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What is the problem with religion? (self.atheism)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/atheism@lemmy.world
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Is it the beliefs? The dogmatism? The epistemology? Something else?

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[–] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I think about the concept of faith. Faith is a virtue in many cultures, to believe something without evidence or in the face of contradictory evidence.

I also think about how most religions have people focusing on the afterlife, what prize they are going to get or what punishment they should avoid.

I also think about how religions misappropriates deeds both good and bad.

Ultimately it is wish thinking, it is believing something to be true because you would prefer that thing to be true. And it blinds people to the truth around them.

When there’s a disaster and neighbors come to help, many believers chalk that up to god working in the hearts. When someone survives a surgery the family will give their thanks to god. When an athlete wins a competition he will finger gun towards the lord.

As an atheist and a humanist, I think that’s a real shame. Those believers don’t see that it’s people doing good in the world. The neighbors, the doctor and all the people that raised and educated them, the athlete and their teammates and all the hundreds of parents and coaches that got them to that place.

It’s the same with bad things, chalking it up to whatever version of the devil or the lack of enough god.

And in both cases it blinds us to the real causes of good things and bad things. When blinded to those causes it can make people pursue weird and useless paths for society. If we can truly understand why bad and good things happen then we can do something about it, but as long as we can chalk it up to the mystery of religion we will be held back. Imagine if we had just gone “electricity, that’s gods blood, we should not investigate any deeper” we wouldn’t be having this conversation now.

If religion is a means to understand and navigate the world around me, it is a poor one at best. And that’s my issue with religion.

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  • [+] [S] -6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

    Maybe faith is appropriate. Maybe it's an expert talking. Maybe you couldn't hope to understand the issue and you should just submit and obey for your own good.

    I mean, it happens. I'm not saying that I generally go along with such programs, but I see the logic.

    And also, there is a common urge to know. And to avoid ever not-knowing. To always have a solid story at hand to explain any phenomenon. So when we're handed such a story, or an ensemble of such stories, like a toolkit for future use, we are inclined to swallow it. Because it serves us that way.

    I don't like that second program either, but again I see the logic. It's just how people work.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Appeals to authority have rarely been good for humanity.

    The scientific method has been such an amazing engine for driving our understanding of the universe around us.

    I would argue it doesn’t really require faith, at least not faith in an authority. It starts with a simple setup, any person in any place can propose a hypothesis and back it with evidence. Any other person is welcome to think “that’s not right” and devise an experiment to disprove it.

    You only need to have faith that such a setup that incentivizes people disproving untrue things will work to disprove them. And I can look at the history of such a setup, see that historically even well established and respected ideas put forth by experts have been corrected when shown faulty to think “well it seems to work”

    And because I don’t have an unwavering faith in the scientific method, some belief that is inarguably true, it allows me to actually look at how that system fails. I don’t need to feel bad about the reproducibility crisis as though it’s some moral failing, instead I can use it to contextualize my understanding of scientific discoveries and others can work on ways to adapt the system to prevent such failures.

    There’s the related concept of trust. When the doctor tells me I should take a medicine or do some kind of treatment, I defer to their judgment. Should I blindly submit and obey, if the condition gets worse or if I disagree with their course of action, I needn’t follow it. I can always “trust but verify” and go ask another doctor their opinion.

    I find there’s been very little time when people submitting and obeying to an authority simply because they are an authority has been a net good for humanity. Authorities with expertise don't need to make such appeals, and authorities that fall back on “do it because I said so” are often the ones you should obey the least.

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  • [+] [S] -7 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    But few actually use the scientific method. Most just treat science as another authority.

    I think that authoritarianism is biological. For good and ill. And few ever overcome that.

    Your attitude towards authority sounds identical to mine.

    Also, I think the knowing-urge might be the bigger hazard. I mean, bigger than the authoritarianism urge.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    FYI I’m not downvoting you, I’ve been enjoying the conversation.

    I think the “few actually use the scientific method” statement might misunderstand my point.

    If someone is saying “here’s a new scientific theory” no one has to take that on faith. If it’s not true then there is an incentive for other scientists to disprove it. I think most scientists are following the scientific method and not really making the case that your average layperson should be reproducing the paper.

    Now I do think a lot of science news and laypeople are too willing to accept a single paper that no one has reproduced as some major breakthrough.

    I tend to agree with you about human nature. Humans are tribal, we want authority figures, we are lazy. The freeing thing though is that if you don’t judge these things moralistically but just accept them as facts of the species you can account for them.

    I’m not the biggest fan of capitalism, I think it’s kinda shit. But the reason it endures is because instead of building a system for our aspirations, it builds a system about reality. It doesn’t propose a system that would function if everyone just isn’t too greedy, instead it says “people are greedy shitheads, that’s fine, the system works in the presence of greedy fucks”. Doesn’t seem like they put enough effort into figuring out what happens when a few greedy fucks get everything, but we are all getting to find out first hand together.

    If you know that people are inclined to be tribalistic, to look for authority figures, to be lazy, to fill in some other trait we would normally condemn then you can build systems that operate in the presence of that reality.

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