1. Observation: Open religious societies tend to be better for their communities. Cultures that embrace religion tend to develop into better communities than those that reject religious belief entirely or mandate strict compulsive beliefs.
2. Observation: All religions are not equal when discussing outcomes and judging benefits to their members. Some religions are better than others, in creating good societies.
3. Morality and Truth are inextricably linked. Societies that value truth tend to be more moral, and highly moral societies tend to be the ones most committed to discovering and upholding truth.
This is because in order to discuss questions of good and bad, you must speak truthfully about actions and outcomes. You can't be vague about events and intentions and hope to derive moral clarity. You can't be vague about outcomes and enforce strictly moral behavior.
Similarly, if there is no objective good, then seeking truth is not valuable. Truth becomes propaganda and speech is only valuable as a way to persuade and manipulate. A cunning lie becomes much more valuable than an awkward truth.
Societies that blur the distinctions of true statements also dull the insight about how those truths translate into good or bad outcomes. You cannot make moral judgements about outcomes until you can describe truthfully what those outcomes were. Similarly, you cannot discern ultimate truth until you believe that good and bad things exist
In order to evaluate historical events, one must be extremely clear about what exactly has happened. This is often the first point of contention with modern moralizing. A morally decayed society often has trouble agreeing on the precise facts of a event. Each telling of the event becomes equally valid, a "different truth" about the event, which actually means that there isn't any truth at all.
There can be differing interpretations about the moral implications of events, and each of these implications can be given differing weights. But if there are no commonly accepted basic facts that the interpretations can rest against, then the arguments and interpretations are without moral weight.
3.5 A successful religious society highlights and elevates truth. It provides an environment in which truth is fostered and supported. Less successful religious societies use dogma to suppress truth, to obscure it. A corollary of this is that successful beliefs foster the activity of thinking, and of intellectual exploration, rather than suppressing novel thinking and instead allowing only blind following and rote repetition. So for example, Christian societies foster education and learning among the widest possible latitude of its population. Education of all classes, of all genders.
This ability to explore and interrogate religious principles leads to a refining of societal norms.
4. The factors that matter most to personal happiness and satisfaction are Religion and Relationships. Open religious societies offer the greatest possible scope for personal satisfaction
This ambiguous topic is about exploring reasons why secular society may want to reconsider rejecting all religious and spiritual ties in favor of a supposed atheistic utopia.
The argument runs along four postulates:
1. Societies that favor spiritual and religious traditions are better in many different metrics (outcomes, productivity, quality of life, prevalence of crime and corruption) than societies that are atheistic or tend toward a single authoritarian religious dogma. Religious tradition is better than atheistic or anti-religious philosophies for society.
2. Not all religions are created equal; some religions are clearly better for society than others. Some religions, such as Christianity, favor concepts such as personal responsibility, personal liberty, objective truth, rational understanding, while others favor violence, hatred as a moral imperative, suppression of personal expression.
4. Religious traditions, and particularly Christian traditions, are more associated with the improvement of personal experience (not merely in outcomes of society as a whole). Personally religious individuals experience deeper satisfaction with life, greater fulfillment, lower levels of depression and anxiety, and better overall quality of life than those who are indifferent to matters of faith, are atheists, or agnostic. Rather than being confining, faith traditions tend to increase the moral compass of individuals and society, leading to greater personal satisfaction and contentment.
The Problem with Multiculturalism: Melanie Phillips
"You can have multi-racial societies, but you can't have multi-cultural societies that are going to work if the host culture believes itself to be inadequate."
People assume that multiculturalism is a good thing because it means that you have to respect other cultures. But it doesn't mean that. (We should all respect other cultures. That should be the starting point for a decent and civilized society.)
Multiculturalism says something quite different. It says that no culture is morally or intellectually superior to any other culture. So it follows that you can't uphold the West against any other culture. You can't say that Western core values are better than any other. You can't uphold things like democracy, one law for all, freedom of expression, equality for women, tolerance of minorities.
And if you can't uphold those things, its a recipe for cultural suicide. A multicultural society is a contradiction in terms. Multiculturalism says that these differing cultures must coexist within the same society. But when that happens, the more violent culture, the more aggressive culture always crushes the more peaceful one.
Multiculturalism destroys a society; it destroys community cohesion. It creates a system of tribal enclaves that are fighting one another for supremacy.
Seven principles of Western Civilization. Melanie Phillips
Christianity is the foundational creed of the West. You can't save the West unless you connect the West to those principles. And that means getting rid of the ideologies that have sought to supplant them.
For example, the Human rights culture as opposed to the culture of the Hebrew Bible and Christianity, which is a culture of responsibility. Human rights culture is inimical to that.
There exist today many political and societal factions that seem to be struggling with one another: women and men, white vs black, gay vs straight. But all of these groups actually embrace the core western principles and use them to advance their own particular ideas. The only way that the West is going to survive is to acknowledge that these common Western principles exist, and that they are rooted in Christianity and Judaism.
You can't say, "We want the West to continue but we want it to continue as a "Universalist creed." We want it to continue as a "human rights" based ideology. That is not the West.
Even if you are from Muslim or Hindu or Sikh societies you've got to be able to say that we want to be part of the West, and we understand that what makes the West "The West" are Jewish and Christian values. So we're going to uphold those. We're not going to try to replace them. These principles are particular to the West. You can't protect and support and defend the West, unless you are protecting those principles.
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