least religious countries, in Scandinavia, have some of the best quality of life and mental health in the world. Some of the worst quality of life and mental health are found in the heavily religious American south.
More later, this is a long post to answer, so I’ll stop here for now.
Delusional.
as the question is a legitimate one, however, it leaves out some
issues… like for example, the word “decline”… how would we
actually know if we are in decline? what standards are we using to
define “decline?” Bob uses Morals as one benchmark in understanding
decline, but that runs into problems… for example, were we more
“moral” when we jailed and killed those who were homosexuals
or are we more “moral” now that we have given them rights like
marriage? I would say based on the giving of rights to minorities,
women, gays, that we are more moral and thus in less decline then
the ops suggest…how are you going to define "Decline?‘’
Decline from what to what?
have we decline in technology?
the answer is easy, no…
have we declined in medicine?
I don’t see how one can make that argument…
despite the GOP best efforts to recreate concentration camps with the
children of immigrants, I don’t see a Dachau today…are we in decline
if we no longer have concentration camps?
It really depends on what one is comparing or not comparing
to work out any suggestion of decline…
Kropotkin
Must be nice to write one single word and think you are contributing to the discussion. Wish I could do that.
Also, the CIA has been running clandestine operations all over the world, with often heinous results, since the end of World War II.
I’ve taken this out of your post, something which you have said before but haven’t really qualified. We can argue for hours on our various takes on science, but what I am trying to get at is the fact that simple, normal people have been told that there is no meaning to life, that they are told to “get over it”. The fact is that human beings have been finding meaning in life for millennia before science took over and eventually decided they had no need for meaning. But you say that we generate meaning “from within”. How do you do that?
I mean, I am a person who did without religion for twenty years before realising that to be a contributing member of a society, I needed something purposeful to do. I had always been someone who found great pleasure in Art and Music, Literature and Poetry, and took great interest in what was coming at me with our first child. A coincidence had led me to pick up a book that interested me because it portrayed Abraham in an interestingly different way to the way I had assumed to know. It became clear that I didn’t know and so I investigated it and joined some Bible club and learned a lot. I even started to take part in Church and began to understand the need that was being satisfied there. Soon I was speaking publicly, and I was addressing that need that I knew people had. This development, together with a change at work led me to train as a nurse and to work with old and dying people. I came to recognise their needs as well, and my focus changed, away from the church, towards a more general understanding of the needs of the people.
I discovered that many old people had been pillars of strength for their children in extremely difficult times, soldiering on through hardships and providing for their children, discovering that their husbands had died in the war and dedicating themselves to their neighbourhood parish. They ordinarily had a quiet faith, were very honest and reliable, and prayed regularly for others more than for themselves. Their quiet faith astounded me, and when I met them, they were suffering quietly and endured the care I gave them patiently. One old lady couldn’t help herself despite dementia, and fed the lady next to her patiently, who was paralysed after a stroke. At night she would recite a prayer that she must have said in her childhood, because she had retained it although many memories were gone.
A key experience was when I was sent to nurse a lady who had suffered a stroke and could only speak a few words. I apologised to her that I was going to invade her privacy and hoped that my being a man wouldn’t disturb her. She only asked, “do you believe?” I nodded, but I was suddenly questioning myself. She said, “go ahead” and smiled a kind of crooked smile that stroke patients have. I have also noticed that people with dementia, in a surrounding with sacred symbolism, would bow their heads and pray quietly, and would say after our “service”, “thank you, I am very grateful!”
I’m not sure that I share the same faith as these people, tempered by wars tribulations, but I am sure that I wouldn’t want to put it in doubt. Whether there is the God that they believed in or not, I was prepared to serve that faith for them and along the way I received a lot back. I wonder sometimes, whether I or any of us could go through what these people went through in that way, and still come out as responsible and caring parents and grandparents. I’m sure that their faith gave them something that recent generations are lacking. I have held training sessions with young staff members who I have told about my experiences and some of them have reacted with appreciation, and I’ve seen in their work, that they respect the people more. Others have been disinterested and I’ve seen that in their work too.
So, how do you generate meaning from within?
Bob, science isn’t telling you that there is no meaning to life. The scope of meaning and values lies outside the domain of science.
All I have said is that in scientific theorizing, a concept of telos, of purpose and direction, is not found in scientific descriptions of the world. Evolution, for example, is totally purposeless, a blind process of random mutation, natural selection, and drift.
It seems, though, that you perhaps think “meaning” just means “supernatural sanction,” God, or some such. If that is what you mean, just say so.
I’m quite sure that you are more intelligent than that. You read the above I hope, in which I showed what I think is lacking and I would just like to know, how do you generate meaning from within?
So, yes, for you, it seems, faith = God and what’s lacking is the decline of faith or belief in God.
For people like me, conjuring a faith or belief in a God that doesn’t exist is not possible. You do not choose your beliefs, your beliefs choose you. Belief for me is evidence-based and if the evidence isn’t there the belief isn’t there. It’s not a matter of my choosing to believe or not.
But, again, science isn’t telling you that there is no God, and science isn’t speaking to values or meaning at all. Certainly, most scientists, from every survey I’ve seen, are atheists, but that’s really irrelevant. All I am talking about is that in the practice of science, the gathering of evidence, the theorizing and testing, there has been found no evidence of a purpose or telos to reality. This certainly doesn’t prove that there is no God, only that if God exists, he sure ain’t showing up in the data.
As for your question to me, the answer, basically, is existentialism.
I’d also add that if one hopes to show that the “decline of the West” is a result of a decline in religious belief, one must show the evidence for this. I think there is no evidence for it, and what evidence exists goes the other way. As mentioned earlier, the most secular nations of Scandinavia show very high levels of mental and material wealth, etc. I don’t think it’s true that religious belief correlates with better societies or better lives. No doubt, many individuals derive succor from religion, which I think was the point of the people you were talking about just upthread. And I have no problem with that. If faith gives you strength, good for you. The problem occurs when religious believers attempt to foist their views on others and change public policy to fit their beliefs, which happens here constantly in the United States to great detriment.
Bob,
Purpose (you’re using the word meaning incorrectly) for me was hard earned.
I figured out that no being in existence wants to have their consent violated. Then I figured out that in some way, shape or form that everyone is having their consent violated. I call this “the consent violation problem”
Then I figured out that when you’re having the best time of your life and it’s stomping on someone else’s heart, that this is a structural problem I call “the pleasurable exclusive access problem”
Then I figured out that for every winner there is more than one loser, another structural problem that I call “the negative zero sum problem”
So now I have a purpose. Violate these three problems as little as possible and work to fix them forever.
Is the east or west in decline?
After what I wrote above… does it matter?
These are just hallucinations… what I wrote is the core, it’s real and true from all reference frames.
What I am saying is that the older people I have met have had a resilience that was not merely physical, and which is also revealed in history, and that they retained a toughness to cope with their trials and tribulations. That isn’t to say these people didn’t suffer, but they stayed in the ring, to use a metaphor. The question is, where does this resilience come from? I have spoken to many younger people in my profession about this observation and many of them said that they wouldn’t be able to keep going like the older people had. This is also backed up by the number of people with psychological problems in our times, which I put down to the fact that they haven’t got anything to believe in.
I’m not even restricting this to a belief in a God; but even in Buddhism, we are confronted with depression. The Buddhist perspective is that an underlying selfishness/egotism is often the basic cause of feeling depressed. This doesn’t mean that the suffering person should be ‘blamed’ for the condition, but rather it opens up a very specific approach to the problem using meditation and emphasis on compassion and loving-kindness. You see, I think that the underlying problem of “selfishness” really boils down to the fact that we struggle with a concept of self that tends to block out our connectedness to a community and, from a Buddhist perspective, from Dharma.
The more individualist we are, the less support we feel from our peers, and the less common goals we have. This has an effect on the whole way we interact with society, and the worst part is that in tribulations we feel alone and may even block the compassion of others. The community spirit needs to be encouraged; people need others to point out that which they cannot see. It also needs to have certain elements like chanting or singing, music and dancing, but also meditation, contemplation and learning. I feel that these are aspects of human culture that we need to form a resilience that isn’t just a result of military drill. Of course, that also helps to a certain degree, but I think that we need a other components as well.
Unfortunately, it is only a minority of people who would be willing to take part in such a community. I notice at the gym that most people are doing their thing and only have superficial contact with others, and the exception confirms the rule. And, like I say, the materialist question, “does God exist?” isn’t necessarily a part of it. Besides, another thread could perhaps deal with the question whether Christian faith is materialist by nature, which I believe we can answer that it is not. At present I am more interested in metaphysical idealism than any materialist argument.
It is curious that you point to Scandinavia as proof of high levels of mental and material wealth. I discovered this on the internet:
In Europe, I’m not experiencing the level of “foisting views on others” that may be the norm in America for example. In fact, the influence of the Church is quite small, and the Islamic influences are also comparably small (except in Moslem communities). Therefore, I don’t see that as the problem you have named. In fact, I think that the fact that 38% of women and 32% of men will receive treatment for a mental disorder at some point during their lifetime may be an indication that they are struggling with something that society no longer addresses. Of course, there have been mental disorders in the past, but we have identified the problems which were prevalent then. This is a new situation and I have stated my case above.
You see, religion isn’t just about a belief in some divine being, it is also about a common goal. It is about a community aiming for the good of the whole. The number of care homes, care for the disabled, hospitals, clinics, and hospices run by the church (at least here in Germany) is quite high and was higher before the state started turning them into commercial businesses, demanding that they make a profit. The charitable aspect of faith is also important and playing a role in the larger society.
This is something I see as on the decline, and it is due to an inability to stay the pace. I observed very often that the older members of staff were more resilient, despite the aches and pains of getting older, than younger staff members. There was a point when staff would ask me to employ an older nurse rather than a younger one. There was also a common feeling that older staff members chose the profession as a vocation and not just as a means of getting paid. Of course, you may say that this was a local thing, but I travelled quite a lot as regional manager and was told the same story elsewhere as well.
But as I have continually tried to point out, this is one component of a larger issue, albeit that many aspects come together. Perhaps you can see that I am not just one of those Christians on the street waving a banner.
I think that the “the consent violation problem” is a problem with individualism, in which people are failing to see themselves as a member of the whole, which seems in particular a Western problem. The idea of being part of a collective seems to work for the orients better in many ways, perhaps because their idea of “self” is different in that it is an illusion. If you try to get down to what you individually are, you find that you are only a protrusion of the collective. Your atoms change, your thoughts are repetitive re-recordings of what you have heard, what you consume becomes part of you and you excrete what is no longer wanted, and you are reliant upon the air, the sun, the green of the vegetation and the colours of the flowers. So what is you?
Then the question is, why do you think you have to give consent? We are all just bustling about in this world, and continually asking and giving consent would only confuse things. Of course, if your freedom or intimacy is infringed upon, we already have laws that state that consent is needed, but even that is a question of degree. I think that the attempt to get people to busy themselves with our gender, forcing them to use certain pronouns individual to each person, is another expression of intrusive individualism. People have lost a vision of who they are because they feel they don’t belong anywhere and so they make up groups to belong to.
It addresses a real problem from the wrong side, and it is a lack of identity that is causing it.