Again, I think you’re misunderstanding the point of the article. The point isn’t just that religious beliefs have social functions or uses (expressing family values, for example). It’s that in the special case of religious beliefs and practices, those social roles are paramount, whereas in the case of mundane beliefs, such as that the sky is blue, the function is more practical because the belief reliably tracks a testable fact. In religion the social roles overshadow the semantic contents and empirical truth values, as in a shibboleth—which is just as well because those contents are preposterous. That’s why they’re preposterous, though, because they’re meant to test the religious person’s faithfulness to the group. That’s their function which in religion’s case is paramount.
And that’s the explanation on the table. I agree that I asserted in the article that religious beliefs are preposterous. I’m just saying now that those assertions were only assumptions. I didn’t attempt to back them up in that article because my focus was elsewhere, and I’ve written dozens of other articles that attempt to show that theism is mistaken. For example, I wrote a two-part article against Craig’s case for Jesus’s resurrection, another article on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, an article on each of the major theistic proofs, a series on the Christ myth theory, and so on and so forth.
As I explain in various articles, a first cause is a far cry from the monotheist’s personal deity, so that’s a red herring.
Moreover, if our intuition does point us towards believing there’s a first cause, we must still contend with how science has shown that our intuitions aren’t to be trusted on the cosmic scale. The appeal to intuition here begs the question because it presupposes an anthropocentric framework that encompasses the universe. It might indeed be miraculous if our cognitive capacities perfectly matched up with everything there is to know. Much more likely on atheistic grounds would be that in our attempt to humanize nature in understanding it, we’d miss much that’s alien or irrelevant to us but that’s nonetheless real. Our mundane notion of “cause,” for instance, might be too terrestrial to account for the quantum events that initiated our universe.
It’s interesting that you speak of your “chosen myth.” Are you conceding that the gospels’ account of Jesus is just a myth, not a historical record? It doesn’t seem so. Rather, you’re mixing up the two when you speak of the testable facts attached. You might be interested in my article “How Christians Misunderstand the Nature of Religion” (first link below), which deals with the nature of myths.
You say philosophizing is easier than dealing with Christianity. Alas for you, I’ve done both. You’ve hardly shown that I don’t understand Christianity. But you’re free to look over my articles on that religion and on theism to check whether I’ve missed anything important. (See the second and third links below, which take you only to the ones on Medium. I’ve written on theism and Christianity for years before that, on my blog, which you can find through the fourth link. Scroll down to around the halfway point.)
https://medium.com/@benjamincain8/list/christianity-and-islam-dad5c0d7814b
https://medium.com/@benjamincain8/list/the-absurdity-of-god-397360389565
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.com/2013/02/map-of-rants.html
