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I do not have to. Hitler would be a product of evolution, being light years smarter than the rest of nature he simply amplified the same principle you can find in nature. There is nothing non-evolutionary about him. No more than our being able to use tools would be. Without God all behavior is the result of evolution. I bet I can find examples of over predation but I do not have to. Without God your stuck in a tiny and very ugly box of your own creation.
There is one part of a sentence in our founding documents about theology and politics and it does not say separation of church and state. They did however write volumes of stuff linking faith and politics. So what is the actual truth. It is that they fled from a nation that had incorporated the church, had universalized doctrine, and forced a pre-packaged faith on everyone. That is what they were attempting to prevent. They wanted the government to not impose any systematized and universal faith. They did not want politics separate from faith, they wanted politics not to enforce faith.
May have, I get in a real hurry at times. However I would argue that consumerism is consistent with secularism. Secularism changes what people value and for the worse in most in this case. I don't see how industrialization was all that influential on tearing apart the family.
The family units importance is exactly the same, however it's simply been denied since the secular revolution. Its' actual importance is clear because since we have lowered it's priority al kinds of related evils have resulted that were spawned by the break up of the family unit. I am not in favor of restricting a women's right to work but I disagree with the priority we assign it. My mother had a job for a year or two when I was young and made god money but she quit because she felt God wanted her at home raising us and I am grateful to God and her for that.
I strongly disagree. To the pop culture crowd promiscuity is among the greatest possible virtues.
I don't know what data would. I just remember the conservative (which comes with traditional values and faith more so by a wide margin that liberalism) tidal wave that swept the nation when Reagan replaced Carter.
Ok, this is where the problem occurred. If you type in Google images teen pregnancy rates you will see a hundred graphs that show that the rate has both risen and fallen since 1950 but has remained higher since 1950. I am not risking posting those graphs again.
Well they sky rocketed as well during the heights of the secular revolution and are still higher than before it.
Keep two thing in mind from this data.
The quote seemed to be cut off. I don't recognize it, was it mine?
Every single stat we have discussed spiked at the height of the secular/liberal movement. How many more do you want?
I did not say anything about a government creating anything. I said our heritage and foundational documents, and especially the writings of the founders have faith based grounding. I find that no matter what document, what inscription, what founders personal testimony, what pray room, what bust or statues, etc........... I list it is attempted to be assassinated by a thousand irrelevant qualifications.
Its' also carved into the house, presidents swear in on the bible going back at least as far as Lincoln, I had to add so help me God to my swearing in to the military, and witnesses must use a bible to be sworn in. How many of these thousands of examples does it take before you admit the government is not, nor ever was intended to be separate from faith.
I am sure there are pictures and statues of all manner of historical persons but Christian symbols and foundations dwarf them all combined. BTW what court rooms have Muhammad in them and why? I can see Roman and Greek figures but not Mohammad. It is often said be even non-theist scholars that the US is morally founded on Jerusalem, politically founded on Athens, and administratively and militarily founded on Rome. No mention of Muhammad have I ever heard in that context. This post is growing like the others did. Lets see if we can trim it down a bit.
Where in nature do you find the principle that the strong of a species systematically kill the weak? Please produce documentation for this claim.
Which is by definition a secular state. From Jefferson himself.
Industrialism created the idea of "jobs" as the way of the future. Now instead of the majority of people working on farms or having some kind of family owned business where individuals worked in what the family trade was, now we needed several newly skilled or slightly skilled workers to man the factories. And to be clear I am referencing mainly the second industrial revolution with the addition of massive factories. Then subsequent laws such as child labor laws and eventually laws dictating education of children have slowly torn the families apart.
In today's world if often takes two people to make ends meet. I know both of my parents worked for the majority of my life. My wife will probably work (hopefully part time) while we raise our children. But the fact that women can be independent also means that they can leave their husbands. Before this wasn't possible. When two people got married they didn't stay together because back then there were no marriage problems. They stayed together because at that time there was very little choice in the matter. Men were expected to take care of their wives and their wives more or less had to stay with the husband. In some cases they may go home to their parents but that was considered one of the most disgraceful things that could be done.
Then we disagree. I don't think I will convince you otherwise. I can agree that the FREEDOM to be promiscuous itself is considered a virtue. But the virtue is freedom not promiscuity.
The danger of this is that your experience is subjective and most likely localized to where you were geographically. There obviously would be some more conservative trends with a Republican president as there will be more liberal trends with a Democrat president. Maybe even meaningful change if we don't elect either party.
Perhaps just a link or type out the website. Because I have researched dozens of different websites during this debate and not a single one of them states that we have a higher teen pregnancy rate than it was in the 50's. In fact all of them have unanimously stated the opposite. There were rises and falls throughout the years but the overall trend has consistently went down. This is especially true since 2010.
Now here you and I can agree a little. Just maybe even in name if not in spirit. During the 50's and 60's there was a great cultural revolution in which there was a newly expressed sexual and social freedom. Suddenly racism was wrong. Suddenly its okay for women to work and to be equal to men. Suddenly its important to get an education in college. Suddenly its okay to question the government about wars. So there was a great upheaval and a massive upshot in the usage of recreational drugs. This was the major part where people began to increase in teen pregnancies. I think there was a bit of social unrest in a very very frustrated generation of people who were very upset with the overbearing ideologies of the 50's.
There was an increase in the 60's. Followed by decrease. Slight increase in the early 90's and then steady decrease for the past 25 years to a point where we are now far below what we were at in the 50's. I have seen several graphs and different websites but I have yet to see one that states that we are higher than we were in the 50s. So if you can just type out where you got that information I would like to see it.
I think the data disagrees with both. Over the last few hundred years the teenage births have increased. though its very hard to take any of this as a comparison value because the system in which we live today which frowns upon getting married and having babies in your teens is very very new. In fact it is new to the last 60 years alone.
You to understand that it is far lower today than it has ever been even during the 50's and the era that preceded it? And that all measurable moral gauges have shown improvement over the years with only temporary rises. I agree that the 60's had a rise in the cultural revolution. However I do not blame secularism for it. And we have only become more secular over time and our stats have only gotten better except for a blip in the early 90's which I have already given an analysis of and provided the alternative reasoning for.
when you can explain why the constitution allows us freedom of religion if we were meant to be ruled by Christian doctrine. Also you can opt out from the bible. It was just customary since it was the proffered religion of the time.
Try the Supreme court.
Ok now your just agitating. Show me why this matters and I might actually do it.
You claimed and I quote: "Hitler would be a product of evolution, being light years smarter than the rest of nature he simply amplified the same principle you can find in nature." Where in nature do you find the principle that the "strong" members of a species systematically kill off the "weak"? Documentation please or retract your statement that this is a principle found in nature.
Let's get you familiarized then.
That is from a personal letter to a church. It has no relevance to our founding principles. Our founding principles are included in the declaration by the same man who wrote the above. He mentioned God as the sole source of any rights of any kind inherent to humanity. So you picked an irrelevant document, for one of the 5% of our founders that was not a Christian, but even he included God in our founding documents. I think this a negligible attempt to sustain your contention.
Industrialization did not create jobs as the cornerstone of economic societies. Jobs have been around since pre-historic times. It only changed what those jobs might be in some cases. I do think your point about it partially replacing family owned enterprises but I think your over stated it's magnitude. There were all manner of non family owned businesses going on as far back as Greece at least. BTW the Industrial revolution occurred in the late 1700's, which was 150 years before the family unit started eroding.
Not really. In todays world it takes two people to get what they want. In most cases only one is necessary for what they need. Secularism is a whole lot more caustic than you may realize. It does two extremely profound things. It uncouples morality from any and all objective moral foundations, it also uncouples our values from God centered and traditional values. That leaves it uncoupled to anything and free to wind up wherever is the most convenient. I think morality has ended up either with a new version of traditional morality or wherever was convenient for which ever group whines the loudest. I think our values landed on the next most logical place, self gratification. So indirectly I think secularism caused or contributed to materialism.
Where the freedom to do a thing and the desire to do a thing combine the result can't be any other than what I believe is the case.
Well I am restricting my claims geographically. To the US specifically. I used to ravel all over this nation when I did work in federal court rooms. I have a very good idea about what at least this nation thinks. Plus the little TV I do watch are nationally syndicated shows.
I already have. In the link where I told you to look at the second graph from the top is just one of those examples.
Partial agreement is partial satisfaction. What do you mean by we did all this great stuff, so there was a massive upshot in drug use? How does one follow the other? At least one disagreement. The civil rights movement was founded on faith not on secularism. It was Jefferson right to equality whose source he said was God that MLK said was his promissory note, you can even see it in what Lincoln told Fredrick Douglass. Now I grant it is easy to confuse them because the hippies simply thought whatever was, was wrong, and so associated with the civil rights movement. But it was God the civil rights leaders said guaranteed them equality and dignity.
This is driving me nuts because I have about a hundreds graphs I want to post. BTW are you talking about teen pregnancy alone, because there are hundreds of these moral issues that spiked with the secular revolution.
I will do so when I state that we ARE to be ruled by Christian doctrine. I don't think I understood what you said clearly.
You got a link, it is 500 miles from my house and I do not even like most of it's inhabitants.
This is one of the best posts you have ever made. One point of contention here is that everything I said about secularism in this context was only for the US. I live here and have been alive a large portion of the date range in question and so I am familiar with al the subtle influences and nuances relevant to my claims. I have no idea about all the factors in other nations. I don't live there. There can be economic reasons teen pregnancies may go up or down, there may be career trends that make teens less likely to risk their future, cultural trend that are not theologically related. For example in Japan they seem to have replaced imperialist devotion with corporate devotion. I have heard of kids committing suicide because they did not get all A's from Japan. So I don't think we are going to be able to properly resolve what is occurring in other nations. That is why I made a national point exclusively. As for what has happened here, I have crashed two posts trying to supply the graphs and have already explained what I could provide and have found out in other posts. I need to check into how to go about posting graphs in the forum, I am constantly needing and constantly doing it wrong. Oh one last thing, a lot of the US's ills have unrelated causes like our great amount of freedom, our softball prison system, and our legal presumption of innocence. As I have said statistics are a mine field.
The second industrial revolution mate. I stated that later down I think so its not your fault for the confusion. The second one started in teh 1860's and gained more steam after the Civil and World Wars. The real start of the effects is in the 1920's where were rather secular at the time compared to the late 40's and 50's, where we seen a mass influx of people to the city.
You mean consumerism? Its possible. However I don't see a connection to secularism and consumerism. The economic factors at play had nothing to do with religion or lack of religion. I think you'll have to provide some pretty impressive evidence to tie those two together. We didn't start buying appliances (which was the real big driver of consumerism in the 50's which was the time in which you seem to think was great and the 60's ruined) because of a lack of religion. In fact it made it easier. Though it may have indirectly caused some of these problems you are mentioning. Women working for example is a KEY and I put that in all caps because it is so important to the discussion here about family and family values, was heavily in part due to the fact she COULD work. She no longer had to can foods to make them last, she didn't have to cook for 5 hours a day for two meals, she didn't have to spend 3 hours to clean the floors, she didn't have to spend 2-3 hours washing clothes by hand, all while taking care of the children. Now with stoves, irons, refrigerators, vacuums, washing machines, in general running water and electricity, cut the amount of work women had to do at home down by a lot. You also had men having to work less and less hours at the factory because it wasn't all done by hand. So now you have two people in the family unit that have far more time on their hands. Women could get a part time job, or even a full time job if things were rough, and men could come home earlier, do different activities, ect.
All from your perspective and the shows that you watch. Anyway this is going nowhere. I would just like to see the evidence that secularism regressed in the 80's and I think that is more your personal opinion based on your subjective observations. I may be wrong because there is a trend to go back and forth roughly every other decade between conservatism and progression.
I was convinced that you were misreading the graphs. Mainly because every single graph states that there is a steady decline. However I went back and I finally found the SINGLE graph out of all of your graphs that seem to indicate your point.
Actually it was both religious and secular in nature. MLK was religious and he fought from a religious point of view which often is mistaken for the whole movement. But it wasn't a "religous" movement by any means. This was, in reality, the birth of humanism. There were several atheists in the high ranks of the movement. For example the man who organized the march where MLKjr gave his "I have a dream" speech was an atheist.
I counted six. What are the rest of the hundreds of thousands? And go back and look at those graphs. None of them state what you are stating WITH the exception of the graph that compared today to a time where most of our men were away or dead. (its hard to make hanky panky with your sweeheart in GA when your crawling in ditches in Germany)
I stated that the freedom of religion granted to us by our constitutional right allows us the most solid evidence that we are not to be ruled by a theocracy. And I believe that to be true of any level of theocracy. We are fundamentally secular with religious influence. But for example as an atheist I can do and preform all of the things that anyone else can in the court, military ect without having to swear over a bible or invoke god in any way shape or form.
U.S. Supreme Court depicts Muhammad
Well that is disconcerting. It is ironic that those who object most to a depiction meant to Honor Muhammad's contribution to law, are Muslims, he did not contribute to our legal system in any way I know, and who's followers seek to destrony our very nation. It's ironic and just plain sad. Thanks for the link.
Since the prohibition movement occurred at this time I do not see how this was a more secular time but I would grant that secularism certainly did make some gains at this time. I would say both sides made public efforts to advance their world views during this period an they cancel out any effect on the whole. I ado agree there was a second less well known industrial revolution but it not deteriorate the family in any significant way as secularism or the indirect results of it in the late 50's.
Both materialism and consumerism are equally valid descriptions. I tried to explain the connection. This countries values were Christian oriented. Even those with superficial faith had theological principles. reading the letters home from the civil war and WW1 as I have make this obvious. Secularism is a break from those values. It is not a total break (as philosophers point out theological values are so inherent secularists must retain may of them while denying their source), usually only involving a shift in priority. The traditional or sacred priority of moral duties are no longer sacred or adhered to with the same priority. Humankind abhors a vacuum. If we deny am actual God we must in many ways make a God out of other things, worship other things, and value other things. This leads to the substitution of many Holy priorities for more self interested and convenient values. In some respects I agree that our shift to a material priority was not only secularism's doing. The post WW2 affluence combined with secularism produced a perfect incubator for consumerism. BTW I recommend Tytler's cycle of government. Democracies usually cycle through several predictable stages.
I thing the rise of secularism in the US was the result of affluence which created apathy. Faith was applied and tested in WW2. As with anything once something has been pressed into service in the extreme many times it is the very thing that is neglected the next instant. Like my Dad always says the US population is like a pendulum. Usually swing too hard to either side. It swung hard to the right like it will every time we are in a pressing situation. Faith is kind of weird. It is not relied upon (in many lives) until it is needed. I have had countless councilors and ministers tell me the hardest people to convince and the most miserable people on earth are rich people. This is because they have tried everything and not found contentment and because they have everything they do not think they need anything. This is probably what inspire the chances of the rich man entering heaven verse in the bible. The most miserable people on earth are those weary of pleasure. Faith thrives under pressure and is not felt needed during easy times. Reminds me of a Greek who told a battle hardened army that was contemplating a nation much more affluence than themselves. He said hard land makes hard men, abundant land makes men soft. If you conquer that nation you will soon find that it conquers yourselves. So our affluence and our no longer being in need of faith in our post war affluence social rebellion among which or caused by such things as secularism. BTW I did not say anything about which times were easy. Our expectation of ease is what is bankrupting the nation.
My claim are specific for several reasons, I have specific experience with this nation, this nations is a very culturally diverse one, and it had a drastic shift in it's theological adherence. So it is a great example and I know about it. However the principles are general though they vary in intensity and severity in different times and places.
It depends on what graphs your using. All the ones I found that went from the 40's through today justify my claims. Those that are much narrower only show a short time frame trend. However I commend your persistence.
Keep in mind I just picked what I think the turning point was, faith's effects are still present today and secularism's effects still existed pre-1960. What is the most telling is that as soon as secularism peaked so did all teen pregnancy. Maybe secularism saw it's mistake in this regard and has corrected it's self but in most others it has not.
It's foundation were faith based. It's motivations were varied but equality is only true if God exists. Evolution never made two equal things, ever.
Let me answer this a couple of ways.
Six of what? Who said hundreds of thousands of what? Most of our men were not away, of course most of the military age men in France died in WW1 but we are not talking about France. I do commend the thought though, never occurred to me. I might even argue that with many men away the ones left were the "rats of the bunch" anyway and would have made up and then some for those gone but who knows.
I am not arguing we are a theodicy, just that faith was never to be separate from the state. It is not even really our state I am primarily concerned with anyway. It's out founding and core principles, the character of the state simply follows from them.
I saw this and was very disappointed.
Yes. The intention was to have the people rule. If the people were a religious people then the laws passed would reflect that but it wouldn't respect establishments of religion. There would not be religiously based laws but laws based in the needs and wants of a religious people. There is no god authority in government but only the voices of the people.
On the topic, the prohibition was not a religiously motivated thing. Some used religion as a tool but it was not because people were upset. Women were tired of their husbands getting drunk and beating them.
I don't think that I have any sort of god that I worship. Some have told me its money or its my own personal whatever. But the reality of the situation is that god only works as a psychological placeholder. If one accepts that there is no god or at least doesn't assume there is one, then we realize we were never stronger because of god. We were just as strong or just as moral one way or the other. Religious morality is rooted in secular morality. It is simply secular morality that cannot be questioned.
This is part of my own argument actually. The concept of faith is something that we have used as a societal and psychological catch all for things we aren't able to deal with. It may be stress, it may be fear, ect. However morality tends to do the opposite. We tend to loose our morality as a people when things get hard. When things are good we have time to discuss and think on the matters. With the rise of secularism we tend to see a rise in moral action if gauged by crime. The vast majority of people in prison for example are very religious for example. I think its a trend that people in despair fall into. It doesn't make it right and by all accounts the evidence doesn't support that it makes them moral.
I commend yours. Well actually I condemn it but that is neither here nor there. If we get the link again I will go through and post the images here on the forum since you were saying you had trouble with that. I can prove, definitively that your claim was wrong.
Except that we still have a lower teen pregnancy rate than the forties. I have very specifically shown you that the ONLY time that it was lower than it is right now was literally DURING WWII when a lager percentage of our healthy young males were in other countries.
The very response this portion of your post was responding to refutes it.
1. Irrelevant
I argue that we cannot have freedom of religion if faith is part of our government. It simply does not work. Especially with a religion that claims total and perfect truth in the face of other contradicting religions as lies.
I wonder why.
The social benefits of acting within socially approved ways dictate morality. Not religion. We do what behooves us.
I don't think you quite get the point. Sure, I may like to be, for example, burned with a cigarette, but logic tells me that most people do not enjoy this and that most probably the few that do would still find it extremely disrespectful for you to burn them with a cigarette without first establishing whether or not they want you to. Treating others as you wish to be treated means treating them with the respect and courtesy you would expect others to treat you with. It does not mean assuming they have the same desires or needs as you.
Anarchy isn't a "law", it is a lack of governance. This question makes no sense.
Correction: some do, so do not. Personally, I regard the institution of marriage as having little to no importance.
Not "the best way to go". Merely "a choice people make that has no negative consequences provided (as with almost anything else) it is a choice made with reasonable consideration and responsibility."
Any of them could. Atheists don't believe in God. Other than that, they are as diverse as the rest of humankind.