Hi Trading. I see you have put a lot of thought and time into this recent post. I have reached a different conclusion. I have highlighted some areas were I believe your arguments to be flawed.
Argument #1: Religion has negative social consequencesOne can only believe this argument if one fails to objectively look at the data. The study you cited is behind a paywall so i could only read the abstract but just from that I can see that you have not presented it in an unbiased fashion. Your own citation claims that children in religious households have more more empathy and sensitivity for justice then children in non-religious households.
If you want to examine the real data on the social consequence of religion I would direct you to
Pascals Renewed Wager which is not behind a paywall. This is a review paper which highlights the overwhelming evidence that not only are the very religious happier they do better on virtually all health metrics. I formalized this argument further in my thread
Atheism and Health. The reality is I have yet to see a single study where atheist (of any stripe) outperform the very religious on any health metric.
Argument #2 Basing ones life and morality on religion is places it on absurd groundsBut if you try to live your life based on experience and scientific knowledge, why are you willing to base your philosophy of life and morality based on such absurd grounds?
Most atheist content themselves with attacking religion without truly and honestly considering where atheism logically takes you. Every once in a while you encounter an honest and thoughtful atheist. I had the honor of debating one of these recently. These are his comments on the matter.
At its most pure and fundamental level knowledge is faith and faith is knowledge.
This is the essential difference between theism/spiritualism and nihilism, it is the question of epistemology, of what is knowledge. I know that this equation of knowledge with faith is false or at least self-defeating.
I agree, atheism is false, but that it is false exactly to the extent that its still not absolute nihilism. It is because people still think of the world in an essentially spiritualistic way, that they fear nihilism and it is because they are still spiritualists, that they have something to fear from nihilism. But to know there is no intrinsic value is the knowledge required to know what value in general is, how to create it and improve it. By having faith in intrinsic value, one is abandoning the quest for knowledge of value, and thus any chance of progress. It is accepting the world as it is, barbaric and unjust. Spiritualists believe in writings on the wall only because they still live behind one.
As a nihilist I think higher of people that, like CoinCube, know the reasons for their belief, no matter how false, than of those that believe blindly and quote inspirational posters as the basis of their belief.
On this point nihilnegativum and I are in agreement. Atheism takes you logically and inexorably into nihilism and this is a treacherous foundation both for a philosophy or life or morality.
Argument #3 Religious books are full of immoral thingsSome of those are so hideous that they can't seriously be considered the word of a god.
For instance, "for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me". Exodus, 20.5. This horrible statement is part of the Ten Commandments! And it's stated also in Exodus 34:7; Deuteronomy 5:9; Numbers 14:18.
The examples are innumerable: acceptance of slavery, death penalty for the most banal deeds, sexual discrimination, killing of gays, etc. But a decisive one is enough to dismiss the Bible as a "sacred" source of moral precepts.
One wonders exactly how the third and fourth generation of those who hate God are punished. Does God punish these innocent children directly or is he warning us that by rejecting him and embracing sin we are harming ourselves and our future children. One wonders if the worst punishment that can be inflected on the third and fourth generations is to deny them the opportunity to exist at all? As it appears that there is not a single current or historic non-religious group that has maintained reproductive replacement levels on the communal level perhaps this warning is a sound one. Regarding slavery in the Old Testament Rabbi Tzvi Freeman discussed this issue extensively as I highlighted
here.
Argument #4 Consciousness does not survive death and the brain creates consciousnessOn the issue of the "soul", taking in account the recent research on the brain, doesn't make sense to say that the human brain, that is the most complex system we know on nature, doesn't create the conscience. The evidence we have point clearly in the positive sense, even if there are still much investigation to be done on the issue (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness#Neural_correlates). If that wasn't the case, we couldn't explain why your "soul" is affected by a trauma to the brain. Why when we pass out, our "soul" passes out too... How dare you to believe that your "soul" will survive the death of your brain based on what we know?
This depends on how one looks at consciousness. I argued in my recent discussion on
Consciousness that consciousness should not be looked at as arising from the brain but instead as propagating through it.