Geo Patric said:
no, i do not think that it is. further, i don't think you have given the matter as much thought as it deserves.
In fact, I would argue the opposite, that believers have not given the matter as much thought as it deserves, they simply embrace it because it is emotionally comforting to them, regardless of whether or not it is logical, and especially whether or not it is factually true.
that aside, "rational" means based on reason. with this very simple definition, it would seem impossible to derive rational behavior from irrational cause. but the fact is, MOST of what we do is NOT based on reason, or at least, not based on OUR reasonings.
Whether or not most of what we do is based on reason doesn't mean that it shouldn't be. The fact is, for most arguments that are not already emotionally charged, we do use logic to evaluate the reasonableness of the claim. If I lose my car keys and I can't find them, is it logical to claim that leprechauns stole them? The vast majority of the population is going to look at that claim and conclude that it isn't rational or logical that such a claim is reasonable, based specifically on the fact that we have no reason to think leprechauns are real. Virtually no one has an emotional investment in claims of leprechauns to be true. However, if you change "leprechaun" to "devil", more people are going to accept that as a reasonable argument, even though there is no more evidence for the existence of a devil than there is for leprechauns. They are more emotionally invested in the existence of devils and demons than they are in the existence of leprechauns. It wasn't that many centuries ago when belief in leprechauns and fairies and the like were more widespread. That didn't make the claims about them any more reasonable then than they are now, nor does it make claims about gods reasonable today, just because they are widespread.
If you want to argue that some people, even the majority of people, are stupid and gullible, I'll accept that, but it doesn't change the facts. There is still no evidence that any of these supposed gods exist. It doesn't matter how it makes someone feel, it doesn't matter how emotionally invested they are in the idea, the facts are the facts. I'm no more interested in people's emotional state over the existence of a god than I am over the existence of leprechauns or a flat earth or magical unicorns. I'm interested in the facts. Full stop.
Hebrew dietary laws WERE rational, though they were not reasoned out as we would.. they had no accumulation of data regarding microbial infections.
Sure they did. They observed that people who ate certain things got certain diseases more often. They had no idea why it happened, they just knew that it did. A rational idea would have been to tell people not to eat those foods, or not to eat them uncooked, whatever their observations were. Once you start tacking on "because this god said so", you leave rationality behind. No god told anyone anything. However, man's brain is hard-wired to seek out patterns and answers. In the absence of easily understandable answers, many people simply make something up because to do otherwise is emotionally uncomfortable. They don't like not knowing so they invent an explanation. Just because we are genetically predisposed to do it, however, doesn't make it rational. Luckily, we are able to overrule most of our mental hard-wiring, we can choose not to fall prey to emotionally comfortable ideas and keep looking until we find an actual explanation, rather than one that's convenient.
our issue today, is that we KNOW the causes of most of those things which early peoples acribed to deities. that modern people continue to ascribe them to deities is irrational.
That is true. However, that doesn't make the original attribution rational, only understandable. Today, it is not understandable why anyone would continue to do such a thing when we know better.
irrational behavior that does not counter "good" is value neutral. irrational behavior that nonetheless produces "good" is still good... could be better, possibly, but still "good".
I don't buy that it is value neutral. There was a time when people believed disease was caused by demons. Lots of people were cut up, tortured, starved and murdered to "get the demons out". Is that value neutral? Hell no! Getting back to your dietary restrictions, you have to remember there are places in the Middle East where they're taking those exact same dietary restrictions and using them as justification for slaughtering millions of pigs and outright banning pigs from some countries. Is that value neutral? Absolutely not! Even taking benign examples, you have people who are taking their religious views and trying to impose them on larger society, even people who do not share those views. Take the Blue Laws in the U.S. They still exist in some areas, and have only been done away with relatively recently in others. It is the imposition of a religious viewpoint upon a secular society by people who want to force their beliefs on everyone. Is that value neutral?
Not a chance. There's no such thing as value neutral so long as the belief goes beyond the believer and invariably, it always does. It affects how a person acts in public, how they vote, how they raise their children, how they interact with society. Our beliefs always affect our actions. So long as one has irrational beliefs, one's actions will be, to one degree or another, irrational. That's not value neutral.
criticizing a religion (qua that religion) is irrational. criticizing religious practice that produces good behavior is irrational. criticizing religious practices that produce harmful behavior is rational and moral. Criticizing Religion (capital "R" - as a social force, a political force) IS rational if we can conclude (as i frequently do) that is is detrimental to the rest of us.
No it isn't, in fact I'd argue that it's rationally necessary. Take the fundamentalists who have been in the news on and off over the last couple of years, the ones who refuse medical treatment for their children. They are killing their kids. I can cite case after case after case of religious parents who might as well be slitting their kid's throat, they are no better than murderers in my eyes because they just watch their kids, kids who could have easily been saved had they sought treatment, wasting away to nothing. Just because you can point out practices which are not immediately and demonstrably harmful to people around the believer doesn't make the practices any more rational. Harmless does not mean valid.
Criticizing a Roman Catholic for kneeling before a plaster statue... is not rational in my view. Criticizing a Roman Catholic adherent for attempting to impose his nonreasoned religious conclusions as policy for others is perfectly rational.
Sure it is, that's not all they do. When you have a church which demonstrably protects pedophiles, which preaches against condoms in Africa, condoms which could have saved millions of people from contracting AIDS, a church that protected and supported the Nazi regime, and someone voluntarily keeps putting money into the collection plate on Sunday to keep supporting an institution like that, it's damn rational to criticize that. Catholics worldwide ought to be ashamed of themselves that they keep supporting this institution, yet they keep showing up and tossing away billions of dollars. Why? Because the church has them all scared that if they stop, they're going to go to an imaginary hellfire when they die. Stick around and you get paradise, leave and you get fried. It's that Pavlovian cycle that keeps those wallets opening and those people, the vast majority of whom have to know what their church is doing, tossing their hard-earned money away to support the system.
And you think it's irrational to criticize that?