I am not saying that religious people are universally stupid. I’m saying that religion is factually incorrect.
I am not saying that atheists are universally smart. I’m saying that religion is factually incorrect.
I am not saying that religion doesn’t provide comfort to and enrich the lives of billions of people. I’m saying that religion is factually incorrect.
I am not saying that everything in the modern scientific consensus is true. I’m saying that religion is factually incorrect.
I am not saying that everything that some asshole passes off as science is true. I’m saying that religion is factually incorrect.
I am not saying that there are no people who attempt to reconcile science and religion. I’m saying that religion is factually incorrect.
I am not saying that nothing good has been done in the name of religion. I’m saying that religion is factually incorrect.
I am not saying that nothing evil has been done in the name of science. I’m saying that religion is factually incorrect.
I am not saying that the tradition and community people get from their religions isn’t valuable. I’m saying that religion is factually incorrect.
I am not saying that religion is inherently tyrannical and oppressive. I’m saying that religion is factually incorrect.
There are atheists that say some of those things that I’m not saying. Which is bad, because all of those things I’m not saying are douchebaggy and factually incorrect and also completely unnecessary.
My radical position is that you should not believe things that are factually incorrect. Even if believing them makes you feel nice. Even if it makes you a better person. Even if it connects you to your community and your ancestors. (You can go to the rituals without believing in God, anyway.) Even if some other people over there believe factually incorrect things sometimes too.
I feel like having to justify why believing things that aren’t true is bad is like having to justify why hitting people who don’t want to get hit is bad. It… is? Duh? But the number of otherwise intelligent people who say “they’re nice and they aren’t hurting anyone, what do you care?” suggests otherwise.
The doublethink necessary to believe things that aren’t true hurts your ability to figure out what’s true and what’s not. Not necessarily; humans are very good at compartmentalizing and often, say, take “I feel it in my heart” as adequate on matters of theology but not on matters of medicine. But in aggregate turning off your critical thinking and rationality sometimes hurts your ability to be rational.
If you believe things that aren’t true, you’re going to make decisions based on the false things you believe, and decisions made based on inaccurate information are usually bad decisions. If you believe apricot pits cure cancer, you might skip chemo. If you believe there aren’t any cars on the street when there are, you might cross and get hit by an SUV. If you believe all-nighters improve your grades, you might flunk an exam. If your map says that Disney World is in Michigan, you will never get to meet the Mouse. For that matter, look at basically any atrocity in history, nearly all of which were caused by people believing untrue things (usually “this group of people is inherently evil,” “God said so,” or “our ludicrous political system totally works”).
As a practical matter, there are a lot of false beliefs in the world, and most forms of theism I encounter in day-to-day life are not actively hurting people and, in fact, might be making people’s lives better. So I’d prefer to try to get people to not believe in untrue things that are also hurting people first.
This is really just a plea for atheists and theists to stop arguing about religion is good. Who cares? The question is whether it’s true.
@all of you all… whatever.
Namaste autonomously sire.
Damn autocorrect.
I meant “Namaste, autonomousdesire.” I thought I made it clear that I know that rebirth and reincarnation are different. What I’ve read suggests that the Buddha used rebirth to contrast his idea with reincarnation.
Gaius: in a sense rebirth is falsifiable. The chemicals that comprise your body will still exist in some form after you die.
An argument which I replied to
An argument which you missed the point of, actually. You tried to make the point that religion is bad because it relies on “because God says so”* and that leads to bad results. I was observing that the argument you made – religious appeal to authority is bad because it traps us in bad results (such as homophobia) – is not correct because religious appeal to authority can also require us to have good results and to reject “reasoned” arguments that lead to bad results. It also assumes that the only possible discussion within a religious framework is God Said So, which isn’t actually true. For example, a believing Christian could easily refute Fred Phelps by pointing out that his theology within the Christian framework is bullshit (which, you know, it pretty much is). A believer might also, quite honestly within their faith, believe that God didn’t address certain issues or meant for humans to decide on them, and therefore that “God said so” can’t answer the question of whether LGBTs should be allowed to enlist in the military.
This is not, by the way, an argument that faith is just as good as evidence or that atheism is wrong. It is an observation that “but it leads to bad things!” is not a very sound argument, and that, as monkey already said, morality is not necessarily something that we can arrive at through the scientific method.
@Gaius, no worries, it was an intentionally shitty argument (though, sadly, a widespread one).
@Ozy, this is weird, because I’m not trying to argue you out of atheism. But I don’t understand your view that the real problem is about ‘how the universe works’ and the moral and ritual systems are not a biggie. If two religious movements are identical, but one believes God started the Big Bang and the other doesn’t, one is better than the other?
@Monkey:
Naturally, but I should note that there appears to be no connection between selfdom and our constituent molecules: we completely change out the molecules we’re made of every eight years. =)
@Mythago:
I know, but I’m like M-O, from Wall-E: I see an argument like that, even as an example, and I have to go after it. Can’t resist. “Foreign Contaminant,” indeed!
As for this:
I’m inclined to blame the limitations of language.
Have you ever been in one of those situations in which, whilst attempting to explain a concept, you end up misrepresenting it? This could be one of those situations in which you and Ozy are fundamentally in the same boat, but there are differences of internal lexicon that are propagating through dialogue that prevent you both from understanding that fact.
Alternatively, Ozy might have beef with one specific practice, irrespective of the surrounding context, and is having difficulty conveying that to us.
I’m just speculating, though.
Gaius: the whole point is that there is no self.
I find it intellectually dishonest to say “religion” is factually incorrect. It would however make sense to say that many beliefs are factually incorrect. I admit that being accurate would have made the rant rhetorically impotent though. Kinda bugged me though and couldn’t help myself, had to nitpick.
If religion is not true, and selectively believing not-true things makes it more difficult to be rational about what’s true, and therefore selectively believing not-true things is bad…then how is that not arguing about whether religion is good?
Reading posts like this makes me realise that, while I no longer consider myself Christian, part of me still believes in God. I will never stop inquiring and challenging, and asking for facts, but part of me still believes. Why? I have no idea, but maybe being raised as a Christian means I will never be able to see the world as an atheist. Maybe I will always be agnostic till I die.
I don’t know if Christianity is different in the US, but over here it’s perfectly acceptable and normal to believe in the Bible AND in evolution. In my church when I was a child a youth leader who was teaching the children Creationism was fired.
I’m not even sure if ‘religion is factually incorrect’ actually means anything. There are so many religions. There are so many histories to these religions. What does ‘religion’ mean in this context? Some of the events and people in religious books really did exist and this is proven. Are you referring to the stuff like healing that is not tangible? That would make more sense. But the word religion means more than that. It also groups together far too many different belief systems, many of which are not even remotely comparable. And know that many religions are based in cultural tradition as well as belief, so maybe in these cases it would be considered acceptable and even preferable to take part in rituals despite whether you actually believe or not, but personally when I stopped considering myself a Christian I stopped taking part in rituals like communion out of respect. Personal experiences with this will no doubt vary widely, but that was my choice.
“If two religious movements are identical, but one believes God started the Big Bang and the other doesn’t, one is better than the other?”
Um, well, there’s a good chance that one is more factually correct than the other (although it’s also possible that both are just factually incorrect, in which case, they are equal in all ways). And if one thinks that factual correctness has value (and Ozy clearly does), then yes, that would mean that one of your otherwise identical proposed religions is “better” than the other.
I’m a religious person, and I believe very strongly in God, and I will agree with you inasmuch as “belief in a higher detiy is not falsifiable.” There is no way that science can prove or disprove the existence of God. But that does not make God untrue in a different sense. There are truths that we all buy into that are not based in science and purely dispassionate fact, but in something else. They are true, and we know that they are true because they are true, and they are the organizing principles of our lives. For example:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
Or: Society will necessarily be better if every individual is able to pursue zir own destiny without having to force zirself into an externally imposed role.
Or: If we work hard enough, we will be able to dismantle systems of privilege.
Or: Everyone deserves to be happy.
Please note that I BELIEVE in all of these myths, and I have a feeling that most of the people posting on this topic do as well. They are not provable or disprovable by scientific inquiry, and yet they fuel much of progressivism in 21st century America. There is nothing wrong with having a mythology that fuels one’s work and one’s reason for existence. There is nothing wrong with buying into something that is not falsifiable.
Yeah, seriously? “Religion is factually incorrect” is about as idiotic of a statement to make as “government and community are factually incorrect”. There’s also the whole thing about “religion” being a thing that’s near impossible to define. You can’t say that something which has no singular unifying feature beyond claim to the name is anything.
The logical fallacies present either explicitly or implicitly in your argument are as follows:
- False Cause
- Ambiguity
- Bandwagon
- Genetic
- The Texas Sharpshooter
FWIW, all the theists who I’ve discussed it with believed in a loving God; that is, not a theoretical idea of a loving God because that’s what God means to them (as autonomousdesire described), but a literal God who loved them. Maybe the people are know are not representative and not in the majority, but I doubt that it’s “almost always” the case that liberal theists believe only in a theoretical idea of God.
I pretty much agree with Fox that it would be more accurate but not as good rhetorically to be more specific than “religion” in the wording.