| Dumb people are not happier. (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/significant-results/...). That would also do nothing to disprove anything I said if it were true. Religious populations that murder irreligious people are bad, and not worth defending. That is likely a type of suffering caused by religion. My argument is that participating in religious activity makes an individual person happier, on average, when looking at the data. That should be convincing, given the data I presented. > It is entirely possible to be religious without rejecting rationalism ... >This is clearly not true, even if (as you suggest) attempt to morph capital-G god into a metaphor. I would have a tough time convincing you that it's true, especially considering that you don't appear to be trying to argue in good faith. But consider the Unitarians. They are mostly focused on personal virtue ethics through religiosity that rejects fundamentalism. I can say that looking at athiest strongholds, such as r/atheism, does not look like a more rational congregation than you might see at your local Unitarian church. The Unitarians are trying to better themselves; r/atheism is mostly focused on tearing down their oppressors. The claim that religious people are more charitable has not been debunked in this thread, and I would be surprised to see that the evidence points that way in the literature. I've researched it a good bit. "But it's because they give to church" does not fully explain the difference. >but in any case if the motivation is 'not spend an eternity being tortured' it suggests it's self-interest, not altruism at play. Altruism is not incompatible with self-interest. Additionally, most Christians are not fundamentalists. You can conceptualize Hell as the suffering that you are dealt as a result of your own failures. By giving to charity, you avoid one of these failures, and in doing so also make the world a measurably better place. (Meanwhile the statistically uncharitable atheists still think of themselves as superior, for some reason...) |
We have to differentiate between unintelligent and uneducated. For the latter, there are several studies showing that lack of education can mean lack of imagination of alternative. For example in The Idea of Justice Amartya Sen described the phenomenon of rural uneducated Indian women reporting less content with their own health after they received basic health education: Suddenly they were aware that there actually was an alternative to many of their miseries.