I don’t quite follow how you get from the observation that you are adopting certain habits you reject, to the idea that you need to reject science in order to get the social benefits you want. Can you unpack that a little?
It’s the reverse of what’s happening now...which is a part of me feeling like I have to reject religion and the supernatural if I want to be respected and liked on Less Wrong. I never felt like my religious friends respected me less because I loved to read about physics and evolution and talk about how cool they were. They thought it was cool, too. I didn’t have to reject anything to get social benefits...I just had to refrain from criticizing their beliefs, which I was fine about.
I think religion is really cool too, as a concept and as an institution in human society. I can (or used to be able to) get inside the reasons why people believe, really truly believe. I had empathy for them. Now a part of me (again, this isn’t necessarily representative of all LW opinions) feels like the dominant meme here is ‘religion is a bad thing for society, you shouldn’t respect it or like it!’ I know this isn’t representative of what everyone on LW thinks, so I don’t know how it’s managed to seep so far into my brain.
feels like the dominant meme here is ‘religion is a bad thing for society, you shouldn’t respect it or like it!’ I know this isn’t representative of what everyone on LW thinks...
I personally used to think pretty much like that before I encountered Less Wrong… and now, I still do. I believe I have good reasons for thinking this way. But if I’m wrong about this, I’d very much like to find out, so I’m open to persuasion.
That said, while I believe that religion does not deserve the privileged position that it enjoys, and that it’s harmful in the long run, this doesn’t mean that I automatically disrespect individual religious people. One great thing about communities like Less Wrong, IMO, is that they make it possible for two people to legitimately disagree with each other, without the whole situation descending into name-calling and other personal attacks. At least, I hope that this is the case...
OK. These are the reasons why I don’t think religion is a horrible thing. (I don’t necessarily think we should always have religion, just that for the moment I don’t find it to be enormously bad.)
Yeah, some people have done bad things in the name of religion (i.e. Crusades). People have done bad things in the name of pretty much everything. Some people don’t need a reason to do bad things. Yeah, there are other people who might not have done bad things otherwise, who just followed along because they were a member of the community. That’s not common to religion, either. People in the Stanford Prison experiment and the Milgram experiment went along with doing bad things because they thought they were expected to, no religion needed. If we took religion out of the world, it wouldn’t do much to solve those flaws in human nature.
Religion often advocates a weird morality, i.e. by spending more time talking about abortion than starving kids...but at least it advocates morality at all. This is mostly based on people I actually know, but most of my religious friends have thought quite deeply about what they think of as right versus wrong, and most of my non-religious friends haven’t thought it about it at all. Involvement in many religious groups encourages people to become more empathetic, more generous, and more open and welcoming to community members in need. I was a better person, in those ways, when I hung out with Christians.
Religion genuinely makes a lot of people happier, including people I’ve known who had very screwed-up lives previously. Yeah, maybe they could have become happier by studying happiness like Lukeprog, but it happens no one was around to guide them through that process, and there were people in local churches lining up to have a chance to be helpful and kind and teach them to pray and reflect, and invite them into close-knit communities. Yeah, I would cheer if something replaced religion in this role. I’m pretty foggy on how to design a replacement, and I have nothing near the leadership skills required to actually run one. I didn’t get nearly the same pleasure out of LW meetups as I did out of going to church. (No offense.)
I would’ve had a lot more problems with religion back when it controlled everything, including intellectual thought. I like being able to study whatever I want and fulfill my curiosity with knowledge that wouldn’t have been discovered if religion had been allowed to keep its iron hold. I’m glad religious groups don’t have as much political power now. But as it stands, I don’t think religion slows the rate of scientific progress enough to blot out all the good things it does do.
Religion cements people together into groups that stay motivated and get stuff done, including some stuff I think is misguided (like convincing people Jesus is the solution to everything), but also some stuff I want to help them with, like building schools in the Canadian North. Like I said, I’m a follower, not a leader. I would be incredibly excited about a LW “mission” to somewhere to build a school and buy kids books, but I doubt my ability to organize it.
People have done bad things in the name of pretty much everything. Some people don’t need a reason to do bad things.
That’s true, but IMO religion makes it a lot easier for people to do bad things, and a lot harder for other people to stop them. It does this by emphasizing faith over critical thinking, and by inventing all kinds of new reasons for doing bad things. Thus, for example, the statement “we should go and wipe out our neighbours because they believe in different gods than we do, and we know that our gods are the only true gods because we have faith in them, amen” is a uniquely religious statement. It combines an in-group/out-group mentality, an unfalsifiable worldview, and a harmful moral imperative, all in one tidy package.
Yes, there are harmful secular statements that follow the same pattern (and plenty of them), but IMO the faith-based nature of religion makes harmful religious memes a lot more virulent.
Speaking of which:
Religion often advocates a weird morality, i.e. by spending more time talking about abortion than starving kids...but at least it advocates morality at all.
Firstly, I’d rather have no morality at all than a harmful one.Secondly, one big problem with religious morality is that it’s unfalsifiable. For example, why is homosexuality immoral ? Because God (or gods) said so. That’s it. You could spend all the time in the world pointing out that homosexuality hurts no one and that prohibiting it harms everyone in the long run, but none of that matters, because evidence can never trump faith. By contrast, secular moral systems, such as Consequentialism, for all their flaws, do have error-correction methods built in.
Involvement in many religious groups encourages people to become more empathetic...
I think this depends on the group. Some groups, such as Scientology or many radical Christian sects, have the opposite effect.
Religion genuinely makes a lot of people happier, including people I’ve known who had very screwed-up lives previously.
Of all the arguments you offer, this is probably the strongest. Is the tradeoff of becoming happier worth the sacrifice of believing things that are actually true ? For some people, and perhaps even many people, this could very well be the case… but, if everyone thought like that, we’d never have invented fire, spaceflight, or representative democracy. I am definitely biased on this topic, though, since believing true (plus or minus epsilon) things makes me personally very happy, and thus for me there’s no conflict.
But as it stands, I don’t think religion slows the rate of scientific progress enough to blot out all the good things it does do.
Really ? What about climate change, or stem-cell research, or evolutionary biology (which is to say, biology) ? Religion has a pretty strong chilling effect on these areas and many others, at least here in the US. In general, though, religion discourages inquiry simply by making faith a virtue, and doubt a sin. This chilling effect is much milder than religious prohibitions against specific topics, but it is more pervasive.
Religion cements people together into groups that stay motivated and get stuff done, including some stuff I think is misguided (like convincing people Jesus is the solution to everything), but also some stuff I want to help them with, like building schools in the Canadian North.
And sometimes, religion spends a lot of time getting harmful things done, like discouraging condom use in Africa, or promoting abstinence-only sex education right here in the US. The problem, once again, is that there’s no error correction mechanism. If you believe that your god wants people to have unprotected sex (or possibly no sex at all), then any negative effects of acting on this belief are irrelevant. As with morality, I’d rather have no motivation than motivation to accomplish bad things—especially since there are plenty of secular organizations that seem to be doing ok (such as Doctors Without Borders, AFAIK).
And sometimes, religion spends a lot of time getting harmful things done, like discouraging condom use in Africa, or promoting abstinence-only sex education right here in the US.
This is a completely valid point. There is a right answer to whether it, and all the other bad things that get accomplished as a direct effect of religion existing, outweigh all the good things that get accomplished also as a direct effect of religion existing. I don’t know.
Right now my estimate leans more towards religion having a net positive effect, for now, at our society’s current level of rationality and general sanity. I don’t think getting rid of churches would get rid of superstition, something would spring up in its place...but slowly getting rid of superstition might naturally lead to churches becoming more and more similar to secular organizations in their scope and goals. (This seems to be what’s happening to the Anglican Church of Canada...socially, they are just as liberal as the Canadian government.)
There are almost certainly things I don’t know about how churches affect the world, and if I did know them, maybe it would sway my opinion more towards the cons and away from the pros. If someone could do an in-depth study, comparing a world identical to ours only without religion and showing that it would be better, I would willingly change my mind.
However, I’m not sure it would change my behavior, at least not right now. I don’t have the power to single-handedly eradicate organized religion. Unlike Richard Dawkins, I’m not famous or well-known or respected, so my mere disapproval of religion would do nothing at all, aside from possibly alienating me from some of my friends. (They already know I’m an atheist, and that I’m ok with their being religious, but if I wasn’t ok with it, I’m not sure how our friendships would fare. And I value those friendships.) Also, if I see a church organization working towards a goal I also want accomplished, and they’re more convenient or more fun to work with than any secular organizations with the same goals, I want to be able to ally with them. I don’t want to be turned off any kind of cooperation because it annoys me that they’re wrong...therefore, that annoyance is an irrational emotion for me to have. It’s not like my not working with them is going to make them convert to atheism to get me on their side… I’m not that important.
Right now my estimate leans more towards religion having a net positive effect, for now, at our society’s current level of rationality and general sanity.
My own estimate leans the opposite way, primarily because I see the overall chilling effect that religion has on critical thought (as we discussed elsewhere on this thread) as having a massively negative utility. Yes, the effect is relatively mild compared to some of the other things religion does, but it’s everywhere.
I don’t think getting rid of churches would get rid of superstition, something would spring up in its place...but slowly getting rid of superstition might naturally lead to churches becoming more and more similar to secular organizations in their scope and goals.
Agreed; plus, I should probably mention that no one in their right mind would advocate “getting rid of churches” by force (even by force of law). Coercive tactics like that have a very poor track record, and besides, they’re pretty evil.
That said, one thing I’d like to see is a diminished respect for religion in general. In our current world, if you said something like, “Bugmaster advocates banning consumption of meat”, most people would probably just shrug. But if you said “Reverend Bugmaster advocates banning consumption of meat”, people would sit up and take notice. But why ? There’s nothing about being a “Reverend” that makes me somehow more competent at making decisions—no more than being a 10-th level Conjuration-specced Wizard, or president of my local Twilight fanclub, or whatever.
I don’t have the power to single-handedly eradicate organized religion.
If you had that kind of power, you’d be a god, and then you’d have to eradicate yourself :-)
They already know I’m an atheist, and that I’m ok with their being religious, but if I wasn’t ok with it, I’m not sure how our friendships would fare. And I value those friendships.
That’s fair enough; no one is expecting you to become some sort of a righteous anti-paladin of atheism (well, I can’t speak for Richard Dawkins, but I know I’m not). Still, I think it’s possible to disagree with a person, even on a fundamental level, while still respecting that person. That all depends on the person in question, of course.
“Bugmaster advocates banning consumption of meat”, most people would probably just shrug. But if you said “Reverend Bugmaster advocates banning consumption of meat”, people would sit up and take notice.
I’m pretty sure these two statements would have exactly the same effect on me...i.e. proportional to how much other information I know about you and how many reasons I already have to respect your expert opinion. I do have a lot of reasons to respect Dawkins’ statements on a lot of things. He knows more about biology than I do, and so if he says something about biology or evolution, I’m prepared to take it at face value. I don’t think he’s studied religion in depth, though, or really undergone a non-biased process of weighing its pros and cons. I have no reason to conclude that his religion arguments are more valid just because he’s a good biologist.
I’m pretty sure these two statements would have exactly the same effect on me...
Right, but as far as I can tell, this isn’t true of the population in general, where religious figures command a certain level of trust and respect simply due to being religious. You and I are probably outliers.
Well, regardless of how those beliefs “seeped” into your brain initially, now you have the option of paying attention to them and making some informed decisions about what beliefs you endorse, what beliefs you reject, what beliefs you intend to research further, etc.
It might be helpful to start by simply articulating the various beliefs that are relevant here, and your reasons for believing and not believing them (by which I mean both the evidence in favor of or against them, and your motives for endorsing or rejecting them independent of evidence).
now you have the option of paying attention to them and making some informed decisions about what beliefs you endorse, what beliefs you reject, what beliefs you intend to research further, etc.
Just noticing that my beliefs and their associated emotions had changed was enough for me to start listing them to myself...which has done a lot to cut off the emotions associated, too. Here are some beliefs which I think are relevant here:
I believe that it is a good thing to try and hold only beliefs that are true relative to the outside world, and to update on evidence from that world. I believe this, well, because it’s useful, and maybe partly because it’s a high-status LW idea. To a degree, I did not always believe this...I went through a ‘the truth is relative’ phase.
I believe that the current evidence says that reductionism is true, that the universe is made up of interactions between smaller parts which are not in themselves intelligent, that cause-and-effect holds. I believe this because it’s what I’ve read in textbooks and books I read for fun, and because it feels elegant and satisfying to believe it. I already believed this before LW and I don’t think LW has influenced it much. Nor has going to church.
I believe that there are people who believe in spirits. I expect that they believe in them because someone told them about it, or they read about it, and thought it was neat.
I believe that many people do not think about whether their beliefs are true relative to the outside world, or what evidence of their truth/falsehood would look like, or why evidence matters. I believe this because it seems obvious to me that the laws of science as we know them do not imply supernatural beings, that the only ‘evidence’ for their existence is the fact that people talk and write about them, and that their are other, simpler explanations for people talking and writing about supernatural beings than their actual existence (i.e. people misconstruing actual experiences, or wishful thinking.)
I do not actually believe that the existence of people believing in the supernatural is that much a bad thing for the world, as long as they don’t go around doing destructive things because of those beliefs. I believe this because most people I know have a firm moral compass regardless of what they think about religion or the supernatural.
I believe that there are people on LW who do think that religion, and people who believe in the supernatural, is a very bad thing for the world. I think that their reasons for believing this are that humans act more ineffectively and waste energy on irrational pursuits like religion. I agree with this, but I disagree on the final outcome because I think many people on LW overestimate the effectiveness of people who aren’t religious or obviously irrational. Most of the people my age who I know to be involved in charity, curious, thoughtful, wanting to be better people, and generally passionate about life, are religious. Many of the ‘atheists’ I know are apathetic or don’t reflect much on their lives.
OK. And if I’m understanding you correctly, you believe that the existence on LW of the belief you describe in #5/#6, that religion and supernatural beliefs are harmful, is causing you to be less able to coordinate usefully with people who hold religious and supernatural beliefs, despite the fact that you endorse such coordination, entirely because you want to fit in here and the way to fit in is to treat such people in ways that are mutually exclusive with such coordination.
I think that’s the underlying motivation, yeah. Putting it explicitly makes it a lot easier to say to myself “well, that’s stupid… It’s my brain and I can do with it what I want.”
I think that their reasons for believing this are that humans act more ineffectively and waste energy on irrational pursuits like religion.
That’s one of the reasons, but not the only one. IMO religion is also harmful because it closes off legitimate avenues of inquiry: once you’ve decided that the answer to some question is “god did it’, or “it’s a mystery of mysteries”, you tend to not spend much time looking for the answer. Historically, though, the answer usually turned out to be something like “this question makes no sense because it rests on incorrect assumptions”, or something like “GMm / r^2” (which is an informative and useful answer).
Religion is also harmful (and again, this is just my own opinion) because it discourages critical thought, replacing it with faith. This not only reduces the overall effectiveness of our decision-making processes, but also contributes to legitimizing religious practices that directly harm people, such as faith healing.
Religion is also harmful (and again, this is just my own opinion) because it discourages critical thought, replacing it with faith.
I’m actually not sure to what degree this is true for religion in general. The emphasis on faith-in-itself seems to be mainly a Christian thing to me, although it’s contaminated a lot of later (i.e. New Age) thought in the Christian cultural sphere; what I’ve read of Islam, for example, puts a pretty heavy emphasis on scholarship, and doesn’t seem to isolate religious observations from empirical confirmation nearly to the same degree that Christianity does. The same goes for Buddhism, for several branches of occultism, and even for some minor Christian traditions, especially prior to the Enlightenment.
I think a fully general objection to religious thought would have to be a bit more subtle: even when a religion contains a tradition of inquiry, even when clerical roles look a lot like research positions, usually only confirming evidence is accepted. This doesn’t have quite the same structure as faith in the modern Christian sense: tautological belief isn’t thought of as virtuous. But the bottom line is already written, and arguments are only respected insofar as they provide support for it. Critical thought isn’t discouraged, but it’s only thought of as beneficial insofar as it serves preexisting goals. (Eliezer gets into this a bit in “Avoiding Your Belief’s Real Weak Points”, although I don’t think it’s limited to orthodox Judaism by any means.) Actually, I don’t even think this is specific to religion: lots of identity groups behave in similar ways.
I think a fully general objection to religious thought would have to be a bit more subtle: even when a religion contains a tradition of inquiry, even when clerical roles look a lot like research positions, usually only confirming evidence is accepted. … But the bottom line is already written, and arguments are only respected insofar as they provide support for it.
That’s a very good point; I have nothing to add but my agreement.
But the bottom line is already written, and arguments are only respected insofar as they provide support for it.
This seems to describe a lot of what I’ve heard about Jewish ‘scholarship’, mostly according to Eliezer. Also, their definition of what constitutes strong versus weak evidence, and what it’s evidence of, is very different from scientific evidence. I don’t deny that the Old Testament exists, or even that its content is evidence of something (it shows what the culture and thought was like back in the ancient Middle East), but I wouldn’t think of proving a scientific hypothesis by pulling out a Torah quote that supported it.
Religion is also harmful (and again, this is just my own opinion) because it discourages critical thought, replacing it with faith.
I agree with you 100% on this. If we’re ever going to move towards a world where significantly more people have good critical thinking skills, religion will have to either be abolished or slowly fade. However, I don’t think removing all churches and religions right now would change much in terms of critical thinking. My opinion is that most people are religious because they are poor critical thinkers...not poor critical thinkers because of their religion., although to a degree the two might interact in a kind of loop or vicious cycle.
Agreed that most of the poor critical thinking in the world has causes other than religion. But I also agree with Bugmaster that a lot of religious institutions discourage critical thinking.
The situation seems to me analogous to thieves in a poor neighborhood. No, eliminating the thieves will not suddenly make the neighborhood wealthier. On the other hand, if the thieves are allowed to operate unimpeded, nothing else will make the neighborhood wealthier either. On the other other hand, perhaps other techniques for making the neighborhood wealthier will cause the thieves to leave the neighborhood on their own.
Personally, I suspect that if all religious institutions suddenly vanished tomorrow, it would be easier to propagate certain forms of critical thinking, but that nobody would actually take significant advantage of the opportunity thus created.
My opinion is that most people are religious because they are poor critical thinkers...not poor critical thinkers because of their religion., although to a degree the two might interact in a kind of loop or vicious cycle.
The “vicious cycle” hypothesis sounds right to me. Most people tend to simply follow the religion of their parents, simply accepting it as a given, because that’s what they were raised with from childhood. And, since most religions encourage faith and discourage doubt, this has an overall chilling effect on the prevalence of critical thinking skills across the entire population… which, in turn, makes it easier to raise one’s children in the religion, as well, thus completing the cycle.
I also know an awful lot of totally non-religious people who don’t seem to have the best critical thinking skills either. Maybe it’s a thing of youth...maybe most middle 20-year-olds are sheltered and complacent and it’s a bias of juvenile brains in particular to care more about status and having fun than about being right or being curious about the world. I certainly hope it gets better as I get older. In general, though, I don’t see a big difference between the actual day-to-day, real-life behavior of religious 20-year-olds and non-religious 20-year-olds...except that many of the religious young people tend to spend more time volunteering or otherwise trying to change things for the better, and spend more time thinking about how they can be better people. (Or at least talk more about these things.)
In general, though, I don’t see a big difference between the actual day-to-day, real-life behavior of religious 20-year-olds and non-religious 20-year-olds...
I think this depends on the population. I have some Catholic acquaintances, for example, who are committed to a child-bearing schedule set by their pastors; this behavior is certainly different from that of non-Catholics. But that’s just a single data point, not a statistically significant trend.
except that many of the religious young people tend to spend more time volunteering or otherwise trying to change things for the better, and spend more time thinking about how they can be better people. (Or at least talk more about these things.)
Is there some data to back this up, adjusted for various meanings of “better” ?
No rigorously collected data, unfortunately (although someone may have studied it.) It’s more a weighted average in my head of people I know personally.
I have a somewhat similar experience. As a teen, I prefered to spend holidays with christian groups, although the religion never made sense to me. The reasons ? No or moderate alcohol drinking, extremely rare smoking with no peer pressure to try it, possibility to sing and not embarass myself, possibility to discuss what is right and wrong and not embarass myself. Mild and more merciful manifestations of the pecking order compared to the world outside of the community. (Christian groups do have their alpha individuals, no mistake in that, but they are nicer about it). More volunteering inside this group than outside. This is obviously a comparison based on people I knew personaly, no statistical survey with standard deviatons etc. I certainly could find atheists and agnostics which would have such qualities, but that was sort of hand-picking of isolated individuals. The Christians were a ready-to-go group I could just join, if I wanted to have some fun with more people around me.
I don’t quite follow how you get from the observation that you are adopting certain habits you reject, to the idea that you need to reject science in order to get the social benefits you want. Can you unpack that a little?
It’s the reverse of what’s happening now...which is a part of me feeling like I have to reject religion and the supernatural if I want to be respected and liked on Less Wrong. I never felt like my religious friends respected me less because I loved to read about physics and evolution and talk about how cool they were. They thought it was cool, too. I didn’t have to reject anything to get social benefits...I just had to refrain from criticizing their beliefs, which I was fine about.
I think religion is really cool too, as a concept and as an institution in human society. I can (or used to be able to) get inside the reasons why people believe, really truly believe. I had empathy for them. Now a part of me (again, this isn’t necessarily representative of all LW opinions) feels like the dominant meme here is ‘religion is a bad thing for society, you shouldn’t respect it or like it!’ I know this isn’t representative of what everyone on LW thinks, so I don’t know how it’s managed to seep so far into my brain.
I personally used to think pretty much like that before I encountered Less Wrong… and now, I still do. I believe I have good reasons for thinking this way. But if I’m wrong about this, I’d very much like to find out, so I’m open to persuasion.
That said, while I believe that religion does not deserve the privileged position that it enjoys, and that it’s harmful in the long run, this doesn’t mean that I automatically disrespect individual religious people. One great thing about communities like Less Wrong, IMO, is that they make it possible for two people to legitimately disagree with each other, without the whole situation descending into name-calling and other personal attacks. At least, I hope that this is the case...
OK. These are the reasons why I don’t think religion is a horrible thing. (I don’t necessarily think we should always have religion, just that for the moment I don’t find it to be enormously bad.)
Yeah, some people have done bad things in the name of religion (i.e. Crusades). People have done bad things in the name of pretty much everything. Some people don’t need a reason to do bad things. Yeah, there are other people who might not have done bad things otherwise, who just followed along because they were a member of the community. That’s not common to religion, either. People in the Stanford Prison experiment and the Milgram experiment went along with doing bad things because they thought they were expected to, no religion needed. If we took religion out of the world, it wouldn’t do much to solve those flaws in human nature.
Religion often advocates a weird morality, i.e. by spending more time talking about abortion than starving kids...but at least it advocates morality at all. This is mostly based on people I actually know, but most of my religious friends have thought quite deeply about what they think of as right versus wrong, and most of my non-religious friends haven’t thought it about it at all. Involvement in many religious groups encourages people to become more empathetic, more generous, and more open and welcoming to community members in need. I was a better person, in those ways, when I hung out with Christians.
Religion genuinely makes a lot of people happier, including people I’ve known who had very screwed-up lives previously. Yeah, maybe they could have become happier by studying happiness like Lukeprog, but it happens no one was around to guide them through that process, and there were people in local churches lining up to have a chance to be helpful and kind and teach them to pray and reflect, and invite them into close-knit communities. Yeah, I would cheer if something replaced religion in this role. I’m pretty foggy on how to design a replacement, and I have nothing near the leadership skills required to actually run one. I didn’t get nearly the same pleasure out of LW meetups as I did out of going to church. (No offense.)
I would’ve had a lot more problems with religion back when it controlled everything, including intellectual thought. I like being able to study whatever I want and fulfill my curiosity with knowledge that wouldn’t have been discovered if religion had been allowed to keep its iron hold. I’m glad religious groups don’t have as much political power now. But as it stands, I don’t think religion slows the rate of scientific progress enough to blot out all the good things it does do.
Religion cements people together into groups that stay motivated and get stuff done, including some stuff I think is misguided (like convincing people Jesus is the solution to everything), but also some stuff I want to help them with, like building schools in the Canadian North. Like I said, I’m a follower, not a leader. I would be incredibly excited about a LW “mission” to somewhere to build a school and buy kids books, but I doubt my ability to organize it.
That’s true, but IMO religion makes it a lot easier for people to do bad things, and a lot harder for other people to stop them. It does this by emphasizing faith over critical thinking, and by inventing all kinds of new reasons for doing bad things. Thus, for example, the statement “we should go and wipe out our neighbours because they believe in different gods than we do, and we know that our gods are the only true gods because we have faith in them, amen” is a uniquely religious statement. It combines an in-group/out-group mentality, an unfalsifiable worldview, and a harmful moral imperative, all in one tidy package.
Yes, there are harmful secular statements that follow the same pattern (and plenty of them), but IMO the faith-based nature of religion makes harmful religious memes a lot more virulent.
Speaking of which:
Firstly, I’d rather have no morality at all than a harmful one.Secondly, one big problem with religious morality is that it’s unfalsifiable. For example, why is homosexuality immoral ? Because God (or gods) said so. That’s it. You could spend all the time in the world pointing out that homosexuality hurts no one and that prohibiting it harms everyone in the long run, but none of that matters, because evidence can never trump faith. By contrast, secular moral systems, such as Consequentialism, for all their flaws, do have error-correction methods built in.
I think this depends on the group. Some groups, such as Scientology or many radical Christian sects, have the opposite effect.
Of all the arguments you offer, this is probably the strongest. Is the tradeoff of becoming happier worth the sacrifice of believing things that are actually true ? For some people, and perhaps even many people, this could very well be the case… but, if everyone thought like that, we’d never have invented fire, spaceflight, or representative democracy. I am definitely biased on this topic, though, since believing true (plus or minus epsilon) things makes me personally very happy, and thus for me there’s no conflict.
Really ? What about climate change, or stem-cell research, or evolutionary biology (which is to say, biology) ? Religion has a pretty strong chilling effect on these areas and many others, at least here in the US. In general, though, religion discourages inquiry simply by making faith a virtue, and doubt a sin. This chilling effect is much milder than religious prohibitions against specific topics, but it is more pervasive.
And sometimes, religion spends a lot of time getting harmful things done, like discouraging condom use in Africa, or promoting abstinence-only sex education right here in the US. The problem, once again, is that there’s no error correction mechanism. If you believe that your god wants people to have unprotected sex (or possibly no sex at all), then any negative effects of acting on this belief are irrelevant. As with morality, I’d rather have no motivation than motivation to accomplish bad things—especially since there are plenty of secular organizations that seem to be doing ok (such as Doctors Without Borders, AFAIK).
This is a completely valid point. There is a right answer to whether it, and all the other bad things that get accomplished as a direct effect of religion existing, outweigh all the good things that get accomplished also as a direct effect of religion existing. I don’t know.
Right now my estimate leans more towards religion having a net positive effect, for now, at our society’s current level of rationality and general sanity. I don’t think getting rid of churches would get rid of superstition, something would spring up in its place...but slowly getting rid of superstition might naturally lead to churches becoming more and more similar to secular organizations in their scope and goals. (This seems to be what’s happening to the Anglican Church of Canada...socially, they are just as liberal as the Canadian government.)
There are almost certainly things I don’t know about how churches affect the world, and if I did know them, maybe it would sway my opinion more towards the cons and away from the pros. If someone could do an in-depth study, comparing a world identical to ours only without religion and showing that it would be better, I would willingly change my mind.
However, I’m not sure it would change my behavior, at least not right now. I don’t have the power to single-handedly eradicate organized religion. Unlike Richard Dawkins, I’m not famous or well-known or respected, so my mere disapproval of religion would do nothing at all, aside from possibly alienating me from some of my friends. (They already know I’m an atheist, and that I’m ok with their being religious, but if I wasn’t ok with it, I’m not sure how our friendships would fare. And I value those friendships.) Also, if I see a church organization working towards a goal I also want accomplished, and they’re more convenient or more fun to work with than any secular organizations with the same goals, I want to be able to ally with them. I don’t want to be turned off any kind of cooperation because it annoys me that they’re wrong...therefore, that annoyance is an irrational emotion for me to have. It’s not like my not working with them is going to make them convert to atheism to get me on their side… I’m not that important.
My own estimate leans the opposite way, primarily because I see the overall chilling effect that religion has on critical thought (as we discussed elsewhere on this thread) as having a massively negative utility. Yes, the effect is relatively mild compared to some of the other things religion does, but it’s everywhere.
Agreed; plus, I should probably mention that no one in their right mind would advocate “getting rid of churches” by force (even by force of law). Coercive tactics like that have a very poor track record, and besides, they’re pretty evil.
That said, one thing I’d like to see is a diminished respect for religion in general. In our current world, if you said something like, “Bugmaster advocates banning consumption of meat”, most people would probably just shrug. But if you said “Reverend Bugmaster advocates banning consumption of meat”, people would sit up and take notice. But why ? There’s nothing about being a “Reverend” that makes me somehow more competent at making decisions—no more than being a 10-th level Conjuration-specced Wizard, or president of my local Twilight fanclub, or whatever.
If you had that kind of power, you’d be a god, and then you’d have to eradicate yourself :-)
That’s fair enough; no one is expecting you to become some sort of a righteous anti-paladin of atheism (well, I can’t speak for Richard Dawkins, but I know I’m not). Still, I think it’s possible to disagree with a person, even on a fundamental level, while still respecting that person. That all depends on the person in question, of course.
Now I know what my next D&D character is going to be. Well, right after I get done playing that transhumanist warlock I’ve been thinking of...
I’m pretty sure these two statements would have exactly the same effect on me...i.e. proportional to how much other information I know about you and how many reasons I already have to respect your expert opinion. I do have a lot of reasons to respect Dawkins’ statements on a lot of things. He knows more about biology than I do, and so if he says something about biology or evolution, I’m prepared to take it at face value. I don’t think he’s studied religion in depth, though, or really undergone a non-biased process of weighing its pros and cons. I have no reason to conclude that his religion arguments are more valid just because he’s a good biologist.
Right, but as far as I can tell, this isn’t true of the population in general, where religious figures command a certain level of trust and respect simply due to being religious. You and I are probably outliers.
Hey, here’s an idea: Maybe balance time spent reading Less Wrong with talking to and hanging out with Less Wrongers who are church-friendly?
Well, regardless of how those beliefs “seeped” into your brain initially, now you have the option of paying attention to them and making some informed decisions about what beliefs you endorse, what beliefs you reject, what beliefs you intend to research further, etc.
It might be helpful to start by simply articulating the various beliefs that are relevant here, and your reasons for believing and not believing them (by which I mean both the evidence in favor of or against them, and your motives for endorsing or rejecting them independent of evidence).
Just noticing that my beliefs and their associated emotions had changed was enough for me to start listing them to myself...which has done a lot to cut off the emotions associated, too. Here are some beliefs which I think are relevant here:
I believe that it is a good thing to try and hold only beliefs that are true relative to the outside world, and to update on evidence from that world. I believe this, well, because it’s useful, and maybe partly because it’s a high-status LW idea. To a degree, I did not always believe this...I went through a ‘the truth is relative’ phase.
I believe that the current evidence says that reductionism is true, that the universe is made up of interactions between smaller parts which are not in themselves intelligent, that cause-and-effect holds. I believe this because it’s what I’ve read in textbooks and books I read for fun, and because it feels elegant and satisfying to believe it. I already believed this before LW and I don’t think LW has influenced it much. Nor has going to church.
I believe that there are people who believe in spirits. I expect that they believe in them because someone told them about it, or they read about it, and thought it was neat.
I believe that many people do not think about whether their beliefs are true relative to the outside world, or what evidence of their truth/falsehood would look like, or why evidence matters. I believe this because it seems obvious to me that the laws of science as we know them do not imply supernatural beings, that the only ‘evidence’ for their existence is the fact that people talk and write about them, and that their are other, simpler explanations for people talking and writing about supernatural beings than their actual existence (i.e. people misconstruing actual experiences, or wishful thinking.)
I do not actually believe that the existence of people believing in the supernatural is that much a bad thing for the world, as long as they don’t go around doing destructive things because of those beliefs. I believe this because most people I know have a firm moral compass regardless of what they think about religion or the supernatural.
I believe that there are people on LW who do think that religion, and people who believe in the supernatural, is a very bad thing for the world. I think that their reasons for believing this are that humans act more ineffectively and waste energy on irrational pursuits like religion. I agree with this, but I disagree on the final outcome because I think many people on LW overestimate the effectiveness of people who aren’t religious or obviously irrational. Most of the people my age who I know to be involved in charity, curious, thoughtful, wanting to be better people, and generally passionate about life, are religious. Many of the ‘atheists’ I know are apathetic or don’t reflect much on their lives.
OK. And if I’m understanding you correctly, you believe that the existence on LW of the belief you describe in #5/#6, that religion and supernatural beliefs are harmful, is causing you to be less able to coordinate usefully with people who hold religious and supernatural beliefs, despite the fact that you endorse such coordination, entirely because you want to fit in here and the way to fit in is to treat such people in ways that are mutually exclusive with such coordination.
Is that correct?
I think that’s the underlying motivation, yeah. Putting it explicitly makes it a lot easier to say to myself “well, that’s stupid… It’s my brain and I can do with it what I want.”
Yeah, that’s been my experience as well.
That’s one of the reasons, but not the only one. IMO religion is also harmful because it closes off legitimate avenues of inquiry: once you’ve decided that the answer to some question is “god did it’, or “it’s a mystery of mysteries”, you tend to not spend much time looking for the answer. Historically, though, the answer usually turned out to be something like “this question makes no sense because it rests on incorrect assumptions”, or something like “GMm / r^2” (which is an informative and useful answer).
Religion is also harmful (and again, this is just my own opinion) because it discourages critical thought, replacing it with faith. This not only reduces the overall effectiveness of our decision-making processes, but also contributes to legitimizing religious practices that directly harm people, such as faith healing.
I’m actually not sure to what degree this is true for religion in general. The emphasis on faith-in-itself seems to be mainly a Christian thing to me, although it’s contaminated a lot of later (i.e. New Age) thought in the Christian cultural sphere; what I’ve read of Islam, for example, puts a pretty heavy emphasis on scholarship, and doesn’t seem to isolate religious observations from empirical confirmation nearly to the same degree that Christianity does. The same goes for Buddhism, for several branches of occultism, and even for some minor Christian traditions, especially prior to the Enlightenment.
I think a fully general objection to religious thought would have to be a bit more subtle: even when a religion contains a tradition of inquiry, even when clerical roles look a lot like research positions, usually only confirming evidence is accepted. This doesn’t have quite the same structure as faith in the modern Christian sense: tautological belief isn’t thought of as virtuous. But the bottom line is already written, and arguments are only respected insofar as they provide support for it. Critical thought isn’t discouraged, but it’s only thought of as beneficial insofar as it serves preexisting goals. (Eliezer gets into this a bit in “Avoiding Your Belief’s Real Weak Points”, although I don’t think it’s limited to orthodox Judaism by any means.) Actually, I don’t even think this is specific to religion: lots of identity groups behave in similar ways.
That’s a very good point; I have nothing to add but my agreement.
This seems to describe a lot of what I’ve heard about Jewish ‘scholarship’, mostly according to Eliezer. Also, their definition of what constitutes strong versus weak evidence, and what it’s evidence of, is very different from scientific evidence. I don’t deny that the Old Testament exists, or even that its content is evidence of something (it shows what the culture and thought was like back in the ancient Middle East), but I wouldn’t think of proving a scientific hypothesis by pulling out a Torah quote that supported it.
I agree with you 100% on this. If we’re ever going to move towards a world where significantly more people have good critical thinking skills, religion will have to either be abolished or slowly fade. However, I don’t think removing all churches and religions right now would change much in terms of critical thinking. My opinion is that most people are religious because they are poor critical thinkers...not poor critical thinkers because of their religion., although to a degree the two might interact in a kind of loop or vicious cycle.
Agreed that most of the poor critical thinking in the world has causes other than religion.
But I also agree with Bugmaster that a lot of religious institutions discourage critical thinking.
The situation seems to me analogous to thieves in a poor neighborhood. No, eliminating the thieves will not suddenly make the neighborhood wealthier. On the other hand, if the thieves are allowed to operate unimpeded, nothing else will make the neighborhood wealthier either. On the other other hand, perhaps other techniques for making the neighborhood wealthier will cause the thieves to leave the neighborhood on their own.
Personally, I suspect that if all religious institutions suddenly vanished tomorrow, it would be easier to propagate certain forms of critical thinking, but that nobody would actually take significant advantage of the opportunity thus created.
Good analogy. Maybe I’ll find an opportunity to bring it up next time I’m discussing this with friends… I’ll make sure to cite it as coming from you.
Heh. I sense an Abbott and Costello routine coming on.
“TheOtherDave says—”
“Which other Dave?”
”The Less Wrong one.”
“What makes him less wrong than the first Dave?”
”Which first Dave?”
I hereby declare that analogy public domain. Use it in good health.
The “vicious cycle” hypothesis sounds right to me. Most people tend to simply follow the religion of their parents, simply accepting it as a given, because that’s what they were raised with from childhood. And, since most religions encourage faith and discourage doubt, this has an overall chilling effect on the prevalence of critical thinking skills across the entire population… which, in turn, makes it easier to raise one’s children in the religion, as well, thus completing the cycle.
I think all of that is true.
I also know an awful lot of totally non-religious people who don’t seem to have the best critical thinking skills either. Maybe it’s a thing of youth...maybe most middle 20-year-olds are sheltered and complacent and it’s a bias of juvenile brains in particular to care more about status and having fun than about being right or being curious about the world. I certainly hope it gets better as I get older. In general, though, I don’t see a big difference between the actual day-to-day, real-life behavior of religious 20-year-olds and non-religious 20-year-olds...except that many of the religious young people tend to spend more time volunteering or otherwise trying to change things for the better, and spend more time thinking about how they can be better people. (Or at least talk more about these things.)
I think this depends on the population. I have some Catholic acquaintances, for example, who are committed to a child-bearing schedule set by their pastors; this behavior is certainly different from that of non-Catholics. But that’s just a single data point, not a statistically significant trend.
Is there some data to back this up, adjusted for various meanings of “better” ?
No rigorously collected data, unfortunately (although someone may have studied it.) It’s more a weighted average in my head of people I know personally.
I have a somewhat similar experience. As a teen, I prefered to spend holidays with christian groups, although the religion never made sense to me. The reasons ? No or moderate alcohol drinking, extremely rare smoking with no peer pressure to try it, possibility to sing and not embarass myself, possibility to discuss what is right and wrong and not embarass myself. Mild and more merciful manifestations of the pecking order compared to the world outside of the community. (Christian groups do have their alpha individuals, no mistake in that, but they are nicer about it). More volunteering inside this group than outside. This is obviously a comparison based on people I knew personaly, no statistical survey with standard deviatons etc. I certainly could find atheists and agnostics which would have such qualities, but that was sort of hand-picking of isolated individuals. The Christians were a ready-to-go group I could just join, if I wanted to have some fun with more people around me.