Monday Meditations (9/12/19) by Vizi Andrei

What Atheists Get Wrong About Religion & On Modern Censorship & More

Fresh Ideas

“It’s a shame to gather knowledge without action – to know so much and use it for nothing.” — Herodotus

“Normality is a paved road: it’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.” — Vincent van Gogh

“Avoiding regret is more important to life satisfaction than increasing accomplishments.” — Shane Parrish

Insight of the Week

In an abundant world, censorship is not about suppressing information – but about flooding you with immense amounts of (irrelevant) information until you are unable to focus.

What Atheists Get Wrong About Religion

The standard atheist view is that religion is merely about belief – that the focus is on powerful, benevolent deities who take care of the world and watch our back. Since there are now simply too many “rational” arguments that contradict this view, we could finally say that such beliefs have been destroyed. So, everything about religions should therefore be ignored.

However – historically speaking – religion has barely been about belief. A great deal of the practical activity and psychological insight of religion has been independent of levitating angels and supernatural incidents.

Religions have fostered the creation of happy communities, helped us with relationships, marked out the seasons, written ethical codes, buried us, tried to encourage kind and forgiving behavior, built sublime gathering places, connected us to nature, and commissioned well-needed periods of fasting and organized meals. In other words, alongside spiritual redemption, religions have been interested in our ethical and emotional wellbeing as well. They developed organically, creating deities after establishing strong rituals and heuristics.

What arrogant fellows such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins or Steven Pinker can’t get (among many other things) is that science and religion deal with different aspects of reality. Science tries to gather insights about the structure of the world around us; religion guides our behavior in it. Religion tries to domesticate the complexity of the world and tackle many aspects science can’t address. It is therefore laughable (and extremely boring) to judge religion on the basis of treating it as if it were an explanatory science.

On the same note, you might nevertheless ask, what is the purpose of creating gods anyway? Well, deities were not created for fun, but for precautionary reasons. The modern age places human beings at the center of hierarchy – above the claims of nature, animals, gods, or the universe more broadly. We are now the main characters of the show. Religions traditionally declined to give humans a pivotal place in the cosmos. The ancient Greeks pictured their Gods living on the summit of Mount Olympus and looking down upon humans with a mixture of amusement and pity. Zen Buddhism interpreted nature in general, with all of its diverse flora and fauna, as far more important than any single creature. Cathedrals were erected to radiate across cities the fundamental idea that we, humans, no matter how accomplished we may be, should remain sober about our place in the universe. Nassim Taleb distills this best: “Religion isn't so much about telling man that there is one God as about preventing man from thinking that he is God.”

On 15 April 2019, Notre-Dame Cathedral was in danger. A fire broke out beneath the roof and nearly destroyed this iconic building. Many fellows vehemently complained that our attention should be set towards other issues (such as climate change) – that this event is so tiny that it should barely concern us. Ironically, this kind of mentality is part of the reason as to why our planet is suffering so much lately: because we believe religion is nonsense; because we have no gods, we can’t be sober any longer: we think we are gods. We are above nature. We are above our planet. That’s why we f**k it up. We shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss religion: it used to keep us sane – it used to teach us humility, to tame our arrogance when it comes to our understanding of the world.

Nietzsche’s most famous – and most misunderstood – aphorism aims to explain the tragedy of modern society: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” (1882).

Ordinary atheists have a hard time understanding that religions offer us a set of tools that can solve problems science can’t address. For evolutionary considerations, religion proved to be highly utilitarian: it helped us survive and prosper as individuals and communities.

Life constantly makes us take decisions under conditions of uncertainty. No matter how much we lionize science – even though we should clearly encourage scientific progress and discovery – we should nevertheless remain humble: it can’t answer all of our questions. We need heuristics. We need wisdom. We need spiritual and emotional support.

No less than our ancestors, we crave to live and die well. Religion may be intermittently too wise and too useful to be restricted merely to those who happen to believe in deities. We need to keep an open mind to understand that what religions have to offer largely lies outside of the supernatural. We need to keep an open mind to understand that, when we talk about religion, we generally don’t know what we’re talking about. Religion is surely not perfect, but rejecting it is surely silly.


Extra Note: Dogma and organized control are not features of religion. They are tools independent of religion which happen to be deployed by pseudo-religious groups but also by pseudo-scientific groups. Both science and religion happen to be vulnerable to dogma, producing confusion as to what science and religion entail.

Eg. Romania (post-communist country) is filled with many dogmatically religious people largely (and ironically) because communists designed a society without religion, art, and culture. You can’t de facto prohibit religion; you only lose control as to how it is being grasped and promoted. In effect, people did not become atheists, but dogmatically religious: they were vulnerable to pseudo-religious recipes sold by ill-intentioned groups. The framework they need in order to appreciate religion as it should be appreciated is missing. Therefore, such characters are not to be conflated with religious people, but dogmatic ones.

References: Alain de Botton, Rory Sutherland, Nassim Taleb, Gore Burnelli

Disclaimer: Many of the excerpts from this post are taken from various texts written by the aforementioned people. My job was to distill their thoughts and convey a more succinct – yet complete – view on this controversial topic. I take no credit for the cleverness of these claims, but I do take responsibility in the sense that I own them too.