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Yes. You're gesturing at the deconstruction of traditional values that we all lived through in the 2000s, the internet atheist wars. Elsewhere in the thread:
The thing is, though, the pinch-faces emerge for a reason. Social Justice is a trash-disaster, but it didn't come from nowhere, and the problems that drive it are, on the whole, real, unavoidable, and demand a response. That response is going to have to be some sort of formalized moral system, and such a system is going to need a mythic grounding.
The atomic individualist, morally-relativist state pursued by the secularist wave in the 2000s is not sustainable. People need structure, need guidance, and removing that structure and guidance isn't sustainable long-term; the resulting instability, combined with the human search for solutions to problems, will recapitulate an irresistible demand for legible social structures founded on metaphysical truth claims.
It seems you are presuming that the average believer in the past expected, for lack of a better term, legible magic as a routine part of life. I don't see why this should be the case. It seems pretty obvious from historical accounts that normal people did not expect miracles as a normal part of their existence; their epistemic grounding was not functionally different from ours. Believing that miracles or magic happen does not mean that you think they are going to happen to you; we all believe that the lottery exists, but none of us expect to win it. Then, too, it is easy to interpret things that happen as being miraculous, but this doesn't mean you count on them happening reliably either.
It always has been, though. Look back on historical accounts of figures from five or eight or ten or twenty centuries ago, and ask yourself if the people depicted are acting as though they actually expect to answer to their Gods. I've seen this argument before, that if people really believed, it would drastically modify their behavior. The thing is, it does drastically modify the behavior of a sizable minority, and it never modified the behavior of anything more than a sizable minority, even in the times when you're claiming belief was near-universal. That sense that you're going to answer personally to God is sustained by personal choice and effort, and unless it is cultivated, it simply goes away.
I've made this argument myself. Now I'm worried that its wrong.
Think about type II diabetes and morbid obesity. Call it the fat nurse problem. Nurses know that they are heading for trouble because they have treated patients a little older than they are who have already run into trouble. It is as if you go on holiday to Rome and the Vatican is doing tours of Hell. You wonder what became of some-one who died recently and who lived a wicked life. You take the tour and spot him among the damned, suffering. Later you return to the USA determined to mend your own wicked ways, and like the fat nurse and her diet, you fail to do so.
Yes, we see people who fail to modify their behavior. In the context of religious belief, we feel tempted to draw an inference: they do not really believe. In the context of practical matters, they have often seen with their own eyes. Of course they believe! And yet they fail to modify their behavior. What then becomes of our logic? In the religious context, we lack clear guidance about whether people believe, so we attempt to infer belief from behavior. In the practical context we have a contingent gold standard for belief: sometimes folk have seen the truth with their own eyes so naturally they really believe. There is no need to attempt an inference.
On the other hand, there is an opportunity to check the validity of our inference. The inference that we draw from behavior ought to agree with belief that we infer on the basis of noticing that some people have direct experience and must therefore believe. Whoops! Disaster has struck. In the practical case we notice people who must really believe, failing at responding appropriately. So the inference we want to make in the religious case is invalid.
What then becomes of the observation that true belief drastically modifies the behavior of a sizable minority, but only a minority? My guess is that in times of universal belief in God, most people really believe. They have a sense that they are going to answer personally to God. They sin anyway. They repent. They sin some more. They face death with a combination of fear and cope, sometimes dreading punishment, sometimes hoping the God is love and will not judge them too harshly.
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I think this framing is wrong. Ordinary people may have not expected to see a resurrection or a theophany in their lifetimes, but while moderns tend to conceptualize a miracle as God suspending the ordinary operations of an otherwise mechanistic, naturalistic universe, pre-moderns tended to view the hand of the gods in everything. Sickness is from the supernatural world. The outcomes of wars are credited to the gods. Natural disasters reflect divine displeasure. Everywhere they looked, there was evidence of the spirit world at work. People believed in the immediate reality of the supernatural and acted accordingly. As late as the 19th century, French peasants left peace offerings for fairies in the woods. To an ancient Israelite, Yahweh parting the Red Sea may not be quantitatively different from Yahweh empowering Israel to defeat its enemies in battle. We would call the former a miracle because we would consider it naturalistically inexplicable, but not the latter. But for an ancient, while the the parting of a sea would be much rarer and more magnificent than a victory in battle, it might not be qualitatively different, because everything only happens because the gods make it so, even if sometimes what the gods make so is more unique and incredible than other times.
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