Has Islamophobia become a conversation stopper?

[TheGlyphstone]

Tolvo's summary is fairly good as well.

At least as far as myself, I sometimes like to call myself a 'meh-theist'. It just doesn't have any direct impact on my life - I'm going to be a good person and do good things because I think that is right. If, at the end of my life a deity exists and decides to reward me for my behavior, free bonus! If no such deity exists, I lose out on nothing that wasn't there to begin with. If that deity exists and condemns me for doing everything it demands except the act of paying lip service to its name...that Heaven isn't one I would want to be part of anyways.

[Regina Minx]

I know I'm going to regret engaging you on this

I hope that regret is because we both understand that this is a digression from the original topic of Islamaphobia (btw, should Islamaphobia be capitalized? Islam itself is a proper noun, but is the concept itself a proper noun? Apropos of nothing, but I wrote the word out twice and had reservations both times. Spellcheck is informing me that it's Islamaphobia so I'll go with that, but it still looks weird). I hope that your regret isn't because you don't want to have the conversation or dislike conversation with me for some reason. I almost wrote in my original segue something to the effect that "I'll have the conversation with anyone that wants to engage honestly," but wanted something a little more succinct so cut it out. If you want to have the conversation, I'm game for it.

but from a consequentialist perspective, what good does changing that worldview accomplish beyond the selfish personal satisfaction of 'converting' someone?

...

-Does holding that belief result in tangible negative benefit to themselves or other people? If it does, removing that belief would help and should be encouraged, subject to circumstances. Examples - a person being gay and believing in the Christian God as a homophobic entity results in psychological trauma and depression. Whether that person is convinced that their God is a false construct entirely, or simply convinced to view their God from a different theological perspective, they are better off than they would have been prior to intervention. This last point can become sticky depending on if you consider a belief system to be one immutable package deal or a set of discrete values capable of being approached separately.

I truncated your words a bit to focus on the part of your trichotomy that I wanted to respond to. See, faith-based epistemologies always bear a negative cost for the simple reason that you cannot build a method of selecting beliefs that will only and exclusively lead you to a false belief that is personally comforting but otherwise harmless. Because to do that you’d have to know the belief was false. It’s a Catch-22. Since the only way to really, reliably know a belief is harmless is to employ a method that can assuredly discover that the belief would have no negative effect on you or if it is false, nor even if it is true. But any method that could discern that will unavoidably always discover the belief is false. Or at least, not likely true.

Any epistemology that sticks you with false beliefs, in other words, will invariably stick you with some false beliefs that are bad for you or others if you embrace them. Because you will have an epistemological blindspot, and that blindspot can’t police what gets in it. Hence you will never know which false beliefs are bad for you or how to detect them. Because the broken epistemology you’ve chosen will also have to shield you from such discoveries. Indeed, to protect you from discovering your false beliefs, it will have to cause you to build ever more elaborate systems of false beliefs. Accelerating the likelihood and frequency of harmful false beliefs slipping in among them.

You will always be far safer with a critical epistemology optimally built to just always catch false beliefs, or as often as possible. And you won’t be able to “tool” it to do that better for harmless beliefs than harmful ones. The only way to reliably filter out harmless false beliefs from harmful false beliefs is to filter them all out because you can't examine the impact of the effect your false beliefs have and still maintain them. So yeah, you have to shed harmless false beliefs that you find comforting. That's the inevitable price. But it’s a price far lower than the cost of the alternative.

TLDR: You can't have a bad belief that is harmless because the mental tool to develop and maintain such a belief requires a mental blindspot that can't screen out other beliefs that are harmful.

OK, this is theoretical philosophy stuff. How about grounding that in the real world people actually live in? What, besides this epistemological stuff, is really the harm of afterlife belief.

Well, for starters, it encourages us to procrastinate getting the stuff done that we have a chance to get done in the one and only life we know for a fact that we have. I specifically mean with regards to making amends to people we've wronged, forgive those we might want to forgive and repair broken relationships. If we maintain the belief that this life we're living is just a lobby, and the real life is the one that comes next, we can and do neglect to do those things. If you have an estranged relationship with, for instance, your father, you have until one of the two of you dies to repair that relationship, if doing so is something you want to do. If you hold an afterlife belief and tell yourself that you can say you're sorry or accept his apology (as the case may be) when you meet up in Heaven, you will probably be less inclined to repair that relationship while you're both still living. And if, as I believe, there is no afterlife, then you have squandered the one and only chance you have to make things right with your father.

I could go on, but only at the risk of further digression. In short, I think that the afterlife belief is pretty much always harmful.

[Tolvo]

That doesn't make any sense though. Since humans are capable of choosing what they believe, they can willfully ignore parts that cause harm or conflict with world views they hold(This is how you can have queer Catholics for example). As well many people don't 100% believe in something and have doubts and consider the possibility it could be false, many also don't see a need to make things worse now since things will just work out later. If someone follows a lot of religious systems with afterlives those contain teachings to make amends, to treat others well, to be kind to your community. You're also taking a very Christian-centric viewpoint when concepts like reincarnation often are based upon how good you are in life so if you aren't your next one will be worse which gives people incentive people to do better. You can also believe in an afterlife without being religious, without even believing in a god. Certain forms of Buddhism for instance are atheistic. If you want to use the idea of heaven as telling people to not make amends, not wanting to make amends and treating people poorly to many might be something that keeps you out of heaven and sends you to hell instead. The concept isn't "You can be as horrible as you want to be and still get in heaven" though there are horrible people who believe they personally belong in heaven(But often they believe they've done nothing wrong).

[Regina Minx]

That doesn't make any sense though. Since humans are capable of choosing what they believe...

But that's not exactly true though.  Human beings do not have direct control over their beliefs. They are either convinced that something is true or likely to be true, or they are not. If I told you that I would give you $1,000 if you sincerely believed that a pink elephant was flying outside your window right now, you couldn't do it. You may be able to say that you believe in a pink flying elephant, you may want to believe it because, hey, who couldn't use $1,000, but you cannot will yourself to believe that there's a pink elephant flying outside your window.

When we are introduced to a given proposition, such as "Some afterlife exists," and if we assume that the concept is intelligible, we make an assessment and arrive at whether we accept the proposition as true or likely true (colloquially, we believe it), or not. What is actually important here is the method that we use when we experience or evaluate this belief, what we call in philosophy is called indirect doxastic voluntarism. Here is where we are able to exercise control in the way we pursue and evaluate the evidence for or against a particular belief or claim. Spinoza wrote about this when he called the mind a "spiritual automaton", and while I would quibble over the terminology, he's almost required reading on the subject.

This means that one cannot directly control whether or not they believe in an afterlife, or anything at all. They can only indirectly control what beliefs they accept as true insofar as they make a good faith effort at understanding and evaluating the best available evidence in light of valid logic.

My point is that you cannot have a cognitive blindspot that allows only harmless false beliefs in to be accepted, because in order to determine that they are in fact harmless, you have to examine them critically, and a truth conclusion is inevitable. Any mechanism that would let false beliefs in (accepting it on authority, faith, or from the notion that this would be an awfully comforting thing, if true) cannot simultaneously screen them for harmlessness while at the same time omitting their truth-value. And once you determine that something is false or not likely to be true or unsupported by evidence, you cannot in any meaningful way claim that you 'believe' it.

[Tolvo]

Whether or not there is a pink elephant outside my window is something observable, whether or not there is an afterlife is not observable until you are dead, at which point if there isn't one it isn't observable because you no longer exist. Things that can't be observed and found to be fact or myth are typically what a lot of religions are built upon. As such they aren't false believes because they cannot be proven false. You can also take into account parts based on where they come from. The existence of an afterlife is generally supernatural while a religion hating gay people is related to the social systems of the religion. So you can very easily believe in the divine but also reject social aspects you consider abhorrent. As well getting something to believe something for just 1,000 dollars is a lot hard than getting them to believe something because the alternative is ceasing to exist and that all of your loved ones will never be seen again and are gone forever.

Cognitive blindspots are very common, it's often how people are able to be very hypocritical while convinced they aren't which is very common. People can also have mental illnesses and disorders that can impact the way the brain functions and how one things, and mental illnesses and disorders are broadly very common. I have OCD, I believe in nothing supernatural. At the same time I believe if I don't wash my hands twice someone will die. If you ask me if that is rational I'd say no, if you ask me if that is true I'd say no, if you ask me if I believe it still I'd say yes. It is something I consider false but still believe because of how OCD effects my mind. And a lot of people without mental illnesses can do this depending on what they convince themself of.

You have also ignored all of my points on how religious believes don't exist in a vacuum and that there are many religions in the world outside of Christianity which you have ignored.

[Regina Minx]

You have also ignored all of my points on how religious believes don't exist in a vacuum and that there are many religions in the world outside of Christianity which you have ignored.

I 'ignored' those points because I do not disagree with them and had nothing additive, only repetitive to add to them. For the latter, I chose a very specific example of a very particular kind of afterlife after defining the abstract of why blindly accepting a belief as true was a de facto epistemological harm. It's also not a harm isolated to religious belief, by the way.

Whether or not there is a pink elephant outside my window is something observable, whether or not there is an afterlife is not observable until you are dead, at which point if there isn't one it isn't observable because you no longer exist....

The correct time to believe something is when there is sufficient evidence to warrant belief. Not before. But even absent direct evidentiary experience, we are not precluded from evaluating the prior probability of a claim before consideration of evidence (indeed, this is exactly what it means to have an operational Bayesian epistemology; being able to assess prior probabilities to evaluate the impact of evidence or lack of evidence). Anyone who has a belief in anything absent direct empirical experience or sufficient grounding in prior probability of agreed-upon facts is, by definition, holding a belief without an epistemic warrant. The fact that it may just be a comforting belief is irrelevant since it leads to the harm I described before.

I also disagree with you when you say that an afterlife belief is 'merely' a metaphysical position on a supernatural event since it has social and interpersonal implications the kind of which I identified before. I'm confused why you bring it up since you also mentioned that religious beliefs don't exist in a vacuum. I'm curious how you hold that a religious belief, related to the afterlife or not, could exist in a vacuum. Since I'm sure you don't (since that's kind of what you said), I don't really follow your point.

More to the point, I believe that the best way to live in this world, not just for myself but for society, is if we make a conscious effort to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible. As Glyphstone asked, that's why I care and why I'll have the conversation, not for the sake of some smug satisfaction.

[Tolvo]

I have not said religious beliefs can exist in a vacuum. Spiritual beliefs can. Spiritual and religious are not the same thing though they often overlap. You can be a theist without being religious. It just isn't very common. You can be atheistic and religious, which is more common since there are forms of Satanism and Buddhist for example that are atheistic.

But I'm not sure we will get any further on this discussion since it appears we disagree on humans having individuality and having different patterns of brain function and how thoughts are even processed so I don't believe we can really reach an agreement.