Do people need God?
Offline (partially satirical)
It has often been said that people need God, that there is an innate psychological necessity for the belief for people and society to function (this is not the same as saying that a particular individual needs the belief because he/she has been thoroughly steeped in it their whole life). Sometimes these notions are couched in the terms that many religious people love for their vague meaninglessness, such as the need to believe in a "higher power", or "something else".
I decided I would test this empirically.
Test 1: I walked into the bathroom, and observed myself in the mirror.
Test 2: I moved my right hand, then my left
Test 3: I pinched myself. It hurt
With these tests, I established a remarkable conclusion:
I exist.
Thus indicating a serious flaw in the hypothesis mentioned above.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
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I think that is a load of crap. Something like 70% of people in Norway are not religious. Seems to work extremely well for their society.
After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.
The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.
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DG, I had an interesting thought earlier today when discussing brain death vs. clinical death, and I think it bears on this topic.
Technically speaking, a clinically dead person isn't dead, if dead is defined as not living in any way. There is still some brain function, and so the entire body isn't dead. Sometimes hearts are stopped for operations. Hell, sometimes during operations, the patient has no heart! Clinically dead is not really dead.
The thing is, "dead" is something we "knew" about long before we knew about internal organs, and particularly brains and brain activity. When someone's heart stops beating and they stop breathing, they're dead. Everybody knows that.
Except that it's technically wrong.
The thing is, we kept the nomenclature, "clinical death," instead of inventing a new word for "not quite dead, but really close." Thus, millions of people believe that humans can be brought back from the dead when the reality is that nobody has ever been brought back from the dead.
Because of poor word usage, or overlapping definitions, or whatever you want to call it, the myth of returning from death is allowed to continue. If there was death and "Heartlungstoppedness" (for lack of a better word) instead of clinical death and brain death, and if we didn't say someone was "dead on the table" during an operation they survived, it would be a lot more difficult for the notion of coming back from the dead to survive.
Similarly, when we talk about people "needing" God, I think this myth has been allowed to persist because nobody who knows better insists on differentiating between "needs" and "strong desires." We need air. We need food. We need light. We don't need self gratification, self actualization, someone to love, or anything else that we often speak of as psychological needs. These things tend to make us happier, but we don't "need" them.
When people get mad at me for nitpicking definitions, I remind myself just how many silly notions persist because people don't use words properly.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
Whether we need god is irrelevant he/she/it dont exist
I just stopped giggling
Air, food, light... I get it, we need those things to survive. What about people who 'need' love, self gratification and actualization to survive? You know, the people who without those things would rather be dead as they weigh so heavily in their lives?
Is it physical vs psychological needs that you are comparing? Hope that question makes sense
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You mean... Republicans?
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Well, the thing is, you take any human and put them in an environment without air, and they will die with 100% certainty. That is a need.
You take someone who "needs" love, and give them something self-actualizing to substitute for love, and they probably won't die. Even the rare few people who get depressed to the point of committing suicide or having their health fail to the point of death aren't dying from a lack of love. They're dying of a gunshot wound to the head or malnutrition or sirrosis of the liver, or whatever other means they use to either purposefully or subconsciously end their own lives.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
So it is physical vs psychological. Even though denying someone the psychological need could, in a very few instances, result in death...the physical is 100 % certain to end in death. Thanks for explaining again
Slowly building a blog at ~
http://obsidianwords.wordpress.com/
The specific point I'm making is that "need" probably shouldn't be used in conjunction with the psychological, as it causes conflations.
To be fair, one can easily make a case for "need" if we word it correctly:
IF one is to have the highest probability of maintaining psychological health, THEN one needs to be loved.
That's all well and good, but it's still not "need" in the most drastic sense of the word. When people say that man "needs" god for anything, they are using the strong sense of the word, meaning that these things are literally impossible without god, in the same way that life is literally impossible without air.
The weak sense of the word is more colloquial and much looser, and can mean anything from "desire strongly," as in "I really need a drink," to "having very strong motivators to do a thing," as in "You really need to pay your taxes."
In either case, it's not really a need. We can opt to not pay our taxes, and if there's no alcohol to be found, it doesn't matter how much we want a drink. We're going to live through not having one. If we made a strong division between want and need, the argument of man "needing" god would disappear. It is only because of this conflation of strong and weak definitions that the argument has any life at all.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
Damn me for not wrapping this head of mine around it the 2nd time
Slowly building a blog at ~
http://obsidianwords.wordpress.com/