Why People Do or Do Not Leave Religion
This is a blog post which I wrote years ago, far before I had a well-known
internet presence. It came up in a discussion during a livestream.
I wrote this around 2011, when I was an atheist. Despite that, I think the
content is still true and wanted to reproduce it here, unredacted execept for
this starting note and an ending note.
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Richard Dawkins arguably gave religion a far better explanation and dissection
in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene than he ever did in The God Delusion.
The Selfish Gene may lack the polemical nature and the specifics of his
recent religious commentary, but it nails on the head the key behind religious
belief and apostasy. This of course the book where he coined the term "meme" and
memetic evolution, and he employs religion as one of his most common examples
of these both.
Naturally it's not only true that religion functions as a bit of cultural
heritage, but as Dawkins explains, memes have a tendency to link themselves to
together, sometimes prolonging their lifespans by association.
Building off that, if we say that the concept of a creator god is one meme, it
should be obvious that religion is the framework that links that meme with
others: a meme that expounds on what behaviors are permissible, a meme of a
specific creation mythology, a meme for eschatology, a meme for proper family
behavior and thousands of others. Thus in a way, religion is not so much a set
belief that can easily be switch on and off, but abandoning the concept of god
can easily undermine foundational moral and social beliefs as well. To change
one's religion is to alter essential one's entire memeplex, with a desperate
need to replace not only factual beliefs, but social understanding.
In a more personal way, if someone becomes an apostate, they would lose a lot of
the religion-specific justification for their family life, their moral
persuasions and likely even their politics. Religion is so powerful over
people's lives because it connects with so much of the foundations of their
everyday interactions, perhaps not practically, but ideologically, and it aids
in putting human action into context given the wide worldview attached to
religion.
Although it sounds practically Kuhnian, discussions on religions are not so much
mediated by the facts, but by the immense ideological threat non-belief poses
to one whose life relies heavily on religious ideology. Both the religious and
non-religious know what side is "right" before they approach any issue, and this
is mostly due to religion's memetic ubiquity.
This should also give us insight into what conditions make religious people more
likely to abandon their faith. Convincing counter-apologetic arguments are
nearly certainly a prerequisite, but seem obviously insufficient alone. Instead,
people are more likely to leave their faith if religion's other memetic
counterparts have been compromised. That is, if they lack a religious family or
friends, if they don't participate in any religious services and if they don't
invoke religion to justify moral or political actions, they'll probably be able
to disbelieve in God with greater facility. A person in these situations frankly
wouldn't be too troubled by the idea of a godless universe.
Religious people are variously dispersed between having religious beliefs that
interlock with every other belief or meme of theirs and having religion as a
tenuous and localized meme that could be switched on and off on demand. A lot of
the difference between fundamentalist and liberal Christians or between
moderate and extremist Muslims can be accounted for by how much of the rest of
their beliefs are determined or influenced by the meme network of religion.
Fundamentalists and extremists view religion as fundamental to understanding
anything in the world, thus in their own minds would be ludicrous and immoral
not to let religion guide them in all political and social affairs. On the other
hands, believers who only have a tiny and insular memetic network for religion
are likely the ones to want to keep religion separate from politics and their
interactions with their friends.
Everybody's error has been to understand religion as one or a set of beliefs. It
is incredibly rare or likely non-occurring for a person of fervorous religious
disposition to hear one or two off-the-cuff arguments against God's existence
and then on the spot relinquish their religion. It's an issue of intellectual
economy and the ideological support of other associated memes. Perhaps an
argument can cause some questioning about the existence or justice of God, but
at the same time it would be unlikely for a believer to toss out the God meme
and every meme associated with it, as to them, the testimony of their family,
church life and moral convictions have not been rebutted and thus are supposed
to constitute evidence confirming their ideology. Of course in a way, religion
survives because the memes of religion have taken the memes of morality and
social cohesion as hostages, and for the religious, losing the former means
losing the latter.
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The analytical point of this essay I still endorse and see as fundamentally
true, as the only disagreements I have with my former self here are his
background assumption that a religion could not be true and is beneath him (he
doesn't explicitly say this, but I know what he was thinking).
The modern world creates atheists because it encourages people to isolate the
domain of faith from other domains.