Many people have requested a one-page summary of the new book. This one is under 400 words. [Slightly revised 8 June 2010.]
Roy Sablosky: NO ONE BELIEVES IN GOD (second draft, November 2009)
- It’s not about belief
- That religion has to do with beliefs becomes implausible when you look at the behaviors it evokes. For example:
- Their “beliefs” challenged, people are often enraged, as if you had threatened not their opinions but their safety.
- One joins a group, not its beliefs. Self-described Catholics may differ profoundly with their church elders on important issues; they are Catholics despite their beliefs.
- Notoriously, church elders routinely flout the “beliefs” they most fervently espouse.
- Claims of belief are implausible where the tenet in question is nonsensical.
- Religious propositions are incoherent. (This is probably by design. A slogan is catchier if no one knows what it means.) In the sentence “Jesus loves you” for example, both the subject and the verb are impossible to characterize or observe. Such a statement is perfectly empty: it is a pseudo-proposition.
- Since they are without meaning, religious statements can be neither meant nor believed. Thomas Jefferson: “I suppose belief to be the assent of the mind to an intelligible proposition.” Ludwig Wittgenstein: “one cannot mean a senseless series of words.”
- Therefore, no one really believes in the teachings of any prophet or the existence of any god. It cannot be done. It does not happen. People who think they are doing it are mistaken.
- That religion has to do with beliefs becomes implausible when you look at the behaviors it evokes. For example:
- Religion is made of memes plus authoritarianism
- Religious “beliefs” are memes. Just like germs, they are contagious; and just like germs they evolve through natural selection. The religious memes circulating now have evolved over thousands of years to be very, very good at what they do.
- People are naturally deferential to authority figures.
- Authority and memetic self-replication combine to form religion.
- What we should do
- Admit no religious exceptions to any legislation. A few examples:
- End all tax breaks (that is: subsidies) for religious organizations and their personnel.
- Eliminate chaplaincy programs at all levels of government, including the armed services.
- Remove legislative impediments to abortion and birth control.
- Outlaw the teaching of antediluvian codswallop in public school.
- Government should ratify only civil unions, not “marriages”. Anyone willing and competent to sign such a contract should be allowed to.
- Revise the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. No proposal having a religious rationale or using religious terminology should become a law.
- Admit no religious exceptions to any legislation. A few examples:
YASHWATA 
Well, a few people probably knew, but not many!
I have not seen a single person who believes in God. Even Pop do not believe in God.
It is very easy to understand for most of us that none of us believe in specific theory than our own which also keeps on changing with age 5y-100year’s age. Same is true for our ancestry. If you tell them what there grand father use to believe they don’t agree with it. If you tell what their grand children are going to think they don’t agree with it either.
1000 years back no one knew that when there is night here there is day other side of the world. Every one on all part of earth had different story. Which has is also changing with time. It is very easy to understand whole universe life, death , rich , poor, health and sickness if you really want to for this you don’t need to link with your so called faith. You don’t need to believe one theory developed in one part of the earth when there are many more on earth. Yours only as per your perception in 2011 only can not be right right. We have right to change and what ever we believed till yesterday we need not stick to it.
I’m glad you are opposed to any kind of coercion, it follows that you must be against ALL marriage including gay marriage, for I as a ‘single’ taxpayer who who has lived and procreated with the same women for 16 years does not think anybody should have more federal benefits than we do, which is none.
Are you against marriage Mr. Soblonsky?
Wow. I wonder where all this anger comes from.
I am opposed to any kind of coercion. Perhaps this is a position you find difficult to comprehend. In any case, please don’t put words in my mouth. I have of course never said that “the federal government should intervene everywhere” — quite the opposite. I want the government to do nothing regarding religious belief.
No I’ve understood your “theories” and have dispatched all of them. Common sense is clearly not a reliable guide to anything but EVEN IF IT WERE THEN YOU CANNOT DENY SOME PEOPLE BELIEVE IN GOD.
Another serious contradiction on your part.
“The proposition is meaningless because it contradicts itself.”
That IS NOT TRUE. It has already been shown that contradiction does not render a proposition meaningless but MORE IMPORTANTLY I gave you an example that was syntactically a contradiction but hermeneutically so.
YOU ARE WRONG AGAIN.
Then you have the audacity to ask this question:
“What have we learned? What information do we have that we didn’t have before?”
What does your theory explain? What problem does it attempt to solve? I submit the answer is NOTHING and I’m sure can’t it so this is the last time I write about you here.
And by the way you are a TOTAL hypocrite when you say that “am opposed to any kind of coercion” because you think think the federal government should intervene EVERYWHERE. That’s COERCION dum dum.
Why do you keep repeating this? Fuck analytical philosophy. My theory rests on common sense. If you would pay attention to the common-sense part of what I’m saying, you’d have a chance of understanding it.
Did I say that it’s meaningless because I can’t understand it? Oh, I get it — this is just a gratuitous insult.
The proposition is meaningless because it contradicts itself. After we are told that God is X, and Y, and not X, and not Y, what do we know about it? What have we learned? What information do we have that we didn’t have before? Not an iota. That’s all I’m saying. It has nothing to do with positivism or analysis. It’s just plain as day.
To call Democritus’s atomic theory metaphysics betrays a profound misunderstanding. It was a physical theory, not metaphysical.
No. The fact that until recently it could not be checked does not make it metaphysical. Untestable is not the same as incoherent. Think about this. It’s important.
I have not glossed over it, I have carefully ruled it out. You ignore my arguments and repeat your own. I have shown why people cannot believe in certain things; your reply amounts to, “Of course they do!”
There are problems here (that the Bible is “inerrant” is incoherent, so no one can really believe it) but I broadly agree with this paragraph. We need to watch out for the tangible things that people can and do believe. Thinking “God is one, and three” cannot have the kind of effect on one’s behavior that thinking “people who don’t believe in Jesus are evil” can.
My views (which you have failed to understand) are thoroughly humanistic. I am opposed to any kind of coercion, period. Your accusation is baseless, reckless and repellent. Take it back.
The notion that metaphysics is entirely meaningless and that metaphysical statements are not genuine propositions but expressions along the lines of moans or grunts or tears and hence not expressions of belief or about which belief can be assented is indeed the CORE doctrine of Logical Positivism and you can deny it however strongly but that doesn’t make it any less true: Your theory rests on a long discredited concept from analytical philosophy.
I’ll make a prediction about your theory: You’ll not find a single serious academic working in analytical philosophy that would agree that that part of your theory is sound.
It is logically untenable for the reasons I laid out above and yet you still resort to comparing religious statements to nonsense as when you use ‘blev’ and ‘klarn’ above. Since you don’t seem to grasp the subtleties I’ll try to use plain English.
Metaphysical propositions CANNOT be shown to be meaningless in any system that would allow us to include universal laws (and much else we would like to accept) as genuine. Just because YOU cannot understand “God is three, and one, and not three, and not one.” doesn’t make it meaningless; there could be contexts, wordplay, metaphor, and other factors that make it meaningful. Think of Vinnie Antonelli’s clearly understandable statement in My Blue Heaven when he said to Barney “I’m not sayin I’m witch you, I’m sayin I’m witch you”
Furthermore some of our scientific theories started as metaphysics. If you follow Democritus’s logic in his development of atomism it is expressly metaphysical and there was no technology at the time that could prove or disprove his ideas yet he was roughly correct.
Was his theory meaningless until the late 18th century when its empirical consequences could be worked out and investigated?
You also cannot without any arguments make an exception for the propositions about math and logic but reject the propositions of logic that undermine your theory. This is yet another contradiction that makes your theory incoherent.
And you totally glossed over my example about aliens. If people can believe in aliens from Zeta Reticuli they can believe in angels from heaven. And if they can believe in angels they can believe in gods and if they can believe in gods they can believe in God. If you’ve ever been camping with credulous people its impossible not to accept that some people really do believe in ghosts and if they can believe in ghosts why not more powerful supernatural creatures?
Ironically the less sophisticated the theology in question the less relevant your (silly) theory would be with respect to it. For it is only with the scholastic tradition that religion turns from a set of primitive beliefs about the natural world into a metaphysical system. There is nothing ‘meaningless’ in the cosmology of religious fundamentalists who believe the Bible is inerrant. It is these people I think whose politics bothers you the most. So we should I guess respect the political views of a Sarah Palin as genuine but render those of Michael Novak as
meaningless. And primitive tribes that worship completely tangible objects like bears or whatever would have to be taken very seriously.
Whatever level of import political agenda plays in your ridiculous ideas I hope you recognize the disturbing shadows of totalitarianism in them. It would not be the first time the absolutism inherent in militant atheism tried to rationalize the political marginalization of religious dissenters.
Sorry, none of that applies. As I have said, my comments are based on commonsense observation, not anyone else’s theories.
You’re right, he did. Thanks for pointing this out. It helps clarify the concept for me. Yes, mathematical equations are pseudo-propositions, in the sense that they are empirically ungrounded; they are not about anything real. Theology is the same way.
I’m thinking that mathematics is a special case where we do kind of believe things like, for example, “e to the i pi equals minus one” — even though they are pseudo-propositions. The reason for this, I reckon, is that although the propositions are not about anything real, they are embedded in a social practice that has rules that anyone who wished to can follow. If I see that you can divide both sides of an equation and still (under certain well-defined conditions) have an equation, then I can do it myself. So the manipulation of these special signs becomes its own reality — kind of like in theology. But the theologian insists that his ruminations refer to something real. The mathematician does not.
I am not interested in this because my argument does not depend on Wittgenstein.
Whatever — I am not trying to make a theory of meaning based on the notion of pseudo-propositions. That is the farthest thing from my mind.
No, that doesn’t address my claim. The dieter believes that dieting will make her thin. She does not believe, for example, that ‘blev’ will make her ‘klarn’, where blev and klarn are both terms that no have no conceivable referent in nature. She can be wrong or right about the dieting. She can’t be wrong or right about blev and klarn.
I have never claimed that my theory covers all possible behaviors. There is no “black swan” that would disprove the whole theory. It’s not that kind of theory, and I have never claimed that it was. I merely claim that most of the “beliefs” called “religious” by their promoters are incoherent (in the way I keep describing and you keep sidestepping) and therefore, given the ordinary meaning of the word ‘belief’, cannot be believed.
Well, I can go a bit further out on that particular limb. Beliefs that are concrete enough don’t sound like religion! Take “Santa will bring me presents”, for example. We don’t regard that as a religious statement. Why? It’s too clear! It can be falsified! The ones that really sound religious are the ones that don’t even begin to make sense, like “God is three, and one, and not three, and not one.”
The two cases are different. You have accused me (repeatedly) of starting from a political agenda rather than from the facts of the matter. I know that this is not so. (And there is no evidence for it, so I guess you’re just trying to be hurtful.)
The case of “religious belief” is more intricate. Here have day-to-day observations and semantic considerations that both imply that what people are saying cannot be exactly what they mean. The question then becomes: What is the nature of the difference, and what causes people to do this?
I disagree with most of your last post and I’ll get to that later but first I am going to try to show you why the doctrine of pseudo-propositions and their relation to meaning is invalid.
I Don’t have time to properly attribute everyone but I rely VERY heavily on Popper along with Tarski, Godel, and Zermelo.
This is the doctrine upon which all theories of the type you are using are built. For a proposition to be meaningful these three conditions must hold.
(a)All words which occur in it have meaning.
(b)All words which occur in it fit together properly.
(c)It is a truth function of, or reducible to elementary propositions expressing observations or perceptions.
This is true of Wittgenstein, early Carnap, Schlick etc. and all those who rely of pseudo-propositional concepts of positivism. It is also implicit in (a) (from (c)) that all names that occur in a proposition must be empirically definable.
But this system cannot work for (c) would declare all universal statements like general scientific laws meaningless. Likewise the lack of genuine universal names renders (a) invalid with respect to science and (b) has been shown to be invalid in the work of Zermelo and others who proved we can ALWAYS construct a language were the formula in question is both well-formed and in some cases even a true statement.
Thus from (b) alone you are left not only with the vexing problem of proving that the believer’s proposition is meaningless in ALL consistent languages but also with proving no meaningful sentence exists in any consistent language that the believer would not recognize as an alternative formulation of what he confesses to believe. These proofs apply to “ordinary language” just as well as they do to mathematics so you cannot dodge this as you tried to above.
But it gets worse, lets take a look at the inconsistencies and indeed incoherence that arises in the system that popularized the notion of pseudo-propositions; Tractarian Wittgenstein. And by the way Wittgenstein said EXACTLY what I suggested above that you challenged:
prop 6.2- …The propositions of mathematics are equations and therefore pseudo-propositions.-So I guess we cannot believe them can we?
But I digress lets look at how Popper buried Wittgenstein.
0. In the preface to the Tractatus Wittgenstein claims “…the truth of the thoughts that are here communicated seems to me unassailable and definitive”
1. We are then told this about science: prop 4.11- The totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science (or the whole corpus of the natural sciences).
2. We are told in prop 4.112- …Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. But this can’t be a statement that belongs to the “whole of natural science” and hence it CANNOT be true.
3. But it can’t be false either since then its negation would have to be true and belong to the whole of natural sciences, and this of course would be an absurd contradiction.
4. Thus it must be a meaningless, senseless, or nonsensical statement and the same holds for MOST of Wittgenstein’s propositions.
5. Thus Wittgenstein’s whole philosophy is nonsensical and he ADMITS it.
6. But of course given the preface it follows we can in fact communicate DEFINITE TRUTHS by propounding nonsense as long as it is DEEPLY SIGNIFICANT NONSENSE.
This is the kind of absurd stupidity that arises when you substitute verbal puzzles as solutions to genuine philosophical problems. By your criterion of belief Wittgenstein of course could not believe any of it anyway. Popper takes his analysis much further, I heavily paraphrased and would refer you to The Open Society and Its Enemies vol II footnote 51 to Chapter 11.
But we can’t stop there lets say you weaken the already inconsistent conditions on meaningful propositions above by removing condition (c) and allowing genuine universals as names in condition (a). Then you can have MEANINGFUL scientific statements but you can now of course apply logical predicates to concepts like God since they can be both universal and need not be empirically definable.
Predicates like ‘the thing x occupies position y’ or Pos(x,y), and ‘the thing x can put object y into position z’ or Put(x,y,z) and so on and define the thing ‘x’ as God whenever ‘y’ and ‘z’ are everything or everywhere or whatever universal you want. You can even add predicates that make God the thing that always and only speaks the TRUTH.
And I reiterate IT HAS BEEN PROVEN that no consistent theory of meaning can be based on the notion of pseudo-propositions since its been SHOWN that ALL such systems require that ANY and ALL propositions are DECIDABLE and that is known NOT TO BE TRUE.
And your thesis suffers from further problems. Above you offered no FALSIFIABLE predictions of your theory and instead offered only INVAlID verifications. They are invalid since a religious person may still believe the proscriptions they flout just as the overweight dieter may genuinely believe skipping dessert is better and healthier but she caves into cravings anyway and feels bad about it and does more sit ups the next day.
You have ironically decided to hold the position that your thesis is philosophical hence by the criteria within which you have formulated it would make it meaningless and hence something that you yourself cannot possibly believe!!!-I of course accept that your theory is both meaningful and that you believe it. Sadly you cannot do the same.
But I think you are in an even worse position than that, for there do exist religious cults which are clearly devout but whose beliefs are not properly metaphysical. And here I am thinking of cults that worship aliens. Now I don’t believe we have evidence of ETs but they are at least possible and certainly meaningful and its conceivable they have vast wisdom and power worthy of admiration and awe. The Heaven’s Gate cult obviously didn’t flout perhaps the strongest commandment of all, and to claim they didn’t believe their faith is not only groundless but offensive.
You said to me above that “I am more familiar with my inner thought-processes than you are”; you are correct and I think most people are more familiar with their own inner thought processes than you are and the next time someone tells you they believe in this or that religious nonsense you should probably believe them considering you obviously believe in deeply inconsistent political nonsense.
Thanks for hanging in there, Tomkinson. I know that this is a surprisingly subtle topic.
Yes. People do believe certain propositions.
The form is the same, but in the former case nothing whatsoever is known about the subject of the sentence. In most cases we know what ‘Dad’ means. But we do not ever know what ‘God’ means, and therefore we don’t know what ‘God doesn’t want you to eat pork’ means.
Here you are just repeating an assertion which I have already disproved.
I don’t think Wittgenstein says exactly that. But we are dealing with ordinary language, not mathematics. Just as you cannot lift a thing that is not a material object, you cannot believe a thing that is not a proposition. We believe (or disbelieve) propositions. That’s how that word is used. “God doesn’t want you to eat meat” is not a proposition (it only looks like one!), so it can’t be believed.
I am more familiar with my inner thought-processes than you are, and I happen to know that your description is false.
My explanation is perfectly simple. You are grasping at straws here.
Again you are merely repeating an assertion which I have already disproved.
Politics. Slogans. Parochialism. Lies. Coercion. Such are the causes of so-called religious behavior.
Dude, I have written a whole book on this topic, and you have not read it. But I will address the question.
Admittedly, the philosophical observation that most religious tenets are pseudo-propositions is, you know, philosophical and does not admit of counter-examples. But, as I have mentioned, we see evidence every day that people do not believe what they say they believe. They routinely violate every single one of the Ten Commandments that they supposedly venerate. They masturbate, fornicate, swear, abort and divorce at least as much as people do, who don’t have supposedly profound and unalterable beliefs that you shouldn’t do those things. So, what do they actually mean when they say that they have those beliefs? Here is a simple theory: they mean that they belong to a special club, where one of the house rules is that you have to say certain things as if you believe them. If this is true, then their “religion” consists of lip service, not belief.
Your position is simply not tenable for the following reasons:
1. You accept that beliefs exist.
2. “God doesn’t want you to eat pork” is of an identical logical form to “Dad doesn’t want you to eat pork”
3. There is nothing incoherent about belief in God or Santa Clause for that matter, therefore there is no logical difference between the two propositions or beliefs that are so derived from them.
4. But even if you are correct that God is an incoherent concept (you’re not), according to Wittgenstein the propositions of mathematics are pseudo-propositions, does it follow that one cannot believe them?
What you have done is start with a political agenda (The policies of Christian conservatives = Bad)
and then generated a ridiculous theory based on a poor understanding of a long discredited philosopher (Wittgenstein) and junk science (memetics) to convince yourself that their positions should be ignored because alas they don’t really have them.
And by the way you are wrong. Its more parsimonious to simply believe the Jew when he says he doesn’t eat pork because of his religion because he probably does the same when his neighbors are not around. And you are also left with the question “Well why do his neighbors not want him to eat pork” so your explanation is anything but parsimonious.
I agree with you that belief is MORE than a disposition to act but we can observe and explain and predict better if we posit people actually believe these things. Saying “They simply have different practices” is not an explanation its a description, religious beliefs explain WHY they have different practices.
Imagine a room filled with unidentified devout conservative Christians and devout conservative Muslims and then someone comes in and burns an effigy of Muhammad. The Muslims would react very differently than Christians and their ‘reaction’ could not be called a ‘practice.’ There would likely be physically measurable effects like heart rate and adrenal response that would make it easy to identify which was which. They are reacting differently because they are assigning different significance to the exact same event. And if that different significance is not based on their different beliefs what is it based on?
I leave with a question:
1. What evidence would falsify your claim that religious beliefs do not exist?
Perhaps it can be, but in the case of religious propositions it has not been.
I don’t need Tarski to explain this particular problem to me. I understand it already. It was not easy, but I sussed it out!
Obviously, there is more to it than this.
Not eating a pork sandwich could perhaps be explained as a result of a belief that your eating it would be frowned upon by a god — but it’s more parsimonious to explain it as the result of a belief that your eating it will be frowned upon by your neighbors. There is ample evidence for the latter belief, and none for the former.
Please be careful. You are mixing up concepts which are crucial to the discussion. I am not sure that it would be absurd to claim that it is not possible for people to believe things that are not true. However, this is not my claim. I claim that it is not possible for people to believe a proposition that is incoherent. This is because an incoherent proposition is only a pseudo-proposition: it doesn’t “propose” anything. It promises to do so, and then it fails. “G-d doesn’t want you to eat pork” is a pseudo-proposition. It does not tell you anything about anything.
Most of this excitement can be explained as excitement about getting presents. As for Santa Claus — children believe that their parents know everything; when Mom says that Santa exists, they take her word for it. This is different from believing that Santa has the attributes claimed (incoherently) for him.
But do you really want to lean on the “beliefs” of children (and, by extension, adults who think like children)?
No. They have different practices.
I explain wars with reference to the powerful men who instigate them (usually for transparently self-regarding reasons). In many cases the instigators use religious rhetoric to justify their campaigns. In other words, they lie about why they’re doing it. This is of course true about almost all wars. They happen for reasons other than the ones that are so loudly proclaimed.
““Do religious pronouncements rely on meaningless signs?” is a pivotal question””
Yes it is a pivotal question and the answer is clearly no. Not only does religion not rely on meaningless signs it has been shown since the 1930’s that meaning can be given to ANY set of signs. You need to start with Tarski and bring yourself up to date with respect to logic and meaning.
“They don’t “behave as though they believe”. This too is so obvious that I have little enthusiasm for arguing it further.”
Yes they most certainly do. If a Catholic believes that they can only be redeemed by Christ and don’t eat meat on Fridays to honor the alleged sacrifice and chose to take communion their behavior is different on Friday and Sunday from that of non-Catholic.
If belief is narrowly construed as a disposition to act am I not given more information about whether or not a practicing Jew is likely to eat a pork sandwich?
Are suicide bombers not more likely to blow themselves up because they believe they will be rewarded by Allah?
“People routinely demand special privileges based on their “profoundly held beliefs”. ”
This is completely irrelevant to whether or not those beliefs exist. People routinely demand all kinds of privileges for all manner of stupid beliefs not merely religious ones.
“I am simply pointing out that they do not have such beliefs, and therefore the privileges are underserved. This is sociology, not metaphysics.”
This is neither sociology nor metaphysics but deeply erroneous thinking. If these beliefs do not exist how am I able to statistically predict the likelihood that X will do Z if I am told X believes Y?
You are basically claiming it is not possible for people to believe things that are not true which is absurd. Sure the psychic may be a fraud but the child that believes in Santa Claus probably isn’t lying when she says she’s excited for his visit.
Are there no children that believe in Santa?
If religious beliefs are non-existent can people be said to have different religious beliefs? And if people don’t have different religious beliefs how do you explain say the Crusades?
“Do religious pronouncements rely on meaningless signs?” is a pivotal question. To me the answer YES seems perfectly obvious. If NO is how it plays out for you, I can’t imagine (at this moment) what else to say about it.
This is one observation that supports the thesis that people do not really believe. There are many more in the book.
They don’t “behave as though they believe”. This too is so obvious that I have little enthusiasm for arguing it further.
When no one could find any evidence for the luminiferous ether, theories were proposed that had no need for that hypothesis. That was a development in physics, not metaphysics.
People routinely demand special privileges based on their “profoundly held beliefs”. I am simply pointing out that they do not have such beliefs, and therefore the privileges are underserved. This is sociology, not metaphysics.
If a “psychic” tells me that I was called Henry Ford in my previous incarnation, I will not believe her statement; nor will I believe that she believes it. I will understand that she is telling me, not what she believes, but what she thinks I want to hear. There is nothing metaphysical about her, or about my judgement of her.
1. To answer your second question first, no. One can with minimal effort clarify concepts like God, souls, afterlife etc. even to the point of logical exactitude. You might find the definitions unsatisfactory, problematic, and incomplete but that doesn’t render them meaningless.
2. Wittgenstein was intellectually lazy and has a greatly inflated reputation. Early on he wrongfully dismissed most of philosophy’s problems as mere semantics and later in life never tried hard enough to find examples that would contradict his more outlandish assertions (i.e. There isn’t an acceptable definition of the word “game”)
3. Your argument may not depend on Wittgenstein directly but the core of your argument rests on a theory of meaning that was discredited almost a century ago and as employed by you is self-defeating.
When I looked at the title of your piece I initially assumed you were going to go the route wherein you claim that because most people are terrified of death and suffer the loss of loved ones so deeply, their faith can’t really be that strong. That would be a defensible position.
Instead you decide to dismiss the entire notion belief by abstracting it away from religious people through specious redefinition. And what does your thesis get you? If people claim they believe in something and behave as though they believe in something, what is gained by claiming they don’t “really believe” in it?
You remove religious belief from a measurable observable phenomenon and banish it to place where it itself is an empty concept and by putting it beyond the scope of science and observation you create another metaphysical category, a category in which the implicit theory of meaning you employ was developed to avoid.
1. That Wittgenstein was “intellectually lazy” is a startling claim, coming from — um, what is it that you do? But my argument does not depend on Wittgenstein. I cite the remark that “one cannot mean a senseless series of words” because it is so elegantly said.
2. Do you not think that religious pronouncements rely on meaningless signs?
There is a debate about how much later Wittgenstein differs from early Wittgenstein but its clear he never totally abandoned methodological essentialism.
If you replace ‘metaphysical’ with ‘religious’ in proposition 6.53 of the Tractatus you would have the following:
… whenever someone else wanted to say something religious, to demonstrate to him that he failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions …
Look familiar? This is nearly identical to your point in I.2. whether you ‘rely’ on W. or not your claim is still untenable
Dismissing problems as meaningless pseudo-problems using the “new way of words” was as intellectually lazy as it was invalid.
I do not rely on “Wittgenstein’s early theories of meaning”. I mention Wittgenstein’s later observations of language, especially as discussed in On Certainty.
Your thesis is untenable for several reasons, here a just a few:
I. Claims of religious belief are not meaningless. Many philosophers have logically clarified concepts like God. Also Wittgenstein’s early theory of meaning (upon which you rely) was proven false by Popper.
II. Memes do not exist, they are at best a weak metaphor. There is as much evidence for them as there is for God, so using them to bolster a thesis is deeply unsound.
III. The third part of of your thesis is political and does not follow from the other two. It is also mostly ignorant of American history (it makes no sense to incorporate a Federalism provision like the Establishment clause against the states). And even if everyone were an atheist tomorrow there might still be reasons to have some limits on abortion, birth control, and marriage.
1. I don’t see how it’s logically impossible for people to think (or assume) that they believe in God. Can you give more detail?
2. I don’t think “It is simply make-believe” explains the passions, the warped moral sense and the violence associated with religion. Yes, it is make-believe — as opposed to truthful — but it’s not quite that simple.
If people can’t logically believe in God (which I agree with), how can they logically think they believe in god? They can’t do that either. Here’s where you’ve failed to see what religion is.
It is simply make-believe. This view not only explains everything about religion, it’s the only one that really explains it at all.