"Church" Street!

This is not actually "Church Street" but if I was re-naming Quadra Street I would call it that since there are four churches within a hundred meters of the two former churches I mentioned yesterday, and these are functioning churches. Above are the First Metropolitan United Church (left) and the Glad Tidings Pentecostal Church. On the immediate left is the St. John the Divine Anglican Church and to the right is the First Baptist Church. Christ Church Cathedral is also on Quadra Street and only a few blocks up from these churches is a mosque. So religion is certainly not dead in Victoria but, as in the rest of the world, its place in our city and in people's lives is changing.

Old Churches

Directly across Quadra Street from yesterday's photo is this large building, formerly the First Baptist Church. At some later point it was home to Nelson's Music and has now been transformed into trendy loft living spaces. The proximity of this former church to the large one featured yesterday reminds me that we are moving rapidly into a genuinely secular society. This has happened really within the last fifty years and I wonder how many of us think about the implications.

I am wondering, for instance, how people without any religious background develop personal moral codes. What's right and what's wrong used to be defined religiously, but for many people nowadays religion is no longer a valid way of defining morality. But what is the philosophy or ethical system that is replacing religion in our society? It doesn't seem to be explicitly codified anywhere but sort of patched together from rights-based pressure groups, media attitudes and the vague humanistic philosophies of psychologists and social workers, and I can't escape the feeling that we may have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. Aside from legal sanctions or religious beliefs, how do you decide what's right and what's wrong?