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Eugine_Nier comments on The Irrationality Game - Less Wrong
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Comments (910)
Religion is a net positive force in society. Or to put it another way religious memes, (particularly ones that have survived for a long time) are more symbiotic than parasitic. Probably true (70%).
If you changed "is" to "has been", I'd downvote you for agreement. But as stated, I'm upvoting you because I put it at about 10%.
I'd be curious to know when you think the crossover point was.
Around the time of J. S. Mill, I think. The Industrial Revolution helped crystallize an elite political and academic movement which had the germs of scientific and quantitative thinking; but this movement has been far too busy fighting for its life each time it conflicts with religious mores, instead of being able to examine and improve itself. It should have developed far more productively by now if atheism had really caught on in Victorian England.
Anyway, I'm not as confident of the above as I am that we've passed the crossover point now. (Aside from the obvious political effects, the persistence of religion creates mental antibodies in atheists that make them extremely wary of anything reminiscent of some aspect of religion; this too is a source of bias that wouldn't exist were it not for religion's ubiquity.)
Oops, I see the ambiguity. Edited.
I think this is ambiguous. It might be interpreted as
Which of these do you mean?
I think a better question is "would the world a better place if people who are currently Christian became their next most likely alternative belief system?". I'm going to go out on a limb here and speculate that if the median Christian lost his faith he wouldn't become a rational-empiricist.
I'd change this one to:
~62%
~69%
~58%
Edit: I case it wasn't clear the 70% refers to the disjunction of the above 3.
I downvoted this, and consider the artistic and cultural contributions of religion to society to alone warrant this assertion.
Note that it is in general very hard to tell if the artistic and cultural contributions associated with religion are actually due to religion. In highly religious cultures that's often the only form of expression that one is able to get funding for. Dan Barker wrote an essay about this showing how a lot of classical composers were agnostics, atheists or deists who wrote music with religious overtones mainly because that was their only option.
Funny, I upvoted this because of the artistic and cultural contributions of religion. For most of history, until the Industrial Revolution or a little before, human economies were Malthusian. You could not increase incomes without decreasing average lifespans. The implication is that the money spent on cathedrals and gargoyles and all the rest came directly at the expense of people's lives. (A recent Steven Landsburg debate with Dinesh D'Souza explored this line of thinking more; I wouldn't recommend watching much more than the opening statements, though.)
I think the positive externalities of having more of those people's descendants alive today would be of higher value than the current benefits of past art--especially since most of that past art has been destroyed.
You sound more confident than Eugine, in which case you should upvote. Or does 70% roughly match your belief?
My personal degree of belief is extremely sensitive to the definition of religion you are using here. I would appreciate some elaboration.
The above is at -5. By the rules of the post that indicates that people overwhelmingly agree with the comment. This surprises me. (I didn't vote.)
It could be that people are browsing the recent comments section and impulse-downvoting. :/
It's a tough question, and involves reasoning heavily about counterfactuals. What would a humanity without religion look like? I tend to think it'd look a lot better, even though I admit there's a lot of confusion in the counterfactual surgery. So I upvoted.
This gave me pause as well. Without religion, Mendel might have been too busy in another occupation to muck around with pea plants. We'd probably still learn what he learned, but who's to say how?
I have this memory that monks transcribed Aristotle, Plato and Pythagoras and kept them alive, when most of the world was illiterate.
I'm not sure if this is accurate or not.
Right idea, wrong philosophers. Keep in mind that Greek was a forgotten language in western Europe throughout the middle ages. They had translated copies of Aristotle but not any other Greek writer.
As for Pythagoras, well he didn't survive. All we know about him comes from second and third hand accounts.