Morals...

Our world is becoming more secular. There are still mega-churches and cathedrals and people proselytizing one religion or another but I tend to think that church is a hard sell in a modern world. Maybe it's always been this way but I wonder how one sells God to someone who sees no reason to believe.

At one point churches sold by threatening those that didn't belong and to a certain extent some still do. But I think that government has put a check on that activity around the world. Once politics became distinct from religion government became the one with the most bite.

Churches exist to fill some need for people, a sense of community, or reassurance that good will happen in the world, etc.

However I don't see that in the future that churches will be a place that people turn to for moral authority. With people in my age group, and at my school I don't know many that attend a service and if they do they are generally Mormon and female. Church doesn't seem to be a guy thing.

So I think that people are turning to government for the function of what is good or bad right or wrong. There seems to me to be two competing moral codes when government is the decider of what is right.

The first is a moral code for optimizing individual powers. Basically whatever an individual does as long as it hurts no one else thus compromising individual rights should be the way to go

The second is a moral code where whatever is best for the group is the way that things should go. Individuals don't matter as much as the collective and we need to optimize for our group.

Nobody holds one or the other exclusively but that seems to me to be the fight in modern society over how we conduct our lives.