Is the West in Decline?

That’s true of any society, though. Whether a tribe of 6 or a cluster of billions, we require care and concern for each other’s well being to remain functional… any society that disposes of that in too large a degree collapses.
This is not a “christian” value… we share this instinct with nearly every other pack animal on the face of this planet.

It’s a christian value, only when it’s motivated by christianity… and when it’s motivated by christianity, that comes packaged with a whole cluster of other motives.

You might have said the same for establishing an autocracy.
There are alternatives, beyond the ridiculous ones you list.

Recognizing the liabilities of our ideas and institutions allows us to build in safeguards or come up with alternatives.
Establishing secular values and elevating them beyond religious ones, so as to live under their rule, was a safeguard against religion.
It does not require we abolish religion… merely render it private and non-vital to society.

A concept you are rebelling against, by suggesting the health of our society depends on the masses subscribing to christianity.

A wise disposition and sage advice… perhaps best heeded by not turning a blind eye to the liabilities of religion?
Imperfection is to be expected, forgiven even, but if left unaddressed… you can’t claim to be trying your best, or trying at all.

Because this conversation isn’t about you, your character or even your faith.
I’ve nothing against you as a person, Bob… your personal tastes are irrelevant to the role religion has played in the world.
And the only way they would be relevant to what role religion WILL play in the world if elevated once again, is if you were given the power to dictate what others should take away from those stories and ideas.

The West is BEING declined - there is nothing natural about it.

The modern outlook separates faith from reason in the effort to separate scientific knowledge from theology and philosophy. Modernity is a result of the uncoupling of knowledge and wisdom in order to give theoretical knowledge of nature that is independent of religious authority and philosophically neutral. The aim is at achieving an objective relation to facts with no essential relationship to theological or philosophical meanings and no deference to interpretive authorities.

A downside of this is that reality and nature are presupposed to have no objective meaning. And if we are part of nature then we are ourselves and our language and our knowledge have no objective meaning.

In effect modernity killed theology and philosophy leaving us with only knowledge. Modern science killed wisdom.

Cosmic meaning is accepted only in the subjective realm of fantasy or personal religious belief. Welcome to the meaning crisis. If you want evidence look no further than the disenchanted, disaffected, and disillusioned, here on ILP.

MIJOT - :smiley:

There is wisdom in seeking meaning from within while remaining uncertain of the cosmic.
The delphic maxims, written on the temple of apollo were:
know thyself
nothing to excess
certainty brings insanity

but such divine insanity:

The madness which afflicts Dionysus and all those who follow him, is a divine madness.

“The madness which is called Dionysus is no sickness, no debility in life, but a companion of life at its healthiest. It is the tumult which erupts from its innermost recesses when they mature and force their way to the surface."
"

in vino veritas

Well surely the West is, in any case, where the Sun declines.

You read Plato. God and the gods were very near to people then and even sometimes possessed them. Now God has been banished from the scientific cosmology. So yeah the sublime chaos of madness may be as close to the Divine as you can get today.

Science has become dependent on technology (application and benefit) and on politics and economics (money and benefit). Science only receives money for its research if it serves the interests of technology, business and politics.

It is all modernity that kills wisdom. Modernity is only interested in money, which serves power, and utility, which serves money and thus power, and applications, which serve utility as well as money and thus power.

The biggest problem of our modernity is the technocreditism (not to be confused with “technocratism”, although this is included in technocredtism).

Great Again-- since it is from you that I first learned of technocreditism; please be kind enough to explain what it is from your point of view.

The alliance of the two self-reinforcing systems of credit-based interest-driven economy and innovation-driven mechanical engineering resulted in the most powerful complex of half-blindly forward-looking tendencies to date, which are still grouped together under the clumsy term “capitalism”, although if it had been a matter of a true name, it should have been called techno-creditism from the start.

This “start” is to be identified with the beginning of Occidental culture, or at the latest with the beginning of the modernity of Occidental culture.

This development and its effects are so unique and so extreme that they have upset the whole world. But first they have upset the Occidental people themselves, put technology (including science) above everything, which has not escaped the economy, so that it has also been catapulted upwards.

On the one hand, we have gladly let ourselves become dependent on luxury, but on the other hand, we have not wanted to see the economic, especially the financial dependence, which can no longer be separated from what we call technical “progress”. Once money is involved, there is no turning back. The Occident is in debt, both financially/economically and demographically. It is becoming more and more dependent, and its decision-makers think they can solve the problems with even bigger problems.

The Occidental downfall has its reasons in almost every Occidental person as well, but the effects of this techno-creditism clearly show us how much the dependence on money and thus on power is also a made and consciously controlled dependence.

The debt, I believe is owed the future generation, who will have to cope with the depletion of resources in such a record time, with nothing to show except refuse and scrap, plastic in the oceans, and poison in freshwater.

The least of their worries.

The plastic in the ocean is 90% Chinese fishing nets.

But whatever feeds your fantasy.

https://www.ecoredux.com/plastic-pollution-in-ocean#:~:text=%2015%20Facts%20You%20Need%20to%20Know%20About,to%20setting%20five%20garbage%20bags%20full…%20More%20

Not so much fantasy …

How about we choose a source that isn’t a blog post written by some dude who gets paid $0.01 per word.

hillnotes.ca/2020/01/30/ghost-f … pollution/

Considering China basically makes all of the world’s fishing nets, when placed relative to the fishing net production of any other group of nations combined, 90% of the plastic in the ocean is Chinese fishing nets.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishing_industry_in_China

The oceans there are so depleted, because of fishing nets, that people now eat jellyfish. I assure you, they don’t recycle them (one would assume, given your doomsday fetish, you would anyways be concerned with the amount of waste produced by recycling).

But I didn’t mean to interrupt your self-flagellating fantasies, what the world needs is people drinking less bottled water.

Sorry, my bad, what the world needs is governments forcing people to drink less bottled water. I’m so clumsy sometimes.

The focus on “science” is relatively new, though not as new as most people believe, but the obsession with the world being destroyed within the next few decades as a result of the sins of man is an old one.

When you control for variables, is it likely that this obsession is caused by scientific discoveries, or that it is a continuation of the old fantasy by new means?

Ghost fishing gear is estimated to make up 46% to 70% of all macroplastic marine debris by weight.

Your source …

Besides, who cares, it is plastic.