Comment by foxglacier
2 days ago
Nonsense. Religion serves some needs of the human mind. It's like saying having friends is fundamentally flawed. We don't need friends but we spend hours saying pointless words to each other and somehow feel good about all that wasted time. Humans have these emotional needs. We're not robots that can just program ourselves to be pure truth and productivity machines.
Social groups serve those needs. I’ve seen no reason to think those groups must be centered on a mythology.
Social groups not built on any kind of shared values or belief system don't actually serve the needs that religions do because they don't scale beyond the familiarity of the specific members of the group
Well, religion doesn’t serve the needs of people like me because we can’t believe in the core nonsense that religion centers on. So what then?
6 replies →
Humans are capable of having friends and fulfilling emotional needs without believing in the supernatural.
Like many people, you may have been indoctrinated into believing that only religion is capable of fulfilling these needs, providing community, a moral framework or a sense of purpose or value to life, but that isn't true, it's part of the propaganda of theism.
Just about every reasonably long-lived society ever has had religion. For some reason. Even modern western atheists treat other ideologies like religions. Perhaps it provides comfort and a feeling of security, or provides a purpose when pure pragmatism would reveal that there's no point in living. Or perhaps we're such social animals that we extend that social thinking beyond what's rational, but we do do it nonetheless, even when we have community and morals. Maybe people with other higher purposes don't take to it so readily but not everyone has the luxury of, say, a successful career. You might have been brainwashed into believing that religion is caused by brainwashing.
The fact that religion is common doesn’t mean it has a purpose or that it’s a good idea. Everybody with eyes has blood vessels in front of their retinas even though it’s a bad design with no advantage over having them in the back.
There has never been a long-lived society with internet before. It must not be possible.
>Even modern western atheists treat other ideologies like religions.
They don't, though. This is a commonly believed fallacy, rooted in the presumption that atheists are essentially hypocrites or blind to religious belief being immutably ingrained into human behavior. But the way atheists approach these "ideologies" is nothing like the way religious people approach religion.
>Perhaps it provides comfort and a feeling of security, or provides a purpose when pure pragmatism would reveal that there's no point in living.
Another commonly believed fallacy, that atheism means "pure pragmatism" and that only religion can provide a sense of meaning to life.
Atheists are actually capable of emotions, and empathy, and morality, and finding value in the world and their own lives, just like anyone else. They aren't insects or Vulcans or sociopaths. To quote Douglas Adams, "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"
>Maybe people with other higher purposes don't take to it so readily but not everyone has the luxury of, say, a successful career.
This is a new one. Atheism is a luxury of wealthy elites? No, atheists exist at every point of the social and economic ladder, and there are even atheists in foxholes, despite the quip.
>You might have been brainwashed into believing that religion is caused by brainwashing.
I'm not going to call it brainwashing but the knee-jerk animosity from a lot of theists towards the very concept of a life not centered around and entirely defined by belief certainly seems like fear of committing thoughtcrime.
3 replies →
Sometimes I wish I could just pick up a religion out of pragmatism. But I don't believe in supernatural stuff, and the secular "religions" (or whatever you call an `Option<Religion>` like humanism don't have much appeal.