[Coach]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

I'm going to have to respond really quickly so apologies for the haste
A government funded community center may be able to satisfy the community's psychosocial needs. It might not, though - when did you last visit your community centre? Is it packed with people? Do you walk in and know everyone there?

The community center (and the church, etc..) are alagories for what we should be using to govern our collective moral compass. It's understandable that religious people would want their faith (ie moal compass) used as the benchmark for that, but what I'm getting at is that is simply can not be that way. We use our government and legal system to democratically decide the difference wbetween right and wrong. Does it always work? No. But it is fluid (as it should be) and religion is not.

For many communities, the local church is basically the community's lodestone even though it fulfils no government roles, which is why this is a misinterpretation of what was being suggested:

Sorry, I think that you're misintrepreting the original comment by peter. As noted above, the buildings are represetentative of our collective morality or "what a community should be built around". I'm not denying the good physical churches and the like can do for their communities at all.

No one is suggesting that the church, synagogue and / or mosque should govern.

Govern our morality, not the state. But in the end, particularly legally, doesn't that become the same thing? Peter's question was posed as "what would you want to build your community around, church, cathedral, mosque, etc.. or community center funded by the government?" As if we're talking about a fresh community, with no previous affiliations.

Absolutely it would be the community centre. Morality, consequence, legality and the differences between those things should be taught in school. The very nature of religion will come up their own ideas about those things, and that is fine, to an extent. As we see with a situation such as ISIS, there is a point where we have to say, "no, your religious freedom, your freedom to follow your own moral path is not without limit. We have collectively decided that murdering, raping, stealing, etc.. is morally and legally wrong regardless of what your favorite book says."

That's part of the problem we're talking about. I'm an agnostic (an atheist by some people's definitions). The decline of religion has many good effects, but we can't be blind to some of the voids left, which also lead to significant social problems.

Yeah I dont deny this at all.

First, this last sentence says a lot about your sense of morality as a progressive - that it's inherently a good thing for morality to be adapted "a lot faster", and in fact the slow march of Canadian law isn't fast enough for you.

Second, this is idealistic and doesn't really describe people. Almost no one has a moral code derived from Canada's laws. Most people don't even know what's in them, and there's a significant chunk of the population that think how our criminal law is applied (for example) doesn't meet their moral expectations. I'm not even going to get into tax laws. No, most people get their moral code elsewhere - if you're religious, it comes from your religious tradition as tempered by the community you belong to, if you're not, more and more it comes from your political ideology. The liberals are good, our platform is right and virtuous, the conservatives are morally bankrupt, or vice versa.

Right, but isn't the democratically elected law the agnostic version of an attempt at guiding the collective morality of the community? Certainly not everyone follows them, just like not everyone follows all the strict rules of their religion.

Both of these forms of moral tribalism cause problems, but given that at least in Canada the effect of moral tribalism in the religious sense is pretty impotent except to the extent it intrudes into politics (which it shouldn't), the latter is arguably more dangerous right now because of the polarization it creates. Admittedly, we're nowhere near the level of discord seen south of the border. Yet.

But the problem as become that we can't say "at least in Canada it's pretty good." That's true, but as a species we are connected now. We are one thing. We see what goes on in other places and it's becoming increasingly difficult to stand by and allow "cultural differences" cause oppression, poverty, death, etc.., particularly when it starts happening in our own nation. And so the question becomes "what can we do about it?" We can't denounce their cultural beliefs or attack them without angering more people into extremism. But we also can't just sit and watch them take over the world with hatred. How can we possibly fight against such a paradox?