A thing about religious (and other) people and the illusion of free will

[ShinyCrystals]

Yeah, I was focusing on the bad parts for some reason. That said, you are right.

Either way, though, beliefs about God and things about religion do tend to be nonsensical or just...heavily flawed. Maybe not all things, of course, but like stuff that is in the bible and all, there are some contradictions here and there, right?

Yeah, sure, tons of contradictions typos misinformation propaganda, straight up mistakes..and narrative discontinuity - but none of that actually matters to the religions of magic book, imo.  If it did, we'd be hard pressed to understand why they were still around.  I don't think you'd find many people who genuinely believe in biblical inerrancy or that any of those issues in magic books means that their religion is doa.  They may say it, hell, even Paul™ said it - but it's never looked like anyone meant it.  Just pious recitation.  Virtue signaling.  The vast majority of us christians, for example, have long been content to call magic book inspirational or aspirational fiction.  

A religion is a set of beliefs about how to live your life.  About the way the world should be, not the way it is, which might go some way to explaining why religions don't fail when we find out that their explanation of the nature and mechanics of this or that are wholly, demonstrably, and indefensibly wrong.  That just gets shuffled off into apologia.  A centuries long project of "on second thought" and "what we meant to say was". The judeo christian god (at least in the monotheistic revisions of the stories) started out as a potter.  Now he's a geneticist.  He was an obgyn along the way.   He's working on getting accredited as a quantum physicist right this very minute.  

Long winded, I know, but I think that to get some clarity here we might have to make a pretty fine separation between religion and superstition.  Beliefs about gods, ghosts, angels demons and pixies and trolls and river spirits and..we could go on and on - well...they may be in error.  They may be superstitious.  But they do not in and of themselves explain how or why the world should be some way.  Superstitions are a collection of discredited (or discreditable) beliefs about how the world is.  What's in it.  How it works  If a person tells you that this world is a world with gods in it you will not be able to determine or divine that they are religious, or what their religious contents are on account of that fact - and that's operative, I think, in the stuff I went on and on about above.  The two are only incidentally or coincidentally related so even a believer in them can discard one without much or any harm to the other.

Sure, people may combine the two - often have combined the two - and insist that the world should be some way and god said so..but the crucial thing to know is whether or not they would want the world to be that way.  Whether, say, in the absence of believing that there really was a real god that really cosigned their normative view...it would still be their normative view.   Anyone who answers in the negative to that is, to my mind and by this way of slicing up the issue..not religious at all.  Merely superstitious.  If there were some god  then they would follow said rules..but if not, fuck em.  They don't agree with them, they don't agree with the religion - they don't think the world should be that way, they just think it is.

I assume (correct me if I'm wrong) that what you're discarding above as nonsensical and flawed is superstition.  If so, I agree wholeheartedly, but being able to discard superstition as nonsensical and flawed..even rightly discarding it, may not have the logical juice to do the same to a/the religion.  I use the examples of religious naturalism and a religion of nature alot because I know we have alot of humanists and naturalists on the board...and because they would seem to evade this criticism entirely.  Even if discarding superstitions could be a valid basis for discarding a superstitious religion - it couldn't touch religions explicitly defined by their lack of such superstitions or their rejection of the primacy of those superstitions in our determinations of how the world should be.  How we should be.  

All of that to say..we're not giving the sorts of religions we're criticizing the credit for their effort.  Religions don't have to be that way.  We can't confidently say that some x is that way because it's a religion.  We can only surmise that some religions went the extra mile and made themselves that way.  We had a christian hop in to saddle his god and his religion on the existence of a free will, for example.  Bold, but foolish.

Yeah, I pretty much meant superstition there. The word in your fourth paragraph. I'd even say, with full accuracy, that superstition is not scientific. At all. I do understand the parts about religion and superstition. Maybe religion is not as bad as I thought...well, not as bad as superstition, anyway.

Interesting thoughts, by the way. And yeah, the stories in the bible, if that is the magic book you are talking about (feel free to correct me if I am wrong) are rather inspirational and aspirational in terms of its stories, as you said. If I understand what you are saying, it is good to see that some people, or many for that matter, can possibly see that the bible is made up.

However, in a number of ways, I do think it is outdated. I mean, it was written long ago, long before how civilization is now. Plus, if I am not mistaken, it has said things that have not changed. I remember on one TV show, I saw someone say that in the bible, something like "It is okay to sell your daughter into slavery" is there. I don't know if that has changed, but I would not be surprised if it were still there.

Still, there have been many religions, and religions being different have caused a lot of fighting. In fact, one of the two causes of war, aside from power, is religion itself. It still could be that way even today. Plus, has religion not allowed for discrimination against other kinds like other races, women or even sexual orientations, or have people who followed religion believed that such religions they are part of said that when they actually made it up themselves?