At its core,

[wufwugy]

Meh. I think this is easy to dismiss. The great classical philosopher, Socrates, once famously quoted the younger generation were morally bankrupt and would ruin the country. I think Nietzsche's belief is more indicative of an opinion of the western civilization's feebleness with which I disagree.

I think I disagree with Nietzsche on this too, though I don't think his concern is wrong. I think my disagreement is that I think God actually isn't dead, meaning that the moral foundation of the West remains even though the church undergoes change, or something to that effect. I think there is great resilience in the human world, and I can't actually say that it's a loss of moral fabric that collapses civilizations (though that degradation is very alarming and we've got plenty of it).

Frankly, Wuf, I think much of this comes down to a fundamental belief regarding human nature. Your arguments, to my interpretation, are predicated on a belief that humans are weak-minded and need ethical frameworks like religion in order that they don't eat each other alive. In my opinion, this is a major underlying assumption of the conservative ideology.

I, on the other hand, think humans are incredibly advanced creatures who continue to iterate on the foundations built over time through shared knowledge and understanding that evolves into wisdom. This wisdom continues to evolve and iterate over time. We're still working on some of the bugs (the fight or flight mechanism, for example) that leads to some of our uglier outcomes.

That's roughly accurate. The way I've seen it described, and I agree with it, is that one side thinks humans are basically good and that institutions corrupt; whereas the other side thinks that humans are not basically good and that institutions reform. I tend to lean more towards the latter. In politics, this whole thing is a mess due to very weird marriages of ideas and galvanizing people. For example, an evolutionary biologist should probably think in terms of the latter, yet today it seems many of them think in terms of the former.

[wufwugy]

God actually isn't dead, meaning that the moral foundation of the West remains even though the church undergoes change, or something to that effect.

I'd like add that I don't think the church or even church traditions appropriately represent God. They try to. But I can think of two examples I think they get grossly wrong: (1) idolizing God, meaning they have turned it from an idea of nature to a literal man, and (2) the idea that sin is an indiscretion, meaning that they have turned what seems to have originally been an idea about "misalignment with a mode of being" to "doing wrong and being bad."