this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
267 points (82.2% liked)
Asklemmy
43890 readers
740 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The fact that some people start as atheists and later become religious demonstrates there has to be more reasons than just that.
Your understanding of their reasoning comes from a fundamental assumption that your choice is the correct choice for every person. They willingly made the wrong decision, therefore they must have been manipulated into doing so.
Many people do just become religious without outside influence. On a large scale, every society will create its own version of religion without fail. Clearly, they have something to gain psychologically by doing so.
While religious indoctrination obviously exists and obviously is a problem, it doesn't discount the actual benefits that religion seems to have, and by extension the reasoning with which some people become religious.
When I said "start", it was in reference to the process of changing your religious identity, not your life as a whole.
This I agree with. Looking back, you were more careful than I thought you were to specify you were not talking in absolutes.
I will however double down that you are still making a fundamental assumption that your option is the correct one, and you make it more clear by arguing that all benefits of religion are possible without religion. If all benefits of religion can be attained without risking the detriment, then religion is the worse option by far.
However, thinking of this made me realize I'm just making the opposite assumption. Just like you, I've constructed a strongly held belief about religion based on my life experiences, which are entirely anecdotal and effectively meaningless.
How would you even get evidence that most people are manipulated into becoming religious? How would you get evidence that most people don't? How would you get evidence that religion does or doesn't benefit people? How would you even define benefit in the first place?
This argument is meaningless.
The strongly held belief I'm referring to isn't a belief in a god or lack thereof, its a belief that religion is a net negative for society.
To say I'm not aware of this is again to argue in bad faith. I have mentioned myself that religious indoctrination of course still exists, and is a problem.
Yes there is research into how religion affects society, but it isn't very useful for this purpose for multiple reasons. There is no instance of a society without religion, so the difference between a religious and non-religious society can't be studied. There can be no consensus on what is beneficial and what isn't, as morality itself isn't objective.
There is not and there never will be definitive evidence as to whether or not religion is beneficial for society.
There is also nothing to suggest the opposite, because this can't really be determined. You would have to so create a set of all the benefits religious people claim to get, which in and of itself would be a monumental task. Then, you would have to demonstrate that nonreligious people can achieve all of the exact same benefits.
This is why I've come to the conclusion that this argument is pointless, and neither of us know anything beyond our personal experience.
Never personally met an atheist that had found religion or heard about one, other than in American evangelical stories, but I've met a few non-religions people who have later in life found religion. Although I live in a quite atheaistic country, so there is a lack of peer pressure or need to talk about such things.
Well congratulations, now you have. It isn't quite as rare as you might think.
Everyone is everything in the internetz.
What about the internet makes this easier to lie about? I could tell you the same thing to your face and you still couldn't fact check it.
They aren't calling you a liar, they're saying they never met someone like that in person.
They are drawing that distinction for a reason. They literally said everyone is everything on the internet. I don't how else you could possibly read that.
I read "everyone is everything on the internet" meaning you can always find someone who is anything, because the internet is just so big and diverse. Not as calling you a liar. Maybe I'm wrong, don't want to put words in their mouth. But that's how I read it.
Maybe you're right, that sounds possible. I would think if that's their intention they wouldn't have written that "everyone" is everything, and would instead say "someone" or something to that effect. At that point I'm probably just overanalyzing though.
That was more a comment on obfuscation of the net. In internet you can just trow adjectives together and somebody will raise their hand, but you can never be sure if they are just putting on a role.
That makes more sense to me. Although, I would contend that people in real life can also just put on a role to varying degrees of success depending on the exact circumstances. Presumably when you said "personally" though, you meant people you already knew well enough to verify their claims to some extent.