That's because it starts with the oldest, most ridiculous parts. Get to Psalms and tell me your soul isn't uplifted.

Why? I'm quite serious. Why? I would like you to justify this viewpoint.

Actually, it sounds just like most of history's leaders and conquerors (i.e enitities with immense power).

Do you think you are wiser, and your life richer, for having done so, when taken in totality? Tolstoy said something like "Only the wise, and the stupid, are unfailingly religious".

Matt Dillahunty coined a phrase, "I want to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible". What do you think about this idea?

I think that most of the beliefs we have about ourselves and our power and abilities and attractiveness and importance and future prospect are built on false observations and beliefs.

For example, depressed people have less self-serving bias than non depressed people. How's that working out for them?

I don't think either wisdom or happiness are always aligned with believing as many true things as possible. Particularly since it's not possible to know what is true for many areas of inquiry. And particularly since beliefs themselves - false or true - have the power to be self fulfilling to some degree. For example, someone who believes a benevolent power is watching over them and testing them and expecting them to act with courage will act as if they are; they might have a broader perspective on bad events and thus not fall to despair.

Would you rather believe what is real, or what makes you happy? It's a harder question to address than it appears on the surface, because you don't really have a conscious choice as to what you believe. Perhaps you can "fake it 'til you make it", and you may eventually legitimately believe something you'd previously not considered to be the case. I can only think about my own reasoning process, and I cannot fathom believing something I thought was probably not true, just so it would make me feel happier.

Beliefs certainly affect your behaviour, but beliefs don't affect reality, that's the woo realm of The Secret (hopefully not what you were saying).

Consider that you gave a positive example of how a false belief could effect someone's behaviour. Don't forget about all the negative examples. Would you have to aggregate all the positives and all the negatives before deciding whether something would be a net positive outcome to believe?

What if you have a more accurate view of reality, wouldn't you eliminate all the effects, whether positive or negative? What's more, can't someone without a false belief like someone is watching over them, still behave courageously? I think it was Hitchens that said (more eloquently than I'm repeating) that there were no good deeds that necessitated being based on religion.

Life is obviously a combination of the two. Which beliefs should be which is an interesting topic of discussion. What about you? Do you think we should always strive for what is "real" rather than what gives the greatest utility? And more importantly, how do you know what is real? Beliefs aren't just intellectual things. We model the world in complex ways - emotionally, intellectually, habitually, philosophically. We also have (very) finite cognitive ability, finite emotional capacity, etc. When you believe something intellectually, it flows over into the other aspects. Intellectual beliefs are a pill with substantial systemic side effects.

Is a man experiencing existential angst because of his cosmic insignificance, created by atheism and a lack of philosophical sophistication, really modelling and understanding the world and reality better than a functional, mentally healthy religious person? I don't think they are.

All representations of reality in human minds are hugely simplified, weirdly optimized models, of questionable or even unknown veracity. Taken at the totality of the mind/emotion/"spirit" level, I'm not sure that atheists are more in touch with reality. Young male atheists certainly aren't. Nietzsche, for example, was as thick as two bricks emotionally and in term of self awareness and awareness of the processes of his mind. Do you think going throw hell and back again to come up with his clownishly stupid "ubermensch" - a ham-fisted attempt to match emotional observations and desires with his intellectual observations - was a good modelling of reality? A 12 year old religious child can understand the concepts better and how they apply to reality.
I think intellectual sophistication and self awareness does give you a choice on what to believe. Think of the kind of mental tricks talked about in 1984. It's perfectly possible to do them on yourself.
A certain "letting go" is required to be able to do this.

The Secret is laughable.

But beliefs affect more than behavior. If I believe people find me interesting or intelligent, as opposed to how people actually see me, I model the world differently. This affects more than behavior. It affects mood, philosophical outlook, the kinds of things I can think about, the kind of world I see, the kind of intellectual energy I have. We're little universe models walking around. The world is actually different for a person who believes something different. Not on all points, but on some.

We don't know the ultimate nature of reality. Perhaps it's a boring dry pointless affair that has no purpose or meaning whatsoever. Perhaps some future mega intelligent AI who grasps that will simply want to terminate itself.

People who invent various structures that don't exist in the outside world may or may not be saner or more rational than those who don't. Ultimately the world is a big fat nothing, open to broad interpretation, and the mind uses a number of tricks to make itself functional and motivated. Are those tricks bad, because they're fake structures? I'm not sure they are.

I think that's what wisdom is - that very kind of aggregation. Far from an exact science though.

Yes, all things are possible without a belief in God. Are they more or less likely, though? More or less easy?

As I said, I can't imagine believing something that I was not convinced was "real". I know as I have become more interested in philosophy over the past few years that I have generally tried to be more thoughtful, but even so, I can't remember thinking differently when I look into my history (I've never been a theist). Memory is a funny thing though, so I can't be sure.

btw, you switched to "greatest utility" rather than "greatest happiness", typo?

(Let's compare otherwise similar subjects, i.e. both mentally healthy)
Why not? You don't think we are cosmically insignificant? Or is it the angst?

I'm not clear on what you mean by "the totality of the mind/emotion/"spirit" level" but it sounds like an unreasonable depth of understanding for anyone.
But again I'd ask, why not? Taken one topic at a time:
IF alternative medicine is not therapeutic, then the skeptic is more in touch with reality than someone who believes in alternative medicine, vis a vis medical treatments.
IF there is no good justification for god, then the atheist is more in touch with reality than the theist, vis a vis the existence of the divine.
etc

If moderately well-educated liberals think their demographic isn't afflicted by any terribad fundamentalist type belief systems, they've never heard of The Law of Attraction! Antivaccer's hit this group, too.

You do have a point, but this has drifted away from what I was originally talking about: what we believe about the 'objective reality' (insofar as we can perceive it) of the exterior world. After all:

I'm pretty much with you
Sometimes I get that stomach-dropping feeling (atheists can experience awe) when I think about how the star-stuff that made up the early universe became elements, then compounds, then self-replicating compounds...etc etc, eventually human beings looked at the universe and tried to understand it. Basically that Carl Sagan quote:

"We are a way for the cosmos to know itself"

This is a romantic notion, but it doesn't explain how it's possible for conscious beings to arise in a dead universe.

"The truth that can be told
is not the eternal Truth" - Lao Tzu

"Words! Words!
The Way is beyond language.
Words never could, can not now, and never will describe the Way."
- Seng-ts’an

I absolutely detest atheists that actually debate religious people. You wouldn't reason with a cat now would you. It's like this huge mental barrier they have and every time you lead them to conclusions that should cause them to reject certain things they make these twists in their minds to avoid having to do so.

Seriously stop doing it. Nobody benefits from it. If we can just contain religion to private life and not let it interfere with rational human beings that should be enough.

You don't really understand religious people very well. Talking or debating with them about religion is like any other kind of conversation people typically have, including politics, sports, science, history, and so on. In general, I don't view the inability to have an intelligent conversation with people about what they care about as a sign of virtue, but more of a failure of intellectual curiosity and understanding.

I guess people get frustrated sometimes because they are very certain about their own view of the world and get frustrated by people who don't immediately assent to it. But this isn't true only of religion, but of everything people believe in. These things take time, patience, and an openness to changing your own mind. Your intolerance of these efforts doesn't speak well of your sense of the intellectual virtues.

Two points: First, religion is often not relegated to private life to begin with, so even by this criteria it will require us talking about it. Second, and more importantly, we are not just public animals, we also have private lives. Talking about our private lives and beliefs with other people is a form of intimacy that can help build social bonds. I think for non-religious people to become completely ignorant of the private lives of the religious (and vice versa) is not a very stable social structure. In that world it is too easy to misread what the other group values or intends and so harder to find the compromises that pluralistic societies usually require.

It's just that I don't want to normalize hallucinations. I mean we lock people up in institutions if what they are rambling about is a different subject for crying out loud. The moment you accept arguments like "well I don't have evidence but you could also be wrong" it influences other areas. "well yeah Trump wants to grab women by the pussy but he is also against TPP" and stuff like that gets normalized and you end up with a maniac in the White House. It's bad enough churches don't pay taxes, do we really need to give them the same respect as normal people?

Obviously my language here is highly offensive but this is how I feel about it. It's offensive to human evolution to normalize religion. If I say "I think the moon is made from cheese and little Jigglypuffs are floating in orbit" I am declared insane. If I say "Humans lived alongside dinosaurs and the earth is 6000 years old" I get "Oh that's interesting, tell me more".

At some point I lost my tolerance for this and gave up on intellectual virtues in this regard. It sort of balances it out I guess.

I wouldn't characterize religious participation as hallucination for a variety of reasons, but even if you accept the premise this seems an awful lot like trying to close the barn door after the horse has gotten out. I'm not sure why we should be concerned about helping to "normalize" beliefs or practices that are already so widespread. From an atheistic standpoint, I would think the arguments that activists or more outspoken atheists make about the need to criticize religion and engage in those discussions would be more compelling.

But surely you don't actually favor the bolded? We can maybe lock up people who are a danger to others or themselves, but not just for crazy ramblings.

In general, I think the concern about normalization is backwards. Atheism is what is not normal. If society decides to stop normalizing dissident religious beliefs, atheism will be denormalized before Christianity.

It isn't a matter of whether your language is offensive - I think offensive language can often be useful as a spur out of complacency. I started posting here in RGT about 7 years ago. A lot of the things I was interested in thinking about back then I've thought through enough where I don't really need to keep going over them. But that doesn't mean that other people aren't in the same place I was 7 years ago. Those topics seem tired and boring to me because I've seen the same conversation already, but to other people they are still new. It would be churlish of me to complain about other people discussing these issues just because I've already done it myself.

It's offensive to the science of evolution that this is the best understanding you have of it.

As far as I can tell, you've given up all intellectual virtue. I don't think you've yet presented a single statement of intellectual value in this forum so far.

Humans are broken and imperfect in lots of ways. Why single out religion?

Also, Christianity has been a bedrock of civilized society. Judaism and its religious love of philosophizing over the Torah, to know God's mind, may well be the reason we even have science and reason today to the degree we do.

Avowed atheistic societies have been horrifically brutal places. People have a need for power and belonging and "ultimate" justice; if it doesn't come from God or delusions, people organize around less wholesome ideals.

So I'm not sure I accept your premise that religious people are broken. It seems low on the list of human flaws. Religion may even be a virtue, a kind of non-obvious group wisdom that humans have organized around.
The second is reasonable given a certain level of ignorance. The first isn't. They're different classes of things. I'm sure you can come up with a good example, but that wasn't it.
Why lose tolerance? People are stupid in lots of ways. I find stupidity and blindness fascinating.

What is your problem man. Seriously.

Religion has been a tool to keep the people in check for thousands of years. I find that despicable to begin with so I don't think too highly of religion.

"reasonable within ignorance" is not a threshold I would deem acceptable to be honest. It's like saying "well it's stupid but it's plausible so I can't compare you with other stupid people".

Stupidity can be funny but when it has so much power I would like that to change.

I care that people get science right. I think it's super-important. There is plenty of space for disagreement about things, but if you're going to present yourself as someone knowledgeable about science, take the time to get it right and stop spreading what amounts to pseudo-scientific garbage.

What you think about evolutionary biology is literally stupid. Stop it. Learn about the thing you're trying to use to bolster your argument.

Ah, there's the problem, isn't it? You just have to look at our elected politicians to see how the encroachment of religion into public affairs affects us all. I am an atheist, but I have no problem with people who believe in that stuff as long as they don't try to force it (or legislate it) on me.

What if they believe slavery is immoral and against Gods will like the abolitionist and try to end it?

I had trouble parsing your post until I realized that you left the apostrophe out of "God's."

But kind of funny that you brought that specific example up, because slavery was defended by religious folks in the south based on their holy book, which sanctions it.

Pick a better example.

Slavery was also attacked by religious folks such as English abolitionist William Wilberforce, if he was motivated in part to campaign to abolish slavery due to his religious beliefs should he have kept that quiet?

What it comes to in practice is "I like democracy, as long as I'm winning." I think it's a bad way to look at democracy and governance in general. And both sides do it.

I think almost all (if not all) legislation *IS* about legislating beliefs in some form. And we force this on each other *ALL THE TIME*.

You could take that as an argument that Christian Scientists should be locked up.

No its a good example. Showing that some were for it does not change some were against it because of their God. Do you mind when they legislate and support your views politically, like not having slaves? Would you have spoken out against the abolitionist?