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Re:Life Is Short (2016) by selfawareMammal on Sunday December 25, 2022 @03:41AM (#34125451)
It's still a social construct. As knowledge and science advance, the need for religion decreases and it's really on us to accept there are some questions we cannot answer.
Re:Life Is Short (2016) by AussieWog93 on Sunday December 25, 2022 @04:11AM (#34125582)
>As knowledge and science advance, the need for religion decreases

Citation needed, massively!

If anything, the powerful technology and knowledge we now wield (weapons of mass destruction, mass surveillance, modern logistics and coordination, global communications) only makes it more important that we don't forget the hard-earned scoial and moral lessons of our pre-scientific ancestors - lessons that were often encoded in evolving cultural systems like religion.

Re:Life Is Short (2016) by anhner on Sunday December 25, 2022 @04:42AM (#34125706)
Ah yes, the hard earned social lesson of not wearing mixed fibers. Or not allowing women on their period to share the bed of their husband.
Re:Life Is Short (2016) by AussieWog93 on Sunday December 25, 2022 @04:54AM (#34125778)
Please don't make comments like this on HN.

Nobody was making the argument that extremely specific religious quirks like this are encode knowledge important to the wise use of modern technology.

Re:Life Is Short (2016) by Lionga on Sunday December 25, 2022 @05:50AM (#34126079)
It is valueable as the comments shows so easily how wrong religions get it, when many take religions as truths
Re:Life Is Short (2016) by AussieWog93 on Sunday December 25, 2022 @06:05AM (#34126175)
That's a valid comment to make - religions do get things wrong, but GP is plain old "look how smart I am" strawmanning.

It doesn't make the discourse more interesting or enlightening, and frankly doesn't belong on this site.

Re:Life Is Short (2016) by Lionga on Sunday December 25, 2022 @06:12AM (#34126217)
You deciding what belongs or does not belong here, what is allowed to be said or what is interesting or enlightening is the terror tactic almost all religions used to suppres people and ideas they do not like
Re:Life Is Short (2016) by anhner on Sunday December 25, 2022 @08:09AM (#34126929)
On the contrary, I think comments that push religion as some kind of romantic enlightenment of the past as opposed to science are the ones that don't belong on this site.
Re:Life Is Short (2016) by tobylane on Sunday December 25, 2022 @04:15AM (#34125593)
Humanism fills that need. It doesn’t matter that it’s new, Islam and Christianity were new once, and corrupted since.
Re:Life Is Short (2016) by AussieWog93 on Sunday December 25, 2022 @04:19AM (#34125606)
There's an argument to me made that the age/popularity of a belief system does correlate with validity, given that their individual memes are subject to Darwinism.

Of course it's not everything, but I don't think humanism on its own would work without an older religion as its "bootstrap".

Re:Life Is Short (2016) by rablackburn on Sunday December 25, 2022 @05:51AM (#34126088)
I wouldn’t say it necessarily correlates with validity - Darwinism is about one thing: fitness of survival.

I feel like if you squint a little you can see all the positive-memetic adaptations that get bolted on to organised religion.

A commandment to “worship no other god but me” is a classic example of something that seems less like profound revelation and more like an effective memetic adaptation.

Re:Life Is Short (2016) by tobylane on Sunday December 25, 2022 @06:16AM (#34126234)
I don't consider myself a humanist, but I accept that my views are similar to them. I think humanism only exists because the way Christianity has been promoted recently forced the alternative to have a graspable answer rather than "I'm a good person for my own preference".

UsefulChart's video on humanism may help. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWhz3SXPWkg

Re:Life Is Short (2016) by stormking on Sunday December 25, 2022 @07:10AM (#34126549)
> There's an argument to me made that the age/popularity of a belief system does correlate with validity, given that their individual memes are subject to Darwinism.

Absolutely not, because the fitness, in an evolutionary sense, of those memes does not correlate with their truthfulness but with how easy they are to believe because they appeal to our fears, hopes and dreams.

Take that "life after death" trope. The hard truth is that there isn't any, when you die, everything that made up "you" will be gone for good. But no religion based on that truth would ever thrive because the thought is just too scary and bleak.

Re:Life Is Short (2016) by fsflover on Sunday December 25, 2022 @04:21AM (#34125614)
Why should one choose humanism instead of personal prosperity (egoism)? Religions have an answer. Humanism AFAIK doesn't.
Re:Life Is Short (2016) by lgas on Sunday December 25, 2022 @04:53AM (#34125771)
What is religions' answer? "Because Sky daddy said so"?
Re:Life Is Short (2016) by AussieWog93 on Sunday December 25, 2022 @05:02AM (#34125818)
If "Sky Daddy" is the literal creator of the Earth who gave direct commands to mankind, then that alone is a pretty valid reason.

If he isn't, then he's a powerful (yet imaginary) social construct that has evolved over the past 4,000 years to encode the wisdom of many past generations through a set of rules and stories that happen to match up with the stories and rules of many other cultures. It's also an incredibly fast and low-cost way to reach a solution.

Either way, there's definitely some validity to the claims of any major religion.

Re:Life Is Short (2016) by Lionga on Sunday December 25, 2022 @05:53AM (#34126096)
The claim of black or gay people beeing inferior had been there for more than 4000 years. Does that give any validity to you?
Re:Life Is Short (2016) by AussieWog93 on Sunday December 25, 2022 @06:20AM (#34126254)
I'm not sure these views are as consistent as you say they are.

The Atlantic slave trade started in the 1500s and ended in the 1800s. Even then, it was controversial and faces opposition from certain Church groups (while getting support from others).

Vilification of gays based on Christian religious grounds apparently goes back to the 11th century (based on a quick read of Wikipedia, TBF), and is only starting to come undone now. I don't really have an answer for this, it was unfortunate.

Re:Life Is Short (2016) by stormking on Sunday December 25, 2022 @07:13AM (#34126566)
The answer is a family of simple heuristics like the "Golden Rule", "tit-for-tat" etc.
Re:Life Is Short (2016) by fsflover on Sunday December 25, 2022 @07:31AM (#34126675)
I don't think it works well, or better than religion for many people.
Re:Life Is Short (2016) by stormking on Sunday December 25, 2022 @08:56AM (#34127259)
How did you come to the conclusion that religion works at all?
Re:Life Is Short (2016) by fsflover on Sunday December 25, 2022 @05:20PM (#34132074)
I know people who based their view of the world based on the religion.
Re:Life Is Short (2016) by stormking on Sunday December 25, 2022 @07:04AM (#34126510)
Oh cut the crap, religious stories are fairytales and everyone knows it. And religious "truths" are either trivialities or simply not true at all.
Re:Life Is Short (2016) by jstimpfle on Sunday December 25, 2022 @07:37AM (#34126708)
Taking Christianity specifically as that's the only religion I know at least a little. Religions teach us to value love and compassion. That's nice, but not terribly interesting. They're not values that you couldn't arrive at through other means.

I don't see how those high-level values help in solving modern crises of global scale. Believers searching for specific advise on modern day problems need to work hard and read though a lot of "code" to find a few nuggets - ultimately failing to get satisfying specific answers.

If I do a web search on what the bible says to homosexuality, for instance, I get walls of text discussing precious few bible verses. In my view what religion does here is allow those in charge to enforce their individual preferences and opinions on their believers by means of laying out suitable interpretations of the code. This does more harm than good.

Re:Life Is Short (2016) by weatherlite on Sunday December 25, 2022 @09:47AM (#34127647)
In the West is it even debatable that christianity is on a decline? As for the muslim world its more mixed but I do think the younger genereation is less religious than the older ones. It has a long way to go though till we can say its a secularized society.
Re:Life Is Short (2016) by lotsofpulp on Sunday December 25, 2022 @10:02AM (#34127782)
“Religious-ness” has two contexts. One is for philosophical purposes, where a person agrees with a set of assumptions (aka beliefs).

The other context is as a tribal marker, for practical purposes. In this context, the “religiousness” is not about agreeing with the set of assumptions, but pretending to agree and/or going through the motions of various customs as a signal of how committed they are to the tribe.

In societies where individuals need to rely less on the tribe, it might be posited that there is less reason for people to put on a show for the latter reason, so they can afford to be less “religious”. So if, on average, children of Christians are more likely to be economically independent, then they may tend to being less religious, and children of Muslims, who are more likely to be economically dependent on each other, tend to be more religious.

Re:Life Is Short (2016) by Nomentatus on Sunday December 25, 2022 @04:16AM (#34125598)
As the unit cost of destruction constantly decreases, logarithmically; we might guess instead that keeping the mental attitudes of individual actors in line is more important as tech surges forward. If you have a better method than religion to do this (and I don't discount the possibility) do drop a description of that.

"Humanism" highly correlates with lock sales worldwide as far as I can tell. It's not defense at all vs drug addiction. Humans feel great when drugged up.