I generally think the probability someone who capitalises logic in a post doesn't understand logic close to 1.

Could the ongoing activity of teaching hell not could be considered a pro-social behavior in itself? It's the behavior of teaching and learning a shared belief, and that process facilitates acceptance, unites believers, and encourages friendship, i.e. group cohesion, but are those things, or the benefits of having a population that now acts in a more pro-social way through fear of divine punishment because of this belief, the intention of teaching hell?

I think that actually it is the intention of both, even though those actually doing it don't, they do it because they think it's true or because it's simply what one does, but that's because I don't believe that any gods exist, so what else could explain it's success? But I don't accept this 'ah, it helped us, so it's ok really' argument. I think it's a weak argument that fails to take into account all those other helping factors, and that in any case fails to take our more modern context into account when used to support continuing this behavior. Even if it did help historically, that doesn't mean that we still need it. I think that both results can be achieved in ways that don't require terrifying, and risking traumatizing, young children. Murdering strangers once helped us survive, as did many other behaviors that have been abandoned as we've become more 'civilized'. I would add terrifying young children, by teaching hell, to that list.

I was offering it as an example of an anti-social behaviour that results from religious teaching.

So when teaching about extreme, unimaginable punishment, is it appropriate to punish children who question or reject such teaching about punishment?

Yes, you think these sorts of things. But the question is *WHY* do you think this? You've provided no evidentiary basis that religious people do this only because "they think it's true" and not because they think they're fostering specific types of behaviors by teaching it. This is just like your whole "Evangelicals vote for Trump primarily because of religion." You can keep asserting it, but that's not going to make it true.

Right. And in doing so, you ignored all of the other evidence that religious participation enhances social behaviors. A single sociological/phychological article published in a journal for cellular biology. That's totally the thing to hang your hat on.

You have your one paper. I'll link many:

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/18/9/803.short

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1...289.x/abstract

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/45/6/1380/

http://130.104.5.100/cps/ucl/doc/psy...Newsletter.pdf

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1...328.x/abstract

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/1...2480XADS0801_3

I could go on, but it's basically like this:

https://youtu.be/cjuGCJJUGsg?t=190

I'm not going to explain any further, **** dude are you illiterate?

Ahhh, I see you simply cherry pick and only read what you want to read, bravo bro. Just like you prob do religion!

Or you with everything.

I think so. Keeping in mind tame_deuces' point that "pro-social" doesn't translate to "morally good".

Neither do I. I'm not sure that OrP thinks it's completely clear-cut either, but rather just that it's also not completely straightforward that teaching the existence of hell is child abuse, or that religion in a broad sense is a purely negative phenomenon.

Is this actually true? And would this count as a "pro-social behavior" in the same sense as other things that are going on?

I think the answer to both is "no" but I'm open to being wrong on the first.

There seems to be some confusion between intrinsically moral actions and actions that are considered moral by the majority of the group. Millions of people have gone off to war for their “group” and have done unspeakable things for the good of their particular group. MightyBoosh says that these majority-moral actions have become rare in “civilized” society, but I don’t think that is necessarily true. Not only is “murdering” justified for soldiers, but it is given pro-social award status.

Formalized military combat is not always about "survival." For example, interventionist actions where you defend another country that isn't yours usually isn't framed in terms of survival. Even the US civil war was a war about policy and not survival.

Scare quotes around murdering... Are you saying that do think that war is murder? Or that you don't?

I am, and it's on that basis that I was arguing against it with OrP, but I wasn't easily able to show how it was morally 'bad'. Exactly what constitutes 'harm', and the levels of harm that may be occurring, is something difficult to establish.


I shy away from the phrase 'child abuse' as it's used generally. Perhaps it's an abuse of the trust that children have in adults to be telling the truth but that's not an argument I would rely on. I certainly consider it to be unnecessarily terrifying for young children. Even if it's true, we don't need to be terrifying children at such a young age. We tell young children 'don't go with strangers' but we don't describe in detail what might happen because that would be considered going 'too far'. I don't see why teaching hell should be treated any differently, and yet it is, which simply reinforces my long held belief that religion is often treated differently and held to different standards.

I don't consider that it has a prosocial benefit to be something that adds to the plus column in the net negative/positive debate mainly because I don't necessarily agree that those benefits are something that is actually positive. So this hasn't changed anything for me.

I don't disagree with this point, but I will also like to add that in my view the paper presented has far from conclusively shown that teaching punitive religion encourages pro-social behavior.

They have not properly addressed how others factors in some religions might also easily explain the encouragement of pro-social behavior, for example cohesiveness / group identity. We know from other studies that Muslims and Christians tend to favor eachother more so than people of other religions (this is even quoted in the paper this thread is about); if we assume other factors in those religions reasonably encourages pro-social behavior towards members of the same religion, we might have a confounding variable (if we assume these religions tend towards punitivity).

It's also a question of definitions. The "strangers" in the paper are persons of the same religion. One can reasonably dispute, or at the very least question, this definition of "strangers" if we factor in group identity.

Again, you should really describe the manner in which you believe things are being taught to children. And precisely what.

What age do you believe these things are being taught?

You continue to undermine your own argument here, as has been discussed previously. You say you object to using fear, but here you're using fear. Your objection therefore comes down to the "amount" of fear, and you have yet to meaningfully discuss this in the context of teaching about hell.

No, this is just you reinforcing your own biases because you actively choose to ignore information that is contrary to your beliefs. It's not actually treated any differently in reality, just in the caricatures you've created in your head.