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The Science of the Benefits of Religion

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Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#221

Post by ekam »

rayiner wrote: post #41
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…

I think it’s time to recognize that many of the things you list as bad have a purpose as well and benefits. Remember, organized religion developed in harsh societies were people were always struggling to survive. If you think about a village in Bangladesh, where there is no government with unlimited resources to come save you, imposition of strict rules, suppression of individual preferences, etc., makes sense. What’…

Really great post

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#222

Post by zzo38computer »

4512124672456 wrote: post #204
afpx wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there are a couple billion people who didn't grow up in a Judeo-Christian societies. And, yet, they seem to have morality and life meaning. So, I think you mean, religion in general. Also, I'm not aware of record of hunter gatherer societies that didn't have religion. Religion is probably something baked in. At least I know that it's baked into me, so I run with it and enjoy it. It's possible to be both rationa…

> It's possible to be both rational and religious. Except the person who is religious will always have a limit to their rationality, because they choose "believe in magic" instead of "knowing and not knowing".

> Except the person who is religious will always have a limit to their rationality, because they choose "believe in magic" instead of "knowing and not knowing".

I do not agree. Being religious does not necessarily mean that you will be "magic" instead of rational. One who is rational can do and figure out things fully rationally, independently from the relgious things and from "magic", just as much as you can speak two languages without having to speak both languages at the same time, or liking a book without having to believe that it is a true story.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#223

Post by robbedpeter »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #219
robbedpeter wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is overhyped ragebait masquerading as news. The reality is more nuanced - not everyone is on board with the idea that the government gets to mandate medical practice, and those people get framed as stupid or stubborn or antisocial. There are deep and rigorously rational and ethical reasons to be against the current vaccine narratives promulgated by this administration. It's ignorant and disingenuous to dismiss t…

I will like to say I've been to anti-vaccine mandate rallies. I have found all of them with no exception to be anything matching the description. Everyone I talked to believed in one or in most cases many conspiracies up and down the list. There was alot of anti joe-biden pro trump activity and a lot of Evangelical Christian crap (main speaker led everyone in Christian prayer). Lots of Bill Gates and Fauci hate and l…

Rallies of that sort aren't attended by rational people anyway. That's not where most people opposed to mandates align politically. The rallies are political stunts and attract the same crowd you'd expect at an old circus freak show. Just like framing Republicans based on what you saw at MAGA rallies, or democrats by whatever drama AOC is up to at the moment - those are the 2-5% fringe folks that make for salacious clickbait, while the remaining 90% of adults in the country are more boring and complicated.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#224

Post by exporectomy »

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…

I don't think you have correct examples of memes not benefiting their hosts. Those are examples of them not benefiting other people who aren't the hosts. A better example would be something like martyrdom. A religion that's perfect for its host might turn out to be one that exterminates or enslaves all non-hosts - if it could somehow achieve that without sacrificing its own hosts.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#225

Post by apatry »

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…

> If you look at the reality instead of aggregated statistics and packaged narratives, you will find that gun deaths in US very much are not of the charts in places where religiosity is off the chart. If anything, these two things are negatively correlated: the more religious a place is, the fewer gun deaths (despite no scarcity of firearms among the religious).

We can debate what off-the-chart means, but when we cross-reference the states with the highest gun death per capita (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/...) with the states that are the most religious (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/02/29/how-religio...), we find a lot of overlap.

Correlation is not causation, but I can't see how we can claim these two are negatively correlated.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#226

Post by alfor »

cletus wrote: post #33

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 som…

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.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#227

Post by Thorrez »

cletus wrote: post #33

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 som…

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").

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#228

Post by exporectomy »

rajin444 wrote: post #12
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…

The issues you describe apply to any grouping of people. Tribes have their own truths. Look at how popular those "we believe science is real" signs are. You could remove religion and we'd still have the same issues. I don't think it's possible to solve them. The best solution is going to be a world where a long, happy life is guaranteed by forces outside man's control. This will likely alleviate a lot of the tribal i…

> a long, happy life is guaranteed by forces outside man's control. This will likely alleviate a lot of the tribal issues we face as well.

I suspect it would make it worse. People without a purpose tend to invent tribes and social status to fight for. School kids and prisoners are great examples. Their purpose is basically to passively exist while their physical needs are provided for by the system. Another example is neighborhoods with high unemployment and lots of people living on social welfare.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#229

Post by vmception »

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…

and also heavily penalize suicide, promoting self preservation instincts! allowing proponents to fall back on many options making suicide more of a non option

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#230

Post by Jensson »

zzo38computer wrote: post #222
4512124672456 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's possible to be both rational and religious. Except the person who is religious will always have a limit to their rationality, because they choose "believe in magic" instead of "knowing and not knowing".

> Except the person who is religious will always have a limit to their rationality, because they choose "believe in magic" instead of "knowing and not knowing". I do not agree. Being religious does not necessarily mean that you will be "magic" instead of rational. One who is rational can do and figure out things fully rationally, independently from the relgious things and from "magic", just as much as you can speak t…

A person might believe and be rational, but it seems like believing makes being rational harder, so you have less rational people among believers.

Whenever you can shut down any discussion with "god willed this" or similar then rationality will suffer. How do you get around that problem? I feel the only way to fix that is to remove that ability from them, ie state that God is just nonsense and they can't just invoke his name to shut down discussions since people don't care about God. People are still dumb even without God, but they seem a bit less dumb.

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