The Downside Of Disbelief

I know of two ways to influence people to behave in a preferred way: positive reinforcement that rewards preferred practices, and punishment of undesirable practices. Anything in-between is a combination of these. At the extreme end of positive reinforcement, a teenager receiving a Porsche from wealthy parents for passing high school might be an incentive to go on to earn a college degree in the hope of the reward of a penthouse apartment. The punishment counterpart would be an adult slave getting whipped in a memorable way for defiance. How far away might be death by hanging? These examples are trite. Yet sceptics would recognise that the outcomes could well be opposite to what was desired. The recipient of lavish gifts might take them for granted and fail to modify behaviour towards greater achievement, perhaps even veering to the depths of depravity in a test of tolerance. The oft-whipped slave may become increasingly incentivised to revolt and seek freedom.

The use of positive reinforcement in animal training works. Many service dogs in training never hear reprimands. Rather, deprivation of reward from undesired behaviour, coupled with a total absence of reaction propels the animal towards behaviour that results in acknowledgement, reward and praise. Eventually, the net sum is a well-groomed, conforming animal.

Punishment of animals works too. The cracking of whips and other forms of torture have been effective at getting lion to jump through hoops and elephant to mimic a conga line at the circus. Even wild animals learn quickly that aggression towards the carrier of the whip results in punishment. They opt to follow instructions to avoid pain.

People are every bit as responsive to both positive reinforcement and punishment as their animal counterparts. At every age and in all spheres of life, infants, students, workers and society-at-large can have their behaviour modified through one or other of these methods of influence. Positive reinforcement can be observed when parents rewarding children with treats, or allowances for cleaning their rooms or removing the trash, improve tidiness and the performance of chores. Students praised richly for using correct formulae and grammar earn higher grades that result in further accolades, then admission to a better college, perhaps a Nobel prize. Employers reward their staff with bonuses for reaching targets. Societies pay lower insurance premiums for clean driving records. In these examples, there is a clear correlation between incentive and conformity.

Punishment too is effective on people. An adage for child-rearing used to be: spare the rod and spoil the child. A spoiled brat must be one who wasn't disciplined through corporal punishment. The fear of academic failure resulting in a career of menial work propels students to burn the midnight oil. The loss of wages through termination compels workers to meet deadlines. Society faces fines and imprisonment for a range of offences. The deleterious consequences of noise violation, littering, fraud, arson and murder is the reason many societies co-exist peacefully, often nervously.

Whichever tool is used, however effective is each, and whatever bone of contention there may be regarding the effectiveness of either, there can be no question about the emotional condition that is the target of manipulation. Positive reinforcement conditions behaviour through satiety. Punishment uses fear as a deterrent.

Poker players call bluffs. They practice in a gloomy, grey area between incentive and punishment. Reward or loss face each action. Opponents could be holding strong hands or they could be bluffing. What is one to do? One could fold and forfeit, or defy the bluff, raise the stakes, see the whole thing through and face the consequences. If one wins consistently, one would have developed a tool that reinforces a strategy. One doesn't get to lose consistently because the punishment is poverty. Bluffing is the nature of the game. Does one call a bluff? How do you calculate the odds? Does one believe his opponent? What is the downside of being contrarian?

Religions adopt a smorgasbord of strategies to influence behaviour. They encompass the extremes of positive reinforcement and retribution, and everything in-between. Their incentives stretch the limits of lascivious reward whilst their punishment deterrents are unfathomably gruesome. If only it were cut-and-dry what behaviour invited which of the myriad outcomes, and that there was consensus amongst religions what constituted appropriate behaviour, societies could be conditioned to behave uniformly. As it stands, religions have kneaded together several doughy sets of principles based on a concoction of secular philosophy and all manner of superstition. Principles differ by geography, climate, celestial phenomena and population demographics, all half-baked at best. As complicated as they are to quantify, the mathematics of poker strategies are child's play compared to those for estimating the requirements of religion in order to benefit from their promises or succumb to their threats. There is a marked difference, however, between games of chance and religions. Games of chance have outcomes to which probabilities can be assigned with strategies to counter bluffs. The tenets of religion are so replete with contradiction that no probabilities can be assigned to the outcomes of adherence. Religious promise, therefore, is untenable by any measure, and its behavioural requirement is an arbitrarily moving target. The regulations are unreliable because they wobble at the behest of clergy, the discoveries of science and the whims of society. Whatever incentive is offered or punishment threatened, religion must dissolve and render itself obsolete precisely because it cannot state unambiguously the downside to disbelief.

Every religion offers positive reinforcements that come with platitudes in the here-and-now, morphing into outright eschatology. If you complied, said these things and spun so many times that way, and faced in some direction and drove your car over said fruit when no cars existed at writing, and married into that group but not above a certain income level, and had sex with a pillowcase over your head, you would climb the religious hierarchy. Onward and upward you travel with your earthly neighbours, creating uniformity, humility, courage, strength, bravery, savagery, dominance and, eventually, wealth and leadership. In the next life, everyone is equal suddenly, you all know one another especially your fellow dead from earth, as if you cannot be geographically displaced in the afterlife, and you assemble into some crescendo of worship of a divine being. Or you reach a state of enlightenment. Or you land a harem or vineyard, depending on interpretation. The incentives can reach dizzying proportions, a veritable vortex into which it's easy to be sucked.

Lest you be squeamish about ostentatious disbursements of comfort post-mortem, or challenge the machinations of society whilst blood still courses through your veins, religions offer dastardly punishment to propel you on the correct path. It's frowned upon nowadays if you were beheaded, torn asunder limb-by-limb attached to horses, or burnt at the stake, all techniques very familiarly administered by the clergy of recent yore to punish dissenters. To this day, some religions command stoning for adultery, or require marriage to one's rapist. The dictates of how to treat slaves remain on the books of others but are conveniently ignored. The after-life is especially unappealing if you chance upon the incorrect permutation of behaviours. In one religion, you could burn forever to the whiff of sulfurous fumes whilst your loved ones are required to watch from their blissfully eternal perches. The progenitor of that religion forecast unequivocally the demise of earthly existence before the natural death of his followers, some two millennia ago. Yet another prophet, probably recognising the fallibility of his predecessor, requires his followers to contrive a dystopia first in order to trigger the escalation to an existence not dissimilar to that forecast by the first. A different religion threatens an endless cycle of diminishing stature for failure to conform to dubious tenets that have no bearing on modernity. Current requirements of religion can be massaged depending on clerical consensus, possible censure from trading partners, and shaming on social media. The conditions of jet travel and the Internet were beyond the imagination of the storytellers during the periods of the compilation of the sacred texts. Back then they required conduct that was pertinent to their level of technology and their circumstances, but which has no relevance to modern secular democracies.

Religions are only as prevalent as their followers. Their existences depend entirely upon the tenures of their believers, hence the unearthing by archaeologists of ancient, defunct systems of beliefs and practices. That is why proselytising by the people who knock on your doors, run TV shows and distribute pamphlets is necessary, to circumvent obsolescence. Deities of lore were in abundance until believers in them died out and there were none left to perpetuate the system. The scriptures of contemporary mono-theistic religions acknowledge undeniably the existence of other deities, through fond retelling of the battles between their Creator and his opposition, but without conceding the contradiction. These mythical battles took the form of wars between tribes who believed differently. Vanquished tribes translated automatically into the demise of their gods, much like the implosion in a puff of the Death Star in science fiction movies. Since time immemorial, ancient humans have been using belief systems to explain the material world. During times of calamity, in the absence of scientific tools like working machines and well-vetted theories for validating or disproving superstition, desperation and frustration led our ancestors to attribute effect to supernatural cause. Once stuck on an ideology, self-appointed leaders whipped and cajoled their fellows into not disrupting superstitious causal chains. They linked morality to superstition rather than use consensus to co-exist.

It may seem an odd set of circumstances that the religious dictates of societal conduct can be so malleable over the mere millennia of human civilisation, yet have outcomes that incorporate such vast time spans as, well, forever. 'Eternity' and 'for all time' are breathed in the same breath as the end of the week in some books. You might as well compare the length of the Great Wall of China to the 13.7 billion light year universe. That the actions in the mere lifespans of a mortal can have eternal consequences speaks to the power of persuasion wielded by the positive reinforcement-cum-retribution crowd.

So what is the downside of disbelief? What is the risk of claiming that there is no evidence of the claims of religion? What if you take the position that the anecdotes of the faithful that are trotted out are mere cult obeisance and have no validity? Each religion has its own consequence to defiance. Not a single one indicates that that is quite okay, that you can go about your skeptical ways, but perhaps be marginally worse off. On the contrary, they turn downright violent, kicking and screaming like a petulant bully. Having failed to lure you into their warm folds in order to bilk you of funds, they become hostile in their threats of damnation. They cannot entertain the contagion that you represent, an agent of their obsolescence. To be sure, religion is nothing more than knuckle dusters in silk gloves. Religion is bluffing and I call bullshit.