History of abolishing God from the society

[Fake Messiah]

I wrote this little retrospective of how people are abandoning God (mentality) more and more in and as a society.

Maybe it was just for myself, but, nevertheless, I would appreciate some additional input. I guess it comes in handy when you are faced with some theists claiming how atheism will perish or that atheism is ridiculous, that in reality society is striving towards abolishing God from its branches so that it can function better.


God out of medicine - perhaps one of the last symbols of clinging to God in medical problems was during the last years of Romanov rule in Russia. Their only son, the prince, had hemophilia and all they did was pray. Empress lived inside of a church. Leading them to think that Rasputin was sent by God to heal their son, and we all know what happened then. It never occurred to the empress that those "dirty" peasants around her had the key to the cure for her son if only she invested her money in godless medical research for the cure. Indeed, there is a cure today so that that boy could have a normal life just by taking it. Which is a mentality of today: if there is some incurable disease, people don't pray but organize foundations to collect money and invest it in medical research.


God lost authority in politics - it was considered that bishops had all the answers from their holy books on how to run a country, but now with humanism, it is considered that human feelings are the most important. So you have the voter deciding what is best for the people and you don't ask God or the Pope. You go to each human and ask him or her what they want. You don't go anymore and tell people "Yes, you might think that and feel this, but you are wrong because there is a higher authority saying that you are wrong," like it was in the middle ages, and is in now Islamic theocracies.


God out of art - in the past, philosophers claimed that art is objective, that people should look for the divine in art, but now the beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Ever since Marcel Duchamp in 1917 took a urinal and proclaimed it as art, people consider art to be subjective, that if you think something is beautiful and are willing to pay for it, then there is no authority to tell you that you are wrong.


God out of ethics and morality - in the past, people went to the priest and asked him what is good and he would tell them "Homosexuality is bad because God says it is bad, or the pope says so." Nobody cared what people thought. But today, people don't care for what God says, or the Bible, or the Pope. What is authority today is what people think and feel. Now, there are some harder ethical questions that need further discussion, but they are all centered around human feelings and thoughts, no one takes out the Bible and looks at what the divine commandments say.


God out of education - people were used to be educated on what God supposedly thinks so that they project that into the society, but today people are educated to think for themselves because thinking for yourself to know what you want is the highest part of the authority in a democracy.

[The Grand Nudger]

Fundies have been pulling the fire alarm about it for awhile. Even self professed christians have been secularized. Nominal christianity may be the dominant form of the religion at present in the us. They've got some pretty good insight into why, too. Parents, even legitimately believing parents, aren't putting as much effort into indoctrinating their children. The state is not providing enough tacit or explicit support - and that's acknowledging that they provide a hell of alot - it's just not enough.

[The Grand Nudger]

An interesting look at part of the phenomena from pew back in 2018, as christianity is being pressured by secularization on the one side, it's also struggling with the ingress of competing religious and spiritual beliefs on the other. This divergence of views can be seen as part of the underlying dissolution (or perceptions of dissolution) of some christian majority or christian authority in giovernment. It's why the nuts went dominionist even though they formed as a social justice subsect. As I've bored people over before - it's how folks who began their adult and spiritual lives doing foreign aid work in central america, to white supremacists chiefly concerned with preventing any aid to people in central america or americans in the us who may have come from central america - further, to cut off the pipe entirely.


https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/20...americans/

-So, I think that while it might seem on the surface like christianity losing it's grip here is a good thing - remember that we're dealing with a trapped animal that was already trying to deal with severe existential distress.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Cut flowers can only maintain there bloom for so long before they eventual die. So too cultures as we watch the debasement of what was good and decent in ours.

[The Grand Nudger]

I guess that's the difference. While you watch the debasement of what was good and decent in your culture, others see the first glimmers of hope in theirs. Yet another way that christian resentment has been produced.

[Belacqua]

God lost authority in politics - it was considered that bishops had all the answers from their holy books on how to run a country, but now with humanism, it is considered that human feelings are the most important. So you have the voter deciding what is best for the people and you don't ask God or the Pope. You go to each human and ask him or her what they want. 

It would be lovely if any country in the world worked this way.

In the US, human feelings are far from the most important things. Corporate profits trump human feelings. It has been shown that the will of the people has no influence on Congress, because only those things pushed by the rich become law. 

You don't ask each human what they want. They want universal health care, and they'll never get it.

Ever since Marcel Duchamp in 1917 took a urinal and proclaimed it as art, people consider art to be subjective, that if you think something is beautiful and are willing to pay for it, then there is no authority to tell you that you are wrong.

People don't think Duchamp's urinal is beautiful. He did it as a joke to show that the new authority in the art world (curators, dealers, critics) act as an authority that can tell normal people what they should be looking at. 

God out of ethics and morality - in the past, people went to the priest and asked him what is good and he would tell them "Homosexuality is bad because God says it is bad, or the pope says so." Nobody cared what people thought. But today, people don't care for what God says, or the Bible, or the Pope. What is authority today is what people think and feel. Now, there are some harder ethical questions that need further discussion, but they are all centered around human feelings and thoughts, no one takes out the Bible and looks at what the divine commandments say.

The Marquess of Queensberry, who provoked the court case against Oscar Wilde as a sodomite, which ruined his life, was an outspoken atheist.

Are all ethical questions centered around human feelings? I'm going to need some evidence for that.

God out of education - people were used to be educated on what God supposedly thinks so that they project that into the society, but today people are educated to think for themselves because thinking for yourself to know what you want is the highest part of the authority in a democracy.

Today we are propagandized within an inch of our lives by corporations. Nobody is taught to think for himself, we just have different evil people filling our heads with crap. 

Political consent is manufactured by skilled manipulators. People are every bit as much sheep as they used to be. 

If you want to be glad at religion's decline I understand. But that doesn't mean we live in the utopia you describe.

[The Grand Nudger]

OFC it's not a utopia, it'll take hundreds of years to clean up the garbage that theism has strewn all over the cultural landscape, to say nothing of their recent penchant for destroying us influence and crippling our economy and infrastructure...or their increasingly militant plans and actions as they face down the barrel of their own demographic decline.

We've made lots of consequential mistakes as a species, and more specifically as a country - god being a stellar example of that.

[Ferrocyanide]

Fake Messiah, I think you are missing an important word here:
Science.

People use to think that certain phenomenon was caused by the gods. Such as the weather, heavy rain, flood, lightning, earthquakes, disease, famine (in other words, scary things).
When they were scared, they thought some intelligence was trying to scare them, such as some god or their dead ancestors.
Are their any cave painting, writings on rocks, clay, papyrus, goat skin that try to explain these phenomenon? I don’t think so.

When did such notions change?
When people were curious enough to look for the non-god answer.
Once such an answer was developed (such as the hydrological cycle), there is no going back. There isn’t a single case where science gets tossed and superstition takes it place again.

I think the 17xx was a big blow to the christian religion. Possibly even the 16xx with Galileo and friends (astronomy). The 17xx seem to have many people join into the science endeavor. There was the notion of elements and element after element was being discovered, and various chemicals, so chemistry was getting a hard push. Eventually, physics and medicine received a good push in the 18xx.

Science has advanced quite a lot while christianity is at a standstill.
On the christian side, not many take the Genesis story as literally true anymore and instead, they choose science.
Once you understand the value of science, it is unlikely that you will toss it and return to believing in Genesis as a literal story.

Most important of all, why is christianity getting the boot? Skepticism.
Bring the evidence to back up the wild claims and then we will believe you and not a nanosecond before.

---

You don't ask each human what they want. They want universal health care, and they'll never get it.

Not exactly.
It depends on how well you are doing financially.
People who tend to do well financially do not need UHC and most likely they will be against it. In order to make UHC work, there needs to be a good pool of $$$ which means there needs to be a tax burden on the rich.

Also, you might want to take the hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, medical equipment makers off the stock market.
You might also want the government to step in and pay the doctors less. Perhaps doctors should work less hours, go home and spend time on reading.
You might also want the government to step in and reduce the prices on drugs.

Of course, once you tell a person that their salary will be going down, even from 120 k$/y to 110 k$/y, they are going to be pissed.

[The Architect Of Fate]

Cut flowers can only maintain their bloom for so long before they eventually die.

 Nope these flowers are green and dandy 

So too cultures as we watch the debasement of what was good and decent in ours.

Nope as we watch the improvement of society from a debased state to a decent one

[Disagreeable]

Cavepersons did just fine without religion.

Then they got religion and they started murdering each other. More so.