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Notes -
[EDIT] - I'll leave the below for clarity, but I think I can make things even simpler.
Here are three beliefs:
someone throwing salt at you is casting a lethal curse.
Some guy you've just met has had a divine revelation and now speaks for God.
Someone two thousand years ago was God, and we have a ~1900-year-old book laying out his teachings.
Let us presume that all three of these beliefs are wrong. Your argument, as I understand it, is that they are wrong in the exact same way, such that all three will result in essentially identical behaviors. Am I understanding you correctly?
That seems like a reasonably good definition. You should apply it rigorously.
Walls of text are unnecessary here. This is really quite simple. Based on the following paragraph, you pretty clearly believe one of the following:
That all Christians here are members of a financially-exploitative tele-evangelist-style megachurch, or are initial converts to mormonism, or both
That those of us who are not members of a financially-exploitative tele-evangelist-style megachurch or are initial converts to mormonism, nonetheless fall victim to similar forms of grifting.
Both of these examples appear very different from your salt curse example, being far more abstract and elaborate. But then, I'm fairly confident that most Christians you converse with here have never been initial converts to mormonism, and also have never donated money to a tele-evangelist or similar. Your position appears to be that we must be falling for some other, unspecified grift. Only, why not specify it?
The straightforward explanation is that you can't. You want to claim that we are delusional. You claim that our beliefs are exactly identical to an obvious delusion. I ask for examples, you give much weaker examples that do not actually apply, and then handwave.
I certainly agree that someone has a habit of making bad arguments. Sadly, I have much, much less time to write than I used to.
But here, specifically, you do not need to elaborate further, because you have not actually elaborated at all. Nor does God even come into the argument in any substantive way. I asked you for an example of how my delusion might be exploited in an obvious, empirical fashion. You have failed to provide one. This isn't some pedantic gotcha; you are making a very strong claim that is in fact indefensible, when a small amount of moderation would put you on much firmer ground. You appear to be doing this because you are failing to parse the details of your own statements in anything like a rigorous fashion.
Suppose I argued that Atheists are all bloodthirsty murderers, and when questioned pointed to the 75-100 million murders from atheist regimes in the last century, and claimed your beliefs were exactly identical to theirs. I do not think you would consider this a valid argument, but if there's a difference between such an argument and what you're presenting here, I'm not seeing it. Perhaps you could point it out? While both they and you were atheists, is there perhaps some notable set of differences between how their atheism and yours operated? If such differences can exist between their atheism and yours, why would you suppose that no differences exist between how my belief in God operates, and how the belief in God of first generation Mormons or African salt-fearers operates?
See, FC, I don't have the time, nor do I care to write a 5 million word polemic that addresses the irrationality of every single religious, sect or cult on the face of the Earth. I think I have pointed out the mechanisms through which hundreds of millions or billions of people have been bilked or fleeced, and my conscience floats as light as a feather.
... Religion. Religion itself is the grift.
Since you will obviously disagree, I chose to start with examples that even you would find examples you would agree with.
Just because I can do this all day doesn't mean I want to do this all day. I have bodily needs that aren't rehashing the usual arguments ad-nauseaum, with a probability of you changing your mind that is a floating point error away from 0.
You seem to accept my operational definition of delusion. Then you ask me to apply it "rigorously".
Good rhetoric. Take a point. I think the implied argument is something like: "Your definition, applied consistently, would classify your own beliefs as delusions too."
But once again, you enjoy the benefit of implication, without making an argument I can engage with it. I can't rebut an argument that hasn't been stated. If you wants to argue that my belief in, say, scientific consensus on some contested empirical question constitutes a "fixed belief immune to updating," I'm genuinely happy to hear that case. Until it's made, I'm going to file this under "ominous foreshadowing that didn't pay off."
I gave examples of religious exploitation you claim don't apply to the Christians you know personally on this forum. Therefore I've "failed to provide" an example of how their delusion could be exploited. Therefore my claim that they are deluded (in the same sense as my clinical examples) is indefensible.
But this conflates two things that should be kept separate: exploitability and having been exploited.
Here's a toy analogy. Suppose I claim that a certain class of people systematically overestimate their driving ability - this is actually a well-documented cognitive bias where the majority of drivers rate themselves as above-average. Now suppose you respond: "Oh yeah? Show me an accident that I specifically caused due to overconfidence in my driving." This would be a strange objection. The point is about the cognitive architecture, not about whether any individual instance of the bias has caused identifiable harm to the specific person you're addressing.
Similarly, my point is not that every Christian has donated to a televangelist or converted to Mormonism. My point is that the cognitive mechanism that generates and sustains religious belief - specifically, the acceptance of extraordinary empirical claims on the basis of testimony, tradition, and subjective experience, with a fairly robust resistance to revision - is the same cognitive mechanism that makes people vulnerable to those exploits. The exploit is diagnostic of the mechanism. The absence of the exploit from your specific history doesn't mean the mechanism isn't there. How exacy am I supposed to know if you've done anything stupid because of your particular, potentially idiosyncratic beliefs? Do I look like God to you? I would have hoped he was more handsome, albeit not quite as articulate.
Would I consider that a bad argument?
Yes, duh. But here's the asymmetry: the claim about atheist regimes is a claim about what certain atheists did, not about a cognitive property that atheism itself entails.
Atheism is the absence of a belief - specifically the absence of theism. It doesn't, by itself, generate any positive empirical commitment that could be exploited. The Soviet state didn't murder people because atheism makes you susceptible to believing false things about kulaks. It murdered people for a complex of political, ideological, and economic reasons that were in no way entailed by the mere absence of belief in God. Nor is insane mass murder exclusive to atheism, because... most of history. I invite you to demonstrate that the average atheist is more likely to murder people than the average religious person. You will fail, but I would enjoy seeing you try.
Whereas my claim about religious belief is precisely about a cognitive property that religious belief does entail - namely, the acceptance of empirical claims (miracles, revelation, answered prayer etc etc) via methods that systematically bypass the kinds of verification we'd demand in other contexts.
This isn't an incidental feature of religion; it's constitutive of it. You can't be a Christian while remaining genuinely, symmetrically skeptical about the Resurrection in the same way you're skeptical about, say, claims for homeopathy. The belief structure requires differential standards of evidence. Religion stripped of unfounded empirical claims is simply philosophy, which is far less exciting.
So the analogy doesn't hold. One is a claim about behavior that some members of a group happened to exhibit. The other is a claim about a structural feature of the belief system itself.
I also agree with your agreement about bad arguments, and I sympathize with a lack of time. And yet here you are, yet here I am. I must say that I do appreciate you attempting to take a stand instead of vanishing when challenged, I would be happy if you kept doing this, or at the very least acknowledge that you no longer wish to continue the debate.
I didn't ask you to. I asked you to admit that, even accepting that we are deceived, different sorts of deception operate in different ways and have different consequences, on a purely materialistic level.
Unless I am mistaken, I have not ever attempted an argument with you in which I claimed God was real and you should believe in him. Every one of these discussions, from my perspective, has been about how logic and reason operate, and all of my arguments appear to me to work equally well if one assumes that there is no God at all. And yet, it does not seem that you have ever recognized this, so let me make it as explicit as possible: for the purposes of this conversation, there is no God and my faith in him is in fact delusional.
I don't. See above.
What I object to is your apparent belief that my faith makes me irrational in obvious exploitable ways, which is why I asked you to explain what those might be. At no point have I argued that my belief is correct, nor do I do so now. You are certain I am irrational, and that is well enough and cheerfully reciprocated. But then you go further and claim that my irrationality is of the sort that imposes immediate, obvious, unnecessary costs. This does not appear to me to be true, and I do not think I am being unreasonable to point out that you are arguing well beyond your actual evidence to make such claims.
If my beliefs are irrational, they are irrational in a way that does not appear to significantly reduce my fitness even from a materialist perspective. Certainly it does not impose costs on me of the sort that you seem to be arguing are typical of religious belief. I do not fear salt curses, nor do I donate to tele-evangelists, nor do I join novel cults. I do believe in a two-thousand-year-old religion, and shape my life by it, but even assuming that I am deceived to do so, it is not obvious where this deceit cashes out in terms of concrete, material loss, in the way your examples center on.
Is that a sufficiently engageable argument?
It seems obvious to me that you have a firm belief that Christians or other believers, being delusional, must suffer significant material consequences as their delusions wreck against material reality, while those such as yourself who do not suffer from such delusions do not incur similar costs. Would you agree that this is an accurate summary of your argument?
Your definition of delusion:
You appear to have a belief that the religious, as a class, are delusional, and that their delusions make them particularly exploitable. You appear to believe that this is an intrinsic characteristic of all religion, such that I myself must be increasingly susceptible to exploitation. Even if I and (most? All?) others here do not appear to have been exploited in any specific way you can identify, this should not be considered contrary evidence to your claims, because your theory takes precedence over our reported facts.
Sure. You can measure the people's self-assessment, and compare it to the accidents they've been in, and note the disparity. If 90% of people believe they're in the top 10% of good drivers, at least eight in ten of them are wrong. So what's the analogous measure of material outcomes for the relatively-intellectual religious mottizens?
If you say "people like you overestimate their driving ability", and I note that I think I'm actually pretty bad at driving, there's likewise a disconnect there, no? If I don't in fact overestimate my skill at driving, in what sense are these people "like me"? Alternatively, if I think I'm a top-10% driver, and can back it up with my actual driving record, there's a disconnect again, isn't there?
If you claim I or people like me are exploitable, the way to back that up is with examples of how we have or plausibly might be exploited, in the same way that overestimation of one's driving ability is demonstrated by comparison to population-level driving outcomes. If your claim is that we're exploitable despite not having been exploited, where do you think the conversation should go from there? If you've rejected empirical evidence, what would you prefer?
That is exactly the question I am trying to get you to engage with. You appear to believe that you can know that I've done, or will do, or am prone to do something stupid because of my particular, potentially-idiosyncratic beliefs. As I understand it, that's your entire thesis!
Atheism in its modern form has routinely and strongly correlated with a particular strong antipathy toward Christianity in particular, the exultation of "reason" that has consistently proved to be fantastically unreasonable, and support for revolutionary social and political changes that have proved disastrous. I'm pretty confident that Atheists as a population much more positive attitudes toward both Communism and Fascism than non-atheists of the same societies.
Soviet atheism does indeed have been upstream of their mass-murder, as evidenced by their pro-murder arguments relying heavily on atheist moral frameworks; contemplate how the term "liquidate" came to be applied to large-scale murder. I would argue that the actual flow went Enlightenment principles/exultation of human rationality > atheism > mass murder.
Explicitly atheist states produced unusually concentrated forms of it, in sharp contrast to contemporary non-atheist states. Appealing to "most of history" doesn't get you around the unusually-appalling nature of ideological totalitarianism in the twentieth century, nor the prominent role atheism played in those ideologies, nor the prominent role the Religious played in opposing them.
You are claiming that structural features of one belief system naturally incline it toward particular outcomes, even in cases where those outcomes can't be demonstrated. Then you are claiming that particular outcomes that can be demonstrated, repeatedly, at horrifying scale, are only "behavior that some members of a group happened to exhibit." You know what a Russell's Conjugation is. I am pretty sure you understand that you are not drawing a rigorous line from first principles here.
My entire point here was that it would be quite bold to claim that atheism leads to mass murder, even with the ton of examples of atheism actually leading to mass-murder that we actually have, and even with the evidence we have that the atheism does in fact appear to have been a significant part of the causal flow. Even with that evidence, I don't claim all atheists are prone to mass murder because it's a whole lot more complicated than that. But you have no problem doing that the other way, on much weaker evidence. This is foolishness.
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