Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire What Does Declining Church Attendance Mean for Our Society?

It’s not taking “God” out of everything.... it’s taking common sense, decency, civility and reality out of everything. God has nothing to do with it.

Jack an infant is not held liable for anything. They just get to grow up in a fallen world. It's our job to give them something better if we can or teach them how to deal with all of it.

This is a good question and there are lots of answers but I’d say this.

Today we are fortunate to live in an unprecedented time of peace & prosperity but historically people have suffered greatly enough that the promise of heavenly rest has offered hope.

For example Stephen, the Church’s first recorded martyr, after preaching an amazing sermon to the murderous Pharisees in Acts 6. They were so moved that he is recorded as having said that he saw Christ seated at the right hand of God as he was being stoned to death. Christ seated position meant His work was done; His position at God’s right hand meant that His work had pleased the Father. That was work Stephen knew to have been on his behalf, and it gave him hope as he died a brutal and heinous death at the hands of evil men.

My life is so unbelievably amazing today I am tempted to think this is as good as it will get. I have to remember to be grateful for this time and prepare my kids for a time when this won’t be the case. I hope they’ll remember that faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of the reality of things not seen.

sigh,"I believe, help my unbelief"

Exactly, these values are not the exclusive domain of Christianity and pretending they are does a major disservice toward their achievement.

From what objective source are “common sense” (which I believe you and I would agree is NOT common), decency, civility, and reality derived?

Evolution and chance can explain where things came from but they can’t explain how things ought to be. From what source do we derive the deep and abiding sense of what is right, good, and beautiful?

These are questions I asked myself as I came to faith. Material science was insufficient to the task.

Again just my .02...

I didn't say you were. It's being done all around us though. Jack all these traits you listed are taught in the Bible as being useful and good. The people that want to preserve these are true christians. The people that want to destroy them are in bed with the devil himself. Just look at every wicked thing we face as a nation. Every last item is soundly condemned by the Bible. So yes God is a part of it. God it the source of goodness and satan is the source of evil. Every one of us will be influenced by one or the other.

Multiple other religions teach the same basic tenets that non believers like me simply call civility and decency. It’s not exclusive to Christianity. Some of these religions predate Christianity by a millennium. Way too many contradictions within the teachings of Christ for me to go all in for blind faith.

efw,

Why do these values need a source? Would it not be enough that they are shared?

Fair enough.

Even so, the questions in my post are worth asking are they not? I am genuinely not trying to “score points” here in some debate. From my perspective there couldn’t be a more important set of questions than those.

You and Kingston are absolutely right; those values are seen in civilizations the world over. But why? From where did they originate? Is there a coherent belief system available that accounts for that?

You’re absolutely free to come to any conclusions you like I’m not here to argue with you. But the questions seem to me to be some well worth investigating.

Amen.

The values exist outside of faith, and there's bucketloads of examples where faith has often contravinened them - it's called history. If anybody thinks all non-believers lack morals because they don't share theit belief system, the need to right royally fugg themselves with a pineapple.

I could not agree more!

They exist in reality but from what source?

The fact that you and I recognize the grave offense of people of faith (or not) having violated them shows they’re as real as laws of nature like gravity.

So where did they come from to carry such near-universal weight in the hearts and minds of men?

And for the record I have never and never will say that non-believers don’t observe these, and to suggest I did is to suggest you missed the whole basis of my argument.

Huh? What?

Worship and Praise for Eternity?...Is that written somewhere, and if so, tell me how that sounds like a wonderful way to spend forever?

🦫

It means folks are sick and tired of man's interference/interpretation of the word, we get a good dose of that here on a regular basis

This thread is a great example in the lack of tolerance in freedom of religion. People saying you must believe how I believe, you must worship how I worship, you must tithe how I tithe, you must spread the word as I spread the word.

That right there is why I am not an active participant in organized religion. I have always been a very independent person and thinker. My religion is just that, mine. I do not believe that any form of religion is 100% right, nor are they 100% wrong. I have read tenets of all religions that make sense, and do not make sense. Heck, even the Christians can not agree. Muslims have been fighting each other for decades.

I would say yes, the source is necessary on two levels:

1) for me to answer these ultimate questions to my personal satisfaction (I use my words here precisely recognizing these questions may not be ultimate to you)

2) for one group fo people to impose them upon another

For instance, Germany. From where does the international community get the authority to prosecute those who were involved in the holocaust? It was lawful according to their laws? Does the might of the victors in WWII make the actions of those men “wrong”? If they’d have won the war would they, by nature of their rejection within their laws, have been innocent?

If a time came when many nations decided to kill people and there was no international will to hold anyone to account would that make it ok?

From my perspective there are many rules of civil society that make no sense from a purely evolutionary perspective. I know that men like Sam Harris have challenged this and I’ve listened to his arguments but he always falls back upon an imagined objectivity to what is “good” and “bad” that isn’t self evident in the way he supposed it to be.

There's no need to make the fact that these values are widely shared a matter of epistemological and/or metaphysical inquiry, if your goal is simply to pursue the values.

Again, why is it important to identify an objective source for these shared values?

I completely disagree. This is a great illustration of the beauty of our freedom of religion and of expression.

What I mean is this; we can come on a public site and disagree. We can disagree vehemently. We can even kind of annoy each other.

And then, as Kingston and I have done, we can hang out and laugh and enjoy one another’s friendship around guns and food and story telling.

And not, as in countries that don’t share our western values of freedom, kill each other over it.

If so and so says that I need to do such and such and I disagree the fact that his god says I’m going to hell matters not a bit to me, especially if I don’t even believe in his god.

Unlike the Left, I do not believe words are violence and I can disagree and still be friends.

As a matter of fact my life would be boring as heck if you all agreed with me. Not to mention we’d all be wrong on many counts...

Truth.

I can even like Antelope Sniper and pray some day he'll buy me a steak dinner. What a heavenly thought. I can even pray we have that dinner in Heaven together. Yep, and with the great guy Gunner too.
Well, a guy can dream, cant he?