Religion is better understood as a form of long-term, multi-generational communication. I would call it "tradition", but tradition is too broad of a word to really capture what is happening in religion.
The first and most foundational thing that religion does through multi-generational communication is organize and unite a group of people. It gives them a shared story and a shared identity tied to that story. This is very, very important for more reasons than just the obvious one of "we do better when we get along." The main reason this matters is that it takes many singular, physical organisms and it transforms them into a single, social organism that, at least in the context of the story, act as a singular entity.
This is critical because what it does is facilitate the evolution of the social group. You can't really identify what drives a group of people forward by testing them one by one. You have to test them in as a single unit. And by combining them into a singular, united organism and bringing them into conflict with other, similar organisms, you can establish fitness.
So let's take an example: let's say you have group A and group A has a religion that teaches first and foremost that the greatest good a person can accomplish is to achieve some sort of personal, spiritual enlightenment. Now let's say we have group B and group B has a religion that teaches first and foremost that the greatest good a person can accomplish is to become powerful enough to challenge the gods and obtain glory. Then let's say we have group C and group C has a religion that teaches first and foremost that the greatest good a person can accomplish is to truly, deeply love their neighbor as themselves.
So we have these three groups and let's say they come into conflict over the finite resources available in their region of the world (as people groups tend to do). Their foundational religious beliefs about where they fit as people and as a group into the universe is going to affect every aspect of how they organize their society. One of them is going to organize in a strict hierarchy and that will carry benefits and drawbacks. Another will organize in less centralized fashion, also carrying benefits and drawbacks. So on and so forth.
When they meet and come into conflict, the organizational structures they built based on these religious ideas are going to determine who wins and loses. One is more efficient than another. One is stronger. One is weaker. Invariably, what we have is a massive test of fitness between not just people, but social orders and the religions that structure them.
So now let's back up and look at this over time. You have millions or even billions of people that are born, live, and die throughout history as part of all these different people groups. The context of their conflicts and the resources they fight over are going to shape who wins to some extent, but in the long term, you are going to start seeing winners and losers. The fitness of one belief system is going to repeatedly win out over another until what you are left with are what we call "world religions", i.e. religions that have tested their fitness against multiple other models and found some measure of fitness.
So what is happening when someone tosses out their religious context? They are essentially saying "I understand this organism perfectly, I know its strengths and weaknesses, and I know better than the process of natural selection as to what is a better way of living."
That's a pretty bold claim. And if you consider the complexity of social organisms, how sociology as a field has barely even scratched the surface of what it means to understand people in groups, it's a stupid claim as well. It's not a simple matter of reverse engineering religion and replacing it with reason or some bullshit like that anymore than it's a simple matter of replacing a human brain with a computer. You're dealing with a complex, evolved system that has proven fitness.
So when we say something like "our society has thrown the baby out with the bathwater" we are referring to things like understanding a balanced position on violence. But we are also referring to a million other nuanced things about religion that provide untold advantages to the social order.
Hope that answers your question.
Also, go to church. Humanity needs you to go and God loves you.
> So what is happening when someone tosses out their religious context? They are essentially saying "I understand this organism perfectly, I know its strengths and weaknesses, and I know better than the process of natural selection as to what is a better way of living."
That's the opposite of what atheism (well, weak atheism, the only valid kind) says, which is: I don't know, and I don't think you do either.
The idea of having a sense of community and values that can be communicated over generations is fantastic, but it does not require superstition any more. Sometimes you need to rip the band-aid, and sometimes you need to be more gentle. But let's agree that the band-aid is coming off so that we can move on to the next step in the healing process.
> God loves you
Again, let's stick to what we know.
Oh, and let's get rid of the notion that skeptics are bad people (Psalms 14:1).
Literally just your way of saying: "I understand this organism perfectly, I know its strengths and weaknesses, and I know better than the process of natural selection as to what is a better way of living."
Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a drug.
How can you possibly ENGINEER something if you don't even know what the requirements are?
This is a totally unjustified assertion. When have you ever met an atheist who thinks they know how everything works?
Contrast that with a common experience: you meet a person who is absolutely certain that a guy in the Middle East was born to a virgin, and he later was resurrected.
Fairy tales are essential. Without them, you're left with just life philosophy (e.g. stoicism, Aristotelian ethics, or modern quasi-religions where the fairy tale parts are almost irrelevant, e.g. Zen Buddhism).
I don't really have a problem with fairy tales (well, except that I cannot considered any opinion of an adult who believes in them, seriously), but the problem is that religious fairy tales often include some idea of "us vs them", "chosen ones", "infidels" and/or "holy wars", which seem to prime many of their followers to be violent against non-followers.
I do go to church (of sorts). My church meetings are organized on meetup.com, developer mailing lists, and tech conferences.
Sounds like more of a distraction than a religion.
I think that's putting lots of words in the mouths of the non-religious. Other people, religious or not, don't know know what you know about the structure, function, and significance of religion.
Everything you wrote before that paragraph I consider to be both true and extremely important. I think it's a very rare take. The number of religious people I meet who interface with their faith with that level of insight and abstraction is very tiny and almost exclusively online. It might be that the religious people I meet in real life are nutty in ways that are not representative of all religious people because I run in the wrong circles, but generally when encountering religion in the wild, I don't find people who deal with it in a productive or rational way like that.
And THAT's the problem. There are effectively two versions of religion. The one you're talking about, with an abstract framework for winning conduct across a set of games, and the other, steeped in literalism, mysticism, rigidity, and ill-founded intolerance. It's similar to the spirit vs letter distinction in law.
And that's the religion people avoid. The one that reads about christ's forgiveness on sunday morning and disowns their gay daughter on monday night. The one that preaches grace and reservedness while diddling kids behind the curtain and driving off in a cadillac paid for by the donation bowl. The ones that find togetherness in vitrol instead of virtue. They vastly outnumber the good guys.
They throw away religion because they don't know the good side exists.
So what we actually have, in my view, is a widespread and severe failure of teachers (both the church kind and the regular kind). Because I was nearly 30 before I came into contact with the impressive and respectable elements of organized religion. Part of that is on me, for sure, and on my progressive upbringing – since the progressive counterpart to religious conservatives are closedminded, foolish, and ideological in precisely the same ways. But part of it is that you have to put some sweat into searching for, or hope to stumble randomly upon, actually virtuous religious people if you're not born into some specific circles.
We don't get converts by shitting on atheists or alienating people who are disgusted by religion, or by behaving in a way that frames organization and conduct that are religion-like as an "obvious" choice, even if they can be intuitive for some.
All we can do is set a good example.
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A separate thought: I think we should view the shape of church with the same abstract flexibility as the rest of the teachings of the bible. I believe that the benefits of organized religion can be realized without many of the fairy-tale elements, and religion would be verrrry well served to enforce that these are allegorical tools meant to communicate concept through stories, a-la-aesop's fables, and not something that should be used for virtue signaling where whoever yells louder about Hell is the winner. I think it's possible to teach conduct, community, and shared growth in places that are equivalent to church, but aren't church.
Athiests are strikingly bad at this, and I say that as basically an athiest. They definitely throw the baby out with the bathwater, and have no large scale organization that approximates even mediocre church communities.
How?