Is religion good even if it's false.?

[Someone here]

I recently was told by someone that religion is a good thing even if it is false. He said that it's good because it brings people together and teaches morality. Is this true? Is religion good for people even if it is false?

A good question that could only be answered, I think, by taking a group of newborns and splitting them into three groups. Group 1: Don't learn anything about religion. Group 2: The common person, learns some. Group 3: The highly religious, learns everything. As they live you can compare how they interact within their own groups, then if you want you can have them interact with the others. It's inhuman to do something like that but I think it will show what religion can and can't do.
I just read something..it said something like if God really doesn't exist, then it would probably be very necessary to invent it. I'm still thinking about that one.

[interim]

When I was young, my answer was - no. Now, when I know the IQ and morality of the average human entity out there, I would say yes. It's the "lesser evil".

God, as a conscious creator fantasized in most religions doesn't exist, and it's elementary to show. Our Universe was created based on Chaos. Actually, religion is anti-Chaos, the Bible is literally a law book, therefore - it's anti-creationist. The thing is, as a society, we need to act in a lawful way, to have common goals, and higher ideals. Alternatively, we have to live like animals, rule of the jungle. As we saw in the recent decades, after getting rid of Christianity, people in the west became highly materialistic, consumer oriented, egocentric, egoistic, mentally and emotionally stupid. But that's really our true nature - basic survivalism, existence with the least effort.

In the past, the nature of the brute was very well understood. This is why it was privilege to be born in the Roman Empire and be a Christian for example. It was first and foremost - a status of culture, of being something more then an animal. Today is a different story...

[thisintegrated]

It has its place ..and that place is called stage Blue.

But using Gods as a tool is something else.  Praying to "Shiva" or "Satan" or "The Stock Market Gods" works in the same way it would work if they were "actually" real.  

[Yarco]

Good for society, I'd lean more toward neutral or bad for the individual. 

2 hours a week for 60 years... that's like 9 solid months of your life wasted sitting in church.

Being religious makes you more happy and fulfilled according to studies, so it might have its benefits. But so does being married or having a dog apparently. I guess those things take up a lot of your time too 

[Razard86]

I'll say its foundational. If it wasn't for church I wouldn't have found spirituality so I can speak for myself it was a positive...doesn't negate that it needs to change and be more accurate.

[Carl-Richard]

Religious people score higher on various measures of health than non-religious people. Apparently, going to church correlates with decreased blood pressure. Religion provides community and meaning, which can cover deficit needs (safety, belonging and esteem) and sometimes growth needs (self-actualization and self-transcendence) when the mystical experience is involved. Feeling that your life has direction and that you have answers for your existential questions is certainly conducive to health.

[Danioover9000]

@Carl-Richard

3 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

Religious people score higher on various measures of health than non-religious people. Apparently, going to church correlates with decreased blood pressure. Religion provides community and meaning, which can cover deficit needs (safety, belonging and esteem) and sometimes growth needs (self-actualization and self-transcendence) when the mystical experience is involved. Feeling that your life has direction and that you have answers for your existential questions is certainly conducive to health.

   Agreed. Apparently people who are not religious, don't believe in some god or force, don't go to a church or some social gathering, and be social, tend to suffer a bit more, even develop more health problems. The more strongly a person identifies as an athirst, non-believer, secularist or skeptic, or just say identifies to logic biased roles, the stronger the suffering, it's bizarre. 

[itachi uchiha]

 

 

[Danioover9000]

@itachi uchiha

On 22/05/2022 at 6:48 PM, itachi uchiha said:

 

 

[Chrisd]

Well, for one thing I don't like this hell idea. It teaches fear.

Morality doesn't need to be taught. It's innate in humans.

Humans gather in tribes, also naturally. Why do we need a religion?

I believe in truth so things that are false are ultimately bad.

I'm confident your experiment has been done in a way, so maybe you can look it up

 

[Eph75]

@Someone here

Religion serves a function. When the need isn't there anymore, i.e. join/conform where the masses are not united around some level of shared morale, the function needs to be transcended, either by abandoning for some other function that serves developmental evolution, or by changing with time. 

Ideological religion can evolve to a deeper sense of individualistic spirituality. 

Or it can evolve to atheism, which itself becomes a function for individualism, that is a stepping-stone towards individualistic spirituality. 

Function, after function, after function.

Serving the inherent need to keep developing. 

Getting stuck with one function, for the sake of the function and not the development, arrests the development itself. 

When we're looking at phenomena as function, there's no objective good, bad, true or false. 

There's only whether it serves the need for development in a sufficient way, or not. 

If religion helps us transcend developmental evolutionary obstacles, then it's favorable. If it's holding us back, the it's unfavorable. 

This is easy to see if we're focused on a desired outcome that is "development". 

What if the desired outcome is something else, for example escape the pains of existence to seek comfort and distance ourselves from responsibity of our own lives (which essentially is resisting development). 

Then, is religion favorable or unfavorable? 

Looking at history, you will see different times when religion served a much needed, and required, function. 

Looking at the world and different societies, you can see that different countries have different needs and require different functions to develop. 

The question then becomes, which societies are using religion as a function to transcend its current state? And for which societies has religion become a crutch, a means of power or oppression, suppression of change, or otherwise, that no longer serves development. 

Generalizing, and looking from a developmental perspective, religion was an ingenious invention, in a barbaric time where conformity and control was needed, to be able to create a society that functioned in a better way. 

Generalizing, and looking at today, religion is more a crutch and holding development back, and it's some new ingenious function we need to evolve.

What might that function be, today, that isn't yet fully evolved and not yet fully accepted to create needed change? 

Connects to the progressives discussion here, where progressive is more the pioneers that being new functions into an existing system. 

Back in the day, the ones that brought religion into the game were the progressives of their time. 

Your example of groups split up is a problematic comparison, since all of these groups stand on a foundation that is built on the positive outcomes that religion already has produced.

You'd essentially have to reset cognitive development (remove all external influence) and in that sense reboot the non-religious group, to allow that group to evolve through thousands of years, while still in isolation, to get an unbiased result.

And, if that experiment even was feasible, I dare bet that they would invent a form of religion as a function to conform their masses, on their developmental journey.

Just like religion in various forms, seemingly independent of each-other, have sprung up in different places around the world, while still being fairly similar at the core, driven and shaped by the need to developmentally evolve. 

Edited May 27, 2022 by Eph75

[asifarahim]

[DocWatts]

The intuitions behind our moral frameworks including religion didn't evolve for the purposes of Truth, they were adaptive ways of allowing people to live and work together in communities that had become too big for kin relationships to serve that purpose.

Whether religion is good or not is going to be whether it fits the adaptive needs of the society its in. Many of the problems we're seeing in Western societies today come from moral frameworks that are highly adaptive for Blue societies without any ethnic or cultural diversity finding themselves in the middle of multicultural Orange societies.

[Matt23]

Ya, I think there are benefits, and drawbacks. 

I've heard from a surgeon who traveled the U.S. and the world helping people out.  He said that yes, being religious and believing in some sort of higher power does seem to increase the likelihood that that person while recover better and survive.  

Also, social factors like belonging, togetherness, and meaning (even if it is constructed meaning).

Drawbacks:  Groupthink, extremism (not everywhere obviously), stifling your authentic self expression, homophobia possible, us-them dynamics.  

 

Altogether, it seems maybe if you're not a very inquisitive person, don't care about knowing the truth for yourself, are fine going along with the group, highly value belongingness and social cohesion... it seems a religious group could be a good fit for you.