It’s not about truth
A rather sane article about the actual purpose of religions and why they persist among the rational & intelligent.
http://blog.evangelicalrealism.com/2010/12/04/getting-religion/
A bit of a Hansonian bent as well. “Genuine objective truths can be complicated and uncomfortable, but what’s worse, they confer no particular social advantage ”
The reason why we tend to want people to convert to atheism is that it will make their beliefs more correct (and hence they will make better predictions). So if they don’t actually use their beliefs to control anticipation, then what’s they point of converting them?
The article continues to assume that people need to be atheists, even after it’s demolished its own reasons for doing so.
Teach people that objective truth really does matter, then they will have the motivation to be atheists.
I still think there isn’t any good reason to be an atheist.
I don’t quite follow—there isn’t any good reason to be what?
Secular. Unchurched.
I don’t imagine you’re talking about political secularism, so I’ll mention that I find myself intensely uncomfortable attending services. It feels to me like an endorsement of belief systems and epistemologies I find false and to some extent harmful. I consider this sufficient reason to be unchurched, unless I am mistaken as to your meaning.
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I think it makes more sense to ask whether there’s good reason not to be.
Apart from the parts which are wrong, there wasn’t a single sentence which isn’t already explicit in Dawkins and Dennett. (I haven’t read much Hitchens so can’t speak for him.)
On the contrary, most believers would strongly disagree that religion is a popularity contest or that beliefs are subjective.
Tell that to the Christians thrown to the lions, the heretics tortured by the Spanish inquisition, or the Christian saints who achieved sainthood through martyrdom (to choose just some Christian examples).
I hate the weasel word “people”. Some people might well be looking for these things. But “people” are just not that homogeneous.
In the end though, this is easy to agree with:
They would state this, but they behave as though it’s a popularity contest. Note the section you quoted explicitly says “Believers understand this on at least an instinctual level” which implies they may not on a conscious one.
Again, you yourself quote the original as saying “almost exclusively”.
Most people do not pursue Christianity with the fervour of those defending it against an oppressor. I note you are having to draw on historical examples to try to counter a statement about the present day.
I don’t fully agree, but the divergence between real beliefs and stated beliefs, in religious matters, is a very important one.
Ok I’ll try to stick to the present day. The fact that most people end up in the dominant religion of their community is much better explained by the parent->child influence than by the society->individual influence. If people mostly choose their religion based on societal factors, then why do we see stable religious minorities, even when it is a disadvantage to be in a minority? Why, to pick a nice uncontroversial example, don’t lots of Palestinians convert to Judaism? There are good partial answers to this question, but I think it still calls the hypothesis into doubt.
OK, I’m finding that a lot more convincing :-)
What I got from the original linked post was that it was about the effects of there being minimal penalty for irrationality compared to the social (or familial) penalty for not being religious. Since rationality has won so big that Western civilisation suffers the effects of too much food, the living is relatively easy so people are freer to believe any old rubbish to fit in. (And I’ve lost the link to where I first found someone stating this idea, and would welcome anyone’s assistance finding it.)
Perhaps Hanson’s This Is The Dreamtime
That wasn’t it, but point 2 states it very well: “Rich folks like us have larger buffers of wealth to cushion our mistakes; we can live happily and long even while acting on crazy beliefs.”
That’s because they’re not defending it against oppressors. If they were, they would tend to become more fervent.
A large proportion of Christianity’s stories about itself fit into an oppression narrative. The extent to which actual Christians take them seriously seems to vary, but at least a substantial minority of the religion’s adherents really do seem to behave as if they’re defending it against oppressors—albeit perceived intellectual and cultural oppressors, not physical ones.