I found that statement odd too. I wonder if he missed the “at” and read your statement as “If people stopped getting value out of religion, the world would be a better place”.
Yes, I missed the at. My apologies.
Other than the word “pray” I don’t see what this has to do with belief in god? None of that kind of self-work requires a belief in god. And dreams are essentially you talking to yourself. ???
If there’s one primary aspect to being theistic that causes me embarrassment by association, it’s the way in which so many theistic people, at least in this culture, behave as if atheists are an affront to God and they, personally, are called upon to intervene. As if God is gonna get his poor widdle feewings hurt if everyone doesn’t believe, and any theistic people who can convert an atheist will get all kinds of brownie points.
I feel no urge to convert atheists. Most of the atheists I know are phenomenal people and participate in making the world a better place. I don’t need them to utilize the concept of God in making sense of the world they inhabit, God sure as fuck doesn’t, and if the atheist doesn’t either we’ve got a trifecta. I sometimes accidentally come across as if I’m trying to convince atheists, but it’s mostly a desire to not be dismissed or ridiculed, a desire to be understood by people I respect a lot. I promise I don’t assume understanding equals contagion. It’s a nomenclature thing. I think I could have chosen to express all that I know and experience in non-theistic terminologies, and no I don’t get any brownie points that I know of for using theistic ones.
Go in peace and keep rockin’ on and all that.
This is the reason. Should have been just this but SD made it longer
I hate to come off as “testifying”, but in my experience, you’ve got it exactly backwards. People don’t become intellectually convinced by theological doctrine and then feel obligated to engage in prayer/meditation/chicken sacrifice/whatever. More typically, they find that they enjoy these practices and then retcon the theology to justify participating in them.
And yes, I agree that if the “G” word is a sticking point for you, all of the benefits that religious practice provides can easily be obtained through similar practices that don’t involve the religious baggage.
This is one of several brilliantly eloquent posts you’ve made in this thread. Thanks very much for your thoughtful contributions.
An atheist prof of man once responded to me when I asked if it bothered him that he didn’t know what happens to him after he dies. He asked me if I remembered what it was like before I was born. I said no, not really. He said that’s how he felt about death and the afterlife.
The only thing I would say about @Stranger_On_A_Train’s otherwise excellent summary is that (like the theories of Karl Marx) it doesn’t adequately deal with analysis of power. So I shall attempt to be Weber.
People work actively to perpetuate the beliefs to which SoaT refers because one of the several facets of religious belief is its effectiveness as an “absent authority” power tactic. I speak for God. You can’t argue with me because what I say comes from God so my hands are tied. You must do what I say because what I say comes from God, for whom I speak. In other words I would say:
“Inculcated belief reinforced by operant conditioning and social/peer reinforcement, perpetuated in significant part by those who stand to benefit from those beliefs as a source of social power”.
You can and should go much, much further.
It’s a conceit that people come to religious practices by any act of will at all - people who make any kind of decision to join a religion are a statistical flyspeck.
Almost all religious people just follow the religion of the family and community they were born into.
This is demonstrably, ludicrously, false. I’m not going to dig up the Pew Religion Survey right now, as has been done in multiple threads previously, but nearly half of American adults currently practice a religion different than the one in which they are raised (that’s the high figure; the calculation obviously varies a lot depending on whether you consider different Christian denominations to be separate religions).
Notably, half of adults raised in non-religious households now practice some sort of religion, which kind of shoots down the theory that childhood brainwashing explains the persistence of religion.
Why don’t you go ahead and dig up that cite? This should be amusing.
I suppose English people, who are mostly Christian and have been for centuries, and Indians, who are mostly Hindu and have been for centuries, and Greeks, who are overwhelmingly Greek Orthodox and have been for centuries, all just have some sort of racial mental trait that causes them to make particular decisions about which religious practices they enjoy? Or do you think it’s just some sort of weird statistical blip that certain countries seem to have maintained the same majority religion for centuries - unrelated to continuity through family and community?
Of course, there is now substantial Muslim population in England - but this is just happenstance and has nothing to do with them almost entirely being recent immigrants (or descendants of immigrants) from Pakistan and other majority Muslim counties. Their family and community totally had nothing to do with it. It’s just a bizarre twist of fate that overwhelmingly those who just happened to hit upon Muslim practices and decided they enjoyed them were ex-Pakistan etc.
You are beyond kidding yourself.
According to this page 96.4% of Pakistanis are Muslim. According to you, some substantial proportion of religious people don’t practice the religion in which they were raised.
According to this table pretty much every Southern US state is 80% approx Christian. But according to you, half of all American adults don’t practice the religion in which they were raised.
Please, do tell how such uniformity of religion can be maintained while half the frickin’ population changes religion every generation?
I suspect you are going to say “but heaps of people change from Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879 to Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.”
To which I say gimme a break. This is a thread about why so many people believe in God. Which trivially different flavour people follow is neither here nor there.
If you tell a lie often enough, pretty soon, people start to believe you, especially if you are extremely emphatic about your assertion. There is even the likelihood that you’ll start to believe the lie yourself.
I was read the Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty-Third Psalm every week for ten years when my parents dragged me to church. I wonder why the pastor never read Psalm 137:9, " Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones [infant children] against the stones"
Look at the number of people who believed Trump when he kept emphatically insisting that the election was stolen. How many still believe that lie now that time has passed?
I assume this is the cite you are talking about?
This doesn’t really back your claim, as 11%, or a quarter of those who changed faith went from affiliated to unaffiliated, 15%, or more than a third changed from one protestant to another, which often happens in marriage, or with friends, if someone relocates, or someone just likes the hymns they sing better. Take a Lutheran and plop them into an Episcopalian or Methodist church, and they likely won’t know the difference.
Only 4% went from unaffiliated to affiliated, so you are only getting a 4% conversion rate on atheists to theists, almost 3 times as many became unaffiliated than became affiliated. As @Princhester said, a statistical flyspeck.
Only 9% are in the category of “other”, which includes those who converted from protestant to Catholic, and the rest being those who really changed beliefs, in going from one religion, not just denomination, to another.
As you said, it varies on whether you consider different Christian denominations to be separate religions, and if you do not consider them to be separate religions, which most don’t, then the max that you can have here is 13%, well under the “nearly half” that you are trying to use to validate your assertion that @Princhester’s statement is “demonstrably, ludicrously, false”. I’d say that 87%+ can easily qualify as “almost all”.
This would need a cite, as it goes against the cite that I found that I think you were referring to in your earlier claim.
OTOH, there is this:
Heretics!
People believe what they want to believe.
With respect to God, I think people generally like to believe there is some higher level of purpose or spirituality or whatever you want to call it beyond what they can see in front of their face.
In fact, people know there is more to how the world works than what they know. A lot of stuff happens based on conversations and plans by people in Washington or Hollywood or Wall Street that people have no clue about until it impacts them. So I think for a lot of people it’s comforting to believe that the world operates based on some higher power than Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
The number of Christians was at one time zero. What happened? Same can be said of Islam.
Powerful states such as the Roman Empire and a whole succession of Caliphates adopted Christianity and Islam as state religions and spread them with fire and sword to enforce loyalty and compliance among their ethnically and culturally disparate imperial subjects
If you tell a lie often enough, pretty soon, people will start to believe you.
200 years ago there were zero Mormons, Jehovah Witness, and Scientologists. Joseph Smith came up with his story about golden plates and people believed him. L.Ron Hubbard, a former science fiction writer, is quoted as saying, “Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, he’d start his own religion.”. Charles Taze Russell put his own spin on interpreting the Bible, and the gullible started following him.
My hypothesis for Christianity is that someone (or many people) who called themselves Joshua, went around performing magic tricks and claiming they were miracles. Enough people believed in his supernatural powers to write about him.