I grew up in a catholic family in a catholic school but was atheist from quite early on, while around that stuff all the time it's hard not to hate it, but since I've left high school its been much easier to see it more for the outcome, and the outcome of atheism in the west has been excessive pride of inherent characteristics (which is a sin in christianity), plummeting birth rates as people dont value family as much as christians typically do, and the whole socialist theory of rejecting all past wisdom to create a virtueless promiscuous society with no responsibility other than satisfying ones own personal pleasures. so I'd much rather live with christians than fellow atheists xD
@@awildtomappeared5925 Ironically it's kinda what the Christians said would happen. I'm Agnostic so I'm kinda up in the air, but I always realized that culturally Christianity had a bunch of good useful things in it
I am an atheist too, but one of my favorite quotations is this one from G. K. Chesterton: "When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then became capable of believing in anything". The Western world of today shows us how very true that statement is!
@@awildtomappeared5925 it's important to acknowledge what religion is (or was) used primarily for. As beacon of reason and kindness in times where are explanation wasn't easy to obtain. To be able to explain something just makes the achievement look less worthy. "The fear of responsibility is the disease of our time" - Otto von Bismarck (1870)
Hardly surprising, considering the fact that, when you combine people with an IQ lower than 110 with zero personal moral/ethical code (not that they could intellectually forge one on their own anyway), and society. You end up with people who devolve into the insanity which we see today. The reason humanity would invent God, even if there were no god, is that, try as they might, people of low IQ can not forge a moral framework based on intelligent observation and personal investiture. God gives humanity a reason, heaven and hell, to pursue virtue regardless of if the individual person has the capacity (intellectual, emotional, self-discipline, etc.) to create a high quality moral/ethical code of life. Atheism is singularly responsible for Modern Feminism, Black Lives Matters, the removal of fathers from their family, and every other unhealthy, destructive idea we face today. How? As I just mentioned, it is zealous people combined with bad ideas and no healthy moral or ethical code as a basis to refute these bad ideas. For example, freedom has a cost. Those with a strong and clear moral or ethical code based on sound reasoning know exactly why keeping freedom is a cost worth paying for. Those without any moral or ethical code don't see any reason why you shouldn't stop people from saying bad things (censorship), owning guns (disarmament), create safe-spaces (segrigation). They have no concept of why freedom should be protected or defended because they see it as doing something helpful because they can't define what "helpful" is. Another example is, my kids. It is helpful to let my kids suffer and have them watch me suffering. Why? Because it teaches them, by my guidance and example, how to suffer with dignity and composure and respect. If I protect them from all suffering and I always tell them not to worry or pay attention when I am suffering then when they do reach the world and begin suffering for the first time in their lives they will snowflake the heck out! They won't have a clue what to do and will view those who cause suffering as evil, bad, and horrible people. Now, with that example in mind, I know that God says, "Spare the rod and spoil the child." I also know that there are good, healthy, rational, sane reasons for making your kids suffer for their misdeeds. Yes, with me being the architect of their suffering. Why? Because on a core level, they love me and I love them. They need to know that someone who they love can cause pain to them AND that the pain does not mean that I love them less to any degree. Feeling bad about a decision that someone has made in your regard does not mean that hell has come to your world. Yet, people without moral code and who can not create one for themselves, have no frame of reference and no way to figure out why suffering offers any benefit what so ever. All they know is, it hurts a lot. Hurt = bad. So, Atheism, on a worldwide scale, gives authority to incompetence to judge for themselves and unfortunately, they simply do not have the brainpower or guidance to forge a moral or ethical code for themselves. Atheism says, there is no God, self is the highest state and ultimate judge, which is exactly what they have done. They don't like borders so, open borders. They judge based on empty, shallow, well-meaning yet self-defeating, reasons. As a final example, I offer the new Star Wars movies. A perfect example of what no one can relate to. Why? Most fans of the movie have some personal moral structure, which is why the themes of good and evil, light and dark, resonate with them. Yet, the new movies have zero clear picture of right and wrong so, they make no sense, they are confused, they suppose women can do anything and we all know that, because men can't do everything they like, women can't either. There's almost no growth for any of the characters and some end up worse, devolving and becoming less proficient than they were when they started out! They don't grow because the people telling the story never had to grow. They had silver-spoon lives, never got told that they were bad and never evolved as a person. And that's exactly what we got. God offers all humanity a way forward with sanity, even if they personally are emotional fruit-cakes. You don't have to be brilliant to do something smart. You simply have to have good reason to do what is sand and rational. God provides both emotional and rational reasons alike. And to those who say, "but, but, all the contradictions, bla, bla, bla", can go shove it. God appeals to humanity and humans are not all rational so why then would everything be written to appeal to YOU, who are rational? What? You think the nut-jobs of the world are beneath persuasion to a sane path through life simply because what is required to persuade them isn't entirely rational? How absolutely superior of you. And it doesn't change the fact that society would be better off with all humanity cohesively living by certain basic moral norms and by clear code of conduct, feeling, and valuing things. Frankly, making all the rational people or all the emotional people outcasts is just plain stupid. So, for the rational, God appeals to them through rational means and for emotional people, God appeals to them as well. That is the superiority of God over man. God reaches out to man anywhere, any time, at any level of function. Smart, brilliant, slow, oaf-ish, whatever. He offers all humanity a way forward. Just because you read something that seems to contradict something else that doesn't mean that it is not clearly understood by someone else.
@Allan Tidgwell Is it wrong to "indoctrinate" one's children with values that are conducive to a healthy society instead of potentially wrecking themselves and others? It's one matter to indoctrinate a child with Christian dogma; religion is a matter I believe people should decide for themselves (I say this as a Christian), but its another matter to indoctrinate a child with decent human civility. "Don't rape, don't bully, do help others to the degree that you are able, do find a worthwhile pursuit that can sustain you and master it as best as you can."
@Allan Tidgwell wouldn't the world be better if we all kept the 10 commandments? A lot of misery is caused because people don't. I'm not saying to believe in God, but as a standard for decent human conduct.
Allan Tidgwell you’re not reading the Bible with any degree of nuance. I don’t claim to understand the reason for every single Old Testament commandment, but if you really have read the Bible, you don’t need me to explain the reason for sacrifice and tithes.
Unless I'm mistaken, he only lamented it because he saw religion as a vehicle of power through which great men could impose their will upon society, rather than actually affording any legitimacy to a given doctrine. That is to say he valued the power and influence manifest in the institution, and not the proclamations of said institution.
@BeGood 2Me he knew very few people could overcome themselves and feared the death of god because religion kept people from using their slave morality to cause extreme pain because religion keeps slave morality in the abstract and doesn't try to apply it in reality like communism which collapses because it's built on a purposeful misunderstanding of life
@@yaboi4831 Communism and nazism was a direct response to the death of religion and elevation of science to the new religion, and men as gods. This is why they are both totalitarians. Just like god is. Only difference is that god doesn't / can't exercise his power. Only his followers can. The communists hated religion and actively suppressed it. the nazis were not especially religious but as long as the church didn't go against the state i think it wasn't as heavily sanctioned. Germany has a lot of Lutherans who the nazis didn't want to make enemies of.
Women who chose career over family feel attacked by the question of duty because the question of duty is a direct (albeit unintended) attack on their life choices. Unless you have already been critically examining you life, coming face to face with the results can be rather jarring. Now here's my thinking; there is responsibility an individual owes themselves to not let the animal run wild. The individual must become stronger. Strength is everything in life. If you do not cultivate strength, you will not lead a good life. This is why you do not over indulge, it weakens you. You are and animal, you need exercise. You need to run, to hunt, to fight. You need to struggle. There is a very strong biological reason why working out not only feels good but also makes you attractive. This is the nature telling the individual how they need to live. It's more than just the strong survive, the strong are not oppressed. The strong are able to maximize their freedom. But to attain that strength, you will naturally check your freedoms with responsibilities. Cultivating the right kind of strength for the individual is a life long pursuit.
I really agree with the points you make, they are some of the most important. However, the way I choose to frame it is that that 'balance is everything in life', not strength. Balance is the one quality that you can't have too much or too little of (thoguh strength is almost always a good thing). Just my two cents
"Women who chose career over family feel attacked by the question of duty because the question of duty is a direct (albeit unintended) attack on their life choices. Unless you have already been critically examining you life, coming face to face with the results can be rather jarring." VERY well put, my friend. I think Sargon struck a chord when he said women must, logically speaking, have moral duties towards families. I don't see how it could be wrong, and continual generational neglect of duties on the female side could ONLY lead to a, um, "deficit" of duties. EITHER each generation, women keep shirking their half of the duties, OR the men keep picking up more than their fair share. It seems VERY foolish of us to keep ignoring this and chalk it up to the quaint fancy of religion, or the outdated attitudes of tradition.
Shadow Skull Your idiotic wish will simply lead to extinction then. Congrats. As for “bully”, this stuff is only possible because of state enforced feminism at gunpoint. There is nothing natural about feminism. It is the most unnatural thing of all and must be forced by government bullying.
I would strongly recommend 2 books for you to read. The Problem of Pain, and Mere Christianity, both written by C.S.Lewis. He is able to articulate and discuss all these different moral aspects and dialogues in a way that is both fun and easy to understand. He actually spent most his early life as an atheist so he knows how to pitch all his arguments with that perspective in mind. And if you want a really fun read, try The Screwtape Letters
BrooksKingdomHeart I hope he reads this comment- I was going to suggest the exact same thing! Carl seems very close to discovering the logical arguments for the existence of God that Lewis so eloquently proposed. Mere Christianity is an amazing work that everyone should read a least once whether you believe in God or not. Have a great Sunday and God bless 💜
Ive come to have more of a sacramental view of a Tolkien, but I am forever in debt to CS Lewis and his ability to speak to me as an athiest in exactly those books you mentioned. I couldn't get over the psychological insights in Screwtape Letters, and I found myself thinking, 'wait a second. If this book is fantastic psychology, what does that say about the existence of something like screwtape?' And the same can be said for Doystoyevsky, Shakespeare, Dickens, etc.
@@AjaxNixon I love Tolkien's works. He showed me the vast spectrum on which thoughts and morals and ideas are predicted on. While there are absolutes in light and dark, good and evil, however, most things, especially the Human experience are varied shades of grey. C.S.Lewis is somewhat opposite in his approach, in that once you understand the fundamental framework everything just falls into place, its so simple even a child can understand it. Interestingly, both views are indeed true. Reading both authors works for me was akin be being made aware that you are sailing on a boat across an ocean Which is knowledge and understanding, sometimes you peer beneath the surface and realize in awe how deep and vast it all goes. Much like Plato's allegory of the Cave. Perhaps it's knowing this, which makes the secular argument against religion as something only uneducated (dumb) people would ever accept particularly stinging and short sighted. I recently discovered one of Lewis's dialogues he had with one of his atheist colleagues about science and religion regarding that very topic. Here's the link, I hope you enjoy. m.ua-cam.com/video/AJu0oYvi-cY/v-deo.html
Watching Carl scratch that itch offers as the same enjoyment Morpheus must of felt watching Neo struggle with accepting the reality of the Matrix before they unplugged him.
I think the problem here is something very fundamental. "You can't have your cake and eat it too." A secular, individualist society does not have an authoritative source from which people must draw moral duties and obligations. Indeed it cannot by the very condition that each individual is the supreme moral agent and is authoritative to themselves and themselves alone. You cannot put something above that without fundamentally compromising the values and principles of a secular, individualist society. Such a condition will shift into a position where people will make the most sensible choices for themselves, maximizing their own payoff matrices, but which can also create externalities that are harmful to society.
The problem with the West isn't freedom it's that people refuse the responsibility for what they have authority over. Women specifically want to be free and have no kids in marriage but also want to have men or the government take responsibility for them which creates an imbalance between responsibility and authority which burdens other people and causes a ripple effect from people who DO take responsibility and then shirk it.
@The Coward Liberius I'm not married to freedom I just think if you're as free as you can be while being responsible your society dominates. That being said if you're taking care of someone whether directly or indirectly through taxes or whatever, they're not free and you're within your rights to have more authority in society and/or over them. What I have a problem with is a free adult that takes responsibility for themself is told you can't do that non harmful thing because of my feelings despite it only involving themself. My way of fixing this is only net tax payers vote for Congress and military veterans/registrees vote for president. This ties rights to responsibility and hurts you directly by making you pay for your stupid vote in extra money or blood.
A secular individualist that has no authoritative source will steer to the rational conclusion of egoism. The poison that religion has left upon the world makes men still reject the ultimate moral duty and righteousness, to serve the self.
@The Coward Liberius yeah, the founding fathers wanted to stop the majority from voting for a reason. If you limit voting to the responsible men will be the overwhelmingly represented and will put in pro family laws that create a community driven positive feedback loop AND have a lot of freedom.
@@entropino9928 Can't wait for someone to say serving the self is the problem, and how no rational being would want to help anyone else and leave a legacy. Egoism is deeply misunderstood.
"Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain. But you feel it. You've felt it your entire life. That there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is but it's there, like a splinter in your mind driving you mad."
The issue with including Japan in the idea that women having careers is that it is a hugely conservative culture that takes a very 1960’s approach to gender roles. Having lived in Japan for 4 years or so-and I’m going to really summarize far more complex a problem here-I think the problem there is the culture views people as cogs, does not socialize them well, and the extreme feminization of men. Further, it infantilizes young people well into their mid-20’s. I’ve known 23/24 year old men who don’t know how to talk to women or claim they won’t have a sexual encounter until after college because they “aren’t mature enough.” I think if you just broadened your wording to say that these highly modern countries are interfering with gender dynamics and how people view/pursue relationships, you’d be dead on the money. But at least in Japan, it’s less about women getting careers and more about men being feminine/never given a proper arena in which to mature. Japan essentially treats you like a dumb kid who needs their hand held and ought to be virginal until you’re 26 then expects you to get married and pop out kids ASAP. And that disregards economic barriers, too. I’d argue it’s treatment of women, however, is a little bit too old fashion. It’s got this weird Overton window of femininity going on in which men are girly and women are so feminine that they pretend to be stupid and things of that sort. I definitely believe the the issue is, broadly, these societies messing with a fundamental paradigm. It’s trying to fix something in human behavior that isn’t broken.
I'm going to try to make this concise, I've been thinking about this a lot and I think I'm on to something. The successful and well functioning society is composed of a few layers that work together to form a cohesive social space. Since the enlightenment and especially since the postmodern era, we seem to be chipping away at them constantly and we have been seeing the ill effects for some time. One of the major fault lines has been drawn by the combination of enlightenment and post modernist thinking. The enlightenment birthed a kind of obsessive scientism which seeks to challenge absolutely anything that cannot be empirically proven. Postmodernism then provides a pathway to further dismantle and problematize anything we used to "know" that now cannot fit the measure of fact, ensuring that not only do we seem to have endless problems, but they are also unresolvable. This dual assault is happening on all fronts, but it has been specifically successful in it's attack on what I refer to as "the Cultural layer" of society. As I see it, the well-functioning society is composed of a few layers. The Family, The Culture, and the State. I see the three layers as each governing a part of our development and behavior as individuals and as a society. They are something like; The Family governs what is, The Culture, what ought, and The State, what ought not. Obviously no one thinks the State should quiet the screaming infant, or the Family should arrest and prosecute the murderer, so there is some general agreement amongst people still that these exist. Here's the problem we are in currently, the Cultural layer in the west was very much tied up in religion. Religion was the technology by which the ought was communicated and governed. This governance was enacted through "responsibility" and "shame", not punitive measures by the state. Just to go over a few important oughts; you ought to treat everyone as you would like to be treated, you ought to enter into a monogamous relationship and have a family, you ought to look after and care for your extended family, you ought to defend those around you from anyone who may seek to hurt them. It's very difficult to say that it's all just a fantasy, invented to control you and yet you should still follow all of it's rules. So now we are seeing cascading failures across the Cultural layer that are destabilizing societies because we have removed the authority that stood behind these oughts. What's worse is where these failures hurt the most, we are seeing the State come to fill the gaps, whether it be in welfare for broken families, or in hate speech laws. The last thing we want to see is State capture of the Cultural layer, but that appears to be what is happening. Trouble is, it took us thousands of years to build the cultural technology of religion, now that it is toppled it cannot just be replaced. I'm afraid we are in a position where we are just left to suffer the consequences of our hubris. Hope this was worth your time. I'm sure someone else has put it better, but I am not hearing it said, so here we are.
That is quite a good analysis, but in the interest of providing you with some hope; we have set down the tools of religion, let the textbooks of that science grow dusty on the shelves, and moved off into other areas; but none of it is gone. All the records of its practice, the instructions on how it functioned, and the tools to make it work again are still there; precisely where we left them. The textbooks weren't destroyed, merely stored away on a high shelf. It may take some growing pains to get the old machinery back in tip top shape, but if we put the work in we can get it all back; even if we may have to first let the deconstructionism finish gutting itself and let it bleed out. Repentance has always been the first step of Godliness, if we turn around and go back to what we abandoned God will restore all we have lost. All he requires of us is that we admit we were wrong. Psalm 51:17 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.
Pro Tip: When you use the word "duty" (or a synonym) with a strong, independent womyn, you completely short-circuit their brain and no rational conversation can follow.
I just start asking about men's obligations, then (once they've set up the mechanism of duty, self-actualization, and everything in between) I demand to know why they hate women? "What I don't hate women" "Yes, you do. You think men are strong enough to live through failure and smart enough to learn from it. So why do you hate women so much to think women can't if not hatred?" ...I don't have many friends 😂
telling someone they have a "duty" implies that they are accountable to you, subservient to your world vision. no one appreciates that kind of condescension, whether its coming to or from a man or woman. sorry, i owe you nothing just as you owe me nothing. have kids, dont have kids, believe in magical sky daddy or dont, its your choice and i dont care either way, just keep your ideals out of my face. your opinions are not facts, i am not beholden to your subjective ideals or "duties."
@@cwg9238 if "in fact" you have a duty, then it's not subjective. You and/or others will suffer for your dereliction. If I have a duty of care, it's not because someone says so... it's because others will suffer if I do nothing. Duty is not from consent or contract, it's from ends.
Provide the right incentives and the sense of "duty" will follow. Reward responsible parenthood with tax breaks and social honours. Discourage parasitic behaviours. Screen immigrants for their motives, values and willingness/ability to integrate.
@@lukeannett I described my opinion of what "right" is in the second, third and fourth sentences of my post. There's the "ought" right there; take it or leave it.
As an ex mormon turned athiests and I totally agree that alot of the things I learned from my parents/religion that have stuck with me. That being moderation and family values. But I think I'm a bit of an outlier in that regard. Every single Exmo I've met has either turned full socialist (who hate their parents and the religious) or hipster (drug addled and hate society). Rejecting an entire worldview at such a young age often results in throwing out the baby with the bath water.
That's really sad. The excess of order creates an equal opposite reaction and backlash with chaos. Unless you really stop and think about it I guess it is a natural path to go down.
See I went from atheist to Anglican, and I don’t see it myself, how can you take a worldview without the foundation of it? Surely it’s like building a house upon the sand.
The most important moral question is "Why should I?" Religious ideas of good and evil don't define evil based on the outcome -- whether it causes harm. Indeed, doing so leads to an inconsistent moral ideology, because sometimes causing harm is justified. More than that, it leads to the idea that the ends justify the means, because one must justify any harm they inflict with the promise that _less harm will occur in the end_ . Of course, there's no way to check and see if this is finally true! But: why should I care if another is harmed by what I do? Why should I be willing to suffer some small pain (taxation, for example) for someone else's good (public education, maybe). But religious people hold the moral truths to be a sort of natural law, self-evident in the consciences of humans, made explicit in the revealed word of God. Religious people won't say that something is evil because God has forbidden it; rather, God has forbidden it _because_ it is evil. Good and evil are objective ideas. Good, being defined in God (who never changes) and evil, being defined as anything that is not good. Like an arrow that has missed the bull's-eye. The religious idea answers the question of Why Should I? in a few different ways-- a) you should, simply _because it is good_ , b) because God has commanded it, and he is in authority; also he is to be thanked (or blamed!) for all you have and all you are, and c) because God has power over you, to punish you for wrongdoing. This is convincing to everyone. To the compassionate, a) is as beautiful a reason as one can desire. To the one who values propriety and order, b) is a good reason. And to the selfish, c) is a good reason (the absolute worst fate that can befall you is hell, so one must avoid this fate _even if_ it means being unselfish!). The moral ideas are sound. The only question is, does God in fact exist? And what is he like? Even if you disagree with God's moral ideas, you must obey the rules of your own nature. If God created you (whether through billions of years, watching over the evolution of life, or by a momentary act of creation-- it makes no difference), then he made the rules by which you live. He created the stomach, so you must eat or you will starve. He created the atom, gravity, and light. You don't have a choice about following these kinds of rules. Therefore, moral laws, if they were put in place by God, must be followed in exactly the same way. The only difference is that he has given us a choice! So, to your point about creating a set of Secular Duties, the trouble is" Why should I?" What I have inherited from my society, I cannot be burdened with the responsibility of upholding it. No one asked me if I ever wanted to be a part of it! It's important to point out that the religious person would agree that you have an obligation to your society, only because they agree that one ought to repay good with good. But unless you already agree with this idea, you don't have an obligation to do it. Religion protects against this, because even those who disagree with the moral ideas must obey them out of fear. There's nothing to motivate the truly selfish in the atheistic worldview, because there won't be life after death, nor any final judgement. So I think you've done a good job explaining "What should I do?", and even described a good way of finding out what else we should do when the question arises again. But, only because the assumption is made that one ought to do something in the first place! To the question of one's obligation to produce children-- when God said "Be fruitful and multiply" and commanded Adam and Eve to subdue the earth, he was speaking to the Jews (Well, when he told it to Moses many years later)! Jews weren't particularly concerned with spreading their religion, since Jewishness is a hereditary thing-- the sons of Abraham are the children of the promise. Ancient Israelites would have felt motivated to bear children because they saw their heritage as pure, blessed and set apart by God. It bears mentioning that the firstborn child under Jewish law was ceremonially dedicated to God, and a sacrifice was made to "redeem" the child (much like Isaac was redeemed at Jehovah-Jirah, and like Israel was redeemed at Passover). Moreover, every male child was circumcised, to bear a sign of God's covenant in their body. So, Jews weren't born as individuals sharing a common worldview. They were members of a family, sharing a common ancestry and final destiny. They were blessed and chosen by God. To them, it was less important that one believe the right things about God than that one was a child of Abraham that obeyed God's covenant. When Judaism led to Christianity, the obligation to bear children may have then become related to spreading the religion. But evangelism is a peculiar trait of Christianity. All Christians have an obligation to spread God's word and his kingdom, because the sons of Abraham, through Isaac, are born of faith, not through flesh. Also, the most obvious reason to have children -- if God felt compelled to create beings in his image, then creating new life must be a good thing in itself. We're simply following his example if we choose to have our own children!
@Matthew Chenault Interesting quote! Another comment said something about Hume's Guillotine, which seemed like a more straightforward way of presenting what I'm saying here.
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See, Augustus WAS right after all. Remember, Science is about "Could" and Religion / Faith is about "Should".
I think a big issue is that science is not very well defined or taught. Religion can't domineer science or it stagnates. But science can't answer moral questions all on its own. It still needs some kind of anchor
Science & religion; Reason & faith; Knowledge & wisdom; two halves of the whole... each, together, are necessary for a well-rounded mind, body & spirit of the human being.
"we can just bring immigrants in and fill in the duties that I was supposed to fulfill." Great idea. Reaaallll nice. Also shows how little they know about the history of integration. Ask the Barbarian tribes how Roman they felt once Rome ran out of money to keep them united. Seems like a whole plethora of theories around integration and social science and racism and tolerance could be scrapped in favor of just good old fashioned duty and responsibility.
No civilization without religion and a superiority complex survives. Why should it if the citizens don't think themselves better and that on a unquestionable level? With doubt and questions you arrive at the same point. There is no external reason to continue something started.
Even romans noted that their high and mighty women of society prefer hedonism and pets to bearing children. Now you have proper knowledge of procreation, condoms and chemical birth control. How are people even in awe that we are below replacement in societies which value hedonism, atheism and equality? Woman who are not hedonistic and think about having children go to the left and arrive logically at the conclusion that resources are limited, and them having one kid would take more than some women in Africa having seven. So they don't have any.
Good to see your sensitive, thoughtful foray into this most urgent and painful of subjects. I know so many women who are 'advised' to forgo marriage and family. The results are just awful, with sadness, despair, pointlessness and marking time as the hallmarks. No one knows what it is going to be like, until they are there. But I can tell you, being a grandmother is THE MOST ASTOUNDINGLY BEAUTIFUL THING I HAVE EVER KNOWN! And no one told me of this either. Why are we not informing our kids and ourselves as a society of these huge truths? Honestly, the grandmother thing is ASTONISHING. I totally loved being mother, but being a grandmother is a higher wonder, a higher love, a more sublime beauty! Honestly!! I want to tell the world and not try to reduce the stunning level of love and purpose that has become evident in life for me. GRANDPARENTHOOD IS THE BEST THING EVER!!!
Low birth rates in the West aren't a consequence of the Enlightenment, but instead, it is the welfare state that shifts the numbers. I would have had more kids but I was overtaxed & overworked to pay for others' govt benefits so I could not afford more kids. Govt policy incentivizing lower birth rates for the capable and higher birth rates for the incapable. I am one of four siblings, so same culture, same opportunities, same privilege. Two grew up to be independent and had 2-3 kids; two grew up to be dependent and had 6-10 kids. Average those numbers and that results misses the actual trend. Kant as the Enlightenment's murderer and advocate of duty lead to the welfare policies that caused such a trend.
The "moral duties" religion prioritizes we're derived through observations of human interaction that are understood to benefit the communities we form. The deist teaching, in my opinion, is to pressure children and dimwits to abide the moral good without fully understanding why it is necessary. If the fear of an invisible man in the sky serves to keep those who are unable to see the big picture in line, then why not? I'm an atheist too, but there's too many people who seem to need an authority directive to decide for them. Nietzsche understood this, the death of God would not usher in the age of reason, it would leave an intellectual vacuum to be filled by ideology. Basically, it's a choice between religion(in traditional western form) and what we have now, which is essentially Alister Crowleys' "do what thou wilt" If you've got a viable secular alternative I'm willing to help spread it.
It didn't *have* to be religion enforcing the moral duties. It was just a convenient vehicle to enforce moral duties. Personally, I don't see the reason why we need to re-invent the wheel. If we need moral obligations to keep the truck moving, why reject the design?
The difficulty arises in advocating for a religion one does not believe in, that those who do not believe it will feel no obligation to accept its moral injunctions. They will, in essence, be advocating for rules for the people which they themselves are not bound to obey. Because however it may be argued that acting in such a way and not this other way is better for the people, or the society, or so on; it can never provide any force upon the person who simply decides that they don't care that it is better to act such, and would prefer to live by the maxim "do as thou wilt." Because the injunction to care about society or other people is itself a part of the Divine law, a man who does not believe in the Divine law does not need to care about anyone but themself. You can tell him all day and night about what consequences his actions will have, but if he either doesn't believe in or care about the consequences no law will hold him. Religion is a thing that matters only if it is true, and if we find that it is necessary for our survival we must endeavor to discover a true religion. Nothing of worth can be achieved by propagating the dogmas of a false god, because inevitably those dogmas will fail, and the society will die anyway. It is an old truth, but it still holds sway; without a true God there really is no reason for us not to live for our own pleasure, because it does nothing for us to sacrifice the enjoyment of today to give prosperity to a world we will never see. As the scripture says, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. 1 Corinthians 15:32 "If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not? let us eat and drink; for to morrow we die." If we only have one life, selfishness is as logical as anything else; and it would be perfectly in character to grab what you can before you lose everything, because dead is dead. If we need religion, we need the truth; and if we need a true religion, then all men from the greatest to the least need it. When it comes to God, it's all or nothing. Matthew 12:30 "He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad." There's either no place for atheism in society or there's no place for theism; the two cannot long coexist in a society any more than they can long coexist in the same mind, eventually the dissonance between them will come to a head and it will all come apart at the seams.
You'll get to God eventually. I've watched you, Akkad. I've seen how close to truly brilliant you are and I dare say you may be one of the few men who are capable of coming to God through His divine intellect. Those who write off God, write off the singularly most brilliant thinker in existence. You love good thoughts. And if you read the Bible, as you should, for what you can glean from it for your life, I think you'll find that there's a great deal more there than you can possibly imagine. Christians are written off as zealots and cooky and not-all-there in the head. Quite the opposite is true. Yes, God is for everyone and it helps all. Therefore, as a work, you'll see very obvious things that can be glossed over because they state what is obvious to you. Keep in mind, not everyone is you and some need simple food. However, to those who are able to see it, there is a feast of thought, logic, reason, and complexity the likes of which no man can compare. Lastly, I say this to you, Akkad, if you are worried about hypocrisy, don't. God didn't invent hypocrisy, humans did. It isn't a question of hypocrisy. It is a question of what kind of hypocrite you want to be, one who is a hypocrite for the sake of personal nonsense or the type of hypocrite who advocates for a sanity beyond our reach as humans. I can not be perfect, and neither can any man but, I can advocate for the most superior ideas ever created and in so doing prove myself incapable of meeting the fullness of the challenge. One day, I will look forward to seeing your head bowed before the Master, the Lord God, builder of all the universe, and the clearest thinker ever. Humanity has ruined God's reputation with his flaws. God has only ever said that which is needful of saying to us, whether we listened or not.
When individuals choose to use their time and labor to benefit their society (i.e. civil meritocracy), that society will benefit as a whole, thereby further benefiting those individuals and so on. The key word here is "choose".
"Till our women had no more children, and our men lost reason and faith--and the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: The wages of sin is death."--Rudyard Kipling
This is a topic I've been bouncing inside my head for almost a year now. In my opinion there is no sustainable society other than conservative. Liberal societies inevitably become what I call "satanic", meaning that they eventually turn into perversions of their original image. Both societies have the same goal except that liberal society reaches there first without strong foundation and is toppling down which we can see happening all across the western world. It's like two people going through the forest full of thorn bushes. First one is threading slowly and carefully while the second one is running full speed. The second one will come out first, but there will be nothing left of him but bloody rags and exposed bone.
"Both societies have the same goal?" What, liberal and conservative societies? Perhaps I've misunderstood you, because I'm pretty sure that's not true. Liberalism tries to maximise individual freedom (especially freedom from duties) and/or happiness in the present, with little, if any, thought for the future, they often say things along the lines that enjoying oneself in the moment is the only, our primary, duty. Meanwhile, conservatism tries to conserve the good things of the past into the future, and makes this a duty. Very different attitudes to, and ideas of, duty, I think. Or are they somehow the same underneath?
@@73elephants It could probably be argued that liberalism is more about the progression towards new good things, conservatism is more about holding on to that good which we have heretofore been given. The intent of both is to make things good for people, but as the saying goes; pioneers are slaughtered, settlers prosper. The people always attempting to push the boundaries are going to be the people who make the greatest number of novel mistakes, and suffering the consequences. The best society is one where progress and conservation are in a harmony or synergy with each other; holding the core of what is recieved from the past, yet acknowledging the mistakes of the past in order to rectify them. If progress becomes an end in itself, nothing will hold the society together; if conservation becomes an end in itself, the society will stagnate and fail to deal with modern problems. It's difficult to keep them balanced, but when they acknowledge the necessity of their opposites and pursue their own ends with that in mind there can be prosperity. If they see their opposites only as an obstacle, the society will fracture into collapse.
@@ryanalving3785 The left is progressing towards things that it supposes are good and new, but which in fact are old, and have been tried many times before, and have disastrous consequences for any society that adopts them.
@@ryanalving3785 More: (1) I use the term "left" where you use the term "liberal", because I reject the implication in that usage, namely that the left is more interested in liberty than the right. Far from it, the left is authoritarian to its core, and constantly seeks to increase the power, and actual interference, of government in all areas of life. (2) The left's ideas and plans are rooted in the 17th and 18th century, and involve a hatred of emerging modernity, and a wish to return to a primitive state. This is quite obvious in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the founding philosopher of leftist ideology -- with his idealization of "the state of nature", and his deprecation of the "arts and sciences", for instance. Thus, the left is locked in the past. (3) Conservatives are not afraid of progress as such. It's "progress" in certain directions that they object to: progress toward totalitarianism, progress away from merit and virtue toward egalitarianism and decadent hedonism, the replacement of private religion by collective worship of the state, the severance of bonds of tribe and family, replaced by the Nanny State, the replacement of education and culture by ideological indoctrination.
@@73elephants Conservative depends on where you are. In the west, at least the US, that is what conservative means. It is always about keeping the core of the culture alive. Egalitarianism is a more western value; however, a conservative in a non-western country is going to be somewhat different. The rest is going to be the same, but the core they are going to fight for is different.
I think it's especially important for atheists to find this secular source for duty. On top of that, a force from which rights stem. I've had so many arguments with atheists who say their is no god, so rights come from government, which is a recipe for those rights to be taken away some day.
As I have stated before, it may be that humans in these nations are hitting a supposed “carrying capacity”, where they recognize having a child isn’t a good idea in an environment. It’s a biological phenomenon where in population levels off, I would recommend you look into it. That is just my thought, good to see you think things through even if you aren’t sure where it will go. Keep up the great work mate
This may seem unrelated but I'm a writer and I run a lot of dnd and worldbuilding is kind of my passion and I've always liked to make cultures and religions that were unique and realistic and your videos on this kind of stuff has really helped me understand the topic more than any 'debate' or 'discussion' channels or videos I've seen on youtube in this aspect, and I've watched a fucking lot. So thanks I guess, you strange glorious bastard
This is really hard to give feedback on, because I am religious, and so it all fits together for me already in my own paradigms, making bias almost unavoidable. I think you have all the pieces. I'll at least say you're on the right track and I hope for humanity's sake you and others like Peterson who are grappling with this problem continue to make headway. So I guess that's my feedback: each individual piece you're considering seems handled correctly. Keep at it. Maybe try picking a sect of a religion and try to attack it from that angle more deeply, and then you can back out and see if you can bring it back to the secular/rational.
I think it was a Prussian king, whose name I will not look up now, who said something like "If soldiers were to begin to think, not one of them would stay in the army" The problem is that society as a whole greatly benefits from decisions that are detrimental to the individual. Such as dying in war for it, or wasting resources on children. But since the detriment to the individual is less that than the benefit to the whole, these inclinations survive. Up to the point where people start thinking and realise "Hey, this is not good for *me*. Why should *I* be doing something that is not good for *me?!*" And that is the strength of all dogma (religion most commonly, but an ideologue has the same advantage): The thought terminating cliche. "You have to do it, because it is divinely mandated that you must. Stop thinking."
I've only recently been reading on Kant but if I'm not mistaken his system of morality is based on God's existence and free will. Kolakowski has an interesting take that it's not that science has replaced religion by debunking it (actually scientific discoveries used to reinforce the argument for the existence of God) but that the products of science brought comfort and consumerism that changed our priorities from spiritual and eternal to material and temporal, thus giving us false gods and idols
I think sargon is heading for a wakeup call studying enlightenment philosophy. I'm not super into it yet myself, but from what I do know, you're right. Pretty much all the parts of the enlightenment that were good and useful were tied inextricably with Christian underpinnings. I'm pretty much in the same boat right now, just learning that my whole "atheist" outlook on life is based on things that are based on christianity, it permeates our whole civilization to a degree that's it's inescapable.
In "Groundwork of Metaphysics of Morals," Kant distinguishes the idea of a "Good Will" and uses the Principle of Non-Contradiction as his means of founding a platform for future ethical debates. No God required.
@@seanmcgrady8688 there are different takes on Kant's arguments or actually Kant makes arguments using different basis peped.org/philosophicalinvestigations/summary-kants-moral-argument/ Or he uses the existence of God to support the existence of morality en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_morality I'm still beginning to grasp Kant in general so I can't really debate his philosophy but it seems to me that the existence of God is linked to his moral system
Yep, Kant tried to stealth God into secular morality with categorical imperatives. Unfortunately, categorical imperatives are not the laws of physics, which are always true despite all attempt to disprove them.
As one of those atheists who was raised religious, Protestant Christian to be more specific, I have to say I'm actually really glad I was raised Christian. I don't believe in the mythology, the burning bush, the parting of the Red Sea, etc. but now that I'm older I recognize the value of the moral instruction that came with going to church. I think the greatest failing of atheism as a movement is that, now that it's cool to dismiss or even outright despise Christianity, many in the West are abandoning the moral values Christianity teaches. And compared to most other value systems, Christian moral values are vastly superior. Too many modern secular people care only about slamming the faults of Christianity, like the lower tolerance towards LGBTQ types and ignore the virtues i.e. humility, grace, charity, etc. I do think you're generally on the right track, and it serves as a good intro to a bigger discussion about the values we hold, why we have/had them, where did they come from, how have they evolved and what are the pros and cons of said values.
I've been interested in Stoicism and Taoism, they seem to fit in and offered me ... the questions to ask myself in order to develop without feeling like I had to believe in some great spirit or being. I do think that some level of *religion* is needed but not to the degree that it controls you or you can use it as an excuse * the holy book says I have/can do it. Instead I feel it should help guide you, question you if you lack the ability to be introspective. But I may be just talking out of my backside. Thank you for your thoughts on this, as I've always felt that there is a need for it but put in a different way.
I'm totally with you on this. Children and commitment need to somehow be made to feel important again. Also, when we leave the church we leave the tribe too. Going to your local church weekly, contemplating, mingling and cooperating with your neighbors who don't agree with you on everything. Without the church to bring us together we have fallen apart. We don't have to go back to believing what we used to believe, but I think we need to go back to doing what we used to do. We threw out the baby with the bathwater and we need to get that baby back!
There is no man without a religious understanding of his surroundings. We all believe in myths, whether they be metaphysical or historical or political, we all tell ourselves myths. Good to see you exploring this topic.
I grew up an atheist and my mom was, too. My children are, as well. My grandma on my mom’s side was a Christian but my grandpa was an atheist. Yet we have strong family values, many from my grandpa. Your children learn by watching and listening.
Do you think those values are nested inside of an outer Christian culture? Which values can you point to that are derived from the atheism of your parents/family?
MrRozburn I don’t think I even began to wonder where my values came from until I started paying close attention to what was happening culturally. My grandpa’s mom was Cherokee and his father was 1st generation American from Germany. His father died when he was a teen. I can only guess how that influenced his beliefs. He had a great love for his family and always put them 1st. He had a great influence on his whole family and was respected and loved by many people.
@@Antonette59 My grandfather also died when my father was young, and the way you describe your father is like describing mine. I've always wondered how he could be such a selfless father without his own father figure growing up showing him the ropes.
I've been thinking simular for some time. And started debating this with friends. Most don't want to face the truth of society changing to be purely selfish and only interested in what a person can get for themselves and the impact this selfishness has on the community and culture they have been privileged to grow up in. It's made me start to reassess the value of religion specifically Christianity.
I feel that one end to this line of questioning will be "why be moral?" Many enlightenment philosophers were religious and answered this with "because God", neichieh toiled with this and created the ubermensch but we need a better answer. Side note: what are your thoughts on Thomas Hobbes?
Yeah. If society runs on everyone voluntarily giving more than they take, removing the "Because God" out of it kind of ruins the whole point of society, doesn't it?
I think what’s kept it going in some sense is that although god is dead, Christian morality has been baked into the structure of western countries. But I think this may be crumbling in the modern day. The only thing deterring people is government, but that of course isn’t virtuous.
Without God at the helm, what duty is there to continue the state or perpetuate the culture we are born into? Without God, by what measures can we universally declare our society to be good, or better than another?
Religion was the only absolute authority. Without it there can be no ultimate accountability and man is capable of anything good or evil. The only thing stopping him is himself.
The "Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter must unite to achieve freedom for all"! It must be remembered we are of Christian Culture. Jesus the one true God bless You and your loved ones CB.
@Totus Tuus Indeed, I'm impressed with your apparent insight. Padraig Pearse would have been under great influence of Pope Leo as he was born just after the start of Leone's reign. If you are, as it seems 'in the know', are you also aware of Leo's vision? And his plea to St. Michael the Archangel to defend us in battle and his call to prayer to be recited at the end of Mass? Later suppressed by subsequent so-called Popes. All part of Satan's work & choice to do his worst work against the Catholic Church and more coming in this Century. It seems that so far Satan is very much having things his way. Keep the faith! KAFIRS OF THE WORLD UNITE. DEUS VULT!
@Totus Tuus What's wrong? Who said they had? I said they are under threat as per Leo's vision and if you cannot recognise the threats I reference then clearly it's you that lost in the echo chamber
Religion is not simply a dogmatic belief in a higher deity. It is also a philosophy, a story and a set of community guidelines rolled into one. Reject the belief, if you wish, but rejecting fundamentally good ideas on their own that happened to be associated with that belief? You are right, Carl, there must be arguments that can be made I wish us good luck in contemplating them
My solution is to hold the ideal self as the highest point in morality to be the best self that you can be based what you are and what you could be within the limits of the human animal
Very thoughtful. I think the Enlightenment ultimately undermines itself, though. That is, it cut its own heart out when it jettisoned religion, because it is not possible to derive "ought" from "is", as Hume would say. The Enlightenment was doomed to eat itself from the start. I'm pretty sure that is Patrick Daneen's thesis on liberalism in his latest book, but I haven't read it. Anyway, not a very optimistic take! Good luck with the conjecturing. The only thing the West can do, in my opinion, is preserve the Christian values it's leaders so despise.
But the Enlightenment came out of Judeo-Christian thought, as the religious are so quick to point out. By your train of thought, hasn't Christianity ultimately undermined itself by birthing the Enlightenment?
Fair question. However, I do not believe that the Enlightenment was the logical outcome of Christianity, even though it follows chronologically, but rather the abandonment of Christianity, even though it retained some Christian principles, such as the belief in the uniformity of the universe, which enables scientific inquiry, as well as moral principles, such as sanctions against murder, stealing, etc, which the Enlightenment held to be universal truths. The logical outcome of the Enlightenment, however, is a society which inevitably has no sense of ultimate moral duty, because it rejects authoritative revelation and any certainty about the metaphysical. A materialistic worldview does not tell you what to do, it only describes what is.
No Carl, you are headed down the right path. There is a huge self made hole in Western Society and it is because a lot of people have never asked the questions you are asking mainly because they know they will not like the answers they might find to the questions they know they will eventually have to ask *if they are honest with themselves*.
The secular point is that we thrived through cooperation. I'm a Christian, but that's the best secular view on where morals came through that I know of, not that I'm convinced by such. Were losing religion sad to say and our numbers are going down because of it. You cover a great deal very well Sargon. Listening to you is always a treat.
"From religion" is such an vague, weasel argument that anti-theists use, hopping from one religion to another, to accuse one religion of the faults of another. Specify the religion, Sargon. Don't be afraid to name them. Don't lump them together to dismiss them collectively.
@@RealClassixX But any attempt at judging "religions" in the abstract is at best, intellectually dishonest. He won't get very far, into his pursuit of the truth, if he's framing the subject in such an abstract manner. Islam left countries stuck into medieval times, Hindus are worshiping bovine excrement and not recognizing the equal value of human life, Shintoism left Japan worshiping an emperor that tried to send all people to the slaughter. Even among Christians, you can find the stark differences in the different branches; protestants doing witch hunts, evangelicals preaching anti-Christian "gospel of prosperity" which are just pyramid schemes.
@@dkosmari None of that is relevant here. It's about the philosophical ramification of the belief in a higher power and the consequences of god's death in philosophy. The specifics of each religion are simply irrelevant in this matter.
@@RealClassixX The part that's "generic" also applies to non-religious culture. The hedonists are perpetuating themselves by taking kids from traditional families and recruiting them into their ways of life too; see the forced school lessons in masturbation, prostitution, child abuse, etc.
I have heard the nihilistic response to this train of thought from many people. Claiming out right that moral absolutes are a fallacy, or an obsolete idea of the past. But duty/responsibility is a concept we as a people are losing. I agree with the sentiment Carl. Men have a duty to sire, provide, and protect. And through upholding these duties teach men to follow suit. Women have a duty to bare, nurture, and nurish. And through upholding these duties teach women how to treat people. Having and respecting your duty isn't a lose of freedom, but an acknowledgement of reality. I'm still interested in a debate on God. I just hope you don't expect a layman's retort on your assumptions. Be well, Carl
It’s fair enough to have trouble believing in “divine revelation” in the traditional sense. But “God” “reveals” himself through all of reality, (nature, the laws of nature, our natures, etc...) Interestingly, more and more sociological studies are discovering the old truths are ...true, and the old rules are good for human thriving.
yeah sure, good old rules like burning the witches is good for human thriving, as long as you ignore those rules and trust the modern secular science instead.
Carl, thanks for tackling this particular topic. Let's talk about it. A while back I was reading about a tree that has lived for 40,000 to 80,000 years and is so large that it makes up an entire forest of genetically identical "stems" that all share the same root system. It got me thinking about human life and the ways we are like this tree. People tend to have very similar physical traits as their parents. The older I get the more I look like my dad, same hairline, same big nose, etc., for example. And I started to wonder if our life experiences were similar too. Sure enough, the things that I've experienced and the challenges I have faced, my dad faced them too. We have the same level of intelligence, the same trouble with finances, the same drive to overcome adversity. But, not just my dad. My grandfather, and great grandfather also had these same problems. Not only that, my great grandfather was a teacher and a lawyer. Nearly half of his male descendants are teachers or lawyers. I'm a lawyer. My dad and grandfather were teachers. So, the question I have is, what if we're like this tree, but our roots are the DNA of our ancestors, and the stems are the individuals of each generation? Is the goal, then, to enrich the life of any particular individual, or is it to enrich the genetic line? If you take the focus off of the individual, and put it on the genetic level, your DNA doesn't care if you have a nice car or if you travel a lot. It only cares that you propagate, and it has equipped you with the necessities to accomplish that one purpose. Maybe that's why people with children and grandchildren seem more satisfied than people without them, because they have fulfilled the genetic purpose of propagation, and we are hardwired to want that satisfaction.
What their idea of duty only one of those two I’m familiar with is buddhism and I only know they Believe in reincarnation and at some point they found peace or something like that.
@@thesmilinggun-knight9646 The Hindu idea of duty is not too dissimilar to how Jordan Peterson conceptualizes duty. It's the idea that your Dharma (which can sometimes translate to 'duty') is the role you play as an individual, a citizen, a worker, a king, a warrior, a friend, a family member, a father/mother, etc., and Dharma is the path of righteousness in all those axes which an individual might fit within. It is a recognition that regardless of whether we know the best path of action, there are nevertheless things we ought to do and things we ought not do. I'd recommend reading the Bhagavad Gita.
Group level Darwinian Fitness ought to be the god of a secular society. Eugenic group behaviour would then become the new secular virtue while dysgenic group behaviour would become the new secular sin. Carl, please interview Edward Dutton.
You don't need God to deter negative actions, you don't need a comandment. The things we hold as wrong in modern society are bad for society and the individual. Why shouldn't I murder? It's safer for me and everyone around me if murder is not allowed. Why shouldn't I steal? It's better for me and everyone around me if stealing is not allowed. Why shouldn't I lie? It's generally better for me and everyone around me if we aren't lying to each other all the time. And so on and so forth...
@@o00nemesis00o That happens, murder in self defense is a good example. I don't want to die and everyone else agrees not to kill each other. If I kill to protect my life, since I was not the aggressor, I should be let off the hook. It's not useful to lock me up because I'm not a danger to society (like dat bitch Carol Baskin jk). If it was intentional, locking me up prevents more useless death.
The line went, "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." - Voltare I actually first heard that line in the movie Easy Rider. Peter Fonda's character Captain America read if off the wall of the Whore House in New Orleans as he had the vision of his own death.
"Is there a way of deriving these kinds of duties from a secular perspective?" This is the question you're positing, and I think I can answer it but it doesn't actually seem to be what you're asking. By the end of the musing your real questions seem to be, "How can we convince secular society to increase its birthrate?", and "How can we imbue secularism with the same total authority as God's word?". As an American, its incredibly easy to understand duty outside of the context of a God or religion; I as an American love my country and its ideals, I therefore, if I wish to maintain my position and those of my fellow citizens and their descendants, must do all that I can to improve myself and the system I have inherited, keeping it strong and resilient so that we may remain powerful and supreme. So God isn't necessary, I as a rational being myself, the "rider" to use the analogy you're fond of, have chosen this path and taken these duties upon myself, all it takes is for one to choose. To tackle what I think you're actually wrestling with, we're going to have to go a little deeper. The fundamental flaw with religious thought and simultaneously its ultimate strength is the absoluteness of their axioms. This is X, that is objective, its true, there's no debating it, we must act in accordance; this can be incredibly useful as you've noticed for maintaining the cohesion of a society and compelling the population to act and live in certain ways, usually to perpetuate the strength and influence of the religion, and as most societies weren't secular that meant maintaining the society as well. But the two aren't necessarily linked, as we've seen in the Roman Empire with its syncretic hands off faith. It wasn't a Roman's duty to fight for the glory of Jupiter, it was his duty to fight for the glory of Rome, and for the defense of his brothers and sisters and his wife and children and all their friends and loved ones. So if we can achieve these things in a society without absolute religious domination, then actually we can cast off religious thinking and retain those benefits. The way to imbue a society's ideals with weight and authority is success, the exact same way a religion would do for its own gain. We can look at Rome yet again, through martial prowess and respect for the arts and sciences of their age they grew in prestige and power, and that prestige and power made people believe in that system and follow its rules and social norms. I do not think we can achieve within secularism what you seem to pine for, an absolute moral duty without a transcendental being compelling us so, but that isn't necessary, two of the most powerful and successful empires, Rome and the US managed just fine. I'll finish with what seems to be the most personal and taxing issue to you, that being your near fetishizing of fatherhood and families. You seem to start with what I believe is a fundamentally flawed position, that egoism cannot allow for the desiring of children, and then start to throw in all the madness of social justice in a kind of slap-dash way that seems inconsistent. Not all forms of egoism are hedonistic, and most of society isn't the LGBT community, even if the internet seems to be at times. The average person still has children, they just have less because unlike the developing world we derive no economic benefit forced by extreme poverty, in fact it is the opposite as most people intend to nurture their child, which costs money. So if you want to fix the problem, we have a few ways we can move forward that will result in exploding birth rates, but none without downsides. 1: Rescind certain child labor laws and couple that reform with tax breaks for every child had, you create a double whammy of potential economic gain and give people a material reason to jump in, but then you deal with potential abuse of those lax regulations and risk parents having too many children and creating a generation of under-educated, anti-social youth with no prospects. 2: Perpetuate a culture of filial piety, actively work as an individual to revere the family structure and those that head it, and also attempt to influence whatever social groups one has sway in; the problem here is what we see in China, a population subservient to the prior generation and much more accepting of authoritarian government. 3: Adopt a new theistic or non-theistic faith-based religion with the cornerstone being reproduction, with severe spiritual penalties for going against the grain; obviously the default in civilization and the option we're attempting to not return to by contemplating all this, probably not a good option. 4: My personal suggestion and somewhat of a reiteration of the second paragraph, reinforcing patriotism and reverence not for the state but for the nation and its ideals, if we create a generation of people who revere and adore the communities we've built and the friendships we've maintained and the love we've felt for those we're close to then they naturally will tend towards perpetuating that, because it is beneficial and validating to the psyche; this one is potentially the most dangerous of all, as with Rome the second the people's belief in those ideals fails so does the nation and the ideals wink out like a candle at the end of its wick. But that is the only option that doesn't compel or threaten the population, and by that measure to me is the only acceptable option. Duties are important, without them society cannot exist, but we have learned from history what can happen when we create unassailable axioms that compel a man inexorably. The reason we're here now is because that paradigm was so thoroughly flawed; that doesn't make the Enlightenment the final answer and your pondering of these problems is brutally crucial and I'm incredibly thankful for it. However I feel as though your frustration with the culture war has bled into much of these musings, you are trapped in what I'd call, "The Eternal Present", and seem to have considerable trouble dislodging yourself from that frame of reference. I respect your intelligence, more than most, but this Achilles' Heel must be dealt with or you will continue wrestling with topics that are in a grander sense more elegant and simpler than you seem to want them to be.
@The Symposium Usually I don't give a single damn if anyone reads even a word of what I wrote, but if you get the chance in between your tea harvests I'd love for you to read this and let me know what you think, I put a lot of thought into it and am thoroughly interested in your reaction. Cheers to you my eloquent cousin from across the pond, and let there be many more musings for me and those like-minded to ponder.
As much as I appreciate your sense of duty, I want to play Devil's Advocate for a minute. You said it was easy for you to have duty apart from religion and God. Very well. Why should I share your sense of duty toward a particular country? Why should my duty not be to my own self-interest? Why should I feel that way about anything other than my interests? What if I want to live my life the way I would like and harm nobody while doing it? Why shouldn't I?
@@refugeguy777 See that seems to be the issue Sargon is dealing with and while I thought I addressed that I will delve a bit on this topic specifically. Even under a complete religious stranglehold with the entire society under the thumb of a theocrat there are lots and lots of people who do not comply, and the result is some form of punishment. Sargon remarked about Muslim societies, but the way they keep them so stiff and rigid is through death for apostates and honor killings of family members, beyond the physical punishments for violation of lesser moral tenets and the ultimate threat of eternal suffering and pain. Just to get 70% of people on board you'd marginalize and even persecute the rest and then you have a society built not on strength or confidence but on fear and misery. So with the examples I gave of the US and of Rome, I think the only option is to actually build a society that people will in fact cherish and uphold because it is in their own individual best interest to maintain that status quo. I don't think anyone can give you an "objective" reason as to why you ought to act in whatever way you seem to trend towards except through a transcendent entity, and even then how does their transcendent nature validate anything at all, except by virtue of strength? At that point we get to the real truth, that all morality is as valid as the arms that can defend it, there is no grander objective set of rules, only what we can defend by force of arms. You can't ever get duties which are wholly compulsory, and even if we somehow managed it would be a fundamental rejection of individualism and all that goes with it. You ask a good question and I'm happy to go back and forth until the end of time, this is the fertile ground of philosophy and the damp earth suits me well.
@@theeccentrictripper3863 I agree that this is great. 👍 Your example of Rome is a bit misleading; most soldiers didn't fight for the glory of an individual member of their pantheon, but they did fight for the glory of the Emperor, who was venerated like a god. They also fought because Roman civic virtues like military service were ways to secure a favorable afterlife. In a secular society, the leader is not a god and there is no promise of an afterlife. How then do you create an incentive to be self-sacrificial, as duty demands us to be? And can that incentive overcome people's natural desire against duty?
@@refugeguy777 You're correct but its a bit misleading to attribute that to Rome as an entity that spanned several governmental shifts and one massive religious shift, I'm speaking a bit more to the late Republic and early Principate, where upholding the honor of the Legion and your general was important but not one that had explicit supernatural rewards and punishments. I think the Roman practice of deifying great men with the honorary Divus is a great way to start, what man in the deepest most secret place in their heart does not desire immortal fame and glory, what more than receiving divinity in the eyes of your peers for all of time? I'm stil an atheist, but I'm more comfortable within a classical framework where atheism and sycretic paganism could live side by side without the kind of dogmatic angst carried by the Abrahamic faiths and even Zoroastrianism to a certain extent. To that end I believe that lifting up those of true quality as a society will not only create ideals and examples to follow but create a kind of ultimate goal, a pursuit of making your deeds and beliefs echo throughout eternity, which is a better immortality than any religion can promise. How many countless souls will be forgotten who were washed clean in the blood of the lamb, how many Roman generals and centurions and even regular soldiers' names and deeds live on to this day as real as we are?
Carl, not all religions are the same. Core beliefs like the Golden Rule, do unto others as you would have done to yourself, is exclusively Christian. Lumping together all religions as if there aren't radical differences between them is ignorant. In fact, most of the good things you agree with "religion" on are in fact Christian... just saying.
@Lucas Wright, Buddhists teachings say "that which is disagreeable to yourself, do not do unto others" Clearly those extra 3000 years and strikingly similar wording kinda negates your point dude sorry.
@@seedsofecofrog1 negates the point? Try living in these regions of the world where Christianity is not the dominant religion. There are pretty radical differences in SE Asia or the Middle East when compared with the West. It's called manifest evidence...
@@lucasdwright don't get me wrong I'm very grateful for the jousting between Catholics and Protestants as this has indeed allowed the world to attain peace threw neighborly banter and shared ideals. But to claim an idea as fundamental as the golden rule to be exclusively Christian is ill informed at best and supremacist at worst. I personally can't think of a single moral that is exclusively Christian though I'm open to being proven wrong.
Thank you, Carl, for the enlightening conversation. I think the statements you have aired, are very well-merited and is a topic that needs to be discussed and aired a lot more.
I see it as three steps: 1) outer morals and outer laws aka religion, 2) skepticism and rationality that rejects outer claims that cannot be personally verified, 3) the birth of true and personal morality within due to the inner struggle with Life-Truth-God-Philosophy-The Other-Reality, where while outer morality is rejected to the extent it is _presumed_ (as for example by a priesthood in a typical organized religion from step 1), but can be "re-embraced" if after due skepticism is brought to it personally, and found to be of real value. Is step 3 a religious step? I think it is very much so, but not at all in the sense that it is normally understood. It is because it is a personal relationship with your own being and the greater world and because it is not based on facts so much as mystical intuition and developing a warm and meaningful relationship with "The Good", which I see as what the heartfelt search for "The God" has always been. Is it important to see this as religious? Words do not matter for this, but my experience and my prediction is anyone who follows step 3 diligently will end-up agreeing that it amounts to the higher form of what religion has always been trying to get at... at least when it has not been a corrupt and twisted way to keep power and control people e.g. the Catholic church selling absolution for sin and the many other abuses of power in organized religion that not only have nothing to do with step 3, but actually do great harm to it by driving people into lagging in step 2 longer than benefits them.
As for if it is possible to go from step 1 straight to step 3: no! You must first become what amounts to an atheist in doubting before it is possible to find authentic connection with the good.
Being raised by a Father who scoffed at the suggestion of a God who would let the world transpire into war, famine, bombing etc., without coming down hard on the perpetrators I came to believe in an overlord, nonetheless... When two of my siblings refused to have children, I went on to have four to make up for them both. :) You, sir, are wonderful. :)
If you're a fan of the Silmarillion, I think the first world is becoming a lot more like Numenor once it began to pass from glory. They abandoned their faith, their morals, and in their mad scramble for material prosperity they ultimately destroyed themselves; losing the greater part of their power and wisdom in the process. The elves were more akin to the best aspects of the Faithful, gradually diminishing from the world; the better part of their influence behind them, numbers declining, they went off to the undying land and left the world to its fate. At least, that's my take on it.
A way of arguing this; different life choices you make have different moral values, for example doing volunteer work that will benefit your community is viewed as a more moral good than a stock broker on Wall Street, who is just trying to benefit them self. Neither is seen as evil as we recognise people have freedom to spend their time as they like (as long as they don’t break any laws). But as the volunteer worker is sacrificing their free time, which could have been used for personal gain, to make communal gains,we see it as morally greater/ the duty of people who are able to do so. Liberal duty’s are not requirements, they are virtuous and you are rewarded in reputation
When it comes to self interest in the rational sense, self indulgence I think should already be considered as something counter to self interest. Your not doing yourself any good by being a slob or just following every pleasure in life. It’s in your self interest to take care of yourself to further and propel your life forward
I'm not sure why all flavors of egoism are somehow bastardized into iterations of hedonism; I kind of blame the Abrahamic faiths and their rejection of the self as a good, there's no room to ponder that as a concept its just "its all bad".
@@theeccentrictripper3863 you dont have to teach someone to pursue their own self-interest. Actually, people have to be taught to temper their self interests to get along with others.
@@Varlwyll I would fundamentally disagree, look at the Golden Rule. The corner stone of so many faiths however it is phrased is centered around self interest. "Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you" the first fundamental consideration in these faiths that reject egoism and self interest, is in fact self interest. The principle by which we interact with each other in a civil and respectful manner in the world we've created is built around self interest. So we teach it on a regular basis, tempering it leads to things like zealotry and violent idealism.
@@theeccentrictripper3863 I think it is important to note that the Christian faith and the Jewish faith both generally hold that it is good to act in a way that benefits you; but that your own desires must be kept in check both for your sake and for the sake of others. Even if you might want to, don't go sleep with every person in sight. It doesn't matter if you want your neighbors property, either buy one yourself or ask him for it, don't steal it. It doesn't matter if you don't want to do your chores, listen to your parents; they're taking care of you. It's not that the self is somehow bad, it's that our own impulses (which may be perfectly fine in moderation or the proper context) are very often going to cause us to desire to do things we really shouldn't. If a man strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other; suppress the impulse to personal vengeance. It wasn't said in vain that whoever embarks on a journey of revenge should first dig two graves. Vengeance is self destructive. The self isn't inherently bad, but personal desire must be tempered and brought under control to prevent problems for everyone. I hope that makes sense. (Side note, I know very little about Islamic teaching on morality; so I have left it out of this analysis)
@@ryanalving3785 I appreciate the perspective, I grew up Catholic under a thoroughly devout father so I know the subtleties of at least their theology, I'm a bit more rusty on the different flavors of Protestantism and I imagine we aren't counting non-Chalcedonian Christianity and its derivatives so how we approach this may be different. In the Abrahamic faiths your duty is to God and the way you live your life ought to be in a manner that properly honors him and follows his word. So the fundamental axiom, the reason why you do all that you do is because God has willed it so, to serve yourself is an option as God gave us free will, but it is the path to damnation. He who is last shall be first, and the whole Sermon on the Mount is a demonstration of this rejection of self in order to glorify God, but in the same breath the actual justifications are all self-interested. Don't pray on the street, pray in secret is a rejection of self from the perspective of a humble Christian, attempting to not boast their faith, but simultaneously an appeal to self interest as actively praying in public like a lunatic was inadvisable at the time. So at least from the perspective I was raised in this is a clear inconsistency, the self is in fact a bad thing to be suppressed because of our sinful nature, and yet its all about improving oneself. This contradiction forces a man down a road where asceticism and disconnection with one's personal desires and intent are regarded as improvement of the self, when really it leads to a disconnection with the present and the concerns of both now and of the future. You see this with the Roman Empire, as Christianity grew money was spent not on maintenance of the legions or the aqueducts or the public games but on charitable endeavors and churches, investing wealth in that which would honor God rather than things that perpetuated their own self interest and that of the empire. This resulted in their civilization crumbling around them, pursuing wealth and martial honor and perpetuating a system that honored heathen gods which degraded their souls were no longer viable options, and so the borders collapsed and barbarians swept the empire.
God looking at the atheist : So you could not live with your own failure to sustain the civilization built on my shoulders. Where did that bring you ? Back to me.
@0-KINGSLOTH-0 there will always be idiots. You can not prevent dumb people being born. Nor unexperienced folks lacking experience in life. That is part of the problem. So , how do we create something able to withstand the certain level of dumbfuckness that is periodically regenerated ? If your solutions only work for a society of high IQ Ubermenschen. It is utopian and useless. The idiots need a place and the system must be foolproof to a certain degree.
I think for the most part Jordan Peterson has absolutely nailed the ideas on this front when he said 'I act like I believe in God.' He pretty much says that God is (or commands) all of the good things that humans should do, balanced between being good individuals and social animals. He makes the point that the idea (even subconcious)of an omniscient God always watching and ready to punish you is the only way to make people behave morally in situations where they could behave immorally without being caught. If you give up on that idea then everyone would have to be policed constantly which is hell for everyone invovled. I used to be an atheist but his thinking along those lines genuinely blew my mind like few things ever have. Despite not being a true believer in a God in the traditional sense, I am oddly content in believeing in a God in Peterson's way.
You Kant find a secular origin for morality because the origin is not secular you cant change the past. If you really want to know why read the story of the garden of Eden it is a story about how men fail when they try to create their own morality. Its basically a warning about communism and intersectionalism. You seek original sin.that which you already poses.
Carl, from a liberal perspective I have to ask: Would you accept a debt (or a duty) that you didn't agree to take on? If somebody throws money at you without your consent, then shows up a decade later demanding payment with interest, would you meet his demands? Obviously, not. So then why do woman and men have a duty to procreate outside the moral authority of a universal ethic? I didn't consent to being born, nor to being part of a society, so why do I owe my parents or my government anything? I just don't think liberalism can resolve this contradiction. Your issue is that liberalism (which is only ONE of the products of the enlightenment I should point out) is behaving in a self destructive manner, but how can that even be a bad thing without an authority on morality? Why is it necessary for liberalism to continue if liberal minded people as a collective can just choose not to?
I think the term "Your duty" in regards to having the children at all is what the issue is. As a point, if you can't afford to have the children or you truly feel you are not up to the task of raising children then it should be your duty to not have them or wait until you can afford/be able to raise them.
I actually agree with you on this as the truth is as we are all human. We have the dream to have a good life, however the interpretation of what a good life is, what we are having difficulties with.
We should cherry pick bits of religions that are morally right, despite them coming from a wrong source (and probably because all but fundamentalists can recognise that morality outside religion has a valid, empathetic, basis).
Glad you mentioned Haidt's elephant/rider piece. For me, its where ideologies can fall down. Things can look great on paper - but they'll look shit in reality, if human nature & emotional thinking, isn't incorporated and/or is recognised in some way.
I appreciate where the videos have wandered as of late; they deal with reality in a measured, rational approach. Women postpone marriage and children for a number of reasons, but one is how much value our society puts on what an individual earns/produces. Why not build incentives into society’s structure for women to spend their early years in the home? What about a system which allows women to have lifelong access to her university? Young women who begin a program can stop, have a family, and return several years or a decade later with only a refresher course or two. Access to university counselors who are trained to translate household management experience into CV and transcript material - because running a well-maintained household DOES require negotiation, leadership, discipline, dedication, endurance, and many other soft-skills. Participation in school councils, aid in the classroom, etc. Then there is navigating eldercare, finances, market assessments concerning purchases, etc. Work it into the system to acknowledge how women have continued personal development outside of the traditional work environment. Or, perhaps financial credits to women who return to school in their mid or later 30's after having raised children to school age? X amount of financial aid for X number of children? If we are discussing the idea of strengthening families, more financial aid to women who remain married? The reality is many women would stay and raise their children until school age if given reasonable options, but raising children also comes to an end at some point. It is a dismal situation if an intelligent woman who spent the better part of a decade working hard in the home is seen as beginning at square 1 when it’s time for her to enter or reenter the workforce. Men, good men, my father being one of them, work hard to provide for their families, and they are -well, were- celebrated for it. (It's a crime good men aren't celebrated for their sacrifices, but that's a different post under a different video) If we want women to make their necessary sacrifices, acknowledge culture and human nature and create a system to incentivize the results we want. Unfortunately, this is more likely to work than a call to duty or personal-responsibility. I am a 32-year-old woman, and there has been an aggressive societal push for me to seek out a career first and foremost since childhood - and I was raised by a stay-at-home mom in a Christian household who did not subscribe to that cultural norm. Rather than blasting, “Be an independent career woman!” at my 8-year-old self, a message of, “Raise a solid, well-ordered family, and then get into the workforce” would made my early 20's much less chaotic. *I am sure there are issues with the examples I’ve suggest, so be creative and help me think of better ones.*
I would consider it in terms of short term versus long term consequences. Homosexual sex is prima facie consequence free. However, in the long term, you have increased spread of VD. Also there may be issues of kids raised by gay couples to have potential developmental problems. Long term versus short term is where I think the key to moral understanding resides. But the human mind can take decades to truly appreciate this. Hence we need the concept of God as a way of saying "this is moral!" Without having to explain why, because to empirically determine what is good takes too long.
I think Cultural Christanity without abandoning liberalism is key to both preserving our nations and out freedoms, it doesn't have to be an either or choice I believe
While I don’t entirely agree, I find it difficult to put exactly *why* that is into writing. So instead I’ll simply offer thanks, for giving me a new perspective and the motivation to further examine my own.
1) Living things generally strive to maintain their life. 2) So, they will favor environments and actions that maintain life, and unfavor things that do not. 3) Some evironments and actions are better at maintaining life. 4) From #3 the inverse is also true. 5) Humans are a living thing. 6) Humans have minds. 7) Since humans have minds, each can objectively measure that some environments and actions are better at maintaining human life than others. 8) Humans, as living things generally wish to maintain their lives, and favor environments and actions that do, and disfavor those that don't. 9) Human minds consider their continuation to be standard, and their termination substandard. 10) So human minds, in relation to that standard mentioned in #9, consider non-life encouraging actions and environments substandard, and life encouraging actions and environments to be standard. __________________________________________________________________________________________ Conclusion: Some actions and environments are worse or better than others for humans. I think "The Tao" could be found in reconciling any conflicts between the last four, which are produced by trying to figure out "whats better for who". By the way, only non-mammals can morally affort to be indifferent, in part because their species can sustain that.
Awesome and necessary video Carl. I am technically an atheist, but have to come to see the value of religion (particularly Christianity), to a society. Haidt's comments in relation to this in The Righteous Mind were extremely important in developing my thinking around this. JBP's approach to religion is also useful and important in maybe developing a rational approach and appreciation of religion. Three comments he made stand out in this regard: man needs 'God', 'God' is what is most important to you, and act as if 'God' exists.
Although I am not a religious person I do recognise the necessary utility of religion. I believe that necessary utility is the true power of God. Your other point on people not having children is absolutely correct. As I begin to meander towards my late thirties I am seeing so many people continue to behave like children. I'm starting to think that there are actually very few true adults around.
I've enjoyed this channel, as well as the other channels you have. Thank you for examining and wrestling with this topic. This is a serious topic and one that ought not to be ignored. I agree with you one many other things, but our worldviews are from opposite perspectives. You have professed yourself a staunch atheist, whereas I was raised a Christian. The examination of flaws in the content of different theological denominations led me to study at my denomination's seminary, and strengthened my understanding of the axioms that different views hold, including my own. I look forward to seeing this unfold in subsequent videos.
Sargon the major thing you need to consider is that people who want children want to have them in a good culture. You may love your culture but that doesn't mean a person can just force themselves to love children that they didn't want. What should be done is the celebration of the family and teach people healthy versions of different family life styles. THESE INCLUDE: -Dos and Don'ts of raising kids (like discipline, not being a helicopter parent, etc.) -How to better understand your childs individual needs. -What is rewarding about having a family. -How to share your culture and ideology with your children. -How to maintain a personal life while being a parent. -How to raise them to be strong willed; independent; morally good; and how to help them find themselves. This is my quick take on the subject.
I understand Carls still working through a lot of this stuff and so probably isn't ready to draw the concrete conclusions on the enlightenment he'd like to, but I'd love it if he wrote a book about his thoughts on it and specifically how it impacts the idea of civic virtue. If he could post a reading list I'd also be delighted as I'd love to see all the sources that have influenced his thinking on this.
Nice to see an atheist who doesn't think religion is just a novelty in the modern age.
I grew up in a catholic family in a catholic school but was atheist from quite early on, while around that stuff all the time it's hard not to hate it, but since I've left high school its been much easier to see it more for the outcome, and the outcome of atheism in the west has been excessive pride of inherent characteristics (which is a sin in christianity), plummeting birth rates as people dont value family as much as christians typically do, and the whole socialist theory of rejecting all past wisdom to create a virtueless promiscuous society with no responsibility other than satisfying ones own personal pleasures. so I'd much rather live with christians than fellow atheists xD
@@awildtomappeared5925 Ironically it's kinda what the Christians said would happen. I'm Agnostic so I'm kinda up in the air, but I always realized that culturally Christianity had a bunch of good useful things in it
I am an atheist too, but one of my favorite quotations is this one from G. K. Chesterton: "When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then became capable of believing in anything".
The Western world of today shows us how very true that statement is!
@@awildtomappeared5925 it's important to acknowledge what religion is (or was) used
primarily
for.
As beacon of reason and kindness in times where are explanation wasn't easy to obtain.
To be able to explain something just makes the achievement look less worthy.
"The fear of responsibility is the disease of our time" - Otto von Bismarck (1870)
Hardly surprising, considering the fact that, when you combine people with an IQ lower than 110 with zero personal moral/ethical code (not that they could intellectually forge one on their own anyway), and society. You end up with people who devolve into the insanity which we see today. The reason humanity would invent God, even if there were no god, is that, try as they might, people of low IQ can not forge a moral framework based on intelligent observation and personal investiture.
God gives humanity a reason, heaven and hell, to pursue virtue regardless of if the individual person has the capacity (intellectual, emotional, self-discipline, etc.) to create a high quality moral/ethical code of life.
Atheism is singularly responsible for Modern Feminism, Black Lives Matters, the removal of fathers from their family, and every other unhealthy, destructive idea we face today. How? As I just mentioned, it is zealous people combined with bad ideas and no healthy moral or ethical code as a basis to refute these bad ideas.
For example, freedom has a cost. Those with a strong and clear moral or ethical code based on sound reasoning know exactly why keeping freedom is a cost worth paying for. Those without any moral or ethical code don't see any reason why you shouldn't stop people from saying bad things (censorship), owning guns (disarmament), create safe-spaces (segrigation). They have no concept of why freedom should be protected or defended because they see it as doing something helpful because they can't define what "helpful" is. Another example is, my kids. It is helpful to let my kids suffer and have them watch me suffering. Why? Because it teaches them, by my guidance and example, how to suffer with dignity and composure and respect. If I protect them from all suffering and I always tell them not to worry or pay attention when I am suffering then when they do reach the world and begin suffering for the first time in their lives they will snowflake the heck out! They won't have a clue what to do and will view those who cause suffering as evil, bad, and horrible people. Now, with that example in mind, I know that God says, "Spare the rod and spoil the child." I also know that there are good, healthy, rational, sane reasons for making your kids suffer for their misdeeds. Yes, with me being the architect of their suffering. Why? Because on a core level, they love me and I love them. They need to know that someone who they love can cause pain to them AND that the pain does not mean that I love them less to any degree. Feeling bad about a decision that someone has made in your regard does not mean that hell has come to your world. Yet, people without moral code and who can not create one for themselves, have no frame of reference and no way to figure out why suffering offers any benefit what so ever. All they know is, it hurts a lot. Hurt = bad. So, Atheism, on a worldwide scale, gives authority to incompetence to judge for themselves and unfortunately, they simply do not have the brainpower or guidance to forge a moral or ethical code for themselves. Atheism says, there is no God, self is the highest state and ultimate judge, which is exactly what they have done. They don't like borders so, open borders. They judge based on empty, shallow, well-meaning yet self-defeating, reasons.
As a final example, I offer the new Star Wars movies. A perfect example of what no one can relate to. Why? Most fans of the movie have some personal moral structure, which is why the themes of good and evil, light and dark, resonate with them. Yet, the new movies have zero clear picture of right and wrong so, they make no sense, they are confused, they suppose women can do anything and we all know that, because men can't do everything they like, women can't either. There's almost no growth for any of the characters and some end up worse, devolving and becoming less proficient than they were when they started out! They don't grow because the people telling the story never had to grow. They had silver-spoon lives, never got told that they were bad and never evolved as a person. And that's exactly what we got.
God offers all humanity a way forward with sanity, even if they personally are emotional fruit-cakes. You don't have to be brilliant to do something smart. You simply have to have good reason to do what is sand and rational. God provides both emotional and rational reasons alike. And to those who say, "but, but, all the contradictions, bla, bla, bla", can go shove it. God appeals to humanity and humans are not all rational so why then would everything be written to appeal to YOU, who are rational? What? You think the nut-jobs of the world are beneath persuasion to a sane path through life simply because what is required to persuade them isn't entirely rational? How absolutely superior of you. And it doesn't change the fact that society would be better off with all humanity cohesively living by certain basic moral norms and by clear code of conduct, feeling, and valuing things. Frankly, making all the rational people or all the emotional people outcasts is just plain stupid. So, for the rational, God appeals to them through rational means and for emotional people, God appeals to them as well. That is the superiority of God over man. God reaches out to man anywhere, any time, at any level of function. Smart, brilliant, slow, oaf-ish, whatever. He offers all humanity a way forward. Just because you read something that seems to contradict something else that doesn't mean that it is not clearly understood by someone else.
It seems Carl is 2 steps away from changing his nickname from Sargon of Akkad to Augustine of Hippo.
@EriolTolkien
He would make for a popular saint, no doubt.
Seanp12
I’d be down for that crossover episode
Carl would make a good Catholic.
I'm not sure about that, given his firm anti-child rape stance
“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6
@Allan Tidgwell Is it wrong to "indoctrinate" one's children with values that are conducive to a healthy society instead of potentially wrecking themselves and others?
It's one matter to indoctrinate a child with Christian dogma; religion is a matter I believe people should decide for themselves (I say this as a Christian), but its another matter to indoctrinate a child with decent human civility. "Don't rape, don't bully, do help others to the degree that you are able, do find a worthwhile pursuit that can sustain you and master it as best as you can."
"A line in a book that I agree with"-That Aforementioned Book
@Allan Tidgwell by that logic, the proper raising children in any extent is indoctrination.
@Allan Tidgwell wouldn't the world be better if we all kept the 10 commandments? A lot of misery is caused because people don't. I'm not saying to believe in God, but as a standard for decent human conduct.
Allan Tidgwell you’re not reading the Bible with any degree of nuance. I don’t claim to understand the reason for every single Old Testament commandment, but if you really have read the Bible, you don’t need me to explain the reason for sacrifice and tithes.
This may be one of your most thought-provoking, introspective videos ever dude. Love it
Most people forget Nietzsche was actually lamenting when he said "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him."
Unless I'm mistaken, he only lamented it because he saw religion as a vehicle of power through which great men could impose their will upon society, rather than actually affording any legitimacy to a given doctrine. That is to say he valued the power and influence manifest in the institution, and not the proclamations of said institution.
DesignatedSpoon only leftist commies think he doesn’t.
@BeGood 2Me he knew very few people could overcome themselves and feared the death of god because religion kept people from using their slave morality to cause extreme pain because religion keeps slave morality in the abstract and doesn't try to apply it in reality like communism which collapses because it's built on a purposeful misunderstanding of life
@@yaboi4831 and we shall never wash the blood from our hands. Paraphrasing, but does that sound triumphant to you?
@@yaboi4831 Communism and nazism was a direct response to the death of religion and elevation of science to the new religion, and men as gods. This is why they are both totalitarians. Just like god is. Only difference is that god doesn't / can't exercise his power. Only his followers can. The communists hated religion and actively suppressed it. the nazis were not especially religious but as long as the church didn't go against the state i think it wasn't as heavily sanctioned. Germany has a lot of Lutherans who the nazis didn't want to make enemies of.
Women who chose career over family feel attacked by the question of duty because the question of duty is a direct (albeit unintended) attack on their life choices. Unless you have already been critically examining you life, coming face to face with the results can be rather jarring.
Now here's my thinking; there is responsibility an individual owes themselves to not let the animal run wild. The individual must become stronger.
Strength is everything in life. If you do not cultivate strength, you will not lead a good life. This is why you do not over indulge, it weakens you.
You are and animal, you need exercise. You need to run, to hunt, to fight. You need to struggle. There is a very strong biological reason why working out not only feels good but also makes you attractive. This is the nature telling the individual how they need to live.
It's more than just the strong survive, the strong are not oppressed. The strong are able to maximize their freedom. But to attain that strength, you will naturally check your freedoms with responsibilities. Cultivating the right kind of strength for the individual is a life long pursuit.
I really agree with the points you make, they are some of the most important. However, the way I choose to frame it is that that 'balance is everything in life', not strength. Balance is the one quality that you can't have too much or too little of (thoguh strength is almost always a good thing). Just my two cents
@@cadarn1274 I'm a Taoist so to me, balance is strength.
This also applies if you are a gymnast.
"Women who chose career over family feel attacked by the question of duty because the question of duty is a direct (albeit unintended) attack on their life choices. Unless you have already been critically examining you life, coming face to face with the results can be rather jarring."
VERY well put, my friend. I think Sargon struck a chord when he said women must, logically speaking, have moral duties towards families. I don't see how it could be wrong, and continual generational neglect of duties on the female side could ONLY lead to a, um, "deficit" of duties. EITHER each generation, women keep shirking their half of the duties, OR the men keep picking up more than their fair share. It seems VERY foolish of us to keep ignoring this and chalk it up to the quaint fancy of religion, or the outdated attitudes of tradition.
A lot of them see the career as their duty.
Shadow Skull
Your idiotic wish will simply lead to extinction then.
Congrats.
As for “bully”, this stuff is only possible because of state enforced feminism at gunpoint. There is nothing natural about feminism. It is the most unnatural thing of all and must be forced by government bullying.
I would strongly recommend 2 books for you to read. The Problem of Pain, and Mere Christianity, both written by C.S.Lewis. He is able to articulate and discuss all these different moral aspects and dialogues in a way that is both fun and easy to understand. He actually spent most his early life as an atheist so he knows how to pitch all his arguments with that perspective in mind.
And if you want a really fun read, try The Screwtape Letters
BrooksKingdomHeart I hope he reads this comment- I was going to suggest the exact same thing! Carl seems very close to discovering the logical arguments for the existence of God that Lewis so eloquently proposed. Mere Christianity is an amazing work that everyone should read a least once whether you believe in God or not.
Have a great Sunday and God bless 💜
Ive come to have more of a sacramental view of a Tolkien, but I am forever in debt to CS Lewis and his ability to speak to me as an athiest in exactly those books you mentioned. I couldn't get over the psychological insights in Screwtape Letters, and I found myself thinking, 'wait a second. If this book is fantastic psychology, what does that say about the existence of something like screwtape?' And the same can be said for Doystoyevsky, Shakespeare, Dickens, etc.
@@AjaxNixon I love Tolkien's works. He showed me the vast spectrum on which thoughts and morals and ideas are predicted on. While there are absolutes in light and dark, good and evil, however, most things, especially the Human experience are varied shades of grey. C.S.Lewis is somewhat opposite in his approach, in that once you understand the fundamental framework everything just falls into place, its so simple even a child can understand it.
Interestingly, both views are indeed true. Reading both authors works for me was akin be being made aware that you are sailing on a boat across an ocean Which is knowledge and understanding, sometimes you peer beneath the surface and realize in awe how deep and vast it all goes. Much like Plato's allegory of the Cave.
Perhaps it's knowing this, which makes the secular argument against religion as something only uneducated (dumb) people would ever accept particularly stinging and short sighted.
I recently discovered one of Lewis's dialogues he had with one of his atheist colleagues about science and religion regarding that very topic. Here's the link, I hope you enjoy.
m.ua-cam.com/video/AJu0oYvi-cY/v-deo.html
Watching Carl scratch that itch offers as the same enjoyment Morpheus must of felt watching Neo struggle with accepting the reality of the Matrix before they unplugged him.
"The Screwtape Letters" is great. The follow up "Screwtape Proposes A Toast" is awe inspiring! I will add the other two titles to my reading list.
I think the problem here is something very fundamental. "You can't have your cake and eat it too." A secular, individualist society does not have an authoritative source from which people must draw moral duties and obligations. Indeed it cannot by the very condition that each individual is the supreme moral agent and is authoritative to themselves and themselves alone. You cannot put something above that without fundamentally compromising the values and principles of a secular, individualist society. Such a condition will shift into a position where people will make the most sensible choices for themselves, maximizing their own payoff matrices, but which can also create externalities that are harmful to society.
The problem with the West isn't freedom it's that people refuse the responsibility for what they have authority over. Women specifically want to be free and have no kids in marriage but also want to have men or the government take responsibility for them which creates an imbalance between responsibility and authority which burdens other people and causes a ripple effect from people who DO take responsibility and then shirk it.
@The Coward Liberius I'm not married to freedom I just think if you're as free as you can be while being responsible your society dominates. That being said if you're taking care of someone whether directly or indirectly through taxes or whatever, they're not free and you're within your rights to have more authority in society and/or over them. What I have a problem with is a free adult that takes responsibility for themself is told you can't do that non harmful thing because of my feelings despite it only involving themself.
My way of fixing this is only net tax payers vote for Congress and military veterans/registrees vote for president. This ties rights to responsibility and hurts you directly by making you pay for your stupid vote in extra money or blood.
A secular individualist that has no authoritative source will steer to the rational conclusion of egoism. The poison that religion has left upon the world makes men still reject the ultimate moral duty and righteousness, to serve the self.
@The Coward Liberius yeah, the founding fathers wanted to stop the majority from voting for a reason. If you limit voting to the responsible men will be the overwhelmingly represented and will put in pro family laws that create a community driven positive feedback loop AND have a lot of freedom.
@@entropino9928 Can't wait for someone to say serving the self is the problem, and how no rational being would want to help anyone else and leave a legacy. Egoism is deeply misunderstood.
"Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain. But you feel it. You've felt it your entire life. That there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is but it's there, like a splinter in your mind driving you mad."
The issue with including Japan in the idea that women having careers is that it is a hugely conservative culture that takes a very 1960’s approach to gender roles.
Having lived in Japan for 4 years or so-and I’m going to really summarize far more complex a problem here-I think the problem there is the culture views people as cogs, does not socialize them well, and the extreme feminization of men. Further, it infantilizes young people well into their mid-20’s. I’ve known 23/24 year old men who don’t know how to talk to women or claim they won’t have a sexual encounter until after college because they “aren’t mature enough.”
I think if you just broadened your wording to say that these highly modern countries are interfering with gender dynamics and how people view/pursue relationships, you’d be dead on the money. But at least in Japan, it’s less about women getting careers and more about men being feminine/never given a proper arena in which to mature. Japan essentially treats you like a dumb kid who needs their hand held and ought to be virginal until you’re 26 then expects you to get married and pop out kids ASAP. And that disregards economic barriers, too. I’d argue it’s treatment of women, however, is a little bit too old fashion. It’s got this weird Overton window of femininity going on in which men are girly and women are so feminine that they pretend to be stupid and things of that sort.
I definitely believe the the issue is, broadly, these societies messing with a fundamental paradigm. It’s trying to fix something in human behavior that isn’t broken.
I'm going to try to make this concise, I've been thinking about this a lot and I think I'm on to something.
The successful and well functioning society is composed of a few layers that work together to form a cohesive social space. Since the enlightenment and especially since the postmodern era, we seem to be chipping away at them constantly and we have been seeing the ill effects for some time. One of the major fault lines has been drawn by the combination of enlightenment and post modernist thinking. The enlightenment birthed a kind of obsessive scientism which seeks to challenge absolutely anything that cannot be empirically proven. Postmodernism then provides a pathway to further dismantle and problematize anything we used to "know" that now cannot fit the measure of fact, ensuring that not only do we seem to have endless problems, but they are also unresolvable. This dual assault is happening on all fronts, but it has been specifically successful in it's attack on what I refer to as "the Cultural layer" of society.
As I see it, the well-functioning society is composed of a few layers. The Family, The Culture, and the State. I see the three layers as each governing a part of our development and behavior as individuals and as a society. They are something like; The Family governs what is, The Culture, what ought, and The State, what ought not. Obviously no one thinks the State should quiet the screaming infant, or the Family should arrest and prosecute the murderer, so there is some general agreement amongst people still that these exist.
Here's the problem we are in currently, the Cultural layer in the west was very much tied up in religion. Religion was the technology by which the ought was communicated and governed. This governance was enacted through "responsibility" and "shame", not punitive measures by the state. Just to go over a few important oughts; you ought to treat everyone as you would like to be treated, you ought to enter into a monogamous relationship and have a family, you ought to look after and care for your extended family, you ought to defend those around you from anyone who may seek to hurt them. It's very difficult to say that it's all just a fantasy, invented to control you and yet you should still follow all of it's rules.
So now we are seeing cascading failures across the Cultural layer that are destabilizing societies because we have removed the authority that stood behind these oughts. What's worse is where these failures hurt the most, we are seeing the State come to fill the gaps, whether it be in welfare for broken families, or in hate speech laws. The last thing we want to see is State capture of the Cultural layer, but that appears to be what is happening. Trouble is, it took us thousands of years to build the cultural technology of religion, now that it is toppled it cannot just be replaced. I'm afraid we are in a position where we are just left to suffer the consequences of our hubris.
Hope this was worth your time. I'm sure someone else has put it better, but I am not hearing it said, so here we are.
That is quite a good analysis, but in the interest of providing you with some hope; we have set down the tools of religion, let the textbooks of that science grow dusty on the shelves, and moved off into other areas; but none of it is gone. All the records of its practice, the instructions on how it functioned, and the tools to make it work again are still there; precisely where we left them. The textbooks weren't destroyed, merely stored away on a high shelf. It may take some growing pains to get the old machinery back in tip top shape, but if we put the work in we can get it all back; even if we may have to first let the deconstructionism finish gutting itself and let it bleed out.
Repentance has always been the first step of Godliness, if we turn around and go back to what we abandoned God will restore all we have lost. All he requires of us is that we admit we were wrong.
Psalm 51:17
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.
Pro Tip: When you use the word "duty" (or a synonym) with a strong, independent womyn, you completely short-circuit their brain and no rational conversation can follow.
maybe if you could trick a woman into saying it for you... Women can't hear ideas from men if they're unflattering.
I just start asking about men's obligations, then (once they've set up the mechanism of duty, self-actualization, and everything in between) I demand to know why they hate women?
"What I don't hate women"
"Yes, you do. You think men are strong enough to live through failure and smart enough to learn from it. So why do you hate women so much to think women can't if not hatred?"
...I don't have many friends 😂
telling someone they have a "duty" implies that they are accountable to you, subservient to your world vision. no one appreciates that kind of condescension, whether its coming to or from a man or woman. sorry, i owe you nothing just as you owe me nothing. have kids, dont have kids, believe in magical sky daddy or dont, its your choice and i dont care either way, just keep your ideals out of my face. your opinions are not facts, i am not beholden to your subjective ideals or "duties."
@@cwg9238 For someone who claims to not care, you sure are awefully concerned about whether someone is superordinate to you or not.
@@cwg9238 if "in fact" you have a duty, then it's not subjective. You and/or others will suffer for your dereliction. If I have a duty of care, it's not because someone says so... it's because others will suffer if I do nothing. Duty is not from consent or contract, it's from ends.
Provide the right incentives and the sense of "duty" will follow. Reward responsible parenthood with tax breaks and social honours. Discourage parasitic behaviours. Screen immigrants for their motives, values and willingness/ability to integrate.
this
What is "right"? There is no ought from an is. It is that simple.
@@lukeannett I described my opinion of what "right" is in the second, third and fourth sentences of my post. There's the "ought" right there; take it or leave it.
@@Ijusthopeitsquick None of those things are oughts.
@@lukeannett O for God's sake.
You’re spot on the biggest issue of the modern age, which makes me baffled as to the push back you’re getting on this line of thought.
"If God is dead then all things are permissible." .. good thing He is alive and well.
As an ex mormon turned athiests and I totally agree that alot of the things I learned from my parents/religion that have stuck with me. That being moderation and family values. But I think I'm a bit of an outlier in that regard. Every single Exmo I've met has either turned full socialist (who hate their parents and the religious) or hipster (drug addled and hate society). Rejecting an entire worldview at such a young age often results in throwing out the baby with the bath water.
That's really sad. The excess of order creates an equal opposite reaction and backlash with chaos. Unless you really stop and think about it I guess it is a natural path to go down.
See I went from atheist to Anglican, and I don’t see it myself, how can you take a worldview without the foundation of it? Surely it’s like building a house upon the sand.
The most important moral question is "Why should I?"
Religious ideas of good and evil don't define evil based on the outcome -- whether it causes harm. Indeed, doing so leads to an inconsistent moral ideology, because sometimes causing harm is justified. More than that, it leads to the idea that the ends justify the means, because one must justify any harm they inflict with the promise that _less harm will occur in the end_ . Of course, there's no way to check and see if this is finally true! But: why should I care if another is harmed by what I do? Why should I be willing to suffer some small pain (taxation, for example) for someone else's good (public education, maybe).
But religious people hold the moral truths to be a sort of natural law, self-evident in the consciences of humans, made explicit in the revealed word of God. Religious people won't say that something is evil because God has forbidden it; rather, God has forbidden it _because_ it is evil. Good and evil are objective ideas. Good, being defined in God (who never changes) and evil, being defined as anything that is not good. Like an arrow that has missed the bull's-eye.
The religious idea answers the question of Why Should I? in a few different ways-- a) you should, simply _because it is good_ , b) because God has commanded it, and he is in authority; also he is to be thanked (or blamed!) for all you have and all you are, and c) because God has power over you, to punish you for wrongdoing. This is convincing to everyone. To the compassionate, a) is as beautiful a reason as one can desire. To the one who values propriety and order, b) is a good reason. And to the selfish, c) is a good reason (the absolute worst fate that can befall you is hell, so one must avoid this fate _even if_ it means being unselfish!). The moral ideas are sound. The only question is, does God in fact exist? And what is he like?
Even if you disagree with God's moral ideas, you must obey the rules of your own nature. If God created you (whether through billions of years, watching over the evolution of life, or by a momentary act of creation-- it makes no difference), then he made the rules by which you live. He created the stomach, so you must eat or you will starve. He created the atom, gravity, and light. You don't have a choice about following these kinds of rules. Therefore, moral laws, if they were put in place by God, must be followed in exactly the same way. The only difference is that he has given us a choice!
So, to your point about creating a set of Secular Duties, the trouble is" Why should I?" What I have inherited from my society, I cannot be burdened with the responsibility of upholding it. No one asked me if I ever wanted to be a part of it! It's important to point out that the religious person would agree that you have an obligation to your society, only because they agree that one ought to repay good with good. But unless you already agree with this idea, you don't have an obligation to do it. Religion protects against this, because even those who disagree with the moral ideas must obey them out of fear. There's nothing to motivate the truly selfish in the atheistic worldview, because there won't be life after death, nor any final judgement.
So I think you've done a good job explaining "What should I do?", and even described a good way of finding out what else we should do when the question arises again. But, only because the assumption is made that one ought to do something in the first place!
To the question of one's obligation to produce children-- when God said "Be fruitful and multiply" and commanded Adam and Eve to subdue the earth, he was speaking to the Jews (Well, when he told it to Moses many years later)! Jews weren't particularly concerned with spreading their religion, since Jewishness is a hereditary thing-- the sons of Abraham are the children of the promise. Ancient Israelites would have felt motivated to bear children because they saw their heritage as pure, blessed and set apart by God. It bears mentioning that the firstborn child under Jewish law was ceremonially dedicated to God, and a sacrifice was made to "redeem" the child (much like Isaac was redeemed at Jehovah-Jirah, and like Israel was redeemed at Passover). Moreover, every male child was circumcised, to bear a sign of God's covenant in their body. So, Jews weren't born as individuals sharing a common worldview. They were members of a family, sharing a common ancestry and final destiny. They were blessed and chosen by God. To them, it was less important that one believe the right things about God than that one was a child of Abraham that obeyed God's covenant.
When Judaism led to Christianity, the obligation to bear children may have then become related to spreading the religion. But evangelism is a peculiar trait of Christianity. All Christians have an obligation to spread God's word and his kingdom, because the sons of Abraham, through Isaac, are born of faith, not through flesh.
Also, the most obvious reason to have children -- if God felt compelled to create beings in his image, then creating new life must be a good thing in itself. We're simply following his example if we choose to have our own children!
@Matthew Chenault Interesting quote! Another comment said something about Hume's Guillotine, which seemed like a more straightforward way of presenting what I'm saying here.
See, Augustus WAS right after all.
Remember, Science is about "Could" and Religion / Faith is about "Should".
Nice and it rhymes. But science is about the search for "it is". Religion presumes to already know "it is".
@
Well said, good sir.
@@Xbalanque84 , thank you, good sir!
I think a big issue is that science is not very well defined or taught. Religion can't domineer science or it stagnates. But science can't answer moral questions all on its own. It still needs some kind of anchor
Science & religion; Reason & faith; Knowledge & wisdom; two halves of the whole... each, together, are necessary for a well-rounded mind, body & spirit of the human being.
"we can just bring immigrants in and fill in the duties that I was supposed to fulfill." Great idea. Reaaallll nice. Also shows how little they know about the history of integration. Ask the Barbarian tribes how Roman they felt once Rome ran out of money to keep them united. Seems like a whole plethora of theories around integration and social science and racism and tolerance could be scrapped in favor of just good old fashioned duty and responsibility.
No civilization without religion and a superiority complex survives. Why should it if the citizens don't think themselves better and that on a unquestionable level?
With doubt and questions you arrive at the same point. There is no external reason to continue something started.
Even romans noted that their high and mighty women of society prefer hedonism and pets to bearing children.
Now you have proper knowledge of procreation, condoms and chemical birth control.
How are people even in awe that we are below replacement in societies which value hedonism, atheism and equality?
Woman who are not hedonistic and think about having children go to the left and arrive logically at the conclusion that resources are limited, and them having one kid would take more than some women in Africa having seven. So they don't have any.
Good to see your sensitive, thoughtful foray into this most urgent and painful of subjects. I know so many women who are 'advised' to forgo marriage and family. The results are just awful, with sadness, despair, pointlessness and marking time as the hallmarks. No one knows what it is going to be like, until they are there.
But I can tell you, being a grandmother is THE MOST ASTOUNDINGLY BEAUTIFUL THING I HAVE EVER KNOWN! And no one told me of this either. Why are we not informing our kids and ourselves as a society of these huge truths? Honestly, the grandmother thing is ASTONISHING. I totally loved being mother, but being a grandmother is a higher wonder, a higher love, a more sublime beauty! Honestly!! I want to tell the world and not try to reduce the stunning level of love and purpose that has become evident in life for me.
GRANDPARENTHOOD IS THE BEST THING EVER!!!
Low birth rates in the West aren't a consequence of the Enlightenment, but instead, it is the welfare state that shifts the numbers. I would have had more kids but I was overtaxed & overworked to pay for others' govt benefits so I could not afford more kids. Govt policy incentivizing lower birth rates for the capable and higher birth rates for the incapable.
I am one of four siblings, so same culture, same opportunities, same privilege. Two grew up to be independent and had 2-3 kids; two grew up to be dependent and had 6-10 kids. Average those numbers and that results misses the actual trend.
Kant as the Enlightenment's murderer and advocate of duty lead to the welfare policies that caused such a trend.
Jim Woods Advocating for duties didn’t harm us, that is frankly idiotic.
The "moral duties" religion prioritizes we're derived through observations of human interaction that are understood to benefit the communities we form. The deist teaching, in my opinion, is to pressure children and dimwits to abide the moral good without fully understanding why it is necessary.
If the fear of an invisible man in the sky serves to keep those who are unable to see the big picture in line, then why not?
I'm an atheist too, but there's too many people who seem to need an authority directive to decide for them. Nietzsche understood this, the death of God would not usher in the age of reason, it would leave an intellectual vacuum to be filled by ideology.
Basically, it's a choice between religion(in traditional western form) and what we have now, which is essentially Alister Crowleys' "do what thou wilt"
If you've got a viable secular alternative I'm willing to help spread it.
It didn't *have* to be religion enforcing the moral duties. It was just a convenient vehicle to enforce moral duties. Personally, I don't see the reason why we need to re-invent the wheel. If we need moral obligations to keep the truck moving, why reject the design?
The difficulty arises in advocating for a religion one does not believe in, that those who do not believe it will feel no obligation to accept its moral injunctions. They will, in essence, be advocating for rules for the people which they themselves are not bound to obey. Because however it may be argued that acting in such a way and not this other way is better for the people, or the society, or so on; it can never provide any force upon the person who simply decides that they don't care that it is better to act such, and would prefer to live by the maxim "do as thou wilt."
Because the injunction to care about society or other people is itself a part of the Divine law, a man who does not believe in the Divine law does not need to care about anyone but themself. You can tell him all day and night about what consequences his actions will have, but if he either doesn't believe in or care about the consequences no law will hold him.
Religion is a thing that matters only if it is true, and if we find that it is necessary for our survival we must endeavor to discover a true religion. Nothing of worth can be achieved by propagating the dogmas of a false god, because inevitably those dogmas will fail, and the society will die anyway. It is an old truth, but it still holds sway; without a true God there really is no reason for us not to live for our own pleasure, because it does nothing for us to sacrifice the enjoyment of today to give prosperity to a world we will never see. As the scripture says, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.
1 Corinthians 15:32
"If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not? let us eat and drink; for to morrow we die."
If we only have one life, selfishness is as logical as anything else; and it would be perfectly in character to grab what you can before you lose everything, because dead is dead. If we need religion, we need the truth; and if we need a true religion, then all men from the greatest to the least need it. When it comes to God, it's all or nothing.
Matthew 12:30
"He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad."
There's either no place for atheism in society or there's no place for theism; the two cannot long coexist in a society any more than they can long coexist in the same mind, eventually the dissonance between them will come to a head and it will all come apart at the seams.
You'll get to God eventually. I've watched you, Akkad. I've seen how close to truly brilliant you are and I dare say you may be one of the few men who are capable of coming to God through His divine intellect. Those who write off God, write off the singularly most brilliant thinker in existence. You love good thoughts. And if you read the Bible, as you should, for what you can glean from it for your life, I think you'll find that there's a great deal more there than you can possibly imagine.
Christians are written off as zealots and cooky and not-all-there in the head. Quite the opposite is true. Yes, God is for everyone and it helps all. Therefore, as a work, you'll see very obvious things that can be glossed over because they state what is obvious to you. Keep in mind, not everyone is you and some need simple food. However, to those who are able to see it, there is a feast of thought, logic, reason, and complexity the likes of which no man can compare.
Lastly, I say this to you, Akkad, if you are worried about hypocrisy, don't. God didn't invent hypocrisy, humans did. It isn't a question of hypocrisy. It is a question of what kind of hypocrite you want to be, one who is a hypocrite for the sake of personal nonsense or the type of hypocrite who advocates for a sanity beyond our reach as humans. I can not be perfect, and neither can any man but, I can advocate for the most superior ideas ever created and in so doing prove myself incapable of meeting the fullness of the challenge. One day, I will look forward to seeing your head bowed before the Master, the Lord God, builder of all the universe, and the clearest thinker ever. Humanity has ruined God's reputation with his flaws. God has only ever said that which is needful of saying to us, whether we listened or not.
When individuals choose to use their time and labor to benefit their society (i.e. civil meritocracy), that society will benefit as a whole, thereby further benefiting those individuals and so on.
The key word here is "choose".
"Till our women had no more children, and our men lost reason and faith--and the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: The wages of sin is death."--Rudyard Kipling
That was a lot of deep thought put into the origins of "Ok boomer"
Ok boomer
Yes indeed, the millennial response to logic. Like a mental blue screen of death error message lol
This is a topic I've been bouncing inside my head for almost a year now. In my opinion there is no sustainable society other than conservative. Liberal societies inevitably become what I call "satanic", meaning that they eventually turn into perversions of their original image. Both societies have the same goal except that liberal society reaches there first without strong foundation and is toppling down which we can see happening all across the western world. It's like two people going through the forest full of thorn bushes. First one is threading slowly and carefully while the second one is running full speed. The second one will come out first, but there will be nothing left of him but bloody rags and exposed bone.
"Both societies have the same goal?" What, liberal and conservative societies? Perhaps I've misunderstood you, because I'm pretty sure that's not true.
Liberalism tries to maximise individual freedom (especially freedom from duties) and/or happiness in the present, with little, if any, thought for the future, they often say things along the lines that enjoying oneself in the moment is the only, our primary, duty. Meanwhile, conservatism tries to conserve the good things of the past into the future, and makes this a duty. Very different attitudes to, and ideas of, duty, I think. Or are they somehow the same underneath?
@@73elephants
It could probably be argued that liberalism is more about the progression towards new good things, conservatism is more about holding on to that good which we have heretofore been given.
The intent of both is to make things good for people, but as the saying goes; pioneers are slaughtered, settlers prosper. The people always attempting to push the boundaries are going to be the people who make the greatest number of novel mistakes, and suffering the consequences. The best society is one where progress and conservation are in a harmony or synergy with each other; holding the core of what is recieved from the past, yet acknowledging the mistakes of the past in order to rectify them.
If progress becomes an end in itself, nothing will hold the society together; if conservation becomes an end in itself, the society will stagnate and fail to deal with modern problems. It's difficult to keep them balanced, but when they acknowledge the necessity of their opposites and pursue their own ends with that in mind there can be prosperity. If they see their opposites only as an obstacle, the society will fracture into collapse.
@@ryanalving3785 The left is progressing towards things that it supposes are good and new, but which in fact are old, and have been tried many times before, and have disastrous consequences for any society that adopts them.
@@ryanalving3785 More: (1) I use the term "left" where you use the term "liberal", because I reject the implication in that usage, namely that the left is more interested in liberty than the right. Far from it, the left is authoritarian to its core, and constantly seeks to increase the power, and actual interference, of government in all areas of life.
(2) The left's ideas and plans are rooted in the 17th and 18th century, and involve a hatred of emerging modernity, and a wish to return to a primitive state. This is quite obvious in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the founding philosopher of leftist ideology -- with his idealization of "the state of nature", and his deprecation of the "arts and sciences", for instance. Thus, the left is locked in the past.
(3) Conservatives are not afraid of progress as such. It's "progress" in certain directions that they object to: progress toward totalitarianism, progress away from merit and virtue toward egalitarianism and decadent hedonism, the replacement of private religion by collective worship of the state, the severance of bonds of tribe and family, replaced by the Nanny State, the replacement of education and culture by ideological indoctrination.
@@73elephants Conservative depends on where you are. In the west, at least the US, that is what conservative means. It is always about keeping the core of the culture alive. Egalitarianism is a more western value; however, a conservative in a non-western country is going to be somewhat different. The rest is going to be the same, but the core they are going to fight for is different.
I think it's especially important for atheists to find this secular source for duty. On top of that, a force from which rights stem. I've had so many arguments with atheists who say their is no god, so rights come from government, which is a recipe for those rights to be taken away some day.
As I have stated before, it may be that humans in these nations are hitting a supposed “carrying capacity”, where they recognize having a child isn’t a good idea in an environment. It’s a biological phenomenon where in population levels off, I would recommend you look into it. That is just my thought, good to see you think things through even if you aren’t sure where it will go. Keep up the great work mate
This may seem unrelated but I'm a writer and I run a lot of dnd and worldbuilding is kind of my passion and I've always liked to make cultures and religions that were unique and realistic and your videos on this kind of stuff has really helped me understand the topic more than any 'debate' or 'discussion' channels or videos I've seen on youtube in this aspect, and I've watched a fucking lot. So thanks I guess, you strange glorious bastard
This is really hard to give feedback on, because I am religious, and so it all fits together for me already in my own paradigms, making bias almost unavoidable.
I think you have all the pieces. I'll at least say you're on the right track and I hope for humanity's sake you and others like Peterson who are grappling with this problem continue to make headway. So I guess that's my feedback: each individual piece you're considering seems handled correctly. Keep at it.
Maybe try picking a sect of a religion and try to attack it from that angle more deeply, and then you can back out and see if you can bring it back to the secular/rational.
@Shadow Skull Can you justify your claims?
@Shadow Skull Nice crystal ball you've got there. Does it let you see the future as well as read minds?
I think it was a Prussian king, whose name I will not look up now, who said something like "If soldiers were to begin to think, not one of them would stay in the army"
The problem is that society as a whole greatly benefits from decisions that are detrimental to the individual. Such as dying in war for it, or wasting resources on children. But since the detriment to the individual is less that than the benefit to the whole, these inclinations survive. Up to the point where people start thinking and realise "Hey, this is not good for *me*. Why should *I* be doing something that is not good for *me?!*"
And that is the strength of all dogma (religion most commonly, but an ideologue has the same advantage): The thought terminating cliche. "You have to do it, because it is divinely mandated that you must. Stop thinking."
I've only recently been reading on Kant but if I'm not mistaken his system of morality is based on God's existence and free will.
Kolakowski has an interesting take that it's not that science has replaced religion by debunking it (actually scientific discoveries used to reinforce the argument for the existence of God) but that the products of science brought comfort and consumerism that changed our priorities from spiritual and eternal to material and temporal, thus giving us false gods and idols
I think sargon is heading for a wakeup call studying enlightenment philosophy. I'm not super into it yet myself, but from what I do know, you're right. Pretty much all the parts of the enlightenment that were good and useful were tied inextricably with Christian underpinnings. I'm pretty much in the same boat right now, just learning that my whole "atheist" outlook on life is based on things that are based on christianity, it permeates our whole civilization to a degree that's it's inescapable.
In "Groundwork of Metaphysics of Morals," Kant distinguishes the idea of a "Good Will" and uses the Principle of Non-Contradiction as his means of founding a platform for future ethical debates. No God required.
@@seanmcgrady8688 there are different takes on Kant's arguments or actually Kant makes arguments using different basis peped.org/philosophicalinvestigations/summary-kants-moral-argument/
Or he uses the existence of God to support the existence of morality en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_morality
I'm still beginning to grasp Kant in general so I can't really debate his philosophy but it seems to me that the existence of God is linked to his moral system
Yep, Kant tried to stealth God into secular morality with categorical imperatives. Unfortunately, categorical imperatives are not the laws of physics, which are always true despite all attempt to disprove them.
As one of those atheists who was raised religious, Protestant Christian to be more specific, I have to say I'm actually really glad I was raised Christian. I don't believe in the mythology, the burning bush, the parting of the Red Sea, etc. but now that I'm older I recognize the value of the moral instruction that came with going to church.
I think the greatest failing of atheism as a movement is that, now that it's cool to dismiss or even outright despise Christianity, many in the West are abandoning the moral values Christianity teaches. And compared to most other value systems, Christian moral values are vastly superior. Too many modern secular people care only about slamming the faults of Christianity, like the lower tolerance towards LGBTQ types and ignore the virtues i.e. humility, grace, charity, etc. I do think you're generally on the right track, and it serves as a good intro to a bigger discussion about the values we hold, why we have/had them, where did they come from, how have they evolved and what are the pros and cons of said values.
I have never been more firmly in agreement with a UA-cam comment than I am with yours.
I've been interested in Stoicism and Taoism, they seem to fit in and offered me ... the questions to ask myself in order to develop without feeling like I had to believe in some great spirit or being.
I do think that some level of *religion* is needed but not to the degree that it controls you or you can use it as an excuse * the holy book says I have/can do it. Instead I feel it should help guide you, question you if you lack the ability to be introspective.
But I may be just talking out of my backside. Thank you for your thoughts on this, as I've always felt that there is a need for it but put in a different way.
I'm totally with you on this. Children and commitment need to somehow be made to feel important again. Also, when we leave the church we leave the tribe too. Going to your local church weekly, contemplating, mingling and cooperating with your neighbors who don't agree with you on everything. Without the church to bring us together we have fallen apart. We don't have to go back to believing what we used to believe, but I think we need to go back to doing what we used to do. We threw out the baby with the bathwater and we need to get that baby back!
"If I didn't exist then sexy female scientists would have to invent me"
- Aaron Yates / Tech N9ne, _Groupie_
There is no man without a religious understanding of his surroundings. We all believe in myths, whether they be metaphysical or historical or political, we all tell ourselves myths. Good to see you exploring this topic.
I grew up an atheist and my mom was, too. My children are, as well. My grandma on my mom’s side was a Christian but my grandpa was an atheist. Yet we have strong family values, many from my grandpa. Your children learn by watching and listening.
Do you think those values are nested inside of an outer Christian culture? Which values can you point to that are derived from the atheism of your parents/family?
MrRozburn I don’t think I even began to wonder where my values came from until I started paying close attention to what was happening culturally. My grandpa’s mom was Cherokee and his father was 1st generation American from Germany. His father died when he was a teen. I can only guess how that influenced his beliefs. He had a great love for his family and always put them 1st. He had a great influence on his whole family and was respected and loved by many people.
@@Antonette59 My grandfather also died when my father was young, and the way you describe your father is like describing mine. I've always wondered how he could be such a selfless father without his own father figure growing up showing him the ropes.
I've been thinking simular for some time. And started debating this with friends. Most don't want to face the truth of society changing to be purely selfish and only interested in what a person can get for themselves and the impact this selfishness has on the community and culture they have been privileged to grow up in. It's made me start to reassess the value of religion specifically Christianity.
I feel that one end to this line of questioning will be "why be moral?" Many enlightenment philosophers were religious and answered this with "because God", neichieh toiled with this and created the ubermensch but we need a better answer.
Side note: what are your thoughts on Thomas Hobbes?
I agree. Even though I believe in God, I don't expect anyone else to if they don't want to. But they should still be moral! How can all of us agree?
Beyond good and evil, amazing book.
Yeah. If society runs on everyone voluntarily giving more than they take, removing the "Because God" out of it kind of ruins the whole point of society, doesn't it?
@Seven V lol. Spelling is hard.
I think what’s kept it going in some sense is that although god is dead, Christian morality has been baked into the structure of western countries. But I think this may be crumbling in the modern day. The only thing deterring people is government, but that of course isn’t virtuous.
I agree with you. I am religious and family is a central part of our religion.
Without God at the helm, what duty is there to continue the state or perpetuate the culture we are born into?
Without God, by what measures can we universally declare our society to be good, or better than another?
Religion was the only absolute authority. Without it there can be no ultimate accountability and man is capable of anything good or evil. The only thing stopping him is himself.
The "Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter must unite to achieve freedom for all"! It must be remembered we are of Christian Culture. Jesus the one true God bless You and your loved ones CB.
I like how you purposefully left out the only non-heretical branch.
@Totus Tuus Indeed, I'm impressed with your apparent insight. Padraig Pearse would have been under great influence of Pope Leo as he was born just after the start of Leone's reign. If you are, as it seems 'in the know', are you also aware of Leo's vision? And his plea to St. Michael the Archangel to defend us in battle and his call to prayer to be recited at the end of Mass? Later suppressed by subsequent so-called Popes. All part of Satan's work & choice to do his worst work against the Catholic Church and more coming in this Century. It seems that so far Satan is very much having things his way. Keep the faith! KAFIRS OF THE WORLD UNITE. DEUS VULT!
@Totus Tuus My mistake. I thought you understood the source of the original quote and something of Leo. Clearly that's not the case
@Totus Tuus I know what I have and don't have and I have no need of anything from you. Good day and God bless
@Totus Tuus What's wrong? Who said they had? I said they are under threat as per Leo's vision and if you cannot recognise the threats I reference then clearly it's you that lost in the echo chamber
Religion is not simply a dogmatic belief in a higher deity. It is also a philosophy, a story and a set of community guidelines rolled into one. Reject the belief, if you wish, but rejecting fundamentally good ideas on their own that happened to be associated with that belief? You are right, Carl, there must be arguments that can be made
I wish us good luck in contemplating them
My solution is to hold the ideal self as the highest point in morality to be the best self that you can be based what you are and what you could be within the limits of the human animal
The vision of your "ideal self" is actually just God's plan for you.
I feel like many monotheistic religions reject the ideal man. Ambition should not be promoted for what if one starts to compete with god.
Who knows but i see no signs of god I just see me moving thru this insane world randomly trying to life freely and without harming others.
@@natesgreatshow1634 Why without harming others?
@@entropino9928 Do you expect yourself to be harmed in turn?
Keep going man, you're hitting a really nice under represented market here
Very thoughtful. I think the Enlightenment ultimately undermines itself, though. That is, it cut its own heart out when it jettisoned religion, because it is not possible to derive "ought" from "is", as Hume would say. The Enlightenment was doomed to eat itself from the start. I'm pretty sure that is Patrick Daneen's thesis on liberalism in his latest book, but I haven't read it. Anyway, not a very optimistic take! Good luck with the conjecturing. The only thing the West can do, in my opinion, is preserve the Christian values it's leaders so despise.
But the Enlightenment came out of Judeo-Christian thought, as the religious are so quick to point out. By your train of thought, hasn't Christianity ultimately undermined itself by birthing the Enlightenment?
Fair question. However, I do not believe that the Enlightenment was the logical outcome of Christianity, even though it follows chronologically, but rather the abandonment of Christianity, even though it retained some Christian principles, such as the belief in the uniformity of the universe, which enables scientific inquiry, as well as moral principles, such as sanctions against murder, stealing, etc, which the Enlightenment held to be universal truths. The logical outcome of the Enlightenment, however, is a society which inevitably has no sense of ultimate moral duty, because it rejects authoritative revelation and any certainty about the metaphysical. A materialistic worldview does not tell you what to do, it only describes what is.
No Carl, you are headed down the right path. There is a huge self made hole in Western Society and it is because a lot of people have never asked the questions you are asking mainly because they know they will not like the answers they might find to the questions they know they will eventually have to ask *if they are honest with themselves*.
"It is hard for you to kick against the goads"
My heart was in my mouth as you said 'X... Y... ZED.'
Thank goodness, I didn't have to close the window.
Elephant = Id
Rider = Ego
God/Ideal/Goal/Societal Norm = Superego
Ride towards the Ideal, and the elephant shall be tamed.
@Alex M Good point thanks
@Alex M I did say "*the* Ideal" though, implying God, but I guess I shouldn't have been vague like that
Pseudo Center God/Excellence = Superego
@@jonathanwells223 What if someone strove to be an excellent murderer?
Only works if you believe in psychoanalysis.
Duty is a gift from those who came before to those that will come after.
Hi Sargon - have ever looked into the Code of Hammurabi, its significance then, and its possible significance now?
ua-cam.com/video/mChFuXpi3sA/v-deo.html
@@MythosTheSophist How many channels does Carl have?
Alex M Sargon of Akkad, The Thinkery, Ancient Recitations, Sargon of Akkad Live, The Symposium, and Akkad Daily.
I am impressed. Great monologue on interesting topic.
The enlightenment is gay.
Looking at Italy around the time of the renaissance I could see how that could be inferred.
Big gay
The secular point is that we thrived through cooperation. I'm a Christian, but that's the best secular view on where morals came through that I know of, not that I'm convinced by such. Were losing religion sad to say and our numbers are going down because of it. You cover a great deal very well Sargon. Listening to you is always a treat.
"From religion" is such an vague, weasel argument that anti-theists use, hopping from one religion to another, to accuse one religion of the faults of another. Specify the religion, Sargon. Don't be afraid to name them. Don't lump them together to dismiss them collectively.
I think he's talking about characteristics that all religions seem to share, like the proliferation of itself.
He's talking about religion as a whole, the concept of it.
@@RealClassixX But any attempt at judging "religions" in the abstract is at best, intellectually dishonest. He won't get very far, into his pursuit of the truth, if he's framing the subject in such an abstract manner. Islam left countries stuck into medieval times, Hindus are worshiping bovine excrement and not recognizing the equal value of human life, Shintoism left Japan worshiping an emperor that tried to send all people to the slaughter. Even among Christians, you can find the stark differences in the different branches; protestants doing witch hunts, evangelicals preaching anti-Christian "gospel of prosperity" which are just pyramid schemes.
@@dkosmari None of that is relevant here. It's about the philosophical ramification of the belief in a higher power and the consequences of god's death in philosophy. The specifics of each religion are simply irrelevant in this matter.
@@RealClassixX The part that's "generic" also applies to non-religious culture. The hedonists are perpetuating themselves by taking kids from traditional families and recruiting them into their ways of life too; see the forced school lessons in masturbation, prostitution, child abuse, etc.
I have heard the nihilistic response to this train of thought from many people. Claiming out right that moral absolutes are a fallacy, or an obsolete idea of the past. But duty/responsibility is a concept we as a people are losing.
I agree with the sentiment Carl. Men have a duty to sire, provide, and protect. And through upholding these duties teach men to follow suit. Women have a duty to bare, nurture, and nurish. And through upholding these duties teach women how to treat people.
Having and respecting your duty isn't a lose of freedom, but an acknowledgement of reality.
I'm still interested in a debate on God. I just hope you don't expect a layman's retort on your assumptions.
Be well, Carl
It’s fair enough to have trouble believing in “divine revelation” in the traditional sense. But “God” “reveals” himself through all of reality, (nature, the laws of nature, our natures, etc...) Interestingly, more and more sociological studies are discovering the old truths are ...true, and the old rules are good for human thriving.
yeah sure, good old rules like burning the witches is good for human thriving, as long as you ignore those rules and trust the modern secular science instead.
Carl, thanks for tackling this particular topic. Let's talk about it. A while back I was reading about a tree that has lived for 40,000 to 80,000 years and is so large that it makes up an entire forest of genetically identical "stems" that all share the same root system. It got me thinking about human life and the ways we are like this tree. People tend to have very similar physical traits as their parents. The older I get the more I look like my dad, same hairline, same big nose, etc., for example. And I started to wonder if our life experiences were similar too. Sure enough, the things that I've experienced and the challenges I have faced, my dad faced them too. We have the same level of intelligence, the same trouble with finances, the same drive to overcome adversity. But, not just my dad. My grandfather, and great grandfather also had these same problems. Not only that, my great grandfather was a teacher and a lawyer. Nearly half of his male descendants are teachers or lawyers. I'm a lawyer. My dad and grandfather were teachers. So, the question I have is, what if we're like this tree, but our roots are the DNA of our ancestors, and the stems are the individuals of each generation? Is the goal, then, to enrich the life of any particular individual, or is it to enrich the genetic line? If you take the focus off of the individual, and put it on the genetic level, your DNA doesn't care if you have a nice car or if you travel a lot. It only cares that you propagate, and it has equipped you with the necessities to accomplish that one purpose. Maybe that's why people with children and grandchildren seem more satisfied than people without them, because they have fulfilled the genetic purpose of propagation, and we are hardwired to want that satisfaction.
Carl, you should look into the Hindu & Buddhist conceptualization of duty.
What their idea of duty only one of those two I’m familiar with is buddhism and I only know they Believe in reincarnation and at some point they found peace or something like that.
@@thesmilinggun-knight9646 The Hindu idea of duty is not too dissimilar to how Jordan Peterson conceptualizes duty. It's the idea that your Dharma (which can sometimes translate to 'duty') is the role you play as an individual, a citizen, a worker, a king, a warrior, a friend, a family member, a father/mother, etc., and Dharma is the path of righteousness in all those axes which an individual might fit within. It is a recognition that regardless of whether we know the best path of action, there are nevertheless things we ought to do and things we ought not do. I'd recommend reading the Bhagavad Gita.
Group level Darwinian Fitness ought to be the god of a secular society.
Eugenic group behaviour would then become the new secular virtue while dysgenic group behaviour would become the new secular sin.
Carl, please interview Edward Dutton.
You don't need God to deter negative actions, you don't need a comandment. The things we hold as wrong in modern society are bad for society and the individual.
Why shouldn't I murder? It's safer for me and everyone around me if murder is not allowed.
Why shouldn't I steal? It's better for me and everyone around me if stealing is not allowed.
Why shouldn't I lie? It's generally better for me and everyone around me if we aren't lying to each other all the time.
And so on and so forth...
And when you calculate that it is materially safer to lie, murder and steal?
@@o00nemesis00o That happens, murder in self defense is a good example. I don't want to die and everyone else agrees not to kill each other. If I kill to protect my life, since I was not the aggressor, I should be let off the hook. It's not useful to lock me up because I'm not a danger to society (like dat bitch Carol Baskin jk). If it was intentional, locking me up prevents more useless death.
The line went, "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." - Voltare
I actually first heard that line in the movie Easy Rider. Peter Fonda's character Captain America read if off the wall of the Whore House in New Orleans as he had the vision of his own death.
"Is there a way of deriving these kinds of duties from a secular perspective?" This is the question you're positing, and I think I can answer it but it doesn't actually seem to be what you're asking. By the end of the musing your real questions seem to be, "How can we convince secular society to increase its birthrate?", and "How can we imbue secularism with the same total authority as God's word?".
As an American, its incredibly easy to understand duty outside of the context of a God or religion; I as an American love my country and its ideals, I therefore, if I wish to maintain my position and those of my fellow citizens and their descendants, must do all that I can to improve myself and the system I have inherited, keeping it strong and resilient so that we may remain powerful and supreme. So God isn't necessary, I as a rational being myself, the "rider" to use the analogy you're fond of, have chosen this path and taken these duties upon myself, all it takes is for one to choose.
To tackle what I think you're actually wrestling with, we're going to have to go a little deeper. The fundamental flaw with religious thought and simultaneously its ultimate strength is the absoluteness of their axioms. This is X, that is objective, its true, there's no debating it, we must act in accordance; this can be incredibly useful as you've noticed for maintaining the cohesion of a society and compelling the population to act and live in certain ways, usually to perpetuate the strength and influence of the religion, and as most societies weren't secular that meant maintaining the society as well. But the two aren't necessarily linked, as we've seen in the Roman Empire with its syncretic hands off faith. It wasn't a Roman's duty to fight for the glory of Jupiter, it was his duty to fight for the glory of Rome, and for the defense of his brothers and sisters and his wife and children and all their friends and loved ones. So if we can achieve these things in a society without absolute religious domination, then actually we can cast off religious thinking and retain those benefits. The way to imbue a society's ideals with weight and authority is success, the exact same way a religion would do for its own gain. We can look at Rome yet again, through martial prowess and respect for the arts and sciences of their age they grew in prestige and power, and that prestige and power made people believe in that system and follow its rules and social norms. I do not think we can achieve within secularism what you seem to pine for, an absolute moral duty without a transcendental being compelling us so, but that isn't necessary, two of the most powerful and successful empires, Rome and the US managed just fine.
I'll finish with what seems to be the most personal and taxing issue to you, that being your near fetishizing of fatherhood and families. You seem to start with what I believe is a fundamentally flawed position, that egoism cannot allow for the desiring of children, and then start to throw in all the madness of social justice in a kind of slap-dash way that seems inconsistent. Not all forms of egoism are hedonistic, and most of society isn't the LGBT community, even if the internet seems to be at times. The average person still has children, they just have less because unlike the developing world we derive no economic benefit forced by extreme poverty, in fact it is the opposite as most people intend to nurture their child, which costs money. So if you want to fix the problem, we have a few ways we can move forward that will result in exploding birth rates, but none without downsides. 1: Rescind certain child labor laws and couple that reform with tax breaks for every child had, you create a double whammy of potential economic gain and give people a material reason to jump in, but then you deal with potential abuse of those lax regulations and risk parents having too many children and creating a generation of under-educated, anti-social youth with no prospects. 2: Perpetuate a culture of filial piety, actively work as an individual to revere the family structure and those that head it, and also attempt to influence whatever social groups one has sway in; the problem here is what we see in China, a population subservient to the prior generation and much more accepting of authoritarian government. 3: Adopt a new theistic or non-theistic faith-based religion with the cornerstone being reproduction, with severe spiritual penalties for going against the grain; obviously the default in civilization and the option we're attempting to not return to by contemplating all this, probably not a good option. 4: My personal suggestion and somewhat of a reiteration of the second paragraph, reinforcing patriotism and reverence not for the state but for the nation and its ideals, if we create a generation of people who revere and adore the communities we've built and the friendships we've maintained and the love we've felt for those we're close to then they naturally will tend towards perpetuating that, because it is beneficial and validating to the psyche; this one is potentially the most dangerous of all, as with Rome the second the people's belief in those ideals fails so does the nation and the ideals wink out like a candle at the end of its wick. But that is the only option that doesn't compel or threaten the population, and by that measure to me is the only acceptable option.
Duties are important, without them society cannot exist, but we have learned from history what can happen when we create unassailable axioms that compel a man inexorably. The reason we're here now is because that paradigm was so thoroughly flawed; that doesn't make the Enlightenment the final answer and your pondering of these problems is brutally crucial and I'm incredibly thankful for it. However I feel as though your frustration with the culture war has bled into much of these musings, you are trapped in what I'd call, "The Eternal Present", and seem to have considerable trouble dislodging yourself from that frame of reference. I respect your intelligence, more than most, but this Achilles' Heel must be dealt with or you will continue wrestling with topics that are in a grander sense more elegant and simpler than you seem to want them to be.
@The Symposium Usually I don't give a single damn if anyone reads even a word of what I wrote, but if you get the chance in between your tea harvests I'd love for you to read this and let me know what you think, I put a lot of thought into it and am thoroughly interested in your reaction. Cheers to you my eloquent cousin from across the pond, and let there be many more musings for me and those like-minded to ponder.
As much as I appreciate your sense of duty, I want to play Devil's Advocate for a minute.
You said it was easy for you to have duty apart from religion and God. Very well. Why should I share your sense of duty toward a particular country? Why should my duty not be to my own self-interest? Why should I feel that way about anything other than my interests? What if I want to live my life the way I would like and harm nobody while doing it? Why shouldn't I?
@@refugeguy777 See that seems to be the issue Sargon is dealing with and while I thought I addressed that I will delve a bit on this topic specifically. Even under a complete religious stranglehold with the entire society under the thumb of a theocrat there are lots and lots of people who do not comply, and the result is some form of punishment. Sargon remarked about Muslim societies, but the way they keep them so stiff and rigid is through death for apostates and honor killings of family members, beyond the physical punishments for violation of lesser moral tenets and the ultimate threat of eternal suffering and pain. Just to get 70% of people on board you'd marginalize and even persecute the rest and then you have a society built not on strength or confidence but on fear and misery. So with the examples I gave of the US and of Rome, I think the only option is to actually build a society that people will in fact cherish and uphold because it is in their own individual best interest to maintain that status quo. I don't think anyone can give you an "objective" reason as to why you ought to act in whatever way you seem to trend towards except through a transcendent entity, and even then how does their transcendent nature validate anything at all, except by virtue of strength? At that point we get to the real truth, that all morality is as valid as the arms that can defend it, there is no grander objective set of rules, only what we can defend by force of arms. You can't ever get duties which are wholly compulsory, and even if we somehow managed it would be a fundamental rejection of individualism and all that goes with it. You ask a good question and I'm happy to go back and forth until the end of time, this is the fertile ground of philosophy and the damp earth suits me well.
@@theeccentrictripper3863 I agree that this is great. 👍
Your example of Rome is a bit misleading; most soldiers didn't fight for the glory of an individual member of their pantheon, but they did fight for the glory of the Emperor, who was venerated like a god. They also fought because Roman civic virtues like military service were ways to secure a favorable afterlife. In a secular society, the leader is not a god and there is no promise of an afterlife. How then do you create an incentive to be self-sacrificial, as duty demands us to be? And can that incentive overcome people's natural desire against duty?
@@refugeguy777 You're correct but its a bit misleading to attribute that to Rome as an entity that spanned several governmental shifts and one massive religious shift, I'm speaking a bit more to the late Republic and early Principate, where upholding the honor of the Legion and your general was important but not one that had explicit supernatural rewards and punishments. I think the Roman practice of deifying great men with the honorary Divus is a great way to start, what man in the deepest most secret place in their heart does not desire immortal fame and glory, what more than receiving divinity in the eyes of your peers for all of time? I'm stil an atheist, but I'm more comfortable within a classical framework where atheism and sycretic paganism could live side by side without the kind of dogmatic angst carried by the Abrahamic faiths and even Zoroastrianism to a certain extent. To that end I believe that lifting up those of true quality as a society will not only create ideals and examples to follow but create a kind of ultimate goal, a pursuit of making your deeds and beliefs echo throughout eternity, which is a better immortality than any religion can promise. How many countless souls will be forgotten who were washed clean in the blood of the lamb, how many Roman generals and centurions and even regular soldiers' names and deeds live on to this day as real as we are?
Boy, I sure can see why this channel is demonetized. So spicy!!
Carl, not all religions are the same. Core beliefs like the Golden Rule, do unto others as you would have done to yourself, is exclusively Christian. Lumping together all religions as if there aren't radical differences between them is ignorant. In fact, most of the good things you agree with "religion" on are in fact Christian... just saying.
LoL
Dude,do you actually believe the nonsense you just wrote?
@@shogunofharlem8240 Yes, because it's not nonsense.
@Lucas Wright, Buddhists teachings say "that which is disagreeable to yourself, do not do unto others"
Clearly those extra 3000 years and strikingly similar wording kinda negates your point dude sorry.
@@seedsofecofrog1 negates the point? Try living in these regions of the world where Christianity is not the dominant religion. There are pretty radical differences in SE Asia or the Middle East when compared with the West. It's called manifest evidence...
@@lucasdwright don't get me wrong I'm very grateful for the jousting between Catholics and Protestants as this has indeed allowed the world to attain peace threw neighborly banter and shared ideals.
But to claim an idea as fundamental as the golden rule to be exclusively Christian is ill informed at best and supremacist at worst.
I personally can't think of a single moral that is exclusively Christian though I'm open to being proven wrong.
Thank you, Carl, for the enlightening conversation. I think the statements you have aired, are very well-merited and is a topic that needs to be discussed and aired a lot more.
That title sounds like Peterson
Smoking Blues damn now I can hear Peterson’s voice saying that.
@@maxrampertshammer I know mate as soon as I read it his voice rang in my head haha
I see it as three steps: 1) outer morals and outer laws aka religion, 2) skepticism and rationality that rejects outer claims that cannot be personally verified, 3) the birth of true and personal morality within due to the inner struggle with Life-Truth-God-Philosophy-The Other-Reality, where while outer morality is rejected to the extent it is _presumed_ (as for example by a priesthood in a typical organized religion from step 1), but can be "re-embraced" if after due skepticism is brought to it personally, and found to be of real value.
Is step 3 a religious step? I think it is very much so, but not at all in the sense that it is normally understood. It is because it is a personal relationship with your own being and the greater world and because it is not based on facts so much as mystical intuition and developing a warm and meaningful relationship with "The Good", which I see as what the heartfelt search for "The God" has always been.
Is it important to see this as religious? Words do not matter for this, but my experience and my prediction is anyone who follows step 3 diligently will end-up agreeing that it amounts to the higher form of what religion has always been trying to get at... at least when it has not been a corrupt and twisted way to keep power and control people e.g. the Catholic church selling absolution for sin and the many other abuses of power in organized religion that not only have nothing to do with step 3, but actually do great harm to it by driving people into lagging in step 2 longer than benefits them.
As for if it is possible to go from step 1 straight to step 3: no! You must first become what amounts to an atheist in doubting before it is possible to find authentic connection with the good.
Embrace tradition
Being raised by a Father who scoffed at the suggestion of a God who would let the world transpire into war, famine, bombing etc., without coming down hard on the perpetrators I came to believe in an overlord, nonetheless... When two of my siblings refused to have children, I went on to have four to make up for them both. :) You, sir, are wonderful. :)
Is it me or is the first world starting to look like Tolkien's elves with the rest being like his view of Man?
If you're a fan of the Silmarillion, I think the first world is becoming a lot more like Numenor once it began to pass from glory.
They abandoned their faith, their morals, and in their mad scramble for material prosperity they ultimately destroyed themselves; losing the greater part of their power and wisdom in the process. The elves were more akin to the best aspects of the Faithful, gradually diminishing from the world; the better part of their influence behind them, numbers declining, they went off to the undying land and left the world to its fate. At least, that's my take on it.
Not the elves, post numenorean virtue peak
A way of arguing this; different life choices you make have different moral values, for example doing volunteer work that will benefit your community is viewed as a more moral good than a stock broker on Wall Street, who is just trying to benefit them self. Neither is seen as evil as we recognise people have freedom to spend their time as they like (as long as they don’t break any laws). But as the volunteer worker is sacrificing their free time, which could have been used for personal gain, to make communal gains,we see it as morally greater/ the duty of people who are able to do so. Liberal duty’s are not requirements, they are virtuous and you are rewarded in reputation
We already have the arguments for what you are talking about, it’s just about figuring out how to redirect them to parenthood
look at youtube doing its job so well, 4 comments 11 likes and apparently 0 views... hm...
When it comes to self interest in the rational sense, self indulgence I think should already be considered as something counter to self interest. Your not doing yourself any good by being a slob or just following every pleasure in life. It’s in your self interest to take care of yourself to further and propel your life forward
I'm not sure why all flavors of egoism are somehow bastardized into iterations of hedonism; I kind of blame the Abrahamic faiths and their rejection of the self as a good, there's no room to ponder that as a concept its just "its all bad".
@@theeccentrictripper3863 you dont have to teach someone to pursue their own self-interest. Actually, people have to be taught to temper their self interests to get along with others.
@@Varlwyll I would fundamentally disagree, look at the Golden Rule. The corner stone of so many faiths however it is phrased is centered around self interest. "Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you" the first fundamental consideration in these faiths that reject egoism and self interest, is in fact self interest. The principle by which we interact with each other in a civil and respectful manner in the world we've created is built around self interest. So we teach it on a regular basis, tempering it leads to things like zealotry and violent idealism.
@@theeccentrictripper3863
I think it is important to note that the Christian faith and the Jewish faith both generally hold that it is good to act in a way that benefits you; but that your own desires must be kept in check both for your sake and for the sake of others.
Even if you might want to, don't go sleep with every person in sight. It doesn't matter if you want your neighbors property, either buy one yourself or ask him for it, don't steal it. It doesn't matter if you don't want to do your chores, listen to your parents; they're taking care of you.
It's not that the self is somehow bad, it's that our own impulses (which may be perfectly fine in moderation or the proper context) are very often going to cause us to desire to do things we really shouldn't. If a man strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other; suppress the impulse to personal vengeance. It wasn't said in vain that whoever embarks on a journey of revenge should first dig two graves. Vengeance is self destructive. The self isn't inherently bad, but personal desire must be tempered and brought under control to prevent problems for everyone. I hope that makes sense.
(Side note, I know very little about Islamic teaching on morality; so I have left it out of this analysis)
@@ryanalving3785 I appreciate the perspective, I grew up Catholic under a thoroughly devout father so I know the subtleties of at least their theology, I'm a bit more rusty on the different flavors of Protestantism and I imagine we aren't counting non-Chalcedonian Christianity and its derivatives so how we approach this may be different. In the Abrahamic faiths your duty is to God and the way you live your life ought to be in a manner that properly honors him and follows his word. So the fundamental axiom, the reason why you do all that you do is because God has willed it so, to serve yourself is an option as God gave us free will, but it is the path to damnation. He who is last shall be first, and the whole Sermon on the Mount is a demonstration of this rejection of self in order to glorify God, but in the same breath the actual justifications are all self-interested. Don't pray on the street, pray in secret is a rejection of self from the perspective of a humble Christian, attempting to not boast their faith, but simultaneously an appeal to self interest as actively praying in public like a lunatic was inadvisable at the time. So at least from the perspective I was raised in this is a clear inconsistency, the self is in fact a bad thing to be suppressed because of our sinful nature, and yet its all about improving oneself. This contradiction forces a man down a road where asceticism and disconnection with one's personal desires and intent are regarded as improvement of the self, when really it leads to a disconnection with the present and the concerns of both now and of the future. You see this with the Roman Empire, as Christianity grew money was spent not on maintenance of the legions or the aqueducts or the public games but on charitable endeavors and churches, investing wealth in that which would honor God rather than things that perpetuated their own self interest and that of the empire. This resulted in their civilization crumbling around them, pursuing wealth and martial honor and perpetuating a system that honored heathen gods which degraded their souls were no longer viable options, and so the borders collapsed and barbarians swept the empire.
God looking at the atheist : So you could not live with your own failure to sustain the civilization built on my shoulders. Where did that bring you ? Back to me.
@0-KINGSLOTH-0 there will always be idiots. You can not prevent dumb people being born. Nor unexperienced folks lacking experience in life. That is part of the problem. So , how do we create something able to withstand the certain level of dumbfuckness that is periodically regenerated ? If your solutions only work for a society of high IQ Ubermenschen. It is utopian and useless. The idiots need a place and the system must be foolproof to a certain degree.
I think for the most part Jordan Peterson has absolutely nailed the ideas on this front when he said 'I act like I believe in God.' He pretty much says that God is (or commands) all of the good things that humans should do, balanced between being good individuals and social animals. He makes the point that the idea (even subconcious)of an omniscient God always watching and ready to punish you is the only way to make people behave morally in situations where they could behave immorally without being caught. If you give up on that idea then everyone would have to be policed constantly which is hell for everyone invovled. I used to be an atheist but his thinking along those lines genuinely blew my mind like few things ever have. Despite not being a true believer in a God in the traditional sense, I am oddly content in believeing in a God in Peterson's way.
You Kant find a secular origin for morality because the origin is not secular you cant change the past.
If you really want to know why read the story of the garden of Eden it is a story about how men fail when they try to create their own morality. Its basically a warning about communism and intersectionalism. You seek original sin.that which you already poses.
Carl, from a liberal perspective I have to ask: Would you accept a debt (or a duty) that you didn't agree to take on? If somebody throws money at you without your consent, then shows up a decade later demanding payment with interest, would you meet his demands? Obviously, not.
So then why do woman and men have a duty to procreate outside the moral authority of a universal ethic? I didn't consent to being born, nor to being part of a society, so why do I owe my parents or my government anything? I just don't think liberalism can resolve this contradiction.
Your issue is that liberalism (which is only ONE of the products of the enlightenment I should point out) is behaving in a self destructive manner, but how can that even be a bad thing without an authority on morality? Why is it necessary for liberalism to continue if liberal minded people as a collective can just choose not to?
Just become a Christian, u know u want it.
Go to the source and become a jew.
I think the term "Your duty" in regards to having the children at all is what the issue is. As a point, if you can't afford to have the children or you truly feel you are not up to the task of raising children then it should be your duty to not have them or wait until you can afford/be able to raise them.
I actually agree with you on this as the truth is as we are all human. We have the dream to have a good life, however the interpretation of what a good life is, what we are having difficulties with.
One of your best. Seriously up there with your Starship Troopers analysis.
We should cherry pick bits of religions that are morally right, despite them coming from a wrong source (and probably because all but fundamentalists can recognise that morality outside religion has a valid, empathetic, basis).
We have to go against the teachings of the enlightenment in order to save the teachings of the enlightenment. How ironic, yet perfectly sensible.
Glad you mentioned Haidt's elephant/rider piece.
For me, its where ideologies can fall down.
Things can look great on paper - but they'll look shit in reality, if human nature & emotional thinking, isn't incorporated and/or is recognised in some way.
I appreciate where the videos have wandered as of late; they deal with reality in a measured, rational approach.
Women postpone marriage and children for a number of reasons, but one is how much value our society puts on what an individual earns/produces. Why not build incentives into society’s structure for women to spend their early years in the home? What about a system which allows women to have lifelong access to her university? Young women who begin a program can stop, have a family, and return several years or a decade later with only a refresher course or two.
Access to university counselors who are trained to translate household management experience into CV and transcript material - because running a well-maintained household DOES require negotiation, leadership, discipline, dedication, endurance, and many other soft-skills. Participation in school councils, aid in the classroom, etc. Then there is navigating eldercare, finances, market assessments concerning purchases, etc. Work it into the system to acknowledge how women have continued personal development outside of the traditional work environment.
Or, perhaps financial credits to women who return to school in their mid or later 30's after having raised
children to school age? X amount of financial aid for X number of children? If we are discussing the idea of strengthening families, more financial aid to women who remain married?
The reality is many women would stay and raise their children until school age if given reasonable options, but
raising children also comes to an end at some point. It is a dismal situation if an intelligent woman who spent the better part of a decade working hard in the home is seen as beginning at square 1 when it’s time for her to enter or
reenter the workforce.
Men, good men, my father being one of them, work hard to provide for their families, and they are -well, were- celebrated for it. (It's a crime good men aren't celebrated for their sacrifices, but that's a different post under a different video) If we want women to make their necessary sacrifices, acknowledge culture and human nature and create a system to incentivize the results we want. Unfortunately, this is more likely to work than a call to duty or personal-responsibility.
I am a 32-year-old woman, and there has been an aggressive societal push for me to seek out a career first
and foremost since childhood - and I was raised by a stay-at-home mom in a Christian household who did not subscribe to that cultural norm.
Rather than blasting, “Be an independent career woman!” at my 8-year-old self, a message of, “Raise a solid,
well-ordered family, and then get into the workforce” would made my early 20's much less chaotic.
*I am sure there are issues with the examples I’ve suggest, so be creative and help me think of better ones.*
I would consider it in terms of short term versus long term consequences.
Homosexual sex is prima facie consequence free. However, in the long term, you have increased spread of VD. Also there may be issues of kids raised by gay couples to have potential developmental problems.
Long term versus short term is where I think the key to moral understanding resides. But the human mind can take decades to truly appreciate this. Hence we need the concept of God as a way of saying "this is moral!" Without having to explain why, because to empirically determine what is good takes too long.
I think Cultural Christanity without abandoning liberalism is key to both preserving our nations and out freedoms, it doesn't have to be an either or choice I believe
While I don’t entirely agree, I find it difficult to put exactly *why* that is into writing. So instead I’ll simply offer thanks, for giving me a new perspective and the motivation to further examine my own.
1) Living things generally strive to maintain their life.
2) So, they will favor environments and actions that maintain life, and unfavor things that do not.
3) Some evironments and actions are better at maintaining life.
4) From #3 the inverse is also true.
5) Humans are a living thing.
6) Humans have minds.
7) Since humans have minds, each can objectively measure that some environments and actions are better at maintaining human life than others.
8) Humans, as living things generally wish to maintain their lives, and favor environments and actions that do, and disfavor those that don't.
9) Human minds consider their continuation to be standard, and their termination substandard.
10) So human minds, in relation to that standard mentioned in #9, consider non-life encouraging actions and environments substandard, and life encouraging actions and environments to be standard.
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Conclusion: Some actions and environments are worse or better than others for humans.
I think "The Tao" could be found in reconciling any conflicts between the last four, which are produced by trying to figure out "whats better for who".
By the way, only non-mammals can morally affort to be indifferent, in part because their species can sustain that.
Awesome and necessary video Carl. I am technically an atheist, but have to come to see the value of religion (particularly Christianity), to a society. Haidt's comments in relation to this in The Righteous Mind were extremely important in developing my thinking around this.
JBP's approach to religion is also useful and important in maybe developing a rational approach and appreciation of religion. Three comments he made stand out in this regard: man needs 'God', 'God' is what is most important to you, and act as if 'God' exists.
Keep itching Ben! God believes in you!
Although I am not a religious person I do recognise the necessary utility of religion. I believe that necessary utility is the true power of God.
Your other point on people not having children is absolutely correct. As I begin to meander towards my late thirties I am seeing so many people continue to behave like children. I'm starting to think that there are actually very few true adults around.
I've enjoyed this channel, as well as the other channels you have. Thank you for examining and wrestling with this topic. This is a serious topic and one that ought not to be ignored. I agree with you one many other things, but our worldviews are from opposite perspectives. You have professed yourself a staunch atheist, whereas I was raised a Christian. The examination of flaws in the content of different theological denominations led me to study at my denomination's seminary, and strengthened my understanding of the axioms that different views hold, including my own. I look forward to seeing this unfold in subsequent videos.
Sargon the major thing you need to consider is that people who want children want to have them in a good culture. You may love your culture but that doesn't mean a person can just force themselves to love children that they didn't want. What should be done is the celebration of the family and teach people healthy versions of different family life styles.
THESE INCLUDE:
-Dos and Don'ts of raising kids (like discipline, not being a helicopter parent, etc.)
-How to better understand your childs individual needs.
-What is rewarding about having a family.
-How to share your culture and ideology with your children.
-How to maintain a personal life while being a parent.
-How to raise them to be strong willed; independent; morally good; and how to help them find themselves.
This is my quick take on the subject.
I understand Carls still working through a lot of this stuff and so probably isn't ready to draw the concrete conclusions on the enlightenment he'd like to, but I'd love it if he wrote a book about his thoughts on it and specifically how it impacts the idea of civic virtue. If he could post a reading list I'd also be delighted as I'd love to see all the sources that have influenced his thinking on this.