Like almost everything else, it depends on who you ask.

The Midrash(Yalkut Shimonion Psalms 25) describes a sort of "panel discussion" in which this question is posed to four different authorities — Wisdom, Prophecy, Torah and G‑d — each of whom gives a different definition of sin.

According to Wisdom sin is a harmful deed. According to Prophecy it is death. Torah sees it as folly. And G‑d sees it as an opportunity.

The philosophical view of sin is that it is a bad idea, like walking barefoot in the snow or eating too many fatty foods. If you do bad things, bad things will happen to you.

Does this mean that Someone sits up there, tabulating sins and dispensing punishments? Well, yes, though it is not as simplistic as a vengeful G‑d getting even with His little earth creatures for daring to defy His instructions. Is frostbite G‑d's punishment for that barefooted walk in the snow? Is heart disease G‑d's revenge for a high cholesterol diet? Ultimately it is, if you accept that everything that happens, happens because G‑d wants it to happen. But what it really means is that G‑d has established certain "laws of nature" that describe the patterns of His actions upon our existence. There are physical laws of nature — the ones that scientists measure and hypothesize. There are also spiritual laws of nature, which dictate that spiritually beneficial deeds bring spiritual benefit, and spiritually detrimental deeds cause spiritual harm. And since our physical existence derives from and mirrors the spiritual reality, a person's spiritual and moral behavior ultimately affects his physical life as well.

Thus King Solomon (who is the source of the "Wisdom" perspective in the above Midrash) states in the book of Proverbs: "Evil pursues iniquity."

"Prophecy" takes this a step further. Sin is not only a harmful deed — it is the ultimately harmful deed. Prophecy (which represents the apogee of man's endeavor to commune with G‑d) defines "life" as connection with G‑d. Sin—man's turning away from G‑d—is a disruption of this connection. Hence, sin is death.

Like almost everything else, it depends on who you ask.

The Midrash(Yalkut Shimonion Psalms 25) describes a sort of "panel discussion" in which this question is posed to four different authorities — Wisdom, Prophecy, Torah and G‑d — each of whom gives a different definition of sin.

According to Wisdom sin is a harmful deed. According to Prophecy it is death. Torah sees it as folly. And G‑d sees it as an opportunity.

The philosophical view of sin is that it is a bad idea, like walking barefoot in the snow or eating too many fatty foods. If you do bad things, bad things will happen to you.

Does this mean that Someone sits up there, tabulating sins and dispensing punishments? Well, yes, though it is not as simplistic as a vengeful G‑d getting even with His little earth creatures for daring to defy His instructions. Is frostbite G‑d's punishment for that barefooted walk in the snow? Is heart disease G‑d's revenge for a high cholesterol diet? Ultimately it is, if you accept that everything that happens, happens because G‑d wants it to happen. But what it really means is that G‑d has established certain "laws of nature" that describe the patterns of His actions upon our existence. There are physical laws of nature — the ones that scientists measure and hypothesize. There are also spiritual laws of nature, which dictate that spiritually beneficial deeds bring spiritual benefit, and spiritually detrimental deeds cause spiritual harm. And since our physical existence derives from and mirrors the spiritual reality, a person's spiritual and moral behavior ultimately affects his physical life as well.

Thus King Solomon (who is the source of the "Wisdom" perspective in the above Midrash) states in the book of Proverbs: "Evil pursues iniquity."

"Prophecy" takes this a step further. Sin is not only a harmful deed — it is the ultimately harmful deed. Prophecy (which represents the apogee of man's endeavor to commune with G‑d) defines "life" as connection with G‑d. Sin—man's turning away from G‑d—is a disruption of this connection. Hence, sin is death.

Torah agrees that sin is a harmful deed. It also agrees that it's a disruption of the flow of life from Creator to creation. Indeed, Torah is the source of both Wisdom's perspective and Prophesy's perspective on sin. But Torah also goes beyond them both in recognizing that the soul of man would never willingly and consciously do such a stupid thing.

Sin, says Torah, is an act of folly. The soul loses its head, and in a moment of irrationality and cognitive confusion does something that is contrary to its own true desire. So sin can be transcended, when the soul recognizes and acknowledges the folly of its transgressions and reasserts its true will. Then the true self of the soul comes to light, revealing that the sin was in fact committed only by the soul's most external, malleable self, while its inner self was never involved in the first place.

And what does G‑d say? G‑d, of course, invented the laws of nature (both physical and spiritual) and the Wisdom that recognizes how they operate. G‑d is the source of life, and it is He who decreed that it should flow to the human soul via a channel constructed (or disrupted) by the deeds of man. And G‑d gave us the Torah and its formulae for spiritual sanity, self-discovery and transcendence. So G‑d is the source of the first three perspectives on sin.

But there is a fourth perspective that is G‑d's alone: sin as the opportunity for "return" (teshuvah).

Teshuvah is a process that, in its ultimate form, empowers us to not only transcend our failings but to also redeem them: to literally travel back in time and redefine the essential nature of a past deed, transforming it from evil to good.

To achieve this, we first have to experience the act of transgression as a negative thing. We have to agonize over the utter devastation it has wrecked on our soul. We have to recognize, disavow and renounce its folly. Only then can we can go back and change what we did.

So is sin a bad, harmful deed? Is it the very face of death? Is it mere stupidity, to be shrugged off by an inherently wise and pristine soul? Is it a potent opportunity for conquest and growth? Turns out, it's all four. But it can only be the fourth if it's also the first three.

Well, let's see. Many times the bible commands people to kill other people but without ever explaining why it's wrong to be a homosexual, for example. Not even you can come up with a reason why it's a sin, your ''disability'' argument is garbage and a disability is not a sin anyways. If you can explain to me the depth there I will agree with you.

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Religious faith in America is going the way of the Yellow Pages and travel maps, we keep hearing. It’s just a matter of time until Christianity’s total and happy extinction, chortle our cultural elites. Is this true? Is churchgoing and religious adherence really in “widespread decline” so much so that conservative believers should suffer “growing anxiety”?

Two words: Absolutely not.

New research published late last year by scholars at Harvard University and Indiana University Bloomington is just the latest to reveal the myth. This research questioned the “secularization thesis,” which holds that the United States is following most advanced industrial nations in the death of their once vibrant faith culture. Churches becoming mere landmarks, dance halls, boutique hotels, museums, and all that.

Not only did their examination find no support for this secularization in terms of actual practice and belief, the researchers proclaim that religion continues to enjoy “persistent and exceptional intensity” in America. These researchers hold our nation “remains an exceptional outlier and potential counter example to the secularization thesis.”

What Accounts for the Difference in Perceptions?
How can their findings appear so contrary to what we have been hearing from so many seemingly informed voices? It comes down primarily to what kind of faith one is talking about. Not the belief system itself, per se, but the intensity and seriousness with which people hold and practice that faith.

Mainline churches are tanking as if they have super-sized millstones around their necks. Yes, these churches are hemorrhaging members in startling numbers, but many of those folks are not leaving Christianity. They are simply going elsewhere. Because of this shifting, other very different kinds of churches are holding strong in crowds and have been for as long as such data has been collected. In some ways, they are even growing. This is what this new research has found.

The percentage of Americans who attend church more than once a week, pray daily, and accept the Bible as wholly reliable and deeply instructive to their lives has remained absolutely, steel-bar constant for the last 50 years or more, right up to today. These authors describe this continuity as “patently persistent.”

The percentage of such people is also not small. One in three Americans prays multiple times a day, while one in 15 do so in other countries on average. Attending services more than once a week continues to be twice as high among Americans compared to the next highest-attending industrial country, and three times higher than the average comparable nation.

One-third of Americans hold that the Bible is the actual word of God. Fewer than 10 percent believe so in similar countries. The United States “clearly stands out as exceptional,” and this exceptionalism has not been decreasing over time. In fact, these scholars determine that the percentages of Americans who are the most vibrant and serious in their faith is actually increasing a bit, “which is making the United States even more exceptional over time.”

This also means, of course, that those who take their faith seriously are becoming a markedly larger proportion of all religious people. In 1989, 39 percent of those who belonged to a religion held strong beliefs and practices. Today, these are 47 percent of all the religiously affiliated. This all has important implications for politics, indicating that the voting bloc of religious conservatives is not shrinking, but actually growing among the faithful. The declining influence of liberal believers at the polls has been demonstrated in many important elections recently.

These Are Not Isolated Findings
The findings of these scholars are not outliers. There has been a growing gulf between the faithful and the dabblers for quite some time, with the first group growing more numerous. Think about the church you attend, relative to its belief system. It is extremely likely that if your church teaches the Bible with seriousness, calls its people to real discipleship, and encourages daily intimacy with God, it has multiple services to handle the coming crowds.

Most decent-size American cities have a treasure trove of such churches for believers to choose from. This shows no sign of changing. If, however, your church is theologically liberal or merely lukewarm, it’s likely laying off staff and wondering how to pay this month’s light bill. People are navigating toward substantive Christianity.

The folks at Pew have been reporting for years that while the mainline churches are in drastic free fall, the group that “shows the most significant growth is the nondenominational family.” Of course, these nondenominational churches are 99.9 percent thorough-blooded evangelical. Pew also notes that “evangelical Protestantism and the historically black Protestant tradition have been more stable” over the years, with even a slight uptick in the last decade because many congregants leaving the mainline churches are migrating to evangelical churches that hold fast to the fundamentals of the Christian faith.

When the so-called “progressive” churches question the historicity of Jesus, deny the reality of sin, support abortion, ordain clergy in same-sex relationships and perform their marriages, people desiring real Christianity head elsewhere. Fact: evangelical churches gain five new congregants exiled from the liberal churches for every one they lose for any reason. They also do a better job of retaining believers from childhood to adulthood than do mainline churches.

The Other Key Factor: Faithful People Grow More Children
There is another factor at work here beyond orthodox belief. The University of London’s Eric Kaufmann explains in his important book “Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?” (he says yes) that the sustaining vitality, and even significant per capita growth, of serious Christian belief is as firmly rooted in fertility as it is in faithful teaching and evangelism. Globally, he says that the more robust baby-making practices of orthodox Jews and Christians, as opposed to the baby-limiting practices of liberals, create many more seriously religious people than a secular agenda can keep up with.

Fertility determines who influences the future in many important ways. He puts it bluntly, “The secular West and East Asia are aging and their share of the world population declining. This means the world is getting more religious even as people in the rich world shed their faith.”

Fertility is as important as fidelity for Christianity and Judaism’s triumph from generation to generation. Kaufmann contends, “Put high fertility and [faith] retention rates together with general population decline and you have a potent formula for change.”

It comes down to this: God laughs at the social Darwinists. Their theory is absolutely true, but just not in the way they think. Those who have the babies and raise and educate them well tend to direct the future of humanity. Serious Christians are doing this. Those redefining the faith and reality itself are not.

This why Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart proclaimed in First Things, long before the proposal of the Benedict Option, that the most “subversive and effective strategy we might undertake [to counter the culture] would be one of militant fecundity: abundant, relentless, exuberant, and defiant childbearing.” The future rests in the hands of the fertile.

What About All the Millennial Ex-Christians?
But what about our young people? We are constantly hearing that young people are “leaving the church in droves,” followed by wildly disturbing statistics. This also requires a closer look at who is actually leaving and from where. Pew reports that of young adults who left their faith, only 11 percent said they had a strong faith in childhood while 89 percent said they came from a home that had a very weak faith in belief and practice.

It’s not a news flash that kids don’t tend to hang onto what they never had in the first place. Leading sociologist of religion Christopher Smith has found through his work that most emerging adults “report little change in how religious they have been in the previous five years.” He surprisingly also found that those who do report a change say they have been morereligious, not less. This certainly does not mean there is a major revival going on among young adults, but nor does it mean the sky is falling.

Add to this Rodney Stark’s warning that we should not confuse leaving the faith with attending less often. He and other scholars report that young adults begin to attend church less often in their “independent years” and have alwaysdone so for as long back as such data has been collected. It’s part of the nature of emerging adulthood. Just as sure as these young people do other things on Sunday morning, the leading sociologists of religion find they return to church when they get married, have children, and start to live a real adult life. It’s like clockwork and always has been. However, the increasing delay among young adults in entering marriage and family is likely lengthening this gap today.

More Americans Attend Church Now Than At the Founding
What is really counter-intuitive is what Stark and his colleagues at the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion found when looking at U.S. church attendance numbers going back to the days of our nation’s founding. They found that the percentage of church-attending Americans relative to overall population is more than four times greater today than it was in 1776. The number of attendees has continued to rise each and every decade over our nation’s history right up until the present day.


People are making theological statements with their feet, shuffling to certain churches because they offer what people come seeking: clear, faithful, practical teaching of the scriptures, help in living intimately with and obediently to God, and making friends with people who will challenge and encourage them in their faith. To paraphrase the great Southern novelist Flannery O’Connor, if your church isn’t going to believe and practice actual Christianity, then “to hell with it.” This is what people are saying with their choices.

Or as Eric Kaufmann asserts, “Once secularism rears its head and fundamentalism responds with a clear alternative, moderate religion strikes many as redundant. Either you believe the stuff or you don’t. If you do, it makes sense to go for the real thing, which takes a firm stand against godlessness.”

If your Christianity is reconstituted to the day’s fashion, don’t be surprised if people lose interest in it. Few are seeking 2 Percent Christianity. They want the genuine deal, and the demographics on religion of the last few decades unmistakably support the fact.

No need to explain the Bible.  It is self explanatory.
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You don't need to explain it.  You need to read it.
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how do you argue that it was by men inspired by god and not just idiots?

The same acts (adultery, kidnapping, rape, homosexual sex, paganism, pedophilia, human sacrifice) are done today and we manage with our secular laws.

Bible is a psychopath wet dream.  Put it away.  We don't need to stone adulterers, kill gays or people who work on Saturday.

Relax with your Bible propaganda.
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Why do so many people think the Bible, the most influential book in world history, is outdated? Why do our friends and neighbors – and sometimes we ourselves – dismiss the Bible as irrelevant, irrational, immoral, or all of these things? This explanation of the Book of Exodus, the second book of the Bible, will demonstrate that the Bible is not only powerfully relevant to today’s issues, but completely consistent with rational thought.

Do you think the Bible permitted the trans-Atlantic slave trade? You won’t after reading this book.

Do you struggle to love your parents? If you do, you need this book.

Do you doubt the existence of God because belief in God is “irrational?” This book will give you reason after reason to rethink your doubts.

The title of this commentary is, “The Rational Bible” because its approach is entirely reason-based. The reader is never asked to accept anything on faith alone. As Prager says, “If something I write does not make rational sense, I have not done my job.”

The Rational Bible is the fruit of Dennis Prager’s forty years of teaching the Bible to people of every faith, and no faith. On virtually every page, you will discover how the text relates to the contemporary world and to your life.

His goal: to change your mind – and then change your life.

If I were Swinburne, I would ask Oxford to return my tuition.

So the bible is not divinely inspired.

There is more knowledge available today than ever before in history. But few would argue people are wiser than ever before.

On the contrary, many of us would argue that we are living in a particularly foolish time — a period that is largely wisdom-free, especially among those with the most knowledge: the best educated.

The fact that one of our two major political parties is advocating lowering the voting age to 16 is a good example of the absence of wisdom among a large segment of the adult population. What adult deems 16-year-olds capable of making a wise voting decision? The answer is an adult with the wisdom of a 16-year-old — "Hey, I'm no wiser than most 16-year-olds. Why should I have the vote and they not?"

America has been influenced and is now being largely led by members of the baby-boom generation. This is the generation that came up with the motto "Never trust anyone over 30," making it the first American generation to proclaim contempt for wisdom as a virtue.

The left in America is founded on the rejection of wisdom. It is possible to be on the left and be kind, honest in business, faithful to one's spouse, etc. But it is not possible to be wise if one subscribes to leftist (as opposed to liberal) ideas.

Last year, Amy Wax, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, co-authored an opinion piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer with a professor from the University of San Diego School of Law in which they wrote that the "bourgeois culture" and "bourgeois norms" that governed America from the end of World War II until the mid-1960s were good for America, and that their rejection has caused much of the social dysfunction that has characterized this country since the 1960s.

Those values included, in their words: "Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime."

Recognizing those norms as universally beneficial constitutes wisdom. Rejection of them constitutes a rejection of wisdom — i.e. foolishness.

Yet the left almost universally rejected the Wax piece, deeming it, as the left-wing National Lawyers Guild wrote, "an explicit and implicit endorsement of white supremacy," and questioning whether professor Wax should be allowed to continue teaching a required first-year course at Penn Law.

To equate getting married before having children, working hard and eschewing substance abuse and crime with "white supremacy" is to betray an absence of wisdom that is as depressing as it breathtaking. It is obvious to anyone with a modicum of common sense that those values benefit anyone who adheres to them; they have nothing to do with race.

But almost every left-wing position (that differs from a liberal or conservative position) is bereft of wisdom.

Is the left-wing belief in the notion of "cultural appropriation" — such as the left's recent condemnation of a white girl for wearing a Chinese dress to her high school prom — wise? Or is it simply moronic?

Is the left-wing belief that there are more than two genders wise? Or is it objectively false, foolish and nihilistic?

Has the left-wing belief that children need (unearned) self-esteem turned out to be wise, or morally and psychologically destructive? To its credit, last year, the Guardian wrote a scathing exposé on the "lie" — its word — the self-esteem movement is based on and the narcissistic generation it created.

Is it wise to provide college students with "safe spaces" — with their hot chocolate, stuffed animals and puppy videos — in which to hide whenever a conservative speaker comes to their college? Or is it just ridiculous and infantilizing?

Is the left's rejection of many, if not most, great philosophical, literary and artistic works of wisdom on the grounds that they were written or created by white males wise? One example: The English department of the University of Pennsylvania, half of whose law school professors condemned Amy Wax and almost none of whose law professors defended her piece, removed a portrait of William Shakespeare (replacing it with that of a black lesbian poet).

Is multiculturalism, the idea that no culture is superior to another morally or in any other way wise? Isn't it the antithesis of wisdom, whose very premise is that certain ideas are morally superior to others, and certain literary or artistic works are superior to others?

And the veneration of feelings over truth, not to mention wisdom, is a cornerstone of leftism.

Here's one way to test my thesis: Ask left-wing friends what they have done to pass on wisdom to their children. Most will answer with a question: "What do you mean?" Then ask religious Jewish or Christian friends the same question. They won't answer with a question.

How can you be this blind, you are the one saying the bible is divinely inspired yet you don't agree with it, mind boggling. ''Tragedy, however, does not necessarily mean we should celebrate or normalize male homosexuality'' Yes we do, it happens, just like infertility or other disabilities.

''to avoid becoming a biological dead end. '' Not everyone wants children and having children is not necessarily a good thing.

''One possible reasons for this could be that these types promiscuity lead to cultural upheaval and decay '' No, the reason is clear, the minds of the people who wrote the bible were primitive and viewed homosexuality as wrong for no real reason, the bible is full of shit and you seem to agree with me so why do you still believe in it.

Bro, that comes not even close as a good argument to kill homosexuals or to view homosexuality as a sin. Someone infertile is also disabled then, should we kill them too? What about, I don't know, dudes who can't get erect, should we kill them too? If homosexuality was viewed as a disability in the bible, shouldn't god say, hey, let's try to fix them instead of JUST FUCKING MURDER THEM? Give me a fucking break.

1. Homosexuals can be in loving relationships.
2. Homosexuals can procreate using donor eggs.

Enough said.

About 1 in 6 (16%) same-sex couple households include children (biological, step, or adopted).

Male-male households (10%) are half as likely as female-female households (22%) to have children present (Figure 1).

In contrast, 41% of opposite-sex couple households have children present (not shown).

(1) Homosexuality is a preventable disability.

He defends (1) in two parts. Firstly, he considers homosexuality a disability because it is deprived of something which heterosexuality possesses. In his words:

"The first things to recognise is that homosexuality is a disability. For a homosexual is unable to enter into a loving relationship in which the love is as such procreative."

Secondly, he thinks this deprivation is preventable. He cites various studies which indicate homosexuality is due to both genetics and environmental factors. Swinburne writes:

"The consensus of the scientific community is that both genetic constitution and social factors interact to produce homosexuality. The social factors may include Freudian-type factors (over-involved mother and cold father causing male homosexuality, etc.) and the absence of gender-specific education and dress; but they will also surely include the acceptability of homosexual practice among peers and society more widely."

Thus, if we foster a climate which inhibits the development of homosexuality, Swinburne thinks fewer potential homosexuals will become actual homosexuals (and grow instead into heterosexuals).

(2) Disabilities ought to be prevented and cured.

Typically, Swinburne thinks we seek to reduce disabilities as far as we can. For instance, suppose  we know a baby has a condition which will very likely result in his loss of limbs some years later. Soon after, someone discovers a medication which will significantly reduce the chances of him losing his limbs. We would administer that medication to the baby. On the flipside, if someone does what worsens the baby’s condition, it would seem a bad thing.

(3) Homosexuality ought to be prevented and cured.

Given (1) and (2), it follows that we should prevent and cure homosexuality. Thus Swinburne urges:

"So part of both prevention and cure (where that is now possible) must consist in deterring homosexuals from committing homosexual acts. Homosexuals can help to prevent the spread of homosexuality and help to cure others by setting an example of not indulging their inclinations and of seeking a cure."

More than 300,000 cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea, and early syphilis were reported in California in 2017, a 45 percent increase compared with five years ago, according to a report by the California Department of Public Health.
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“The levels we are seeing now are higher than they’ve been since 1990,” said Watt. “We’ve been seeing increases for all three diseases for the last five or six years. It’s concerning because that slope, that uptick, doesn’t seem to be coming down. In fact, it seems to be getting steeper.”
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There were 75,450 cases of gonorrhea in 2017, the highest number since 1988, the report said. The rate of gonorrhea infection, which is highest among people under age 30, increased 16 percent over 2016. Males were two times more likely to get the disease than females.
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The rates of gonorrhea and syphilis are higher among men because male-on-male sex carries with it a higher risk of transmission

The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association analysis of medical claims data showed that the overall rate of major depression was 4.4 percent and that diagnosis rates rose 33 percent between 2013 and 2016. Those rates increased 63 percent among teens and 47 percent among millennials.

The number of teens hospitalized for suicide ideation or suicide attempts nearly doubled between 2008 and 2015, with the highest increase seen in adolescent girls, a study found.

“Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.” – Werner Herzog
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2.) Individuals, Families & Civilization:

Property rights, law, marriage – all these things were invented to stabilise civilization by exerting environmental pressure on human instincts. Without such things, we revert to a base tribalism: violence and petty territorial barbarianism.

The family unit is a prerequisite for the functioning of more complex social order. One cannot have committees, courts, institutions, panels, religions or even nations without first establishing family.

As the individual bonds with the family, the family bonds with the civilization it inhabits. But individuals deprived the bonds of family by outcome of immutable social factors are often at odds with civilization. Such individuals give up on community, opting for a more parasitic survival strategy. They are the shameless narcissists, the angry barbarians and each and every shade of dysfunction there between. Scarcely do such people care for civilization. And how can we expect them to care for something as grand and abstract as civilization when such individuals were never fully subject to the bonds of family? How does one come to love something as grand as nation when they had not even the love of kin?

Far from statesmen interested in the public good, vagabonds and the estranged are typically apathetic to the plight of civilization...

Familial estrangement manufactures apathy. This is how promiscuity and divorce undermine social progress, and in turn, civilizational progress. The effects of such action cause pain, which in turn, promotes excessive individualism and a disdain for collectivism. And so the cosmic recurrence that is a need for balance is tipped too far in one direction. That is, an obsession with the self (individualism, narcissism) and a disregard for the whole (collectivism, abstraction.)

Naturally, this is bad for family. And what is bad for family is in turn bad for civilization. Each family represents a building block in the construction of civilization. Families (in the traditional sense of the word) contribute more value to society than lone individuals. Generally speaking, they have better mental health, a higher sense of civic duty, are more productive, and pay more taxes than broken homes or one person households. And this seems only rational. Family is bound by blood, civilization forms around the desires and needs of such bonds. People work harder and produce more when they care for and are cared for by others.

Familial social pressure urges individuals to excel, to make the family proud, not to disappoint. Of course, there are always exceptions. There are highly motivated self starters devoid of family married to nothing but narcissism and money, but such individuals are the exception rather than the rule. In general, the prevailing notion is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, that families achieve more as units than they would if their members were autonomously estranged. This doesn’t mean that family life is suited to all; it simply “is.”

3.) Freedom & Human Instinct:
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Civilization does not punish the individual out of sadism, but rather, it punishes destructive behaviour because that behaviour threatens the social order necessary to sustain civilization.
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Civilization is a process of domestication, without it, we are more beastlike than man. For humans evolved far longer in a pre-civilizational state than in a civilizational one. One need only look at cases of feral children to see how without civil domestication a human becomes a beast. Your ability to indulge your curiosity and intellect to exponential heights, to grow, to expand your mind and to travel vast distances – these things are possible only by the discoveries and sustenance of civilization. As such, to enjoy the furnishings of higher civilization, we are required to, for better or worse, forgo some of our more primitive aspects. Unfettered hedonism is just one of these aspects, although it is popular to think this is a piece of the proverbial cake that can be eaten and enjoyed without consequence.

4.) Promiscuity Threatens Civilization:

Asserting promiscuity costs our civilization dearly. Indeed, in the pursuit of orgasmic pleasure, we have a higher national debt (welfare,) a burgeoning divorce industry, lost boys and girls growing up fatherless, increased mental illness, higher rates of crime etc. I could go on, but I think the point has been sufficiently made. This is more a statement of reality than it is a judgement on the behaviour of those who contribute to the decline. It is what it is and so what will be, will be.

And even in spite of moral considerations, it is most apparent that promiscuity diminishes the quality of a civilization by merit of its societal consequences. Should promiscuity not undermine family it would be all well and good. And so it appears that families cannot insulate themselves with an open-door sexual policy, just as nations cannot insulate themselves with an open-door immigration policy. Civilizations that do not protect their culture lose their culture. In truth, a family is a micro-civilization. It has its own rules, customs, politics and opinions distinct from the larger culture. A strong family, much like a strong nation, is therefore selective rather than liberal in who it allows into its domain.

And this is the incredible thing about the social engineers who compose much the intelligentsia of western civilization. They ignore the history of human social development in favour of pursuing ever-evolving obscurities dreamt up in the solitary detachedness of the ivory tower.

A man’s innate power is in his bodily strength and logic, a woman’s, in her bodily beauty and cunning. The social engineers ignore such immutable human intricacies in their egalitarian idealism. The social contract is the set of social rules that makes civilization possible, social engineers create and perpetuate ideologies which alter the terms of said contract, damaging civilization by swapping what works with what is desired to work. Swapping what is functional if imperfect, with what is dysfunctional and even less perfect. Then, quite satirically, it labels this regression progress.

5.) Religion Subjugates Promiscuity:

Almost every religious institution to ever dominate the hearts and minds of a society has preached quite mightily the importance of monogamy. Religion..., is therefore not only a pre-science way of explaining reality, but likewise a civilizational mechanism for social order... Human instinct is not without fault, and thus by merit of its destructive aspects will undo civilization if left unchecked. Religion inherently acknowledges the flawed nature of the human character.

I`m sorry, I can`t agree with that in any way.
The fear of God, under my perspective, is one of the biggest problems in humanity right now. To believe that something is controlled by a divine-force, including your life, your desitions, and than everything can be forgive at your last moment...

Let`s talk about how religion is seeking mind-control. When human kind appeared in the face of the earth (more than 150.000 years ago) there where some common beliefs, as something magic related to rain, life itself and so. In the prehistoric art before the first cities in the world it is virtually impossible to find any scene of people fighting other people, but people hunting animals and such. I`m talking about a period in history in which there where few humans, small groups of them, walking in the earth, nomads seeking their haunt and in a total balance with the nature. Then, possibly due to a climate change, the humankind begun to build cities. Soon in the ancient cave-art they begun to paint human vs human fights, grupal rituals and such. It happends arround the 9.000 B.C. (notice how huge period it is).

The authors found genetic evidence for a surge in human population size about 40,000 to 50,000 years ago. This period, just after humans first set foot outside Africa, is of great interest to archaeologists because it coincides with a dramatic increase in the sophistication of human behavior. People began crafting tools from bone, burying their dead and fashioning clothing to keep themselves warm in cool climates. They developed complex hunting techniques, and created great works of art in the form of cave paintings and jewelery.

The archaeological record also shows that during this time, humans began hunting more dangerous prey and more easily exploiting small game like rabbits and birds. They traveled farther than they had before, perhaps due to the growth of long-distance trade routes – the first of their kind. Jared Diamond, author of The Third Chimpanzee, calls this period “The Great Leap Forward,” when humans burst forth culturally – finally separating themselves from their evolutionary cousins.
The exact cause for these changes in human behavior may never be known. Some believe a simple genetic mutation or that the evolution of language could have sparked such a dramatic change. But what we do know now, thanks to this new genetic research, is that like the (much later) invention of agriculture this explosion of innovation was accompanied by population growth.

So, when humans come togheter, there is war, bounderies problems and, the most important of all, unequal distribution. Now we have specialists in so many areas: we have agriculture from the first time, walled cities to protect their reserves, war, and religioust specialist to convince people to work. Yes. To convince them. Since the very beggining, fearing a god means too many things:
1.- There are a few knowing (and somehow having) the world of God in them. So they get to have a privileged status and to dictate the norms, because they are the chosen ones. If you make the people to believe that, then they will live forever under the fear and they will believe whatever you want them to believe.
2.- Governments were chosen, as well. So your succeed in life is not longer related to your abbilities, but the kind of blood you have in your veins.
3.- The first tyrant government appeared based on religion status. Only by the fear of something supernatural you can have all this power. Just read the Old Testament.
4.- The legitimacy of unfair power. By explaining everything that can`t be controlled by human kind under the supernatural explanation, and by giving all the possible communication between those supernatural forces and humanbeings to a few, you can make anything legit.
Why the rain is destroying everything? Because you don`t give enough money to church. Why my son is dying? Because you are a siner. How can we stop this to happen? By maintaining a church, a monument, a faraon, a cesar...
 

Religion and Progress

The greatest obstacle to human progress is not a technological hurdle but the evil inherent in ourselves. Humans have knowledge of good and evil and with this knowledge we often choose evil.

Collectivism exists because it employs aggregated force to limit evil especially the forms of evil linked to physical violence. Collectivism is expensive and inefficient but these inefficiencies are less than the cost of unrestrained individualism. Collectivism aggregates capital for the common good and we are far from outgrowing our need for this.

1.   Prehistory required the aggregation of human capital in the form of young warriors willing to fight to protect the tribe.
2.   The Agricultural Age required physical capital in the form of land ownership and a State to protect the land.
3.   The Industrial Age required the aggregation of monetary capital to fund large fixed capital investments and factories.

A farmer in the agricultural age could achieve some protection from theft and violence by arming himself. He could protect himself against a small hostile groups by forming defensive pacts with neighboring farmers. To defend against large scale organized violence, however, requires an army and thus a state.

In 1651 Thomas Hobbes argued for the merits of centralized monarchy. He believed that only absolute monarchy was capable of suppressing the evils of an unrestrained humanity. He described in graphic wording the consequences of a world without monarchy a condition he called the state of nature.


There may well have been a time in human history when the absolute monarchy of Hobbes was the best available government but Hobbes was writing at the end of that era. England had been transformed from a nation almost completely conquered by the Odin worshiping Great Heathen Army of 865 to a country that protected the legal rights of nobles in the Magna Carta of 1215 to a devoutly Christian nation that formalized the rights of judicial review for common citizens in the 1679 Habeas Corpus act. Hobbes had failed to appreciate the growth of moral capital that allowed for superior forms of government with increased freedom.

The Beginning of Wisdom

Top-down control fulfills its mandate when it maximizes cooperation and minimizes defection. Top-down control also uses fear, violence, and forced interaction. Top-down control is thus only morally justified if the use of those things results in an overall increase in cooperation and a reduction in defection.

The amount of top-down control required to maximize cooperation is proportional to the amount of defection prevalent in the population as well as the capability of individual defectors to do harm. Humans are morally flawed resulting in recurrent excessive concentrations of power and a general refusal to cede power. The recent human condition has been notable for the gradual progression of moral progress with either no accompanying change in top-down control or a counter intuitive increase in top-down control. When this happens the top-down control itself limits cooperation and becomes a form of defection. The situation is like a pressure cooker that eventually explodes in a rebellion resetting the top-down control to more appropriate levels.  

Defection and rebellion are thus entirely separate phenomenon. The first is evil and always morally unjustifiable. The second is not only just but a moral obligation once a superior solution to top-down failure becomes available.

Decentralization paradigms are useful and necessary when resetting top-down control to more appropriate levels. However, decentralization paradigms must always be accompanied by a top-down control that maximizes cooperation alongside the decentralization paradigm.

The reality is we will always need top-down control. This may be a bitter pill to swallow for an anarchist. The need for top-down control does not go away just because we don't like it or don't want to think about it.

Religion is also top-down control, but that statement is meaningless without context. We both need top-down control and will always need top-down control. Thus ultimately the relevant question is what kind of top-down control is religion.

That answer of course varies depending on the religion we are talking about. The primitive idols worshiping pagans had horrific gods. These religions were tools of extreme top-down oppression and their extinction is welcome. See: Pagans and Human Sacrifice.

However, belief in God especially individual belief in God coupled with a fear of God is something else entirely. A society where all individuals genuinely believed in and feared God would have very little defection. What defection did occur would be the result of ignorance not malice and even that would decline with time as knowledge progressed. An individual restrained only by a genuine belief and fear of God has complete operational autonomy he would willing choose only cooperation and never defection limited only by his knowledge of what actions constituted genuine cooperation.

Belief in God is top-down control. It is the purest manifestation of such control enabling a maximization of freedom. Rejecting God leads ultimately to higher levels of defection and consequentially less freedom.

You can cling to your Bronze Age myth all you want.

We have evolved not were made from dirt.
...

BTW, I am 100% sure we live on a globe not a flat disk as your scripture says.

Science discovered that your Christian ideology is wrong by discovering that the Earth is not flat and that Earth is not in the center of the universe, that humans evolved from the same common ancestor as did chimpanzees not from dirt in case of a man and rib bone in case of a woman.

Your comparison of atrocities done by Christians to those  done by Communists tells me you are scratching the bottom of the barrel for arguments.  I hope you are not justifying murders with other murders that will happen in the future.  This 'argument' is the same argument Islamists are using to justify atrocities done in the name of their religion.
"Look Christians did crusades so why are you singling us out?".

That is not a defence.  

You literally object when I say don't teach children nonsense from the Bible.  Not only you object, you think you are justified.  Your logic follows the same rationalization the prosecutors of Giordano Bruno followed.

Ancient crimes?  Are you kidding me?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_executed_for_witchcraft

Thanks to scientific revolution and secular thought you guys can flush toilets...

BTW, in the US it is a political suicide to be openly non-religious.  How many atheists do you have in your congress?

Talk about under representation, LOL.

Trans-formative? You better look up the definition of the word.

The Bible is opposite of being transformative. The ideas presented in the Bible kept women in servitude for millennia.

Any opposition to what the Bible said was swiftly dealt with burning on the stake, or chopping off heads.  This religion was introduced by force all across Europe and from there it spread by sword all over the world.  If this is what you mean by transformative, then I agree.  It transformed the world by killing millions.

Progressive secular thought brought end of racism, improved human rights, abolishment of slavery, equal rights to both genders, gay rights etc.  Without secularism and scientific revolution we would not be having this conversation; you (and people like you) would simply come to my house and kill me.  

You live in a carefully constructed bubble.  Why can't you answer questions about the Bible?  Too close to the foundation of your bubble?

Your 'claims 1-8' are laughable.  I answered them all.

Religion is all about coercion.  Coming from the guy who values freedom that is kind of ironic, LOL.

My one liner moral system suppresses defection without reliance on a supernatural stick.  Not sure what is your point...

Why are you interpreting the Bible within the context of the times when the Bible was written?

If you admit that you need to interpret the Bible, then you admit that it is a Bronze Age literary work, not a 'word of God'.
Either it is a 'word of God' or it is not.  You cannot have it both ways.