Is Religion a Good Idea?

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i think we need that any comprehensive assessment of whether an idea is a good one or worth believing has to attend both to its relationship to evidence and logic, and also pay attention to the causal consequences. So i'm enough of a pragmatist and enough of a jamesian to think that downstream consequences matter also. But i think it's true of many forms of delusive ideation that they provide a short term psychological or social benefit at a long term collective cost. And if that's your reason for believing in, say, god, i think your reasons are fundamentally selfish and mean to be re examined.

Astonishingly irrational ideas are spreading. COVID-19 denial, anti-vaxxers compromising public health, conspiracy thinking hijacking minds and inciting mob violence, toxic partisanship cleaving our nations, the return of Flat Earth theory… What the heck is going on? Why is all this happening, and why now? More important, what can we do about it? Does our “right to our opinion” trump our responsibilities? Does the resulting ethos effectively compromise mental immune systems, allowing “mind parasites” to overrun them? Are conspiracy theories, evidence-defying ideologies, and garden-variety bad ideas all species of mind parasites, each of which employs clever strategies to circumvent mental immune systems? In this conversation, based on the book Mental Immunity, Andy Norman shows that minds and cultures have immune systems, and that they really can break down. Fortunately, he assures us that they can also be built up: strengthened against ideological corruption. Can his ideas revolutionize our capacity for critical thinking?