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The Science of the Benefits of Religion

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Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#161

Post by joe_the_user »

api wrote: post #55

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 statem…

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.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#162

Post by ggggtez »

> After only eight weeks of study with a Buddhist lama, 50 percent of those who we randomly assigned to meditate daily spontaneously helped a stranger in pain.

I'm waiting for the follow up study after 520 weeks, where a certain percentage of them become radicalized zealots.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#163

Post by alfiedotwtf »

api wrote: post #55

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 statem…

> One can find examples of both religion and secular philosophy promoting irrational thinking.

Can you please give one example of secular philosophy promoting irrational thinking?

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#164

Post by ggggtez »

xyzzyz wrote: post #159
VictorPath wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> evolutionary hunter-gatherer behavior and other various strains of pseudo-scientific bullshit, but all of those are equally as faith-bound as religion given that there is no possible way to devise reasonable (or ethical) experimentation on how past humanity What past humanity? There are hunter gatherer bands roaming around the Amazon right now. They seem to exhibit at least as much "upstanding behavior" as the evan…

> There are hunter gatherer bands roaming around the Amazon right now. They seem to exhibit at least as much "upstanding behavior" as the evangelicals sloshing around the US. Considering how violent are cultures of hunter-gatherers, I’d say that they are much less morally upstanding. But, they provide a good data point here: the hunter gatherers are typically highly religious. It’s just their religions are pretty bad…

>how violent are cultures of hunter-gatherer

WW2 killed 75 million people. Tell me again, who has the more violent culture?

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#165

Post by pbourke »

woodpanel wrote: post #79
estaseuropano wrote: post #6

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 m…

> Religion has been a major source of soothing and a major source of suffering for all of humanity's past The idea that religion is such a big source of suffering throughout all of our history is one I stopped believing once I took a closer look at the actual nature of war, particulary how a country's elite is moving closer to war and how "religious" said elite actually is. IMO the amounts of blood shed over millenia…

> The idea that religion is such a big source of suffering throughout all of our history is one I stopped believing

The Irish Troubles

Muslim/Hindu conflict in India

Church-run residential schools in Canada and the US

ISIS

The suicide rate among LGBT youth

Rohingya genocide

The Taliban

Israeli/Palestinian conflict

The destruction of indigenous cultures by missionaries

9/11

- should I start on the 19th century?

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#166

Post by smackeyacky »

xyzzyz wrote: post #141
smackeyacky wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting and well thought out response but I have a few issues with it: > Secular humanism, by contrast, emphasizes development of the self, and discourages social enforcement of moral norms I don't think this statement is true. For example, secular society provides the legal framework that reinforces the social practice of marriage. > single parenthood rates is the single factor most highly correlated…

> For example, secular society provides the legal framework that reinforces the social practice of marriage. Huh? The legal framework around marriage as it currently exists in the secular society of USA does exactly opposite. After no-fault divorce became an option, and as legally sanctioned child support system was set in place, incentive to get and stay married became much diminished. > Poverty is a much bigger dri…

No-fault divorce and legally sanctioned child support were put in place to give women more choices. I don't think we need to return to a time where women and children are effectively chattel. The overall effect of these policies has been positive.

There is an untested assertion here that Bangladesh has better outcomes for marriages because the practise of religion is higher. Yet you should also see lower levels of violence against women in Bangladesh from all these happy families but it seems that isn't so. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2740706/

I'm not sure how far we are going to get trying to work out whether the chicken/egg situation regarding dysfunctional families and poverty in the US is causal. All we really know for sure is that poverty is a reliable cause of family breakdown.

We shouldn't force people to stay together because some religious folk think that piling further misery on unhappy people is OK.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#167

Post by ggggtez »

estaseuropano wrote: post #27
lalaland1125 wrote: post #9

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…

I would warmly recommend the last chapter(s) of 'The Selfish Gene'. Now an aged book but still largely up to date. In those last chapter(s) Dawkins invented the word meme as analogy to gene: a meme is a self-replicating piece of information. Like genes that are successful (in the environment they are in) propagate so do memes that are successful. Religion is the ultimate meme complex, it is a set of ideas that lives…

The articles premise that Americans acted kinder for a little while after doing some Buddhist meditation.... Completely ignoring the fact that Buddhism has extremists just like other religions...

The people didn't act kinder because of Buddhism. The experimental setup primed them to act in a certain way.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#168

Post by analog31 »

woodpanel wrote: post #79
estaseuropano wrote: post #6

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 m…

> Religion has been a major source of soothing and a major source of suffering for all of humanity's past The idea that religion is such a big source of suffering throughout all of our history is one I stopped believing once I took a closer look at the actual nature of war, particulary how a country's elite is moving closer to war and how "religious" said elite actually is. IMO the amounts of blood shed over millenia…

To be fair, the good things that happened in the past might also have been the same under atheists.

The thing that's puzzling to me is that religion is supposed to have such a profound effect on society, but is utterly innocent of involvement in anything bad that happens. Granted it's very hard to pin historical events on specific root causes.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#169

Post by gaganyaan »

dQw4w9WgXcQ wrote: post #140

So much of the US population cruises along unconsciously on an implicit set of Judeo-Christian values and morals. Increasingly many citizens claim to have left religion behind and subscribe to an exclusively scientific worldview, but the majority of their upstanding behavior still stems from religious beliefs. Pressed to reveal its true character, a purely scientific worldview produces no inherent sense of meaning, m…

> Judeo-Christian values and morals

Just no.

Normal human values were co-opted by various religion-based memeplexes to justify themselves.

> a purely scientific worldview produces no inherent sense of meaning, morality, or right v. wrong.

Absolute morality does not exist. Fundamentally, morality is selfish (i.e. relative).

I don't murder someone because I don't want to live in a society where I myself can be murdered. That's what all the religious bloviating boils down to. That's it. That's all that really is.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#170

Post by xyzzyz »

smackeyacky wrote: post #166
xyzzyz wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, secular society provides the legal framework that reinforces the social practice of marriage. Huh? The legal framework around marriage as it currently exists in the secular society of USA does exactly opposite. After no-fault divorce became an option, and as legally sanctioned child support system was set in place, incentive to get and stay married became much diminished. > Poverty is a much bigger dri…

No-fault divorce and legally sanctioned child support were put in place to give women more choices. I don't think we need to return to a time where women and children are effectively chattel. The overall effect of these policies has been positive. There is an untested assertion here that Bangladesh has better outcomes for marriages because the practise of religion is higher. Yet you should also see lower levels of vi…

> I don't think we need to return to a time where women and children are effectively chattel.

This is very much factually wrong description of the position of women in America before no-fault divorce. In fact, I consider the suggestion that women in America completely lacked agency before 70s to be rather reprehensible.

> Yet you should also see lower levels of violence against women in Bangladesh from all these happy families but it seems that isn't so.

I don’t think anyone argues here that family life in Bangladesh is better than in America in all aspects. Violence against women is obviously bad thing, just as all violence is. It is a good societal goal to reduce violence against any of its members.

At the same time, this is only one of the goals the societies might want to pursue. Often, you might encounter hard trade offs to make. For example, is it better to have a bit more violence, but much fewer children raised by a singe parent? Or, is it better to give the members of the society more choices, at cost of the society failing to choose to procreate, leading to ultimate decay and dissolution of the society in a few generations? One of the problems in the secular society in the US is failure to acknowledge these trade offs, and deciding that more choice of, less violence towards, and more workplace empowerment of women as always preferable at all circumstances.

If anyone thinks it is a straw man, just look at how responses to this comment will claim that I want to enslave women and promote violence towards them, which I of course do not, but the mere suggestion of the trade off existing, and potentiality of choosing something other than liberal women empowerment is an idea completely outside the overton window of secular, liberal discussion within educated, professional community.

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