What are the political implications of growing irreligiosity? R*ddit atheists are getting dunked on but their worldview is becoming more prevalent every year.
>>537111949political? I dont know, maybe religious linked borders or shit like that. Vatican Israel mecca
Lower IQ and testosterone
>>537111949Is interesting to see fedoras claim zoomers and alphas. So, the generations that are showing cognitive decline are atheists? Interesting
>>537111949reddit atheism is jewish. non-christian deism is White.
>>537112284Please
>>537111949Religion is cancer and if it dies it will be only good.Imagine if Christians back then existed 10,000 years ago when first blue eyed baby was born to the first brown eyed humans. They would torched baby and mother on stake and mother would be called witch.
If people don't have a higher power to believe in, then how can they believe in themselves? How can we expect to advance to a higher state of being and improve each generation?
>>537112383This will go so hard on reddit bro
>>537113517It's truth humans are creating stupid constructs in their heads and it pushes them away from reality. Science, Religion, etc... while it does some good as a coping mechanism with reality when it's hard to live for them it also destroys them.
>>537111949>>537111949It's weird. Atheists don't even bother arguing after getting BTFO'd over and over but yet their beliefs are still mainstream
>>537113774>Atheists don't even bother arguing after getting BTFO'd over and over but yet their beliefs are still mainstreamThis is what happens when you start a war and then just declare victory in your head
>>537112383Religion gives people strength and peace. Like if someone's kid dies and they believe they'll see their kid again in Heaven, do you think they'll be better off believing in something else? What about people who have a terminal illness and know they're going to die? How are they better off believing that they'll simply stop existing vs what religion tells them?
>>537115316You are going to die whenever you like or not it just if you die now or 10 years later doesn't change fact that you are going to die. If you want to believe in heaven or non-existence (simply you have no idea what is after death not science not religion knows this) then believe in what you want reality is going to be different most likely completely from whatever we think about it. Humans are psychotic with this concepts, truth is ... you don't know neither i don't or somebody else is just at the end of the day coping mechanism.
>>537115316This is called motivated reasoning. If the tool you use to estimate whether something is true is how it makes you feel, you become incapable of discerning truth from fiction. Incapable of seeing any unpleasant truth for what it is. That makes you unable to make decisions based on facts. The consequences seem to me much more dangerous than the pain of grief.
>>537115836And they are.Look at modern christianity allowing for transgenderism, illegal migration and everything disgusting. Reasonable person would look at this and said "These people do not belong to our culture, in fact they are violent and act like caveman and their religion is directly calling for our death" and said no to that but religious people say "oh authority said so, so it must be like that we accept".
>>537115836>>537115562What I'm saying is whether it's true it doesn't matter. Telling an 8 year old terminal cancer patient that she's going to die and stop existing doesn't do any good to anyone. Our irrationality is not a bug but a feature. We have evolved to be irrational because it benefited our survival. And we're the only irrational animal as well as the most intelligent. Coincidence?As for the absence of religion, you can see how that worked out throughout history in the few societies where religion was suppressed. Otherwise there was religion in every human (meaning homo sapiens) society. As soon as humans developed brains powerful enough to imagine the benefits of tying a rock to a stick, they also started believing in gods or spirits or whathaveyou. Seems like the opposite of religion being the consequence of stupidity.
>>537116212>And we're the only irrational animal[citation needed]animals do dumb shit all the time
>>537116049You're right, reasonable people are, by definition, people who agree with you. Other people are the ones who use motivated reasoning to make illogical choices. I'm sure you would love nothing more than to welcome strangers to your country and see crossdressers everywhere, but your mastery of logic allowed you to understand these are objectively disgusting, and you had the honesty to face the facts.
>>537111949>Arrow down when the actual time is up.>No mention of the pool.>Leddit mentioned.Atheists are mindbroken about god this miluch. The most faithful followers.
>>537116212I don't know man i wouldn't put conceptual thinking and believes into same category. Intelligence comes from being able to understand reality (crafting concept in your head) then if proves to be real meaning tested, you can go and use that concept to craft actual physical things. This isn't believing this is just it works or not. Believe might be a drive behind something like i wake up and work my ass off so 10 years later i will not live like a bum. To your 8 year old it's better to say "You have cancer and you are most likely going to die since it's bad." Stop existing in this case i don't know as said previously i have no answer if there is a life after death nor do you.
>>537111949>people abandon God>everything turns to shit
>>537111949yeah no one is falling for the whole woman worship thing any more
>>537116306That's not what irrational means in this context. An animal can't conceive of the concept of a god or the afterlife. It knows (or thinks it knows) only the things it has experienced. If course our communication with animals is limited so maybe whales and crows have some beliefs that they can't express in a way we'd understand.But look at pre-human human societies. Religion and burials didn't exist until human brains developed enough, and only became more elaborate and important as humans developed. And religion as a concept is universal in human societies, which can't be a coincidence but a side effect of cognitive development.
>>537113837They were so fucking giddy during the Evolution vs Creationism "Debate" and now they're just scurrying away and living in denial whenever people bring up arguments or evidence against materialism lmao.
>>537116049>modern christianity allowing for transgenderism
>>537116566>burials didn't exist until human brains developed enoughhttps://www.cnn.com/2024/03/14/asia/asian-elephant-burials-scli-intl-scnWhat you're really saying is that humans are smart enough to fit your narrow definition of "irrational". That doesn't mean being "irrational" allow people to be smart.
>>537116383Fact is simple.Transgenderism isn't natural it's not something that makes sense, somebody wanting to be a woman when they are men is illogical thus those who want it anyway are mentally sick. They believe in concept that was created by either jew or some scientist that faked data (like in Co2 case where whole thing was done by few private companies) to make them believe that this is okay. Since politicians are controlled by those same people they are not putting them into mental asylums. If it doesn't make sense and it doesn't came from nature logic dictates it's degeneracy or attempt of control.
>>537116212What I'm saying is that whether it's true or not does matter. Not for an 8-year-old terminal cancer patient, and I doubt atheists or philosophers are going to sit at her bedside to explain to her that after that, there is nothing, and pain is everything she'll know. That example is there purely for pathos.For people who live and have decisions to make, decisions that will impact themselves, their close ones, and society at large, seeking the truth to guide their actions is essential. You can't go around believing only what makes you feel best and expect to end up on top. Say your girlfriend is cheating on you; that thought is unpleasant. If you ignore the signs and focus on the fact that you'd be happier with a faithful partner, you're not gonna have a good time in this relationships, or the next ones if you don't learn.What you believe in shapes how you act. Epistemological rigor helps you make sure you act based on reality instead of wishful thinking.
>>537116790In that sentence I was talking about burials in human societies. We don't know what motivations elephants have when burying their dead, but human motivations were always cultural and rooted in spirituality. Maybe it's the same for elephants or crows, who knows, but we know that religious rituals were much rarer before modern humans. There's little evidence for even Neanderthals having religion and they died out practically yesterday.My point is in humans, intelligence and irrationality (you can call it imagination too, basically the ability to imagine things that may not exist) went hand in hand.
>>537116906Too much concepts...there is one vagina and one dick.if one vagina wants two dicks you leave.Simple as.
>>537116906Ok, so why has religion endured for so long? Why didn't nonreligious societies out compete religious societies? Surely there's some net benefit to something that survived throughout human history for tens of thousands of years?
>>537117109Sure, that last sentence is a reasonable observation.
>>537117109Neanderthals died because of them being energetically inefficient and introverted. They had to consume more food because their build. They didn't controlled as much territory because of they have smaller groups and their final nail to their coffin was that they didn't invented atlatl for throwing spears because they relied on their physical superiority. Meanwhile we did because any bigger animal would kill us instantly. We out numbered them and out smarted them since our inventions come from necessity.
>>537117184To me, religion is a byproduct of our uniquely powerful intelligence. Society is extremely recent on an evolutionary scale, we still have exactly the same brains as our hunter-gatherer forebears. And one of the ways intelligence works is by pattern-matching. Our brains are, among other things, insanely powerful pattern-matching machines. The benefits of that intelligence are massive. From there, the idea of superior powers explaining the unexplained is pretty natural.Another unusual trait of human intelligence - unique, in fact, as far as we know - is the ability to internalize the rules and values of society. Anthropologists and ethnographers like Christopher Boehm have noticed that blushing is universal among cultures. Dogs will act guilty if you catch them doing something they know is forbidden, but if they don't know they're being observed, they do not display shame. Neither do primates, elephants, birds, dolphins or any animal we've observed. Humans, however, can feel guilty all on their own when transgressing the values of their education. It has been hypothesized - although it can obviously never be proven - that this stemmed from hunter-gatherer societies needing very ingrained prosocial behavior for hundreds of thousands of years (so over evolutionary time), and has been used to propose a solution to the problem of the evolution of altruism.This ability to internalize social rules is central to our ability to build societies. It also offers a very fertile ground for organized religion to thrive. Moral injunctions function in humans in a way that it couldn't in any other animal species, as far as we know.(cont. to address your other point)
>>537117997That's also what I believe, but I think if it weren't advantageous we'd have "devolved" whatever causes most humans to believe in the supernatural. Basically religion is useful even if it's all lies. If it stops you from killing yourself when your daughter dies because you believe you'll see her again in heaven and you don't want to end up in hell, that's useful in all kinds of ways. I'm not religious myself because it didn't stick with me but I can't look down on religious people just like I can't look down on confident people.
>>537117184>>537117997As for nonreligious societies outcompeting religious societies, I thought that was the point of the thread. Atheism is on the rise worldwide, and has been since we discovered the epistemological disciplines that allow us to partially bypass our inherent biases. The Popperian scientific method was designed precisely to help us get to the truth despite the power of our pattern-matching tendencies, which are excellent heuristics to help us survive in the savanna, but awful at discerning truth from fiction. Just have a look at the list of cognitive biases that have been explored by psychology in the last century. There are simply too many to name.In other words, all societies so far have been religious because our brains almost can't help but embrace religion, not because religion is true. And that our brains almost can't help it doesn't mean it's the best thing to do, either for the individual or for society. Epistemological rigor is what produced the world-changing advances in science in the past few centuries. It's why we have medicine, since the discovery of bacteria was a direct consequence of proto-scientific experimentation by Semmelweiss. It's why we have electricity, electronics, in fact most technological advances have been made possible through techniques that allowed us to find out some truths of the universe through connections that our brain and senses alone couldn't possibly have made without that knowledge.All that stems from seeking the truth despite what our brains tell us. Religion is anti-epistemology at heart: it is offering an explanation, an answer to our questions, with no regard for whether that answer is true or not. It even discourages close inspection.
>>537118421Oh, I don't look down on religious people at all, I just think they're wrong. We're all wrong about most things most of the time, so there's no reason to look down on them for believing. I do think religiousness is a bug, not a feature, and that it does more harm than good, both to the individual and to society, over the long run.
>>537118625But there have been scientific advances through history and by religious people. The increased rate or advances can't be caused by irreligion because religious people were the vast majority up to fairly recently. In the middle ages, what scientific advances were made were made mostly by religious people, often in the clergy because they were the most educated. I think most religious people (aside from the kind that try to pray away cancer) understand that despite a loving and benevolent god we're basically having to fend for ourselves and that we have to be figuring out things like energy production and medicine.
>>537118992Don't confuse scientific advances and the scientific method. Most of the progress from before the Enlightenment was technological in nature, or mathematics, which is mostly abstract. Exploration of the natural sciences in any meaningful way first needed some epistemological groundwork. And I'm not saying the increased rate of advances (which I'll mention is absolutely massive) is caused by irreligion, rather that the increased rate of progress and irreligion share the same root. And that root is understanding that doubt is an infinitely better guide to the truth than faith is.Changing a belief that's ingrained within you since childhood is a gigantic feat. Scientists that grew up in an extremely religious society, one that could kill you for doubting, could hardly convert, whatever doubts they may have harbored. Many have also adopted doubt as a tool for science without applying it to their personal lives. In the modern world, faith is rare among scientists. You don't find many creationists in biology labs, and even fewer working at the CERN. Doubt as a mental discipline is too naturally opposed to the faith religion demands. It doesn't mean you can't discover things without doubting, if only through luck. It also doesn't mean they're mutually exclusive - thankfully, you can doubt some things even if you're a man of faith. The fact remains that the two don't go well together.Just look at medicine. Medieval medicine and up until the 18th century had the most bizarre ideas about what was wrong in patients. By never actively trying to disprove their theories, they built a corpus of "knowledge" that sounds like the ramblings of the insane to us now.
