NS,
Isn't implied in posts that state humanity as a whole would be bettering without religious belief? And we do see those on here. Vlad's continued use of individual cases is a straw man and not an effective argument but there is a point to be made, just not his.
That’s a fair point. Vlad’s guilt by association crap (“Stalin was an atheist. Stalin was a monster. Therefore atheism leads to monsters”) gets in the way of meaningful discussion but I happen to be one who thinks that, on balance, societies would be better served without religion than with it.
Right off the bat it’s worth saying that this has nothing to do with the truth values of various religious claims – Vlad’s god, Steve H's god, Zeus, Allah or any of the others could be real regardless of whether anyone thinking they’re real leads to more harm than good. There’s also no way of testing the proposition ether, short that is of somehow eliminating religion for a generation or two in some countries with similar religious profiles to others then counting the bodies in each afterwards.
And while were at it, how would we measure harm/good in any case? Religious wars are fairly obvious but generations of shame and guilt for committing “sins”? Or staffing a stall at the local vicarage jumble sale for a good cause? Or how about the comfort of thinking deceased loved ones have gone to heaven set against the abject terror of thinking unchristened babies are in purgatory and non-believing loved ones are in hell? How should we weigh the harm and good done by each?
So it’s broad brush stuff at best I think, but here’s mine for what it’s worth…
1. Hobbes vs Rousseau
A typical argument for religious belief is that, absent a celestial policeman we’d run amuck. This seems to me to be palpably nonsense – reciprocal altruism (co-operation, resource sharing, working collectively etc) come from long before gods arrived, and we see similar behaviours in other species too. There’s no evidence that jails are disproportionately full of atheists either (just the opposite in fact though income and educational attainment may have something to do with that), and it puts the theist in a difficult position too – is he really suggesting that, if he lost his faith, he’d be raping and pillaging at the drop of a hat? Seriously though?
No. We’re innately “good” I think for sound evolutionary reasons that function at the genomic rather than individual level and I see no evidence to suggest otherwise.
2. Without gods there’d be no moral road map to follow
C’mon now. First there are countless god stories so who’s to say which set of attendant “holy” texts contain the correct rules?
Second, treating morality as if it were an immutable phenomenon of the universe like gravity or the weak electro-magnetic force is too daft even to trouble with. We can opt out of a moral rule as we wish; we can’t opt out of gravity.
Third, as interpretation seems to be all even if you think some moral laws are correctly written in books how would anyone ever know that his interpretation in a given place at a given time is the “correct” one?
3. Faith is the enemy or reason
As someone said, he who hasn’t reasoned his way onto a belief cannot be reasoned out of it. “Faith” seems to me in it’s deepest sense to be more harmful than good because it so rarely allows for doubt, let alone for falsification. How could “but that’s my faith” be falsified even conceptually, and once someone has that absolute certainty what’s to stop him acting on it, regardless of the consequence? Press this button and you’ll accelerate the “end of times”? Bring it on!
4. What have the Romans ever done for us?
What use is religion in the furtherance of human affairs in any case, and what stifling and stultifying effect does it have on human flourishing and progress? It’s no co-incidence I think that nothing of value has come out of the Islamic world since the great flowering of learning was extinguished in favour of religious dogma in the 1400s or so, and nor can Christianity point to a cancer treatments or jet engines of satellites just popping out of privileging faith over just guessing. To the contrary, these and other faiths seem to me actively to have discouraged much learning, persecuted great minds, destroyed libraries etc that, had they kept their atrophying dibs off, would have led us to who knows what stage of development now.
To put it another way: would even an ardent theist lying injured in the road rather hear “make way, I’m a doctor” from the back of the crowd, or “make way, I’m a theologian”? That’s the thing I think – such people will espouse all sorts of confident statements of their truths when it doesn’t matter much, but when the chips are down I’d quite like some of the fruits of post enlightenment thinking please if it’s all the same to you.
Anyways, just a few thoughts while I have some time…
