Where do religious people get all the weird beliefs that make up their religions? Well, according to their own scriptures, it seems that a lot of those beliefs came from prophets, who claimed to speak for God. But according to how their own scriptures describe them, the prophets seem to have been insane.
Prophets were known for acting like maniacs, going naked in public, and intentionally getting people to injure them. They would elaborately attack inanimate objects, cook with turds, and claim to see bizarre things that no one else saw. Why would anyone believe anything that these madmen told them? In the Bible, God describes his own messengers as metaphorically “blind” and “deaf”. So why would anyone expect them to have any special insights?
Since the biggest religions are centuries old, they tend to incorporate a lot of the ignorant beliefs that were common back then, when people were even more likely to fall for superstitious ideas than they are now. These religions were developed in times when most people couldn’t even read, science hadn’t really been invented yet, and all the ordinary phenomena of nature that we now understand so well were seen as inexplicable magic and the work of invisible spirits.
Most of the things that come to mind when you think of “superstitions” originated from religious ideas. Christian religious ideas, as often as not.
Religion involves belief in highly desirable things, like miraculously answered prayers, universally enforced justice, and immortality. But these things are how we wish the world was, not how we observe the world to actually be. This sounds like the result of wishful thinking, rather than the result of any kind of thinking that reliably produces true beliefs. And if people have beliefs based on wishful thinking, that means they have these beliefs for reasons unrelated to whether these things are actually true.
One way religion irrationally manipulates people’s beliefs is by promising them endless bliss if they believe certain things, and threatening them with endless torture if they believe certain other things. Can you imagine a worse obstacle to true belief than that?
To varying extents, religious people tend to completely ignore large portions of their own religion’s teachings. The actual requirements and claims made by religions are so unreasonable that most people manage to convince themselves that a lot of those parts of their scriptures don’t mean what they say. Or that those disagreeable parts don’t matter, for some reason. And they also convince themselves that rejecting those things somehow doesn’t constitute disagreeing with their religion.
Because religious beliefs are mostly false, incoherent, or mutually inconsistent, people have to adopt all kinds of irrational thinking habits if they want to preserve their belief. Which is something religious people will tend to want to do, as a result of another irrational thinking habit which religion directly promotes: Faith.
Faith is unquestioning belief in a particular thing, regardless of evidence. Faith is a mix of gullibility and closed-mindedness and other forms of stupidity, which religion pretends is somehow a virtue. This kind of mindset will generally lead to false beliefs and bad consequences. A lot of people have died because they had faith that talking to their imaginary friend would save their lives, so they didn’t bother to get any real help.
Faith means you have no real reason for what you believe, and it means you refuse to change your mind for any reason. Faith-based beliefs are by definition completely disconnected from reality. So if you want to have true beliefs and not false ones, having faith is the worst possible way to think.
The fact that religious beliefs are based on blind faith is one good reason to think that those beliefs are most likely false. If people believe something on faith, there is no reason to think it’s true, since they would believe it whether it was true or not. A true belief wouldn’t need to rely on faith, because people would be able to arrive at that belief by following the evidence. And also because the belief wouldn’t be threatened by people considering the evidence.
Most people believe in a particular religion just because they were born into it, which is clearly not a very good reason to believe something. You would likely have different religious beliefs if you had been born in a different time or place. Even worse, religions have often been enforced by law or spread through violence, leading to people believing arbitrary things for non-truth-based reasons.
Continue reading Religion is irrational →