Disclaimer: I may not be the right person to be joining this discussion, as a never-religious atheist, but I think your point 1 is understating the problem. Religion (and I’m mostly thinking of Christianity here, but I think the same applies to Islam and Judaism) doesn’t just make ”straightforwardly false” claims. The claim “ivermectin is a wonder drug that cures 100% of Covid” is straightforwardly false and potentially harmful but doesn’t generate the same reaction. Religion demands thought patterns which systematically undermine your ability to tell true from false.
Examples:
You must have faith. Faith is praiseworthy, doubting is wrong / sinful. Requiring evidence for your beliefs is therefore wrong.
Questioning what you are taught by (religious) authority figures is sinful.
If the (holy) text doesn’t make sense or is outright self-contradictory, you should rationalise the problems and teach yourself to ignore any evidence that the text is not perfect.
Training yourself to apply these degraded thought-patterns undermines your entire epistemics and is consequently very difficult to self-correct. That is far more harmful than embracing any individual object-level false belief.
This is the right answer, but I think it’s under-generalized. Any false belief systematically undermines your ability to tell true from false, if it’s sufficiently integrated into your world model and not just free-floating. Believing “ivermectin is a wonder drug” starts out harmless, presuming you don’t actually take it or get COVID. But if you got the wrong answer about ivermectin and you’re committed to stick with that answer, then every time your beliefs about ivermectin interact with your beliefs about something else, the accuracy of those other beliefs takes damage. Eg if you go and read a bunch of studies about ivermectin, and try to figure out how to distinguish good studies from bad ones, then you’ll draw wrong conclusions about that.
Religion has this property more than most things, because the things it gets wrong are relatively big, central things which tend to interact with a lot of other beliefs, and because it’s had a long time to get entrenched and put damaged neighboring-beliefs, many of which are not obviously religion-related, into the culture. But the problem is a general one.
The problem isn’t per falseness per se but epistemic stubborness. After all there can be attitudes that “all models are wrong, some are useful”. There is one strategy to try to be ragefully and pedantically correct about everything but one canbe quite short of that and still get a “adjusts quickly in the face of big frictions” type of systems that don’t get strongly guided by the priors.
Yes agreed. I think we’re both getting at the same point: religion demands that you believe false things and then undermines your entire epistemics to make you keep upholding those false beliefs. You can do yourself comparable damage by picking some other belief like a political ideology and warping all your other beliefs to fit in. Mike Evron below wrote that he isn’t opposed to religion, he’s opposed to dogma. I think that’s a good way of summarising the point: any false belief is dangerous if it becomes a dogma that resists correction, and religion is unusually good at forming dogma, compared to other types of belief.
The thought patterns you cite are not universally demanded by religion. They might be demanded by some religious people sometimes, but they are by no means a universal feature of religion. So, as a never-religious atheist, your perception of religion does seem to be skewed. In my experience with religious people, I very rarely encounter the kind of attitudes you mentioned.
Disclaimer: I may not be the right person to be joining this discussion, as a never-religious atheist, but I think your point 1 is understating the problem. Religion (and I’m mostly thinking of Christianity here, but I think the same applies to Islam and Judaism) doesn’t just make ”straightforwardly false” claims. The claim “ivermectin is a wonder drug that cures 100% of Covid” is straightforwardly false and potentially harmful but doesn’t generate the same reaction. Religion demands thought patterns which systematically undermine your ability to tell true from false.
Examples:
You must have faith. Faith is praiseworthy, doubting is wrong / sinful. Requiring evidence for your beliefs is therefore wrong.
Questioning what you are taught by (religious) authority figures is sinful.
If the (holy) text doesn’t make sense or is outright self-contradictory, you should rationalise the problems and teach yourself to ignore any evidence that the text is not perfect.
Training yourself to apply these degraded thought-patterns undermines your entire epistemics and is consequently very difficult to self-correct. That is far more harmful than embracing any individual object-level false belief.
This is the right answer, but I think it’s under-generalized. Any false belief systematically undermines your ability to tell true from false, if it’s sufficiently integrated into your world model and not just free-floating. Believing “ivermectin is a wonder drug” starts out harmless, presuming you don’t actually take it or get COVID. But if you got the wrong answer about ivermectin and you’re committed to stick with that answer, then every time your beliefs about ivermectin interact with your beliefs about something else, the accuracy of those other beliefs takes damage. Eg if you go and read a bunch of studies about ivermectin, and try to figure out how to distinguish good studies from bad ones, then you’ll draw wrong conclusions about that.
Religion has this property more than most things, because the things it gets wrong are relatively big, central things which tend to interact with a lot of other beliefs, and because it’s had a long time to get entrenched and put damaged neighboring-beliefs, many of which are not obviously religion-related, into the culture. But the problem is a general one.
The problem isn’t per falseness per se but epistemic stubborness. After all there can be attitudes that “all models are wrong, some are useful”. There is one strategy to try to be ragefully and pedantically correct about everything but one canbe quite short of that and still get a “adjusts quickly in the face of big frictions” type of systems that don’t get strongly guided by the priors.
Yes agreed. I think we’re both getting at the same point: religion demands that you believe false things and then undermines your entire epistemics to make you keep upholding those false beliefs. You can do yourself comparable damage by picking some other belief like a political ideology and warping all your other beliefs to fit in. Mike Evron below wrote that he isn’t opposed to religion, he’s opposed to dogma. I think that’s a good way of summarising the point: any false belief is dangerous if it becomes a dogma that resists correction, and religion is unusually good at forming dogma, compared to other types of belief.
This seems correct to me. (Nor do I think it’s unique to Abrahamic religions, or Western religions.)
The thought patterns you cite are not universally demanded by religion. They might be demanded by some religious people sometimes, but they are by no means a universal feature of religion. So, as a never-religious atheist, your perception of religion does seem to be skewed. In my experience with religious people, I very rarely encounter the kind of attitudes you mentioned.