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The Science of the Benefits of Religion

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Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#171

Post by BuyMyBitcoins »

analog31 wrote: post #146
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…

>>>> "Creationism is true if it will keep my kids off oxycontin." The thing is, it won't.

It would be a second or third order effect. It stands to reason that someone who is a part of a strong religious community would have a much better social life, support structure, and network. All of these things reduce the likelihood of getting addicted to hard drugs. You could also take it a step further and say that having such things makes breaking an addiction/rehab more likely to be successful, too.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#172

Post by tomrod »

jkhdigital wrote: post #150
pvg wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The value system (and its underlying philosophical premises) which is being perpetuated by the society in which those areligious people live was crafted by religious tradition. > 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. This is kind of a weird statement; for most of human history there was no li…

Rites and aesthetics have existed independent of culture -- consider the Romans, who adopted, adapted, and incorporated others' rites but left the culture mostly unchanged. I don't know that the equivalence or dominance of religion-as-culture paradigm is conclusive.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#173

Post by temp8964 »

ggggtez wrote: post #155

> Secular philosophy has failed to produce enough value for ordinary people living ordinary lives Consider the situation: you want to get an abortion. Or you know someone who does. I don't think I need to spell out the debate. But the secular world view is producing value for people who don't want to be afraid that they will spend literally INFINITY TIME being tortured. (And arguably it produces value for the religio…

I am totally atheist, but I am against most abortion. You don’t have to be religious to be against abortion.

Be secular doesn’t make anybody free from judgement.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#174

Post by BuyMyBitcoins »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #163
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?

In my own experience having debates and discussions in this day and age, there’s this pervasive notion that you can’t assert anything without some citation or study to prove your point. This isn’t necessarily bad, per se, but it does mean people are offloading reasoning about a problem to letting some citation’s abstract make the point for them. There is a massive replicability crisis in academia and we know that the publish or perish culture means null results put careers into jeopardy. It is also heavily biased towards studying things that can be measured empirically.

So, here is my example, up until the mid 90’s it was widely believed in the medical community that babies could not feel pain. Anyone who has ever spent time around newborns knows that these little humans can indeed feel pain. Yet somehow, secular men of science came to the conclusion that no, they could not, and what we thought were pain responses were just reflexes. Besides, the infant wouldn’t remember it. They would perform surgeries without anesthesia on babies up to a year old.

Part of the problem as to why this profoundly wrong notion held on for so long was that there really wasn’t a good way to quantify infant pain. Eventually some researchers finally got around to devising some kind of measurement and the science eventually came around. But for a good part of the 20th century an incredible amount of pain was inflicted because a scientific notion couldn’t be refuted by a non-scientific argument (of course that baby feels pain, just look at him).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3523036

This isn’t a scathing indictment of secular values, but rather, a cautionary tale. Not everything needs to be proven via peer-reviewed papers. A lot of the human experience can still be asserted and known using unscientific or pre-scientific reasoning.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#175

Post by rayiner »

smackeyacky wrote: post #138
rayiner wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What exactly about secular humanism has caused this social problem? Do you have some research that indicates that walking away from "parental obligations" is in any way influenced by religious belief? 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 t…

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…

> Poverty is a much bigger driver behind low economic mobility.

You can test this, by looking at economic mobility rates for bottom quantile kids who differ along other dimensions. And it’s not just right wing people noticing that these days: https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/01/new-harvard-study-w...

> Of all the factors most predictive of economic mobility in America, one factor clearly stands out in their study: family structure. By their reckoning, when it comes to mobility, “the strongest and most robust predictor is the fraction of children with single parents.” They find that children raised in communities with high percentages of single mothers are significantly less likely to experience absolute and relative mobility.

This likely one of the reasons why Asian kids raised in the bottom 1/5 have a 25% chance of ending up in the top 1/5 as adults, versus 11% for white kids. Asians have by far the lowest rates of single parent families, across the income spectrum.

> Poor people in the west tend to have less stable family structures, it has nothing to do with social norms and everything to do with money. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44127459

Saying it has “everything to do with money” is a pretty remarkable assertion given that the single parenthood gap between classes is growing even as everyone gets richer in absolute terms, and is extremely low in countries that are very poor in absolute terms.

I’m not saying we should turn a blind eye to anything. But we should be cautious about undermining institutions and hierarchies that may be doing more good than harm because we’re only fixated on the harm. And education and cognitive elites should be especially careful not to project their own experiences rest of society.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#176

Post by michaelmrose »

temp8964 wrote: post #173
ggggtez wrote: post #155

> Secular philosophy has failed to produce enough value for ordinary people living ordinary lives Consider the situation: you want to get an abortion. Or you know someone who does. I don't think I need to spell out the debate. But the secular world view is producing value for people who don't want to be afraid that they will spend literally INFINITY TIME being tortured. (And arguably it produces value for the religio…

I am totally atheist, but I am against most abortion. You don’t have to be religious to be against abortion. Be secular doesn’t make anybody free from judgement.

This is interesting insofar as most arguments against addiction seem to be philosophically connected with either spiritual guilt or assigning a clump of cells person status at conception due to the presumed presence of a soul. How precisely do you arrive at your stance in the absence of a soul?

Virtually all the actual brain development happens very late in the game and almost all abortions happen in the first or early second.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#177

Post by alfiedotwtf »

BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #174
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

In my own experience having debates and discussions in this day and age, there’s this pervasive notion that you can’t assert anything without some citation or study to prove your point. This isn’t necessarily bad, per se, but it does mean people are offloading reasoning about a problem to letting some citation’s abstract make the point for them. There is a massive replicability crisis in academia and we know that the…

How is your example specific to secular values? I'm sure there are many doctors who are religious.

> there’s this pervasive notion that you can’t assert anything without some citation or study to prove your point

Yes. That's to prevent people from making false assertions. I can't believe you're arguing that people shouldn't need facts to back up their statements.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#178

Post by smackeyacky »

BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #171
analog31 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>>> "Creationism is true if it will keep my kids off oxycontin." The thing is, it won't.

It would be a second or third order effect. It stands to reason that someone who is a part of a strong religious community would have a much better social life, support structure, and network. All of these things reduce the likelihood of getting addicted to hard drugs. You could also take it a step further and say that having such things makes breaking an addiction/rehab more likely to be successful, too.

Drug use and abuse levels do differ between religious and irreligious folk, but one explanation for that might be regional availability rather than religion.

https://drugabuse.com/featured/drugs-and-devotion/

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#179

Post by michaelmrose »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #163
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?

We used to believe that diseases were the result of bad smells and physicians used to go from cutting up corpses to delivering babies without substantial sanitary measures. The difference isn't lack of irrationality. To err is human after all. The difference is how science and religion move forward in response to new data.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#180

Post by Thorrez »

joe_the_user wrote: post #161
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 r…

What is the horrific midwest social problem?
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