What a load of gibberish. The last thing we in the West need is a return to the anti-empirical worldview of religion and spirituality. In Lincoln's words, "we must first disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."

Yet, how is the rule of law determined? One cannot make societal laws based on empirical science. Rather, laws are based on the norms and values of a society. And, where do those norms and values come from?

In my opinion, it doesn't have to come from religion. However, there must be some sense of higher good for the society in order for the rule of law to work. So, other than religion, how is the sense of a higher good determined.

~~~~~~~~~~~
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.

Come visit PROJECT: Lucidity.

Show me one democratic regime in the entire region

Yemen.

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Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.

Come visit PROJECT: Lucidity.

Our justice system is based on people telling the truth. This is the key value of both science and of the ethical systems of mankind (religion):

Considering religion and the various myths by means of whose symbolic content it communicates ethical truths, Albert Einstein maintained that: "the moral attitudes of a people that is supported by religion need always aim at preserving and promoting the sanity and vitality of the community and its individuals, since otherwise this community is bound to perish. A people that were to honor falsehood, defamation, fraud, and murder would be unable, indeed, to subsist for very long." (1948)

***
Adam Gopnik on Darwin (in the New Yorker, 2006)

"Darwinism has never been a threat to humanism; it is humanism, in flight. By humanism, we can mean two things. One is that man is the measure of all things; the other, that all things can be measured by man. The first view, essentially religious in origin, inspires Renaissance painting and the Sistine ceiling and Vitruvian proportions. The second view—that what makes people uniquely interesting is their capacity for gauging their environment and changing it; that the more we measure, the more accurately we see what things are actually like—has been what we have meant by humanism since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and Darwin is one of its greatest exponents and examples.

.... [Darwin] ended as a skeptical materialist who had proved that the forms of life were shaped by history, not by a supervising mind. But reading him also shows us that no emotion we would fear losing is lost in the transformation. The hardest Darwinian view of all is still roomy enough for ordinary love to breathe in. Darwin was a Darwinian fundamentalist. But he was not a Darwinian absolutist. He knew that what feels to us like soul or spirit—the flash of understanding at an infant's smile or grief at a child's death—can never be argued away...."

I'm not sure that the religiosity question is really central here. The issue could be one of increasing religious belief, or of decreasing sense of moral purpose - rising nihilism.  In fact, I'm not convinced of either, now that I write it down.

But I do think there is an important weakness being pointed out.  The values expounded by secular Western society are all formal - rights are, in essence, prohibitions on government conduct, e.g.  (Kant and Rawls are cool and all, but I don't see how they provide anything more than formal values).  These don't really reach to any higher goals or answer any basic human yearning - the golden rule is an important code of conduct, say, but treating others accordingingly doesn't really give me a richer sense of the meanign of my life.  Within our tradition, there is plenty that will fill unmet spiritual needs - I think a half century ago, we were better at that - but I don't see it in play today.

And what I want to know is from where those values and principles come.

I'd argue (at unreasonable length here) that the answer to this question is that they come from the fact that our cognitive architecture allows us to copy, in a sense, the feelings that we observe in others (through 'mirror neurons' or the 'theory of mind module').  This gives not quite universal but strongly correlated judgments about right and wrong (I'd argue, contentiously) that, in turn, define a set of mores.

How's that for an atheistic moral realism? 

Amitai "De Maistre" Etzioni is off his meds again.

The West understands that "God is Dead," that nature is "disenchanted," and that humans are all alone in this universe and must construct their own individual and personal "meaning of life."

Those who cannot do so, and in a world become or everywhere tending to become a celebratory consumerist society that means those who cannot "keep up with the Joneses" will wind up on the ash heap of history.

Yes, but the problem with a naturalistic explanation of morality is that it doesn't deal very well with the problem of evil. Where do all of the wars in human history come from? How does innate empathy explain a mass-movement that is evil, such as Nazism?

My impression is that whatever innate instinct for empathy we may have is fairly limited in its range, to members of our immediate families and a fairly small community or tribe.

To go beyond that requires a compelling system of cultural belief and training.

So then the question becomes, what makes a system of cultural belief compelling?

To stay with your naturalistic line of reasoning, maybe there is a higher instinct, that goes beyond empathy. But if such a higher instinct exists, who is to say that it does not reflect something authentic in the structure of reality?

We have eyes to register light waves. Perhaps we have a higher instinct to register something important about the structure of reality?

That sounds as good as any answer I've seen.

Although, I must admit, it seems awfully familiar to the "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" more of Christianity.

Or, the karmic debt and cessation of suffering in Buddhism.

Or, the yin-yang understanding of duality, and the inter-connectedness of all as part of the whole, as found in Taoism.

:)

So... Theory of Mind Module... architect of ancient religions? Or, modern rationalization of spiritual connectedness to fit the atheistic moral realism? I'll give those two links a good reading. Thanks.

~~~~~~~~~~~
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.

Come visit PROJECT: Lucidity.

I should add that while American textbooks do not have, in general, lengthy tributes to Fearless Leader, it's a myth that they don't discuss anything outside the terms of empirical science. That's true in a limited sense for science books, which don't go much beyond discussions of the scientific method, including such values as testability and skepticism. But they're science books!

They may mention that some concepts like causality and a search for fundamental laws apply in science. They may discuss how our sense of nature is changed by quantum mechanics. And textbook features these days meant to motivate students imply values: making sure that images of people include other than white males may encourage tolerance and diversity; sidebars on cool applications may suggest science matters in life; sidebars on famous scientists may suggest that science is a human activity and that creative, questioning minds are cool, too. Still, mostly science books, and math books even more, don't go overboard instilling a political or religious message, and I'm uncomfortable thinking we should come up with a parallel to praise of Saddam Hussein in such a book.

But humanities courses are filled with values. American history and American government texts, for example, have always been about what it means to be American, although the terms there have shifted over generations. Once the drumbeat of patriotism might have been easier to follow, and now the question might be presented as an ongoing debate the student should enter, too. (Who are "we the people," how powerful are elites in a democracy, and what role should gender, immigration, and religion play in our political futures? Debate!)

But sheer description, on the grounds of objectivity, is not what's going on in texts. Trends in teaching even stress such context. Say, current books in music appreciation or art will try to show you how music and art function to express the beliefs of a culture.

So maybe the problem isn't that we're all godless heathens, and maybe the comments defending science against religion here aren't entirely pertinent. Maybe the only problem is whether we are listening to Iraqis and Afghanis. If we don't want their explorations of their own culture in history books about it to be rote learning preaching the greatness of the Taliban and Baath party, is it a sign of Western weakness if we may not have an easy way to know how best to speak for their aspirations?

Maybe it's a sign that someone finally realizes the ignorance of their world that goes into the Neocon vision. I can only hope that Etzioni isn't as awash in the same ignorance as he seems to claim.

John

http://www.haberarts.com/

It seems that mono-theistic religions that incorporate a "loving" deity don't do well with evil. However, anyone can rationalize anything (e.g., Christian god giving "free will").

Poly-theistic religions have all sorts of ways to describe evil. Evil gods/goddesses, the need for duality in light/dark, the male/female divide, etc.

~~~~~~~~~~~
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.

Come visit PROJECT: Lucidity.

Laws against murder, and the jury system itself, grew out of a disgust...

Disgust is an emotional response, borne of morality. Not of scientific reason.

Why was it decided that the endless cycles of vengeance and feuding were disgusting? Weren't humans doing this very same thing for countless years until organized societies and religions came to being?

Wars are socially destabilizing, yet are sometimes viewed as just and right. Governments even like to invoke the name of God during wars, to prove to the populace they are morally right.

Self defense, police use of force, state-sponsored capital punishment. All of these are killing in the name of the state, yet are not considered morally reprehensible to those who can rationalize it. How can we have one set of mores for one situation, yet a completely different set for different situations?

The difference are the circumstances, not the actual act itself. The death of a person is a death of a person, regardless of the events leading up to it. Yet, the societal consequences vary greatly. Which means, there are exceptions. And, exceptions, in my opinion, are the product of value judgements.

~~~~~~~~~~~
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.

Come visit PROJECT: Lucidity.

Emotions are information.

Some (Adam Smith) have argued that our ethical systems are ultimately based on emotion, specifically the emotion of empathy.

Rather, he is talking about what Jurgen Habermas has called the "flattening" aspect of empiricism: that is to say, its tendency to ignore mystery, spiritual longing, existential crisis, in favor of quantifiable data.

When the religious community appeals to exactly these sorts of ambiguous terms--"mystery," "spiritual longing," "existential crisis"--to establish empiricism's alleged weaknesses, it instantly raises my hackles. What exactly is this "mystery" that an empirical secular worldview lacks? What does "spiritual longing" mean exactly, other than a sense of melancholy due to the knowledge that superstitions are not borne out by evidence? What is an "existential crisis," other than emotional discomfort at the fact that we are indeed alone and mortal?

Why cede the moral highground to those who use mushy buzzwords to conceal the vacuousness of what they're peddling? This doesn't strike me as a valid criticism of empiricism. It strikes me as whining. The peddlers are watching the citadel of power they've build for themselves crumble as the "mysteries" to which they previously claimed to hold the keys are solved. Their followers are psychologically fearful of death or the absence of a deity figure or a universe without intrinsic meaning. Boo-frickin'-hoo.

There are no crowded churches in former communist countries. Communists have forcefully suppressed religion (because it clashed with their own) and it is natural that now that the communists are gone, religion is on the rebound. But at best, religiosity is back to normal, ie. where it was before the arrival in communism. The only post-communist country I can think of where religion plays an important role is Poland, which has traditionally been deeply Catholic country. In countries like Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, or Slovenia, religion simply isn't all that important. I would be rather surprised to discover that in any post-communist country, religion today plays a greater role than it did before communists took power.

Well, instead of using the word disgust I could have said that the endless cycle of feuding and vengeance killings were tragic and unbearably painful for all involved. The grief people feel at the deaths of one's children and closest relatives is not a "by product" of anything, arguably. One's value system, wanting to prevent such tragedies, is a by product of one's emotions, not the other way round.

Ah, yes, I admit, I shouldn't have used "describe". Rather, I meant to say "explain".

And, yes, the Poly-theistic religions do explain evil, at least the origins of evil in mankind.

~~~~~~~~~~~
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.

Come visit PROJECT: Lucidity.

We've got a long tradition of ethical philosophy - going back to Aristotle - which bases itself not-at-all on religion. And among religions, the most ethical by far is Buddhism, which worships no God.

However, if you must have a more fanciful religion, I'd seriously suggest we'd be better to worship Gandalf - or perhaps Prospero.

I agree we're missing a spiritual dimension but why blame that on the Enlightenment alone? I blame it on the great Market God who is supposed to explain all things in terms of I'll take all I can get. I'd also blame it on the narrow perspective kids get today when they spend more time working than going to school and most of their time in school learning business and nothing else.

We need a whole lot more love, contemplation, and humility, which can come via spirituality or other ways.

And we need to transcend our limited cognitive model of reality as Rumi does here in 13th century Islam:

"We are the mirror as well as the face in it.

We are tasting the taste this minute of eternity."

I'm more interested in hearing the term "remoralize" explained. If it means teaching our people not to be greedy and selfish but to share with those less fortunate, and not to embark on grandiose imperialistic wars for no good reason, I'm all for it. But if he means forcing gays back in the closet, returning women to the barefoot-and-pregnant era and suppressing the teaching of evolution then thank-you, but no.

I am somewhat out of my depth here, but it seems to me that a murder is evil whether or not it is committed by a sociopath.

Whether or not there is such a thing a metaphysical evil with which humankind is cursed at birth (original sin) is another question.

Let us hope that even though majority of citizens may not have considered, say, witch burning, evil, and the leading citizens of the day did not condemn it or even deign to notice it, there were some brave souls who did condemn it, and, over time, their opinion has become the majority. We can call it moral (or cultural) progress, if you like.

We Enlightenment types need to be less instinctively hostile to believers who are making honest and good-willed attempts to make sense of existence. Does this mean tearing down the wall of separation? Of course not.

Yeah, I think we all know that. Or at least I do (since I was the one who mentioned separation...) The issue is, the people in power don't.

I don't see any hostility to those making "honest and good-willed attempts" at the larger philosophical and metaphysical questions. I would renounce anyone that does, but I think, really, it's a strawman.

I think there's a big difference between someone sorting out the Big Questions, and someone instituting an abstinence-only policy in the face of empirical data, or, even worse, someone like leading evangelical (and, reportedly, Presidential advisor) Ted Haggard, who deals with his own homosexuality by telling everyone how evil homosexuality is.

Dissent Protects Democracy.

The more I think about it, the more clear it is to me that the division here is the wrong one, and that if you make the cut more accurately, the problem really isn't there.

The post suggests that there is a growth in relgiosity that is partly explicable in terms of the failure of secular rationalism to frame its values in terms that meet the human need for meaning and something spiritual. This implies, first, that the religious are yearning, so to speak, for some deeper sense of the mysteries and purposes of life; second, it implies that the areligious are not.

It seems to me that the real distinction cuts across these categories: those who, er, have a spiritual side, who see the need for something of that order (to categorize what it is that they need, I think, is very difficult), and those who do not. I see plenty of religious people who aren't especially interested in the higher questions that you speak of; they find in religion, say, a sense of belonging, or an us to belong to as against them. By the same token, looking around the cafe, it seems to me there are no shortage of atheists with a "spiritual" side. Myself, I am pretty much a thoroughgoing materialist atheist, but I cultivate a spiritual side, too (if you want to sound like a dualist and call it that), because I think that recognizing the need to ask those bigger questions, and to have at least quasi-religious experience of the world just makes life richer, and not seeking the richest possible life is just foolish.

I suspect the growth of religion, if there is such, is due to a variety of factors, and the godless emptiness of the West is probably not by far the most significant. By contrast, the apparent inability of secular westerners to articulate ideas that have a richer spiritual appeal probably has to do with a few things, too - for one, the fact that here in the U.S. we are grossly outgunned by the religious, for another, because those who are more on the spirity side don't really want to explain how you can believe in nothing but atoms and the void and still see beauty, wonder, and maybe even purpose in this life. But mainly because the formal principles by which liberals believe society should be organized, if followed properly, do not leave a lot of room for proselytizing.

Science can't tell you what's the right thing to do about anything, though.  It can tell you how to clone people; it can tell you how to make a nuclear bomb; it can tell you how to factory farm; it can tell you how to sterilize people ala the early 20th c. eugenics movement.  It can't tell you what to *do* with that knowledge. 

Ya gotta have values, morals, a philosophy, whatever.  It would be a lot less messy to say "This is science, so it's the right thing to do, but that's a belief, so it's the wrong thing to do," but it wouldn't be true.  Science can't make value judgments.

Moreover, there are a number of well-documented lapses in our reasoning skills, systematic and numerous enough that some in cognitive science call humans irrational.

But when they say this, what they mean is that human cognition does not follow the canonical rules of formal logic (for example, there is a specific test, using cards laid out in a table, that is typically failed by everyone but philosophy grad students).  Having spent a few too many years in the world of the logicians, I can say that the suppleness of our ability to sidestep logic is one of our primary cognitive assets. 

Well put!  I assume that you saw the NY Times Magazine article on religiosity as an evolved trait?  

Lebanon is a weird democracy, but democracy nevertheless. Israel, as a democracy, is not without its idiosyncrasies (say, theocratic elements, lack of constitution, extremally low percentage of private ownership of land).

Lebanon was even praised by Bush as a positive example, several months before it was thouroughly bombed with Bush's blessing.

I grappled with using "higher good" to define what I thought. I thought about using "common good," but wondered if that might be interpreted with a belief in communal living, or communistic policies. I wanted to keep politics out to minimize side-topics.

I certainly do not advocate an arbitrary or anarchistic set of rules and laws. This, I believe, would be the result of aggregating the different, individual interpretations of religion; in a way, as you described it.

The other problem with "common good" is that, in my opinion, it implies compromise on the part of the individual to temper their values. Rather, my usage of "higher good" was more in line with recognizing there are values and mores that all individuals in a society share.

~~~~~~~~~~~
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.

Come visit PROJECT: Lucidity.

Friend, religion exists within human beings. It is a fact. It is an empirical fact. What you call a load of gibberish has been shown to have biological connections and therefore has a genetic connection. You are very likely implying ridding ourselves of the genetic predisposition to faith. What you've never seen is a world without faith. And most likely it would be a world that you would not want to live in. Your point of view is so two dimensional that it doesn't hold up to a mere breeze of scrutiny. The impulse to rid "society" of religion when "society" was built in and by religious people is a mad technician's conclusion not warranted by science. The dream of Hitler was to rid the earth of Jews as a "final solution." The notion of a final solution in getting rid of something inherent in other people which you falsely blame for other problems is not only prejudice, it lays the groundwork for genocidal or totalitarian policies.

Now this use of a quote is more honest, referring to "ecclesiastical establishments." But in nearly every false association or over-the-top presumption that religion (as apart from state established ecclesiastical establishments) was not deemed important by our founders, this truth is taken outside of its application to say that religion is delusional or a thrall. It is a false argument lacking logical glue, and devoid of truth.

Honor: Ilsa's and Rick's decisions in Casablanca.

The Jefferson quote highlights the fact that religion has nothing to do with reason and fact. Religion is based on faith, which is defined by the dictionary as belief without proof. Basing any government act without reason, denying fact and reality, is shear folly. If there is a God, then he would want us to act out of reason and not out of fear.

The Christian prayers consider the flock to be "rational sheep." It's an old prayer book. You should look into it. Faith and reason go together like "love and marriage." I raise your Jefferson with a Sinatra.

The Treaty of Tripoli quote highlights the fact that we are not a Christian nation and, more importantly, why we are not a Christian nation. We never want people to hate us because we are Christian. We never want to get into a religious war. Muslims in the Middle East still hate Europe because of religious wars fought 700+ years ago.

A nation is more than a government. We don't want a government to favor or establish a national religion, however, we want it to respect the good of religion in its people and not turn down their qualities of service. And so, we wouldn't be bad off having a Christian nation which became more and more like Christ, which in my view equals a Christian nation. To the extent that is not the status quo among the many in our country, we are in little danger of it I'm afraid.

The country would be better off if it were more Christian in orientation and true religion touched us. More people would find themselves able to overcome a large number of social problems using the power of Christian faith and community both of which humbly realize we are individuals capable of great individual feats, however, not islands who do not need each other. Much of the positive social change in US history came from Christian moorings. And that is not to disparage that which came from others.

You are correct we don't want to get into a religious war, however, to protect our religious freedoms, that would be one reason for a just war, e.g. to keep a new nazi front from trying to kill a whole group based on their religion in a nihilistic rage of blame and resentment. 

The Treaty preamble may not be good law. It's a cherry picked text. We can find the invocation of God in no small number of governing texts.

Were we a Christian nation, then every war we fought could be looked upon as a religious war.

That is a very well thought out point.

As it stands, we already walk that line in Iraq. Luckily, there are other reasons for our being there, such as Saddam and oil. If they saw religion as the primary reason behind the war, then we would never see the end of hatred for another 700+ years, like Europe.

Too late for that, I'm afraid. That hatred is what led to a string of attacks on the US up to and including 9-11. What you have there is not Islam as a religion requiring attacks on the US, you have spiritually weak Muslims giving into human passions of rage, revenge and other tragic emotions that simply look different in expression than the passion of greed that sends us unjustly abroad in too many cases.

The Madison quote gets to the heart of Etzioni's point. Religion has been the reason and purpose of great evil for thousands of years from the crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, witch burnings, and more.

Again, perhaps by your definition of religion this is true. However, I define the religion by its core teachings, and the inquisition and Crusades have nothing to do with the teachings of the Christian religion which are, religious teachings. Rather, those actions are the abrogation or suspension of religious teachings using rationalization, misdirection, and false reason, to allow people to go out there and slaughter. That's what overtook Hitler's supporters and tacit enablers while he and his corps of child-maiming physicians manipulated German Christian populations and their sense of passion (crimes of passion) to cover their atrocious and devilish crimes against Jewish people because of their religion. Religion was the target of the violence, not the cause. Christ killed no man, and Christ is the root of the Christian religion.

Religion has proven again and again that it lacks any moral authority. Religion has no grounds in instructing anyone on the virtuous life. Religion has no grounds instructing us on obligations to our family members, friends and other community members.

Nonsense. No man who murders does so in obedience to Christ's teachings. It is always against. You must be defining religion as that which departs from the Christian faith which is Christ's life and example and teachings. However, Christ himself passed to his apostles that true religion cares for widows and orphans (the needy) while the false does the things you blame all of religion for.

Do not try to purge true religion by overgeneralizing it with false religion. Without true religions, this world would be very near close to a living hell itself.

When you talk this way, it is an implied provocation and threat to people who should otherwise be free to work out true and false religion by something as great as our First Amendment to the Constitution, so that you continue to get the benefit of true religion. Remove that benefit which our wise framers saw as a key nutrient to human civilization, and you will come to a point where you should fear getting old. When the generations of anomie are caring for the old, it won't be long before they may just as well commit atrocities against them one day versus being nice to them the next. What you pretend is that you or other people can provide us with the true ethics, and make up your own new religion supposedly free of the passions.

I say, prove you know what Christ taught, and that you've tried to master those teachings before you go speaking about them as if you had authority.

The US's strength is based on the fact that our government does not subscribe to any one religion.

This is very true, only it is only part of its strength. The other part is that it puts religion in a well-protected spot in the Constitution. Not only is government protected from religious mismatches, religion is protected from government political pollution, which is the driving source of what you and others call religious atrocities in history -- they were really political passions using religion for camouflage. No one who is truly interested in the spiritual purposes and mission of their respective faiths would dress their faith up as yet another political institution, but only political, unbelieving people would do that. Appearing to have faith doesn't mean it exists in the appearer. This is so elementary and yet so serially ignored by the sort of arguments put out on this site every week about "religion."

Anyone of any religion or no religion can come here and find a home. That gives us a unique position in the world that is increasing becoming polarized on extreme religious values. Our government's lack of religion is a cause of strength, not a concern of weakness.

First sentence, powerfully true.

Second is the false assumption that "extreme religious values" cause polarization. It takes an extreme person to do that. A religious value is a statement or teaching of a way of life deemed good. With Christianity you can navigate between what is a Christian teaching and what a person has substituted for Christian teaching. The former is the religion and that latter is not. In a similar way, an unscrupulous scientist could falsify experiments and results and come up with a false body of knowledge -- lies really. It would no more make his output science than a rock is an oxygen molecule.

And what you assume above is that the "value" can do something without a human being behind the "doing." You detach responsibility from persons and put it on religious teachings which you do not specify. It is that which more often leads to unthinking persecutions, because statements rule people rather than people measuring statements and applying them with wisdom in various situations.

If you think I made your point, you were hallucinating. It was not a vision.

Faith and spirituality in the Christian tradition are one. Love and faith are one. These are within the person. Getting into examples of that and why this is important is something we could do here. I don't assume you wish to do so, however. If you do, let me know and we can discuss.

Lao Tzu's precepts and observations are imbued with faith in an orderly universe of balances that he (or she, no one ever saw 'him') essentially prophesied them. His writing is on the order of prophecy as religious texts go. We can get into substance if you want.

Faith involves other faculties than rationality yet doesn't omit it either.

I don't think we know about all of our own faculties, much less understand the ones we know about. We remain blind, groping people who have much, much to learn, and that is an article of faith which limits how many dogmas there are. A great thing about science is that it realizes that we can get something temporarily right and then need to measure again to find out if something has changed -- forces, genetics, mutations, energy changes, material changes, force changes etc. etc.

As beings we have the ability to cast our gaze inward and outward and watch. To a great extent, the human watch is deeply faithful. 

In the Christian faith there are some very firm dogmas for life in this world, however, these don't exist for the purpose of worship of the dogmas as absolutes, however, for their navigational value in relations with others and with God. They're not scientific texts for temporal use and utility divorced from spiritual infinity.

I'm skeptical about this too.  Not necessarily that most people don't have a variety of angsty pangs every now and again, nor exactly that most of the people you meet are don't, either.  Rather, I think that dissatisfaction, alienation, anomie, ennui and a feeling of emptiness are something that anyone in any context, religious or secular, experiences at times.  I'm pretty sure that neither the 1950s nor the days of the Caliphate were any different than here and now.

"murder is evil whether or not it is committed by a sociopath"

We agree with each other, but my argument is with the rationalist. Every rational argument has to be based on axioms. If our axioms are drawn from nature, we can justify anything that has ever happened. If our axioms are based on what people believe, we can justify anything that has ever been done by an angry mob.

I think of the sociopath as the perfect rationalist. He knows what he wants. He does what it takes to get what he wants. He knows there are risks, but he accepts them. Could anything be more rational than that?

devolving them into ritual, parochialism, sectarianism and facile, often misunderstood dogma  

Well but I wouldn't call rituals per se a corruption of "a desire to comprehend and make sense of his existence, place in the universe and his relationship to others".  Funerals, baptisms, Bar/Bat Mitzvahs -- they're all about that.

" However, such secular teachings do not address profound issues that religions do speak to: What is a virtuous life? What are our obligations to our family members, friends and other community members? Is death a threatening end we all must fear or merely a passing to a better place?"

Teach math,science and english (literature),and let everyone sort out their own spirituality. Spirituality does not have to mean a faith in a non-material existence. Meditation, for example, is a tool for examining the mind and leads to a deeper understanding of self and spirit.There are enough spiritual traditions to learn from without believing in an all powerful god that controls everything.
The revival of religion and especially fundamentalist religion is the last gasp of a dying dynamic whose purpose has long been replaced by rational thought.All of the above questions are being discussed every day as evidenced by the thoughtful conversation in the above comments.

This is a good question. I have heard people refer to the loss of a sense of community in terms of the difficulty in making friends when moving to new cities. I am not sure the alienation is necessarily in every case so much a conscious complaint as it is a mindless acceptance of consumerism, which results in people acting out in ways that are otherwise hard to explain. People do complain vocally about a decline in the quality of popular music, which may be attributable to the emptiness that results when big business controls everything. What has been called the financialisation of our economy results in a loss of commitment of business management to workers, and an overemphasis on boosting stock prices in artificial ways. It is undeniably true that old-fashioned companies had a greater sense of loyalty to their employees than modern companies do. It has been said that there has been a decline in business ethics. I do not have the documentation on that, but my understanding is that there has been a measurable increase in the economic risk to ordinary people. There was a time when a software developer working more or less on his own could invent a new program and make a fortune from it, but the possibilities for expressing individualism in this field are much more limited today.

To glance at a few issues of Reader's Digest one sees that the average, presumably conservative person seems to hold a rather sour philosophy of life, in which life is hard and everybody is on his own and people deserve what they get. That seems alienated to me, but I don't know if it is a new development or if the Reader's Digest philosophy has always been that way. That philosophy seems to have been dominating our government for the last several years, but maybe that is just because the Republicans stole the last two presidential elections.

Well, sociopathology is a pathology.

I agree with you that there are limits to reason. Many crimes are committed in the name of reason.

And tradition, specifically "spiritual tradition" -- such as that of the golden rule, may embody a "longer term" reason.

Mr. Healy Says:

 I don't really see any evidence of widespread "alienation and anomie". 

A few studies worth considering:

• Bowling Alone
• The Great Good Place
• Robert Jenson:  Fighting Alienation in the USA
• David Korten Worse Off than Ever Before (and other essays)
• The Science of Happiness (from BBC)

None of these are particularly religious in orientation, but they do recognize some quality to life provided by something beyond a rationalist materialism.

aMike

How about this. Stop torturing human beings. Give starving human beings food.

And STFU about religion until you've completed the above.

What a pathetically stupid thread.

The major religions are extremist. They tell us to practice radical virtues and be saints -- to sell all our posessions and leave our families and to wholly devote our selves to the worship of God -- in other words to live like Mother Theresa or Gandhi.

It is philosophy, as someone else has pointed out here, that addresses the issues of how to live in this -- the secular realm. Aristotle tells us to be moderate in all things, including virtue -- which is why Bertrand Russell condemned him. While I can see Aristotle's point, I am not sure I do not sympathise more with the Russell who, though an atheist, or at least agnostic, gave away most of his fortune while alive and spent conssiderable time in jail for his abhorrence of war. But radical virtue is no doubt a luxury that few of us can afford.

MJ Shep

Not only is Lao Tzu prophetic by some interpretations, you will find close similarities with Torah in there. Will discuss that soon enough.

As to Hitler being a Christian, here are some quoted historical proofs as counterexamples to that misconception:

"The internal expurgation of the Jewish spirit is not possible in any platonic way. For the Jewish spirit as the product of the Jewish person. Unless we expel the Jewish people. Unless we expel the Jewish people soon, they will have judaized our people within a very short time."

- Jackel, Hitler's Worldview, p. 52; from a speech at Nuremberg, January 13, 1923

"The heaviest blow which ever struck humanity was Christianity; Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew."

- Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, trans., (Oxford, 1953), Hitler's Table-Talk, p. 7

"The law of selection justifies this incessant struggle, by allowing the survival of the fittest. Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure."

- Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, trans., (Oxford, 1953), Hitler's Table-Talk, p. 51

Honor: Ilsa's and Rick's decisions in Casablanca.

An article (not that enlightening) on the evolution of laughter.  The thing I like about the evolutionary analysis is this: all the things that really make human life interesting are the spandrels.  

Marvin closed with:

It needs a spiritual rather [than] a military surge.

Of course we're in one of my favorite subjects, but the weird thing that makes it tricky to talk about is that there is the outside view of why things are, but it doesn't connect easily to the inside world of what things mean to us.

They've pruned out all the moronic males who chose wrongly.

Wow.  I think I know some men that you don't....

What women were choosing were those show-off males with a good singing voice (see groupie) or a winning move in wrestling (see Michael Jordan) or lots of animal skins (see Anna Nicole Smith).