[quote=“daneel, post:90, topic:51175, full:true”]Well, if you want to say God = Nature = Universe and then say that exists, be my guest.
I don’t really see what it adds to anything, mind. Doesn’t seem like much more than a semantic argument. God just is? Where does that get you?[/quote]
There are physical and psychological benefits to believing in God, according to scientific research on the subject and also from my empirical observation. And you can get those benefits just as well from my faith as from any other, but you won’t have to do any dumb stuff a pope or preacher says you should. I would call this a functional or pragmatic argument, rather than a semantic one.
There are also social and economic benefits to becoming part of a religious community. But you don’t have to be a theist for that - many religions welcome atheists. Richard Dawkins goes to church, you know.
EDIT: Topic closed so I can’t reply directly to @Gem - I believe I once heard Dawkins say he occasionally attends the local COE, but my memory could be mistaken as I can find no cite for that… in May 2014, he said, “I would describe myself as a secular Christian in the same sense as secular Jews have a feeling for nostalgia and ceremonies” so clearly he is not condoning Anglican theology even though he sees some vaguely defined value in community traditions.
Related note, I was in England this summer and went to a Church of England Sunday morning service with a Catholic, three atheists and a Unitarian. The music was very good, although I thought the sermon was both bigoted and unconvincing (the latter being a good thing given the former, I suppose).
Either that, or our societies place physical and psychological stresses on people who don’t; are the benefits the same in places that are less religious on the whole? I’d argue the social and economic benefits really come from being part of a welcoming community, and right now many religious groups have a better tradition of providing those.
The physical and emotional benefits of the transcendental religious experience can apparently be gained through some forms of meditation. I believe one experiment found that the brain activity of a Bhuddist monk experiencing a pantheistic union with the universe through meditation was essentially the same as that of a Christian nun experiencing ecstatic union with Jesus through prayer? However, I don’t know of anyone reaching that mental state without acknowledgement of a superior entity - regardless of whether that entity is the awesome infinitude of subjective reality, or merely a dream of invisible sky men. The benefit of being a pantheist or panentheist in this context is that you can approach the divinity as a participant and not a supplicant.
But yeah, I think society does stress non-believers, and in particular Western society stresses non-Christians. I need my Solstice celebration every year principally as remedy for the relentless Christmas horror of whiny Christians talking about how oppressed they are (their principal holiday is a state celebration but somehow that’s not good enough for them). You can’t go to a PTA meeting in a US school in December without some fundie nutball standing up and shrilly objecting to their child being “forced” to learn a Chanukah or Kwanza song for the school concert…
I suspect you’re right!
A third bonus of being a theist is that you can use and understand god-language without conflict or remorse. A great deal of human thought and philosophy is couched in that language, so it’s empirically useful to be comfortable with it. Marcus Aurelius, Confucius, etc. and so forth…
I thought that entire point of the Book of Job was supposedly that their god would not prevent people from suffering! It’s not for us to understand why! So it would be surprising to me that this is controversial. No doubt various converts would love to help me to interpret the apparent contradictions of this this “correctly”. Such problems seem unique to the Abrahamic god because of the conceit that it is like a person, personally constructed everything, and such has a sort of personal responsibility over its constructs. They might be unavoidable assumptions to those who were raised with such ideas, but they likely seem quite weird to anybody else.
I wonder if they’d be equally livid if it was suggested that the world, complete with all its suffering was already “perfect”. Or if this was one of their god’s mistakes which should be fixed for their own selfish desires.
My own take on deities is that they have nothing to do with belief nor worship. People naturally engage in rituals. Even how people brew their coffee and browse the net are ritual. Rather than anything supernatural it is really a discipline, a kind of practice.
I think the key thing here is that it needs to be a god who is fairly powerless. What makes unfalsifiable spiritual relief so special if you believe in a god who created our physical reality? If God isn’t interested in helping you with your real, physical needs, what good is spiritual comfort from him? That’s what friends do (and that’s OK, because that’s all they can do at that point).
In some ways, that seems to be a lot of the point - God cares about his glory more than our comfort. It isn’t like he doesn’t care at all and sometimes he will help us, but the point of bad things happening isn’t so that we will have a better life or something. God persecuted Job and killed his family in order to win a bet. He sent Adam and Eve out of the garden because they were thinking too independently. He killed large numbers of Jews because they worshipped other gods. While the Bible talks a lot about God’s love and care for his people, I don’t think it’s supposed to be understood as we would imagine those attributes now. It’s all quite feudalistic and patriarchal, and that’s supposed to be a good thing.
I am not aware of any research comparing actual physical manifestations (brain waves, etc.) but based on my limited experience I would say that psychedelic drugs do seem to allow some people to achieve a religious experience under some circumstances.
I bet there is some research, though - got any links? I’ll read 'em!
A tiny bit of googling brings this up from the Spectator:
[quote]I suppose I’m a cultural Anglican and I see evensong in a country church
through much the same eyes as I see a village cricket match on the
village green. I have a certain love for it.’ Would he ever go into a
church? ‘Well yes, maybe I would.’
[/quote]
“Yes, maybe I would” does not a churchgoer make!
The average British person is not a churchgoer either, so it would be a little odd for an outspoken atheist such as Dawkins to buck that trend. Another quick google suggests that 5 to 6% of Britons attend church on any given Sunday (I’m actually surprised that it’s as high as 1 in 20, and I note that the average age of attendee at a Church of England service is apparently 62).
