If you were, though, to look at what social and psychological needs in its followers it fulfills, and what "sacred" means to them, it might both tell you something about American society and provide some pointers to possible ways to change the law to keep as many people happy as possible.
I once wrote a long post on SLU explaining how I came to not believe , but still had a nagging faith in anti-prayer (pray for the things you don't want to happen)
But i guess that's lost now ... the post that is , my non-belief is still strong
I'm wondering about adopting a more earthly approach to it, and betting on things I don't want to happen -- e.g. bet something on a No Deal Brexit happening by the end of October -- so I have an insurance policy of sorts that will cheer me up a bit if the worst comes to the worst.
I'm wondering about adopting a more earthly approach to it, and betting on things I don't want to happen -- e.g. bet something on a No Deal Brexit happening by the end of October -- so I have an insurance policy of sorts that will cheer me up a bit if the worst comes t the worst.
If you were, though, to look at what social and psychological needs in its followers it fulfills, and what "sacred" means to them, it might both tell you something about American society and provide some pointers to possible ways to change the law to keep as many people happy as possible.
It's not even a "supernatural" requirement. It's an earthly-power requirement. "Does your cult or organization play well with those in power, AND could you be useful to them in keeping their power?". If the answer is yes, your group is sacred and gets favorable treatment by the law and enforcement of it.
If not, too bad. You might get away with a few of the named liberties allowed religious groups (tax exempt status, for example), but expect to work much harder if you're org is in legal conflict with one the unofficially "approved" state-symbiotic religious organizations.
Tldr: legal projections favor those that are seen as useful to the political career and agendas of the people deciding if those protections are relevant.
It's absolutely a "supernatural" requirement in the US. I'm an ordained ULC minister*, and if I had no conscience and was willing to get in on the con I could get my share of those same benefits in the name of Bob, Eris, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. People do. Without being part of any powerful cult.
But you absolutely have to pretend to be part of the god game. Doesn't matter what god.
* Because this mail-order minister pissed me off online so I decided to be one too so I could pompous back at him. Also it's handy when sky pilots come to the door.
It's absolutely a "supernatural" requirement in the US. I'm an ordained ULC minister*, and if I had no conscience and was willing to get in on the con I could get my share of those same benefits in the name of Bob, Eris, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. People do. Without being part of any powerful cult.
But you absolutely have to pretend to be part of the god game. Doesn't matter what god.
* Because this mail-order minister pissed me off online so I decided to be one too so I could pompous back at him. Also it's handy when sky pilots come to the door.
Other than Native Americans, I'm honestly not aware of any religions that get preferential treatment by any government entity in the US, aside from tax-exempt status (I'll agree with any argument that many religious institutions are not exactly non-profit). Religious beliefs are a protected class in the US, but that only means nobody can be discriminated against (or receive preferential treatment) on the basis of their religious beliefs or lack thereof.
Other than Native Americans, I'm honestly not aware of any religions that get preferential treatment by any government entity in the US, aside from tax-exempt status (I'll agree with any argument that many religious institutions are not exactly non-profit). Religious beliefs are a protected class in the US, but that only means nobody can be discriminated against (or receive preferential treatment) on the basis of their religious beliefs or lack thereof.
Unfortunately an example pops into my mind immediately, the way fundies in Idaho can refuse medical care for their children. While if they were Catholic or LDS and a court ordered the parents to allow medical care they’d have to obey.
Then there’s the funneling of tax money to “faith based” charities, which causes discrimination against protected classes among the poor, and the plan to fund pregnancy centers that won’t mention abortion (I know of at least one that was the supply for a profitable adoption mill.)
Now that I think of it, refugee children at the border are being diverted to “Christian” adoption agencies. This, to my mind, fits the definition of genocide - tearing children away from parents of the wrong race/denomination/ethnicity.
The way Hobby Lobby claimed it was a religion and opposed birth control insurance coverage comes to mind too.
I’m sure there are additional examples. But we’re used to this kind of loophole, so the hard Right is driving a semi through it.
To be honest, I started dis thread on a lark after downing about 3/4 of a bottle of red wine, so I didn't really have any idea where it was going. And all of y'all have been super cool and talked about really thought provoking stuff.
I love you all so much right now!
Thank you all, theists and non-theists, for sharing your thoughts here. It's been amazing reading all you have to say. I personally want to thank all of you for keeping this interesting and not letting it devolve into a screaming cesspool. Dat made those who were nervous about posting their thoughts feel safe enough to do so, and I REALLY appreciate that.
If you were standing here right now I would hug the bejeezus out of you!
I am really amazed that nobody yet came up with Ludwig Feuerbach as explanation,: "God is the mirror of the humans." He came up with it in the first half of the 19th century, and has heavily influenced Marx and Engels.
Meaning that humans tend to project some inner parts of themselves into god, and therefore god is nothing else than an externalised part of the humans.
How about religious exemptions to vaccination (which is much easier to get than merely "sincerely held belief" exemptions, and both are thankfully going down), religious holidays (holy days), military and prison chapels, religious exemptions to facial hair regulations, and on and on and on.
I am really amazed that nobody yet came up with Ludwig Feuerbach as explanation,: "God is the mirror of the humans." He came up with it in the first half of the 19th century, and has heavily influenced Marx and Engels.
Meaning that humans tend to project some inner parts of themselves into god, and therefore god is nothing else than an externalised part of the humans.
Yes, but to my mind, that's only part of the story, because any deity or deities are parts of a shared social and cultural practice.
That's what so annoys me about that God as "imaginary friend" jibe, because a child's imaginary friends are, in general, private to the child and its immediate family.
Unlike Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy, Barbie, or the Slender Man, who are already there as part of the culture into which the child is socialised, they are very much the child's private creation (using, of course, tropes from the existing culture).
God(s), in contrast, is, or are, a shared "imaginary friend" who is a key part of an illusion shared by a whole community.
He/she/it/they is part of a tradition and culture that stretches back hundreds, and in most cases, thousands of years, which is a key part of many communities' self-identity and usually communal, as well as private, acts of worship as an integral feature of the tradition, both as part of life's normal routine and to mark important life events and rites of passage.
Gods do not spring fully-formed from the believer's heads, like Athena from the head of Zeus. They're there in the culture already, even for atheists.
The God in whom I no longer believe, the God of the Roman Catholics (see spoiler below*), has very little in common with the God of the most extreme Evangelical Protestants in whom Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris disbelieve so vehemently, and neither of them have much in common with the whole Hindu pantheon about whom my sometime father-in-law used to argue with one of my brothers-in-law -- I can still summarise some very convincing arguments against believing in the lords Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, but most of them are utterly meaningless outside the context of Hinduism.
If you tried using them on an evangelical Christian, he'd wonder what you were talking about, and if I tried to reproduce them here, they'd almost certainly mean very little to most of us without lengthy explanatory footnotes.
To my mind, trying to discuss God or gods without reference to their role in both the religious community of which they are part and to the role they and their doctrines and rites play in the wider culture is like trying to describe a soccer match with reference only to the movements of the ball round the pitch but without reference to the players, the crowd, the supporters' clubs, the soccer clubs and leagues and so on.
My late father introduced me to Joyce, telling me that Stephen Dedalus' story was very much his own:
Cranly asked suddenly in a plain sensible tone:
—Tell me the truth. Were you at all shocked by what I said?
—Somewhat, Stephen said.
—And why were you shocked, Cranly pressed on in the same tone, if you feel sure that our religion is false and that Jesus was not the son of God?
—I am not at all sure of it, Stephen said. He is more like a son of God than a son of Mary.
—And is that why you will not communicate, Cranly asked, because you are not sure of that too, because you feel that the host, too, may be the body and blood of the son of God and not a wafer of bread? And because you fear that it may be?
—Yes, Stephen said quietly, I feel that and I also fear it.
—I see, Cranly said.
Stephen, struck by his tone of closure, reopened the discussion at once by saying:
—I fear many things: dogs, horses, firearms, the sea, thunderstorms, machinery, the country roads at night.
—But why do you fear a bit of bread?
—I imagine, Stephen said, that there is a malevolent reality behind those things I say I fear.
—Do you fear then, Cranly asked, that the God of the Roman catholics would strike you dead and damn you if you made a sacrilegious communion?
—The God of the Roman catholics could do that now, Stephen said. I fear more than that the chemical action which would be set up in my soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration.
—Would you, Cranly asked, in extreme danger, commit that particular sacrilege? For instance, if you lived in the penal days?
—I cannot answer for the past, Stephen replied. Possibly not.
—Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?
—I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost selfrespect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?
Once you start looking at the social and psychological needs organised religions help fulfill, and the particular sociological function of particular organised faith communities in specific times and circumstances, and the role a shared belief in that divinity and the practice of ritual worship, whether communal or personal, and other shared activities, then you begin to explore questions I find far more satisfying and informative than endlessly sterile debates that haven't advanced much since the days of Charles Bradlaugh.
It's like nicotine. You can put your time and attention into a community, charitable or personally fulfilling project with or without an addiction to nicotine and get the exact same gains and do the exact same good. Nicotine is neither baby nor bathwater. It's not an essential piece of stable human existence, communally or individually. It can seem essential to the individual, but that’s a requirement of nicotine use, not a requirement of the wider world or a requirement of living well in it.
Other than Native Americans, I'm honestly not aware of any religions that get preferential treatment by any government entity in the US, aside from tax-exempt status (I'll agree with any argument that many religious institutions are not exactly non-profit). Religious beliefs are a protected class in the US, but that only means nobody can be discriminated against (or receive preferential treatment) on the basis of their religious beliefs or lack thereof.
In principle, no, but what about, oh, Xmass as an official holiday? It is not something for everyone though, have you SEEN Rs go off if you try to claim it is for something else or just a generic holiday? Or military grave markers, there is a huge pushback any time you want them to recognize something other than a cross as a valid choice.
There are plenty of unofficial ways where christianity is the de fact default too. Try claiming a minority religion or no religion on everything unless you love the closet.
After a few years of my doing stuff like that my teachers basically figured out I would come up with a creative answer to any assignment they gave. This lead to stuff like them telling me I could not learn the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram in another language because they would only understand it if I did the usual English and some Hebrew. I still translated it but that was extra work for me.
Or when they gave the assignment to do a report on a magical language. My question was if I could create one first (it uses hexadecimal characters for the alphabet and you pronounce it using leet).
It's like nicotine. You can put your time and attention into a community, charitable or personally fulfilling project with or without an addiction to nicotine and get the exact same gains and do the exact same good. Nicotine is neither baby nor bathwater. It's not an essential piece of stable human existence, communally or individually. It can seem essential to the individual, but that’s a requirement of nicotine use, not a requirement of the wider world or a requirement of living well in it.
Possibly so, though that's a statement that's empirically testable, and -- at least as I understand it -- there's some evidence that the case may be rather different:
There is now a great deal of evidence that religions do in fact help groups to cohere, solve free rider problems, and win the competition for group-level survival.
The clearest evidence comes from the anthropologist Richard Sosis, who examined the history of two hundred communes founded in the United States in the nineteenth century.30 Communes are natural experiments in cooperation without kinship. Communes can survive only to the extent that they can bind a group together, suppress self-interest, and solve the free rider problem. Communes are usually founded by a group of committed believers who reject the moral matrix of the broader society and want to organize themselves along different principles. For many nineteenth-century communes, the principles were religious; for others they were secular, mostly socialist. Which kind of commune survived longer? Sosis found that the difference was stark: just 6 percent of the secular communes were still functioning twenty years after their founding, compared to 39 percent of the religious communes.
What was the secret ingredient that gave the religious communes a longer shelf life? Sosis quantified everything he could find about life in each commune. He then used those numbers to see if any of them could explain why some stood the test of time while others crumbled. He found one master variable: the number of costly sacrifices that each commune demanded from its members. It was things like giving up alcohol and tobacco, fasting for days at a time, conforming to a communal dress code or hairstyle, or cutting ties with outsiders. For religious communes, the effect was perfectly linear: the more sacrifice a commune demanded, the longer it lasted. But Sosis was surprised to discover that demands for sacrifice did not help secular communes. Most of them failed within eight years, and there was no correlation between sacrifice and longevity.
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, ch 11, citing Sosis, R., and E. R. Bressler. 2003. “Cooperation and Commune Longevity: A Test of the Costly Signaling Theory of Religion.” Cross-Cultural Research: The Journal of Comparative Social Science 37:211–39.)
He goes on to discuss similar phenomena, and provides this as a parallel example and partial explanation:
Social capital refers to a kind of capital that economists had largely overlooked: the social ties among individuals and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from those ties. When everything else is equal, a firm with more social capital will outcompete its less cohesive and less internally trusting competitors (which makes sense given that human beings were shaped by multilevel selection to be contingent cooperators). In fact, discussions of social capital sometimes use the example of ultra-Orthodox Jewish diamond merchants, which I mentioned in the previous chapter.This tightly knit ethnic group has been able to create the most efficient market because their transaction and monitoring costs are so low—there’s less overhead on every deal. And their costs are so low because they trust each other. If a rival market were to open up across town composed of ethnically and religiously diverse merchants, they’d have to spend a lot more money on lawyers and security guards, given how easy it is to commit fraud or theft when sending diamonds out for inspection by other merchants. Like the nonreligious communes studied by Richard Sosis, they’d have a much harder time getting individuals to follow the moral norms of the community.
I won't try to summarise the whole book, which I've not yet finished, but I hope that gives an indication of sort of discussion that is apparently going on amongst anthropologists and social psychologists.
To quote Haidt again,
Why doesn’t sacrifice strengthen secular communes? Sosis argues that rituals, laws, and other constraints work best when they are sacralized. He quotes the anthropologist Roy Rappaport: “To invest social conventions with sanctity is to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming necessity.” But when secular organizations demand sacrifice, every member has a right to ask for a cost-benefit analysis, and many refuse to do things that don’t make logical sense. In other words, the very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship. Irrational beliefs can sometimes help the group function more rationally, particularly when those beliefs rest upon the Sanctity foundation [a term he uses to identify one of the various foundations for moral principles that people when they try to explain why they consider something right or wrong]. Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.
Sosis’s findings support Atran and Henrich. Gods really do help groups cohere, succeed, and outcompete other groups. This is a form of group selection, but Atran and Henrich say it’s purely cultural group selection. Religions that do a better job of binding people together and suppressing selfishness spread at the expense of other religions, but not necessarily by killing off the losers. Religions can spread far faster than genes, as in the case of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries, or Mormonism in the nineteenth century. A successful religion can be adopted by neighboring people or by vanquished populations.
So I think your point needs further objective investigation.
In any event, though, even if we accept your point, I don't see where it gets us.
It might be far more sensible if we all ditched Windows and used Linux instead, or everyone adopted Esperanto as a common second language, but to enjoy the undoubted benefits of such an arrangement, you've got to persuade everyone to install Linux and learn Esperanto, and that ain't going to happen any time soon, any more than are people who feel they're deriving benefits of whatever sort from their membership of a faith group going to abandon that en masse for a form of secular social activity that is said to provide similar benefits.
I'm interested in the world as it is, not in how I might want it to be, and in how people do actually behave rather than how I might think they ought to had they only what I regard as common sense but they don't.
I think the general ideas about god are so contradictory that no such entity could possibly exist given the evidence we have around us.
Any deity that designed us to behave in opposition to our urges, who then relied on a system of corrupted gossip to disseminate their notion of 'ultimate morality' is just too ridiculous to contemplate as anything other than terrible fiction.
i grew up in a heavily Christian environment, but early on as a child i questioned everything. it just seemed to ridiculous how everything contradicted itself. if he really didn't want something to happen it wouldn't even be a thought in our minds. If this person is really omnipresent and knows everything i'm going to do even before i do it but still loves me anyway? and his son made this ultimate sacrifice so we can do those things and not get punished for them?( so will be saved no matter what, right?) it just didn't add up. the lessons being taught seem to repeat itself after a while and no one seemed to be listening to it.
we can't even get a game of telephone to work properly after 2 minutes and you expect me to believe that the bible that has supposedly survived thousands of years out of everything else still translates and interrupted the same as it was? even tho we are also told the ones that survive are the one that write history?
once out of school i started seeing how hypocritical the real world was i stopped going to church. i still have to interact with these people all the time so i'm still in the echo chamber.... like Hex i've delved alittle into Buddhism and philosophy to keep me sane..
i do believe we are all connected in some weird way like a 6th sense where Karma, Magic and premonitions that we think is god.... i'm not sure if i'll support another religious organization again.
Possibly so, though that's a statement that's empirically testable, and -- at least as I understand it -- there's some evidence that the case may be rather different:
Hmm, I don't see longevity as a particularly useful measure of utility or quality of living. I'd have to read the book and I'm just going on what's quoted, but I'd have to know more about the research to know in what relevant sense disbandment is a failure.
Could be that secular communities disband because those of such mind simply have different priorities, or do not have appetites that need feeding by group reinforcement, or need more freedom to come and go in order to scratch whatever itches they have. Could be they are worse off in a community, that they find the commitment itself exhausting, or have aversion to routine and would live a more fulfilled life on their own terms. And so on.
Sure, certain communes may last longer than others, but when compromises and sacrifices have to be made to extend them, I’m left wondering how that actually plays out with regards to quality of life and individual health, and whether those sacrifices lead to net gain or loss. I think it’s important to find that out before we make any conclusions about the fitness of religious social models and whether anything is truly gained by the sacrifices they demand.
But again, I have not read the book, so I don’t know if his thesis resolves that.
Well, like you say; the world as it is, not how it might be. My point isn't as much to move the world somewhere as it is just me describing the world as it is now by my lights. That’s what religion looks like to me. Nothing is truly contingent upon it and its just a matter of partiality. Religions are marketed on features that have never been their exclusive domain, often at steep cost.
