What is the Harm in a Little Woo?

[Secret Chief]

you have the freedom to believe what you want but, should you?

Absolutely certainly.

 

[Secret Chief]

Honestly, I deeply believe that in Europe, the 90% of people are atheists. Within this 90% there are those who are allegedly religious people, but deep inside believe in no deity or in no afterlife.

So I am convinced that people in Europe are a priori skeptical.

According to the most recent UK Census you are wrong. If you think contrary to this then, according to the author of the OP, then you should not.

Religion by age and sex, England and Wales - Office for National Statistics

 

[RestlessSoul]

Belief in some form of universal creative intelligence is no more unsupported nor unevidenced, than the belief that all aspects of human experience can be accounted for in reductionist, materialist terms.

Though gifted with the ability to reason, man is not a rational being, and efforts to understand human behaviour solely by application of (pseudo) scientific principles always end in failure. For example, economics, sociology, social anthropology etc are not sciences, because they are matters "of human affairs, of which everything is paradoxical" - Kant, 'What is Enlightenment?'

 

[PureX]

It's not our recognition of "woo" that is bad for us. It's how we choose to respond to it. Immature minds respond to it immaturely. And that includes those who pretend it doesn't exist at all, or that it's all 'make-believe'.

It's our desire to be in control of everything that gets us in trouble. As we either try to use our experience of the real existential mystery (woo) to gain some sort of advantage. Or we deny it's existence to pretend that we are more in 'knowing' control than we are. The mysteries that we are calling "woo" are real. But as they ARE mysteries, we cannot control them to our own advantage. And when we think we can, that's when we start to go off the rails and become vulnerable to either our own made up nonsense or someone else's.

 

[Augustus]

You have read the definition I used, haven't you?
Organized religion only became a thing with permanent settlements, agriculture and groups exceeding the Dunbar number. Religion was (and is) a tool of power.

How would you explain the formation of Christianity as being primarily a process of “controlling the masses “?

 

[ADigitalArtist]

The impulsively of rejection of anything that can be theoretically woo is why holistic wellness was largely ignored to the detriment of patients who were being treated as a basket of only somatic symptoms.

I've seen no shortage of people who claim they only follow evidenced based research when they do nothing of the sort, they just find the headline articles that support their particular pre-made conclusion.

For a long time dietitians and cognitive behavioral therapies were considered and dismissed as woo. So maybe some of the woo skeptics need to be extra careful they're not throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Because it doesn't take a religious person to be a scam artist, and there's plenty of irreligious woo thinking that goes into things like cryptocurrency and supplement crazes.

 

[Heyo]

How would you explain the formation of Christianity as being primarily a process of “controlling the masses “?

By the fact that it was made state religion as soon as Christianity had enough followers to be useful as such. And it proved to be one of the most successful in that regard. It was a tool of power for at least 1,500 years.

 

[RestlessSoul]

By the fact that it was made state religion as soon as Christianity had enough followers to be useful as such. And it proved to be one of the most successful in that regard. It was a tool of power for at least 1,500 years.

A tool of power for who? Certainly not the landowning warrior class of medieval Europe, who often found their own power challenged by troublesome clerics (see Henry II of England and Thomas a Beckett).

 

[Debater Slayer]

I haven't bought into the notion that being religious makes one more susceptible to accepting unsupported beliefs ever since I realized how much propaganda, unsupported ideology, and fallacious appeals to prejudice were present within "skeptic YouTube" and many New Atheist circles.

Rejecting religion or its "unsupported beliefs" doesn't seem to me to make one less prone to false beliefs; critical thinking and trying to keep biases at bay do.

 

[Augustus]

By the fact that it was made state religion as soon as Christianity had enough followers to be useful as such. And it proved to be one of the most successful in that regard. It was a tool of power for at least 1,500 years.

After 4 centuries, and while still a minority religion among the people, the army and the elite it was adopted by an emperor. Previously it had been somewhat subversive and contrary to the interests of the powerful.

Then a few emperors down the line ( one of whom was pagan) it became the state religion.

You can’t seriously think that this is a religion that was “formed to control the masses”.

Not to mention that prior to modern communication and transportation technology, "controlling the masses” with the manufactured top down imposition of a new belief system across a vast empire is basically impossible. Emperors didn’t have a few centuries to wait for their tree to bear fruit.

As well as assuming leaders had more power than they actually did, it also kind of assumes no one really believed it and were just trying to cynically dupe the masses, which is obviously not the case.

That people have used religious institutions for reasons of power doesn’t mean religions were “formed to control the masses”.

It’s more a lesson on how institutions that gain power often use this power to benefit the institution, rather than the greater good.

 

[Augustus]

I haven't bought into the notion that being religious makes one more susceptible to accepting unsupported beliefs ever since I realized how much propaganda, unsupported ideology, and fallacious appeals to prejudice were present within "skeptic YouTube" and many New Atheist circles.

Rejecting religion or its "unsupported beliefs" doesn't seem to me to make one less prone to false beliefs; critical thinking and trying to keep biases at bay do.

Our minds are compartmentalised, so biases and irrationalities in one domain don’t mean they are more likely in another domain.

We all have our blind spots where we are more susceptible to being fooled by our prejudices and/or wishful thinking. We will also be resistant to being corrected on these as cognitive dissonance kicks in.

The first step is trying to identify as many of these areas as possible. But it’s a never ending whack-a-mole.

 

[Debater Slayer]

Our minds are compartmentalised, so biases and irrationalities in one domain don’t mean they are more likely in another domain.

We all have our blind spots where we are more susceptible to being fooled by our prejudices and/or wishful thinking. We will also be resistant to being corrected on these as cognitive dissonance kicks in.

The first step is trying to identify as many of these areas as possible. But it’s a never ending whack-a-mole.

When someone tries to argue that having some unfounded or "irrational" beliefs necessarily means abdicating all of one's reasoning faculties or evaluation of evidence, I like pointing out that Newton believed in alchemy, Gödel was a believer, and, conversely, Dawkins argued that eugenics would work in humans. Our reasoning is not monolithic or uniformly applied.

 

[lewisnotmiller]

How would you explain the formation of Christianity as being primarily a process of “controlling the masses “?

The formation of Christianity, no...the adoption of Christianity by Constantine, and then his drive to determine orthodoxy...maybe a little more so.

 

[lewisnotmiller]

I haven't bought into the notion that being religious makes one more susceptible to accepting unsupported beliefs ever since I realized how much propaganda, unsupported ideology, and fallacious appeals to prejudice were present within "skeptic YouTube" and many New Atheist circles.

Rejecting religion or its "unsupported beliefs" doesn't seem to me to make one less prone to false beliefs; critical thinking and trying to keep biases at bay do.

I basically agree.
I tend to think of 'woo' (not that I'd ever use that term) as more specifically ring-fenced beliefs that can be exploited.
As an example, my mother-in-law would visit clairvoyants at times, and mostly do it 'for a laugh' or similar. She'd take along one of her daughters, or whatever, and later on they'd laugh over some of the predictions, or exclaim how uncanny some others were. Let a few years pass, and when she'd reminisce about the same clairvoyant, it would almost always be limited to cherry picking out the 'uncannily accurate' predictions (which ranged from vague to specific) and the rest was kinda cast aside.

To me...good old emotional as a teacup and spiritual as a concrete block...it seemed clear self-delusion. EVEN IF clairvoyancy is real...and she would almost always be seeing precogs, which gets a little hard to square away with belief in free will, and a raft of loosely held religious beliefs, but anyway...even if it's real, it seems incredibly unlikely that all clairvoyants are real. Exercising a degree of skepticism on the abilities of any given individual, holding yourself to account by not misremembering, or 'guilding the lily' on claims made, and trying to keep some level of compatibility between held beliefs seems kinda...obvious. Or perhaps obvious is the wrong word. Unavoidable? I couldn't deal with the cognitive dissonance involved in NOT doing it.

But despite the contradictory beliefs and in some cases outright superstitions my mother in law held in many areas, she was a pretty grounded and sensible person, and unlikely to fall for scams. Well...she thought the Church had redeeming qualities, but apart from that.
Ahem...

 

[Heyo]

A tool of power for who? Certainly not the landowning warrior class of medieval Europe, who often found their own power challenged by troublesome clerics (see Henry II of England and Thomas a Beckett).

Exactly those. Often enough the landowning warriors and the landowning clerics were of one family. They sometimes fought about who gets the bigger piece of the cake but they were in full agreement that they should rule and that the lower classes should obey.

 

[lewisnotmiller]

When someone tries to argue that having some unfounded or "irrational" beliefs necessarily means abdicating all of one's reasoning faculties or evaluation of evidence, I like pointing out that Newton believed in alchemy, Gödel was a believer, and, conversely, Dawkins argued that eugenics would work in humans. Our reasoning is not monolithic or uniformly applied.

I agree with your basic thrust here, but just because it's night time and I'm not yet asleep, and looking to amuse myself...

Newton was a socially awkward dude who had episodic mental issues. His dalliances with chymistry and his predictions on the world ending in 2060 weren't really irrational though, I would say. Just eccentric. When one has used maths to solve so much by 26, it might be simple hubris that led him to think he was capable of solving anything. I mean, he also suggested toad vomit lozenges to prevent catching the plague.

Gödel similarly was an outlier, eccentric compared to his peers, but also a genius in some ways, who seemed quite confident in the power of his brain more generally. He was religious, but his pushback on atheism was more structured and logical than allows for the charge of 'unfounded or irrational'. He pushed back on evolution too, incidentally.

Which bring us to the New Atheist example...
Yeah, so if I suggested that the Dawkins thing isn't quite as clear an example of abdication of reason as you seem to be suggesting here, am I gonna get called a Nazi by someone?

As many here know, I am heavily invested in basketball. It's a sport which has a pretty high incidence of familial involvement, because height is a pretty directly and obviously hereditary trait (hence why the Khamis-Roche method works). If you have a 6'2 mum, and a 6'6" dad, chances are you'll be taller than average and have (quite literally) a leg up.

As most of you wouldn't know, my father in law is part owner of a number of racehorses, a sport where bloodlines are obviously considered, etc.

Now, does any of this make selective breeding in humans desirable? No. Does it suggest you can make 'better' humans? No. But...to be fair...Dawkins didn't suggest that. He just did his normal trick of answering something in a truthful and accurate manner...as long as you only consider the question from a single and very narrow point of view.

Still, not sure you can call it abdication of reason. Naivety, moreso.

 

[Augustus]

The formation of Christianity, no...the adoption of Christianity by Constantine, and then his drive to determine orthodoxy...maybe a little more so.

While that is a more reasonable claim, I still find it hard to believe either adopting a minority religion that was recently persecuted as a threat to the empire, or attempting to find a consensus within that religion are best conceptualised as primarily being an attempt to control the masses.

 

[Heyo]

That people have used religious institutions for reasons of power doesn’t mean religions were “formed to control the masses”.

Not all religions, but religion as a concept. We see the first religions always together with the rise of high cultures, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Indus Valley, Maya, Inca, you name it. They all had a powerful priest caste, often with the (god) emperor at the top.

 

[lewisnotmiller]

A tool of power for who? Certainly not the landowning warrior class of medieval Europe, who often found their own power challenged by troublesome clerics (see Henry II of England and Thomas a Beckett).

Beckett was a lord, as well as clergy.
He was also Lord Chancellor...literally in charge of taxation...before becoming Archbishop of Canterbury. And he helped raise Henry II's son. One of the main reasons he was installed as Archbishop was a belief by the nobility (including Henry) that he would look after government (monarchy) interests.

Beckett became a troublesome cleric, as you say, because of his changing views on spirituality, and his adoption of ascetic principles. But he most certainly is an example of the intermingling of nobility and church in a structural sense, and the combined efforts of them to control the masses, even though he personally became a thorn in the side of the King. As any noble might, incidentally.

 

[lewisnotmiller]

While that is a more reasonable claim, I still find it hard to believe either adopting a minority religion that was recently persecuted as a threat to the empire, or attempting to find a consensus within that religion are best conceptualised as primarily being an attempt to control the masses.

Fair enough. Some have argued that it was that (at least to a large degree). An example would be Hans Pohlsander, in The Emperor Constantine.
In any case, I'm not trying to convince you, since I'm unsure of my own position. Only that there are arguments to be made in this direction.

Similarly, it would be easy enough to argue that the medieval church in England was certainly attempting to control the masses, in quite a direct and unabashed way. The motivation behind this is a little less clear, and consistent. You might allow (for example) that this was intended as a benevolent control and influence...the shepherd looking after the flock. Or you might see ambition and material causes. Or (as I do) a much muddier picture which involved both.