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.
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.
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.
Both talking about capitalism here, right ?
Religion has two purposes.
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Coping mechanism for those who can’t fathom death
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How to not be a dick for those who don’t have empathy
In either case a mental health structure for the damaged
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Not really to answer your questions. But a book came out a year ago and it covers the philosophy of simulation theory.
That is it explains the theory that our reality may be a simulation inside of a computer, and then re-establishes all major philosophical ideas from this premise. Ironically enough, a lot of philosophical ideas it arrives at are very similar to those proposed by religious philosophers.
The book is called Reality +. Good read if you like philosophy and think simulation theory is interesting.
None of the knowledge you mentioned overturns religion
People thini the earth is flat and vaccines contain microchips.
Yes, and there are likely similar reasons between conspiracy theories and religion. But the question was asking what they were, not more examples of irrational belief.
Tradition and support in major life events. A lot of people who only go to churches for weddings, baptisms and funerals.
For me, religion at its essence is about the fear of death.
Many people cannot process the idea that one day, they will just…end.
Religion is there to give a comforting notion that there existence will continue.
Organized religion or religion in a spiritual sense? I do believe there is some higher power that created matter and the laws of physics. But I don’t believe they care or even know about us.
Because it turns out that conforming to what your parents and your community believe is way more influential to the average person than objective truth.
Exactly. Where I grew up you would have nothing without your family, and they are all rabid believers. So the choices are toe the line or abandon it all.
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?
“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”-Voltaire
Why not? It makes sense to me, it carried me through some very difficult times and is a good way to think about how I interact with the world and my moral framework.
Science doesn’t concern itself with the existence of God so I’m not sure what knowledge you’re referring to.
The vast majority of religions do make explicit falsifiable claims about the natural universe that go far beyond the existence of a god.
A random Jewish preacher coming back to life, for instance, or a random Arab religious reformer casually taking a midnight flight to Jerusalem.
A random Jewish preacher coming back to life, for instance, or a random Arab religious reformer casually taking a midnight flight to Jerusalem.
I mean, these claims are only falsifiable if you assume the religions are false. It’s circular reasoning. For example going “God doesn’t exist so there’s no way Muhammed could’ve went to Jerusalem” doesn’t do much to disprove that God exists. Taking this particular event as an example, you’d need to, independently from the existence of God, find evidence that Muhammed didn’t go to Jerusalem. Especially since Islam provides evidence for its claim that he did go there.
No, that’s not what I mean by ‘falsifiable’.
That there exists some external force or entity that is completely outside the realm of anything observable is not a falsifiable claim, because there is absolutely nothing we could ever observe that would absolutely contradict it. It is, quite simply, not a statement about the observable universe, so it’s definitionally outside the domain of science. Science will never disprove the existence of Heaven, because Heaven is by definition not observable.
That’s a very different kind of claim from “If you’d sneakily observed Jesus’ crucifixion and followed him as he was buried, you’d eventually see him come back to life, move a stone away from his tomb, and wander up into Heaven after having a few chats with friends”.
To be clear, I’m not saying that those religious claims have been absolutely proven false, only that they hypothetically could be proven false. Of course, there are other religious claims that have been proven false, like young earth creationism, but those have a funny habit of being either abandoned or significantly re-interpreted after conflicting facts come about. It’s also probably just a coincidence that the more fantastical claims all tend to be from long enough ago that gaps in the historical record provide a significant amount of fuzziness. Why God got tired of performing miracles after the invention of the camera is just one of those mysteries.
It needs to be emphasized that I am not making the absolute positive claim that Muhammad never flew to Jerusalem. What I’m saying is that someone with sufficient information could possibly make a clear determination of the truth. Muhammad himself, for instance, presumably knew the truth of the matter. It’s falsifiable in that it could be falsified given sufficient observed information, unlike the existence of Heaven, which categorically cannot be.
(It’s also worth mentioning that the Qur’an itself actually contains only the slightest and briefest mention of the Night Journey; the story is greatly expanded upon in the hadiths, which he himself did not directly write but are rather traditionally attributed to him).
Oh I see. I thought you were listing examples of claims that were falsified.
(It’s also worth mentioning that the Qur’an itself actually contains only the slightest and briefest mention of the Night Journey; the story is greatly expanded upon in the hadiths, which he himself did not directly write but are rather traditionally attributed to him).
That’s true, but Sahih Hadith can basically be taken with the same degree of trust as the Quran (aka “this is the capital T Truth” if you’re a Muslim, “Muhammed said/did this” if you’re not) so the distinction doesn’t really exist.
Humans are not rational creatures, and despite all the knowledge we have gained, people will still find what they want to be true the most believable of all
Besides, you can talk about all of the science we have discovered, but the overwhelming majority of people don’t really see it. We see the technology and all that, but we don’t truly understand it, so you ultimately are just taking someone else’s word for it. To me, the word of the scientific community is credible, but to some it is not
Some people are flat-earthers. People aren’t swayed by reason. We’re dumb animals, and the conceit of us as “rational” is hubris
