RE: Why I am not an Atheist: Religion Isn't About Belief
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.
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.
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.