Did your exit bring you sadness or happiness?

[Kishkumen]

Christian apologists sometimes (maybe often) do argue that their faith is the only basis for morality and that stopping prayer in schools, or whatever, is the start of society's inevitable slide into barbarism. Inasmuch as a fair number of people really do try to argue that, I don't think this purported position is a straw man, in general.

I do think it may be a straw man for Kishkumen in particular, though, because I don't think he has been saying that. What I read him as saying, instead, is that a society's average morale and morality don't just come directly from human DNA, but depend on cultural infrastructure, which has a fair amount of inertia. You can't just delete it all and install a new version within a few years. In some particular countries, I understand Kishkumen to be observing, a lot of that cultural infrastructure happens, historically, to have been Christian. It's not unreasonable to worry about what might happen if that infrastructure gets trashed too quickly for a smooth handover to any new model.

I don't think Kishkumen's point about Japan is that it suffers from its lack of Christian heritage, in particular, but maybe that Japan is suffering spiritual malaise because its own spiritual traditions seem to have run out of steam for recent generations, or something, with no adequate replacement up and running yet. I've only ever been in Japan for one week, twenty-five years ago, so I have no view on this point, but one does see stories in western media about various kinds of unhappiness in Japan. So Kishkumen's perception of contemporary Japanese society might well be inaccurate, for all I know, but it's not just something he made up for himself.

Thank you for investing the effort into reading what I write instead of remaking everything I write into something you can fit into your own agenda.

My view is that religion is part of culture, and that cultures can have problems that manifest in destructive or self-defeating ways. Some of those problems may be the product of religious developments. In my opinion, what we call Western civilization is, at its foundation, the product a cultural conversation between the Near East and Mediterranean culture. Religion and philosophy are very much at the center of that civilization's internal conversation and self-understanding.

The effort to separate out key parts of this civilization as "parasitic" or some such nonsense is nothing less than historical ignorance tangled up with ideological bias.

I don't know exactly what Japan's problems are. Maybe they are overblown by fascinated Westerners, or maybe they are real but the natural outcome of particular geographical, ecological, and demographic factors. My key point was that civilizations have their own track of development, and one civilization is not the magical key to figuring out the problems of another. It is a very Western thing to look at the East for validation of one kind or another, but most of these exercises are doomed at the outset.

I was mostly just bemused about the act of pointing to Japan for validation. I love Japan. I think Japanese civilization is incredibly interesting. But I am also allergic, partly thanks to my children and other reasons, to the use and abuse of Asian cultures by Westerners, not that I think this is exactly what Chap was up to or at least intended.

What really gets me is our collective intellectual inability to think beyond the granular individual perspective. It was obvious to me that at the outset we were being asked to look at whether an individual, non-Christian Japanese person could be good, and that the self-evident conclusion that this was of course true was somehow proving that Christian claims are stupid and Christianity itself is unnecessary. Well, that is all fine and good as a nifty polemical attack against Christianity or the very notion of being religious that aims to convince individuals or affirm their individual choices, but it has absolutely nothing to do with understanding human culture, of which Christianity and Shintoism are parts.

Maybe I am just getting bored with missionary efforts of this kind.

For myself, I'm sure that most people can be decent without religion, even noble at times—if conditions are good enough that they can afford to be decent. And I'm sure that some people can be decent without religion even in terrible times, at high cost to themselves. It also seems obvious to me, though, that a sincere belief in something like afterlife consequences is bound to have some general effect on people's behaviour. People adjust their behaviour due to their expectations of consequences at tax time; why wouldn't their behaviour be affected by their expectations of divine judgement? There are other incentives to decent behaviour besides fear of hellfire, and in many cases and under many circumstances those other incentives can certainly be enough to keep people kind and honest. I can't think of any motivations for decent behaviour which an atheist could have, though, which a religious believer could not also have; the religious believer, on the other hand, has extra incentives beyond those that apply to any non-believer.

One can argue that this advantage in religious belief isn't actually worth so much in today's world, or that it's outweighed by disadvantages. For example the opportunity cost of relying on prayers instead of actions to make things better can be high. I still don't see how one can legitimately avoid conceding the specific point that religious belief can offer additional incentives to moral behaviour, though. Just saying, "I'm an atheist and I would never murder anyone" is no doubt true but it's an anecdote, like the smoker without emphysema or the factory town with clean water. Unambiguous statistics are also going to be hard to obtain. Just as the scattering of infrared light by CO2 provides a clear basic mechanism for climate change, though, there's a clear basic mechanism by which religion can be an additional support for morality besides anything else. "You'll go to Hell if you do that." If someone believes that, it's got to be additional weight on the scale, when they decide what to do.

Besides morality there is the question of morale. A high-demand religion like Mormonism may bring drudgery but my impression is that it can also make life more exciting. It's like a virtual reality visor that superimposes a vivid(-ish) layer of spiritual meaning on top of mundane things. You didn't just talk to somebody at work for a while: you planted a seed that might save their soul, or something.

I'm not much tempted to murder people, but I want meaning and purpose to set against life's setbacks and tragedies, and overlay on its drudgery. Leaving a religion like Mormonism probably doesn't make many people suddenly struggle to resist urges to murder, but I bet it does often come with a feeling of loss.

Really interesting and thought-provoking stuff. At the same time, I want to point out that your perspective is centered on individual choice and cost-benefit analysis. And here, I think, is the root of why traditional culture is disintegrating. Once you make consumerism the heart of your approach to the world, nothing that doesn't meet the consumer's demands will stand up to the tsunami. In this way, every conversation becomes a Coke versus Pepsi debate.