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Comment by sjbr | Hacker News Reader

BITE = Behavior Information Thought Emotional Control

All cults use that but all religions do too to a certain degree.

No sane religion will allow members that can think for themselves to do an independent research and decide if they want to join or not. That would remove the easiest prey, children. Children have an implicit trust in his parents so religion will hijack that and insert themselves at the center of their lives. As Paine said: All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

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I can't speak for other religions or even Christianity as a whole due to its breadth and differences of practice, but there were and are certainly those in the Christian church who independently reasoned their way to an understanding of the existence of God and a corresponding faith in Christ and encouraged others to do the same.

See, for example, the history and works of Francis Schaeffer and C.S. Lewis. I also think the work of John Frame on epistemology might reveal some of the underlying presuppositions seemingly evident in the above comment.

I'm not making any other assertion about their works or perspectives on religion, faith, or lack thereof. I point it out solely as a counter to the above perspective, which is a bad caricature at best.

If ideas of Christ/God/etc. were truly independently reasoned into by someone never exposed to Christianity (as anything else would not satisfy any definition of "independent"), it would really be a miracle. However, it is much more likely to be a post-rationalisation.

Yes, conceptually similar philosophical ideas could be reached from first principles, but those would not come in the same exact packaging as Christianity (and it is packaging that makes many religions not that different from cults preying on vulnerable people).

You can't independently verify that a religion is valid. There's no experiment that will demonstrate the existence of gods, let alone establish what a god would supposedly want you to do.

I don't understand why a god would care what a human does, in any case, especially in the case of an all-knowing god who would already know every detail of what the human will do before they are even born, or an all-powerful god, who wouldn't be emotionally hurt by the choices a human makes.

> You can't independently verify that a religion is valid.

The same thing is practically true for almost everything we believe. For the most part, we blindly trust the evidence of our senses and "authority", whether that be the "experts" or the social consensus or something else.

And even for the things we can demonstrate, it ultimately relies on the assumption of unprovable axioms.

> I don't understand why a god would care what a human does, in any case, especially in the case of an all-knowing god who would already know every detail of what the human will do before they are even born, or an all-powerful god, who wouldn't be emotionally hurt by the choices a human makes.

I don't see why the qualities and motives an all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the universe would be fully understandable by limited human reason. I see this kind of argument a lot, but I don't get it - the same thing is ultimately true even of natural things, Nietzsche has a great passage on this.

> It is no different with the faith with which so many materialistic natural scientists rest content nowadays, the faith in a world that is supposed to have its equivalent and its measure in human thought and human valuations-a "world of truth" that can be mastered completely and forever with the aid of our square little reason. What? Do we really want to permit existence to be degraded for us like this-reduced to a mere exercise for a calculator and an indoor diversion for mathematicians? Above all, one should not wish to divest existence of its rich ambiguity: that is a dictate of good taste, gentlemen. the taste of reverence for everything that lies beyond your horizon. That the only justifiable interpretation of the world should be one in which you are justified because one can continue .to work and do research scientifically in your sense (you really mean.mechanistically?)-an interpretation that permits counting, calculating, weighing, seeing, and touching. and nothing more that is a crudity and naivete, assu~ing that it is not a mental illness, an idiocy. Would it not be rather probable that, conversely, precisely the most superficial and external aspect of existence-what is most apparent, its skin and sensualization-would be grasped first-and might even be the only thing that allowed itself to be grasped? A .. scientific, interpretation of the world, as you understand it, might therefore still be one of the most stupid of all possible interpretations of the world, meaning that it would be one of the poorest in meaning. This thought is intended for the ears and consciences of our mechanists who nowadays like to pass as philosophers and insist that mechanics is the doctrine of the first and last laws on which all existence must be based as on a ground floor. But an essentially mechanical world would be an essentially meaningless world. Assuming that one estimated the value of a piece of music according to how much of it could be counted, calculated, and expressed in formulas: how absurd would such a •'scientific" estimationof music be! What would one have comprehended, understood,grasped of it? Nothing, really nothing of what is "music" in it!

Well, there are two traps here. The first is to say that we can't trust anything, not even what we see with our own eyes, since for all we know we may be living in a fabrication. In that case, you'll probably just die of starvation, since you have no reason to believe that you have a body and need to eat.

The second trap is to say that everything just comes down to which authority you believe, and it's all just a matter of aesthetics, or personal taste, or perhaps you'll just stick with whatever you were indoctrinated with as a child. In that case, it's an arbitrary choice whether you want to be a Christian, a Moonie or a QAnon follower. There's no right or wrong, valid or invalid. The demands of religions seem suspiciously human-orientated from what I've seen: it's far more likely that they are demands from various individuals or groups about how other people should live. I see no sign of any involvement by an "all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the universe".

I'll stick with science, regardless of what Nietzsche may have said, as the only option that makes any sense for flawed human nature. Science can be wrong, but it's based on generally repeatable observations, and is ultimately self-correcting: it's the best we can do to understand the Universe.

Scientific worldview is also great in the sense that it allows for openly admitting that the "beliefs" can be wrong, and if they are, they can be openly challenged. No belief system that's guided by a central authority can allow that.

Faith is belief without evidence or belief in the presence of contradicting evidence - people don't "reason their way" into faith, they rationalize. C.S. Lewis is popular because he uses humanist principles to spin a fundamentally authoritarian, controlling religion into something easier for the modern mindset to rationalize. The GP's perspective is extremely accurate - child indoctrination is religion's primary mechanism to maintain it's power and control.

To be blunt, you either haven't read cs Lewis or are being intentionally deceitful. Cs Lewis's arguments are explicitly anti-humanist.

Dostoesvsky and lewis changed my life and brought my from a mild agnosticism to traditional Catholicism and my life has never been better.

Of course Lewis isn't explicitly humanist - Humanism is a "worldly" movement, and we can't let the "evil", "fallen" world take credit for anything good. I would be more inclined to buy Lewis' depiction of the Christian god if it didn't clash with all of Christian history up until, serendipitously, humanistic principles gained traction.

Testimonials are not evidence.

Most of us don't independently research the science either. Trash epistemology is the norm.

Also, every ideology seems to be enemies with the others. No seeking of common ground. Each painting the other as pure crazy evil. That's an interesting constant.

Trash epistemology is the norm. But it would be nice at the very least to normalize evidence-based knowledge as the default instead of religious mythology. Just because the ideologies are enemies, doesn't mean one of them isn't significantly less wrong than the other.

Alternate possibility: religion is a pre-modern adaptation to encourage co-operation / unity / pro-social behavior and it likely correlated with fitness of societies for a long time.

To the extent it played that function, indoctrinating children was no different than teaching them to hunt or gather.

In practise, both are probably true.

I fundamentally dislike religion and the tribal, irrational cult like mind control they seem to all exhibit. But I have seen it in a different light after reading "Sapiens" by Yuval Harari. So I now acknowledge that it has probably played a useful role in human society, despite its large negative traits.

Yeah, I've been against religion most of my life, but softened the stance a bit. There's good and bad.

We need a modern social construct that fulfills and replaces some of what religion provided. I don't think we've nailed that yet.

It's not that easy to replace something that arose semi-organically across large swaths of space and time. The whale is dead, and we've been living in its carcass for the last 200 years. Can you build a replacement whale whole cloth? Do you understand what all the little fiddly bits do, and why they're there? It sounds hard

Alain De Botton makes this argument in Religion for Athiests.

https://www.alaindebotton.com/religion/

There are certainly exceptions like Buddhism, if you consider that a religion.

In theory that is true, but in practice Buddhism breaks down into the usual behaviors with reverence for the central figure and tenets and tribalism for the followers.

Actually, what's true in practice is true in theory as well; reverence for the sangha ("buddhist community") is baked in as one of the three precious jewels. Buddhist prostrations are a gesture of submission to the three jewels.

Tantric buddhism adds a fourth target of reverence: the guru. And reverence for the guru in tantra extends to absolute obedience to your personal teacher.

Buddhism is very culty.

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