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It's still a social construct. As knowledge and science advance, the need for religion decreases and it's really on us to accept there are some questions we can

It's still a social construct. As knowledge and science advance, the need for religion decreases and it's really on us to accept there are some questions we cannot answer.

AussieWog93 4y ago
>As knowledge and science advance, the need for religion decreases Citation needed, massively! If anything, the powerful technology and knowledge we now wield (weapons of mass destruction, mass surveillance, modern logistics and coordination, global communications) only makes it more important that we don't forget the hard-earned scoial and moral lessons of our pre-scientific ancestors - lessons that were often encoded in evolving cultural systems like religion.
- tobylane 4y ago
  Humanism fills that need. It doesn’t matter that it’s new, Islam and Christianity were new once, and corrupted since.
  - AussieWog93 4y ago
    There's an argument to me made that the age/popularity of a belief system does correlate with validity, given that their individual memes are subject to Darwinism. Of course it's not everything, but I don't think humanism on its own would work without an older religion as its "bootstrap".
    - rablackburn 4y ago
      I wouldn’t say it necessarily correlates with validity - Darwinism is about one thing: fitness of survival. I feel like if you squint a little you can see all the positive-memetic adaptations that get bolted on to organised religion. A commandment to “worship no other god but me” is a classic example of something that seems less like profound revelation and more like an effective memetic adaptation.
    - tobylane 4y ago
      I don't consider myself a humanist, but I accept that my views are similar to them. I think humanism only exists because the way Christianity has been promoted recently forced the alternative to have a graspable answer rather than "I'm a good person for my own preference". UsefulChart's video on humanism may help. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWhz3SXPWkg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWhz3SXPWkg
    - stormking 4y ago
      > There's an argument to me made that the age/popularity of a belief system does correlate with validity, given that their individual memes are subject to Darwinism. Absolutely not, because the fitness, in an evolutionary sense, of those memes does not correlate with their truthfulness but with how easy they are to believe because they appeal to our fears, hopes and dreams. Take that "life after death" trope. The hard truth is that there isn't any, when you die, everything that made up "you" will be gone for good. But no religion based on that truth would ever thrive because the thought is just too scary and bleak.
  - fsflover 4y ago
    Why should one choose humanism instead of personal prosperity (egoism)? Religions have an answer. Humanism AFAIK doesn't.
    - lgas 4y ago
      What is religions' answer? "Because Sky daddy said so"?
      - AussieWog93 4y ago
        If "Sky Daddy" is the literal creator of the Earth who gave direct commands to mankind, then that alone is a pretty valid reason. If he isn't, then he's a powerful (yet imaginary) social construct that has evolved over the past 4,000 years to encode the wisdom of many past generations through a set of rules and stories that happen to match up with the stories and rules of many other cultures. It's also an incredibly fast and low-cost way to reach a solution. Either way, there's definitely some validity to the claims of any major religion.
        Lionga 4y ago
        The claim of black or gay people beeing inferior had been there for more than 4000 years. Does that give any validity to you?
        AussieWog93 4y ago
        I'm not sure these views are as consistent as you say they are. The Atlantic slave trade started in the 1500s and ended in the 1800s. Even then, it was controversial and faces opposition from certain Church groups (while getting support from others). Vilification of gays based on Christian religious grounds apparently goes back to the 11th century (based on a quick read of Wikipedia, TBF), and is only starting to come undone now. I don't really have an answer for this, it was unfortunate.
    - stormking 4y ago
      The answer is a family of simple heuristics like the "Golden Rule", "tit-for-tat" etc.
- anhner 4y ago
  Ah yes, the hard earned social lesson of not wearing mixed fibers. Or not allowing women on their period to share the bed of their husband.
  - AussieWog93 4y ago
    Please don't make comments like this on HN. Nobody was making the argument that extremely specific religious quirks like this are encode knowledge important to the wise use of modern technology.
    - Lionga 4y ago
      It is valueable as the comments shows so easily how wrong religions get it, when many take religions as truths
      - AussieWog93 4y ago
        That's a valid comment to make - religions do get things wrong, but GP is plain old "look how smart I am" strawmanning. It doesn't make the discourse more interesting or enlightening, and frankly doesn't belong on this site.
        Lionga 4y ago
        You deciding what belongs or does not belong here, what is allowed to be said or what is interesting or enlightening is the terror tactic almost all religions used to suppres people and ideas they do not like
        anhner 4y ago
        On the contrary, I think comments that push religion as some kind of romantic enlightenment of the past as opposed to science are the ones that don't belong on this site.
- stormking 4y ago
  Oh cut the crap, religious stories are fairytales and everyone knows it. And religious "truths" are either trivialities or simply not true at all.
- jstimpfle 4y ago
  Taking Christianity specifically as that's the only religion I know at least a little. A lot of the more specific day-to-day life advice in those texts are outdated because they're based on societal circumstances of the time, which have changed by now. Or they are explanations of phenomena that we have a much better grasp on now. Or they make claims that are implausible given today's understanding. Religions teach us some valuable high-level concepts, like love and compassion. Those values are extremely important, but also not terribly interesting. You can totally arrive at them through other means. I don't see how those high-level values help at solving modern crises of global scale. Believers searching for specific advise on modern day problems need to work hard and read though a lot of "code" to find a few nuggets - ultimately failing to get specific enough answers. If I do a web search on what the bible says to homosexuality, for instance, I get walls of text discussing precious few bible verses. In effect the bible, being what it is, allows those in charge to impose their individual preferences and opinions on their believers by means of laying out suitable interpretations of the code. I am tempted to conclude that there is less collected wisdom in the bible than you might think, and more potential for harm than you like to admit.
- weatherlite 4y ago
  In the West is it even debatable that christianity is on a decline? As for the muslim world its more mixed but I do think the younger genereation is less religious than the older ones. It has a long way to go though till we can say its a secularized society.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    “Religious-ness” has two contexts. One is for philosophical purposes, where a person agrees with a set of assumptions (aka beliefs). The other context is as a tribal marker, for practical purposes. In this context, the “religiousness” is not about agreeing with the set of assumptions, but pretending to agree and/or going through the motions of various customs as a signal of how committed they are to the tribe. In societies where individuals need to rely less on the tribe, it might be posited that there is less reason for people to put on a show for the latter reason, so they can afford to be less “religious”. So if, on average, children of Christians are more likely to be economically independent, then they may tend to being less religious, and children of Muslims, who are more likely to be economically dependent on each other, tend to be more religious.
Nomentatus 4y ago
As the unit cost of destruction constantly decreases, logarithmically; we might guess instead that keeping the mental attitudes of individual actors in line is more important as tech surges forward. If you have a better method than religion to do this (and I don't discount the possibility) do drop a description of that. "Humanism" highly correlates with lock sales worldwide as far as I can tell. It's not defense at all vs drug addiction. Humans feel great when drugged up.

It's still a social construct. As knowledge and science advance, the need for religion decreases and it's really on us to accept there are some questions we cannot answer.

AussieWog93 4y ago

>As knowledge and science advance, the need for religion decreases Citation needed, massively! If anything, the powerful technology and knowledge we now wield (weapons of mass destruction, mass surveillance, modern logistics and coordination, global communications) only makes it more important that we don't forget the hard-earned scoial and moral lessons of our pre-scientific ancestors - lessons that were often encoded in evolving cultural systems like religion.

tobylane 4y ago
Humanism fills that need. It doesn’t matter that it’s new, Islam and Christianity were new once, and corrupted since.
- AussieWog93 4y ago
  There's an argument to me made that the age/popularity of a belief system does correlate with validity, given that their individual memes are subject to Darwinism. Of course it's not everything, but I don't think humanism on its own would work without an older religion as its "bootstrap".
  - rablackburn 4y ago
    I wouldn’t say it necessarily correlates with validity - Darwinism is about one thing: fitness of survival. I feel like if you squint a little you can see all the positive-memetic adaptations that get bolted on to organised religion. A commandment to “worship no other god but me” is a classic example of something that seems less like profound revelation and more like an effective memetic adaptation.
  - tobylane 4y ago
    I don't consider myself a humanist, but I accept that my views are similar to them. I think humanism only exists because the way Christianity has been promoted recently forced the alternative to have a graspable answer rather than "I'm a good person for my own preference". UsefulChart's video on humanism may help. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWhz3SXPWkg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWhz3SXPWkg
  - stormking 4y ago
    > There's an argument to me made that the age/popularity of a belief system does correlate with validity, given that their individual memes are subject to Darwinism. Absolutely not, because the fitness, in an evolutionary sense, of those memes does not correlate with their truthfulness but with how easy they are to believe because they appeal to our fears, hopes and dreams. Take that "life after death" trope. The hard truth is that there isn't any, when you die, everything that made up "you" will be gone for good. But no religion based on that truth would ever thrive because the thought is just too scary and bleak.
- fsflover 4y ago
  Why should one choose humanism instead of personal prosperity (egoism)? Religions have an answer. Humanism AFAIK doesn't.
  - lgas 4y ago
    What is religions' answer? "Because Sky daddy said so"?
    - AussieWog93 4y ago
      If "Sky Daddy" is the literal creator of the Earth who gave direct commands to mankind, then that alone is a pretty valid reason. If he isn't, then he's a powerful (yet imaginary) social construct that has evolved over the past 4,000 years to encode the wisdom of many past generations through a set of rules and stories that happen to match up with the stories and rules of many other cultures. It's also an incredibly fast and low-cost way to reach a solution. Either way, there's definitely some validity to the claims of any major religion.
      - Lionga 4y ago
        The claim of black or gay people beeing inferior had been there for more than 4000 years. Does that give any validity to you?
        AussieWog93 4y ago
        I'm not sure these views are as consistent as you say they are. The Atlantic slave trade started in the 1500s and ended in the 1800s. Even then, it was controversial and faces opposition from certain Church groups (while getting support from others). Vilification of gays based on Christian religious grounds apparently goes back to the 11th century (based on a quick read of Wikipedia, TBF), and is only starting to come undone now. I don't really have an answer for this, it was unfortunate.
  - stormking 4y ago
    The answer is a family of simple heuristics like the "Golden Rule", "tit-for-tat" etc.
anhner 4y ago
Ah yes, the hard earned social lesson of not wearing mixed fibers. Or not allowing women on their period to share the bed of their husband.
- AussieWog93 4y ago
  Please don't make comments like this on HN. Nobody was making the argument that extremely specific religious quirks like this are encode knowledge important to the wise use of modern technology.
  - Lionga 4y ago
    It is valueable as the comments shows so easily how wrong religions get it, when many take religions as truths
    - AussieWog93 4y ago
      That's a valid comment to make - religions do get things wrong, but GP is plain old "look how smart I am" strawmanning. It doesn't make the discourse more interesting or enlightening, and frankly doesn't belong on this site.
      - Lionga 4y ago
        You deciding what belongs or does not belong here, what is allowed to be said or what is interesting or enlightening is the terror tactic almost all religions used to suppres people and ideas they do not like
      - anhner 4y ago
        On the contrary, I think comments that push religion as some kind of romantic enlightenment of the past as opposed to science are the ones that don't belong on this site.
stormking 4y ago
Oh cut the crap, religious stories are fairytales and everyone knows it. And religious "truths" are either trivialities or simply not true at all.
jstimpfle 4y ago
Taking Christianity specifically as that's the only religion I know at least a little. A lot of the more specific day-to-day life advice in those texts are outdated because they're based on societal circumstances of the time, which have changed by now. Or they are explanations of phenomena that we have a much better grasp on now. Or they make claims that are implausible given today's understanding. Religions teach us some valuable high-level concepts, like love and compassion. Those values are extremely important, but also not terribly interesting. You can totally arrive at them through other means. I don't see how those high-level values help at solving modern crises of global scale. Believers searching for specific advise on modern day problems need to work hard and read though a lot of "code" to find a few nuggets - ultimately failing to get specific enough answers. If I do a web search on what the bible says to homosexuality, for instance, I get walls of text discussing precious few bible verses. In effect the bible, being what it is, allows those in charge to impose their individual preferences and opinions on their believers by means of laying out suitable interpretations of the code. I am tempted to conclude that there is less collected wisdom in the bible than you might think, and more potential for harm than you like to admit.
weatherlite 4y ago
In the West is it even debatable that christianity is on a decline? As for the muslim world its more mixed but I do think the younger genereation is less religious than the older ones. It has a long way to go though till we can say its a secularized society.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  “Religious-ness” has two contexts. One is for philosophical purposes, where a person agrees with a set of assumptions (aka beliefs). The other context is as a tribal marker, for practical purposes. In this context, the “religiousness” is not about agreeing with the set of assumptions, but pretending to agree and/or going through the motions of various customs as a signal of how committed they are to the tribe. In societies where individuals need to rely less on the tribe, it might be posited that there is less reason for people to put on a show for the latter reason, so they can afford to be less “religious”. So if, on average, children of Christians are more likely to be economically independent, then they may tend to being less religious, and children of Muslims, who are more likely to be economically dependent on each other, tend to be more religious.

Nomentatus 4y ago

As the unit cost of destruction constantly decreases, logarithmically; we might guess instead that keeping the mental attitudes of individual actors in line is more important as tech surges forward. If you have a better method than religion to do this (and I don't discount the possibility) do drop a description of that. "Humanism" highly correlates with lock sales worldwide as far as I can tell. It's not defense at all vs drug addiction. Humans feel great when drugged up.