Re: Born atheist?
Posted: Tue Oct 05, 2021 6:23 am
Popular traditional belief evolves according to whatever produces emotional comfort and has a set and accepted mythological structure. The separation of intellectual elites from popular society creates a social divide, seen most vividly in the creationist debate. Creationism establishes a morality of order and control with a simple story of salvation based on Jesus repairing Adam’s sin, together with an exclusionary device in the idea that anything that contradicts their views comes from Satan and can be rejected and ignored. The myth serves to inoculate against reason. Equally, intellectually based structures also have their own mythologies, and more seriously, an inability to respect the emotional support provided by traditional myths.Harry Marks wrote:I think most people operate without a carefully considered set of intellectual structures such as one would be taught in college.BWM wrote: It's easy to point and laugh at religion, and say; ''you actually believe in all that crap?'' I don't believe in it either,
These are good examples where religion teaches to put the community before the individual, whereas ‘reason’ encourages people to put their individual happiness before the overall good of community or family. People who have been taught to function as autonomous individuals feel an emotional repugnance toward such sacrificial tribal attitudes (known as heteronomy) and are quick to condemn the irrational beliefs that tend to be used to encourage a sense of duty. I suspect this is even an unconscious factor in the evolutionary biology debate between Dawkins and Wilson about group selection versus gene selection.Harry Marks wrote: As a result, when they do sometimes think about big questions, like "Does the universe operate with a plan or goal?" or "Am I facing this tribulation because of something I did?" they are likely to arrive at conclusions that fit their personality using narratives that are part of their culture. And when narratives have evolved to shape practice in specific ways (no sex before marriage, couples remain faithful for the sake of the kids, or whatever) then people are likely to respond to those narratives in terms of their sense of function.
This point reminds me of the current Booktalk non-fiction selection, The Human Cosmos by Jo Marchant. Religious meta-narratives, the ultimate story of meaning and purpose that unifies the myths, evolved memetically in social contexts where observation of the stability and order of the heavens provided a template for moral values on earth. My view, which I hope aligns with Jo Marchant’s, is that religious meta-narratives have mutated under selective pressure from politics, leading to knowledge of some of the original causative cosmic context to be lost.Harry Marks wrote: It's a relatively new phenomenon to judge the meta-narratives based on evidence.
Belief in miracle is an example of a narrative that leads to a set of practices both good and bad. I was listening yesterday to a podcast by an ex-Christian who was talking about how Amish teach their children to love each other. That is an example of where a rigidly ordered lifestyle built around a supernatural mythology creates space for things of value which can be lost when there is more individual freedom and encouragement of questioning.Harry Marks wrote: Of course such things went on with Socrates and Abelard and Confucius, but now we have large bodies of evidence that impact what narratives can be considered credible. It is difficult to get underneath the evidence and believability questions to deeper questions of how the narratives fit with personality types and what the narratives lead to as practices.