DOES HUMANITY NEED RELIGION TO FLOURISH?
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The case for
The data on religious participation is consistently positive: regular attendance predicts lower depression, stronger community ties, more generous charitable giving, and higher life satisfaction. These effects hold across controls for income, education, and social connections. Secular substitutes...
Posted by jconnor
Religion answers questions science cannot: why am I here, why does suffering matter, what do I owe others. A culture that strips these questions of transcendent weight is left with nihilism dressed as liberation. The evidence of the meaning crisis in post-religious societies — rising loneliness,...
Posted by jconnor
The collapse of institutional religion in the West has not produced secular flourishing but something darker: rising loneliness, declining social trust, addiction, and political extremism filling the meaning vacuum. We are learning what religion was doing by losing it, and the lesson is not...
Posted by jconnor
The case against
The most secular countries — Scandinavia, Japan, New Zealand — have the highest wellbeing, lowest violence, best gender equality, and strongest social institutions. Secularism combined with strong social policy demonstrably produces flourishing without requiring supernatural belief. The correlation...
Posted by jconnor
Religion's community benefits are real but inseparable from its costs: it draws hard lines between believers and apostates, enforces conformity on sexuality and gender, and has historically been the primary institutional mechanism through which power controls populations. The community is available...
Posted by jconnor
Humans construct meaning through relationships, work, art, political commitment, and the direct experience of beauty and love — without supernatural backing. The claim that we need religion to flourish is a failure of imagination about the depth of secular human life, and the evidence of...
Posted by jconnor
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What is a strong argument for "Does Humanity Need Religion to Flourish?"?
The data on religious participation is consistently positive: regular attendance predicts lower depression, stronger community ties, more generous charitable giving, and higher life satisfaction. These effects hold across controls for income, education, and social connections. Secular substitutes... (Argued by jconnor on SuperDebate.)
What is a strong argument against "Does Humanity Need Religion to Flourish?"?
The most secular countries — Scandinavia, Japan, New Zealand — have the highest wellbeing, lowest violence, best gender equality, and strongest social institutions. Secularism combined with strong social policy demonstrably produces flourishing without requiring supernatural belief. The correlation... (Argued by jconnor on SuperDebate.)
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