Ok.....So you killed off Religion...

[Fidel_Castronaut]

...hypothetically of course!

Maybe 50 or 60 years from now when science finally proves that all of you are right and there is no God..... and religion dies out for you!

Where as a society will the moral compass come from? Considering of course you even want a moral society?

Will it be: Laws? hmmmm...who will instill these laws? Teachers? Police? Parents? Military? Government Agencies?

Will it be community groups? Say like: Acorn? YMC...whoops....Boys & Girls & Gay clubs? Planned Parenthood? The cities or states?

Or will it be just every "being" for themselves, and NO LAWS? Total FREEDOM! WOW!! Freedom to do ANYTHING!! And no one to tell you differently!

I'm just wondering what it will be like in "Your Perfect World" w/o God & religion?

Let us see where the moral compass points in a world w/o God?

First off I would say that 'science' doesn't care one iota about a god or gods. No scientist I've ever spoken to (and I'm engaged to one) even thinks about god through their research.

I would also, in addition, say that the abolition of religion is not (my) goal, rather the abolition of people using their religion as a hammer to force others into thinking as they do as their sole raison d'être.

Anyway, to the premise of the initialy question (effectively; what morals [if any] will dominate society]), I would say, whatever morality has evolved socially at the point in time that the hypothetical was engaged.

As it has done throughout all of history. There has never been an objective morality that exists in history. The morality of a Christian community in a south Scottish border town 1,300 years ago would be wildly different to what it is today. Indeed, morality across the globe can be pinpointed to be vastly different dependent on the community one sought to engage with.

You may be interested (although also may not be) that states with the most entrenched secularism in Europe also tend to be the most peaceful and have the more liberally informed laws when it comes to justice and rehabilitation (for example), notably states such as Norway and Sweden. That's not to say that secularism and religion are mutually exclusive; indeed, Christianity's greatest invention in history was secularism in 1648.

However, I must insist that the idea that we claim 'there is no god' is off the mark. It's simply not true. We cannot know for sure, but until there's evidence to back up an existence of a deity, we can easily and rightly dismiss such claims as 'absurd and false until proven otherwise'.

When Christian hegemonies ran the state system in Western Europe (from the people pre-17th century) the life expectancy for your average poor parishioner was pretty dire, excluding the numerous conflicts that they were expected (forced) to fight in on behalf of the sovereign (often either endorsed through the papacy or in opposition to it). After Westphalia we had the enlightenment, and the beginnings of the liberation of the common people and eventually their supremacy over the sovereign through democratic liberalism (in all its forms).

Democratic liberalism is the result of the abolition of the church's involvement in state affairs and the adoption of cuius regio, eius religio. If we're going to talk about morality in the state without religion, we should look at the way in which the people took control of their own religion from the central papacy and adopted their own rules based on their own state contexts. It hasn't worked out too bad, IMHO.