Comment by aprilthird2021
4 months ago
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
4 months ago
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?
You don't have to believe, you just have to fit in. I once read somebody's theory on why atheist "churches" aren't very successful. In a real church, you have true-believers who are happy competent people with normal jobs and friends and families. They're there because of their belief, not to fill a need to belong to something. Their presence keeps the quality of the social group high so that weak or fake-believers can still participate and enjoy the benefits. If there's nothing for true-believers to believe in, then all you have is unhappy lonely people looking for company and they're not very good company for each other.
It may be hard for a religious person to say "Pretending to believe in God is more important than actually believing." so you may get the feeling that if you don't believe, it's not for you. But I think it kind of is like that. It's a useful lie that everyone silently agrees to perpetuate because it actually works better than anything truthful.
Why is it nonsense but the idea that life is invaluable and meaningless is not, despite the fact that no one, not even the most ardent defenders of this worldview, lives as if it is true?
FWIW "invaluable" means the opposite of what you want here.
There's no evidence of any objective source of value or meaning in our lives. All indications are that we're the product of random chance and unthinking laws of physics. Gather a huge amount of hydrogen and eventually it turns into people.
What would it look like to live as if it were true? I still have the emotions and drives that evolution and culture baked into me. I fear death, not because I think my life has some inherent objective value, but because my ancestors who were genetically predisposed to fear death had better odds of reproducing. I care about my family and work to make their lives better not because I believe their lives have some objective value, but because their lives have value to _me_, and that's because my ancestors who were genetically predisposed to value other people had better odds of passing along those genes. What do you think I should be doing differently given my beliefs?
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