Does religion make you nice? Does atheism make you mean?

http://www.slate.com/id/2203614/pagenum/all/

by robg • 18 years ago

33 80 18 years ago

slate.com

IsaacSchlueter• 18 years ago

"Religion poisons everything"... even atheism.

alexandros• 18 years ago

atheism will become a religion when an empty plate is considerred a meal. mmmm, yummy!

kschrader• 18 years ago

"Most Americans who describe themselves as atheists, for instance, nonetheless believe that their souls will survive the death of their bodies."

Wait, what? How does that make sense?

kirse2• 18 years ago

That, and: "The Danes and the Swedes, despite being godless, have strong communities. In fact, Zuckerman points out that most Danes and Swedes identify themselves as Christian. They get married in church, have their babies baptized, give some of their income to the church, and feel attached to their religious community—they just don't believe in God."

Any Danes or Swedes want to weigh in on this? I don't understand this at all.

lhorn• 18 years ago

Makes perfect sense: they've clearly separated traditions and habits from religion.

The tradition of getting married in church is no different from a habit of screaming "jesus motherfucking christ!" when faced with a scary chance of seeing Texas Tech playing in a national championship game: no reason to call someone religious on both grounds.

netcan10• 18 years ago

Or even the habit/tradition of getting married full stop. This is also a tradition that has it's roots in religious heritage.

Many institutions including Universities, States & many others have their roots in a religious foundation. If you asked 200 years ago, they may have been considered completely inalienable from each other.

What happens if you take a Church & surrounds & remove God? You keep the building where a community of mixed age demographics but roughly stable across the long term meet weekly and talk about ways of living ethically or just hang out? People are welcome to join. Community activities are run there. There are a few people responsible for keeping the community together, caring for members in temporary or permanent need, spiritual well being of the members (can mean psychological well being if you're more comfortable with that). They do this full time & are committed to it. This religiony thing has ceremonies & traditions attached to it. Particularly those that are 'public' like weddings & funerals.

What has belief in God got to do with any of that?

rokhayakebe• 18 years ago

It makes a lot of sense. Think of Christians who go to Church and are very devoted, but deep inside they do not believe that Hell exists. They will not say it out loud, but they truly believe that Hell does not make sense. It is a bit of a Dichotomy, but Religion, Life, Atheism are all dichotomies themselves.

laut• 18 years ago

Some are christians some are not. I don't know why Danes or Swedes are labeled godless. In the surveys I have seen, most, but not all, Danes say they believe in God.

I know that in many other countries some a lot of people say they are Christian even though they are not very religious.

By the way it has been my experience that people in the US are very hospitable and offer to help strangers. I think more so than in Denmark. Additionally people in the US are more polite, which is nice, even though some people say it's just a superficial thing.

I don't think this article is very good. It states that there is a welfare state in Denmark, but what does that have to do with being nice? The majority are beneficiaries, so they just vote that the minority should fund the system. I don't think it's being nice. The welfare state works on the basis of coercion, not voluntary help.

- a Dane living outside of Denmark

P.S. Are people going to upvote lolcats next? I think lolcats are funny, but for I can go to icanhascheezburger for that.

netcan10• 18 years ago

In the technical sense it makes sense: Atheism means non-belief (or disbelief) in theism (& maybe also deism). You can hold all sorts of supernatural beliefs without a god-equivalent. So you can vaguely believe in souls, reincarnation, afterlife, spiritual energies, qi, prana, karma, darma, etc & still be an atheist.

In the looser sense of common usage, people often call themselves atheists if they do not believe in a formalised or institutionalised set of beliefs & do not explicitly believe in (a) god.

SwellJoe2• 18 years ago

As you've noted, "atheist" is a very specific term, which simply means one affirms the non-existence of a god or gods. "Skeptic", of course, is probably the word that would best describe one who does not believe in any supernatural things, including god, elves, gremlins, and Eskimos.

kaens7• 18 years ago

It may make sense in the technical sense, but I for one have never met someone who claimed to be atheist that believed that humans had a soul that continued after death.

I've met ones that didn't discount it as a possibility, but not any that professed a belief in it.

gaius• 18 years ago

Most atheists, if you probe them a little, turn out to be skeptical agnostics. The atheist position "there absolutely, unequivocally is no god" is untestable scientifically and is therefore a position of faith. In that sense, atheism has religious aspects.

Hexstream3• 18 years ago

Some of the worst serial-killers were deeply religious ("even after all I did, I know God forgives all"); doesn't that hint that you don't need to be religious to be nice?

shader3• 18 years ago

Part of the problem is that the distinction here is between "religious" and "atheist", not taking into account the many different forms "religion" takes, and the different degrees to which it can be applied. There are many religions out there that believe decidedly un-nice things (such as your serial killer).

If someone decided to believe something completely wacko (like scientology) and then called it a religion; does that reflect meaningfully on the other religions? If someone called themselves a "Christian" or "Buddhist", but then did something obviously un-Christian, un-Buddhist, and un-nice, does it mean that Christianity or Buddhism are necessarily evil or un-nice? The same can be said for atheism. Hitler was not nice; if he had applied Christianity or Scientology, would he have turned out better? No way to tell.

I would say that you have to evaluate each person individually, and how they apply their religion, and then see whether it made a positive or negative difference in that one case. Whether supposedly "religious" people either do or do not behave better or worse than their neighbors doesn't have much significance beyond their specific case. Even then, it is hard to know how they would have turned out otherwise.

No one ever hears about the religious people who didn't become serial killers because of their religion, precisely because they didn't, and there is no way to know that they would have.

Every generalization is wrong.

The label "religion" poisons (or at least confuses) everything.

shader3• 18 years ago

Another thing to think about:

If a particular religion were seriously applied to its fullest, should it make a person better or not? This method helps separate individual variability from the actual effects of religion.

Note that many religions include evangelism or actual belief as part of application, which many may not consider "nice". If you believe your religion, it often means that you don't believe another person's, and that could be construed as intolerant, and thus un-nice.

Therefore, you may consider it to be impossible for religion to make a person "nice", since it often comes with these nasty side effects. In that case, you are probably also being intolerant and un-nice yourself.

From what I can tell, there are several religions (such as Christianity) that require you to be a "better" person if you actually apply it. In that sense, then yes, religion can make you a better person. Does that mean that you can't be a "good" person without religion? Of course not.

At the same time, Christianity states that it is impossible to apply Christianity without divine intervention, which brings into question whether "religion" itself makes you better, or God. Again, that doesn't mean that you can't be nice without God, only that it is (purportedly) impossible to reach the standards required by Christianity without His help.

There are also religions that arguably neither improve nor hurt someone's "goodness." Atheism is probably one of these. Nothing about atheism says that you need to be nicer than you are, but it doesn't make you more evil either.

And finally, there are some "religions" that have (according to everyone else, of course) entirely bad or evil effects when applied. The human sacrificial tendencies of the Aztecs were arguably in this category.

So, "religion" in general neither makes one nice or bad. Only specific religions, applied in a specific way have that result. And even then, who defines "good" or "bad"?

None of this belongs on HN though; religion is too close to the base of one's entire thought structure and world view, and thus debates concerning it are almost entirely inflammatory and unlikely to positively change either side's opinions.

Hexstream3• 18 years ago

"If someone called themselves a "Christian" or "Buddhist", but then did something obviously un-Christian, un-Buddhist, and un-nice, does it mean that Christianity or Buddhism are necessarily evil or un-nice?"

Giving a vague definition to some philosophy/ideology/methodology then claiming the good things that arise out are inherent in it while saying the bad things that come out of it are external. Classic. (Sorry, I can't for the life of me express this clearly. There was an article on Agile recently that said it better than I can).

jimbokun• 18 years ago

This demonstrates how any atheism vs. religion debate has a short fused, built-in self-destruct mechanism.

"All the serial killers are religious!" "All the genocidal Communists were atheists!" Etc.

I've pretty much come to the conclusion that all atheism/religion discussions on the Internet (even Hacker News) are guaranteed to get real stupid, real fast.

olefoo• 18 years ago

It's the most easily reached stable equilibrium since no actual evidence pro or contra can be produced that would be acceptable to both parties to the debate.

unalone3• 18 years ago

This argument came up on reddit. I think the reason this happens is that there's a certain mindset that says that absolute truth is extremely simple, and that deviance from that truth is a black-and-white affair. On Hacker News, we see mostly the atheist side of this black-and-white spectrum: the sort that denies religion any benefit, and which denounces people who disagree as insidious and festering.

That mindset appeals to programmers, in part because it's a very lazy mindset that allows you to quickly judge complex things and focus on the very specific thing that you care to focus on. It's the same mindset that encourages blind libertarianism. The problem with it is that it discourages intellectual discussion and leads to flame wars. That's what brought reddit down: a mass of people who were willing to instantly denounce people, and who led to a very hive-mind situation.

Hexstream3• 18 years ago

You're not making the debate any smarter with your strawman. Last I checked "some" is not a synonym of "all".

trominos• 18 years ago

No, it demonstrates that you don't need to be nice to be religious.

PS: This is an ugly topic and a terrible article. Can we please get some moderation in here?

josefresco• 18 years ago

Does participating in these debates make us dumb?

tdavis• 18 years ago

I'm not even sure what we're debating. The entire article is just anecdotal evidence that completely fails to make a point.

I mean, I'll throw my hat in. I'm an atheist and a pretty big jackass. I'd sooner burn a church down with everyone inside than donate to it; I'm pretty much as amoral as they come and don't regret any of the morally "bad" things I've done in my life.

I guess the article is accurate. Debate over!

sgibat2• 18 years ago

The point was that belonging to a community is more important to the strength of your moral compass than your religion of lack of it and that in America, religion fosters community.

About communities, I agree.

jfornear• 18 years ago

Hacker News? How does a slate.com article like this get on the front page? I've read freshman philosophy papers that were more intellectually engaging than this.

bkbleikamp• 18 years ago

The members of Hacker News are very smart (on average) and probably enjoy reading and thinking about things beyond programming.

Intellectual stimulation comes from things other than programming.

axod• 18 years ago

They're probably smart enough to get "things beyond programming" from other sources wouldn't you say?

Discussing religion (again), why women are cold, what 'adolescence' means, is not hacking IMHO. There is more than enough of that sort of thing elsewhere.

shader3• 18 years ago

In that case, maybe you should post links to them; they'd probably provide an interesting, welcome alternative to articles this.

run4yourlives• 18 years ago

Except that they aren't Hacker News.

nazgulnarsil2• 18 years ago

if you're bored. here's why the ideology I, and most entrepreneurs espouse does not work.

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/12/why-i-a...

robg• 18 years ago

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.)

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

alan• 18 years ago

So, the conclusion of the article is that, in the US, religion causes athiests to be immoral. That's one of the more ludicrous statements I've heard: all those poor athiests unable to take responsibility for their own actions.

Dilpil• 18 years ago

The issue of atheism vs religion is not about what produces a better moral compass, but what view of the universe is correct.

ars7• 18 years ago

That's an extremely simple minded way of thinking.

First of all it's impossible to know which is correct. So instead you look at the effect on people.

Second truth isn't everything - it looks that way, but when you run a civilization entirely on truth it fails, and can not survive.

I have a feeling you're not going to understand this, it took me years to understand it - I wanted only truth, and was utterly miserable, until I understood that truth isn't everything (and I'm not talking about religion BTW).

Sometimes believing something that is wrong gives a better outcome. Which is more important? The truth? Or the outcome?

Don't answer quickly - philosophers have been arguing about this for millennia. I chose truth and was miserable. I recently changed my mind.

tomsaffell• 18 years ago

Agreed on all points (except the use of 'simple' :). I found the book 'Life of Pi' useful in understanding this. I recommend it highly to everyone.

dgordon3• 18 years ago

"Second truth isn't everything - it looks that way, but when you run a civilization entirely on truth it fails, and can not survive."

When you run a civilization (whatever "running a civilization" means) based entirely on truth (the facts of reality) it cannot survive? How's that? And, by the way, what's the alternative to that? Lies, wishes, and general irrationality? How's that working out?

dhimes• 18 years ago

Hey, now that brings about an interesting question: If we were to discover the correct view of the universe, but that view would necessarily brings about our own demise, do we tell the world the correct view?

netcan10• 18 years ago

Wad'ya mean 'The Issue?'

There are all sorts of issues. This one is important to quite a few people.

'what produces a better moral compass' is not very relevant to you if you are trying to find a rational basis for you beliefs or a lack thereof. It is relevant if you are an American that fears the rise of atheism or atheist politicians, judges or cops. It is relevant if you are an agnostic that can't or won't decide on a position but needs to decide if a 'religious foundation' is better for their kids.

nazgulnarsil2• 18 years ago

Hold on just a minute guys. Are you trying to tell me that human beliefs are not logically consistent?!

giardini2• 18 years ago

I'll believe all Americans are equal when an atheist is elected President.

time_management2• 18 years ago

We've never had an atheist president, but we've had deists (whom most evangelicals would discount as Christians) including Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. We've also had Unitarian presidents, such as John Adams.

jganetsk• 18 years ago

When Jefferson was running for President... his opponents would smear him by calling him a "howling atheist".

Jefferson was deeply repulsed by Christianity, read his quotes: http://www.nobeliefs.com/jefferson.htm

sofal• 18 years ago

So, in other words, equality in America will be accomplished when someone like you is elected President?

How inclusive. My turn...

I'll believe all Americans are equal when a gay, handicapped, unattractive Muslim woman who never attended college is elected President.

ars7• 18 years ago

Are you saying you are a "gay, handicapped, unattractive Muslim woman who never attended college"?

giardini2• 18 years ago

No, that's not what I said.

I don't know why my post was modded down. Apparently atheists are highly discriminated against, even within "enlightened" groups.

To my astonishment a very recent Gallup poll indicated that, of many groupings, atheists were _least_ likely to be elected President of the US (e.g., _well_ behind Mormons, homosexuals, 72-year-olds, etc.):

http://www.gallup.com/poll/26611/Some-Americans-Reluctant-Vo...

I knew it was bad, but didn't realize just _how_ bad.

kaens7• 18 years ago

"Where there is no God, all is permitted."

As much as I like Dostoyevsky, this is bullshit in this context.

Perhaps "Where there is no God, as well as the lack of critical thought about what is best for group survival, all is permitted"

I'm an atheist, and I think that all common morality is based off of one concept - consent. I think one can very easily come to logical conclusions about how one should act towards other humans in the absence of a higher power - one just has to think about it.

ars7• 18 years ago

No you can't. You can not come up with a common morality from first principles. It always must be imposed/started from above. Two people can think about the same very difficult moral situation, and come up with opposite answers - each person thinks the other is a horrible amoral human being. There is no way from logic to decide who is right.

To go with the simplest example: abortion. Is it murder?

How about: is it OK to kill in self defense? What about kill 10 people to keep yourself alive? What about killing someone who is not harming you, in order to keep yourself alive? What about kill a baby to save 100 people?

None of these questions can be answered by thinking about them.

kaens7• 18 years ago

By "common morality", I did not mean a base set of "this is right, this is wrong" absolutes. I meant that in all existing moral codes, the base parts of them are derived from the concept of consent.

Your "simplest" example is a can of worms that I don't even want to try to open. The answer to that depends on whether or not you consider a fetus to be human, or at what stage you do.

In most cases such as your examples, there are no "moral" choices by my definition. Ending the life of another, thinking, capable of consent persons life is never a moral action. It may be the "best" choice, or it may be the choice that leads to the least breaking of the "consent" rule, but that does not make it moral - consent is still being broken.

As a general rule, I would think that if someone has taken actions that imply that they do not care about the consent-based groundings of morality, then they should be treated as if those rules do not apply to them. That does not mean that breaking those rules for that person is moral, but that it shouldn't weigh heavily on ones conscience.

My argument is mainly that the varying moral codes are based on the idea that non-consensual action should be avoided. There are very few, if any, cultures that consider cold-blooded murder to not be immoral - or rape, or thievery, etc. This makes sense in the context of group survival.

EDIT: Also, assuming you're responding in part to my assertion that "one can very easily come to logical conclusions about how one should act towards other humans in the absence of a higher power", I do not see how the existence of logical conundrums counter that. For the vast majority of human interactions, the vast majority of people will arrive at the conclusion that it is best overall to follow the "golden rule" - which is more or less an alternate expression of "don't break others consent" - through the process of critical analysis - edge cases do not change that.

dgordon3• 18 years ago

Yes, they can. And because I'm bored enough to argue with people on the Internet, I will.

"is it OK to kill in self defense?"

Yes. Someone who threatens your life has removed themself from any concept of morality, like any other person initiating force against anyone else.

"What about kill 10 people to keep yourself alive?"

If they're ten gangsters trying to rob or rape or kill you, see the above. If they're ten random people that some madman ordered you to murder for his own reasons, at the cost of your own life if you do not, then morality cannot apply here. There can be no right and wrong in the case of someone who is acting under coercion.

"What about killing someone who is not harming you, in order to keep yourself alive?"

Assuming no madman scenario, so no coercion (which would make it the same as the above), no. Not for organs for transplant, nor for money to pay rent, nor for two dollars for a loaf of bread. A person does not gain the right to use force against others to get what they need to live by their inability to get it by other means.

"What about kill a baby to save 100 people?"

I can't see any way this would apply outside of the madman scenario I answered above.

All of these answers are based on my understanding of morality, which is derived from first principles, as you put it. I'm not so bored as to write about it in detail, and besides, the works of Ayn Rand provide a good first approximation to it. (Read the part of Atlas Shrugged nobody actually reads [in before "You mean any of it?"] -- John Galt's radio speech -- and you'll get a good idea. The key phrase, as I recall, is "human life as the standard of value.")

mattmaroon• 18 years ago

So religion makes atheists mean.

gills• 18 years ago

Doesn't this completely miss the point?

Most religions claim some level of enlightenment in showing grace over condemning another person's morality. The effects of religion on morality should, by definition, be irrelevant to atheists.

blurry4• 18 years ago

Where there is no God, all is permitted.

Yet another argument for religion based on a lie.

This widely quoted phrase (In Russian: Если Бога нет, то всё дозволено) is commonly attributed to Brothers Karamazov. Except it is not anywhere in there. I just spent a good half poring over the original text chapter by chapter and nothing. Nada. Doesn't exist.

My biggest problem however is not the veracity of the quote. It's the intellectual dishonesty of taking words from a fictional character and attributing them to Dostoevsky himself. Although I should not be surprised. Faith and the inability to distinguish between reality and fiction go hand in hand, don't they?

Does religion make you nice? Does atheism make you mean?

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