How to debunk the first cause argument without trying too hard

[TheRocketSurgeon]

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I'm happy you agree with that, and hope that will happen one day, except for no heaven and no religion. But lets see the way things are now. 

We learn about history and how the Turks invaded the Balkan peninsula, destroyed churches and set up gigantic mosques facing the walls of Vienna. We learn about ancient battles and turning points, and saw our own brute potential to do massive evil. And we wonder who we are to have done that. And we feel guilt to the point of striving towards an ideal Europe not according to Jesus Christ at all, but according to John Lennon. The European constitution is a massive document of hundreds of pages. Never once does it mention Christianity when defining European identity. Instead, they moved towards a border free dream of utopia at the cost of national and religious identity. 

There are problems. Something had to replace those things. In the former Yugoslavia, that was the personal cult of Marshall Tito, and the dream of Communist Utopia. All religious and ethnic differences were pressed. Lets just see how that turned out at the death of Tito with the implosion of the country along ethnic and religious divides. 

In the modern European union the thing to replace religious and national identity was consumerism. Reproduction was cut off from sex, and universal contraception and the occasional abortion in case it failed, loosened boundaries of marriage, smaller and smaller families, and children growing up in families with absent caregivers. This problem intesified to the point of governments having to give monetary incentive to large families. Either that, or promote immigration to maintain the economy, to have a young labor force, and feed the hunger of the German companies for cheap labor. But the new generation of immigrants are generally not well integrated. The second generation of immigrants (the children of the first generation) are especially dissatisfied, not few are even going to fight for ISIS. 

Why did they not integrate? Is it because of racism, and the color of their skin? Is it because of their differing customs? Or is it because having been uprooted from their old culture, they are ready to integrate into the new, but the new has nothing to offer them any more other than consumerism. They feel unfed by this consumerism. They feel they should have been fed, but they still remain hungry and dissatisfied. As a response, they are prone to returning to the old cultures of their parents, only in a more radicalized way. The new wave of Islamic radicalism is completely cut off from their traditional roots, but they see it as a new alternative to the consumerism that has not made them well, only sicker. 

The reality is that there is religion, and there will be as long as we are human. There is national identity, just as people need a solid cultural base to thrive. How will the Europeans help the wave of migrants from Syria if they are unsure about their own identity? 

We have governments and borders to keep from anarchy. Before Chrsitianity, civilizations used to maintain order based on scapegoating, even to the point of human sacrifice. If there is no religion to counter it, or of religion is not taught based on the tradition of the ages, if there is no culture to feed them, my fear is that people will resort to anarchy. And that is dangerous because we can destroy the world at the push of a button.

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Such a dim view of humanity. Actually, from most of what I have read about the issues of European immigrants being dissatisfied, it appears to stem from an underlying racism similar to that in the United States (with our southern border), in that Europeans seem to be okay with the immigrants only so long as they come in and do the bottom-of-the-barrel jobs, rather than offering the full treatment that Europeans enjoy, as seen in France for instance.

There is also the problem if resistance to cultural assimilation by the immigrants, especially in the face of alienating prejudices by the majority against them, in which they form enclaves of relative poverty and social isolation, fertile ground for extremists to tell them that their identity is not to be found in becoming Europeans but in their religious heritage. I don't think it's a matter of feeling unfed by the "consumerist" culture, as you put it, but of being unwelcome.

The issues with Tito and that form of communism are, I think, wholly unrelated to the discussion here. I consider communism to be a religious ideology that simply has no deity (except the "cult of personality" of the leaders pushing it), in the same way that Taoism and Buddhism are godless religions (except they are, ideally, peaceful at their roots, whereas communism begins with the principle of an inherent conflict between the workers and the owners).

I wholly agree with you that the issue for all humanity is that we are often too unwilling to give up our old, tribalist identities, and that these identities (be they religious or not) can at their worst cause hatred and destruction. But I disagree in the strongest possible terms with your conclusion that "If there is no religion to counter it, or of religion is not taught based on the tradition of the ages, if there is no culture to feed them, my fear is that people will resort to anarchy."  Religious identities that override the ties of brotherhood, as between the Christian Croatians and the Muslim Serbs (in this case, the Christians were the aggressors), are as often as not the root cause of the fracturing of humanity. Though Europe is increasingly secular in its population, the countries that make up the EU almost all have an official Christian state religion, leading to increased feelings of alienation by the immigrants who have other religious affiliations. It is one of the reasons we atheists tend to object so stringently to objects and symbols of official state religious entanglement; we understand well the feeling of alienation that these symbols represent, and the dangers of church-state entanglement making a majority group feel entitled or superior.

As a former environmental scientist, I certainly agree that economies which are based on a requirement of perpetual growth in population are unsustainable for a number of reasons, but a discussion of economics goes well beyond the scope of this exchange. It suffices to say that I don't agree that "loosening of family bonds" has the impact you seem to be implying. This argument is often made in the United States by our religious leaders, but it is often based on incorrectly-remembered data about an idyllic past that simply did not exist. A great book on the subject, if you are interested, is The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz.