Values, Morality, and Culture

I am not a religious evangalist; however I wish to pose a question. I am concerned about how the lack of concern for our country's religious foundations is affecting our culture. The last 40 years of human rights movements and the seperation of church and state has left a void in our cultural training that was previously taught in the schools. I love America's freedoms and I respect the agnostic and atheists rights to there beliefs; however with religion removed from the schools and the government there is no organized way for us as a society to teach basic human rights. Morals and values which in previous generations were taught as absolutes now are subject to ridicule and debate but nothing formal has taken its place. I see this as a very big long term problem.

Dave

David, nice comment. I guess the need is for Christians to spread the good news. Some organizations do that publicly too. That is how the early Christians did it.

Brien

2 points of historical order: 1) church and state were separated 220 years ago, not 40 years ago. 2) Some of that separation was undone 50 years ago when certain national mottos and pledges and emblems were changed to be more religious in response to the threat posed by Godless Communists (when "e pluribus unum" was replaced with "in God we trust" and when the phrase "under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance). So really in the last generation in some respects church and state have been less separate than they were in the past.

But this misses the point. Anyone who studies history knows that any time you start mingling religion and government it rarely does anything to strengthen the religion but often does much to strengthen the government. Reasons are obvious, when the government starts declaring its actions in the name of God people have less inclination to question the government's actions. Who wants to speak out against the will of God?

This is why we don't have religion in state schools. You are of course free to choose a religious education for your children. But state involvement entails the risks inherent in mixing state and religion. For examples, see Iran or Afghanistan. Or Spain under the Inquisition.

There is an infrastructure of organized instruction in morals and values. It's called parents. If we're losing our morals and values it's because parenting is going out of style. Everybody's letting their kids be raised by daycare mills in their formative years. Then in school they load up with extracurricular activities because, well, that's what you do these days or are content to let them sit on the computer but between that and the parents working 2 jobs there's no family face-time anymore. So kids are learning all their values from each other or (shudder) the internet. And it feeds into church too, kids aren't coming to church with their parents, partly because their parents feel "too busy" to go themselves or simply because they're losing touch with their kids anyway to the point where they're not expected to go where their parents go. Pardon that little rant and I know it rambled, but I think this is a real problem.