Since the other thread got locked, I'd like to continue the discussion of some of the ideas on that thread over here.
I was trying to argue that religion used to have a strong hold on culture but the modern world has pushed religion aside and that the religion we know today, the religion of individual choice is an impotent religion.
It seems to me that the author of this piece is in some ways supporting my point. She's arguing that religion is an outgrowth of a social institution.
I think the dominant institution of modern society (the capitalist corporation) is almost completely irreligious. Combine the corporation with science and the university with a democratic politics based on a social contract and religion is almost certainly pushed to the periphery.
None of the above institutions embody the interests of traditional society. There is no moral focus on producing a good person, there is no inherent respect for traditional authority, there is no quest for the transcendent, and decisions are made on the basis of personal or class interests.
Perhaps this is why family has to be turned to as the sole remaining source of religion. Once production, knowledge, politics and law become pragmatic there simply isn't enough cultural space left for religion to gain a foothold.

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Do people love the corporation or look to the corporation for guidance in their lives? Does anybody keep-up with past heroes of the bureaucracy? I don't think so. If people think of the corporation at all it is usually in slightly to strongly negative terms. Except for maybe the upper priesthood ... uh management. Some proportion of them probably see the corporation as an entity that is a force for good. Most people think of the corporation as a job and would prefer not to think about it when they don't have to.

My candidate for replacing deities in the modern world is government. It is the source of power in our lives, we are taught to revere the pantheon of national demigods, we sing songs to it's glorification, and we want it's beneficence to smile upon us always.

Dammit, I typed out a long reply and lost it.

I agree that the corporation cannot command loyalty and nationalism is essential for this. I think Hitler saw this very clearly.
However, I still think the corporation is the dominant institution in the modern world, and the nation is its adjunct. I see the question of secularization as the question of whether a society with an amoral (immoral?) central institution can survive in the long term. Will it's lack of a moral center push the world towards fascism or religious fascism because the lack of a moral commitment in the center of our productive lives produces too much alienation? Can privatized and individualized religion suffice to meet the problem?
I think this issue is partly why I am in favor of modifying the capitalist corporation along the lines of the Mondragon cooperative model. It introduces a level of commitment and moral life to the corporation, thereby reducing alienation without losing the advantages that capitalism and a market economy have provided and without resorting to traditional religion or fascism.

__________________
1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

In terms of the corporation as the model of a faith institution, clearly it cannot substitute for religion. Morality is imposed on the corporation, not the reverse. In other words, government, the will of the people, enacts and enforces laws that govern corporations, not the reverse.

I would argue that corporations have no "business" in the morality game. Their motivation should be very narrow -- profit for investors. To balance this and protect individuals and the environment, an outside omnipotent agent is required, government.

The government should also balance the excesses of the individual. What I mean by that is that people should go through life with their own self-interest as paramount. Why? Because I know best what I need. You know best what you need. Etc. Occasionally our needs are in conflict. We require an outside agency, the government, to arbitrate our various competitive needs. Thus was once the role of God and it required few codes to enforce. With divinity no longer responsible for morality we require a myriad of laws to govern relationships between us.

B

I agree that the capitalist corporation will not be moral without external coercion, but I think that cooperative corporations, since they are governed by everyone who works there, would diminish the need for external controls since there is no structural design which concentrates power and the motivations of the corporation would be broader than simply profit making.

I strongly agree that people should go thru life in control but I don't think it's accurate to describe that as being 'self-interested' because I think most people have a wider range of interests than just themselves.

__________________
1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

The cooperative model would probably be more generous internally than the corporate model but it wouldn't have any incentive to be more generous with external agencies.

Concerning self-interest, I guess that's a reflection of my belief that humans are animals more than they are saints. I do not believe in altruism as a motivator in itself. That is, to give of one's self dispassionately. It maybe more of a definitional issue between us than a real one.

It probably is because I don't believe in altruism either. Self interest and other interest are intextricable intertwined.

I also agree that internally a cooperative would be more generous but I think that the difference between a cooperative and a capitalist corporation is that the 'legal personhood' of a capitalist corporation is structured to require selfishness of the corporation. There would not no legal requirement to maximize profits in a cooperative so motivations would be far more complex and more closely aligned with the multiple motivations that individuals experience.

__________________
1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

Gazing into the Abyss

The sudden appearance of love
and the galvanizing prospect of death
lead a young poet back to poetry and a
“hope toward God”



By Christian Wiman


Though I was raised in a very religious household, until about a year ago I hadn’t been to church in any serious way in more than 20 years. It would be inaccurate to say that I have been indifferent to God in all that time. If I look back on the things I have written in the past two decades, it’s clear to me not only how thoroughly the forms and language of Christianity have shaped my imagination, but also how deep and persistent my existential anxiety has been. I don’t know whether this is all attributable to the century into which I was born, some genetic glitch, or a late reverberation of the Fall of Man. What I do know is that I have not been at ease in this world.

Poetry, for me, has always been bound up with this unease, fueled by contingency toward forms that will transcend it, as involved with silence as it is with sound. I don’t have much sympathy for the Arnoldian notion of poetry replacing religion. It seems not simply quaint but dangerous to make that assumption, even implicitly, perhaps especially implicitly. I do think, though, that poetry is how religious feeling has survived in me. Partly this is because I have at times experienced in the writing of a poem some access to a power that feels greater than I am, and it seems reductive, even somehow a deep betrayal, to attribute that power merely to the unconscious or to the dynamism of language itself. But also, if I look back on the poems I’ve written in the past two decades, it almost seems as if the one constant is God. Or, rather, His absence. There is a passage in the writings of Simone Weil that has long been important to me. In the passage, Weil describes two prisoners who are in solitary confinement next to each other. Between them is a stone wall. Over a period of time — and I think we have to imagine it as a very long time — they find a way to communicate using taps and scratches. The wall is what separates them, but it is also the only means they have of communicating. “It is the same with us and God,” she says. “Every separation is a link.”

It’s probably obvious why this metaphor would appeal to me. If you never quite feel at home in your life, if being conscious means primarily being conscious of your own separation from the world and from divinity (and perhaps any sentient person after modernism has to feel these things) then any idea or image that can translate that depletion into energy, those absences into presences, is going to be powerful. And then there are those taps and scratches: what are they but language, and if language is the way we communicate with the divine, well, what kind of language is more refined a nd transcendent than poetry? You could almost embrace this vision of life — if, that is, there were any actual life to embrace: Weil’s image for the human condition is a person in solitary confinement. There is real hope in the image, but still, in human terms, it is a bare and lonely hope.

It has taken three events, each shattering in its way, for me to recognize both the full beauty, and the final insufficiency, of Weil’s image. The events are radically different, but so closely linked in time, and so inextricable from one another in their consequences, that there is an uncanny feeling of unity to them. There is definitely some wisdom in learning to see our moments of necessity and glory and tragedy not as disparate experiences but as facets of the single experience that is a life. The pity, at least for some of us, is that we cannot truly have this knowledge of life, can only feel it as some sort of abstract “wisdom,” until we come very close to death.

More at: http://www.theamericanscholar.org/su07/abyss-wiman.html

Finally printed it out and am reading it more closely. There seems to me something she is not examing: It may not be that smaller families cause a decling in religion but that whatever causes smaller families also causes decline in religion.
From what I've observed in religious people, such people are much less inclined to 'play God' (whatever that means). This means they are less likely to take deliberate effort to direct their lives and limit the number of children. Non-religious people are more Promethean and willing to take deliberate action to create their lives. So, what may be happening is that a certain kind of personality is evolving in the modern world (the Promethean person or in economic terms, the capitalist rational man, or the Nietzschean proto-Supermen) which in the short term to individuals means they plan their families, and in the long term, find religion less relevant to their lives.

__________________
1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

1. Excellent example of the fundamental problem of inferring causality from correlation. A corollary is that the more factors one includes in a correlation analysis, the greater the correlation. This seems to imply increasing causation, but it does not.

2. Reasonable derivative of #1. I especially like the fatalistic vs Promethean contrast. Succinct and very rich. Probably the main reason I have low tolerance for predestination.

Frank Furedi
The end of Europe?
Blaming Europe’s decline on the fertility rates of fecund immigrants misses the point that the continent is politically, not physically, exhausted.

Today, pessimism permeates the Western world. In political, academic and media circles, there is a deep-seated scepticism about the benefits of economic growth and the possibility of social progress, and a great deal of anxiety about the future.

Europe in particular is afflicted by a powerful sense of terminus. Of course, Europe has experienced waves of political pessimism in the past. In the 1920s and 30s, for example, when Oswald Spengler’s 1926 book Decline of the West was a talking point in European salons, words such as ‘end’, ‘decline’, ‘death’ and ‘decay’ were frequently used in the same breath as ‘Western civilisation’. Judging by the title of Walter Laqueur’s recent book The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph For An Old Continent (which I reviewed for the spiked review of books here), this narrative of European decline is making a comeback in public debate. In Britain, there are currently tortured debates about whether there should be a referendum on adopting the European Union’s Constitution, and widespread concern that if Britain embraces the European project too closely, it might inadvertently put itself on the road to decline.

Political pessimists have a habit of getting things wrong. Those who espouse pessimistic views of the future present themselves as brave messengers prepared to say what others are too afraid even to think. But in reality the pessimists tend to blame others for the failures of their own way of life, and there is little brave about that.

Spengler attributed what he considered to be the inexorable decline of the West to the rise of the uncultured masses. He had the most venomous contempt for the mass of the population. In contemporary Europe, the pessimists tend to point the finger of blame at the mass influx of immigrants, who apparently pose a mortal threat to the European way of life. Blaming immigrants for ‘overwhelming’ or ‘undermining’ traditional European culture is to look for external causes of Europe’s current malaise. Instead of raising tough questions about the European elites’ own responsibility for their societies’ loss of direction, many critics focus myopically on the behaviour and cultural habits of the non-European immigrant.

This immigrant-blaming has become more intense following the events of 9/11: apprehension about mass immigration now focuses almost exclusively on the culture and religion of new arrivals, especially those who come from the Muslim world. Today there is much public handwringing about a possible re-Islamicisation of Europe.

Twenty-first century Malthusianism

The preoccupation with an ‘immigrant invasion’ of Europe shows the extent to which Malthusianism is influencing early twenty-first century thinking. There has been a shift in the cultural imagination in recent years, from a political mindset towards a new consciousness of natural limits. Natural cycles, the climate and biology are now looked upon as the main drivers of human destiny. Some argue that there must be a significant reduction in the number of humans inhabiting the planet if we are to protect and preserve the natural environment. Others take a different view: they worry about the declining birth rates amongst their people. Many thinkers and commentators are concerned about the reluctance of European natives to have large families, or to have any children at all, and thus they would like to see a reduction in the numbers of the ‘wrong kind of people’ being born or arriving in Europe.

more at: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3721

Maybe it is the hype that people buy into. A placebo effect, if you will. Kinda like some people install a go-fast part and feel a SOTP difference. Take it to the track and there is no real difference. The wife thought her new glasses were so heavy compared to her old ones. It would weigh down on her nose and what not. Weighed it and the new ones were lighter. People are conditioned to see the "miracle of birth".
Miracle:

1 : an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs
2 : an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment

It is a daily event.

__________________
01 Ford Excursion Powerstroke
99 E300 Turbodiesel
91 Vette with 383 motor
05 Polaris Sportsman 800 EFI
06 Polaris Sportsman 500 EFI
03 SeaDoo GTX SC Red
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04 Tailgator 21 ft Toy Hauler
11 Harley Davidson 883 SuperLow

[QUOTE=Botnst;1531190]I have never known a-religious or atheists or even agnostics who had very large families. I'll arbitrarily stipulate that "very large" is more than five living children from the same marriage./QUOTE]

Dad's parents had 8 kids. They didn't really have any sort of belief at that time.

__________________
01 Ford Excursion Powerstroke
99 E300 Turbodiesel
91 Vette with 383 motor
05 Polaris Sportsman 800 EFI
06 Polaris Sportsman 500 EFI
03 SeaDoo GTX SC Red
03 SeaDoo GTX SC Yellow
04 Tailgator 21 ft Toy Hauler
11 Harley Davidson 883 SuperLow

How is what they do not related to just themselves? If you give money to a starving kid, do you do it for no reason or because you have that warm feeling inside you have been conditioned to have when you do something that is defined as "good"?

__________________
01 Ford Excursion Powerstroke
99 E300 Turbodiesel
91 Vette with 383 motor
05 Polaris Sportsman 800 EFI
06 Polaris Sportsman 500 EFI
03 SeaDoo GTX SC Red
03 SeaDoo GTX SC Yellow
04 Tailgator 21 ft Toy Hauler
11 Harley Davidson 883 SuperLow