Reminds me of the virus that was found in the sequels to Ender's Game - there was an alien species that was completely dependent on the virus for survival, to the point that they believed it might have been directly responsible for their intelligence. Also, it brings to mind something like a biological version of the virus in Snow Crash, the concept that you could upload information to human minds that would instantly change the social structure as a whole.
Here's the thing: this is a discussion that needs to happen, because the truth is that all sorts of things that are part of success in any school experience (getting homework in on time, understanding directions exactly, handling conflict and disputes well with the teacher or other students) are really measures of conscientiousness, not intelligence. This is also appropriate, because these same skills will help you be successful in life.
The problem is, nobody really talks about (or understands) what school is for. The prevailing idea is this very shallow concept that it is about filling your head with factual knowledge. That is an almost useless pursuit now that the answer to just about any question is trivially easy to find.
The truth is, it is about developing juveniles into successful adults, and this involves social skills, intellectual pursuits, and character development. There's also the unavoidable truth that school is a high-efficiency means to keep children contained and relatively safe, freeing parents up for work. If we don't recognize that, and have hard conversations about which elements to emphasize and why, we'll continue getting this haphazard approach that ends up working fairly well, but mostly by accident. In some ways I think we haven't had any coordinated rationale for our schooling practice since the early 1800's, when simple literacy was the big objective.
This is a good point. A lot of where grades come from is about being conscientious - turning things in on time, listening to directions, etc. However, I think it is arguable that this is a good thing, because in the work world, and life in general, being conscientious is going to do more for you than being intelligent, up to a certain point.
That is, a serious deficiency in conscientiousness is one of the fastest ways I know of to get fired from almost any kind of job, whereas people with below average intelligence can still be very successful in lots of professions if they are diligent.
You haven't spent much time around today's students, have you? Out of the few hundred students I taught during my short teaching career, I encountered lots of girls that worked their asses off academically, and only one or two boys.
Don't know what I'm doing replying to an AC - but weight distribution is not at all separate from aerodynamics. Look up center of pressure some time and center of mass - the location of these is what determines whether you can get stable flight. Hint: put heavy shit forward, put air resistance towards the rear.
If you don't believe me, try throwing a dart without extra weight in the tip.
Actually, that was Sojourner, which I did mention. You are right that I messed up though - I said it was after Spirit and Opportunity, but Sojourner was first as you correctly stated.
Absent reliable, rigorous science, just admit that you do not know. That's what I'm saying.
By your standard, half of the accomplishments in the hard sciences would be thrown out. We don't 'know' that the Higgs exists, we look at heaps of indirect data and see a signature that agrees with a theoretical prediction within a certain statistical margin. If we have the results of a longitudinal study, including medical records, surveys, clinical observations, and all the rest from psychology, I assert that we know something more than we did before. It is ignorant to claim that all of that data can't be put to any meaningful use. Hell, look at what Nate Silver pulled off with recent polling (if politics isn't a giant psychology experiment, I don't know what is) to see the predictive capacity of self-reporting.
At any rate, your personal vendetta against all social science is uninteresting, so unless you have something else to add to the conversation we can agree to disagree and I'll sign off.
This dialogue, and the forked one, has gotten far off into the weeds. I am not particularly a champion of social sciences, although I think there are many, many useful studies based on good data, and those are a far better basis for our understanding of human psychology than random opinions, gotten from nowhere at all.
Either way, the original point was a fairly modest one - that religion can make people happier, and healthier. Not that it always does, but that on average it skews outcomes slightly that way. Even if you reject the data entirely, the point still stands - religion offers people direct and indirect benefits, which is why they engage in it. That isn't to say it is "true", or "right", or that everybody ought to participate in it, just to say that for those people who experience a notable improvement of life from it (certainly a nonzero number), it is in fact the rational choice for them to continue their involvement.
The followup to Curiosity currently in the works is a sample return mission. The long absence after Viking is a bit strange and I'm not sure what the explanation is, but I think the Mars rovers were a bit of a fluke, actually. This wasn't some big, orchestrated "find life on Mars" initiative. At the time of Spirit and Opportunity getting developed it was more like NASA was hurting from a couple of high profile failures and needed something doable enough that it was almost a sure thing, and compelling enough to capture the public imagination. Hence, a pair of cute little robots that could send back nice pictures and look for water along the way.
The whole rover architecture is only obvious in hindsight - sure it has benefits, but before Spirit and Opportunity there was really only one successful science mission using a wheeled platform, which was a Soviet deal where they landed something and drove it to get a distance record, and collected minimal science. If you look at things in that light, you have the initial rover mission that has something attainable for that architecture (try to find evidence of water visually and using spectral analysis instruments) and pretty safe (small, cheap, enough so that you can afford an entire redundant rover). Then, you find that things worked really damn well, so you work your way up to Sojourner, which was also a remarkable success, although they have still been hampered by low mass budget and solar panel degradation. Then, develop a whole new architecture for a pretty massive platform, Curiosity, which can afford a lot more instrumentation and really explore some things in depth, get rid of the solar panel problem, and get into the kind of mass category you would need for something like sample return.
So yes, in hindsight, knowing that rovers are really badass on Mars, you could have skipped a step or two and jumped straight to sample return. However, not knowing whether it would work (and not having this grand vision from the beginning that seems so obvious now), this iterative process has worked pretty well I think.
As well, the first people they sent to the moon were geologists, and the principal investigators for Mars missions have been geologists, because all there really is to look at are rocks. Plus, if you want to find signs of something that has been there before, you again would want something between a paleontologist and a geologist (the fields are closely related), and not a chemist or biologist, except for niche cases. Geology is really all about detective work, trying to piece together the past, which is exactly the discipline you want here.
Scientific consensus in this case is closer to the side that religion DOES have an effect. The thing is, it isn't that controversial - it is a small, positive, but reliable effect. There are studies that disagree with it, but on the whole, it consistently shows up.
And as you yourself say, even if studies are sensationalized in the media and twisted to nefarious purposes (which isn't unique to the social sciences, btw), their findings can still be perfectly valid.
And, in case it you find it relevant, my background is in physics, which is about as much on the 'hard' side as you are going to find. However, I work as an engineer, where we frequently have to get by with answers that are incomplete. The question is when data is good enough to do something useful with, and it turns out that that threshold is much lower than having a perfect and rigorous understanding.
It seems you're quite determined to hang onto your preferred soft science studies. I'm more consistent in that I reject even ones that would seem to be favorable to me (like the one that concluded atheists were somehow more intelligent than theists).
You reject the most authoritative body of knowledge that exists on the subject, and trust your personal opinion more than the data collected by experts that have devoted their lives to the subject. I'm not talking a tiny and favorable subset of studies - the effect is well established.
Here's the thing - I don't know what field you are in, but in the fields I am somewhat knowledgeable about, it is painfully obvious how uninformed the common person is, yet many of them act as though the experts in my field are idiots. Being a non-expert in psychology, I try to trust that the experts there know more than I do, and that even if there are truly some ignorant people in the mix, the aggregate tends to produce useful results. It certainly seems to be a better path than assuming that my uninformed, non-expert opinions are correct.
It is one thing to say that social sciences aren't rigorous, but you are actually saying that no studies can be used here whatsoever so we can do no better than opinion. I disagree. I prefer to use data to inform my conclusions rather than baseless conjecture.
And note: This doesn't mean that religion is true, or that anything supernatural exists. It just means that it has some sort of effect that can improve health and/or happiness. What is so bad about that? At this point it seems as though you are just determined to maintain your belief that following a religion is always irrational.
According to your empirical test, few people would choose that religion. It made me do things I didn't like (never a fan of going to church) and feel guilty for doing things that probably aren't wrong in any objective sense (who cares if I covet your car/house/wife as long as I don't go any farther?)
Sounds like you left that religion because of your experience, and I think you were justified in doing so if you didn't find it helpful. Some people find that the sense of external moral authority helps them to maintain better life habits. As for your example of coveting, there's a good case to be made that it is an undesirable habit, just because to covet means that you are not content with the things you possess in your own life, and therefore unhappy, at least about something. I've found personally that making intentional attempts to be less covetous improves my quality of life.
Again, not because following their religion makes you necessarily happy, but because it's true.
How do you decide if a religion is true, or if the god in question exists? By seeing the impact it has on your life. If every teaching sounds irrelevant or nonsensical, if you don't get into a supportive community, if all the practices and guidelines are truly repellent to someone, that person will leave. The only reason I continue to associate myself with a religion (at least consciously) is that I find that it helps me to ask meaningful questions about my own life, and that I enjoy belonging to a community united in a common purpose of helping one another and improving life for the less fortunate. I honestly don't much care whether the stories it is based around are fictional or literal, because the meaning they have for me is symbolic so it wouldn't change either way.
I suppose I disagree on your main point. The fundamental "sell" of any religion I've been exposed to is that it's actually true.
Some religions are like that, certainly, and I have myself left a tradition that had that approach. It isn't at all characteristic of religion as a whole, though, much less Christianity. The things that most people find objectionable about Christianity are actually objections to fundamentalist evangelicalism, which showed up around the early 1900s and brought with it bizarre beliefs about raptures (not in the Bible, only indirectly inferred by bad theologians) and most of the really distasteful things you've noted are a results of that theology. Early Christianity was characterized by a totally novel commitment to helping the poor, a disregard for elite religious status, and the assertion of the value and equality of all people.
I'd like to optimize my long term happiness. Most religions have a theory on what happens after you die (including atheism, which would just say nothing happens), and most have a theory on how what you do now affects that. I'd think the actual truth of those claims is very important. If I have to be a Christian or be pitched into a lake of fire for all eternity, then surely I'd do that. If I have to be a Muslim, or have to go to hell forever, surely I'd be a Muslim. Only if neither is true would I really be free to just pick whichever makes my life better, or choose none.
Here's the thing: we can't ever really know what will happen after we die, and so no matter what you choose it is a gamble. Of course, I think it is probably similar to sleeping, or the time before I was born, because those are the closest experiences I have for comparison. Jews thought something very similar, and Christians probably did as well before theology got all fucked up. That said, if you are choosing principles to live your life by, finding ones that makes your long-term happiness better is a pretty good way to go. First of all, your life will be better. Second of all, if there is something that happens in the afterlife, a religion that has trustworthy principles for life would presumably be mor
What "truth" are you talking about? Because there's only one discipline where it can be proven, and that is in formal mathematics.
In physics, the next most formal, we make massive assumptions and consider particles found using statistical arguments - not so very different from the statistical arguments that social scientists use. Our most sensible and intuitive models are demonstrably incorrect at the corners (classical mechanics vs relativity and quantum mechanics) and any reasoning person who understands the implications of either of these newer revisions to mechanics will tell you they are completely ridiculous, and don't match what any person has ever experienced of the world. We have indirect theories based on indirect evidence of indirect evidence in physics, and anybody who has the attitude that "science knows the truth" has a very juvenile understanding of how these things are actually done.
All that we really have are models, descriptions of how reality works that seem to have some level of consistency and predictive capacity. We approximate reality with theoretical constructs, and that is all that science can ever really accomplish. And, what's more, that is all it needs to accomplish, because everything our civilization depends on was built using these good-enough models.
So, here's the thing. You're basically arguing that it is pointless to do social science, because the level of rigor can't realistically ever approach that of more formal disciplines. Which means that, regardless of the evidence I provide, you won't concede the point. One of us here is committed to an ideal regardless of what the evidence might say. Sounds like "magical" thinking to me.
Wait, what? Second derivative of the growth curve would be the rate of change in the rate of change of growth... maybe you mean the second derivative of revenue? First derivative being growth (better be positive more often than not) and second derivative being change in growth (hopefully positive, but whatever).
The studies are about as rigorous as it is possible to be with questions like this - that is, not very rigorous by the standards of the "hard sciences", but as good as it gets by medical and social science standards:
I can supply plenty of more links, but I think it is clear from these and prior ones that this effect is well established in the literature. There's lots of speculation about the causes (community, stronger moral inhibitions against harmful behavior like smoking, ???) but the relationship is fairly consistent - religion does seem to correlate with favorable outcomes. For that matter, the fact that every major civilization has developed a religious tradition means that either humans are naturally prone to creating religions, or the civilizations with religion dominated the ones without, or some blend of the two. That in and of itself should make us question the impulse to dismiss it unilaterally.
Whether social sciences are legitimate is an entirely different diatribe. Certainly, there are potential problems with self-reporting, but as long as you are aware of them and fully disclose how the data is obtained, they are far from useless. Or should we just ignore all sorts of important questions about society because we can't perfectly control the experiment as we can with simpler sciences like physics?
Either way, self-reported mental health is absolutely pertinent here. If a certain lifestyle makes people self-report as happier and healthier, obviously it is having some effect on their lives, even if only the way they perceive themselves. And honestly, essentially the ONLY way to evaluate mental health at scale is by self reporting - do you really think observation or MRI would be more effective, much less practical? Even clinical diagnosis relies heavily on self reporting.
I'm not so sure that is the only approach to take. Fundamentally, when you really get down to it, the "sell" of religion(or anything, really) is that life is better with it than without it. It's very easy to test this - try out some of the tenets of the religion and see if you find your life is improved. If the stuff doesn't work or makes your life worse, you aren't going to stick with it. This is actually very much in the spirit of scientific empiricism - how can you say that all the guidelines of a religion are bogus if you've never tried it, or run a study about it?
The whole Abraham story is an interesting and potentially troublesome one, but really makes the most sense as a dramatic parable that serves to differentiate the religion of the Jews from the other local religions of the day, where child sacrifice was the rule rather than the exception.
Of course, understanding texts that are thousands of years old isn't trivial, and careless attempts to do so can lead to bad theology, which can lead to religious followers doing bad things (as you noted). However, we also have tremendous good that has been heavily inspired by religious teachings - the Civil Rights Movement and Ghandi's liberation of India, for starters.
Have I argued about whether a certain religion is "true" or not? Lots of things that are not true are still useful and beneficial - do you think fiction is pointless?
Consider Joseph Campbell's approach to myth - stories are important to us, even if (and sometimes especially if) they have no connection with historical reality. The point is that they connect with the way the world ought to be, or convey something universal about life, or otherwise capture some important part of human experience. Besides that, religions provide one of the most well-established venues around for connecting with a community, which has also been shown to correlate strongly with health and happiness. Neither of these substantial benefits depends at all on the veracity of the mythologies in question.
Of course, there ARE problems with people applying mythological stories to scientific pursuits, but that problem is not common to all religious traditions. People as far back as St. Augustine have pointed out the problems with this, and supported empirical study as the right way to seek factual understanding about the universe.
Health can be measured, relatively objectively, in lots of ways. You can also just pull some meaning from self-reported surveys - even though there are plenty of problems with self-reporting, if religious people consistently claim to be happier and healthier, that certainly says something about the impact it has on average. One such study for reference: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
We have no idea how likely or even possible it was for those "things" to go differently.
It is easy to imagine a universe where the gravitational constant was higher, or the weak force was slightly weaker, or something along those lines. It is interesting to consider how these constants impact the structure of the universe at every level, and how tiny, tiny changes in them would have profound impacts (think of the universe as a sea of neutrons rather than this one, filled with a rather useful variety of atomic structures). Further, we have only very indirect (and highly suspect) evidence suggesting that there are more universes than this one, and even if we did know there are other universes, why would we expect them to have different values for the fundamental physical constants?
We may be a very probable universe. There may be many improbable universes, of which we are one. If things had gone slightly differently, maybe we'd be debating this on Mars. Maybe life would be everywhere. Wild speculation is rather pointless.
It is one thing to speculate with no basis, quite another to change a term in a formula and see what the consequences would be. Small changes in these constants could make anything resembling the universe we live in completely impossible - we're not talking life that isn't carbon-based, we're talking a universe that doesn't have carbon or any other elements heavier than helium. Or a universe where stars never ignited because gravity was too weak to start fusion, or a universe that burned itself out far before life could evolve because gravity was stronger and all the fuel for fusion was spent too quickly. All sorts of non-religious physicists have remarked about how lucky we seem to be that our universe didn't develop into something much less interesting and hospitable.
Religion is just more comfortable for people who are uncomfortable admitting that we just don't know some things.
Citation needed. Religion has numerous, concrete benefits, which I listed above and which you haven't responded to at all. I find that many religious people are much more willing to live in a state of not-knowing than more naturalist-minded people. And, in my experience, religion isn't a respite from the questions in life - it is an invitation to ask more pointed questions of my own life.
There are lots of scientific arguments FOR religion, even if you restrict it merely to selfish ones. People involved with religion are generally healthier, happier, and have "better lives" according to most of the metrics you could attach to that.
Of course, WHY that is the case is anybody's guess (sense of meaning, belonging to a community and enjoying the social support network, etc) but there's little contention about the results.
I think the conflict between science and religion is largely manufactured. The truth is, there are some very funny things about the universe and our place in it. Really, I think the strongest arguments for how incredibly unlikely our intelligent civilization is come from what we know about evolution and the big bang - the universe would be very, very different if some things had gone slightly different at the big bang, and there's also an interesting argument to be made that human-level intelligence might have never come about without the very fortunate (for mammals) extinction event at the end of the cretaceous.
At any rate, there are lots of questions that are interesting and very relevant to life, but that science isn't suited to answering. They are subjective and personal questions that have many answers, and a different sort of meaning to each person. Religion can do a great job at exploring these questions, and only the worst kinds of religion suggest that all of those questions have already been answered conclusively.
With the cry-it-out thing, people always act as though if you don't do cry-it-out, your only alternative is never sleep and get up with your kid multiple times a night until they are 9 years old or something. There are better ways - just use a structured schedule and consistent routines (cues like turning the lights off, swaddling, rocking) that basically condition the child to go to sleep. The Baby Whisperer series of books outlines a technique like this, and it worked wonders for the first kid, and is currently shaping up to work just as well for the second.
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Reminds me of the virus that was found in the sequels to Ender's Game - there was an alien species that was completely dependent on the virus for survival, to the point that they believed it might have been directly responsible for their intelligence. Also, it brings to mind something like a biological version of the virus in Snow Crash, the concept that you could upload information to human minds that would instantly change the social structure as a whole.
Once again, life imitates art.
Here's the thing: this is a discussion that needs to happen, because the truth is that all sorts of things that are part of success in any school experience (getting homework in on time, understanding directions exactly, handling conflict and disputes well with the teacher or other students) are really measures of conscientiousness, not intelligence. This is also appropriate, because these same skills will help you be successful in life.
The problem is, nobody really talks about (or understands) what school is for. The prevailing idea is this very shallow concept that it is about filling your head with factual knowledge. That is an almost useless pursuit now that the answer to just about any question is trivially easy to find.
The truth is, it is about developing juveniles into successful adults, and this involves social skills, intellectual pursuits, and character development. There's also the unavoidable truth that school is a high-efficiency means to keep children contained and relatively safe, freeing parents up for work. If we don't recognize that, and have hard conversations about which elements to emphasize and why, we'll continue getting this haphazard approach that ends up working fairly well, but mostly by accident. In some ways I think we haven't had any coordinated rationale for our schooling practice since the early 1800's, when simple literacy was the big objective.
This is a good point. A lot of where grades come from is about being conscientious - turning things in on time, listening to directions, etc. However, I think it is arguable that this is a good thing, because in the work world, and life in general, being conscientious is going to do more for you than being intelligent, up to a certain point.
That is, a serious deficiency in conscientiousness is one of the fastest ways I know of to get fired from almost any kind of job, whereas people with below average intelligence can still be very successful in lots of professions if they are diligent.
You haven't spent much time around today's students, have you? Out of the few hundred students I taught during my short teaching career, I encountered lots of girls that worked their asses off academically, and only one or two boys.
Don't know what I'm doing replying to an AC - but weight distribution is not at all separate from aerodynamics. Look up center of pressure some time and center of mass - the location of these is what determines whether you can get stable flight. Hint: put heavy shit forward, put air resistance towards the rear.
If you don't believe me, try throwing a dart without extra weight in the tip.
Actually, that was Sojourner, which I did mention. You are right that I messed up though - I said it was after Spirit and Opportunity, but Sojourner was first as you correctly stated.
Absent reliable, rigorous science, just admit that you do not know. That's what I'm saying.
By your standard, half of the accomplishments in the hard sciences would be thrown out. We don't 'know' that the Higgs exists, we look at heaps of indirect data and see a signature that agrees with a theoretical prediction within a certain statistical margin. If we have the results of a longitudinal study, including medical records, surveys, clinical observations, and all the rest from psychology, I assert that we know something more than we did before. It is ignorant to claim that all of that data can't be put to any meaningful use. Hell, look at what Nate Silver pulled off with recent polling (if politics isn't a giant psychology experiment, I don't know what is) to see the predictive capacity of self-reporting.
At any rate, your personal vendetta against all social science is uninteresting, so unless you have something else to add to the conversation we can agree to disagree and I'll sign off.
This dialogue, and the forked one, has gotten far off into the weeds. I am not particularly a champion of social sciences, although I think there are many, many useful studies based on good data, and those are a far better basis for our understanding of human psychology than random opinions, gotten from nowhere at all.
Either way, the original point was a fairly modest one - that religion can make people happier, and healthier. Not that it always does, but that on average it skews outcomes slightly that way. Even if you reject the data entirely, the point still stands - religion offers people direct and indirect benefits, which is why they engage in it. That isn't to say it is "true", or "right", or that everybody ought to participate in it, just to say that for those people who experience a notable improvement of life from it (certainly a nonzero number), it is in fact the rational choice for them to continue their involvement.
The followup to Curiosity currently in the works is a sample return mission. The long absence after Viking is a bit strange and I'm not sure what the explanation is, but I think the Mars rovers were a bit of a fluke, actually. This wasn't some big, orchestrated "find life on Mars" initiative. At the time of Spirit and Opportunity getting developed it was more like NASA was hurting from a couple of high profile failures and needed something doable enough that it was almost a sure thing, and compelling enough to capture the public imagination. Hence, a pair of cute little robots that could send back nice pictures and look for water along the way.
The whole rover architecture is only obvious in hindsight - sure it has benefits, but before Spirit and Opportunity there was really only one successful science mission using a wheeled platform, which was a Soviet deal where they landed something and drove it to get a distance record, and collected minimal science. If you look at things in that light, you have the initial rover mission that has something attainable for that architecture (try to find evidence of water visually and using spectral analysis instruments) and pretty safe (small, cheap, enough so that you can afford an entire redundant rover). Then, you find that things worked really damn well, so you work your way up to Sojourner, which was also a remarkable success, although they have still been hampered by low mass budget and solar panel degradation. Then, develop a whole new architecture for a pretty massive platform, Curiosity, which can afford a lot more instrumentation and really explore some things in depth, get rid of the solar panel problem, and get into the kind of mass category you would need for something like sample return.
So yes, in hindsight, knowing that rovers are really badass on Mars, you could have skipped a step or two and jumped straight to sample return. However, not knowing whether it would work (and not having this grand vision from the beginning that seems so obvious now), this iterative process has worked pretty well I think.
As well, the first people they sent to the moon were geologists, and the principal investigators for Mars missions have been geologists, because all there really is to look at are rocks. Plus, if you want to find signs of something that has been there before, you again would want something between a paleontologist and a geologist (the fields are closely related), and not a chemist or biologist, except for niche cases. Geology is really all about detective work, trying to piece together the past, which is exactly the discipline you want here.
Scientific consensus in this case is closer to the side that religion DOES have an effect. The thing is, it isn't that controversial - it is a small, positive, but reliable effect. There are studies that disagree with it, but on the whole, it consistently shows up.
And as you yourself say, even if studies are sensationalized in the media and twisted to nefarious purposes (which isn't unique to the social sciences, btw), their findings can still be perfectly valid.
And, in case it you find it relevant, my background is in physics, which is about as much on the 'hard' side as you are going to find. However, I work as an engineer, where we frequently have to get by with answers that are incomplete. The question is when data is good enough to do something useful with, and it turns out that that threshold is much lower than having a perfect and rigorous understanding.
It seems you're quite determined to hang onto your preferred soft science studies. I'm more consistent in that I reject even ones that would seem to be favorable to me (like the one that concluded atheists were somehow more intelligent than theists).
You reject the most authoritative body of knowledge that exists on the subject, and trust your personal opinion more than the data collected by experts that have devoted their lives to the subject. I'm not talking a tiny and favorable subset of studies - the effect is well established.
Here's the thing - I don't know what field you are in, but in the fields I am somewhat knowledgeable about, it is painfully obvious how uninformed the common person is, yet many of them act as though the experts in my field are idiots. Being a non-expert in psychology, I try to trust that the experts there know more than I do, and that even if there are truly some ignorant people in the mix, the aggregate tends to produce useful results. It certainly seems to be a better path than assuming that my uninformed, non-expert opinions are correct.
It is one thing to say that social sciences aren't rigorous, but you are actually saying that no studies can be used here whatsoever so we can do no better than opinion. I disagree. I prefer to use data to inform my conclusions rather than baseless conjecture.
And note: This doesn't mean that religion is true, or that anything supernatural exists. It just means that it has some sort of effect that can improve health and/or happiness. What is so bad about that? At this point it seems as though you are just determined to maintain your belief that following a religion is always irrational.
According to your empirical test, few people would choose that religion. It made me do things I didn't like (never a fan of going to church) and feel guilty for doing things that probably aren't wrong in any objective sense (who cares if I covet your car/house/wife as long as I don't go any farther?)
Sounds like you left that religion because of your experience, and I think you were justified in doing so if you didn't find it helpful. Some people find that the sense of external moral authority helps them to maintain better life habits. As for your example of coveting, there's a good case to be made that it is an undesirable habit, just because to covet means that you are not content with the things you possess in your own life, and therefore unhappy, at least about something. I've found personally that making intentional attempts to be less covetous improves my quality of life.
Again, not because following their religion makes you necessarily happy, but because it's true.
How do you decide if a religion is true, or if the god in question exists? By seeing the impact it has on your life. If every teaching sounds irrelevant or nonsensical, if you don't get into a supportive community, if all the practices and guidelines are truly repellent to someone, that person will leave. The only reason I continue to associate myself with a religion (at least consciously) is that I find that it helps me to ask meaningful questions about my own life, and that I enjoy belonging to a community united in a common purpose of helping one another and improving life for the less fortunate. I honestly don't much care whether the stories it is based around are fictional or literal, because the meaning they have for me is symbolic so it wouldn't change either way.
I suppose I disagree on your main point. The fundamental "sell" of any religion I've been exposed to is that it's actually true.
Some religions are like that, certainly, and I have myself left a tradition that had that approach. It isn't at all characteristic of religion as a whole, though, much less Christianity. The things that most people find objectionable about Christianity are actually objections to fundamentalist evangelicalism, which showed up around the early 1900s and brought with it bizarre beliefs about raptures (not in the Bible, only indirectly inferred by bad theologians) and most of the really distasteful things you've noted are a results of that theology. Early Christianity was characterized by a totally novel commitment to helping the poor, a disregard for elite religious status, and the assertion of the value and equality of all people.
I'd like to optimize my long term happiness. Most religions have a theory on what happens after you die (including atheism, which would just say nothing happens), and most have a theory on how what you do now affects that. I'd think the actual truth of those claims is very important. If I have to be a Christian or be pitched into a lake of fire for all eternity, then surely I'd do that. If I have to be a Muslim, or have to go to hell forever, surely I'd be a Muslim. Only if neither is true would I really be free to just pick whichever makes my life better, or choose none.
Here's the thing: we can't ever really know what will happen after we die, and so no matter what you choose it is a gamble. Of course, I think it is probably similar to sleeping, or the time before I was born, because those are the closest experiences I have for comparison. Jews thought something very similar, and Christians probably did as well before theology got all fucked up. That said, if you are choosing principles to live your life by, finding ones that makes your long-term happiness better is a pretty good way to go. First of all, your life will be better. Second of all, if there is something that happens in the afterlife, a religion that has trustworthy principles for life would presumably be mor
What "truth" are you talking about? Because there's only one discipline where it can be proven, and that is in formal mathematics.
In physics, the next most formal, we make massive assumptions and consider particles found using statistical arguments - not so very different from the statistical arguments that social scientists use. Our most sensible and intuitive models are demonstrably incorrect at the corners (classical mechanics vs relativity and quantum mechanics) and any reasoning person who understands the implications of either of these newer revisions to mechanics will tell you they are completely ridiculous, and don't match what any person has ever experienced of the world. We have indirect theories based on indirect evidence of indirect evidence in physics, and anybody who has the attitude that "science knows the truth" has a very juvenile understanding of how these things are actually done.
All that we really have are models, descriptions of how reality works that seem to have some level of consistency and predictive capacity. We approximate reality with theoretical constructs, and that is all that science can ever really accomplish. And, what's more, that is all it needs to accomplish, because everything our civilization depends on was built using these good-enough models.
So, here's the thing. You're basically arguing that it is pointless to do social science, because the level of rigor can't realistically ever approach that of more formal disciplines. Which means that, regardless of the evidence I provide, you won't concede the point. One of us here is committed to an ideal regardless of what the evidence might say. Sounds like "magical" thinking to me.
Wait, what? Second derivative of the growth curve would be the rate of change in the rate of change of growth... maybe you mean the second derivative of revenue? First derivative being growth (better be positive more often than not) and second derivative being change in growth (hopefully positive, but whatever).
The studies are about as rigorous as it is possible to be with questions like this - that is, not very rigorous by the standards of the "hard sciences", but as good as it gets by medical and social science standards:
http://greatist.com/happiness/...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/hea...
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/he...
I can supply plenty of more links, but I think it is clear from these and prior ones that this effect is well established in the literature. There's lots of speculation about the causes (community, stronger moral inhibitions against harmful behavior like smoking, ???) but the relationship is fairly consistent - religion does seem to correlate with favorable outcomes. For that matter, the fact that every major civilization has developed a religious tradition means that either humans are naturally prone to creating religions, or the civilizations with religion dominated the ones without, or some blend of the two. That in and of itself should make us question the impulse to dismiss it unilaterally.
Whether social sciences are legitimate is an entirely different diatribe. Certainly, there are potential problems with self-reporting, but as long as you are aware of them and fully disclose how the data is obtained, they are far from useless. Or should we just ignore all sorts of important questions about society because we can't perfectly control the experiment as we can with simpler sciences like physics?
Either way, self-reported mental health is absolutely pertinent here. If a certain lifestyle makes people self-report as happier and healthier, obviously it is having some effect on their lives, even if only the way they perceive themselves. And honestly, essentially the ONLY way to evaluate mental health at scale is by self reporting - do you really think observation or MRI would be more effective, much less practical? Even clinical diagnosis relies heavily on self reporting.
I'm not so sure that is the only approach to take. Fundamentally, when you really get down to it, the "sell" of religion(or anything, really) is that life is better with it than without it. It's very easy to test this - try out some of the tenets of the religion and see if you find your life is improved. If the stuff doesn't work or makes your life worse, you aren't going to stick with it. This is actually very much in the spirit of scientific empiricism - how can you say that all the guidelines of a religion are bogus if you've never tried it, or run a study about it?
The whole Abraham story is an interesting and potentially troublesome one, but really makes the most sense as a dramatic parable that serves to differentiate the religion of the Jews from the other local religions of the day, where child sacrifice was the rule rather than the exception.
Of course, understanding texts that are thousands of years old isn't trivial, and careless attempts to do so can lead to bad theology, which can lead to religious followers doing bad things (as you noted). However, we also have tremendous good that has been heavily inspired by religious teachings - the Civil Rights Movement and Ghandi's liberation of India, for starters.
Have I argued about whether a certain religion is "true" or not? Lots of things that are not true are still useful and beneficial - do you think fiction is pointless?
Consider Joseph Campbell's approach to myth - stories are important to us, even if (and sometimes especially if) they have no connection with historical reality. The point is that they connect with the way the world ought to be, or convey something universal about life, or otherwise capture some important part of human experience. Besides that, religions provide one of the most well-established venues around for connecting with a community, which has also been shown to correlate strongly with health and happiness. Neither of these substantial benefits depends at all on the veracity of the mythologies in question.
Of course, there ARE problems with people applying mythological stories to scientific pursuits, but that problem is not common to all religious traditions. People as far back as St. Augustine have pointed out the problems with this, and supported empirical study as the right way to seek factual understanding about the universe.
Health can be measured, relatively objectively, in lots of ways. You can also just pull some meaning from self-reported surveys - even though there are plenty of problems with self-reporting, if religious people consistently claim to be happier and healthier, that certainly says something about the impact it has on average. One such study for reference: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Yes, and it was a total pain, although apparently a solution is being developed.
Is it just me, or does Defikopter sound like something that flies around and shits on people?
We have no idea how likely or even possible it was for those "things" to go differently.
It is easy to imagine a universe where the gravitational constant was higher, or the weak force was slightly weaker, or something along those lines. It is interesting to consider how these constants impact the structure of the universe at every level, and how tiny, tiny changes in them would have profound impacts (think of the universe as a sea of neutrons rather than this one, filled with a rather useful variety of atomic structures). Further, we have only very indirect (and highly suspect) evidence suggesting that there are more universes than this one, and even if we did know there are other universes, why would we expect them to have different values for the fundamental physical constants?
We may be a very probable universe. There may be many improbable universes, of which we are one. If things had gone slightly differently, maybe we'd be debating this on Mars. Maybe life would be everywhere. Wild speculation is rather pointless.
It is one thing to speculate with no basis, quite another to change a term in a formula and see what the consequences would be. Small changes in these constants could make anything resembling the universe we live in completely impossible - we're not talking life that isn't carbon-based, we're talking a universe that doesn't have carbon or any other elements heavier than helium. Or a universe where stars never ignited because gravity was too weak to start fusion, or a universe that burned itself out far before life could evolve because gravity was stronger and all the fuel for fusion was spent too quickly. All sorts of non-religious physicists have remarked about how lucky we seem to be that our universe didn't develop into something much less interesting and hospitable.
Religion is just more comfortable for people who are uncomfortable admitting that we just don't know some things.
Citation needed. Religion has numerous, concrete benefits, which I listed above and which you haven't responded to at all. I find that many religious people are much more willing to live in a state of not-knowing than more naturalist-minded people. And, in my experience, religion isn't a respite from the questions in life - it is an invitation to ask more pointed questions of my own life.
There are lots of scientific arguments FOR religion, even if you restrict it merely to selfish ones. People involved with religion are generally healthier, happier, and have "better lives" according to most of the metrics you could attach to that.
Of course, WHY that is the case is anybody's guess (sense of meaning, belonging to a community and enjoying the social support network, etc) but there's little contention about the results.
I think the conflict between science and religion is largely manufactured. The truth is, there are some very funny things about the universe and our place in it. Really, I think the strongest arguments for how incredibly unlikely our intelligent civilization is come from what we know about evolution and the big bang - the universe would be very, very different if some things had gone slightly different at the big bang, and there's also an interesting argument to be made that human-level intelligence might have never come about without the very fortunate (for mammals) extinction event at the end of the cretaceous.
At any rate, there are lots of questions that are interesting and very relevant to life, but that science isn't suited to answering. They are subjective and personal questions that have many answers, and a different sort of meaning to each person. Religion can do a great job at exploring these questions, and only the worst kinds of religion suggest that all of those questions have already been answered conclusively.
With the cry-it-out thing, people always act as though if you don't do cry-it-out, your only alternative is never sleep and get up with your kid multiple times a night until they are 9 years old or something. There are better ways - just use a structured schedule and consistent routines (cues like turning the lights off, swaddling, rocking) that basically condition the child to go to sleep. The Baby Whisperer series of books outlines a technique like this, and it worked wonders for the first kid, and is currently shaping up to work just as well for the second.