Quote:
Originally Posted by craig1120
What I see happening in this thread is a misconception that assumes people are primarily motivated to have their beliefs accurately reflect reality. That is almost always a secondary motivation for people when it comes to beliefs that they have invested identity and meaning into.
I think it is quite true that religious beliefs are, for most believers, inextricably intertwined with their identities and something they invest meaning into.
But there's two problems with relying too much on this.
First, religions really do make factual claims. Obviously, they make factual claims about silly issues that have little effect on modern life, such as whether or not Jonah really lived inside a whale or how old Methuselah really was.
But they also make factual claims that do matter. A lot. Claims such as about the age of the earth. Or whether God granted the land of Israel to Jews. Or whether women are subordinate to men. Or whether homosexuality is harmful.
If the community of religious believers were nothing more than a bunch of people who invested meaning in a bunch of stories which were intertwined with their identity, that would be relatively harmless. But there are women who have had their clitorises cut off because of religion. There are gays who have been stoned to death because of religion. There are schoolchildren who have not been given a basic understanding of human biology because of religion.
The second problem is a significant number of believers don't simply want to identify with a religion. They want power. They want to compel belief, using either the formal sanction of laws or the informal sanctions of ostracization and community pressure. Some even want to kill infidels, and many want to discriminate against them.
And when religion becomes an instrument of power rather than simply a personal identity, the fact that it makes a lot of false claims becomes a very, very big problem.