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Comment by amcoastal | Hacker News Reader

While your points are good your last paragraph projects a lot of weaknesses onto your readers. Do you believe you're the first person to come up with these points and realize them? Or perhaps that someone could have taken an opposite approach of yours -- moving from very religious to non-religious and can see the same behaviors? And then you continue to assume the only way forward is to perpetrate that behavior.

All while claiming other people don't have the cognitive tools you do. I'm amazed this comment didn't get downvoted.

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> while claiming other people don't have the cognitive tools you do. I'm amazed this comment didn't get downvoted.

it's the HN psuedo-intellectualism. Most HN readers tend to believe in their above-average intelligence, and that their view point comes from a place of rationalism and superior intellectual capability to analyse the world.

I myself, also fall into this category.

What bonafides are needed to think ?

Being religious isn't a weakness, it is an inevitability. A human mind is very limited and not up to the challenge of understanding everything - people have to accept most of their knowledge through social proof. Once social proof is involved religious-looking structures evolve rapidly. It isn't a matter of having or not having cognitive tools, it is that the tools necessary to avoid faith and community can't exist. At least without a level of change that shatters what it means to be human.

That is a bad definition of religion. I will accept a field of study's conclusions in the absence of time myself to investigate. However, if it turns out that field is incorrect (say with the reproducibility crisis), then I won't "have faith" and believe anyways. In other words, belief != faith, and I'm willing to update my beliefs based on new evidence.

That is hardly a strong argument, religious people can do all that too and still be highly faith based.

I don't think the GP's intent was to project his own superiority. Rather, if we're unable to use mythologies as a metaphor for the human experience, that is, for our self-expression, we are not as smart nor as strong as we fashion ourselves to be.

I read the last paragraph analytically, as in the Sapir Whorf hypothesis. It can be difficult to identify that one is in a religion if one assumes that it will call itself one. In this case, missing the “cognitive tools” could be a precise way of describing the shortcoming.

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