this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023

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Unpopular Opinion

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Religious and superstitious beliefs should not be respected. (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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We're in the 21st century, and the vast majority of us still believe in an utterly and obviously fictional creator deity. Plenty of people, even in developed countries with decent educational systems, still believe in ghosts or magic (e.g. voodoo). And I--an atheist and a skeptic--am told I need to respect these patently false beliefs as cultural traditions.

Fuck that. They're bad cultural traditions, undeserving of respect. Child-proofing society for these intellectually stunted people doesn't help them; it is in fact a disservice to them to pretend it's okay to go through life believing these things. We should demand that people contend with reality on a factual basis by the time they reach adulthood (even earlier, if I'm being completely honest). We shouldn't be coddling people who profess beliefs that are demonstrably false, simply because their feelings might get hurt.

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Science doesn’t care if earth is full of life or if it’s a glassed sphere in an infinite void.

You have a very poor understanding of what science is. Of course it does care, because those two things are different, and the purpose of science is to collect all information there is, discern everything, catalogue all differences of all things.

Yet I choose to believe that some acts are better than other.

That's simply morality, a human behavior. You needn't "believe" that morality exists, as humans behave in such a way as to create morality.

So my “choice” to prefer one of those is arbitrary (scientifically speaking).

But the fact you did so isn't - unless you suffer from a mental illness, you were bound to choose something. That's simply how your brain evolved.

Now why is my believe in that “big lie” any more sane than other peoples believe in the “small lies”?

Because "sanity" is a measure of how one's brain behaves as compared to the collective of humankind - how "average" your brain is. Because morality is baked into humanity, it's sane to make a choice regarding, say, murder being wrong or not. Believing in flying unicorn robots that sing heavy metal, on the other hand, isn't.

And their belief in a benevolent sky daddy also can’t be falsified or proven.

Fallacy: Non Sequitur. Give me a description of a god, any god, and I'll disprove them. No god can be described and exist, and a god which can't be described might as well not exist.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You have a very poor understanding of what science is. Of course it does care, because those two things are different, and the purpose of science is to collect all information there is, discern everything, catalogue all differences of all things.

If all there is a lifeless ball in space, what would science "care"? There would be no one to do science and "science" as a concept can't care.

But the fact you did so isn’t - unless you suffer from a mental illness, you were bound to choose something. That’s simply how your brain evolved.

And now we're slowly getting to the crux of the matter: just as our brain evolved to produce morality of some kind, it also evolved to make up stories (grand and small) to try to explain the world.

Some of those "stories" eventually formed into what we now call the scientific method (i.e. try to make sure your stories are verifyable and falsifiable and produce "facts".

Some of those stories were used as a social tool to develop some shared morality, to agree on which acts were good and which ones aren't.

And some of the latter category turned into religion.

Because “sanity” is a measure of how one’s brain behaves as compared to the collective of humankind - how “average” your brain is. Because morality is baked into humanity, it’s sane to make a choice regarding, say, murder being wrong or not. Believing in flying unicorn robots that sing heavy metal, on the other hand, isn’t.

Can you seriously look at human history and say with a straight face that religion (and made up stories) aren't just as "baked into" the human brain as morality is?

It's one thing to argue that a neutral, as-objective-as-possible brain should disregard religion (and I pretty much agree with that), but it's an entirely different thing to argue that "humans believing in religion is abnormal" in a historic scale ... that's just being blind to the facts.

And their belief in a benevolent sky daddy also can’t be falsified or proven.

Fallacy: Non Sequitur. Give me a description of a god, any god, and I’ll disprove them. No god can be described and exist, and a god which can’t be described might as well not exist.

Last Thursdayism or the five-minute hypothesis is one great example. They don't usually mention a god in the common phrasing, but it's easy to rephrase it to include one: "There is a god that created the universe exactly 5 minutes ago with all the signs and properties that make it look like it's a lot longer. That god created you and all your memories as well as all the uncountable cosmic radiation rays that have yet to hit earth and everything else as well. After that creation that god stopped interacting with the universe.". Go ahead and disprove it.

I'm an agnostic atheist myself, but I really don't understand the obsession of some people with "disproving god".

If there was any kind of real scientific proof of the non-existence of god, don't you think that several Nobel prices would have been given out for that by now?

Most current religions have developed to a state where the existence of their god is basically un-falsifiable, because if you can ever prove any specific thing about them wrong, then they can always just use the "gods ways are inscrutable" escape hatch.

That makes any god effectively un-falsifiable. And any theory that can't be falsified is irrelevant to the scientific method.