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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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