That’s not quite the argument that Landesburg is making.
He doesn’t claim that people are deciding that the long-term consequence is worth the short-term benefit. He is saying that if you engage in some behavior, you cannot really believe that it will lead to long-term consequences.
It is not, in other words, that people say “I don’t want cancer, but it’s a less pressing issue to me than quitting smoking would be” - he is saying that anyone who smokes doesn’t “really” believe that smoking causes cancer. They are not making a risk-benefit decision - they don’t “really” believe there is any risk.
A smoker does not rationalize that he probably won’t die of cancer. A smoker rationalizes that smoking feels so amazing that dying of cancer is worth it. The negative consequences are finite, not infinite. Infinity punishment is on an entirely different level.
If he is honestly arguing against all religion in this way, then obviously he’s not familiar with the two biggest religions, Christianity and Islam. Christians know what the Apostle Paul said: “We know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.” [Romans 7:14-17] In other words, the conception of human beings as rational actors who know they have specific goals and act based on those goals is incorrect. All human beings do things which they know to be wrong or imperfect and which they lack and justification for doing. Of course Christians also believe that by turning to Christ we can enter a new way of living by which we eventually get out of this state, but it’s a process that will not be completed in this lifetime.
Muslims, meanwhile, believe that each person’s eternal destiny was decided by God before any of us were born, and that none of us can doing anything to change it, so a rational calculus based on that eternal destiny wouldn’t be expected to have any effect on their behavior.
Again I have trouble taking this one seriously. Lagnsburg seems to think that a Christian is expected to base all actions with his or her eternal destiny in mind. But this is incorrect; a Christian ideally would use God’s will as a basis for his or her actions.
Obviously untrue. Interfaith dialogue and cooperation could bear a great deal of fruit, even in the perspective of someone convinced that their religion is a correct path.
Only if one believed that incessant proseletyzing was likely to lead others to the faith, whereas common sense says otherwise. Further, Christianity teaches that God has assigned different roles for different members of the church. [1 Cor 12:27-31] Not all are assigned for the task of prosletyzing.
I would agree that there are some people today who might fit in with Landsburg’s thesis. However, we should also consider that many of the devoutly religious today live on the fringes of society or in enclaves where you won’t encounter them if you don’t specifically seek them out. I doubt that Landsburg has much contact with the Amish, for instance, or with Carmelite nuns.
Nitpick: “I believe. Help thou my unbelief.” was not said by Saint Paul. It comes from chapter 9 of Mark’s Gospel, where a father is asking Jesus to heal his son. Your point is still perfectly valid, however.
I believe that there is no such thing as mutually contradictory beliefs. The human mind is flexible enough to force itself to believe anything with enough effort. Something appealing, like religion, would take considerably less effort. Thus, it is impossible to say that a person cannot be religious based on circumstantial actions alone. Certainly, if they say they are religious, that pretty much confirms that they have religious beliefs. Even if they have logically contradictory beliefs at the same time.
My own thoughts here. I’m a moral philosopher, so remember that no one ever really cares what I think.
1. Religions that posit an omnipotent God who demands good behaviour should result in believers who are unusually well behaved, since their behaviour will result in either great rewards or awful punishments. A person who honestly believed God would send them to hell for being bad would never be bad. But there is no evidence religious people are better behaved than irreligious people, even though there is a huge amount of evidence that the perception of temporal punishment is strongly correlated with obeying rules.
I am not a psychologist, but I am fairly certain that changes to behavior based on punishments or rewards diminish the farther away the punishment or reward is. In other words, the later the punishment or reward the less effect it will have. Combined with the human tendency to prefer a smaller payoff sooner over a larger payoff later, the presumed infinity of the punishment or reward stands no particular reason to be all that effective. Moreover, because the choice is so stark, infinity on either side of the pleasure-pain divide, it would stand to reason that the cutoff point can’t be all that rigorous.
*2. Religions that promise people eternal life would result in people being less mindful of personal safety, since if they legitimately believe in heaven they have nothing, really, to lose. EVen if one assumes suicide is a sin, they would be more cavalier with their safety in other ways - more likely to engage in dangerous activities and sports, less likely to use safety precautions, etc. But there is no evidence this is the case.
Landsburg, incidentally, notes that you do have suicide bombers, but that in the grand scheme of things willing suicide bombers represent an incredibly tiny fraction of self-professed believers.*
No belief of any sort can always dominate the general human tendency to try to stay alive in even the most difficult situations. It takes a lot to want to die, in either a religious context or out of it. There’s only so much a belief system can do to change that. Allowing for this, that there are some who die for their beliefs would dispute the claim that no one at all truly believes.
3. If people legitimately believe in their religion being a correct path, the widespread trend towards interfaith dialogue and cooperation simply doesn’t make any sense.
It makes perfect sense if you believe that the similarities outweigh the differences, especially when two religions are “joining forces” to fight off attacks to this core of shared belief.
4. People who legitimately believed that faith was the key to eternal life should all be incessant proseletyzers; no degree of being “tolerant” or “polite” can possibly overwhelm the fact that if your neighbour does not convert he’s going to hell. Eternal suffering is worth doing anything you can to save your neighbour from it.
Not all religions are proselytizing. Not all religions believe in Hell. Not all religions believe that making an enemy of your neighbor is a good idea. And this is the fundamental issue. He’s collapsed all religions into more or less to the extreme version of the evangelicals. Not everyone’s faith works like this, and he establishes no foundation on which to justify this perspective. So, it seems that regardless of your own religious belief or lack thereof, his argument, as a whole, is not really all that good.
No. Faith isn’t an activity, it is a life style, and those committed to it attach a substantial amount of their self worth to it.
Convincing a priest his life’s pursuit was spent worshiping an imaginary friend isn’t an argument about faith, it is about the gullibility of the person holding that faith.
First off, people who honestly believe in temporal punishments do not “obey the rules”. The obvious example of this is smoking. Something like 99.9% of smokers know that smoking is very likely to kill them. Around 90% fully expect to die a slow, painful from smoking related diseases, almost 100% of them know that smoking is damaging their health and fitness right now. Yet these people still smoke. Even more remarkable, the average ex-smoker quits five times before they finally quit the habit. IOW they knew the experience of smoking, they knew the effects and penalties perfectly well, and they still relapsed four times. We’re not talking about kids taking up smoking here, we are talking about adults who quit, have no more psychological or physical addiction, and take the habit back up because it is is comforting. I won’t even get into the stories of people with laryngectomies or amputated limbs from smoking/diabetes who continue to smoke.
We could then go on to consider things like homesexual behaviour, adultery, illicit drug use and other acts that had serious temporal punishments, and yet were little affected by those punishments
So the claim that “there is a huge amount of evidence that the perception of temporal punishment is strongly correlated with obeying rules” is at best misleading and, IMO, simply not true. There is evidence that temporal punishment deters some people from some minor misbehaviour in instances where the misbehaviour has minor rewards. Claims that perceptions of temporal punishments are strongly correlated with obeying the rules in every single case case (which is what Landsburg is tacitly arguing) flies in the face of what we all know to be true.
Then we get to the claim that all religious people “believed God would send them to hell for being bad”. That is simply not true. Landsburg must never have read any theology of any major religions before writing his thesis. I can’t think of a single major religion that holds such a belief. If you can think of one, then please name it. Even Jack Chick does not believe that God will send everyone to hell for being bad, and he is the most rabid pre-damnation preacher I have ever encountered. In fact Chick does not believe that God will send *anyone *to hell for being bad.
In short, Landsburg is not just arguing a True Scotsman her, he is attacking a strawman. No religion in the world holds such a position as far as I know.
Weak. I used to be a member of a religion that promised people eternal life. I know that I genuinely believed. It had absolutely no correlation to personal safety. I honestly don’t even see the link.
In a nutshell, people are put on this Earth to perform a task. Whether that is full-blown predestination/dharma, to have time to learn about God or simply to worship God, all religions accept that we are here for a reason.
Since we are here for a a reason, and a reason that has been ordained by our higher power, there is no reason *not *to be just as careful as non-believers. For starters, most fatal injuries are not instantaneous. Dying painfully over a period of hours or years is still painful, no matter what the afterlife, that in itself is reason to avoid it.
Even if the outcome is instantaneous death, this is still the equivalent of walking out of either a movie or an exam partway through. Then we have the issue that in most faiths our bodies are gifts from. pathways to the divine. We are borrowing them, we don’t own them, and damaging them make sit more difficult to commune with the divine. As such we have an obligation to take care of them. Rather than being less careful of their health, believers of the major faiths are told explicitly in their scriptures to be more careful.
Once again, Landsburg appears to have never studied any of the world’s major theologies.
Does Landsburg not understand that suicide is a major sin in Christianity, at the very least?
Once again, he doesn’t seem to have even a rudimentary understanding of the world’s major religion.
This is a total non-sequitur. It is a bald assertion with no logic or evidence to back it up, and the conclusion does not follow from the premise.
Do you/Landsburg accept that Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin both legitimately believed in their political/economic philosophy being a correct path? Does that mean that you do not believe that Churchill and Stalin could ever have any form of dialogue or co-operation?
As I said, the argument is a simple non-sequitur. I don’t see at all how it follows that having legitimate and total faith in your own belief system precludes dialogue and co-operation with competing belief systems.
First off. this can only possibly true if we accept that “incessant proseletyzation” is the most effective way to win converts. Since virtually no religious people believe this to be true, and since Landsburg presents no evidence that this is true, the argument is once again a total non-sequitur. The conclusion simply does not follow from the premise.
What if we accept that being a good example by being tolerant and polite is the best way to win converts? What if we accept that prayer is the best way to win converts? What if we accept that God will guide to him those who are seeking? If we accept those things, then why is “incessant proseletyzation” necessary or even desirable?
Secondly, contradicts Landsburg’s original Strawman that all religious people believe that God will condemn people for being bad. Which is it? Does God condemn people for being bad, or for being non-believers, or for both, or for either?
If it’s the first, then this current argument is a load of dingo’s kidneys.
If it’s the second, then Landsburg’s first argument is a load of dingo’s kidneys.
If the third then this argument is a blatant strawman, since nobody believes that simply converting your neighbour will save him if he is bad.
If the final, then *both *arguments a load of dingo’s kidneys, *and *this argument is a strawman.
Blatant Strawmen, astounding ignorance of basic theology, non sequiturs and the whole thing based upon a True Scotsman?
How about analogy #4, where there isn’t just a possibility that your actions will result in a bad outcome, but a certainty?
Do you know anybody who wants anaphylaxis? I wouldn’t. So it follows that nobody with a peanut allergy is going to make themselves a peanut butter and banana sandwich for lunch.
Why is God’s Wrath equatable to a chance of getting cancer, heart disease or AIDS, instead of the certainty of anaphylaxis? Is there some sort of uncertainty regarding God and how he wants us to act?
It does not take extraordinary willpower to avoid actions that you know will harm you, it takes willpower to avoid actions that might harm you.
While statements about large groups of people (like believers and nonbelievers) are allowed even if SDMB posters are included in the groups, everyone on both sides of this debate is advised to tread carefully.
I ask once again: what is this religion that says that God will *definitely *harm you for any act? That there will never be *any *chance of repenting from the act, that the act will result in *certain *and *unavoidable *damnation from which there is no chance of reprieve?
Because of course if you can’t name the religion that believes such a thing, then the peanut analogy is hideously flawed.
And to answer your question: there is no uncertainty in how God wants us to act in some religions and in some regards. However even within those bounds, it is acknowledged that humans are fallible, that humans will fail to live up to expectations. The Christian, Moslem and Buddhist scriptures, at least, state explicitly that humans will always fall short of the way that we are expected to act. That every single one of us will fail to act according to what is right.
So it’s not an issue of whether there is uncertainty in how to act. Even when that is certain, it is equally certain that we will fail to act in that manner. We are doomed to fail, what is important is that we try.
To apply this to your peanut analogy, it’s more like someone carrying an epi-pen because they know that they will eventually be exposed to peanuts, and they want to survive the effect of that. It is a certainty that they will eventually be exposed to peanuts and the outcome is certain to be bad, so they have a method of mitigating the worst of the damage.
Religion is an Epi-pen. It’s designed to to give a reprieve from the the inevitably bad effects of an event that is inevitably going to happen. The event will still occur and the results will still be unpleasant with or without the Epi-pen. All the Pen does is give you a chance of surviving.
Which is why the smoking analogy works so well. We are all going to die. The question is what we are going to die of and how painful it will be. We are all going to “sin” and we are all going to go feel the effects of that. The only question is how bad that will be.
Which brings us back to the original point: if people know that something is almost inevitably going to cause death, as in the case of smoking, then they shouldn’t do it. Except that we know that they do, because humans are fallible and give in to their desires, no matter what the punishment is. Doesn’t matter whether we are talking temporal or spiritual punishment, people will still indulge in acts that will cause death.
Now you might argue that eternal damnation is worse than 5 years of terminal lung cancer, but bot punishments are so horrendous that nobody thinking rationally would risk either one. Yet billions of people clearly do knowingly risk lung cancer. That is human nature.
We could also use the example of gay bathhouses in the 1980s. It was pretty much 100% guaranteed that every man who frequented gay bathhouses would die of AIDS. Yet hundreds of thousands of men did still attend.
What does that tell you about the ability of humans to make rational judgments about consequences?
Only if that Epi-pen also promises rebuke and possible punishment of undesirable behavior as well.
I have no idea where you’re getting your risk estimates. The incidence of lung cancer among regular, heavy smokers is about 25%. I’m fairly certain that the rate of AIDS among those who frequented gay bathhouses was not 100%. Stop the hysterics, please.
In a similar vein, I can eat ice cream without causing myself any harm, and I can write a post on a message board when I should be working on something else without there being any negative consequence whatsoever. I don’t find these examples to be very convincing, because the harmful consequences of these types of behaviors isn’t from committing them, it’s from committing them for long periods of time and in the context of the other behaviors one is “committing” in their life as well. To further complicate things, the consequences of these types of behaviors also vary across individuals, so that George Burns can smoke cigars forever, and that one guy can still be alive after eating a million Big Macs.
But this seriously misrepresents what the majority of religious people actually believe. They do not believe that god sends them to infinite punishment for minor transgressions. Therefore, there is no “cognitive dissonance” in being both religious, as in believing in a god, and committing transgressions.
That’s sorta a gaping hole in this guy’s argument - as others have noted, it’s a strawman wrapped up in a no-true-scotsman.
He overlooks prophecy. Since there is valid prophecy that has come true, this is evidence of the supernatural nature of the scriptures containing the prophecies.
“Science” (I’m not a disbeliever in science, mind you, I believe in evolution, i use quotation marks because I am talking about bad science) dismisses these in an argument that it is not valid prophecy, just coincidence or something. But this cannot be proved in any scientific test we have. The scripture says something will happen, then it happens. I do not dismiss this lightly.
A good example is John in Revelation prophesying that Rome would become a religious institution (it did) that would persecute believers (it did) and say it changed God’s laws (it did). And while I cannot prove exact starte/end date, it also ruled the world (the known world from the perspective of a man 2000 years ago in the middle east) approximately 1260 years, as the prophecy says.
It suffered severe blows to its dominance, as though decapitated as the prophecy says. Then it revivied, as the prophecy says.
There is another interesting set of prophecies by some monk (I will go try to find this) that is uncannily accurate in foreseeing Popes. The list ends, as I remember, either with the current Pope or the one after.
The question is whether this last one (whichever pope that is–I am not assuming the monk was completely correct, perhaps he is wrong and popery will go on) will start performing obvious miracles in order to unite the world in believing he is God.
The biblical track record for fulfilled prophecy is pretty good. That’s a solid reason to believe despite all arguments to the contrary, and for those who do, their belief is legitimate.
It only shows that religions are constructed by people to ensure that their followers continue to show up for services and contribute to the collection plate.
Yet, zero peanut allergy sufferers are going to make themselves a peanut based meal. Zero. Not a single one of them is going to fall off the wagon, doomed to eat a peanut someday because it’s just so tasty.
Humans are fallible. Sure, that means “Sorry, Hon, I forgot to take out the recycling.” not “Sorry, Hon, I’ve been sneaking off to bone my secretary twice a week for the past 3 months.”
The Epi-pen isn’t there so Mr. Allergic can eat a PB&J, and be “forgiven” for his “mistake”. It’s there because, despite his active effort to avoid peanuts, he may unknowingly eat one.
Many people nowadays, including apparently Landsburg, seem to have the idea that the essence of religion is “Be good so you’ll be eternally rewarded, not bad so you’ll be eternally punished,” which is, in my understanding, at best a caricature of anything taught by any of the major religions.
This cuts both ways, right? If professed atheists truly believe that there is no afterlife and that their time on earth is all they get, you’d expect them to be vastly more risk-averse than religious people. If indeed there is no evidence that this is the case, one can just as easily conclude that it is the professed atheists who don’t really believe what they say they do, as opposed to the professed theists.
No, it isn’t. There aren’t any fulfilled prophecies. There are random, religious bullshit and people bending over backwards to attach the events of modern times to fit them.
It doesn’t show great judgement to be taken in by such things.
