Yes, that was implied by the adjective 'major', the qualifier 'largely' and the phrase 'much more', rather than 'perfectly'.
There is a downside to religion dying out though. For more than a few people, it's hard to find meaning in life. Religion gives that to quite a few people, provides community (which is actually like the number one factor in happiness, if the science podcast I listened to was correct), improves mental health in most cases...science, in deciphering the mysteries, can also result in such joyous philosophies as nihilism, solipsism, and egoism. Plus, science always thinks it's right, when actually, science is really damn hard, and confusing, and every once in a while it'll turn out religion had it figured out via trial and error a couple thousand years ago. (like meditation and acupuncture and shit, which I've never seen a real in depth scientific explanation for; religion just says 'it works, this is how you do it', and it does) And then science gets into civil wars.
So you know, ups and downs to both, as usual.
And this is what really annoys me. I mean, you can make some pretty decent extrapolations from the assumption that this miserable death arena was actually designed this way. And people make loads of assertions about gods anyway, so that whole unknowable thing is basically a catchphrase with no substance. God is love(in my experience, love is evil), God is all powerful, god is everywhere, god knows everything, god is perfect, god is good, god is great, god sent the Israelites on a mass murder spree, god punishes the wicked, god designed human variance with respect to wickedness, humanity was spoiled by a serpent that god designed perfectly, knew every facet of, left in close proximity to humanity in god's own private garden and god knows everything anyway and god could totally take that serpent any time it likes with no effort at all...
I don't buy the argument that suffering makes any sense either. I have heard analogies to smithing. The sword must go through the horrific smelting process and then the warrior needs to swing it around and such to test if it works before relying upon it in a battle-field. I am pretty sure that god can make perfect swords directly, or even a massive variety of interesting but also functional swords, and I see no reason that humans would be more effort than swords considering that god is supposed to be so powerful and wise and so forth... It makes far more sense that something that exists without limitations would make a depressing pit of misery and watch it like a soap-opera, collecting the memories of the living to play as reruns while dumping their minds into oblivion as disgusting sludge. Occam's razor seems to cut the divine just as readily as it cuts anything else...
I mean, it's much easier to assume god is not infallible and that either people painted him as such when they wrote his book because they wanted to be on his good side, than to assume god is evil, I would say. But then, I also don't consider the world to be a miserable death arena, so you know. :/
Way I've heard suffering is that it's the only way to simultaneously provide an incentive at the material level to avoid sin and still allow free will. *shrug*
I have faith in other people, for example
Now this is the thing that I just don't understand at all. As near as I can tell, religious people have more faith in god than they do in people, but know less about god than they do other people. Knowing someone should give you a better idea of if and how they will betray you. I mean, if god tells you to run into a burning building to rescue a child, and a firefighter tells you to stay out of the building because it is about to collapse, what do you do? You know that the firefighter has seen many fires and many collapsed buildings and knows about the child and is crying because they like children and not being able to save this one is, well, bothering them, and they explained why you shouldn't do it. God, on the other hand, has never directly explained anything, got you to join up through peer pressure because everyone around you was already a member, provided you with a book that reads like a war propaganda script, and has never actually stated that the objective is to rescue the child, it could be that the desired outcome is for you to be stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of your life and the child was toast no matter what. Everything that I know about faith/trust/belief tells me that religion is wrong about it, that god should be treated as an annoying fool that constantly produces unimportant nonsense but you may as well listen to it in the absence of legitimate inspiration. Everything that I know about religion tells me that god should be trusted without question precisely because it refuses to allow anyone to question its trustworthiness. I just don't understand how I could possibly accept any of the established religions, and then religious types have the nerve to imply that I will be punished by my supposed designer for following the imperatives of my design...
I mean, that's one way to look at it. The other way to look at is that this firefighter is a stranger you've never met before, that you may well have seen miracles before (or what you believe to be miracles), and that you have this whole long book about God that you've been studying your entire life. Oh, and there's a child in that burning building, so fuck it if you're not going to try anyway. Also, odds are that either the firefighter is crying, or they've got a lot of experience, not both. Most people become jaded to stuff like that because they have to keep doing their job. I mean, I don't really have a way to respond to you saying 'everything I know about X tells me Y', other than to say obviously other people have different views on the subject? I dunno, man.
Also, 'religious types' don't believe those are the imperatives of your design. So, you know. :/
I think for missionary work, what you have to remember is that to people who believe, they're saving people's lives and their souls at the same time. You think of it as recruiting, but really? If it gets people to go help other people, what does it matter that they try to bring Jesus along? Who cares if the person doing charity work is doing it for the warm fuzzies, because it's the right thing to do even though they get zero personal satisfaction out of it, not even for the fact of doing the right thing, because God says to help the poor, or because they want to convert people in the process? The alternative to giving aid is not giving aid. Demanding that they give people aid for the reasons you think they should is rather...conceited. I understand that's not what you're doing, I'm just pointing out that charity is charity, don't matter what reason, people are being helped, and that's the point, in the end.
Their souls only need saving if they are imperilled, which means that god is going to punish them, probably for being born in the wrong place, which makes it a pretty brutally malevolent god in my book. Charity and conversion can be separate. Religion survives because it perpetuates, destroying other religions is most of why christianity is so successful. Religion is an overriding mental construct that has evolved to spread rapidly, or, in other words, a memetic hazard. If people don't accept a religion without the charity, then the religion doesn't offer enough to be accepted. If the charity cannot be offered without conversion as an incentive, then charity is not sufficient motivation for the people offering it. Christianity has an unfortunate history of doing things with the intention of saving people which were not appreciated by the people being saved
Well, you say that god's gonna punish them, but if the whole point is that you must actively become close to god in order to have a place in Heaven, and God designed humanity and let it run it's course...I mean, hell, we started out in North Africa, far as I remember. That's right around the birthplace of the abrahamic religions, to be fair. Humans chose, of their own free will, to go run off to places and get stuck there. And no, destroying other religions is most definitely not why Christianity was/is so successful. It was successful for a few reasons. One, timing; Roman Empire provided a very nice backdrop against which everything else could play out and spread. Two, narrative; appealing to the poor/common people(charity helps with that, by the way), and using powerful images like sacrifice, martyrdom, persecution, etc., are very powerful ways to spread an ideology, which is why they get used time and again(and watching people die for their beliefs is actually a surprisingly effective way to get people to wonder if maybe there's something to it). Three,
assimilation of local beliefs and customs. Throughout most of it's early years, it did that a lot, when it managed to get a hold in places. it was only well after that, say, 1500 years after, that it started the wholesale destruction thing. And at that point it's hard to say it's really the religion acting, when there were so many other motivations involved.
Charity is part of the religion, though. That's like saying that if a restaurant doesn't offer enough without the drinks, then the restaurant doesn't offer enough to be in business. But if any restaurant didn't serve drinks, no one would go to them. That's not how they work. And again, if the potential for conversion gets more people to do charity work, great, that's an extremely cheap price to get people to donate more of their time to helping others. Sweet deal.
Finally: yeah. That's true of most ideologies, turns out. Replace saved with other things, though, so often even the intent to help is missing. But yeah, pediatricians also do things to help save kids the kids may not appreciate. Needles, mostly. Kids tend to hate those.
Religion only resists analysis so far as the people in it do. By which I mean that theology is the analysis of religion. And that's been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years. No, it's not analysis as you would typically think of it, but it definitely still exists.
I really don't know theology well, but I suspect that it spends a lot more effort on discerning how and why something is true rather than upon what is true. I tend to see a lot of ignorance being proposed in such discussions. I see things like "you cannot know if god exists" and it hurts. I cannot discern if something exists if the means and inclination to prevent me from discerning its existence are in effect, but I can make reliable speculation upon combinations that are not compatible with that scenario and I can also observe that if I cannot even perceive its existence than it is not practical to consider it as being relevant to my decisions. People also say that you cannot know the mind of the creator, but I can speculate upon what I would create, what pothers would create, and who would create what we have, and how relevant they are to a world that appears to function without external intervention. Ignorance hurts me and common religious belief seems to regard it as a necessity. Not that I am free of ignorance myself, but the world was never fair or just...
Modern, lay-theology tends to be that, yes. Much like most modern physics lectures tend to be on how and why something is true rather than about what is true. Because most of the work about what is true for that particular sect has usually been hashed out hundreds or thousands of years ago. Usually, when they come to a different conclusion about what is true, and people agree that that makes sense, it creates a new religion. Lutheranism, Calvinism, All the many many many different sects, almost all were started by that sorta thing, and people who agreed with them. Almost all the possibilities for interpretation have been looked at by this point, is why you don't see much else in the way of 'what is true?' It's like how we'll look at modern-day chemistry in like 300 years. Nobody except a few subspecialties will care about the past hundreds of years of evidence for how we know chemical X interacts with chemical Y in Z way. They'll care about the mechanics of how it does so, and why it does so, but the 'what' is already taken care of.
Furthermore; I cannot perceive the existence of bacteria. I can witness their effects, or what people claim are their effects, but I cannot directly perceive the existence of bacteria. Microscopes could be seeing really weird dust particles, for all I actually know. Nonetheless, I choose to believe that they do exist, and that they do have an impact, and modify my behavior accordingly. Is it so difficult that for someone to whom 'God' is no less strange a notion, that this might be the case? Furthermore, while you don't see external intervention, many religious folk see it everyday. Interpretation of events, that some would call chance, luck, probability, etc., and others call fate or God. *shrug*
Also; the reason people give religion 'a free pass' is because they were taught this by their family, and people trust their family. Also because when people survive really extraordinary things, it becomes rather simple to attribute that to god. It seems like you're saying they're stupid to trust family and try to find meaning in life instead of allowing themselves to fall into a spiral of despair. And yes, I know people who have told me that if they didn't think Jesus existed they would see no meaning in life, because they've suffered such tremendous trauma.
I preach understanding. Family was persuaded by family was persuaded by family was persuaded by family... Trusting family is good(as far as arbitrary bas is concerned, and arbitrary bias is bad, but meh, it gets really really complicated really quickly...) but only to a certain extent. Blind faith in anything is bad, I am sure that you can imagine a scenario in which family can prove unworthy of trust.
Just because nobody in your family has ever betrayed you doesn't mean that that holds true for everyone else. If family is the only justification for a faith, then I do not believe that faith to be well-founded.
For every potentially fatal situation, there is a chance of survival. That those who happen to survive attribute it to external forces implies that all who died were ignored or abandoned by said forces. This is a fairly obvious expression of people placing a greater importance upon themselves than others. It is not remarkable that someone survived as most dangerous situations have many peers so the odds of someone surviving one of them are quite high. That the survivor is the survivor is certain, and it had to be someone... Attributing such an event to god is unfounded, and thus will tend to produce false assumptions in the future, likely resulting in errors and suffering.
Just because religion sustains someone doesn't mean that religion is the only thing that can sustain them. If people pit half as much effort into actual helpful psychology as they do into psychology that sells bad products then we might be able to get an actually reliable treatment for such people and save everyone. Rather than only hearing from the few that were saved by religion and ignoring all the victims who religion failed and thus were not available to provide testimony. A large part of fixing a problem is recognising that the problem exists, and religion gets in the way of that.
For my own problems, I cannot appreciate why believing that this whole world were deliberately designed to be so would help with the trauma of enduring its peculiarities. I find no comfort in believing that nobody cares, but it is far less comforting that somebody cared and that this world was the result.
Trusting family isn't all that much of an arbitrary bias, really. They have a vested interest in your wellbeing, after all, particularly from an evopsych point of view. But usually it's not simply blind faith. There's pastors to help answer questions, an entire process of learning about the faith and you still usually have to decide for yourself whether you want to stick with it or not. And yeah, sometimes there's peer pressure involved, but it's a community. You can't leave the community and expect to still be a part of the community (leaving aside, for the moment, the shittier families that disown people who don't remain within the faith, since of what I know, that's fairly uncommon). Further, it's possible for there to be other implications, like god's grace, or other such things. Additionally, when people go through trauma, they aren't usually concerned with the finer implciations of their rationalizations for how they survived when others didn't (have you heard of survivor's guilt? wonderful thing, really fucks people up, recommend it every time). And yes, people place more importance on themselves than on others. Weird, that. Also: most people, religious or not, don't understand how probabilities work. Especially not at the meta-level like that.
It's more than a matter of effort, as you should well know, (for one thing, define 'actual helpful psychology'? Therapy that works? That's different for everyone, sometimes nothing works, and trying to mess with what's working well as-is is usually considered a no-no in medicine, for a reason). Psychology is
hard. Why fix something that ain't broke, and risk breaking it? Here, let me give you an example. My grandparents had one of their children raped and killed at the age of two. The only thing that allows my grandfather to continue to function effectively is the knowledge/belief that there was a greater purpose in that trauma and that their daughter is in heaven, now. Now, you could try to dissuade him from this belief, and risk the psychology failing, or you could let him continue to be a functioning member of society, instead of deciding that you know better than he does. Which is what is implied by your reasoning here.
The reason it helps people find comfort is the idea that it was for a purpose. That the suffering was for a reason beyond things within their control or things outside anyone's control. People find comfort both in the idea that their suffering was necessary, and that they are therefore noble for struggling through it, and that is within
someone's control. Whether or not that someone is themselves comforts or discomforts them is usually up to the individual; some people find comfort in knowing that it was their own doing, and some people don't like the idea that they could have avoided it, because it makes them blame themselves and the memory festers.
And actually, Jesus was a pretty cool dude, all things considered. Turn the other cheek helps avoid blood feuds and continuous revenge, treating others how you want to be treated is called cooperating in the Prisoner's Dilemma, and a lot of the stuff he talks about are basically means for society to function more effectively if everyone does it. You're correct, if you're the only who does it, you're going to suffer more. Turns out that's maybe why Christianity has such a big martyrdom/persecution fetish, because that was the only way to get it started.
Turning the other cheek can, potentially, settle a feud between two people. Or it can just fail. Or it can exacerbate the situation by inciting an ally who doesn't like seeing people being assaulted without defending themselves. Religion provides a single solution which might not work. Better to work towards understanding the situation and preempting a situation in which a blood-feud would start. I am a MASSIVE fan of nonviolence, but even I have to accept that it is preferably to be briefly violent yourself than to allow an inherently violent force to use violence to proliferate freely. As technology, both military and psychological, progresses, violence becomes more and more viable as a means of suppression. The existence of armies is a failure of society, but it is better to fail and acknowledge that failure than to surrender your influence upon the world to those who do not recognise such as a failure. Blood-feuds are bad but there are worse things, it is better to seek your won wisdom than to blindly trust religion's.
Prisoner's dilemma?!?!?!?
!?!?! Empathy is bad. It promotes group dynamics that destroy individuals. Compassion is better. If your prisoner buddy has been looking for a way to pay you back and also wants to get out of the business for a while, and silence gets them prison time and a criminal record regardless, then selling them out can be a kindness. IF, on the other hand, you respect that they do not want longer prison time, then you can choose to protect their interests without considering your own wishes. "Do as you would experience" is okay for a desperation ploy, if you don't have any information, but it is comfortable pitiful as far as morality goes.
I do not recall implying "if you're the only who does it, you're going to suffer more". Did you mean the bit about "earn me nothing but hostility"? I have often been the victim of people trying to help me, and people often complain when I offer them the same considerations that I myself desire. The people around me do not want what I want and I do not want what they want. "do unto others" is not a lesson, it is an encouragement to succumb to natural empathy, which evolved to keep society more or less functional but is horrific from a morality perspective. Empathy often causes harm because what you would have others do unto you is not always what they would have done unto them. If everyone does it then eye for an eye is better, provided that it extends to repaying positive efforts, or just being neutral to positive and negative. People who are ignorant will either use hostility or empathy, and thus either their hostility will be confronted or their empathy will be reflected with something that they desire rather than what the other party desires which they might not desire. Once they actually understand one another than eye for an eye evolves into something more sophisticated where you actually understand what the other party is trying to achieve and respond with similar intent rather than similar action.
I agree that martyrdom can be effective. It is less effective now as propaganda improves, but mostly my problem with it is that it solidifies your position. Your legacy is unchanging, and if your policies were a bit too extreme, or missing a vital point, then your followers will be hesitant to reject your example. It is tricky to work around.
So, I don't think you were getting what I was saying there. Those possibilities are not, in fact, equally likely. Even though there are three possibilities that you put forward for the result of turning the other cheek, they do not each have a one in three chance. In fact, I really don't think you understand this part at all, the way you're talking about it. I don't mean that to be rude, I think either I failed to make it exactly clear because I think you may be in precision analysis mode, rather than overview analysis mode, or we both failed to get to the same level of specificity. A. No, it does not provide a
single solution. It has years upon years of history and chapter upon chapter of solutions and guidelines for how to deal with situations such as that. B. It's not designed to work at the individual, it's designed to work at the society wide level. Obviously the best method is to avoid the situation that would lead to violence in the first place. Just because you don't turn the other cheek doesn't make that likely to work. Also; christianity kept armies, you may have noticed. Keeping public order and dealing with criminals was also talked about in the bible. Defense of the faith is in there too. Don't take my examples as end-all be-all means.
And no, empathy is not bad. I can conceive of nothing you could say that will make me believe having empathy for another human being is bad, nor a means I can see of convincing me that is it is mutually exclusive, even partially, with compassion. In both of the situations you describe, the solution is still for both people to cooperate. Again, this is a society-wide thing, not an individual thing. I think that failed to come across. You're discussing how relevant this is for individual use, and how it isn't perfect. I'm talking about how as a rule of thumb for entire cultures, it's pretty damn great.
I was raised to help people. It's difficult to help people who don't want to be helped, and 'do unto others as you would have others do unto you usually has to kicked up a meta-level or two in order to work in all situations, but nonetheless, I offer my assistance and ask what they need/how I can help. Because that's how I would like for people to treat me. Furthermore: most people's needs are surprisingly similar. While it's true that trying to help someone the way you would want to be helped doesn't always work, that doesn't make 'don't try to help people' the solution. It means 'be smarter about how you try to help people'.
Hostility and trust both tend to be reciprocated. In fact, there's a part of psychology where it's really hard to respond to someone the way they're acting towards you. But in iterated prisoner's dilemmas, tit-for-tat with forgiveness succeeds above all others. On society wide scale, eye for an eye is tit for tat. Turn the other cheek is forgiveness.
As for free will: You mean you're affected by people other than yourself in decision-making? That's still free will. Free will is the ability to choose within the parameters you have available to you. Free will is the ability of the conscious mind to make decisions, rather than the unconscious mind (which loves to take over decision making from the PR part of the brain).
I mean that people can enter a situation, know what path will keep them from regret, know that same path is what they want, and still be incapable of following that path. Some people are literally incapable of leaving the food platter alone until the guests arrive. Some people wake up in a gutter and say "never again" and throw away their drugs, call their friends or help, lock themselves in a room, and wake up in a gutter a week later. I am saying that some people really don't want to drink alcohol, but their friends all invited them to a bar, and they were bought a drink, and people sometimes look at them funny, and they are getting thirsty, and they don't want to insult their friends by leaving, and just a little bit won't hurt, and then they wake up in a stranger's bed. I am saying that being fat is almost never a choice, that people went off to war and died for their county without ever stopping to think if glory was worth it, that if you test a man's restraint by having them refuse water in the desert that they are probably capable of it but will probably have forgotten about the test and just take you up on the offer. I am saying that a lot of the time free will doesn't happen. I am saying that we got the shoddy factory-second garbage version and I would be ashamed to put my name on this useless junk. It is a joke gift, a prank gift, an insult gift. I cite it as an example of religion having really low standards.
Willpower/battling it out with the unconscious is not the same as not having free will. You don't have perfect free will, because other things happen in the world, because you are not yourself God with all abilities, which is what it seems like it would take to fulfill your definition of free will, in which there are literally no limits on your actions. I don't know if literally incapable ever really applies to people. They could do things like lock the food platter under a top, give the key to a friend, and tell the friend not to let them eat anything on the platter under any circumstances until the guests arrive. Peer presusre is not irresistible. People changing their mind later is not a failure of free will, it's a feature. That's literally the point. The war/glory thing has nothing to do with anything because that's not even about free will or making a choice, it's just about considering the consequences of one's actions, which is a whole nother matter. Being fat is also a whole nother thing, because if you want to start bringing physical attributes into this then it becomes another matter entirely. Most of these are, in fact, the culmination of a lot of little choices that result in a different result than they previously, and may even currently desire. None of these are something overriding your decision making process entirely. Which can happen. But usually it doesn't, your judgment is just reduced (I had that happen to me at one point and it freaked me the fuck out, because my idea of 'what is acceptable behavior' shifted temporarily) in various situations and you make a decision you wouldn't have made in other situations. That's not your will being overruled.
Lastly, charity is good, period.
That REALLY depends upon the charity, there is nothing to say that you can't pity the difficulties of being a nazi in the modern world and offer them a bit of support to help them with their eugenics untranationalist agenda. And really, it is better to fix the world so that nobody needs charity. Unfortunately we were given a junk garbage world where power disparity is all-pervading and I am too miserable to bother being the antichrist and fixing it all just yet...
Are you seriously Godwinning already. I understand this is the spirituality thread, but it doesn't literally mean God-Win. You know quite well what charity means in this context, RAM. Please just don't.
If religion makes people more likely to do charity work, then I don't see much of a problem with the charity taking care of orphans. You see the alternative as 'charity without religion'. When the alternative is 'no charity at all', I'll take the religion every time.
I think that there are other people who will do charity and that many religious people are willing to do charity anonymously. And this assumes that religion is harmless. If its doctrine of relying upon external forces to secure an afterlife results in a weakening of the soul and avoidable disintegration at the conclusion of death then that is a count against it. If it indoctrinates people and preaches an unwillingness to investigate the full range of possibilities in matters that conflict with spirituality then I would count that against it. If it can be used to convince people to mass-migrate to the holy lands and kill everyone who disagrees with you then I would count that against it. I think that there is too much blind acceptance in religious doctrine so that it it discourages critical thinking. I really don't know with any precision, but it seems entirely possible that the presence of religion could be worse than the absence of charity. It seems much easier to rescue someone from desperation than obedience. And bear in mind that christianity is not the only religion. I have little doubt that there are "terrorist organisations" with religious themes that are operating orphanages today...
It is impossible to completely avoid indoctrination, our world is full of influences, but it would be healthy to limit the extent to which biases can be solidified or led to extremes of volume or focus.
And those people are capable of doing charity as well. There is currently no real cap on how much charity can be done and still help people, unfortunately. Vast majority of the time, religion is harmless or helps people. The doctrine weakening the soul is, uh...what?
I mean, seriously, dude, evolution was used to justify Social Darwinism. Do you count that against it? Guilt by association doesn't belong in the courts or in philosophy. You don't have to say "all religion is evil!" just because some of it is. I mean, hell, here's a line of reasoning for you: one way or another, people who are susceptible to ideology will become indoctrinated into
something. It is, on average, better for that something to be religion, because weighted by probability of their conversion, most religions preach charity, kindness to one's fellow man, moderation, and good work ethic, which means that for society as a whole, it is more beneficial than them being indoctrinated into other less savory ideologies. I definitely believe there's flaws in that reasoning, but my point is that you're making a lot of assumptions here that could just as easily go the other way, and you seem to ignore probability weighting in much of it.
Regarding philosophy: When irrational numbers were discovered, the guy who discovered them in ancient greek society was thrown over a boat by the followers of Pythagoras for making his claim. Stalinists during the Cold War, or McCarthyists during the Cold War, would do plenty of stuff to someone who obstinately persisted in saying that the ideology which wasn't the prevailing one was wrong. Religion is not unique in this aspect. It is a facet of humanity, as all else is, and like all of humanity, contains the good and the bad. I seek to preserve what is good, and allow what is wrong to gutter out.
Oh, granted, it certainly exists, but I feel that religion tends to be a bit more conductive to fanaticism than philosophy does. And philosophy is more prone to people pointing out that it is just plain wrong. As I said, I like philosophy as a game, a tool to explore possibility, as something to devote yourself to it runs much the same risks as religion does. I have never really been inclined towards devotion myself so I suppose I could be ignorant on this matter, but still, it seems difficult for me to understand how a religion could be used without being devoted to it.
I mean, that's kinda how most people operate with religion. It's a background thing. It's not usually the single most overriding thing in their life, particularly if they grew up with it. It's just...there. They believe in it, they try to live in accordance with it, and they live their life in all the other ways. It's part of the backdrop of their life, not the forefront. Religion only produces more fanatics because it's more common.
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