That is a discussion from Justin L. Barrett’s new and interesting Born Believers: The Science of Children’s Religious Belief. He gives more than equal time to how to raise your child to be religious, but we’re already pretty good at that. Here are his atheism tips, noting that I am excerpting and paraphrasing:
1. Have less-than-average fluency in reasoning about minds.
2. Do not have children.
3. Stay safe.
4. Get in the habit of crediting or blaming humans for whatever you can.
5. Learn to like pseudoagents (including abstractions).
6. Take time to reflect.
7. Add to these factors indoctrination of the young against religion.
The key theme of Barrett’s book is HADD — Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device, and how pronounced it is in most human beings.
The thesis of the book—and I haven’t read it, I’m basing this off the Amazon page you linked to—is that because kids “naturally” gravitate toward religion and religious beliefs, this proves that humanity is “designed” to be religious.
I’m not sure this proves the point that he thinks it does. Kids are also “naturally” narcissists and sociopaths. Good parenting teaches them to be, uh, not those things.
I’d add the pejorative corollary that it’s childish to believe in supernatural beings, and it’s a crutch of a less than fully developed brain.
Or you could just, I dunno, not teach them stories about invisible men in the sky.
Is his thesis that religious belief is a default, and that it is only through some fault of parenting that the child does not believe?
As an atheist, I have to say I find some of these implications offensive, number 1 especially.
Yeah agreed. Though I’m not sure if it’s the summary that’s offensive or the original subject matter.
I’m not sure I like tylers new habit of summarizing books as bullet points.
Probably more that magical thinking is a default, which it is, via the pathetic fallacy writ large (our mind modeling modules running amok).
+1
As an atheist myself (moderate, not the priest-eating kind), I was religious up to the day I wasn’t. I wasn’t angry at clergy or the opium to the masses or anything… it just didn’t make sense anymore. And I was going to a Catholic University at the time.
If you’d been going to Protestant U, you’d have been angry. (Bertrand Russell told a joke about a friend describing the situation in Ireland – Protestant this, Catholic that. Russell asked if there were any atheists, and his friend replied “Yes. There are Catholic Atheists, and Protestant Atheists.”)
Catholic schools – high schools and colleges, at least, are notorious for turning out atheists. I believe it’s because of the quality of the education they provide – if you haven’t had a specifically religious experience, you can’t prove to yourself of the existence of God, and you know that you can’t prove the existence of God without having had that experience.
Also, having not read the book, I’m not sure how they get to a “default” that is free from the surrounding prevailing religiosity.
“Have less-than-average fluency is reasoning about minds.”
If that’s a sentence than I must have less-than-average fluency.
(then, hehe)
Thank you for pointing that out. I read this sentence about six times before deciding that *it* was aphasic, not me.
Maybe teach them a lot of natural sciences like physics — assuming they’re interested. This is just a guess though.
I think it is much more important to teach kids not to be dogmatic.. about anything (no portfolio moves!).
…and be suspicious of stories!
I don’t know about this. It seems some-to-middling knowlege of the natural sciences makes you less religious, but deeper knowlege brings you back (but not necessarily to an organized religion).
I would disagree. A deep knowledge of physics, astronomy, biology, and chemistry does not bring you back to religion of any sort, unless you define religion as “a sense of wonder.”
I’m firmly in the camp of Richard Feynman on this: “I can live with doubt, and uncertainty and not knowing. You see, I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing things rather than cling to answers which might be wrong…Altogether I can’t believe the special stories that have been made up regarding our relationship to the universe at large…they seem too simple, too local, too provincial. The Earth, he came to the EARTH! One of the aspects of God came to the EARTH mind you, and look at what’s out there, it isn’t in proportion…once you start doubting, when you doubt and ask, it gets harder to believe.”
Further: “Isn’t it much more exciting to discover that we’re on a ball, half of which is upside-down, it’s spinning around in space, there is a mysterious force which holds us on, it’s going around a great big glob of gas that’s fueled by a fire that’s completely different from any fire on Earth? That’s a much more exciting story to many people than the tales that people used to make up, that we were living on the back of a turtle or something like that. They were wonderful stories, but the truth is so much more remarkable.”
I don’t understand why people always make a dichotomy between the sciences and religion. Religion at heart is philosophy, not science. Sure there are a lot of pre-scientific explanations for physical phenomena in millenia old religious texts, but that’s all secondary to the philosophy. (And I think a lot of the anti-science from extreme religious groups is arising _in response_ to attempts to use science to attack religion. That’s been the case at least since Galileo.)
If you want an antithesis to religion, you should be looking to philosophy; a set of principles based upon axioms exploring the _why’s_ of the world, not science, based on observations, exploring the _what’s_ of the world. If anyone kills God, it will be a philosopher, not a physicist.
My favorite quote about religion is from Pope Benedict when he was Cardinal Ratzinger: Faith is a decision to live one’s live as if something were true.
I don’t understand why people always make a dichotomy between the sciences and religion:
Because sciences rid us of the need for God(s).
If you want an antithesis to religion, you should be looking to philosophy; a set of principles based upon axioms exploring the why’s of the world,
Things like evo psy (the serious stuff, not the junk) and neuroscience seem more promising. Philosophy has had millennia to take out God and failed.
“Because sciences rid us of the need for God(s).”
No, dude: you just have made science your god.
No, Dude. You haven’t. Science actually works and doesn’t care if you need it or not.
In case you need this pointed out to you, a belief in God requires faith. There is no evidence of a God.
Science is not faith-based, but evidence-based. There’s nothing to ‘believe in.’
Those religious groups who have made it a calling to undermine science are strongly weakening their cause. They’d be far better served with the Hawking et al approach (which I still reject, but at least it’s a tolerable interpretation.)
Science doesn’t need God to work, but most people do need to equate science to an infallible entity. We are a long way from a society that has material need for understanding the scientific method and knowing how science and God are completely separate concepts. To the vast majority of people, one does replace the other. Think back to your elementary school science classes. We were taught science the same way we were taught math and english. Here are the facts and here are the rules. This is inline with all the absolutes our culture teaches us when we are children that we are suppose to unlearn as we grow older. It is my experience (in myself as well as others) that we do not unlearn most of that information. So why wouldn’t most people treat science like a God?
“Science doesn’t need God to work, but most people do need to equate science to an infallible entity. ”
Most people who believe in God believe in God full stop and not because of anything to do with science. Sometimes (I’d argue almost always) that belief is in spite of science.
In any event, I doubt most scientists have a need to equate science to an infallible entity.
Honestly for me it was a matter of:
1. Teach your kids a lot about the natural sciences;
2. Don’t force them to go to church (in my case, until it was too late – age 13 or so).
Now of course my life is occasionally hell when my parents realize what they’ve created. Was not married in a church, will not baptize my children when we get to that. The tears…
Creating a child that is a life-long church-goer is not, I think, a matter of instilling in them a deep religious faith. Children and teenagers are usually not capable of this level of thought. The lesson is more like, “going to church is something you just do, like making your bed, not stealing from stores, and doing your homework”. The deep religious faith might come later.
I guess this why I define myself as a “moderate” atheist. I do not believe, but I want to be in peace with friends and family. So I don’t advertize it much, I occasionally go to church, allowed my wife to baptize the kids and generally avoid laughing at other peoples believes.
I suspect that there is a lot of people like me, specially religious leaders that seem to be only in it for the money and power.
Pascal’s Wager is the best approach, I agree.
“Have less-than-average fluency is reasoning about minds.”
Does this mean “be less able to construct thorough models of other people”? I can see how this would be linked with not attributing things you understand to divine intervention.
this might be apropos:
“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, and reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I gave up those childish ways.”
[slow clap].
Yep. Small kids tend to quite easily believe in Santa Claus as well. That tends to last until…eh…they are told otherwise (from parents or peers). I think this is very cultural/country-specific and related to wider social norms (rather than small changes in parenting style in a given context). I have not had any strong thoughts about raising my son either religious or atheist, but he (8 yo) sees the idea (at least today) of religion as quite absurd. I would say that this is “more or less” the norm here in Scandinavia. There are no “campaigns” against religion, it just does not play a big part in society (and is not especially active in the “public debate” in general)…and hence, a very large share of kids grow up to be non-believers and that’s not a big deal to anyone (well, almost).
“but he (8 yo) sees the idea (at least today) of religion as quite absurd.”
Yes, that would pretty much be an eight-year-old level of thought.
Here’s the thing. A child isn’t predisposed to believe anything unless his or her parents, teachers, or especially peers plant those seeds.
It’s not as if Santa Claus is a fantasy character thought up by children. Along the same lines, God is not a construct that most kids would ever think to believe in. The contention that kids are ‘born believers’ is the most laughable thing I’ve read in quite some time. What they are is born naive and gullible, and if raised by religious parents (if I wanted to be trollish I’d say ‘similarly naive and gullible parents’) who inculcate such fantasies, they will be inclined to believe in God. Just as they are inclined to believe in the Tooth Fairy if their parents indulge that fantasy.
Put another way, my son doesn’t believe in the Flying Bell that delivers chocolate and toys come Easter as a French boy might. That’s a role that the Easter Bunny and the Easter Bunny alone fulfills.
Why would that possibly be the case?
I figured out about Santa Claus on my own, and God as well. I have three kids, 14, 11 and 9, and none of them seem to show any interest or attraction to religion. No special effort on my part.
They do all like the Matrix, and Inception and other world-bending movies like that.
Oh, and if you find the possibility that we’re living in a simulation at all plausible, that means you’re technically agnostic, since the existence of a simulation strongly implies (dare I say mandates?) the existence of a Creator with unknown motives.
A creator is not the same thing as God, right?
Children are pretty much idiots.
1. Read to them the Tanakh, Gospel, and Quran.
Apologies, mate. Meant to reply this to the main thread.
Though, I was going to say sometimes idiocy lasts into adulthood.
Wait, people find that simply not sending your kids to church isn’t sufficient?
Give both parents a high IQ and breastfeed from birth for at least a year. Also don’t drop the kid on its head and don’t take it to church.
Life is pretty easy to understand when you can summarize complex interactions with pithy sentences like this, no?
I wonder where people get the idea that atheists are assholes?
Folks don’t react well to being told that they aren’t wearing clothes.
What are pseudo-agents?
Agents that aren’t real. Imagined actors. For example “The USA loves applesauce”. There is no agent that is the USA that can perform verbs. This kind of talk distracts us from the microbehaviors that are really occurring; and attributes them instead to a non-accountable being.
I get the general impression from this summary that Mr Barrett does not want atheists. Hence the absence of the most obvious suggestion of “don’t teach children to sanctify religious dogmas “. Or otherwise “don’t teach children to be religious “. And the presence of “don’t have children”. Yes there may be a natural state of anthropromorphized events and superstitious nonsense. This does not mean kids should have to remain that way or that this is by default an appropriate way to organise one’s life.
For me, it was probably simply not going to church very often mixed with the feeling that the stories I did here the few times I went seemed awfully silly. Raising people from the dead? Turning water into wine? Coming back from the dead? They struck me as having more in common with the fairy tales I knew were made up than they did with anything I’d observed in the “real world” during my short life. I came to my own conclusions about religion by age 6, at least, maybe even earlier. I can remember thinking that dying was probably a lot like turning off a computer. The body just stopped running.
Other than not taking me to church, my parents didn’t really do anything one way or the other. I don’t actually recall ever talking about religion at home one way or the other, neither pro or con. While it’s true my parents were scientists (both played pretty big rolls in the Apollo space program), they never expressed any bias against religion. They just never pushed for it to be a part of our family life either.
In short, I’m siding with the people who are saying it’s as simple as “Don’t take your kids to church.” I don’t think religion is inherent. You don’t really have to do anything to prevent it, just don’t push children to believe it.
It’s fascinating how a few well placed little provocations can stir up atheists comments.
Basically kids believe what they are are told by their parents, thats true for anything. Also children still have a sense of wonder and possibility unharmed by cold “truths” and the ever-present cynicism of our society.
At some point, they will try to find their own answers, but like any human being, their answers will be influenced by their childish beliefs, society and their peers.
Having not read the book and getting my clues from the points above, I would say Barrett is just describing the contrast between the childish sense of wonder and the grownups disillusion. Force the disillusion on your children (or just gently get them there), and they will more probably become atheists, seems pretty logic to me.
There’s a reason he doesn’t mention sciences. Contrary to the atheists wishful thinking that they kind of own the sciences, there are of course a lot of religious scientists. In fact, looking at all the worlds societies (and not just north America) the percentage of religious scientists shouldn’t significantly differ from the percentage of religious people in the general population.
To see those two as in any way opposed is always a clear sign of either believers who dont understand sciences or atheists who have not a clue about faith – its always sadly pathetic.
As opposed to happily pathetic?
I think you have it backwards. Atheists don’t actively claim to own science; rather, creationists shun science outright and thus the image of religion being anti-science is largely self-forged.
I am not a religious person, but I do think that the Hawking explanation of God with regard to science is elegant (if still incorrect.)
In fact, looking at all the worlds societies (and not just north America) the percentage of religious scientists shouldn’t significantly differ from the percentage of religious people in the general population.
This seems very unlikely. The evidence indicates that scientists are much less religious than the general population.
Scientists are much less likely to be religious than the general populace. Let’s be scientific about this and look at some numbers. The United States is a good test case, as the general populace is quite religious. In a 2009 Pew survey, 83% of the general populace believed in God, whereas only 33% if scientists did. If you look at scientists who are members of the National Academy, that figure shrinks further down to less than 7%. Fully 93% of Academy members (elite scientists) don’t believe in God.
And of course none of this should be surprising, as science often conflicts with people’s religious beliefs. So being scientifically literate is a good way for children to become atheists.
Rather than simply “not taking children to church” I would imagine “teaching children that religious stories are wrong” would be an effective method of creating atheist children. Children don’t believe in fairies or ogres any longer, and, as noted above, kids learn to reject Santa Clause reasonably early even after years of belief. Plus, every child seems able to reject the deities of religions other than their own easily enough. So if the goal is to raise atheist kids, it seems that goal can be proactively pursued with a good chance of success.
1. Read to them the Tanakh, Gospel, and the Quran.
Teach your children, time and time again, that this (really, REALLY fallen) world cannot be redeemed.
This can be accomplished by being as unfair, enigmatic and capricious as possible. Er, hang on…
Richard Dawkins “The Magic of Reality”, October, 2011, with a plug on its back cover by physicist Lawrence Krauss, is a wonderful children’s book. Each chapter presents what people once espoused for a few pages, then presents what today’s rational minds understand.
Raise your child in a philosophical “religion”; eg, Norther Virginia Ethical Society in Vienna, Virginia. Ethical Society, in Sunday School, teaches their children various religions for one year.
Think like Thomas Payne, who at 7, wondered why God didn’t kill Adam and Eve, avoiding declaring all humans evil sinners.
The 4-1/2 years old becomes perhaps most rational person, unwilling to believe that either superman or god can see what’s under a nutshell.
Go to a different church every week, to see its variety, but not stay so long that you enjoy what it really amounts to: friendships, help clubs, and sharing/using members’ businesses (I got a good inexpensive painter this way).
Become a top scientist as a member of the National Academy of Sciences or equivalent in Great Britain where 93% believe in no personal god.
Live beyond 30 — when people died by 30, their thinking hardly had a chance to form beyond childhood.
Softly ridicule religious ideas, but recognize good religious ideas as ideas all people already consider.
People did not die by 30. That was an average, including a horrendous infantile mortality rate.
Thank you for this important correction
“Religion at heart is philosophy, not science.” Oh balls. Religion at heart is superstition.
+1
+2
Science at heart is balls.
The Amazon summary includes this sentence:
“How the developing brain grapples with these and other questions leads children, across cultures, to naturally develop a belief in a divine power of remarkably consistent traits––a god that is a powerful creator, knowing, immortal, and good”
Is he suggesting that for children, monotheism is naturally occurring? Given the history of humanity, that strikes me as incredibly unlikely, but it would definitely be interesting if he’s making that argument. Tyler, can you clarify?
Let you kids reason for themselves. By all means, give them the tools to reason. (How to do that is an entirely different topic.).
I grew up in a very religious household, and by 8 or 9, had my doubts about the sky fairy. By the time I was in the awkward years, I was an atheist. I attribute this to learning from my mother to reason, to question authority, to think.
On the other hand, some friends are very religious, and share the same traits. Maybe your kid rejects atheism. Who cares, so long as they come to what they believe for reasons that are meaningful to them, and lead them to a fulfilling life?
I understand wishing to perpetuate one’s values, etc. I don’t understand wanting to do so as a superior priority to wanting one’s offspring to be content, successful people on their own terms.
Or, teach that correlation does not equal causation! I can thank my areligious economist dad for that one – it helped me resist a year of Catholic school, half a year of Party propaganda disguised as 5th grade in China, and various acquaintances insisting that their string of good/bad luck was all due to fate/God/karma/etc.
The analogies for religious belief in the comments so far are: Santa Claus, invisible men in the sky, psuedoagents (even thought that is one of the tips for raising an atheist), lack of IQ or inquisitiveness, magic.
Now compare that with what Judaism and Christianity actually say at the defining moment for each. Moses a real person led a bunch of slaves out of Egypt after a series of signs and wonders of the power of God and guided by a pillar of cloud or flame representing his presence. This story is told from generation to generation preserving the witness to God’s actual deeds. Christianity points at a real man on a real cross put there by real priests and Roman rulers. The followers of that real person said he rose from the dead and they went on to sacrifice everything to continue to say that. Both religions are based on historical claims. Now they might be supernatural, but they are historical claims. Each religion’s scriptures include plenty of skeptical searching and pondering about the claims, Ecclesiastes and St. Paul for example. And that is supported by reams of saints and writers through the ages struggling. Most of which I would say were people with above average IQs and inquisitiveness.
If religion = Santa Claus, yes, everybody would give it up by age 8. That is not religion. What those claims are is sophomoric, low-IQ, small inquisitiveness wishful thinking. Or maybe in the vein of the post – safe thinking. Actually dealing with the historic claims is less safe.
“Because my book said so” doesn’t get much traction as something to base ones life philosophy upon. If the recorded wisdom of generational oral tradition is valid, give me a monster-killing Beowulf any day.
You showed him, I tell ya.
The followers of that real person said he rose from the dead …
That thing right there puts it on a par with belief in Santa Claus.
No, those claims are (admittedly dismissive) shorthand.
If you find them insulting enough to lash out, well, sorry. I, for one, am intimately familiar with (the Episcopalian version of) Christian “history”, having spent the first 18 years of my life soaking in it, and still hearing it on those holidays when I see family. Your claim that using the term “sky fairy” must preclude this, or make one stupid, comes out as either defensive or a display of lack of confidence on your part.
But, whatever gets you through the night.
And you think that believing that Jesus literally rose from the dead or that Moses literally parted the Red Sea is different from Santa Clause how?
Thinking of the game of telephone that’s represented in any current version of any ancient religious text as a historically factual account, rather than a repeatedly re-translated evolution of what began as essentially political propoganda at it’s creation is “sophomoric, low-IQ, small inquisitiveness wishful thinking.”
From page 5, amazon look inside, “Religious ideas are very different from pretend or fantasy.”
Justin Barrett isn’t very smart.
Has any economist ever calculated how much wealth is wasted on religion, when you include wasted time, percentages of wealth spent on church donations/tithing, and deleterious side effects of religious belief on attitudes towards science and the environment?
I’d reckon the US must lose 5% of GDP to such effects.
I wonder if it is any coincidence that the countries in Europe with the worst economic problems (Greece, Ireland, Portugal) are also the most religious. (This would suggest Poland will be next.)
Every sentence of this post is incorrect.
How so?
That’s not even possible
It’s barely even possible that one of them is incorrect, the other two can’t be incorrect.
Can’t wait to read this book! Thanks for sharing. This makes a lot of sense to me – I was raised by my parents to be an atheist, or at the very least an agnostic, and now I’m a baptized Christian preparing for ordination in the United Church of Christ. I know lots of kids who were raised by anti-religious or atheist parents and are now on very different faith journeys. I’ll be very interested to read more about this…
I bet that’s pretty common. Kids often like to ‘rebel’ against their parents as part of their self definition. Religious parents often find their kids reject their faith, or at least their intensity. No surprise the opposite happens too.
“Kids often like to ‘rebel’ against their parents as part of their self definition.”
For what it is worth, kids in school today seem much less prone to rebel and be anti-authoritarian than I remember my generation being. The generation gap is pretty small these days by historical standards.
Oh, I get it. The point is to make fun of this idiot’s book. It’s like shooting a video of the stupidest conservatives you can find and saying “Here’s how conservatives think.”
“the stupidest conservatives you can find”
I’d watch that game show. Talk about a content bounty.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Science and the existence of God are not mutually exclusive concepts.
What nonsense!
I’m very surprised (and slightly appalled) that Tyler Cowen actually called this a “new and interesting” book.
Given that I probably have more experience (and success) at the business of raising secular children than he does, here are my tips:
1. Don’t make a point of regularly going to religious services; but don’t be afraid of a socially necessary religious service on rare occasions with family or friends.
2. Don’t pray. This can be harder than it seems for people with religious roots or immersed in religious cultures. Notions and impulses like Thanksgiving turn out to be harder to find comparable secular habits to “translate” than things that would seem hard like prayers of petition for something.
3. Find worthwhile things to do on Sunday and Saturday mornings other than attending religious services.
4. Don’t pretend to be religious or act ashamed of your lack of religious beliefs around others; but acknowledge that many other people have different beliefs and that those beliefs aren’t monolithic. It is very hard to model secular living from the closet.
5. Be a good moral role model for your kids. If you are, you don’t need to resort to supernatural authority to be authoritative morally.
6. Don’t worry too much about your kids’ lack of detailed theological and scriptural knowledge. What they really need to know to be well read they will pick up easily enough sooner or later.
7. Ignore the pleas of agonized grandparents concerned that your children are hell bound. They aren’t your children’s parents.
8. Answer all questions your children ask honestly and consistently with your own beliefs. Mysteries are more interesting than facts.
9. Live in an urban rather than a rural or exurban area; avoid the Deep South or Utah or Southern Idaho.
10. Don’t worry about exposing your children to religious materials, particularly ones they can’t read anyway (e.g. Latin masses or Korean language church services) or treat religious materials as if they have special supernatural power.
11. Develop suitable ways to recognize the grief or health anxiety of others that are not religious that your children can model.
12. Develop suitable ways to talk about death in connection with dead pets and distant relatives that don’t involve metaphysics that they can model.
13. Have friends and help them find places where they can make friends. In a predominantly Christian society, having friends who aren’t Christian, even if they aren’t necessarily secular either, is a particularly powerful antidote to religious peer pressure.
14. Develop regular patterns and habitual ways of living day to day. Kids need consistency, but it doesn’t have to be religious.
15. Develop habits of gift giving disengaged from religious calendars to prevent envy.
16. Don’t ask for trouble by enrolling your son in the Boy Scouts, even if it would be nice to be able to do so.
17. Make good use of zoos, art museums, libraries, nature and science museums, recreation center events, etc.
18. Enroll your children in secular schools at least until they are capable over respectfully and quietly overcoming peer pressure.
19. Have a historically accurate, unargumentative, and factual set of things you know and can talk about when it comes to religion, which is real, even if God is not.
20. Develop understandings about how to raise your children that you and your co-parent can be comfortable maintaining and trust each other to sincerely be comfortable carrying out. This may involve compromises, but compromises are better than perpetual distrust of a co-parent.
21. Watch Anime and read contemporary Japanese fiction. Japan is a modern society in which monotheism has not penetrated very deeply at all. As a result, it demonstrates some alternative models and life scripts for addressing daily life that those of us who have grown up in a religious, strongly monotheistic culture may have never had an opportunity to experience first hand.
22. Talk about history enough so that your children come to the realization that the way things are now is not the way that they always have been and always will be. This is a much more natural intuition that monotheism or even religion and can only be overcome with education to the contrary.
23. Try to enjoy life. Would you want to try to grow up like someone who is happy, or like someone who is miserable. When I was a kid, one of the songs we used to sing was “they will know we are Christians by our love.” The sentiment in that song, that people who live well may be onto something and worth emulating is solid, but neither Christians nor members of other faiths have a monopoly on love.
24. Don’t bore your children with rational arguments about religion’s truth. Religious affilliation is mostly a socially driven decision and secondarily an emotionally driven decision. Reason and logic are far down the totem pole in persuasiveness on questions of religion. Save these kinds of discussions for ages when your children intiate them rather than pushing them on children.
25. Be a good parent. If you are secular and abuse or neglect your children, or perform poorly relative to a co-parent with whom you don’t manage to maintain a stable, long term, loving relationship, you risk losing the ability to be involved in your children’s religious upbringing and won’t get the benefit of the doubt in close cases in many places.
There’s only been one society in the history of the world that had no religion, or at least, that was the official government line, and that was the USSR and it lasted 70 years. College professor type atheists attack religion on the scientific evidence of weather a superior being exists or not without looking at what the benefits are. You can argue about the relative merits of individual religions but the anthropological evidence strongly suggests there are benefits.
No, the “college professor types” would simply suggest that your correlation is not causation and that we need to look at a larger sample of societies on the secular/religious spectrum to draw any conclusions. It is not clear the Soviet Union convinced many people to abandon religious beliefs so what you see are the effects of an atheistic, Communist government and not an atheistic or secular society. Post-Communist Czech Republic is pretty secular if not atheistic society — what are the costs and benefits of this compared to its more religious neighbor Poland?
As far as attributing the evils of the Soviet Union to atheism, the more one reads about it, the less plausible this whole line of argument is. There are a lot of logical steps one has to go through between “there is no God” and “I need to collectivize agriculture and starve the Ukrainian peasants to finance industrialization.” In fact, it’s not clear the two beliefs (both evidently held by Stalin) have anything whatsoever to do with each other.
I would have just given him an F in history.
This was the greatest laugh I’ve had in a long while from this blog. It seems that the author has not studied the subject at all. He doesn’t even realise that atheism or agnosticism is the default and religion requires effort in terms of learning and persuasion. The world would have been a lot more interesting if his views were even remotely accurate. Imagine religious affiliation being distributed randomly instead of being dependant of the culture. Three siblings with one being a Catholic, one a Jew and one a Muslim growing up together. Could it be that he is in fact hoping to land a contract for a television series – Three religious brothers and their poor indoctrinated atheist little sister.
Fawlty Towers: Beating the Car http://youtu.be/mv0onXhyLlE
Why, then, do children have the ability to stop believing in the godlike Santa Claus in a matter of minutes, after you explain to them the real source of their christmas presents?
Because it’s pretty obvious even to most children that their presents are far more likely to come from their parents than Santa Claus.
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