The Science of the Benefits of Religion

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Religion (speaking about Christianity here, but Islam is similar) prioritizes marriage and family within the traditional two parent structure. Organized religion provides a framework for pressuring people to confirm to that structure. Secular humanism, by contrast, emphasizes development of the self, and discourages social enforcement of moral norms.

There’s many studies on correlation between religious belief and say fertility rate. There’s also studies showing the correlation between vibrant religious institutions and various positive family formation characteristics. In particular, if you compare geographically and economically similar places, those with healthy religious institutions where people regularly attend church (say certain Dutch parts of Iowa) are socially better off than similar places where the religious institutions aren’t healthy. (Tim Carney has done a lot of research on this.)

To be clear: I’m not saying that religion is the only way to achieve these goals. My thesis is narrower: religion is a social phenomenon that have average people practice healthy behaviors. Educational elites who similarly practice these healthy behaviors (say non-religious but highly educated Asians in California) may not need the support mechanism offered by organized religion. But those same people underestimate or overlook the support networks they may have, or cognitive advantages they may enjoy, which average Americans may lack. (My great grandfather was an imam. My dad didn’t raise us religious, but we had the same moral framework, and our Bangladeshi community enforced the same behavioral standards.)

The reason this is important is the research being done now, for example by Raj Chetty, which shows that single parenthood rates is the single factor most highly correlated with low economic mobility.

> I could make the equal assertion that religion turns men into sexual abusers of children (reference: the Catholic church). Are you comfortable with that?

I think it would be more accurate to say that hierarchical religious organizations make it easier for sexual abusers to hide. And that’s absolutely true.

But that’s not the end of the analysis. Our society has a tendency to focus on injustice to individuals created by social structures, which is admirable. But we are often myopic about the benefits of social structures to the majority.

For example, we focus a lot on abuses within the Mormon community, which undoubtedly exists. But if you go to Utah you can’t help but notice these people have created a thriving civilization in the middle of an inhospitable desert, next to a lake that has no drinkable water. And heavily Mormon areas continue to thrive even as other non-coastal areas, which aren’t full of educational elites, are collapsing.

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.