Comments on: Religion on Trial

By: miko

miko — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 19:29:02 +0000

An interesting idea i heard from a colleague. Religion teaches basic ethics and morals. More strongly, without religion, it would be near impossible to correctly instill in the general population the necessary morals and ethics required for a society to function seamlessly.
Social people are happy people, religion is a necessity for most people to be social and civil, for societies to work etc…

Morals/Ethics outside of belief without evidence, considered under a framework of logic requires a decent mathematical competence and a strong curiosity for quite an esoteric subject.
Not so accessible to the general public.
Anything outside of this might as well be considered a form of religion.

By: Harold

Harold — Thu, 27 May 2010 10:50:48 +0000

“There is no way belief in nonsense can make the believer better off”. I don’t think that is logically valid. If I have 1 of 2 passages to pass down, one leads to death, the other life. I pick passage A because I believe passge B contains dragons. Dragons may be nonsense, but passage A could stil bethe right one.

By: Neil

Neil — Tue, 25 May 2010 02:47:09 +0000

Religion is the belief in nonsense. Nonsense that has no basis in fact, and more often than not contradicts fact. There is no way belief in nonsense can make the believer better off, except in the fairy tale sense of word. It is like saying the heroin user is better off in his heroin heaven. If rationalists cannot best nonsense in head to head combat, we’re done for.

If you have not already done so, consult Jerry Coyne’s blog for hundreds of good reasons why religion is a pile of crap.

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/

By: MERLIN

MERLIN — Sun, 23 May 2010 19:49:05 +0000

As an economist I am not very happy with the use of “world”, but rather think in terms of individual (maximizers). I think religion definitely makes individuals (that have it) better off. People prefer to diversify, and religious belief gives individuals the satisfaction of insurance against death or misfortune, which are otherwise systematic. I would speculate that religion could result in complacency and self-righteousness or self-sacrifice and good works. It could also promote self-sacrifice for the greater good. In any case, religion should be distinguished from the bureaucracy (church) which controls or attempts to control believers for purposes both laudable and evil, but always self-serving. Certainly there have been episodes of positive influence as well as negative, and of course one might judge religions differently. The difficult part of the question is in the implicit assumption that a world without religion (for better or worse) might exist. It is one of those institutions — family, government, markets — that emerge at all times everywhere, even when slightly disguised — Environmentalism, Marxism, Keynesianism.

By: Kent Frazier

Kent Frazier — Sat, 22 May 2010 23:02:03 +0000

If religion makes the world better, then one would expect the most religious parts of the world to be better off. One might, for example, in the US, try to determine if the Bible Belt states have greater economic prosperity, lower crime rates, or whatever other measures of “better world” one might wish to consider.

By: Noah Yetter

Noah Yetter — Sat, 22 May 2010 21:20:07 +0000

Here is the best argument in favor of religion that I have heard:
http://paulgraham.com/lies.html

The money quote:
“You can’t distinguish your group by doing things that are rational, and believing things that are true. If you want to set yourself apart from other people, you have to do things that are arbitrary, and believe things that are false.”

The core idea is bundling. You create a bundle of attributes, some of them good things we can all agree on, and the rest religious nonsense. You tell your children “We are X’s, and X’s are hard-working, and honest, and go to [place of worship], and pray, and go to [heaven or whatever] when we die.” It’s the hard-working and honest bits that you WANT to instill, but they have to piggyback on the worship, prayer, and afterlife bits in order to stick, because it’s easier to form a group identity through false belief and arbitrary action.

If you look at the Judeo-Christian Bible in this light, it makes a lot more sense. And if you look at the history of Christianity, you can see that while the fantasy parts of its belief structure have done immeasurable harm, the other parts have done a lot of good. If it’s truly not feasible to have one without the other, then it’s possible that religion makes us better off, for certain bundles of true and false beliefs. “Certain bundles” being the key, because on the other hand you have faiths like fundamentalist Islam, which bundle few if any positive beliefs or behaviors together with their poisonous dogma.

By: Bradley Calder

Bradley Calder — Sat, 22 May 2010 15:29:33 +0000

If possible, could you have them video tape the debate and post it on youtube?

Thanks!

By: Weekend Roundup at Steven Landsburg | The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics, and Physics

Sat, 22 May 2010 10:37:12 +0000

[...] am amazed and delighted by the many excellent responses to my call for arguments about religion. These will be very helpful to me as I prepare for my debate with Dinesh [...]

By: Vic

Vic — Sat, 22 May 2010 03:58:22 +0000

Why don’t you (somehow) estimate and compare migration rates? Among adults (say, 20+ years old) what are rates of switching from atheism to religion and vice versa?

By: GregS

GregS — Fri, 21 May 2010 21:32:27 +0000

I would expect you to make an argument about what religion does to the marginal actor. Does it push people who are marginally moral to be more or less moral? If someone is just barely tolerant of his strange neighbors, does religion nudge them towards the “ethnically cleanse them” solution or the “forgive them and tolerate their differences” solution? Does it nudge people toward being more charitable, or nudge them toward meaningless charities (like subsidizing a church/state institution)? I don’t have a fully formed argument to give, just an outline of the kind of argument I’d give.
(From “The God Delusion”) Apparently religion has no impact at all on an individual’s answers to the trolley problem. So any argument about religious people having better moral intuitions is probably wrong.
Are you going to blog your Freedom Fest talks? Will there be video/audio of it available?