Life in Silico

First, two stories - a sad one and a funny one (found via here and here, respectively). To summarize, the sad one involves a girl dieing of treatable diabetes because her parents preferred praying over seeing a doctor, and the funny one involves a prominent “black magician” proving his incompetence on live television to hundreds of millions of viewers in India.

The usual take on the issue is that religion is bad and stupid, leading to effects both malicious and comical. Richard Dawkins and others have gone as far as to argue that religion is child abuse. Critics point out that religion has many positive benefits, but as Weinberg said, “with or without [religion] you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

But that doesn’t sound quite right. If religion can make good people into bad, why not the opposite? Even if it scares kids to death, can’t we at least use that to make sure they don’t do anything wrong? And isn’t there some real moral sentiment among the world’s religions?

All that may be true, but it doesn’t address the fundamental issue. Religion is neither inherently good nor bad - rather, it is arbitrary. Many crazy, nonsensical and conflicting ideas both about the world and appropriate behavior have been and still are preached and practiced by the world’s religions. Their evolution through time is also pretty arbitrary. They may morph into something better or worse, without any actual direction or method. The constraints seem to be (1) historical context, and (2) cognitive bias. #1 is pretty chaotic in itself, but #2 has been better studied. Pascal Boyer did a great job of explaining religion in light of our evolution (”religious concepts and norms can be explained as a by-product of standard cognitive architecture”), and you can see here and here for more orthodox psychology.

Coupled with the necessary authoritarianism of religion, you get behavior which is divorced from reality. Even if you pound every scientific equation, every righteous moral into a person using religion, you’ll get a semi-random drift that’ll widen with time towards a disconnect as reported above, because there is no method to weed out the right from the wrong.

Religion is like Russian Roulette. You push the trigger once - nothing, twice - still nothing, but eventually it’s gonna fire, and people are going to die, as they have for millennia, as they still are, for nothing much.