This is nice to verify, but it shouldn't surprise anyone. Religion is largely unrelated to moral, civil behaviour.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/16/ending-religion-lessons-in-schols-leads-to-overall-decline-in-belief-not-morals
@lightweight Religion is related to what we value as a collective. If we drop the religion that got us here, I'm afraid that we have a long way to fall. How can we tell what we should value other than from the accumilated learning of the past?
@liamdiprose I think it's a mistake to think that religion has ever reflected our values or our direction. It has, at best, followed very very slowly. I'd argue it only had relevance when we were desperately ignorant of the world in which we exist. It is increasingly at odds with everything we're learning about the world, and its credibility among the incredulous drops with every new verified scientific discovery. I don't think religion offers society anything of real value.
@lightweight The Bible is showing its age and perhaps some passages could be retired. But I don't think the message is at odds with Science. Science tells us where we are, but doesn't provide any guidance as to how we should grow. Picture a tree, science can tell us where the tree is, but religion is the sun that guides its growth.
@liamdiprose I don't agree that the Bible offers anything of value. I think it's just one of millions of other philosophical/moral/ethical treatises, and it's extraordinarily inconsistent and self-contradictory as well. I'd suggest that many of the others are written by more thoughtful, insightful, and coherent people. Also, I think that society leads human morals which in turn are eventually (but very reluctantly) adopted by religions. They're the laggard, not the leader.
@lightweight The Bible is really really old, copied from stories even older. The refinement of time those stories went through is much more insightful than one mind, and tell us more about what proporous societies valued as they grew to what we have today. If you need something extremely reliable, like a society, would you pick the newest tech, or the laggard tech?
Matching parts form the essence and the concrete message of the Bible. Contradicting parts are symbolic or part of a specific story for historical illustration rather than direct philosophical guidance.
@lightweight
They all think the reason they do it is because they're good Christians and have "Christian values".
@lightweight @liamdiprose
@clacke @liamdiprose heh - of course, knowing which is which seems quite arbitrary depending on who one talks to. I think it's better to just leave it on the shelf.
@liamdiprose I'm afraid I have zero admiration or sentimental attachment to the Bible. I consider it to be largely noise, its internal contradictions plus the calculated edits (removing many/most of its narratives) by past despots for their own benefits rendering it entirely untrustworthy. I think it's not worth reading except as an anachronistic curiosity. It's *definitely* nothing to base a society on.