Comment by djtango | Hacker News Reader

Comment by djtango | Hacker News Reader

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It's very trendy these days to only point to the negatives of religion but if you view religion as a social technology, you can work backwards from the assumption that every one of those practices initially solved some problem. For example it turns out that giving daily thanks helps us stay positive in the face of arduous times - especially given that our human history was full of disease, war, poverty and famine.

Personally I'm not convinced that the vacuum left behind by going to church (and having a community) has been well replaced yet and instead our collective religious tendencies have been steered towards identity politics and idol worship by social media instead.

I'm not religious in the slightest but my mother is a harmless Christian and when I see how a little bit of faith anchors her and make sense of a world that is completely unrecognisable to the one she was born into (she didn't even have a fridge let alone an iPhone lol) I am always reminded to stay humble and open minded

> you can work backwards from the assumption that every one of those practices initially solved some problem.

This isn't quite right.

The true version of what you're getting at is, "at some point every practice was useful to someone", but just because someone or someones found it useful doesn't necessarily mean it solved a real problem for society overall.

E.g. men have dominated over women in almost all pre-modern societies (and even in modern ones there's often a good ways to go), because that was useful and advantageous to men, who also had the physical strength to enforce such a social division. It was never truly about "solving a problem".

Sure, in some cases religious practices may have helped with a problem, but in other cases (e.g. indulgences) they were just about gathering or retaining power for the religion, which was certainly useful for the leaders within said religion.

Surely if male dominance was about physical prowess, there wouldn't be any emperors or kings older than 35 before being punched to death by rivals?

Male dominance as a gender is about physical prowess. That's not the same thing as an individual male person being dominant based on physical prowess.

European powers were dominant over other countries and colonized them due to superior weaponry and organized armies that used said weaponry, but that doesn't mean every European leader was a soldier toting around a gun themselves.

I'm not here to deny those things - I'm not really qualified to argue in either direction. I wanted to focus on some of the good religion brings, even if you're not religious.

In any case power capture is just another one of those axiomatic things of the human condition for me. After all, democracy and capitalism is being contorted into neo-feudalism in our own lifetimes.

My point was that even though they seem silly to nonbelievers, I suspect a lot of people would probably be happier spending an hour a day singing hymns and reciting prayers. It turns out singing can be a pretty good mind-body hack for making you feel happier. And prayers are a pretty good presence of mind hack for regaining focus

It's true that some of those things are probably useful in some way, sure. But you can't just axiomatically assume that all religious practices were useful in general to people, rather than being useful in specific ways to specific people.

The practices propagated or persisted for some reason.

For sure organisations find themselves in ruts or local maxima. And things like virtue signalling exist but when practices like prayer, meditation, chanting and singing exist across religions maybe it is worth trying to understand what ordinary people derive from the practices. Whether that be a sense of belonging, presence of mind or the ability to make peace with the cruelty and randomness of life.

It rubs you up the wrong way that I axiomatically assume that all religious practices were useful in general but my point is just like being healthily skeptical about things and challenging the status quo is good. So too, is looking at things you don't understand and starting from the supposition that it is beneficial UNTIL you can prove in your own mind with all certainty that it isn't and then feel free for you to do your own thing.

Are those two approaches in contradiction? Yes that's a good thing, it's healthy to hold opposing views in tension.

If we continually ignore the lessons of the past we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes and relearn the same lessons.

Religion ultimately propagated because people preferred it to what they had before. Sure bad people have manipulated and exploited those tendencies in people but that still happens even without "religion" - see crypto. At least most faiths ostensibly revolve around a set of morals and virtue. The establishment has also been tempered by their own success and and are being forcefully dragged into the 21st century by their need to stay relevant. When I attend my usual annual Midnight Mass CoE service in the UK, the biblical elements are so watered down it's mostly just about being a good person.

Tldr people who are skeptical might benefit from being more charitable just like people who are gullible could benefit from being more skeptical.

I really agree, religion unlocks a lot for a lot of people. I have transcendental beliefs that have been of service. Acknowledging that, some organisations use others conscience against them to control them. Some make the decision selfishly, some think the ends justify the means, and some just do it without being aware of it. There’s a whole spectrum of benefit, some benefit their members a lot and I think we can safely say that most cults do not in the end benefit their members.

most people get lost on the way to factorizing religion which explains your being downvoted ... although the devil plays many tricks it is always a choice to give up one's own soul , a good teacher doesn't expect that ...

Yeah thanks, I tried to say I’m not criticising religion

It was a literal cult I’ve read like hundreds of articles and regrets of members and experienced first hand discussions that are manipulative and withholding information and rationalising political stuff with scripture that anyone would just have to experience to get why it’s manipulative and exploitative, it won’t come across online as easily

So it’s a lot of research into the brainwashing funnel of a type of cult that I was talking about and not religion at large

it's a shame really the tool held it purpose for many years and still does even in acting the savage from brave new world ... unfortunately for souls in desperate need of hope life is not shared victory, there is only winner takes all (c.f. tool - vicarious) ... imo community and higher standards are integral to intellectual advancement regardless as to the implementation ... we are witnessing eroding of both, to the detriment of those cheering said erosion ...

Religions are memetic organisms subject to survival of the fittest and this strikes me as similar to a fallacy present in thinking about genetics and evolution as the idea that evolved features must have some use otherwise they wouldn't have evolved.

Sometimes animals just do be like that, since it doesn't harm their fitness, and it seems likely to me that the same is true for most features of religions.

The bigger issue imo is the assumption that because something is effective/useful this must necessarily "solve a problem (for society)".

I am someone who enjoys challenging the status quo and am generally living unconventionally but I think we've swung too far in the opposite direction of being skeptical of practices of our forebears.

For example it is suddenly all the rage to study the health benefits of breathing or meditation. But this has been common knowledge amongst yoga and qigong practitioners for 1000+ years. If you are scientifically minded, a lot of the explanations of how qigong works are hard to reconcile but if you actually try it earnestly you'd realise there's something there. Sure, a 1000 year old model has the wrong explanations, but all models are wrong some are useful.

Empiricism gives us so much false confidence when we often still can't measure many things and often don't know what to measure. Especially so when real true reproducible science is hard, slow, and expensive.

So for me, starting from a prior "maybe people do do this thing for a reason even if they themselves have forgotten why" can be useful

> But this has been common knowledge amongst yoga and qigong practitioners for 1000+ years.

Okay, but there's also "common knowledge" amongst practitioners of yoga or qigong or other traditional practices that's complete bullshit. There's good reason to not just accept that traditional practices must be smart automatically.

> If you are scientifically minded, a lot of the explanations of how qigong works are hard to reconcile but if you actually try it earnestly you'd realise there's something there.

I'm guessing they're less "hard to reconcile" and more "completely made up".

Everything is completely made up. Atoms don't exist they're just a phenomenon we have observed and conceptualised - today's explanations are our best attempts at conceptualising them.

We were perfectly able to use fire (and the Romans even had a prototype of the steam engine) long before Lavoisier had a working model of gases and stoichiometry.

The model for what qigong is and what qi is can be wrong while still being helpful. Having worked on it I'd argue that it is a mental model / visualisation technique for honing your body awareness and mind-body connection. Visualisation techniques proliferate everywhere. I've been taught visualisations in swimming, martial arts, yoga and singing - so who cares if qigong is "completely made up" if the visualisation training achieved the goal.

Only just recently in some self practice on the piano I was trying to achieve a specific multi-voicing effect on a tiny passage and have practiced this single bar at least 5+ hours. I finally had a breakthrough when I stopped trying to control the individual velocity and depth of my presses and just imagined I was whispering the secondary voice.

I'm not whispering anything on that piano and my fingers are still just pressing keys. Its as made up as when I imagine I'm playing woodwind instruments during a Mozart adagio but it still accomplishes the effect.

This is all airy fairy but my point is that actually my experience has taught me that for certain things, especially where the body is involved trying to think in mechanics or vertebrae and muscles is a lot less useful than imagining you're Mount Everest peaking above the clouds reaching for the sun.

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

― Friedrich Nietzsche

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