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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Subject6051@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

I am Ganesh, an Indian atheist and I don't eat beef. It's not like that I have a religious reason to do that, but after all those years seeing cows as peaceful animals and playing and growing up with them in a village, I doubt if I ever will be able to eat beef. I wasn't raised very religious, I didn't go to temple everyday and read Gita every evening unlike most muslims who are somewhat serious about their religion, my family has this watered down religion (which has it's advantages).

But yeah, not eating beef is a moral issue I deal with. I mean, I don't care that I don't eat beef, but the fact that I eat pork and chicken but not beef seems to me to be weird. So, is there any religious practice that you guys follow to this day?

edit: I like religious music, religious temples (Churches, Gurudwara's, Temples & Mosques in Iran), religious paintings and art sometimes. I know for a fact that the only art you could produce is those days was indeed religious and the greatest artists needed to make something religious to be funded, that we will never know what those artists would have produced in the absence of religion, but yeah, religious art is good nonetheless.

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[-] TheWoozy@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Approaching kindness or generosity from a biological point of view seems (to me) to lead to The Prisoners' Dilemma. Everyone is better off if we are all generous, but if I can't trust others to be generous, I'm better off being selfish.

IMHO, religion is an evolutionary adaptation to "solve" this problem. It might have worked in small communities, but not in our global society.

I'm rambling...

[-] SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social 2 points 1 year ago

It sounds like you might really enjoy an episode of Radiolab, The Good Show, on this very topic, the evolution of altruism. Indeed, digging into it leads them to the Prisoner's Dilemma. One of the segments covers a competition organized by a computer scientist around an iterative cooperate/defect game. Entrants tried to come up with an algorithm that would maximize the benefit to the 'player' in repeated rounds against the computer. I won't spoil it by revealing which algorithm won, but I'll say it's really fascinating.

this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
322 points (95.2% liked)

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