[i_made_a_booboo]

Mildly hilarious how Japan is a ridiculously safe place crime-wise and has pretty high moral standards and is pretty much entirely atheist. They visit temples because they visit temples and it's just expected that that's what you do because everyone does it ala being Japanese circular logic. The same circular logic is responsible for their moral standards.

Turns out it's not God thats responsible for morality, it's the existence and enforcement of norms by members of the community that is.

[Johnny555]

Japan...has pretty high moral standards

Well.... that depends on your morals, Japanese pop culture still sexualizes young girls... and the trains have dedicated "female cars" so woman can avoid groping in the regular cars. Women are distinctly in a lower class than men.

Japan is a very clean and safe country, but I wouldn't hold it up as a beacon of morality.

[i_made_a_booboo]

And Americas full of drug addicts, school shootings and cops killing black teenagers. And that's despite all those Christians, their morals and their prayers.

And as it turns out women and black people were distinctly lower class than men until a few decades ago. Religion didn't change in that time. But the social norms that various communities enforce on each other did.

And that's my whole point. Religion has nothing to do with it. It's the same dynamics that exist in every group that are what cause the phenomenon of people behaving themselves according to a set of rules.

My one and only point with my example was not the absolute morality of one place vs another but the fact that a place basically devoid of all religious belief doesn't automatically devolve into debauchery, chaos and total amorality. They seem to think that's what will happen. It doesn't but that doesn't stop them believing that.

People arguing the point completely miss the fact that humans don't care at all what's true. They care who's side your on and that's all they try to figure out.

[eudora]

The people you describe are a ridiculously tiny minority.. It hardly reflects on their society as a whole.

What you bring up, I think, is just a common trope about Japan.

People have misleading ideas like this about countries they haven't experienced much of.

For example, I've met a few people who think every inch of the US is a lawless bullet storm.