The Science of the Benefits of Religion

100% no.

Faith in religion is a completely different thing to believing the scientific method works. Science is self correcting. Religious faith is, by definition, the surrendering of any and every impulse to question the faith to a higher earthly authority. Those earthly authorities are notoriously unreliable (c.f. history of the Jehovah's Witness "end of the world" scenarios).

I know this is hard for religious people to understand, but if you have no belief in religious deities you can't just magic it up out of nowhere. There are people like me who simply can't believe in gods. We just aren't wired that way. I've had well meaning religious folk explain to me that I have apparently "hardened my heart" against (their) god and I need to stop doing that and he will sort it out but it simply isn't true

This certainly hasn't stopped people like me being involved in religions but it makes it a bit...difficult. This attitude that somehow the atheists in the community "do not want to put any efforts in" is wrong, plain and simple. There is no effort we can put in.

There’s a big difference between trust in a process that has so consistently yielded results vs something like faith or political adherence. It’s about the foundations upon which those results lie more so than the belief themselves, and also an amenability to update beliefs. If humanity really gets something wrong about how the natural world operates it will usually be revealed. The trust ergo is largely warranted, even if the human execution of said process is flawed.

The canard that every individual has to maximally recapitulate the entirety of hundreds of years of human discovery is just absurd. Trust exists at all levels of human intellectual discourse.

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.

> There is no effort we can put in.

Well, that's not quite true. I'm an atheist, and I run a weekly Bible study (which has lately morphed into more of a general theological/philosophical study and discussion group) [1]. Religious traditions are worth studying even if you don't believe in them, if for no other reason, than as a way of better understanding the thought processes of people who do believe in them.

[1] https://www.meetup.com/Bible-Study-for-Skeptics-Agnostics-an...

That's not what I meant - I meant that there is no effort that I can put in that would turn me into a deist.