Quote (ThatAlex @ Mar 20 2016 05:52pm)
Is secularism or atheism really leading down a path to moral nihilism and cultural decline, though?
Prisoners and criminals are far more likely to identify as Christian than agnostic or atheist.
And wealthy democracies around the world that are less religous than the United States almost all have lower rates of violent crime per capita, too.
So while Christians find things such as homosexuality morally repungant, I'd much rather have gay people acting gay with each other than violent crimes or theft.
To be clear, I'm not arguing there is some grand correlation between more religous societies and violence. What I am saying though is that there is little evidence to suggest secular socieities are on path toward nihilism or hedonism, unless you want to include your own personal definitions of those items, such as acceptance of homosexuality or women allowed outside of domestic roles.
Being in a bad situation is going to leave you predisposed towards religious belief; prison is clearly a bad situation. You've got your cause and effect all mixed up.
And of course you're saying that. You can't say that you're not arguing for correlation and then implicitly claim the two are related.
Why do young white men commit the large majority of mass shootings? What's driving the increasing polarization of modern political processes? Is the world getting more or less free over time?
The vacuum religion has left behind has been filled by a whole host of pseudo-religious ideological identities.
Conservatism without religion is Donald Trump, it's angrier and more violent than it was before. The Left believes that deviating from ever more stringent notions of "correctness" is heresy. To say that you're not complicit in the oppression of an ever-expanding number of identity groups is to identity yourself as a bigot, and as we all know, the only way to deal with a bigot is with violence.