Multipolar disagreements (Hal’s religious quandry)
Hal Finney wrote: "…reminds me of my justification for not being religious: the majority of people in the world are not Christian, the majority of people in the world are not Muslim, the majority of people in the world are not Hindu, the majority of people in the world are not Buddhist, etc… So I can’t pick any religion without being in a minority! I’m not sure the conclusion really follows though. Something I’m still working on."
Also, the majority of people in the world are not atheist (or non-religious, or secular). Absent reasons to weight some opinions more, what should one believe when there are several inconsistent views, none of them commanding majority support?
I think in such a case one should believe a superposition of the views, i.e. one assigns a probability measure over the alternatives that reflects the degree of support they each have from their various constituencies. In the unrealistic, simplest case, where everyone’s reliability is the same and errors are uncorrelated, this might perhaps amount to assigning probability proportional to number of proponents.
Assuming the unrealistic simplifying premiss, in Hal’s case this would amount to being uncertain but not dismissive about spiritual matters, say being an agnostic who tends to believe that some existing religion is probably right, but not sure which one although more likely one of the big ones than some minor cult.
Of course, you might find that almost everybody would agree that such agnosticism is wrong, and you would find yourself in disagreement with this overwhelming majority. But it would nevertheless seem to be the position that would minimize disagreement.
A separate problem is what you should do if you end up with this belief. Suppose each religion claims that you will go to hell unless you believe that particular religion with all your heart. In that case, your rational course of action might be to pick the most likely religion and then do what you can to try to become a full convert to it.
The existence of such extreme disagreements as in the religious case, however, strongly suggests that not everybody involved is unbiased an in honest pursuit of objective truth. Some other factors must play a huge role in determining religious belief. So you might also think that by carefully examining what those non-rational factors are, you may be able to do better than minimizing disagreement; you might reach some insights that would make it rational for you to take sides. Of course, it is easy to delude oneself into thinking that one has such special insights, so one should be cautious.
Since the vast majority of humanity is religious, more so if you consider the issue historically, then you've got a problematic defintion of sanity. If religions are infectious memes, then they are more like symbiotic gut bacteria than they are like diseases.
The definition of sanity, along with other psychological parameters, evolves over time. What could be considered sane behavior for lesser primates or children would probably be considered insane, or at least not fully sane or retarded, by adult homo sapiens standards.
If the vast majority of humanity carries gut bacteria that makes them behave irrationally, it doesn't make the gut bacteria carrying population sane, compared to those who don't carry the bacteria and don't act irrationally. The definition of sanity doesn't appear to be linked to the behavior of the vast majority of humanity, whether they are sane or not.
Can one be sane without being rational? Can one be rational without being logical? Does intelligence play a part? To be able to help people who suffer from lack of "straight thinking" one needs to know what it takes to be rational and logical.
I wouldn't call them sane with respect to that particular issue. If you unhesitatingly repeat back memes composed by authors some of whom suffered from organic brain disorders, you can't exactly be called "sane" even if you don't suffer from the same organic brain disorder yourself.Since the vast majority of humanity is religious, more so if you consider the issue historically, then you've got a problematic defintion of sanity. If religions are infectious memes, then they are more like symbiotic gut bacteria than they are like diseases. Religion has been a key ingredient of human culture since the beginning, and it's part of what made us human.
That's not to say that we necessarily still need it. Perhaps we've arrived at a historical point where we can rid ourselves of religious memes, maybe they do more harm than good. But it's hard to evaluate that if you don't have any concept of what the good might be, and a lot of the proudly atheist don't seem to have any sense of the real role of religion in society.
I presume that the people here must have given some thought to situations where it might be beneficial (in the evolutionary or economic sense) to believe in things that aren't true, or at least aren't provable. If your goal is to eliminate false beliefs then you need to have a theory of why people might want to hold onto those false beliefs.
Religion is a really interesting case because it involves deeply-held beliefs that are deeply counterintutive and often completely unprovable, with the latter trait somehow reinforcing the former.