xabotage

It's clearly been working for decades. The only reason modern software needs so much attention is because 1) Internet connectivity requires constant security updates and 2) new features to sell, neither of which should apply here.

Empathy is a survival strategy that benefits society as a whole whereas sociopathy is a survival strategy that benefits the individual. Humans are complex and diverse enough to display both sets of behaviors within the population.

I thought it should be fairly obvious that social instincts are "blindly inherited," I can't imagine why you think that any institution, scientific or religious, would need to manufacture them.

I don't help the poor as a hobby or because I was told to. I help the poor because I have compassion and empathy. Animals also demonstrate these same pro-social behaviors, and I'm pretty sure none of them are Jewish or Hindu.

You are assuming that magical thinking is the optimal survival strategy as opposed to a lesser-evil byproduct of advanced cognition in a particular environment. This is like assuming that because all humans have appendices, having an appendix is necessarily a better survival strategy. It's not. It may have once served a purpose, but now the best it can do is kill you.

Nukes could wipe out the human race, but so could an asteroid. Coincidentally I'd be much less worried about having nukes if there was a lot less magical thinking in the world.

I somewhat agree, but I am optimistic that society will change in other ways to fill this gap. It need not be any single activity or institution.

There won't be an exact replacement because the circumstances that led to the community cannot (or rather, should not) be replicated. For the sake of the survival of the planet/species, I also don't think any institution based around magical thinking should fill the gap.

Keep in mind that high-demand religions require a huge investment of time and money. Devoting even just a fraction of those resources to hobbies, art classes, and/or other local activities tends to yield much better social results. While this might not perfectly fill the gap, neither did the religion, which is why people are leaving it.

There is definitely a massive breakdown of old social institutions that have not adapted to the modern world. People don't need to be closely knit to their families and local religion in order to survive anymore, and they are simultaneously discovering how awful these institutions habitually are.

To improve families, I imagine we'd have to wait for a significantly large generation to mature whose parents started a family through informed choice rather than social/cultural/religious pressure.

Alternatively, we could regress by taking away people's freedoms (especially women's) and force everyone to be dependent on traditional power structures just like the "good old days."

Personally, I'd rather move forward, but it's not entirely clear what that looks like.

You're looking at weekly religious gatherings through rose-colored lenses. A crossfit gym membership and book club could very well produce a far healthier local community than a church. Religion does not have a monopoly on the variables that attract healthy, thoughtful, intelligent people (in fact, trends in the US suggest quite the opposite).

Interesting how you just said science "cannot be used to explain everything" and yet now you're claiming "proof" and "evidence" (i.e. science) for your particular religion. Make up your mind.

Numbers are a human construct, just like words in a language. They don't "exist" in the same sense as anything physically real. Nobody has "faith" in the number one, it's just a concept that's proven to be universally useful. If it weren't useful, people wouldn't (and couldn't) conceptualize it. Again, faith is believing in something despite lack of evidence or despite evidence to the contrary.

I trust scientific facts proportional to the evidence I have that these facts are true. This is not the case for faith, wherein disproportionately large amounts of trust are demanded without any evidence.

Our model of the atom allows us to accurately predict chemical reactions. Religion has no predictive power whatsoever, and none of its unique "truth" claims are provable or falsifiable.

People who uncritically trust "science" as regurgitated by pop-culture media are more akin to theists.