Main tactics used by religion

Religions have formed (or evolved, if you pardon the pun) during the millenia. Some tactics used by religions have become very prevalent because they are so effective due to how human psychology works. Here are some of them.

Guilt

Many people do not fully realize this, but from all the tactics used by religions, including the ones listed in this post, guilt is possibly the most fundamental and effective one. It's even more fundamental than fear or intimidation.

The basic tactic is to make the person feel wrong about themselves. Things that you normally do are  wrong, harmful, and shameful. You are guilty, you are a bad person at a fundamental level, you are worthless. Most importantly, you must immediately correct these problems if you want to make amends and be a slightly better person.

Usually it's important to emphasize that no matter what you do, you can never get completely rid of the shame and bad things, not in this life, but at least you can make amends to be slightly better and to earn your better standing in the afterlife. In other words, it's not like you can just make amends, do some magic rituals and poof, you are a good person again. No, you can become slightly better, but never completely perfect. The sense of guilt must always be maintained, even if you try to do something about it.

Of course the solution to this enormous problem is, what else, the religion that's being sold via this guilt trip. You must accept the religion and fully submit to it, and you must spread it further, teaching it to others.

This tactic abuses the fact that humans are naturally gullible. We have evolved that way because it has been a survival advantage during the history of humanity. (If someone tells you that there's something wrong with what you are doing, that it's dangerous, in average it's more beneficial for your survival to believe it than to ignore it. Thus instinctive gullibility has been naturally selected into the human psyche.)

Fear

Of course the other extremely common tactic is eliciting fear and intimidation. If you don't do what the religion mandates, you will experience great suffering, either in this life or in the afterlife (or, in the case of some religions, in your next life.)

Christianity has taken this to its logical extreme: Indescribable endless torture, the worst possible pain and suffering you could ever imagine, up to eleven, for all eternity. The greatest possible punishment that the human mind can come up with.

And why not. If you can scare people into accepting your religion, then why not go all the way to the absolute extreme with it? Especially since so many people are ready to believe it, completely disregarding the logic of it. (It really is quite amazing how the exact same person could claim that a perfectly good, all-loving god who is incapable of evil could punish people with the worst possible torture that can be imagined for all eternity. This is almost Orwellian double-think.)

Demonization of the opposition

Demonization of the "enemy" has been a common tactic for all kind of warfare during the entirety of human history, be it physical warfare or just "warfare" at the ideological level. It consists of making the opponents to be depicted as extremely unpleasant, horrible, wicked and dangerous.

This tactic actually serves two roles. Firstly, it gives confidence to your own followers that they are in the right path and that "fighting" the opponents is a good thing. Secondly, to instill fear into your followers (in other words, if you ever leave the religion, you will become such a wicked and horrible monster as those, and you wouldn't want that, would you?)

Sometimes the "opponents" to demonize are people, usually people who follow a different religion or don't follow any religion at all. Sometimes the "opponent" is at an ideological level.

Science is a perfect example of the latter category. Many believers demonize science, especially certain branches of it, and make all kind of outlandish claims about it, such as it being a demonic plot, a world-wide conspiracy to overthrow religion, the biggest lie ever told, and of course extremely dangerous (for example that the theory of evolution causes this and that negative thing, such as racism or the holocaust.)

The difference between psychics and magicians

With the title of this post I don't mean to say that the first are scammers and the second are just entertainers. What I mean to say is what's the difference between psychics (or, for that matter, anybody who claims supernatural powers) and stage magicians from the perspective of people who want to believe in the supernatural powers of the human mind?

The only difference between them is that the former claim that their tricks are not tricks at all, but completely genuine, while stage magicians make no such claims (at least not seriously; sometimes they may allude at mystical powers, but it's just for the entertainment, and they are fully ready to say that it's just an act for the purposes of entertainment if asked about it.)

The strange thing about this is that this difference is really effective. The mere claim that the fraudsters present is enough to convince the believers. Nothing else is needed. The believers are completely ready to accept said claim, and will defend the claim to death if challenged.

What makes this really schizophrenic is that these exact same people who defend alleged psychics do not have any problem whatsoever in accepting and acknowledging that the exact same tricks performed by stage magicians are just that, ie. tricks with no supernatural origin of any kind. Just sleight of hand, misdirection, doing things behind the scenes hidden from the viewers...

And the thing is, the stage magicians do the exact same things as the psychics, such as "mind reading", "predicting the future", spoon bending and all other kinds of seemingly impossible feats. Yet, somehow, the believers still have this weird attitude where they fully accept these things as just physical tricks, while still defending the exact same stunts as genuine and supernatural when performed by psychics.

It seems that if someone claims that the trick is not a trick, that it's a genuine supernatural event, that's enough. It doesn't matter if it can be demonstrated that the exact same stunt can be performed via entirely natural means; that makes absolutely no difference. It's still genuine and supernatural when made by a psychic.

When challenged, the believer will inevitably resort to an argument from ignorance. "Yeah? If it's a trick, then how does he do it? Can you explain that to me?" Any counter-argument along the lines of "well, can you explain to me how a stage magicians does the same thing?" will be ignored. If you can't explain how the psychic does it, that's proof enough that it's genuine and supernatural. Never mind the stage magicians.

Biblical literalism is actually quite rare

Quite many secular people, and even many Christians, have the misconception that the vast majority of Christians are fundamentalist biblical literalists. In other words, that they hold the position that every single story of the Bible is literally true as described, and should be interpreted as such, rather than being eg. an allegory or parable.

This notion isn't actually true. In fact, the fundamentalist literalists form a minority among all of the world's Christians (even if we count only those who consider themselves believers and who actively practice Christianity, rather than being "Christian" in name only but are in practice as secular as any atheist.)

For example, the biggest denomination of Christianity, Catholicism, is not a young-earth creationist denomination, accepts that the universe and the Earth are billions of years old, and considers the events depicted in the book of Genesis to be more or less allegorical and figurative. While individual catholics might themselves be biblical literalists and young-earth creationists, the vast majority accept the official position of the Catholic church.

Many, if not most, of the protestant denominations also have no problem in accepting the old age of the universe and consider the first chapters of the Bible more or less allegorical.

So why does one easily get the notion that the vast majority of Christians are fundamentalist literalist young-earth creationists? This is most probably because this minority of Christians tends to be the most vocal as well, and the subgroup of Christianity that gets into the biggest and most visible fights with secular people and the ones who most vocally demand special privileges at a governmental level. All the non-literalist non-fundamentalists are much more "moderate" and do not tend to be so vocal, start fights and demand special privileges and changes to law.

An alternative hypothesis for the origin of the universe

Many apologists and creationists have this strange notion that if nobody can present an alternative explanation for the origin of the universe, then their God hypothesis should therefore be accepted by default, until something better is presented. In fact, many apologists actually present this very argument in all seriousness.

It shouldn't be necessary to emphasize the fallacy in this kind of thinking. Even if there were no alternative explanations whatsoever, no alternative hypotheses to rule out, that doesn't make such a made-up explanation as "God did it" any more plausible. Having only one hypothesis for something quite obviously doesn't make it somehow automatically true or even more believable. It's not like it gets an exemption for being the only one.

But if we wanted to present an alternative hypothesis, just as a thought experiment, and just to show that it's not outright impossible to come up with such an alternative, consider this one:

Our universe resides in a kind of "meta-universe" (or "metaverse" for short) whose properties might be completely different from the ones inside this universe of ours, and nigh impossible for us to fully comprehend. (Think of quantum mechanics, up to eleven.) Our universe is a kind of "bubble" inside this metaverse.

Concepts such as space, time and causality might be completely nonsensical in this metaverse. They just don't work in the same way as inside our universe. If you want, you could hypothesize that the metaverse might be "spaceless" and "timeless", and that things like causality are really fuzzy things (a bit like in quantum mechanics, but at an even more incomprehensible level.)

There could be a physical mechanism, like a law of nature, in this metaverse that constantly pops up randomized universes into existence, like bubbles appearing in boiling water. This mechanism is just a simple physical mechanism, just like gravity or entropy in our universe. It doesn't have any kind of mind or goal, it just is. It's simply an intrinsic property of the metaverse, just like eg. gravity is an intrinsic property of our universe. (We could further hypothesize that it always creates universes in pairs that cancel each other, one universe always being the exact negative of the other. Balance seems to be an intrinsic property of everything, so it would make sense that entire universes are also always balanced in this manner.)

These universes might or might not have a limited existence.

Each universe has a random set of energy and physical properties. In the vast majority of these universes the amount of energy and the particular physical properties are such that they never develop any kind of life (if they develop anything at all; they might just remain devoid of any structure for their entire existence.)

In the case of our particular universe, it just happened, by chance, to have the exact amount of energy and physical properties for our kind of life to form. There was no higher purpose or goal for this universe to be like this, it just happened to be like this from among innumerable random universes.

Now, the point of this hypothesis is not for it to be a correct explanation, especially since there's zero evidence for it. Its point is to show that the God hypothesis is most certainly not the only possibility. It's easy to come up with other explanations.

Of course if you present this hypothesis to an apologist, he or she will most probably, and quite ironically, immediately object with the same objections that are presented against God: Where did the metaverse come from? Where did this universe-popping mechanism come from? Why would you believe in this hypothesis given that there's zero evidence of it? And so on.

The irony here is, of course, that apologists want to exempt God from being subjected to all these questions, while not having any problem presenting them about other hypotheses such as this one. Anyway, as said, that's not really the point. The point is that there are other possible hypotheses. The God hypothesis is not the only one and does not have any special status.

The God hypothesis is quite useless

Theists offer the God hypothesis as an explanation for the most fundamental questions about this universe. They consider it a beautiful, complete explanation for everything. The major problem with it is that it doesn't actually explain anything at all. It simply shifts the exact same questions one step further, with the drawback that one additional mystery is added in between.

Theists also want God to be exempt from the very problems that it's trying to solve.

Why does the universe exist? They say that it's because of God. Well, why does God exist? There is no answer to this. He just does, period. God's existence is exempt from being explained.

How did the universe come into existence? They say that God created it. How did God create it? Again, no answer. It's just "somehow." No further explanations are needed. Thus this "explanation" doesn't actually explain anything.

What is the cause for the existence of the universe? They say that the cause is God. Well, then what is the cause for God's existence? But no, God is exempt and doesn't need a cause. Again, a mystery is simply replaced with another mystery.

They say that the universe cannot be infinite because it's "logically" impossible (as if logic had anything to do with that.) Yet they claim that God is infinite and has always existed. Again, God is exempt from these rules, with no justification of any kind. He just is, period, no justification or demonstration needed.

The fact is, the "God hypothesis" is completely useless. It actually doesn't explain anything. Moreover, it's worse than no hypothesis at all because it only adds more questions than it answers.

William Lane Craig is a deceitful liar

When an apologist is presented with a counterargument that he or she cannot refute, there are a few tactics that are usually used (instead of, you know, just outright admitting that yes, that's a good and valid counterargument.) Some start outright avoiding the counterargument, others move the goalposts. Others start playing dumb. A fourth tactic is to distort what the other person said or clearly meant, and attack that.

A perfect example of this fourth tactic is William Lane Craig's response to one of Richard Dawkins' counterarguments to the so-called cosmological argument. Dawkins writes:

Even if we allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving it a name, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing of such human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins and reading innermost thoughts.

How does Craig respond to this objection? He says:

Dawkins doesn't deny that the argument successfully demonstrates the existence of an uncaused, beginless, changeless, immaterial, spaceless, timeless and unimaginably powerful personal creator of the Universe.

No, that's not at all what Dawkins is saying. "Even if we allow..." and so on does not mean "I accept the proof as valid." It means "even if we assumed it to be valid" which is a completely different thing. What Dawkins is doing here is pointing out the huge and completely unjustified leap in logic that happens at the end of the argument (which even itself is very much questionable.)

What Craig is doing here is blatantly distorting what Dawkins is saying, in order to try to win. Why does he do that instead of actually addressing the objection? The only possible conclusion is that Craig does not have an actual response to the objection and therefore must resort to distortion.

And this is coming from someone who loves to emphasize the correct use of rigorous logic and philosophy, and who belittles anyone who he sees as not being in par with his own knowledge and education on these subjects.

Transcendental argument

One of the most typical and popular forms of the so-called "transcendental argument for the existence of God" is that the laws of logic exist, are immaterial and must have been created by something.

This argument makes no sense. The laws of logic are simply concepts that describe something (eg. existence.) Claiming that the laws of logic must have been "created" makes as much sense as saying that, for example, the concept of "roundness" must have been created.

We describe a ball as "round." Roundness is a concept that we use to describe a geometric property of certain things. Nothing needed to first "invent" this concept for round things to be possible, or for us to be able to describe them with such a concept.

The geometric property which we describe with the concept "round" is not something that "exists" on its own, independently of anything. If absolutely nothing existed, then there would be no concept of "round" either. The concept is completely tied to what it describes. It's simply a notion we use to describe a property that we can find in existence.

Moreover, the concept of "round" does need to be "created" or "invented" or anything before it becomes possible (as a description of something.)

The people who use the TAG argument seem to have this weird notion that the laws of logic are somehow "existent" on their own right, independent of anything, rather than simply being notions we use to describe something in the same way as we use "round" or "square" or "twice as large", etc.

(And of course, like every single other such argument, this one also falls into the same fallacy of jumping from "an unknown caused X to exist" to "God" with no justification whatsoever. This is not only a completely fallacious jump in logic, it's also completely useless because it tells us absolutely nothing. It just puts a label on an unknown, which is completely useless.)