Suppose it depends on where you live. It's a little uncomfortable in my neck of the woods. People definitely dislike you and discriminate against you. But in some areas it's really, really bad.

@ChestRockfield More than half of the British public describe themselves non-religious. Plus, there is a kind of protocol established in British society that religious belief (or no belief) is a personal thing. You wouldn't be discriminated against because you are an atheist. We wouldn't bother asking if you are a theist or an atheist in the first place.

@Ryo1 Yeah, definitely way different here. Being an out atheist is almost a perfect impediment to holding public office. I mean, it's happened, but very, very rarely.

One out of the 531 members of congress surveyed identified as religiously unaffiliated, not even expressly 'atheist'. One.
[pewresearch.org]

[twin-cities.umn.edu]

[scientificamerican.com]

[reason.com]

I'm thinking humans come into the world fully capable of accepting propositions without evidence. It takes some pretty specialized training to break them of that natural habit, and even then, the natural impulses often win out over the training. Religions are not the source of that impulse.

@skado I think what he's saying is that religions foster that notion so that it gets worse and worse over time instead of things, like science classes, that try to remove that impulse.

I bet that's also why there's a greater correlation between religious belief and the Republican party, which shovels an unbelievable amount of horse shit down their adherents' throats.

@skado Well, I agree that humans have a natural propensity to anthropomorphize things both animate and inanimate; to see intention where none exists; to be easily swayed by specious arguments; to embrace easy answers before thorough investigation is completed; and to infer causal relationships between A and B simply on the basis that A occurred before B (the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy). Alas, flabby thinking comes naturally to us. But religions are institutions where all those bad cognitive habits are indoctrinated, formalized, reinforced, and lauded. So science education has to not only tone up weak minds, it also has to overcome indoctrination in poor thinking habits by competing religious institutions. In the absence of religion, science education would be much, much easier. Our nature is what it is; we can't change that. But religious dogma is a dead weight of our own making, dragging us down. It is human invention. We can choose to discard it. And we should.

@ChestRockfield

Religions do have a great vulnerability to misunderstanding, misuse, and abuse, but it would be a huge mistake to think that is all they do for us. That vulnerability has to be weighed against their evolutionary benefits, which are less popularly recognized, especially by the non-religious.
But religions do have, contrary to popular opinion, corrective mechanisms - they just run in much longer cycles than those of science. In its much greater time on Earth religion has changed more than science has in its relatively brief stint.

Also... science gets a shot at the average citizen during our school years, and then optionally perhaps through the occasional popularizer like Sagan or Tyson on TV, but religion is something that engages the faithful every week for their entire lives. It doesn't spend all that time teaching people to be worse and worse citizens. And it's not, as so many atheists claim, teaching false or primitive science. That's not its job. It's using metaphor to illustrate social and psychological relationships that foster social cohesion and personal psychological wholeness. Those metaphors are not false or unfounded propositions. They, unlike science, are products of millennia of cultural evolution - trial and error - which are time tested to produce social cohesion and personal wholeness. To take them as literal, propositional truth is to entirely miss their mode of operation. You have to look through the lens of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology to see their functionality.

@ChestRockfield
Never thought I'd find myself defending the Republicans, (and I'm not) but... in the larger picture, they are just the American version of the world's, for lack of a better word, conservative faction. Which, as best I can tell is close to half of the world population, or at least similar in number to the liberal faction. But the world's religious are around 80% of the population. So I'm not sure how much more religious they are than the Democrats. What I suspect they are is much more fundamentalist/literalist in their religion. They take it more literally and wear it on their sleeve, but the overwhelming majority of humans are religiously affiliated in some capacity or other.

@Flyingsaucesir

I think it is a great mistake to see science and religion as oppositional. They aren't trying to do the same thing. They are not in competition. Only religious literalists think that. Religious dogma can and does get stagnant, and needs desperately to be updated, but from an anthropological view, certainly no more a human invention than science is, and arguably less. It's job is stabilizing human societies (no easy task) such that the discipline of science can even be undertaken. A minority of individuals can discard it, but our species can't, probably at all, but certainly not without disastrous results.

@skado I think you are too pessimistic. It's not going to happen overnight; it probably will never happen totally, but I think humanity is capable of dropping belief in gods, devils, angels, ghosts, etc. These superstitions are not necessary for a moral compass or positive social interactions. And their absence would not impoverish the culture. We could always read, enjoy, and glean lessons from the old stories without being indoctrinated to believe in the literal truth of some subset of them.

@skado
Pew disagrees with you.
In 2019, 38% of Dems were religiously unaffiliated. Only 15% of Republicans were. That doesn't sound like a giant difference to you? Over two and a half times more Democrats are religiously unaffiliated.

[pewresearch.org]

@Flyingsaucesir
I'm not at all pessimistic. I'm just familiar with the science. It does not support the idea that "religions are institutions where all those bad cognitive habits are indoctrinated, formalized, reinforced, and lauded." Those cognitive habits are directly traceable to natural selection. Nobody "thought up" religion. It is a bio-culturally evolved counterbalance to the aspects of our cognitive nature that are now no longer adaptive, since we moved from our ancestral environment, where those traits evolved, and took up the experiment called civilization. But nature is a formidable force. It easily and often overpowers whatever cultural correction we try to impose on it.

It's like there is a raging fire consuming several city blocks. An antique fire truck comes and sprays water on the fire but is unable to completely extinguish it. The atheist walks by and exclaims "We've got to get rid of Fire Departments altogether. They're causing fires all over the city!"

My position isn't one of pessimism. I'm suggesting we modernize our Fire Department. Religion isn't the problem. It is a solution that is overdue for renovation..

@ChestRockfield
I don't doubt that that Pew survey is an accurate snapshot of this place and this moment in time, but I'm talking about world trends, which are going to more nearly reflect human nature at large. It is Pew that I rely on for my claim that 80% of world population is religiously affiliated, and growing. I don't know if they have ever done a survey on world statistics of conservative/liberal factions of religiosity. That would be interesting to see. It wouldn't surprise me for it to favor conservatives, but we can see from this site we're on that not all atheists are politically liberal. So that 80% is not going to be all conservative. Jesus after all was a flaming Liberal! His teachings are the foundation of modern liberal politics. ( Don't tell the churches that use his name! )

@skado
So if you assume the world population of religious conservatives and religious liberals are the same, then you think that the trend outside of the US is opposite of the US in that liberals are more religious than conservatives to balance out how lopsided it is here. What would make you think that, instead of that the trend follows anywhere you'd look in the world?

Oh, and also, Pew disagrees with you.
[pewresearch.org]

@skado I'm not crazy about your metaphor of the fire department, though it does have a couple of illuminating factors. 1. Yes, religions are supposed to have the function of helping people to live together in peace (call it putting out fires; we don't have to discuss religious wars right now). And they secondarily function as power structures that employ a con job to keep people in line and money flowing to an elite high priesthood. 2. Religion, like a fire department and the equipment it uses, is a human invention, just as all cultural artifacts are human inventions.

We do agree that something is wrong with religion as it exists today. Your solution is renovation. What would that look like? I would posit that any meaningful renovation would have to include stripping out all references to the supernatural, so no God(s), demigods, devils, angels, ghosts, souls, heaven, hell, purgatory, etc., etc.; calling a halt to teaching belief in the literal truth of outdated creation myths and other fables; making helping the poor and downtrodden the actual mission, rather than just a facade to cover up the fleecing of the flock for the greater wealth and aggrandizement of the high priesthood. That's what I would call a useful renovation. After it's done, do you still have a religion? Maybe. That's question for a discussion on semantics.

@ChestRockfield
I'm not stuck on the idea that dems and reps are absolutely equal in religiosity. My personal prejudices tempt me to think the republicans are generally more religious, and they might be. But my scientific spidey sense keeps whispering "caution". A lot of it comes down to how we define religion. Most atheists I encounter define it as every bad thing any religious person ever did. But I don't think that's factually correct. My personal definition takes its cues from biology, anthropology and personal observation. Most of the religious liberals I've known would never be suspected of being religious, because it's more of a private thing for them, whereas the conservatives tend to make more of a public display of it I think.

Pew not withstanding, I think we still don't know (unless they have another, more comprehensive survey) how that all shakes out worldwide. The survey you cite shows a list of developed countries, but not a single country in the entire continent of Africa. The fine print says Russia and Japan weren't asked, and I don't see China, with what, a quarter of the world's population, even mentioned. Hard for me to see that one chart as anything near representative of our species in general.

Another problem is that outside the U.S., words like liberal and conservative may mean very different, even diametrically opposite things to survey respondents.

The only thing that seems reasonably clear to me is that both of those tendencies probably have fairly strong genetic determinants - not immutable, but strongly influential. And that suggests to me some kind of balance, whether that balance works out to be crisply symmetrical or something asymmetrical like high volume/low amplitude playing against high amplitude/low volume.

In any case, not a hill I need to die on.

@skado It's been a few years now, but I did read about an interesting study that indicated a link between the propensities toward liberalism or conservatism on the one hand, and where the subject fell in the birth order of his siblings, on the other. It turns out that a disproportionate number if conservatives were first-born sons, while most radicals and revolutionaries in history were second or third-born. The explanation hypothesized was that first-borns, before the birth of their siblings, were the sole focus of their doting parents, and had an interest in maintaining that status quo. The interests of the later-born siblings, by contrast, lay in upsetting the status quo. The author provided lists of historical figures that supported his claim. If true, this would tend to refute the notion of a genetic link, instead making the development of conservatism or liberalism more a matter of nurture rather than nature.

@Flyingsaucesir
"What would that look like?"

Great question!

As it happens, I have given quite a bit of thought to that.
I don’t claim to have “the” answer, but I have some suggestions that might be worth looking into.

The first criteria that spring to mind are:

1. It would have to be resolvable (regardless of how indirectly) to well-established scientific principles.
2. It would have to be cognitively accessible, rationally as well as emotionally, to the greatest number of people globally - an overwhelming majority at minimum.
3. It would have to be implementable.

In order to determine whether you would still have a religion, you would first have to figure out what the most functionally consequential and universal aspects of religion are - those qualities which, if all others were lost, would still be recognizable by the general public as "religion", and still serve not only the evolutionary role that organized religion has served for the last five or six thousand years, but accurately anticipate the role it will be called upon to serve in the foreseeable future.

To my thinking, the only thing that might meet this tall order would be something like a "meta-religion" that could be layered over any and all existing religions, or could be used as a stand-alone religion in its own right.

it would need to find an honest path of compatibility between all major world religions, as well as between them and modern science. I won't write a novel here, but I have worked out many of the details as to how to accomplish all of these things. Hypothetically.

@Flyingsaucesir
Everywhere I have tried to trace the nature/nurture conundrum to ground I have found it almost invariably to be... both.

The birth-order angle sounds very plausible to me. I had not heard of that before.

The thing about the genetic angle that so often escapes notice is... that genes are often not absolute determiners of specific behaviors, but "influencers" that predispose an individual to a variable range of behaviors relative to a given current environmental context.

@skado You say it's not a hill you need to die on, yet continue to come up with potential explanations of ever-less-likely scenarios that would make your initial hypothesis correct. First, it was 'outside the US it's flip-flopped'. Now, it's 'outside the surveyed nations, it's flip-flopped', or 'religious liberals are so secretive, the numbers only look uneven'. When what is apparent, is actually what is most likely true: conservativism and religiosity are more apt to go hand in hand. Being resistant to change, more or less the crux of conservatism, is essentially required for religion to survive, thus, those that are predisposed to one are more likely to be an adherent of the other.

@ChestRockfield
I'm not arguing against your point. It was a casual reference I made upon which nothing dear to my heart depends. It's nothing so sophisticated as a hypothesis - it was just a casual guess. I suspect you are right. I just don't know.

But there is no flip-flopping. From the very beginning, in my sincere understanding, neither the U.S. nor the developed world comprise a comprehensive picture of our entire species - especially compared to other Pew surveys that much more nearly do.

One thing that very probably complicates this discussion, which I've been endlessly open and transparent about, but still seems to plague us, is that our respective definitions of "religion" probably don't even remotely resemble each other.

But I am not even slightly trying to prove my "hypothesis" correct, because I don't have one. Other than I strongly suspect the thing you are wanting to argue about is currently unknown, and likely unknowable. At minimum, that Pew reference is a long way from determining anything, AND, if it did... I would be perfectly fine with that. As I said several times now. I suspect you are right.

@skado, @ChestRockfield We are at the point now in our political discourse that we identify as conservative (and Republican) belief in the person-hood of a fertilized egg. But this notion is anything but conservative. It's actually a radical idea, and one that is not supported by any repeatable evidence.

We really need to spend some time defining our terms.

Notwithstanding, I think its safe to say that Republicans in this country are more likely to be affiliated with an Evangelical Christian church than are Democrats. And the evangelicals, along with the Christian nationalists (there appears to be significant overlap in that Venn diagram) are the ones we really have to worry about.

@ChestRockfield, @skado Yes, and we are barely beginning to understand epigenetics. Environmental factors experienced in one generation can actually affect the expression of genes in that generation or the next generation. I hope civilization persists long enough to fully explore all this.

@Flyingsaucesir
Yes, epigenetics is definitely a factor.

@Flyingsaucesir @skado

Not sure where either of you stand, but I'm one who has come to the realization that humans do not have free will. I'm as sure of that as I am anything else in this world. That said, for me it turns the whole nature/nurture thing on its head because everything is basically nature.

@ChestRockfield Oh, I think we have free will, but it's influenced, to a greater or lesser extent depending on the individual, by our genetically-driven predispositions and our circumstances.

@Flyingsaucesir
I can't wrap my brain around partial free will or sometimes free will.

This is the most concise video I've found on the subject.

@ChestRockfield
I usually try to avoid taking any stand on free will. Mostly because I see it as more of a linguistics problem than a physics problem or even a philosophy problem.

But also because… if there is no free will, then I can’t see much point in taking a stand on anything. And if there is free will, then I’d choose to use mine to pursue issues that I can see some practical application for.

@skado You see it as a linguistics problem? How so?

I will say it's funny you don't see the linguistic problem created by tiny minorities of people defining 'god' and 'religion' differently than the rest of the population, but sure, free will is a linguistics problem.

If there is no free will, you don't have a choice what you will take a stand on or how much value you see in it.

@ChestRockfield Funny video We may never know for sure if we have free will or not, but I'll tell you something you probably already know: our legal system assumes that we do.

@Flyingsaucesir I know, that is one of the biggest travesties.

@ChestRockfield So you would let Trump off the hook, because he just couldn't help himself? Please!

@ChestRockfield
Oh I very much do see the definition of religion as a linguistics problem. Any time you’re arguing about definitions you’re wrestling with a linguistics problem.
In both cases, the biggest obstacle is the different ways people envision the meanings of the words they’re using. Beyond that, the actual facts are usually not that hard to discover. I will spend endless hours discussing the religious problem because it is something that people can, given a better understanding, do something about. I won’t spend any time discussing free will, because if we don’t have it, there’s nothing we can do about it. If there’s anything we can do about it, then we clearly do have it, so no problem. I just don’t see any practical application for that piece of knowledge either way. If I don’t have a choice about a matter, I certainly don’t want to waste my time discussing it, and I have no idea why you would either.

@Flyingsaucesir Oh no. People need to be protected from those that would hurt society. Personally I think he's so dangerous he needs to be locked up for the rest of his life. But it does make you want to avoid vengeful punishments.
There's a philosophical thought experiment about punishing a criminal and it runs though several scenarios where you find out he has a large brain tumor on his frontal lobe that alerted his thinking and behavior. For me, there's no difference between a naturally occurring healthy brain state that makes you perform criminal acts and a naturally occurring diseased brain state that makes you perform criminal acts.

@ChestRockfield The law sees a difference, and rightly so, I think. If the tumor is inoperable, then the person will still have to be restrained, but it would probably be in a different setting; a mental institution rather than a penal one. No? In any case, I agree that we should avoid vengeful punishments. In fact, I would like to see more rehabilitation and education go on, and less warehousing.

@ChestRockfield
Sam Harris has mentioned the benefit of no-free-will regarding the treatment of criminals, and I have two things to say about that.

One is... that's not how science is done, and Sam Harris, of all people, should know that. You don't start with a desirable conclusion and then try to justify it by some presumption of facts. You start with the known facts and let them tell you what the conclusion is.

So to my mind, the issue of criminal justice has no place in the free will debate. The chips should fall where they fall according to evidence alone.

The second is... you don't have to go all around the world in a convoluted debate about free will in order to take a stand for compassionate treatment of the incarcerated. It is easily justified by compassion alone.

Retributive justice is not justice. It is vengeance.

If people are intent on causing harm, they do need to be restrained from doing so, but nothing good comes from punishing them. Deterrence is another issue, and a thorny one, but again, not one that needs to have any bearing on whether free will exists.

I don't think so. You're basically making the same argument that religious people make stating that morality comes from the holy text. But it clearly doesn't, otherwise people would be following all of the rules set forth. The reason they don't is because they use their internal moral compass to determine what in the holy text of theirs is actually moral or not, and that moral compass will still be intact after they realize there is no god. If the Bible wasn't enough of an authority when they did believe in god to make them stone homosexuals to death, there's no reason to think the Bible forbidding murder (of straight people I assume) is going to make people start murdering once they stop believing in god.

@Shaggy2018
I'm with you on most of that, but it's good to keep in mind that no large group of people is going to be monolithic - especially one that comprises 80% of a species that is eight billion strong. Religious people are as diverse as non-religious people. Many are very serious about adhering to the best principles of their respective tradition. But I totally understand the sentiment. I left a dentist for similar reasons. But I did give him a chance to show me his individual character before pulling the rip cord.

Who would have thought honesty as an act of rebellion.But in this politically correct environment honesty is the thing most lacking.

Religion greed and stupidity.
Have bought us where we are today.
Yard signs say "pray for our nation"
And it's mental constipation.
We have a great need for lucidity.

@Paganpaddy Yea…….’Pray for our nation’. Seriously, all hope is lost at this point.

Two of my kids are openly atheist, one goes to church to a. play the piano, and b. keep daddy happy. I generally keep my atheism under wraps especially at work. I've had tooo many managers that made a show of their religion. My current team lead, though she has not declared which way she thinks, she grew up in a religious family, dad and brother are preachers. Our former manager seemed to be religious and her last name was Lorde. Current manager I'm not sure about, but given her demographics I'd be surprised if she wasn't. I'm not about to come out as atheist, if I do at all, until right before I retire, 1555 more days. Yes, I'm counting. I have a countdown app on my phone.

Well "truth is iberating"!

I copy/paste the whole thing. I had a version that did not have a paywall.

What is your definition of 'successful' and 'stable'?

@ChestRockfield
Great question, and of course volumes could be (and have been) written on the subject. But for starters I’d say… one in which the rate of change is kept more or less in the goldilocks zone - not too fast and not too slow.

Slow enough that plans for the future can be made, with a reasonable expectation of not being interrupted, and fast enough to avoid stagnation and decay.

@skado Those are still incomprehensibly vague. Plans for what? Anything? Everything?
What counts as an interruption? What counts as stagnation or decay? And what population size are we even talking about? Does it have to be all humans? Country sized? State? Small village in Africa? Your comment, knowing you, seems to suggest that a religion would be needed for that unifying narrative, then you put these vague parameters on to dictate any success or failure as you see fit.

@ChestRockfield

Well to start with, you DON"T know me. That's clear from the way you speak to me and about me.

Yes, anything and everything. Interruption is when you were planning a family picnic but there are bombs exploding outside, or roving bands of thieves taking whatever they want from the villages they plunder. Or maybe just a dictator who requires exorbitant bribes from anyone wanting to cross a state line...and didn't notify you until you got there. Or longer term interruptions of food supply or medical help because the economy has taken a dive. Societal collapse is not mysterious, or unheard of in history. Stagnation is when rules are enforced so rigidly for so long that it stifles innovation and growth. This is just basic sociology and history - not any invention of mine.

Any size society that is functioning as a society. Certainly any present-day nation, but today we are transitioning to a global society. Clearly financial contagions, just like microbial contagions, spread around the globe rapidly. Cultures are mixing at a rate never seen before.

I usually try to choose my words pretty carefully to mean what I actually intend. Whatever assumptions you add are your responsibility - not mine. When I say a unifying narrative, I mean a unifying narrative. In the past that narrative has most often, maybe always, been built around a religion. If people can come up with something that works as well, that's fine by me. But I don't see anything approaching that functionality on the horizon.

Look, I have spent virtually my whole adult life as a religion-hating atheist. I don't believe anything about gods or the supernatural that you don't believe. But when I retired I had the time, and interest, to study some of these things more deeply from a scientific perspective. It was due to a growing respect for science (not religion) that brought me to my current worldview. I am not the source of any of this information. I'm just relaying what the various related sciences are saying today about these matters.

Humans have always, and still do, need a unifying narrative in order to function cooperatively. As a matter of observable fact, religions have served that purpose as long as societies were isolated. Now that we are merging into a global society, the various religions and political systems are clashing. That is not sustainable. If we don't want our national, or our global, society to crash, we need to be finding a narrative that can unify that society. And in order to do that you have to recognize that 80% (and growing) of the world population still depends on their religion for their worldview. And 13% of them still can't even read.

Whatever works is fine with me, but I'm guessing it might be easier (and vitally, quicker) to illuminate the many existing similarities between world religions, as well as what they have in common with science, than to... what? I can't even think of an alternative. Talk 80% of the world population out of believing in anything at all? Provide 80% of the world population with the science education I, as a privileged, white, male American didn't have the time to pursue until I retired, and then only happened to because of my personal interests? What?

Sincerely open to your suggestions.

@skado humanist manifesto, get these marketing wizards to start selling it. If they can sell worthless trinkets for astronomical prices, how much easier would it be to sell a world where we have universal motivation. That motivation being nothing more than being good to one another. Capitalism untapered by kindness and humanity is quite ugly. Some wise individual will probably blow this to hell. It is my opinion and no it would not be easy to change humanities inherent greed.

@skado So you're claiming that religion would be the best way to have a unifying narrative, yet even after thousands and thousands of years, it still hasn't been successful (given we experience the examples you gave on a daily basis). Doesn't sound to me like that's the way to go if it's never been successful before. Maybe the road from 80% to 0% is longer, but if the road from 80% to 100% is impossible to drive, how much shorter it is, is irrelevant.

@ChestRockfield
No, I don't think anybody knows, or could possibly know, what "would be the best way to have a unifying narrative". I don't have anything invested in it being one thing or another. I'm just looking at the evidence that I'm aware of and saying what it looks like to me. "Success" in evolutionary terms looks very different from how most humans might define success. Our species, unlike all the other human species that ever existed (Neanderthals, Denisovans, Naledis, etc.) is still extant. As far as evolution is "concerned" that's success. It doesn't "care" that we are a hot mess.

So something has been successful. Everything I read suggests a large portion of our success has been due to our ability to coordinate our actions in groups, and that such cooperation has been due to our capacity for complex culture, and that the core of that culture, up to this point has been religion. If you know of anthropologists or other scientists who specialize in related fields who have other hypotheses I'd love to read about them.

I don't think either 100% or 0% are particularly relevant. Evolution doesn't require, or hardly even tolerate, such precision. What matters is whatever is adequate for survival. A scientific attitude would prescribe at least looking at what has worked in the past when we are casting about for what might work in the future.

"a unifying narative"! Well, Trumpsters believe "that the truth is a lie"- that to me, seems to be an obvious nonsequiture.

@Diogenes
For sure, but that one is more of a dividing narrative, relative to the whole society.