I think it's because, unlike the groups mentioned, Christians as a whole are oppressing nonbelievers, not the other way around. Despite the fact Christians claim to be put upon, the opposite is true.
So nonbelievers ridicule and mock as a way to hold off the onslaught. To not do so would be to cede the high ground to them.
Nonbelievers are on the DEFENSIVE, and as we speak are in danger of losing whatever political power they still have, which will transform the U.S. into at least a quasi-theocracy, in which the Christian religionists will take over all facets of public life, and their persecution of other viewpoints will become aggressively explicit.
So don't feel sorry for them, but for us.

Hi @Storm1752, Your view is specific to what it is like in American society, so I will not be arrogant to comment on it. Still, thanks for your insightful comment. Interesting.

I think perhaps it is the arrogance and entitlement exhibited by proselytizers, it makes them a convenient target. Most groups such as you mention don't come at others with such overt conviction that their way is the only way. I dunno, it's just my guess. Maybe, maybe not.

I think Francis Fukuyama does an excellent job of explaining how Christianity was central to change the balance of power between the ruler and the ruled in the west. By placing God above the king, certain rules could be enforced on the ruler by the masses which led to greater accountability and slowly to parliamentary democracy. It is not only the factor for sure, but religion did play a major role in the cultural changes. I guess it is obvious for anyone with an open mind to look at the world and its history for what it is rather than what it "should be".

Those are great questions, thanks. Basically three questions if I understand correctly: one about what is the thing that isn’t literally true... one about how belief in religion can enhance survivability, and one about possible non-literal truth content of religious texts.

From the scientific perspective, and very generally speaking, the thing that need not be literally true is... any and all religious doctrine or belief.

How such belief can enhance survivability is complex, but I’ll try to hit some of the “high points”. Humans are a social animal. Our survival as a species owes a lot to working as a team as opposed to going it alone. Teamwork is served better when every member can be trusted to be loyal and not defect to the other side, or become a freerider and take without giving.

So, for example, if everybody believes a God is watching, they are less likely to cheat or freeload. But maybe more importantly, religions require commitment and sacrifice. This cost tends to filter out those who would take unfair advantage. And the learning of, and repeating of all the doctrines and culture makes you identifiable as a member of the “tribe” even if you are not personally known to other members. No interloper is going to go to the trouble to learn all that stuff. It’s a lot like the points system on this site that keeps scammers to a minimum by requiring an investment before full privileges are bestowed.

So in some ways, it doesn’t matter whether the stuff you have to learn is objectively true or not, just so long as you are willing and able to learn it and repeat it, and demonstrate that you are willing to bear the burden of living the basic tenets (no matter how nonsensical they may be) as the cost of being a trusted member of the team.

Beyond that, religions provide an identity, a sense of purpose, a salve for the disheartened, a source of support for the disadvantaged, a cosmology for the curious, and not least, a way to cope with the knowledge of impending death. Evolution cares not whether any of these beliefs are objectively true - only that the collective belief bonds the community into a cohesive unit that can pursue goals more successfully than the individuals could working independently.

Thus far my answer has little to do with my personal beliefs, but is just a reporting, to the best of my memory, of what I have read in scientific journals.

So as far as all that is concerned, the only reason I qualify truth as “literal” is because I am personally aware of, and interested in possible “figurative” interpretations of certain religious texts, but I’m not aware of much scientific exploration into that realm. I’d be happy to share if anyone is interested, but it’s not really pertinent to this thread. This post is just about the evolutionary value of religious belief whether true in any sense or not.

To answer that I can perhaps just quote the reply I just gave above.

You do not have to go as far as science, to demonstrate the adaptive and genetic advantages that religion has brought to many. History will do. There is no doubt, that for example, many Arabic male gained a considerable genetic advantage from the establishment of the Islamic empire, and that the resulting boom in the access gained to female slaves and forced marriages, helped their genetic success.

While economics would show that, the wealth and power generated by the professions of priest, witch doctor etc., always helped males to gain access to more and better sexual partners, and that even the priestess may to a less extent have gained genetic advantages, such as higher grade male partners and more resources enabling more social success and higher survival rates among her children.

But it is a two edged sword, because there is also no doubt that, the monastic tradition for example, did do a lot of harm to the breeding success of many.

@skado To quote you: "So, for example, if everybody believes a God is watching, they are less likely to cheat or freeload." That right there is some bullshit. The religious are at least as crooked as everyone else. At least.

@skado Okay, that's all fine, inspirational even; thank you for the detailed answer. But it's still ridiculous from my point of view.
I personally THINK 'god,' by some definition (not of a personal deity, a separate "thing," of any kind) could be said to exist, so I don't have an atheistic bias.
I also think there is no need to hypothesize a god to have a strong sense of right and wrong, of loyalty to your tribe, or to think good conduct is rewarded and bad conduct punished in some existential way. I think those things are innate, and all contribute to the success of the group as a whole.
BUT belief in a god is not necessary to have those characteristics. Tribal members who do not have them won't be as useful or successful, period. Yes, an evolutionary "screening out" must occur; nature "selects" individuals who possess these traits or not, irrespective of his or her beliefs.
In fact, EVERY animal alive today is a product of natural selection, not just human beings. A pack of dogs is made up of members who fearlessly attack an enemy, not because individual dogs "believe" in anything, but because such individual "courage" and "heroism" enhances the survivability of the pack as a whole.
So these innate BEHAVIORS of individuals contribute to the general welfare, and those BEHAVIORS are later given labels, the desirable ones are called "courage" or "bravery," etc., and those who possess these things are awarded with status, and power.
The foot soldier who has no problem taking position on the front lines and throwing himself into battle with no concern for his personal safety MAY do so because he believes in a heavenly reward, OR he can do it because one of his ancestors did it and survived, so HIS chances are at least marginally better than average. But that doesn't mean a belief in God is to thank; rather, each generation is made up of men and women who have been "screened" BY SURVIVAL itself!
So, people who argue it's the BELIEF which bestows upon the individual survival skills and traits has it, in my opinion, backwards.
It is after the fact, I think, the person and tribe gives credit to a deity for things that have nothing to do with god's blessings, but to the tribes superior evolutionary makeup, and those tribal members aquire their survival-enhancing strength, or intelligence, or selflessness, or whatever, through a process of natural selection, which they later identify as " god-given," but only because, absent an understanding of the true forces at play, they go with the cause being an unseen force.
This may be an incomplete response, but one that immediately comes to mind.

@Fernapple Oh give me a break, "Arabic males gained a considerable genetic advantage?" Is that why they're fleeing the region to Europe and whoever will have them as their "civilization" crumbles all around them?
The Ottoman Empire was successful not because of a belief in Allah, but because before Islam abandoned science, art, high culture and. a centralized, unified organizational structure, they had all of these things in spades. Sure it was all inspired and unified under the Islamic umbrella, but it wasn't the belief itself, or else why is the Arab world so disorganized and poverty-stricken today (except for the Gulf states)? Where is this genetic advantage?!?
And priests, witch doctors, and other "holy men" ALSO have a "genetic advantage?" For one thing their numbers were too small to be statistically significant, and for another, name for me any examples of this genetic superiority.
Please. I'm waiting.

@JonnaBononna The whole premise is ridiculous. Nature selects for physical and mental traits advantageous for survival, and later these primitive people attribute their success to 'god,' and these jokers turn it on its head and claim it was the BELIEF in God that explains that success, and superior strength, stamina, intelligence, etc., were beside the point?
They must really think we're stupid if they expect us to swallow that hogwash. If we WERE, we wouldn't have made it this far to begin with.

@Storm1752 Not genetic superiority, but genetic advantage, that is to say an advange in passing their genes on to the next gereration.

And no Islam did not establish a great empire because of its greater science, art and high culture, the biggest growths in the empire were made by primitive followers of the prophet in the first hundred years after his death. Religion and the zeal it generated, was certainly the main driving force, and the main reason why the established empires failed to stop the Arabic expansion, was because the new religion offered to free any slaves who joined, and the slave owning empires fell like dominos before its liberal agenda.

@Fernapple Look, 'skado's original premise, that the survival and flourishing if the human species is due, in part, to formation, in the brain of a capacity (and predisposition?) to believe in god, and it is this belief which is one of the most important, if not THE most important, traits critical to tribal cohesion, among other things.
Sorry, but I fail to see how Islamic belief in, and devotion to, Allah explains the Ottomans success.
Yes, it imparted inspiration, a unifying influence, and most of all a fanatical zeal for expansion.
How is any of this a result of evolution? Were there latent genes activated by Muhammed which sprung into action after laying dormant for centuries?
Islam abandoned worldly knowledge, advancement, and knowledge in the 14th century, and the Ottomans reached their peak in the 16th century, then went into decline. The first 100 years were indeed, a period of the greatest expansion of the Arab empire, but Islam continued to expand and may still be expanding.
Anyway, none of this indicates some underlying capacity for and attraction to religious beliefs.as a main cause of the success of the human species.
As a topic it's too absurd to pursue any further, as far as I'm concerned, and the history of Islam bores me.

@Storm1752
Your reasoning is sound, but our reasoning can only be as good as our knowledge is complete, and of course, our knowledge is never totally complete. I think your assessment is very accurate for dog packs, and mostly accurate for H.sapiens before the invention of agriculture. Agriculture threw a major wrench into that scheme. That's the point at which humans stopped playing by the rules that apply to dog packs (nomadic hunting and gathering) and started making their own rules.

Evolution isn't just about the organism. It is necessarily always about the interplay between organism and environment. It is about how well the organism fits its environment. And when that fit is altered too much, the organism goes extinct. It's called evolutionary mismatch - the universal, primary cause of species extinction.

Sapiens evolved, as you correctly point out, just as the dogs did for everything to balance out quite naturally, by the actions of innate traits. Then for reasons that are still not clear, the human brain started growing in size and complexity. This enabled a degree of self-awareness and inventiveness hitherto unknown by any other species. Then we started tinkering with our own development - a capacity that the dogs never possessed.

Around ten thousand years ago (two seconds ago in evolutionary time) we began radically altering our environment from the way it had been for the entirety of our evolutionary development. And when I say environment, I'm not just talking about the landscape, but social environment, psychological environment, economic environment - everything. This radical redesign of our total environment was many times more severe and more abrupt than shifts that had precipitated the extinction of many "lesser" species. But Homo sapiens had a trick up its sleeve. Culture.

There was no way we could have biologically evolved our innate traits fast enough to avoid extinction, but we had a biological capacity for culture, and culture could be modified rapidly enough to serve as a counterbalance to the evolutionary mismatch we had brought upon ourselves.

Our innate biological traits were forged in the savannas of the Pleistocene to be members of small, nomadic bands of hunter/gatherers, numbering around 150 individuals who were mostly kin, or at minimum, all known personally to each other. And we were choosing, quite abruptly, to live stationary lives, farming the land, and depending upon the trust of thousands of strangers to make it all work. We needed to rapidly modify our hunter/gatherer instincts, and our capacity for complex culture was our only innate trait malleable enough to do the job in a timely manner.

We made rules. We concocted disciplines. We modified our outward behavior and our inner feelings in order to extend the boundaries of the tribe to include masses of strangers who could still all work together as a coordinated team. A few thousand years later someone started calling those cultural modifications "religion". Latin: re-ligio. Ligio being the root of words like ligament. A connector. A re-connector. Reconnecting what had been torn apart by evolutionary mismatch.

It actually has relatively little to do with gods. Some religions use gods to achieve the result - some don't. But they all (modern, organized religions) serve as a counterbalance to the evolutionary mismatch caused by the invention of agriculture. As Dan Dennett (a lifelong devout atheist and professional philosopher) said, we should understand, better than we currently do, what religion is, before we go carelessly throwing it away.

@skado Interesting.
You could replace the word "religion" with "ideology," or any other thing which binds a group together, like art, or science, as long as it brings into being a commonty-shared ethos.
In the case of the U.S., that ethos has up to now been cultural and religious pluralism, humanist values like democracy and human rights, with deep undercurrents of ungovernable individualism, religious extremism, and pursuit of the American Dream (unlimited wealth)..
Those undercurrents are now threatening to tear this now-shaky ethos apart.

@JonnaBononna

My understanding of the science is that, indeed, it doesn’t make the individual inherently less crooked than anyone else, but it apparently, according to the folks who study this stuff formally, does tend to make members of that particular tribe less likely to cheat other members of the same tribe.
That was a way to expand the size of the tribe from 150 relatives to several hundred or several thousand strangers. Now we have apparently reached the practical limits of that particular psychotechnology and will need a new paradigm to deal with a global tribe.

@skado But like I said above, it doesn't have to be religion, it could be "ideology, or science, or anything, as long as it's a commonly-shared ethos. It just happens to be religion for many which provides that sense of community.
For the U.S. it's been a "secular religion" of humanism, democracy, human rights, separation of church and state, cultural and religious pluralism, etc.
It looks like that binding ethos is now coming apart at the seams.

@Storm1752
YES! It doesn’t matter what we call it - we just need it to be stable, and it is currently trending otherwise. May be time to invent a whole new system, but that usually comes with lots of chaos and death for a few years. I guess I lean in favor of a less violent path, like reforming the obsolete system we have inherited. It would be interesting to see how it all plays out, but I probably won’t be around by then.

@Storm1752 No I agree with you, the system is not broken and Skados sentimental clinging to the only real broken bit of it, is a serious mistake. While ignoring the most common modern usage of the word religion and exchanging it for an ancient out modded usage, is just an attempt to tap dance round the real issues. It ignores, or even seems completely blind to the very real progress which is being made in, secular ideology, human rights, environmentalism, socialism, democracy, nation states, internationalism, health, secular philosophy, science and law etc.

While trying to rename the whole of human culture with the name of religion, is just a cheap devious shabby trick, typical of a certain low type of apologist, with whom Skado seems to be enthralled, to abolish the very real difference between a real ideological sub-group and all the others and regain religion it its centrality, which it has justifiably lost, just by an Orwellian renaming game. ( Like changing Facebook to Meta.) Even if it can be justified by a trivial reference to an ancient and forgotten historic usage. ( And yes I am aware that "usage", could be seen as an appeal to the, ad populum, fallacy, but I think that usage is more applicable in this case than an appeal to the fallacy from authority, especially ancient authority, "must be true if its old" .)

The future of religion, real religion, and especially theist religion, is to become increasingly, (as we can observe happening ) the ideological wing of organized crime, and the home of the dangerously antisocial. For the simple reason that, religion has only ever been able to prosper because it provided an alternate view to mainstream secular culture, without that it has no place in the market. And as all the other modern cultural institutions, increasingly, come to agree on certain moral and ideological standards, religion has nowhere else to go, and nobody else to attract save the criminal.

Yes, yes, yes and yes indeed.

Religion should be like pornography: if you really need it, keep it to yourself, keep it at home, and keep it away from the children.

I understand your feelings. I have felt the same. My question would be... how many is "too many"? What percentage of a group must behave despicably before we feel justified in identifying the entire group as despicable? Is there a reliable, scientific measure of what percentage of religious people are obnoxious proselytizers? If not, how is that different from any other prejudice?

@skado I get what you're saying.

Unfortunately, I see this as being exactly the same as good cops not doing anything about bad cops within their ranks. That makes them all bad cops to me.

If the believers who keep their religion to themselves, can't or won't work harder to rein in their overzealous brethren, then they're all guilty of using their religion to control everyone else. Whether they have that intention or not.

@KKGator
I totally understand the feeling but I don’t know what mechanism churchgoers have at their disposal to correct the behavior of people who only happen to attend the same church.
Police departments (but maybe not individual cops) could, if they were so inclined, use employment as leverage on officer behavior, but churches have even less leverage, especially since their whole shtick (within the flock at least) is all about inclusion/forgiveness, etc. Very few modern religious institutions excommunicate any more.

Should we, for example, hold nurses responsible for not correcting doctors who malpractice? What power do they have to do so?

@skado Just calling people out on their bad behavior would be a step in the right direction.
Public shaming works to an extent.
Fight fire with fire.

The silence has to stop.
Being "nice" doesn't work.

@KKGator The problem with police is that there is just no incentive for them to do just that.

Not only that, but their lives could also be threatened if they do speak out. The NYPD has 35, 36,000 officers so of course there’s going to be bad apples. Look at what happened to NYPD officer Frank Serpico back in the late 60’s and early 70s when he reported corruption in the ranks, he was shot in the face during a narcotics bust setup and almost cost him his life.

@CuddyCruiser Safety in numbers.
Put the fear back into the corrupted.

@KKGator I agree. There needs to be greater penalties for cops who do bad over regular citizens. They have enormous power to deprive a person of their freedom by arrest, trained in the use of firearms and how to use deadly physical force if necessary. And when that trust is betrayed, they should suffer much greater penalties.

@KKGator As Skado says. What "mechanism churchgoers have at their disposal to correct the behavior of people who only happen to attend the same church ?" They have only one, which is to leave the church themselves, in the hope that the evil doers in the church will only be left with a stump of a church, starved of resources.. And that is what they are doing arround the world in increasing numbers.

Which has the effect though, of leaving the churches and temples etc. increacingly in the hands of the immoral (evil if you like) minority. Which in turn drives away more moderates, until religion becomes a purely criminal and immoral activety. That is its destiny. Unfortunately for Skado his sentimental attachment to religions past and long faded glories, only allows him to get as far as understanding, "mechanism churchgoers have at their disposal to correct the behavior of people who only happen to attend the same church." But not to face the future.

@Fernapple I'm suggesting that they stand up, in the moment, and call out the lies.
Just leaving the church is not enough.
Tell them WHY you're leaving.
Have the courage to take a stand.

Look, it wasn't until women started standing up to the men who were mistreating them, and going public with their stories, that we all started being more aware, and taking action.

Same with systemic racism.
Change only comes when people make noise.
There's courage in using your voice.

@KKGator
Calling individuals out for bad behavior that they committed is necessary. Assigning blame to an entire class of people for the deeds of a few of their members has at its core the same mechanism as racism.

@skado I disagree. I think I've already explained why.
Silence is acquiescence.

@KKGator
I don’t recall much silence about this topic in my lifetime, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it. Communication is vital. Nastiness begets nastiness. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

@skado I can recall lots of silence, on a number of issues.
If that hasn't been your experience, I understand.
However, it doesn't mean that it's not reality.

Yes, philosophically. But some think they are only atheist while demonstrating anti-theism.

And one can be both, like me.

This post is a spinoff of a previous post which linked to a study that made some claims about the evolutionary roots of religion:
[agnostic.com]

Your questions are really quite good ones. I hope I can do them justice.

The success I'm talking about is of the human species.
To clarify, no one is saying that human success is solely due to religious practice. Of course it's a lot more complex than a single behavior. And "success" here refers to evolutionary success - mainly the ability to survive, reproduce, and increase our numbers.

None of my claims are based on a single study, though as the linked study mentions, there is a growing scientific consensus that religion is either a direct or an indirect product of evolution. That is to say, that it has most likely contributed in a positive way toward our survival as a species. So the funding is not from a single source. The scientific debate was mostly not even about whether evolution played a role - I think that is assumed to be true in most scientific circles, but whether religion was an idle byproduct of several other adaptations, or a direct adaptation itself, all fairly well represented in the argument between Stephen J. Gould and E. O. Wilson, and after several decades, the Wilson camp seems to have won the debate. It spans many studies and much argumentation, but the evidence is piling up in favor of Wilson's point - that religion is adaptive.

This in no way pretends that religion hasn't been host to untold corruption and misappropriation. It clearly has. It's just to say that, through it all, people who were religious survived more often and produced more offspring than those who weren't, and so, passed the capacity/tendency to be religious to their offspring genetically.

@skado Thank you for your reply.
Here’s an ironic thought…
We’re all born Atheists.
That’s called indoctrination.
How many civilizations have even existed that were atheists? If most all civilizations of the past forced their religion on the masses then really I don’t see how it can be given much merit. Are we missing the obvious here??? People really didn’t have a freakin choice…so following whatever crap you were born into WAS literally integral to survival!!
Personally it’s feels insulting to give religion credit for anything.

@Lordess

I totally understand that feeling and have had it many times myself, but as I’m sure you know, science doesn’t pay much attention to our feelings about these issues. It’s all data driven.

For example, it seems like a no-brainer to assume that we are all born atheist, but the data isn’t stacking up that way. The evidence today suggests strongly that our capacity for religious participation is like our capacity for language. No one is born a French speaker or a Buddhist, but our capacity for, and tendency to, pick up a language easily and practice a religion is a genetic predisposition in Homo sapiens.

Yes, we get “indoctrinated” into our particular language or religion, but word on the scientific street is that the stage is set rather strongly at the genetic level, for those things to manifest. Individuals may vary but societies don’t vary much.

There virtually are no civilizations that have existed without religions. But indoctrination alone doesn’t adequately explain that. It just begs the question why would such consistent indoctrination take place? The scientific rule of thumb is that if a behavior is found in all population locations of a species and in all time periods, then it is generally assumed to be a biologically evolved trait.

If we go by the science alone, we must at least consider the likelihood that religion was, originally at least, an evolved tendency, meaning that it enhanced our chances of surviving and reproducing during a very long period of our evolutionary development.

@Lordess there is a lot of evidence that human babies are born "believers", not in a god but in structures. A child that just follows what the parent says ("don't eat the poison fruit" ) has a better chance of survival than a critical thinker baby that believes only in its own experiences obtained through continuous experimentation. Richard Dawkins does a great job of explaining how this adaptation might have been hijacked by religions for controlling people. Religion is probably an exaptation and not an adaptation. In effect, religious adults are children who never grew out of their infantile need for belief.

@Spongebob THANK YOU for THIS explanation!!

I read this twice. Needed to look up the meaning of exaptation. My first pass did make me laugh and immediately recalled an image of my “critical thinker”. He did manage to survive childhood and is a well educated adult atheist. Woohoo!

Why not?

@skado Many of the Homeless and those who are both Homeless AND enduring/suffering with Mental Illnesses deserve to be treated far, far better than they get because, sadly and most unfortunately in those circumstances where they have found themselves to TRYING to survive they had NO choice in the first place.
However, the religious, imo, deserve very little consideration BECAUSE, whether they'll admit to it or not, THEY did have a choice, they could have chosen to reject the worlds of Religious Superstitions, etc, and enter the world of Reality and Freedom of though, Mind, and Decision making, etc, etc.
As the old adage goes, " You have made YOUR bed, now you MUST lay upon it."

@skado what he said.

@MrDragon @Triphid
What exactly does non-tolerance entail?
Passing laws to prohibit religion?
Maybe laws that prescribe the death penalty? What’s the plan? What does non-tolerance look like? Maybe just being rude to people who think differently from you? Maybe de-humanizing them, or comparing them to the mentally ill? Give me specifics please.

@skado IMO, no need for the passing and enacting such Laws and Regulations since Religions do all of those and more ever so expertly and have done so for many centuries AND profited from the doing so a well.
Your specifics as requested,

1. Homeless peoples are NOT permitted into many, many Churches either during Services, after Services or to take refuge at night, etc, etc,
2. the bible clearly states that God rejects the infirm ,the lame, the mentally ill, the deficient and the poorest of the poor,
3. Catholicism and its Doctrines REFUSE to allow a marriage to held and consecrated in ANY of it Churches or Cathedrals IF one or both of the prospective partners in the union of marriage is a Divorcee,
4. Catholicism again here, a marriage between a male and a female CANNOT be held or consecrated within Church/Cathedral grounds IF one of the prospective partners is NOT of the Catholic Faith,
5. at St. Vincent De Paul Meals establishments for the poor, the needy and the homeless ONE must have the ready money available then and there to PAY for the meal, NO credit is available under ANY circumstances what-so-ever,
   Ergo, Non-tolerance wears well the guise of Religion yet blames the Non-tolerance one everything and everyone else EXCEPT itself which is at least 90% of the main root cause of Intolerance.
   And, I await your comments, etc, of the irrelevance and 'taken out of context' regard this statement/comment of mine.

@skado what triphid said sounds good to me.

@skado why should I? Are they are just as inept as the homeless?
Here's the way I see it, you don't mess with me, I won't mess with you.
But if the religious asshole invades my space then they are open game.

Hear! Hear!

True but totally unrelated to this post. if anything, all of that behavior is a history of corruption of religion rather than “religion” from a scientific perspective.

Ireland has been seriously chipping away at the stranglehold of the Catholics on their government over the past several years. Good to see!

@skado So, where is the perspective of scientific religion then since there IS NOT science in religion ergo there can be be NO scientific perspective in religion.
And since Science has NEVER truly been at odds with nor against religion as the Religious are ever so oft to imply the differences cannot be used as a comparison because the two disciplines are truly as different as chalk is to cheese.

Let me see.. There was the RCC for centuries and then we fell into a millennia of regression called The Dark Age with the loss of so much ancient knowledge it makes a learned man or woman weep...Now could there be a connection I wonder.....

@Triphid
Not scientific perspective in religion, but scientific perspective on religion. Science has always had lots to say about religion, and more every day. And though from the scientist's perspective (ideally) science has no quarrel with religion, it certainly does produce a challenge, culturally speaking, to those religious folks who choose to take their religious texts literally. When I say "religion from a scientific perspective", I mean as viewed from an evolutionary perspective, rather than from a historical or political perspective.

@skado The behaviour of those representing religion corrupts the religion, a m I getting this in the context to which you are expressing it?
If that be so, then yes, BUT humans manage to corrupt almost everything with or without religion/religious beliefs being involved.
As I commented above, your proposal of there being a 'scientific perspective' to religion is, imo, somewhat deeply flawed since no-one has shown and proven ANYTHING SCIENTIFIC or remotely Scientifically related in the Tenets, Doctrines and Dogmas of ANY religions past or present known to Human kind.

@skado "Scientific Perspective ON religion," this time is it now, so you are once again changing the goal posts in the hopes of gaining a victory.
You may want to change the deck-chairs on the R.M.S. Titanic whilst you are at it as well then.

@Triphid
The scientific perspective on religion is not any kind of endorsement of its tenets or doctrines, any more than the scientific perspective on praying mantis copulation is an endorsement of eating your partner’s head after you have sex. It’s just a dispassionate examination of behavior. This is also a mystery to me - why people don’t know that scientists study religious behavior just like they study every other human behavior.

@Triphid
“once again changing”

Where did I change? Please copy and paste. Thanks.

@skado @Skado, as I have observed in countless past discussion, you seem to have this talent for PROCLAIMING any statement, comment or what-so-ever that disagrees with your very tightly limited scope and range of view and comprehension as being either irrelevant, out of context, etc, etc.
Why is that may I ask?

@skado Hmm, there be NONE so blind as those who REFUSE to see, None so deaf as those who REFUSE to listen, NONE so mute as those who refuse to speak the truth and NONE so obstinate as those who MUST always be correct and never make a mistake etc, etc.

@skado Show me the actually documented studies of Religious behaviours, etc, etc, as done by Noted Scientists NOT as per done by Scientist/Scientific Communities that are known for having results that exhibit a 'religious bent' instilled with in them.

@David1955 Yes, when the Roman Empire, the so-called PAGAN Roman Empire that is, fell into ruins then the Holy Roman Empire ( aka Catholicism, the Catholic Church as it was later to become) rose rapidly from the dust and ashes, some might well say like the stench of death and decay, to steal the power, hold and grasp over the masses that was left wanting.
That is when the bastard child known as the Dark Ages was born.

I would go further (and you are entitled to say that I am being pedantic): I see religious zealots as being a problem.

I think maybe you and anglophone are saying similar things here, with which I agree wholeheartedly. Religion isn’t a problem - zealotry is. All the more reason to oppose the zealotry that inevitably creeps into the non-believer side of the equation.

@skado if you wanna include the irrationality of zealotry to include making law and guiding public opinion, sure, lots of zealotry going around.

Right on!

Well I agree with all of that.

@skado there it is then, zealotry and the anti-zealotry or reverse zealotry. how can you have trouble understanding non-beleiver push pack or hatred when the christian zealots do the same, and usually first. it would be great to allow those folks thier beliefs unfettered, but they can't do that themselves can they.

@hankster
The fact that “they” do it doesn’t make it ok for us to do it. I don’t let them set my standards. I don’t have trouble understanding pushback against foul behavior. My quarrel is with identifying a class of people (religious) with the members of their group who are the worst example of it. That’s what they do to atheists.

@skado that goes in both directions. i just don't want any of it aimed at me. the same arrogance drives it from both sides - zealot christian or atheist. there is no settlement for them, and it will usually make news because a lack of conflict don't sell soap or bullets.

Yes, religion as a doctrine, tenet and its dogma exists but the foundation beliefs of it, eg. Christianity, are totally baseless, unfounded, composed mostly of innuendoes, suppositions, assumptions, etc, etc, with no evidence, proof, etc, etc, to support any of it at all.

I see nothing but harmless (at best) or severely disruptive (at worst) consequences of religious belief. I have no time for anybody who ascribes humanitarian actions to religious belief.

@anglophone Oh trust me there are the harmful, very harmful effects of religion.
And I have dealt with many of them over the last 20+ years.

@Triphid You, my friend, have much more experience in that field than I do. I am delighted with your work.

@anglophone In actual fact, I was asked last Tuesday why I still do my Counselling and do it for Free as well.
I think my answers kind of shock my questioner up a bit.
They were,

1. Because I enjoy knowing that I have helped someone in their often direst time of need,
2. I may have lost a few to suicide but I have saved a darned sight more than I have lost,
3. What is money when you can't take it with you when you die?

To start with, I readily admit to being human, and humans have biases. So having biases isn’t a crime when you do it or I do it.

I haven’t named any individuals, and I have acknowledged that this is a diverse group, containing some atheists/agnostics, and some religion-haters. I made a point of not conflating the two.

I don’t disapprove of any humans. But I am very curious to understand what makes them tick, so I ask questions.

I have definitely not characterized members of this site (I’m one too) as generally being religion-haters, though there are some.

What’s a recurring theme for me, and the main reason I’m on this site, is my interest in understanding the very popular perception that science and religion are incompatible.

I also spend time on religious sites, and ask them the same questions. They think I’m an atheist, and people here tend to think I’m a religious “apologist”. Funny, that.

It doesn’t mystify me so much when religious people ignore or deny science, because, by their own admission, they are oriented toward faith more than reason.

What’s harder to understand (and admittedly easier for me to criticize) is when the people who claim science as their foundation are just as quick as the religious to deny any parts of science that doesn’t support their biases.

I have spent my entire adult life as a non-theist, for lack of a better description, but when science starts revealing that part of H.sapiens’ success is due to religious practice (far beyond the confines of a single study) I have no trouble assimilating that information with my already science-based worldview.

I just wonder why some of my brothers and sisters in non-belief react so negatively to this particular bit of science. Why not just follow the science? What is so unbelievable about the idea that human success has depended upon cooperation, and cooperation is enhanced by identification with a group, and group identification, at least up until the present time, has been fortified by religious belief? Seems perfectly logical to me, but maybe I’m biased.

@skado the reason it's more hateable now is that science is growing up, people are waking up to that, and the old powers that have always been running that stuff don't have as strong a leg to stand on. evolutions role
in social dynamics is falling apart relatively quickly. especially as the world get smaller god does too.

@hankster
Looks like maybe a typo there, or one of the site glitches, so I’m not sure if I’m taking your point correctly, but...
I think it’s way too early to discount evolution. It appears to me that humans are a long way from escaping the influence of evolution, and worldwide, religion is growing, rather than receding.

@skado no no no not discount or deny evolution but to watch religions role in it change. my thoughts....so HS been around for what, 200,000 years, religion, 10,000, 20,000 more? agriculture,? law? written language? then there is toasters, nuclear weapons, cell phones, the WWW. A mind can change in a second / minute and there is a lot more to know, to enlighten that mind than ever. it doesn't mean everyone will shift thier sights to non- belief right away but religions, tribes, clans, languages that proved stable/stabilizing influences on social function are undergoing tremendous change. where has society moved since just the internet even, especially among younger folk who don't know a world without it. information technology (sciences) will shift our trajectory in the next 200 years more than than it has in the last 2000.....and i think the ability of god stories to weather the insights that are coming are limited to traditions over truly faithful followers.

@skado not happening?

@hankster
There certainly are big changes afoot, but where it’s all going may not be where we intuitively suspect. Reports I have read say that world religious participation, as a percentage of the population, is growing robustly. Not here in the U.S. obviously, but worldwide, which includes the U.S., the projections say the percentage of non-believers will continue to decline for decades to come.

And even in the U.S. while the cultural shift is away from “organized” religion, and traditional belief, many people are filling that void with equally unscientific worldviews and attitudes. We don’t collectively seem to be getting more rational. We’re split between Trump and Biden as the two best humans among us to run the country.

@skado the trends I see are: growing secularisation in the West, declining religious participation and religious belief, but increasing growth of Islam through population increases, because as we know official religious expansion is caused by population growth. This is a great concern, as Islam is an appalling religion and religious observance in Islamic countries is enforced by oppression. Of course, we have to note there is a difference between the notionally religious and the functionally religious in all these trends. Notionally religious people just claim that religion but don't actually practise it. Functionally religious actually practise their religion. In any religions there are many more notionally religious than functionally religious. Finally, in the West there is a lot pseudo religion, new age bull shit 'spiritual' nonsense type religions that people are attracted to. Mostly, however, this rubbish is harmless, allowing escapees from formal religions to feel good about their 'spiritual' side.

@skado i think i might try making a video game of heaven. capitalism and fear do it all.

@David1955
That sounds like a fair synopsis for the most part. But what individual religions are doing “on the ground” is almost unrelated to what “religion” is doing evolutionarily.

@hankster
that’s a pretty mean heaven you’ve got there.

@skado what is it really made of? just add some selfisness and a spoonful of points and make of it each their own.

@hankster
Points!
Now I’m getting interested!

@skado wonder what the appeal of points is.....how do points stretch us?

@hankster
Great question. It’s a mystery. I guess it gives us a sense of accomplishment and a way to measure that accomplishment. Must tap into something pretty primitive cause it sure ain’t rational.

@skado like money? biggest pile?

@skado ia money rational?

@hankster
Yes, very much like money, the difference being money can be exchanged for real goods, and points are like the glass egg yer grandma used to put in the hen’s nest to entice her to lay.

@skado sure....but the drive to gain it, is that not an evolutionary pressure or is it a consequence/result of the evolutionary pressure? which came first, the evolution or the glass egg?

@hankster
I don’t know if anybody knows. I suspect it’s something like a supernormal stimulus response. Like sea turtle hatchlings that are evolved to crawl toward the light of the open night sky over the ocean, but streetlights are brighter so they crawl toward them and are run over by cars. Hunter/Gatherers were egalitarian and probably frowned on private property so the urge to accumulate was kept in check. But when sedentary farming life got established and trade and land ownership, etc. there was no longer any checks on accumulation so we can’t stop.

Like sugar salt & fat were scarce in the ancestral environment, but are necessary nutrients. So to get enough, we evolved deep cravings for them. Then when agriculture made them plentiful and cheap we lost the natural resistance to our cravings previously provided by their scarcity, and so we accumulate fat.

@skado i wish you'd quit talking about that resistance to cravings like its a good thing.

sad about the turtles.

I cheerfully condemn every damned arrogant fool who tries to ram his particular god or gods down my throat.

I’m sure they are, but sick and tired has nothing to do with reason. Everybody is sick and tired. I look to the folks who claim to put reason above feelings to rise above sick and tired, and acknowledge the science, whether it supports their familiar worldview or not.

@skado sick and and tired is as good a reason to affect some change as any. seems entirely rational, reasonable to to do so. simple acceptance is a guarantee of more frustration.

@skado pain seems immensely like a reason for evolution to protect whatever.

@hankster
All true, but constructive change requires accurate identification of the culprit first.

@skado like the religious telling me to be an idiot also? theres a common culprit. believers, zealots of christanity are commanded to spread that idea regardless of its "facts", so that pushes pretty hard and pushing back is entirely appropriate

@hankster
Those people also drive cars, so why not mount a campaign against car-drivers? My point being that maybe what is offensive about them is not that they claim to be following a religion, but that they are obnoxious proselytizers of their worldview. I fully support resistance against ANY worldview that gets forced upon me, religious or otherwise. I know lots of religious people who never mention their religion.

@skado right, they should stay in their own lane and quit trying to paint stripes on the road.

@hankster
Who gets to paint the stripes?

@skado people that are more interested in getting somewhere than which bus they're on.