See? We agree on almost everything on this topic!
It seems we agree that Prosperity Theology is bullsh!t. Not so sure on the rest.
But, Whiskey! I would maintain that a fairly small minority look for a well formed moral system, whether it be "objectively" moral or not. Then there is a larger group who looks for help with moral issues. Then there is a larger group that may be helplessly superficial, but wants to be good and moral. The latter group is not bad, they are actually to be commended. Where they do not have the rudder to steer or the sails to catch wind, or the sextant to find the North star and set a course, they do want to be good and live a good and moral life.
I agree, and I can't respond to this any better than C.S. Lewis did in Miracles:
"In the conditions produced by a century or so of Naturalism [liberation of knowledge, abolition of select elite teachers:], plain men are being forced to bear burdens which plain men were never expected to bear before. We must get the truth for ourselves or go without it. There may be two explanations for this. It might be that humanity, in rebelling against tradition of authority, has made a ghastly mistake; a mistake which will not be the less fatal because the corruptions of those in authority rendered it very excusable. On the other hand, it may be that the Power which rules our species is at this moment carrying out a daring experiment. Could it be intended that the whole mass of the people should now move forward and occupy for themselves those heights which were once reserved only for the sages? Is the distinction between wise and simple to disappear because all are now expected to become wise? If so, our present blunders would be but growing pains. But let us make no mistake about our necessities. If we are content to go back and become humble plain men obeying a tradition, well. If we are ready to climb and struggle on till we become sages ourselves, better still. But the man who will neither obey wisdom in others nor adventure for her/himself is fatal. A society where the simple many obey the few seers can live: a society where all were seers could live even more fully. But a society where the mass is still simple and the seers are no longer attended to can achieve only superficiality, baseness, ugliness, and in the end extinction. On or back we must go; to stay here is death."
I am not sure that the hostility that is causing the slow decline is about moral objectivity, or more accurately opposed to "objective" morality. I think it is more about who has the armies, as well as who gets to man the turnstile.
That's a very Machiavellian take on religion. I agree that some of the decline of religiosity in the West since the Enlightenment is likely due to the separation of church and state, and the loss of cultural reinforcement that entailed.
Edit: The Church is booming in Africa and Southeast Asia, and that's without the benefit of sympathetic sovereigns or Papal armies.
The more technology increases, individual comfort and physiological wellbeing is increased, the less people tend to lean on moral codes.
I agree, though I don't think that's a good thing. Applied science has far exceeded the goal of magicians since time immemorial-- creating the illusion of mastery over Nature. And it is an
illusion (and a dangerously utopian one at that). But you're right, of course, that when people
feel self-sufficient, they're less likely to think of God, to reckon with their true condition, or to concern themselves with moral codes.
And it's not like material wealth has abolished the need for morality; it's just chosen for you by the 1%. So now a greater % of people are held in thrall to Huxley's spectacle instead of Orwell's boot. That's not progress.
At the same time when education increases so there are alternative methods of "knowing" what is objectively moral, people rebel against dogmatic institutions.
What are these alternative methods of "knowing" objective morality? On the Christian view, morality is supernatural in origin, and therefore only knowable by looking inwards (or studying human societies). Conversely, the dominant Naturalism of academia dismisses our inborn moral impulses as mere instinct, which arose from the purely irrational forces of natural selection. Morality, then, is something an educated modernist sees
through; not a supernatural law to which all men are subject.
And strangely enough coupling that with the birth control pill, (the basis for "the sexual revolution"), may explain everything you have stated, in a slightly different way.
I think this gets back to applied science creating an illusion of mastery over nature.
If there is a slow steady decline it has to do with the empowerment of the masses to amass enough information that they can develop a working "objective" moral system in their own life with the freedom and security to pursue it. Further, the decline may be aided by more being able to achieve this, because of gains in wealth, freedom, and information (up to the general availability of the internet).
Again, I don't believe individuals can "develop" a working morality on their own. The Christian view is that morality is discovered, not invented (thus, its objectivity). Your view strikes me as utopian, which is very common these days. It's almost taken for granted that, if we can simply keep from blowing each other to bits or ruining the planet in the interim, applied science will bring about a harmonious society where no one lacks for material goods. Material abundance in which even the poorest can share may be possible (though the recent actions of our elites makes me skeptical), but without a commonly held moral framework, such a world won't be harmonious.
The Church's task now has become much more difficult (which is partly responsible for its decline). The advance of applied science has created the illusion of mastery over nature and more distractions than have ever existed before. Imagine a parent with a bunch of adolescent sons who are constantly surrounded by video games, pornography, and junk food; but the parent has no power over the sons other than gentle exhortation. How many of the them will, of their own volition, tear themselves away from such an orgy of physical and psychological gratification? How many will simply shut their bedroom doors and stop listening to the parent entirely?
So churches have slowly lost membership for the abovementioned reasons. Then if a church changes mid-stream, they would have a more dependent than ever membership, they would have "lost" and risk "losing" their membership permanently! Think about it. If a member needed a church to provide me a moral code, then overnight (so to speak) the church changes it, who is gone?
Absolutely. Forgive me for quoting Lewis again, but his concept of "
the Tao" is useful here:
[T]here is a set of objective values that have been shared, with minor differences, by every culture "... the traditional moralities of East and West, the Christian, the Pagan, and the Jew..."
A church can only remove itself from the Tao by stepping into the abyss. That's what every mainstream Christian denomination has done in an attempt to "liberalize", and that's why they've uniformly collapsed once having done so.
That summary of Lewis' argument in The Abolition of Man (linked above) seems relevant to our discussion:
Lewis criticizes modern attempts to debunk "natural" values (such as those that would deny objective value to the waterfall) on rational grounds. He says that there is a set of objective values that have been shared, with minor differences, by every culture "... the traditional moralities of East and West, the Christian, the Pagan, and the Jew...". Lewis calls this the Tao (which closely resembles Confucian and Taoist usage). Without the Tao, no value judgments can be made at all, and modern attempts to do away with some parts of traditional morality for some "rational" reason always proceed by arbitrarily selecting one part of the Tao and using it as grounds to debunk the others.
This is why I don't believe individuals can "develop" a working morality for themselves.
The final chapter describes the ultimate consequences of this debunking: a distant future in which the values and morals of the majority are controlled by a small group who rule by a "perfect" understanding of psychology, and who in turn, being able to "see through" any system of morality that might induce them to act in a certain way, are ruled only by their own unreflected whims. In surrendering rational reflection on their own motivations, the controllers will no longer be recognizably human, the controlled will be robot-like, and the Abolition of Man will have been completed.
And this is the dystopian future we're rapidly approaching by placing our faith in applied science and Naturalism. It sounds less like science fiction and more like reality every day.
