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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   3175 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 25, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Is there anything that you can only get from belonging to a religion that you can’t get from secular alternatives?

There are things that you can get from both religion and secular alternatives (such as moral guidance, community, solace). Is there something about religion that makes religion the better place to seek them?

Dunno about "belonging to a religion", but the truths discovered by the Buddha are very liberating.

Obligations.

It's impossible to achieve the same degree of community provided by religion without a sense of obligation to the community. Religion is an obligation because of the outside forces believed to require adherence to the principles. Secular alternatives have been speculated many times, they have all floundered on the rocks of the lack of obligation. They fall apart over time, people drift away.

It's very easy to build something that's church without the God bit, it's been tried over and over, it dies. The only examples of enduring community institutions that are cited as being non-religious generally drift so far towards religious and supernatural beliefs that they're closer to religions than not. They substitute the race or the nation or the Proletariat and its eventual triumph for God.

Religion is a universalizing force to provide a community for humans to exist.

You can just not do that. I have friend groups that have nothing to do with religion. We meet based on prior meetings, or tradition if you will.

Cool. Do we have a remindme bot for talking about this again 100 years from now?

One stop shopping for solace in one's current position, moral and political beliefs, community, learning (though the state has basically taken that one in a lot of the world) and all the other good shit mentioned below.

If you are discerning enough or have enough time you can find each of these things on your own and put together a bespoke bundle . But it's a lot of hassle. So some of us buy prebuilt.

Genuine belief is a built in placebo effect whenever you want it, for one thing.

Would I argue that you should belong to a religion(specifically, mine) because it is true? Yes(once I have it written up, I'm lazy). But I don't think you're asking for that. So instead I'll point out that communities founded on logic and reason have proven themselves singularly incapable of providing the same kind of community as religious communities do, and generally worse at providing moral guidance and solace.

You are correct I'm not asking if I should belong to a religion. I was pondering the concept of 'Religion of No Religion' that John Vervaeke talks about

...we need to do something like what religion used to do. We need a comprehensive set of psychotechnologies that are set within communities of practices that allow for the comprehensive transformations of consciousness, cognition, character, and culture in a way that is analogous to religion...

The closest things I’ve found are pop culture fandoms (which often involve fictional religions) and twelve-step recovery groups (which include expecting something with greater power than yourself to do the things you can’t).

The Fourth Step of the twelve is a mature psychotechnology which I personally recommend for anyone interested in altering their subconscious.

And without supernatural belief, you will not be able to do this.

Where exactly would you classify Confucianism in terms of "religion" vs. "not a religion"? I'm thinking both of Confucius's refusal to address supernatural matters, as well as atheist Confucians like Xunzi. Do you see Confucianism as having "worked" only to the extent is was a philosophical adjunct to traditional Chinese "folk religion"?

It seems like some belief in the not-strictly-material is pretty load bearing for Confucianism and Buddhism even if it’s not part of the religious doctrines, whether that’s practicing another religion alongside it or believing in some kind of ancestors and small gods mishmash that’s hard to distinguish from general superstitiousness.

Well, presumably, the religions that promise eternal rewards have a better shot at getting them than by not joining them.

The mindset? There is a sea of difference between honest to God believing that God exists and knowing it's all a meta community building cultural fitness maximizing ritual. The former is what actually enables all the moral guidance, community, solace, etc to be effective.

This is like asking what can you get from watching cooking videos other than eating. Well just about everything about eating.

This is not a small-scale question.

But anyway,

(1) An external motivation to act rightly. In the old internet-atheist days, there was lots of indignation at the perceived attitude of the religious that atheists can’t be good people. That was always a strawman, though. There are lots of good atheists. The question is why there should be. Penn Jilette famously protested that he doesn’t need religious belief to keep him in line, since he already rapes and murders everyone he wants to, it’s just that he never wants to. I admire his purity, and grant that in a society as decadent as ours rape and murder are less tempting than they might once have been. And maybe Penn Jilette has never reflexively blurted out a self-exculpatory fib, or fumed internally about some kid getting the last burger at a barbecue, but it would appear that a lot of people have, and it would be surprising if the rest of humanity had jumped straight to Einsatzgruppen and Congolese rape-battalions without passing through lower levels of immorality.

We can Euthyphro this all day but even setting aside questions of the One True Good, the loss of that external nudge has been disastrous. Law cannot fill the gap- there can be no law against selfishness or contempt, for example.

(2) A prescribed human identity. Religions tell people who they are. Muslim women know exactly what they are supposed to do. Orthodox Jewish men know exactly who they are supposed to be. Suicide bombers know. The vast majority of people are incapable of forming an identity from scratch. Religion offers/offered identities that had many drawbacks and did not adequately serve a lot of people, but they did the job for the vast majority. Among the truly religious, there is no self-expression-by-buying-tattoos, no retail therapy, no do-it-for-the-gram; indeed such narcissistic paroxysm is a sign that someone is on their way out of the religion. Religious people have/create lots of problems for themselves and others, but the defining problem of our age, lack of identity, is the result of the loss of religion. No such broadly effective alternative source of identity has yet appeared.

That seems like a kind of crazy way to look at it. Of course Penn hasn't wanted to do that. Because humans are by nature, compassionate tribal beings. It isn't because he is lucky enough to live in a time that allows him all nice things without killing children. It is because killing children doesn't feel good and serves no purpose. You don't need the pope to tell you that.

Humans are by nature animalistic tribal beings. Actually worse than animalistic, since animals don’t have the same imagination for creative evil that we do. No animal would come up with, “What is best in life? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.” Or if you think that’s unrealistically pessimistic, coming as it does from fiction, here’s a real quote: “Heaven brings forth innumerable things to nurture man. Man has nothing good with which to recompense Heaven. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill.”

The only reason people rise above their baser instincts is that they’ve been trained and civilized otherwise (and note that the civilizing process has been a long one, and there’s plenty of evidence that most of its advances can be undone in a short amount of time).

As for Penn’s specific examples, every man has more of a proclivity toward some sins than others. Perhaps he and you are just not naturally wrathful people. Plenty of others are. I’ll say for myself, I do not want to murder anyone right now. I do not want to murder anyone 99.999% of the time. I have, however, been so furious in the past that I have absolutely wanted to murder someone, particularly when I was younger and presumably more testosterone-filled than I am now. I never acted on those feelings, of course, but they were there.

I am reminded of C. S. Lewis’s introduction to the Screwtape Letters, where wrote that all he had to do to come up with the book was spend some time in serious introspection, thinking about all the ways in which his thoughts, temptations, and natural proclivities tended toward evil. If you really think people are kind, compassionate, and fundamentally good by nature, I’d suggest you’re probably just not introspecting hard enough.

C. S. Lewis is a great author. If you are halfway to his level you can think of 1000 evil things that could be done to a person. Being creative and having the capacity to think of evil scenarios has nothing to do with being good or evil at all.

Your outlook is pretty dark considering the trajectory the human race is on towards actual physical transcendence. Maybe I am typical minding it. But people who grow up in happy and healthy environments and that don't have genetic or environmental brain damage are not screaming KILL KILL KILL. Having an intrusive thought you don't act on doesn't make you a murderer in waiting.

There is a mediocre book out there somewhere that I read 20 years ago on a plane, a large part of the plot was a nano/serum that cured all defects and disease and restored body and mind to perfect genetic baseline human health. One of the antagonist's hitmen was a sociopath that was deathly afraid of getting hit with it as it would rob him of his sociopathy by fixing his brain. All problems are physical in the end, if you can fix a damaged brain you will fix the damaged person.

It appears that while some evils are the product of base human instinct, many are learned in civilization just as much as the "civilized" behaviour is. And it's not like civilization has been descended from above unto us. We didn't make up kind and compassionate behaviour when we became civilized - we learned to extend our natural kindness to a larger circle of people. And also, of course, to project our negative proclivities onto artificially constructed enemies.

HOW DO LISTS WORK ON THIS CURSED WEBSITE??!!!

With Markdown’s formatting for ordered lists:

1. An external motivation…

   We can Euthyphro…

2. A prescribed human identity…

I think you needed spaces after the periods.

without:

1.one

2.two

3.three

with:

  1. one
  2. two
  3. three

Reddit has exactly the same problem. Just use "(2)" instead of "2.".

Religion could never have given me that, at least. Thank you.

Divine intervention is what comes to mind as the biggest. I guess that depends on what kind of denomination you belong to. But, certainly, I'd say a lot of Christians I know do think that God will act on their behalf if they behave appropriately. You even see this in agnostics and atheists who make deals with the universe or themselves (Just let me do x one more time, and I swear I won't do x ever again). I actually think it's interesting how widespread such deals are regardless of a person's beliefs. Though, of course, religious people might feel inclined to pray for something routinely (like good health for themselves or others) with the expectation that God will bring it about because of their faith.

I don't see why God is necessary for this. I also have faith that behaving appropriately will yield inexplicable rewards- I just accept that the nature of these forces are beyond my understanding and unknowable. Perhaps they're predicated in placebomancy, or in human driven serendipity, or in the tendency of agents to reflect the kindness expressed to them back into the world, or maybe there is in fact a divinity driving things behind the scenes, or it's all just a simulation. But none of that matters. What matters is the feeling of spiritual wholeness, the kindness, the joy one can bring to those around them, the duty to one's brethren, and so on and so forth.

I notice that a lot of these structures are Christian in shape- merely with an appeal to an abstract Divine rather than a concrete one. But this itself seems to indicate to me that the architectural purpose of 'God' was always just a concrete placeholder for something ineffable.

Reassurance that death is not the end.

*EDIT: Meaningful words of comfort for those who grieve.

It's funny, a lot of people I've come across who have turned to atheism seem to have gravitated towards it precisely because they like knowing death is the end. Especially those who were formerly religious and feel a great deal of guilt over their behavior. I've always found it interesting how only one side of this is often presented, as if there's no psychological reasons a person might be drawn to atheism.

Faith in God?

How valuable that is probably depends on whether God is real or not.

Adding: Aside from that, it depends on the specific religion in question. Different ones are different.

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