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Comment by trees101 | Hacker News Reader

Any stable human being has some kind of framework whereby they don't just live to please every desire as soon as it pops us. The closest thing we see to immediate self gratification is the drug addict under the bridge. There is nothing wrong with having a set of norms and using them to regulate desire.

It also pays to think about the word "natural" and all that it implies. our desires are not simply rational thoughts that independently arrive in our minds - look at the different objects of desire among different cultures. There is no untouchable "natural" desire that is so holy that it should be off limits to regulation.

Religion shouldn't be criticised simply for having a framework for moderating response to desire, and because it offends some sacred cow of "natural" desire.

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> Religion shouldn't be criticised simply for having a framework for moderating response to desire, and because it offends some sacred cow of "natural" desire.

Oh I'm not criticizing religion for having a framework. I'm criticizing it because it's the wrong framework. Of course some natural desires must be regulated. That's just self control. People don't need unprovable superstitions to stop killing each other. For whatever small crumbs of peace religious harmony may have brought religion has brought plenty of excuses for war, murder, and hatred.

I have always found this 'religion justifies war' argument to be somewhat weak. I guess you can say Islamic expansion and the crusades were examples of this but I don't feel these sorts of conflicts would have been prevented by both sides sharing a common religion - there were plenty of wars within Christian Europe or the Islamic world, after all.

Cults are central to culture, it's true but we can still show a lot of conflicts around ethnic, cultural lines that seem to lack a religiously motivated dimension.

I think this line of argumentation should be retired - it's just not robust. It is an attempt to gain the moral high ground by secularists and maybe before the 19th and 20th centuries we could imagine it would be true but there have been too many secualr conflicts of a massive scale to sincerely hold this polemic in 2021.

> Cults are central to culture, it's true but we can still show a lot of conflicts around ethnic, cultural lines that seem to lack a religiously motivated dimension.

Existence of problematic non-religious frameworks doesn't negate the wrongness/harmful of religion.

Both religious and non-religious memes can be bad at the same time.

> I think this line of argumentation should be retired - it's just not robust. It is an attempt to gain the moral high ground by secularists...

Even if you dismiss thousands of years of wasted effort and active harm there is the ongoing harm and waste still happening. This isn't harmless LARPing. People are being shamed, ostracized, and even killed in 2021 over these--at best unprovable--beliefs. Religion also encourages lazy thinking with appeals to authority, confirmation bias, and often faith over evidence.

Religion does have some upsides , at a communal and individual level. If we weigh those along with the negatives who is to say what's best? Clearly, it's a human meme that has some positives and no dramatic downside that would have caused it to die out.

> If we weigh those along with the negatives who is to say what's best?

Perhaps those weakest and most marginalized by these memes.

> Clearly, it's a human meme that has some positives and no dramatic downside that would have caused it to die out.

Is it so clearly positive? Not in my experience. Natural selection doesn't instantaneously stop every injustice. It could be humanity had just been caught in a valley between the least bad options until it could ascend out of a malaise, like the dark ages. The Middle East has some of the most religious populations yet I wouldn't say they evolved into a beacon of human progress.

> Both religious and non-religious memes can be bad at the same time.

As a framework for society at scale, Christianity gave us the western world as we know it. It gave us abolition of slavery at a time when belief in the equality of people was a religious belief that couldn't easily reconciled with the self-evident disparities in the level of development of different civilizations. Atheism gave us eugenics, communist horrors, etc.

Your point is correct on its face, but the fact is that people will believe in some framework or another.

> As a framework for society at scale, Christianity gave us the western world as we know it.

Is Christianity the dominant or even a significant factor which made the western world better?

> Atheism gave us eugenics, communist horrors, etc.

Are you sure you're not throwing out the baby with the bath water?

Racial 'purity' goes back at least to the Torah. Eugenics and other horrors aren't any more the result of atheism than Judaism or Capitalism.

You're confusing Christians and Christianity. The Bible seems quite OK with slavery.

The fertility rate among american atheists is 1.24. Seems like kind of an impediment to asserting that other frameworks are the problem.

Educated people generally have fewer kids. Shall we conclude education is a problem?

A number of more religious states (Utah, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Iowa, etc.) have sustainable or near-sustainable birth rates. It’s not like these are exactly third world countries. And most of this “education” isn’t in anything real anyway.

Insofar as a culture is only sustainable through arbitrage—importing people from religious societies (Latin America in the case of the United States, the Muslim world in case of Western Europe)—that seems indicative of a “problem” to me.

> And most of this “education” isn’t in anything real anyway.

Can you elaborate?

> Insofar as a culture is only sustainable through arbitrage...

Culture can be sustained at lower than current population levels. And increasing population is much less painful than reducing it. Also, reasonably well managed immigration is a huge net positive for any society.

That said, a world of uneducated people raised on belief without evidence--all competing for too few resources--isn't exactly sustainable. Even more so now that humanity has so many tools to destroy itself and most complex life.

> Shall we conclude education is a problem?

I'm starting to think... Yes?

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