From the Huffington Post:
“I think it’s important that we quit apologizing for having a spiritual conversation,” Huckabee continued. “Quit being ashamed that we believe in God.”
During his own Fox News program over the weekend, Huckabee also spoke about the massacre, tying the supposed removal of God from society to the increased instances of violence. "We’ve escorted [God] right out of our culture and marched him off the public square," Huckabee said, according to Inquisitr. "And then we express our surprise that a culture without him actually reflects what it has become.”
Huckabee asked for and received an ass whooping from the liberal media primarily because he focused on the issue of God as (a) a call to bring back "God" in the Christian sense and removal of a culture of strict separation of church and state and (b) he suggested that the removal of God from schools was the fundamental cause of the tragedy. However, upon further analysis, there is a good point made here.
The issue at hand that was and is never discussed in detail is the relationship between a society structured from spiritual mores (morals drawn from the general fear of God/ understanding of its role as the hand guiding the universe) and the values carried by its own constituents. I say spiritual mores primarily because the stock response to such a claim would be that religious morality can be bad; ie strict application of Sharia law, the violence caused by the Crusades etc. Instead I will discuss these mores in terms of a general spirituality not subject to conditional responses.
At my university I can say with utmost confidence that almost every student is borderline atheist. This does not mean that he or she does not identify with a religion culturally or even abstain from participation in religious ceremony, rather it merely suggests that he or she does not think of God and religion as a concrete rule. That is, none of my friends who are Jewish, Hindu, Christian, or Muslim could care less what the other believes; they are all in essence "spiritual" without a God. This does not apply to only the Penn population, but the vast majority of the millennial generation. I would contend there are a few specific reasons for this:
1) Since the 1980s the amount of diversity in the United States had exploded dramatically. Throughout those years the numbers of Indian and other South Asian, Oriental Asian, and Latin American and Mexican immigrants overtook previously Euro and Chinese by the numbers. Cultural acceptance tends to be a lagged process, hence the sudden rise in the number of Indian and Chinese American celebrities and demographic segments in marketing. With the rise in the number of distinct groups with different religious morals and "God[s]", it became hard to discuss God as a specific entity or moral code.
2) The rise of mass exposure technology such as the internet and further developments such as social media has allowed the primarily liberal media and sentiment to flood the airwaves. Not only are liberal ideas more exposed to the youth (people who can actually use evolving technology tools), with technology these ideas are allowed to proliferate at exponential levels. I think to believe this all you have to do is go to reddit and see the kind of threads that get the most upvotes, and question whether people were in fact that indoctrinated just a year ago. Again, religion as a concrete concept became easy to beat up.
3) The United States has always been a country that has celebrated its freedom, but now we are reaching a new pinnacle for groups who previously lacked a voice. The recent election affirmed a couple instances of gay marriage and legal weed. Again, the strict sense of "God" is easy to argue against here because no one, including myself, believes that we should restrict rights based on spotty and unverifiable claims.
So basically younger generations have accepted an at-best purely spiritual viewpoint of religion today. I already discussed in my previous post on social media why I think society is becoming increasingly narcissistic and motivated by a "keeping up with the Jones" kind of happiness. This makes people more susceptible to unhappiness and ultimately hurts the productivity of society. The concept of spirituality can alter this notion of social interaction.
In the past when we still believed in religion, it served as a guide for action of two fronts. It provided people with a guide by which to live their lives because by not following the guide they faced the wrath of their maker. This meant that people who didnt follow the rules went to hell and those who did went to heaven. Second, religion provided people with hope for the future by suggesting that their inherent problems were ordered rather the product of pure free will as society dictates today. For example, the Hindu concepts of karma and reincarnation would argue that a person who had done good actions to others despite unfortunate circumstances to him or herself would be reincarnated in a higher social order. This kept social order despite the broad socioeconomic disparities between castes.
My Advocacy.
Obviously we cant teach kids the Bible in class, or the Torah, or any particular religion. What I'm suggesting is that we incorporate an idea of greater morality into society stemming from spirituality. At best this would again take the good characteristics of earlier time periods and transition those values into the context of our freer and more advanced society today. At worst, we would become exposed to an unscientific (but simultaneously unverifiable concept) of something greater than ourselves.
The problem with this argument is obviously implementation, but I suggest the following.
1. Exposure to all major forms of religion within social studies classes at a young age, not purely as a cultural argument but also as a dialogue on different beliefs and why people hold them. This would help us maintain an accepting breed of diversity while still making arguments explaining why people believe in greater powers.
2. Discussion of evolution but consequently also the alternative/mutual concept of deism as a spark for the start of the universe. I'm not saying to argue in favor of God, but to merely explain what deism is along with the scientific and verifiable argument for evolution.
3. Families should try to instill morals from both logical and fundamental concepts of what is acceptable. I think people too often tell each other that something is either fundamentally wrong because it is wrong or only tell them that it is wrong because x -> y. Both means should be discussed.
4. We should actually teach ethics as a class in high school. What are the rational theories for ethics, religious theories so on and so forth. Simply assuming a culturally relativist viewpoint is just as bad as an indoctrinated religious viewpoint because it creates a relationship which is all other nothing. By this I mean that the culturally relativist allows anything to be justifiable based on the morals of society while the indoctrinated religious viewpoint makes anything other than the religion wrong. Instead we might as well teach ethical theories from the rationalists and intangible sides.
4. We should actually teach ethics as a class in high school. What are the rational theories for ethics, religious theories so on and so forth. Simply assuming a culturally relativist viewpoint is just as bad as an indoctrinated religious viewpoint because it creates a relationship which is all other nothing. By this I mean that the culturally relativist allows anything to be justifiable based on the morals of society while the indoctrinated religious viewpoint makes anything other than the religion wrong. Instead we might as well teach ethical theories from the rationalists and intangible sides.
In conclusion, I think we are in a strong transition stage as far as our freedoms are concerned. We have more rights than ever, but sometimes I wonder if rights at a loss of order is tradeoff that we will agree with in the long run. However, I do think that technology has the yet to be seen potential to completely render all of these arguments moot by presenting new ways to earn happiness and self satisfaction. Until that point in time, I believe we need to search beyond what we are willing to accept on face to be true in the pursuit of real truth.
