Choosing a faith

Sure

There are too many changes to mention but overall people then looked out more for others than what they do now. I don't have statics to prove it and it is simply an observation. As kid it was pretty much accepted that we would give up our seat on the bus to someone older than ourselves. There was simply far more courtesy and respect in our society.

But don't you think you need to work out whether what you say is correct or just something you imagined or simply believe?

You think secularism caused the society to turn nasty? I blame the growing intolerance of white American christianity to accept difference, fear change.Not secularism ... I blame you and your religion.

Was that before or after BIPOC were segregated? When I was a child there were places we could not rent or buy homes. Was this before or after interracial marriage? When I was born there were states where my parents could be arrested for being married. Was this before or after women could get credit in their own name. Is this when white supremacists were allowed to murder civil rights workers?
Please tell me about this wonderful world that existed before secular humanism. Seems like a place no one in my family (even the religious) got to experience.

As I said before some things are better but racism is still evil and still around although but not as institutional as it was then. In my case I never observed racism growing up but that was on the prairies in Canada and wasn't obvious to me. I'm so sorry for what your family endured.I certainly don't suggest that there wasn't evil that existed and sometimes in the name of corrupted Christianity.

Quick question. Would you rather have grown up when you did that now?

Children are safer now than any other time in the history of mankind.

Drugs were always a problem. Just the drugs changed. Teens have always had premarital sex. My grandmother, who was born jn 1910, was pregnant twice before she married my grandfather. He was the father of the youngest, but he raised the other as his own daughter. No one ever questioned or thought different. My grandmother was Canadian and a church goer.
There was no golden age of childhood innocence. It is just different now. People bitched the same when when TV came out. A generation earlier it was evil radio. In the late 1800's it was pulp magazines. Before that their were penny dreadfuls and dime novels. People bitched at the decay of society with the arrival of the printing press and people being able to read the Bible all by themselves. There was no golden age. Things slowly get better.

That still happens everyday. You sound like you live around a lot of shitty people.

plains of Canada and no First Nations? Weird. Oh yeah they were in government schools being tortured and killed.All those people that did those evil things were christians.

I think you are looking through rose colored glasses and where you grew up may have been insulated from what some of us saw growing up.I graduated from high school in 1965 and remember a lot of civil unrest in the 50s through the 70s. I remember college students being shot for protesting, and there was a lot more than the war in Nam being rebelled against, post WWII.My mother's side of my family were all ranchers and they all locked their doors at night and when they were not at home. All the families I knew growing up locked their doors and vehicles. Burglars didn't suddenly pop into existence in 1997 or something. I think it's a rural myth that "nobody locked their doors back in the old days."One thing we didn't have here in the U.S. is more guns than citizens or nearly as many citizens.

Rural and small community are the key qualifiers. I'm about four years your junior (Class of '69) but I grew up in Orange County, basically a suburb of Los Angeles, and we always locked our houses, cars, and bikes (mine actually got stolen once as a kid). That was normal.When I was stationed near Grand Forks, ND, ('77 to '82) we were surprised that few of the older people would locked their doors. Our neighbor told us about a little neighborhood kid who came in and made a mess in the kitchen; that was when we first heard that she didn't lock her door.Part of the problem with driving in the winter (this was in the cold part of North Dakota, BTW) was making a lot of stops in town for shopping and business. You needed to drive for a certain amount of time to completely recharge the battery (cold weather puts much more strain on it) and to heat up the muffler to remove moisture, otherwise your battery would die and your muffler would rust out. Therefore, over the decades the locals had developed the habit of leaving their car running when they went into the store, and since it was a small town where everybody know everybody else, they trusted that nothing would happen. Every winter the local police would run articles begging the public to please lock their cars, but nobody did. Small town mentality.Things have changed now, mainly in the western part of the state and because of the sudden influx of thousands of transient outsiders working the oil fields. That ended their small town mentality.

Don't tell anyone. We don't lock our door. I think I know where the key is. The neighbor kid was surprised the first time he watched our house when we travel. Our doors are expensive. TV's are cheap and I am insured. We have 8 houses on our 2 mile stretch of road. We look out for each other. No one is an armed lunatic. Joy of country living.

That's not a question that can be answered with any degree of rationality. What children need is their parents' love and care and so long as their basic needs of food, clothing, health, housing and friends are met, they'll be happy regardless.All the stuff you worry about now are adult concerns and adults have those concerns at all times in history.What I do remember are children in my class with calipers on their legs caused by polio. Those were the ones that survived it. I remember much talk amongst adults of children in 'iron lungs' until they died. A close friend died of measles and the girl across the street that I'd promised to marry died in an epileptic fit. Most adults seemed to have false teeth. Teachers could abuse kids with impunity - belting them with whatever implement came to hand from wooden blackboard dusters to purpose made canes.Although I didn't know it - being a child - food was poor post-war and some families in my street had no men.We were free to roam and we went everywhere on our bikes, but the roads had far less traffic then, not everyone had a car.Doors where quite definately locked, burgalry wasn't invented in the 21st century. It was the age of consumer goods and electronics, stuff in house was worth stealing.As for religion, the Catholic kids fought the Protestand kids in the streets. They had seperate schools - catlickers and proddydogs. All great fun until they found you on your own.Society has always changed, some things have improved beyond recognition, some things feel like they're not as good, but when looked at objectively there's been a steady rise in living standards and a steady fall in crime for centuries. Those improvement are because of our secular institutions - religious belief is a drag on progress.