Does a decline in religion/spiritualy, mirror a declining moral state?

Looks like crime is higher today than 1960 to me.

 

Most dead from disease, before people even knew about germs. What does Jesus have to do with that?

 

Could we please difine ‘moral’ before we start?

 

you made the BS claim.

 

And yet dramatically declining in the last 25 years, as the current shift to atheism that you are complaining about appeared.

Oops, this thread kind of fell right on its face.

 

It appears you did, and then tried to blame all the wrong people for it. BS layered on BS.

 

Um, considering Jesus is supposed to be god and would have control over disease...

 

Even though I’d be pleased to know crime rates have fallen with the rise in un-belief we all need to be careful of the fact that statistics can be distorted and missasembled from selective samples to give whatever picture is disired.

 

And one would think the conman Jesus would have had people around him actually, you know, write stuff down...since he was claiming to be here to spread his message.

 

Correlation is not causation (ignoring your unqualified argument against any and all statistical facts). But lack of correlation certainly does demonstrate lack of causation (and lack of correlation,of course), rendering this thread dead in the water.

 

Much as I want to believe crime rates have fallen with the rise of un-belief we all need to be careful. Well documented and widely available methodology for making statistics say whatever you want exists. Additionally we need to ask questions about such issues as the links between specific crimes and religion; instance sexual abuse of children by the priesthood and be careful not to assume it’s the mere lack of religious conviction by atheists as the single or most important cause of drops in crime rates. Consider for instance the technology now available to police bodies for real time surveillance and identification such as DNA matching. This is no simple debate.

https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=30065031474&searchurl=kn=how+to+lie+with+statistics&sortby=17&cm_sp=snippet-_-srp1-_-title2

 

Unqualified naysaying is never an appropriate argument. And it is especially not appropriate here , as the crime statistics themselves do not and are not meant to show any causation from any cause whatsoever. You are correct, it is not simple.... for those with the burden of proof. You have inverted those parties. The burden lies on those who tried to make the claim in the thread title. And they have fallen on their faces, spectacularly.

 

It's a fallen world. Adam and Eve misused their freewill, like you do.

 

He did, see the Gospels. Can't you read?

 

I would say the rise in crime happened about the time activist judges threw God out of the schools. They invented the notion that it is unconstitutional for kids to pray in schools, you know, like Congress and the SCOTUS does everyday.

 

No, they did exactly what god knew they would do before he created them, and us.

 

What is 'good' in a monotheistic world view? How can there be 'standards' of morality in a purely monotheistic universe with nothing but obedience and disobedience? They are meaningless platitudes and authoritarianism, with no philosophical basis. And they make calling God "good" completely meaningless, since all "good" could mean is that God obeys himself. They are, likewise, arbitrary, since they can't be based on anything other than God's whim--if God were to arbitrarily prefer rape and murder instead (as he sometimes does in the Scriptures), then those things would be good instead. If God were to base his judgement on something, then moral judgement would be available outside of God . . . available to atheists.

If you are going to offer a system of morality outside Divine Command Theory, then that system no longer depends on God's proclaimations and is equally available to atheists.

In other words: monotheists have never developed a robust, satisfactory answer to the Euthyphro Dilemma, posed around 400 BC.

 

They have fallen on their faces spectrally and have also failed to prove a system of morality is impossible without a belief in &/or fear of an Almighty being.
But hey, that’s just one of the many psychological tricks religious doctrine plays on the unwary. Take for instance the idea of Satanic possession. If for instance a believing Christian finds themselves romantically (or heaven forbid) sexually attracted to a member of their own gender they can swallow the comforting delusion it’s not their nature at work but a devil sitting on their shoulder whispering in their ear. Problem with this ( here there are firm statistics to prove this scenario) a disgracefully high percentage of believers who find themselves same sex attracted then convinced by the religious authorities they can ‘Pray the gay away’ place themselves in full time residential ‘care’ under groups such as Exodus only to discover intense prayer hasn’t cured them. Many of them blame themselves for not having forced Satan from their lives and commit suicide. I have some personal experience of this having stumbled across my 16 year old cousin’s body. He’d hung himself leaving a note confessing “I am not strong enough to fight the devil within me”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthyphro_dilemma

 

Bingo. The only system of morality that has been offered that absolutely requires believe in/fear of an almighty being is Divine Command Theory, which proposes that morality is arbitrary and virtually meaningless--it consists of nothing more than obedience to divine commands, which makes it meaningless to call God good and proposes that anything is morally permissible so long as God commands it. Everything from rape to slavery to murder and infanticide. It is one of the most empty moral theories available.

 

Indeed. The Old Testament is riddled with nasty examples of obscene acts committed for no other reason than ‘obedience’ to God. The power of this still manifests in many religions today. The most peculiar is the idea of martyrdom in Islam. The Koran tells us if we die defending the faith, or more usually killing the infidel ( see below) we shall be transported to paradise where we will be given a large tribe of beings who exist simply to fulfil our commands. Early and some later translations of the specific passage describe these being as ‘shape changers’. Some translations, and many later commentaries, tell us the martyr may then instruct these beings to transform into males, females, goats or whatever they’re instructed. Possibly the origin of the old Arabic saying “A woman for necessity, a boy for pleasure but a goat for ecstasy”


“Oh our Lord! For the day is if whose coming there is no doubt, thou wilt surely gather mankind together. Verily, God will not fail the promise.
As for the Infidels, their wealth, and their children, shall avail them nothing against God. They shall be fuel for the fire.
After the wont of the people of Pharaoh, and of those who went before him, they treated our signs as falsehoods. Therefore God hath laid hold of them in their sins: and God is severe in punishing.
Say to the Infidels: ye shall be worsted, and to Hell shall yeah be gathered together; and wretched the couch!” Koran Sura 3 V 7 - 10.

In some translations the believer, not the Almighty, is tasked with gathering the Infidel together in hell.

 

No judge has ruled that it is unconstitutional for kids to pray in schools. That's just a lie certain groups tell to rile up their base. There's a limit on those in tax-funded positions to LEAD them in those prayers, but they can pray. It happens literally every day.

 

So it’s freewill for a Native American child to get small pox and die horribly?

 

Who's netherregions did you pull those stats out from? Have you checked out crime rates in the cities between 1960 and now? Crime has increased when we started kicking God out of the public sphere. The best times America had was when we had the great revivals of the early 20th century.

 

In cases where the American Center for Law and Justice had before the SCOTUS, this is exactly the clarification that was ruled.

 

The crime rates have fallen most every year since the early 1990s, as USAfan charts show.
Sure, the number of crimes is still above the 1960s numbers, but the decline back to 1960s numbers is 25 yrs long.

How about the crime rates from 1900 to 1960? Did they increase? Why are you stuck on 1960 as a base point?