Yeah, for most people it is instrumentally rational to be religious. When I deconverted from Christianity, I was shocked by how many of my friends eventually reverted to some form of Pascal's wager, which was what kept me from confronting my doubts as long as I did. With your average cherry-picked Christianity, you don't lose much, and you gain a ton. It's nice believing an all-powerful all-loving God who is much smarter than we are has everything in control even when we don't understand, it's nice believing you're going to heaven, it's nice socializing with your friends at Bible study, yada yada yada.
So I couldn't help but think of religious belief when I read meditations on moloch. For the average individual, it's great to be religious. Yet the world as a whole would probably be better off if no one were, for obvious reasons.
I saw something circulating facebook about atheists being more altruistic than Christians. I don't know how legit the study was, but I wouldn't be surprised if atheists were less likely to default in other prisoner's dilemmas as well. But even so I wouldn't fault the Christians and wouldn't prefer they change their ways. I think there's a lot of truth to Dostoyevsky's saying something to the effect of "the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular" and that it goes both ways. You can't perfectly love individuals and perfectly love humanity at the same time.
The Christians I know love "man in particular" an incredible, incredible lot. Like my mom, who spends probably ten hours a week visiting and helping an elderly lady whose kids live in another state and don't visit often. And who will drop everything to take drive a grumpy and entitled-acting disabled lady to get shampoo or any such random errand. I would never do these things. Or if I did, I would feel so good about myself afterward that it would eliminate the selflessness of the act. But love and connection like this on an individual level is part of what makes us human and is important too, I think. It's good for the world to have some people of each type.
Hah, I guess I too have been making my peace with belief lately.
I grew up in an atheistic household.
Almost needless to say, I was relatively hostile towards religion for most of my early life. A few things changed that.
First, the apology of a pastor. A friend of mine was proselytizing at me, and apparently discussed it with his pastor; the pastor apologized to my parents, and explained to my friend he shouldn't be trying to convert people. My friend apologized to me after considering the matter. We stayed friends for a little while afterwards, although I left that school, and we lost contact.
I think that was around the time that I realized that religion is, in addition to being a belief system, a way of life, and not necessarily a bad one.
The next was actually South Park's Mormonism episode, which pointed out that a belief system could be desirable on the merits of the way of life it represented, even if the beliefs themselves are stupid. This tied into Douglas Adam's comment on Feng Shui, that "...if you disregard for a moment the explanation that's actually offered for it, it may be there is something interesting going on" - which is to say, the explanation for the belief is not necessarily the -reason- for the belief, and that stupid beliefs may actually have something useful to offer - which then requires us to ask whether the beliefs are, in fact, stupid.
Which is to say, beliefs may be epistemically irrational while being instrumentally rational.
The next peace I made with belief actually came from quantum physics, and reading about how there were several disparate and apparently contradictory mathematical systems, which all predicted the same thing. It later transpired that they could all be generalized into the same mathematical system, but I hadn't read that far before the isomorphic nature of truth occurred to me; you can have multiple contradictory interpretations of the same evidence that all predict the same thing.
Up to this point, however, I still regarded beliefs as irrational, at least on an epistemological basis.
The next peace came from experiences living in a house that would have convinced most people that ghosts are real, which I have previously written about here. I think there are probably good explanations for every individual experience even if I don't know them, but am still somewhat flummoxed by the fact that almost all the bizarre experiences of my life all revolve around the same physical location. I don't know if I would accept money to live in that house again, which I guess means that I wouldn't put money on the bet that there wasn't something fundamentally odd about the house itself - a quality of the house which I think the term "haunted" accurately conveys, even if its implications are incorrect.
If an AI in a first person shooter dies every time it walks into a green room, and experiences great disutility for death, how many times must it walk into a green room before it decides not to do that anymore? I'm reasonably confident on a rational level that there was nothing inherently unnatural about that house, nothing beyond explanation, but I still won't "walk into the green room."
That was the point at which I concluded that beliefs can be -rational-. Disregard for a moment the explanation that's actually offered for them, and just accept the notion that there may be something interesting going on underneath the surface.
If we were to hold scientific beliefs to the same standard we hold religious beliefs - holding the explanation responsible rather than the predictions - scientific beliefs really don't come off looking that good. The sun isn't the center of the universe; some have called this theory "less wrong" than an earth-centric model of the universe, but that's because the -predictions- are better; the explanation itself is still completely, 100% wrong.
Likewise, if we hold religious beliefs to the same standard we hold scientific beliefs - holding the predictions responsible rather than the explanations - religious beliefs might just come off better than we'd expect.