a person does not notice much harm from believing the Messiah is coming
and objected, ‘martyrs!’:
Say that to the countless martyrs, especially in Roman times, who could have evaded torture and death just by publicly saying “I no longer believe” (even if they continued to believe in secret).
Now. How do martyrs show that believing in the Messiah is harmful? If something is harmful, then it should make one more likely to die compared to someone who doesn’t believe in the Messiah, such as an atheist; however, it’s a well-known epidemiological result that the relative risks of believers and non-believers tends to go the other way ie. religious believers (such as Christians and other groups who believe in the Messiah coming) live longer. This is true on a population level, so however many martyrs there are these days, however many morons go to North Korea with delusions of conversion, they do not move the needle; to the extent we want to make any inference about the effects of believing in a Messiah, we would say that believing in a Messiah is healthy, and if something is healthy, one indeed will not ‘notice much harm’. One could ask, if martyrs are dying for their beliefs and this is inherent to believing in a Messiah on its own, why are all the other believers (who also believe in the Messiah) not dying for their beliefs?
OK, maybe current figures are unrepresentative and in other periods believing in a Messiah would have had noticeable decreases in correlated life expectancy. While the records of Christian persecution are light on details and headcounts (unsurprising for a brief and half-hearted persecution, of minimal interest to outsiders and poorly documented due to its unimportance, which has been hyped a great deal by certain parties whose interest is understandable), my understanding is that the most realistic estimates of the ‘countless’ martyrs, based on Eusebius’s count, extrapolate to figures in the thousands, not millions. In an empire with a population of 58 million+, this is not noticeable, and given the described mechanics of the persecution in which ‘victims’ could usually trivially escape punishment, it would be astounding if it were noticeable. (How many victims would Stalin/Mao’s gulags and secret police and famines have claimed if one could escape any punishment by simply saying “why yes, I am a communist!” ) Expecting it to matter would be as ridiculous as pointing to the martyrologies (if I may borrow the term) of Travyon Martin et al and saying police killings are a major reason for why black males have shorter life expectancies in the USA (which of course they don’t, as that’s affected much more by issues like increased heart disease rates).
Since all that shows belief qua belief is harmless or outright healthy, that resolves your objection as simply wrong. The rest is tangents.
But that does still leave an issue as to why a handful of weirdos chose suicide-by-praetor as exemplified in my anecdote, and for that I suggest a toxic mix of status-seeking, mental illness, dangerous auxiliary beliefs (“I believe in the Messiah and that by dying I … [hasten his coming / spread the Gospel / whatever]”); none of these may strike you as particularly plausible or likely, and none of these explanations explain all of the martyrs simultaneously, but that’s fine, since for extremely rare outliers (as martyrs are), there will not usually be any universal explanation and the true explanations will nevertheless be extremely unlikely a priori. (Since my airplane example apparently didn’t convey my point, consider a lottery; the chance of a particular number winning is extremely unlikely and no number wins many times, yet someone will win with some number.)
Do you think that all (or most) missionaries who go to a dangerous area, do it with the explicit purpose of getting killed, and do not believe in their cause?
I think for many of them there is a definite death-seeking component to the psychology which made them seek out that dangerous area when there’s an entire world to choose from, and that martyrdom and talk of sacrifice attracts those people in particular. This is visible right down to the rhetoric.
About your North Korean example, it’s not the example I asked for, as they didn’t just go directly to an officer or a border guard to announce their faith, I have an educated guess that they would continue their work and take at least some steps for not being found out. But let’s suppose I was wrong. Even if we assumed that the missionaries going to north Korea don’t believe in their cause and are doing it just because they want to commit suicide and are just lazy or afraid to hang themselves,
The record of missionaries to NK is not good. They are routinely captured and executed. Clearly, whatever precautions they are taking do not work very well. So why do they do it? Are they just too stupid to realize the danger and that their precautions are insufficient? Well, the exact reason will differ from outlier to outlier...
what do you think about people who are not actively seeking danger, and are killed by death squads because of their beliefs?
Confounded by the many reasons for killing people: cultural, economic, ethnic, governmental. Because religion lines up with so many other divisions (religion is not about belief...), I am doubtful there are many clean cases of religion-only genocide. There are few instances where persecution stops immediately upon recanting—to give some examples, simply converting to Catholicism was not enough to save Jews in Nazi Germany, simply declaring oneself an atheist did not exempt Jews from persecution in the USSR, etc.
By your logic, there are much fewer mountain climbers than people who don’t climb mountains, and mountain climbers are much more likely to die a violent death than the average people. Nevertheless, there are fewer mountain climbers who died during their expedition than those who didn’t. Does this mean that the mountain climbers climb mountains because they seek death as their primary reason, and those who died, died because of this? Or that they accept falling from a cliff as a risk, and are climbing the mountain because they love it, not because they want to die?
I’m glad you chose that example, since that is one of the better ones for illustrating my point. Imagine a group of mountain enthusiasts, some of which climbed them and some of which expressed their interests in other ways. The handful of climbers frequently diegruesome deaths (“5,656 times with 223 deaths”), and when one looks at life expectancy, the climbing group does indeed live shorter lives, leading to descriptions of key holy sites for these enthusiasts as a “high-altitude lunatic asylum”; one psychology book notes, after discussing various studies correlating mental illness & suicide attempts with risk-taking behavior, that “The person who plays Russian roulette has a one in six chance of dying; the person who climbs Mount Everest has a one in ten chance of dying. Is it suicidal to attempt that climb?” (leading into, amusingly, a mention of early Christian martyrs and the Malay running-amok syndrome). If we looked at the climbers faction of the mountain enthusiast group and asked whether they were 100% psychologically normal, if there was no way we could distinguish them, if they appreciated and liked mountains in the same way as everyone else, we would likely have to answer… no. They are different. What is different probably differs from person to person (to give a LW-relevant example, the CEO of the Intrade prediction market died climbing Mount Everest—the same day his wife was giving birth, IIRC—and his death seems to have led to the exposure of substantial embezzlement or other fraud on his part and the shutdown of Intrade; one has to wonder if there was any connection between his hobbies and professional activities), but it would be bizarre to claim that simply liking mountains is harmful when it’s clearly more specific than that; I like mountains, but I don’t expect to ever die on one.
You should be. Let’s review. Your first comment was http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/m0l/is_belief_in_belief_a_useful_concept/c89r , in which you quoted the claim
and objected, ‘martyrs!’:
Now. How do martyrs show that believing in the Messiah is harmful? If something is harmful, then it should make one more likely to die compared to someone who doesn’t believe in the Messiah, such as an atheist; however, it’s a well-known epidemiological result that the relative risks of believers and non-believers tends to go the other way ie. religious believers (such as Christians and other groups who believe in the Messiah coming) live longer. This is true on a population level, so however many martyrs there are these days, however many morons go to North Korea with delusions of conversion, they do not move the needle; to the extent we want to make any inference about the effects of believing in a Messiah, we would say that believing in a Messiah is healthy, and if something is healthy, one indeed will not ‘notice much harm’. One could ask, if martyrs are dying for their beliefs and this is inherent to believing in a Messiah on its own, why are all the other believers (who also believe in the Messiah) not dying for their beliefs?
OK, maybe current figures are unrepresentative and in other periods believing in a Messiah would have had noticeable decreases in correlated life expectancy. While the records of Christian persecution are light on details and headcounts (unsurprising for a brief and half-hearted persecution, of minimal interest to outsiders and poorly documented due to its unimportance, which has been hyped a great deal by certain parties whose interest is understandable), my understanding is that the most realistic estimates of the ‘countless’ martyrs, based on Eusebius’s count, extrapolate to figures in the thousands, not millions. In an empire with a population of 58 million+, this is not noticeable, and given the described mechanics of the persecution in which ‘victims’ could usually trivially escape punishment, it would be astounding if it were noticeable. (How many victims would Stalin/Mao’s gulags and secret police and famines have claimed if one could escape any punishment by simply saying “why yes, I am a communist!” ) Expecting it to matter would be as ridiculous as pointing to the martyrologies (if I may borrow the term) of Travyon Martin et al and saying police killings are a major reason for why black males have shorter life expectancies in the USA (which of course they don’t, as that’s affected much more by issues like increased heart disease rates).
Since all that shows belief qua belief is harmless or outright healthy, that resolves your objection as simply wrong. The rest is tangents.
But that does still leave an issue as to why a handful of weirdos chose suicide-by-praetor as exemplified in my anecdote, and for that I suggest a toxic mix of status-seeking, mental illness, dangerous auxiliary beliefs (“I believe in the Messiah and that by dying I … [hasten his coming / spread the Gospel / whatever]”); none of these may strike you as particularly plausible or likely, and none of these explanations explain all of the martyrs simultaneously, but that’s fine, since for extremely rare outliers (as martyrs are), there will not usually be any universal explanation and the true explanations will nevertheless be extremely unlikely a priori. (Since my airplane example apparently didn’t convey my point, consider a lottery; the chance of a particular number winning is extremely unlikely and no number wins many times, yet someone will win with some number.)
I think for many of them there is a definite death-seeking component to the psychology which made them seek out that dangerous area when there’s an entire world to choose from, and that martyrdom and talk of sacrifice attracts those people in particular. This is visible right down to the rhetoric.
The record of missionaries to NK is not good. They are routinely captured and executed. Clearly, whatever precautions they are taking do not work very well. So why do they do it? Are they just too stupid to realize the danger and that their precautions are insufficient? Well, the exact reason will differ from outlier to outlier...
Confounded by the many reasons for killing people: cultural, economic, ethnic, governmental. Because religion lines up with so many other divisions (religion is not about belief...), I am doubtful there are many clean cases of religion-only genocide. There are few instances where persecution stops immediately upon recanting—to give some examples, simply converting to Catholicism was not enough to save Jews in Nazi Germany, simply declaring oneself an atheist did not exempt Jews from persecution in the USSR, etc.
I’m glad you chose that example, since that is one of the better ones for illustrating my point. Imagine a group of mountain enthusiasts, some of which climbed them and some of which expressed their interests in other ways. The handful of climbers frequently die gruesome deaths (“5,656 times with 223 deaths”), and when one looks at life expectancy, the climbing group does indeed live shorter lives, leading to descriptions of key holy sites for these enthusiasts as a “high-altitude lunatic asylum”; one psychology book notes, after discussing various studies correlating mental illness & suicide attempts with risk-taking behavior, that “The person who plays Russian roulette has a one in six chance of dying; the person who climbs Mount Everest has a one in ten chance of dying. Is it suicidal to attempt that climb?” (leading into, amusingly, a mention of early Christian martyrs and the Malay running-amok syndrome). If we looked at the climbers faction of the mountain enthusiast group and asked whether they were 100% psychologically normal, if there was no way we could distinguish them, if they appreciated and liked mountains in the same way as everyone else, we would likely have to answer… no. They are different. What is different probably differs from person to person (to give a LW-relevant example, the CEO of the Intrade prediction market died climbing Mount Everest—the same day his wife was giving birth, IIRC—and his death seems to have led to the exposure of substantial embezzlement or other fraud on his part and the shutdown of Intrade; one has to wonder if there was any connection between his hobbies and professional activities), but it would be bizarre to claim that simply liking mountains is harmful when it’s clearly more specific than that; I like mountains, but I don’t expect to ever die on one.