Gang crisis shaking Sweden

Freedom of religion doesn't mean we:

1. Can't question religious values, the religions themselves.

2. Have to welcome people with extreme religious ideas that put religion over the ideas of a liberal democracy.

For example, would you be suspicious of a person who belongs to a cult?

Please note that these are my own experiences and anecdotes, but I think they answers your questions.

The free healthcare and elderly care used to be quite fast and humane. The very professional healthcare is still available for those with serious illnesses, but it's very difficult getting an appointment for more benign problems, dentist appointments, etc. The elderly care has changed so it's now almost a luxury to be accepted to the (still quite expensive) public retirement homes, that are burdened with huge waiting lists nowadays. Most elderly people have to resort to treatment at home, staffed by young or otherwise fairly low skilled carers who spend very little time with their clients. We are talking mere minutes per visit, mainly to hand out pills and serve food. Those carers often spend as much time on TikTok in their cars as they are interacting with clients. This sounds like hyperbole but is based on my own experience as a carer, as a neighbor to those receiving this care, and as someone with multiple people in my close family having worked as carers.

It is very difficult to phone the police to report a low-severity crime - ongoing or not - such as for example fraud, noise violations or reckless driving. You are not supposed to dial the emergency number if the crime in question is not in danger of hurting anyone. So how would we report vandalism for example? We wait on the phone for up to two hours only to hang up before we get the chance to even report the crime. This affects the statistics. Any criminals are long gone if we reach the police at all. This is caused by an overwhelmed law enforcement and is how children mostly get away with torching cars as a service for criminal older teenagers.

Schools have degraded immensely for some reason. This is not an immigration problem although I believe that may play a part in some parts of the country. The biggest issue is what can only be described as some sort of ADHD pandemic, where classrooms are disorderly to the point where kids are offered over-ear hearing protection to be able to focus when their classmates are making too much noise. When I went to school in the 90s, we had our fair share of fights, students that were acting out and teachers that couldn't be bothered. But it was nothing like it is today, and I don't really know who to blame. I think the teachers are doing their best, I think most parents are engaged and want the best for their kids, and I think most kids see the problem themselves. But even the best schools have these problems. My kids go to a fairly high profile school with unusually strict policies that are actually enforced, but they've still had alcohol and drugs in school, thefts, violent acts and a general environment that is making it difficult for the kids to learn. I suspect older teachers are more successful than their younger colleagues but that is merely anecdotal.

20-30 years ago our mostly social democratic parents used to complain that Sweden was slowly "turning into the USA" (meaning: a society where the rich prosper while the poor suffer), and now it's really starting to feel like that to me as well. Our society has been getting very cold lately and I'm not sure this is where I want to grow old anymore. Not that there are any alternatives, really. The free healthcare and education is still awesome when you need it and most of us can't imagine where to relocate to, because we are after all used to a fairly well functioning society. I would be quite happy if we went back to where we were 40 years ago.

Consequences. Like erecting a transparent plexiglass-cylinder with 3 meters diameter and 5 meters height in public, filling it up to half height with pig piss. Dropping the problems into it, until they cease to exist. And associated bystanders realizing there will be no paradise for them, soiled before the eyes of their god.

Simple, isn't it?

Of course you can. But if you know a little bit about how religion works then you will realize that it is strongly coupled to the identity of the person. Someone isn't a carpenter or a baker in the same way that they are Hindu, Muslim, Christian or Jew. They can't just turn off that chunk of their identity while you question their religious values or their religion, they will interpret it as an attack on them. And that's half the problem.

The other half is that any religion - and therefore most of its adherents - are conservative and static. They would like things to stay the way they are. Obviously this is at extreme odds with emigrating from one place into another. People not only bring their culture with them but also some of their luggage. But the locals would do well to realize that they too are usually not exactly paragons of virtue and that there are plenty of things where they would feel personally offended if an outsider pointed out to them that they were maybe not all that level headed about something.

For instance: in NL we have this crazy confrontation about St. Nicholas, which arguably is a racist display in the guise of a childrens festival. Or maybe it really is just a childrens festival. Everybody has an opinion and it is always either the one or the other but never anything with some nuance. So fights break out and everybody feels like they are the ones in the right.

That's what identity will do for you.

If you want to question religious values and religions themselves then you're going to have to start by planning something that will take decades. It took some small parts of 'the West' about 100 years to go from majority strongly Catholic or other Christian denominations to being more accepting of atheists and that in turn led to those places eventually losing a lot of religion. And that's with a religion that went through the enlightenment, which isn't the case for most religions practiced outside of Europe, and only then because the main centers for religion in Europe all were subject to this (and to the horrors that came before).

So in a way all this feels like a step back. But fixing it will take at least 100 years and probably more. Without an actual solution in the form of education, massive funding and housing and healthcare improved at a scale that no country in the West could afford based on their present day budget it may well never be solved at all.

As for whether or not I'd be suspicious of a person who belongs to a cult, my grandmother belonged to the cult of Catholicism, and we didn't see eye to eye on a great many subjects. But I didn't have a problem with it, she was my grandmother. Neighbors are practicing Muslims, I don't have any problem with that, it's their heads and their houses.

And then we come to your 2.

If you move to a country I think your first and foremost pledge should be that you are not going to put your past to work to recreate the place that you fled from in the place that you've arrived at. But people are hardly aware that this is what they are doing, they are so immersed in this that it is invisible to them. And that's a serious problem that I think will only be solved in many generations, and possibly never.

You can probably sense that I don't have a high regard for religion, not because I don't think people should not be able to believe whatever they want to believe but because it brings so much misery. I've seen plenty of this up close to know that most of the people that do this do it from the conviction that they - and not you or I - are in the right. And that's a very difficult thing to repair because then we're back at identity again.

> If you want to question religious values and religions themselves then you're going to have to start by planning something that will take decades

Exactly why we need to start that process now.

I'm not saying we should treat all immigrants as terrorists or anything, I'm just saying that we should recognize that a large influx of people who don't share Western values is a danger to western society and we need to think how to handle it instead of just saying "be inclusive" and hoping that nothing bad happens.

And if we want a (silly) tech analogy, this isn't that different from tech companies who grow too quickly and lose their "culture" on the way. You have to have a hiring strategy if you don't want that to happen.