Everyone can have a different reason. For me, the main objection is that religion plays a form of epistemic “pigeon chess”—that it joyfully throws out of the window all sanity, and instead promotes an epistemic norm: “if you don’t believe this memeplex, you will be horribly tortured—and this is supremely good thing (and if you disagree that this is a supremely good thing, you will be horribly tortured, too, mwahahaha!)”.
From my perspective, anyone who threatens other people with torture, should be kicked in the balls, repeatedly. Like, the moment you seriously started threatening me with torture, this stopped being a civil discussion, and I refuse to pretend otherwise.
Your imaginary god who enjoys torturing people is a sick psycho. If it was someone else’s god, torturing people for not joining someone else’s religion, I assume it would be quite obvious to you, too.
(EDIT: here, “you” refers to a general hypothetical religious audience, not OP specifically)
After epistemology, the next thing the religion throws in the toilet is morality. Because, in order to avoid being horribly tortured yourself, you better start believing that torturing people who follow the normal rules of evidence is a good thing. As St. Thomas Aquinas said, one of the greatest joys of people in heaven will be eating popcorn while watching sinners (e.g. people who masturbated at some moment of their lives) tortured in hell. Do you realize that in the unlikely case you get in heaven, most of your friends and relatives will be in hell? Are you seriously looking forward to watching them suffer, forever, while singing praise to your mad god? You better sing loud and sincerely, because he can read your thoughts, and he certainly does not like criticism.
...now of course, most religious people would object strongly against this description. But that’s kinda my point: if you believe stupid and evil shit, why look for excuses, when you could simply stop believing it instead? Ah, because in the infinitesimal chance that you were wrong and the religion was somehow right after all, you will get horribly tortured for your lack of faith. No shit Pascal, shut up and multiply.
So, to address your questions: (1) yes, religion is false, and (2) yes, it makes people say stupid things. But the actually horrible thing is the mechanism it uses to make people say and believe stupid things (the threat of torture for those who want to consider the evidence instead of blindly believing). Saying “religion is false” is just the tip of the iceberg. Many things are false, without being promoted under threat of torture, with sick morality saying that threatening people (including small kids) by torture to make them believe absurdities is a good thing.
Many religions claim that such things as courage, honesty, and hard work are virtues.
Also: killing strangers, killing skeptics, killing witches. Arguably, those are folk values, too.
I suspect that religion (especially, communally practiced religion) makes it easier for people to create stable marriages and to raise children by providing shared maps of how to do this together. I suspect it also encourages more people to want these things by providing a more accurate map of their value, and a more accurate map of what kind of thing we humans are, such that we value children. (Again, providing accurate maps matters most for young people.)
Whoa, that was an interesting jump from “shared maps”, through maps more accurate in one specific thing (a broken clock is also right twice a day), to generally “accurate maps”. The religion is right about the fact that some people want to have kids—awesome! But what about the remaining 99% of the holy books?
Many scientistic materialists seem in my experience to have difficulty finding anything to care about
I am not very confident here, but it seems to me that this is mostly a function of having an active social life. (That is, if you controlled for social activity, would the materialists differ from the religious meaningfully? I suspect no; but I am not sure.) Yes, religion forces you to participate in certain social activities, which are on average good for you. An atheist totalitarian regime can do the same. In theory, you could also organize voluntary social activities for people… but this somehow doesn’t seem to work well in practice… perhaps because the people who are most likely to get depressed when they stay alone are also the ones most likely to opt out of voluntary activities? Or maybe it’s some kind of paradox of choice, that if you have many activities to choose from, none of them seems clearly best, so you choose none? Also, the more choices, the less likely you are to choose the same thing as your neighbors.
But this is unrelated to accuracy. Reading horoscopes together can be a fun social activity, too.
How do people find out about the voluntary activities?
(How many of them have ‘people know about it because their parents did it’ going for them?)
Or maybe it’s some kind of paradox of choice, that if you have many activities to choose from, none of them seems clearly best, so you choose none?
It seems harder for separate organizations to propagate such a variety of messages. Though 5 people would like to play soccer, 3 basketball, (some more other things), and then (stag-hunt style) there’s not enough people for soccer or basketball so that’s not what happens.
Maybe it’s a bigger issue than it looks, and can’t be fixed by sending an entire city a message like ‘At dawn, we meet in the park for soccer, this Saturday*’.
*For the particular city, the particular activity might be better chosen to be something else. Also, yes, what if too many people show up.
How do people find out about the voluntary activities?
Great question! Let me think...
afternoon activities at school;
competitions for kids that school tells you about;
generally, all kinds of clubs for children are advertised at schools;
parents sign you up for a club;
teambuilding at work;
announced in various papers, including ones that are given to everyone for free;
google;
advertised on facebook;
told by a neighbor;
given a flyer;
you organize it yourself.
So, in theory, there are many ways. Though some of them require agency on your side, so if you are not the type of person who does these things, and if no one even told you that this is an option, it effectively does not exist for you.
In some villages, they still have a local village radio that among other things announces all local activities, so if you want to organize soccer, people will know. In towns, there is sometimes a municipal neswpaper which could be used to announce such activities, but now you need to plan a few weeks in advance (and then your plans can be ruined by weather). Some communities have a local facebook group, you could share the information there. At some places there are bulleting boards, I wonder if anyone still reads them. You could print little flyers and throw them in neighbors’ mail. Activities for kids you could try to promote at local schools: either by a flyer or by telling the relevant teacher (e.g. contact the gym teacher about sport activities).
Yet most of these things require some agency, which I suspect is the greatest obstacle. The most convenient ones seem to be: village radio, and local facebook group (assuming one already exists).
Everyone can have a different reason. For me, the main objection is that religion plays a form of epistemic “pigeon chess”—that it joyfully throws out of the window all sanity, and instead promotes an epistemic norm: “if you don’t believe this memeplex, you will be horribly tortured—and this is supremely good thing (and if you disagree that this is a supremely good thing, you will be horribly tortured, too, mwahahaha!)”.
From my perspective, anyone who threatens other people with torture, should be kicked in the balls, repeatedly. Like, the moment you seriously started threatening me with torture, this stopped being a civil discussion, and I refuse to pretend otherwise.
Your imaginary god who enjoys torturing people is a sick psycho. If it was someone else’s god, torturing people for not joining someone else’s religion, I assume it would be quite obvious to you, too.
(EDIT: here, “you” refers to a general hypothetical religious audience, not OP specifically)
After epistemology, the next thing the religion throws in the toilet is morality. Because, in order to avoid being horribly tortured yourself, you better start believing that torturing people who follow the normal rules of evidence is a good thing. As St. Thomas Aquinas said, one of the greatest joys of people in heaven will be eating popcorn while watching sinners (e.g. people who masturbated at some moment of their lives) tortured in hell. Do you realize that in the unlikely case you get in heaven, most of your friends and relatives will be in hell? Are you seriously looking forward to watching them suffer, forever, while singing praise to your mad god? You better sing loud and sincerely, because he can read your thoughts, and he certainly does not like criticism.
...now of course, most religious people would object strongly against this description. But that’s kinda my point: if you believe stupid and evil shit, why look for excuses, when you could simply stop believing it instead? Ah, because in the infinitesimal chance that you were wrong and the religion was somehow right after all, you will get horribly tortured for your lack of faith. No shit Pascal, shut up and multiply.
So, to address your questions: (1) yes, religion is false, and (2) yes, it makes people say stupid things. But the actually horrible thing is the mechanism it uses to make people say and believe stupid things (the threat of torture for those who want to consider the evidence instead of blindly believing). Saying “religion is false” is just the tip of the iceberg. Many things are false, without being promoted under threat of torture, with sick morality saying that threatening people (including small kids) by torture to make them believe absurdities is a good thing.
Also: killing strangers, killing skeptics, killing witches. Arguably, those are folk values, too.
Whoa, that was an interesting jump from “shared maps”, through maps more accurate in one specific thing (a broken clock is also right twice a day), to generally “accurate maps”. The religion is right about the fact that some people want to have kids—awesome! But what about the remaining 99% of the holy books?
I am not very confident here, but it seems to me that this is mostly a function of having an active social life. (That is, if you controlled for social activity, would the materialists differ from the religious meaningfully? I suspect no; but I am not sure.) Yes, religion forces you to participate in certain social activities, which are on average good for you. An atheist totalitarian regime can do the same. In theory, you could also organize voluntary social activities for people… but this somehow doesn’t seem to work well in practice… perhaps because the people who are most likely to get depressed when they stay alone are also the ones most likely to opt out of voluntary activities? Or maybe it’s some kind of paradox of choice, that if you have many activities to choose from, none of them seems clearly best, so you choose none? Also, the more choices, the less likely you are to choose the same thing as your neighbors.
But this is unrelated to accuracy. Reading horoscopes together can be a fun social activity, too.
How do people find out about the voluntary activities?
(How many of them have ‘people know about it because their parents did it’ going for them?)
It seems harder for separate organizations to propagate such a variety of messages. Though 5 people would like to play soccer, 3 basketball, (some more other things), and then (stag-hunt style) there’s not enough people for soccer or basketball so that’s not what happens.
Maybe it’s a bigger issue than it looks, and can’t be fixed by sending an entire city a message like ‘At dawn, we meet in the park for soccer, this Saturday*’.
*For the particular city, the particular activity might be better chosen to be something else. Also, yes, what if too many people show up.
Great question! Let me think...
afternoon activities at school;
competitions for kids that school tells you about;
generally, all kinds of clubs for children are advertised at schools;
parents sign you up for a club;
teambuilding at work;
announced in various papers, including ones that are given to everyone for free;
google;
advertised on facebook;
told by a neighbor;
given a flyer;
you organize it yourself.
So, in theory, there are many ways. Though some of them require agency on your side, so if you are not the type of person who does these things, and if no one even told you that this is an option, it effectively does not exist for you.
In some villages, they still have a local village radio that among other things announces all local activities, so if you want to organize soccer, people will know. In towns, there is sometimes a municipal neswpaper which could be used to announce such activities, but now you need to plan a few weeks in advance (and then your plans can be ruined by weather). Some communities have a local facebook group, you could share the information there. At some places there are bulleting boards, I wonder if anyone still reads them. You could print little flyers and throw them in neighbors’ mail. Activities for kids you could try to promote at local schools: either by a flyer or by telling the relevant teacher (e.g. contact the gym teacher about sport activities).
Yet most of these things require some agency, which I suspect is the greatest obstacle. The most convenient ones seem to be: village radio, and local facebook group (assuming one already exists).