Aunt Maple wants to use sugar water for her cancer treatment...
Hmm.. strange, how much the value of false things overlaps with the number of wishful things. And how the ones we ought keep are those you like to wish for, and not those terrible wants other people wish for.
One might wonder: is the false really that valuable? Do we need to revive the Norse Gods for their "value"? Or rather, is it much simpler: falsehood is a kind of oppression which limits our ability to act.
"The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness."
Nothing I was discussing can be considered a falsehood. These are unprovable beliefs. They cannot be proved and they cannot be disproved. (or rather: we have yet to discover the means to prove or disprove them)
> Hmm.. strange, how much the value of false things overlaps with the number of wishful things. And how the ones we ought keep are those you like to wish for, and not those terrible wants other people wish for.
I believe you are making mistaken assumptions about what I believe.
The functional utility of wide classes of beliefs has changed rapidly over the last several hundred years. I am not arguing that everything people believe has or continues to have functional utility. In fact, I believe to ideologies to succeed over time, they must repeatedly adapt and evolve to maintain their utility.
My issue is that Mjburgess dismissed an entire category of human cognitive function as a "bug" when it seems much more likely that such a pervasive trait is in fact an adaptive feature of human cognition.
I have great admiration for skeptics who attempt to disprove provably false beliefs. I also have no problem with atheists and many of them are intellectual heroes of mine. However, I take issue with atheists to believe their belief in the 'non-existence of all gods' is somehow epistemologically superior to people who hold religious beliefs despite them being similarly unprovable.
Doesn't really matter what you, me or anyone else thinks, no? Nature decides who survives.
Nature does not determine importance. Survival is an event, it isnt a value.
We determine what matters. And I do, in particular, when I am speaking of the things I care about.
The western world is pretty focused on rational thinking. This indeed doesn't mean that a society with some irrational thinking ingrained into it, has a better chance of surviving.
And indeed, if you look at the world, religious thinking did a pretty good job at surviving in about any culture in the world. While it might not be 100% correct, the things they believe, it might give them an extra psychological edge to survive. All evidence points that way.