Are Spritual Concepts Harmful?

I am going to use a very broad definition of God, anything from simply a higher form of intelligence as we know intelligence all the way to a God who takes an active roll in our lives.

I feel many of us need this belief and many of us don't. I don't think this need is connected to ones sense of logic or intelligence. I see spirituality as just another tool in our tool box that can help us get through life. I believed sprituality has played a large roll in how we evolved into what we are today. 

On some levels I often say to myself that we have used our sense of spirituality to get this far and now that we have a better sense of how things actually happened most of us don't need it anymore. Could it be that we are patting ourselves on the back too soon? Have we really looked as far as we will evil look into inner or outer space? Of course not! Do scientists still ponder things they suspect exists or laws and forces not yet fully understould or for that matter even discovered yet? I would imagine they do. 

 I see looking for God as a noble concept to advancing science, I see no confllcit. 

Looking for proof that God does not exist is also looking for proof that he does exhist. I hope they keep looking.

Until when? We have a finite amount of time here on earth, and time spent looking for your particular deity alone(nevermind the almost limitless number of others out there) is precious time not spent doing other things.
Also could you please explain how looking for your “God” in particular helps advance the cause of science?

In what way does that search advance science?

Nobody is looking for proof that god does not exist, that would be futile. If anyone is looking for proof that one does exist then I’ve yet to hear of anything interesting to come from that.

I think this is true. However. violence and aggression also played a large role in making us what we are today. There are somethings which are better to put aside as we mature.

We’re always looking for things we don’t understand yet, because that is where the advances come from. We’ve looked billions of light years into space and billions and billions of years backward in time and to the very essence of matter. But in none of this have we found anything that could be called a spirit. If there is one, why is it hiding?

I don’t think anyone is looking for a proof that God does not exist, since God is such an ill-defined concept it is impossible to pin down. We just see no need for him in explaining the natural world, and we see that all the places people have used god to explain things, it turns out god is not necessary.

I don’t have a spiritual bone in my body. I’m fine with people who feel they need it for themselves, just don’t try to push it on others.

I think it depends more on what you do with those beliefs.

For instance, if you ‘believe in a higher intelligence’ and the most that comes of that is you go to temple on Saturday, eh whatever.

But let me give you an example where those beliefs can be harmful: when I was in grad school I worked on a short-lived project that modeled cultural reactions to certain events. (Things like "If a bomb goes off at a sports arena, will Japanese attendees react differently to German ones, and how can we design stadiums to accommodate those differences?) One of the things I was asked to take to take into account was “locus of control”. An internal locus of control means you believe you control your own destiny, i.e. “I eat right and exercise, therefore I won’t get sick”. An external locus of control means you believe something else controls your destiny, i.e. “If I get sick, then it must be because God willed it”. (Those were the examples given to me at the time). In cultures where religion has caused people to have a very external locus of control, like some latin american cultures*, health officials have difficulty getting people to get vaccinations because the people don’t believe it will make a difference - whether or not they get sick is because God wants them to or not, regardless of what a doctor shoots into their veins.

So, obviously having certain “spiritual beliefs” can be harmful if they lead people to take or not take certain actions.

If nothing else, continuing to investigate something that doesn’t exist is a waste of effort, and having scientists/philosophers/etc waste their time trying to find if God exists when s/he clearly doesn’t is a waste of resources that could be better used.

  • I don’t know if that anecdote is true or not, it was the example related to me by the Mexican lady who proceeded to complain about her own culture for the next 10 minutes, making the lily white rest of us in the room somewhat uncomfortable.

At the end of the day whether belief is going to help or hinder (or both) is a matter of the individual person and even their current life situation. To the extent that it might clearly do either, the obvious response would be to say “good for them” or “that’s a shame” for varying degrees of intensity. To the extent it isn’t clear what effect belief has on someone’s life, well, there’s the tricky part.

I guess whatever way round it goes, it’s something that’s worth looking into, on the basis of attempting to understand why and how and when it works and has an effect, and what other effects it has, in order to see if those same bad situations could be helped in other ways, too. If there’s some uniform rules at work behind how belief can help people, then understanding those could well improve efficiency and efficacy of that. Twelve step programs, for example, seem to be getting at that.

This is problematic, as you’re bundling a massive amount of very different concepts together in a manner which may change your argument phenomenally. Case in point:

And I see spirituality as the reason why the twin towers haven’t been around the last decade or so. See, this is the problem with your overly broad definition. Is it harmful to believe in a deistic, non-reactionary god? Yes (I’ll get to that in a moment), but not overtly. Is it harmful to believe in an omniscient, omnipotent god who demands human sacrifice? Yes. Overtly so. Spirituality is a vague, ill-defined term that encompasses everything from pantheism to the shit Al Qaeda believes in.

And yes, I have been kind of a dick about semantics in these kinds of discussions lately, and that’s because it’s important. What even is spirituality? Belief in a higher power? Belief in something beyond ourselves?

Hey, I agree with you! Science ain’t done. We haven’t discovered everything there is to discover. We haven’t found all the answers. But why should spirituality be appealed to? Not only has every single documented case of a phenomenon being attributed to the supernatural or spiritual shown itself to be a mistake (in the immortal words of Tim Minchin: “Throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be… Not magic.”), but there’s good reason to believe that depending on how you want to define the supernatural, it will either fold itself into science alongside the natural to the degree that the distinction is irrelevant/nonexistent*, or it is, by definition, something that science and empiricism cannot approach, or even establish exists in the first place. In that case, I’m stuck asking the question I always ask in these scenarios - what is your epistemology for determining these things if not scientific empiricism and naturalism? Because that’s the only reliable epistemology we’ve come up with to know anything.

*See also: Clarke’s Laws

Yeah. Dark matter is one of the current mysteries we’re working on. Just to take that as an example… Do you know what invoking the spiritual would do to further our goal of understanding this phenomenon? Nothing. It would merely put a layer of obfuscation between us and the answer. Like, if you were to ask “how does X work”, and I were to answer “magic”, even if I was right, now we’ve just moved the question down. “What is magic and how does it work?” “I don’t know.” We’ve gone from a perfectly honest “I don’t know” to a term which offers us no explanatory or predictive power, but people are quite loathe to get rid of.

But God is almost always defined in such a way that demonstrating its existence is impossible. Even so, when we have no reason to believe that such a thing exists in the first place, why should we waste time looking for it?

Nobody is looking for proof that God does not exist.

It’s like hitting yourself with a hammer. You could do so very lightly (and cause no injury at all) or very hard (and cause major injury).

It is not, in any case, a productive use of your time.

Because they have no where else to look but in the physical horizons they presently have

I see it as you do for the most part.

I would not be productive use of everybody’s time, but I find it hard not to believe that some of us don’t need a period of meditation or reflection now and then. When I talk about looking for God I don’t mean that in the literal sense, but they are looking for whatever is out there.

It’s not like spirits, if they existed, would be made of matter. If the world were created by a hypothetical God , this God could just as easily create a different field of existence not based in matter. You can’t use science to test whether there are spirits or not, because they just wouldn’t show up in any tests, whether or not they existed. Besides, scientists just discount any claims of evidence of spirits as made up. Spirits aren’t hiding; some people say they are obviously there, and some people say they are obviously not there.

Spiritualists in the 19th and early 20th centuries looked for things beyond the physical dimensions. They didn’t find anything. If something does not affect us in any way, it might as well not exist - in fact it not existing is the way to bet.

Meditation and Reflection don’t require any form of spirituality.

Religious and spiritual beliefs can be harmful. But they certainly don’t have to be.

At worst, religion leads some people to violent extremism. At best, it inspires them to personal excellence in moral living, creativity, love, and kindness.

It’s a little like asking, “Is chemistry harmful?” Sometimes, yes…and sometimes, no.

Are “spiritual concepts” harmful? Yes. They bring out the worst in people, destroy that which is best in them, distract people from anything useful or true, and never turn out to be anything more than empty nonsense.

And I don’t think that anyone needs it.

And I see it as useless baggage at best, and usually outright destructive.

On the contrary; moral, social and scientific progress require sidelining or rejecting the destructive irrationalism of the “spiritual”. We haven’t used it to get this far; it’s held us back and contributed to our problems.

Of course there’s more to discover. But the “spiritual” is intellectually sterile; it contributes nothing to our search for knowledge. It’s a dead end.

It’s wasted effort, at best. Progress requires that such Iron Age falsehoods be ignored; not that we pretend that there’s something to the myths of long dead primitives. And only a specific group of such primitives at that; somehow there’s no demand that we look for Anu, Ra or Zeus.

No, they’re not.

They say the ego itself is an illusion created by our brain in order to be able to cope with all the information it is bombarded with. Spiritual concepts have an equally practical purpose.

One of these days - it could be tomorrow or it could be in 100,000 years’ time or so - a big disaster will lead to the demise of our technological civilization. Spiritual concepts will be the only tool humans will have left to prevent themselves from tearing one another to bits. In my opinion, of course.

The problem is, IMHO, not that looking at the supernatural in search of truth is a problem, its that all of the information is completely made up. Maybe you take the word of the Bible as truth. That’s fine as far as it goes I guess - I won’t argue whether that’s made up or not. If you want to believe that then fine. But people don’t just read the Bible, they take word of the pastor or the priest or the whoever seems to have a little authority and claims to know some truth. Strangely, so many of those possessors of the truth caution against listening to anyone else.

Hundreds of thousands of authorities on religion around the world, screaming, screaming, screaming that they have found some truth but yet disagreeing with each other. How can that be an honest search for truth?

And in my opinion it’s the opposite; “spiritual concepts” will be one of the things those people will have to overcome to stop tearing themselves to bits. Spiritual concepts encourage division, ruthlessness and violence; they don’t ameliorate such things.

Okay, then maybe you can answer the question I keep on coming back to - if not methodological empiricism and the scientific method, what epistemology are you applying to detect the existence of such things?