This works for me. It isn’t exactly the “religiousness” of a body of thought that is the problem, but the willingness to use such tools.
Personally, I do think there is an issue with ideology that isn’t just not based on evidence, but actively encourages “faith” (beliefs based on little to no evidence) as a virtue. At worst it can justify anything, of course. But there is a seeming benign side that I think does real harm, and that is the idea that you don’t need logic or justifications for your beliefs.
Don’t call me Shirley.
I see your point, and acknowledge some validity to it. But I want to leave room for the more harmless aspects of irrational thought. I want to keep room in our culture for movies about people following their inner inspiration, no matter what their rational critics say. I want to keep room for “Use the Force, Luke,” even though we all know that closing your eyes and firing blind is the last thing in the world we want from fighter pilots in real life. I want to preserve those elements of our culture – pretty much at the level of the movies and very little more – that enshrine “love at first sight” and “ghost lovers” and “I can feel the truth in what you say” – romantic claptrap, but comforting to our overall cultural values.
Let us exorcize the harmful demons in Carl Sagan’s “Demon-Haunted World.” Let’s crack down, hard, on faith healers. Those bastards do real, serious harm to people, and need to be extirpated by the power of law. But when Father Jackson says, “God loves you, always remember that,” I’m more likely to say “Awww…” (okay, and maybe “Ewww…”) than to want to call a cop.
Let people have their illusions; just keep them at arm’s length from where they can cause real harm.
I mostly agree. The only thing I might disagree with (I’m not sure if you meant this sort of thing or not) is when characters (in fiction) act on “intuition” or “gut feelings” or similar, specifically in the face of what is considered logical within the context of the story, and are rewarded for it. Because sometimes gut feelings just trump boring old reason. That irritates me, just a little.
I definitely have to agree that this sort of thing makes for bad fiction!
There’s an old Keith Laumer sf novel where the steely-eyed heroic admiral of the space fleet keeps making wild ass guesses – in the middle of combat! – and happens to be right every single time. The author intended it to show the character’s magnificent strategic insight, but, to me, it just made the character an insufferable jerk.
Obviously, Luke Skywalker is somewhat different, as he has magical superpowers.
And, hey, sometimes ya just gotta guess, like the bomb-defusing scene where the character has to cut the red wire or the black wire. If the character has absolutely no other information to go on, then, “My favorite team is the Red Sox, so I’m cutting the red wire” is stupid and illogical…but what else do you have?
People who bet on horse races on this basis are just dummies!
No, atheists are just people who think they are smart who talk mirror image delusional BS of theists.
psik
there was a book I read several years ago by Karen Armstrong, might have been The History of God. She pointed out that in the wall paintings at the caves in France, there was a painting of a spiritual figure. Her take on it was, these cave dwellers needed an explanation of where their food came from. It was thought it came from deep in that cave. And the spiritual figure was an object to express appreciation for that food. The other part I remember from the book, she stated we are in need of a new definition of God, she called it, a “post-modern” God. Her take was that during the 17th century, science came to the fore front. Before that God was accepted as mystery, but with the advent of scientific facts, religion fought back by making God factual. A “post-modern” God would be a return to the mystery.
What you are saying is we atheists don’t explain how we came about…so therefore it must be a supernatural guy as an atheist I will say, “I have no idea how we all began so until I know, I will not make up stories to explain them” the Greeks made up wonderful stories to explain how the sun rose and set etc.
It is so obvious that there is no god. God was created to control people. Also as a way to explain the unexplainable.
Some still can understand that it all happened, they need a god to have created everything.
That is fine, but then who created god? I mean really, who? Did another god create our god? then who created that god?
Neither science nor most conventional religions adequately explain existence in general or its origins, and similar arguments can be made against either. Both God and the big bang beg the question of what came before, or in the case of arguing that there was “no time before”, merely punts it to what the context of the origin was.
I think qualia and consciousness are almost as big a problem as origin and existence. I don’t think life itself is that big of an issue because the anthropological principle seems adequate to justify that, although this strongly implies multiple universes.
There are some esoteric philosophies and perhaps a few mathematical theories that have more reasonable or targeted explanations, but no one has found a way to prove or disprove them, so they remain mere hypotheticals at this point.
I think the main actually good argument against deism is that of the “God of the gaps”. The more we discover about the world, the less there is for a god to do, and it takes an awful lot of fanwanking to come up with not very convincing arguments about why a god would not want to have a more obvious relationship with its creation.
I think the one strong argument for deism is that of multiple universes. God is such an obvious concept that were it not to exist, it seems likely that one would either be created at some point due to its immense usefulness, or evolve out of the natural progression of technology and culture.
If a god does exist, it’s unlikely to resemble most of the popular notions of what that would look like in form and practice. At the very least it would seem any higher powers are operating under some kind of Prime Directive, and will not contact us as a society until we reach some sort of benchmark.
Religion is in no way unique in this regard. The fact is, it’s chillingly easy to get people to act against their own sense of right and wrong. It’s not religion that makes people evil, it’s our instinctual obedience to authority.
And even worse (IMO, the hive mind. It stops thought and people think it absolves them of responsibility for their actions.
What greater authority is there than an all-powerful god that you supposedly owe everything to?
Religion is much more effective at it. Tell someone that someone else belongs to a different religion or is a threat to their religion, and his or her moral compass vanishes. Suddenly killing them all becomes perfectly reasonable. Nothing is as effective as religion at turning well meaning people into monsters; monsters who continue to mean well as they commit their monstrous acts.
Irrelevant. One may not be able to conceive of a power greater than a god to evoke anti-social actions of mobs, but there is plenty of evidence that humans need no such powerful incentive with triggers and instigators that are far less powerful.
meh
Nationalism, ethnic differences, social class, and other factors are every bit as powerful as religion in getting people to lose their moral compasses. Blacks lynched in the South were of the same basic religion as the whites that lynched them. Poles held the same basic religious beliefs as the Germans who invaded their country and murdered as many military officers, university professors, and clerics as they could catch. The inhabitants of Constantinople held the same basic religious beliefs as the Crusaders who murdered them in 1204, and had even called for the Crusaders to help them in the name of their relatively common religious beliefs. The killing fields of Cambodia/Kampuchea were not the result of religious conflicts. There was no religious conflict involved in the Rape of Nanking.
As a social institution, religion is certainly as susceptible to being employed as a method of subverting personal morality as any other social institution, but it is hardly the only or most prevalent institution that is employed by humans in that way.
Agreed, and I put all of those under the category of tribalism. Milgram was something else though: that was about incrementalism and a gut level of obedience towards employers/authority figures/experts.
Interestingly that has now been pretty much debunked. Milgram was poor science.