[libraryatnight]

You do realize that you don't need church for any of that right? Any sort of club or organization will work. This beating over the head that church is the answer is rubbish. I know lots of religious people that are very pleasant and kudos to them for having their own faith while respecting others, I know more that are prejudiced and feel morally superior to those around them, or won't let their kids go on the school trip to the natural history museum - so I'd rather see people not getting sucked into the Church machine like it's an answer when there's lots of ways to socialize without the dogma.

[beasteurope]

No, you don't need religion to hang out and stuff but having matrimony as a sacrament sure nudges people to build families.

[velcrovan]

> having matrimony as a sacrament sure nudges people to build families.

Or, you know, a million years of evolution baking the instinct into our primate brains

[blotter_paper]

I'm an atheist. I want to agree with you so bad, but having kids is different than building families. I think beasteurope is correct about religion encouraging families to stay together rather than breaking up. I'm not saying other social structures can't encourage this behavior, but I don't think relying on evolutionary instincts is going to keep families together as reliably as relying on evolutionary instincts combined with a social custom where potential parents promise commitment in front of the whole community (with the magical threat of eternal torture should they part ways for bonus points). Not the world I want to live in, just the world I think I live in. And again, I can imagine other social customs for building families (like matrilineal lines with strong social expectations of uncles participating in childcare, for example -- there's at least one hunter-gatherer example of this I'm forgetting the name of).

[_fq4v]

> like matrilineal lines with strong social expectations of uncles participating in childcare, for example -- there's at least one hunter-gatherer example of this I'm forgetting the name of

There is one matrilineal society with a culture that some anthropologists describe in terms you describe -- the Mosou people. However, more recent anthropological data indicates that this too is not the whole truth. While the Mosou are undoubtedly matrilineal, they typically know who the father is and children with involved fathers (rather than just involved uncles) do better. Moreover, Mosou society is not spontaneous. It developed as the result of a lower class being subjugated by a very patrilineal upper class nobility. The lower class was socially engineered to be compliant, while the upper class taxed them. The upper class was eventually disbanded by communist china, and the Mosou are now mistakenly used as an example of a stable matriarchal society. Nevertheless, even this fails to stand to scrutiny as exposure to the patrilineal mainstream Chinese society means most men just leave for greener pastures in mainstream Chinese society. Were it not for gawking tourists to prop up their economy, it's unlikely they'd be around still.

[Shorel]

I think our evolution even made us dependent on extended families. Like in having groups of at least 20 individuals in order to raise children successfully.

The smallish nuclear family is a very modern invention. Going to high school (and the natural consequence of parents not educating their own children) is even more recent.

[blotter_paper]

Agree completely. Prussian-style education is good at promoting fascism and perhaps at preparing people to fit into a poorly-designed workforce, but not much else. Some combination of homeschooling, tutors, and (around age 12-16) apprenticeship programs would probably be better for the sorts of goals I have regarding society. The nuclear family is useful but insufficient given our biology; atoms alone are less useful than the higher-order molecules that supervene them.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> I think beasteurope is correct about religion encouraging families to stay together rather than breaking up.

Which really means: Encouraging families that don't work to stay together, no matter how much it hurts the people involved.

Helping people to resolve conflicts so they want to stay together is a completely different thing than just encouraging people to stay together.

[blotter_paper]

I'm really drawn on this. It's not like I want people to stay in abusive relationships, but the statistics around single parent homes in the US aren't great. I'm sure there's all sorts of chicken-and-egg problems in the data, and I'm not claiming that I know the best way of sorting those out without the sort of study that would never pass an ethics board ("group A was assigned to divorce, while group B was forced to continue marriage despite child abuse and other family issues"). I suspect that there is some amount of misery in a relationship which, if the parents endure rather than throwing in the towel, results in a happier/healthier childhood for the children. I don't know exactly where that threshold is, and where the "oh shit this nightmare has gone too far and it's leaving psychological trauma on the children" zone begins. Trying to get the parents to want to stay together is a worthy effort, but when you've decided to make children I socially expect you to put their needs first; I don't think it's unreasonable to encourage people to stay in an unhappy marriage rather than leaving their kids with a broken home, assuming the current home wouldn't be worse for the kids than the broken one. I doubt that marriages of the past struck a good balance there, and I doubt that modern marriages do either.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> It's not like I want people to stay in abusive relationships, but the statistics around single parent homes in the US aren't great.

Apart from the chicken-and-egg problems, probably the bigger problem with that is that naturally the populations you are comparing are extremely biased. So, even if it is not an artifact of social policies that children in two-parent households do better than children of single parents, there is no reason to think that the number of parents is actually the determining factor.

It might just as well be that people who are bad at maintaining relationships are also bad at raising children, so forcing two of them to raise a child together will not give you any of the benefits that you get from people who are good at maintaining relationships raising a child, and you will instead just draw down the average outcomes of two-parent households.

> I'm sure there's all sorts of chicken-and-egg problems in the data

Pretty much that.

If society disadvantages people who build support structures that do not fit a very strict set of requirements, then you can't really draw any useful conclusions about whether those support structures are good based on observing that society, because it is very likely that negative effects you see are simply effects of the discriminatory policies, and thus are useless for justifying the discrimination.

> Trying to get the parents to want to stay together is a worthy effort, but when you've decided to make children I socially expect you to put their needs first

But trying to get people to stay together who don't want to is very unlikely to be putting the child's needs first. If you can make people want to stay together (and not due to outside pressure/threats), that might well be worth it, but if you can't, you probably will be hurting the child if you try to force them, in particular if they get to resent the child because it's what is keeping them in a relationship they don't want to be in.

You can not force people to like other people, and forcing people to be with people they dislike is a recipe for disaster. It's really as simple as that.

> I don't think it's unreasonable to encourage people to stay in an unhappy marriage rather than leaving their kids with a broken home, assuming the current home wouldn't be worse for the kids than the broken one.

How is an unhappy marriage not a broken home? Either the parents will be displaying their dislike for each other, or they have to constantly live a lie, constantly be dishonest to their child about their emotional state ... neither sounds like a nurturing environment for a child.

[endgame]

I think that's a black-and-white interpretation of the point. Seems like there's a set of marriages that would hold regardless of social pressure, and a set of marriages that would be miserable if forced together, and a grey zone in between with marriages that would work well if encouraged to stay together but would also dissipate if not encouraged by society.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

But the point is that you shouldn't encourage staying together, you should encourage working out differences, because they should not stay together if they can't work out their differences, but they will generally stay together anyway if they do manage to work out their differences.

[tathougies]

Human male instinct is to have sex with lots of females and leave. Religion / transcendent philosophy and civilization and family are a self reinforcing loop that has resulted in human prosperity. Take one component out, and it all falls apart.

That is why people say 'family is the building block of civilization'.

[andrepd]

[citation needed]

Seriously though, I'm sure we can attribute our urge to procreate to 4,500,000,000 years of evolution, not to churches.

[rando444]

I think you're under the mistaken assumption that all churches preach religion.

I suggest you read up on Unitarian Universalist and Sunday Assembly churches, which you may not have heard of, but they exist all over the world, and echo exactly what you're saying.