I don't really have limits here.

Starvation diets don't usually work over the long term, so I am doubtful that would actually solve the obesity problem.

You are focusing on the wrong issue here. Your argument is fairly simple.

1) Causing children to experience fear is always wrong.
2) Teaching children that hell is real causes them to experience fear.
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3) Therefore, teaching children that hell is real is always wrong.

I have quibbled a bit about the extent to which (2) is accurate (you think it causes much more fear than I do), but I will certainly accept that in general it is true that some children experience fear because of being told that hell is real.

My main disagreement is with (1). I think this is a crazy view. Fear is unpleasant, but it can definitely make people's lives happier and better. But you reject any attempt to justify the use of fear by pointing to the positive consequences of that fear. Fine. I think you are wrong about that, but I don't want to argue about whether or not we should accept moral consequentialism.

Now, if you want to try to argue on consequentialist grounds (even though you personally reject them) that it is wrong to teach children that hell is real, go ahead. Alternatively, I would be interested in your reasons for treating fear as an inherent evil that can't ever be justified.



What about school? Is it wrong to send your children to school because they might be scared of it?

I thought it caused unnecessary stress for religious people.

...............................................



I can't make sense of this.

Right. So it is your view that better understanding of the world doesn't have survival benefit.

You think pro-social attitudes towards distant others no longer matter in modern societies?

This seems guarded and a little ambiguous. For clarity, are you saying that as long as a positive benefit is the result, or as long as a clear and immediate 'harm' cannot easily be identified, that there is no behaviour toward children that you would consider unacceptable?


No this is wrong, my view is not this simplistic. I did think that I had made it clear that I understand why we experience fear and why it has utility, but I haven't brought up the types of fear that I think are acceptable to inflict on children because I thought you would do that at some point. I've scared my children, I've made them afraid of being abducted, or of killing themselves or making themselves unhealthy with drugs or cigarettes or a bad diet, of falling off cliffs, or in a more trivial way, of losing their TV time because they haven't done their homework or tidied their rooms etc etc.

However, when they were very young, before what we consider the age of reason, I didn’t always give reasons. I didn’t tell them what could happen if they were abducted, I didn’t mention rape, torture and abuse, murder, snuff porn, paedophilia, serial killers etc etc. Some of those issues I’ve introduced as they got older, more intellectually capable of processing such awful thoughts, and had more experience of life, in other words a framework within which to process this information. Others I still haven’t told them about.

I considered that type of information to be unsuitable for very young children, a commonly held viewpoint, even though I know without doubt that those issues are real. Since even those issues can’t begin to compare to what the Devil is capable of, it seems then that there’s an argument that withholding that information until children are older would also be a suitable way of dealing with it.
What’s your view on that?

In what way? Presumably the stress hasn’t changed, but now you consider it ‘necessary’? This suggests that you’ve done some kind of calculation too, to have decided that this new information moves the result close enough to net-positive that you were wrong in your previous view but since you can’t measure the stress, or the benefits, can you say that are you being empirical?

...............................................



My confidence level is 'strongly suspect', maybe even 'lean towards'. I am probably influenced by my cognitive biases but try to overcome that. Even if everything else about religion was wonderful, I would still reject it because of the way it limits and hinders our progress.


Of course not, but how is that inconsistent with being able to reconcile that something negative has a survival benefit?

No, I think that they exist (and to a lesser extent have always existed) for reasons entirely separate from religious ones, not least because of technologies such as TV, the internet and faster communications. We are generally much better informed and we live in a global society now, although we are still divided in many ways (one the most significant divisions being caused by religion). I strongly doubt that sharing a religious belief systems with strangers still has the benefit it once had.

How do you try? By holding tight to your various hypotheses and believing things like:

Because if so, it doesn't appear you're trying all that hard to overcome your biases. It looks like you're just reinforcing them.

Why would you teach your children that hell is real, when there is no such thing as "hell"? Seems pretty simple to me.

Obviously because you believe there is such a thing as hell.

On a lighter note:

I believe there is such a thing as hell. Yet I believe it to be somewhere here on Earth. Namely, North Korea.

I would teach my children to believe in hell.....on earth.
Likewise with heaven, except heaven has a much larger dominion: everywhere except North Korea.
Clearly, we have a generous God.

I don't know what is unclear about what I said. You asserted that there were limits to the consequentialist view I'm defending here. I said there wasn't.

Yes, I know that you acknowledge that fear has utility, but you said that you are not a consequentialist, that the means do matter, and that using fear is wrong. But if causing children to feel fear is wrong, and you aren't including the consequences of that fear in your moral evaluation, then I don't see your justification for making your children afraid of doing drugs, or any of the other things you list here.

Okay. So you wouldn't have a problem with adults teaching children about hell as long as they aren't too graphic about it?

I don't have a problem with that. I'm doubtful that being more explicit about these things to young children matter nearly as much as people think, but they might have a marginal impact. I also don't think religious people generally teach about hell to young children in a graphic way either.

My view of the actual harm is that it isn't as big a deal as I supposed and there is more empirical support for the benefits than I had previously thought.

The real difference is that I used to engage with theology much more strongly on an object-level, so that I would argue that hell is false because I thought a universe where hell was real was morally despicable (as I still do) and that the arguments for an eternal hell were weak from both a theological and philosophical perspective.

Over the last few years I've shifted to a more pragmatic view of theology, where my main interest isn't as much in the content of various schools of thought as on the effects of a group holding that theology. Initially, as I tend to agree with liberal Christians more on political and cultural matters, I thought I should favor more Christians becoming liberal Christians.

However, the social science literature has identified some real benefits to more conservative forms of religion, which has caused me to reevaluate my original views on the matter. This study is one. There are others, such as conservative religion's ability to maintain a high birthrate in developed countries, and its greater ability to maintain social groups over time.

Okay. As you know, I think your confidence in this claim is unwarranted.

You said that religion hinders our ability to understand the world, but also that religion has survival benefit. This means either that our ability to understand the world has negative survival benefit or that religion has some other positive survival effect that is larger than the putative drag on our ability to understand the world caused by religion.

I still don't understand what you think is different about modern societies such that punitive religion no longer has this effect. Why would better communication technology change this?

and

seem incredibly contradictory to me.

I haven't followed this thread very closely, and I also have a pretty strong negative bias towards conservative religion in the US, so a grain of salt is recommended, but...

My (rather humble) meanderings into anthropology suggest to me that "conservative" vs "liberal" religion might be a misleading way of approaching this topic, at least from the standpoint of assessing the pro-social value of modern American Christianity. The idea of hell as a pro-social belief reminded me of a couple other beliefs which I recently read about:

1) The Itzaj, a Mayan group in Guatemala, traditionally have a belief in the Arux, wind spirits who monitor human activity and play tricks on people who over-hunt or otherwise damage the forest.

2) In the Peruvian Amazon, there are tribes who have a belief in a being called Kiatsi, a sort of snake spirit of the river, who similarly punishes people for over-fishing.

The pro-social benefit of both of those beliefs is clear, and I think the comparison to hell is also. A functionalist would probably argue that the pro-social benefit is even the cause of the beliefs, ultimately. But, the culture and religious worldview within which those beliefs are situated is of course very different from conservative Christianity. It seems to me that in all of these cases the strength of the pro-social effect is likely tied to how integrated the specific beliefs are within an overarching worldview and shared cultural identity. The advantage that "conservative" religion has over "liberal" religion in the west in this regard is that it has maintained a stronger and more integrated worldview, so the beliefs have more normative force. The downside is that it only seems to maintain its cohesion by also strengthening the "us vs. them" attitude and xenophobia towards non-group members, and that's a pretty big problem in a pluralistic society.

Now, I think that historically "religion" is how we describe the kind of integrating identity-creating worldviews which tend to produce and maintain these sorts of pro-social beliefs*, and its useful to recognize that, but it doesn't have to take the particular form of "conservative" Christianity to be effective. In a sense, atheism as a movement (rather than in apathetic forms) represents a new kind of overarching worldview, which can also construct strong social and cultural identity. It can be "religious" in that sense, and is characterized by certain common moral and epistemological principles, as well as a certain view of the nature of humanity and its relation to the world. I think that it is perhaps likely that traditional religions appear to have an advantage in this respect at the moment simply because they are well established, while more secular worldviews are recent and tumultuous. I think it's not too much of an overstatement to say the modern world is in the middle of a tremendous upheaval caused by a crisis where traditional worldviews have ceased to be generally believable.

So I think I would agree that there is truth to the claim that traditional religion has social value, but the better lesson might be that it's useful to keep in mind the importance of symbol, ritual, myth, and traditionally "religious" categories of human expression in creating shared culture, rather than thinking that it's important to perpetuate specific beliefs.

* e.g. Clifford Geertz' definition: "religion is (1) a system of symbols (2) which acts to establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men (3) by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic."

It's also important to remember that a researcher's definition of "pro-social" is basically a cardboard-cutout. It doesn't translate to "good" or "moral". Some scientific authors who tend towards the pop-sciencey can be a bit flimsy when it comes to that distinction, and do a leap from the descriptive to the normative which is more taken for granted than fully justified.

In my country these days a convicted mass murderer is suing the state for human rights violations, as they are censoring some of his mail correspondence (specially the ones where he is trying to recruit others to engage towards violent extremism and cases where he might be trying to do so). Such cases often display the weakness of the term "pro-social behavior". It's an easy term when we can chose between "good" or "bad", but often becomes fragile when we have to chose between "bad" or "worse".

Point taken. At least in this case I think by "pro-social" we mean something like "encourages social cohesion and behavior that is beneficial to the collective rather than being purely self-interested".

Although from that perspective the individualism of western culture is also interesting, and is plausibly influenced by Christianity, because of the soteriology of individual salvation.

On Original Positions point about benefits from religion that seem to manifest themselves more strongly on more "conservative" religions, this politard thread has some interesting datapoints:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/41.../#post49599739

Okay, this isn't conservative/liberal but mosque attending/not attending, but nonetheless interesting.

It isn't really very surprising that people that tend towards engagement in their local community also tend towards more engagement in their local religion, though.

itt, plenty of non-religious people following the guidelines of the worst religion of them all to a tee: science.

Or maybe some of you guys can give me the rigorous methods you must go through in order to rank which kind of food is best, better, bad and worst for each of your kid without any reasonable doubt. Or if it is truly better for him to use more or less sunscreen. Or if that cheaper toothpaste really has similar quality after all? The number of 'leaps of faith' needed to get even one of these answer with a reasonable degree of certitude will overwhelmingly exceed the amount needed to adhere to every other known religion.

Science is a religion because it can't point to us their god and prophets anymore than others; you can tell me the apple is full of good vitamins, and that my body feeds off these vitamins; but I will still have to take your word for it that the apple is actually good for me. Nothing else can actually prove to me that the vitamins get where they need to go in my body or if they even had the right vehicle. Oh, sure, you can take a bunch of us and examine changes. But who is it to tell me that this boy became that way because of this instead of that? Leaky logic indeed, the same and only kind that is being used against religion nonetheless. What's irrefutable, though, is that no amount of facts can save me from the burden of blindly believing in the synchronicity between them.

Why are you expecting them to point at their god for you can see them again??

While you atheist are doing all the right things like fearmongoring your kids of all the possible ways and causes in which their body will assuredly decay, you are surely encouraging them in other activities that are thought to be OK as of now but will, just like fast food or smoking, be proven to be harmful to them in a near future. On that day we might agree to collectively compare ourselves to our lesser mate in order to save the little that is left of our dignity. Then I will pray to God for he saves your children.

Face it, atheist, you aren't really anything different from me. weak men of faith. You're so tough to show God the way out; for if we forget the Men you greet to take His place. You would have really showed the pastors and bishops your way, for if you didn't worship their sons after them: Scientists, Journalists, Lawyers, Doctors, or just experts.

What I find the most confusing aspect of this line of argument is when religious people think that they're undermining the credibility of Science by calling it a religion. Wut?

I never employ 'faith', so in that one respect I can say with certainty that I differ from you.

Objectivity in science doesn't mean "universal absolute truth", it means something ala "qualified conclusions, agreed upon by peers". It's a very reasonable thing. The same logic is what you employ when you don't go to a shaman to have your car fixed, you go to a mechanic or someone who is proven competent on the matter of fixing cars (perhaps even yourself). Science is of course not perfect, if it was there wouldn't be any need for more science.

As for the rest of your post there is nothing about atheism that means you have to accept science or know science however. Atheism is merely (at its most minimal level) a lack of belief in gods. Atheists can believe in the supernatural, be religious, reject science and disdain intellectuals - just like you do.

"Is it wrong to teach kids that hell is real?"

It's wrong to teach kids anything that has no proof to support it claims to be real. It's wrong obviously, why don't we teach our kids about the Alien race the Smurfs on planet X too, while we're at it! (O, wait...Why don't we do that exactly? Lets see...lightbulb moment for the believers!!!!Ding ding ding..... WE HAVE NO PROOF, SO WE DONT TEACH THAT CRAZY ****!)

Adults teaching kids about religion/ a belief/ a hunch/ a personal feeling, is exactly that just another individual trying to exert their power over another individual. They themselves have no proof, why on Earth would they even offer to pass on that knowledge. It is false knowledge until proven. How nobody sees the banality, the absolute craziness of this situation is beyond me.

The person teaching "false knowledge" is crazy, for 1. believing without proof and 2. teaching those beliefs without any evidence. I still find it funny that adults believe in something without any evidence! Why still keep up the charades? Why keep lying to yourself? Einstein said, If you keep doing the same thing over and over, why would you expect different results? Have faith all you want, keep believing all you want, do it over and over, all you will get in the end is the same result. God does not exist! That's the same answer you have got since day 1 where you were old to realise it.

It's one thing making someone aware about possibilities, I have no problem with that, but it's an entirely different thing what's really going on with religion.

Of course you don't. You merely employ beliefs that you've formulated in the absence of any evidence and often in spite of evidence contrary to your beliefs, and then label them as "suspicions."

do you talk about Santa Claus, morality, or any scientific thing you haven't yourself studied and evaluated the evidence on?

I think the problem I'm having with considering this to be something that would justify terrifying, and potentially traumatising young children with the idea of hell and the devil is that I think that the benefits are being overvalued and also that many other issues are being ignored.

Firstly, the definition of 'pro-social' is that it is is something "which is positive, helpful, and intended to promote social acceptance and friendship" and I don't think that the intention of teaching hell is to promote those things. The benefits are not intentional, they're a side effect. I think that those who teach hell do it because it's a truth, not to deliberately encourage pro-social behaviour, and that they would teach it even if it didn't. That it has had a survival benefit and that this may be the reason such behaviour continues makes perfect sense to me, but that doesn't mean that we still need it. Xenophobia and racism probably had survival benefits too, but we're keen to shed them.

Secondly, other studies have shown that religious teachings cause people to be less altruistic than the non-religious. If we encouraged pro-social behavior in other ways, and avoided the lower level of altruistic behavior that results from religious teachings, perhaps we would have made more progress than we have.

Thirdly, religions just add another item to the list of reasons why different social groups reject or even fight each other.

Lastly, for now, other developments, like language, agriculture, science and understanding, environmental change, the need for protection from predators and simple bodily needs like needing nourishment, have also united people and have contributed to the formation of 'civilizations'. How strongly does teaching hell figure among things that have benefited us? Enough to justify terrifying young children?

(I also have a problem with the base paradigm that the resulting civilization is actually something 'desirable').

Be careful, because you're treading into that consequentialist analysis that you've said you reject.

This is a very interesting viewpoint that's almost certainly wrong. You mean to say that you REALLY don't see that teaching about hell as a consequence of certain negative behaviors also has a connection to encouraging children to engage in certain positive behaviors?

You mean that *A* study has shown this, and the study was particularly controversial from a methodological and analytic standpoint:

http://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/...ore-altruistic

It's also a good example of science reporting gone awry because the way that the study was characterized was often grossly misleading.

By this logic, ANYTHING is bad because it adds another item to the list of reasons. This just a terribly overbroad point to try to build on.

Again, you've really got to stop being as stupid as you're being about this whole "terrifying young children" business. You have yet to produce any meaningful evidence that this characterization is useful or accurate.

This is you just stretching as hard as you can to find negative things to say about religion. But this is not a new thing at all. It's not as if you've put forward any meaningful commentary on what is "desirable" beyond your blanket statements that lead one to conclude your position is that anything not religious is desirable, in which case you're just asserting your assumptions again. But that's also not new.

I think you're taking that definition from Wikipedia, but if so you're misunderstanding it. The article is defining pro-social behavior as involving intent, but in this thread the pro-social behavior in question is not the teaching of hell, but the behavior of people who have been taught that hell is real and because of that belief act in a certain pro-social way out of fear. Whether or not the teaching itself was intended to promote pro-social behavior is irrelevant as far as the definition of pro-social behavior is concerned, as well as from a functionalist perspective in sociology.


altruistic behavior is a narrower category of behavior than pro-social behavior, at least as far as the studies you are looking at are concerned. That is, we might count it as "pro-social" behavior if people being afraid of hell avoid acting in ways that are directly harmful to others, but that's not altruism, and it's not what the studies about altruism look at.

If you read my first post you would see I somewhat agree with you on this count.

This is a tale that has some legs and may give some justification to the "hell believers", at least in this literary sense.

Dante's "Divine Comedy" speaks to his Inferno or "Hell". The "Nine Levels of Hell" are presented in a ghastly appreciation. This is a work which I have never been able to penetrate but still hold it in high esteem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(Dante)

It becomes more interesting in the character of Brunetto Latini who is understood to be the teacher of Dante. After returning from a diplomatic mission in Spain the was informed that his Guelph party had lost power and that he , in effect, became ostracized from his city of Florence.

It becomes a singular incident when at the same time as to when he learned of his loss Brunetto Latini lost consciousness which some may call heatstroke or shock, depending upon the perspective of the narrator.

It was during this episode that Brunetto Latini had a supersensible experience to which he was able to bring to consciousness in later life. the only experience which many may know which may be related may be the experience of Paul on the road to Damascus.

Latini's experience or "initiation" or in ancient times called a 'baptism" was in effect, that which occurs at death only in this case(s) the man survives. And yes, that very experience to which Dante writes was the very experience which was taught to him by his teacher , Brunetto Latini.

Yada, yada, "Hell" is something which can be seen as more than a flippant state of abstracted incongruity. And no, the loss of consciousness is not noted in the Wikipedia referral.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunetto_Latini

Jeez, dude...Grow up already!!! FFS.

Talk about and even inform is all good. Religion is a completely different ball game. Targeting children, indoctrinating them whilst their brain is still not fully matured. ****ing pathetic. Most religious people are dumb non thinking people. Look at Muslims or Christians, most are low or uneducated and just simply follow without thought. You can see the evidence all over NOW! People (matured) have a hard time letting go (even smart people) because they have been fed that horse**** from a small age.

Even in the face of LOGIC, they continue to believe! Grown up and fully matured. It baffles me, because they want to put faith and or religion on a pedestal. Just treat it like any other question you have and seek to find the answer, then draw your own conclusions from the information/evidence you have collected.

Would you continue to believe in an experiment to which you BELIEVE to produce answer X, yet continues to produce answer Z. You have tested it a million times and the result stays the same. You have to draw the line somewhere dude. The answer is not changing from X to Z. Just stop trying to justify that religion is any different to any other experiment you are trying to find an answer to.

One last question, as you brought up Santa.

Do you teach your children about Santa? Of course you do.

Do you live your life as if Santa is real? Do you believe Santa is real. If everyone around you believed Santa was real, would you? Even though there is NO evidence?

Yeah. Let's not teach children ANYTHING because feeding them information when they're young and their brain is still is not fully matured is pathetic. They should be blank slates until they reach an age of reasoning, at which point they can then just discover all the true information on their own.

This whole teaching thing is moronic.