A good and just god does not punish' ( Archived) (139)

Brainwashing at its very best.

But you don't appear to be moved by stories of genocide.

I'm not that good at unconditional love that I can revere a god purported to have committed that act. How does that mean I lack spirituality, or humanity in your opinion?

Atheists are heavily concentrated in economically developed countries, particularly the social democracies of Europe (Barber, 2012). In underdeveloped countries, there are virtually no atheists. Atheism is thus a peculiarly modern phenomenon. Why do modern conditions produce atheism?
First, as to the distribution of atheism in the world, a clear pattern can be discerned. In sub-Saharan Africa there is almost no atheism (Zuckerman, 2007). Belief in God declines in more developed countries and is concentrated in Europe in countries such as Sweden (64% nonbelievers), Denmark (48%), France (44%) and Germany (42%). In contrast, the incidence of atheism in most sub-Saharan countries is below 1%.

The question of why economically developed countries turn to atheism has been batted around by anthropologists for about eighty years. Anthropologist James Fraser proposed that scientific prediction and control of nature supplants religion as a means of controlling uncertainty in our lives. This hunch is supported by data showing that the more educated countries have higher levels of non belief and there are strong correlations between atheism and intelligence (see my earlier post on this).
Atheists are more likely to be college-educated people who live in cities and they are highly concentrated in the social democracies of Europe. Atheism thus blossoms amid affluence where most people feel economically secure. But why?

It seems that people turn to religion as a salve for the difficulties and uncertainties of their lives. In social democracies, there is less fear and uncertainty about the future because social welfare programs provide a safety net and better health care means that fewer people can expect to die young. People who are less vulnerable to the hostile forces of nature feel more in control of their lives and less in need of religion.

In addition to being the opium of the people (as Karl Marx contemptuously phrased it), religion may also promote fertility, particularly by promoting marriage, according to copious data reviewed by Sanderson (2008). Large families are preferred in agricultural countries as a source of free labor. In developed "atheist" countries, women have exceptionally small families and do not need religion helping them to raise large families.

Even the psychological functions of religion face stiff competition today. In modern societies, when people experience psychological difficulties they turn to their doctor, psychologist, or psychiatrist. They want a scientific fix and prefer the real psychotropic medicines dished out by physicians to the metaphorical opiates offered by religion.

Moreover, sport psychologists find that sports spectatorship provides much the same kind of social, and spiritual, benefits as people obtain from church membership. In a previous post, I made the case that sports is replacing religion. Precisely the same argument can be made for other forms of entertainment with which spectators become deeply involved. Indeed, religion is striking back by trying to compete in popular media, such as televangelism and Christian rock and by hosting live secular entertainment in church.

The reasons that churches lose ground in developed countries can be summarized in market terms. First, with better science, and with government safety nets, and smaller families, there is less fear and uncertainty in people's daily lives and hence less of a market for religion. At the same time many alternative products are being offered, such as psychotropic medicines and electronic entertainment that have fewer strings attached and that do not require slavish conformity to unscientific beliefs.

References

Barber, N. (2012). Why atheism will replace religion: The triumph of earthly pleasures over pie in the sky. E-book, available at:

Noah's Arc is a story of genocide, but you appear to revere the god who committed this act. You've yet to say how you rationalise this.

So if you don't believe it is Gods will these things happen. Then why.

We assume divine intervention in human affairs.
Biblical rhetoric often implicitly assumes these intuitions. Take, for example, St. Paul's words: "We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord" (2 Corinthians 5:8, KJV). This idea of being "absent from the body" not only assumes dualism, but could not be believed without an established intuitive architecture for souls that can violate physical laws. The advantage of this type of rhetoric is that it does not have to present any real evidence because the only "evidence" required is the listener's own intuitions about souls and the continued existence of consciousness after death (whether these intuitions are correct or not is beside the point). Another clear instance of taking these intuitions for granted is Luke's crucifixion account: "And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, 'Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit': and having said thus, he gave up the ghost" (Luke 23:46, KJV). Like the outlandish dirt-drinking god imagined earlier, which would not survive cultural transmission because of our cognitive constraints, accounts like this would be unbelievable (and its attached rhetoric therefore ineffective) if not for the way in which the human mind perceives and conceives of the world. Since a person's mind or soul (or "spirit" and "ghost" here) is conceptualized as separate from the body, it is intuitively plausible for Jesus to command his spirit to go somewhere else, away from his body, at the time of death. That this is part of the core story of Christianity—and that there are millions upon millions of Christians in the world—testifies to the efficacy of this verbal and conceptual rhetoric.

As Kenneth Burke writes, "rhetoric is the art of persuasion, and religious cosmogonies are designed, in the last analysis, as exceptionally thoroughgoing modes of persuasion" (Burke, "Rhetoric" v). But that still leaves us with the question: "Why is religion persuasive"? Burke continues: "Theological doctrine is a body of spoken or written words. Whatever else it may be, and wholly regardless of whether it be true or false, theology is preeminently verbal" (vi). This paper set out to explore the relationship between rhetoric and religion with an emphasis that diverges somewhat from Burke's. Instead of focusing on the verbal rhetoric of religion (although that certainly remains a vital component), I have argued that the conceptual rhetoric of various religious ideas has a priori persuasiveness. The more specific question is thus: "Why are gods, souls, afterlives, and other components of religion highly credible to human beings even though they are objectively unverified?" The answer is that the intuitions and perceptions that human beings experience when sensing and conceiving of our environment, as well as the cultural rhetoric of religion, predispose us to believe in such things. These two aspects of religious concepts combine to make them particularly persuasive. Religious concepts are conceptually intuitive and rhetorically appealing because of preexisting cognitive biases in the evolved human mind.

References

Atran, Scott. In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Baron-Cohen, Simon, Alan M. Leslie, and Uta Frith. "Does the Autistic Child Have a Theory of Mind?" Cognition Vol. 21, No. 1 (October 1985): 37-46.

Barrett, Justin L. "Exploring the Natural Foundations of Religion."