The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life Robert Trivers - Religione ch 12

The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life Robert Trivers - Religione ch 12

• CHAPTER 12 Religion and Self-Deception
• Dawkins. Some people think of religion itself as complete self-deception, all of it nonsense on its face, counterfactual, and in the extreme having nothing but negative side effects.
• Critica a D.: but these people have no theory for how this malady could have spread so far... What some have is a metaphor. Religion is a viral meme; that is, it is not an actual virus, which can easily bring a population to its knees, but rather it is merely a thought system... This is not a very impressive foundation for an evolutionary theory of religion,
• First we need to separate the truth value of religious statements from the possible benefits of believing in them,
• Il credente e il meta ateo convivono. there is often an internal struggle within religions between general truth and personal or group falsehood. That is, the essence of religion is neither self-deception nor deep truth, but a mixture of the two,
• Esempio do beneficio. Religions tend to increase within-religion cooperation at the cost of lowered cooperation with outsiders. Often this involves a false historical narrative
• COOPERATION WITHIN THE GROUP
• the double-edged sword of religion, inside and outside: a religion urges its own members to treat each neighbor as they would treat themselves, yet also to slaughter every nonbeliever and outsider, as is ordered in the good book, for group after group, down to every last man, woman, and child.
• Dio ti vede: comportati bene. In some religions, people imagine that God is watching and evaluating their every action.
• One study shows that even a pair of eyelike objects on a small part of a computer screen can unconsciously increase cooperative behavior in an anonymous economic game.
• Sopravvivenza delle comunità. One interesting fact on the effect of religion on cooperation emerges from comparing small religious organizations—“sects”—with small nonreligious communes. There is a striking tendency for the religious to outlast the secular... So religion provides some kind of social glue that makes organizations based on them more likely to endure
• Strategie pastorali. Another interesting difference between the two kinds of communes is that the more costly the requirements imposed on group members in a commune (regarding food, tobacco, clothing, hairstyle, sex, communication with outsiders, fasts, and mutual criticism), the longer the survival of a religious commune... Spiegazione: greater cost needs to be rationalized, leading to greater self-deception, in this case in the direction of group identity and solidarity.
• RELIGION: A RECIPE FOR SELF-DECEPTION
• A Unified, Privileged View of the Universe for Your Own Group
• I prescelti. Either you are the founding people and all others degenerate dogs, or else yours are the “chosen people”either by ethnicity (Jewish)
• There May Be a Series of Interconnected Phantasmagorical Things
• Once you have signed on to a few of these notions, there are hardly any boundaries left, and very small details can turn out to be critical features of dogma.
• IMHO: sul punto vedi Plantinga vs Swinburne
• RELIGION AND HEALTH
• Religious behavior and practice appear to be positively correlated with health, a well-established fact with dozens of careful studies in support,
• tendency of religions to establish rules related to health: avoid tobacco and alcohol, pork, top predators such as sharks and lions (which tend to concentrate toxins as they move up the food chain), and generally risky or unwise behavior,
• Some effects may come from the benefits of positive belief itself—for example, on immune function—as well as benefits that flow from being a member of a mutually supporting group,
• The exalting, positive music of so many religions is probably on the high end for positive immune
• Even confessing sins to God and disclosing trauma may have beneficial immune effects.
• One benefit of religion is that it does provide a framework for understanding and acting within our world, a framework we might expect to provide some psychological and mental benefits.
• Benefici alla corteccia cetebrale. It was as if religion was providing them a buffer against error.
• PARASITES AND RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY
• Religions have repeatedly split into subreligions that are sometimes at one another’s throats.
• Recent work suggests that parasites and, in particular, parasite load may drive religions to split... The argument goes as follows: Where parasite load is low, an in-group and out-group member may be almost equivalent where risk of transmitting a new infection is concerned, namely, low. But where parasite load is high, an asymmetry emerges. An in-group member will in general have been exposed to the same set of parasites as the other members and will carry some of the same genes that give at least partial resistance to many of these parasites...From the standpoint of each group, the other is a threat
• What is the evidence? Two broad factors are of interest: religious and linguistic diversity. That is, how many languages and religions coexist per unit area? With high parasite load, we expect many of each, since splitting into smaller groups facilitates language formation.
• Il freddo ci rende omogenei. Canada and Brazil are roughly the same size, yet Canada has 15 religions and Brazil, 159. Canada is located in the far north, where parasite load is low;
• Processo. Presumably, no one is saying, “Look, worm density has increased alarmingly in ourselves in this area for the past ten years. Perhaps it would be wise for us to be more focused on in-group interactions, including mating. Let’s up our racism level.”Instead, as I imagine it, religion provides substitute logics with similar.
• WHY THE BIAS AGAINST WOMEN?
• Contro l'argomento prevedente: molti parassiti sino favoriti dalla riproduzione intra druppo. We know that sexual reproduction—and the recombination it promotes—is strongly associated with evolutionary protection from coevolving parasites.
• Consider greater sexual promiscuity, or diversity of mating partners, well known to be higher in both birds and humans in the tropics, and presumed to represent an adaptive response to parasite load by increasing genetic quality of offspring.
• Tradimento. women would benefit more from such activity (improved genetic quality of their offspring) and thus provoke greater male countermoves, the kind of behavior we described so vividly in Chapter 5: mutilation, beating, terror, and murder?
• L'obbligo di castità. There are very few genetic dynasties in the Catholic Church (contrast North Korea, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, India, Haiti, and the United States), so the Church is likely to be corrupt but not nepotistically so.
• Bioetica cattolica. The Catholic Church outlaws all control by a woman over her own reproduction short of abstinence from sex at the very moment that she is most eager for it. She is not allowed to prevent conception if copulation occurs, and she is not allowed to terminate a pregnancy, however induced (rape and incest included). This appears to be a simple strategy for maximizing group reproduction.
• POWER CORRUPTS
• the powerful are less attentive to others, see the world less from their standpoint, and feel less empathy for them.
• Dimmi con chi vai e ti dirò che dottrina hai. The religious effects are that humility, fairness, forgiveness, and neighborly love are more apt to be virtues preached among the powerless.
• Religioni di minoranza. Islam’s more peaceful injunctions came when it was an oppressed minority, its more assertive when it reemerged with military power.
• monotheistic religions: with state power comes a new source of bias.
• Pope Paul XXIII and Vatican II inspired in the Latin American Church a new “liberation theology”in the 1980s closer to the humble, persecuted church (prior to Constantin), the time when Jesus’s teachings were actually written down.
• RELIGIONS IMPOSE MATING SYSTEMS
• Religions tend to impose their own mating systems, and these in turn affect degrees of relatedness within and between religions.
• inbreeding has well-known effects. Products of inbreeding show less internal variability than do products of outbreeding. This genetic similarity can have two detrimental effects. On the one hand, relatively rare negative traits that require two copies of the same gene for expression (for example, sickle-cell anemia, Tay-Sachs disease) become more common. On the other, greater genetic variability has well-known benefits in defending against rapidly coevolving diseases,
• Mitigare gli effetti dell' in breeding. The second form of in-migration is simple conversion (initially unconnected to marriage), and religions differ in their rules regarding this. Thus, Christianity has usually been a proselytizing religion,
• RELIGION PREACHES AGAINST SELF-DECEPTION
• It is often argued that self-deception interferes with one’s ability to know not only oneself and others but also God herself.
• Regola aurea come tegola gnoseologica. If you are told to treat others as you wish to be treated, then you have a rule, which, if actually followed, would counter much of your unconscious self-deceptive tendencies.
• Religions also preach explicitly against self-deception. Consider Jesus’s famous teachings about not judging others (Matthew 7:1–5):
• Pagliuzze. Why do you see the minor fault in your neighbor but fail to see the major one in yourself?
• Another argument against the speed—and injustice—with which we judge others comes from the case where Jesus is presented with a woman about to be stoned to death for committing adultery. His reaction? “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
• one that is opposed to the in-group/out-group bias. In the parable of the Good Samaritan
• Padre nostro
• 1 assertion of humility: “hallowed be thy name” and “thy will be done.”
• 2 you may ask that your own sins be forgiven but only insofar as you forgive those of others. This is critical: no blanket amnesty. You must give to get; you must forgive to be forgiven. This binds you to a psychological
• 3 ask not to be led into temptation—really an injunction against allowing yourself to be tempted—and to be protected from all evil (self-induced included).
• Salmo. hard to imagine looking God straight in the face and lying—to
• Islam. the jihad against oneself, called the greater jihad... This is a personal struggle that requires controlling your bodily desires (for money, pleasure, satisfaction) in order to purify your soul. These desires occlude self-knowledge, in our system of logic, by encouraging self-deception.
• Greek sage Thales once put the general matter succinctly. “Oh master,”he was asked, “what is the most difficult thing to do?”“To know thyself,”he replied. “And the easiest?”“To give advice to others.”
• Eastern religions also sometimes urge rather extreme systems of physical self-denial
• INTERCESSORY PRAYER—DOES IT WORK?
• Then came a multimillion-dollar study, carefully organized with six hospitals in which groups prayed for given patients from the day before they entered surgery until two weeks later, while another group of patients received no such prayer. Meanwhile, some of those being prayed for were told that they were being prayed... no effect whatsoever of intercessory prayer on the outcome... One hypothesis is that when told people are praying for you, you interpret your situation as being more dire than it really is, with associated stress.
• IMHO. Per ina confutazione vedi Swinburne sullo studio Benson
• RELIGION AND SUPPORT FOR SUICIDE ATTACKS
• Religion has an external, social aspect and an internal, contemplative one. Across a variety of suicidal conditions (Palestinian surveys, a hostile prime for Israeli settlers), religious attendance (the social aspect) is positively correlated with support for suicide bombings, but prayer (the contemplative) is not.
• RELIGION → SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS → WARFARE
• Religions tend to contribute to war in several ways. They encourage an in-group mentality,
• But there is one final gift of many religions: self-righteousness.

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