Demagoguery - does it matter how specifically religious it is so long as the appearance of religiosity is enough to appeal to individuals prone to such influence.

Also demagogues compete with each other for who is the bigger, better demagogue. It never makes sense for them to be unified and if so not for very long.

Eh. I don't want to get into Trump here, so I'll let this one go.

Which is why you need to present more than a narrative. You need to produce evidence.

Okay. But this still doesn't make your point for you in any way, as the reasons they are called "Evangelicals" has little to do with voting. (There are Evangelicals OUTSIDE the US and in countries that don't vote. Is your mind blown?)

The label "Evangelical" extends beyond the political sphere, and it would even be right to say that the political sphere adopted the language. So to narrow it as you have to playing a significant factor, in the face of plenty of evidence showing internal criticism (criticism FROM Evangelicals) about the voting patterns of Evangelicals NOT matching their beliefs... well... you'd have to be interpreting reality in an absurd way to try to argue that religion is driving their voting patterns.

But your ability to hold to your own narratives in the face of evidence is a talent that you've exhibited consistently throughout your participation on RGT. (I'm still amused by "What does a Christian do?" as being a form of state-sponsored religious indoctrination.)

Nobody is disagreeing with possibility. The claim is that "possibility" isn't "evidence" and you were asked to provide "evidence."

Firstly, it is appallingly rude that you have gone on this tangent! Or at least, that's what you seem to believe is rude. In reality, it's perfectly fine.

Second, you seem to have it backwards. The whole religious identity, fanning the flames of dubious religious persecution and electing devoted Christians who will defend your beliefs and values certainly is a motivating thread in the GOP you aren't at all wrong there. But trump doesn't pull that thread. His appeal is decisively on other directions and if anything we have learned that the type of voters who will typically vote huckabee or Santorum will switch to someone who is barely Christian, has previously viewed the key abortion issue backwards, and barely espouses any Christian values BUT is popular on other metrics.

Trump shows the limitations of religious identity as a motivating factor, not the other way around.

Perhaps, but how can we be empirical about this when it's not really possible to measure any of the required data meaningfully? In the case of this study moving the pointer a little toward religion being less net negative, I explained that I had already assumed this prosocial behaviour benefit to be true anyway so it doesn't change anything for me.

We clearly have a difference of opinion over when it's ok to cause children to suffer, and when it's not. I think, incidentally, that you're focusing to much on how children may be affected into adulthood where I think that's irrelevant because the act is still right or wrong regardless of any long term effects. I think this is a dangerous justification/defence anyway because there's not much you can't justify if you can point out that 'they turned out ok'... And to object to really horrible things being justified in this way, you would have to go back to the actual act and show that it is horrible, so you end up back in the moment of the act itself despite the defence.

There's a scale of suffering that we can inflict on children, anything from being deprived of TV for a night all the way to severe physical abuse leading to death. On my scale, teaching Hell is closer to the latter end of the scale than the former, because it's such a terrifying thing to small children. It's on the wrong side of my line. Frankly, even if I thought it true, I wouldn't teach it to them until they had at least reached the age of reasoning, I certainly wouldn't teach it to toddlers and primary age children.

I do. It may not account for how people treat those from a different in-group, but who share the same belief, but it can explain most other types of prosocial behaviour.

I think you're making your own assumptions, primarily that teaching Hell has the same benefits in modern society that it's had historically. How do you know this to be true?

How can you be sure that teaching Hell isn't now a waste of time, time that we could be spending focusing more on teaching the things to children that could eradicate poverty and global warming issues?

It's not a tangent, it's a counter example, used to demonstrate one of the many problems that religions cause in our society, in a conversation that is about the benefits or not, to society, of teaching religion to young children.

Feel free to jump into the conversation if you like, but it's not actually about Trump.

Out of curiosity, where do other things fall on your scale of fear? For example, "dark rooms" can be particularly frightening to young children. At slightly older ages, we have things like "the boogieman." Do you think that small children are more frightened by an abstract concept ("eternal damnation") than they are these more immediate fears?

Classic maneuvering. Trump this, Trump that, Evangelicals and Trump, but this isn't actually Trump.

Oh? You don't think talking about how much of Trump's appeal is about his religious is a tangent from the OP? Really? It's practically the definition of a tangent. I'm just going to guess that if YOU started a thread about the morality of teaching hell given a theory on the roll of hell in the historical development of society, that you would find it a tangent if people started talking about Trump.

Of course you ignore the substance of my post.

How much time do you think is being spent teaching kids about Hell? I don't see how you gain anything reasonable in any sort of analysis here.

For those who agree, what [punishment should the legal system do to the parents of the child ?

Ok, if you insist...

You said:
See the bolded bit? It's wrong. Did you visit the page at the other end of the link I previously provided? If you didn't, you should. And if you did, you might want to read it again, you're missing the point.

But now you're turning this into an actual tangent, so don't expect any further replies from me.

so let me get this straight. When you talked about trump, when you debated about trump with others, that was not a tangent. But when I challenge you on your point about trump, now it is a tangent. And you defend the point - engaging on the tangent - but referring to an earlier part of the conversation that seems to be simultaneously a tangent and not a tangent. Now you are refusing to respond if I address the article because it would be a tangent now even though it wasn't a tangent when you made it. Or something.

The point is simple: tangents are, and have always been fine. When we previously disagreed on this - you seemed to believe tangents were incredibly rude - I planned ahead to wait until you made a tangent of your own in a thread. You have now done so. But instead of capitulating that tangents are indeed fine and you indeed go on them, you seem to be steadfastly refusing to accept you went on a tangent while simultaneously accusing me of going on a tangent for engaging the same point you went on a tangent on.

That said, I reject a bunch of that oped. I'd type out why, but since you have passively aggressively already decided not to respond - despite responding yourself - what is the point?

Super, super slow pony, but... This is actually the identical logic that anti-vaccination folk apply.

(1) Vaccinations are unnecessary: "My friend's cousin wasn't vaccinated and turned out just fine.
(2) Vaccinations could have damaging effects: "Vaccinations aren't a perfectly safe option. Some kids have reactions to the chemicals."
(3) In my opinion: "I just don't trust those studies. They were funded by the pharmaceutical companies."
(C) I won't vaccinate my kid.

Don't use that logic. It's not good logic.

Yes, it is this assumption that I'm criticizing. You shouldn't have assumed that punitive religions encourage more pro-social behavior among co-religionists than non-punitive religions. You might have thought that it was a plausible hypothesis, but that doesn't mean it is true. Basically, you are probably giving too much weight to narrative or pattern-matching (non-empirical factors) as a reason to believe p if empirical evidence that p doesn't strengthen your estimation of the probability that p.

My guess is that you are doing the same thing with regards to your views about the negative effects of religion as well.

Right, I get it, you reject consequentialism.

You have certainly not demonstrated this claim about teaching hell. Is there psychological literature on this subject, demonstrating that teaching children that hell is real can cause psychological trauma?


Yeah, that is probably an assumption I'm making. In fact, I would probably be more confident that it has this effect now than that it did in the past. After all, the study I cited is testing humans that are alive today, not humans from the past.

Well, I'm not sure.

I just don't have the prior that says that I must reject this finding because I don't like religion. I'm more or less neutral on the question of whether religion is overall a good or bad thing. However, in the past I've thought that teaching children that hell is real causes harm to them and so we should avoid doing so. I would also guess that I am culturally closer to liberal Christians and so tend to prefer their forms of religion over more conservative versions.

But this study presents us with a reason, and a bit of evidence to think it is true, that points to positive benefits to teaching that hell is real. So now, especially keeping in mind my own biases, I tend to think my prior view that we should encourage religious people to give up the hell belief was wrong.

Temporal damnation? (Joke)

Seriously, How would that even work that's not ridiculous?

Xactly..

I think you're making it seem more unreasonable than it is to do what I did. I didn't create the framework that this hypothesis required out of thin air, it comes from the evolutionary model. If all behaviours that we observe have an evolutionary explanation, then why not this one too? And the explanation is an obvious one, that like all behaviours it had some survival benefit. The results of this study were not a surprise to me and since it's virtually impossible to measure any of the elements in my net-negative position, it's not like this was the one element that I wasn't being thoroughly empirical about and as such should have been more reserved about and maybe left out.

Also, there's the question of, regardless of the benefits of this particular aspect of religion, whether it would be still be a good idea to do it if other aspects of religion were much more strongly a negative impact, such the way religion has limited and hindered our progress toward understanding what we observe.

I don't accept this casual dismissal of my objection. I don't think that your view is as simple as 'so what if it's bad, they turned out ok', that way I could justify almost anything. So you must have your own criteria for what is ok and what oversteps the bounds, and a way of determining what they are, so what are they? Why are they more correct than mine?

If by 'psychological trauma' you mean causing fear and dread in young children, then I have to double check here, you're actually asking me to prove that telling young children about the devil and Hell is terrifying to them? (As I've said a few times, I'm not interested in the long term effects, they don't change whether or not it's right to do it in the first place.) Or perhaps you mean something else?

Do you think the groups they chose are representative of modern humanity? I don't. Nor would that make sense for the study if they were. Modern society is nothing like the societies that were benefited by such beliefs, you don't appear to be factoring this into your view.

(1) inland Tanna, Vanuatu; (2) coastal Tanna, Vanuatu; (3) Yasawa, Fiji; (4) Lovu, Fiji; (5) Pesqueiro, Brazil; (6) Pointe aux Piments, Mauritius; (7) the Tyva Republic (Siberia), Russia; and (8) Hadzaland, Tanzania.

Perhaps you're being a little too dispassionate here. I may not agree with the people who are firmly convinced that they are telling their children something terrifying but true, something that they themselves believe very strongly, but I can at least understand why they do it. But to terrify children simply because a study shows that there has historically been some benefit to our society, but which hasn't weighted that benefit against all the other explanatory factors or impacts of religion both positive and negative, and which AFAIK doesn't mention at all whether it still holds true in a modern and much better informed society?

This seems to represent a misunderstanding of evolution. Everything is the result of evolution, but this doesn't mean that everything has survival benefit. For example, humans have two arms. This is result of evolution. But it's not the case that either two arms is necessarily some survival advantage over three or four arms, or even over just one arm or no arms, or that this survival advantage is even the "reason" we have two arms.

So to claim that X has an "obvious" evolutionary explanation already shows that you're likely making very strong assumptions about the quality of your evolutionary narrative. You shouldn't do that because it really means you *ARE* forming your framework out of thin air. It's not driven by data to support it, just the narrative that you have chosen to accept as being true (for reasons that are unclear and have often been shown to be false).

This misses the point. I'm not criticizing you for having a model of punitive religion where it has the effect of increasing pro-social behavior at a distance. Rather, I am saying that you had too much confidence in that model being true. "Obvious" explanations lead us astray all the time, and in the absence of good empirical evidence for those models we should have relatively low confidence in them being true. If your confidence in a model is already so high based on that your first empirical data can't significantly increase it (eg if your confidence is already at 99% it can only increase it a small amount), then you are being unscientific.

For instance, wiki says this about the evolutionary study of religion:

That is, one of the two major schools of thought in evolutionary approaches to religion claims that it was not selected for its survival benefits. This study is evidence against that theory.

How do you reconcile your claim that religion has survival benefit with your claim that it has a strong "negative impact" and hinders our understanding of the world? Is it your view that understanding the world doesn't have survival benefit?

It is not a casual dismissal. Consequentialism vs. deontology is one of the major debates in ethics and not one I'm interested in pursuing here. If your criticism of my argument rests on rejecting consequentialism, well, we don't need to keep arguing anymore because I've already had that argument.
Yes. You need to show that teaching children about the devil and hell is terrifying and that this terror is harmful.

For instance, is it wrong to tell scary stories to children? Take them on rollercoasters? Teach them to ride a bicycle? Go to school (first day of school was always one of the scariest days of the year for me)?

After all, you aren't concerned about potential positive effects, but seemingly just have a rule against ever doing anything that might cause a child to be scared.

Just so we're clear, is it your contention that this effect (that people act more impartially towards distant co-religionists if they are adherents to a punitive religion) disappears in modern societies?

As I have said repeatedly, I have made no claims that non-believers should teach their children that hell is real. Rather, I am asking whether it is immoral to do so. Lots of things that are not immoral are not morally required. For instance, teaching your kid to play tennis. Not immoral. Also not required.

A child's psychological capacity to think of eternity combined with pain has a face-value kind of quality about it.

How much pervasive fear is too much for the kids that actually think and imagine the stuff they learn about?

I see some issues here.

Do you believe hell exists?

1) In general I think you want to teach children the truth. If you believe hell is real I think it is perfectly reasonable to want to teach that to children. Conversely if you don't believe in hell it would be wrong to teach it to children.

2) The second point is that even if hell is real, should children be protected from it? Arguably children exposed to violence become violent in later life, abused become abusers etc. So you could make a case for avoiding the subject regardless. Teaching children about hell could be as bad or even worse than letting them watch really scary movies.

3) If the child lives in an environment where 98+% of the population believe in hell, and to be irreligious in any way is to ostracise oneself from your society, then it might be best to teach that child hell exists, regardless, so that they can fit in.

Anyway as I am sure hell is a ridiculous fantasy I think the idea of teaching it to children is silly, although if you believe in hell you should at least disagree with my argument if not my conclusion.

Ok. Some of my replies to the rest of your post are really digressions from this focus. I've left them in but don't feel that you need to respond to those parts. I've put them below the dotted line. Above the line are the two issues that I think are pertinent.


Although you don't want to discuss this, I think this is where our disagreement hinges. To try persuade you that teaching Hell is immoral (and to prove it to my own satisfaction), I think I have to show that the Consequentialist outlook that you're using does not justify it. And to do that I think that I have to identify where your personal limits are.

You have your own limits for what you would accept can be done to children, regardless of whatever benefit might result. For example, one solution to the child obesity epidemic would be to lock all the obese children in a room and restrict their diet until they are a healthy weight again. This would have huge benefits to society, a healthier, more productive generation, with all the corresponding benefits. I think you would agree though that a Consequentialist outlook would not justify this treatment. So where we don't agree, we simply differ in the limits of what we consider acceptable, and I'd like to know how you're deciding what yours are?

Possibly yes with the scary stories example, after all, what is the teaching of Hell but a scary story. But it would definitely be wrong to show young children the Saw movies, or Texas Chain saw massacre, or videos of real life torture sessions, and those things cannot even begin to come close to the eternal horrors that they are told await them in Hell, horrors from which it would be impossible to hide because the Devil is always watching them.

In any case, I want to take a different tack for the moment, you previously said "I tend to think my prior view that we should encourage religious people to give up the hell belief was wrong." Can I ask why you thought that they should give it up?

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

I'm pretty sure that in the past the only times I've given a confidence level it was something along the lines of 'strongly suspect'. And yes, I'm well aware (I really ought to be after all...) that I may be experiencing Confirmation Bias, and probably other biases too, but I also keep in mind that I could be completely wrong. But, whether or not I'm right that religion has or has had a net negative impact, I think it's time we moved on from it because of my oft repeated objection to how it impedes our progress. If everything else about religion were wonderful, this problem alone would make me feel the way I do.


I can reconcile it easily. Cognitive biases are cognitive errors, they're mistakes in our thinking, and yet their overall impact has been to increase our survival prospects at a species wide level. Like religion though (in which I think that Cognitive biases play a significant role), I think our population levels and technological capability have now reached levels where these errors in thinking pose a grave risk to our long term survival. Just because they helped us to be 'successful' so far, doesn't mean that these particular adaptions have long term prospects. 'Intelligence' could be a dead end like so many other adaptations.

No, I'm saying that we live in a very different world from the one where the benefits it offered, mattered.

It would be very interesting for you to elaborate on whatever it is you think parents are teaching kids when they teach them that "hell is real." I'm reminded of your tendency to insert your own assumptions about what religious parents do, and then your tendency (after it is plainly obvious that religious people don't do that) is to say "I'm only talking about *certain* religious people" but then continue your hasty generalizations and speak as though you're talking about all religious people.

100% spot on.

Not mentioning his tendency to redefine words, and when corrected,
continue on with his false definitions.