That’s all well and good and I’m not trying to say otherwise. But I have met many genuinely happy, kind, generous and free thinking people. People that don’t live by that set of rules.
Thinking you have all the answers makes people happy. I know furiously happy Mormons and Evangelicals and… I was going to say Muslims, but I don’t actually know any really happy Muslims.
In any case, the point of religion is to make you look at the shambles your life is in, and think it’s for a reason. Cancer? Gonna be with God. Lost your job? Closes a door, opens a window. Wife dies in a car accident? Never gives you more than you can bear.
Of course highly religious people are going to feel that more.
Who’s saying otherwise? You asked the question and I provided an answer from my experience. Never in a million years would I be orthodox (the whole atheist thing gets in the way), but that wasn’t what you were asking.
Of course. I think that’s obvious- it’s like the Amish, they feel very little angst or confusion about their role in life. That would never work for me or most I know, the cost is too high. But for whom it does work, they’re happy, which was all I was addressing.
No. As stated previously in this thread, I have lots of problems with how religious institutions have been and are still used as tools of oppression, and as Malthus has expressed, there is lots to beat up on the Haredim.
I am however unwilling to state that there is nothing positive about religion or that the right amount of myth-based ritual is by definition the amount that I am comfortable with. It is what is right for me. Others choose less and possibly fill the space with other rituals and myths or do not, which is right for them. Others still choose more, some much more, and that is just as valid a choice, whether they believe their myths are fact or symbolic stories.
If believing in Santa or chi adds value to someone’s life and it does not involve oppression or harm to society at large, why should I snark on it, especially publicly?
And yes I do think experiencing certainty and experiencing the perception of being touched by the Divine brings value to their lives that I am do not experience. I do not begrudge the trade-off but I do acknowledge it.
And I can object to elements of what they do that are oppressive or intrusive without having to state that the complete structure is without value. Doing things to mark a particular day of the week as sanctified? I can object to doing that in dangerous ways without believing that the concept is idiotic. It is not. It serves all those positive elements that you agree rituals and mythologies serve.
Yes there are other paths; that does not invalidate that one.
Lobohan, you over-generalize from a very limited experience with a few religious people. Of the very religious people I know few take the perspective you state. The answer to not just personal shambles but shambles of the world is that God did not finish the job and left perfecting the world up to us, an ongoing process - tikkun olam - which funnily enough Obama referenced today. Passive acceptance of shambles is not the tradition.
Right, let me clarify what I was getting at. The question I was trying to ask is: Do I need to accept for myself that those rules are a necessary condition for them? Because it that is case the criticism I’ve leveled seems very harsh. I won’t “attack” anyone for a necessary condition for a happy life, like breathing or food or shelter.
If not, I’m good, let’s roll.
But it’s a rhetorical question, I think I already know the answer.
I didn’t say there was nothing positive about religion. So how do you want me to respond to that? You are just taking your black and white thinking and projecting it on me.
You keep doing that. Maybe take a critical eye to what I said instead of what you think I’m saying and rejecting out of hand? It’s like I’m this atheist stereotype that has come to take away your toys.
I don’t need you to tell me that I don’t hold the absolute truth on the right amount of ritual for everyone.
I’m just some guy saying some things you disagree with on a message board. I hope that is not detracting from your enjoyment of the Divine.
You take enjoyment from the mystical, I take enjoyment from the cynical.
You HAVE tasted my chicken soup! Nah, I’ll enjoy it just fine.
Big Religion Fail for 2015: they did not stock any macaroon cookies in the docs’ lounge for Passover.
Seeing that one of the best features of Judaism is pastry, I am very very disappointed.
Good. So can we say that your indifferent god is about making the right noises to conform and enjoy that nice chicken soup?
I tried checking Spinozism in Wikipedia but my eyes rolled back in their sockets so much I’m afraid I might need a doctor’s appointment.
This is a pretty childishly naive oversimplification of the relationship between suffering and theological doctrines about suffering.
And I say that as an atheist who has never believed in any kind of divine purpose or intrinsic meaning in the random happenstance of life. Even without believing in such things, it’s easy to spot some objectively valid benefits to believing in such things (at least, if you’re not one of the fervently evangelical New Atheist types who refuse on principle to admit that anything in the nature of religious belief could ever have any positive consequences for anybody).
Simply put, being miserable and despairing is unhealthy. No matter how much rock-solid rational realistic justification you may have for misery and despair about your current life situation, the fact is that it’s not good for your mental health to be dwelling on how unhappy you are.
The faith-based reassurances about a divinely issued safety net or silver lining are objectively helping those who believe in them by relieving destructive feelings of unhappiness, despite their having no empirical evidence in their favor.
For nonbelievers to dismiss such reassurances as mere pointless deceptions because they have no demonstrable factual basis is kind of like scoffing at anesthetic for a gravely wounded person. “Who do they think they’re fooling? The wound is still there! The anesthetic isn’t doing anything to fix the wound, it’s just temporarily preventing them from feeling it! Open your eyes and wake up to reality, sheeple!”
Of course, we would consider such scoffers ridiculous fools because we know that causing a temporary cessation of pain in a seriously wounded person is medically a good thing in and of itself, even though the anesthetic isn’t actually treating the wound. And people who scoff at the empirical emptiness of religious consolations for sufferers, ignoring the fact that such consolations can have the beneficial effect of reducing emotional pain levels even though they’re not actually changing the reality that’s causing the pain, are being similarly foolish.
Mind you, I’m not saying that people who don’t believe in religious consolations would find them comforting or should be subjected to them against their will. I’m just saying that only a fool or a bigot would refuse to recognize that for people who do believe in them, they can have some positive effects.
I agree that religion can comfort people. It does that by lying. It causes an awful lot of damage in the process of getting people to believe those comfortable lies.
All major human institutions do an awful lot of damage, especially ones that have been part and parcel of daily human life since far back in prehistoric times. When you’re painting with that broad a brush, you can’t meaningfully separate “damage people do because they’re religious” from “damage people do because they’re human beings”.
Of course there would still be problems if religion ceased to exist. There would be fewer though.
Maybe, maybe not. Maybe the long-standing social cohesion and identity and formulation of ethical codes that evolved in the context of shared religious practices over millennia have overall been more beneficial than harmful to human societies. Or maybe they haven’t. We can’t do a controlled experiment repeating the whole course of human history with the religion element removed, so there’s no way to know.
Of course, I’m not disagreeing that if you somehow possessed the magical ability to make all non-empirical religious beliefs disappear from modern human life while still retaining all the beneficial social features that pre-modern societies tended to associate with religion, you might well come up with a society that was objectively improved in many ways.
But, of course, that’s a fantasy. You can’t just wave a wand and get rid of all the societal traces of religion that you don’t like, while retaining all the ones you do like in a magically secularized form.
You can’t wave a wand. You can, however, look at countries that are less religious and find that they tend to be fine. More than fine, actually.
Religion is simple answers to complicated questions. Of course it makes people do stupid things. Nearly all of evolution denial comes from religion. Get rid of it, and education would improve immediately. Along with abortion rates, STDs and gay rights.
Man, you just keep on giving. Is that how misery and despair works? An existencial condition that only religion can cure? Doing hard drugs also has a paliative effect (that’s good) but it might not be the best idea ever.
And then you start throwing around emotionally charged words like bigot to describe that thought. While calling it “evangelical New Atheism”.
What do you get out of it, an inflated ego?
But they’re not “less religious” in the sense that they somehow managed to avoid religion throughout the course of human development and so can serve as a control for our hypothetical experiment. On the contrary, they tend to be societies that were strongly religious throughout most of their history. You can’t meaningfully separate what they’re like now from what they’re like because of their overall history, which included lots of religious influence.
[QUOTE=Lobohan]
Religion is simple answers to complicated questions.
[/quote]
Among other things. It’s kind of amusing, though, that the guy who seems to think we can confidently assess the net value of religion over human history by looking at the success of a few modern societies that didn’t become significantly secular until within the past century or two, and which were fundamentally shaped by religious institutions for thousands of years before that, is complaining about religious thought on the grounds that it oversimplifies things. :dubious:
They’re less religious now. Of course, when people were ignorant and savage, religion had a purpose. Thinking an angry God was behind thunder was a reasonable guess, when one doesn’t have any relevant knowledge.
I’m surprised you’re thinking this is an argument that carries any weight. “We can’t get rid of religion because we used to have religion.” That’s drivel, bro. And it’s an example of how utterly desperate and nonsensical people have to get to justify religion as an institution. Duh, we used to have religion. We don’t need it now. It’s worthless. Actually worse than worthless, because the price for the delusional happiness is real-world damage and lost opportunity.
Okay, now you’re just being a fucking retard.
Do you think I’m calling for the retroactive elimination of religion from human society? I’m saying it has no net value now. Reflexive, unthinking defense of religion.
Strawman argument. Just because I make the perfectly reasonable point that religious beliefs can ameliorate destructive negative feelings in religious believers doesn’t imply in any way that I think religious beliefs are the only or the best way to ameliorate destructive negative feelings.
[QUOTE=Pedro]
And then you start throwing around emotionally charged words like bigot to describe that thought. While calling it “evangelical New Atheism”.
What do you get out of it, an inflated ego?
[/QUOTE]
No, just the satisfied conscience of having spoken out against sloppy thinking and irrational exaggeration.
A lot of folks around here frequently talk about how necessary it is for moderate followers of an ideology to openly challenge or critique extremist versions of that ideology. By that reasoning, I feel I have a duty occasionally to make it clear that the evangelical New Atheist types don’t speak for all of us atheists, and that many of us are capable of detecting and criticizing logical flaws in the hyperbolic religion-bashing rhetoric they sometimes indulge in, even though we happen to share their core belief that there’s no such thing as a god.
I was going to attack you pretty hard because I have a lot of problems with your stance but now that your are being all civil and stuff I’m forced to reconsider.