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The Science of the Benefits of Religion

139 points by rathertrue 5y ago

tus89 5y ago
Mass rape of little kids?
- dang 5y ago
  We've banned this account for repeatedly posting flamebait and unsubstantive comments, including religious flamewar comments, which we specifically asked you to stop: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28378449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28378449. If you would please not create accounts to break HN's guidelines with, we'd be grateful. We're trying for something a bit different than internet default here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
tasty_freeze 5y ago
The title of the book is "How God Works" yet the the author explicitly states he is ignoring theology and instead is focusing on spiritual practices can have beneficial effects on a practitioner's mental state (happiness, kindness, acceptance, etc). The subtitle of the book, which is the title of the HN submission, seems to better convey the research presented in the book.
- xorfish 5y ago
  Religion isn't that easily defined. Are Confucianism and American Civil Religion religions? God, Gods or even believe in the supernatural are not necessary parts of religion, some religions place much higher importance on rituals than on their believe systems.
  - jkhdigital 5y ago
    > some religions place much higher importance on rituals than on their believe systems I don't think any religion actually puts belief systems anywhere below the highest level of importance, because any ritual is always predicated on a belief system that gives it meaning.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Religion clearly has mental health benefits, especially in terms of robustness. The interesting question is whether it is a transcendent ‘supra-rational’ belief system, e.g. a cheat code at life, because even assuming nothing matters, it makes sense to believe if you want to ‘be statistically more joyful’ (of course, some don’t want joy in their lives, so maybe it wouldn’t make sense for them?).
- rpmisms 5y ago
  I grew up strongly religious, and I still believe strongly, but left the organization due to the people in it. I did have an atheist phase, but that depressed me so severely that I almost had no choice but to reconsider my belief. Without a religious structure, life has no set purpose. Sure, you can make a purpose for yourself, but it feels empty compared to a created, beautiful universe by a benevolent being who got lonely.
  - bmicraft 5y ago
    As somebody that never felt they had some higher purpose I can't say that I feel any need for it. I can understand you feel like you lack something when lose a higher purpose you've had all your life, but that (for lack of better words) sound like you have developed a dependency on that purpose. What you describe is common for many people leaving religion, but it is also something that is overcome by most after (sometimes a long) time. Personally, my values of making the world a better place for future generations while having some fun seem to do.
    - exporectomy 5y ago
      "never felt they had some higher purpose" ... "my values of making the world a better place for future generations". Sounds like you're now having an epiphany :)
      - bmicraft 5y ago
        What I ment so say was some "externally given purpose" that makes claims about being objective. I consider my values to be more of a general goal than a purpose in itself and make no claims about them being objectively good.
123pie123 5y ago
I believe humans need rituals and for that religion mainly fills that gap for now (weddings etc..) I also believe we need stories and religion used to fill that gap well, but with the advent of the modern era religion is losing out personally as a mainly athiest and with a slight agnostic streak (btw I'm from the uk with a CoE upbringing) , I feel that most/ if not all religious people - from my personal experience - pick and mixes their relgion which kinda feels that it makes the whole thing hypocritical I also see that almost all people really really really want to do the right thing and 'generally' believe in the golden rule of do not do upon to others, things/ stuff, that you do want to be done to yourself. My grandma was deeply relgious and it it brought her extreme happiness towards the end of her life, so I understand it's significance, but still, she picked and mixed her believe to make her happy
estaseuropano 5y ago
There seems to be little doubt that religion, faith, spirituality or rite can have benefits. The question is how to get the good side of all these (community, meaning, satisfaction and fulfilment) without the nasty side (exclusion and intolerance, resistance to or denial of reality, imposition of impossible standards, the denial of one's own preferences and wants). Religion has been a major source of soothing and a major source of suffering for all of humanity's past. I think we need to overcome religion and move to a world where each can have their own spirituality - but as long as people follow religions that preach their own unique truthfulness (believe the pope, the Bible, the Quran, the priests, the sutras, ...) we will never get there.
- nprateem 5y ago
  Think for yourself?
- rajin444 5y ago
  The issues you describe apply to any grouping of people. Tribes have their own truths. Look at how popular those "we believe science is real" signs are. You could remove religion and we'd still have the same issues. I don't think it's possible to solve them. The best solution is going to be a world where a long, happy life is guaranteed by forces outside man's control. This will likely alleviate a lot of the tribal issues we face as well.
  - PartiallyTyped 5y ago
    The difference between religion and other groups is that it provides an impenetrable shield to those who wield it, and virtually anything can be deflected a-la > God's ways are mysterious fashion. Any differing positions appear as attacks against the person's religion, which - when it carries sufficient argumentative power - can shake the foundations of the person's world model. This, in turn, prevents them from accepting the differing position because such events induce fear and shut down mental faculties, effectively putting a person in a fight or flight mode. Furthermore, it prevents people from maturing and accepting integral parts of the human condition, such as the permanence of death, it provides a false sense of security that renders people incapacitated from taking meaningful action (God will find a way if God wills it), and finally gives a false sense importance and grandiose to puny humans who live in utter ignorance of their own insignificance in the medium (NB humanity scale) and grand scheme of things. To reach the solution that you point to, society needs to accept that free-will is an illusion, and that is inherently incompatible with Abrahamic religions.
jhgb 5y ago
What benefits could possibly outweigh abuse of children by forcing them to not commit imaginary thoughtcrimes?
- crocodiletears 5y ago
  Those are social norms. We inflict such things on them in secular society as well. At the risk of citing an undesirable author, Kaczynski had a real good schpiel about it in Industrial society.
  - jhgb 5y ago
    What exactly are the "social norms" you're talking about?
    - crocodiletears 5y ago
      Any normative claim that suggests an individual or group is morally less-than or unworthy of participating in society if they don't wholly affirm or adopt a specific worldview. Consider contemporary discourse surrounding gender identity, the legitimacy of the nation state, border controls, and other political wedge issues. Information control has been one of the chief concerns of our social institutions, because certain ideas have been deemed unfit to even be considered in our discourse because we're concerned that exposure alone is enough to potentially corrupt someone who might otherwise be a moral and decent person. The thoughts we allow in polite society are always bounded, and it is always painful for those outside of it whether they're coming from a priest, a teacher, a parent, a corporate bureaucrat, or a government official.
- dang 5y ago
  Please do not take HN threads into religious flamewar hell. We don't want it here and we ban accounts that do it. This post was particularly flamebaity. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting to HN, we'd appreciate it.
nprateem 5y ago
"I’ll admit that we’re unlikely to learn much about the nature of the universe or the biology of disease from religion" just moments after admitting to hubris. I thought some physicists had noticed parallels between physics and Buddhist thought
lalaland1125 5y ago
It's interesting to think of religion as a societal tool that has co-evolved along with humanity. Societies with more beneficial religions would prosper and societies with less beneficial religious would die out. It's thus no surprise that the religions that survived until the present day promote human survival. For example, it's no accident that most major religions heavily encourage their followers to have a lot of kids.
- estaseuropano 5y ago
  I would warmly recommend the last chapter(s) of 'The Selfish Gene'. Now an aged book but still largely up to date. In those last chapter(s) Dawkins invented the word meme as analogy to gene: a meme is a self-replicating piece of information. Like genes that are successful (in the environment they are in) propagate so do memes that are successful. Religion is the ultimate meme complex, it is a set of ideas that lives 'on top of' us and as long as it doesn't kill its host it may spread further. In that sense, while I would guess at minimum religion can't kill its host, it does from this logic not necessarily benefit the host. An aggressively missionising or crusading religion might outcompete one that is peaceful and better for its host. And even a peaceful variant (see original Buddhism or zen Buddhism) might evolve into an aggressive, exclusive and murderous ones (see Buddhist monks in Myanmar firing up and demanding the genocide of the mostly muslim rohingya ethnic group).
  - ggggtez 5y ago
    The articles premise that Americans acted kinder for a little while after doing some Buddhist meditation.... Completely ignoring the fact that Buddhism has extremists just like other religions... The people didn't act kinder because of Buddhism. The experimental setup primed them to act in a certain way.
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    I don't think you have correct examples of memes not benefiting their hosts. Those are examples of them not benefiting other people who aren't the hosts. A better example would be something like martyrdom. A religion that's perfect for its host might turn out to be one that exterminates or enslaves all non-hosts - if it could somehow achieve that without sacrificing its own hosts.
benrmatthews 5y ago
I was fortunate enough to be involved with a modern secular community that aimed to become a non-religious church: Sunday Assembly. Take the best bits of religion, including purpose, structure, community, and tradition, but make it available for non-believers. We even got so far as making the interview stage of Y Combinator: https://benrmatthews.com/meeting-heroes-y-combinator-interview-experience/ https://benrmatthews.com/meeting-heroes-y-combinator-intervi... During the interview, Sanderson (Sunday Assembly co-founder) had a brilliant back and forth with Sam Altman, but ultimately the idea didn’t stand. I still think the ethos of Sunday Assembly has merit.
- deleted 5y ago
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- technothrasher 5y ago
  I've attended a few Unitarian Universalist services, and they're very open to "non-believers", as well as pretty much any type of personal belief. They seemed to be much more interested in community and rite than to forcing dogma. Still, while they were certainly a friendly and pleasant group of people, I found it all a bit too fuzzy with objective truth to be my cup if tea. I don't have anything like Sunday Assembly in my area, and occasionally thought of trying to start some kind of weekly humanist gathering. Rather than the UU message that "any belief is welcome", I wanted to convey more of a "everyone is welcome, personal religious beliefs aside" message. Where we could just work on humanistic goals together.
  - antognini 5y ago
    There's an old joke: Catholics believe in transubstantiation. Baptists believe in the Rapture. Unitarian Universalists believe in donuts on Sunday.
- zafka 5y ago
  This is very interesting to me. I am just "Saturday browsing" but plan to try to read what I can about your community. My first impression is surprise that the group was trying to raise venture capital :) I will find out more as I read i guess.
srcreigh 5y ago
This excerpt is from a widely prayed Orthodox Christian akathist hymn. [0] Akathist means not sitting as it is usually prayed standing up. It was composed during the persecution in communist Russia by Metropolitan Tryphon [1] "The breath of Thine Holy Spirit inspires artists, poets and scientists. The power of Thy supreme knowledge makes them prophets and interpreters of Thy laws, who reveal the depths of Thy creative wisdom. Their works speak unwittingly of Thee. How great art Thou in Thy creation! How great art Thou in man! Glory to Thee, showing Thine unsurpassable power in the laws of the universe Glory to Thee, for all nature is filled with Thy laws Glory to Thee for what Thou hast revealed to us in Thy mercy Glory to Thee for what Thou hast hidden from us in Thy wisdom Glory to Thee for the inventiveness of the human mind Glory to Thee for the dignity of man's labour Glory to Thee for the tongues of fire that bring inspiration Glory to Thee, O God, from age to age" [0] http://www.saintjonah.org/services/thanksgiving.htm http://www.saintjonah.org/services/thanksgiving.htm [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryphon_(Turkestanov) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryphon_(Turkestanov)
- rpmisms 5y ago
  I love this Akathist, and it should be noted that Metropolitan Tryphon wrote it in a literal gulag. The ability to see and be thankful for the beauty of our world, even under those conditions, is a testament to the power of religion, and some would say God.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Beautiful, thanks for sharing.
ecpottinger 5y ago
I am one of Jehovah's Witnesses - Please read on before you just dismiss what I have experienced. Going door to door I have meet plenty of people who say "I don't believe in God, we got here thru evolution!". So I ask the simple question which theory of evolution do they think is probably has the right idea. Too often I hear, "Survival of the strongest." or "What? There is more than one theory about how evolution works?". What is clear to me is that to these people evolution is a BELIEF and not something they thought of, it is as much a religion to them as mine is to me. Worse, I can study and agree or disagree with things I was taught, too often people are just blindly accepting because they do not want to put any efforts in.
- PartiallyTyped 5y ago
  A belief does not constitute a religion, people have all sorts of irrational beliefs, but that doesn't make them religion.
- BrightGlow 5y ago
  I share your frustration, the people who you were talking to likely also had a misconception of what evolution and scientific theories in general are, or were stating it poorly. It's not accurate to describe it as a "belief" it's more like "best current guess that we have but we'll change our mind if a new guess comes up that is better able to explain things".
- ceilingcorner 5y ago
  Disappointed that this is downvoted. You are absolutely right: most people don’t actually investigate the origins of their beliefs and just adopt whatever their social tribe believes. The average urbanite atheist knows as much about evolution as the average rural creationist. It is almost entirely a social phenomenon, not an epistemological one.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    Is this an American thing? I remember being taught the basics of evolution in year 8 or 9 science class in a way that was impossible to misunderstand ("children resemble their parents" + "some parents more likely to survive" => small changes in distribution of traits among each child generation => specialisation to local environment over many generations). I do have a Christian friend who believes that it was God who set the wheels of evolution in motion, but there seems to be little misunderstanding where I am (Melbourne, AU) about what Darwinism is or denial that it's a strong force at play.
robg 5y ago
Consider the calming power of slow rhythmic breathing; meditative practices are found in every religion.
jlpom 5y ago
Basing anything on false or inexact beliefs won't leads to lasting desirable outcomes IMO*. Some argues to read religious texts as metaphors but I think it's just a way to circumvent the reality. *except for charities but benevolence is obviously not (only) tied to religions
- nlitened 5y ago
  Scientific method gives you only falsifiable theories and inexact beliefs. Anything “universally true” and “exact” is a religion.
cletus 5y ago
This is something I've thought about a lot, and I say this as a diehard atheist. Historically (and even now), religion has served two useful purposes: 1. As a provider of community. There are of course other ways to socialize with wider groups. Sports clubs, going to the pub, classes, that sort of thing. But it's a lot more interest-driven and haphazard. 2. As a provider of and enforcer for a moral code. Here are some things I believe to be true: 1. A lot of people like being told what to do. This isn't necessarily unhealthy or bad. I also believe in decision fatigue. We defer decisions to others all the time; 2. Fear is an easier tool for keeping people in line than any alternative. There's a carrot and a stick with religion. The carrot is paradise in the afterlife (depending on your flavour of religion). The stick is partly eternal damnation but much more important than that, it's the fear of losing that community. 3. The majority of people only act in an ethical manner out of fear of the consequences. Now looking at the political situation in the US, we have the rise of Christian conservatives. Just the name "conservative" is worth examining. It is of course derived from "conserve". The intent is obvious: it is to resist change, to maintain traditions and generally to keep doing things the way we "always" have. It almost seems like to be a conservative requires you to believe things were better in the past and changes are just making everything worse. At least that's how it seems. It shouldn't really surprise anyone that religion and conservatism tend to be correlated but does one cause the other? I honestly don't know. But what I find fascinating is that the desire to be told what to do combined with the mistrust in government fomented by religions (as in, the person is to put their faith in [deity] and the church rather than government) means these people are so easily manipulated. Take the Covid vaccine (and masks). Every current and former president (including Trump), every governor, every Senator and all but a handful of Congressmen are vaccinated. I'm also sure every Fox News host is too. Yet these same vaccinated people are quite happy and willing to pander to whack job conspiracies as a means of control. I find it ironic that the people who I'm sure genuinely think they're standing up for "freedom" by fighting against mask mandates are in fact least free because they're so easily manipulated. So I guess my point is, I'm not sure these problems go away if, say, religion goes away.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  The politics of today are in the context of the most un-religious America in its history. Whether that is related is left as an exercise for the reader.
Fezzik 5y ago
So to be clear, if you ignore all the awful stuff that (almost all) religions have promoted for centuries: racism, sexism, genocide, slavery, child abuse, extreme hostility to science and free thought… meditation and some religious swaying may make you a little nicer. Sure. Okay. Moving on. Edit, to add: and hostility and persecution of any and all non-heterosexual relationships.
- dang 5y ago
  Please do not take HN threads into religious flamewar. It's the opposite of what we want here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
deleted 5y ago
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mu_sub_naught 5y ago
Sir Isaac Newton was a devout Christian theologist. Perhaps his adopted philosophy offers discipline features that aided in the production of fruit prized by the scientific community. Islamic discipline gave us fundamental mathematical systems. Nikola Tesla thought of his brain as an antennae for the universal core ("I don't know its secrets, but I know it exists"). George Carlin has a bit about how the aliens don't talk to us because of our own self-centered hubris. Religious thought is there for a reason. Science searches for explanations for observable phenomena. If you call yourself an "atheist" and announce your belief in "nothing", then you will shut yourself off from fellow citizens (complete with their own unique knowledge) who are inheriting rehearsed traditions. I've been taught to never tell someone they're wrong. Why would you want to become someone's ideological enemy? Perhaps there are fundamental, ancient gears turning if you embrace religion. When describing my complicated views about religion to my own "simple", hard working father - I was told "Well, I just go to church because everybody is there." You must speak their language so that they sing for you. Their willingness to profess their view of the world is a beautiful, valuable thing. An honorably discharged American marine with a missing leg told me that Islam preaches punishment, while Christianity preaches forgiveness. Both of these concepts are necessary to steer a population, and both can be issued excessively. Forgiveness can mean more intimate personal data released to the priest in a confessional booth, and punishment can mean less corrosive civil behavior overall. I've had hail strike my car seconds after sending the sarcastic chat message "the algorithms replaced the priesthood". I've had lightning strike dozens of feet away from where I slept in the middle of the night in a parking lot mere hours after watching the clip [0] of Christof demanding his team "DO IT!". If you want proof, you've incentivized your industry to make my car constantly connected to an LTE tower by default. In a Faraday cage protected HDD somewhere, I'm sure my file is residing along with billions of others, courtesy of Pegasus (et al). Unless you are going to say "lightning struck the same place 4 times in a row." [1] “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” [0] https://youtu.be/wcMCS_6oung?t=248 https://youtu.be/wcMCS_6oung?t=248 [1] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/212586-google-data-center-loses-data-following-four-lightning-strikes https://www.extremetech.com/computing/212586-google-data-cen...
Animats 5y ago
But if we remove the theology—views about the nature of God, the creation of the universe, and the like—from the day-to-day practice of religious faith, the animosity in the debate evaporates. Of course, then it's no longer a religion. It's a social organization. It seems to be quite possible to overdose on religion. Some religions do that as policy, as a form of brainwashing. The religions with mandatory prayer several times a day work like that. It's really hard to break people free of that brainwashing if they grew up with it. It's not the theology, it's the repetition. Both haredi Judaism and Islam use that approach to induce some degree of fanaticism. The Catholic Church, in previous centuries, was into that sort of thing, but has lightened up a bit.
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  My experience with Buddhism was that theology was very much not the point, but most people still consider it a religion.
  - asdff 5y ago
    Buddhism can in practice be very religious. The life of your typical buddhist monk really doesn't look that different from the life of your typical christian monk, they just utter different prayers while lighting their candles. The Pali Cannon reads a lot like the new testament too
  - spicymaki 5y ago
    I was a practicing Mahayana Buddhist for many years and I can assure you it is a religion. There is an entire pantheon with Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, ancestors are worshipped. There are temples, rituals, idols, altars, prostration, chanting, incense lighting, religious texts, etc. There is an afterlife via rebirth which you are trying to end via merit making (virtuous acts). Most of the religious practices are there. There is even a religious rite similar to the Christian sacrament of confirmation called taking the precepts where you make certain religious commitments, and you are given a Buddhist name after time of religious study. I think it is pure fantasy that people believe Buddhism is not a religion. I think some people want to convert Buddhism into just philosophy because they want to take out the interesting content and drop the baggage (rituals, worship, etc.). Many are leaving Christianity with the hope of finding a spiritual community without all of the negatives of religion. However without the baggage there is no meaning or purpose and people will fill in the blanks with their own culture and religious upbringing.
api 5y ago
One of the more profound statements I once heard on the problem with modern secular philosophy was this throwaway comment I read online years ago: "Creationism is true if it will keep my kids off oxycontin." (I'm guessing the poster was from the rural Midwestern US.) I'm not saying I agree with that statement, but I can see where they are coming from. I found it to be one of the more profoundly honest and deep statements I've ever encountered. Secular philosophy has failed to produce enough value for ordinary people living ordinary lives embedded in the ordinary matrix of threats and opportunities presented by every day life. Religion has done that for thousands of years. Sometimes it does that quite well and sometimes it does it very badly, but at least it tries. Yes sometimes religion is full of shit, but secular philosophy and ideology is sometimes full of shit as well. One can find examples of both religion and secular philosophy promoting irrational thinking. I think things like antivax and Qanon can be blamed as much on postmodernism as religion, and I don't see any evidence that people who abandon religion automatically become more rational. Many just glom onto other forms of superstition or secular but totally insane ideas. Go read some academic philosophy. The older stuff is deeply abstract, looking down at the world from orbit and drawing a lot of deep but distant conclusions. The newer stuff is completely impenetrable to someone who has not studied the subject in depth. Very little of it is relevant to someone working a regular job and trying to raise kids. Speaking of kids... much secular philosophy barely mentions children at all, or seems indifferent to them. The fact that the central generative process of all organic life gets barely a mention in secular philosophy is to me a profound indicator of something very deeply wrong. It's like physics avoiding the subjects of electromagnetism or gravity and trying to make sense of everything else. The marketplace of ideas is like any other marketplace. If your store does not stock what people need they will shop elsewhere. If you don't like where they are shopping, it's your problem for not producing the right products. The customer is always right.
- keymone 5y ago
  Sounds to me like you’re saying that churches are interested in brainwashing kids because their existence depends on it, while secular philosophy as a branch of science is not an agent that could act at all. To compare apples to apples somebody should start a church of secular philosophy.
- 5y ago
fredgrott 5y ago
be careful mixing religion and philosophy up they are not the same. One has factual benefits the other we still have no clue about
- tapas73 5y ago
  which is which?
deleted 5y ago
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hota_mazi 5y ago
Right on. I challenge anyone who disagrees to come up with a benefit that religion offers that cannot be offered by a secular organization.
- truetraveller 5y ago
  The motivation to do good, and stay away from evil. The idea that a person if being watched. You can never get that with atheism. Atheism is just ruthless "survival of the fittest", when push comes to shove.
  - hota_mazi 5y ago
    You think that doing good only because you are being watched is a good value to have? IF yes, then please, by all means, continue believing in your god if that's all that keeps you from raping and killing people. Atheists do good because it's the right thing to do. You seem to do it because you are afraid of getting punished.
    - tapas73 5y ago
      > Atheists do good because it's the right thing to do. Or is remnant from religious generation? (parents programm kids that doing good is right thing to do because God says so. Certain generation starts omitting "God says so" part)
    - truetraveller 5y ago
      >You think that doing good only because you are being watched Never said "only because" of being watched. Being watched is an added measure. > Atheists do good because it's the right thing to do Many atheists, from personal experience, most don't really care to do good when no one's watching. Not saying it applies to all atheists, but for many. It's simply not rational. Why do good? For "karma"? So, the atheist has replaced "God" for "karma"?
      - jhgb 5y ago
        Human psyche is not rational. Reason takes work that most are not willing to invest in most of the time, regarding most things. Not even scientists, whose job is to be rational about things, live their lives fully rationally, or even "50+% rationally". Yes, it's not rational to feel good when doing good things for someone. Yet, most people do feel good when doing good things for someone. It's called empathy. And while that feeling is not rational, it is very handy. I don't see how you could have humanity as we know it without it. Whatever the reason for its existence, I'm glad that it exists. Who knows, maybe that's just the anthropic principle in action here? Maybe without it, you really wouldn't have humanity to wonder about it.
dQw4w9WgXcQ 5y ago
So much of the US population cruises along unconsciously on an implicit set of Judeo-Christian values and morals. Increasingly many citizens claim to have left religion behind and subscribe to an exclusively scientific worldview, but the majority of their upstanding behavior still stems from religious beliefs. Pressed to reveal its true character, a purely scientific worldview produces no inherent sense of meaning, morality, or right v. wrong. Sure, you get the hemming and hawing about evolutionary hunter-gatherer behavior and other various strains of pseudo-scientific bullshit, but all of those are equally as faith-bound as religion given that there is no possible way to devise reasonable (or ethical) experimentation on how past humanity might have evolved various senses of "right and wrong" or even a capacity for wanting meaning. It's entirely rational to glean from religion what continues to influence a large portion of our success and stop pretending like science is our new "one true god" and all of the churches need to be burnt to the ground in favor of some absolute separation of church and state.
- VictorPath 5y ago
  > evolutionary hunter-gatherer behavior and other various strains of pseudo-scientific bullshit, but all of those are equally as faith-bound as religion given that there is no possible way to devise reasonable (or ethical) experimentation on how past humanity What past humanity? There are hunter gatherer bands roaming around the Amazon right now. They seem to exhibit at least as much "upstanding behavior" as the evangelicals sloshing around the US. Scandinavia is fairly secular and has many nice attributes, the US is off the charts in terms of religion, violent behavior, gun deaths etc. I don't see how irrational beliefs about burning bushes, virgin births, walking on water, resurrections result in "upstanding behavior". If this were the case evangelicals would be the epitome of "upstanding behavior", but they are not.
  - xyzzyz 5y ago
    > There are hunter gatherer bands roaming around the Amazon right now. They seem to exhibit at least as much "upstanding behavior" as the evangelicals sloshing around the US. Considering how violent are cultures of hunter-gatherers, I’d say that they are much less morally upstanding. But, they provide a good data point here: the hunter gatherers are typically highly religious. It’s just their religions are pretty bad at creating positive societal outcomes. Not all religions are created equal in that aspect. > Scandinavia is fairly secular and has many nice attributes, the US is off the charts in terms of religion, violent behavior, gun deaths etc. If you look at the reality instead of aggregated statistics and packaged narratives, you will find that gun deaths in US very much are not of the charts in places where religiosity is off the chart. If anything, these two things are negatively correlated: the more religious a place is, the fewer gun deaths (despite no scarcity of firearms among the religious).
trees101 5y ago
This is a challenging article. To paraphrase, it suggests that a suite of religious practices have been shown to have real world benefits. The author suggests that scientists should overcome their personal allergy to religion and instead trust the data. He suggests the compromise of rejecting the "theology" of the religion, presumably because it is "unscientific", and instead focusing on the empirically observable physical social practices. I agree with him, but suggest a few further considerations. Wouldn't a truly open minded scientist be forced to consider that the real world impact of religious practice is evidence (not necessarily proof) for the causal effect of something that is outside of empirical measurement? Only a mind that has the improvable a-priori belief in physicalism could reject this possibility. A commitment to physicalism is not itself provable by science, and therefore is merely a religious belief, although it is disguised and subconscious most of the time so we don't notice. And how does he think that we can decouple the "theology" of the religion from the practices? Could a hall full of strangers start swaying together like in the Jewish Shuckle, feel the same unity felt by the synagogue? What came first, the theology or the swaying? This sounds like a cargo cult mentality, where by imitating the behavior of the rich, you, too can become rich. Even if it worked a little bit, it's hard to imagine that it could become popular or last. I think team sports played in Stadiums is the best imitation we have so far, and even that is only sustained by a narrative ("your" team "battling" an "enemy" team). It would be interesting to see if an idiosyncratic hodge-podge of different rituals cobbled together from various religions could ever work. As far as I can tell, that is exactly what New Age religion is, and that is far from impressive. The way forward is to stop and re-think the blind philosophical pre-commitments of our day, which are a slowly eroding set of modernist beliefs from the Enlightenment era. This gave us a dualistic world view, with the complete separation of a "spiritual" and "physical" realm. As science is built to only examine the physical, it naturally produces confirmation bias that there is no "spiritual" and gradually we went from dualism to believing only in the "physical". It is this erroneous background assumption which leads us to misunderstand what scripture even means when it talks about heaven/earth and angels and other "spiritual" beings. https://thesymbolicworld.com/articles/how-the-scientific-revolution-changed-our-worldview/ https://thesymbolicworld.com/articles/how-the-scientific-rev... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXOdlIXDsr8&t=0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXOdlIXDsr8&t=0s
- 5y ago
ggggtez 5y ago
> Secular philosophy has failed to produce enough value for ordinary people living ordinary lives Consider the situation: you want to get an abortion. Or you know someone who does. I don't think I need to spell out the debate. But the secular world view is producing value for people who don't want to be afraid that they will spend literally INFINITY TIME being tortured. (And arguably it produces value for the religious, who do utilize secular services even when their religion forbids it). The secular world view offers you freedom from judgement, both mortal and immortal. Many people find value in the freedom to not worry about superstition.
- temp8964 5y ago
  I am totally atheist, but I am against most abortion. You don’t have to be religious to be against abortion. Be secular doesn’t make anybody free from judgement.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    This is interesting insofar as most arguments against addiction seem to be philosophically connected with either spiritual guilt or assigning a clump of cells person status at conception due to the presumed presence of a soul. How precisely do you arrive at your stance in the absence of a soul? Virtually all the actual brain development happens very late in the game and almost all abortions happen in the first or early second.
    - temp8964 5y ago
      See my response to the above comment.
  - hota_mazi 5y ago
    I am pro choice and against abortion. I don't like abortion. Nobody likes abortions. Women who feel that they need to get an abortion don't like it either. It's a horrible, traumatic procedure. But it's a reality that it needs to be legal, regulated, and safe. It's absolutely critical to civilization that women have a choice to undergo an abortion if they choose to. It's their body, their life, their future. Nobody else's business, especially not the government's. The government should never require them to carry a pregnancy to term in much the same way that it shouldn't force you to give an organ (and it doesn't). I am not pro abortion, I am pro choice. People opposed to abortions are not pro life, they are anti choice.
ggggtez 5y ago
> After only eight weeks of study with a Buddhist lama, 50 percent of those who we randomly assigned to meditate daily spontaneously helped a stranger in pain. I'm waiting for the follow up study after 520 weeks, where a certain percentage of them become radicalized zealots.
France_is_bacon 5y ago
Everything that is listed in this article can be done non-religiously. Personally, I've led groups and I understand about ritual, repetition, moving in unison and other techniques to create cohesiveness within the groups. I don't think all of this started in religion. We see apes moving in tandem, their ritual of grooming each other, etc. But, for some reason, people want to use these basic everyday knowledge and ascribe it to religion. I'm not saying religion doesn't use them, but they are hardly the first. Think of sports teams. They all have their chants, wear the same colors, go to the same bars, commiserate on wins and losses. Any organization is like this. Humans naturally move towards this type of way of reacting. There is nothing special about religion.
spoonjim 5y ago
I feel like my life would be better if I believed in some supernatural being who loved me and cared for me and was going to bring me into his paradise of eternal ecstasy after I die. I don’t see how that couldn’t make a person happier and more able to cope with the deaths of loved ones, their own death, etc. It seems like being on a very powerful narcotic that still lets you function day to day. But I don’t see any way I can make myself believe that stuff.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  the point of genuine faith isn't to be a narcotic that let's you function in day-to-day life, it's not some sort of theological Soma out of Brave New World, it's supposed to transform, which involves a fair amount of suffering. Your life wouldn't be better if you you could believe any of that stuff, and no genuine believer treats religion or God like some sort of spiritual Xanax.
  - spoonjim 5y ago
    I don’t think that genuine believers treat religion like a spiritual Xanax... but I do think, and have observed, that that’s what it can often be. Especially seeing the religious people I know coping with the deaths of loved ones, and in one case the death of their child.
allturtles 5y ago
I have no problem believing that religion may serve useful social and cultural functions. Unfortunately, this article is founded on findings in social psychology, and we already know that social psychology is largely bunk[0]. What are the chances that this "meditation leads to kidness" result (with a total of 39 participants) would actually stand up to attempts to replicate it? The claimed effect size - "8 weeks of meditation resulted in such a large effect—increasing the odds of acting to relieve another person’s pain by more than 5 times"[1] - defies belief. [0]: https://replicationindex.com/2020/01/05/replication-crisis-review/ https://replicationindex.com/2020/01/05/replication-crisis-r... [1]: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52853b8ae4b0a6c35d3f8e9d/t/528d263ce4b04aa0e2083b1e/1384982076484/meditation-increases-compassionate-responses-to-suffering.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52853b8ae4b0a6c35d3f8...
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  Besides, associating meditation to religion is like assuming fasting == religion. They are both practices that can exist without mythology, sacred texts or believes of what happens after death.
  - qazpot 5y ago
    > Besides, associating meditation to religion is like assuming fasting == religion. Meditation and fasting are both integral parts of Sanatana Dharma (called hinduism by westerners). Dont mix these with you perception of Christianity.
    - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
      Intersection != Equality I fast. I meditate. I'm not religious. One may be religious and not fast nor meditate.
  - eikenberry 5y ago
    > They are both practices that can exist without mythology, sacred texts or believes of what happens after death. While I agree with your main point, that they are equating things that and not the same, you seem to be to be making the same mistake. None of the things you list are required for religion either.
loveJesus 5y ago
Hallelujah, i remember when in Reed College we were introduced to Clifford Geertz statement about religion serving to give 'long lasting moods and motivations'. When i got into a lot of trouble from drugs, sexual immorality and all the other stuff i knew no human doctor, medication or other thing would get me well and satisfied with my wellbeing. I finally decided to follow Jesus Christ. Much more than just a mood and motivation (which is also there), i watched my illness heal and have been med free since 2014 with doctor's approval, my dad here spoke tongues in Arabic praising God without an accent (someone else astounded told us) and my dog even heal of cataracts the day after praying for her. Many prophecies that have come true many other things, feel free to message me. Above all i urge trust in the Bible and We can have a relationship with God through what Jesus did on the cross alone.
mybrid 5y ago
Every culture has some version of the golden rule yet religions claim to originate it. Most of what was studied in this article is common across all religions. Calling such practices "religion" is like calling smiling "religion". Religion co-opts nature and then, for a fee, hands it back to you. Human nature is not religion, religion puts an artificial price on that which should be enjoyed sans grift.
- paisawalla 5y ago
  If you think human nature (i.e. the free and ordinary expression of a person unperverted by social conditioning) comprises something like "do unto others and you would have them do unto you," I have several billion pieces of bad news for you. There is no evidence for this, and the only rebuttal you could have to all the counterexamples will be some form of No True Scotsman -- "yes, those people acted badly, bad that's their conditioning, not their True Human Nature..."
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    But by your own definition none of those billion can be expressing their human nature since all of them have been subject to social conditioning. What I think the OP is getting at is the concept of universal human traits. There’s a big old list of them compiled by an anthropologist here: https://condor.depaul.edu/~mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm https://condor.depaul.edu/~mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm The thing to note is that the golden rule could be a universal as much as murder is. Which is to say the golden rule is continuously reinvented by humans but not necessarily followed by them all. What factors in this are innate versus conditioned are opaque.
    - paisawalla 5y ago
      > The thing to note is that the golden rule could be a universal as much as murder is. Which is not a helpful understanding of human nature at all, which is my point. What I am trying to argue against -- and maybe this is not the intent of the original commenter -- is the idea that the Golden Rule is an innate and inevitable expression of our nature, but say, the horrors of Communism are not.
keithnz 5y ago
I quite like Alain de Bottons attempt at trying to mine religion for "good ideas". He wrote a book "Religion for Atheists" on this idea https://www.amazon.com/Religion-Atheists-Non-believers-Guide-Uses/dp/0307476820 https://www.amazon.com/Religion-Atheists-Non-believers-Guide...
dartharva 5y ago
At a personal level, one very visible difference I have seen religion make in people is that it makes them more disciplined. Pious people who regularly and "religiously" perform their rituals every day tend to have a nice bonus effect of being easily able to start and adhere to good habits and exercise self-control over superficial cravings.

139 points by rathertrue 5y ago

tus89 5y ago

Mass rape of little kids?

dang 5y ago
We've banned this account for repeatedly posting flamebait and unsubstantive comments, including religious flamewar comments, which we specifically asked you to stop: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28378449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28378449. If you would please not create accounts to break HN's guidelines with, we'd be grateful. We're trying for something a bit different than internet default here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

tasty_freeze 5y ago

The title of the book is "How God Works" yet the the author explicitly states he is ignoring theology and instead is focusing on spiritual practices can have beneficial effects on a practitioner's mental state (happiness, kindness, acceptance, etc). The subtitle of the book, which is the title of the HN submission, seems to better convey the research presented in the book.

xorfish 5y ago
Religion isn't that easily defined. Are Confucianism and American Civil Religion religions? God, Gods or even believe in the supernatural are not necessary parts of religion, some religions place much higher importance on rituals than on their believe systems.
- jkhdigital 5y ago
  > some religions place much higher importance on rituals than on their believe systems I don't think any religion actually puts belief systems anywhere below the highest level of importance, because any ritual is always predicated on a belief system that gives it meaning.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

Religion clearly has mental health benefits, especially in terms of robustness. The interesting question is whether it is a transcendent ‘supra-rational’ belief system, e.g. a cheat code at life, because even assuming nothing matters, it makes sense to believe if you want to ‘be statistically more joyful’ (of course, some don’t want joy in their lives, so maybe it wouldn’t make sense for them?).

rpmisms 5y ago
I grew up strongly religious, and I still believe strongly, but left the organization due to the people in it. I did have an atheist phase, but that depressed me so severely that I almost had no choice but to reconsider my belief. Without a religious structure, life has no set purpose. Sure, you can make a purpose for yourself, but it feels empty compared to a created, beautiful universe by a benevolent being who got lonely.
- bmicraft 5y ago
  As somebody that never felt they had some higher purpose I can't say that I feel any need for it. I can understand you feel like you lack something when lose a higher purpose you've had all your life, but that (for lack of better words) sound like you have developed a dependency on that purpose. What you describe is common for many people leaving religion, but it is also something that is overcome by most after (sometimes a long) time. Personally, my values of making the world a better place for future generations while having some fun seem to do.
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    "never felt they had some higher purpose" ... "my values of making the world a better place for future generations". Sounds like you're now having an epiphany :)
    - bmicraft 5y ago
      What I ment so say was some "externally given purpose" that makes claims about being objective. I consider my values to be more of a general goal than a purpose in itself and make no claims about them being objectively good.

123pie123 5y ago

I believe humans need rituals and for that religion mainly fills that gap for now (weddings etc..) I also believe we need stories and religion used to fill that gap well, but with the advent of the modern era religion is losing out personally as a mainly athiest and with a slight agnostic streak (btw I'm from the uk with a CoE upbringing) , I feel that most/ if not all religious people - from my personal experience - pick and mixes their relgion which kinda feels that it makes the whole thing hypocritical I also see that almost all people really really really want to do the right thing and 'generally' believe in the golden rule of do not do upon to others, things/ stuff, that you do want to be done to yourself. My grandma was deeply relgious and it it brought her extreme happiness towards the end of her life, so I understand it's significance, but still, she picked and mixed her believe to make her happy

estaseuropano 5y ago

There seems to be little doubt that religion, faith, spirituality or rite can have benefits. The question is how to get the good side of all these (community, meaning, satisfaction and fulfilment) without the nasty side (exclusion and intolerance, resistance to or denial of reality, imposition of impossible standards, the denial of one's own preferences and wants). Religion has been a major source of soothing and a major source of suffering for all of humanity's past. I think we need to overcome religion and move to a world where each can have their own spirituality - but as long as people follow religions that preach their own unique truthfulness (believe the pope, the Bible, the Quran, the priests, the sutras, ...) we will never get there.

nprateem 5y ago
Think for yourself?
rajin444 5y ago
The issues you describe apply to any grouping of people. Tribes have their own truths. Look at how popular those "we believe science is real" signs are. You could remove religion and we'd still have the same issues. I don't think it's possible to solve them. The best solution is going to be a world where a long, happy life is guaranteed by forces outside man's control. This will likely alleviate a lot of the tribal issues we face as well.
- PartiallyTyped 5y ago
  The difference between religion and other groups is that it provides an impenetrable shield to those who wield it, and virtually anything can be deflected a-la > God's ways are mysterious fashion. Any differing positions appear as attacks against the person's religion, which - when it carries sufficient argumentative power - can shake the foundations of the person's world model. This, in turn, prevents them from accepting the differing position because such events induce fear and shut down mental faculties, effectively putting a person in a fight or flight mode. Furthermore, it prevents people from maturing and accepting integral parts of the human condition, such as the permanence of death, it provides a false sense of security that renders people incapacitated from taking meaningful action (God will find a way if God wills it), and finally gives a false sense importance and grandiose to puny humans who live in utter ignorance of their own insignificance in the medium (NB humanity scale) and grand scheme of things. To reach the solution that you point to, society needs to accept that free-will is an illusion, and that is inherently incompatible with Abrahamic religions.

jhgb 5y ago

What benefits could possibly outweigh abuse of children by forcing them to not commit imaginary thoughtcrimes?

crocodiletears 5y ago
Those are social norms. We inflict such things on them in secular society as well. At the risk of citing an undesirable author, Kaczynski had a real good schpiel about it in Industrial society.
- jhgb 5y ago
  What exactly are the "social norms" you're talking about?
  - crocodiletears 5y ago
    Any normative claim that suggests an individual or group is morally less-than or unworthy of participating in society if they don't wholly affirm or adopt a specific worldview. Consider contemporary discourse surrounding gender identity, the legitimacy of the nation state, border controls, and other political wedge issues. Information control has been one of the chief concerns of our social institutions, because certain ideas have been deemed unfit to even be considered in our discourse because we're concerned that exposure alone is enough to potentially corrupt someone who might otherwise be a moral and decent person. The thoughts we allow in polite society are always bounded, and it is always painful for those outside of it whether they're coming from a priest, a teacher, a parent, a corporate bureaucrat, or a government official.
dang 5y ago
Please do not take HN threads into religious flamewar hell. We don't want it here and we ban accounts that do it. This post was particularly flamebaity. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting to HN, we'd appreciate it.

nprateem 5y ago

"I’ll admit that we’re unlikely to learn much about the nature of the universe or the biology of disease from religion" just moments after admitting to hubris. I thought some physicists had noticed parallels between physics and Buddhist thought

lalaland1125 5y ago

It's interesting to think of religion as a societal tool that has co-evolved along with humanity. Societies with more beneficial religions would prosper and societies with less beneficial religious would die out. It's thus no surprise that the religions that survived until the present day promote human survival. For example, it's no accident that most major religions heavily encourage their followers to have a lot of kids.

estaseuropano 5y ago
I would warmly recommend the last chapter(s) of 'The Selfish Gene'. Now an aged book but still largely up to date. In those last chapter(s) Dawkins invented the word meme as analogy to gene: a meme is a self-replicating piece of information. Like genes that are successful (in the environment they are in) propagate so do memes that are successful. Religion is the ultimate meme complex, it is a set of ideas that lives 'on top of' us and as long as it doesn't kill its host it may spread further. In that sense, while I would guess at minimum religion can't kill its host, it does from this logic not necessarily benefit the host. An aggressively missionising or crusading religion might outcompete one that is peaceful and better for its host. And even a peaceful variant (see original Buddhism or zen Buddhism) might evolve into an aggressive, exclusive and murderous ones (see Buddhist monks in Myanmar firing up and demanding the genocide of the mostly muslim rohingya ethnic group).
- ggggtez 5y ago
  The articles premise that Americans acted kinder for a little while after doing some Buddhist meditation.... Completely ignoring the fact that Buddhism has extremists just like other religions... The people didn't act kinder because of Buddhism. The experimental setup primed them to act in a certain way.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  I don't think you have correct examples of memes not benefiting their hosts. Those are examples of them not benefiting other people who aren't the hosts. A better example would be something like martyrdom. A religion that's perfect for its host might turn out to be one that exterminates or enslaves all non-hosts - if it could somehow achieve that without sacrificing its own hosts.

benrmatthews 5y ago

I was fortunate enough to be involved with a modern secular community that aimed to become a non-religious church: Sunday Assembly. Take the best bits of religion, including purpose, structure, community, and tradition, but make it available for non-believers. We even got so far as making the interview stage of Y Combinator: https://benrmatthews.com/meeting-heroes-y-combinator-interview-experience/ https://benrmatthews.com/meeting-heroes-y-combinator-intervi... During the interview, Sanderson (Sunday Assembly co-founder) had a brilliant back and forth with Sam Altman, but ultimately the idea didn’t stand. I still think the ethos of Sunday Assembly has merit.

deleted 5y ago
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technothrasher 5y ago
I've attended a few Unitarian Universalist services, and they're very open to "non-believers", as well as pretty much any type of personal belief. They seemed to be much more interested in community and rite than to forcing dogma. Still, while they were certainly a friendly and pleasant group of people, I found it all a bit too fuzzy with objective truth to be my cup if tea. I don't have anything like Sunday Assembly in my area, and occasionally thought of trying to start some kind of weekly humanist gathering. Rather than the UU message that "any belief is welcome", I wanted to convey more of a "everyone is welcome, personal religious beliefs aside" message. Where we could just work on humanistic goals together.
- antognini 5y ago
  There's an old joke: Catholics believe in transubstantiation. Baptists believe in the Rapture. Unitarian Universalists believe in donuts on Sunday.
zafka 5y ago
This is very interesting to me. I am just "Saturday browsing" but plan to try to read what I can about your community. My first impression is surprise that the group was trying to raise venture capital :) I will find out more as I read i guess.

srcreigh 5y ago

This excerpt is from a widely prayed Orthodox Christian akathist hymn. [0] Akathist means not sitting as it is usually prayed standing up. It was composed during the persecution in communist Russia by Metropolitan Tryphon [1] "The breath of Thine Holy Spirit inspires artists, poets and scientists. The power of Thy supreme knowledge makes them prophets and interpreters of Thy laws, who reveal the depths of Thy creative wisdom. Their works speak unwittingly of Thee. How great art Thou in Thy creation! How great art Thou in man! Glory to Thee, showing Thine unsurpassable power in the laws of the universe Glory to Thee, for all nature is filled with Thy laws Glory to Thee for what Thou hast revealed to us in Thy mercy Glory to Thee for what Thou hast hidden from us in Thy wisdom Glory to Thee for the inventiveness of the human mind Glory to Thee for the dignity of man's labour Glory to Thee for the tongues of fire that bring inspiration Glory to Thee, O God, from age to age" [0] http://www.saintjonah.org/services/thanksgiving.htm http://www.saintjonah.org/services/thanksgiving.htm [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryphon_(Turkestanov) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryphon_(Turkestanov)

rpmisms 5y ago
I love this Akathist, and it should be noted that Metropolitan Tryphon wrote it in a literal gulag. The ability to see and be thankful for the beauty of our world, even under those conditions, is a testament to the power of religion, and some would say God.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Beautiful, thanks for sharing.

ecpottinger 5y ago

I am one of Jehovah's Witnesses - Please read on before you just dismiss what I have experienced. Going door to door I have meet plenty of people who say "I don't believe in God, we got here thru evolution!". So I ask the simple question which theory of evolution do they think is probably has the right idea. Too often I hear, "Survival of the strongest." or "What? There is more than one theory about how evolution works?". What is clear to me is that to these people evolution is a BELIEF and not something they thought of, it is as much a religion to them as mine is to me. Worse, I can study and agree or disagree with things I was taught, too often people are just blindly accepting because they do not want to put any efforts in.

PartiallyTyped 5y ago
A belief does not constitute a religion, people have all sorts of irrational beliefs, but that doesn't make them religion.
BrightGlow 5y ago
I share your frustration, the people who you were talking to likely also had a misconception of what evolution and scientific theories in general are, or were stating it poorly. It's not accurate to describe it as a "belief" it's more like "best current guess that we have but we'll change our mind if a new guess comes up that is better able to explain things".
ceilingcorner 5y ago
Disappointed that this is downvoted. You are absolutely right: most people don’t actually investigate the origins of their beliefs and just adopt whatever their social tribe believes. The average urbanite atheist knows as much about evolution as the average rural creationist. It is almost entirely a social phenomenon, not an epistemological one.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  Is this an American thing? I remember being taught the basics of evolution in year 8 or 9 science class in a way that was impossible to misunderstand ("children resemble their parents" + "some parents more likely to survive" => small changes in distribution of traits among each child generation => specialisation to local environment over many generations). I do have a Christian friend who believes that it was God who set the wheels of evolution in motion, but there seems to be little misunderstanding where I am (Melbourne, AU) about what Darwinism is or denial that it's a strong force at play.

robg 5y ago

Consider the calming power of slow rhythmic breathing; meditative practices are found in every religion.

jlpom 5y ago

Basing anything on false or inexact beliefs won't leads to lasting desirable outcomes IMO*. Some argues to read religious texts as metaphors but I think it's just a way to circumvent the reality. *except for charities but benevolence is obviously not (only) tied to religions

nlitened 5y ago
Scientific method gives you only falsifiable theories and inexact beliefs. Anything “universally true” and “exact” is a religion.

cletus 5y ago

This is something I've thought about a lot, and I say this as a diehard atheist. Historically (and even now), religion has served two useful purposes: 1. As a provider of community. There are of course other ways to socialize with wider groups. Sports clubs, going to the pub, classes, that sort of thing. But it's a lot more interest-driven and haphazard. 2. As a provider of and enforcer for a moral code. Here are some things I believe to be true: 1. A lot of people like being told what to do. This isn't necessarily unhealthy or bad. I also believe in decision fatigue. We defer decisions to others all the time; 2. Fear is an easier tool for keeping people in line than any alternative. There's a carrot and a stick with religion. The carrot is paradise in the afterlife (depending on your flavour of religion). The stick is partly eternal damnation but much more important than that, it's the fear of losing that community. 3. The majority of people only act in an ethical manner out of fear of the consequences. Now looking at the political situation in the US, we have the rise of Christian conservatives. Just the name "conservative" is worth examining. It is of course derived from "conserve". The intent is obvious: it is to resist change, to maintain traditions and generally to keep doing things the way we "always" have. It almost seems like to be a conservative requires you to believe things were better in the past and changes are just making everything worse. At least that's how it seems. It shouldn't really surprise anyone that religion and conservatism tend to be correlated but does one cause the other? I honestly don't know. But what I find fascinating is that the desire to be told what to do combined with the mistrust in government fomented by religions (as in, the person is to put their faith in [deity] and the church rather than government) means these people are so easily manipulated. Take the Covid vaccine (and masks). Every current and former president (including Trump), every governor, every Senator and all but a handful of Congressmen are vaccinated. I'm also sure every Fox News host is too. Yet these same vaccinated people are quite happy and willing to pander to whack job conspiracies as a means of control. I find it ironic that the people who I'm sure genuinely think they're standing up for "freedom" by fighting against mask mandates are in fact least free because they're so easily manipulated. So I guess my point is, I'm not sure these problems go away if, say, religion goes away.

mensetmanusman 5y ago
The politics of today are in the context of the most un-religious America in its history. Whether that is related is left as an exercise for the reader.

Fezzik 5y ago

So to be clear, if you ignore all the awful stuff that (almost all) religions have promoted for centuries: racism, sexism, genocide, slavery, child abuse, extreme hostility to science and free thought… meditation and some religious swaying may make you a little nicer. Sure. Okay. Moving on. Edit, to add: and hostility and persecution of any and all non-heterosexual relationships.

dang 5y ago
Please do not take HN threads into religious flamewar. It's the opposite of what we want here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

deleted 5y ago

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mu_sub_naught 5y ago

Sir Isaac Newton was a devout Christian theologist. Perhaps his adopted philosophy offers discipline features that aided in the production of fruit prized by the scientific community. Islamic discipline gave us fundamental mathematical systems. Nikola Tesla thought of his brain as an antennae for the universal core ("I don't know its secrets, but I know it exists"). George Carlin has a bit about how the aliens don't talk to us because of our own self-centered hubris. Religious thought is there for a reason. Science searches for explanations for observable phenomena. If you call yourself an "atheist" and announce your belief in "nothing", then you will shut yourself off from fellow citizens (complete with their own unique knowledge) who are inheriting rehearsed traditions. I've been taught to never tell someone they're wrong. Why would you want to become someone's ideological enemy? Perhaps there are fundamental, ancient gears turning if you embrace religion. When describing my complicated views about religion to my own "simple", hard working father - I was told "Well, I just go to church because everybody is there." You must speak their language so that they sing for you. Their willingness to profess their view of the world is a beautiful, valuable thing. An honorably discharged American marine with a missing leg told me that Islam preaches punishment, while Christianity preaches forgiveness. Both of these concepts are necessary to steer a population, and both can be issued excessively. Forgiveness can mean more intimate personal data released to the priest in a confessional booth, and punishment can mean less corrosive civil behavior overall. I've had hail strike my car seconds after sending the sarcastic chat message "the algorithms replaced the priesthood". I've had lightning strike dozens of feet away from where I slept in the middle of the night in a parking lot mere hours after watching the clip [0] of Christof demanding his team "DO IT!". If you want proof, you've incentivized your industry to make my car constantly connected to an LTE tower by default. In a Faraday cage protected HDD somewhere, I'm sure my file is residing along with billions of others, courtesy of Pegasus (et al). Unless you are going to say "lightning struck the same place 4 times in a row." [1] “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” [0] https://youtu.be/wcMCS_6oung?t=248 https://youtu.be/wcMCS_6oung?t=248 [1] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/212586-google-data-center-loses-data-following-four-lightning-strikes https://www.extremetech.com/computing/212586-google-data-cen...

Animats 5y ago

But if we remove the theology—views about the nature of God, the creation of the universe, and the like—from the day-to-day practice of religious faith, the animosity in the debate evaporates. Of course, then it's no longer a religion. It's a social organization. It seems to be quite possible to overdose on religion. Some religions do that as policy, as a form of brainwashing. The religions with mandatory prayer several times a day work like that. It's really hard to break people free of that brainwashing if they grew up with it. It's not the theology, it's the repetition. Both haredi Judaism and Islam use that approach to induce some degree of fanaticism. The Catholic Church, in previous centuries, was into that sort of thing, but has lightened up a bit.

amanaplanacanal 5y ago
My experience with Buddhism was that theology was very much not the point, but most people still consider it a religion.
- asdff 5y ago
  Buddhism can in practice be very religious. The life of your typical buddhist monk really doesn't look that different from the life of your typical christian monk, they just utter different prayers while lighting their candles. The Pali Cannon reads a lot like the new testament too
- spicymaki 5y ago
  I was a practicing Mahayana Buddhist for many years and I can assure you it is a religion. There is an entire pantheon with Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, ancestors are worshipped. There are temples, rituals, idols, altars, prostration, chanting, incense lighting, religious texts, etc. There is an afterlife via rebirth which you are trying to end via merit making (virtuous acts). Most of the religious practices are there. There is even a religious rite similar to the Christian sacrament of confirmation called taking the precepts where you make certain religious commitments, and you are given a Buddhist name after time of religious study. I think it is pure fantasy that people believe Buddhism is not a religion. I think some people want to convert Buddhism into just philosophy because they want to take out the interesting content and drop the baggage (rituals, worship, etc.). Many are leaving Christianity with the hope of finding a spiritual community without all of the negatives of religion. However without the baggage there is no meaning or purpose and people will fill in the blanks with their own culture and religious upbringing.

api 5y ago

One of the more profound statements I once heard on the problem with modern secular philosophy was this throwaway comment I read online years ago: "Creationism is true if it will keep my kids off oxycontin." (I'm guessing the poster was from the rural Midwestern US.) I'm not saying I agree with that statement, but I can see where they are coming from. I found it to be one of the more profoundly honest and deep statements I've ever encountered. Secular philosophy has failed to produce enough value for ordinary people living ordinary lives embedded in the ordinary matrix of threats and opportunities presented by every day life. Religion has done that for thousands of years. Sometimes it does that quite well and sometimes it does it very badly, but at least it tries. Yes sometimes religion is full of shit, but secular philosophy and ideology is sometimes full of shit as well. One can find examples of both religion and secular philosophy promoting irrational thinking. I think things like antivax and Qanon can be blamed as much on postmodernism as religion, and I don't see any evidence that people who abandon religion automatically become more rational. Many just glom onto other forms of superstition or secular but totally insane ideas. Go read some academic philosophy. The older stuff is deeply abstract, looking down at the world from orbit and drawing a lot of deep but distant conclusions. The newer stuff is completely impenetrable to someone who has not studied the subject in depth. Very little of it is relevant to someone working a regular job and trying to raise kids. Speaking of kids... much secular philosophy barely mentions children at all, or seems indifferent to them. The fact that the central generative process of all organic life gets barely a mention in secular philosophy is to me a profound indicator of something very deeply wrong. It's like physics avoiding the subjects of electromagnetism or gravity and trying to make sense of everything else. The marketplace of ideas is like any other marketplace. If your store does not stock what people need they will shop elsewhere. If you don't like where they are shopping, it's your problem for not producing the right products. The customer is always right.

keymone 5y ago
Sounds to me like you’re saying that churches are interested in brainwashing kids because their existence depends on it, while secular philosophy as a branch of science is not an agent that could act at all. To compare apples to apples somebody should start a church of secular philosophy.
5y ago

fredgrott 5y ago

be careful mixing religion and philosophy up they are not the same. One has factual benefits the other we still have no clue about

tapas73 5y ago
which is which?

deleted 5y ago

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hota_mazi 5y ago

Right on. I challenge anyone who disagrees to come up with a benefit that religion offers that cannot be offered by a secular organization.

truetraveller 5y ago
The motivation to do good, and stay away from evil. The idea that a person if being watched. You can never get that with atheism. Atheism is just ruthless "survival of the fittest", when push comes to shove.
- hota_mazi 5y ago
  You think that doing good only because you are being watched is a good value to have? IF yes, then please, by all means, continue believing in your god if that's all that keeps you from raping and killing people. Atheists do good because it's the right thing to do. You seem to do it because you are afraid of getting punished.
  - tapas73 5y ago
    > Atheists do good because it's the right thing to do. Or is remnant from religious generation? (parents programm kids that doing good is right thing to do because God says so. Certain generation starts omitting "God says so" part)
  - truetraveller 5y ago
    >You think that doing good only because you are being watched Never said "only because" of being watched. Being watched is an added measure. > Atheists do good because it's the right thing to do Many atheists, from personal experience, most don't really care to do good when no one's watching. Not saying it applies to all atheists, but for many. It's simply not rational. Why do good? For "karma"? So, the atheist has replaced "God" for "karma"?
    - jhgb 5y ago
      Human psyche is not rational. Reason takes work that most are not willing to invest in most of the time, regarding most things. Not even scientists, whose job is to be rational about things, live their lives fully rationally, or even "50+% rationally". Yes, it's not rational to feel good when doing good things for someone. Yet, most people do feel good when doing good things for someone. It's called empathy. And while that feeling is not rational, it is very handy. I don't see how you could have humanity as we know it without it. Whatever the reason for its existence, I'm glad that it exists. Who knows, maybe that's just the anthropic principle in action here? Maybe without it, you really wouldn't have humanity to wonder about it.

dQw4w9WgXcQ 5y ago

So much of the US population cruises along unconsciously on an implicit set of Judeo-Christian values and morals. Increasingly many citizens claim to have left religion behind and subscribe to an exclusively scientific worldview, but the majority of their upstanding behavior still stems from religious beliefs. Pressed to reveal its true character, a purely scientific worldview produces no inherent sense of meaning, morality, or right v. wrong. Sure, you get the hemming and hawing about evolutionary hunter-gatherer behavior and other various strains of pseudo-scientific bullshit, but all of those are equally as faith-bound as religion given that there is no possible way to devise reasonable (or ethical) experimentation on how past humanity might have evolved various senses of "right and wrong" or even a capacity for wanting meaning. It's entirely rational to glean from religion what continues to influence a large portion of our success and stop pretending like science is our new "one true god" and all of the churches need to be burnt to the ground in favor of some absolute separation of church and state.

VictorPath 5y ago
> evolutionary hunter-gatherer behavior and other various strains of pseudo-scientific bullshit, but all of those are equally as faith-bound as religion given that there is no possible way to devise reasonable (or ethical) experimentation on how past humanity What past humanity? There are hunter gatherer bands roaming around the Amazon right now. They seem to exhibit at least as much "upstanding behavior" as the evangelicals sloshing around the US. Scandinavia is fairly secular and has many nice attributes, the US is off the charts in terms of religion, violent behavior, gun deaths etc. I don't see how irrational beliefs about burning bushes, virgin births, walking on water, resurrections result in "upstanding behavior". If this were the case evangelicals would be the epitome of "upstanding behavior", but they are not.
- xyzzyz 5y ago
  > There are hunter gatherer bands roaming around the Amazon right now. They seem to exhibit at least as much "upstanding behavior" as the evangelicals sloshing around the US. Considering how violent are cultures of hunter-gatherers, I’d say that they are much less morally upstanding. But, they provide a good data point here: the hunter gatherers are typically highly religious. It’s just their religions are pretty bad at creating positive societal outcomes. Not all religions are created equal in that aspect. > Scandinavia is fairly secular and has many nice attributes, the US is off the charts in terms of religion, violent behavior, gun deaths etc. If you look at the reality instead of aggregated statistics and packaged narratives, you will find that gun deaths in US very much are not of the charts in places where religiosity is off the chart. If anything, these two things are negatively correlated: the more religious a place is, the fewer gun deaths (despite no scarcity of firearms among the religious).

trees101 5y ago

This is a challenging article. To paraphrase, it suggests that a suite of religious practices have been shown to have real world benefits. The author suggests that scientists should overcome their personal allergy to religion and instead trust the data. He suggests the compromise of rejecting the "theology" of the religion, presumably because it is "unscientific", and instead focusing on the empirically observable physical social practices. I agree with him, but suggest a few further considerations. Wouldn't a truly open minded scientist be forced to consider that the real world impact of religious practice is evidence (not necessarily proof) for the causal effect of something that is outside of empirical measurement? Only a mind that has the improvable a-priori belief in physicalism could reject this possibility. A commitment to physicalism is not itself provable by science, and therefore is merely a religious belief, although it is disguised and subconscious most of the time so we don't notice. And how does he think that we can decouple the "theology" of the religion from the practices? Could a hall full of strangers start swaying together like in the Jewish Shuckle, feel the same unity felt by the synagogue? What came first, the theology or the swaying? This sounds like a cargo cult mentality, where by imitating the behavior of the rich, you, too can become rich. Even if it worked a little bit, it's hard to imagine that it could become popular or last. I think team sports played in Stadiums is the best imitation we have so far, and even that is only sustained by a narrative ("your" team "battling" an "enemy" team). It would be interesting to see if an idiosyncratic hodge-podge of different rituals cobbled together from various religions could ever work. As far as I can tell, that is exactly what New Age religion is, and that is far from impressive. The way forward is to stop and re-think the blind philosophical pre-commitments of our day, which are a slowly eroding set of modernist beliefs from the Enlightenment era. This gave us a dualistic world view, with the complete separation of a "spiritual" and "physical" realm. As science is built to only examine the physical, it naturally produces confirmation bias that there is no "spiritual" and gradually we went from dualism to believing only in the "physical". It is this erroneous background assumption which leads us to misunderstand what scripture even means when it talks about heaven/earth and angels and other "spiritual" beings. https://thesymbolicworld.com/articles/how-the-scientific-revolution-changed-our-worldview/ https://thesymbolicworld.com/articles/how-the-scientific-rev... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXOdlIXDsr8&t=0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXOdlIXDsr8&t=0s

5y ago

ggggtez 5y ago

> Secular philosophy has failed to produce enough value for ordinary people living ordinary lives Consider the situation: you want to get an abortion. Or you know someone who does. I don't think I need to spell out the debate. But the secular world view is producing value for people who don't want to be afraid that they will spend literally INFINITY TIME being tortured. (And arguably it produces value for the religious, who do utilize secular services even when their religion forbids it). The secular world view offers you freedom from judgement, both mortal and immortal. Many people find value in the freedom to not worry about superstition.

temp8964 5y ago
I am totally atheist, but I am against most abortion. You don’t have to be religious to be against abortion. Be secular doesn’t make anybody free from judgement.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  This is interesting insofar as most arguments against addiction seem to be philosophically connected with either spiritual guilt or assigning a clump of cells person status at conception due to the presumed presence of a soul. How precisely do you arrive at your stance in the absence of a soul? Virtually all the actual brain development happens very late in the game and almost all abortions happen in the first or early second.
  - temp8964 5y ago
    See my response to the above comment.
- hota_mazi 5y ago
  I am pro choice and against abortion. I don't like abortion. Nobody likes abortions. Women who feel that they need to get an abortion don't like it either. It's a horrible, traumatic procedure. But it's a reality that it needs to be legal, regulated, and safe. It's absolutely critical to civilization that women have a choice to undergo an abortion if they choose to. It's their body, their life, their future. Nobody else's business, especially not the government's. The government should never require them to carry a pregnancy to term in much the same way that it shouldn't force you to give an organ (and it doesn't). I am not pro abortion, I am pro choice. People opposed to abortions are not pro life, they are anti choice.

ggggtez 5y ago

> After only eight weeks of study with a Buddhist lama, 50 percent of those who we randomly assigned to meditate daily spontaneously helped a stranger in pain. I'm waiting for the follow up study after 520 weeks, where a certain percentage of them become radicalized zealots.

France_is_bacon 5y ago

Everything that is listed in this article can be done non-religiously. Personally, I've led groups and I understand about ritual, repetition, moving in unison and other techniques to create cohesiveness within the groups. I don't think all of this started in religion. We see apes moving in tandem, their ritual of grooming each other, etc. But, for some reason, people want to use these basic everyday knowledge and ascribe it to religion. I'm not saying religion doesn't use them, but they are hardly the first. Think of sports teams. They all have their chants, wear the same colors, go to the same bars, commiserate on wins and losses. Any organization is like this. Humans naturally move towards this type of way of reacting. There is nothing special about religion.

spoonjim 5y ago

I feel like my life would be better if I believed in some supernatural being who loved me and cared for me and was going to bring me into his paradise of eternal ecstasy after I die. I don’t see how that couldn’t make a person happier and more able to cope with the deaths of loved ones, their own death, etc. It seems like being on a very powerful narcotic that still lets you function day to day. But I don’t see any way I can make myself believe that stuff.

Barrin92 5y ago
the point of genuine faith isn't to be a narcotic that let's you function in day-to-day life, it's not some sort of theological Soma out of Brave New World, it's supposed to transform, which involves a fair amount of suffering. Your life wouldn't be better if you you could believe any of that stuff, and no genuine believer treats religion or God like some sort of spiritual Xanax.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  I don’t think that genuine believers treat religion like a spiritual Xanax... but I do think, and have observed, that that’s what it can often be. Especially seeing the religious people I know coping with the deaths of loved ones, and in one case the death of their child.

allturtles 5y ago

I have no problem believing that religion may serve useful social and cultural functions. Unfortunately, this article is founded on findings in social psychology, and we already know that social psychology is largely bunk[0]. What are the chances that this "meditation leads to kidness" result (with a total of 39 participants) would actually stand up to attempts to replicate it? The claimed effect size - "8 weeks of meditation resulted in such a large effect—increasing the odds of acting to relieve another person’s pain by more than 5 times"[1] - defies belief. [0]: https://replicationindex.com/2020/01/05/replication-crisis-review/ https://replicationindex.com/2020/01/05/replication-crisis-r... [1]: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52853b8ae4b0a6c35d3f8e9d/t/528d263ce4b04aa0e2083b1e/1384982076484/meditation-increases-compassionate-responses-to-suffering.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52853b8ae4b0a6c35d3f8...

BiteCode_dev 5y ago
Besides, associating meditation to religion is like assuming fasting == religion. They are both practices that can exist without mythology, sacred texts or believes of what happens after death.
- qazpot 5y ago
  > Besides, associating meditation to religion is like assuming fasting == religion. Meditation and fasting are both integral parts of Sanatana Dharma (called hinduism by westerners). Dont mix these with you perception of Christianity.
  - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
    Intersection != Equality I fast. I meditate. I'm not religious. One may be religious and not fast nor meditate.
- eikenberry 5y ago
  > They are both practices that can exist without mythology, sacred texts or believes of what happens after death. While I agree with your main point, that they are equating things that and not the same, you seem to be to be making the same mistake. None of the things you list are required for religion either.

loveJesus 5y ago

Hallelujah, i remember when in Reed College we were introduced to Clifford Geertz statement about religion serving to give 'long lasting moods and motivations'. When i got into a lot of trouble from drugs, sexual immorality and all the other stuff i knew no human doctor, medication or other thing would get me well and satisfied with my wellbeing. I finally decided to follow Jesus Christ. Much more than just a mood and motivation (which is also there), i watched my illness heal and have been med free since 2014 with doctor's approval, my dad here spoke tongues in Arabic praising God without an accent (someone else astounded told us) and my dog even heal of cataracts the day after praying for her. Many prophecies that have come true many other things, feel free to message me. Above all i urge trust in the Bible and We can have a relationship with God through what Jesus did on the cross alone.

mybrid 5y ago

Every culture has some version of the golden rule yet religions claim to originate it. Most of what was studied in this article is common across all religions. Calling such practices "religion" is like calling smiling "religion". Religion co-opts nature and then, for a fee, hands it back to you. Human nature is not religion, religion puts an artificial price on that which should be enjoyed sans grift.

paisawalla 5y ago
If you think human nature (i.e. the free and ordinary expression of a person unperverted by social conditioning) comprises something like "do unto others and you would have them do unto you," I have several billion pieces of bad news for you. There is no evidence for this, and the only rebuttal you could have to all the counterexamples will be some form of No True Scotsman -- "yes, those people acted badly, bad that's their conditioning, not their True Human Nature..."
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  But by your own definition none of those billion can be expressing their human nature since all of them have been subject to social conditioning. What I think the OP is getting at is the concept of universal human traits. There’s a big old list of them compiled by an anthropologist here: https://condor.depaul.edu/~mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm https://condor.depaul.edu/~mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm The thing to note is that the golden rule could be a universal as much as murder is. Which is to say the golden rule is continuously reinvented by humans but not necessarily followed by them all. What factors in this are innate versus conditioned are opaque.
  - paisawalla 5y ago
    > The thing to note is that the golden rule could be a universal as much as murder is. Which is not a helpful understanding of human nature at all, which is my point. What I am trying to argue against -- and maybe this is not the intent of the original commenter -- is the idea that the Golden Rule is an innate and inevitable expression of our nature, but say, the horrors of Communism are not.

keithnz 5y ago

I quite like Alain de Bottons attempt at trying to mine religion for "good ideas". He wrote a book "Religion for Atheists" on this idea https://www.amazon.com/Religion-Atheists-Non-believers-Guide-Uses/dp/0307476820 https://www.amazon.com/Religion-Atheists-Non-believers-Guide...

dartharva 5y ago

At a personal level, one very visible difference I have seen religion make in people is that it makes them more disciplined. Pious people who regularly and "religiously" perform their rituals every day tend to have a nice bonus effect of being easily able to start and adhere to good habits and exercise self-control over superficial cravings.