Is Religion Necessary For A Healthy Society? Ft. Bionic Dance (R2)

for those of you who don't know Bionic dance she's been in the youtubes a theists community for a very very very long time she did a guest appearance in one of armored skeptics videos years ago before I even started YouTube that's where I first heard about her when Professor stick and I were a lot smaller than we are now I remember her commenting on one of his videos and he and I fangirl doubt about it for about fifteen minutes straight now our channels have grown and I feel honored to get to have somebody on my channel as a guest who's been on YouTube for so much longer than me so thanks for coming Bionic dance I'd say my pleasure but sounds more like it's yours okay let's get into it [Music] okay in this way I want to talk about why religion is necessary for society so to start with I would like to make a distinction between a micro level and a macro level where I don't think religion is necessary for the individual but I do think religion is necessary for society as a whole it's necessary for the individual if the individual isn't following the religion then what good is it going to do for society you can't have the macro level without the micro the big is made out of the small now the reason why is that well there's multiple reasons why over the first is if you look at the average IQ of a university graduate and philosophy I think it's 129 and could be it's it's around there right and so the average IQ of society on the wider scale is about 100 what this means is that in order to read books and ethics requires a pretty decent IQ to begin with and if these if if you can't have the average person reading books and ethics because they've the average IQ is 100 and that means without religion there will be nobody to tell them what good and bad is and so because they won't have their own self developed notion of good and bad they will therefore be no ethics within society without religion don't hit your sister don't cut in line don't take what isn't yours no God required no Einstein level IQ required the idea that there would be no ethics in society without religion is ludicrous and which religion no two have exactly the same morals and ethics many are often quite opposed on certain issues and every religion has denominations within it unless you pick one religion as our guide you'll have chaos but if you tell some people that their religion is getting thrown under the bus you'll have chaos so what you're gonna do not to mention the fact that our sense of right and wrong stems heavily from empathy the ability to put ourselves in other people's shoes to build models in our minds of situations and then place ourselves in those situations that originally became evolutionarily advantageous god those two words are hard to say together for hunters who are trying to plan out how they were going to work together to take down a large animal but at this point it's the basis for our entire system of morality now that doesn't get us all the way there most of the time that'll prevent us from killing somebody or stealing or committing some heinous crime but we have cultural morality to fill in the gaps where our innate sense of right and wrong leave off and honestly so far religion hasn't done much for us so far we've got people using religion to justify hating just about everybody who might be different from them in some way I'd suggest we give up on the Bible go with our inherent built-in morality stop talking to people like they're idiots and rely on our culture and great thinkers to pull us through the rest right and so there's an IQ limitation in terms of developing secular ethics he's leaving out the concept of the evil genius you know like Lex Luthor or dr. evil smart people make the best bad guys his idea needs to be seriously rethought or the entire comic book industry in the spy movie genre will be destroyed destroyed incidentally I'd make one hell of a Batman villain come on admit it so and on the social level I think really division for good and bad now the other thing is community right if you have a society where they they previously had religion and the religion falls out of favor with the society or than the institutions and communities and social norms associated with a set of beliefs they're going to fall out a place right the premise being that we cannot have community without religion now he may look like a dork but I'm sure this guy has been in various communities social groups that didn't have religion as a component I know I have had better has I'm an atheist church was the only way I could make connections with friends and family I'd be screwed really do you think he's been in various communities that don't have religion as a component okay I mean maybe while there are communities within communities my weekly board game night doesn't have a scrap of religion in it well unless the game we're playing has is fighting evil demons or something and I'm sure he's been in something like that and I'm sure that that group had rules written or unspoken that needed to be followed no God required you definitely don't need religion to build communities in fact in all seriousness I'm sure he's been in plenty of other non religious communities too it seems like he's just not thinking his argument through thoroughly enough and so again going back to the a cute thing well if if you don't have some new authority to come in and tell people what good and bad is then what's going to happen is you'll have people who are developing these more questionable or more just more ancillary forms of social norms okay I'm sorry I have to address the elephant in the room look at these books in the background why are they stacked haphazardly why are they covering a picture of the Mona Lisa it look like they're mostly college textbooks he certainly didn't take every single one of those college classes and work his way through all of those books where is this dude is he at a library no self-respecting library would stack their books like that honestly he probably did it in front of the books this way so he could give the impression that he read them that he's intelligent lend credibility to what he's saying and he probably thought that we'd be so stupid that we wouldn't even realize it if I did that it'd be comic books in my DVD collection so I could give the impression that I'm a complete gigatron just saying collection you say I know a little something about collections I'm a fan of collecting things anyways dudes kind of an arrogant dick honestly I'm sorry I mean he seems like he's non-religious like me and I appreciate that in somebody but talking down to people like this is definitely the wrong way to get people to like you fYI if you ever see this that's something you should work on okay moving on institutions right so I would say if you look at some of the new risings up in social media for example tinder that has been basically correlated with the rise in atheism right wait what I don't use tinder myself and the only Google articles I can find on the subject of atheism and tinder are atheists wondering whether the site will yield results for non-believers and correlated with devising atheism I'm pretty sure atheism was around long before tinder existed so what in heck does he mean by that and it is the case that at least in anecdotal anecdotally speaking a lot of atheists tend to be awesome moral nihilists they they take the it's just your subjective preference to the logical extreme no I don't think more than others it was a grant position in and of itself but I didn't know the video in that but without religion it seems to be the case that you develop your society begins to be plagued with these social ills that weren't there beforehand right and which social ills exactly let's hear some specifics because I honestly have no idea what you're talking about here and I could name more than a few things I'd consider social ills that exists thanks to religion the idea that either one causes good or bad all by itself is short-sighted at best ludicrously stupid at worst we need evidence he should know that better than most if you think about long law is a threat backed by brownells to some extent it's not always a factor but to some extent it is well in religion they have they have threats backed by violence say if you don't behave morally if you don't behave good you will be burnt in hell that's that's what that's the image they give you right and with without that image people don't have anything to fear and they don't have any reason to behave morally or good and religiously inspired eternal torture is the only possible thing people might fear that could cause them to act morally or good apparently jail isn't enough being shot by the police isn't enough it has to be eternal torment your people will act like complete jerks right not only does this once again assume that everybody needs religion the same religion with the same values but that nobody religious or otherwise has enough empathy to not wanting ly hurt other people I'd like to have more confidence in human nature than that perhaps an overly optimistic hope but still sure religion has the old carrot and the stick follow their rules and you get the carrot heaven break the rules and you get the stick hell but there are a couple of interesting things to note about that first different religions have different carrots and sticks in fact some religions don't have carrots or sticks at all which religion does he expect we'll be following here the one that society can't live without we've got quite the menu available okay yeah I'm pretty sure we all know which one he's on about but he can at least be honest enough to say it it's fine I'll say it for him he's obviously talking about Islam yep that's what I figured - I bet you'd be hard-pressed to find somebody who would instantly become a murderer if they found incontrovertible proof that God wasn't real we don't murder because we have empathy we don't murder because we have this built-in morality it ultimately has nothing to do with religions carrot-and-stick we don't steal because we don't want to go to jail and because we don't want it to happen to us we can see ourselves in the shoes of the victim of a crime we don't want to be that victim so we don't like it when we witness it happening to somebody else it's the same reason why we can't stand seeing an animal dying on the side of the road it hurts we don't want another living thing to feel pain we don't need to imagine ourselves in that position to know that it's bad religion isn't the only carrot and stick game in town and I'd argue that it's the least important one because it's honestly hard to keep people subjugated without logical reasoning to back it up you have to shut down logical thought to get them to buy the carrot in the stick with the legal system it's easily understood and can be logically followed to a conclusion I don't want anybody to steal for me thus no stealing allowed is a good law but with religion it's all about not hurting God instead of not hurting you as it is with the legal system sometimes it's even just about hurting God's feelings if people can see a direct logical line from the rule to a benefit to them personally then it's a lot easier to get them to follow it that's why a child is a lot more likely to do what you tell them to if you explain your reasoning as opposed to saying because I said so now as I was saying a second ago about having different carrots and sticks Jehovah's Witnesses don't really have much stick at all if you die and you don't believe it you're just dead there's no hell to them so believing Jehovah's Witnesses don't really have a stick at all on the other hand people who once believed it but don't anymore do have a stick to keep them in they'll lose every family member and friend they have if they decide to leave but at that point they're a lot more likely to just fake it and do what they want when they're alone the stick is effectively sidestepped they do still have a pseudo stick though if you don't follow the rules you won't see your dead family again for example I just think the threat of torture as a stick is way more widely effective at least partially because not getting to see your dead family members again isn't even really a stick it's more of a reverse carrot you get to see your family members if you stick with God Jehovah's Witnesses only real stick is the shunning bit as I was saying some groups don't have a carrot or a stick some versions of Buddhism don't believe in reincarnation or continuity of life or any of that other good stuff they just have a specific philosophical outlook on life now the fact that there are people in this society who are non-religious in itself doesn't prove that religion isn't required for society you did mention that in the beginning but it shows how unreliable religion is as a self-imposed rule book if it were worth its weight we wouldn't need secular governments at all but we do so as far as I can tell religion is a hundred percent useless and unnecessary and in fact too downright harmful in too many cases that's just the way I see it I think it's worth noting that the proportion of religious people in prison versus non-religious is rather telling either atheists are too smart to be caught by the police or believing in God is far less of a deterrent against misbehavior than just wanting to do the right thing I don't think this guy's stick is as effective as he'd like to pretend maybe he can borrow a professor stick for a minute hey put me down don't hit that guy with me unless again you could in theory it's possible to be placed on society with a secular ethics but that's that's a conversation for another time no it's not this entire video has been about how religion is necessary for society no he's saying that there's a possible rebuttal to this idea but he only wants to discuss it later if his premise in this video might be undermined by an opposing or alternate view why not discuss it now seems like a bit of a cop-out to me so with that being said thanks for watching thanks Bionic dance for coming on my channel I really appreciate it I enjoyed working with you glad to have in you you've been super easy to work with hopefully I can get you back on sometime don't forget to check out mine and Bionic dances social media and subscribe to our channel you know or else links are in the description as always and you can click the annotation and screen card thingamajigger there too to get to her channel that's all I've got for you thanks for watching guys [Music] you

Channel: Telltale

Views: 15,803

Rating: 4.8532495 out of 5

Keywords: youtube, video, telltale, telltail, bionic dance, featuring bionic dance, religion, necessary, healthy society, society, is religion necessary for a healthy society

Id: ZImsJD0vOhQ

Length: 14min 53sec (893 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 04 2018