What is your relationship with Western civilisation?

Exactly what Christianity used to be about. There is a reason why these two religions came to dominate the globe, and it isn't because they have nice doctrines everybody wanted to accept. They were both spread very much by the sword and gun. Onward Christian/Muslim Soldiers and all that, bringing "salvation" to the "savages" and "heathens". Burn the witches. Slay the infidels.

The primary difference between Christianity and Islam is that Christian lands went through a secularization as science and reason became valued over doctrine. Islam back then actually was more liberal than Christianity at the time. It has changed dramatically.

 

Lol! Well before we get to your Star Trek-utopia, secular people are going to need to learn how to breed at least at replacement level. Time is running out for that.

Also, human beings don't seem to be able to exist without some sort of religion, whether it's the old fashioned supernatural kind, or the secular versions like communism and wokeism. I'm afraid you are not going to find an easy fix to human nature.

 

That decline is global, for the most part. If you want, Peter Zeihan talks about it, and throws up charts in most of his videos. He's on Youtube. I don't know he's right, but he's clearly onto something, even if I am not entirely sure what.

Humans can exist without religion easily. Europe, for example, is massively less religious than we are.

You do need an ethos, but the Enlightenment works just fine, and we've had that for centuries. We used it to build our government..

 

Well I'm definitely pro enlightenment, but since you didn't address or refute anything in my post I assume you have not really thought much about this topic. That's OK though. I'm sure you've had many feelings about it.

 

Very passive reply. "It always has been so it always will be:.
History tells us that mankind has the power to change its course of action, its very nature, if it wants to badly enough. Mankind is the only thing that can create and make choices and change itself.

 

You were wrong, and it's not particularly complicated. The decline in the birth rate is global, and the reasons have almost nothing to do with religion. You're pretending that about 1% is the whole enchilada. There was a baby boom around the world after WW2. But for a bunch of reasons, those people didn't have as many kids. Economics had a lot to do with it.

I pointed out Europe is not particularly religious, which contradicts your point, to a degree.

Humans like fiction, which is why we have religion. But you don't need it.

 

OK I hit it right out of the park then when I called your idea a Star Trek utopia.

No, mankind can't change it's nature. Sorry.

 

I'm not sure how Europe tending to not be religious contradicts may point? Are you sure you read anything I write or do you simply have pre programmed answers to insert?

 

"Also, human beings don't seem to be able to exist without some sort of religion"

Nope...

 

Mankind has been changing its nature for as long as it has existed.
Just compare yourself to a roman whose attitude to the value of human life was a tad different than it is today.
A man and men across the world have free will. They can collectively change their behaviour and the bases upon which they organise themselves and make relationships.
We are not locked into the current nature of home sapiens. That fact is one of the marks of a higher order. We control our environment, and have the means to do it.
It just takes will.

 

"...whether it's the old fashioned supernatural kind, or the secular versions like communism and wokeism."

If you guys wouldn't constantly edit my quotes, you would be so confused.

 

That Roman had a widely different culture and worldview than I do, but he wasn't an alien; he was human and had a human nature that would be perfectly understandable today. If you are confusing human nature with human cultures, no wonder we don't agree.

 

The average roman had very different views of the ways to live, from their conception of gods to the holding of slaves, to the acceptance of oppression, cruelty to the treatment of women and marriage. Yes they were vengeful and power hungry but that rarely is how we live today, anywhere.
We changed partly because we learned through history that such behaviour is not acceptable and also because we found different ways of doing things.
Fatalism will never improve the human state of being.

 

Again, you're talking about culture, not human nature.

 

No. I am talking about concepts like human rights, equality, mana behaviour to man. How they treat each other, how they consider animals, how they make priorities, feel relationships like anger, jealousy, love, property, family, allegiances. These things and others define and shape the world people live in.
Culture is the result of that as expressed in their product such as music, art, conquest, governance and law, and religion.
It is not surprising that Roman gods were jealous, promiscuous and often violent. They mirrored Roman norms.
Humans changed their workd when they rejected those human failings. Some say Jesus did that. Certainly someone showed a better way to organise society and priorities.
But it was an act of human will.

 

OK well what happens to concepts like "human rights, equality, mana[?] behaviour to man" when the people who espouse them stop having kids? How will they be passed down and to who?

 

We can pass on the ideas. They aren't genetic. They also aren't uniquely Western, nor were the Romans all that great at implementing them.

 

Pass them down to who?

 

Why do you assume "down"? Why do you assume that thoughts are genetic? Why do you assume they can't survive on their own merits?

 

"thoughts are genetic"

That's a weird take.

But Western enlightenment ideas grew in the West because they grew out of Western cultures, which evolved based on their particular histories. The written Western canon is available all over the world right now but you don't see a flurry of nations rewriting their governing documents to match the US constitution, and successfully copying the United States. You can export pop culture, like baseball, blue jeans, apple pie and Chevrolet, but you can't export real, actual deep culture:



So you can provide a library of Gibbons, Hume, Kant, Locke, or Voltaire to Africa or Asia, but you can't make them really get it.

To answer your actual question (not your weird genetic thoughts one), yes the Western canon and culture will survive, in books, sitting in a library or hard drive somewhere, but without Westerners, it won't exist in any real form in the real world.

 

The Greeks developed geometry (both plane and spherical0 and trigonometry. Calculus was discovered by Newton and Leibniz, long after Islam decayed.

 

Those ideas also arose TO COMBAT Western culture at the time. And it wasn't the first time some of these concepts arose. Not by a long shot.

 

Greeks attributed much of their geometry to the Egyptians before them. Muslims did plenty to develop algebra (itself an Arabic term).

 

This is true. We need to be more diligent than just to think ending established religion will necessarily mean freethinking rational society. Religion is only one of a wide variety of dogmatic thinking styles.

We need to teach critical thinking skills and encourage people to think for themselves and rebuff authoritarianism, not just rail against the church.

Base nature and instinct, perhaps not. But we can develop society to improve life and make ethical progress. Discouraging authoritarianism and dogmatic thought should be a big part of that.

 

??
These things aren't genetic.
They are new creative thoughtful responses to the human condition which have always moved towards the closer understanding and respect for the individual .
Happily that has been the story of Western civilization as opposed to Eastern civilization which still seems happy to incarcerated dissidents and force conformity on the population.