The religious behavior may be a misfiring, an unfortunate manifestation of an underlying psychological propensity that in other circumstances was once useful."
And here is where I choke. While his insights about the moth is informative and good, his conclusion that religious behavior is a misfiring, shows only his negative cynical attitudes against religion. What I would say instead is that the misfiring of that guidance system attracted to light leading moths into the flame by mistake, describes religious fundamentalism!
Religion, if you want to speak from an evolutionary perspective, in fact serves as a guidance system to navigate life. It has its ethical and moral precepts, it teaches about respect of others, it teaches responsibility to community, and so forth. The mere fact it persists, it survives, because it has functionally worked.
It's the "suicide bombers", or the religious fundamentalists who don't get it, who instead take a tool for Life, and turn into their own deaths. If that were all that religion was, it would not survive. That form of religion does not support life.
Think of this like a Christian who believes that all humans are inherently wicked and evil. If that were actually true, our species would not survive let alone thrive! Same thing with religion. If religion were as Richard Dawkins projects his disdain of it upon the world stage, inherently evil and bad, then why has it persisted and continues to be adopted?
And so, the prevalence of organized religion is explainable by positing that it is advantageous for people to exploit one another using this propensity to trust and believe,
No it is not explainable because of that! I get how it is easily exploited, but that doesn't make it itself inherently evil. It simply means it like anything else becomes exploited by those who are parasites. Wherever you find a healthy organism, you find parasites. That does mean fish are inherently bad because they get leeches attached to them.
But according to Dawkins' logic here, we should think that way about fish. The reason fish exists, is because leaches can so easily attach themselves to them! That is of course an absurd and cynical answer!
which is normally a juvenile quality, but can be maintained into adulthood through conditioning.
The same thing can be said about those who trust that Dawkins knows what he's talking about when he speaks about religion, especially when you consider it's anything but his field of expertise. Plenty of adults trust his word about religion, the same way plenty of adults trust the word of their pastor speaking to matters of science and evolution!
It's the exact same thing in reverse. Neither are experts of those fields outside of their wheelhouses.
Not to me. Sure, it includes prelinguistic children and dogs, but so what? It's not like we're counting atheists and including them.
Oh but that is what these "default position" advocates of atheism are in fact promoting. It's the truth by numbers game. But as I've illustrated by example, there is no default position whatsoever. It's all individual propensities towards certain types of perceptual experience. It's personality based.
You have those like me who saw the world as magical and wondrous being attracted to religious symbolisms (but then utterly confused and dismayed by their actual theology!
), and then those who aren't like that as children. Even as adults there are some in life who just simply don't get what others see when looking at the same thing. If there were a default position, there would be no diversity of personality types.
LOL. That's to be expected if you use that word. It's an inescapable fact that if you say God, most westerners will understand that to be the angry, invisible guy that some pray to for mercy.
As I've said, I'm not one to like to hand the power of the language over to lowest hanging fruits on the tree. I prefer to take that word away from them by using it is it's more elevated, transcendent, and meaningful terms. Words like love can become trivial and even nauseating, if you listen to teens talk about how my they
love this cute boy in school!
But should we as adults say, let's quit using that word
love because Becky and all her giggling friends are using like it like hormone infected lunatics?
Fortunately, there are enough people who use it like an adult that the word has meaning and usefulness for deeper understandings. That's really how I feel about using the word God. I use it like the word love, only bigger, with a capital L.
You suggested recently that our outlooks are pretty similar, and I would agree. You seem to see the cosmos as sacred and not deflect that respect to disembodied consciousnesses, and that would describe my outlook as well. If I wanted to anthropomorphize that, I would call her Mother Nature, not God, because nobody misunderstands what I mean by Mother Nature.
Well, the problem with a term like mother nature, which I do appreciate that you capitalized it that they way I might, is that it is one of those metaphors that has become so trivialized, that it doesn't carry the meaning of the sacred with it. Some see it simply just another way to speak about nature, like a "sexed up atheism" kind of use, as Dawkins completely misunderstands pantheism as.
But to say Mother Nature, carries with it an reverence of it. So yes, someone can misunderstand your intent if you use that word too. They may miss the deeper, reverential meaning you intended.
Same thing with the use of the word God. It all honestly boils down to
how someone uses it. The context, the speaker, the intent. Not just the word itself.
I think you're doing something similar, but using the word God to mean something similar, and so you get lumped in with Jerry ****ing Falwell.
Not if they actually listen to how I use it!
If they simply knee-jerk, well then, they aren't actually listening to what is being said. Hopefully though in time, when they hear enough people who aren't idiots use the word, they won't make those sorts of knee-jerk assumptions anymore.
I avoid the word God like the plague for just these reasons (somebody noted recently that perhaps we should rethink that cliche given the reaction of so many who refused to vaccinate, mask, distance, or quarantine)
The closest I come is to use it with some safeguards or warning labels, such as using the scare quotes, "God". But that's just to get the person familiar with the idea that not everyone who uses that word is an idiot.
Yes, but for me, my philosophical understanding, not somebody in a philosophy book. I almost never defer to any other thinker. That doesn't mean I don't hear them or that they never influence my thinking - you have.
Thank you. It's good to hear I may have helped expand your understandings. Any good discussion should do that. I know I have learned to appreciate your perspectives as well and that has helped me.
It's just that their ideas need to become my ideas (my philosophy) for them to have value to me.
Same here. If I can't explain it in my own words, but simply parrot others, then it hasn't actually been intergraded. I may quote from others, as I did with the Stanford link, simply to show that my thoughts are not just "my opinion". These are the same thoughts of others who are far more qualified in a professional sense than I am in my own informed opinions.
In other words, I like my opinions to be informed and knowledgeable opinions, not "just my opinion", no better than any other Joe at the corner bar spouting off their views on topics they really don't understand at any level of depth.
I'm simply never going to read somebody, not fully understand or agree with them, and then repeat their words as gospel. I leave that kind of thinking to the faithful.
Me either. But I don't call that a trait of the faithful. Quite the opposite. I call that a trait of the
lazy!
I know plenty of online atheists who do just that too.
Another long post by me, one who is himself too lazy to self-edit.
