I have compassion for religious people who finds comfort in faith; especially if it’s born out of personal trauma.
As an atheist, I’ve been advised not the challenge people’s religious faith. The atheist, by pointing out reality to the faithful, is seen as mean, or unethical for stealing a security blanket away from people. People often find themselves in a fragile states, and religion is said to offer great comfort. I fully understand that perception, I sympathize with it, and there is a partially reasonable, and ethical argument to be made in favor of allowing the faithful to maintain their faith unchallenged.
The larger problem is, the faithful do not realize the true costs of their faith. Most people accept, as a matter of faith, that having faith in God is a net good. If that is one’s default assumption, then anything that chips away at faith is a net bad.
If someone could maintain faith in private, and not bring their private thoughts on faith into the public sphere, then in theory their would be no issue with faith. But faith, by definition, forces one to warp reality to believe things that aren’t real. It trains one’s mind to reject uncomfortable realities. So in a very real sense, faith steals your sense of reality, and that is extremely dangerous. There are high societal costs associated with people training themselves to reject reality.
If faith and reality are at odds, and they are, consider weighing these two alternatives . . . What is more unfair: For someone of faith to insist I and all others reject reality, or for those of us who do not shy away from reality to insist the faithful accept what is real?
Facts are real regardless if you believe them. When a powerful group within society refuses to face facts, it puts society as a whole at risk. The high costs for maintaining faith are born on those forced to subsidize the them. Having to play along and pretend people of faith have equally valid claims on facts or reality in general is not only unfair, but harmful to social trust and human progress. The “faith subsidy” paid by society has real world effects, and the net effects are largely negative.
Faith is inherently unethical; it’s harmful and unfair to others. The scales of justice favor the atheist.
The idea of cost-benefit associated with religion is a topic of personal interest. The research I’ve come up with tends to look at dollars spent for benefit gained, but that kind of analysis omits the value of personal emotional or psychological comfort, presumably because it can’t be measured in dollars or something else tangible. I have considered your argument, and agree with it, that there are costs associated with doing politics detaches from reality, but again, I’m not sure how one puts a number on the net benefit minus the net cost. You refer to high societal costs incurred by reality detachment. Do you have a link to some data?
In the past I’ve tried to build algorithms to get at rights cost-benefits when rights clash, e.g., burden on religious freedom and speech and on commercial activities vs expanded right to same-sex marriage in (i) the religious context, and (ii) in commerce. The two analyses give quite different results, but that’s only an estimate based on personal assignments of degree of burden and benefit.
One of the big complications about reality detachment comes from the biology of morality. Morality and religion often get mixed together to some degree, but cognitive and social science is clear that personal modes of moral thinking shape perceptions of reality, thinking about what is perceived and beliefs in what is perceived, true or false. The human mind has far too little data processing bandwidth to deal with reality per se, so it relies heavily on cognitive shortcuts to unconsciously generate coherence, even when there’s far too little data for coherence to exist. That happens all the time and it’s a form of innate, automatic reality detachment. Strongly held ideological beliefs, e.g., liberalism, conservatism, socialism, capitalism, etc., make the problem significantly worse by triggering amazingly powerful unconscious biases, e.g., motivated reasoning, in defense of personal worldview regardless of whether reality is or isn’t consistent therewith.
Because of the complexity of human cognition, your statements and conclusions on this are much more certain and far-reaching than what I have been able to reason my into believing. Any comments you have on how you arrived at the conclusions, “Faith is inherently unethical; it’s harmful and unfair to others. The scales of justice favor the atheist”, would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for your time and consideration.
My argument in the core issue with religion and faith in general is a philosophical one, not an economic one. In referencing costs, I’m focusing on the harm and injustices incurred unto individuals and society as a whole due to the indoctrination of young and/or volnerable minds into accepting as unquestioning faith the false claims and learned ignorances religion instills. Religion favors ignorance over curiosity, and that is religions original sin. Science encourages curiosity, and the promotion of knowledge and understanding. There are no ideas beyond approach, regardless of previously held beliefs. The Scientific Method allowed humanity to progress more in 200-years, than what occurred in the previous 200,000-years.
Religion promotes blind obedience to Gods authority, without defining what God is. Ethical Understanding provides us with the know-how to question authority, to validate if an authority’s commands are morally just. Blind obedience to any authority is a great way to make well meaning people do incredibly unethical things. Philosophy requires us to liberate our minds to question our own dogmas through the use of skepticism. If we can stand beside our dogmas long enough to objectively question them with an ethical lens, truth can be derived.
The fact that every individual’s mental model of the world is different, does not change external reality. The fact that we can view images using X-rays, infrared, or visible light does not change the fact that the objects observed are real. Someone looking at the universe with X-ray vision will see the planets different than the person using visible light. The planets still exist in both, the physical properties of planets such as gravity exist regardless of your chosen electromagnetic lens. Electromagnetism exists in both realms, as does a host of properties. Don’t be fooled into the notion that different ways of viewing reality makes reality any less real. Questioning reality is a pointless exercise that can be temporarily interesting but leads nowhere. If you don’t believe the wall in front of you is real, try running through it, that should snap you back into reality.
With regards to mental models of the world not being similar and accurate, that is because everyone’s mental models are not similar and accurate 🙂
The greater the complexity of the observed phenomenon, the more divergence there will be in people’s mental models, and the less accuracy there will be. The greater the difference in knowledge (know-how) and understanding (know-why) of the world, the greater the divergence. If you observed a pool ball hit three times in a 2D plane, once with back spin, once with top spin, and once flatly, then you will observe three different reactions for the same event. It would be nearly impossible for you to derive an accurate model of the pool balls interactions, even with numerous observations. If however you observed the same interactions in a 3D plane where you could observe the spin on the ball, then you could build an accurate model of what you were observing. Your understanding would lead to wisdom, providing a predictive model of these interactions such that you’d be able to anticipate the path of the cue ball simply by the angle of the initial hit. Meanwhile the observer in the 2D plane would be forever off with their predictions of the cue ball’s path after contact with the object ball.
Perspective changes your mental models, not reality itself. The goal of science is to learn more about the world with certainty. The goal of education is increasing the scope of knowledge and understanding, leading to personal and group wisdom. The fact that we can not achieve perfection does not make the path toward a more perfect world any less useful or desirable.
With regards to mental models of the world, generally speaking you can only be two of these three things: General, Specific, or Accurate. Accurate generalizations are possible, but narrowing down into specifics will reduce the accuracy. You can be specific and accurate, but good luck generalizing on a specific item, regardless of how accurate the observation. Think of these three components as existing on a color wheel. Two primary colors combine to form another beautiful color. Three primary colors combined form mud.
The notion that “Faith steals reality” is something I’d encourage you to meditate on. It is an accurate statement. For some, I assume the point of faith is to do just that; alter one’s internal reality. Faith is a non-nicartic drug that has extremely long term affects. Can you steal something from someone if they willing give it way? Ethically speaking, I’d say no. So for the individual, faith is ethically acceptable. I personally don’t like mind altering drugs, but I understand why some individuals do like them and if used responsibly, you can make an ethical argument for their use. The problem with imposing your faith, or “truths derived from faith” (i.e. B.S.), is that you are now stealing others reality with your fanciful notions. When people of faith impose their B.S. onto others, that’s when faith becomes an ethical issue. So I’d encourage people to “use faith responsibly.” In other words, do it in private and don’t enter the public sphere high on nonsense. This sentiment is the basis of religious liberty.
The fact that someone has faith in one sphere, does not mean they can’t acknowledge reality in another sphere. That said, if the faithful appeal to others to have faith in their fanciful notions without rational reasons to believe, or worse, if they impose their doctrines derived from faith unto unwilling others, their faith based “knowledge” ought to be a disqualified of authority on the subject.