Matt Walsh and the Case for Destroying Someone’s Faith
Added 2023-06-01 03:42:43 +0000 UTCThis was somehow even more controversial than I expected. I’ve actually lost more than a few supporters over this video, so I appreciate you sticking with me. While I do think religious harm should be met with firm opposition, an effective approach to that requires quite a bit of nuance. I tried to capture that here, but perhaps I didn’t do that well enough. I’m honestly not sure. Thank you again for the support this month, everyone. ❤️ Post 2/2 for May.
Comments
You make a good point about most religions, but my religion is one that thrives on people debating it, in proving parts of it wrong so those parts can evolve in a way that can't be reasonably argued against. So, I wouldn't want anyone to hold back in debating against it, unless they were trolling me or something else unreasonable.
Ben Allen
2023-06-25 21:11:14 +0000 UTCTldr: I think faith itself is intrinsically bad. An impressive video as always Drew. I find myself wanting to be convinced, but I’m not there yet. I too am a recovering theist, and perhaps soon a recovering anti-theist. Perhaps this community can help. You say Ocean helped you see: 1. Even true beliefs can be misapplied and poorly inform behavior. 2. You should be able to demonstrate how harm arises from every seemingly innocuous religious belief which you claimed was harmful. The first point seems irrelevant to me. This is the case in every other situation where truth matters, and yet truth is obviously better than falsehood. If you are making a tactical decision in a war, or a business decision, or a relationship decision, or any decision at all: it is possible to make a good decision despite (or even because of) false information. And it is possible to make a bad decision despite good information. But by and large more correct information is more likely to result in a better decision. There’s a positive correlation between good information and good decisions. This is why we evolved to care about truth at all. It’s just how information works. I think I can satisfy the requirements of the second point. I claim only one belief is harmful, and that I can demonstrate how harm arises from it. I claim faith is harmful, specifically the idea that faith is good. By faith, I mean the notion that it is good (either practically advantageous or morally admirable) to believe in an idea despite bad evidence or no evidence, to such a degree that you will reject contrary evidence. Faith to me means disregarding evidence when choosing what to believe. Faith is the opposite of critical thinking. I think harm arises from faith, regardless of what people have faith in, because it weakens their critical thinking skills, and makes them more easily scammed, controlled, and manipulated into agendas like fascism, racism, ect. Faith creates the fertile ground from whence all the most destructive ideas we have can take hold. I grew up in Utah, where this is obvious. Faith is a difficult state of mind to maintain. Our brains naturally want to believe in evidence. But people there believe that faith is intrinsically good. So they use ritual, and social pressure, music, and thought stopping exercises, to intentionally suppress that tendency. They have to work hard to prevent themselves from thinking too much. As a result they are susceptible to the mormon church’s teachings, but also to a litany of other scammers: multi-level marketing schemes, snake oil sales, whole life insurance, and of course right-wing fear mongering. The scammers know this, and openly acknowledge it. They specifically target the most religious areas, and tell their potential marks to have faith. And it works because those people have trained themselves to suppress doubt when they want something to be true, to respect authority over facts, to disregard evidence when deciding what to believe, to have faith. Much of this evidence is anecdotal I admit, but I think there is ample record online that Utah is home to a disproportionate number of scammers, and that they openly target the religious, and mimic religious rhetoric. There is clear evidence that Utah (and similarly religious areas) are disproportionately affected by right wing rhetoric. For broader evidence, I can’t do better than Dawkins did. Across the world, across history, in atrocity after atrocity, we find people in the bonds of faith. Not always faith in a religion, but faith nonetheless. Dictators want their people to have faith, preferably faith in the dictator but any faith is better than none, because it makes them easier to control. Faith makes systematic oppression and atrocity far more possible than it otherwise would be. We have correlation and causation. I think faith is always bad, even faith in harmless or helpful things, because faith is so easily and often harnessed to commit atrocity. Perhaps it wasn’t always so. Perhaps it was necessary to organize people, and in the absence of systematic ways to obtain truth any organization was better than none. I don’t dispute that many religions have done many good things. It just seems clear to me that all that good combined is many times dwarfed by the staggering vastness of the horrors that are possible only because of faith.
Mitchell Hulick
2023-06-10 03:48:15 +0000 UTC
