I lost an argument the other day \u2013 and it\u2019s bugging me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s not so much that I lost, since we weren\u2019t really arguing \u2013 as that I let it get away from me because I was pushing on two different ideas at once. I let myself get all confused and failed to make any point at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So here\u2019s idea one: \u201cThere exist people for whom religious belief makes it is easier to lead a happy, good life.\u201d<\/strong> Note that I\u2019m not talking about child rape, bigotry, dark and hidden political agendas, the phrase \u201cin God we trust\u201d on the currency, or any of the usual woes that beset organized religion. I\u2019m talking about faith in a non-empirically-provable god or gods. My observation is that (a) it\u2019s possible to decouple belief from a lot of the badness of organized religion, and (b) some folks find it easier to face their lives with God at their back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Personally, I do not. I do observe a correlation between faith and people who are less stuck in their heads than I am \u2013 who are less academic, and perhaps less unhappy if their pencils are not perfectly aligned on their desk. Note that I am specifically not saying \u201csmarter\u201d people or \u201cpeople farther along the path\u201d or anything judgmental like that. Some people don\u2019t like bitter flavors, some do. Some are happier if the pencils are perfectly aligned, and some don\u2019t care. Some people find that faith makes it easier to get along \u2013 some do not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With that said, here\u2019s idea two: \u201cI think that organized religion has some really valuable properties in terms of lifting societies out of chaos and into a stable state.\u201d<\/strong> I\u2019m thinking specifically about Haiti here \u2013 the fact that after decades of aid \u2013 the country is still struggling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My observation is that external aid is really hard to do effectively \u2013 since you tend to get people hooked on your largess. Similarly, I begin to think that we may have done Haiti a disservice by knocking over dictator after dictator. Where they are right now is chaos. Would order, even under an exploitative regime, be better than that? Religion splits the difference. As I\u2019ve observed it in practice down there, religion is about a community saying \u201cwe will be better than this \u2013 we will be better than we are right now \u2013 and we will do it for ourselves.\u201d It\u2019s inspiring to watch a community build a church out of the mud. It\u2019s stunning to watch them use that church as an anchor for a school, a clinic, and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Somehow, between those two thoughts I let myself get all confused and dragged into the question of whether Haiti was somehow morally and intellectually inferior to the US \u2013 and thus not equipped for my highfalutin god free existence. That wasn\u2019t my point at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I lost an argument the other day \u2013 and it\u2019s bugging me. It\u2019s not so much that I lost, since we weren\u2019t really arguing \u2013 as that I let it get away from me because I was pushing on two different ideas at once. I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1707","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1707"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1707\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1709,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1707\/revisions\/1709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}