THE TWO LEGITIMATE REASONS FOR SUPERNATURAL CHRISTIAN RELIGION – UNTIL THERE IS A SUPERIOR ALTERNATIVE
–“The non-existence of “God” is so completely obvious that, absent state coercion or peer pressure, few truly intelligent individuals could ever believe, or profess to believe, in it”– Coach VTCG
Coach,
While that’s likely true, let me add two utilitarian exceptions that mean the provisions of christian religion must be provided by market demand, by some means:
Reason 1
Human personalities form a distribution of the feminine empathic to the masculine systematizing, and from the feminine neurotic to the masculine stable, at the extremes from the self regulatory to the masculine schizophrenic and the feminie psychotic.
The truth is, that there are quite a few people, more than you might imagine, and in particular men and women with feminine neurological composition, that cannot provide self regulation and therefore require external regulation by social reinforcement, or, as in the case of christian religion, both social reinforcement AND rituals and beliefs that are proxies for social reinforcement. And without them their neuroticism (prey response really) is unbearable, and is increasingly expressed in self harming to socially harming ways (antisocial behavior).
So, religion is the CHEAPEST method of teaching moral foundations that ALSO captures these people in a net.
The answer? To use more expensive education to teach people through cognitive behavioral therapy the self regulation, and to provide social groups with that same training to provide cognitive, emotional, and psychological stability. (Stoicism-Epicureanism is the only non-false set of teachings, rituals, and social system that provide mindfulness.)
The masculine systematizing mind cannot imagine the chaos and burden of the female mind, and the far greater chaos and burden of the neurotic to psychotic mind is not only unimaginable, but if imagined it would likewise be unbearable.
Reason 2
There is overwhelming evidence that chrsitian ‘training’ – meaning the resulting christian personality – is extremely advantageous for the less able and the poor, because it produces and extraordinary pro-sociality that makes possible the high trust society. The criticism that people NOT trained as such, even though most of us depart the faith we retain the psychological benefits of it, are better prosocial people than those who are not trained in it and disregard it. This evidence is overwhelming.
So while we can teach an alternative to what is, in the end, cognitive behavioral therapy against the normal distsribution of natural human genetic instinct, impulse, intuition and reason, we should not presume that christianity serves no function until them.
I’m raised in both catholic and protestant traditions, though mostly catholic. And my position remains that the church of england has it right. “It doesn’t matter what you believe after childhood if by childhood you have learnd the behaviors the church seeks to instill in you as a child.”
Because in the end, you will behave by christian intuition, ethics, and morals. And if so, the church has done its only necessary job.” The rest is taking care of the … less fortunate in mental blessings.
Affections
Curt Doolittle
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