To my fellow athiests, what we lost, when we lost religion............

I thought Freemasons already solved that dilemma?

 

Religious culture is apparently all about lying about people you dont like or dont understand.

Falsehoods and calumny in bold above submitted in evidence.

 

""""Traditionally women had a defined role, when asked what it was to be a women, you could find some consistency in response. Then came a cultural revolution that destroyed the cultural expectations of what it meant to be a women. This in itself is neither a good thing or a bad thing. What is without a doubt a negative impact on society is asking 100 different women what it means to be a women and getting 100 different answers.""""


The old, "Men Effed Up So Let's Blame Those UPPITY Women"..../"Women Don't Know Their Place" excuse for failure.

Such a shame that 100 women all have seperate intellects, don't think like the cattle you want them to be....how frightening for tiny men!

 

This "destroyed' bit is such crap. We achieve some freedom from the 'traditions' and oh dear look how she has destroyed the egg shell when she busted out.

 

In my case, I find that I can only take some women seriously regarding serious relationships, only if they are seriously using sex on me.

 

Well a shallow individual will lead a shallow life and die with no one really caring.

 

The golden rule is not religious in nature. Atheism is the idea that there is no god and that everything is the result of nature. It has nothing to do with non-religious philosophical beliefs like the "golden rule".

 

pimptight,
I always say that there is no need for organized religion but there is a need to discover what morals are and how they are integral to our beings as a whole. It is my finding that morals or natural laws were never created, they were just given and avenue of expression through Creation or what is called Nature; this is the idea of Natural Law in my mind. Natural Laws are not manufactured by governments, princes, kings to legislatures, natural law have always been in existence even before Creation and The Creator Himself.
Think over these words, if you will.

 

I believe the only thing we lost was enough self-reliance to bear true witness to the morals Ordained and Established by our Founding Fathers and enumerated as our supreme law of the land.

 

You don't WANT to find more atheists. You want to find the definition of God.

You can't disbelieve in something until you know its identity.

If I said, "Hey do you believe in............", you'd say, "Do I believe in WHAT? I can't tell you if I believe in something if you don't tell me what that something is.

The reason you don't believe in the one workable definition of God is that you don't know what that definition is.

And it isn't the Catholics or the Buddhists or the Muslim or the Baptist or the Mormon or the atheist notion of God.

 

There is not one thing in the entirety of reality that is not religious in nature.

Religion (that is, the Science of God, not the attendance of church on Sunday, nor a pamphlet of bylaws), is the forest, which being omnipresent, is often missed by some people for the trees.

 

I don't think you guys are doing yourselves any favors by mutually excluding US history and religion. "Not sinning" worked wonders when it holds the threat of eternal (*)(*)(*)(*)ation... as the church softened and secularism grew... we lost an "always present" authority. There WAS less fraud, and the frauds were for less. Women got married if they were pregnant. Divorce was not easy. Oppressive or not, hard to deny the results. Nobody is suggesting replacing it with oppression... but with something.

I am fond of rational anarchy. A very minimal federal government, Smaller state interference... community oriented self-policing. The idea of the state is more... well... rational. It is recognized as an idea of law, without the teeth to enforce itself. This is left to society. Ideally it would be too savage to even really discuss with folks with current values. In my world... if you catch someone raping your wife or child... you can kill them. Society will not suffer such. No second chances there... of course an investigation will have to be conducted... and should you have wrongly killed someone... you will suffer the same fate. If you kill someone not in self-defence, you pay for their children. Society is all growed up now. We can manage ourselves and manage ourselves in groups. "Mob mentality" is not law... it in fact only exists when mobs are divorced from authority, and like teenagers with a taste of freedom, rebel and follow.

Congress is a mob. They manage not to clear the benches like a baseball game. They are able to decide as a group without killing each other. It is because they are free of authority. They are the legislators. They are the law.

I think WE can do it better. Anyway... it is a long and involved theory... which was laid out actually in some sci-fi novels by Robert A. Heinlein (one of which was made into a terrible movie, ignoring the politics).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress#Politics_and_society
http://dwrighsr.tripod.com/heinlein/RatAnarch/

 

I'd say New Orleans culture still very much revolves around Catholicism, but not in an all-encompassing way.

 

While about a third of New Orleans claim Catholicism, Baptists, black Methodists and Voodoo and have more to do with New Orleans culture than Catholicism imo.


It is not the most reverent city that comes to mind... but it is all flavors of weird. I would not rush to claim its culture if I were affiliated with a Christian denomination.

 

True, dat, there are many other groups in my hometown, and I didn't grow up Catholic myself. Its culture is also flavored now by Vietnamese immigrants and other groups. But classic New Orleans culture grew out of French Catholic and Black culture. Of course, the area was originally settled by the French, and it was a home to French expatriates long after Louisiana was bought by the United States. African slaves, many transplants from the Caribbean, practiced Voodoo. But Voodoo wouldn't exist, in the form it's taken in the United States, without a healthy dose of Catholicism. In the 19th century also came large populations of Irish and Italians, both groups largely Catholic. And consider this: Mardi Gras, THE New Orleans holiday, is a Catholic holiday (of sorts). Certainly, all kinds of people live there. But the culture that is quintessentially New Orleans is bound, hand in hand, with Catholicism, and will be for a long time, even as other groups move in and influence it. Anyway, that's it on the history lesson. Peace.

 

You a coonass?


What's the difference between New Orleans Catholicism and yogurt?


Yogurt has an active culture.

 

Sadly, not a coonass.

Good one!

 

If i am getting the OP right he is asking for communism ?

 

What is wrong with aspiring to a "divine" Commune of Heaven on Earth?

 

Culture is multidimensional and Atheists are just as much a part of our culture as Christians are. The problems you have stated are age old issues, around long before you or I were born. But in the past there was no Internet, 24/7 cable TV, and the media was much more tame. In the past, when JFK was bedding some hottie in Vegas the press looked the other way and it was not widely reported. Watch old news reels and will see that corporate corruption has been around for many decades. IMO America has just come out of the closet and no longer hypocritically hides their vice behind a veil of civility and morality. Back in the day of Prohibition, many of the very men who passed the Prohibition law spent their evenings at speakeasies. They wanted to hide behind the veil of respectability and morality... a facade.

 

of course those problems existed before

 

What if we really just need to be moral enough to be better Angels on Earth who have not the need, for the Expense of Government in modern times.

 

I don't think it's necessary to have a religion to have a moral culture. I think one thing that helped in the past is that you know your neighbors you were part of a "tribe" of sorts. You couldn't cheat because your neighbors knew you, and they'd shun you or simply not fall for your tricks. Religions have the effect of bringing you into a community -- you attend the parish church with neighbors, your kids play with the kids in the parish, etc. So you have connections to the people you're dealing with that have nothing to do with your business. The thing is that it's possible to create similar things through other things. Blood lines (as in actual tribalism), sports, scouting, benevolent organizations, social clubs, all of that can form the same types of bonds.

 

Out of all the responses in this thread, I feel like you might be the only one who got it.

 

technology is changing, culture has to change with it, were more efficient then we ever were... but Corps need skilled labor less and less... culture will have to change