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Religion Not Superstition

Entry 866, on 2008-10-09 at 20:41:02 (Rating 3, Religion)

A recent Yale survey of religious and other superstitious beliefs has attracted a certain amount of attention, mostly through somewhat invalid analysis of the results, especially in a piece written for the Wall Street Journal. The essential conclusion was that religious people are less superstitious than non-religious people. Interesting thought, but is it true?

Well no, of course not. But why not? The problem is that the conclusions are based on several arbitrary interpretations and misinterpretations of the data. The main one is that religion itself isn't a superstition. Assuming the average person only has a certain capacity for illogical beliefs then if religion is using up most of that capacity we would expect other superstitions (UFOs, monsters, spirits, ghosts, etc) to be rejected. Even if that isn't the case, there are many religions which see other superstitions as evil and prevent their followers from believing them (I guess one form of superstition doesn't like competition from another).

Also, the fact that some people who don't believe in a god have substituted that belief for some other nonsense, such as different forms of spirituality, shouldn't be used to show that atheism inevitably leads to that sort of belief. People become atheists for different reasons: they find another belief which suits them better, or they follow the empirical evidence away from supernatural beliefs, being the two major ones.

So the claim that the attempts to make people question religion will just lead them to new age nonsense, spirituality, conspiracy theories, denial of established facts, and other illogical rubbish isn't really true. People who are affected by arguments such as those of Richard Dawkins aren't likely to substitute one superstition for another. But even if they did that isn't necessarily any worse than believing an established religion. In some ways its better because it at least provides variety.

The only thing worse than a crazy belief with a small percentage of the population following it (UFOs, 9/11 conspiracies, Scientology, etc) is a crazy belief that has gone mainstream and is accepted by the majority (Christianity in the US, Islam in the Middle East, etc) so people being lead into new forms of belief maybe isn't so bad.

Religious people have always seen themselves as different from everyone else. They think believing in god is different from believing in UFOs. And it goes further: they think believing in their own dogma is different from believing someone else's (Christian belief is better than Islam or vice versa, for example). But it gets even worse: I often hear different sects within a belief system criticising each other: for example they say that you can't compare the beliefs of a Jehovah's witness with those of a Mormon.

Really? Are they so blind that they can't see that, in the end, its all the same? Sure, some sects are even crazier than others but from the neutral perspective of an outside observer (an atheist) they all look remarkably similar. I think that if these people were forced to look at their world in the same way I do they might see that what they thought was obvious is anything but obvious!

And if anyone was tempted to include atheism, secularism, humanism or other non-belief based philosophies with the list of people blinded to the truth I should say that there is a difference. Rational beliefs like those can be justified using objective facts and methodologies, the others rely on particular ideas or arbitrary starting points to prove their point. That isn't the same at all.

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