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Comment by verdverm | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of religious like beliefs about things as people have moved away from traditional religions. I wonder if it is in our nature to have something bigger than ourselves to believe in based on faith in the message

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I suspect that this is mostly a first-generation atheism problem, and most atheists these days were still raised religiously. They spend a lot of time being religious about other things, or treating atheism religiously and attacking religion with religious levels of fervor.

For a sizeable chunk of people possibly so, but it seems not so universal. Lots of people don't find any form of "just have faith" convincing.

They're probably doing it unconsciously.

That's the sort of conjecture which lets you arbitrarily dismiss evidence against a theory. Even worse, its the sort of conjecture that is plausibly true yet hard to find conclusive evidence. Any lack of evidence for a subconscious explanation can itself be rationalized away as they just didn't look hard enough to uncover it.

So where's the goalpost for falsifying the theory that they do it unconsciously? Whats the bar of evidence where you change your mind?

You've got a good point. I'm not sure. I guess if I met someone who didn't seem religious in their way of being non-religious, that would interest me.

No. They're probably not.

I'm convinced religious beliefs/feelings are an unavoidable emergent property of human minds.

And soon, AI minds.

So it’s going to be as disappointing as Battlestar Galactica :/

”Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities — the political, the religious, the educational authorities — who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing — forming in our minds — their view of reality.” —-T.L.

Perhaps that's because just about anything can be portrayed as a religion: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/25/is-everything-a-religi...

Perhaps organized religion was a Chesterton’s Fence that we removed at our own peril.

I dunno where you live but from my vantage point it hasn't really been removed.

Also we have pretty solid ideas about why some arbitrary rules regarding eating pork/shellfish came about.

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