One of the more profound statements I once heard on the problem with modern secular philosophy was this throwaway comment I read online years ago:
"Creationism is true if it will keep my kids off oxycontin."
(I'm guessing the poster was from the rural Midwestern US.)
I'm not saying I agree with that statement, but I can see where they are coming from. I found it to be one of the more profoundly honest and deep statements I've ever encountered.
Secular philosophy has failed to produce enough value for ordinary people living ordinary lives embedded in the ordinary matrix of threats and opportunities presented by every day life. Religion has done that for thousands of years. Sometimes it does that quite well and sometimes it does it very badly, but at least it tries.
Yes sometimes religion is full of shit, but secular philosophy and ideology is sometimes full of shit as well. One can find examples of both religion and secular philosophy promoting irrational thinking. I think things like antivax and Qanon can be blamed as much on postmodernism as religion, and I don't see any evidence that people who abandon religion automatically become more rational. Many just glom onto other forms of superstition or secular but totally insane ideas.
Go read some academic philosophy. The older stuff is deeply abstract, looking down at the world from orbit and drawing a lot of deep but distant conclusions. The newer stuff is completely impenetrable to someone who has not studied the subject in depth. Very little of it is relevant to someone working a regular job and trying to raise kids.
Speaking of kids... much secular philosophy barely mentions children at all, or seems indifferent to them. The fact that the central generative process of all organic life gets barely a mention in secular philosophy is to me a profound indicator of something very deeply wrong. It's like physics avoiding the subjects of electromagnetism or gravity and trying to make sense of everything else.
The marketplace of ideas is like any other marketplace. If your store does not stock what people need they will shop elsewhere. If you don't like where they are shopping, it's your problem for not producing the right products. The customer is always right.
Secular philosophy has failed to produce enough value for ordinary people living ordinary lives embedded in the ordinary matrix of threats and opportunities presented by every day life.
I don't there's much, if any, evidence for this claim. Religion is in a steep decline in Europe but there's little evidence for more anti-social behavior. The American mid-west, where your quote comes from, in contrast is especially religious for an advance industrial area and it's noted for it's horrific social problem.
Secular philosophy has failed to produce enough value for ordinary people living ordinary lives embedded in the ordinary matrix of threats and opportunities presented by every day life. Religion has done that for thousands of years.
There are zillions of ordinary people living ordinary lives all over the world who are largely areligious, especially in industrialized countries so this doesn't seem very accurate beside coming off as somewhat condescending. Additionally, for most ordinary people over many of the thousands of years in question, participation in the dominant religion of the time and place was compulsory.
Given what we now know about the structure of the oxycontin problem in the US that’s profoundly depressing. It’s little to do with religious versus secular philosophy and everything to do with the political structure of society and a lack of action. Most often in the US by professed religious people at every level of the oxy trade and government.
Secular philosophy (including science) and religion address different concerns, and can coexist cooperatively so long as there is a willingness on both sides to do so. The first step in that cooperation is to put aside the question of which side is not cooperating.
> "Creationism is true if it will keep my kids off oxycontin."
I think this highlights that while the specific claims of religion (on the age of the earth, origin of species, existence of God, etc) may well be false, religion nevertheless can be a useful social technology.
But this is a problem, because:
(1) many people who might otherwise become religious adherents can't be expected to beleive what to them is silly bafflegab (they could always just pretend to, but that has its own costs too)
and (2) religions tends to be really keen that new adherents actually do belief in their belief systems.
>Raikothin religion, sumurhe in its own language, recognizes two aspects of God, called Truth and Beauty. The existing world is a poorly ordered mishmash of these two aspects, whereas God is the two aspects artfully and perfectly combined.
>Truth includes everything that actually objectively exists, in the exact way that it actually exists. This aspect is mathematical, precise, and completely devoid of subjectivity. It is symbolically associated with winter, stars, the colors blue and silver, and all the hard sciences as well as math.
>Beauty includes feelings, dreams, hopes, personality, meaning. This aspect is numinous, charged with emotion, and fantastic. It is symbolically associated with summer, roses, the colors green and gold, and all the arts, especially poetry and especially especially music.
>This philosophy cashes out into a formalization of two different ways of looking at things, the Elith-mirta and Ainai-mirta (Perspective of Truth and Perspective of Beauty). The sumurhe religion itself is a perfect example. In the Elith-mirta, it is a useful metaphor for the fact that some things are easier to understand using mathematics and other things are easy to understand using native anthropomorphic intuitions, as well as a recognition that religion promotes psychic health and strengthens community ties. In the Ainai-mirta, Truth and Beauty are literal anthropomorphic deities (the god Elith and the goddess Ainai) who are worshiped through prayer and sacrifice and invoked for strength in times of need.
Sounds to me like you’re saying that churches are interested in brainwashing kids because their existence depends on it, while secular philosophy as a branch of science is not an agent that could act at all.
To compare apples to apples somebody should start a church of secular philosophy.
I have no problem believing that religion may serve useful social and cultural functions. Unfortunately, this article is founded on findings in social psychology, and we already know that social psychology is largely bunk[0].
What are the chances that this "meditation leads to kidness" result (with a total of 39 participants) would actually stand up to attempts to replicate it? The claimed effect size - "8 weeks of meditation resulted in such a large effect—increasing the odds of acting to relieve another person’s pain by more than 5 times"[1] - defies belief.
I read the paper, and agree with your impression of its quality. With training, it is possible to navigate a shaky field like social psychology, so I'll provide my estimates here.
The paper was written in 2013, so it's not pre-registered.
The sample size of 39 is suspicious given its date. People became upset about junk papers two years before, so the authors should have known better. However, I would hesitate to draw conclusions about the integrity of the paper's authors, because each participant was paid $60, which makes expanding the sample size somewhat expensive.
The authors declared no conflicting interests, but I looked up the first author and he has major conflicts of interest.
Combining these factors, I'd adjust the p-value from .02 to .45, if it were a pre-registered paper which you have pre-committed to read. This paper is worthless.
It's interesting to think of religion as a societal tool that has co-evolved along with humanity.
Societies with more beneficial religions would prosper and societies with less beneficial religious would die out.
It's thus no surprise that the religions that survived until the present day promote human survival. For example, it's no accident that most major religions heavily encourage their followers to have a lot of kids.
I used to be a very hard headed atheist until I read the book "The Secrets of our Success" by Joseph Heinlein. That book speaks of how culture evolved along with genetics, and it made me realize how important tradition and religion really are to society. I am still atheist, but now very much encourage religious people to stay with their faith and continue their worship. There are definitely downsides to religion, but ultimately they encourage strong communal and familial values, which I think are very lacking in my generation.
> For example, it's no accident that most major religions heavily encourage their followers to have a lot of kids.
I noticed looking at my family tree, that basically all the secular branches have below replacement fertility, while the more religious branches have above replacement.
Ironically it seems secularism is the ultimate proselytizing ideology, it seems it can't grow its own base through reproduction, it can only tempt the religious to abandon their religion and enjoy secular freedoms with fewer responsibilities (like fewer kids) - but it has to repeat this process at every generation to survive.
Also ironic that secular society holds up the theory of evolution as a reason we no longer need religion, yet it seems evolution itself favors the religious with more descendents!
I believe humans need rituals and for that religion mainly fills that gap for now (weddings etc..)
I also believe we need stories and religion used to fill that gap well, but with the advent of the modern era religion is losing out
personally as a mainly athiest and with a slight agnostic streak (btw I'm from the uk with a CoE upbringing) , I feel that most/ if not all religious people - from my personal experience - pick and mixes their relgion which kinda feels that it makes the whole thing hypocritical
I also see that almost all people really really really want to do the right thing and 'generally' believe in the golden rule of do not do upon to others, things/ stuff, that you do want to be done to yourself.
My grandma was deeply relgious and it it brought her extreme happiness towards the end of her life, so I understand it's significance, but still, she picked and mixed her believe to make her happy
The title of the book is "How God Works" yet the the author explicitly states he is ignoring theology and instead is focusing on spiritual practices can have beneficial effects on a practitioner's mental state (happiness, kindness, acceptance, etc). The subtitle of the book, which is the title of the HN submission, seems to better convey the research presented in the book.
But if we remove the theology—views about the nature of God, the creation of the universe, and the like—from the day-to-day practice of religious faith, the animosity in the debate evaporates.
Of course, then it's no longer a religion. It's a social organization.
It seems to be quite possible to overdose on religion. Some religions do that as policy, as a form of brainwashing. The religions with mandatory prayer several times a day work like that. It's really hard to break people free of that brainwashing if they grew up with it. It's not the theology, it's the repetition. Both haredi Judaism and Islam use that approach to induce some degree of fanaticism. The Catholic Church, in previous centuries, was into that sort of thing, but has lightened up a bit.
I feel like my life would be better if I believed in some supernatural being who loved me and cared for me and was going to bring me into his paradise of eternal ecstasy after I die. I don’t see how that couldn’t make a person happier and more able to cope with the deaths of loved ones, their own death, etc. It seems like being on a very powerful narcotic that still lets you function day to day.
But I don’t see any way I can make myself believe that stuff.
the point of genuine faith isn't to be a narcotic that let's you function in day-to-day life, it's not some sort of theological Soma out of Brave New World, it's supposed to transform, which involves a fair amount of suffering.
Your life wouldn't be better if you you could believe any of that stuff, and no genuine believer treats religion or God like some sort of spiritual Xanax.
Every culture has some version of the golden rule yet religions claim to originate it. Most of what was studied in this article is common across all religions. Calling such practices "religion" is like calling smiling "religion". Religion co-opts nature and then, for a fee, hands it back to you. Human nature is not religion, religion puts an artificial price on that which should be enjoyed sans grift.
If you think human nature (i.e. the free and ordinary expression of a person unperverted by social conditioning) comprises something like "do unto others and you would have them do unto you," I have several billion pieces of bad news for you. There is no evidence for this, and the only rebuttal you could have to all the counterexamples will be some form of No True Scotsman -- "yes, those people acted badly, bad that's their conditioning, not their True Human Nature..."
There seems to be little doubt that religion, faith, spirituality or rite can have benefits. The question is how to get the good side of all these (community, meaning, satisfaction and fulfilment) without the nasty side (exclusion and intolerance, resistance to or denial of reality, imposition of impossible standards, the denial of one's own preferences and wants).
Religion has been a major source of soothing and a major source of suffering for all of humanity's past. I think we need to overcome religion and move to a world where each can have their own spirituality - but as long as people follow religions that preach their own unique truthfulness (believe the pope, the Bible, the Quran, the priests, the sutras, ...) we will never get there.
Basing anything on false or inexact beliefs won't leads to lasting desirable outcomes IMO*. Some argues to read religious texts as metaphors but I think it's just a way to circumvent the reality.
*except for charities but benevolence is obviously not (only) tied to religions
Religion clearly has mental health benefits, especially in terms of robustness.
The interesting question is whether it is a transcendent ‘supra-rational’ belief system, e.g. a cheat code at life, because even assuming nothing matters, it makes sense to believe if you want to ‘be statistically more joyful’ (of course, some don’t want joy in their lives, so maybe it wouldn’t make sense for them?).
> Religion clearly has mental health benefits, especially in terms of robustness.
The question is if this generalizes to society as a whole. For atheists it seems like living in religious communities has severe negative mental health consequences causing them to die earlier, but atheist societies tend to live longer and be happier than religious societies. So in any society it is better to be religious, but you'd rather that your peers weren't religious because their belief hurts you.
The main thing is that they create a social group that you can't be a part of. But aside from that they might also blame the worlds problems on your non-belief, pester you to start believing, they might obstruct your ability to get healthcare etc.
I grew up strongly religious, and I still believe strongly, but left the organization due to the people in it. I did have an atheist phase, but that depressed me so severely that I almost had no choice but to reconsider my belief.
Without a religious structure, life has no set purpose. Sure, you can make a purpose for yourself, but it feels empty compared to a created, beautiful universe by a benevolent being who got lonely.
Does it? If I knew 100% there's any kind of afterlife, I'd kill myself today. Not to mention that there's some almighty butthole in the sky that does nothing to help anyone but asks for faith (also their supposed representatives ask for money), now that's depressing. Oh and v1.0 of the European shit is pretty gruesome.
This is something I've thought about a lot, and I say this as a diehard atheist. Historically (and even now), religion has served two useful purposes:
1. As a provider of community. There are of course other ways to socialize with wider groups. Sports clubs, going to the pub, classes, that sort of thing. But it's a lot more interest-driven and haphazard.
2. As a provider of and enforcer for a moral code.
Here are some things I believe to be true:
1. A lot of people like being told what to do. This isn't necessarily unhealthy or bad. I also believe in decision fatigue. We defer decisions to others all the time;
2. Fear is an easier tool for keeping people in line than any alternative. There's a carrot and a stick with religion. The carrot is paradise in the afterlife (depending on your flavour of religion). The stick is partly eternal damnation but much more important than that, it's the fear of losing that community.
3. The majority of people only act in an ethical manner out of fear of the consequences.
Now looking at the political situation in the US, we have the rise of Christian conservatives. Just the name "conservative" is worth examining. It is of course derived from "conserve". The intent is obvious: it is to resist change, to maintain traditions and generally to keep doing things the way we "always" have. It almost seems like to be a conservative requires you to believe things were better in the past and changes are just making everything worse. At least that's how it seems.
It shouldn't really surprise anyone that religion and conservatism tend to be correlated but does one cause the other? I honestly don't know.
But what I find fascinating is that the desire to be told what to do combined with the mistrust in government fomented by religions (as in, the person is to put their faith in [deity] and the church rather than government) means these people are so easily manipulated.
Take the Covid vaccine (and masks). Every current and former president (including Trump), every governor, every Senator and all but a handful of Congressmen are vaccinated. I'm also sure every Fox News host is too. Yet these same vaccinated people are quite happy and willing to pander to whack job conspiracies as a means of control.
I find it ironic that the people who I'm sure genuinely think they're standing up for "freedom" by fighting against mask mandates are in fact least free because they're so easily manipulated.
So I guess my point is, I'm not sure these problems go away if, say, religion goes away.
I'm not sure the bottom part of your argument makes sense. Religious people trust God, but I don't see a reason they would trust or distrust any specific government or news organization unless that government or news organization claimed to be divinely backed. I don't see why religion would cause someone to be more likely to blindly trust a news organization over the government. There's been a lot of US patriotism tied to religion ("In God we trust.", "God bless America.", "endowed by their Creator").
You could also said that the conservative are looking at understanding was worked in the past and not throwing everything out the window for the newest fad.
To me, it seems like a precautionary principle, let’s take our time and not throw the baby with the bathwater, things a changing fast, we must preserve what was good or we risk falling into some traps like communism/fascism (that where secular endeavours)
Ultimately, we need to find out what was great about our roots and also what need to change to face up modern problems.
A problem we have now, is that these stories were written in the bible which prevented them from being updated as they would have been in an oral tradition, and now the update is way overdue.
I've attended a few Unitarian Universalist services, and they're very open to "non-believers", as well as pretty much any type of personal belief. They seemed to be much more interested in community and rite than to forcing dogma. Still, while they were certainly a friendly and pleasant group of people, I found it all a bit too fuzzy with objective truth to be my cup if tea. I don't have anything like Sunday Assembly in my area, and occasionally thought of trying to start some kind of weekly humanist gathering. Rather than the UU message that "any belief is welcome", I wanted to convey more of a "everyone is welcome, personal religious beliefs aside" message. Where we could just work on humanistic goals together.
This is very interesting to me. I am just "Saturday browsing" but plan to try to read what I can about your community. My first impression is surprise that the group was trying to raise venture capital :) I will find out more as I read i guess.
This excerpt is from a widely prayed Orthodox Christian akathist hymn. [0] Akathist means not sitting as it is usually prayed standing up. It was composed during the persecution in communist Russia by Metropolitan Tryphon [1]
"The breath of Thine Holy Spirit inspires artists, poets and scientists. The power of Thy supreme knowledge makes them prophets and interpreters of Thy laws, who reveal the depths of Thy creative wisdom. Their works speak unwittingly of Thee. How great art Thou in Thy creation! How great art Thou in man!
Glory to Thee, showing Thine unsurpassable power in the laws of the universe
Glory to Thee, for all nature is filled with Thy laws
Glory to Thee for what Thou hast revealed to us in Thy mercy
Glory to Thee for what Thou hast hidden from us in Thy wisdom
Glory to Thee for the inventiveness of the human mind
Glory to Thee for the dignity of man's labour
Glory to Thee for the tongues of fire that bring inspiration
I love this Akathist, and it should be noted that Metropolitan Tryphon wrote it in a literal gulag. The ability to see and be thankful for the beauty of our world, even under those conditions, is a testament to the power of religion, and some would say God.
At a personal level, one very visible difference I have seen religion make in people is that it makes them more disciplined. Pious people who regularly and "religiously" perform their rituals every day tend to have a nice bonus effect of being easily able to start and adhere to good habits and exercise self-control over superficial cravings.
This is a challenging article. To paraphrase, it suggests that a suite of religious practices have been shown to have real world benefits. The author suggests that scientists should overcome their personal allergy to religion and instead trust the data. He suggests the compromise of rejecting the "theology" of the religion, presumably because it is "unscientific", and instead focusing on the empirically observable physical social practices.
I agree with him, but suggest a few further considerations. Wouldn't a truly open minded scientist be forced to consider that the real world impact of religious practice is evidence (not necessarily proof) for the causal effect of something that is outside of empirical measurement? Only a mind that has the improvable a-priori belief in physicalism could reject this possibility. A commitment to physicalism is not itself provable by science, and therefore is merely a religious belief, although it is disguised and subconscious most of the time so we don't notice.
And how does he think that we can decouple the "theology" of the religion from the practices? Could a hall full of strangers start swaying together like in the Jewish Shuckle, feel the same unity felt by the synagogue? What came first, the theology or the swaying? This sounds like a cargo cult mentality, where by imitating the behavior of the rich, you, too can become rich. Even if it worked a little bit, it's hard to imagine that it could become popular or last. I think team sports played in Stadiums is the best imitation we have so far, and even that is only sustained by a narrative ("your" team "battling" an "enemy" team).
It would be interesting to see if an idiosyncratic hodge-podge of different rituals cobbled together from various religions could ever work. As far as I can tell, that is exactly what New Age religion is, and that is far from impressive.
The way forward is to stop and re-think the blind philosophical pre-commitments of our day, which are a slowly eroding set of modernist beliefs from the Enlightenment era. This gave us a dualistic world view, with the complete separation of a "spiritual" and "physical" realm. As science is built to only examine the physical, it naturally produces confirmation bias that there is no "spiritual" and gradually we went from dualism to believing only in the "physical". It is this erroneous background assumption which leads us to misunderstand what scripture even means when it talks about heaven/earth and angels and other "spiritual" beings.
Sir Isaac Newton was a devout Christian theologist. Perhaps his adopted philosophy offers discipline features that aided in the production of fruit prized by the scientific community. Islamic discipline gave us fundamental mathematical systems. Nikola Tesla thought of his brain as an antennae for the universal core ("I don't know its secrets, but I know it exists"). George Carlin has a bit about how the aliens don't talk to us because of our own self-centered hubris.
Religious thought is there for a reason. Science searches for explanations for observable phenomena. If you call yourself an "atheist" and announce your belief in "nothing", then you will shut yourself off from fellow citizens (complete with their own unique knowledge) who are inheriting rehearsed traditions. I've been taught to never tell someone they're wrong. Why would you want to become someone's ideological enemy? Perhaps there are fundamental, ancient gears turning if you embrace religion. When describing my complicated views about religion to my own "simple", hard working father - I was told "Well, I just go to church because everybody is there." You must speak their language so that they sing for you. Their willingness to profess their view of the world is a beautiful, valuable thing.
An honorably discharged American marine with a missing leg told me that Islam preaches punishment, while Christianity preaches forgiveness. Both of these concepts are necessary to steer a population, and both can be issued excessively. Forgiveness can mean more intimate personal data released to the priest in a confessional booth, and punishment can mean less corrosive civil behavior overall.
I've had hail strike my car seconds after sending the sarcastic chat message "the algorithms replaced the priesthood". I've had lightning strike dozens of feet away from where I slept in the middle of the night in a parking lot mere hours after watching the clip [0] of Christof demanding his team "DO IT!".
If you want proof, you've incentivized your industry to make my car constantly connected to an LTE tower by default. In a Faraday cage protected HDD somewhere, I'm sure my file is residing along with billions of others, courtesy of Pegasus (et al). Unless you are going to say "lightning struck the same place 4 times in a row." [1]
“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”
[+] [-] api|4 years ago|reply
"Creationism is true if it will keep my kids off oxycontin."
(I'm guessing the poster was from the rural Midwestern US.)
I'm not saying I agree with that statement, but I can see where they are coming from. I found it to be one of the more profoundly honest and deep statements I've ever encountered.
Secular philosophy has failed to produce enough value for ordinary people living ordinary lives embedded in the ordinary matrix of threats and opportunities presented by every day life. Religion has done that for thousands of years. Sometimes it does that quite well and sometimes it does it very badly, but at least it tries.
Yes sometimes religion is full of shit, but secular philosophy and ideology is sometimes full of shit as well. One can find examples of both religion and secular philosophy promoting irrational thinking. I think things like antivax and Qanon can be blamed as much on postmodernism as religion, and I don't see any evidence that people who abandon religion automatically become more rational. Many just glom onto other forms of superstition or secular but totally insane ideas.
Go read some academic philosophy. The older stuff is deeply abstract, looking down at the world from orbit and drawing a lot of deep but distant conclusions. The newer stuff is completely impenetrable to someone who has not studied the subject in depth. Very little of it is relevant to someone working a regular job and trying to raise kids.
Speaking of kids... much secular philosophy barely mentions children at all, or seems indifferent to them. The fact that the central generative process of all organic life gets barely a mention in secular philosophy is to me a profound indicator of something very deeply wrong. It's like physics avoiding the subjects of electromagnetism or gravity and trying to make sense of everything else.
The marketplace of ideas is like any other marketplace. If your store does not stock what people need they will shop elsewhere. If you don't like where they are shopping, it's your problem for not producing the right products. The customer is always right.
[+] [-] joe_the_user|4 years ago|reply
I don't there's much, if any, evidence for this claim. Religion is in a steep decline in Europe but there's little evidence for more anti-social behavior. The American mid-west, where your quote comes from, in contrast is especially religious for an advance industrial area and it's noted for it's horrific social problem.
[+] [-] pvg|4 years ago|reply
There are zillions of ordinary people living ordinary lives all over the world who are largely areligious, especially in industrialized countries so this doesn't seem very accurate beside coming off as somewhat condescending. Additionally, for most ordinary people over many of the thousands of years in question, participation in the dominant religion of the time and place was compulsory.
[+] [-] analog31|4 years ago|reply
The thing is, it won't.
[+] [-] hota_mazi|4 years ago|reply
This is whataboutism to an absurd degree.
"Yeah, religion is not perfect, but atheism is not perfect either, so they're both on par".
No, they're not.
> and I don't see any evidence that people who abandon religion automatically become more rational.
They just abandoned an irrational belief, so by definition, they are immediately more rational.
[+] [-] meheleventyone|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mannykannot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alfiedotwtf|4 years ago|reply
Can you please give one example of secular philosophy promoting irrational thinking?
[+] [-] MisterBastahrd|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] PontifexMinimus|4 years ago|reply
I think this highlights that while the specific claims of religion (on the age of the earth, origin of species, existence of God, etc) may well be false, religion nevertheless can be a useful social technology.
But this is a problem, because:
(1) many people who might otherwise become religious adherents can't be expected to beleive what to them is silly bafflegab (they could always just pretend to, but that has its own costs too)
and (2) religions tends to be really keen that new adherents actually do belief in their belief systems.
One solution might be an idea Scott Alexander had, of separating true-with-respect-to-external-reality from true-with-respect-to-human-psychology (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/15/raikoth-history-religi...):
>Raikothin religion, sumurhe in its own language, recognizes two aspects of God, called Truth and Beauty. The existing world is a poorly ordered mishmash of these two aspects, whereas God is the two aspects artfully and perfectly combined.
>Truth includes everything that actually objectively exists, in the exact way that it actually exists. This aspect is mathematical, precise, and completely devoid of subjectivity. It is symbolically associated with winter, stars, the colors blue and silver, and all the hard sciences as well as math.
>Beauty includes feelings, dreams, hopes, personality, meaning. This aspect is numinous, charged with emotion, and fantastic. It is symbolically associated with summer, roses, the colors green and gold, and all the arts, especially poetry and especially especially music.
>This philosophy cashes out into a formalization of two different ways of looking at things, the Elith-mirta and Ainai-mirta (Perspective of Truth and Perspective of Beauty). The sumurhe religion itself is a perfect example. In the Elith-mirta, it is a useful metaphor for the fact that some things are easier to understand using mathematics and other things are easy to understand using native anthropomorphic intuitions, as well as a recognition that religion promotes psychic health and strengthens community ties. In the Ainai-mirta, Truth and Beauty are literal anthropomorphic deities (the god Elith and the goddess Ainai) who are worshiped through prayer and sacrifice and invoked for strength in times of need.
[+] [-] keymone|4 years ago|reply
To compare apples to apples somebody should start a church of secular philosophy.
[+] [-] allturtles|4 years ago|reply
What are the chances that this "meditation leads to kidness" result (with a total of 39 participants) would actually stand up to attempts to replicate it? The claimed effect size - "8 weeks of meditation resulted in such a large effect—increasing the odds of acting to relieve another person’s pain by more than 5 times"[1] - defies belief.
[0]: https://replicationindex.com/2020/01/05/replication-crisis-r...
[1]: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52853b8ae4b0a6c35d3f8...
[+] [-] ad8e|4 years ago|reply
The paper was written in 2013, so it's not pre-registered.
The sample size of 39 is suspicious given its date. People became upset about junk papers two years before, so the authors should have known better. However, I would hesitate to draw conclusions about the integrity of the paper's authors, because each participant was paid $60, which makes expanding the sample size somewhat expensive.
The authors declared no conflicting interests, but I looked up the first author and he has major conflicts of interest.
The last author, DeSteno, is ranked very poorly at https://replicationindex.com/2021/01/19/personalized-p-value....
Combining these factors, I'd adjust the p-value from .02 to .45, if it were a pre-registered paper which you have pre-committed to read. This paper is worthless.
[+] [-] BiteCode_dev|4 years ago|reply
They are both practices that can exist without mythology, sacred texts or believes of what happens after death.
[+] [-] Digory|4 years ago|reply
A problem of sociology that now extends to our public-policy-facing sciences, as well.
[+] [-] lalaland1125|4 years ago|reply
Societies with more beneficial religions would prosper and societies with less beneficial religious would die out.
It's thus no surprise that the religions that survived until the present day promote human survival. For example, it's no accident that most major religions heavily encourage their followers to have a lot of kids.
[+] [-] sali0|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klipt|4 years ago|reply
I noticed looking at my family tree, that basically all the secular branches have below replacement fertility, while the more religious branches have above replacement.
Ironically it seems secularism is the ultimate proselytizing ideology, it seems it can't grow its own base through reproduction, it can only tempt the religious to abandon their religion and enjoy secular freedoms with fewer responsibilities (like fewer kids) - but it has to repeat this process at every generation to survive.
Also ironic that secular society holds up the theory of evolution as a reason we no longer need religion, yet it seems evolution itself favors the religious with more descendents!
[+] [-] 123pie123|4 years ago|reply
I also believe we need stories and religion used to fill that gap well, but with the advent of the modern era religion is losing out
personally as a mainly athiest and with a slight agnostic streak (btw I'm from the uk with a CoE upbringing) , I feel that most/ if not all religious people - from my personal experience - pick and mixes their relgion which kinda feels that it makes the whole thing hypocritical
I also see that almost all people really really really want to do the right thing and 'generally' believe in the golden rule of do not do upon to others, things/ stuff, that you do want to be done to yourself.
My grandma was deeply relgious and it it brought her extreme happiness towards the end of her life, so I understand it's significance, but still, she picked and mixed her believe to make her happy
[+] [-] tasty_freeze|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|4 years ago|reply
Of course, then it's no longer a religion. It's a social organization.
It seems to be quite possible to overdose on religion. Some religions do that as policy, as a form of brainwashing. The religions with mandatory prayer several times a day work like that. It's really hard to break people free of that brainwashing if they grew up with it. It's not the theology, it's the repetition. Both haredi Judaism and Islam use that approach to induce some degree of fanaticism. The Catholic Church, in previous centuries, was into that sort of thing, but has lightened up a bit.
[+] [-] spoonjim|4 years ago|reply
But I don’t see any way I can make myself believe that stuff.
[+] [-] Barrin92|4 years ago|reply
Your life wouldn't be better if you you could believe any of that stuff, and no genuine believer treats religion or God like some sort of spiritual Xanax.
[+] [-] mybrid|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paisawalla|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] estaseuropano|4 years ago|reply
Religion has been a major source of soothing and a major source of suffering for all of humanity's past. I think we need to overcome religion and move to a world where each can have their own spirituality - but as long as people follow religions that preach their own unique truthfulness (believe the pope, the Bible, the Quran, the priests, the sutras, ...) we will never get there.
[+] [-] jlpom|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nlitened|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|4 years ago|reply
The interesting question is whether it is a transcendent ‘supra-rational’ belief system, e.g. a cheat code at life, because even assuming nothing matters, it makes sense to believe if you want to ‘be statistically more joyful’ (of course, some don’t want joy in their lives, so maybe it wouldn’t make sense for them?).
[+] [-] Jensson|4 years ago|reply
The question is if this generalizes to society as a whole. For atheists it seems like living in religious communities has severe negative mental health consequences causing them to die earlier, but atheist societies tend to live longer and be happier than religious societies. So in any society it is better to be religious, but you'd rather that your peers weren't religious because their belief hurts you.
The main thing is that they create a social group that you can't be a part of. But aside from that they might also blame the worlds problems on your non-belief, pester you to start believing, they might obstruct your ability to get healthcare etc.
[+] [-] rpmisms|4 years ago|reply
Without a religious structure, life has no set purpose. Sure, you can make a purpose for yourself, but it feels empty compared to a created, beautiful universe by a benevolent being who got lonely.
[+] [-] bserge|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cletus|4 years ago|reply
1. As a provider of community. There are of course other ways to socialize with wider groups. Sports clubs, going to the pub, classes, that sort of thing. But it's a lot more interest-driven and haphazard.
2. As a provider of and enforcer for a moral code.
Here are some things I believe to be true:
1. A lot of people like being told what to do. This isn't necessarily unhealthy or bad. I also believe in decision fatigue. We defer decisions to others all the time;
2. Fear is an easier tool for keeping people in line than any alternative. There's a carrot and a stick with religion. The carrot is paradise in the afterlife (depending on your flavour of religion). The stick is partly eternal damnation but much more important than that, it's the fear of losing that community.
3. The majority of people only act in an ethical manner out of fear of the consequences.
Now looking at the political situation in the US, we have the rise of Christian conservatives. Just the name "conservative" is worth examining. It is of course derived from "conserve". The intent is obvious: it is to resist change, to maintain traditions and generally to keep doing things the way we "always" have. It almost seems like to be a conservative requires you to believe things were better in the past and changes are just making everything worse. At least that's how it seems.
It shouldn't really surprise anyone that religion and conservatism tend to be correlated but does one cause the other? I honestly don't know.
But what I find fascinating is that the desire to be told what to do combined with the mistrust in government fomented by religions (as in, the person is to put their faith in [deity] and the church rather than government) means these people are so easily manipulated.
Take the Covid vaccine (and masks). Every current and former president (including Trump), every governor, every Senator and all but a handful of Congressmen are vaccinated. I'm also sure every Fox News host is too. Yet these same vaccinated people are quite happy and willing to pander to whack job conspiracies as a means of control.
I find it ironic that the people who I'm sure genuinely think they're standing up for "freedom" by fighting against mask mandates are in fact least free because they're so easily manipulated.
So I guess my point is, I'm not sure these problems go away if, say, religion goes away.
[+] [-] Thorrez|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alfor|4 years ago|reply
To me, it seems like a precautionary principle, let’s take our time and not throw the baby with the bathwater, things a changing fast, we must preserve what was good or we risk falling into some traps like communism/fascism (that where secular endeavours)
Ultimately, we need to find out what was great about our roots and also what need to change to face up modern problems.
A problem we have now, is that these stories were written in the bible which prevented them from being updated as they would have been in an oral tradition, and now the update is way overdue.
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|4 years ago|reply
Whether that is related is left as an exercise for the reader.
[+] [-] benrmatthews|4 years ago|reply
Take the best bits of religion, including purpose, structure, community, and tradition, but make it available for non-believers.
We even got so far as making the interview stage of Y Combinator:
https://benrmatthews.com/meeting-heroes-y-combinator-intervi...
During the interview, Sanderson (Sunday Assembly co-founder) had a brilliant back and forth with Sam Altman, but ultimately the idea didn’t stand.
I still think the ethos of Sunday Assembly has merit.
[+] [-] technothrasher|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] zafka|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] srcreigh|4 years ago|reply
"The breath of Thine Holy Spirit inspires artists, poets and scientists. The power of Thy supreme knowledge makes them prophets and interpreters of Thy laws, who reveal the depths of Thy creative wisdom. Their works speak unwittingly of Thee. How great art Thou in Thy creation! How great art Thou in man!
Glory to Thee, showing Thine unsurpassable power in the laws of the universe
Glory to Thee, for all nature is filled with Thy laws
Glory to Thee for what Thou hast revealed to us in Thy mercy
Glory to Thee for what Thou hast hidden from us in Thy wisdom
Glory to Thee for the inventiveness of the human mind
Glory to Thee for the dignity of man's labour
Glory to Thee for the tongues of fire that bring inspiration
Glory to Thee, O God, from age to age"
[0] http://www.saintjonah.org/services/thanksgiving.htm
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryphon_(Turkestanov)
[+] [-] rpmisms|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keithnz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dartharva|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] trees101|4 years ago|reply
I agree with him, but suggest a few further considerations. Wouldn't a truly open minded scientist be forced to consider that the real world impact of religious practice is evidence (not necessarily proof) for the causal effect of something that is outside of empirical measurement? Only a mind that has the improvable a-priori belief in physicalism could reject this possibility. A commitment to physicalism is not itself provable by science, and therefore is merely a religious belief, although it is disguised and subconscious most of the time so we don't notice.
And how does he think that we can decouple the "theology" of the religion from the practices? Could a hall full of strangers start swaying together like in the Jewish Shuckle, feel the same unity felt by the synagogue? What came first, the theology or the swaying? This sounds like a cargo cult mentality, where by imitating the behavior of the rich, you, too can become rich. Even if it worked a little bit, it's hard to imagine that it could become popular or last. I think team sports played in Stadiums is the best imitation we have so far, and even that is only sustained by a narrative ("your" team "battling" an "enemy" team).
It would be interesting to see if an idiosyncratic hodge-podge of different rituals cobbled together from various religions could ever work. As far as I can tell, that is exactly what New Age religion is, and that is far from impressive.
The way forward is to stop and re-think the blind philosophical pre-commitments of our day, which are a slowly eroding set of modernist beliefs from the Enlightenment era. This gave us a dualistic world view, with the complete separation of a "spiritual" and "physical" realm. As science is built to only examine the physical, it naturally produces confirmation bias that there is no "spiritual" and gradually we went from dualism to believing only in the "physical". It is this erroneous background assumption which leads us to misunderstand what scripture even means when it talks about heaven/earth and angels and other "spiritual" beings.
https://thesymbolicworld.com/articles/how-the-scientific-rev...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXOdlIXDsr8&t=0s
[+] [-] mu_sub_naught|4 years ago|reply
Religious thought is there for a reason. Science searches for explanations for observable phenomena. If you call yourself an "atheist" and announce your belief in "nothing", then you will shut yourself off from fellow citizens (complete with their own unique knowledge) who are inheriting rehearsed traditions. I've been taught to never tell someone they're wrong. Why would you want to become someone's ideological enemy? Perhaps there are fundamental, ancient gears turning if you embrace religion. When describing my complicated views about religion to my own "simple", hard working father - I was told "Well, I just go to church because everybody is there." You must speak their language so that they sing for you. Their willingness to profess their view of the world is a beautiful, valuable thing.
An honorably discharged American marine with a missing leg told me that Islam preaches punishment, while Christianity preaches forgiveness. Both of these concepts are necessary to steer a population, and both can be issued excessively. Forgiveness can mean more intimate personal data released to the priest in a confessional booth, and punishment can mean less corrosive civil behavior overall.
I've had hail strike my car seconds after sending the sarcastic chat message "the algorithms replaced the priesthood". I've had lightning strike dozens of feet away from where I slept in the middle of the night in a parking lot mere hours after watching the clip [0] of Christof demanding his team "DO IT!".
If you want proof, you've incentivized your industry to make my car constantly connected to an LTE tower by default. In a Faraday cage protected HDD somewhere, I'm sure my file is residing along with billions of others, courtesy of Pegasus (et al). Unless you are going to say "lightning struck the same place 4 times in a row." [1]
“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”
[0] https://youtu.be/wcMCS_6oung?t=248
[1] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/212586-google-data-cen...