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The Science of the Benefits of Religion

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Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#151

Post by mensetmanusman »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #22
rajin444 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The difference between religion and other groups is that it provides an impenetrable shield to those who wield it, and virtually anything can be deflected a-la > God's ways are mysterious fashion. Any differing positions appear as attacks against the person's religion, which - when it carries sufficient argumentative power - can shake the foundations of the person's world model. This, in turn, prevents them from acce…

“ society needs to accept that free-will is an illusion “

The funny thing about pushing the ‘free will is an illusion’ argument is that it sounds exactly like a faith argument.

How is one going to ever prove that free will does not exist when most of us are running real time experiments during most of our waking hours.

For some reason, the universe gained consciousness even though it could have outputted zombies that would never argue whether they are not zombies :)

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#152

Post by mensetmanusman »

rayiner wrote: post #133
smackeyacky wrote: post #56

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

> 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…

I think it would be more accurate to say that hierarchical organizations make it easier for sexual abusers to hide, with the Olympics, sports, Hollywood, government, industry, academia stories we hear every week.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#153

Post by mensetmanusman »

worrycue wrote: post #111
woodpanel wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I believe plenty of people have been killed for religious reasons. Sure religion is used as an excuse to start wars but wouldn't the fact that it works means people are willing to kill because of it?

WW2 was 90% Christians killing Christians. People forget how easily the powerful can manipulate the poor to kill themselves.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#154

Post by mensetmanusman »

snuser wrote: post #13
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 real problem with religion is that there's more than one

That’s what some people believe about politics and political parties, which is why China banned different parties:)

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#155

Post by ggggtez »

> 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 religious, who do utilize secular services even when their religion forbids it).

The secular world view offers you freedom from judgement, both mortal and immortal. Many people find value in the freedom to not worry about superstition.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#156

Post by mensetmanusman »

trees101 wrote: post #149

This is a challenging article. To paraphrase, it suggests that a suite of religious practices have been shown to have real world benefits. The author suggests that scientists should overcome their personal allergy to religion and instead trust the data. He suggests the compromise of rejecting the "theology" of the religion, presumably because it is "unscientific", and instead focusing on the empirically observable ph…

Well, the interesting thing is that the blind philosophical pre-commitments of our day are dying off, as the religious are the only ones having replacement rates of children. Darwin was right.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#157

Post by jkhdigital »

xorfish wrote: post #11
tasty_freeze wrote: post #3

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.

> some religions place much higher importance on rituals than on their believe systems

I don't think any religion actually puts belief systems anywhere below the highest level of importance, because any ritual is always predicated on a belief system that gives it meaning.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#158

Post by mensetmanusman »

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…

The politics of today are in the context of the most un-religious America in its history.

Whether that is related is left as an exercise for the reader.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#159

Post by xyzzyz »

VictorPath wrote: post #143
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…

> 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 at creating positive societal outcomes. Not all religions are created equal in that aspect.

> Scandinavia is fairly secular and has many nice attributes, the US is off the charts in terms of religion, violent behavior, gun deaths etc.

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).

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#160

Post by mensetmanusman »

srcreigh wrote: post #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 creativ…

Beautiful, thanks for sharing.
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