Dennett has always had a great way with words.

But the comments seem to be mostly by theists, so I wouldn't expect them to be friendly. Shit, one of them actually recommended William Lane Craig, who maybe a seasoned debater, but like Duane Gish and Uri Geller is a one trick pony.

In the past Dennett has expressed that he could not see religion passing away. However, he said that if we could learn to make religion less virulent that would be a good thing. And learning about religion, and how it works (cognitively?) might help us find a way towards a less virulent form of religion. It is a major theme in "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon" which I highly recommend.

So I don't know what Dennett is about in this short essay. Has he changed his position? Possibly. I would like to read more about this.

Myself, I rather like Dennett. Of the four horsemen, he is my favorite. (Well, Hitch is way up there, too.)

Much of the criticism is well deserved, imo, and not all of it is from theists.

I agree with Dennett about making religion less virulent. That is why I advocate feeding the good and starving the bad. I continue to think it is very unproductive to try and starve the entire beast.

This is particularly true in light of Dennett's accurate observation that religion tends to flourish in areas where people are the most desperate and marginalized. If those are the people with the worst levels of health and security, taking away their religion and religious support seems, well, basically cruel.

Anyway, the data recently presented by PEW flies in the face of his belief that the future of religion is bleak.

I was scratching my head on this one.

Regards.

"This is particularly true in light of Dennett's accurate observation that religion tends to flourish in areas where people are the most desperate and marginalized. If those are the people with the worst levels of health and security, taking away their religion and religious support seems, well, basically cruel. "

...depends on whether you think those people turning to religion in their desperation is beneficial or harmful to their situation.


Dennett's position that it is harmful is, I would say, rather clear (and imo, correct). So his argument that it is unfortunate that religion springs up in those circumstances is entirely consistent and not in any way cruel.

I am not in the position to make that determination for them, but having been in some pretty desperate and unthinkable situations, I would argue that for many it is sometimes the only ting that provides something positive.

That might not be the case for you, but it is for others.

Unless there is definitive information showing that it is more harmful than beneficial, advocating for it's removal is, imo, cruel.

But they can be, and often are, wrong about what helps them. See: any alcoholic turning to the bottle to make themselves feel better.


And there are extremely solid arguments that retreating into fantasy to avoid properly facing painful reality is less than a beneficial approach to dealing with hardship.

Can I decide for you if you find yourself in dire straights? If you decided the the bottle is your answer and aren't harming others, can I force you into rehab and enforce my idea that you should stop?

Where are the solid arguments or evidence that turning to religion during times of crisis is not beneficial? I challenge you to present them.

This kind of paternalistic oversight has no place in a liberal/progressive agenda. I suspect you would never tolerate this kind of "benevolent oversight" by those who think they know better than you.

and you personally viciously attack anyone who does any such study. You, mrs. Bayer, are part of the problem.

Saying people would be better served by not retreating into fantasy in denial of reality is not proposing forcing them not to. It's just saying they would be better off if they didn't and actually dealt with reality instead. Nobody said a damn word about forcing people to give up their religion.

And I would think denying reality as a coping mechanism would be self evidently not the healthiest means of dealing with hardship. If you're unfamiliar with any arguments or evidence to that effect I would suggest you haven't looked very hard.

are based only on your own beliefs and POV.

Retreating into fantasy is how you experience religion. Denying reality is how you experience religion. You can not apply that to anyone but yourself. For others, embracing religion may lead them to examine their alternatives and weigh the solutions. For others, it may give them the strength to proceed when nothing else does.

And very concretely, religion may provide the basic necessities of life when there are no others available.

Even if you see religion as a defense mechanism, it is important to recognize that sometimes defense mechanisms serve an important purpose.

Please try not to resort to making this personal and suggest that I haven't looked very hard or am constructing straw men. We are having a discussion. You are no more right than I am.

"Wow things are rough, I'm going to believe, all evidence to the contrary, that there is an all powerful magical superbeing looking over me with some kind of plan so everything will turn out ok eventually... because that makes me feel better."



That's denial of reality. If you can't face that that's, well, keeping with the denial of reality theme really...

"And very concretely, religion may provide the basic necessities of life when there are no others available. "

I think you're confusing "religion" and "people who happen to be religious" yet again. Religion provides squat in the way of basic necessities of life. It is incapable of doing so.


And pointing out that you constructed a strawman is not in any way "making this personal". It was pointing out a fallacy in your argument. That is the opposite of making it personal.

That is the nature of belief and faith, and despite your personal views, for others its not at all about somebody looking over them with a plan that will make everything ok.

There is no denial of reality in the scenario you paint. If you can present something to prove that their belief is less real than your non-belief, go for it. I don't think you can.

I understand that religion does nothing for you and it is abundantly clear that you are overtly hostile towards it. Fortunately you live in a place and age where the very reasonable option to not ascribe to any religion is yours to exercise.

And fortunately for those that do feel religion does something for them and feel very positively about it, I hope they are fortunate to live in a time and place where the free exercise of their religion is permitted.

Like, every objectively verifiable observations of the universe conducted by humanity, ever. All of which tell us magic doesn't happen.


The fact that the religious insist on refusing to deal with that is, well, denial in action. Again.

You can call it magic. You can completely dismiss it. You can not believe it.

But you can't provide evidence of it not being true anymore than someone can provide you evidence of it being true.

Refusing to deal with the facts is indeed denial, and the fact is that there is no evidence that god does not exist.

They are the formulation of the observational reality that the universe operates according to specific natural laws that are *always* true. Hence, *never* violated in *any* observation ever.


Which is another way of saying the natural laws are never observed to be violated by supernatural influences.


THAT is the abundant evidence that God, or at least any version of such an entity that in any way supernaturally intervenes in the workings of the universe, does not exist.


Now you can quite rightly claim that a God could exist that simply never ever ever interacts with the universe in any way. If that is your desire feel free to believe in your totally absent and irrelevant deity, but we both know that is not the version of God most people profess belief in.

Scientific laws are descriptions of phenomenon only. They say nothing about how or why something happens, only that it does happen. There is much that has not been explained or may not be explainable. Dismissing that their may be things at play that are not currently scientifically understood, and therefore currently supernatural, is a mistake.

I'm not sure where you are going with all this, but I think you have wandered off the path.

There is no evidence for the lack of existence of a god. When you get some, let me know and I will call Oslo on your behalf.

It's been nice talking to you. I will let you have the last word, if you wish.

Scientific laws are descriptions of phenomenon only. They say nothing about how or why something happens, only that it does happen.

Specifically, a law is a description of a phenomena that is true UNDER EVERY OBSERVATIONAL CASE OF THAT PHENOMENA EVER PERFORMED.

If there was ever a single confirmed violation the law would be dis-proven. So every scientific law on the books today is an explicit statement that the universe operates according to that natural law ALWAYS. It is NEVER observed to be supernaturally violated.

There has, in the entire history of human activity, NEVER been a verified observed supernatural violation of the natural laws of the universe.


That is evidence, at the very least, of the lack of existence of any version of a god that intervenes supernaturally in the universe. Which is the exact version of God most people profess belief in.



That remains true whether you live in denial of that fact or not.

wild irrationality. Being unable to disprove something is not a reason to believe. Should we believe in magical wizards creating the laws of nature because they can't be disproven? You don't even understand the burden of proof. Stop being part of the problem.

Of course being unable to disprove something is not reason to believe it. That's not what belief and faith are about.

You can believe in anything you want, but if you take the position that you have loads of proof that something doesn't exist, you better be able to back it up. The same is true is you take the position that you have proof that something does exist. That's burden of proof, phil.

Now, what part of the problem do you think I am?

That ship sailed a long time ago and is devoid of intellectual honesty.

Belief is not justified by the fact that the object believed in cannot be proven to not exist. Making that claim is shifting the burden of proof from the one believing in that for which there is no evidence to the one skeptical of that belief. It is an entirely dishonest argument.

but since reality is subjectively perceived, those conversations tend to support the truth of the religious experience, even though they bear no weight on the factuality of dogmatic precepts.

For example, through your facts, you might perceive reality as painful, but through my religion, I might not. In the big picture, it doesn't matter whether a religious ritual like taking communion has a factual effect. What matter is whether a person finds peace in the ritual. What matters is perception

If your reality is painful, why not spend more time creating a better reality, and less time trying to get others to share your pain?

If there's nothing past this life, do your best to enjoy it, to hell with painful realities...

If you're going to claim all reality is subjective.

There is a vast chasm between the subjectivity of, say, the aesthetic appeal of a work of art and the "subjectivity" of the electrical charge of the capacitor I'm measuring.

Saying the former is a subjective rather than an objective reality is a generally well accepted use of the terms. Claiming the latter is a subjective rather than an objective reality is a gross abuse of the language which relies on claiming that anything perceived by the individual is subjective simply by virtue of being perceived by an individual... thus defining objectivity out of existence.

You've attacked me for suggesting people 'starve the bad'.

You. Personally. Have literally attacked me for precisely that position.

He still thinks religion will exist.

it's mostly a hodge-podge of unsupported claims, centering around the rather high-level abstraction "religion"

Let us look more closely at his paragraph

Any institution—just like a person or an organism—depends on a modicum of privacy in which to conduct its business and control its activities without too much interference and too many prying eyes. Religious institutions, since their founding millennia ago, have managed to keep secrets and to control what their flocks knew about the world, about other religions and about the inner workings of their own religion with relative ease. Today it is next to impossible.

This is peculiar in several ways. He seems to begin by acknowledging that secrecy is widespread, then claims that "religious institutions" rely on secrecy as a social control mechanism, and finally asserts such social control mechanisms are no longer possible in today's world

If the argument had an predictive power, one would (by only slight) modification obtain similar arguments that in the future we will see no governments, no militaries, no large capitalist concerns, no organized crime, no successful police investigations, and so on. Various libertarians, pacifists, anti-capitalists, anti-mafia, and anti-police crusaders might be thrilled by such utopian promises, but IMO they would be deluding themselves: Dennett's vision that the internet's promise of free information will liberate us from secrecy-based social control is a one-sided ideological view that overlooks the fact that new technologies always also create opportunities for new forms of social control. Innovations such as movable type or the telegraph did enable us to communicate with more people, or more quickly, but nothing ever guaranteed that only altruistic wise men would reap the advantages

Dennett, of course, is an intellectual -- and so he belongs to one of the most-propagandized sectors of society. High-level abstractions play an important role in the social control of intellectuals, and the intellectuals themselves are unlikely to understand this, unless they have developed a reflexive habit of critical thought about both society and their role in it. Dennett has a very comfortable life, writing books and attending conferences on "philosophy of mind," hobby-farming or sailing in his summers -- and for this reason he is unlikely to understand the language with which less fortunate persons express their alienations. The famous concentration camp dialog --

Q. Where is God?
A. Where is God? He is over there, hanging from the gallows!

-- might actually give us more insight than we want into the early spread of (say) Christianity and the necessary secrecy which attended its early spread. Marx had considerable insight when he wrote: Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the spirit of spiritless conditions. Marx was outraged by the heartless world whereas Dennett, in his privilege, is outraged by the cry of the oppressed creature

Marx had considerable insight when he wrote: Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the spirit of spiritless conditions. Marx was outraged by the heartless world whereas Dennett, in his privilege, is outraged by the cry of the oppressed creature

It is not the cry of the oppressed that outrages Dennett. It is the fact that upon those oppressed people is foisted the placebo of religion, because as always it is those in the greatest desperation who are most vulnerable to the Snake Oil Salesman.

Via secrecy. Yes, the Internet could be used as a form of control by religion, and is, in theocracies. But Dennet is talking about religion specifically in the West. Not all forms of secrecy by any organization. And in the West, religions don't have the power to control the information that reaches their adherents nearly as much, though they certainly strive to.

The reason more information is hurting religion is because that information isn't favorable to religion. If more information about liberal democracies only shows information that proves its efficacy, it's not going to lead to the overthrow of liberal democracies.