This site has documented how atheism is over, with godlessness declining faster than any religion while Christianity holds steady as a percentage of the world population.
But it looks like you can’t keep a Reddit sperg with daddy issues down. Because the fedoras have sounded another quixotic charge at the spaghetti monster atop the windmill in their minds.
The zombie meme sent out from their low-age-of-consent Asian pleasure nests is the old “based Japan” canard.
If the sum of your life’s aspirations is to bang teenage hookers in an ethnically homogenous bug state, the above sounds like a pretty good deal.
The problem with basing one’s decisions on the pleasure principle, as always, arises when you factor in that pleasure is an insufficient source of meaning. And it turns out that people need meaning to live.
A new study by economists Tyler Giles, Daniel Hungerman, and Tamar Oostrom, “Opiates of the Masses: Deaths of Despair and the Decline of American Religion,” finds that the cause of the dramatic increase in so-called deaths of despair—such as suicides, deaths by opiate addiction and overdose, and alcoholism—is, quite simply, the decline of “organized religion.”
In just the past two decades, suicides are up 30 percent. The authors of the study sought to understand the factors causing “one of the most important economic and demographic issues of our time,” and they found that very little provided an explanation for the rise in despair, with one glaring exception: a decline in religious practice was highly correlative since the late 1990s, following a steep downturn in “religious adherence” (presumably the collapse of mainline Protestantism) in the late 1980s. Using the General Social Survey, the authors find that this had a disproportional effect on the poor, and especially on “white middle-aged Americans without a college degree.”
People can’t live without God.
The pattern holds for based Japan™ too, where suicide is the leading cause of males from Generations X, Y, and Z.
To atheists who would argue that suicide is not an intrinsic evil because it’s an effective – if extreme – solution to suffering, I’ll just point out that pain is nature’s warning system. If your arm hurts, chances are you have some kind of wound like a torn ligament or even a broken bone. Suicidal despair is spiritual pain that indicates a wounded soul.
On a basic level, an injury is the absence of health. It means something that should be there is missing.
The despair epidemic is a warning that too many people are missing God.
NB: Even if one were to consider suicide a potential good – which I don’t – despair attacks societies from the other end, too.
Look at the Japanese fertility rate:
If these trends continue, the last Japanese person will die in AD 2500.
A position on religion – or the rejection thereof – that would extinguish the population which adopts it can’t be considered a social good. Unless you consider mass death an intrinsic good, in which case you are a death cultist by definition.
Yet atheists aren’t the only Moloch and Mammon worshiping hedonists BTFO by this study. It detonates a sacred cow of Libertarians, and Liberals in general.
Yet the most powerful aspect of the study, especially for readers of Postliberal Order, is that the authors track the rising despair and the decline of religion most precisely to the repeal of blue laws.
“These laws have been shown to be strongly related to religious practice, creating discrete changes in incentives to attend religious services . . . the repeal of these laws lowered religious participation.”
While politics is downstream from religion, that doesn’t mean the former has no impact on the latter. You can have a vicious cycle in which a slip in religiosity leads to a change in laws that undermine religion’s role in the public square. That in turn leads to further slippage in religious practice, etc.
When you understand the problem, you have the solution. To save America from Japan’s fate, we must reinstate Sunday blue laws and go back to enforcing the blasphemy laws already on the books.
For more actionable tips on fighting the Death Cult, read my #1 best seller:
Very interesting. Sadly, I expect that our society is too deep in sin by this point to go back. I believe that if you forced us to acknowledge that it’s Christ or Death, a great many would choose Death.
The only way out is through. But take heart! God only allows evil that He may bring about greater good from it.
Also, on the topic of Japan more specifically: modern Japanese culture represents a very radical break from Japanese tradition. The Allied Occupation Government had a shocking number of social radicals in it, and repealed Japan’s morality laws, even though similar laws were still on the books back home. Essentially the same thing happened in South Korea (obviously, as it was a Japanese colony before the war), which is in an even worse demographic shape. All the Asian countries that imported Enlightened European Liberal Mores have suffered this same fate. China is on the cusp of falling into the same trap, with the only major difference being that in their case the damage was self-inflicted.
You make an excellent point. Nu-atheists love to crow about the pro-civilizational effects of post-Enlightenment neoliberalism. But the countries they flee to from the cradle of the Enlightenment are only healthier to the degree that they reject neoliberalism.
I came here to make essentially the same point. So I will just agree and amplify, the degree to which the secularisation of the Emperor broke the Japanese’s own traditional connection with Heaven (the Imperial Patriarch is a ‘Son of Heaven’ like in Imperial China) cannot be overstated.
The worship of the emperor in japan was based on Catholicism, it started in 1880 by trying to emulate France’s Catholicism without being Catholic.
CantusTropus,
I concour with your analysis. I taught Japanese and Chinese students in Asia and I can tell you I’ve never seen a more dispirited, demoralized, sad group of people. Chinese kids are in distressing moral/ emotional shape, they really are lost and hunger for something more substantive.
I won’t blackpill the comments because there’s hope and our Lord has a plan. I might not see it unfold, but I hope I’ve done my part when I lived and worked in Asia. So I’ll take solace, I dug up the soil and mixed it for others to plant the seeds and water them.
xavier
Shusaku Endo once called Japan a “swamp” back in the day, and it is a theme in a lot of his work. His main qualm was with how Post-WWII Japan would consume and cram everything into itself without regard for its meaning. Basically, they were defeated and struck out at anything they could to find meaning. When the materialism boom ended with the 1980s, they soon found nowhere to go but inward, and they have been declining ever since.
There was also a podcast I listened to a few years back about a Japanese man who converted to Christianity and went back to Japan to try and spread it. The resistance he felt isn’t so much resistance but a slog of wading into a swamp to pull heads up. They don’t want to think or talk about the deeper issues at play, and it is what is doing them in right now.
I know some Catholic burgers try to say Endo was a universalist at the end to discredit him, but I think it was more likely that he was trying to process how his people could be saved when their problem is so unique and different from other place’s relationship with religion in general. Even discussing religion or bringing it up at all is considered a social taboo. Nightow himself wouldn’t discuss Catholic themes in his works, even though he still has them to this day. One just doesn’t do that there. It’s a strange environment in Japan, but all one can do is pray and hope they figure it out.
They are definitely no weeb paradise, but they are a unique people who will hopefully get passed this before it does them in.
Japan’s religious situation is a strange one. My knowledge is imperfect, but as far as I can tell they simply syncretised whatever new beliefs came to them, and they ended up with a strange tripartite system. Shintoism handled day-to-day customs, superstitions, and rituals, Confucianism handled public morality, and Buddhism handled questions of transcendence and cosmic meaning. To put it another way, rather than having a whole religion, the roles of Cult, Code, and Creed were split up between three different belief systems, with them taking what parts they wanted from each to form a kind of incoherent amalgamation. Quite a unique situation. God Bless them and have mercy on them, and may He lift this veil of ignorance that covers them (not that we can afford to throw stones in this regard!).
That really is a strange separation I haven’t seen anywhere else. It also explains a lot.
It’s in keeping with the unique challenge Japan poses to evangelization: How does one evangelize in a custom-bound place where discussing religion just is not the “done thing?”
There’s a saying in Japan that goes “Shinto is for this life, Buddhism is for the afterlife.”
Good analysis. I’m convinced one of the reasons Christianity has never really taken root in Japan, aside from the country’s general materialistic bewitchment, is because the brand of Christianity most aggressively exported is American evangelicalism/Baptists with the serial numbers filed off. This is a very idiosyncratic, individualist version of Christianity at odds with the basic Japanese psyche and cultural sensibilities as a collectivist rather than individualist culture, so it’s no surprise that it’s failed to resonate with the average Japanese person – in my experience most people in Japanese churches have some strong interest in the West or learning English or what have you.
As a convert to Orthodoxy I’m rather biased but I can’t help but think it’s a version of Christianity that would be vastly more comprehensible to the Japanese mind given its “Eastern” character. I was quite amused when I discovered that Orthodox priests will bless automobiles, which I remembered Shinto priests in Japan do as well.
Hermetic Seal,
Southern Japan was becoming Catholic in the late 16th century and growing in leaps and bounds until one of the shoguns effectively destroyed it. The event must have been very traumatic. I’m wondering how much catechesis was required when the Japanese Catholics were finally allowed to emerge from the catacombs.
I noted in an earlier comment, I wonder how Japan would’ve evolved if Catholicism has been suppressed.
xavier
There are small Catholic enclaves in Japan that are very paranoid and skittish with their neighbors (and tourists) because of the rough treatment Japan traditionally gave to them. Add in that Nagasaki was actually the Christian capital of Japan before it was bombed in WWII, and you can see why the Christians who actually are there are almost always in survival mode.
JD,
I read somewhere, a pope many years lamented he made a mistake of naming local (i.e. Japanese) bishops to the parishes instead of bringing outside bishops. The local bishops are as conformist and supine as the rest of the population. In my years, I spent in Asia, I never came across a Japanese Catholic. It would’ve been interesting to learn some insights about Catholicism there.
It’s really regrettable, the shogun dis such an effective job of practically wiping out Catholicism there. I wonder how Japan would’ve evolved if Catholicism had thrived there. I suspect there’d be a north/south split, where the south would’ve leaped forward due to its integration with the 16th century world system.
xavier
xavier
To be honest, even if you found them there is a good chance they wouldn’t tell you they were one. You usually have to find that information yourself. For instance, I recently learned that the JP VA for Bakugo from My Hero Academia is a Catholic, and it wasn’t from an interview with him. Considering Japan’s shaky history with Christianity, it isn’t a surprise that finding one among their number is tricky.
It’s not everyday you find an Eiji Tsuburaya who practically invented Japan’s notion of heroism, and he was a practicing Catholic who based Ultraman on his faith. It’s just another example of Japan taking something in and not really realizing its source or higher meaning. Nonetheless, it is imprinted on their culture, whether they realize it or not.
*Japan’s MODERN notion of heroism, I meant. Of course they had heroes before.
>The Based Japan Canard.
I could bring up the dozens of failed states in the majority Christian Africa, Latin America, or other spots on the globe. They also wouldn’t prove the idea that Christianity doesn’t help civilization in general, but this entire discussion just reminds me of the various arguments that came out in the 8th century over the Iconoclast heresy, and how if material fortune were the only thing we should judge things on, the Roman gods are what should’ve been worshipped.
Regardless, Japan’s rate of suicide is much higher than other 1st world countries, at about 3 times the rate of places like the UK, or the US. I think it has more to do with Japan’s general honor culture, and how they handle things like disgrace, that explain why that is. The one thing about fertility rates that folks never want to talk about, is the simple fact that they start dropping like a rock around the time No Fault Divorce is part and parcel of living in a westernized country, or the rise of plastics in everything that was going on at the time.
Culture is downstream from religion.
Culture is downstream of the ruling elite’s tastes. Then again, so is just about everything else these days, and it’s pretty obvious they hate everything that is actually Good, Beautiful, and Just.
But the ruling elite don’t WANT the commoners to have the same tastes as them – that would ruin the point of them being refined to begin with. And even if we ignore that, the elites of today aren’t influencing culture in line with their “tastes”, they’re influencing it in line with their evil religion. Nearly everything that modern Hollywood makes is saddled down with Death Cult propaganda that at the very least severely reduces its appeal and the amount of potential money that it can make, but they make them anyway out of religious devotion.
Bugs for thee; Wagyu beef for me
At one point, 90% of Japan was Catholic without knowing it because everyone was in hiding.
The Shimibara Rebellion was unfortunately put down by freemason mercenaries hired by the shogun; the dutch masons fired incendiary bombs on edo as the Rebels were storming the Palace.
edo was burned to the ground, the shogun was killed by his own mercenaries in the fire, and the dutch masons created the emperor family as a puppet leadership.
Most Japanese customs are actually taken from Catholicism.
there is a reason Japan was becoming Catholic before ww2 started, and why then 32nd degree mason truman Martyred over 90% of Japan’s Catholics to send a message 2 weeks after the emperor surrendered in honor of his Love for Catholics who wanted nothing to do with the war. truman got his 33rd degree for that.
I can give more information if needed.