"Being godless might be good for your health - study shows

[mentalgymnast]

My apologies, MG. If I you think I failed to respond to a question you asked me, please let me know and I’d be happy to respond. But I can see why, after getting in your digs at atheists in general and at me in particular, you’d much rather get out of Dodge than back up what you said with any facts.

At this point, because I expect that all you’ll contribute going forward is dodge, distract and dissemble, I’m happy to leave the conversation right here.

I’m good with that. I don’t see the conversation going anywhere at this point. And I’m happy to let you think what you will in regards to why the discussion is at an impasse. This gives you a way out which acts in your favor, and should help in keep your resume intact.

I’m fine where I’m at. Thanks for your contribution to the conversation.

Regards,
MG

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

fOrWaRd SlaSh, bLacK aNd wHiTe tHiNkInG, bInArY, hUrR dUrR

edited for the tRiBaL atheist

Also: nUaNcEd, nOt aN aPoLoGiSt, and I'Ve iNvEsTiGaTeD aLL tHe ReliGioNs

- Doc

[Res Ipsa]

fOrWaRd SlaSh, bLacK aNd wHiTe tHiNkInG, bInArY, hUrR dUrR

You left out tribal. You have to include it.

[Lem]

fOrWaRd SlaSh, bLacK aNd wHiTe tHiNkInG, bInArY, hUrR dUrR

You left out tribal. You have to include it.

Yes. And this:

....But to engage in pop psychology as a defensive mechanism without adequate evidence simply derails the conversation....

Except that no one is doing that. All readers can do is respond to what people write, and the comments to mg are made on the basis of what he writes. To call that “inadequate evidence” when people are exactly and specifically responding to the exact and specific ‘evidence’ he writes in his posts is just more ‘dodging, distracting, and dissembling.’ And projection, which seems to be this round’s go-to tactic.

[Lem]

...As I noted earlier, there are literally thousands upon thousands of groups with a 'belief' structure that has nothing to do with religion that bring people together and provide emotional support and social cohesion. People find what they love and what motivates them, and then they find other people who feel similarly. It may or, more often, may NOT be what they were born into. But it is what they love, think about, care about, and it provides them with a group of other people who love, think, and care similarly. Religion is one example, but it is in no way unique. Stating that atheists don't have this because a god of some type is not involved really misses the point of human interaction.

And I’m late in saying that you made the point more eloquently than I. The trick, I think, is to facilitate the formation of these groups without turning them into tribes. And perhaps encourage existing groups to become less tribal. I dunno.

Thank you. But your point about tribalism is very significant. I was thinking about that when I mentioned interests that “may or, more often, may NOT be what they were born into.” That small difference, that you find your group when you are a little older, may allow for a little more flexibility and maybe less tribalism—it’s not necessarily bred into you what your tribe MUST be, regardless of who you as an individual are, and you don’t have it bred into you that your tribe absolutely IS arbitrarily better than any other, again regardless of whether you fit or not. Of course it may still happen, but maybe that cultish aspect of it would be a little less impactful.

[IHAQ]

That’s not to say, at all, that atheists as individuals can’t be happy here and there. But they tend more towards social isolation, more so than religionists.

I'm looking for your supporting evidence on this claim.

Still waiting...

[Physics Guy]

Catholicism and Islam were forced on new territories they took over.

I don’t know about Catholicism; the Spanish conquests of the Americas are generally supposed to have been brutal and for all I know were every bit as bad as the leyende negra makes them out to be, but the history is controversial to this day because English sources began propagandizing against the evil Spanish Catholics so early that it’s hard to disentangle the real and fake news.

About Islam, though, I’m pretty sure that the whole idea of propagation by forced conversion is a myth. Muslims paid less taxes and that was all. The histories I’ve read say that the early Arab conquerors actually discouraged conversion, in order to keep up the tax income. Conversion was slow and gradual, and over the centuries the various Muslim regimes all allowed other faiths to keep their own traditions and community structures. Non-Muslims were second-class citizens but were not compelled to convert.

[Physics Guy]

For any phenomena as complex and widespread as religion, I think it would be naïve to claim that the effects are all good or all bad in terms of social or medical effects on individuals. And I'm skeptical that the existence of religion over a long period of time can be explained through some type of utilitarian calculus. It could even be that religion itself has had no survival value, but is an artifact of brain processes that do. Both patternicity and intentionality are known biases in the brain, and could easily have been significant advantages when dealing with predators on the plains of Africa. Religion could simply be an effect of these biases with no net value or even a slight negative value. At some point, trying to explain why X exists today is an exercise in creating just so stories.

Yeah, this is a good point. I still tend to think the idea that religions confer some kind of benefits is a good, simple default assumption, given that they have persisted so robustly in human societies. It’s not a really strong prior, though, for the reason you give: they could be what Stephen Jay Gould’s architectural metaphor calls “spandrels”, accidental consequences of a structure that is preferred for other reasons. I think it’s generally worth giving some weight to Darwinian arguments like this, but you have to keep a salt shaker handy with all these post-hoc Just So hypotheses.

To me, the effects of religion today are so situational that it makes little sense to try and treat it as a monolith. My major concern with religion today is its effect on tribalism. In group cooperation/out of group conflict may well have been an effective survival strategy for individual groups over long periods of history. Today, however, I think the tribal approach is a huge net negative for humanity. We have common problems that can be solved only by cooperation that crosses the lines of existing tribes.

I agree about the monolith fallacy. Nobody wants to have to sort through all the world’s zillion religious varieties to check for grains of wheat in the chaff or tiny babies hiding in a lot of bath water, so it’s really tempting to toss them all out once and for all by reifying “religion”. Given the shortness of life I can quite understand deciding not to keep checking for babies at some point, but ranting against “religion” in order to justify the wholesale rejection of a zillion things just seems like the same fear of uncertainty that keeps many people in some religion or other. Plus it often means grotesquely misunderstanding a lot of religions by assuming they must all be like the particular religion one happens to know.

Tribalism is a big deal, all right. I hope that a thousand years from now there will be histories of it, with the longest chapters being about how it finally decayed.

As I said, rejection of tribalism is a big theme—though not an unopposed one—within many religions. Early Christianity consciously attempted to be a religion of “the nations”, writing its scriptures in the lingua franca of the day (sometimes writing in it really badly). Muslims from all over the world meet as equals in Mecca each year.

As Meadowchik noted, the breaking of tribal barriers within the religion can easily come at the cost of raising higher barriers around the religion. Obviously that’s a problem. I think we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that many religions have also been about breaking barriers, though. We take the things we like for granted and focus on the things we don’t like; that’s natural but it can skew how we think.

[Physics Guy]

Sure I did read what I quoted and responded to, which is why I gave explicit examples of how a person can deal with crisis without God-belief. The psychological mechanism of valuing and respecting a human being, including oneself, is powerful.

You seemed to be responding to "No atheists in foxholes" as if I had asserted it, when I was only discussing it and had even explicitly denied that it was literally true.

There are certainly other ways, besides trusting in God, to strengthen one's own courage in crisis. It seems to me, though, that all those other ways are also available to believers. So trust in God is an additional psychological asset. It may not be needed; it may not be enough. Some people may need it more than others; perhaps with some people it doesn't actually help. On the whole, though, it seems most likely to me that it has to help somewhat.

Of course this judgement of mine is based on my own experience. One night a few years ago my wife had an onset of what turned out to be gas pains, or at any rate something harmless, but at the time we thought she was quite likely having a heart attack. We had family members there who knew that when in doubt about that you don't stand around wondering, you react as if it is a heart attack. They got some aspirin into my wife right away and we jumped in the car and took off for the hospital.

We were staying in a cottage half-an-hour away from the rural hospital, and the first ten minutes of the drive were on a twisty and bumpy dirt road through the woods, in the dark.

As we started I prayed something to the effect of, "God I'm going to concentrate entirely on driving now, to go as fast as I can without hitting a tree, but please do what you can." Then I forgot about everything except not hitting trees. That brief prayer helped me do that, I think. It calmed me by letting me think that I had done what I could in one direction (prayer), and this made it easier to believe in myself as someone who would be able to do the other thing that I could do (driving).

None of us ever thought that God had miraculously turned a heart attack into gas pains or anything like that. It was all a false alarm, scary at the time, but reassuring, after it had all turned out fine, because in a crisis we all did the right things. Among those right things, for me, was a prayer.

I might well have driven well enough without the prayer; somebody with more talent than me for reacting in crisis might never have needed a prayer at all; perhaps if it had actually been a heart attack my driving wouldn't have been fast enough with or without the prayer. It still seems to me that that short prayer was something that cost me nothing, yet raised my chances of not crashing the car and being fast enough by some percentage, by calming me down and helping me focus. And it was a card that I would not have been able to play if I had no faith in God.

(As a reflection on how memory I works I have to say that I'm not entirely sure it was really dark. My memory is of driving through dark woods, but was I really only seeing with headlights or was it actually dusk? Conceivably it was broad daylight and it was only the shade of the trees that made me feel that the light was dangerously insufficient under the circumstances. I'd give it about 30%/60%/10% for being night, twilight, or day.)

[Meadowchik]

Sure I did read what I quoted and responded to, which is why I gave explicit examples of how a person can deal with crisis without God-belief. The psychological mechanism of valuing and respecting a human being, including oneself, is powerful.

You seemed to be responding to "No atheists in foxholes" as if I had asserted it, when I was only discussing it and had even explicitly denied that it was literally true.

There are certainly other ways, besides trusting in God, to strengthen one's own courage in crisis. It seems to me, though, that all those other ways are also available to believers. So trust in God is an additional psychological asset. It may not be needed; it may not be enough. Some people may need it more than others; perhaps with some people it doesn't actually help. On the whole, though, it seems most likely to me that it has to help somewhat.

Of course this judgement of mine is based on my own experience. One night a few years ago my wife had an onset of what turned out to be gas pains, or at any rate something harmless, but at the time we thought she was quite likely having a heart attack. We had family members there who knew that when in doubt about that you don't stand around wondering, you react as if it is a heart attack. They got some aspirin into my wife right away and we jumped in the car and took off for the hospital.

We were staying in a cottage half-an-hour away from the rural hospital, and the first ten minutes of the drive were on a twisty and bumpy dirt road through the woods, in the dark.

As we started I prayed something to the effect of, "God I'm going to concentrate entirely on driving now, to go as fast as I can without hitting a tree, but please do what you can." Then I forgot about everything except not hitting trees. That brief prayer helped me do that, I think. It calmed me by letting me think that I had done what I could in one direction (prayer), and this made it easier to believe in myself as someone who would be able to do the other thing that I could do (driving).

None of us ever thought that God had miraculously turned a heart attack into gas pains or anything like that. It was all a false alarm, scary at the time, but reassuring, after it had all turned out fine, because in a crisis we all did the right things. Among those right things, for me, was a prayer.

I might well have driven well enough without the prayer; somebody with more talent than me for reacting in crisis might never have needed a prayer at all; perhaps if it had actually been a heart attack my driving wouldn't have been fast enough with or without the prayer. It still seems to me that that short prayer was something that cost me nothing, yet raised my chances of not crashing the car and being fast enough by some percentage, by calming me down and helping me focus. And it was a card that I would not have been able to play if I had no faith in God.

(As a reflection on how memory I works I have to say that I'm not entirely sure it was really dark. My memory is of driving through dark woods, but was I really only seeing with headlights or was it actually dusk? Conceivably it was broad daylight and it was only the shade of the trees that made me feel that the light was dangerously insufficient under the circumstances. I'd give it about 30%/60%/10% for being night, twilight, or day.)

I am glad that you engaged with this a bit more, despite my frankness.

Doubtless, religion is useful. You believe your belief helped you in a moment of crisis and I believe you.

However, here's something to think about: whenever I use a tool, it requires something from me to function. Using a paper map requires the user to read it. Riding a horse requires a person to sit on it. Second, the user requirements of using tools often preclude using other tools. For example, you cannot read a paper map and drive a car, or ride a horse and drive a car at the same time.

So you have two kinds of costs already, the cost of the user requirements ands the cost of what you cannot do when you use the tool. Add to that the lost of benefit of other tools you could be using if you were not using the present tool.

Back when I was at BYU, members of our student ward were driving in town when the engine died. The car stopped in the middle of the road. As I remember their telling of it (since together they all recounted it in testimony meeting at church), the first thing these students did was pray. But when they said Amen, they were rear-ended by another car. I don't know if they could have changed that outcome by doing anything different, but I think we can say that by praying like that, they precluded they possibility of attempting something else at the same time.

Another problematic example that is pretty specific and commonly demonstrated in exmormon experience, is mourning. And it is not uncommon to hear from people of many religious types, including believers, who fear disbelief because they have lost someone and they do not know how they could manage that sorrow without their belief. Sometimes when an exmormon leaves the church and becomes agnostic or atheist, they feel like they experience the grief process anew, because the tools they used before no longer work. They cannot hold onto a belief that their loved one is with God and they'll see them again.

One thing many learn is that they actually did not properly grieve the loss the first time, because the belief that they will see them again is a forestallment of grief. It is made worse, too by the common social pressure to rejoice and prove essentially their faithfulness by being positive and happy. Furthermore, because this forestallment is the prevailing grief management tool, they have not spent their formative years and beyond developing tools to manage grief. Remember those questions kids ask, "Dad, do dogs go to Heaven?" If the parent answers affirmatively, the child will be holding onto that tool instead of building their own.

The way to manage grief is to let it happen, not paint over it with a belief that there is no real death. And there are ways to minimize grief, too, by acting in the moment in life to improve relationships and take care of each other. We cannot always avoid untimely or extremely tragic death, or being on bad terms with a loved one, but that hope for Heaven can and frequently does interfere with the effort to improve relationships now, and improve health outcomes now.