Exactly! I’m glad we agree!
It is. It’s a perfectly valid analogy; an invisible pink unicorn is no more absurd than God; less so, if anything. That’s the point of using such an impossibility as an invisible pink unicorn; if it’s reasonable to believe in something as absurd as God, then why not believe in the IPU?
And easily dispelled by showing why the new belief is so much sillier and improbable than the already established belief, right?
I agree. Your argument’s not new and it’s not getting any less lame as time goes on.
An ironic criticism, given that that describes arguments for religion as much or more than the OP’s argument. Believers have been using the same old, obviously wrong arguments for their various religions for thousands of years. Critics of religion re-use arguments too of course, but that’s because religion is wrong for the same reasons it’s always been wrong; religion is intellectually sterile and never produces anything new that needs new arguments to counter it.
I’ll volunteer a couple - although I’m not sure they’re particularly relevant, meaningful, or that they have any bearing on the question of whether self-deception is generally beneficial.
Enjoyment of fiction and entertainment. Movies are more fun if you can suspend your disbelief in the fantasy universe they present to you; books are more enjoyable if you recreate their world in your head, and so on.
Self-deception as a method of focus or meditation. For example, shutting out the world so you can concentrate on something - the world is still there - you’re deluding yourself to think otherwise - but this delusion can often be productive.
Or enjoyable. Once (Christmas Eve, year before last), I quite purposely talked myself into believing that the bacon sandwich on the plate in front of me was the very last bacon sandwich in the world (alcohol helped persuade me) - I have never enjoyed a bacon sandwich so much before or since.
As I say, I don’t think these examples prove anything one way or t’other about the value of (nor are necessarily analogous to) other forms of self-delusion.
compared to the “lets take a perfectly functional analogy and make a desperate attempt at making it look foolish and hope no one notices that you actually just made the argument stronger by pointing out how good the analogy actually was”?
not sure if you were serious or not in that post, if not you win points for some really dry satire.
While I don’t “believe” in an afterlife (meaning I’m not convinced it absolutely exists nor do I build my personal philosophy around it), I do think there may actually be one. However, the afterlife is not available for everyone – only a few select souls will live eternally beyond their dirt nap, and basically, if the Universe and the Angelic Pantheons can utilize your talents, your soul will be recruited. (Kind of like the C.I.A.)
Don’t really care about any kind of religion; I do pray sometimes but that’s basically a form of meditation, where I reassure myself that everything’s okay or if I can’t do that, just admit to myself there are things I can’t control and need to let them go. Regarding faith, I don’t trust that mindset at all – blind faith is exceptionally dangerous.
Self-delusion can be beneficial, in manageable doses. People who are narcissistic are annoying jerks. But they also tend to be really good at what they do. Because they believe their own hype. To a much lesser extreme, studies have shown that people with depression tend to have a more realistic assessment of themselves than non-depressed people. So it does pay to be a little delusional.
I agree with the OP but not 100%. When my mother tries to provide comfort by saying “God will work it out” or she gives God credit for everything to her winning money at the casino to helping her to lose weight, I can’t help but think she’s crazy. And like listening to the blatherings of a narcissistic, she annoys me with this shit. However, I do not think it’s necessarily unhealthy for her. If she were like me (someone who fashions herself to be a pragmatic, analytical realist), she probably would be much more prone to depression and cynicism. Just like I am. I have had a lifetime of practice dealing with angst and worry. She hasn’t. So I’d actually be concerned for her health if her crutch was taken away from her. That crutch is the foundation of her existence.
I am considered in my old age, and I believe(of course I have no proof) but I think we will all go as the plants and animals do, our atoms etc. will return to what they were before we existed as we do, and the cycle of life goes on. We are no longer a person, just a memory, and now if one is cremated there is little left of the body we had. If there is a loving being and a just supreme being, that knew ahead of time what we would do with the life we were given then that being would either not have created us or loved suffering. I find it hard to believe a caring father( as God is called) would want a child to suffer for trillions of years because they did as he knew ahead of time they would do. Or allow a evil being as a Satan to destroy a child of his.
I agree. If going out of your way to cure people of their harmless delusions does nothing more than spoil things for them, what’s the point?
ETA: as I expect to be quoted the board motto in response to this, I’ll just say that being a dick to people, for no good reason, is also it’s own form of ignorance.
I generally agree with this old standby, except, the subtle difference here is they don’t believe the Invisible Pink Unicorn created the universe, then drove away with the keys.
If we replace the notion of God with the IPU (a rose by any other name), then I’m on board. If we have the notion of God plus the IPU, then believers have a nit to pick.
I mean to weigh in more but got slammed with work soon after the OP, in the mean time, thanks all for the interesting discussion so far!
I completely agree with this as well, but it does sow the seeds for what monstro mentions (i.e. creating a blathering monster about her delusions at best, and proselytizing extremist at worst).
I don’t want to shatter anyone’s reality so long as they don’t start being a dick with theirs. Also, there is the consequence that it has a profound, global effect on damn near everything. When it comes to that point, looking at the bigger picture of religion and faiths of all walks, it’s damn near frightening.
I take that back. It is frightening.
I would tend to agree, with the exception that I don’t think it’s an effective analogy precisely because the belief in God, even if he doesn’t actually exist, makes a meaningful difference.
Using my own method of prayer, as I explained upthread, and instead attempting to apply it to an IPU isn’t the same because I don’t have faith. It may very well be that, in fact, both don’t exist and the difference is entirely in my head, but as that belief is a fundamental part of the human experience of any person who has some sort of faith, it is not effective. And it’s exactly the reason why, at the same time, it seems like a valid analogy to an atheist because, in their own minds, they don’t have faith in either, so experientially, they ARE identical.
The best analogy I can imagine to explain why I think this is an invalid analogy, would be sports. It would be like a sports fan arguing with a non-sports fan about why his favorite sport is the most amazing sport in the world. Maybe the non-sports fan has heard it all before, watched games, and he still finds it boring. So, he counters it by just making up a sport, that no one plays, no one watches, no one is a fan of or even cares about and asserts that it is his favorite sport. Not only would that quite possibly be offensive to the sports fans, but it completely misses the point of why they’re passionate about it in the first place. He can argue about why football is better than soccer which a big soccer fan all day and know he’ll never change that person’s mind, but there’s a certain je ne sais quoi about sports fandom that those two share that the non-sports fan just won’t get.
That’s really how this IPU argument comes across. It’s a non-sports fan coming in and basically making an argument that sports are stupid because of some sport they made up and pretend to like is stupid. Well, of course it’s stupid, you just made it up. What makes a sports fan a sports fan isn’t the specific rules of a sport, as the rules are different for all of them, it’s his passion for that sport. And it’s exactly the same for faith. You can’t just make up a deity and compare worshipping it to worshipping whatever god you’re mocking, because that je ne sais quoi is the faith that those people have, and as no one actually believes in or worships IPU or FSM, it just isn’t there.
See post #23. The point of the IPU is to point out that the reason why anyone should worship it, the logic and evidence supporting worshipping this artificial construct, is no more and no less valid than the worship of ancient mythological constructs. I am absolutely certain that, given a few thousand years of deep thinking and religious debate, the IPU could be seen as a perfectly reasonable thing to believe in. In fact, if the IPU had been conceived of first and this “Invisible God that created everything, impregnates women, has his own son killed, and lives outside the universe” had been a recent construction created to make a point, you would absolutely making the same argument in the other direction.
Both “God” and the IPU are equal on logical and evidentiary grounds-the only difference is the amount of true believers…and time can fix that problem easily.
Unfortunately, that analogy does imply that all sports are, in fact, made up.
This doesn’t bode well in favor of a belief in god. Only, which fictional deity is valid due to layers of mythology slathered upon over time and perfected with canon, dogma and fandom. :dubious:
If one believes that tragedies could be averted with prayer, they are putting the responsibility on the people instead of on God. And “God’s mysterious plan” is just another name for the best of all possible worlds argument.
We had a thread a while back (quite a while back) on whether our existence was all part of God’s plan. Each of us is the product of an unbelievably improbable chain of events, many of them tragic. My father was in the Army during WW II, and if WW II hadn’t happened I almost certainly wouldn’t be here, because the life of my parents would be very different. Thinking my birth was part of God’s plan would be to think that the war, and all its horrors, was worth it because I got born. I’m not nearly that egotistical. Each of us has a similar story.
If the story of history is written by God, it is a tale told by an idiot.
That’s about right: the belief is internal to the believer, as the passion for sports is internal to the sports fan. Belief doesn’t depend on anything that’s external, i.e., real.
The IPU illustrates this nicely.
I was posting on alt.atheism when the IPU was born, and the purpose of the analogy is to illustrate the special pleading which is a part of religion. The IPU is absurd, and can’t be logically justified. But God - oh that’s just different!
Faith in the IPU stupid. Faith in God, smart.
And if anyone doubts that absurd things can become matters of faith, just look at Scientologists and Mormons, to name two recent examples.
Even an atheist would agree that fervent belief can have an impact on a person. We don’t lack belief in faith, only in the object of that faith. Faith in all sorts of deities have similar effects.
What if the soccer fan thinks that is has been played for time immemorial, and his fervor for it is based on that? Pointing out that baseball and football fans are just as fervent has no effect. Showing the origins of the game in the not too recent past gets a “you can’t prove that cavemen didn’t play.” And making up an absurd game get s “you’re just mean.”