(July 29, 2017 at 11:55 pm)wallym Wrote: There is value in thinking someone is praying for you. There is value in praying for yourself. As a coping mechanism. As a social interaction. There's no God on the line taking the call, but the act of another person saying they are concerned for you is a real thing. I know you don't like the 'fake' part, but I think that's just decorative. It's not what it's about.
And I hear what you're saying with being pragmatic. But for some people, there is no happy ending. There will never be a happy ending. It's just a matter of being as comfortable as possible as the ship sinks. If a person is running around the subway asking for strangers to pray for a job/girlfriend/license, they're fucked. That's likely not a situation where a good life is on the table if they just make the right choices.
Just the idea of being pragmatic is beyond the capabilities of many people. I think we take what our brains can do for granted. That there is an assumed baseline that everybody is above, and I think that baseline is way higher than where it is in reality.
Not that this is always the situation. There are plenty of situations where religion is bad. And buying into lies is bad. But I don't think it matters for begging for prayers on subway people. I think with them, you can give them a second or two of comfort, or not, and that is the entirety of the significance. And that's probably why they do it, because a few small positive moments is all they can get.
Firstly, I really appreciate this response. This is the discussion I was hoping for.
I guess the problem I have with accepting this is... is it really as simple as 'they're fucked'? Personally, nothing in my life is even comparably as valuable to me as my ability to make rational decisions. I feel I could operate under no other condition. So the thought of leaving large groups of people out of this paradigm simply because I think they're not able to be pragmatic in that fashion feels cruel. In the most poignant sense. To strand someone in delusion would feel to me like leaving them to drown.
This view is based on my own experiences (growing up in a very secular household) and the successes I've had operating under a rational paradigm. So I wouldn't try to defend it as objective. But for me, if I could give someone a moment of comfort or a moment of sanity, I'd choose sanity.
In the case of some (perhaps this case), maybe I'm being an optimist to assume that it is possible for a person to be rational. I think Alzheimer's patients are a good example of where it's kind of pointless to try to convince people to pragmatically understand the world around them. From then on there are varying degrees of capacity, and at some point the benefits of pragmatism outweigh the value of false hope for increasing someone's wellbeing.
With things like religion confusing people, I think there's a large number of people who are capable of much more rationality than they regularly express and act upon. These are the people I would be loathe to give up on, and they are the ones who are causing the cool stats that show atheism levels increasing so dramatically in many regions. I suppose the challenge lies in determining who is who, and that is a matter of judgement that will vary between people.
Thanks, you've really helped me understand the other side of this.
