There seems to be little doubt that religion, faith, spirituality or rite can have benefits. The question is how to get the good side of all these (community, meaning, satisfaction and fulfilment) without the nasty side (exclusion and intolerance, resistance to or denial of reality, imposition of impossible standards, the denial of one's own preferences and wants). Religion has been a major source of soothing and a m…
What’s soured me on secular humanism is how the liberal revolution hasn’t made a big chunk of the population better off: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir.... I don’t think that’s just economic, I think it’s social as well.
> According to the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, 60 years ago just 20 percent of children born to parents with a high-school education or less lived in a single-parent household; now that figure is nearly 70 percent. Among college-educated households, by contrast, the single-parent rate remains less than 10 percent. Since the 1970s, the divorce rate has declined significantly among college-educated couples, while it has risen dramatically among couples with only a high-school education—even as marriage itself has become less common.
If you think about the marshmallow test of impulse control, a lot of us are those kids at the far right of the bell curve who could wait forever for future rewards. But what about everyone else? What if a lot of people need the threat of exclusion or intolerance to, for example, to not walk away from their parental obligations.
My in laws live in rural Oregon, and what’s striking to me is how dysfunctional their communities are. People might putatively religious, but liberalism has won insofar as organized religion has no power to police public morals. And what’s been the result? Not a social libertarian utopia, but dysfunction. My mother in law has teenagers just flocking to her house because it’s an island of stability in a world of mom’s boyfriends coming and going, divorces over trifles, etc.
My dad in the other hand comes from a village in Bangladesh, and they don’t have a fraction of the material comfort of folks in rural America. But what they have is Islam, and tight regulation of social behaviors, intact families, etc. They have social structures that help them make the most of what little they have, which is why I think they thrive when they immigrate to America.