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Comment by HumanOstrich | Hacker News Reader

Looking at it through a religious lens is pretty narrow-minded. Secular people have values too. You're limiting your ability to understand the world around you.

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I would reckon looking at these kinds of things through religious lenses is actually VERY useful.

I don't follow sportsball, but there are masses of population and massive institutions that are built upon for and on sportsball.

So, seeing large changes or shifts within sportsball can be useful in gleaning some sort of trend.

While, I don't fully follow the gp comment, I can see the other side of yours.

It's more like following astrology - entirely irrelevant to reality.

Your comment is entirely irrelevant to most of the human beings on this planet.

And yet, you took the time to type it out. And will even spend some time defending it, proposing it.

Narrow worldviews have utility to one, but don't encompass "reality" as such.

Some secular people have values, I don't think religious people are saints. Secular people however don't have a framework to 'force' others with supposed values to adhere to them. I don't believe it's narrow minded to believes changes in religion might have an effect on things, the way people follow their religion is influenced by external factors, don't see why it wouldn't be the other way around as well. Atheists are quite new we'll see what happens.

> Atheists are quite new

What ever you're smoking, I'd like to try. A break from reality sounds nice right now.

Gallup polling says 1% of people in the US didn't believe in god in 1967, 17% in 2022. Of those 17% i'd imagine many believed at some point (or went to church/temple/...), these people don't really behave like a 'pure' atheist would. They're very much still influenced by the religious ideas they grew up in. So yes it's a rather new thing if you're thinking about society.

I think your problem is you don't seem to be aware of history before 1967 or society outside of the US. Your local community college might offer some courses in history and sociology.

You are deeply mistaken as to roots of this culture difference. There many highly religious cultures which absolutely lack the "social agreement" framework. The real reason why "social agreement" countries exist is feudalism. Feudal structure of power was the second on this planet (after ancient Greece, but that culture had been exterminated) to allow bidirectional agreements between kings and wealthy nobles. The only countries which managed to preserve this tradition unbroken were European ones, NA colonized by the Europeans and Japan which had societal structure close enough to adopt this culture without big changes and who later transferred them to its own colonies in Korea and Taiwan. And that about all countries valuing "social agreement". This is not because of religion or lack of it, it because of the accident - not being conquered by a despotic empire in the middle ages.

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