Ask Lemmy

Because religion provides comfort, community and a meaning to people's existence that goes beyond "we were born of chance on an insignificant rock somewhere in the universe".

(I'm not religious BTW)

Existence is meaningless and we just wobble around here for a little while and then we die. There's nothing to it. Everything that happens is just a logical consequence; beauty is nothing but a tiny chemical reaction in your brain. Once you rot it's all worthless.

Science is great at giving explanations, but not so good at providing meaning. For a lot of people, meaning is probably more helpful in order to facilitate a happy life.

Nietzsche writes at length about this stuff, most famously in the anecdote about the madman coming down from the mountain to inform the villagers that God is dead and that we have killed him. Everybody knows the three words "God is dead", but I think it's worth reading at length:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

Nietzsche, whose father was a priest, recognizes that "God has become unbelievable", but he does not celebrate it as the progress of science. Rather, we lost something that was fundamentally important to humans, and which science cannot easily replace.

Here one could start talking about the Free Masons, who attempted learning from religious rituals without the added layer of religion. Or one could dig deeper into the works of Nietzsche, and the contrast between Apollonian and Dionysian. It's all fascinating stuff.

In short though, spirituality used to offer people a sense of meaning that is not so easily replaced by science alone. How do we bury our dead now that we know our rituals are pointless?

Childhood indoctrination is a big part of it. I have been told by my 8-year old niece that she'd like to save me from drowning in a lake of fire. She was genuinely scared for me. It's literal child abuse followed by Stockholm syndrome.

Have you heard of the fireplace delusion? Burning wood is horrible for our health and the environment, but most of us have fond memories of sitting by a fire. Religion is the same. Holiday traditions with family, organized events marking important life events, it’s hard to break away.

https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-fireplace-delusion

Belief is social. If you're surrounded by people that all believe a thing, you're more likely to also believe. If challenged on something that threatens group membership, your brain reacts like it's a physical threat. Group membership is that important. Facts matter far less.

This happens to everyone.

I think a big part of the mental blocked on both sides is people generally not understanding the difference between fact and faith.

Knowledge is about fact. It's the realm of science, empiricism, and logic. If it can be understood and known, it belongs here.

Faith is about the unknowable (not the unknown). It's a choice to believe something without evidence because that evidence cannot exist.

You can't both believe something and know it.

Understanding that faith and science don't intersect allows people to hold spiritual beliefs without rejecting knowledge and science. They don't conflict because they're entirely separate.

Some people aren't wired with the mental flexibility to embrace both spiritually and empiricism. Some reject science, while others reject faith, and neither understand the other.

One thing atheists often ignore is that being part of a religion means being part of a community, a group. That alone is reason enough for many people to stick with it.

Sure, the preacher/priest/whatever may be a scammer asshole, but this isn't about him, it's about me and the people around me. I belong in here and so do these people.

Remember, humans are social creatures. Being part of a group is a big fucking deal.

Another thing I've been giving some thought, religion can be a "lazy shortcut" for the brain to acknowledge some stuff without having to spend too much energy thinking about it. It's a lot easier to wrap your head around "Because God wants it" than digging deep into the hows and whys of anything. No, it's not scientific in the least, but humans are lazy. I am lazy, you are lazy, everyone here is lazy, we just opt to save energy in different things.

Religion has certain self-reinforcing properties. Kind of like genes that make it more likely to propagate against other forms of information.

• Believing without question is better than questioning
• Not believing will be punished
• Virtue will be rewarded
• Spreading the belief is a virtue
• You should obey your parents

Combine that with young human brains being malleable, and religion tends to continue against all odds.

Grooming from a young, impressionable age

What's "wrong" in your question is the assumption that a) the only reason religions exist is the lack of knowledge and b) that the knowledge we have answers all the questions that people seek answers to when they turn to religion. I think if you question these assumptions then you'll easily start to find the answers. Otherwise see all the other comments.

Religion works on emotions, which are easy. Knowledge works on thinking, which is hard.

Because humans are animals, ruled by emotion and superstition.

Because recent AI and cloud development proves that genesis was right, god trained multi model transformer neutral network to simulate earth in 6 days on the cloud. God (the lead developer and co-owner of company) created earth branch and he was working in agile environment because the tasks are clearly explained in the genesis book sprint with day numbers so everything was estimated during planning.

At the end of sprint god deployed earth to development environment to test if everything works ok so he can continue with his changes next week. Adam and Eve were naked subprocesses without firewall and edge case errors but it was fine because whole thing was just a draft PR and god wanted to see what happens during weekend.

When god went home for weekend from now on everything got fucked up, eden was unstable and satan junior developer and son of co-owner uncle was on hot call during weekend. On Sunday satan was having barbecue and got a call that he need to redeploy eden. He was so drunk that not only he deployed god's branch to production but also he merged this branch into main tree. Unfortunately the Snake was online that day, he broke into eden and changed all the code on main branch introducing many errors and exploits, stole all the data from gods company.

When god got back on monday he god fucking mad. He said fuck you satan from now on you will be working on earth alone despite you don't know programming at all I can't fire you because me and your uncle are best friends. What I will do I will push main with earth into dev and let you fix it and I will rollback eden to where it was. Untill all the bugs from earth branch are resolved don't fucking dare to make a single voice about merging earth into production branch.

So here we are satan knows nothing about programming so he causes more evil than good to this day. Couple thousands earth years later god's kid went into intership for couple of months and tried to fix earth branch but fucking exploits grow so big they manipulated humans and killed his fix patch, now we wait until he finish his masters and come back to fix all the bugs.

Once per day god runs Holy Spirit CI/CD that automatically merges eden into earth and validates if earth passes all eden unit tests if it's not it rolls back and marks all people that pass the tests on green and all those are not to red. That fucking simple because dev development cloud have unlimited computing power.

Recent studies in AI shows that merge with eden will happen sooner than later despite all the errors because Jesus said that when he will be back all dead will come back to life and now you need only couple pictures, couple seconds of voice and chat history to clone anyone and deploy this person to cloud (see AI Girlfriend) without their constent. Probably what will happend is that all the people will be put in freeze ( there was test freeze during covid - no get out from home rule) so all of us can be patched when we are in front of computers. So we're waiting for those patches and we can go back to eden.

If you don't believe me go work as a developer for a year

Indoctrination! 😁

This is such a complicated question because it gets into the origins of religion and belief systems in general, but also power and class struggles, economics, social psychology and propaganda, and more.

Lots of people haven't been properly educated Lots of people have been indoctrinated Lots of people have a reason to exploit the beliefs of others Lots of people value comfort and community above scientific accuracy or consistency

Can you refine your question a bit?

People are stupid, scared and ignorant. Tradition and the thought that all this chaos has some kind of meaning behind it bring them comfort.

I actually got more religious before I accepted I was trans. When faced with a harsh reality people can become more religious.

Luckily it looks like the internet and access to information is killing religion in the new generations before it takes root.

Religions are sort of like mind viruses. The ones that have survived have done so because they are very good at taking root and multiplying in the human mind. Sort of a natural selection of ideas. They develop the necessary features like a way to ignore contrary evidence and severe consequences for not believing

What part of "all the knowledge humans have" irrefutably proves that god does not exist? Just because you think our limited knowledge of the universe implies the inexistence of the god, doesn't mean it is the absolute truth or everyone should be coming to the same conclusion as you.

Existence is pain. Religion is one of many ways to relieve it.

It's not about what an individual could know, it's about what they do know and how structured is a person's thinking.

So just because out there somewhere there are tons of explanations for tons of things doesn't mean people actually know them (lots if not most is quite obscure or requires understanding of a lot of other things first before you can trully understand those things) plus people have to think in very structure ways to spot gaps or flaws in what they thing they know and go look for better info.

And this is just the Logic level problem.

The Emotional level stuff is way more important. Religion:

• provides easy non-scary explanations for tons of things which can be terrifying to accept as just random (Massive Earthquake, killing hundreds of thousands: "It's the will of Deity" is a calming explanation which implies "someDeity" has control)
• provides hope for one's and one's loved one's future (Granny died: "She's gone to Heaven!")
• makes the World seem so much simpler and hence understandeable for anybody by explaining away all complexity (All those lights in the night-sky: "There was a fight between the SunGod and the MoonGod during which his rays pierced the black veil that surrounds us").
• for those born into it, it's just familiar and "the way people think".

And last but not least, Religion is a ready made tribe, generally mutually supporting, so it satisfies people's lowest tribalist instincts and provides concrete benefits from being part of a social circle from which you can get help.

This also explains why supposedly Religious people are selective in what they believe from their religion (notice how almost none of Christians take to hearth the whole point of Christ casting out the Money Lenders from the Temple), why they don't actually know all that much detail about their own Religion (if they don't think in a way that helps them spot what they do not know, that gets reflected on not looking for more info both outside and inside religion) and why it's so easy to manipulate people with religion (if the complexity of the world is explained as "blady, blady, blah, Deity", those trusted to understand the Deity can make sure pretty much all complex things get reasoned as "Deity wills it so because my bullshit reason" - plus remember, religious types are the non-structured non-skeptic thinkers).

Im not religious, not in the sense that i follow any particular religion.

But it seems to me, analyzing the history of humanity across multiple cultures, that we humans have fundamentally a "spiritual need", a need to believe into something that is bigger than us, that lies on a superior level of existence.

Call it buddhism, christianity or whatever, but it seems like we need to believe in something like that.

To an extent, i believe it has to do with us being moral animals and having a natural need for justice. We want to believe that justice exists in this world and a religion and its rules is a way to a just world. Because bad people go to hell, or are victims of karma.

So to answer your question. I think we want the world to be fair, because we are moral animals. And believing in religion is a way to believe in a fair world.

The problem with religions is twofold.

One, that across human history the above core element of all religions has been conflated with other foreign elements that have nothing to do with it, like descriptions about the origin of the universe and humans (which is a question of science, not of religion) and rules about how to live your life which have nothing moral about them (and are probably the temporary result of the existing culture within a society). Like forbidding homosexuality, or the idea that women serve a very limited function in society which is limited to taking care of the home and the children.

Usually people have come to accept this because religion is sold as a "complete package" (particularly enforced with rules that you make a bad religious person if you don't accept it all and with the people close being incentivized to look down on you for not strictly adhering to the religious teachings). That is also why people believe in religion in general (and not just in its moral teachings which actually make sense) in 2024.

The second problem with religion (and here i'm going on a tangent that doesn't have much to do with the question at hand) is that it usually makes a validity claim for eternity, i.e. religion asserts that its rules and knowledge are valid forever (literally set in stone). This has done more harm than good to our improving of our set of guiding moral principles.

Sorry if this comment is a bit of a mess.

Trying to understand emotion and faith with logic and reason is a fools errand.

I find the prevalence of faith makes more sense if you think of it like a living organism. It only exists because it's built to exist. If it didn't, it would die.

That's why faiths often have rules around birth control and sex out of wedlock. Kids often take the beliefs of their parents, so the religion has to keep 'traditional' families together to keep itself alive. It's also why they threaten eternal damnation if you drop the faith or don't try to force it on the people around you. A lot of this often isn't the conscious effort of the members, it just kinda slowly crops up, like evolutionary mutations. Key word there being 'often', as I'm sure members of these religions have also figured this out but have used it to their own advantage.

Religion is founded on belief, and belief allows people to feel certainty about things they're ultimately uncertain about. As long is there is something that someone doesn't fully understand, religion and god are a solution to bridge the gap.

When you are that person, the leap to a god is fairly logical and easy to them, since at a base level, it's born out of a desire for someone to be in charge and in control. You understand some of the world around you. To understand it more fully, you just need a bigger, stronger, smarter version of yourself. That's why in most religions, a god is not some transcendent, immortal, eternal, all powerful being. They're just essentially Human+. There are way more religions with gods like Zeus than Allah. Saying that nobody is in charge, and nobody fully understands anything, and that's all OK makes billions of people uncomfortable. And, screaming at them that they're wrong and need to be more OK with some existential dread usually just serves to make them more uncomfortable.

It's a source of comfort. People want to be in control. If they can't be in control, they at least want to feel like someone or something is in control. That there is some organizing force or principle to the universe. Religion, astrology, conspiracism etc all flow from that impulse.

Because it turns out that conforming to what your parents and your community believe is way more influential to the average person than objective truth.

The world makes much more sense if you realize that despite all our achievements and knowledge we are just hungry, angry, horny apes in clothes.

Asking a bunch of non-religious people is nothing but a circle jerk.

People believe in religion for a variety of reasons. I believe in what I believe in because I've had personal experiences, and because it gives me a way to be better than I am.

Not everyone believes in that knowledge or feels it is true.

Humans are not rational creatures, and despite all the knowledge we have gained, people will still find what they want to be true the most believable of all

Besides, you can talk about all of the science we have discovered, but the overwhelming majority of people don't really see it. We see the technology and all that, but we don't truly understand it, so you ultimately are just taking someone else's word for it. To me, the word of the scientific community is credible, but to some it is not

Some people are flat-earthers. People aren't swayed by reason. We're dumb animals, and the conceit of us as "rational" is hubris

They see reality as too dismal. With faith comes hope. Uncle Roy didn't die and leave all of his children to suffer. He was called to heaven and God will look after them. You're not trapped in your dead end job because of lack of aptitude or opportunity or generational life choices, It's God's willing if you just pray a little harder and donate a little more to the church everything will come together, and if it doesn't, The Bible says something about not needing worldly possessions right?

For most religious people, religion is a way to be a better person and live a better life.

Let's say you struggle with anger issues? How do you deal with it?

Religions have thousands of years of lessons about anger. Churches will have entire support groups built around helping with anger. You'll often get sermons about anger. Ways to deal with it. Why it happens. Benefits of not giving into anger etc.

If you have a slip up with anger, religions have ways of handling it and helping you grow.

Probably the most visible thing is addiction. Churches have helped soooo many people deal with addiction who otherwise might be dead by now.

Religion is not for everyone, but there are certainly lots of people who feel they are better off because of it

Not really to answer your questions. But a book came out a year ago and it covers the philosophy of simulation theory.

That is it explains the theory that our reality may be a simulation inside of a computer, and then re-establishes all major philosophical ideas from this premise. Ironically enough, a lot of philosophical ideas it arrives at are very similar to those proposed by religious philosophers.

The book is called Reality +. Good read if you like philosophy and think simulation theory is interesting.