Is religion harmful to society?

[InfiniteNow]

Not photons.

[Moontanman]

Not photons.

 

How about photon torpedos?

 

I have many time tried to point out to very religous people that if they are right then heaven is a very lonely place and hell must be quite full but of course they always say I am headed to hell and I will know for sure at some point.

[Southtown]

Your post reminded me of this...

Dr. Schambaugh, of the University of Oklahoma School of Chemical Engineering, Final Exam question for May of 1997...

 

One student, however, wrote the following:

 

"First, We postulate that if souls exist, then they must have some mass...

 

That was forwarded to me also. lol

 

Does all that exists have mass? ;)

 

Not photons.

I thank you, sir. And so the question begs 'why must we postulate that souls must have some mass.'

[InfiniteNow]

I dunno. Why must we postulate that unicorns are purple? ;)

[Southtown]

Nobody's defending unicorns bro. lol (Fallacy: Straw Man)

[Moontanman]

I dunno. Why must we postulate that unicorns are purple? ;)

 

Because the book of Unicorns says they are purple and that's all I need to know it's the truth!

[Boerseun]

Nobody's defending unicorns bro. lol (Fallacy: Straw Man)

Can you maybe explain to me how the argument would differ, if we took unicorns out of the equation? This isn't a strawman. It is, however, a slightly uncomfortable, though completely valid, analogy.

[InfiniteNow]

As has been made clear, we know that nobody is arguing in favor of unicorns. The bigger point is that it rests on exactly the same logical footing as does an assertion about god or souls.

 

Also, you're my bud, so no worries, Southie... but a strawman is actually if I misrepresent your position into a weaker form and then argue instead against that weaker position, ultimately claiming victory. It doesn't really apply here for two reasons. One, it was an analogy, not an argument. Two, what I shared is not a "weaker" argument, but an argument resting on the same assumptions as yours.

 

:)

[Pyrotex]

... but a strawman is actually if I misrepresent your position into a weaker form and then argue instead against that...

Well said. The biggest danger in any contentious conversation is misrepresentation of each other. If you can avoid that, you're halfway there. :)

[Southtown]

... but a strawman is actually if I misrepresent your position into a weaker form and then argue instead against that weaker position, ultimately claiming victory.

Ah I see. Thanks, my bad. :doh:

[Galapagos]

New article by Phil Zuckerman at the Huffington Post..

 

Phil Zuckerman: The Religious Support Behind Proposition 8

 

Proposition 8 passed because of religious folk. There is no question about it. Church-going Black Americans, tithe-paying Mormons, mass-attending Latinos, and Evangelical whites all joined forces in "protecting marriage." The underlying reason religious people voted to revoke from gays and lesbians the legal right to marry is doggedly theological: God doesn't like it. And when a society or culture does things that God doesn't like, that society or culture will suffer. This is a central tenet of every religion, and has been ever since the first shaman first claimed to be able to discern the will of the Almighty by examining the patterns in a bowl full of crushed berries.

 

And it simply isn't true. If God punishes societies that violate his commandments and rewards those that do, this just isn't apparent by looking at the state of the world today. The sociological fact is that the most irreligious nations right now are among the most successful, humane, moral, and free, while the most religious nations tend to be among the most destitute, chaotic, crime-ridden, and undemocratic. A similar pattern also holds true within the United States: those states and counties that boast the greatest numbers of strong believers and regular church attenders tend to have higher poverty rates, child abuse rates, violent crime rates, and lower educational attainment rates than those states and counties characterized by more secular populations.

 

Zuckerman recently did some extensive research and then wrote a book about religiosity in Scandinavia, check it out:

Amazon.com: Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment: Phil Zuckerman: Books http://www.amazon.com/Society-without-God-Religious-Contentment/dp/0814797148

[charles brough]

Religion has been around longer than the past couple of decades. The point we have currently reached, occurred with religion dominating 95% of the time. It is closer to natural and genetic, due to its longer time span, compared to the short term alternatives.

 

I am of the opinion that one can take a person out of religion but not religion out of the person. It has such a long historical basis, that it will merely change form. It may no longer say god, but its structure repeats. For example, the biggest modern example of getting rid of real religion was the Soviet Union. Socialism was sort of a distortion of the Christian ideal with a strict theocracy clone trying to force its pseudo-religion on everybody. What was suppose to happen didn't work out, so real religion came back. Now those cultures are autonomous and prosperous. Human rights are better and the risk of global anihilation has lowered significantly. It didn't work very well. What is different now?

 

What the alternatives forget is most people are being supported with the prosthesis of culture. This can make one think one is more than one actually is. All one has to do is remove the prosthesis, and do it all from scratch. One can look cool in their new sports car. Build it from scratch and now one looks lame. This is the real person under the prosthesis. Religion gives an inner strength without as much superfiscal prosthesis requirement.

 

Hello all,

 

Seems to me that Hydrogen Bond has got all the elements there of the answer. It is figured in the social science consensus that religion goes back some 100,000 years in the old stone age and as long as we have developed speech. In my research I figure that it exists to utilize speech in a way that binds us into a community with each having beliefs in common with the others and hence an ability to work together more efficiently. (see:Why atheism makes you mean - SciForums.com

 

Seems to me that the first religion was the belief that everything had a spirit. Later religions narrowed this down to several thousand gods. Finally, the last tier of them down to an almost monotheism. This meant that the social evolution of the human race was needing ever fewer "spirits" to "explain" cause and effect.

 

So, logically, this trend leads to an age in the future in which the whole world will be encompassed in a non-"spirit"-based ideological system that will unite us all and keep our crowding and being depleted planet from being fought over (with atomic weapons) by our different-believing, divided and mutually hostile nations and their societies. (see: the Atheistic Science Institute - home page )

[HydrogenBond]

I like looking at ancient religions, because it helps to profile people of those times so we can better understand how they thought. They were not us in old clothes, like in the movies. The easiest to explain is the psychological basis for polytheism.

 

The best way to see how it worked is with an example. Say you are an average basketball player. Even the average player has those games when they are on fire and can't miss. The difference between these two states of mind is the second involves better cooperation with the processing power of the unconscious mind. The trajectory calculations are occurring at an unconscious level. If it was conscious and subject to will that same person could do this on demand, every game. The difference is between will power for the average game, and an additional layer of unconscious affect that gives the extra edge, now and then.

 

The ancients were aware of this difference. That glory game came from the "gods" or the god of basketball. It was not subject to will but was subject to the whim of the gods, which is why it did not always occur on demand. That unique trick shot, that just happened on that glory game, came from the "god" and may later be remembered and copied for a willful edge. Their rituals were similar to modern visualization techniques where the athlete pictures making those difficult shots and tries to get in the state of mind similar to that game where they were on fire. The value of the god to the ancient was it helped to differentiate the unconscious affect, while the ritual was an attempt to trigger the glory day to occur again.

 

So if one had to go to battle the next day, you wanted to be at the top of your game with that winning champion attitude that has no fear. Simple will power and even training may not be enough, once the stress of the battle begins. Something always happens you don't plan for then you are stumped. One needed to get the unconscious mind on board for its stronger CPU so one is just reacting like an animal to any situation. The team may stay up all night doing their ritual war dance around the fire, almost in an unconscious trance state, until the god of war or the unconscious subroutine would be triggered. The team with the strongest god, showing the most favor, or their unconscious being pulled into the task, would be the team that is at the top of their game. They would kick butt. But sometimes, in the heat of the battle, the losing team may get their second wind, as their god or collective unconscious would be triggered, changing the course of the day. Now they have the CPU against only will power.

 

Polytheism had a god for almost any task or state of mind, with seeking favor from that god allowing that specialist to trigger that subroutine in the unconscious and get a glory day. The goddess of love ritual might trigger a viagra affect, which one can not do willfully but will happen every now and then. We need to take pills to do this. They would call on Venus for this unconscious blessing to active the needed subroutine. Again they did not know psychology, but they could differentiate the pure average will power state and the extra edge if the "gods" were favorable.

 

In modern days, one is not suppose to isolate the unconscious CPU but assume it is all ego doing this. One only has to consider walking, to realize the ego is only doing a fraction of this, with most of the processing done by the unconscious CPU. We only have to think the command line "walk over there". The ego terminal will access the mainframe which does the data crunching. The gods of polytheism allowed a way to add programs to the mainframe. If you ever wondered how Rome could be so advanced 2000 years ago, it was this CPU connection. That was lost in the dark ages, when that ancient gods connection was broken. What was left was the ego having to build up it capability apart from the ancient access. That was the dividing sword for the next stage of human evolution. We have reached a point where the ego is almost as strong as the combined affect of old, but the CPU is still there.

 

Religion still can access the mainframe, which is sort of the fear, since the affect does not always direct itself in the most positive ways. The ego can trigger a runaway train do to subroutines within the unconscious mind. This is the motivation that can drive even the creationists against all logic and odds. If we get rid of religion, it is only will power and less consciousness of subroutines. But these can still induced by culture ritual at some level but we just react without any way to differentiate. We do a drug to turn off the subroutine god if it is not favorable.

 

This does not prove or disprove god. It was about polytheism which was then superseded. They were not gods just subroutines. When I was younger I used to play with this programming language but I learned although the affect could be achieved these programs are not for the modern mind, since they tend to regress one to a different time. That is why religion has continued to evolve because of the needed software updates.

[Galapagos]

In my research I figure that it exists to utilize speech in a way that binds us into a community with each having beliefs in common with the others and hence an ability to work together more efficiently. (see:Why atheism makes you mean - SciForums.com

 

I already responded to this post here. A more recent study has been done by the same authors and had some interesting conclusions.

 

Massimo Pigliucci had some good coverage over at Rationally Speaking:

 

To begin with, they debunk the oft-repeated claim that religiosity increases charitability. It turns out studies that have made that link are entirely based on self-reporting, a notoriously unreliable source of behavioral evidence. When one looks into experimental studies of the issue, the picture changes dramatically. A series of “Good Samaritan” studies found that people’s actual (as opposed to self-reported) charitable behavior shows no correspondence whatsoever with the degree of religious belief. Secular people are just as likely (or not) to help someone in distress as are religious people. Interestingly, however, researchers have been able to show that a strong link between religiosity and prosocial behavior does emerge, but only when there is a self-reputation enhancing egoistic motivation: religious people are more likely to engage in prosocial behavior if they know that there is a good chance that their reputation in the group will be positively affected.

 

Perhaps one of the most interesting sets of experiments reported by Norenzayan and Shariff concerns what happens when people are reminded of a morally watchful authority -- religious or secular. In a control group that was not “primed” with a god-like concept, people behaved selfishly (most pocketed an available sum of money without sharing). When participants were primed with a god reminder, however, the modal behavior switched to fairness (they split the money). So, does religion trigger altruistic behavior after all? Nope. Here’s the kicker: people that were primed with reminders of a secular moral authority were just as altruistic as the religiously primed ones! It isn’t religion, it is the presence of a moral authority that does the trick.

[HydrogenBond]

One of the difficulties of isolating the affect of religion is differentiating religion from atheism, when both affects are blended. These affects are not on-off, but often a question of percentage.

 

In general terms, religion teaches a higher power beyond the ego, whether you believe this or not. The atheist is more self contained free to make individual choices. The result of this, is one can get cross contaminated affects that need to differentiated. The TV evangelist, who is there for the money, is using religion, like a product, for his own self centered needs. On the one hand, he can motivate and teach religion but he may also be enjoying the ego worship. It could 70-30 or 30-70, whatever.

 

As an easier example to see, say one was trained in biology, all the way to a PhD. They would be called a biologists and a scientist. To continue the scenario, their new found religion stresses creationism. Because they were brought up as a biologist, is their new creationism output, biology or religion? In this case, the label would be based on the output and not the labeling from their early training. Science would disclaim any scientific labeling, because the final affect is not consistent. They would be lumped 100% religion, even if they tried to do science to prove their point. In this case it may be 50-50.

 

We may have to fine tune to get percentages. If a pure atheist, in thought and behavior, accepted only the concept of god, but all other behavior is valid rational atheist, even with this 90-10 atheist ratio, he may be lumped 100% religious. With the more objective scale this person might be tabulated 90% in the atheist pile and 10% in the religious pile. I realize this is a harder scale but would give more realistic results.

 

The same can go the other way. Even if a person claims atheism but is into nature idolization, "mother nature", there is also a ratio here. They may claim and be lumped 100% atheist but still be 75-25. This will distort the curve.

[REASON]

Interesting. So what do you think, HB? Is religion harmful to society or not?

[charles brough]

I read the Massimo Pigliucci link. Trying to prove religion has no function by doing little projects like that is like trying to disprove the existence of "God." That is not the function of intelligent science. It is finding out what the function is, and Pigliucci did not find it. He does not say what religion is and what it is not, how and why if forms, what function it has served . . . All the research was on small samples of an immense picture. He stated that communes function only because members have a high investment! What would you call a hunting-gathering group but a commune? We had them every since we became human---and before. In other words, the research picks at little things but only confuses the picture. I wrote a book on this subject and cannot re-write it here.

 

The problem with our modern civilization and its society is that it is unable to stop nuclear proliferation and that we are arming up in old-religion divided nations and systems. We have to get a common system of belief that can supercede the old religions so we are not going to have to fight each other.

Our weak secular unity is failing to do that.

 

charles

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