A study basically asked people ““Can you be good without god?”. The answer, unsurprisingly, is that a heck of a lot of people think you can’t.
A recent study (of more than 3,000 people in 13 countries) published in the journal Nature Human Behavior echoes Voltaire’s maxim. Looking at intuitive thinking—presumptions drawn by individuals through unconscious biases—researchers led by Will M. Gervais, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky, discovered that most individuals intuitively conclude that a serial killer is more likely to be an atheist (approximately 60 percent) than religious (approximately 30 percent).
The article has a lot of good rebuttals from atheists like James Croft, Monette Richards, and Maggie Ardiente, but let’s cut the crap. This survey isn’t actually going to answer that question. Of course there are good atheists and good Christians, and also bad atheists and bad Christians. All that survey can do is determine that the subjects have been methodically lied to by their religion.
The question should be, “Can you be good with god?”, and the results determine that religion is great fertilizer for bigotry. I’d also argue that the example of the most notoriously godly people in America further demonstrates that with great faith comes great greed and exploitation.
Here’s Joel Osteen’s house.
Never mind his behavior towards his fellow human beings in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. I ask you, what kind of corrupt, selfish person needs the kind of conspicuous consumption being shown off here?
Before we can ask either question, perhaps we should clarify what we mean by good in the first place?
Yeah, I don’t think people reciting a point of explicit religious ideology counts as “intuition”.
Wonder how many displaced people ol’ Joel is putting up in his house. Looks like he has plenty of room.
Love this Wikipedia description:
Wait, he can’t be a true Christian preacher. He let’s wife do some preaching, too. That’s just not allowed.
Meanwhile, the whole family is riding the gravy train, tax breaks and all I bet. Missionary in New York? Tough assignment.
Re: Joel Osteen’s House….
Maybe he does a lot of entertaining? Maybe it is really a commune, or he has a very extended family?
It would be interesting to hear what sort of nonsensical explanation he has for why he has such a ridiculously large house.
Jesus Fuck, does he have 3 dozen children?
There seems to be a parking lot.
Maybe it’s also a church … no taxes!
Oh God bless him. For he built such a big mansion to accommodate the homeless. What 150 rooms there? Marie Antoinette would’a guillotined herself had she seen this mans charity.
This is also identified as Osteen’s $10.5 million house. It’s just as ostentatious.
Perhaps one could be, if there were any gods (unless they would prevent it, of course), but that’s presumably not what you’re trying to ask, which is about belief in the thing instead of the thing. Nonexistent stuff doesn’t have an effect on whether you can be good or on anything else. That doesn’t sound like the right question to me either.
Bill Gate’s mansion, Xanadu, is considerably larger. Does that make Gates a corrupt and selfish person?
Note: you could certainly argue that possessing such a house is against Osteen’s professed religion, but that’s not what you wrote.
I ask you, what kind of corrupt, selfish person needs the kind of conspicuous consumption being shown off here?
Louis XIV would!
PS – nothing says “the lord is my shepherd” like an 8-foot-tall concrete wall around your mansion.
chigau@#6:
Maybe it’s also a church … no taxes!
It’s probably a rectory – property of the church, which allows him to live there. In other words, also a tax shelter.
Yes. Bill Gates is also guilty of conspicuous consumption.
I have a house that was slightly crowded when we had 3 kids living here, and now that they’re gone, it’s a bit on the large size to rattle around in. It is nowhere near that, or even close to Xanadu. So what are these people doing with a ‘residence’ that is so immense you can get lost in it?
Selfish, yes. (Perhaps corrupt too, but that doesn’t depend on mansion size.)
Never the mind the rest of it, most can’t afford the fucking swimming pool in that picture (or baptismal font or whatever the fuck Osteen might call it for tax purposes). If you’ve got some other concept of selfishness which can somehow make sense of that, then you’ll have to share that and explain how the fuck you came up with it.
I personally don’t care which religion he’s in. It makes no difference if he burned piles of $100 bills every day to receive a personal blessing from the god of selfishness. He’s a fucking asshole no matter what.
aziraphale @ #10
Why not? Gate’s has a reputation for underhanded business practices (corruption). No one needs nearly $90 billion dollars to survive. His motivation for that looks like selfishness and greed. There are people that argue for a cap on wealth. Somewhere north of a billion, you’re done.
Well, if being ultimately responsible for Windows didn’t push him over the edge…
@10 Bill Gates is not an official associated with a religion that professes charity and poverty. Bill Gates didn’t lie about his offices being flooded so that poor people wouldn’t stink up his building. Bill Gates sells shitty and occasionally useful software, not a pernicious philosophy that claims you’re poor because you didn’t pray hard enough.
Morality and ethics are words that lack precision re meaning. Amazing that we can even share a language when such basic intuitions are missing.
Richard Bennett @#19 — Communication doesn’t require precision. If it did, we couldn’t talk. “Good enough” is how we operate mostly.
Is that a helipad (top of picture)?
Gates has done quite a bit, with his fortune, to help others.
Gervais has done some interesting work on the prevalence of atheists in the US.(link below) i heard him speak a couple of months ago and he reported that indirect measures of atheism indicate a rate of as much as 38%. I find this cheering. We are not as alone as we thought perhaps.
From the abstract:
“Widely-cited telephone polls (e.g., Gallup, Pew) suggest USA atheist prevalence of only 3-11%. In contrast, our most credible indirect estimate is 26% (albeit with considerable estimate and method uncertainty). Our data and model predict that atheist prevalence exceeds 11% with greater than .99 probability, and exceeds 20% with roughly .8 probability. Prevalence estimates of 11% were even less credible than estimates of 40%, and all intermediate estimates were more credible. ”
https://psyarxiv.com/edzda/
Sent from my iPad
I don’t think PZ’s picture is correct. robro’s picture looks more like it. The picture PZ posted does not have near enough dense vegetation for the River Oaks neighborhood where Osteen lives. robro’s picture is from a home in River Oaks. The point is the same regardless.
And Osteen claims that one day he was walking down a street and God told him that he (God) wanted him to have a big mansion.
@ 6 chigau
There seems to be a parking lot.
No, no, that’s the heliport
And I’m pretty sure River Oaks doesn’t allow heliports. Those rich people need their quiet.
@ 11 Marcus
Louis XIV would!
Well, you can also argue that Versailles was a tool of government that helped him weaken the nobility as much as “conspicuous consumption”.
There may have been better and cheaper ways to do this but it worked.
Osteen moved houses in the last few years, that’s probably related.
As someone raised in a Mormon home and only recently and reluctantly converted to atheism, I feel some confidence asserting that if someone desires to do some good in the world, the Bible (at least) can provide parables and imagery that support that desire. While I believe there are basic moral truths bearing on justice, protecting and weak and vulnerable and basic goodwill toward all, there is something (I believe) particularly potent about stories such as the sheep & goats (“Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these my brethren ye did it unto me”), committed / sacrificial love (“A greater love hath no man than this- that a man lay down his life for his friends”), and so on. As a returned LDS missionary concerned about the state of my soul, I remember going out of my way to help strangers I met downtown specifically because of the Book of Mormon teaching: “if ye turn away the needy, and the naked, and visit not the sick and afflicted, and impart of your substance, if ye have, to those who stand in need—I say unto you… your prayer is vain, and availeth you nothing”. I had some wonderful experiences as I met people traveling through who needed a helping hand, largely because of my religious training. I would often share my home, provide transportation to look for services, share what little money I had, etc. I honestly don’t know whether I would have thought those types of thoughts or valued those types of values without that training. The language and imagery are there for those so inclined.
Now that I have been de-godded, however, I realize there is no reason not to keep all the good things I learned through my religious years. The values mean even more to me, if anything, because of the shortness and preciousness of my limited time on earth.
lee101
Well done.
I’m sure you will be just fine
…I might add, there is a downside to doing good things for religious reasons that I’ve learned to see all too clearly in myself: As I tried to help my neighbor, my thoughts were also largely on myself as I asked “Is my heart right in this matter? Is this making me a better person? Am I becoming ‘pure in heart’? Am I ‘laying up treasures for myself in heaven’?” To the degree that religious beliefs take a person’s mind off the immediate need at hand and the person being helped and focuses it back on oneself, I think it unnecessarily complicates the matter. Much more practical to just say “Who cares? This person needs help and I’ll do what I can.”
In some ways, giving up religion has taken away a huge psychological burden for me. I don’t have to constantly worry “Is my heart right?” I just have to make a choice and follow through. So much easier.
@lee101 #30
I was not raised Mormon, but I was raised Catholic. I’ve been more charitable since becoming unaffiliated with any church. My rationalization for helping people is “This is the right thing to do; I need to help fellow human beings.” Before, I was supposed to be thinking about whether this person was worth helping, or if that person deserved their burden because God was punishing them. It makes much more sense to help people because they are human, not figure out where they belong on a scale of deserving it or if I’m helping the right people in the right way for the right reasons.
Which ever picture is correct – the one above or the one robro links to – the place is a hellish McMansion. Osteen is guilty of crimes against architecture.
http://mcmansionhell.com/post/148605513816/mcmansions-101-what-makes-a-mcmansion-bad
Holy shit. It’s like he read Gormenghast and said “Yes. That.”
Re: Good without god? When someone asks me that I usually respond with “Do you *want* to live in a world with more serial killers? No? Me neither. That’s why I’m not going to be one.” Be the change you want to see, etc. It works for little things too. Don’t want to run into random shopping carts in the parking lot? Return random carts to the carts corral. If you add a side of “it could be me”, donate to social programs like you’d like people to do if you were without means.
Re: Churchy McBigHouse. Isn’t that just a sign of him succeeding at Prosperity Gospel? Selfish and corrupt is their core principle.
Re: #33. v. accurate.