Is Religion Worth It?

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
1

Taking as a given that the mythologies of the global religions are false, is it worth it to maintain them?

I find this problem nearly intractable. On the one hand, believing falsehoods is detrimental to one’s health. On the other, in a large and perhaps necessarily stratified society, religion may play an important role as a social lubricant.

Scholars like Dawkins will say that it isn’t worth it, but recently I’ve been thinking Dawkins downplays the social function of religion, and overstates the role that religion plays in its negative aspects.

Perhaps the least contentious positive function of religion is a community structure (one which Humanism is striving to replicate, and so far without much luck that I’m aware of). Though that kind of group formation causes problems between groups, within groups it enables great cohesion. The same downsides could be said of any group scaffold, and there’s reason to believe that religion functions better as a scaffold than others.

They also offer some hope to people who would otherwise have none. We’ve accepted that it is a false hope, but it is nonetheless comforting to believe for those who do. Insofar as that comfort translates into docility, productivity, and cohesion, it serves a practical purpose for others who may or may not believe.

And yet, it is a given that they are false. The issue this creates is two-fold: 1) Is it in my interest to convert others away from religion if I can, or am I better served by allowing them to believe falsehoods? and 2) Is it always in the interest of the person who believes to be convinced that they believe a falsity, or might there be times when the compassionate thing to do is to allow ignorance to be bliss?

2

Do people who think religious activities are falsehoods think that people who practice them are a detriment to society? If that is the case, it would involve a large amount of people on this earth.

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I think it would involve just about everyone, since for most of history, most religious groups held that other religious groups were a detriment to society. Still today, I’m willing to wager a fair few Christians believe Muslim extremism to be detrimental to society, and vice versa. Religion generally through the eyes of non-believers is just a special case in that respect.

A more general form of the question is, are there falsehoods that it is useful to believe, or is believing the truth always more useful?* It seems that, with the amount we lie to children, we believe it’s useful to believe certain lies in certain situations, or at least it’s useful to us for others to believe certain lies in certain situations.

The more specific question is, is ever religion that certain kind of lie, and if so in what situations?

*here I mean to imply that, if X is the most useful option, then ~X is ‘detrimental’. That’s to equate ‘detrimental’ to ‘suboptimal’, which might not be what you had in mind.

4

The acceptance of sub-optimal is always detrimental, I would argue, if that acceptance prevents us from improving or evolving towards the optimal.

And as for religion’s role in society… I always seems to end up bringing up the fact that we here in scandinavia enjoy a mostly religion free society and we havn’t descended into anarchy and chaos just yet. Contrary to popular opinion, we atheists are not bitter and anti-social people… take that false hope and shove it, I say. Make peace with mortality and enjoy life… you’ll be too dead to care once it’s over.

Of course you cant just strip away religion overnight and have everything be the same in countries that rely on religious institutions for certain social services or some other vital thing… but it is entirely possible to form a religion free society and have it function as well as any religious one if not better… and as a plus, the people don’t generally believe in ancient fantasy.

How is this a hard question?

But here’s the hard part… is it possible to have a society where no one is ever fooled? If not… then I don’t see how being duped into believing some supernatural nonsense, is any worse than believing some naturalistic nonsense… it all depends on what it was you were duped into believing and what you might do as a consequence.

The best one can hope for is to inject peopel with a healthy dose of skepticism and tools for critical thinking along with a good education… and maybe be less tight assed and affording undue respect left and right in fear of offending idiotic people… no one should be forced to take bullshit seriously… we are allowed to laugh and crack jokes about other peoples silly beliefs… so long as you don’t equate the belief with the believer… it’s all good.

But alas… that won’t stop some people from being taken in by some BS belief or another, just reduce the numbers to a minority… so what does it matter if that BS is religion or some other thing? I think I’d rather it were some religion that has evolved and learned from past mistakes such that it at least has a chance of being a positive influence of it’s members… better than something like scientology… shivers

5

Religion is a lie as much as we are to ourselves, and religion is a danger as much as man is to his own society.
A dangerous man is dangerous regardless of the weapon he wields, and a good man is good regardless of the gift he brings.

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I think it largely depends on the belief? Take this example for instance: A man crashes his car on a dark snowy night. His wife and children were also in the car. Upon impact the man is knocked unconscious, and only regains consciousness in hospital. He has suffered major internal injuries and won’t survive the next hour. He asks the doctors if his family are ok. The doctors know that his family died at the scene, they also know that the man needs to know that they are ok so he can die in peace. Would it be wrong for the doctor to lie and say his family were ok, knowing that the man would never know otherwise?

Now some. perhaps Kantian’s, would argue a lie is a lie and is always wrong, but many of us I imagine would see no wrong in giving a dying man one last consol.

The ‘rightness’ of the above example perhaps rests on the certainty that the man will never know the truth. The lie is safe. It could perhaps be argued that lies are useful providing there is no chance of discovering the lie.

Which then leads us to ask, can we ever truely discover the falsity of religion? Presumably not, as if there is no afterlife, we can never know as we no longer exist.

What I think is dangerous is taking ideas, such as religion, and promoting them as beliefs. We can believe in ideas such as gravity or evolution because there is a great deal of evidence to support these ideas. But where is the evidence to support religion. It is an idea, a view of how the world is. Without evidence ideas should not become beliefs that we defend, in some cases to the point of absurdity. That is perhaps I think what Dawkins feels hurts us. Religion as an idea is fine, but as a belief it harms us. To quote Chris Rock in Dogma, “Ideas are easier to change than beliefs”

7

I would say the detriment of religions lies where interpretation is involved. In the case of Christianity, when anger replaces compassion through God’s Word, the basic tenets of the Bible gets derailed. People who become ‘mad for God’ do not realize they are usurping God’s position and replace His Ideals with their own.

People acting as agents for God sometimes let negative emotions lead the way. They get blinded from what they perceive as the best course of action when in actuality they are doing is quite the opposite. In essence they are imposing their will against people they feel are doing wrong when God’s Will should be at the forefront.

8

“False” needs epistemological context. Is fiction false for example? If there are people out there reading fiction and they think it is a literally true account of something that happened, they are likely deluded. Though a lot of fiction is based on things that literally happened. But let’s say everyone is sane and knows what fiction is in a basic way. There is still a whole world of nuance involved. Some fiction is rings “true” and some strikes us as “false”. Is it worth it to write and read fiction? Which authors have more to say to us? To my mind, it’s always a question of how to understand something and how to relate to it - what context to put it in. And the challenge is always to neither make something more than it is nor to take away from what it is. I think Dawkins and others have a strong tendency to take too much away - theologians of various types have a strong tendency to add too much, to make certain things too important. I do think it’s possible to just relax and see things for what they are - and to benefit ourselves and others in any way possible. Balance is good for our physical and mental health.

9

Personally, I don’t like any organized religion, organized ideology, organized crime, organized mass gathering or ritual, organized mind conditioning of any sort.
So, it’s my interest to present information that may reduce things I don’t like.

And I think these fake ideals keep people stupid. So, religions and other organized stupidities are harmful to the interest of these people if they wanted to be less silly. So, it might be a good thing to help them understand it’s not very wise to take fake ideals as something real.

Having said that, I know too well that religion and ideology and any other thing that sells false hope, false certainty, false sense of security would not go away, so easily. And I don’t care about personal beliefs of others, as long as they don’t have sticky organizing tendency. In addition to these, I don’t think it’s a good idea to force something upon someone because it will backfire, swing back, etc.

So, I do pursuit my self-interest by posting my views here and there but I’m not so pushy. And I don’t have any unrealistic expectation about the impact my actions may make.

I do think we would get rid of religion and fake absolutes/certainty/security if we become more aware and more logical. Currently, not many people are aware/logical enough.
But no big deal, as long as we don’t get tortured or burnt alive by bunch of fanatics. :smiley:

Sure, ILP is infested by religious preachers. But mods can move religious post in religious section, if it becomes excessive. So, it’s not a big problem, either.

Let religions do their scripture parrot talks and whatever they want, as long as they don’t try to forcefully impose their fake ideals upon others. They may finally get bored with fakes/fallacies, maybe in several thousands years. :slight_smile:

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Mad Man, look at religion evolutionarily. If religion were really all cost, how could it have survived as long as it has? It must provide some benefits, and given that it’s false, those benefits must be personal or social.
Scandanavia, in addition to its lack of religion, has a high suicide rate.

Stumps, is religion exactly as dangerous as people are? If beliefs and ideas can motivate action, or even influence action, certainly religion must have some impact.
Take for instance usury laws. It is hard to argue that medieval laws against interest were motivated by anything other than religion (or perhaps religious tradition), but they clearly stifled economic activity for centuries. This phenomenon didn’t have anything to do with how good or evil the people involved were, but rather with their beliefs about what a parental god would do to them if they did otherwise.
Are you interpreting religion as a sort of mask over human action, hiding temporal motives behind a cosmic garb?

Anon, I think ‘fiction’ is a good synonym for what I mean by ‘false’. I don’t mean to ask whether we should let people read the Bible like they read Catcher in the Rye, and find truth in both, but rather to ask whether we’d be better off if all people everywhere treated the Bible as they treat The Odyssey.

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In fact we’re currently debating if we should legalize suicide and it seems the popular opinion that we should. Does that mean we’re an unhappy bunch and that we’re all thinking about killing ourselves because there’s no God who loves us?

There are other factors to consider, as you well know… I doubt very much religion has anything to do with our suicide rates.

and as for the evolution of religion, I might point out that religion largely played a different role in most of our history than it does today… kinda like our tail bone… sure it was doing something useful once… but we don’t need it anymore…

I’d also like to mention that religion didn’t necessarily do us any good in the past either… Having an explination for why the world is as it is and a notion of your role in it was probably as desirable in the past as it is today… but the explinations we made up for ourselves didn’t necessarily have to be “good” for us… only percieved as such so as to be accepted… and once accepted, it could easily change for the worse, and if the changes were gradual enough people would still remain loyal…

the evolution of ideas is not affected by natural selection… it’s determined by human nature and the dynamics of our social interactions… being useful is not necessarily what is selected for.

12

Displaying his usual level-headedness, I think Humegotitright hits pretty close to the mark. This question oughtn’t be approached in a “big issue” sort of way because that necessarily demeans the dialogue. We need to ask ourselves a lot of questions like: “which myths?”, “whose interpretation?”, “whom does it affect” and “how does it affect society?”. The last question is clearly the most important whereas the first three serve to frame that last one.

For example, part of the mythic narrative of Islam is that it is a “religion of peace.” This aspect of the myth can be interpreted in various ways but on the internet you are most likely to encounter interpretations at the poles. At one pole, you have Islam being a non-violent religion that strives for social harmony throughout the world. At the other pole, you have Islam being an obligatorily violent religion because the peace they are trying to bring about is through the forced conversion of the entire world and subsequent unification under a new Caliphate. From a non-Muslim perspective (and hopefully from the perspective of most Muslims) one of these interpretations is clearly better than the other. If I were in a society where the first interpretation was prevalent, I’d argue that we ought keep that myth. If I were in a society where the latter interpretation was prevalent, well, I probably wouldn’t say anything because I wouldn’t want to die, but from my present disengaged viewpoint I’d say that it should be removed.

In order to address the big question, we’d have to really sit down and create a sort of balance sheet to see whether these myths were more of a positive or a negative force both in terms of sheer quantity of elements but also in terms of magnitude. I am a great lover of European medieval art but I’d gladly lose the art if it meant we also lost the book (and people!) burnings of the time.

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Hitler.

I believe the point of impact with or without religion is resounded in that one man’s name.

Take religion away and the men that would abuse it would abuse another method of mass.

Religion, however, has positive functions far more consistently than it does negative.

For instance; and answer however you may please…
When you meet a Buddhist Monk, Greek Orthodox Monk, or Benedictine Priest would you spit in their face for choosing to live restrained and command them to give up their false lies and accept the truth that there is nothing beyond this reality?

It is not inherently a mask, though people may hide behind religion.

Religion is an extension of ourselves in our understanding of our place in relation to the spiritual.

It is as much of a lie as we are to ourselves.

14

One analogy we hear often, and one I think, although it’s been a while since I read it, Dawkins uses in ‘The God Delusion’, is of a child believing in Santa. The lie brings joy and happiness into children’s lives for 6, 7, 8 if your lucky, years. Then comes the realisation of the truth, that Santa isn’t real. Now a pyschologist may prove me wrong, but I don’t think that discovering they were lied to does the child any great harm. If they are anything like me, they would ‘play’ along to the lie to get more presents!. So the conclusion on this would be that some falsehoods can bring more good than harm.

So the comparison is that even if God is a lie, it brings great comfort to those who choose to believe.

But I don’t think the two are comparable. When we learn that Santa is a falsehood, we are told what the truth is, i.e. Mum and Dad put the presents there. But if we decide God is false, we are not presented with an instantly replacement truth. Because God is the ultimate answer, He is irreplacable. This I think is in part responsible for the prevelance of religion, even with all the science and knowledge we have today. Ask any student sitting an exam, a dodgy answer is better than no answer at all.

Which brings me to my point. Religion stifles the search for the truth. Because religion gives us the answer, which when we examine logically we suspect isn’t right. But we are told it is a matter of faith, indeed in many religious traditions faith is a virtue, something to be treasured. I would argue it is better to spend your life searching for the truth and never discovering it, than to forsake the truth for the comfort of an answer, any answer.

15

I think you could argue that point and win, but what Carleas is asking, I think, is are positives based on a lie really a positive? Is it right to promise eternal salvation, 77 virgins, reincarnation to a higher plan, etc…, if such a promise is a lie? How much value should we put on false hope?

My point is that lies are fine, so long as we don’t propagate our lies as truth. With religion we have no way of testing the hypothesis so we shouldn’t put them forth as truth.

16

Completely off-topic but it’s always struck me as odd that suicide is illegal. What they gonna do? Fine you?

Completely. Religion was a necessary part of getting to where we are today. A step in the chain of understanding the world we live in. It’s reminants remain but it’s function is defunct.

17

My stance remains the same; Religion is a lie just as much as we are a lie to ourselves.

Religion is the pursuit of understanding the essence of the intangible side of ourselves in relation to the intangible essences of our world and reality.

Therefore, Religion is a language of that pursuit.
To argue whether God is a lie or not is to argue whether a tree is called a tree or is called “ki” (Japanese for tree; if memory serves me well enough).

It is to argue over the dialect that should be used to understand the essence of the intangible.

18

Interestingly enough, yesterday I was in a 45 minute line for the submarine ride at Disneyland with my 8 yr old (who still believes in Santa, but does not believe in the “mythological Santa” I have suggested to him), sweating profusely, after having just answered his question as to whether all girls have babies (I introduced the idea of the pill and freedom of choice), when he asked why we call trees “trees”. I gave him the shorthand answer of our having long ago consecutively named things that were important to us so we could talk about them together, quite conscious of my lie-telling representations. We continued on with random other topics until the fake immersible led us into the condensed story of Nemo. And now we are back in Canada. Southern California, and its many glorious story-telling cathedrals, is a foreign land once more.

Perhaps Religion is most essentially shorthand, in the way all storytelling is shorthand. It is a lie, but only insofar as it is so apparently impossible to tell the whole story. Or, it is a lie when the story it relates is presented as complete in any essential way.

Perhaps it is impossible to say truthfully whether it is really a positive, or whether it is worth it. And perhaps God is not called God. :neutral_face:

When we are arguing over the dialect by which to understand the essence of the intangible, I think we need to be careful not to assume the intangible has an essence.

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Oughtist; a very well put post.

I really enjoyed this part;

Indeed.

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Hello Carleas:

— Taking as a given that the mythologies of the global religions are false, is it worth it to maintain them?
O- When I think of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Pat Robertson, then I am inclined to say no. But when I think of Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Jr and other persons that I have actually encountered on a daily basis and who find strenght in their faith and express that faith in loving others, sometimes, to their credit, unconditionally, then I am disposed to say yes. The catch is that I am taking an utilitarian approach, a sorta of having the consequences dictate the worthines of an idea. I am saying that “worth” needs to be judged not solely by the “truth” (or falsehood) of a proposition, but by the consequences of that proposition as well. As far as religion is concerned, there is merit for either side of the debate.

— I find this problem nearly intractable. On the one hand, believing falsehoods is detrimental to one’s health. On the other, in a large and perhaps necessarily stratified society, religion may play an important role as a social lubricant.
O- Doctors invite religion into their hospitals and find a relation, in studies, between survival rates and beliefs systems. Longetivity may be associated with religion. But let’s not advance a false causal chain. It might be the meaning people get from religion, or how they live in complex social enviroments that help maintain the health of a social brain…as an author said: Religion is not about God. I would add: not ONLY about God.

— They also offer some hope to people who would otherwise have none. We’ve accepted that it is a false hope, but it is nonetheless comforting to believe for those who do.
O- Have you heard about placebos and the power of the mind to either help with the healing process or create new complications, such as depression, which it is said, can weaken our immunological system?

— And yet, it is a given that they are false.
O- How much else would be deemed as “false” using science as our guide? Is your marriage “true”? Is it love your feel for your wife or is that just another falsehood to be dispensed with? Should we not concede that we feel lust? That we experience love in connnection with novelty and so that love “till death do us apart” is another falsehood? And how is faith arrived at? The falsehood of religion would be the death to religion IF, and that is a big if, religion was arrived at after a reasonable pause, a calculation, a cold judgment on the merits of an idea. But no. Religion is much more like love. No one can reason another into loving them. You either feel or you don’t. You cannot be convinced that you are in love or not in love by arguments that “prove” or “disprove” what is essentially a “feeling”.

— The issue this creates is two-fold: 1) Is it in my interest to convert others away from religion if I can, or am I better served by allowing them to believe falsehoods? and 2) Is it always in the interest of the person who believes to be convinced that they believe a falsity, or might there be times when the compassionate thing to do is to allow ignorance to be bliss?
O- 1) Be aware of that ol’ Nietzsche aphorism which said that God was dead and then right after asked what should replace God. If you take away their religion, because of the personality type, the person might require a new “religion” to fill the void left by the departure of God. This is what some psychologist believed happened with Rosenberg, the Nazi philosopher. The difference between a person’s old religion and new religion can have devastating effects, such as was the case with Communism and Nazism. In Christianity, for example, there was a withdrawl from this world and it’s politics, and so, scriptually, there lay the basis for conservative forces. The new religion took it’s faith in the form of Progress, aided by science, the new prophet, to bring about Utopia, Heaven on Earth. But as the price for the Christian Heaven was an unholy Hell, so too the price of atheist’s Utopia was marked by a principal of death, a series of holocausts of various degrees. So be weary of the personality type and what they might do to regain homeostasis.
2) Let them tell you. A person that is ready for change actually just needs someone to agrees with them. Other than this, you can safely undermine the foundations of the building until cracks appear on the walls protecting the building, if you get my metaphor. Eventually a person cannot maintain an honest adherence and continues on for a while with a mask of adherence and either maintain this for the rest of their lives or just until something comes along which they can embrace. So I say, don’t go for knockouts, don’t go for a ground invasion. start with an embargo and weakened it. Now, if it is a loved one, do not be cruel or else you might lose that person. Tactfulness is key.