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The Science of the Benefits of Religion

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Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#11

The title of the book is "How God Works" yet the the author explicitly states he is ignoring theology and instead is focusing on spiritual practices can have beneficial effects on a practitioner's mental state (happiness, kindness, acceptance, etc). The subtitle of the book, which is the title of the HN submission, seems to better convey the research presented in the book.

Religion isn't that easily defined.

Are Confucianism and American Civil Religion religions?

God, Gods or even believe in the supernatural are not necessary parts of religion, some religions place much higher importance on rituals than on their believe systems.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#12

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 issues we face as well.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#13

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 real problem with religion is that there's more than one

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#14
I was fortunate enough to be involved with a modern secular community that aimed to become a non-religious church: Sunday Assembly.

Take the best bits of religion, including purpose, structure, community, and tradition, but make it available for non-believers.

We even got so far as making the interview stage of Y Combinator:

https://benrmatthews.com/meeting-heroes-y-combinator-intervi...

During the interview, Sanderson (Sunday Assembly co-founder) had a brilliant back and forth with Sam Altman, but ultimately the idea didn’t stand.

I still think the ethos of Sunday Assembly has merit.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#15

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…

>resistance to or denial of reality

It's not just this but it's also the lying and attempting to pass off various myths, mysticism, dogma, theology and fairy tales as being true with no evidence, and the promotion of "faith" and "belief" as justifications for doing so. And before someone says it, yes, there are other groups besides religious groups that fall into these same self-reinforcing traps. For example a significant number of people still believe in witches and ghosts: https://news.gallup.com/poll/2380/One-Third-Americans-Believ...

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#16
post #13

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 real problem with religion is that there's more than one

That's what the GP says. It's too few of them for too many people.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#17

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…

> There seems to be little doubt that religion, faith, spirituality or rite can have benefits.

Doubt among who? Religious congregations?

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#18

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…

> (exclusion and intolerance, resistance to or denial of reality, imposition of impossible standards, the denial of one's own preferences and wants).

This is true of group affiliation in general, and may be innate to human beings:

> “The human mind,” Klein observes, “is exquisitely tuned to group affiliation and group difference”—so much so that, as soon as an affiliation has formed, the people who have affiliated with one another proceed to define themselves against an out-group. To make matters worse, Klein goes on, human groups compete less for resources than they do for social esteem, and esteem is zero-sum: more for you means less for me. We would rather “win” against the out-group and be worse off than be better off and lose.

* https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/ezra-kleins-why...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We%27re_Polarized

> but as long as people follow religions that preach their own unique truthfulness (believe the pope, the Bible, the Quran, the priests, the sutras, ...) we will never get there.

Except that some world views do hew closer to reality than others:

> Occasionalism is a philosophical doctrine about causation which says that created substances cannot be efficient causes of events. Instead, all events are taken to be caused directly by God.

[…]

> The doctrine first reached prominence in the Islamic theological schools of Iraq, especially in Basra. The ninth century theologian Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari argued that there is no Secondary Causation in the created order. The world is sustained and governed through direct intervention of a divine primary causation. As such the world is in a constant state of recreation by God.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occasionalism

> Secondary causation[1][2][3] is the philosophical proposition that all material and corporeal objects, having been created by God with their own intrinsic potentialities, are subsequently empowered to evolve independently in accordance with natural law.[citation needed] […] That the physical universe is consequentially well-ordered, consistent, and knowable subject to human observation and reason, was a primary theme of Scholasticism and further molded into the philosophy of the western tradition by Augustine of Hippo and later by Thomas Aquinas.

> Secondary causation has been suggested as a necessary precursor for scientific inquiry into an established order of natural laws which are not entirely predicated on the changeable whims of a supernatural being.[4] Nor does this create a conflict between science and religion for, given a creator deity, it is not inconsistent with the paradigm of a clockwork universe.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_causation

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#19

I was fortunate enough to be involved with a modern secular community that aimed to become a non-religious church: Sunday Assembly. Take the best bits of religion, including purpose, structure, community, and tradition, but make it available for non-believers. We even got so far as making the interview stage of Y Combinator: https://benrmatthews.com/meeting-heroes-y-combinator-intervi... During the interview, Sanders…

[deleted]

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#20
This excerpt is from a widely prayed Orthodox Christian akathist hymn. [0] Akathist means not sitting as it is usually prayed standing up. It was composed during the persecution in communist Russia by Metropolitan Tryphon [1]

"The breath of Thine Holy Spirit inspires artists, poets and scientists. The power of Thy supreme knowledge makes them prophets and interpreters of Thy laws, who reveal the depths of Thy creative wisdom. Their works speak unwittingly of Thee. How great art Thou in Thy creation! How great art Thou in man!

Glory to Thee, showing Thine unsurpassable power in the laws of the universe

Glory to Thee, for all nature is filled with Thy laws

Glory to Thee for what Thou hast revealed to us in Thy mercy

Glory to Thee for what Thou hast hidden from us in Thy wisdom

Glory to Thee for the inventiveness of the human mind

Glory to Thee for the dignity of man's labour

Glory to Thee for the tongues of fire that bring inspiration

Glory to Thee, O God, from age to age"

[0] http://www.saintjonah.org/services/thanksgiving.htm

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryphon_(Turkestanov)

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