SD on 16/1/2007 at 19:52
Quote Posted by Thirith
And that's one of your problems in this thread. You project a number of (mainly literalist) assumptions of what religion is/means to people into the people who post opinions that differ from yours. You may want to consider the possibility that not everyone professing faith interprets religion the same way.
I know that not everyone interprets religion the same way. If they all thought the same way, they wouldn't all be oppressing and massacring each other to ensure their way was the dominant one.
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And, again, you don't address the points made. Why does the God fiction differ from the other fictions according to which we live our lives? Why is it wrong and evil and must be abolished when other fictions can persist?
What other fictions were you specifically thinking of?
Thirith on 16/1/2007 at 20:28
Love, for instance. It can be seen as nothing but a cultural construct that nevertheless governs how we relate to one another and how we form and tend to relationships. It makes people unhappy as often as it makes them happy. A large part of relationships fails. Let's not forget that our current common idea of love is not that old. Nevertheless, many people believe in it. And in economic terms it's a force to be reckoned with. Yet does it have much evolutionary value?
The idea that anything in life *has* meaning can clearly be seen as a fiction, whether you see this meaning in religion or in something else. It's not something that can be scientifically proven - yet you seem to believe that there is such a thing as meaning in what we do or who we are.
The notion that there is such a thing as anyone's real, essential self. That we've got an essential core of some sort, and that's who we really are.
Nations. There's a fiction for you. There's as much evidence for nations as there is for God - there's books that describe them, there's buildings that try to define them. Yet there is no such actual thing as a nation. It's all in our head... but nations are fictions that have armies. Aren't they the truly dangerous fictions?
Money is also largely a fiction these days, but a very powerful one (most monetary transactions are tiny changes in cyberspace, yet these tiny changes can determine life and death). However, you'd need a neo-Marxist to discuss this in greater detail.
Vivian on 16/1/2007 at 20:34
Well, yes it does. It encourages the long-term pair bonding that helps children to survive in difficult times, and decreases intraspecific aggression by lowering mating competition. Admittedly other apes seem to get by with polygamy, but they don't live in as complex societies or tricky environments as us.
SD on 16/1/2007 at 20:35
Good grief, love isn't a "cultural construct". Man isn't the only creature on Earth that mates long-term. And yes, of course it has evolutionary value, otherwise it wouldn't persist in the human population. QED.
Vivian on 16/1/2007 at 20:48
Well, it might not if we were evolving biologically instead of culturally. People like love, so it sticks around, whether or not it is actually useful for our individual biological continuation. Beyond a few obvious pluses, love (and a sense of humour) is a puzzler - I'm not sure anyone knows for sure, but I remember reading a theory that a lot of the more complex and slightly nonsensical elements of human social behaviour have to do with us being shoved fairly unceremoniously through an ice age or two, and having to be a lot nicer to each other than normal to survive. I think there's some sense to that.
Thirith on 16/1/2007 at 20:55
Quote Posted by Strontium Dog
Good grief, love isn't a "cultural construct". Man isn't the only creature on Earth that mates long-term. And yes, of course it has evolutionary value, otherwise it wouldn't persist in the human population. QED.
Yet it doesn't happen. Few people actually stay monogamous, apparently. It's what we promise to one another when we get married, yet how many marriages fail? How many relationships fail? Notions that you and a specific person belong together? That's just the fiction we impose on our hormones doing their thing.
You seem to assume that your idea of love is generally true - it isn't. People pretend it is, yet numbers of divorce and infidelity in the West would seem to suggest otherwise.
You'll find as much actual scientific evidence for love as you will for god. At best you could say it's the fancy name we give evolutionary urges, coupled with societal conventions and constraints, yet people talk and behave as if there was a distinct thing called love that has real existence.
In addition, "of course it has evolutionary value, otherwise it wouldn't persist in the human population" - how does that apply to love but not to religion?
SD on 16/1/2007 at 21:35
Quote Posted by Thirith
Yet it doesn't happen. Few people actually stay monogamous, apparently. It's what we promise to one another when we get married, yet how many marriages fail? How many relationships fail? Notions that you and a specific person belong together? That's just the fiction we impose on our hormones doing their thing.
It's not a "fiction" to apply a name (love) to describe long-term sexual chemistry between partners. Nothing you've listed, in fact, is a fiction in the sense that God is.
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In addition, "of course it has evolutionary value, otherwise it wouldn't persist in the human population" - how does that apply to love but not to religion?
I knew someone would ask this. So did Dawkins, which is why chapter 5 of
The God Delusion is addressed to that very question. I'm too lazy to type my own summary of an entire chapter, so I'll just copy and paste Wikipedia's:
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Chapter 5 explores the roots of religion and why religion is so ubiquitous across all human cultures. Dawkins advocates the "theory of religion as an accidental by-product – a misfiring of something useful" and asks whether the theory of memes, and human susceptibility to religious memes in particular, might work to explain how religion might spread like a "mind" virus across societies.
Okay, I'll add a bit more.
When Dawkins talks about a mis-firing of something useful, he uses the analogy of moths. Moths use the moon to navigate, but sometimes they fly into a candle flame and burn to death. However, on balance, steering by the moon is valuable for moths, despite the occasional accidental self-immolation.
Similarly with religion. It is useful for a child's survival to believe what their elders tell them. "But the downside of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses. For excellent reasons related to Darwinian survival, child brains need to trust parents, and elders whom parents tell them to trust. An automatic consequence is that the truster has no way of distinguishing good advice from bad. The child cannot know that 'Don't paddle in the crocodile-infested Limpopo' is good advice, but 'You must sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, otherwise the rains will fail' is at best a waste of time and goats."
In short, nonsense spreads along the same pathways as sense.
BEAR on 16/1/2007 at 22:08
I dont know what Dawkins says of this but my personal belief is that Religion has or had advantages as far as social order and community go. That would make sense for how it is pervasive, I know that communities in alot of places are stronger the more people are like eachother. If everyone agrees and has static unchanging rules and beliefs to hold people together, the stronger the community will in the end be, over a community that lacks such structure.
I think humanity needs a firmware upgrade. We're hardcoded for religion, but not the kind of religion we need or at least we're coded for the kind of religion we dont need. Religion was useful else it wouldnt exist, it probably still even has its use somewhere, but the world is too diffrent for the type of thinking it instills. Thats not to say spirituality has no place in the future but it obviously needs modifying. With global travel, communication and trade, the entire world is a community now, only a good portion of it can't get along, meaning that it actually does the opposite of what its purpose (as far as I can tell) was.
Thirith on 16/1/2007 at 22:13
Okay, Strontium, so we don't agree about the designation of the term 'fiction' to the concept of love. Frankly, I think that in part that is due to you not being willing to examine your own beliefs with the same critical faculties that you expect from those on the other side of the debate, but I may be wrong there. However, the longer I think about it, the more I think that 'nation' is a fairly useful analogue to 'religion', and one that I notice you haven't addressed at all. Could I ask you to do so?
Edit: Some reasoning on why I think you're not really looking at your own fictions critically, Stronts: Evidence would seem to suggest that guys aren't hardwired by nature to be monogamous. They find a mate, have some kids, and then they look for the next potential mate who's young and likely to bear their offspring. That seems to be fairly normal, common behaviour in men. How does that sort of behaviour (which makes sense from an evolutionary point of view) fit with your notion of love?
