The Science of the Benefits of Religion
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"Creationism is true if it will keep my kids off oxycontin."
(I'm guessing the poster was from the rural Midwestern US.)
I'm not saying I agree with that statement, but I can see where they are coming from. I found it to be one of the more profoundly honest and deep statements I've ever encountered.
Secular philosophy has failed to produce enough value for ordinary people living ordinary lives embedded in the ordinary matrix of threats and opportunities presented by every day life. Religion has done that for thousands of years. Sometimes it does that quite well and sometimes it does it very badly, but at least it tries.
Yes sometimes religion is full of shit, but secular philosophy and ideology is sometimes full of shit as well. One can find examples of both religion and secular philosophy promoting irrational thinking. I think things like antivax and Qanon can be blamed as much on postmodernism as religion, and I don't see any evidence that people who abandon religion automatically become more rational. Many just glom onto other forms of superstition or secular but totally insane ideas.
Go read some academic philosophy. The older stuff is deeply abstract, looking down at the world from orbit and drawing a lot of deep but distant conclusions. The newer stuff is completely impenetrable to someone who has not studied the subject in depth. Very little of it is relevant to someone working a regular job and trying to raise kids.
Speaking of kids... much secular philosophy barely mentions children at all, or seems indifferent to them. The fact that the central generative process of all organic life gets barely a mention in secular philosophy is to me a profound indicator of something very deeply wrong. It's like physics avoiding the subjects of electromagnetism or gravity and trying to make sense of everything else.
The marketplace of ideas is like any other marketplace. If your store does not stock what people need they will shop elsewhere. If you don't like where they are shopping, it's your problem for not producing the right products. The customer is always right.
To compare apples to apples somebody should start a church of secular philosophy.
I think this highlights that while the specific claims of religion (on the age of the earth, origin of species, existence of God, etc) may well be false, religion nevertheless can be a useful social technology.
But this is a problem, because:
(1) many people who might otherwise become religious adherents can't be expected to beleive what to them is silly bafflegab (they could always just pretend to, but that has its own costs too)
and (2) religions tends to be really keen that new adherents actually do belief in their belief systems.
One solution might be an idea Scott Alexander had, of separating true-with-respect-to-external-reality from true-with-respect-to-human-psychology (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/15/raikoth-history-religi...):
>Raikothin religion, sumurhe in its own language, recognizes two aspects of God, called Truth and Beauty. The existing world is a poorly ordered mishmash of these two aspects, whereas God is the two aspects artfully and perfectly combined.
>Truth includes everything that actually objectively exists, in the exact way that it actually exists. This aspect is mathematical, precise, and completely devoid of subjectivity. It is symbolically associated with winter, stars, the colors blue and silver, and all the hard sciences as well as math.
>Beauty includes feelings, dreams, hopes, personality, meaning. This aspect is numinous, charged with emotion, and fantastic. It is symbolically associated with summer, roses, the colors green and gold, and all the arts, especially poetry and especially especially music.
>This philosophy cashes out into a formalization of two different ways of looking at things, the Elith-mirta and Ainai-mirta (Perspective of Truth and Perspective of Beauty). The sumurhe religion itself is a perfect example. In the Elith-mirta, it is a useful metaphor for the fact that some things are easier to understand using mathematics and other things are easy to understand using native anthropomorphic intuitions, as well as a recognition that religion promotes psychic health and strengthens community ties. In the Ainai-mirta, Truth and Beauty are literal anthropomorphic deities (the god Elith and the goddess Ainai) who are worshiped through prayer and sacrifice and invoked for strength in times of need.
There are zillions of ordinary people living ordinary lives all over the world who are largely areligious, especially in industrialized countries so this doesn't seem very accurate beside coming off as somewhat condescending. Additionally, for most ordinary people over many of the thousands of years in question, participation in the dominant religion of the time and place was compulsory.
> Additionally, for most ordinary people over many of the thousands of years in question, participation in the dominant religion of the time and place was compulsory.
This is kind of a weird statement; for most of human history there was no line between religion and culture. So if participation in human culture is "compulsory" then I suppose you are technically correct, but then your statement is vacuously true.
The thing is, it won't.
Religious community members have far more reason to avoid acknowledging their drug problem in a way that might make that information public.
Remove "religious" from this sentence and it is still true. Now the question remains whether a religious community is better than other communities. I doubt it, because religion usually comes with a lot of extra baggage and can become outright dangerous.
I don't there's much, if any, evidence for this claim. Religion is in a steep decline in Europe but there's little evidence for more anti-social behavior. The American mid-west, where your quote comes from, in contrast is especially religious for an advance industrial area and it's noted for it's horrific social problem.
To be honest, I've never heard of the midwest referred to anything other than boring, which seems like it would be a strong contradiction to "horrific social problems"
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwestern_United_States
The top Midwest state is South Dakota, in 12th place.
There are deep and rigorously rational and ethical reasons to be against the current vaccine narratives promulgated by this administration. It's ignorant and disingenuous to dismiss the arguments as equivalent to the "vaccines are made of mercury, cause autism, the lord is my vaccine,etc" single digit iq cretins.
It got politicized because apparently both parties decided it was OK to fuck with America's pandemic response, because it justifies expansion of power and control. Never let a crisis go to waste.
Everyone I talked to believed in one or in most cases many conspiracies up and down the list. There was alot of anti joe-biden pro trump activity and a lot of Evangelical Christian crap (main speaker led everyone in Christian prayer).
Lots of Bill Gates and Fauci hate and lots of 5g is a world domination conspiracy.
I don't deny there may be some people only there about the mandate. But I've found that , that sort of person seems to be rare
Also, orthodox Jews are idiot conspiracy theorists? Yes, I guess so. People neglect to include Jews when they criticize religious people because they have their favorite demonized religion (Christianity) and somehow venerate the others.
On religion and social health I do have to ask which way the arrow of causation goes. Is Europe healthier in many ways because people are less religious, or are people less religious because they experience less crises and dysfunctions that drive them toward religion?
When someone's father just died of an overdose or their marriage is failing and their family is breaking apart, which secular philosopher would you recommend that they read?
I understood you as "entertaining the possibility" of your original quote. I don't think that you can take such a statement in terms of "big if true" without looking at a larger context.
On religion and social health I do have to ask which way the arrow of causation goes. Is Europe healthier in many ways because people are less religious, or are people less religious because they experience less crises and dysfunctions that drive them toward religion?
I don't think there's a strong arrow of causation either way. The US is very religious (for a developed nation) for it's historical/social and economic reasons and Europe less-so similarly. The one thing I'd say is that, statistically, there's little plausible evidence that "turning to religion" helps the US' problems.
When someone's father just died of an overdose or their marriage is failing and their family is breaking apart, which secular philosopher would you recommend that they read?
It seems half this thread has been riding the strawman of "secular philosophers". I could mention a variety of secular sources that make an effort to provide hope or reconciliation or whatever from the Sartre and Camus to the latest self-help, non-religious stuff claims to provide a lot.
But the real way these argument are faulty is that they assume religious approaches are somehow the tried and true approach for dealing with tragedy and that assumption is just unjustified. If we throw the gates open to discussion of how to deal with all of life's difficulties it's a big topic and one I'm going to claim I have all the answers to. But I don't want let the assumption "religious is well known for dealing well this stuff" just slip in. That's not my experience. I've seen religious people spend a lot of time blaming the people who've experienced these tragedies. I've seen people turn away from religion and not find it useful and I've with a variety of personal tragedies without religion and done just fine. That's anecdotal but it's mostly refusing to accept your presupposition.
Religion may be the opium of the masses but opium isn't usually isn't a cure for what ails it's average user.
Can you please give one example of secular philosophy promoting irrational thinking?
So, here is my example, up until the mid 90’s it was widely believed in the medical community that babies could not feel pain. Anyone who has ever spent time around newborns knows that these little humans can indeed feel pain. Yet somehow, secular men of science came to the conclusion that no, they could not, and what we thought were pain responses were just reflexes. Besides, the infant wouldn’t remember it. They would perform surgeries without anesthesia on babies up to a year old.
Part of the problem as to why this profoundly wrong notion held on for so long was that there really wasn’t a good way to quantify infant pain. Eventually some researchers finally got around to devising some kind of measurement and the science eventually came around. But for a good part of the 20th century an incredible amount of pain was inflicted because a scientific notion couldn’t be refuted by a non-scientific argument (of course that baby feels pain, just look at him).
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3523036
This isn’t a scathing indictment of secular values, but rather, a cautionary tale. Not everything needs to be proven via peer-reviewed papers. A lot of the human experience can still be asserted and known using unscientific or pre-scientific reasoning.
> there’s this pervasive notion that you can’t assert anything without some citation or study to prove your point
Yes. That's to prevent people from making false assertions. I can't believe you're arguing that people shouldn't need facts to back up their statements.
I know plenty of religious people also like the scientific method and empiricism, but probably only as much as where it won’t conflict with their beliefs. I’m sure a pious doctor would easily dismiss a paper refuting the efficacy of prayer. So to me, at least, this kind of scientific worldview is not really a feature of religious thinking, but the two can coexist up to a point.
I never said people shouldn’t need facts to back up their statements. I am trying to say that there are other ways to make assertions without having to cite peer reviewed studies.
And, that when people get stuck in a mindset of dismissing any idea that doesn’t have a citation to justify it, when subjects come up that aren’t easily studied empirically you end up with a blind spot. In my example the blind spot was infant pain. In my mind, any rational person would look at a crying baby and come to the conclusion that the little baby feels pain. But, if you demanded I bring a fact to back that assertion up, for the longest time I couldn’t provide you with one.
https://dictionary.apa.org/learned-response
Anyway, my point is that a religious framework isn't needed to have a gut feeling about something.
> (knowledge from) an ability to understand or know something immediately based on your feelings rather than facts
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/intui...
Scientific theories carry with them the premise that they are merely the best theory so far and are subject to revision as new data comes to light. Some may jealously guard the fruits of their labor against newer better understanding and people both lie and fail to do the proper due diligence but the process though flawed because it is carried out by flawed humans is fundamentally different and better.
Daniel Kolak claims that only one person actually exists (open individualism), and everyone is the same person, it is just that most of us haven't realised this fact yet. Graham Priest rejects the law of non-contradiction, and argues that it is possible for a proposition to be equally true and false, at exactly the same time and in exactly the same way (dialetheism), and has even suggested that these true contradictions may exist in the real physical world, not just in abstract thought about paradoxes. Nick Bostrom argues that we may be living in a computer simulation, and if we are not, that's bad news, it is evidence that humanity is doomed, or at least that our prospects as a species are not as bright as many hope (the simulation argument). David Chalmers argues that conscious awareness is a property not just of humans and (higher?) animals, but rather that everything in the universe is conscious, even inanimate objects such as rocks, stars, planets, galaxies, even cells and molecules and atoms and subatomic particles (panpsychism).
Are these ideas "irrational"? Rationality is in the eye of the beholder. But they are just as much "out there" as those of many of the great religious philosophers–whether Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, etc.
This is whataboutism to an absurd degree.
"Yeah, religion is not perfect, but atheism is not perfect either, so they're both on par".
No, they're not.
> and I don't see any evidence that people who abandon religion automatically become more rational.
They just abandoned an irrational belief, so by definition, they are immediately more rational.
What are the chances that this "meditation leads to kidness" result (with a total of 39 participants) would actually stand up to attempts to replicate it? The claimed effect size - "8 weeks of meditation resulted in such a large effect—increasing the odds of acting to relieve another person’s pain by more than 5 times"[1] - defies belief.
[0]: https://replicationindex.com/2020/01/05/replication-crisis-r...
[1]: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52853b8ae4b0a6c35d3f8...
They are both practices that can exist without mythology, sacred texts or believes of what happens after death.
Meditation and fasting are both integral parts of Sanatana Dharma (called hinduism by westerners).
Dont mix these with you perception of Christianity.
I fast. I meditate. I'm not religious.
One may be religious and not fast nor meditate.
While I agree with your main point, that they are equating things that and not the same, you seem to be to be making the same mistake. None of the things you list are required for religion either.
The paper was written in 2013, so it's not pre-registered.
The sample size of 39 is suspicious given its date. People became upset about junk papers two years before, so the authors should have known better. However, I would hesitate to draw conclusions about the integrity of the paper's authors, because each participant was paid $60, which makes expanding the sample size somewhat expensive.
The authors declared no conflicting interests, but I looked up the first author and he has major conflicts of interest.
The last author, DeSteno, is ranked very poorly at https://replicationindex.com/2021/01/19/personalized-p-value....
Combining these factors, I'd adjust the p-value from .02 to .45, if it were a pre-registered paper which you have pre-committed to read. This paper is worthless.
A problem of sociology that now extends to our public-policy-facing sciences, as well.
Societies with more beneficial religions would prosper and societies with less beneficial religious would die out.
It's thus no surprise that the religions that survived until the present day promote human survival. For example, it's no accident that most major religions heavily encourage their followers to have a lot of kids.
In that sense, while I would guess at minimum religion can't kill its host, it does from this logic not necessarily benefit the host. An aggressively missionising or crusading religion might outcompete one that is peaceful and better for its host. And even a peaceful variant (see original Buddhism or zen Buddhism) might evolve into an aggressive, exclusive and murderous ones (see Buddhist monks in Myanmar firing up and demanding the genocide of the mostly muslim rohingya ethnic group).
The people didn't act kinder because of Buddhism. The experimental setup primed them to act in a certain way.
I noticed looking at my family tree, that basically all the secular branches have below replacement fertility, while the more religious branches have above replacement.
Ironically it seems secularism is the ultimate proselytizing ideology, it seems it can't grow its own base through reproduction, it can only tempt the religious to abandon their religion and enjoy secular freedoms with fewer responsibilities (like fewer kids) - but it has to repeat this process at every generation to survive.
Also ironic that secular society holds up the theory of evolution as a reason we no longer need religion, yet it seems evolution itself favors the religious with more descendents!
I don’t really see the relation. Some major religions have a creation story that relies on spontaneous creation and found it really important to not consider anything else. But what is secular society proposing exactly?
The so called "secular society" will not be able to digest a moral system based on theory of evolution.
> There are definitely downsides to religion...
Pretty minor ones. The basic concepts are well battle tested good ideas. Saying religion is bad is like saying democratic politics is bad - no, it is great because even when horrible people are in charge the fundamental positive influence of the institution persists.
Well, except for all the violence committed in the name of various religions over the millennia.
Maybe it balances out, but I wouldn’t say it’s minor.
If the argument is that communism is just as bad as religions then sure I'll buy it.
Do see the difference between Catholicism as abused by various Spanish and English kings and Christianity.
Do see the difference between abusive cults that do things that the rest of us disapprove of and the rest of us.
Otherwise be prepared to defend Stalin, because he was an atheist just as much as the mad guys during the dark ages were Christians.
> But the assertion was that there has been much greater harm done by the religious _because of their religion_ than harm done by athiets _because of their atheism_.
How about:
"Much greater harm has been done by atheists in their fight against religions than by religious in their fight against atheists" ?
Or even: "Much greater harm has been done by atheists than by religious" ?
I'm purposedly keeping why out of the equation here. It might for the sake of the argument be because we Christians are dumber and not as able to commit atrocities, but the numbers are quite clear: atheists have killed more people than all religions together during the last 1000 years.
And, to be clear: It is not my point to prove that Christianity is right or Christians are better people. There are many atheists I respect a whole lot. And a lot of people claiming to be Christian that I don't respect as much.
My point is no one can collect all the bad stuff done by one side and all the great done by another and compare.
If you want be to be responsible for madmen "on my side" 500 years ago you should very much take responsibility for madmen "on your side" 50 years ago.
To play the devil's advocate, I'll point out that religion has also inspired acts of charity, large and small, for millennia, a not insignificant number of the greatest works of art and philosophy in history, and provided a sense of community and fellowship for humanity. For all of the atrocities committed in its name, suggesting that nothing good came of religion is inarguably false. We'll see where communism/socialism and atheism stands in a few centuries but, to date, it's hard to say their track record is as good as religion if we're being intellectually honest.
Also, it is often difficult to define what was committed in the name of a religion as there are often multiple sources of conflict. Anything that defines a person in any way can easily be abused by propaganda that seeks to split people into "us" vs "them".
I don't know how you could say that, considering the many horrible things taught because of or done in the name of religion over the millennia. Like, to use a recent issue, the biggest thing stopping gay marriage in the US at least was people's religiously driven belief that homosexuality is morally wrong.
I know many will say, "well it's only nominally driven by religion, people would've done [bad thing] regardless". But that's a clear double standard, if you don't also say that people would've done good things regardless.
I'm guessing the truth is both: sometimes people really would've done bad or good things anyway, the religion is just a cover. And other times, they really were driven particularly by religion.
Killing the american natives, the tutsi, the jews or the cambodgian intellectuals intellectuals were among the worst things humanity have ever done, and the religion of the perpetrators had nothing to do with it.
Terrible humans will use any rationalization to do terrible things.
Most muslim women in my country don't wear a hijab. However, men beating their wifes are from all kind of religious and non religious backgounds.
I now believe that religion is a reflect of the state of your society, not the other way around. People are racist, homophobic, intolerant, entitled, misogynist, and then, they sometimes use religion to justify that.
...and there it is. I literally addressed this in my comment already.
> Terrible humans will use any rationalization to do terrible things.
Sure, but you can say the same thing the other way: fantastic humans will use any rationalization to do good. Good people aren't going to suddenly turn into monsters if they don't believe in an All-Powerful Judge in the sky.
Those aren't the same thing, even if the demographics somewhat overlap.
In any case, I'm no fan of authoritarian socialism either, because yes, they did some really horrible shit in the name of their ideology.
But most atheists aren't communists/authoritarian socialists.
It's unfortunate that religion has those elements. I hold many Christian values, but I refuse to accept the afterlife, God, saints, apostles and other shit made up by the Church for their own material benefit.
Christianity has largely reformed.
Judaism is too exclusionary to affect the whole world.
Unfortunately islam is still being practiced like it was 1000 years ago.
In my view, early bands of humans who weren't following a charismatic leader, who weren't following a strong religious practice, were killed off by those bands of humans who did follow the word of a charismatic leader who assured their followers that the divine itself were guiding their decision making. Fast forward though millions of years of evolution, and of course we are predisposed to religion, to xenophobia, to answering some call of duty and dying in someone else war. Our cultist ancestors killed off anyone they came across who didn't follow with this program. This behavior of humans hasn't even gone away today, its so entrenched.
I also believe we need stories and religion used to fill that gap well, but with the advent of the modern era religion is losing out
personally as a mainly athiest and with a slight agnostic streak (btw I'm from the uk with a CoE upbringing) , I feel that most/ if not all religious people - from my personal experience - pick and mixes their relgion which kinda feels that it makes the whole thing hypocritical
I also see that almost all people really really really want to do the right thing and 'generally' believe in the golden rule of do not do upon to others, things/ stuff, that you do want to be done to yourself.
My grandma was deeply relgious and it it brought her extreme happiness towards the end of her life, so I understand it's significance, but still, she picked and mixed her believe to make her happy
Are Confucianism and American Civil Religion religions?
God, Gods or even believe in the supernatural are not necessary parts of religion, some religions place much higher importance on rituals than on their believe systems.
I don't think any religion actually puts belief systems anywhere below the highest level of importance, because any ritual is always predicated on a belief system that gives it meaning.
Of course, then it's no longer a religion. It's a social organization.
It seems to be quite possible to overdose on religion. Some religions do that as policy, as a form of brainwashing. The religions with mandatory prayer several times a day work like that. It's really hard to break people free of that brainwashing if they grew up with it. It's not the theology, it's the repetition. Both haredi Judaism and Islam use that approach to induce some degree of fanaticism. The Catholic Church, in previous centuries, was into that sort of thing, but has lightened up a bit.
I think it is pure fantasy that people believe Buddhism is not a religion. I think some people want to convert Buddhism into just philosophy because they want to take out the interesting content and drop the baggage (rituals, worship, etc.). Many are leaving Christianity with the hope of finding a spiritual community without all of the negatives of religion. However without the baggage there is no meaning or purpose and people will fill in the blanks with their own culture and religious upbringing.
That's a rather narrow definition of religion. Perhaps consider one suggested by Paul Tillich in his writings - "faith is not simply the will to believe" - such as The Dynamics of Faith and The Courage to Be
- concern with the nature of ultimate reality
- doubt is included in every act of faith
- courage to make a personal commitment
- the will to believe does not create faith
- venture: acting when the outcomes are beyond one's own control
Market-based corporations develop planned obsolescence, redundant marketing, feature churn, and style-over-function in mass market appeal.
Government bureaux tend to be adversarially structured against political adversaries, internal, partisan, or foreign.
Militaries are structured around political, cultural, and martial requirements, as well as an environment of infrequent but extreme risks. "Hurry up and wait", inefficiencies of troops and materiel, and actions which lack apparent consistency from the front-line tactical to the general headquarters strategic level are common.
And in religious organisations, you'll find that a number of social functions (see Max Weber on the sociology of religion) such as trust, group-cohesion, longevity, tradition, uniformity of faith and doctrine, etc., create structures and behaviours which don't make sense on first blush, but which do seem to have at least some logic when viewed at scale in both space, time, and population.
I find it interesting that it is religions and academic institutions which seem to be among the most long-lived. They greatly outlive virtually all commercial enterprises, and all but the most durable governments. Arguably cities might be another contender.
But I don’t see any way I can make myself believe that stuff.
Your life wouldn't be better if you you could believe any of that stuff, and no genuine believer treats religion or God like some sort of spiritual Xanax.
What I think the OP is getting at is the concept of universal human traits. There’s a big old list of them compiled by an anthropologist here: https://condor.depaul.edu/~mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm
The thing to note is that the golden rule could be a universal as much as murder is. Which is to say the golden rule is continuously reinvented by humans but not necessarily followed by them all. What factors in this are innate versus conditioned are opaque.
Which is not a helpful understanding of human nature at all, which is my point. What I am trying to argue against -- and maybe this is not the intent of the original commenter -- is the idea that the Golden Rule is an innate and inevitable expression of our nature, but say, the horrors of Communism are not.
Religion has been a major source of soothing and a major source of suffering for all of humanity's past. I think we need to overcome religion and move to a world where each can have their own spirituality - but as long as people follow religions that preach their own unique truthfulness (believe the pope, the Bible, the Quran, the priests, the sutras, ...) we will never get there.
You could remove religion and we'd still have the same issues. I don't think it's possible to solve them. The best solution is going to be a world where a long, happy life is guaranteed by forces outside man's control. This will likely alleviate a lot of the tribal issues we face as well.
> God's ways are mysterious
fashion. Any differing positions appear as attacks against the person's religion, which - when it carries sufficient argumentative power - can shake the foundations of the person's world model. This, in turn, prevents them from accepting the differing position because such events induce fear and shut down mental faculties, effectively putting a person in a fight or flight mode.
Furthermore, it prevents people from maturing and accepting integral parts of the human condition, such as the permanence of death, it provides a false sense of security that renders people incapacitated from taking meaningful action (God will find a way if God wills it), and finally gives a false sense importance and grandiose to puny humans who live in utter ignorance of their own insignificance in the medium (NB humanity scale) and grand scheme of things.
To reach the solution that you point to, society needs to accept that free-will is an illusion, and that is inherently incompatible with Abrahamic religions.
Yeah, other groups have this as well. I once had the temerity to observe that Bush did a lot to quell anti-Islamic sentiment by appealing to other people of faith in post-9/11 speeches. I recounted my own experience as a brown guy with a Muslim name living in the south in 2002-2003.
An acquaintance, a young white atheist lady, told me that I needed to “educate myself” about the “damage” that “Islamaphobia does to brown people in America.”
I didn’t even engage further because it was clear I was dealing with someone’s quasi-religious belief.
Everyone has belief systems and everyone’s belief systems necessarily include things taken as axiomatic.
No matter what a white man or woman does or how they feel about attraction or their gender.... He or she will never be brown. Sorry I'm not putting up with this intersectionality shit.
There is no action a white man or woman can take, not surgery they can pursue, that will make them brown.
The funny thing about pushing the ‘free will is an illusion’ argument is that it sounds exactly like a faith argument.
How is one going to ever prove that free will does not exist when most of us are running real time experiments during most of our waking hours.
For some reason, the universe gained consciousness even though it could have outputted zombies that would never argue whether they are not zombies :)
if i can perfectly predict what you are going to do before you realize what you are going to do, that would be at the least an indicator.
Can we do that? not at present. Is there research results that pushes that idea somewhat? Yes. Is it conclusive enough, no way.
But i don't think you can rule it out either.
The gist is that we have some world model that arises out of the structure of the brain and the chemical state of it.
Your mind doesn’t change because you have free will. Your mind changes because you have collected a sufficient amount of experiences that alter the state and structure of the brain.
You don’t learn stuff because you “decided” I will learn this and that and I will store it in my brain somewhere. All your learning is actually involuntary because as you accumulate experiences, your synapses get positively or negatively reinforced and that causes the learning. You may choose to study something but you don’t choose which exact information gets stored and where. Instead, when trying to recall something your brain probes its world model and tries to find the circuit that triggers the correct response.
So why would anyone argue that free will doesn’t exist? Because it gives people the opportunity to prove their world model, see the inconsistencies, experience new trains of thought and rewrite their brain.
But no person who is not open to the idea will ever get to accept despite mountains of evidence because for most people, the idea of free will is so integral to their world model, that any challenge feels like a threat to their very foundation, which causes cognitive dissonance, and the shut down of executive functions that process information logically.
Our brains have two competing circuits, one that tries to break the mould and challenges everything, and one that tries to be grounded and conservative. Cognitive dissonance occurs when the former is pushing the latter around but the latter has trouble coming to terms with reality and falls in denial.
I do have to admit that for a good while, accepting absence was not good for both my mental well-being, or my actions, simply because I could not find meaning or reason to do anything when no choice is ever my own.
Absence of free will however, implies that there is no locus of control at all. Things happen as they will, regardless of what any human believes, and accepting that things just happen and going with the flow is something that many eastern religions advocate for.
The consequence of accepting the absence of free will is that the person can stop dwelling about the past, because they were never in control and could have never done otherwise. The person understands that any action they "take" is conditioned on their brain's current state (ie structural and chemical).
This means that nothing is fixed, the person itself is not fixed in place because the person is a manifestation of the brain's state, which is constantly modified and revised.
This assumption then, even if wrong, enables a much stronger growth mindset, one that doesn't dwell on the past, and doesn't get stuck on misfortunes, or on a false sense of optimism.
By accepting that we lack free will, we "can" then probe our world model to see what makes us happy, ie what utility functions our brain has, which then gives us a compulsion to do things that make us happy or reach goals. This is because we understand that what needs to be done is change our brain's structure such that when the time comes, it will be in the correct state to achieve whatever it wants to achieve, and understands that achieving goals and pushing forward makes the brain happy - even if only momentarily - due to dopamine.
On a larger scale, suddenly inmates are not the evils society makes them to be, but people who have a screwed up brain and that need help, rehabilitation and normalization of their brain and structures so that they too can experience a decent life, and the events that got them imprisoned can not unfold again. Obviously this does not mean that the inmates get thrown back in with the general population (pun not intended), and that is because they are still in a space of states that cause them to be dangerous to other humans.
Obviously if you are person who was harmed in some way by this person, it's hard to hear and follow this plan. But as a society, we have to think in a more calm and deliberate manner, and try to make dispassionate decisions.
Further, if in the future, we find a drug for psychopathy, such that we can just give it dangerous people in prisons, and they become rational, healthy people, at that point it makes no sense to keep incarcerating them. Holding the treatment as a further punishment also makes no sense.
There is a point to be made that incarceration does potentially effect other people's drive to do bad things. Certainly their brain can be dissuaded by them seeing huge prison penalties paid for similar crimes they might do. But i'm not sure the correlation is all that high, and i'm not sure it's ethical to use one person to dissuade another. But that is a point that a society would have to decide on.
A treatment for psychopathy could be possible through magic mushrooms as they seem to promote neuroneogenesis, and restructuring of the brain in depressed patients, so that is a very promising angle, and a lot of further research needs to be done on hallucinogenics because they seem to have profound effects on our perception of reality.
With psychopathy, one of the major problems is with the mirror neurons of the brain, their absence prevents the person from being empathetic, so very targeted treatment would be needed, but in the end, it is better than suffering and rotting in prison.
In which case, would you rather be part of a healthy community, or a dying one?
However, I would like to point out that a non deterministic system does not imply a system where the agents have free will. The scales at which QM apply are many orders of magnitude smaller than those of individual neurons and I don’t believe Penrose has reached a meaningful conclusion with his work. And any deterministic system can be simulated as far as we would like and at any point we want, even if it is chaotic, if the initial parameter are the same the outcome is always the same.
I would also like to argue that consciousness, being aware of one’s own actions or probing some world model does not imply free will. This occurs simply because your brain was in such a state to perform such actions. The act of self referencing can be achieved with things even more dumb, like natural numbers, and I can recommend Hofstadter’s work here, like Gödel Escher Bach.
I suspect it would make it worse. People without a purpose tend to invent tribes and social status to fight for. School kids and prisoners are great examples. Their purpose is basically to passively exist while their physical needs are provided for by the system. Another example is neighborhoods with high unemployment and lots of people living on social welfare.
It's not just this but it's also the lying and attempting to pass off various myths, mysticism, dogma, theology and fairy tales as being true with no evidence, and the promotion of "faith" and "belief" as justifications for doing so. And before someone says it, yes, there are other groups besides religious groups that fall into these same self-reinforcing traps. For example a significant number of people still believe in witches and ghosts: https://news.gallup.com/poll/2380/One-Third-Americans-Believ...
Doubt among who? Religious congregations?
This is true of group affiliation in general, and may be innate to human beings:
> “The human mind,” Klein observes, “is exquisitely tuned to group affiliation and group difference”—so much so that, as soon as an affiliation has formed, the people who have affiliated with one another proceed to define themselves against an out-group. To make matters worse, Klein goes on, human groups compete less for resources than they do for social esteem, and esteem is zero-sum: more for you means less for me. We would rather “win” against the out-group and be worse off than be better off and lose.
* https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/ezra-kleins-why...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We%27re_Polarized
> but as long as people follow religions that preach their own unique truthfulness (believe the pope, the Bible, the Quran, the priests, the sutras, ...) we will never get there.
Except that some world views do hew closer to reality than others:
> Occasionalism is a philosophical doctrine about causation which says that created substances cannot be efficient causes of events. Instead, all events are taken to be caused directly by God.
[…]
> The doctrine first reached prominence in the Islamic theological schools of Iraq, especially in Basra. The ninth century theologian Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari argued that there is no Secondary Causation in the created order. The world is sustained and governed through direct intervention of a divine primary causation. As such the world is in a constant state of recreation by God.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occasionalism
> Secondary causation[1][2][3] is the philosophical proposition that all material and corporeal objects, having been created by God with their own intrinsic potentialities, are subsequently empowered to evolve independently in accordance with natural law.[citation needed] […] That the physical universe is consequentially well-ordered, consistent, and knowable subject to human observation and reason, was a primary theme of Scholasticism and further molded into the philosophy of the western tradition by Augustine of Hippo and later by Thomas Aquinas.
> Secondary causation has been suggested as a necessary precursor for scientific inquiry into an established order of natural laws which are not entirely predicated on the changeable whims of a supernatural being.[4] Nor does this create a conflict between science and religion for, given a creator deity, it is not inconsistent with the paradigm of a clockwork universe.
Historical trends seem to be going in the exact opposite direction. Individualism is sustainable to a certain point, but not when it becomes the default position of a society. All of the countries, belief systems, and ideologies that are succeeding today are running away from individualism. Whether that’s good or bad, is up to you.
What’s soured me on secular humanism is how the liberal revolution hasn’t made a big chunk of the population better off: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir.... I don’t think that’s just economic, I think it’s social as well.
> According to the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, 60 years ago just 20 percent of children born to parents with a high-school education or less lived in a single-parent household; now that figure is nearly 70 percent. Among college-educated households, by contrast, the single-parent rate remains less than 10 percent. Since the 1970s, the divorce rate has declined significantly among college-educated couples, while it has risen dramatically among couples with only a high-school education—even as marriage itself has become less common.
If you think about the marshmallow test of impulse control, a lot of us are those kids at the far right of the bell curve who could wait forever for future rewards. But what about everyone else? What if a lot of people need the threat of exclusion or intolerance to, for example, to not walk away from their parental obligations.
My in laws live in rural Oregon, and what’s striking to me is how dysfunctional their communities are. People might putatively religious, but liberalism has won insofar as organized religion has no power to police public morals. And what’s been the result? Not a social libertarian utopia, but dysfunction. My mother in law has teenagers just flocking to her house because it’s an island of stability in a world of mom’s boyfriends coming and going, divorces over trifles, etc.
My dad in the other hand comes from a village in Bangladesh, and they don’t have a fraction of the material comfort of folks in rural America. But what they have is Islam, and tight regulation of social behaviors, intact families, etc. They have social structures that help them make the most of what little they have, which is why I think they thrive when they immigrate to America.
I could make the equal assertion that religion turns men into sexual abusers of children (reference: the Catholic church). Are you comfortable with that?
Religion (speaking about Christianity here, but Islam is similar) prioritizes marriage and family within the traditional two parent structure. Organized religion provides a framework for pressuring people to confirm to that structure. Secular humanism, by contrast, emphasizes development of the self, and discourages social enforcement of moral norms.
There’s many studies on correlation between religious belief and say fertility rate. There’s also studies showing the correlation between vibrant religious institutions and various positive family formation characteristics. In particular, if you compare geographically and economically similar places, those with healthy religious institutions where people regularly attend church (say certain Dutch parts of Iowa) are socially better off than similar places where the religious institutions aren’t healthy. (Tim Carney has done a lot of research on this.)
To be clear: I’m not saying that religion is the only way to achieve these goals. My thesis is narrower: religion is a social phenomenon that have average people practice healthy behaviors. Educational elites who similarly practice these healthy behaviors (say non-religious but highly educated Asians in California) may not need the support mechanism offered by organized religion. But those same people underestimate or overlook the support networks they may have, or cognitive advantages they may enjoy, which average Americans may lack. (My great grandfather was an imam. My dad didn’t raise us religious, but we had the same moral framework, and our Bangladeshi community enforced the same behavioral standards.)
The reason this is important is the research being done now, for example by Raj Chetty, which shows that single parenthood rates is the single factor most highly correlated with low economic mobility.
> I could make the equal assertion that religion turns men into sexual abusers of children (reference: the Catholic church). Are you comfortable with that?
I think it would be more accurate to say that hierarchical religious organizations make it easier for sexual abusers to hide. And that’s absolutely true.
But that’s not the end of the analysis. Our society has a tendency to focus on injustice to individuals created by social structures, which is admirable. But we are often myopic about the benefits of social structures to the majority.
For example, we focus a lot on abuses within the Mormon community, which undoubtedly exists. But if you go to Utah you can’t help but notice these people have created a thriving civilization in the middle of an inhospitable desert, next to a lake that has no drinkable water. And heavily Mormon areas continue to thrive even as other non-coastal areas, which aren’t full of educational elites, are collapsing.
> Secular humanism, by contrast, emphasizes development of the self, and discourages social enforcement of moral norms
I don't think this statement is true. For example, secular society provides the legal framework that reinforces the social practice of marriage.
> single parenthood rates is the single factor most highly correlated with low economic mobility
Poverty is a much bigger driver behind low economic mobility. Poor people in the west tend to have less stable family structures, it has nothing to do with social norms and everything to do with money. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44127459
> But we are often myopic about the benefits of social structures to the majority
If this means what I think you are saying (please correct me if I'm wrong) that we should turn a blind eye to the injustices fomented by a big religious institution like the Catholic church, because overall they appear to do more good than harm, I would 100% disagree.
The Mormon example is a bit of a weird one. Utah has a higher GDP per capita but I'm not sure you can ascribe that to religious practices. It might be just because Utah is better farmland than (say) Nevada. https://countryeconomy.com/countries/usa-states/compare/neva...
Huh? The legal framework around marriage as it currently exists in the secular society of USA does exactly opposite. After no-fault divorce became an option, and as legally sanctioned child support system was set in place, incentive to get and stay married became much diminished.
> Poverty is a much bigger driver behind low economic mobility. Poor people in the west tend to have less stable family structures, it has nothing to do with social norms and everything to do with money.
If it was about wealth, the family structures in rural Bangladesh would be complete disaster, as the people there are much, much poorer than what passes as “poverty” in the States. Americans with income at federal poverty threshold enjoy material wealth that most Bangladeshi can only dream of, and that’s before you consider government transfers, which boost real consumption of poor Americans by 25-50% beyond what their wage income would allow them. Nevertheless, families in Bangladesh are strong, and families of poor Americans are highly dysfunctional. Why is it so?
Moreover, most poor Americans are poor precisely because their families are dysfunctional. In America, poverty among people who are married, have not had children before marriage, and who have a full time job (even minimum wage one) is very rare. It’s not poverty that causes dysfunctional families, it’s dysfunctional families that cause poverty.
> Utah has a higher GDP per capita but I'm not sure you can ascribe that to religious practices. It might be just because Utah is better farmland than (say) Nevada.
Given that agriculture contributes less than 1% to Utah GDP, I consider it highly unlikely to be relevant.
There is an untested assertion here that Bangladesh has better outcomes for marriages because the practise of religion is higher. Yet you should also see lower levels of violence against women in Bangladesh from all these happy families but it seems that isn't so. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2740706/
I'm not sure how far we are going to get trying to work out whether the chicken/egg situation regarding dysfunctional families and poverty in the US is causal. All we really know for sure is that poverty is a reliable cause of family breakdown.
We shouldn't force people to stay together because some religious folk think that piling further misery on unhappy people is OK.
This is very much factually wrong description of the position of women in America before no-fault divorce. In fact, I consider the suggestion that women in America completely lacked agency before 70s to be rather reprehensible.
> Yet you should also see lower levels of violence against women in Bangladesh from all these happy families but it seems that isn't so.
I don’t think anyone argues here that family life in Bangladesh is better than in America in all aspects. Violence against women is obviously bad thing, just as all violence is. It is a good societal goal to reduce violence against any of its members.
At the same time, this is only one of the goals the societies might want to pursue. Often, you might encounter hard trade offs to make. For example, is it better to have a bit more violence, but much fewer children raised by a singe parent? Or, is it better to give the members of the society more choices, at cost of the society failing to choose to procreate, leading to ultimate decay and dissolution of the society in a few generations? One of the problems in the secular society in the US is failure to acknowledge these trade offs, and deciding that more choice of, less violence towards, and more workplace empowerment of women as always preferable at all circumstances.
If anyone thinks it is a straw man, just look at how responses to this comment will claim that I want to enslave women and promote violence towards them, which I of course do not, but the mere suggestion of the trade off existing, and potentiality of choosing something other than liberal women empowerment is an idea completely outside the overton window of secular, liberal discussion within educated, professional community.
Suppose you were a stay at home dad married to a high earning wife. You then meet a new woman you find more attractive. Under most Western countries' laws you can divorce your wife for no reason other than you no longer find her attractive, and she has to pay you alimony and child support to maintain your lifestyle while you're dating your new, hotter partner.
What's the downside to you? Seems there isn't any.
It seems obvious that a system setup like that will increase divorces initiated by stay at home parents, and hence increase single parent households.
To be honest, I don't see anything wrong in your scenario. People fall out of love for lots of reasons, making them miserable by making it harder to split up doesn't seem like a particularly good solution to me. The scenario you've raised would have to involve a very emotionally shallow individual whom the other partner would be better off without anyway.
So you think half your future earnings is a reasonable price to pay to rid yourself of a shallow partner?
Is Shallow Hal doing the majority of the childcare? Do they need to find somewhere to live to perform that function?
In the general sense that a house husband should be treated like a stay at home mom in a divorce settlement, there is nothing at all wrong here.
Didn't you just write in another post above "There is only one acceptable level of violence and abuse and that is zero."?
You can test this, by looking at economic mobility rates for bottom quantile kids who differ along other dimensions. And it’s not just right wing people noticing that these days: https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/01/new-harvard-study-w...
> Of all the factors most predictive of economic mobility in America, one factor clearly stands out in their study: family structure. By their reckoning, when it comes to mobility, “the strongest and most robust predictor is the fraction of children with single parents.” They find that children raised in communities with high percentages of single mothers are significantly less likely to experience absolute and relative mobility.
This likely one of the reasons why Asian kids raised in the bottom 1/5 have a 25% chance of ending up in the top 1/5 as adults, versus 11% for white kids. Asians have by far the lowest rates of single parent families, across the income spectrum.
> Poor people in the west tend to have less stable family structures, it has nothing to do with social norms and everything to do with money. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44127459
Saying it has “everything to do with money” is a pretty remarkable assertion given that the single parenthood gap between classes is growing even as everyone gets richer in absolute terms, and is extremely low in countries that are very poor in absolute terms.
I’m not saying we should turn a blind eye to anything. But we should be cautious about undermining institutions and hierarchies that may be doing more good than harm because we’re only fixated on the harm. And education and cognitive elites should be especially careful not to project their own experiences rest of society.
I object to the notion that there is some acceptable level of violence and abuse we need to tolerate for the dubious good that any institution might claim. There is only one acceptable level of violence and abuse and that is zero.
You don't actually believe that because governments commit violent using their police and military and you accept that.
If it this turns out to be the case, we can’t just pretend otherwise.
Can we make a better religion that doesn’t depend on false myths?
I don't believe that religion works if it is sold as a series of fables containing practical advice encouraging pro-social behavior (even if that's how it functions). Religion works as myths that are true and make your hair stand up when you read them.
That is, unless we are going to conflate spirituality with anything even remotely related to existential ruminations.
In the crowds I run in people are primarily satisfied by a good think.
This is one of the pluses, not the minuses. There's nobody out there saying you can achieve the standards. But there are lots of people out there saying you should push yourself in the direction of the standards.
Not all directions are worth pushing in, and religion is actually really bad at identifying the good directions.
The idea that religion is such a big source of suffering throughout all of our history is one I stopped believing once I took a closer look at the actual nature of war, particulary how a country's elite is moving closer to war and how "religious" said elite actually is.
IMO the amounts of blood shed over millenia would have been the same under atheists.
And because today most of us are Atheists/Agnostics, and because most of these millenias' rulers weren't, it is our "agnostic hindsight" which follies us into believing that this suffering was all just caused by religion.
Sure religion is used as an excuse to start wars but wouldn't the fact that it works means people are willing to kill because of it?
The Irish Troubles
Muslim/Hindu conflict in India
Church-run residential schools in Canada and the US
ISIS
The suicide rate among LGBT youth
Rohingya genocide
The Taliban
Israeli/Palestinian conflict
The destruction of indigenous cultures by missionaries
9/11
- should I start on the 19th century?
The thing that's puzzling to me is that religion is supposed to have such a profound effect on society, but is utterly innocent of involvement in anything bad that happens. Granted it's very hard to pin historical events on specific root causes.
The interesting question is whether it is a transcendent ‘supra-rational’ belief system, e.g. a cheat code at life, because even assuming nothing matters, it makes sense to believe if you want to ‘be statistically more joyful’ (of course, some don’t want joy in their lives, so maybe it wouldn’t make sense for them?).
Without a religious structure, life has no set purpose. Sure, you can make a purpose for yourself, but it feels empty compared to a created, beautiful universe by a benevolent being who got lonely.
Personally, my values of making the world a better place for future generations while having some fun seem to do.
I consider my values to be more of a general goal than a purpose in itself and make no claims about them being objectively good.
Sounds like you have simply convinced yourself about that being true, my guy
Would you say then that you think it's more important for you to feel better than to believe true things?
> Without a religious structure, life has no set purpose.
Life has the purpose that you give it, there is no need for religion or deities for it.
I feel empowered by the fact that I give my life the meaning that I want, as opposed to that purpose being imposed on me by some supernatural deity whose existence has never been demonstrated.
And you know what? Even if at some point, the existence of such a deity is demonstrated, I will still choose to give my life my own purpose.
Believing in a higher power and believing untrue things aren't codependent. I believe in science, and the power of man's reason. None of that contradicts my belief in a higher power.
The question is if this generalizes to society as a whole. For atheists it seems like living in religious communities has severe negative mental health consequences causing them to die earlier, but atheist societies tend to live longer and be happier than religious societies. So in any society it is better to be religious, but you'd rather that your peers weren't religious because their belief hurts you.
The main thing is that they create a social group that you can't be a part of. But aside from that they might also blame the worlds problems on your non-belief, pester you to start believing, they might obstruct your ability to get healthcare etc.
1. As a provider of community. There are of course other ways to socialize with wider groups. Sports clubs, going to the pub, classes, that sort of thing. But it's a lot more interest-driven and haphazard.
2. As a provider of and enforcer for a moral code.
Here are some things I believe to be true:
1. A lot of people like being told what to do. This isn't necessarily unhealthy or bad. I also believe in decision fatigue. We defer decisions to others all the time;
2. Fear is an easier tool for keeping people in line than any alternative. There's a carrot and a stick with religion. The carrot is paradise in the afterlife (depending on your flavour of religion). The stick is partly eternal damnation but much more important than that, it's the fear of losing that community.
3. The majority of people only act in an ethical manner out of fear of the consequences.
Now looking at the political situation in the US, we have the rise of Christian conservatives. Just the name "conservative" is worth examining. It is of course derived from "conserve". The intent is obvious: it is to resist change, to maintain traditions and generally to keep doing things the way we "always" have. It almost seems like to be a conservative requires you to believe things were better in the past and changes are just making everything worse. At least that's how it seems.
It shouldn't really surprise anyone that religion and conservatism tend to be correlated but does one cause the other? I honestly don't know.
But what I find fascinating is that the desire to be told what to do combined with the mistrust in government fomented by religions (as in, the person is to put their faith in [deity] and the church rather than government) means these people are so easily manipulated.
Take the Covid vaccine (and masks). Every current and former president (including Trump), every governor, every Senator and all but a handful of Congressmen are vaccinated. I'm also sure every Fox News host is too. Yet these same vaccinated people are quite happy and willing to pander to whack job conspiracies as a means of control.
I find it ironic that the people who I'm sure genuinely think they're standing up for "freedom" by fighting against mask mandates are in fact least free because they're so easily manipulated.
So I guess my point is, I'm not sure these problems go away if, say, religion goes away.
Whether that is related is left as an exercise for the reader.
To me, it seems like a precautionary principle, let’s take our time and not throw the baby with the bathwater, things a changing fast, we must preserve what was good or we risk falling into some traps like communism/fascism (that where secular endeavours)
Ultimately, we need to find out what was great about our roots and also what need to change to face up modern problems.
A problem we have now, is that these stories were written in the bible which prevented them from being updated as they would have been in an oral tradition, and now the update is way overdue.
>forcing them to believe in an entity they can't see
People can't see the big bang either, at least at a young age. In my mind there's a pretty clear argument for God's existence from the laws of thermodynamics. You can define God to be whatever caused mass and energy to exist, and more foundationally whatever caused the laws of the universe to exist.
Take the best bits of religion, including purpose, structure, community, and tradition, but make it available for non-believers.
We even got so far as making the interview stage of Y Combinator:
https://benrmatthews.com/meeting-heroes-y-combinator-intervi...
During the interview, Sanderson (Sunday Assembly co-founder) had a brilliant back and forth with Sam Altman, but ultimately the idea didn’t stand.
I still think the ethos of Sunday Assembly has merit.
"The breath of Thine Holy Spirit inspires artists, poets and scientists. The power of Thy supreme knowledge makes them prophets and interpreters of Thy laws, who reveal the depths of Thy creative wisdom. Their works speak unwittingly of Thee. How great art Thou in Thy creation! How great art Thou in man!
Glory to Thee, showing Thine unsurpassable power in the laws of the universe
Glory to Thee, for all nature is filled with Thy laws
Glory to Thee for what Thou hast revealed to us in Thy mercy
Glory to Thee for what Thou hast hidden from us in Thy wisdom
Glory to Thee for the inventiveness of the human mind
Glory to Thee for the dignity of man's labour
Glory to Thee for the tongues of fire that bring inspiration
Glory to Thee, O God, from age to age"
I agree with him, but suggest a few further considerations. Wouldn't a truly open minded scientist be forced to consider that the real world impact of religious practice is evidence (not necessarily proof) for the causal effect of something that is outside of empirical measurement? Only a mind that has the improvable a-priori belief in physicalism could reject this possibility. A commitment to physicalism is not itself provable by science, and therefore is merely a religious belief, although it is disguised and subconscious most of the time so we don't notice.
And how does he think that we can decouple the "theology" of the religion from the practices? Could a hall full of strangers start swaying together like in the Jewish Shuckle, feel the same unity felt by the synagogue? What came first, the theology or the swaying? This sounds like a cargo cult mentality, where by imitating the behavior of the rich, you, too can become rich. Even if it worked a little bit, it's hard to imagine that it could become popular or last. I think team sports played in Stadiums is the best imitation we have so far, and even that is only sustained by a narrative ("your" team "battling" an "enemy" team).
It would be interesting to see if an idiosyncratic hodge-podge of different rituals cobbled together from various religions could ever work. As far as I can tell, that is exactly what New Age religion is, and that is far from impressive.
The way forward is to stop and re-think the blind philosophical pre-commitments of our day, which are a slowly eroding set of modernist beliefs from the Enlightenment era. This gave us a dualistic world view, with the complete separation of a "spiritual" and "physical" realm. As science is built to only examine the physical, it naturally produces confirmation bias that there is no "spiritual" and gradually we went from dualism to believing only in the "physical". It is this erroneous background assumption which leads us to misunderstand what scripture even means when it talks about heaven/earth and angels and other "spiritual" beings.
https://thesymbolicworld.com/articles/how-the-scientific-rev...
Religious thought is there for a reason. Science searches for explanations for observable phenomena. If you call yourself an "atheist" and announce your belief in "nothing", then you will shut yourself off from fellow citizens (complete with their own unique knowledge) who are inheriting rehearsed traditions. I've been taught to never tell someone they're wrong. Why would you want to become someone's ideological enemy? Perhaps there are fundamental, ancient gears turning if you embrace religion. When describing my complicated views about religion to my own "simple", hard working father - I was told "Well, I just go to church because everybody is there." You must speak their language so that they sing for you. Their willingness to profess their view of the world is a beautiful, valuable thing.
An honorably discharged American marine with a missing leg told me that Islam preaches punishment, while Christianity preaches forgiveness. Both of these concepts are necessary to steer a population, and both can be issued excessively. Forgiveness can mean more intimate personal data released to the priest in a confessional booth, and punishment can mean less corrosive civil behavior overall.
I've had hail strike my car seconds after sending the sarcastic chat message "the algorithms replaced the priesthood". I've had lightning strike dozens of feet away from where I slept in the middle of the night in a parking lot mere hours after watching the clip [0] of Christof demanding his team "DO IT!".
If you want proof, you've incentivized your industry to make my car constantly connected to an LTE tower by default. In a Faraday cage protected HDD somewhere, I'm sure my file is residing along with billions of others, courtesy of Pegasus (et al). Unless you are going to say "lightning struck the same place 4 times in a row." [1]
“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”
[0] https://youtu.be/wcMCS_6oung?t=248
[1] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/212586-google-data-cen...
Consider the situation: you want to get an abortion. Or you know someone who does.
I don't think I need to spell out the debate. But the secular world view is producing value for people who don't want to be afraid that they will spend literally INFINITY TIME being tortured. (And arguably it produces value for the religious, who do utilize secular services even when their religion forbids it).
The secular world view offers you freedom from judgement, both mortal and immortal. Many people find value in the freedom to not worry about superstition.
Be secular doesn’t make anybody free from judgement.
Virtually all the actual brain development happens very late in the game and almost all abortions happen in the first or early second.
I don't like abortion. Nobody likes abortions. Women who feel that they need to get an abortion don't like it either. It's a horrible, traumatic procedure.
But it's a reality that it needs to be legal, regulated, and safe.
It's absolutely critical to civilization that women have a choice to undergo an abortion if they choose to. It's their body, their life, their future. Nobody else's business, especially not the government's.
The government should never require them to carry a pregnancy to term in much the same way that it shouldn't force you to give an organ (and it doesn't).
I am not pro abortion, I am pro choice.
People opposed to abortions are not pro life, they are anti choice.
But if it's a choice between the mother's feeling / opinion and the baby's life, I would say the baby's life overwrites the mother's feeling / opinion. The reason is simple, nobody gets to decide to kill the other person just because he/she doesn't like it. And the existing of the baby is the consequence of the mother's behavior.
The only exception is the that the conception is a result of rape, in this case the conception is not a consequence of the mother's voluntary behavior. But I still struggle with this, because the baby does not become less human because it's a result of rape.
I don't think there is a valid choice between someone's life and someone's feeling / opinion. And remember, pregnancy is something totally normal for women to do. And many women do several times in their life. It's not a punishment, nor a definite suffering or torture.
Also the "nobody else's business" argument is wrong, murder is the government's business.
As for when is the OK time to conduct the abortion, this is the question for people who support abortion. I don't really see the point here. The development is a continuum process. I don't believe there is a definite cut point where the humanness changes from zero to non-zero. Even when it's a embryo, it's a human embryo living in its natural environment, with the full potential to grow to a full human. I also don't see the need of a spiritual concept like soul or whatever.
Typing the above paragraph leads me to think about lab-grown human embryo. Google leads me to this webpage: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02343-7 "Researchers are now permitted to grow human embryos in the lab for longer than 14 days." Of course I don't believe humanness changes from zero to non-zero on day 14. Also I don't believe it's ethical to experiment on some human to gain knowledge to save other human.
You are avoiding 100 percent of the actual dilemma. Nobody is OK with murder they disagree on what constitutes a human life. That is as they say the entire ball game which you have neatly sidestepped as if it were irrelevant. I suggest we return to it shortly.
> The only exception is the that the conception is a result of rape
This is a profoundly illogical position. It cannot possibly be OK to murder a baby regardless of whether its existence is the result of free choice of its mother. You say you "struggle with it" but how can you possibly struggle with the decision to allow infanticide? If its a person you can't kill it for your convenience.
> And many women do several times in their life. It's not a punishment, nor a definite suffering or torture.
Many people get kidney stones often multiple times. The fact that its natural doesn't mean that the experience isn't even when planned and desired torturous. Only the mother is in a position to make that judgment. Many people choose to live in small domiciles from which they only but rarely leave. This doesn't mean that for example prison isn't punitive. It is in many ways the denial of free exercise of the will over ones own person that is in fact punitive.
Let us return to the most important point.
At what point do you consider it a child and why? I think a reasonable person would agree that an unfertilized egg isn't a child but calling it a person 2 seconds after conception is very nearly as absurd. Any given egg and sperm has the potential to create life so potential wont serve as a dividing line. Some harking back to pre-scientific understanding would like to set the milestone at a heart beat but no matter how essential it may be to our existence a heart doesn't make you human. A mouse whose neck you snap in a trap to keep it from your larder has one.
There is one singular thing without which all characteristics that make you human are moot the brain. In fact one particular segment of the brain without which you would display zero meaningful human behavior, the cerebral cortex. Prior to the third trimester your brain is less meaningfully you than a squirrel. In the third trimester the surface area of the cerebral cortex increases by 30 times.
https://www.whattoexpect.com/pregnancy/fetal-development/fet...
You seem to want to sidestep this once again.
> As for when is the OK time to conduct the abortion, this is the question for people who support abortion. I don't really see the point here. The development is a continuum process. I don't believe there is a definite cut point where the humanness changes from zero to non-zero.
This is a complete cop out. As human beings we deal with situations where there is a continuum all the time. There are reasonable strategies to deal with such. Given a situation where one must pick a hard line in a complex situation where one side of the line is safe and the other dangerous you select a position far enough towards the safe side as to be certain to avoid negative consequences. This is how we are able to hire some, fire others, declare some doctors, others dropouts.
For example if nearly all fetal brain development happens between week 27 and week 38 if you select week 24 as the limit or for example week 14 by which 92% of abortions that are going to happen, happen you won't be offing what we would properly think of a human.
I hold that a fertilized egg is zero on the humaness scale. Agree or disagree? I hold that a baby viable outside of the womb is a 1. Agree or disagree? I hold that a fetus in the 27th week of development is still nearly indistinguishable from zero with a nearly nonfunctional brain incapable of consciousness or thought as we know it.
I believe that it goes from near zero to 1 almost entirely between week 27 and 38 ergo someone taking a pill to stop their pregnancy from progressing at 9 weeks is unambiguously moral.
I think the most interesting statement in your post is the statement
> in this case the conception is not a consequence of the mother's voluntary behavior.
This hints at a moralistic view as opposed to a logical one.
I suggest if you intend to defend the position that life begins at conception without benefit of the fig leaf of the fiction of the human soul you need to beg borrow or steal a different argument than life is a continuum so we can't possibly apply argumentative tools developed over thousands of years to crack that egg.
Also it is important whether it is a consequence of the mother's voluntary behavior, because if it is not then the human embryo would not have end up inside her body. So yes, it matters.
Thanks, I am just saying atheist can be against abortion. No more argument with me is needed.
lab-grown full function brain, would it be treated as a human?
lab-grown baby with brain development stopped at day x, would it be treated simply as a pile of meat?
adult after accident left with x% brain function, would it be treated simply as a pile of meat?
Just use your brain, you will see it is not that easy.
If the baby or the human had a sufficiently damaged or deficient brain it WOULD be a pile of meat. If they weren't treated as such it would be because of an emotional connection as opposed to a logical reason. This is all you've posited in this comment. Emotional situations designed to confuse the issue. I am using my brain, specifically to cut through the fog.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28656583.
I challenge anyone who disagrees to come up with a benefit that religion offers that cannot be offered by a secular organization.
Atheism is just ruthless "survival of the fittest", when push comes to shove.
Atheists do good because it's the right thing to do. You seem to do it because you are afraid of getting punished.
Or is remnant from religious generation? (parents programm kids that doing good is right thing to do because God says so. Certain generation starts omitting "God says so" part)
Never said "only because" of being watched. Being watched is an added measure.
> Atheists do good because it's the right thing to do
Many atheists, from personal experience, most don't really care to do good when no one's watching. Not saying it applies to all atheists, but for many. It's simply not rational. Why do good? For "karma"? So, the atheist has replaced "God" for "karma"?
We feel a natural need to help other people because we hope that other people would help us if we needed it to.
"Today, you. Tomorrow me".
We hold the door to strangers, help them carry stuff, or pick them up they have a flat tire, and none of that requires the existence of a vengeful god who will send us into a lake of eternal fire if we don't comply to his wishes. We help each other because we are a social species.
We do it because most people on this planet are good people who want to be happy and who want people around them to be happy.
Religion and gods are unnecessary for any of this.
You're describing sociopathy.
I would make the assertion that a religious person who is only "being good" because they are afraid of divine punishment is a good working definition of a sociopath.
You perpetuated it too (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28657137). That's not cool.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28655948.)
If you would please not create accounts to break HN's guidelines with, we'd be grateful. We're trying for something a bit different than internet default here.
Going door to door I have meet plenty of people who say "I don't believe in God, we got here thru evolution!".
So I ask the simple question which theory of evolution do they think is probably has the right idea.
Too often I hear, "Survival of the strongest." or "What? There is more than one theory about how evolution works?".
What is clear to me is that to these people evolution is a BELIEF and not something they thought of, it is as much a religion to them as mine is to me. Worse, I can study and agree or disagree with things I was taught, too often people are just blindly accepting because they do not want to put any efforts in.
I do have a Christian friend who believes that it was God who set the wheels of evolution in motion, but there seems to be little misunderstanding where I am (Melbourne, AU) about what Darwinism is or denial that it's a strong force at play.
> This may seem paradoxical, since atheists and agnostics have very low levels of religious commitment and yet score very well on the survey questions. However, atheists and agnostics account for a relatively small share of the total number of people with low levels of religious commitment; 4% of Americans describe themselves as atheists or agnostics, while fully 35% have low religious commitment. Atheists and agnostics answer an average of 20.9 questions correctly, compared with an average of 15.4 correct answers among people with low religious commitment who do not describe themselves as atheists or agnostics.
Btw survey questions them selfs are a bit nitpicky.. (who cares if jesus realy changed water into wine or if that was just symbolic)
Original article: https://www.pewforum.org/2010/09/28/u-s-religious-knowledge-...
Further to that, some religions also heavily use traditions that don't appear in the bible at all. Catholics, for example, are meant to believe that the sacrament literally turns water and wine into the flesh of Christ. As in, it's actual flesh and blood (Transubstantiation).
So either Jesus was a walking breadstick or Catholicism as it is currently practised is obviously wrong.
There are so many varieties of Christianity based on "those other christians are definitely wrong" that I guarantee you somebody cares about those distinctions.
Whereas for religion, there is nothing to point to other than blind faith.
The canard that every individual has to maximally recapitulate the entirety of hundreds of years of human discovery is just absurd. Trust exists at all levels of human intellectual discourse.
If you need a complex surgery, would you like to go to a doctor or a priest?
Because knowledge has to be justified in order to be knowledge. Universities produce justifications (in form of repeatable experiments, studies, proofs, etc.), churches don't.
The difference between a belief of religious person and say a scientist is that the former asks you to trust them on blind faith while the latter asks you to trust them by proving they have more control over something than you do.
Faith in religion is a completely different thing to believing the scientific method works. Science is self correcting. Religious faith is, by definition, the surrendering of any and every impulse to question the faith to a higher earthly authority. Those earthly authorities are notoriously unreliable (c.f. history of the Jehovah's Witness "end of the world" scenarios).
I know this is hard for religious people to understand, but if you have no belief in religious deities you can't just magic it up out of nowhere. There are people like me who simply can't believe in gods. We just aren't wired that way. I've had well meaning religious folk explain to me that I have apparently "hardened my heart" against (their) god and I need to stop doing that and he will sort it out but it simply isn't true
This certainly hasn't stopped people like me being involved in religions but it makes it a bit...difficult. This attitude that somehow the atheists in the community "do not want to put any efforts in" is wrong, plain and simple. There is no effort we can put in.
Well, that's not quite true. I'm an atheist, and I run a weekly Bible study (which has lately morphed into more of a general theological/philosophical study and discussion group) [1]. Religious traditions are worth studying even if you don't believe in them, if for no other reason, than as a way of better understanding the thought processes of people who do believe in them.
[1] https://www.meetup.com/Bible-Study-for-Skeptics-Agnostics-an...
It turns out that you actually can induce subjective experiences in yourself that I believe are similar to what religious people describe as "feeling the presence of God". It's an interesting and worthwhile exercise (though not what we do in my study group, that's a more academic format). But it's worth doing at least once in your life. It actually feels pretty good, not unlike taking certain psychoactive drugs.
It's impossible to understand western literature without a decent working knowledge of the bible (although choosing which one is problematic in itself), it's useful for that alone.
However, studying the bible made me less religious, not more.
Yep, same here.
It sounds like you've already decided that you will never be a deist, and so you never will. How is that different from religious belief?
This is not at all accurate; the faith people express in science is generally identical to the faith other people express in religion, with no difference in the reasons, motivations, or justifications offered.
It is true that science is often self-correcting. The same is true of religion - you don't hear much about the Xhosa cattle-killing cult anymore.
I think this is fundamentally incorrect. People believe in science because it produces results in the form of correct predictions and devices.
But people make no distinction between believing in science in the same area where it makes correct predictions, and believing in "science" in an area where it has nothing valid to say, because it makes correct predictions somewhere else.
To most people, science is just a word, and they support it because they know that that is the right thing to do.
> In Indonesia, the Kantus of Kalimantan use bird augury to select locations for their agricultural plots. The anthropologist Michael Dove argues that two factors will cause farmers to make plot placements that are too risky. First, Kantu ecological models contain the Gambler's Fallacy and lead them to expect that floods will be less likely to occur in a specific location after a big flood in that location (which is not true). Second [...], Kantus pay attention to others' success and copy the choices of successful households, meaning that if one of their neighbors has a good yield in an area one year, many other people will want to plant there in the next year.
> Reducing the risks posed by these cognitive and decision-making biases, the Kantu rely on a system of bird augury that effectively randomizes their choices for locating garden plots, which helps them avoid catastrophic crop failures.
> The patterning of bird augury supports the view that this is a cultural adaptation. The system seems to have evolved and spread throughout this region since the seventeenth century when rice cultivation was introduced. This makes sense, since it is rice cultivation that is most positively influenced by randomizing garden locations.
> Whatever the process, within 400 years, the bird augury system had spread throughout the agricultural populations of this Borneo region. Yet it remains conspicuously missing or underdeveloped among local foraging groups and recent adopters of rice agriculture, as well as among populations in northern Borneo who rely on irrigation.
> This example makes a key point: not only do people often not understand what their cultural practices are doing, but sometimes it may even be important that they don't understand what their practices are doing or how they work.
this is so wrong, it's "not even wrong".
It's always important to determine why something worked or didn't. If we did not do that, we would never be able to produce enough food to feed ourselves. Ignorance and blind adherence to nonsense is what creates famines in the first place.
Salt, fat, cholesterol, fructose, etc have each gone through several wild swings in good for you / bad for you. The science is entirely unsettled, yet forms the backbone of many doctors' recommendations.
Then, when the science gets taken in by mainline cultural space, it gets blown up into all sorts of utterly nonsensical, mystical woo-woo. Somehow moderation turns into paleo, vegan, fruitarian, or alkaline based diets.
People shoot wheatgrass or fast on lemon juice. All sorts of vaguely scientific sounding bullshit that isn't backed up by actual data.
Further, using statements like "entirely unsettled" in reference to science is a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works. It's not "settled" like religious arguments where everybody agrees to a particular interpretation of the holy book. Science either works and we make stuff with it, or it doesn't and it gets tossed away.
If you want to argue in that fashion, I'd like to point out to you that praying doesn't always work, so all religions must therefore be bunk.
Do you mean Lamarckism vs Darwinism? The correct answer is that Lamarckism is wrong.
Do you mean gradual change vs punctuated equilibrium or similar? That's not a "which theory of evolution", which is why people are confused by your question.
It really comes across as a classic "confuse people with trick questions and then try to inject religion into them while they're distracted" tactic. I'm glad I'm done with that sort of thing.
Also, belief in evolution is great, faith in evolution is not. Belief != faith, and religious people need to stop conflating them. If someone came up with an alternate theory for how we got here that explained all of the evidence better, I'd have no trouble believing it, because I don't have "faith in evolution" or any such thing.
Sure but nonbelievers experience the same thing with believers. I was asking a Christian about his interpretation of the two creation stories in Genesis. He didn't even know there were two. Most Christians don't.
And they always shut down when I want to discuss in detail the possibility of mistranslation changing their understanding of God. They seem to not understand that it's possible to lose meaning or change meaning when translating from one language to another. Even if you try hard not to.
I am totally respectful in these interactions. I'm not ambushing them with questions... I just genuinely want to learn something from someone who apparently should have deep and intimate knowledge of Christianity... and it's always disappointing.
Some things just have to be taken on faith because life is too short to get a PhD in every subject, but I sure hope the world continues to move towards evidence-based rather than magic-based foundations of default belief.
Evolution is a fact. It has been demonstrated over and over again, is observable, and has predicative powers.
Religion has none of these things, and your particular religion is well known for being absolutely traumatic for people who follow it and even more so for people who leave it.
Everything you consider to be true is a belief. That's the very definition of a belief: beliefs are the things you consider to be true. So you saying that this is a belief to them carries little information.
One has factual benefits the other we still have no clue about
I'm waiting for the follow up study after 520 weeks, where a certain percentage of them become radicalized zealots.
Sure, you get the hemming and hawing about evolutionary hunter-gatherer behavior and other various strains of pseudo-scientific bullshit, but all of those are equally as faith-bound as religion given that there is no possible way to devise reasonable (or ethical) experimentation on how past humanity might have evolved various senses of "right and wrong" or even a capacity for wanting meaning.
It's entirely rational to glean from religion what continues to influence a large portion of our success and stop pretending like science is our new "one true god" and all of the churches need to be burnt to the ground in favor of some absolute separation of church and state.
What past humanity? There are hunter gatherer bands roaming around the Amazon right now. They seem to exhibit at least as much "upstanding behavior" as the evangelicals sloshing around the US.
Scandinavia is fairly secular and has many nice attributes, the US is off the charts in terms of religion, violent behavior, gun deaths etc. I don't see how irrational beliefs about burning bushes, virgin births, walking on water, resurrections result in "upstanding behavior". If this were the case evangelicals would be the epitome of "upstanding behavior", but they are not.
Considering how violent are cultures of hunter-gatherers, I’d say that they are much less morally upstanding. But, they provide a good data point here: the hunter gatherers are typically highly religious. It’s just their religions are pretty bad at creating positive societal outcomes. Not all religions are created equal in that aspect.
> Scandinavia is fairly secular and has many nice attributes, the US is off the charts in terms of religion, violent behavior, gun deaths etc.
If you look at the reality instead of aggregated statistics and packaged narratives, you will find that gun deaths in US very much are not of the charts in places where religiosity is off the chart. If anything, these two things are negatively correlated: the more religious a place is, the fewer gun deaths (despite no scarcity of firearms among the religious).
WW2 killed 75 million people. Tell me again, who has the more violent culture?
Normally in the US it's about 1 in 17,000 according to the CDC
https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/datasources/nvdrs/ind...
In Sweden its more like 1 in 83,000
Ancient stats are a little hard to come by and different groups were more or less warlike losing between an estimated 1 in 100 to 1 in 3000
Big events like WW2 are very noticeable but ancient people were in fact very violent because not shockingly people are violent.
As importantly is the context in which violence appears in ancient society driven not my large scale political movements but by resource scarcity. A continually expanding human population in the absence of modern civilization would not have achieved present population size but they would certainly have continued to grow leading to greater scarcity and increasing conflict. That is to say that they were more violent on average already and they would be more so in the modern context.
Leibingsraum was explicitly part of the reasoning for invading France.
I know it's a natural instinct to defend modern living as more peaceful, and to some extent that may be true. But modern society has also created atrocities that ancient people could never dream of.
We can debate what off-the-chart means, but when we cross-reference the states with the highest gun death per capita (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/...) with the states that are the most religious (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/02/29/how-religio...), we find a lot of overlap.
Correlation is not causation, but I can't see how we can claim these two are negatively correlated.
Look, I’ll make this straight, because there is a lot of willful ignorance here. Overwhelming majority of gun homicides happen in large cities, where the religiosity is low, and very few in suburbs and rural areas, where religiosity is high. Moreover, people committing those gun homicides are very rarely practicing religious people, and neither are most of their victims.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/26/black-men-a...
Just no.
Normal human values were co-opted by various religion-based memeplexes to justify themselves.
> a purely scientific worldview produces no inherent sense of meaning, morality, or right v. wrong.
Absolute morality does not exist. Fundamentally, morality is selfish (i.e. relative).
I don't murder someone because I don't want to live in a society where I myself can be murdered. That's what all the religious bloviating boils down to. That's it. That's all that really is.
>Claims to have a statement about what morality ultimately boils down to.
Pick one bro. You can't even stay consistent within your own supposedly relative belief system. Morality clearly cannot boil down to some simple statement if its truly relative.
Also, I'm not aware of record of hunter gatherer societies that didn't have religion. Religion is probably something baked in. At least I know that it's baked into me, so I run with it and enjoy it. It's possible to be both rational and religious.
Except the person who is religious will always have a limit to their rationality, because they choose "believe in magic" instead of "knowing and not knowing".
I do not agree. Being religious does not necessarily mean that you will be "magic" instead of rational. One who is rational can do and figure out things fully rationally, independently from the relgious things and from "magic", just as much as you can speak two languages without having to speak both languages at the same time, or liking a book without having to believe that it is a true story.
Whenever you can shut down any discussion with "god willed this" or similar then rationality will suffer. How do you get around that problem? I feel the only way to fix that is to remove that ability from them, ie state that God is just nonsense and they can't just invoke his name to shut down discussions since people don't care about God. People are still dumb even without God, but they seem a bit less dumb.
Yes, but being religious does not automatically mean that you have to shut down any discussion with "god will this" (although some religious people are, not all religious people are).
There are less rational people among both religious and nonreligious. (Although, the nonreligious will not say "God willed this", that does not necessarily mean that they will not say a different answer that is just as worthless as the religious answer.)
The problem is that their religious peers would take their side, find "good willed this" to be a more reasonable argument than the facts, and thus they as a group wont accept the truth. Without organized irrationality they wouldn't create a support group of irrational peers to back up their irrational arguments so in most cases they would have to adapt. And such irrational support groups doesn't often materialize randomly, religion absolutely helps them. There are a few of those who aren't religious, but I condemn the irreligious ones just as much, Homeopathy is just nonsense etc.
So for me the rest doesn't matter, if an organization is first and foremost organized irrationality I'll argue that the organization is bad. Maybe you don't use it that way, but others do, and that hurts everyone.
However, IMO morality has a deeper source than organized religion. Human beings experience pain, hunger, will to live, and so on. We want to live in a society that allows us to thrive and we can deduce that if we were to kill people randomly then the same could happen to us. This applies to any other moral issue as well. This is social contract theory.
Edit: prior to the development of this philosophy along with liberalism, many people (in the West) were still Christian, but I'd say society was constructed in a less moral manner.
Toxicity on social and other online media, the prevalence of scams in online marketplaces, the willingness of people (even on HN) to be employed by businesses that cause environmental and social ills as an externality, etc. all point there being a very limited radius of innate human morality, even among modern civilization. While that isn't to say that religion is a good solution, it's hard to argue that some powerful mechanism to reinforce feelings of human fellowship and community at from the individual level to the societal level wouldn't be beneficial.
Morality can be bootstrapped from selfish means. I don't need religion to understanding that punching someone in the face may end up with me getting punched in the face, and I don't like getting punched in the face. Primates exhibit similar behaviors without religion and merely having a developed sense of cause and effect.
God wants to free His people from Egypt (why aren’t all people his people if he created them?) so he tells Moses to tell Aaron to tell Pharaoh that if he doesn’t free the Israelites God will punish the Egyptians - and eventually kill a bunch of kids.
Wouldn’t a better solution be to just teleport the Israelites to the Holy land and not kill children? Or possess Pharaoh and make him issue a decree. Put yourself in Gods shoes and see if you can’t come up with a better solution that doesn’t involve a bunch of innocents dying.
Ditto Noah’s arc, sodom and Gomorrah. Even in the New Testament he tells Joseph to hide from Herod to avoid the slaughter of the innocents but doesn’t stop the innocents being slaughtered.