Religion is an old form of it is what is, hope, direction, tradition, and community.
Can’t explain a thing or understand it God’s will or only God knows. Can’t do anything to help a person because they are in surgery pray or talk to God to wish for good outcomes.
Don’t feel loved or know what to do or wanted. God loves you, will show you the way, and wants you.
Most traditions and communities in the west were founded on a religion so you have hundreds of people to connect with at a church and maybe millions world wide that will help. Those raised on books of wisdom or what is right and wrong still tend to keep the values even after they move away from the religion but realize they can have values without divine beings
Lastly control. Just like businesses it is easier to control people under a religion so if you can get people indebted, traditionalized, and ostracized otherwise. You can control people easily. Lots of people don’t know what to do and why trust another human being but if a human being says wisely God said this it is easier to accept and gain a direction
The existence of one or more gods can’t be conclusively proven or disproven. So it makes sense to me that some people believe in it and others don’t.
Alternative ways of explaining the world have been around for like a century and a half, and religious conversion is slow.
Why we did religion in the first place instead of just “I dunno where stuff came from or why” is a much more interesting question IMO.
We’ve proved the popular religions wrong definitively, but the truth’s turned out to be unbearably horrifying for most people.
Our tendency to perceive agency in ambiguous situations sheds light on the origins of cognitive biases like religion. Our minds, shaped by eons of natural selection, are finely tuned to err on the side of caution. Think of a group of ancient hunters traversing the savanna. A rustle in the tall grass could be merely the wind, or it could be a lurking predator. Those who instinctively assume the worst and flee are more likely to survive than those who dismiss the sound and remain vulnerable.
Over time, this survival advantage has led to the evolution of cognitive models that favor the perception of agency, even when there is none. We are prone to seeing patterns, faces, and intentions in random events because the cost of mistakenly attributing agency is far less than the cost of failing to detect a real threat. This explains why we might see a face in the clouds or feel a presence in a dark room. Religion is a direct byproduct of this phenomenon.
Furthermore, it’s important to keep in mind that every contemporary belief system stems from an uninterrupted chain of development, tracing back to the earliest human societies. This implies that every ideology has enjoyed a measure of success, having endured the test of time. This makes it difficult to definitively assert that one set of beliefs is fundamentally “more correct” than another, as truth is often subjective and dependent on context. After all, the effectiveness of a belief system in enabling a culture to thrive and grow is perhaps the most relevant measure of its “truthfulness.”
If somebody grows up in a religious environment, then religion becomes central to their world model. It’s not an isolated concept, it’s an integral part of the tapestry of their mind. Our brains, like all physical systems, operate within the constraints of energy efficiency. Assimilating a new idea requires mental effort, as it necessitates restructuring our existing cognitive framework to accommodate the newcomer. This, in turn, translates to expending energy to rebalance the connections within the neural networks of our brain. If a novel concept clashes significantly with our established beliefs, the energetic cost of integration can be substantial. Radical ideas that demand a significant restructuring of our mental models, such as challenging deeply held religious beliefs or political ideologies, may be discarded, deemed “too expensive” from an energetic standpoint.
This principle helps explain why it’s often so difficult to change the views of others, regardless of the soundness of your argument. The strength of the argument alone may not be enough to overcome the inherent inertia of our entrenched belief systems.
I listened to a great podcast on the subject last week which was super helpful, https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/what-does-it-feel-like-to-believe.
For me, I just do. It’s just who I am and what I feel. I don’t really talk about it outside of my church friends, but I just believe. I don’t think the Bible is terribly accurate and regard it much as I do Arabian Nights, a book of fantastic stories based loosely on events. I also think it has much to offer in teaching you how to treat others and live your life as a good person, and that’s what I take away from it. I find Jesus honestly a touch creepy, but I never stop believing in a higher power of sorts.
Also I honestly have made the best friends I’ve ever made in my church life. Horrible homophobic Christians aside, there’s some really excellent people who genuinely love you and do good things to meet there.
Search Engine is a great podcast and that was a great interview. For me it didn’t really answer the question though, but I guess the answer is very individual.
It is a great podcast. I liked his answers but my perspective is different, that’s ok.
I guess a part is that science seems to meticulously avoid the question “why do we live”, in a non-technical way, in a way that actually gives people a sense of meaning.
That and mental inertia, i.e. some things change very slowly.
In 2024 life is hard and you can’t do anything about it in most cases. Religion gives you an excuse for why it must be so, so that you can keep grinding away.
They are raised with it and old habits die hard.
The fact that some people start as atheists and later become religious demonstrates there has to be more reasons than just that.
Never personally met an atheist that had found religion or heard about one, other than in American evangelical stories, but I’ve met a few non-religions people who have later in life found religion. Although I live in a quite atheaistic country, so there is a lack of peer pressure or need to talk about such things.
Never personally met an atheist that had found religion or heard about one
Well congratulations, now you have. It isn’t quite as rare as you might think.
personally
Everyone is everything in the internetz.
What about the internet makes this easier to lie about? I could tell you the same thing to your face and you still couldn’t fact check it.
They aren’t calling you a liar, they’re saying they never met someone like that in person.
They are drawing that distinction for a reason. They literally said everyone is everything on the internet. I don’t how else you could possibly read that.
You are correct. However, relatively there are a tiny amount of them and their reasons are not good reasons.
Almost always, they are in a vulnerable state and at that time have also been exposed to some kind of religious indoctrination specifically tailored to take advantage of that.
It’s easy to see this from the perspective of brainwashing techniques used by cults. Religion just has more developed techniques for longevity.
some people start as atheists
We all do. It takes effort to instill beliefs and usually greater effort to change them. Education is the most common inoculation.
Your understanding of their reasoning comes from a fundamental assumption that your choice is the correct choice for every person. They willingly made the wrong decision, therefore they must have been manipulated into doing so.
Many people do just become religious without outside influence. On a large scale, every society will create its own version of religion without fail. Clearly, they have something to gain psychologically by doing so.
While religious indoctrination obviously exists and obviously is a problem, it doesn’t discount the actual benefits that religion seems to have, and by extension the reasoning with which some people become religious.
We all do.
When I said “start”, it was in reference to the process of changing your religious identity, not your life as a whole.
My understanding comes from many years of direct study and experience. As such, you’ll find that I don’t apply what I say to all people, or “every person.” I stand by what I said and painting it as absolutes is arguing in bad faith.
When it comes to beliefs which are very important to people, we aren’t usually going out of our way to believe things that aren’t true. What’s different with the religious is that they tend not to be rigorous in adjusting their beliefs when there is little to no evidence to support them.
While this is common with humans over all sorts of things, it’s particularly common with deeply held beliefs. There’s many reasons for this, but religion is a very refined method of influencing human belief. Much of it is designed to steer away from questioning it, and also to reinforce it.
With this in mind, it’s easy to see why it’s not so much a choice, but for those few we are discussing, we could say that it’s just something that happened.
As for the benefits, psychological or social, etc. I don’t discount them at all. What I do say, however, is that none of them require religion. Any and all benefits attributed to religion can be achieved without it, and very often they are.
When humans are born, they only acquire a religious identity if it is impressed on them. If they acquire it after childhood, it’s usually due to the reasons I’ve outlined.
I stand by what I said and painting it as absolutes is arguing in bad faith.
This I agree with. Looking back, you were more careful than I thought you were to specify you were not talking in absolutes.
I will however double down that you are still making a fundamental assumption that your option is the correct one, and you make it more clear by arguing that all benefits of religion are possible without religion. If all benefits of religion can be attained without risking the detriment, then religion is the worse option by far.
However, thinking of this made me realize I’m just making the opposite assumption. Just like you, I’ve constructed a strongly held belief about religion based on my life experiences, which are entirely anecdotal and effectively meaningless.
How would you even get evidence that most people are manipulated into becoming religious? How would you get evidence that most people don’t? How would you get evidence that religion does or doesn’t benefit people? How would you even define benefit in the first place?
This argument is meaningless.
Well, thank you for that.
However, I’m not making an assumption. I’m merely pointing out that if religion isn’t necessary for the implied benefits, then why use that method? The fact is that no one uses blind faith as the basis for anything else important to them.
I don’t have a strongly held belief regarding the existence of any gods. When presented with the assertion that they do exist, the lack of good evidence means that I remain unconvinced. I’m open to good evidence.
In the case of manipulation, as you call it, religious indoctrination from birth by family, community and peers is well documented. I’m surprised you’re not aware of this.
As for the assessment of benefits, there’s a great deal of research into what people do with their lives and why. We know a lot about these motivations and there are clear lines to known conclusions. It’s largely psychology.
There is nothing to suggest we need religion for any of the benefits that religious people say they obtain from it, or that they demonstrate through their actions.
I hope this makes things clear but feel free to ask if not.
I don’t have a strongly held belief regarding the existence of any gods.
The strongly held belief I’m referring to isn’t a belief in a god or lack thereof, its a belief that religion is a net negative for society.
I’m surprised you’re not aware of this.
To say I’m not aware of this is again to argue in bad faith. I have mentioned myself that religious indoctrination of course still exists, and is a problem.
As for the assessment of benefits, there’s a great deal of research into what people do with their lives and why.
Yes there is research into how religion affects society, but it isn’t very useful for this purpose for multiple reasons. There is no instance of a society without religion, so the difference between a religious and non-religious society can’t be studied. There can be no consensus on what is beneficial and what isn’t, as morality itself isn’t objective.
There is not and there never will be definitive evidence as to whether or not religion is beneficial for society.
There is nothing to suggest we need religion for any of the benefits that religious people say they obtain from it,
There is also nothing to suggest the opposite, because this can’t really be determined. You would have to so create a set of all the benefits religious people claim to get, which in and of itself would be a monumental task. Then, you would have to demonstrate that nonreligious people can achieve all of the exact same benefits.
This is why I’ve come to the conclusion that this argument is pointless, and neither of us know anything beyond our personal experience.
It’s like asking why people smoke.
Is it bad for you? Yes.
Is it a burden on society? Yes.
Is it addictive and does it make you feel good? For some, yes.
I think that for most people it’s nothing more than a social club. I have always been skeptical ever since hearing absurd stories about arks and being eaten by whales, but every once in a while (especially after sobering up) I went into various churches to see if I might have been missing out on something. Invariably I just found a social club of people just looking for excuses to feel better about themselves. Anything good that happens is a direct blessing from a doting god; anything bad is always the devil…personal responsibility is never part of the answer. Many are just uneducated and dont know how to think; they accept whatever Grandpa says as truth without any consideration, and this extends to pastors. I am atheist; my wife is a devout believer…but more and more she sees something horrible happen and can’t deny it when I point out that religion did that. She still has her higher power but is starting to see the brainrot and brainwashing in her friends and family and can’t understand why they do what they do while calling themselves ‘christians’. It’s not faith; it’s just social self-service.
I’m an effort to get you an answer that isn’t dismissive:
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Youth indoctrination, social conformity, and cultural isolation. If your parents, friends, and most of your community tells you something is true, you are unlikely to challenge it for a variety of reasons including trust (most of what they’ve taught you works for your daily life), tribal identity, etc
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People naturally fear death, and one coping strategy for the existential fear of death is to convince yourself that the death of your body is not the end of your existence. Science does not provide a pathway to this coping strategy so people will accept or create belief systems that quell that fear, even in the face of contradictory evidence. Relieving the pressure of that fear is a strong motivator.
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Release of responsibility. When there is no higher power to dictate moral absolutes, we are left feeling responsible for the complex decisions around what is or isn’t the appropriate course of action. And that shit is complicated and often anxiety inducing. Many people find comfort in offloading that work to a third party.
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Indoctrination.
Because they keep having experiences they can’t or have no interest in explaining.
Pick up a Quran, read a chapter a day. You will have answers to questions you didn’t even think to come up with.
Like if pedos are accepted in your religion?
Define pedos.
If both parties achieved mental and physical maturity then what’s wrong.
Ask your grandmother at what she - or people her age - married at.
This is likely to get downvoted, I say this because mentioning downvotes in your posts/comments usually prevents them from being downvoted (a little psychological thing probably)
I remember SouthPark doing an episode about that exact viewpoint
Then let’s talk facts and logic, why is an older person marrying a younger person bad? because you’re an educated Atheist/Agnostic (I guess), you must’ve questioned what you were taught at childhood, unlike those brainwashed and spoon fed Christians.
“Minimum age of marriage”, who came up with concept? it surely isn’t common sense since it only appeared less than a century ago, so what is it? Some may say that young marriage is a mere relic of the ancients, a result of their underdeveloped logic and science, and that our advanced logic is better and is infallible.
But wait, your people, just mere a century ago saw people 2 centuries a ago the exact same way, and so did those before them, so using our logic, we can deduct that our logic is illogical.
How about statistical data we can speculate, a mere century ago, how did the world look like? there was certainly very little employees, even Christians believed in their book, Javascript did not exist (alhamdulillah), young people were treated as adults, and people older than Israel who to this day live under bombing by your morally superior society were being born; How does something like the depression rate among their youth compare to today? It is reportedly much lower, so how did your generation fail? Surely with all that development of medicine and the like, your people should “logically” be much happier. Are you really strictly superior to the ancients?
“But statistics back then were biased and limited”, I see your point, unlike the “infallible” statistics of today, those statistics were surely awful, so let’s move to broader ideas.
At childhood, you were spoon fed many ideas, like “Slavery is unacceptable”, “The old marrying the young is awful”, and “Humans evolved from monkeys”. By using the fact that our logic is illogical, we can conclude that these aren’t concrete facts. How is slavery involved with almost every product in the average American household? how did the ancients grow up to be healthy adults? Again, ask your grandmother. How is there not, to this day, concrete evidence of humans evolving from anything but slightly taller humans?
How is slavery unacceptable in your eyes, yet you can’t live without it? Is the average McDonalds worker treated better that how Islam treats slaves?
How did the ancients grow up to be healthy individuals? Is insisting that you’re much better than the ancients truly your way of avoiding depression?
Why is anything that goes against the theory of someone named Darwin, of whose book you know nothing, and whose theory’s shortcomings you are ignoring, and whose teachings you were fed in school, and whose ways you never questioned, mere ancient fables?
But there stands, the teachings of Islam, Allah’s divine revelation to us, it never failed, for 14 centuries it stood unchanged, yet who reads it could never tell, that this book wasn’t written by a scholar of today, how could it so accurately describe today? how did our caliphate, only a mere century from today, stand strong? How didn’t we truly fail, until we forgot the words and called it a day?
//////////end
I got a little peotic at the end.
You guys just look at Christians and decide that religion is dumb.
I thought of finishing with some miracles like the 360 joints, the beating of alcoholics and adulterers, and camel milk+urine, but the
articlesouth_park_remarkreply got too long.I realize these miracles can be individually dismissed, it is not their individual traits that will persuade, it is their collected wight. It is the fact that the prophet, peace be upon him, never claimed anything that is wrong, unlike scientists of a mere decade ago, and that his medicines did nothing but heal, unlike scientists of a mere decade ago.
This is likely to get downvoted, I say this because mentioning downvotes in your posts/comments usually prevents them from being downvoted (a little psychological thing probably)
I look at religion and decided it’s silly…wish you’d stop putting words in my mouth. And you can stop defending slavery/pedophilia or whatever, I’m not having that convo with you troll
Here’s the problem with English: I can not use the word “you”, and still have people know whether I am talking to them, or to people like them in general. Some of my "you"s were plural, some were singular. I need some way of coping with this language.
You replied to only 1 paragraph of mine, and decided I am a troll just for
suggestingpushing that slavery/“pedophilia” might not be bad, unlike what you were taught.Here’s an article I remembered, it’s written by a Christian:
Although you’ve been lied to, it’s not the lies that’s the problem. As an adult, you can a lot of the times tell when the media is manipulating you, especially in the last past decade it’s gotten so obvious even a Boomer could see it. But what you don’t see is how when you were lied to (or told selective truths) as a child, you didn’t have the same BS-detector, and that allowed a lot of deep-seated impressions about the world to be formed. So a lot of people who don’t believe anything the media says now (rightly) are still mind-cucked. They accept the programming and differ on the details.
I will give you this hint. Basically all of your programmed emotional responses are your enemies. There was an old Moldbug blog post where he talked about even far after “awaking from his dogmatic slumber,” he still was surprised that if he saw a group of Nazi LARPers, he would reflexively have a pang of emotional stress, but if he saw Stalinist LARPers, he wouldn’t have the same kind of emotional reaction. I think everyone raised in the West has that same programmed reaction. You might know with your head that the communist death count is supposed to be higher and the suppression wider, but it doesn’t click because you weren’t made sensitive to it.
Edit: no, actually, English isn’t the problem, since I appended “guys” to my statement about looking at religion and deciding it’s silly, you should know that I wasn’t talking about you personally.
I think the biggest flaw is assuming you’re among the atheist/agnostic crowd, but even then, I appended that claim with “(I guess)” to indicate that I am indeed putting words in someone’s mouth. Maybe you’re among the Christian crowd, or maybe you’re a…
ZionistJew? Hindu?For any passing people, the original reply isn’t edited, so I am safe from that side of accusations.
I see, English isn’t your first language. You made (and continue to make) false assumptions. The media has had no influence on my viewpoints on religion (Christianity in particular), my personal experiences are more than sufficient. My first comment was based on Mohammeds youngest wife and how it’s accepted/ignored by Muslims. We have (somewhat?) similar action in the US, there was a republican GOP member in New Hampshire that was pushing to keep legal marriage set at 16 rather than 18, described the 16 year-olds as “ripe”…super creepy
Like how women are basically men slaves for some
Definitely pickup a Quran and read it. It’ll correct your error(s).
