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mikraite
| author | Franklin Schmidt <fschmidt@gmail.com> |
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| date | Sat, 13 Sep 2025 19:48:31 -0600 |
| parents | 38e5ff291f96 |
| children | 94e7aee1666a |
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| 115 <p>The correlation between the decline of cultures and the decline or corruption of the culture's founding religion is obvious to anyone who knows history. But the religion declines first, and there is a long lag between the decline of religion and the outward decline of society. As a result, cultures peak in outward output after their religion has failed, giving the mistaken impression that secular societies are most productive.</p> | 115 <p>The correlation between the decline of cultures and the decline or corruption of the culture's founding religion is obvious to anyone who knows history. But the religion declines first, and there is a long lag between the decline of religion and the outward decline of society. As a result, cultures peak in outward output after their religion has failed, giving the mistaken impression that secular societies are most productive.</p> |
| 116 | 116 |
| 117 <p>The sequence is roughly this: Religion declines which causes morality to decline including a decline in effective prevention of adultery and this causes feminism and cultural decline which in turn is dysgenic and causes genetic decay. This long sequence explains the lag. This happened in Ancient Israel, Ancient Athens, Rome, Early Islam, and is now happening in the West.</p> | 117 <p>The sequence is roughly this: Religion declines which causes morality to decline including a decline in effective prevention of adultery and this causes feminism and cultural decline which in turn is dysgenic and causes genetic decay. This long sequence explains the lag. This happened in Ancient Israel, Ancient Athens, Rome, Early Islam, and is now happening in the West.</p> |
| 118 | 118 |
| 119 <p>Why does religion decline in successful societies? One can only speculate. I gave one possible explanation in my post <a href="https://mikraite.arkian.net/Why-Religions-Fail-tp2257.html">Why Religions Fail</a> but here I will give another. When society is poor then people feel a need for religion and intelligent people tend to go into religion as the only escape from the chaos of their world. Once a society becomes successful, regular people don't feel as much need for religion. But even more important is that intelligent people have many other options in a successful society besides religion, so religion attracts far fewer intelligent people. Some of these intelligent people become degenerates and attack religion. Since religion doesn't have enough intelligent people to defend itself, it either conforms to the degeneracy of its time or it simply closes its collective mind and becomes fundamentalist and rejects all reason. This happened most clearly in Islam where the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%CA%BFtazila">Muʿtazila</a> became degenerate in response to challenges from philosophy, and then there was a fundamentalist backlash led by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanbali">Hanbali</a>. Muslims have been fundamentalists ever since which is why they never produced anything comparable to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age">Islamic Golden Age</a> again. Christianity is now going through a similar process. The end result is a loss of religious understanding as I described in my post <a href="https://mikraite.arkian.net/Understanding-tp6.html">Understanding</a>.</p> | 119 <p>Why does religion decline in successful societies? One can only speculate. I gave one possible explanation in my post <a href="https://mikraite.arkian.net/Why-Religions-Fail-tp2257.html">Why Religions Fail</a> but here I will give another. When society is poor then people feel a need for religion and intelligent people tend to go into religion as the only escape from the chaos of their world. Once a society becomes successful, regular people don't feel as much need for religion. But even more important is that intelligent people have many other options in a successful society besides religion, so religion attracts far fewer intelligent people. Some of these intelligent people become degenerates and attack religion. Since religion doesn't have enough intelligent people to defend itself, it either conforms to the degeneracy of its time or it simply closes its collective mind and becomes fundamentalist and rejects all reason. This happened most clearly in Islam where the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%CA%BFtazila">Muʿtazila</a> became degenerate in response to challenges from philosophy, and then there was a fundamentalist backlash led by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanbali">Hanbali</a>. Muslims have been fundamentalists ever since which is why they never produced anything comparable to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age">Islamic Golden Age</a> again. Christianity is now going through a similar process. The end result is a loss of religious understanding as I described in my post <a href="/mikraite/Understanding.html">Understanding</a>.</p> |
| 120 | 120 |
| 121 <p>As far as I know, the only Christians who retain a good understanding of their religion is the <a href="https://saidit.net/s/nonmorons/comments/9e6z/please_visit_a_mennonite_church/">Conservative Mennonites</a>. One can see the beginning of the process of religious decay in the <a href="http://forum.mennonet.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=4641">Mexican Mennonites</a>. Most of modern Christianity is too far gone to even be interesting. Modern Islam is closed-minded but still retains the potential for a reformation that could make it a good religion again.</p> | 121 <p>As far as I know, the only Christians who retain a good understanding of their religion is the <a href="https://saidit.net/s/nonmorons/comments/9e6z/please_visit_a_mennonite_church/">Conservative Mennonites</a>. One can see the beginning of the process of religious decay in the <a href="http://forum.mennonet.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=4641">Mexican Mennonites</a>. Most of modern Christianity is too far gone to even be interesting. Modern Islam is closed-minded but still retains the potential for a reformation that could make it a good religion again.</p> |
| 122 | 122 |
| 123 <p>One last point is the relationship between religion and science. Science only conflicts with fundamentalist religion, and in fact science depends on good religion, particularly good monotheism. I discussed this in my post <a href="https://mikraite.arkian.net/Science-Requires-Monotheism-tp2014.html">Science Requires Monotheism</a>.</p> | 123 <p>One last point is the relationship between religion and science. Science only conflicts with fundamentalist religion, and in fact science depends on good religion, particularly good monotheism. I discussed this in my post <a href="https://mikraite.arkian.net/Science-Requires-Monotheism-tp2014.html">Science Requires Monotheism</a>.</p> |
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