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The Science of the Benefits of Religion

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Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#351

Post by rpmisms »

dartharva wrote: post #281
rpmisms wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up strongly religious, and I still believe strongly, but left the organization due to the people in it. I did have an atheist phase, but that depressed me so severely that I almost had no choice but to reconsider my belief. Without a religious structure, life has no set purpose. Sure, you can make a purpose for yourself, but it feels empty compared to a created, beautiful universe by a benevolent being who got…

> Without a religious structure, life has no set purpose. Sure, you can make a purpose for yourself, but it feels empty compared to a created, beautiful universe by a benevolent being who got lonely. Sounds like you have simply convinced yourself about that being true, my guy

I've lived it. Maybe religious thought is addictive.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#352

Post by rpmisms »

bmicraft wrote: post #301
exporectomy wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"never felt they had some higher purpose" ... "my values of making the world a better place for future generations". Sounds like you're now having an epiphany :)

What I ment so say was some "externally given purpose" that makes claims about being objective. I consider my values to be more of a general goal than a purpose in itself and make no claims about them being objectively good.

You still got caught in the rhetorical trap. You have a purpose, you just had to provide it for yourself, and it goes beyond altruism.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#353

Post by Thorrez »

slim wrote: post #250
Thorrez wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ti…

It's the authority to interpret the word of god. The authority is delegated by people you already trust to people they are trust themselves. It creates a hierarchy of power. It's easy to manipulate millions of people if you are at the top of that hierarchy. Especially when the people we're talking about have their sense of truthfulness broken at a very young age by forcing them to believe in an entity they can't see

Is Fox News part of a hierarchy of power interpreting the word of God? Is QAnon? I'm not really seeing how your comment supports cletus's comment about Fox News and wack job conspiracies.

>forcing them to believe in an entity they can't see

People can't see the big bang either, at least at a young age. In my mind there's a pretty clear argument for God's existence from the laws of thermodynamics. You can define God to be whatever caused mass and energy to exist, and more foundationally whatever caused the laws of the universe to exist.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#354

Post by PartiallyTyped »

iammisc wrote: post #342
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd use prejudiced over racist since the same 'allies' are often very homophobic, biphobic and transphobic.

Nah they're just racist. The thing is a white liberal can become a homosexual should they choose to have sex with someone of the same sex. They can even theoretically become trans. No matter what a white man or woman does or how they feel about attraction or their gender.... He or she will never be brown. Sorry I'm not putting up with this intersectionality shit.

People don't choose to be gay/lesbians or trans, and there's tonnes of evidence in support of this.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#355

Post by ghostDancer »

drran wrote: post #319
ghostDancer wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communists is not equal to atheists , in fact most of the atheists I know are not communists. Blaming to atheists the crimes committed in name of communism is like saying that as Hitler admired christianism all his crimes should be blamed on christians . And right the ones trying to impose their beliefs, and deny rights to others, in Europe and USA are the followers of some of the Abrahamic religions.

Atheists are not communists, but communists are atheists: they're believing that God does not exist, so they can take his role.

That line of thinking is dangerous, you can assume that televangelists are scammers because they are christians or that priests that abuse children are abusers because they are christians. and not, they are because they are bad people. Stalin/Mao/etc .. were bad people and that's the reason they did what they did not because they were atheists or communists, when a priest abuses a child does it's because he's a bad person not because he's a christian.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#356

Post by MisterBastahrd »

commoner wrote: post #349
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, which isn't intuition. Intuition is when you have a correct feeling about something even though you have no knowledge of the situation.

That's too strict of a definition, in my opinion, and I don't understand how conditioning is related to the crying baby example. Intuition can produce incorrect judgments and doesn't need the person to be clueless. Here's a dictionary definition: > (knowledge from) an ability to understand or know something immediately based on your feelings rather than facts https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/int…

No, it really isn't, not unless you have alternative definitions for "understand" or "know."

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#357

Post by dQw4w9WgXcQ »

gaganyaan wrote: post #169
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 murdere…

>Absolute morality does not exist.

>Claims to have a statement about what morality ultimately boils down to.

Pick one bro. You can't even stay consistent within your own supposedly relative belief system. Morality clearly cannot boil down to some simple statement if its truly relative.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#358

Post by commoner »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #356
commoner wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's too strict of a definition, in my opinion, and I don't understand how conditioning is related to the crying baby example. Intuition can produce incorrect judgments and doesn't need the person to be clueless. Here's a dictionary definition: > (knowledge from) an ability to understand or know something immediately based on your feelings rather than facts https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/int…

No, it really isn't, not unless you have alternative definitions for "understand" or "know."

It's trivial to find examples of intuition being incorrect. The APA has a cover story on this:

https://www.apa.org/monitor/mar05/misfires

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#359

Post by dredmorbius »

Animats wrote: post #48

But if we remove the theology—views about the nature of God, the creation of the universe, and the like—from the day-to-day practice of religious faith, the animosity in the debate evaporates. Of course, then it's no longer a religion. It's a social organization. It seems to be quite possible to overdose on religion. Some religions do that as policy, as a form of brainwashing. The religions with mandatory prayer seve…

Different forms of human organisation seem to find their own specialised elements of esssential waste. Essential in the sense that they're necessary for function, waste in that in a strictly rational sense, they're inefficient.

Market-based corporations develop planned obsolescence, redundant marketing, feature churn, and style-over-function in mass market appeal.

Government bureaux tend to be adversarially structured against political adversaries, internal, partisan, or foreign.

Militaries are structured around political, cultural, and martial requirements, as well as an environment of infrequent but extreme risks. "Hurry up and wait", inefficiencies of troops and materiel, and actions which lack apparent consistency from the front-line tactical to the general headquarters strategic level are common.

And in religious organisations, you'll find that a number of social functions (see Max Weber on the sociology of religion) such as trust, group-cohesion, longevity, tradition, uniformity of faith and doctrine, etc., create structures and behaviours which don't make sense on first blush, but which do seem to have at least some logic when viewed at scale in both space, time, and population.

I find it interesting that it is religions and academic institutions which seem to be among the most long-lived. They greatly outlive virtually all commercial enterprises, and all but the most durable governments. Arguably cities might be another contender.

Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion

#360

Post by temp8964 »

michaelmrose wrote: post #345
temp8964 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems you are trapped in the idea that humanness is defined by brain function. Which is obviously wrong to me, but I am not interested in expanding the discussion. Also it is important whether it is a consequence of the mother's voluntary behavior, because if it is not then the human embryo would not have end up inside her body. So yes, it matters. Thanks, I am just saying atheist can be against abortion. No more…

As an atheist it would seem dualism would be out of bounds so given that your brain is you in a very literal sense what other factor do you believe defines humanness? I think therefore I am seems like the strongest possible argument here.

No. Brain alone does not define humanness. You can do a few thought experiments, such as:

lab-grown full function brain, would it be treated as a human?

lab-grown baby with brain development stopped at day x, would it be treated simply as a pile of meat?

adult after accident left with x% brain function, would it be treated simply as a pile of meat?

Just use your brain, you will see it is not that easy.

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