Thats because you came along well after this transition. We have had 200 years of progression and over the last 50 years we have been more on the No God and secular ideology side with social norms and worldview within the public square.
While I knew you were making a claim about society in general, it does resemble the path out of religion that some people take.
So people are going to be born into secularism.
Not me. I was forcibly baptized before I could hold up my own head.
I think they have good reason to. Endowed by their created is another way of saying God created us.
Any decent historian of the American Enlightenment and Revolution will tell you otherwise.
Thats the point people keep missing that even language is a different metaphycis to secular ideology that makes humans the gods that determine who we are and our worth.
That's not how deism works, which is what is implied in the Declaration.
Thats because God and Christainity is working within a fallen world and so its a gradual process of changing minds and systems. CHristains were working behind the scenes trying to gradually change the system before it happened. They have always been at the forefront in welfare and looking after people.
Classic excusagetics. (We'll come back to this.)
Not really. Theres more than one way to measure progress. Yes rational thinking and science has brought many great things. But
of course there was a "but", there is always a "but" when we equvicate about progress to push an agenda.
at the same time society seems to have lost its moral compass and meaning.
I have the feeling we have different ideas about moral progress and regress...
More people are suffering meental illness and ending their lives. Substance abuse is prevelent and people are struggling to live in suppodely modern advanced nations.
Is that somehow actually changing or new? Can it be demonstrated to being less religious as a society?
Society is divided by identity politics to the point anti-semetism and violence against people is now increasing. The US is at risk from homegrown terrorism and the world is hovering on the bring of war.
Brink of war? Wars have been going on somewhere for a very long time. What's any of this got to do with more secularism?
Climate change is a real concern, where all dreading the next pandemic and thats if its not due to some totalitarian State trying to impose their will on the people as democracy is dying in what use to be free nations.
It ain't western secularists to blame for that.
I don't want to get into the slavery thing as its more contextual than your making out.
There is, but I do know what I am talking about and it isn't a good look for your scriptures.
All I can say is that yes there were aspects that went along with slavery and there were reasons why non Hebrew slaves were treated differently. One was they could not convert to Hebrew.j
I guess people weren't treated equally then.
So even owning them was discouraged. Which then means they were enslaving Hebrews more than non Hebrews.
Something about you may buy your slaves from the other nations.
But slavery was not even what you think it was so your equating todays morals with 1,000s of years ago.
It wasn't as different as you like to think. And it would seem that morals have improved. So much for the degradation of morals under non-Christian influence.
This shows how our worldview and different paradigms can blind us from seeing different points of view.
First there are 100's if not 1,000s of examples of how God had warned or revealed to people their sin or a choice and God allowed them to choose sometimes waiting 100s of years. Allowing them to choose against God. God did not intervene and make them.
God gave Sodem heeps of chances to repent. Abraham pleaded with God if even 50 then 10 and down to 1 person could repent and be saved and Gog gave them that chance each time before he cast His judgement on them.
Revelations 3:20 says "Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me". That shows Jesus waits patiently at the door and allows the person to choose to open the door before He will enter.
So, a bunch of stories about choosing sin and punishment or not. Some choice. This is not relevant to the originating comments about choosing government.
The point is that despite the Constitution saying there was a seperation of church and State that did not happen right away and Christainity underpinned social norms and laws for some time. Even up until the 1970's. So the idea of seperation is a bit misleading.
I'm not sure you quite know what separation of religion and government actually means. It's not about social norms or even if people use their religious opinions when they decide on politicians to vote for. Violations are permitted to exist from time to time and they come and go (they are building now), but we have had effective separation of church and state from the beginning. Maybe you should read up on your own section 116 first.
Yes and I said that predominately the early colonies were founded on Christain and biblical beliefs whether Protestant, Catholic, Methodist, Quaker, Pilgrim or Puritan.
What Christian/biblical belief were the commercial colonies founded on? which book is "the queen needs more gold" located?
Ah something I read in relation to the period of formulating the Constitution and then it being ratified by all the colonies or states at the time.
The US Constitution was formulated in the Summer of 1787 in a single room in Philadelphia and ratified by enough states to trigger elections by late 1788.
Ok so I have read varying accounts but most state that the majority of colonies were one denomination or another of Christains.
They had state religions (all Christian, most were Anglican) except Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, but that doesn't mean everyone participated or believed. (See modern European nations with state religions.)
So maybe something happened and many people fell out with their belief by 1776. But it doesn't make sense that such a sudden and dramatic change should happen like that especially with belief.
What sudden dramitic change? All we have is some vague data spaced out over decades and generations. Things can move much faster than that without being "sudden".
If surveys show 90% belief in 1900 then whatever happened in 1776 had then reversed back to pre 1776. So something strange is going on there with the data.
What surveys from 1900?
Also what I find strange is that I am pretty sure I can find norms and laws with that time period of pre or post 1776 that were based on CHristain beliefs and the bible. If there was only 1 in 5 or 6 Christains how can a society and government favor Christain belief to underpin their norms and laws. Thats more or less imposing a minority on the majority.
If that is correct, then yes it is. (Note above almost all had state religions). And as we noted before, membership underestimates, surveys overestimate. That leaves a lot of flexibility to determine the number of "nominal Christians".
What was wrong with the Pew report from the 1900.
It doesn't exist. There was no Pew Research Center (the pubisher) until 1990. The funder (Pew Charitable Trusts) was founded in 1948 with money from an oil man that was a school boy in 1900.
Also the link you have used is about church membership and attendence. As it states the attendence can be underestimated as for example rural folk may not attend church. In fact there may be many that don't attend a church but are Christain.
Wait until you find out how infrequently rural people attended church in the Middle Ages...
Yes I agree that we have seen a decline in the second half of the 20th century and especially say post 2000.
You are skipping right past church membership, participation *rising* in the mid-20th century before it starts to fall. It goes up, it goes down. The past is not a land of monolithic uniform, and complete Christianity even in the "Christian countries".
I think around the Enlightenment is when the decline started which makes sense in that this was when people were questioning the church and then human reason rationalised that people could exist with a God as nature had all the answers.
You can't make this quantitative measure because there isn't good data. Certainly not "do you believe" surveys. Other proxies have their limitations as we have already discussed.
Hum, certainly its important to reason and the bible does tell us to question and use reason in our judgements. Not to just blindly accept something.
Looks like we're going to need some more citations...
But I am not sure rationality is something we can equate with social issues. Rationalists can reason that inhumane ideas as based on human ideology. There is no basis outside the instrumental and functional. Afterall there were rationalist arguements for slaves just as there were religious ones.
What actually changed was applying the Christain truth principle of human worth being grounded in something beyond human rationalisations. The problem with humans playing God is that we are not all knowing and imperfect and have a tendency to blind ourselves to sin thinking it is nobel when its not.
This wasn't an invitation to bring up your favorite social issues. "Better ideas about society", you know like "elected governments", "human and civil rights", "personal freedoms", and determining the way things work through regularized and rational methodologies (science).
But I agree that The Enlightenment was needed. The Church had become dogmatic and power went to their heads. In some ways this brought the church back down to earth.
Umm. that was the Reformation, not the Enlightenment.
But still the Enlightenment was seen through the prism of a Christain and to a lesser extent a Deistic and natural worldview which is very different from later incarnations and especially today.
It was a gradual de-evolution from the Christain and God worldview to the secular ideological one. The Enlightenment had varying effects. It made Christainity more focused on reasoning faith and understanding Gods creation better in nature thus strengthen faith.
I think you are rambling now. Not sure what your point is.
But at the same time this rational thought led to finding naturalistic explanations instead of some creator God. Thus led to people falling away from the church. Maybe a necessary evil.
But still we are sort have come full circle as the biggest issue today despite all the rationality and success oif material science explaining GOd away is that more people than ever are lost and lack meaning. They are still looking. All that rationalism hasn't really explained things.
The function of science is not to explain away any god.
I might cut this one short as well. I like shorter chunks and to break things up lol.
I wish your definition of "short" wasn't quite so long.
