So what is religion for, anyway?

[liv]

I'm going to do something that's rare for me and talk about actual religion, rather than just community stuff. If you hate reading about that kind of thing you're very welcome to skip.

I got buttonholed by some Mormons when I was in town yesterday. I decided to be polite to them, because I wasn't in a big hurry, and because Mormon missionaries these days look like bar mitzvah boys to me, so young in their big grown-up suits and shiny shoes, I kind of took pity on them. Though in retrospect they would probably have rather talked to someone who doesn't get a kick out of driving salesmen off-script. The conversation didn't actually go very well, because every time I said anything interesting they got all flustered and returned to their scripts anyway. And perhaps I shouldn't have been polite to them after all, perhaps I should have been righteously angry about their church's homophobia, racism and execrable habit of posthumously converting Holocaust victims and other distinctly non-Mormon people. But I think those things are basically not the fault of a couple of young missionaries, and I like to set a good example to proselytizers by taking a polite, respectful interest in their religious traditions and not trying to convince them they're wrong.

Anyway one of their stock questions on discovering that I'm a theist but not a Mormon was "what do you search for from God?" I tried to answer this concisely, thinking on my feet, and without using religious jargon that wouldn't mean anything to people from a different tradition. I don't think I really succeeded, but setting myself the challenge was thought-provoking. What I actually came out with was something like: I seek to discover how God wants us to act in the world and how to treat fellow human beings who I believe are created in the divine image. This got an almost comic reaction: sage nod, platitudes about yes, I quite underst... no wait, I have no idea what you just said!

And then a friend posted (locked) about her difficulties in choosing a church, and I was primed by the conversation with the missionaries to be thinking about what religion is for. So I came up with a theory, which I'll copy over from my comment to this other discussion, because I hope it's of interest to at least the religion geeks in my circle, and I'd like to pull it apart and come up with something better:

(Using "church" here to mean a religious community that meets regularly in a fixed location, so I don't have to keep typing "church or synagogue or mosque or temple etc".) I think a successful church needs three things, and how relatively important they are will vary between individuals and over time. I'm going to call them intellectual, spiritual and pastoral domains.

Intellectual: the church should teach things that are in line with current, evidence-based understanding of the world. It should be open to scholarship, both religious and historical-critical approaches to religious texts and beliefs, and secular scholarship and scientific advances. It should have room for doubt and be open to reinterpret stuff to fit into its social context. It can't afford to ask its congregants to check their critical faculties at the door.

Spiritual: the church needs to provide a moving, uplifting emotional experience of religion. This could beautiful music or architecture, it could be a charismatic, inspiring minister / leader / preacher what have you. It could also be simply time-honoured traditions which connect to a sense of shared culture and humanity. In most cases, for a church to be successful in the spiritual domain it needs to be somewhat conservative, because the things that press people's emotional buttons are atavistic and don't work well with lots of change and innovation and not knowing what to expect every week.

Pastoral: the church needs to function as a community. Members need to feel a connection to eachother, need to be able to turn to the community in times of crisis. This has to happen without becoming an exclusive, inward-facing clique, because the church also needs a constant stream of new members with fresh ideas. There needs to be space for kindness and outreach to people who aren't part of the inner circle, either because they're new to the community or because they aren't able to commit fully or because they're going through a theological crisis.

Ideally, a community which is successful in all three domains will also have some kind of shared external goal, making the world a better place, if you will, or social action, or actually mediating a relationship between worshippers and the divine. Otherwise it's just there to be a self-perpetuating meme machine, and that can be effective in the short term but eventually people will see through it.... (Yes, all of these needs can be fulfilled outside religion, I'm well aware, but the genius of religion is that at its best, it combines all three in one institution.)

I also clarified in the comments that it's a three-legged stool metaphor, no church can concentrate purely in one domain, you do need all three to an extent, though some communities do min-max things a bit. And of course they're not completely separate, all three domains will influence eachother to a great extent. Eg a person may not be able to have a spiritual experience unless they are at least somewhat intellectually satisfied by their church's teaching, while moving, meaningful services may well be a big factor in creating a sense of community, and so on.

I was also trying to connect my shiny new theory to the ongoing discussion about how one ought to respond to members of religious traditions whose teachings are homophobic. In some ways homophobia can be seen as a serious failure in the Pastoral domain, since (obviously) it excludes people who are in any way not straight or have friends who are. But there's probably a reason for it to do with strengthening the Spiritual domain, because a church than control its members' sexuality has a very major emotional hold on them. (I should add that I think this kind of approach is emotional manipulation and therefore false religion, but that's not a very useful statement because everybody thinks that their brand of spirituality is genuine and meaningful and other approaches are false and manipulative, and atheists may well think that all religion is manipulative or laying a claim to aesthetic experiences when there's no such thing as "spirituality".)

Obviously this doesn't make it ok for a religious org to behave like this. But it's possibly the beginning of an explanation for how come some otherwise perfectly lovely people may remain loyal to homophobic religious denominations: perhaps what they're looking for from religion is more about the Spiritual than the Pastoral domain? Or perhaps I'm talking complete nonsense, that usually happens when I make up classifications on a whim!

Comments

[wychwood]

Also it may be possible for some people (particularly if they're straight themselves) not to be particularly aware of the homophobia. Like - as I'm sure you know, I disagree pretty strongly with the RC church on that issue, but on a day-to-day level, in my life and my parish experience, it's not that relevant. I'm not homophobic, most of the people I am close to in the community aren't homophobic, there are some gay parishioners that I know (though not many), and even when I hear anti-homosexual talk it's not actively violent or hateful; it's what I think of as "misguided" rather than "wrong", if that makes sense? They mean well, they're just wrong about it. In my opinion! They might want to say the same of me!

Anyway, I like your three-legged stool idea. I can definitely see things relevant to me in all three aspects. I'm not sure how widely applicable the "intellectual" strand is, though - there always seem to be a lot of people who value conformity and blind obedience over questioning. Even allowing for min-maxing, I feel like evolution-deniers in the evangelical Protestant end of things (or the ones who claim that Catholics aren't Christians) and some of the traditionalist Catholics I encounter are really almost rejecting that - although there are absolutely strong intellectual traditions in both denominations more broadly.

[liv]

That's a very useful point, yes. It gets into the differences between what the overall religious leadership teaches, and what actually goes on at a congregation level. My three domains were really meant to refer to assessing specific communities, rather than religious sects as a whole, though obviously any given community is going to be affected to a greater or lesser extent by what the central leadership tells it to do. It sounds like your particular church / parish is not in fact particularly homophobic, or only a little bit, rather than that people are willing to sacrifice some of the Pastoral stuff for the sake of other benefits.

I can also imagine an even more extreme example, where a community was actually homophobic in practice, but never really came across any out gay people, and most straight congregants genuinely didn't know how homophobic their community was. I remember an incident the other way round, when we had a recent convert join our shul, and he was very intense for about a year and a half, until he belatedly realized that the community was in fact quite comfortable with LGBT people, including rabbis. So he flounced off and refused to have anything more to do with Judaism ever again cos we weren't homophobic enough for him. If it was possible for him not to know what our position was on these issues, I can imagine a straight ally being similarly confused.

You also have a really good point that some religious communities are explicitly anti-intellectual, not just relatively weak on the intellectual side. On the other hand, some of the groups who deny evolution expect their members to be really well up on quite advanced Christian theology, Biblical scholarship, apologetics etc, so perhaps the Intellectual domain is satisfied in those ways rather than in a sciencey way. I guess the reason I included Intellectual as one of the legs is that you can only go so far in asking people to believe stuff that runs completely counter to their experience of reality. Otherwise they'll just get disillusioned and leave! And I know some very anti-intellectual denominations do have a big problem with people being initially zealous and burning out after a few years. (The other direction this can go is to be a brain-washing cult where questioning the orthodoxy is so severely punished that people don't dare to do it, but that I think is not really religion at all, it's something much more sinister.)

[wychwood]

In fact I'm pretty sure there are homophobic people in my parish. But it's - I suppose I would say that I don't feel that homophobia is an agenda pushed by the parish and our priests particularly. Like with anything else, there's a range of expression / differing priorities between groups. Actually, with a lot of these things it's not always easy to say where anyone stands on anything - because the ritual is relatively formalised, there's not that much space for exploration of anything else. I have some idea of the thoughts of my friends, who I talk to (though I don't have a great deal of significant discussion at church, most of the time; we're busy with practicalities), and the priests obviously have their homilies, which give an idea of their priorities as well as those of their thoughts which they talk about. And my Bible Study group has been... interesting. But the rest of the parish? Pfft. No idea. I assume they're comfortable with the relatively liberal, relatively low-church approach of the priests, but beyond that. Well.

I did think about the "advanced theology" thing; there's definitely something there about the direction of the intellectualism. Roman Catholics aren't as bad about science as some other denominations, but they barely touched scriptural criticism until quite recently - nearly all of the study of source texts and contrasting manuscripts of the Bible and so on was done by Protestants, it simply wasn't part of the Catholic tradition even in Catholic universities and centres of study. I think there's only about 100 years of Catholic study, even now.

I know you're talking about individual "churches", but to be honest I think that the "intellectual" leg is much more about denominations and the like than it is about individual communities - at least in the Christian churches I'm familiar with. Given communities are based on a particular intellectual tradition, as they are a spiritual one, but it's relatively distant from most of the day-to-day experience. Although in denominations that focus more heavily on group studying of the scripture and so on, things might be different?

Cults tend not to be long-term successful, I think, perhaps for the reasons you suggest. My feeling is that the ones that do survive tend to open up and normalise, become less extreme - the early Christian community might be an example.

Aaaaaand I really don't know enough about any other religion to talk about how this might apply. Though I think Judaism is more intellectual on a day-to-day worship level than the kind of liturgy-focused churches I'm most familiar with. Hmm.

[liv]

Thank you again for bringing up all these points from your experience. My theory is almost certainly insufficiently general, and it's definitely good to have some concrete examples of where it falls short.

I don't feel that homophobia is an agenda pushed by the parish and our priests particularly
Makes sense, absolutely. There's a subtle but important difference between a community which subscribes to homophobic teachings and has a number of homophobic members, and a community which actually behaves in a homophobic way. Not that the former is perfectly fine, but it may well be a lot easier for gay people and their allies to make their peace with such a community.

nearly all of the study of source texts and contrasting manuscripts of the Bible and so on was done by Protestants, it simply wasn't part of the Catholic tradition
Yes, very valuable point, thank you. I should have made it a lot clearer that the textual scholarship was an example, rather than a definition. It's definitely a Jewish thing for the Intellectual strand to be very scripture-centred (which is exactly why I designed my "Jewish" icon the way I did), and I shouldn't at all assume that other religions have that particular attitude. For Catholics I would guess the Intellectual domain is more about things like theology and philosophy of religion, also liturgy (for example, you have very complex rituals which need a lot of training and knowledge to be able to carry out correctly), and yes, natural science. The Galileo incident is stereotypical, but my impression is that historically, the Catholic church have been patrons and guardians of scientific knowledge, not opponents of it.

I think that the "intellectual" leg is much more about denominations and the like than it is about individual communities
That's a very interesting counterpoint. When I think of a Catholic approach to the Intellectual side of religion, I think Jesuits and their scholarship, I think of thinkers like Aquinas and others. But I can well imagine that historical background doesn't have much direct impact on people's actual experience of being members of churches.

[wychwood]

That's partly what I was thinking of, actually - if you're in a Jesuit or Dominican parish, or a parish with a particularly intellectual diocesan priest, you probably will have much more than that. But my impression is that the average diocesan priest is much more focused on pastoral care (which is totally legitimate!), so they don't get so much of that. The Augustinians certainly aren't anti-intellectual, but their focus tends to be more on community and social justice, and so that's more what comes across within the parish.

[elf]

everybody thinks that their brand of spirituality is genuine and meaningful and other approaches are false and manipulative

I think my own brand is plenty manipulative, and I'm not sure I believe any of them are "false." (Okay, the flat-earthers and the breatharians have some serious "false" going on. But aside from scientifically provable falsehoods, I don't think a religion's tenets are "true" or "false" in any meaningful way.)

(Scripture says: All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.)

Timothy Leary said that the purpose of religion was to deal with seven basic spiritual questions, and provide "ecstatic, incontrovertibly certain, subjective discovery of answers" to those questions. I'm still mulling over his definitions.

[liv]

Mm, thanks for joining in. Really good to have a non-Abrahamic perspective on this, because one of the most likely flaws in my embryonic theorylet is that I'm over-generalizing from religions I'm familiar with and quite likely coming up with stuff that isn't universal. I do definitely like your quote from Leary about spiritual questions, thank you for bringing that to my attention. Where I'm coming from is that religious experience is not the key thing; religious experience is one aspect of what religion is for, but without some semblance of community, tradition, "good works" and possibly some other things, it's just ecstasy, and that alone doesn't classify as religion.

It's fair enough to point out that some believers are self-aware and understand that there is manipulation going on in their (presumed true) religion, and also quite happy that different beliefs may be true in their own way. I hope that's the case for me as well. I was thinking more on a meta-level; I don't think (eg) Christians' belief in the Trinity is "false" even though I don't share it. I do think religions that use fear and prejudice to keep members loyal are doing something morally bad, which isn't what I would include under the heading of true religion. But I'm also aware that in making that judgement, I'm possibly falling into the Scotsman fallacy.

[green_knight]

For me, there's something else really important: that the practitioners are confident and open-minded.

Confident in that they know they're on the right path. They've made up their minds about the existence and nature of their deity(s), they don't feel attacked by people who don't believe or believe something else, or who question everything. I think the 'modern science' is part of that. I can live perfectly happily in both worlds, the shared rationality and a world where I get a parking space nine out of ten times I remember to ask for one. (The tenth time tends to be either too big a hurdle- like an event that draws dozens of extra people to the area - or a Hint.)

I loathe people who try to push their religion on me. (It doesn't help that it's usually religions I don't want.) Not attacking or belittling people who are not interested, who search, or doubt probably falls under 'pastoral'. 'Knock and the door will be opened' is a good policy, IMHO - because it's up to the person themselves to do the knocking, and to enter if they want to. The missionaries I encounter often strike me as trying to grab me and shove or scare me through the door, whether I want to or not.

(Personally, I would like to learn more about Judaism without wishing to practice it - I'm intellectually and spiritually curious but I have no idea about the etiquette involved.)

[liv]

I feel very much the same as you; my own Jewish religion emphatically does not proselytize, and confident and open-minded are absolutely key for me in terms of what I seek in a religious community. I have a strong emotional prejudice against missionaries.

However I live in a country where the two major religions, Christianity and Islam, are proselytizing religions. Different denominations and groups within those two understand proselytizing in different ways, and some are more intrusive than others. But I feel that if I'm going to be open-minded, it would be wrong for me to refuse to see any value in any religion that actively seeks new converts.

Regarding Judaism, obviously I can't speak for the whole religion, but my experience is generally that nearly all Jewish people and Jewish communities are very open to people who want to learn more without intending to actually join the religion. For example I think that most synagogues would be happy for someone in your position to attend services or events.

[mathcathy]

What do you mean by homophobic?

I think there's a big difference between a community acknowledging that the teachings of their religion instruct that same-sex sex is taboo (and the teachings of various religions is exactly that) and rejecting people who are naturally attracted to the same sex because they fear or don't understand it.

The word "homophobic" seems very emotive, particularly if you're using it to describe the former of these two things.

[liv]

I was being deliberately vague about homophobic. You'll recall from the previous discussion that some people were taking the position that simply expressing the opinion that a legally recognized relationship between two people of the same sex should be called a civil partnership rather than a marriage was homophobic hate speech. Some people undoubtedly think this, and would not be able to be comfortable as members of a religious community that took that view.

I am more inclined to your position, that acknowledging the existence of prohibitions on certain kinds of sexual relationships is not necessarily homophobic. It is likely to be a barrier against full acceptance of gay people within your community, but perhaps not an insurmountable barrier. For example, my current community, which I do not consider to be particularly homophobic, reads that verse from Leviticus publicly on Yom Kippur, arguably the most important day of the liturgical year. They do this because that chapter on sexual prohibitions is traditionally read during that service. Another community I belonged to in the past followed this tradition, and a lesbian woman within the community was extremely upset by it and walked out of the service and caused a huge emotional fall-out. Was she wrong to be upset? I don't know, I'd hesitate to say she definitely was. Was the community wrong / homophobic to continue that particular tradition unquestioningly? Again, I don't know; I do think it was ignorance more than malice, but it's not at all a simple issue.

[mathcathy]

Good answer.

I think a community which considers homosexual relationships to be frowned upon by God is just as likely to consider any sexual relationship outside marriage to be equally taboo. It isn't usually a special thing and people considering it to be homophobia are making homosexuality too big a deal because it's the issue which is occupying their lives at the time. It's easy to inflate other people's views when really all they are doing is carrying on with tradition. Actually, that very inclination towards "anti-racism" on the part of people who act hard-done by as a minority when they really aren't is likely to make me come across homophobic at times. It isn't the homosexuality, it's the judgment on all people who don't understand it, aren't comfortable with it, don't need to acknowledge differences because they aren't usually relevant.

I mean, consider catholics whose tradition says that all sex must be carried out between couples who are willing for the act to result in conception as it is the sole purpose and that all sex must have the potential for life (even the strongest miracle is unlikely to create a child from a homosexual sex act). There are far more sexually active heterosexuals affected by this approach than homosexuals.

I know there are communities which are active in their feelings against homosexuality, but I think they are possibly fewer than those who don't think about it much.

[siderea]

But it's possibly the beginning of an explanation for how come some otherwise perfectly lovely people may remain loyal to homophobic religious denominations: perhaps what they're looking for from religion is more about the Spiritual than the Pastoral domain?

I am sad to have to report that one of the other things people look for in the Pastoral domain is, er, I don't quite know how to put this. They want of the group (be it a religious congregation or any other similar scaled voluntary or state group) that it recognize the fact that their lived experience attests to that There Are Bad People Out There. You know, if we're using the term "Pastoral": wolves. And one of the things they look to in a group, is that it is engaged in actively trying to protect the flock, in attempting to identify the wolves-in-sheep's-clothing and expel them. They see doctrines which are efforts to identify the worthy and the unworthy, the virtuous and the vicious, as intrinsically a good thing, as doing what a good congregation should be doing for the protection of its members.

To someone who sees things that way -- and it's not even a bad way of seeing things -- the fact that any giving teaching or behavior is exclusionary is in no way a bad thing. To the contrary, excluding is something they want their congregation to do.

For such a person, if they don't have a strong moral sense that homophobia is wrong, they may well greet moral authority figures who claim homosexuality is per se wrong and a sign of criminality with the deference anyone might reasonably give a trusted expert whom one has decided to delegate such discriminations to. And even to the extent they see their religion's/congregation's homophobia as bad and wrong, they may see it as merely unfortunate -- as collateral damage that, alas, can't be avoided.

(Of course, there are also people who are looking for, in a congregation, a gang to join to beat up on identified victims, to improve their self-regard by looking down on someone else. Presumably none of them are your so described perfectly lovely people. But that would be another "Pastoral" domain phenomenon.)

[liv]

Yay, your theory has much more explanatory power than mine, thank you! This makes a load of sense, it's not that exclusion is +Spiritual but -Pastoral, it's that having an out-group to despise or fear helps to create community cohesion, even if it does so in a way I would consider negative.

I am also very convinced by your point about deference to authority. I suspect issues of authority are a big gap (one of many, I'm sure) in my off-the-cuff theory. It seems to cut across all three of my proposed domains.

[siderea]

it's that having an out-group to despise or fear helps to create community cohesion

...I didn't say that. I think that's usually not true, and it's a nasty thing liberals like to believe of conservatives to dismiss their concerns.

[liv]

I think I am likely to be susceptible to nasty liberal prejudices against conservatives, for sure. I think what you're saying here is that my rephrasing of your comment (which I intended as emphatic agreement) has changed the impact of what you were telling me, is that right?

What's key here? Perhaps I've skimmed over the fact that there genuinely are Bad People Out There, and that an effective community genuinely does need to protect its people from harm from such people? The problem then would be misidentifying gay people as a threat, as a group who need to be excluded in order to prevent harm to the congregation, rather than the fact of exclusion. Is that any closer to your point?

I think my own community has policies and practices which are exclusionary in many ways; unlike the more universalist religions which bother me because they try to force their religious beliefs on others, Jewish communities are only open to people who were either born in or go through considerable effort to join the tribe. So I think it's fair to say that I myself see some positive sides to exclusion, and in some lights I am willing to see the hurt caused by that as collateral damage. I feel defensive about applying this model to myself because (being a good little liberal!) I don't see non-Jews as in any way "unworthy" or "vicious". However I have no doubt at all that Jewish particularism can easily come across that way, and it's not always a false impression either.

[siderea]

Hey, I'm short spoons at the moment, so I can't give you the answer this requires. Sorry about that.

[liv]

No problems. I don't think my comment requires an answer, and I certainly don't expect it to be a high priority for you to keep clarifying when I'm getting the wrong end of the stick. Thank you for pointing out where I'd misunderstood you, that definitely leaves me less ignorant than at the start of this conversation, and I do appreciate that.

[nameandnature]

But there's probably a reason for it to do with strengthening the Spiritual domain, because a church than control its members' sexuality has a very major emotional hold on them.

Religions which have a cost to following them (not necessarily monetary) do better than those which don't make demands on their followers, ISTR (I'd like to be able to quote the research here but I can't think of good search terms). This is a bit like what someone said in the locked discussion that a liberal religion didn't seem worth getting out of bed for, I suppose.

I'm not sure what the psychology of that is. Maybe it's a bit like when you never buy the cheapest brand, or maybe people want challenges and want to be part of a narrative where they struggle and perhaps overcome them. Back when I was an evangelical Christian, a common piece of jargon was to say "I was challenged" (by that sermon, say) to mean that "I've realised I'm falling short there".

Why specifically homophobia? Well, it's the patriarchy, innit? Also, if you're going to pick an out-group to strengthen your in-group by having an identified enemy, it's good to pick a sin to which few of them are tempted.

[403]

This. It's the Ikea secret sauce - people will value something they've worked for more than something they haven't.

[liv]

Mm, very interesting, thank you. I hadn't thought about the psychological benefits of imposing some cost or barrier. The "challenge" thing is sort of hilarious, cos we liberals tend to say "I was challenged by that sermon" to mean that we're uncomfortable with being reminded of the unpleasant side of religion, the misogyny or xenophobia or violence or whatever. Which makes it seem like traditionalists are "challenged" by flaws in themselves, while liberals are "challenged" by flaws in their religion!

I think the not worth getting out of bed for phenomenon is sometimes a failure mode of a community that leans too heavily on the Intellectual while dumping the Spiritual. And sometimes it's a failure mode of being in your 20s or 30s with few ties or dependants and not realizing why Pastoral and the support of a community could be important.

It's interesting that you see homosexuality as rare enough that you can get away with excluding gay people, whereas I see it as common enough that pretty much everybody is going to have at least some gay friends, so it's a very risky strategy for defining your out-group! I guess the difference lies partly simply in subjective perceptions of frequency, and partly in the difference between the proportion of people who have some homosexual inclinations versus the proportion of people who specifically identify as gay and are publicly out as such.

[ptc24]

"what do you search for from God?"

Ooooh, that's one that even some people who aren't theists (or deists) can answer. Looking back on some of my own searching...

My first thought is, "meaning, purpose, completeness" - that's not quite right though; you can have those without (propositional) beliefs - doesn't searching for purpose already imply some sort of purpose or at any rate purposefulness or purposiveness that's motivating the search? However, it would be nice to have some beliefs, some rituals, some community, to flesh things out a bit. So from my point of view, your "Ideally" is the whole point.

The other thought is fear; I think in my case, this was fear of having made the greatest possible mistake. Not really a fear of mortality in my case, certainly not an explicit, concious one, but I understand it's important to some people.

[liv]

Hmm, thank you for answering that question. I think I would not want to ask it of a non-theist because I would expect the answer "Nothing, God doesn't exist!" But it seems like you've answered the question along the lines of, what would you like God / religion to provide, which is a perfectly reasonable interpretation.

This also gives some insight into what might be attractive about CICCU-style Evangelical Christianity. It's always seemed a bit mysterious to me that a religion I basically associate with anti-intellectual American rednecks would have such a strong following among students at elite universities.

The things you describe figure very very small as religious motivations for me; I firmly believe that purpose and meaning are something you have to create, not something that's as it were out there. Religion and theism don't really help to give me a sense of purpose, partly because I find it reasonably likely that God created a world that is (from our non-omniscient point of view anyway) purposeless and random. Likewise fear, I do fear mortality to some extent, but again, I don't think my religious views really alleviate that very much. I definitely don't fear making mistakes in the sense of holding wrong beliefs; I expect to be judged on my actions, not on how close I am to aligning myself with the Truth (and I'm not even totally convinced there is a singular, objective truth to be found.) Conversely you put beliefs, rituals and community as sort of minor side-benefits, whereas for me community is primary, with rituals and shared beliefs helping to strengthen communities.

Or do you mean fear of hellfire, as in Pascal's wager? I find myself absolutely unable to take the idea of eternal damnation seriously as a threat, so that particular line of argument from Christian missionaries is extremely ineffective for me!

[ptc24]

Literal hellfire is too silly to have any emotional resonance for me, let alone be anything that may play a part in any rational thought. However, it seems my brain is capable of coming up with ideas which have some emotional sting (mostly involving loneliness), although again, nothing that manages to reach anywhere rational. Of course, you could imagine the idea of a Cosmic Naughty Step as being silly too; and that gives a suggestion of where it might be coming from.

(Random side note; apparently Pascal didn't think you could will yourself into belief as such - more that if you went through the motions of religion, belief would follow.)

Truth, as a value (intrinsic, rather than instrumental), as a moral or quasi-moral sentiment, is interesting - I don't really have the perspective of being judged. On the one hand, contra Kant, I that think lying to a murderer who's asking you where their intended victim has gone is a good thing to do. On the other hand, it does seem important; to the extent that thinking about promoting socially useful but untrue doctrines makes me realise I'm not a utilitarian. On the other other hand, I often see it (mainly?) in terms of attempt rather than success; truthfulness and honesty rather than being right. On the fourth hand, there's a whole pile of issues to do with meaning (in the semantic sense of the word), that make the whole thing complicated; in particular one of these is speech act theory.

I think, with truth, there's a triangle, with dogmatism in one corner, uncertainty in a second corner, and postmodernism in the third. I find myself close to or on the edge between corners 1 and 2. From this point of view, the thing about CiCCU-style Christianity is that it does at least make definite comprehensible claims; it does avoid the problem of being "not even wrong" from time to time.

[liv]

Pascal was wrong in his assessment of the odds for his wager, but I think he was right about the method to follow once you've taken the wager (yes, I have read his Pensées). It's absolutely true that you can choose belief to some extent, you can follow mental and practical habits which then set up a psychological attitude. I think this is similar to falling in love; there is an involuntary element, but you can absolutely choose behaviours that enhance and sustain your feelings for the beloved, or not as the case may be. My feeling about eternal torment (and yeah, you can imagine examples more plausible than literal fire) is that there logically could be an evil or capricious deity who might punish me arbitrarily, but I have access to basically no knowledge about what such a deity might want, so there's no point trying to run my life based on not offending such a hypothetical being. I don't find any reason at all to believe that the Christian version of the great Punisher is any more likely than any other option.

I do think truth has moral value value, yeah. I mean, hey, I'm a scientist, I'm all about the empiricism. I think seeking truth is somewhat different from honesty and avoiding lying, though. On the holding opinions which reflect reality level, I think there's a whole lot we don't have access to. Not just metaphysical stuff, but I also don't believe that we can make a complete, true model of physical reality which is any less complex than reality itself. I do definitely think it's worth putting effort in to examining the evidence and making valid predictions and so on, but I don't think that using the scientific method to refine your perceptions so that you have useful expectations of what will happen next is quite the same as actually knowing The Truth. And yes, you're right about meaning as well, I know just enough about the field to know it's not that simple.

On the not-lying side, I am not a Kantian absolutist about it either, but it's still a value and a goal I strive for. Sometimes it comes into conflict with other values, such as protecting people from getting murdered, in your example! But I think statements about God are mostly unknowable rather than true or false, though that in itself is a kind of meta-claim about the nature of God.

And that probably does make me sound like I'm in the post-modern or not even wrong corner of your triangle. Basically I think truth (or humanly knowable truth, anyway, I'm not willing to commit to statements about reality as it actually is) is contextual rather than absolute.