Loss of religious grounding. Christianity was the north star for our societies, it organized people, align them to work together, put the future(love) before personal interest(excess pleasures, sins) Without religion we are going to fail. There never was a working society without religion. Yes we are in a different time, we have to update our stories, but if we throw them out we are going to collapse. Ex: does a doct…
I'm curious how you explain Japan. Their traditional religions have never been very big on moral instruction, certainly not the way Christianity is, and today a supermajority of the population doesn't take religion seriously at all. And yet you have a generally well-behaved populace, low crime, very low rates of out-of-wedlock births, and so on. They have their own problems, of course, but not so much these particula…
For sure there is a mix of cultural norms that are mixed with religions.
I see religion as knowledge that span multiple generations, saving the new ones from falling in the same mistakes as the previous ones. The religions that produced productive and resilient (and combative) cultures thrived, they others disappeared. In a sense like our dna they are evolutive adaptations, but they can evolve much faster and can spread horizontally.
I think they all end up reflecting patterns from reality in a way that is transmissible between humans of different level of education and cognition.
Now, we look at them with very skepticals eyes (for good reasons) but they contain wisdom that we cannot get in one human live. I think we have gone too far in pushing them away, now we need to look at them with humility, just like we wouldn’t modify our dna without care.