this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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Your understanding of their reasoning comes from a fundamental assumption that your choice is the correct choice for every person. They willingly made the wrong decision, therefore they must have been manipulated into doing so.
Many people do just become religious without outside influence. On a large scale, every society will create its own version of religion without fail. Clearly, they have something to gain psychologically by doing so.
While religious indoctrination obviously exists and obviously is a problem, it doesn't discount the actual benefits that religion seems to have, and by extension the reasoning with which some people become religious.
When I said "start", it was in reference to the process of changing your religious identity, not your life as a whole.
This I agree with. Looking back, you were more careful than I thought you were to specify you were not talking in absolutes.
I will however double down that you are still making a fundamental assumption that your option is the correct one, and you make it more clear by arguing that all benefits of religion are possible without religion. If all benefits of religion can be attained without risking the detriment, then religion is the worse option by far.
However, thinking of this made me realize I'm just making the opposite assumption. Just like you, I've constructed a strongly held belief about religion based on my life experiences, which are entirely anecdotal and effectively meaningless.
How would you even get evidence that most people are manipulated into becoming religious? How would you get evidence that most people don't? How would you get evidence that religion does or doesn't benefit people? How would you even define benefit in the first place?
This argument is meaningless.
The strongly held belief I'm referring to isn't a belief in a god or lack thereof, its a belief that religion is a net negative for society.
To say I'm not aware of this is again to argue in bad faith. I have mentioned myself that religious indoctrination of course still exists, and is a problem.
Yes there is research into how religion affects society, but it isn't very useful for this purpose for multiple reasons. There is no instance of a society without religion, so the difference between a religious and non-religious society can't be studied. There can be no consensus on what is beneficial and what isn't, as morality itself isn't objective.
There is not and there never will be definitive evidence as to whether or not religion is beneficial for society.
There is also nothing to suggest the opposite, because this can't really be determined. You would have to so create a set of all the benefits religious people claim to get, which in and of itself would be a monumental task. Then, you would have to demonstrate that nonreligious people can achieve all of the exact same benefits.
This is why I've come to the conclusion that this argument is pointless, and neither of us know anything beyond our personal experience.