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Preventing people from doing some of what they want is actually an important function of society. I made my peace with religions after reading Darwin's Cathedra

• dschuetz 8y ago
  Don't forget that religions kept people from doing what they want for centuries. They also can be tools of oppression and terror. Christianity did all that and beyond. Societal value systems don't need any religion at their base, but obviously people have need for faith and belief for emotional support which is not a given in any society. Let's not mix all that up.
  • lolc 8y ago
    But it is already mixed up! Trying to disentangle society from religion will leave you with a poor understanding of either. Common beliefs prop up societies. And as I said before, preventing people from doing some of what they want is a prerequisite for any society. In the end I think our main disagreement here is how broadly we define religion. To me, if you take take the narrow view of religion, you're leaving huge human catastrophies to be explained outside religion. What do you think of the Stalinists' belief system, for example? Their terror wasn't justified by a god but still by rules they demanded blind acceptance of. And they had ceremonies and rituals. To me, it is easier to understand the Stars and Stripes behind every politician's head in the U.S. as a religious symbol than to invent a whole new category over it. But I see how people could be irritated by that.
• wahern 8y ago
  The same argument is (facially, at least) the conclusion of Plato's Laws. Atheism is briefly discussed as something young people espouse only to reject with age and wisdom, and which notably is one of the earliest references to atheism I've found in the literature.
• ptx 8y ago
  That religion perhaps helped to bootstrap early societies doesn't mean that it continues to be useful after that job is done - once the BIOS hands over to a proper OS, we don't need to call into the BIOS to do I/O anymore, since the OS does a much better job.
  • lolc 8y ago
    That analogy doesn't work for me. If anything, we'd have to look at every individual human as a system to be "booted" with the same OS. So they have a common API. But that's not an area where you'd want to use technical metaphors. I think what you're trying to say is that we've got better tools than religion now. My approach here is to broaden the meaning of religion. As I said before every society needs common beliefs to function. I refer to those beliefs as religion. But I can accept if this is too broad for some people.
• zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
  There is one defining characteristic of religion: The acceptance of unsubstantiated claims as actual fact, i.e., faith. Please explain how that is something that society needs. Redefining religion to encompass any kind of shared values is a cheap trick to legitimize the destructive nature of dogma and of teaching people that accepting nonsense as fact is a virtue by pretending that a secular state is a religion--which is just absurd.
  • lolc 8y ago
    Every society needs common beliefs to function. These beliefs are arbitrary in the sense that there are other beliefs that would work just as well. All secular states have a flag used for ceremonial purposes for example. It's supposed to create a feeling of unity. Just like religious symbols do. Sure we can talk about matters of degree. Not all societies have an all-seeing god, for example.
    • zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
      > Every society needs common beliefs to function. These beliefs are arbitrary in the sense that there are other beliefs that would work just as well. First of all, you are confusing two very distinct concepts here under the label "belief", just as religions usually do. One is "stuff you think you know about how the world works", the other is "how you think certain things should be done". Your "beliefs" as to how certain things should be done are arbitrary to a degree. If your "beliefs" about how the world works are arbitrary, then your epistemology is heavily broken, in particular it is probably lacking falsifiability. Things you let go close to the surface of the earth either fall down or they don't. If you believe the latter, you are just wrong. This is the concept of "belief" that I was talking about above: Religions make unsubstantiated claims about how the world works and indoctrinate people into accepting that nonsense as factual knowledge about the world, claiming that doing so (what they then call "faith", another such misleading equivocation) is a virtue. Now, you need common beliefs about how the world works for the simple reason that if two people have contradicting beliefs about how the world works, at least one of them is wrong, and being wrong about how the world works is not conducive to controlling your environment. In that sense, it is much less confusing to simply say that a society needs accurate beliefs about how the world works--which necessarily will be common. As for common beliefs about how certain things should be done: Well, yes, you need that, too, and while those can be arbitrary to a degree, it isn't all that much of a degree, because most of how things should be done is a consequence of how the world works, and if it isn't, you are, again, wrong. > All secular states have a flag used for ceremonial purposes for example. It's supposed to create a feeling of unity. Just like religious symbols do. So? Are there any unsubstantiated claims in the existence of a national flag? Why do you mention this?! Religions do lots of stuff that non-religions do, which is exactly why those things are not defining characteristics of religions. > Not all societies have an all-seeing god, for example. Which is indeed an example of an unsubstantiated claim that religions sell as factual. And a claim that secular states do very well without. Which is precisely why it is absurd to pretend that secular states are religions.