It's far from obvious that this is true. (On multiple accounts -- Whether Trump *actually* assures the fundamentalist right anything, whether those things are "their Christian values and beliefs", and whether Trump really does get through the nomination process in front.)

Edit: Also:

"No matter how much evidence there is to the contrary, everything is religion's fault."

[QUOTE=
"No matter how much evidence there is to the contrary, everything is religion's fault."[/QUOTE]

What evidence? Please provide.

This is not a good reason to hold your opinion, or at least not in isolation. After all, as the theory behind the survey I linked to suggests, avoiding teaching hell could have damaging effects on some children lasting well into adulthood and even an entire lifetime as well.

Evidence of the claim? Evidence to deny the claim? Evidence that MB appears to hold the position? Evidence specific to the presidential race?

Can you be more specific about the nature of your inquiry?

"No matter how much evidence there is to the contrary, everything is religion's fault."

Read your statement that I responded to. Your the one that cited the 'evidence'. What evidence are you referring to?

You're responding to me rephrasing one of MB's primary theses on this forum in an exaggerated manner. That's why I put an extra set of quotes around my own words. You are welcome to browse the forum and look for threads that he started to better understand the positions he has taken in the past.

Edit: I was highlighting the fact that he's throwing in this "thanks mainly to religion" without the slightest hint of evidence. And I would also argue that the existence of many religious leaders speaking out against Trump is more than enough evidence to suggest that Trump's popularity is not mainly due to religion. There was even a thread that he randomly bumped that spoke precisely to that point.

Slight hint of evidence, are you serious? You must be allergic to knowledge.

You think that Trump's religion is why people are drawn to him? You must be allergic to reality.

Okay.

I am generally opposed to capital punishment, mostly because I think it doesn't have a net positive effect on the societies that still use it. I am somewhat indifferent to corporal punishment--physical child abuse is immoral, but I don't think that corporal punishment typically is child abuse.

Okay.


Your bias is showing again. I identify one way in which religion can increase pro-sociality, but you minimize it by emphasizing all the other things that can increase pro-social behavior. But with Trump, who no one thinks is particularly religious, you are willing to give religion the lion's share of the credit.

You are ignoring the actual study here. As tame deuces has pointed out, it isn't surprising that religion increases pro-social behavior among co-religionists. What is interesting here is that punitive religions in particular will have a larger pro-social effect among co-religionists than non-punitive religions.

Also, I would point out here that this is the kind of moral benefit that we have a hard time appreciating and so you should be wary of cognitive bias. If most people's utility is increased by a small amount, it is hard to even notice except in society-wide metrics like GDP, GINI, employment rate, etc. But it isn't hard at all to notice the larger decrease in utility suffered by a few. But yet that small increase in utility might completely swamp the sharper decreases in utility suffered by a few (eg this is one of the reasons that terrorism punches way above its objective importance as a political topic).

This is too faith-based a view for me to accept.

I have not seen any evidence that Trump's rise is primarily due to religion. In fact, one of the main takeaways from the Republican primary seems to be that among working-class white evangelicals, religious identity and beliefs are actually less important than previously thought.

I'd agree that his rise hasn't been due primarily to religion, but what I don't think is being taken into account is that in Trump, many people who don't necessarily share of all of his values or goals, but are conservative Christians, see someone who will protect their belief system against the persecution that they have been led to believe is occurring, and the influx of 'them' who don't share Christian beliefs. That's very appealing and I think explains his recent success more than that there are millions of people who also want to build an anti-Mexican immigrant wall....

I could argue the case for Capital punishment but I think your view on Corporal punishment would be more simple to work with. I think it's morally wrong for a person to inflict pain on a young child, or to instill in that child the fear of being hurt by a person, i.e. to scare that child to some degree, for punitive reasons, especially when there are many other disciplinary options that don't require that we hurt children.

Do you think it's morally right to instill in a child the fear of being hurt by someone, as a punishment?


That's not what I was doing, You offered this study as something that might swing the calculation regarding religion back towards net-positive. I'm pointing out that I think the negatives still far out weigh that and don't make it harder to argue that religion is a net-negative. My viewpoint already factored this in as a benefit.

See my other post for the Trump/religion connection.


That doesn't make it morally right. I'm still not really seeing an argument from a moral PoV to support that assertion. What is your position generally with morality?

I could say the same to you, that I feel the same about the hindrance that religion has been to our progress in understanding the universe. It's easy to point to a few examples of when religious organisations have caused some kind of advance, but it was always something that didn't contradict their paradigms, and the general discouragement and often forceful resistance to knowledge or study that could contradict religious doctrines has been steady and incalculably damaging. As I said, this is far and away the thing that causes in me the strongest feeling of resentment toward, and dislike of religions.


It's faith based to suggest that we no longer need this benefit of having religious beliefs? While my opinion of humanity isn't high, it does assume that we now know enough, and understand enough about what we observe that if religion is nothing more than superstition that once offered a survival benefit, that we no longer need that help, that we're capable of uniting, working together and progressing as a species without such superstitions, or that religious differences of opinion could now pose a threat to our survival as a species.

I don't think I need to use faith to suggest that this is a credible idea.

Right. Because you didn't say

....

What I don't think is being taken into account is that you can construct whatever narrative you want, and your ability to do so does not in any way mean that it's grounded in reality.

Besides, over half of GOP primary voters are white Evangelicals so that (basically) one must be winning the evangelical vote in order to be winning the GOP primaries. And not only that, only about one third of the primary voters actually voted for Trump.

So your hasty generalization from your flawed narrative clearly doesn't take into account the actual data that's available regarding the demographics of the GOP primary.

Here's an interesting chart from Christianity Today:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/gle...r-tuesday.html

If it leads to that child having a better life, I have no problem with it. Fear is an unpleasant emotion, but it can also be a useful one.

Hmmm...then I would say you are insufficiently empirical in your approach to these questions. The main significance of studies like this is that they increase the probability that religion really does have the claimed positive effect. Since most of the claimed effects of religion, whether positive or negative, have relatively low probability of being true, this should shift your guess in the positive direction (this is of course still consistent with believing that religion is a net negative).

There is nothing confusing about this. I'm arguing from a moral consequentialist perspective, which is very common. A consequentialist will look at the effects of an actions to determine its morality. So, if terrorizing a few kids leads to a greater increase in utility overall, then it is not wrong to terrorize those kids.

I'm also still not persuaded that the effect is even real. That is, are there actually large numbers of people who experience the teaching that hell is real as psychologically traumatic? Would these people be traumatized by other common worldviews such as the various forms of secular humanism, nihilism, or more liberal religions?

Okay. I do think it takes faith to assert it as true.

This is not evidence.

My only comment so far is that perhaps the thread title could be changed to: Is it wrong to teach kids that Trump is real?

Then again I did look at the study and the added link to the science news post. I think the conclusions are preliminary at best but worthy of discussion. The study was not extensive enough or statistically rigorous enough (IMO, n=591) to drawn more than a broad suggestion, but one that could have repercussions on how we think human society and interaction develop. It should be noted that the study focused on agrarian societies, and that hunter/gathering societies acted differently.

Replying to each individual point, with those points quoted, created a pretty decent TL;DR, so I’m going to try to condense it. This is the condensed version

Firstly, I’ve long understood the value/utility of beliefs that unite groups in some way and I’ve always factored into my ‘calculation’ the value of punitive type god beliefs specifically (apart from anything else, it explains how those claiming to represent such gods have commonly been able to hold positions of power in many of our societies), so this study hasn’t changed anything about my view, it’s not new information, it’s just evidence for something I’ve always thought very likely and pretty much assumed to be the case. And despite knowing that, I’ve always felt religion to be a net negative, so your ‘insufficiently empirical’ claim is unfounded. It should cause a move for people for whom this is a new idea, but I’m not one of them. However, if you could show that religion hasn't had the very damaging effect of slowing our progress toward understanding that I’ve claimed, then that would be a game changer for me.

Second, I’m not certain that I would use the term ‘child abuse’ the way Dawkins does, it's too strong (I think it’s an abuse of trust, but that’s a different argument), but neither would I accept that it is morally right to terrify children with stories of Hell even if I accept the benefit to society. My reasons are:

1) It's almost arbitrary. In practice, I find the the way that it is done to be almost arbitrary. **I’ll explain this one below.
2) It's inefficient. Even if true that historically it has been of benefit to society, we are now at point in our development as a species that we can replace superstitions that encourage co-operation but which hinder our acquisition of new knowledge and understanding, with a new paradigm that helps us but doesn’t hinder us at the same time. We shouldn’t need superstitions; we shouldn’t need to be made to be afraid, to decide that working together is beneficial. (it's inelegant too)
3) It's not justified. While fear has utility, this doesn’t justify its use in all cases, and in the case of young children and terrifying them with stories of Hell for the purposes of teaching prosocial behaviours when there are many effective alternatives, fear is simply not necessary. We're not uneducated savages flinching every time there's thunder, we're much more sophisticated and knowledgeable than that that now. It's use is cruel. I’m not a consequentialist, the 'mean's matter.

**If Hell is real, then of course, it’s something we have a duty to tell our children about, even if that terrifies them. So, the justification I would accept for terrifying young children with stories about Hell is that that they are unquestionably true. Since we can’t know the truth of it, the genuinely unbiased approach to dealing with this issue, the morally right approach IMO, would be to teach children all the punitive god stories, and of course the secular alternative (I took this approach). What we find though in practice, is that individuals choose which version to tell their children, based on what they themselves believe. Since they can’t all be right, some must be wrong, and that means some people are terrifying their children solely for the purpose of discipline when there are plenty of effective alternatives that don’t involve causing children to suffer the fear of something that might not even be true. So I think that it’s ‘unnecessary mental anguish’, no different from 'the bogey man will get you' stories.

Washingtonpost.com - Donald Trump is running as Christianity’s savior. And it might work.

Do you have another explanation for why evangelicals are voting for someone who clearly doesn't share many of their values?

The specific criticism I'm making here by highlighting a lack of empiricism is that you have too much confidence in these speculations about the costs and benefits of religion being true. You shouldn't assume this effect to be real without evidence.

You argue that even if teaching hell to children is a net positive for society it is still immoral to do so. You present three reasons for this claim.

a) Arbitrary. Here I'm not sure what moral principle you are appealing to here. Your argument is this:

b) In practice, people teach their own beliefs about hell to their children.
c) Some people's beliefs about hell are false.
d) Therefore, these people are teaching hell solely for the purpose of discipline.
e) There are ways to discipline children without causing them to suffer.
f) Therefore, these people should use these other methods of discipline.

First of all, this is not a valid argument. It does not follow from the fact that people are wrong about hell that they think they are wrong about hell. Therefore this argument doesn't show that the sole reason these people have for teaching about hell is discipline.

Second, I am skeptical of (e). Or at least, that has yet to be demonstrated. This also ends up collapsing your first objection into your second, arguing not that it is wrong, but that it is not best. I accept satisficing models of consequentialism where you don't need to find the best action to be doing the morally right action.

Anyway, I don't think discipline is the right model. I was raised to believe in hell, but my parents didn't use it as a disciplinary tool. I'm sure some parents do this, but I'm doubtful it is very common. Typically the most effective punishments are immediate. Saying that you shouldn't do x because if you do you'll be punished in 60 years isn't going to be as effective as a saying you'll be punished immediately.

2) This is just an assertion. Maybe it is true that we are at that stage in our evolution, but we don't have enough evidence of it to claim it is wrong to teach hell. For instance, suppose someone has a more risk-averse value set, where they are willing to accept a slower trend line towards a better society for a lower chance of catastrophic failure. Such a person might think that messing around with the institutions of civil society is very dangerous and can have unintended and potentially sharply negative consequences.

To me, this sounds much like what you want to believe than conclusions you have found through a study of social science.

3) Actually, we do still flinch when we hear unexpected thunder. I am not convinced that we have evolved into the enlightened humans you seem to think we have. I also don't think it is as easy as you claim to motivate people to pro-social behavior.

And fine, if you reject consequentialism you can reject my argument. But realize that if this is one of your assumptions then you significantly lower the probability that your view is correct.

To sum up, your objection seems to be that we have better alternatives and so we shouldn't do teach hell. I think this argument has several unlikely assumptions. First, it assumes that motivations for pro-social behavior don't stack--that is, you seem to think that we can't teach hell AND whatever these unidentified alternatives.

Second, it assumes that it is wrong to do x even if x has positive utility if doing y has more utility. I think there are real problems in the world worth solving. Global poverty. Climate change. That is because these have sharply negative utility effects. If teaching hell is a good thing for the world, but not quite as good as some other thing, I don't think the advocacy and outrage on the issue on the part of atheists is justified.

Uh, yeah. There are many, many explanations available. Trump is winning evangelical support because of racism, because of nostalgia, because of their anger at the GOP and media establishment, because they agree with his policy positions, because of increased media exposure, and so on. What has not been offered as an explanation is that they agree with him because they view him as someone who shares their values or religion.

You seem to be assuming that these white evangelicals political support is somehow always explained by their religious beliefs. Trump's support among them is the best argument for the claim that it isn't. Trump is about as far as you can get from a typical Evangelical-style candidate. This is why so many evangelical leaders have come out against Trump and for Cruz (eg James Dobson, Tony Perkins, David Barton).

Is the proliferate of belief in spiritual warfare relevant to to the demographic?

Though in an actual sense It's more like spiritual pro-wrestling. I read some philosopher's take about the wrestling aspect of trump in the media recently.

It's really interesting to use an opinion piece when challenged to present evidence. It's a fascinating strategy, considering the number of opinion pieces that make arguments other than the one you're trying to make.

Just maybe, it's because their votes are NOT being driven by their religion.

Yes, it's possible that among the evangelical voting block there are enough racists, people who are nostalgic or angry, or who actually agree with enough of his ridiculous, vague and unsubstantiated positions, that he managed to acquire such a large percentage of that specific voting demographic.

It's also possible that what the article said is true.

No, I'm not doing that, but neither am I completely ignoring it as a factor. This group is not called 'don't even consider religion when voting', they're called the 'evangelicals' for a reason.

And this doesn't disagree with the possibility that despite being "as far as you can get from a typical Evangelical-style candidate", something is attracting evangelical voters for whom sharing a few of Trumps values shouldn't be enough on their own to get their vote, and perhaps it's the reason suggested in the article.

Jesus!Jesus?