Because religion provides comfort, community and a meaning to people’s existence that goes beyond “we were born of chance on an insignificant rock somewhere in the universe”.
(I’m not religious BTW)
It also exists to control people, and it still works.
Organised religion is always about power and money.
Not always, but the ones that aren’t about that are much smaller. E.g. I know a little community of christ church that is very simple and they rotate through the sermon and then have a friendly morning tea after. I’m not religious but it’s the only church I’ve been to where I kinda enjoyed it and I think it does just bring community and no harm. That being said, it’s a fringe denomination and isn’t really growing, because it’s not trying to force itself on others
Both talking about capitalism here, right ?
Existence is meaningless and we just wobble around here for a little while and then we die. There’s nothing to it. Everything that happens is just a logical consequence; beauty is nothing but a tiny chemical reaction in your brain. Once you rot it’s all worthless.
Science is great at giving explanations, but not so good at providing meaning. For a lot of people, meaning is probably more helpful in order to facilitate a happy life.
Nietzsche writes at length about this stuff, most famously in the anecdote about the madman coming down from the mountain to inform the villagers that God is dead and that we have killed him. Everybody knows the three words “God is dead”, but I think it’s worth reading at length:
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
Nietzsche, whose father was a priest, recognizes that “God has become unbelievable”, but he does not celebrate it as the progress of science. Rather, we lost something that was fundamentally important to humans, and which science cannot easily replace.
Here one could start talking about the Free Masons, who attempted learning from religious rituals without the added layer of religion. Or one could dig deeper into the works of Nietzsche, and the contrast between Apollonian and Dionysian. It’s all fascinating stuff.
In short though, spirituality used to offer people a sense of meaning that is not so easily replaced by science alone. How do we bury our dead now that we know our rituals are pointless?
Very well written, and insightful. Thanks for sharing this perspective in the discussion as I personally found it very valuable. You articulated my own perspective on this much better than I could have, and gave some great philosophical background to boot. 10/10 👍
“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”-Voltaire
Says the man who rigged the lottery. We don’t need god anymore than we need cancer
Thank you for your insightful perspective.
Childhood indoctrination is a big part of it. I have been told by my 8-year old niece that she’d like to save me from drowning in a lake of fire. She was genuinely scared for me. It’s literal child abuse followed by Stockholm syndrome.
That part.
When I was about the age of 12, I had a new friend who asked me if I believed in God. I said no, and then she told me I was going to burn in hell. That was my first introduction to religion.
I don’t remember ever speaking with her again, but I still remember that interaction crystal clear and where it happened 20+ years later.
Your young niece sounds a lot like my elderly family. They’re conscious that they “just can’t let go” despite being very progressive and open to new ideas and they’re aware of that.
Have you heard of the fireplace delusion? Burning wood is horrible for our health and the environment, but most of us have fond memories of sitting by a fire. Religion is the same. Holiday traditions with family, organized events marking important life events, it’s hard to break away.
Great perspective
Belief is social. If you’re surrounded by people that all believe a thing, you’re more likely to also believe. If challenged on something that threatens group membership, your brain reacts like it’s a physical threat. Group membership is that important. Facts matter far less.
This happens to everyone.
There’s basically a 100% chance that OP believes something equally as unprovable as religion.
This happens to everyone.
Yeah, they said that in their comment. Did you not read all 5 sentences?
Edit: Sorry, I misunderstood your post.
I wasn’t disagreeing with them
I think a big part of the mental blocked on both sides is people generally not understanding the difference between fact and faith.
Knowledge is about fact. It’s the realm of science, empiricism, and logic. If it can be understood and known, it belongs here.
Faith is about the unknowable (not the unknown). It’s a choice to believe something without evidence because that evidence cannot exist.
You can’t both believe something and know it.
Understanding that faith and science don’t intersect allows people to hold spiritual beliefs without rejecting knowledge and science. They don’t conflict because they’re entirely separate.
Some people aren’t wired with the mental flexibility to embrace both spiritually and empiricism. Some reject science, while others reject faith, and neither understand the other.
Great synopsis.
One thing atheists often ignore is that being part of a religion means being part of a community, a group. That alone is reason enough for many people to stick with it.
Sure, the preacher/priest/whatever may be a scammer asshole, but this isn’t about him, it’s about me and the people around me. I belong in here and so do these people.
Remember, humans are social creatures. Being part of a group is a big fucking deal.
Another thing I’ve been giving some thought, religion can be a “lazy shortcut” for the brain to acknowledge some stuff without having to spend too much energy thinking about it. It’s a lot easier to wrap your head around “Because God wants it” than digging deep into the hows and whys of anything. No, it’s not scientific in the least, but humans are lazy. I am lazy, you are lazy, everyone here is lazy, we just opt to save energy in different things.
I’ve known atheists who go to church for the community. I’m an atheist, and I have recommended going to a nondenominational church to other atheists who had said they really lacked community support.
Of course, sometimes religious community systems can actually be very hostile and nonsupportive and downright exploitative. Really just depends on the specific church community. Just like there are some great people and some major assholes out there. Churches are no different.
Wonder why atheists often do not value the communal aspect of a community they are often excluded from. It is almost as if they do not value not being included in the group? Also, lazy shortcuts often lead to bad outcomes. Being wary about that is a good thing, in my opinion.
Hey, who are you calling lazy. I,m not lazy, I just choose to do nothing at all. ;)
being part of a religion means being part of a community, a group.
The local crafting circle doesn’t endanger children and carpet bomb the neighbours, though.
Don’t be silly, neither does the local church.
The funny thing is that that kind of talk of the previous poster is just a bad type of generalization, a lazy shortcut. The existence of bad elements within a large group is a given. There are pedophile priests, just as there are pedophile uncles or teachers. The only difference here is in how accountable they are for their actions, as the Roman Catholic Church is well known for protecting its abusive priests, which isn’t too different from Epstein’s friends having money shields.
As for carpet bombing and general violence, one could say it’s “politics as usual”. When words fail (whether on purpose or not is irrelevant here), violence emerges, because one side wants to impose its will. Religion is just another lazy (and often effective) shortcut to rally people behind a cause, not unlike patriotism
When words fail
George Bush said god spoke to him in a dream and told him to invade Iraq to usher in the apocalypse.
No, but they enable those that do.
Religion has certain self-reinforcing properties. Kind of like genes that make it more likely to propagate against other forms of information.
- Believing without question is better than questioning
- Not believing will be punished
- Virtue will be rewarded
- Spreading the belief is a virtue
- You should obey your parents
Combine that with young human brains being malleable, and religion tends to continue against all odds.
Also, depending on the sect, you may burn in eternal, unquenchable fire in utter darkness if you don’t accept it, so…
You’re right and I think it helps to remember certain traits which make religion “fit” from an evolutionary perspective can be beneficial to its followers: believing that the most powerful being in the universe is on your side instills confidence and a sense of well-being. Having community members who believe that God has mandated they should help each other means people may receive assistance when they experience difficulty.
I would argue in the long term having beliefs which are more and more consistent with observed reality is more sustainable. The further your beliefs are from reality and the longer they’re held the more likely something will go wrong. Still, if we (whoever that is) want to encourage people to move away from religion we should think about how we can replace the positive aspects of the religious experience.
Grooming from a young, impressionable age
What’s “wrong” in your question is the assumption that a) the only reason religions exist is the lack of knowledge and b) that the knowledge we have answers all the questions that people seek answers to when they turn to religion. I think if you question these assumptions then you’ll easily start to find the answers. Otherwise see all the other comments.
Religion works on emotions, which are easy. Knowledge works on thinking, which is hard.
Because humans are animals, ruled by emotion and superstition.
Because recent AI and cloud development proves that genesis was right, god trained multi model transformer neutral network to simulate earth in 6 days on the cloud. God (the lead developer and co-owner of company) created earth branch and he was working in agile environment because the tasks are clearly explained in the genesis book sprint with day numbers so everything was estimated during planning.
At the end of sprint god deployed earth to development environment to test if everything works ok so he can continue with his changes next week. Adam and Eve were naked subprocesses without firewall and edge case errors but it was fine because whole thing was just a draft PR and god wanted to see what happens during weekend.
When god went home for weekend from now on everything got fucked up, eden was unstable and satan junior developer and son of co-owner uncle was on hot call during weekend. On Sunday satan was having barbecue and got a call that he need to redeploy eden. He was so drunk that not only he deployed god’s branch to production but also he merged this branch into main tree. Unfortunately the Snake was online that day, he broke into eden and changed all the code on main branch introducing many errors and exploits, stole all the data from gods company.
When god got back on monday he god fucking mad. He said fuck you satan from now on you will be working on earth alone despite you don’t know programming at all I can’t fire you because me and your uncle are best friends. What I will do I will push main with earth into dev and let you fix it and I will rollback eden to where it was. Untill all the bugs from earth branch are resolved don’t fucking dare to make a single voice about merging earth into production branch.
So here we are satan knows nothing about programming so he causes more evil than good to this day. Couple thousands earth years later god’s kid went into intership for couple of months and tried to fix earth branch but fucking exploits grow so big they manipulated humans and killed his fix patch, now we wait until he finish his masters and come back to fix all the bugs.
Once per day god runs Holy Spirit CI/CD that automatically merges eden into earth and validates if earth passes all eden unit tests if it’s not it rolls back and marks all people that pass the tests on green and all those are not to red. That fucking simple because dev development cloud have unlimited computing power.
Recent studies in AI shows that merge with eden will happen sooner than later despite all the errors because Jesus said that when he will be back all dead will come back to life and now you need only couple pictures, couple seconds of voice and chat history to clone anyone and deploy this person to cloud (see AI Girlfriend) without their constent. Probably what will happend is that all the people will be put in freeze ( there was test freeze during covid - no get out from home rule) so all of us can be patched when we are in front of computers. So we’re waiting for those patches and we can go back to eden.
If you don’t believe me go work as a developer for a year
Yeah, but who is Satan’s uncle?
Tim.
This is such a complicated question because it gets into the origins of religion and belief systems in general, but also power and class struggles, economics, social psychology and propaganda, and more.
Lots of people haven’t been properly educated Lots of people have been indoctrinated Lots of people have a reason to exploit the beliefs of others Lots of people value comfort and community above scientific accuracy or consistency
Can you refine your question a bit?
Do millions just want to ignore science?
Why would you think science and religion are irreconcilable? Or are you thinking of one church in particular?
Adding to this comment: Science is fundamentally agnostic. You can even go so far as to say that the existence of God or a higher power is the one question which is forever doomed to be unanswerable by science and logic, almost by definition of God.
Of course, specific parts of the mythos of specific religions can and have been contradicted by science. But the main question of whether or not a higher power exists remains and will forever remain unanswerable.
It’s funny how it works one way and not the other. If we had even a hint of positive evidence for God you would never stop hearing about it. But since we don’t we are told that we have to pretend this is outside our knowledge. Heads I win, tails you lose.
They are irreconcilable. People who try to merge the two are using double-think also known as cognitive dissonance. I know, I did it for years.
Religions make claims and the evidence more often than not doesnt support the claims being true. You are free to try to square the circle, but you will fail. And the extent of your failure will be the effort you put in.
Just to poke at Buddhism. Sidrattha made claims about the geography of the world, those are not true and we have lots of good data backing up a round world. He made claims about rebirth and the soul which logically contradict each other.
You seems to love these flat, oversimplified questions :)
(Or why don’t you just ask these millions of people?)
…why don’t you just ask…
Good idea, maybe using some sort of widely-available service in a section where “ask” is part of the name. Might not reach every demographic equally but it’s easier and less expensive than hiring an army to conduct door-to-door surveys.
I have to imagine you’re not an American, because yeah, millions of Americans legitimately want to ignore science completely. They’re pretty loud about it too.
I’m an American. The religious people here are terrifying.
People are stupid, scared and ignorant. Tradition and the thought that all this chaos has some kind of meaning behind it bring them comfort.
I actually got more religious before I accepted I was trans. When faced with a harsh reality people can become more religious.
Luckily it looks like the internet and access to information is killing religion in the new generations before it takes root.
You hit the nail on the head. A lot of people are just scared by the chaos and meaninglessness of life and death. It is terrifying to know that everyone you know and love is going to die and be forgotten, eventually, including yourself. Everything that has meaning to you has an expiration date, and a lot of people have trouble accepting that. So they hold on to illogical fairy tales of eternal life in paradise to deal with the existential dread.
Paul
John
Ptolemy
Basil
Gregory
Francis
Aquinas
Calvin
Augustine
Ockham
Milton
Kierkegaard
Tutu
Lewis
Luther
Yes, you are far wiser than these stupid, scared, and ignorant people.
You can be smart and wise and also delusional. Actually if the delusion is deep having a good brain can work against you.
