First of all, I want to make it clear that I’m glad to answer genuine questions made in good faith (no pun intended), but I won’t argue with anyone.
I’m a practicing Hellenic Polytheist and this is my personal experience. I do not only worship deities with names and myths, but also the twinkling of stars, the waves of the ocean, the colors of a sunset, the kindling of a fire on a cold winter day, and the rustling of leaves in the treetops. Sometimes I look at the sky and see stars so far away that we will (probably) never reach them, and that feels divine to me. There’s something that can’t be described with words that is too great for a human to understand, and I find that something so beautiful that I will worship it.
Got a bit poetic there, but I also think that my relationship with religion has also been influenced by the good old autism a lot. I find the psychology behind religion very fascinating, and I think that for some people, especially those who have been raised in a certain faith, it is a “home” that provides comfort in difficult situations. For some people, the thought that a recently deceased loved one is now in Heaven or has been reincarnated as someone/something else is probably a lot easier to accept than that they don’t exist anymore in any shape or form.
That being said, I also want to state that I always try to maintain a healthy sense of scepticism with my beliefs, whether they be religious, moral, or political, because blind belief never leads to anything good. I think that sadly the darker aspects of religion, such as cults and using religion to justify unjust power structures (the patriarchy or the divine right of kings for example) are hard to get rid of.
Religion is an old form of it is what is, hope, direction, tradition, and community.
Can’t explain a thing or understand it God’s will or only God knows. Can’t do anything to help a person because they are in surgery pray or talk to God to wish for good outcomes.
Don’t feel loved or know what to do or wanted. God loves you, will show you the way, and wants you.
Most traditions and communities in the west were founded on a religion so you have hundreds of people to connect with at a church and maybe millions world wide that will help. Those raised on books of wisdom or what is right and wrong still tend to keep the values even after they move away from the religion but realize they can have values without divine beings
Lastly control. Just like businesses it is easier to control people under a religion so if you can get people indebted, traditionalized, and ostracized otherwise. You can control people easily. Lots of people don’t know what to do and why trust another human being but if a human being says wisely God said this it is easier to accept and gain a direction
The alternative is absolutely unfathomable. Like I am an atheist and the fact we exist in any capacity is insane. Where did everything come from? Where will it go? People believe in religion because it’s easier.
When I have an existential crisis over it I sometimes wish I was religious.
I feel the same way when I think about how when ever you get a whole bunch bunch of stuff together in one spot, it frickin warps time and space and that’s why I’m standing and not floating.
I like how all these answers involving science fail to realize that the scientific method was used exclusively by many scholars and students who had no historical evidence of giving up their religion.
Empirical evidence is as old as humans, and afaik the modern scientific method has been in use since the Islamic golden age if not older.
The key here is that many of these people did not consider religion an empirical issue but a philosophical and ethical one. Particularly with the monotheistic religions, this would make sense because you can easily argue that it would be impractical to test for the existence of God.
I think a better question would be why do people believe in their respective religion if it contains a glaring contradiction(s).
Religion is primarily a social phenomenon, so as long as people want to belong to a larger group then there will always be people willing to believe whatever non-falsifiable truths they need to in order to belong to one.
I am not even remotely religious. But I take science pretty seriously.
Please tell me, scientifically, why you are so sure that people of faith are wrong?
There is some decent science that prayer does not work. I am not aware of anything offers anything at all testable concerning God.
And if we are simply pushing our preferences on others, I think a more important question is what makes people that claim to be evidence driven to adopt such strong opinions on things ( without evidence ) that they feel comfortable publicly slamming the preferences and values of others ( again with no evidence at all ).
As a science fan, you can say that absence of evidence means you do not have to believe. Correct. You cannot say that an absence of evidence proves your guess correct such that you can treat people who believe otherwise as stupid. Incorrect.
And “they have to show me the evidence” is a moronic stance. As a fan of the scientific method, evidence is YOUR burden of proof. For people that adhere to a religion, their standard is FAITH. So, they are holding up their end and you are dropping the ball. So what gives you the right to be the abuser?
So, I guess my answer to “why do people believe in religion would be”, “well, people still have faith and tradition and science has not produced any evidence that credibly calls that into question”.
Why are people not arriving at this conclusion on their own in 2024? Why have we failed so badly to explain the scientific method that people can still make wild pronouncements like this one.
I don’t like religion because it makes people easy to manipulate. People that treat science like a religion exhibit the same problems. I am not a fan of that.
Please tell me, scientifically, why you are so sure that people of faith are wrong?
Because they all offer competing and mutually exclusive hypotheses.
Christianity tells us that the one true path to salvation is by accepting Jesus Christ as your lord and saviour.
Hinduism tells us that our next life will take place in this world, based on our actions in this life.
Islam tells us that Mohammed is the one true prophet.
Buddhism says that there are no prophets, enlightenment only comes from within.
They make contradictory claims, so by definition they can’t all be right, and they typically claim that they are correct and the other explanations are false, so even if one religion is correct, the rest (comprising of the majority of the faithful) must be wrong.
I am certain that Russel’s teapot is not orbiting Jupiter.
If you want to hypothesize about the existence of some kind of demiurge then that’s one thing, but religions are about some really and weirdly specific gods with very specific rules and systems and laws without a shred of evidence for anything.
That teapot is orbiting somewhere. I have no idea if my universe is the one.
Saying that you “know” there is no God is an extraordinary claim. Do you demand extraordinary evidence from people that make that claim? Or do you only demand it from people following a philosophy that requires them to believe independent of evidence?
Honestly, this is about as smart as religious people demanding miracles before they will believe in Science.
No one understands what your first sentence says because it’s an empty platitude.
The fact that religion is “fundamental” to you really helps you out? Care to actually elaborate with specific examples because that’s literally an empty phrase.
I find that most people use religion to absolve themselves of responsibility and make themselves feel superior to “lessers” (aka non believers).
Because the lowest common denominator is much MUCH lower than you think it is.
This means it’s easy to indoctrinate and easy to maintain that for a massive number of people.
Scientific illiteracy is extremely high, and actual “6th grade reading comprehension” is the highest level of literacy for > 50% of a country like the U.S. and ~20% are low literacy or actually illiterate.
This means that half of everyone in the U.S. can read and understand what they read at or below a 6th grade level. This isn’t “reading big words”, it’s “tell us about what you read”, “what is the relationship between x & y” type questions.
This comment for example, up to this point only, would be difficult to understand & comprehend for > 50% of people in the U.S. (it demands an 11th grade reading comprehension). And may be misread, misunderstood, or not understood at all.
People are driven to religions to cults and alt conspiracy theories when they don’t understand how the world works around them. They latch onto extremely simple often misleading or incorrect ideas of how the world works because they can understand it and it “makes sense” within their sphere of ignorance (we all have one, this isn’t meant to be a disparaging term).
This means that the problem is that humans are just not smart enough to escape religion yet. It’s the simplest answer, and it appears to be correct.
I agree. At the root of it, people want to feel safe. This is a fundamental need. Religion does this for them because they don’t need to make decisions and they’re promised that if they follow it they will indeed be kept safe. Also spiritual bypass is awesome.
Having been raised in a religious household and having escaped it later in life to become an engineer/science nerd, while being ostracized by my, incredibly, incredibly disappointing parents because they refuse to learn new things or acknowledge scientific studies that conflict with their religious views:
This answer is unequivocally, absolutely, a 100% correct take on humanity and their need for the “simplistic” and incorrect answers religion gives about the world around them.
I believe it started with a sense of security. Don’t worry, there’s a reason and someone is in control of this shit show. Feels better than we’re on this crazy freight train called life that is almost completely out of control, no one knows where we’re going, no one knows how we’re going to get there, and we basically have no control over any of it.
There’s a degree of just feeling viscerally like the supernatural is around us, too. Not everyone has that, but some people certainly do. Then yeah, we also want to answers the big questions in a satisfying, even comforting way. Particularly modern monotheism has a deep component of offering a way the world is fair, actually, despite all appearances.
It looks like religion is a thing that started with modern humans, just based on archeological finds, but I don’t know why or if it was adaptive. Some scholars will talk about the beginning of religious finds as a beginning of abstract thought, but it seems to me that even a damn dog can make a creative guess about how the world works, so that’s not it.
I mean, depending on how profound you need it to be. I had my dog jump into a neighbor’s car once. Clearly, he figured a different one would take him fun places if the usual one did, generalising the concept.
In my view, there are two components to “religion”.
1 - it typically starts with an attempt to explain why and how things are
2 - it becomes a human administration - this becomes more about politics than “religion”
Most of the problems with religion stem from the second part. I see the politics as the far bigger problem there. So people that want to create political movements around “science” are absolutely no better in my view.
If you read the question being asked in this thread critically, do you find it a scientific question? A political one?
Human politics are always going to be human politics. Religion is usually just an excuse to do what everyone wanted to do anyway. Science is what happens when you inquire about how why and how things are honestly and thoroughly, though, so I don’t think the former is harmless.
If you read the question being asked in this thread critically, do you find it a scientific question? A political one?
Probably political, or at least personally motivated. I suppose it’s possible OP genuinely has no ideas, but I think that’s unlikely. I still stand by my answer.
I don’t find it surprising given that the vast majority of people don’t research the claims that other people make. For example, during the GameStop short squeeze, people came to the conclusion that corruption or collusion was at play, when in reality it wasn’t for the most part.
People would rather listen to a guy who says something confidently than a guy who says “I don’t know.” The former gets to spread their word, and the latter gets ignored.
In vsauses video “The Future of Reason” he talks about how logic is a best seen in a group context, (a group consensus). So if a group of people agree on something, that is how it is. You can also put in some “if its not important to change the consensus for the group, don’t change it” as to why belief in groups doesn’t change very fast. Also the social and economic aspect, groups have people, people need people, you can also more easily find skilled people in a group.
(both religious and secular groups). Examples of belief, god cannot be observed directly, but religious people still believe : scientists can’t find dark matter, but they still believe that it exists. The most important reason is that groups in general serve the people that are in them. Religions keep together well because the majority of people believe in the group consensus (e.g. god), and get to contribute and gain the benefits of the group. Universities are a good example aswell, as they provide employment, teach skills, and foster community and independence.
Because there is no downside. I mean, the only thing that atheist think is appealing is that they can reason themselves out of religion. What makes you think that ‘reasoning yourself out of religion’ is attractive, desirable or a worthy goal? It just isn’t. It leads to existential crisis in most if not all cases. And then atheist take pride in surviving that crisis. Which, sure, admirable… But attractive? Of course not.
You can be religious and do anything in the world. Literally. I know that atheist love to focus on dumb fucks and literalists, and on how religions are being abused. But the truth is that religion is deeply personal and peoples relation with religion is completely their own. It’s extremely simple to pick and choose from the myriad of options within religion. Most religious people are not literalists.
And then you get connection with people, see them regularly, participate in rituals, celebration days, rules for engagement with life.
Plus, don’t forget, an extremely old and mystic piece of human history. The attempts of people to live in a world that has a God. Their struggles, their victories. In essence a reflection on the human condition. And you get to be part of that. Atheist are often too fast to explain religion as a sort of ‘failed science’, while it’s absolutely not. And of course if you can’t figure that out you’re going to ask why people want to believe in something like that.
There will never be a rational reason for the human condition. Religion will never ever not be part of humanity. As the only way in which the human condition can be contextualised is in a world that is created, and religions are the keepers of that knowledge.
What makes you think that ‘reasoning yourself out of religion’ is attractive, desirable or a worthy goal?
I think for a lot of atheist converts it becomes hard to keep the alternate reality going, and so reasoning out of it becomes unavoidable. Some people are raised atheist. Personally, I just like to know things even if it sucks.
Most religious people are not literalists.
I suspect that’s not actually true at a global level. In Africa many people are so literalist they’ll believe they’re bulletproof because a spell was cast. Even in the West there’s areas where I’m guessing most churchgoers believe funny things about natural history.
There are billions of religious people in the world. I understand that there are millions of examples of people who are literalist and dumb. Religion has a lot of pitfalls. But most religious people are navigating religion in a personal and open manner, avoiding those pitfalls and using the same examples to do so.
Again, I’m not sure that’s actually true. I suspect literalists may be a small majority.
I get along with religious people of all sorts in real life, to be clear, but I don’t think the progressive, quiet Christian or Muslim is as universal as the average Lemmy user may think it is, based on where they live.
Sure, unless you care about LGBT+ people not being discriminated against and murdered. And unless you care about teaching strong critical thinking to avoid conspiracies including anti-vax. And unless you care about the future of the planet in the face of climate change which is largely ignored by religious people who are more focused on the next life than this one. And unless, and unless, and unless…
There are tons of downsides.
As the only way in which the human condition can be contextualised is in a world that is created, and religions are the keepers of that knowledge.
Yeah no, we can contextualize with rational thought, it’s just that more work needs to be done that has historically been stifled by religion considering they have historically killed people who didn’t go along with them. Religions don’t have some monopoly on knowledge in this field, what they have is some shit they just made up, some of which works, and a lot of which doesn’t. But they have no methodology by which to test which parts work and which don’t so they just push all of them regardless.
That’s a very shortsighted view of religion. People two thousand years ago were extremely religious and lgbtq friendly, etc. Most religious people are vaxxed. I mean the things you attribute ro religion is shortsighted, obviously so.
You’re looking at a small subsection of the world during a small subsection of time. It’s not applicable to religion as a whole and why people are religious. People are obviously not becoming religious in order to be antivax anti lgbtq, etc, etc. The reason is obviously not found there.
And no, we can not contextualize the human condition through rational thought. Humans aren’t just rational, we don’t just act rationally. We have irrational feelings, emotions and thoughts. So it’s literally impossible, in a literal sense. This is basic logic.
The funny thing is that people believe very specific things about gods, like that there’s only one, or that they’re nice or at least have similar values to us.
Or literally look like a specifically male human. What he does with those two legs when he already exists everywhere, nobody knows. It’s not just the Abrahamic religions either, all the myths of the world have a bit of anthropocentrism to them. That was excusable when we had no better ideas.
My favorite interpretation of that was in Mage: The Ascension. Man being “in God’s image” wasn’t morphological, it was in man’s ability to reshape reality to his whims.
On the subject of fiction, I was thinking about H.P Lovecraft when I wrote this. His whole thing was making a mythology that’s not anthropocentric, and incorporates that character of vast incomprehensibility that our modern science has.
Since here the answers are split between edgy kids and people repeating a bland, stale narrative about comfort and fear of death, I will try to bring a different perspective.
For context: I grew up in a Catholic country but in a very secular family and in a very secular region. I’ve had an edgy atheist phase that lasted between 8yo and probably around 30yo.
I studied a STEM discipline and have always been surrounded by mostly atheist or agnostic people.
I was afraid of death up until I was 27/28yo, but the cope was gnostic transhumanism, not Abrahamitic religions. At some point I took acid, my gf at the time told me I was going to die, I cried my eyes out for a few minutes and then I was fine and I’m still fine. I had a near-death experience in the hospital that further consolidated the idea that I’m going to die, and it’s chill: if you’re sick, you have a bunch of people looking after you, everybody gives you attention, you spend all your day chilling in bed on drugs. Dream life death.
I was still agnostic at that point. I started approaching spirituality later on, not much because of an emotional need, but because further studies both in STEM disciplines and Philosophy highlighted the limit of reason to explain and understand the world. Reason is a tool among others, with its limits. Limits that can be reasoned about using reason itself. You cannot investigate or explain what lies outside though, let alone change it, something for which you need different tools: faith, spirituality, trust. I got closer to what Erik Davis calls “Cyborg Spiritualism”, but it doesn’t mean much since it’s not an organized movement, but more of a shared intuition and meaning-making process to which, in the last 60 years, more and more people arrived. Especially people dealing with disciplines like system theory, cybernetics, system design, and information theory, but also people disillusioned with the New Age movement or other Western Gnostic practices. Mixed in it there’s plenty of animism.
Atheists believe that all religions are about speaking to God, and hoping for an answer, while many religions are about listening to God because they are already talking to us all the time.
Gods are literally just a psychological comfort blanket to explain the unexplainable. Most religious people don’t put that much thought into what they believe, challenging concepts are just tucked nicely away in the “Gods will” box and they move on. I think everyone copes with those brain shattering concepts in their own creative way or risk getting buried alive in anxiety.