A society without faith, hope and love which transcends the here-and-now won't even barely procreate (if they can help it) let alone flourish across generations. A person without faith,hope and love -- I don't know. I won't go there.
Just saw this, and had to share it. From an interview with Walker Percy.
Q. What kind of Catholic are you — a dogmatic Catholic or an open-minded Catholic?
A. I don’t know what that means. Do you mean do I believe the dogma that the Catholic Church proposes for belief?
Q. Yes.
A. Yes.
Q. How is such a belief possible in this day and age?
A. What else is there?
Q. What do you mean, what else is there? There is humanism, atheism, agnosticism, Marxism, behaviorism, materialism, Buddhism, Muhammadanism, Sufism, astrology, occultism, theosophy.
A. That's what I mean...
Q. I don’t understand. Would you exclude, for example, scientific humanism as a rational and honorable alternative?
A. Yes.
Q. Why?
A. It’s not good enough.
Q. Why not?
A. This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end and then be asked what you make of it and have to answer, “Scientific humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less. I don’t see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and would not let go until God identified himself and blessed him.
Q. Grabbed aholt?
A. A Louisiana expression.
The problem is in blurring what 'faith' means.
Muslims 'flourish', in spite of total faith in the wrong god. Most of them even seem to have more stable families from my experience, at least in comparison to Western single motherhood which has just about become the norm (almost half of all new births are to single mothers in the US).
Afghanistan has one of the highest birth rates, too.
What's actually funny is that the idea of humans 'flourishing' is similar to an argument I made about the necessity of humans thriving (term that I used). A lot of people here had a problem with it.