Why I am not an Atheist: Religion Isn't About Belief
"Those who think religion is about "belief" don't understand religion, and don't understand belief." -- Nassim Taleb
Religion has 3 main components: dharma, culture, and belief. Religion gets a bad rap nowadays, mostly because people define it as superstitious beliefs, but this is a very naive definition of a complex phenomenon. It is possible to have a religion without any belief in the supernatural.
Atheism is a political subversion of traditional practices, which are heuristics that benefited the survival of humans at some point in history. Some traditions need to adapt to new environments and stimuli, but it's naive to blindly dismiss all of them. Often, practices are useful before we could fully articulate them or scientifically understand them. For example, quinine was used in the traditional medicine of South American tribes for millenia before we scientifically showed that it can be used to treat malaria. The vast majority of significant innovations come from trial and error out of necessity rather than scientific research. As Taleb puts it, birds don't need to thank ornithologists for showing them how to fly using scientific principles. Everyone knows that's ridiculous, yet when we replace birds with humans and ornithologists with researchers in general, we lose our minds. It turns out that we were really good at surviving for 100,000+ years prior to the discovery of the scientific method and evolution.
However, it's important to not dismiss science. The scientific method is great. It's a formalization of the trial and error empirical methods that we have always used. The problem is in using scientism to create revisionist history that ignores the true geneology of ideas and innovations. Other heuristics for obtaining knowledge of the world existed prior to Academia... in fact, even academics usually don't apply rigorous scientific methods to everything they do in daily life. Everyone uses much old and often biased heuristics to navigate through life practically. Yet biased and nonfactual beliefs are often more beneficial than factual and unbiased beliefs. For example, it's better to tell your children to not trust strangers because they are all kidnappers. If you tell them that technically, less than 1% of people in the world are kidnappers, they would be far less cautious and greatly increase their chance of actually being kidnapped. Even if very few people are actually kidnappers, kidnappers aren't stupid. They play a numbers game. It's not like they would ever approach only one kid, and over time, they get better at identifying which kids are easier to kidnap. Also over time, you child gets exposed to more and more strangers, increasing the probability that he will encounter a kidnapper. Eventually, the kidnapper would identify your naive kid as an easy target, because your "rational fact" has exposed him to greater fat tail risks.
Strangers are all kidnappers is a false belief, but religion isn't about belief. Belief isn't the important part of life that insures your survival and happiness. Atheists and utilitarians are biased towards the obvious first order consequences and dismiss the second and third order consequences that they are ignorant of. Dharmic heuristics often seem stupid at the superficial first order level, but are usually actually important hedges against second and third order fat tail risks. The ancients might not have been able to conceptually articulate why they follow such seemingly absurd traditions to the modern scientific man, but they would still follow the practices to mitigate unknown risks. Sure many practices turn out to be ineffective superstitions, but that's just the process of trial and error. Most solutions you try won't work, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't try at all. Over a long period of time, the ineffective practices slowly die out and gather a set of antifragile traditions that perform very efficient and practical purposes that often initially confuse researchers.
Dharma is the most practical and useful heuristics that withstood the test of time. Some other ritual practices don't have obvious practical purposes, but they aren't harmful either. These practices form culture. Each culture is a centuries long experiment run under different environmental conditions, so the cultures express in very different ways. For example, Chinese food is very different from French food. However, these experiments are ran in the same universe with the same laws of physics, so there is significant overlap of the dharma of all religions. For example, thou shalt not steal.
We uncover dharma through experience of life and confirm them through the study of history and tradition. The scientific method is a great tool for such examinations, but it's important to distinguish the scientific method (dharma) from scientism (culture).
When atheists get pissed at calling their beliefs religious or political that's indeed the proof that they are religious. They can't tolerate bashing against their ''sacred'' nothingness.
This is really interesting, thanks for the discussion. Is the writing all yours or are you paraphrasing Taleb a lot?
Firstly, I think this is an important point. Religion and spiritualism, and the things that are often lumped in with religion and spiritualism, is not stupid nor pointless. There is wisdom there and only the blindest non-believers think it's pure fantasy.
However it's not clear if there's a point beyond this.
The "all strangers are kidnappers" (this is the correct word ordering) falsehood is only useful if believed and works well for children who are limited in their ability to discover otherwise. To apply this to adults is a bit of a mistake because it implies that there needs to be a power differential between those who really know the truth and those that don't. That not all strangers are kidnappers might be some kind of secret sacred knowledge, or a blasphemy. Perhaps no one knows it but anyone who suggests it are heretics. This is more in line with the actual (and not simply strawmanned) atheist opposition to religious practice - it can and often does attempt to suppress truth.
The fact is that not all strangers are kidnappers, but it's also true that some strangers are kidnappers, so it's reasonable to assume that a stranger could be a kidnapper. Simply using the distribution of kidnappers in the population to arrive at a probability and then (most importantly) using this probability to assess risk is really foolish, and we intuitively know why - because in the unlikely case you do meet one and the situation is in the kidnappers favor, the negative consequences are really really bad. In other words, the probably is weighed heavier by scale of the effect if it happens.
Good analysis. I'm not paraphrasing, but my points aren't all that different from Taleb's. Here's what I said to a friend in message:
Sam Harris’s book is called Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. I would define religion differently: Religion = {dharma, belief, culture}. What Sam is doing is religion as dharma with minimal belief and culture, where dharma is pragmatic behaviors and moral heuristics governed by the laws of reality. I understood Peterson as giving a dharmic approach to Christianity, while Sam tries to attack the belief aspects of religion while separating the dharmic practice of meditation as something different.
I think what is crucially left out here is culture, and in my opinion that culture is in fact not religion. Culture is how we "do" society, and not simply cultural touchstones such as high art, etc. It is the everyday, which I know from your writing you understand.
It is my position that culture and religion are not the same thing, though they are intertwined, quite inseparably. This is to say that culture is not a subset of religion, as you suggest.
It is in the aspect of belief in which this is most clear. We often find that the belief in the average person is not what is purported to be the religious belief of the established religious orthodoxy. Thus you have so-called non-practicing Jews or Catholics or whatever it is. One cannot escape culture though as it is the very stuff of society, so those non-practicing often have much in common with the practicing, and it is the culture which they share.
Yes, culture is not a subset of religion, intertwined is a better way to phrase it.
@limitless, thanks for making your stand known. Kudos to you for this work
Religion is about mindless belief.. what a joke.. religion is fairytales for adults..for you to politicize atheism is outrageous.. how does a delusional believer have the audacity to speak for the other point of view.. this is the height of arrogance.
I don't believe in any fairies or sky daddies, but atheism is a nihilistic movement that promotes ignorance of history and anthropology, and decreases the probability of long run human survival.
what kind of mindless dribble are you squawking.. atheism was around way before mindless superstitions.. look it up.. Its perverse to call atheism ignorance when in fact its religion that is ignorant to the max
It looks like you have no clue how the human brain evolved...
Ya ok..sure whatever you say.
Proofs @democracydirect?