The Science of the Benefits of Religion(wired.com)
wired.com
The Science of the Benefits of Religion
https://www.wired.com/story/psychologists-religion-how-god-works/
359 comments
Mass rape of little kids?
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The title of the book is "How God Works" yet the the author explicitly states he is ignoring theology and instead is focusing on spiritual practices can have beneficial effects on a practitioner's mental state (happiness, kindness, acceptance, etc). The subtitle of the book, which is the title of the HN submission, seems to better convey the research presented in the book.
Religion isn't that easily defined.
Are Confucianism and American Civil Religion religions?
God, Gods or even believe in the supernatural are not necessary parts of religion, some religions place much higher importance on rituals than on their believe systems.
Are Confucianism and American Civil Religion religions?
God, Gods or even believe in the supernatural are not necessary parts of religion, some religions place much higher importance on rituals than on their believe systems.
> some religions place much higher importance on rituals than on their believe systems
I don't think any religion actually puts belief systems anywhere below the highest level of importance, because any ritual is always predicated on a belief system that gives it meaning.
I don't think any religion actually puts belief systems anywhere below the highest level of importance, because any ritual is always predicated on a belief system that gives it meaning.
Religion clearly has mental health benefits, especially in terms of robustness.
The interesting question is whether it is a transcendent ‘supra-rational’ belief system, e.g. a cheat code at life, because even assuming nothing matters, it makes sense to believe if you want to ‘be statistically more joyful’ (of course, some don’t want joy in their lives, so maybe it wouldn’t make sense for them?).
The interesting question is whether it is a transcendent ‘supra-rational’ belief system, e.g. a cheat code at life, because even assuming nothing matters, it makes sense to believe if you want to ‘be statistically more joyful’ (of course, some don’t want joy in their lives, so maybe it wouldn’t make sense for them?).
> Religion clearly has mental health benefits, especially in terms of robustness.
The question is if this generalizes to society as a whole. For atheists it seems like living in religious communities has severe negative mental health consequences causing them to die earlier, but atheist societies tend to live longer and be happier than religious societies. So in any society it is better to be religious, but you'd rather that your peers weren't religious because their belief hurts you.
The main thing is that they create a social group that you can't be a part of. But aside from that they might also blame the worlds problems on your non-belief, pester you to start believing, they might obstruct your ability to get healthcare etc.
The question is if this generalizes to society as a whole. For atheists it seems like living in religious communities has severe negative mental health consequences causing them to die earlier, but atheist societies tend to live longer and be happier than religious societies. So in any society it is better to be religious, but you'd rather that your peers weren't religious because their belief hurts you.
The main thing is that they create a social group that you can't be a part of. But aside from that they might also blame the worlds problems on your non-belief, pester you to start believing, they might obstruct your ability to get healthcare etc.
I grew up strongly religious, and I still believe strongly, but left the organization due to the people in it. I did have an atheist phase, but that depressed me so severely that I almost had no choice but to reconsider my belief.
Without a religious structure, life has no set purpose. Sure, you can make a purpose for yourself, but it feels empty compared to a created, beautiful universe by a benevolent being who got lonely.
Without a religious structure, life has no set purpose. Sure, you can make a purpose for yourself, but it feels empty compared to a created, beautiful universe by a benevolent being who got lonely.
As somebody that never felt they had some higher purpose I can't say that I feel any need for it.
I can understand you feel like you lack something when lose a higher purpose you've had all your life, but that (for lack of better words) sound like you have developed a dependency on that purpose. What you describe is common for many people leaving religion, but it is also something that is overcome by most after (sometimes a long) time.
Personally, my values of making the world a better place for future generations while having some fun seem to do.
Personally, my values of making the world a better place for future generations while having some fun seem to do.
"never felt they had some higher purpose" ... "my values of making the world a better place for future generations". Sounds like you're now having an epiphany :)
What I ment so say was some "externally given purpose" that makes claims about being objective.
I consider my values to be more of a general goal than a purpose in itself and make no claims about them being objectively good.
I consider my values to be more of a general goal than a purpose in itself and make no claims about them being objectively good.
You still got caught in the rhetorical trap. You have a purpose, you just had to provide it for yourself, and it goes beyond altruism.
> I did have an atheist phase, but that depressed me so severely that I almost had no choice but to reconsider my belief.
Would you say then that you think it's more important for you to feel better than to believe true things?
> Without a religious structure, life has no set purpose.
Life has the purpose that you give it, there is no need for religion or deities for it.
I feel empowered by the fact that I give my life the meaning that I want, as opposed to that purpose being imposed on me by some supernatural deity whose existence has never been demonstrated.
And you know what? Even if at some point, the existence of such a deity is demonstrated, I will still choose to give my life my own purpose.
Would you say then that you think it's more important for you to feel better than to believe true things?
> Without a religious structure, life has no set purpose.
Life has the purpose that you give it, there is no need for religion or deities for it.
I feel empowered by the fact that I give my life the meaning that I want, as opposed to that purpose being imposed on me by some supernatural deity whose existence has never been demonstrated.
And you know what? Even if at some point, the existence of such a deity is demonstrated, I will still choose to give my life my own purpose.
> Would you say then that you think it's more important for you to feel better than to believe true things?
Believing in a higher power and believing untrue things aren't codependent. I believe in science, and the power of man's reason. None of that contradicts my belief in a higher power.
Believing in a higher power and believing untrue things aren't codependent. I believe in science, and the power of man's reason. None of that contradicts my belief in a higher power.
That belief is irrational, though, since there is no evidence that such a being exists.
> Without a religious structure, life has no set purpose. Sure, you can make a purpose for yourself, but it feels empty compared to a created, beautiful universe by a benevolent being who got lonely.
Sounds like you have simply convinced yourself about that being true, my guy
Sounds like you have simply convinced yourself about that being true, my guy
I've lived it. Maybe religious thought is addictive.
Does it? If I knew 100% there's any kind of afterlife, I'd kill myself today. Not to mention that there's some almighty butthole in the sky that does nothing to help anyone but asks for faith (also their supposed representatives ask for money), now that's depressing. Oh and v1.0 of the European shit is pretty gruesome.
I believe humans need rituals and for that religion mainly fills that gap for now (weddings etc..)
I also believe we need stories and religion used to fill that gap well, but with the advent of the modern era religion is losing out
personally as a mainly athiest and with a slight agnostic streak (btw I'm from the uk with a CoE upbringing) , I feel that most/ if not all religious people - from my personal experience - pick and mixes their relgion which kinda feels that it makes the whole thing hypocritical
I also see that almost all people really really really want to do the right thing and 'generally' believe in the golden rule of do not do upon to others, things/ stuff, that you do want to be done to yourself.
My grandma was deeply relgious and it it brought her extreme happiness towards the end of her life, so I understand it's significance, but still, she picked and mixed her believe to make her happy
I also believe we need stories and religion used to fill that gap well, but with the advent of the modern era religion is losing out
personally as a mainly athiest and with a slight agnostic streak (btw I'm from the uk with a CoE upbringing) , I feel that most/ if not all religious people - from my personal experience - pick and mixes their relgion which kinda feels that it makes the whole thing hypocritical
I also see that almost all people really really really want to do the right thing and 'generally' believe in the golden rule of do not do upon to others, things/ stuff, that you do want to be done to yourself.
My grandma was deeply relgious and it it brought her extreme happiness towards the end of her life, so I understand it's significance, but still, she picked and mixed her believe to make her happy
There seems to be little doubt that religion, faith, spirituality or rite can have benefits. The question is how to get the good side of all these (community, meaning, satisfaction and fulfilment) without the nasty side (exclusion and intolerance, resistance to or denial of reality, imposition of impossible standards, the denial of one's own preferences and wants).
Religion has been a major source of soothing and a major source of suffering for all of humanity's past. I think we need to overcome religion and move to a world where each can have their own spirituality - but as long as people follow religions that preach their own unique truthfulness (believe the pope, the Bible, the Quran, the priests, the sutras, ...) we will never get there.
Religion has been a major source of soothing and a major source of suffering for all of humanity's past. I think we need to overcome religion and move to a world where each can have their own spirituality - but as long as people follow religions that preach their own unique truthfulness (believe the pope, the Bible, the Quran, the priests, the sutras, ...) we will never get there.
The issues you describe apply to any grouping of people. Tribes have their own truths. Look at how popular those "we believe science is real" signs are.
You could remove religion and we'd still have the same issues. I don't think it's possible to solve them. The best solution is going to be a world where a long, happy life is guaranteed by forces outside man's control. This will likely alleviate a lot of the tribal issues we face as well.
You could remove religion and we'd still have the same issues. I don't think it's possible to solve them. The best solution is going to be a world where a long, happy life is guaranteed by forces outside man's control. This will likely alleviate a lot of the tribal issues we face as well.
The difference between religion and other groups is that it provides an impenetrable shield to those who wield it, and virtually anything can be deflected a-la
> God's ways are mysterious
fashion. Any differing positions appear as attacks against the person's religion, which - when it carries sufficient argumentative power - can shake the foundations of the person's world model. This, in turn, prevents them from accepting the differing position because such events induce fear and shut down mental faculties, effectively putting a person in a fight or flight mode.
Furthermore, it prevents people from maturing and accepting integral parts of the human condition, such as the permanence of death, it provides a false sense of security that renders people incapacitated from taking meaningful action (God will find a way if God wills it), and finally gives a false sense importance and grandiose to puny humans who live in utter ignorance of their own insignificance in the medium (NB humanity scale) and grand scheme of things.
To reach the solution that you point to, society needs to accept that free-will is an illusion, and that is inherently incompatible with Abrahamic religions.
> God's ways are mysterious
fashion. Any differing positions appear as attacks against the person's religion, which - when it carries sufficient argumentative power - can shake the foundations of the person's world model. This, in turn, prevents them from accepting the differing position because such events induce fear and shut down mental faculties, effectively putting a person in a fight or flight mode.
Furthermore, it prevents people from maturing and accepting integral parts of the human condition, such as the permanence of death, it provides a false sense of security that renders people incapacitated from taking meaningful action (God will find a way if God wills it), and finally gives a false sense importance and grandiose to puny humans who live in utter ignorance of their own insignificance in the medium (NB humanity scale) and grand scheme of things.
To reach the solution that you point to, society needs to accept that free-will is an illusion, and that is inherently incompatible with Abrahamic religions.
> The difference between religion and other groups is that it provides an impenetrable shield to those who wield it, and virtually anything can be deflected
Yeah, other groups have this as well. I once had the temerity to observe that Bush did a lot to quell anti-Islamic sentiment by appealing to other people of faith in post-9/11 speeches. I recounted my own experience as a brown guy with a Muslim name living in the south in 2002-2003.
An acquaintance, a young white atheist lady, told me that I needed to “educate myself” about the “damage” that “Islamaphobia does to brown people in America.”
I didn’t even engage further because it was clear I was dealing with someone’s quasi-religious belief.
Everyone has belief systems and everyone’s belief systems necessarily include things taken as axiomatic.
Yeah, other groups have this as well. I once had the temerity to observe that Bush did a lot to quell anti-Islamic sentiment by appealing to other people of faith in post-9/11 speeches. I recounted my own experience as a brown guy with a Muslim name living in the south in 2002-2003.
An acquaintance, a young white atheist lady, told me that I needed to “educate myself” about the “damage” that “Islamaphobia does to brown people in America.”
I didn’t even engage further because it was clear I was dealing with someone’s quasi-religious belief.
Everyone has belief systems and everyone’s belief systems necessarily include things taken as axiomatic.
Haha same. Been informed by so many white liberals as to how I should feel, one wonders if they think they'd make a better brown man.
Yeah it's been crazy to experience - white liberals lecturing minorities on how they should feel or think is itself extremely racist and insulting.
I'd use prejudiced over racist since the same 'allies' are often very homophobic, biphobic and transphobic.
Nah they're just racist. The thing is a white liberal can become a homosexual should they choose to have sex with someone of the same sex. They can even theoretically become trans.
No matter what a white man or woman does or how they feel about attraction or their gender.... He or she will never be brown. Sorry I'm not putting up with this intersectionality shit.
No matter what a white man or woman does or how they feel about attraction or their gender.... He or she will never be brown. Sorry I'm not putting up with this intersectionality shit.
People don't choose to be gay/lesbians or trans, and there's tonnes of evidence in support of this.
Sure. But if I, a straight man, slept with a man, then I would become a homosexual by definition. Or if I pursued becoming trans. Now it's unlikely I'd do this but theoretically it is part of the set of possible actions..
There is no action a white man or woman can take, not surgery they can pursue, that will make them brown.
There is no action a white man or woman can take, not surgery they can pursue, that will make them brown.
“ society needs to accept that free-will is an illusion “
The funny thing about pushing the ‘free will is an illusion’ argument is that it sounds exactly like a faith argument.
How is one going to ever prove that free will does not exist when most of us are running real time experiments during most of our waking hours.
For some reason, the universe gained consciousness even though it could have outputted zombies that would never argue whether they are not zombies :)
The funny thing about pushing the ‘free will is an illusion’ argument is that it sounds exactly like a faith argument.
How is one going to ever prove that free will does not exist when most of us are running real time experiments during most of our waking hours.
For some reason, the universe gained consciousness even though it could have outputted zombies that would never argue whether they are not zombies :)
>> How is one going to ever prove that free will does not exist
if i can perfectly predict what you are going to do before you realize what you are going to do, that would be at the least an indicator.
Can we do that? not at present. Is there research results that pushes that idea somewhat? Yes. Is it conclusive enough, no way.
But i don't think you can rule it out either.
if i can perfectly predict what you are going to do before you realize what you are going to do, that would be at the least an indicator.
Can we do that? not at present. Is there research results that pushes that idea somewhat? Yes. Is it conclusive enough, no way.
But i don't think you can rule it out either.
If free will doesn't exist, what's the point in arguing with someone predetermined to believe in free will? They have no free will to change their mind!
That assumption lies in ignorance of how our brains work.
The gist is that we have some world model that arises out of the structure of the brain and the chemical state of it.
Your mind doesn’t change because you have free will. Your mind changes because you have collected a sufficient amount of experiences that alter the state and structure of the brain.
You don’t learn stuff because you “decided” I will learn this and that and I will store it in my brain somewhere. All your learning is actually involuntary because as you accumulate experiences, your synapses get positively or negatively reinforced and that causes the learning. You may choose to study something but you don’t choose which exact information gets stored and where. Instead, when trying to recall something your brain probes its world model and tries to find the circuit that triggers the correct response.
So why would anyone argue that free will doesn’t exist? Because it gives people the opportunity to prove their world model, see the inconsistencies, experience new trains of thought and rewrite their brain.
But no person who is not open to the idea will ever get to accept despite mountains of evidence because for most people, the idea of free will is so integral to their world model, that any challenge feels like a threat to their very foundation, which causes cognitive dissonance, and the shut down of executive functions that process information logically.
Our brains have two competing circuits, one that tries to break the mould and challenges everything, and one that tries to be grounded and conservative. Cognitive dissonance occurs when the former is pushing the latter around but the latter has trouble coming to terms with reality and falls in denial.
The gist is that we have some world model that arises out of the structure of the brain and the chemical state of it.
Your mind doesn’t change because you have free will. Your mind changes because you have collected a sufficient amount of experiences that alter the state and structure of the brain.
You don’t learn stuff because you “decided” I will learn this and that and I will store it in my brain somewhere. All your learning is actually involuntary because as you accumulate experiences, your synapses get positively or negatively reinforced and that causes the learning. You may choose to study something but you don’t choose which exact information gets stored and where. Instead, when trying to recall something your brain probes its world model and tries to find the circuit that triggers the correct response.
So why would anyone argue that free will doesn’t exist? Because it gives people the opportunity to prove their world model, see the inconsistencies, experience new trains of thought and rewrite their brain.
But no person who is not open to the idea will ever get to accept despite mountains of evidence because for most people, the idea of free will is so integral to their world model, that any challenge feels like a threat to their very foundation, which causes cognitive dissonance, and the shut down of executive functions that process information logically.
Our brains have two competing circuits, one that tries to break the mould and challenges everything, and one that tries to be grounded and conservative. Cognitive dissonance occurs when the former is pushing the latter around but the latter has trouble coming to terms with reality and falls in denial.
Let's try another question. How does not believing in free will give you an advantage in life? Studies seem to show that a "growth mindset" is superior to a "fixed mindset", and I would guess a belief in free will tends to correlate more with a "growth mindset".
A strong belief in free-will correlates with an internal locus of control, which enables a "growth mindset", an external locus of control does not enable a growth mindset because the human believes they react to things.
I do have to admit that for a good while, accepting absence was not good for both my mental well-being, or my actions, simply because I could not find meaning or reason to do anything when no choice is ever my own.
Absence of free will however, implies that there is no locus of control at all. Things happen as they will, regardless of what any human believes, and accepting that things just happen and going with the flow is something that many eastern religions advocate for.
The consequence of accepting the absence of free will is that the person can stop dwelling about the past, because they were never in control and could have never done otherwise. The person understands that any action they "take" is conditioned on their brain's current state (ie structural and chemical).
This means that nothing is fixed, the person itself is not fixed in place because the person is a manifestation of the brain's state, which is constantly modified and revised.
This assumption then, even if wrong, enables a much stronger growth mindset, one that doesn't dwell on the past, and doesn't get stuck on misfortunes, or on a false sense of optimism.
By accepting that we lack free will, we "can" then probe our world model to see what makes us happy, ie what utility functions our brain has, which then gives us a compulsion to do things that make us happy or reach goals. This is because we understand that what needs to be done is change our brain's structure such that when the time comes, it will be in the correct state to achieve whatever it wants to achieve, and understands that achieving goals and pushing forward makes the brain happy - even if only momentarily - due to dopamine.
On a larger scale, suddenly inmates are not the evils society makes them to be, but people who have a screwed up brain and that need help, rehabilitation and normalization of their brain and structures so that they too can experience a decent life, and the events that got them imprisoned can not unfold again. Obviously this does not mean that the inmates get thrown back in with the general population (pun not intended), and that is because they are still in a space of states that cause them to be dangerous to other humans.
I do have to admit that for a good while, accepting absence was not good for both my mental well-being, or my actions, simply because I could not find meaning or reason to do anything when no choice is ever my own.
Absence of free will however, implies that there is no locus of control at all. Things happen as they will, regardless of what any human believes, and accepting that things just happen and going with the flow is something that many eastern religions advocate for.
The consequence of accepting the absence of free will is that the person can stop dwelling about the past, because they were never in control and could have never done otherwise. The person understands that any action they "take" is conditioned on their brain's current state (ie structural and chemical).
This means that nothing is fixed, the person itself is not fixed in place because the person is a manifestation of the brain's state, which is constantly modified and revised.
This assumption then, even if wrong, enables a much stronger growth mindset, one that doesn't dwell on the past, and doesn't get stuck on misfortunes, or on a false sense of optimism.
By accepting that we lack free will, we "can" then probe our world model to see what makes us happy, ie what utility functions our brain has, which then gives us a compulsion to do things that make us happy or reach goals. This is because we understand that what needs to be done is change our brain's structure such that when the time comes, it will be in the correct state to achieve whatever it wants to achieve, and understands that achieving goals and pushing forward makes the brain happy - even if only momentarily - due to dopamine.
On a larger scale, suddenly inmates are not the evils society makes them to be, but people who have a screwed up brain and that need help, rehabilitation and normalization of their brain and structures so that they too can experience a decent life, and the events that got them imprisoned can not unfold again. Obviously this does not mean that the inmates get thrown back in with the general population (pun not intended), and that is because they are still in a space of states that cause them to be dangerous to other humans.
Agreed, and to add on, incarceration then, is about protecting society from harmful people, not retribution. It makes no sense to say, were going to keep this person in jail for another 10 years because s/he really deserves it. Rather, we can't let them out because it seems likely they will harm other people.
Obviously if you are person who was harmed in some way by this person, it's hard to hear and follow this plan. But as a society, we have to think in a more calm and deliberate manner, and try to make dispassionate decisions.
Further, if in the future, we find a drug for psychopathy, such that we can just give it dangerous people in prisons, and they become rational, healthy people, at that point it makes no sense to keep incarcerating them. Holding the treatment as a further punishment also makes no sense.
There is a point to be made that incarceration does potentially effect other people's drive to do bad things. Certainly their brain can be dissuaded by them seeing huge prison penalties paid for similar crimes they might do. But i'm not sure the correlation is all that high, and i'm not sure it's ethical to use one person to dissuade another. But that is a point that a society would have to decide on.
Obviously if you are person who was harmed in some way by this person, it's hard to hear and follow this plan. But as a society, we have to think in a more calm and deliberate manner, and try to make dispassionate decisions.
Further, if in the future, we find a drug for psychopathy, such that we can just give it dangerous people in prisons, and they become rational, healthy people, at that point it makes no sense to keep incarcerating them. Holding the treatment as a further punishment also makes no sense.
There is a point to be made that incarceration does potentially effect other people's drive to do bad things. Certainly their brain can be dissuaded by them seeing huge prison penalties paid for similar crimes they might do. But i'm not sure the correlation is all that high, and i'm not sure it's ethical to use one person to dissuade another. But that is a point that a society would have to decide on.
Agreed with all of your points!
A treatment for psychopathy could be possible through magic mushrooms as they seem to promote neuroneogenesis, and restructuring of the brain in depressed patients, so that is a very promising angle, and a lot of further research needs to be done on hallucinogenics because they seem to have profound effects on our perception of reality.
With psychopathy, one of the major problems is with the mirror neurons of the brain, their absence prevents the person from being empathetic, so very targeted treatment would be needed, but in the end, it is better than suffering and rotting in prison.
A treatment for psychopathy could be possible through magic mushrooms as they seem to promote neuroneogenesis, and restructuring of the brain in depressed patients, so that is a very promising angle, and a lot of further research needs to be done on hallucinogenics because they seem to have profound effects on our perception of reality.
With psychopathy, one of the major problems is with the mirror neurons of the brain, their absence prevents the person from being empathetic, so very targeted treatment would be needed, but in the end, it is better than suffering and rotting in prison.
I'm not sure that question matters. The question of whether or not we have free will is independent of what would be better.
because your mental state is a culmination of some mix of your genes and external influences, both in history and through the world now. If you are around people who consistently present ideas to you, there is a more likelyhood that your brain will accept those beliefs as facts. This is why indoctrination works so well. So just because you don't have free will doesn't mean your position won't change, in fact, it's evidence that it will change.
I don’t see how running real-time experiments invalidates absence of free will and I’d like to discuss this further.
However, I would like to point out that a non deterministic system does not imply a system where the agents have free will. The scales at which QM apply are many orders of magnitude smaller than those of individual neurons and I don’t believe Penrose has reached a meaningful conclusion with his work. And any deterministic system can be simulated as far as we would like and at any point we want, even if it is chaotic, if the initial parameter are the same the outcome is always the same.
I would also like to argue that consciousness, being aware of one’s own actions or probing some world model does not imply free will. This occurs simply because your brain was in such a state to perform such actions. The act of self referencing can be achieved with things even more dumb, like natural numbers, and I can recommend Hofstadter’s work here, like Gödel Escher Bach.
However, I would like to point out that a non deterministic system does not imply a system where the agents have free will. The scales at which QM apply are many orders of magnitude smaller than those of individual neurons and I don’t believe Penrose has reached a meaningful conclusion with his work. And any deterministic system can be simulated as far as we would like and at any point we want, even if it is chaotic, if the initial parameter are the same the outcome is always the same.
I would also like to argue that consciousness, being aware of one’s own actions or probing some world model does not imply free will. This occurs simply because your brain was in such a state to perform such actions. The act of self referencing can be achieved with things even more dumb, like natural numbers, and I can recommend Hofstadter’s work here, like Gödel Escher Bach.
> a long, happy life is guaranteed by forces outside man's control. This will likely alleviate a lot of the tribal issues we face as well.
I suspect it would make it worse. People without a purpose tend to invent tribes and social status to fight for. School kids and prisoners are great examples. Their purpose is basically to passively exist while their physical needs are provided for by the system. Another example is neighborhoods with high unemployment and lots of people living on social welfare.
I suspect it would make it worse. People without a purpose tend to invent tribes and social status to fight for. School kids and prisoners are great examples. Their purpose is basically to passively exist while their physical needs are provided for by the system. Another example is neighborhoods with high unemployment and lots of people living on social welfare.
I think it’s time to recognize that many of the things you list as bad have a purpose as well and benefits. Remember, organized religion developed in harsh societies were people were always struggling to survive. If you think about a village in Bangladesh, where there is no government with unlimited resources to come save you, imposition of strict rules, suppression of individual preferences, etc., makes sense.
What’s soured me on secular humanism is how the liberal revolution hasn’t made a big chunk of the population better off: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir.... I don’t think that’s just economic, I think it’s social as well.
> According to the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, 60 years ago just 20 percent of children born to parents with a high-school education or less lived in a single-parent household; now that figure is nearly 70 percent. Among college-educated households, by contrast, the single-parent rate remains less than 10 percent. Since the 1970s, the divorce rate has declined significantly among college-educated couples, while it has risen dramatically among couples with only a high-school education—even as marriage itself has become less common.
If you think about the marshmallow test of impulse control, a lot of us are those kids at the far right of the bell curve who could wait forever for future rewards. But what about everyone else? What if a lot of people need the threat of exclusion or intolerance to, for example, to not walk away from their parental obligations.
My in laws live in rural Oregon, and what’s striking to me is how dysfunctional their communities are. People might putatively religious, but liberalism has won insofar as organized religion has no power to police public morals. And what’s been the result? Not a social libertarian utopia, but dysfunction. My mother in law has teenagers just flocking to her house because it’s an island of stability in a world of mom’s boyfriends coming and going, divorces over trifles, etc.
My dad in the other hand comes from a village in Bangladesh, and they don’t have a fraction of the material comfort of folks in rural America. But what they have is Islam, and tight regulation of social behaviors, intact families, etc. They have social structures that help them make the most of what little they have, which is why I think they thrive when they immigrate to America.
What’s soured me on secular humanism is how the liberal revolution hasn’t made a big chunk of the population better off: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir.... I don’t think that’s just economic, I think it’s social as well.
> According to the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, 60 years ago just 20 percent of children born to parents with a high-school education or less lived in a single-parent household; now that figure is nearly 70 percent. Among college-educated households, by contrast, the single-parent rate remains less than 10 percent. Since the 1970s, the divorce rate has declined significantly among college-educated couples, while it has risen dramatically among couples with only a high-school education—even as marriage itself has become less common.
If you think about the marshmallow test of impulse control, a lot of us are those kids at the far right of the bell curve who could wait forever for future rewards. But what about everyone else? What if a lot of people need the threat of exclusion or intolerance to, for example, to not walk away from their parental obligations.
My in laws live in rural Oregon, and what’s striking to me is how dysfunctional their communities are. People might putatively religious, but liberalism has won insofar as organized religion has no power to police public morals. And what’s been the result? Not a social libertarian utopia, but dysfunction. My mother in law has teenagers just flocking to her house because it’s an island of stability in a world of mom’s boyfriends coming and going, divorces over trifles, etc.
My dad in the other hand comes from a village in Bangladesh, and they don’t have a fraction of the material comfort of folks in rural America. But what they have is Islam, and tight regulation of social behaviors, intact families, etc. They have social structures that help them make the most of what little they have, which is why I think they thrive when they immigrate to America.
But what do we do if the core factual claims turn out to be false? Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, nothing happens after you die, there is no anthropomorphic super-entity like the biblical god or Allah from Islam, and so on.
If it this turns out to be the case, we can’t just pretend otherwise.
Can we make a better religion that doesn’t depend on false myths?
If it this turns out to be the case, we can’t just pretend otherwise.
Can we make a better religion that doesn’t depend on false myths?
I think this is a core question.
I don't believe that religion works if it is sold as a series of fables containing practical advice encouraging pro-social behavior (even if that's how it functions). Religion works as myths that are true and make your hair stand up when you read them.
I don't believe that religion works if it is sold as a series of fables containing practical advice encouraging pro-social behavior (even if that's how it functions). Religion works as myths that are true and make your hair stand up when you read them.
Most Christians have already shed a lot of now-disproven beliefs. Angels aren't literally flying in the sky over our heads. Literal stories get re-interpreted as metaphors or the definitions of words changed. Contradictions get solved by picking whichever one agrees with the culture at the time. And there are a lot of contradictions, so if logic was enough to un-believe a Christian, they would all have become atheists already.
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Most Christians have already became atheists though. USA is lagging the rest of the world a bit, but the trend is clear all over.
Really great post
What exactly about secular humanism has caused this social problem? Do you have some research that indicates that walking away from "parental obligations" is in any way influenced by religious belief?
I could make the equal assertion that religion turns men into sexual abusers of children (reference: the Catholic church). Are you comfortable with that?
I could make the equal assertion that religion turns men into sexual abusers of children (reference: the Catholic church). Are you comfortable with that?
> What exactly about secular humanism has caused this social problem? Do you have some research that indicates that walking away from "parental obligations" is in any way influenced by religious belief?
Religion (speaking about Christianity here, but Islam is similar) prioritizes marriage and family within the traditional two parent structure. Organized religion provides a framework for pressuring people to confirm to that structure. Secular humanism, by contrast, emphasizes development of the self, and discourages social enforcement of moral norms.
There’s many studies on correlation between religious belief and say fertility rate. There’s also studies showing the correlation between vibrant religious institutions and various positive family formation characteristics. In particular, if you compare geographically and economically similar places, those with healthy religious institutions where people regularly attend church (say certain Dutch parts of Iowa) are socially better off than similar places where the religious institutions aren’t healthy. (Tim Carney has done a lot of research on this.)
To be clear: I’m not saying that religion is the only way to achieve these goals. My thesis is narrower: religion is a social phenomenon that have average people practice healthy behaviors. Educational elites who similarly practice these healthy behaviors (say non-religious but highly educated Asians in California) may not need the support mechanism offered by organized religion. But those same people underestimate or overlook the support networks they may have, or cognitive advantages they may enjoy, which average Americans may lack. (My great grandfather was an imam. My dad didn’t raise us religious, but we had the same moral framework, and our Bangladeshi community enforced the same behavioral standards.)
The reason this is important is the research being done now, for example by Raj Chetty, which shows that single parenthood rates is the single factor most highly correlated with low economic mobility.
> I could make the equal assertion that religion turns men into sexual abusers of children (reference: the Catholic church). Are you comfortable with that?
I think it would be more accurate to say that hierarchical religious organizations make it easier for sexual abusers to hide. And that’s absolutely true.
But that’s not the end of the analysis. Our society has a tendency to focus on injustice to individuals created by social structures, which is admirable. But we are often myopic about the benefits of social structures to the majority.
For example, we focus a lot on abuses within the Mormon community, which undoubtedly exists. But if you go to Utah you can’t help but notice these people have created a thriving civilization in the middle of an inhospitable desert, next to a lake that has no drinkable water. And heavily Mormon areas continue to thrive even as other non-coastal areas, which aren’t full of educational elites, are collapsing.
Religion (speaking about Christianity here, but Islam is similar) prioritizes marriage and family within the traditional two parent structure. Organized religion provides a framework for pressuring people to confirm to that structure. Secular humanism, by contrast, emphasizes development of the self, and discourages social enforcement of moral norms.
There’s many studies on correlation between religious belief and say fertility rate. There’s also studies showing the correlation between vibrant religious institutions and various positive family formation characteristics. In particular, if you compare geographically and economically similar places, those with healthy religious institutions where people regularly attend church (say certain Dutch parts of Iowa) are socially better off than similar places where the religious institutions aren’t healthy. (Tim Carney has done a lot of research on this.)
To be clear: I’m not saying that religion is the only way to achieve these goals. My thesis is narrower: religion is a social phenomenon that have average people practice healthy behaviors. Educational elites who similarly practice these healthy behaviors (say non-religious but highly educated Asians in California) may not need the support mechanism offered by organized religion. But those same people underestimate or overlook the support networks they may have, or cognitive advantages they may enjoy, which average Americans may lack. (My great grandfather was an imam. My dad didn’t raise us religious, but we had the same moral framework, and our Bangladeshi community enforced the same behavioral standards.)
The reason this is important is the research being done now, for example by Raj Chetty, which shows that single parenthood rates is the single factor most highly correlated with low economic mobility.
> I could make the equal assertion that religion turns men into sexual abusers of children (reference: the Catholic church). Are you comfortable with that?
I think it would be more accurate to say that hierarchical religious organizations make it easier for sexual abusers to hide. And that’s absolutely true.
But that’s not the end of the analysis. Our society has a tendency to focus on injustice to individuals created by social structures, which is admirable. But we are often myopic about the benefits of social structures to the majority.
For example, we focus a lot on abuses within the Mormon community, which undoubtedly exists. But if you go to Utah you can’t help but notice these people have created a thriving civilization in the middle of an inhospitable desert, next to a lake that has no drinkable water. And heavily Mormon areas continue to thrive even as other non-coastal areas, which aren’t full of educational elites, are collapsing.
I think it would be more accurate to say that hierarchical organizations make it easier for sexual abusers to hide, with the Olympics, sports, Hollywood, government, industry, academia stories we hear every week.
Or more simply power lets people abuse, and hierarchy indicates power differentials.
This is an interesting and well thought out response but I have a few issues with it:
> Secular humanism, by contrast, emphasizes development of the self, and discourages social enforcement of moral norms
I don't think this statement is true. For example, secular society provides the legal framework that reinforces the social practice of marriage.
> single parenthood rates is the single factor most highly correlated with low economic mobility
Poverty is a much bigger driver behind low economic mobility. Poor people in the west tend to have less stable family structures, it has nothing to do with social norms and everything to do with money. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44127459
> But we are often myopic about the benefits of social structures to the majority
If this means what I think you are saying (please correct me if I'm wrong) that we should turn a blind eye to the injustices fomented by a big religious institution like the Catholic church, because overall they appear to do more good than harm, I would 100% disagree.
The Mormon example is a bit of a weird one. Utah has a higher GDP per capita but I'm not sure you can ascribe that to religious practices. It might be just because Utah is better farmland than (say) Nevada. https://countryeconomy.com/countries/usa-states/compare/neva...
> Secular humanism, by contrast, emphasizes development of the self, and discourages social enforcement of moral norms
I don't think this statement is true. For example, secular society provides the legal framework that reinforces the social practice of marriage.
> single parenthood rates is the single factor most highly correlated with low economic mobility
Poverty is a much bigger driver behind low economic mobility. Poor people in the west tend to have less stable family structures, it has nothing to do with social norms and everything to do with money. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44127459
> But we are often myopic about the benefits of social structures to the majority
If this means what I think you are saying (please correct me if I'm wrong) that we should turn a blind eye to the injustices fomented by a big religious institution like the Catholic church, because overall they appear to do more good than harm, I would 100% disagree.
The Mormon example is a bit of a weird one. Utah has a higher GDP per capita but I'm not sure you can ascribe that to religious practices. It might be just because Utah is better farmland than (say) Nevada. https://countryeconomy.com/countries/usa-states/compare/neva...
> For example, secular society provides the legal framework that reinforces the social practice of marriage.
Huh? The legal framework around marriage as it currently exists in the secular society of USA does exactly opposite. After no-fault divorce became an option, and as legally sanctioned child support system was set in place, incentive to get and stay married became much diminished.
> Poverty is a much bigger driver behind low economic mobility. Poor people in the west tend to have less stable family structures, it has nothing to do with social norms and everything to do with money.
If it was about wealth, the family structures in rural Bangladesh would be complete disaster, as the people there are much, much poorer than what passes as “poverty” in the States. Americans with income at federal poverty threshold enjoy material wealth that most Bangladeshi can only dream of, and that’s before you consider government transfers, which boost real consumption of poor Americans by 25-50% beyond what their wage income would allow them. Nevertheless, families in Bangladesh are strong, and families of poor Americans are highly dysfunctional. Why is it so?
Moreover, most poor Americans are poor precisely because their families are dysfunctional. In America, poverty among people who are married, have not had children before marriage, and who have a full time job (even minimum wage one) is very rare. It’s not poverty that causes dysfunctional families, it’s dysfunctional families that cause poverty.
> Utah has a higher GDP per capita but I'm not sure you can ascribe that to religious practices. It might be just because Utah is better farmland than (say) Nevada.
Given that agriculture contributes less than 1% to Utah GDP, I consider it highly unlikely to be relevant.
Huh? The legal framework around marriage as it currently exists in the secular society of USA does exactly opposite. After no-fault divorce became an option, and as legally sanctioned child support system was set in place, incentive to get and stay married became much diminished.
> Poverty is a much bigger driver behind low economic mobility. Poor people in the west tend to have less stable family structures, it has nothing to do with social norms and everything to do with money.
If it was about wealth, the family structures in rural Bangladesh would be complete disaster, as the people there are much, much poorer than what passes as “poverty” in the States. Americans with income at federal poverty threshold enjoy material wealth that most Bangladeshi can only dream of, and that’s before you consider government transfers, which boost real consumption of poor Americans by 25-50% beyond what their wage income would allow them. Nevertheless, families in Bangladesh are strong, and families of poor Americans are highly dysfunctional. Why is it so?
Moreover, most poor Americans are poor precisely because their families are dysfunctional. In America, poverty among people who are married, have not had children before marriage, and who have a full time job (even minimum wage one) is very rare. It’s not poverty that causes dysfunctional families, it’s dysfunctional families that cause poverty.
> Utah has a higher GDP per capita but I'm not sure you can ascribe that to religious practices. It might be just because Utah is better farmland than (say) Nevada.
Given that agriculture contributes less than 1% to Utah GDP, I consider it highly unlikely to be relevant.
No-fault divorce and legally sanctioned child support were put in place to give women more choices. I don't think we need to return to a time where women and children are effectively chattel. The overall effect of these policies has been positive.
There is an untested assertion here that Bangladesh has better outcomes for marriages because the practise of religion is higher. Yet you should also see lower levels of violence against women in Bangladesh from all these happy families but it seems that isn't so. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2740706/
I'm not sure how far we are going to get trying to work out whether the chicken/egg situation regarding dysfunctional families and poverty in the US is causal. All we really know for sure is that poverty is a reliable cause of family breakdown.
We shouldn't force people to stay together because some religious folk think that piling further misery on unhappy people is OK.
There is an untested assertion here that Bangladesh has better outcomes for marriages because the practise of religion is higher. Yet you should also see lower levels of violence against women in Bangladesh from all these happy families but it seems that isn't so. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2740706/
I'm not sure how far we are going to get trying to work out whether the chicken/egg situation regarding dysfunctional families and poverty in the US is causal. All we really know for sure is that poverty is a reliable cause of family breakdown.
We shouldn't force people to stay together because some religious folk think that piling further misery on unhappy people is OK.
> I don't think we need to return to a time where women and children are effectively chattel.
This is very much factually wrong description of the position of women in America before no-fault divorce. In fact, I consider the suggestion that women in America completely lacked agency before 70s to be rather reprehensible.
> Yet you should also see lower levels of violence against women in Bangladesh from all these happy families but it seems that isn't so.
I don’t think anyone argues here that family life in Bangladesh is better than in America in all aspects. Violence against women is obviously bad thing, just as all violence is. It is a good societal goal to reduce violence against any of its members.
At the same time, this is only one of the goals the societies might want to pursue. Often, you might encounter hard trade offs to make. For example, is it better to have a bit more violence, but much fewer children raised by a singe parent? Or, is it better to give the members of the society more choices, at cost of the society failing to choose to procreate, leading to ultimate decay and dissolution of the society in a few generations? One of the problems in the secular society in the US is failure to acknowledge these trade offs, and deciding that more choice of, less violence towards, and more workplace empowerment of women as always preferable at all circumstances.
If anyone thinks it is a straw man, just look at how responses to this comment will claim that I want to enslave women and promote violence towards them, which I of course do not, but the mere suggestion of the trade off existing, and potentiality of choosing something other than liberal women empowerment is an idea completely outside the overton window of secular, liberal discussion within educated, professional community.
This is very much factually wrong description of the position of women in America before no-fault divorce. In fact, I consider the suggestion that women in America completely lacked agency before 70s to be rather reprehensible.
> Yet you should also see lower levels of violence against women in Bangladesh from all these happy families but it seems that isn't so.
I don’t think anyone argues here that family life in Bangladesh is better than in America in all aspects. Violence against women is obviously bad thing, just as all violence is. It is a good societal goal to reduce violence against any of its members.
At the same time, this is only one of the goals the societies might want to pursue. Often, you might encounter hard trade offs to make. For example, is it better to have a bit more violence, but much fewer children raised by a singe parent? Or, is it better to give the members of the society more choices, at cost of the society failing to choose to procreate, leading to ultimate decay and dissolution of the society in a few generations? One of the problems in the secular society in the US is failure to acknowledge these trade offs, and deciding that more choice of, less violence towards, and more workplace empowerment of women as always preferable at all circumstances.
If anyone thinks it is a straw man, just look at how responses to this comment will claim that I want to enslave women and promote violence towards them, which I of course do not, but the mere suggestion of the trade off existing, and potentiality of choosing something other than liberal women empowerment is an idea completely outside the overton window of secular, liberal discussion within educated, professional community.
I don't quite understand this argument. Are you saying this is all women's fault for wanting to participate in the workforce and leave bad relationships?
The incentives aren't specific to women though.
Suppose you were a stay at home dad married to a high earning wife. You then meet a new woman you find more attractive. Under most Western countries' laws you can divorce your wife for no reason other than you no longer find her attractive, and she has to pay you alimony and child support to maintain your lifestyle while you're dating your new, hotter partner.
What's the downside to you? Seems there isn't any.
It seems obvious that a system setup like that will increase divorces initiated by stay at home parents, and hence increase single parent households.
Suppose you were a stay at home dad married to a high earning wife. You then meet a new woman you find more attractive. Under most Western countries' laws you can divorce your wife for no reason other than you no longer find her attractive, and she has to pay you alimony and child support to maintain your lifestyle while you're dating your new, hotter partner.
What's the downside to you? Seems there isn't any.
It seems obvious that a system setup like that will increase divorces initiated by stay at home parents, and hence increase single parent households.
So, the no fault divorce system has to be absolutely perfect to be acceptable?
To be honest, I don't see anything wrong in your scenario. People fall out of love for lots of reasons, making them miserable by making it harder to split up doesn't seem like a particularly good solution to me. The scenario you've raised would have to involve a very emotionally shallow individual whom the other partner would be better off without anyway.
To be honest, I don't see anything wrong in your scenario. People fall out of love for lots of reasons, making them miserable by making it harder to split up doesn't seem like a particularly good solution to me. The scenario you've raised would have to involve a very emotionally shallow individual whom the other partner would be better off without anyway.
> whom the other partner would be better off without anyway
So you think half your future earnings is a reasonable price to pay to rid yourself of a shallow partner?
So you think half your future earnings is a reasonable price to pay to rid yourself of a shallow partner?
> "So, the no fault divorce system has to be absolutely perfect to be acceptable?"
Didn't you just write in another post above "There is only one acceptable level of violence and abuse and that is zero."?
Didn't you just write in another post above "There is only one acceptable level of violence and abuse and that is zero."?
> Poverty is a much bigger driver behind low economic mobility.
You can test this, by looking at economic mobility rates for bottom quantile kids who differ along other dimensions. And it’s not just right wing people noticing that these days: https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/01/new-harvard-study-w...
> Of all the factors most predictive of economic mobility in America, one factor clearly stands out in their study: family structure. By their reckoning, when it comes to mobility, “the strongest and most robust predictor is the fraction of children with single parents.” They find that children raised in communities with high percentages of single mothers are significantly less likely to experience absolute and relative mobility.
This likely one of the reasons why Asian kids raised in the bottom 1/5 have a 25% chance of ending up in the top 1/5 as adults, versus 11% for white kids. Asians have by far the lowest rates of single parent families, across the income spectrum.
> Poor people in the west tend to have less stable family structures, it has nothing to do with social norms and everything to do with money. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44127459
Saying it has “everything to do with money” is a pretty remarkable assertion given that the single parenthood gap between classes is growing even as everyone gets richer in absolute terms, and is extremely low in countries that are very poor in absolute terms.
I’m not saying we should turn a blind eye to anything. But we should be cautious about undermining institutions and hierarchies that may be doing more good than harm because we’re only fixated on the harm. And education and cognitive elites should be especially careful not to project their own experiences rest of society.
You can test this, by looking at economic mobility rates for bottom quantile kids who differ along other dimensions. And it’s not just right wing people noticing that these days: https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/01/new-harvard-study-w...
> Of all the factors most predictive of economic mobility in America, one factor clearly stands out in their study: family structure. By their reckoning, when it comes to mobility, “the strongest and most robust predictor is the fraction of children with single parents.” They find that children raised in communities with high percentages of single mothers are significantly less likely to experience absolute and relative mobility.
This likely one of the reasons why Asian kids raised in the bottom 1/5 have a 25% chance of ending up in the top 1/5 as adults, versus 11% for white kids. Asians have by far the lowest rates of single parent families, across the income spectrum.
> Poor people in the west tend to have less stable family structures, it has nothing to do with social norms and everything to do with money. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44127459
Saying it has “everything to do with money” is a pretty remarkable assertion given that the single parenthood gap between classes is growing even as everyone gets richer in absolute terms, and is extremely low in countries that are very poor in absolute terms.
I’m not saying we should turn a blind eye to anything. But we should be cautious about undermining institutions and hierarchies that may be doing more good than harm because we’re only fixated on the harm. And education and cognitive elites should be especially careful not to project their own experiences rest of society.
Chetty also notes that his study can't be used to determine whether single parent families are a cause or an effect. Racial segregation and quality of schooling are also noted as being correlated with lower social mobility in that study.
I object to the notion that there is some acceptable level of violence and abuse we need to tolerate for the dubious good that any institution might claim. There is only one acceptable level of violence and abuse and that is zero.
I object to the notion that there is some acceptable level of violence and abuse we need to tolerate for the dubious good that any institution might claim. There is only one acceptable level of violence and abuse and that is zero.
> There is only one acceptable level of violence and abuse and that is zero.
You don't actually believe that because governments commit violent using their police and military and you accept that.
You don't actually believe that because governments commit violent using their police and military and you accept that.
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When did I say that was acceptable?
When you said tolerating any violence was unacceptable. It takes violence to protect people from violence.
That's quite a logical leap. Would you care to lay out the exact steps from somebody saying they find violence unacceptable, to asserting that they definitely support state sanctioned violence?
For the state to not tolerate any violence, it must prevent violence among its citizens and from foreign attackers. The only way we have that works is using violence to restrain criminals, or fight against enemy armies. We don't have any perfect safety shield that can protect everyone without harming the attackers, or to prevent people from doing violent acts without physically restraining them (violence).
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>resistance to or denial of reality
It's not just this but it's also the lying and attempting to pass off various myths, mysticism, dogma, theology and fairy tales as being true with no evidence, and the promotion of "faith" and "belief" as justifications for doing so. And before someone says it, yes, there are other groups besides religious groups that fall into these same self-reinforcing traps. For example a significant number of people still believe in witches and ghosts: https://news.gallup.com/poll/2380/One-Third-Americans-Believ...
It's not just this but it's also the lying and attempting to pass off various myths, mysticism, dogma, theology and fairy tales as being true with no evidence, and the promotion of "faith" and "belief" as justifications for doing so. And before someone says it, yes, there are other groups besides religious groups that fall into these same self-reinforcing traps. For example a significant number of people still believe in witches and ghosts: https://news.gallup.com/poll/2380/One-Third-Americans-Believ...
I don’t think spirituality has anything to do with it. It’s about community first and foremost. We are social creatures after all.
That is, unless we are going to conflate spirituality with anything even remotely related to existential ruminations.
In the crowds I run in people are primarily satisfied by a good think.
That is, unless we are going to conflate spirituality with anything even remotely related to existential ruminations.
In the crowds I run in people are primarily satisfied by a good think.
> imposition of impossible standards
This is one of the pluses, not the minuses. There's nobody out there saying you can achieve the standards. But there are lots of people out there saying you should push yourself in the direction of the standards.
This is one of the pluses, not the minuses. There's nobody out there saying you can achieve the standards. But there are lots of people out there saying you should push yourself in the direction of the standards.
"Impossible standards," for some religions, include things like being happy and fulfilled in a mixed orientation marriage with a large number of children.
Not all directions are worth pushing in, and religion is actually really bad at identifying the good directions.
Not all directions are worth pushing in, and religion is actually really bad at identifying the good directions.
This is the classical liberal take: ultra-individualism. Everyone can have their own god(s) (even metaphorically) and things will just work out if everyone got along.
Historical trends seem to be going in the exact opposite direction. Individualism is sustainable to a certain point, but not when it becomes the default position of a society. All of the countries, belief systems, and ideologies that are succeeding today are running away from individualism. Whether that’s good or bad, is up to you.
Historical trends seem to be going in the exact opposite direction. Individualism is sustainable to a certain point, but not when it becomes the default position of a society. All of the countries, belief systems, and ideologies that are succeeding today are running away from individualism. Whether that’s good or bad, is up to you.
> (exclusion and intolerance, resistance to or denial of reality, imposition of impossible standards, the denial of one's own preferences and wants).
This is true of group affiliation in general, and may be innate to human beings:
> “The human mind,” Klein observes, “is exquisitely tuned to group affiliation and group difference”—so much so that, as soon as an affiliation has formed, the people who have affiliated with one another proceed to define themselves against an out-group. To make matters worse, Klein goes on, human groups compete less for resources than they do for social esteem, and esteem is zero-sum: more for you means less for me. We would rather “win” against the out-group and be worse off than be better off and lose.
* https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/ezra-kleins-why...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We%27re_Polarized
> but as long as people follow religions that preach their own unique truthfulness (believe the pope, the Bible, the Quran, the priests, the sutras, ...) we will never get there.
Except that some world views do hew closer to reality than others:
> Occasionalism is a philosophical doctrine about causation which says that created substances cannot be efficient causes of events. Instead, all events are taken to be caused directly by God.
[…]
> The doctrine first reached prominence in the Islamic theological schools of Iraq, especially in Basra. The ninth century theologian Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari argued that there is no Secondary Causation in the created order. The world is sustained and governed through direct intervention of a divine primary causation. As such the world is in a constant state of recreation by God.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occasionalism
> Secondary causation[1][2][3] is the philosophical proposition that all material and corporeal objects, having been created by God with their own intrinsic potentialities, are subsequently empowered to evolve independently in accordance with natural law.[citation needed] […] That the physical universe is consequentially well-ordered, consistent, and knowable subject to human observation and reason, was a primary theme of Scholasticism and further molded into the philosophy of the western tradition by Augustine of Hippo and later by Thomas Aquinas.
> Secondary causation has been suggested as a necessary precursor for scientific inquiry into an established order of natural laws which are not entirely predicated on the changeable whims of a supernatural being.[4] Nor does this create a conflict between science and religion for, given a creator deity, it is not inconsistent with the paradigm of a clockwork universe.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_causation
This is true of group affiliation in general, and may be innate to human beings:
> “The human mind,” Klein observes, “is exquisitely tuned to group affiliation and group difference”—so much so that, as soon as an affiliation has formed, the people who have affiliated with one another proceed to define themselves against an out-group. To make matters worse, Klein goes on, human groups compete less for resources than they do for social esteem, and esteem is zero-sum: more for you means less for me. We would rather “win” against the out-group and be worse off than be better off and lose.
* https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/ezra-kleins-why...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We%27re_Polarized
> but as long as people follow religions that preach their own unique truthfulness (believe the pope, the Bible, the Quran, the priests, the sutras, ...) we will never get there.
Except that some world views do hew closer to reality than others:
> Occasionalism is a philosophical doctrine about causation which says that created substances cannot be efficient causes of events. Instead, all events are taken to be caused directly by God.
[…]
> The doctrine first reached prominence in the Islamic theological schools of Iraq, especially in Basra. The ninth century theologian Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari argued that there is no Secondary Causation in the created order. The world is sustained and governed through direct intervention of a divine primary causation. As such the world is in a constant state of recreation by God.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occasionalism
> Secondary causation[1][2][3] is the philosophical proposition that all material and corporeal objects, having been created by God with their own intrinsic potentialities, are subsequently empowered to evolve independently in accordance with natural law.[citation needed] […] That the physical universe is consequentially well-ordered, consistent, and knowable subject to human observation and reason, was a primary theme of Scholasticism and further molded into the philosophy of the western tradition by Augustine of Hippo and later by Thomas Aquinas.
> Secondary causation has been suggested as a necessary precursor for scientific inquiry into an established order of natural laws which are not entirely predicated on the changeable whims of a supernatural being.[4] Nor does this create a conflict between science and religion for, given a creator deity, it is not inconsistent with the paradigm of a clockwork universe.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_causation
The real problem with religion is that there's more than one
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That's what the GP says. It's too few of them for too many people.
That’s what some people believe about politics and political parties, which is why China banned different parties:)
> Religion has been a major source of soothing and a major source of suffering for all of humanity's past
The idea that religion is such a big source of suffering throughout all of our history is one I stopped believing once I took a closer look at the actual nature of war, particulary how a country's elite is moving closer to war and how "religious" said elite actually is.
IMO the amounts of blood shed over millenia would have been the same under atheists.
And because today most of us are Atheists/Agnostics, and because most of these millenias' rulers weren't, it is our "agnostic hindsight" which follies us into believing that this suffering was all just caused by religion.
The idea that religion is such a big source of suffering throughout all of our history is one I stopped believing once I took a closer look at the actual nature of war, particulary how a country's elite is moving closer to war and how "religious" said elite actually is.
IMO the amounts of blood shed over millenia would have been the same under atheists.
And because today most of us are Atheists/Agnostics, and because most of these millenias' rulers weren't, it is our "agnostic hindsight" which follies us into believing that this suffering was all just caused by religion.
To be fair, the good things that happened in the past might also have been the same under atheists.
The thing that's puzzling to me is that religion is supposed to have such a profound effect on society, but is utterly innocent of involvement in anything bad that happens. Granted it's very hard to pin historical events on specific root causes.
The thing that's puzzling to me is that religion is supposed to have such a profound effect on society, but is utterly innocent of involvement in anything bad that happens. Granted it's very hard to pin historical events on specific root causes.
I believe plenty of people have been killed for religious reasons.
Sure religion is used as an excuse to start wars but wouldn't the fact that it works means people are willing to kill because of it?
Sure religion is used as an excuse to start wars but wouldn't the fact that it works means people are willing to kill because of it?
WW2 was 90% Christians killing Christians. People forget how easily the powerful can manipulate the poor to kill themselves.
Yep, war has always been about resources and the fights of the elites. Religion is only ever an excuse, just like WMDs or whatever; a convenient lie to mislead the populous into believing there's a legitimate casus belli.
> The idea that religion is such a big source of suffering throughout all of our history is one I stopped believing
The Irish Troubles
Muslim/Hindu conflict in India
Church-run residential schools in Canada and the US
ISIS
The suicide rate among LGBT youth
Rohingya genocide
The Taliban
Israeli/Palestinian conflict
The destruction of indigenous cultures by missionaries
9/11
- should I start on the 19th century?
The Irish Troubles
Muslim/Hindu conflict in India
Church-run residential schools in Canada and the US
ISIS
The suicide rate among LGBT youth
Rohingya genocide
The Taliban
Israeli/Palestinian conflict
The destruction of indigenous cultures by missionaries
9/11
- should I start on the 19th century?
> There seems to be little doubt that religion, faith, spirituality or rite can have benefits.
Doubt among who? Religious congregations?
Doubt among who? Religious congregations?
Think for yourself?
jhgb(2)
"I’ll admit that we’re unlikely to learn much about the nature of the universe or the biology of disease from religion" just moments after admitting to hubris. I thought some physicists had noticed parallels between physics and Buddhist thought
It's interesting to think of religion as a societal tool that has co-evolved along with humanity.
Societies with more beneficial religions would prosper and societies with less beneficial religious would die out.
It's thus no surprise that the religions that survived until the present day promote human survival. For example, it's no accident that most major religions heavily encourage their followers to have a lot of kids.
Societies with more beneficial religions would prosper and societies with less beneficial religious would die out.
It's thus no surprise that the religions that survived until the present day promote human survival. For example, it's no accident that most major religions heavily encourage their followers to have a lot of kids.
I used to be a very hard headed atheist until I read the book "The Secrets of our Success" by Joseph Heinlein. That book speaks of how culture evolved along with genetics, and it made me realize how important tradition and religion really are to society. I am still atheist, but now very much encourage religious people to stay with their faith and continue their worship. There are definitely downsides to religion, but ultimately they encourage strong communal and familial values, which I think are very lacking in my generation.
Would you encourage radical muslims to stay with their faith and continue their worship? What about even more marginal religions? If not they which exactly religions are you going to encourage? What's the "good list"?
Not all religions are same and abrahmic religions are regressive religions.
Christianity has largely reformed.
Judaism is too exclusionary to affect the whole world.
Unfortunately islam is still being practiced like it was 1000 years ago.
Christianity has largely reformed.
Judaism is too exclusionary to affect the whole world.
Unfortunately islam is still being practiced like it was 1000 years ago.
That can be done without some mythical life after death and almighty chode in the sky.
It's unfortunate that religion has those elements. I hold many Christian values, but I refuse to accept the afterlife, God, saints, apostles and other shit made up by the Church for their own material benefit.
It's unfortunate that religion has those elements. I hold many Christian values, but I refuse to accept the afterlife, God, saints, apostles and other shit made up by the Church for their own material benefit.
Same boat.
> There are definitely downsides to religion...
Pretty minor ones. The basic concepts are well battle tested good ideas. Saying religion is bad is like saying democratic politics is bad - no, it is great because even when horrible people are in charge the fundamental positive influence of the institution persists.
> There are definitely downsides to religion...
Pretty minor ones. The basic concepts are well battle tested good ideas. Saying religion is bad is like saying democratic politics is bad - no, it is great because even when horrible people are in charge the fundamental positive influence of the institution persists.
> Pretty minor ones.
I don't know how you could say that, considering the many horrible things taught because of or done in the name of religion over the millennia. Like, to use a recent issue, the biggest thing stopping gay marriage in the US at least was people's religiously driven belief that homosexuality is morally wrong.
I know many will say, "well it's only nominally driven by religion, people would've done [bad thing] regardless". But that's a clear double standard, if you don't also say that people would've done good things regardless.
I'm guessing the truth is both: sometimes people really would've done bad or good things anyway, the religion is just a cover. And other times, they really were driven particularly by religion.
I don't know how you could say that, considering the many horrible things taught because of or done in the name of religion over the millennia. Like, to use a recent issue, the biggest thing stopping gay marriage in the US at least was people's religiously driven belief that homosexuality is morally wrong.
I know many will say, "well it's only nominally driven by religion, people would've done [bad thing] regardless". But that's a clear double standard, if you don't also say that people would've done good things regardless.
I'm guessing the truth is both: sometimes people really would've done bad or good things anyway, the religion is just a cover. And other times, they really were driven particularly by religion.
Those things would have been done in the name of something else too. Religions here is just a pretext.
Killing the american natives, the tutsi, the jews or the cambodgian intellectuals intellectuals were among the worst things humanity have ever done, and the religion of the perpetrators had nothing to do with it.
Terrible humans will use any rationalization to do terrible things.
Most muslim women in my country don't wear a hijab. However, men beating their wifes are from all kind of religious and non religious backgounds.
I now believe that religion is a reflect of the state of your society, not the other way around. People are racist, homophobic, intolerant, entitled, misogynist, and then, they sometimes use religion to justify that.
Killing the american natives, the tutsi, the jews or the cambodgian intellectuals intellectuals were among the worst things humanity have ever done, and the religion of the perpetrators had nothing to do with it.
Terrible humans will use any rationalization to do terrible things.
Most muslim women in my country don't wear a hijab. However, men beating their wifes are from all kind of religious and non religious backgounds.
I now believe that religion is a reflect of the state of your society, not the other way around. People are racist, homophobic, intolerant, entitled, misogynist, and then, they sometimes use religion to justify that.
> Those things would have been done in the name of something else too. Religions here is just a pretext.
...and there it is. I literally addressed this in my comment already.
> Terrible humans will use any rationalization to do terrible things.
Sure, but you can say the same thing the other way: fantastic humans will use any rationalization to do good. Good people aren't going to suddenly turn into monsters if they don't believe in an All-Powerful Judge in the sky.
...and there it is. I literally addressed this in my comment already.
> Terrible humans will use any rationalization to do terrible things.
Sure, but you can say the same thing the other way: fantastic humans will use any rationalization to do good. Good people aren't going to suddenly turn into monsters if they don't believe in an All-Powerful Judge in the sky.
Communists (atheists) done a lot more harm than any religion, and they hate gay marriage too. Anything powerful can be used to do a good thing and a bad thing. Any institution can be used to do an evil thing, neglect, or be corrupt, e.g. police (police can be abused to protect corrupt regimes), courts or event justice as whole (slaves were legal in many countries), church, etc.
Communists is not equal to atheists , in fact most of the atheists I know are not communists. Blaming to atheists the crimes committed in name of communism is like saying that as Hitler admired christianism all his crimes should be blamed on christians . And right the ones trying to impose their beliefs, and deny rights to others, in Europe and USA are the followers of some of the Abrahamic religions.
Atheists are not communists, but communists are atheists: they're believing that God does not exist, so they can take his role.
That line of thinking is dangerous, you can assume that televangelists are scammers because they are christians or that priests that abuse children are abusers because they are christians. and not, they are because they are bad people. Stalin/Mao/etc .. were bad people and that's the reason they did what they did not because they were atheists or communists, when a priest abuses a child does it's because he's a bad person not because he's a christian.
> Communists (atheists)
Those aren't the same thing, even if the demographics somewhat overlap.
In any case, I'm no fan of authoritarian socialism either, because yes, they did some really horrible shit in the name of their ideology.
But most atheists aren't communists/authoritarian socialists.
Those aren't the same thing, even if the demographics somewhat overlap.
In any case, I'm no fan of authoritarian socialism either, because yes, they did some really horrible shit in the name of their ideology.
But most atheists aren't communists/authoritarian socialists.
> Pretty minor ones.
Well, except for all the violence committed in the name of various religions over the millennia.
Maybe it balances out, but I wouldn’t say it’s minor.
Well, except for all the violence committed in the name of various religions over the millennia.
Maybe it balances out, but I wouldn’t say it’s minor.
That is quite a vast time frame. Violence used to much more common in general than it is today. Is there any evidence that religion increased violence above average for a specific time period?
Also, it is often difficult to define what was committed in the name of a religion as there are often multiple sources of conflict. Anything that defines a person in any way can easily be abused by propaganda that seeks to split people into "us" vs "them".
Also, it is often difficult to define what was committed in the name of a religion as there are often multiple sources of conflict. Anything that defines a person in any way can easily be abused by propaganda that seeks to split people into "us" vs "them".
Look at staunch atheists such as Stalin and you'll find that it has been not only balanced out but far in favour of many religions.
That was in the name of communism though, not in the name of atheism. They viewed religion as just another corporation used to oppress workers.
If the argument is that communism is just as bad as religions then sure I'll buy it.
If the argument is that communism is just as bad as religions then sure I'll buy it.
Ok, fine but then I ask you to do the same for for example Christianity:
Do see the difference between Catholicism as abused by various Spanish and English kings and Christianity.
Do see the difference between abusive cults that do things that the rest of us disapprove of and the rest of us.
Otherwise be prepared to defend Stalin, because he was an atheist just as much as the mad guys during the dark ages were Christians.
Do see the difference between Catholicism as abused by various Spanish and English kings and Christianity.
Do see the difference between abusive cults that do things that the rest of us disapprove of and the rest of us.
Otherwise be prepared to defend Stalin, because he was an atheist just as much as the mad guys during the dark ages were Christians.
That's a straw man and missing the point. Sure, not all harms committed by the religious are because of their religion.
But the assertion was that there has been much greater harm done by the religious _because of their religion_ than harm done by athiets _because of their atheism_.
History clearly supports that. It even stands up taking into account the different population sizes.
Not intended to be a straw man (and I even think whataboutism would be closer if you were going to try to dismiss it).
> But the assertion was that there has been much greater harm done by the religious _because of their religion_ than harm done by athiets _because of their atheism_.
How about:
"Much greater harm has been done by atheists in their fight against religions than by religious in their fight against atheists" ?
Or even: "Much greater harm has been done by atheists than by religious" ?
I'm purposedly keeping why out of the equation here. It might for the sake of the argument be because we Christians are dumber and not as able to commit atrocities, but the numbers are quite clear: atheists have killed more people than all religions together during the last 1000 years.
And, to be clear: It is not my point to prove that Christianity is right or Christians are better people. There are many atheists I respect a whole lot. And a lot of people claiming to be Christian that I don't respect as much.
My point is no one can collect all the bad stuff done by one side and all the great done by another and compare.
If you want be to be responsible for madmen "on my side" 500 years ago you should very much take responsibility for madmen "on your side" 50 years ago.
> But the assertion was that there has been much greater harm done by the religious _because of their religion_ than harm done by athiets _because of their atheism_.
How about:
"Much greater harm has been done by atheists in their fight against religions than by religious in their fight against atheists" ?
Or even: "Much greater harm has been done by atheists than by religious" ?
I'm purposedly keeping why out of the equation here. It might for the sake of the argument be because we Christians are dumber and not as able to commit atrocities, but the numbers are quite clear: atheists have killed more people than all religions together during the last 1000 years.
And, to be clear: It is not my point to prove that Christianity is right or Christians are better people. There are many atheists I respect a whole lot. And a lot of people claiming to be Christian that I don't respect as much.
My point is no one can collect all the bad stuff done by one side and all the great done by another and compare.
If you want be to be responsible for madmen "on my side" 500 years ago you should very much take responsibility for madmen "on your side" 50 years ago.
> "If the argument is that communism is just as bad as religions then sure I'll buy it."
To play the devil's advocate, I'll point out that religion has also inspired acts of charity, large and small, for millennia, a not insignificant number of the greatest works of art and philosophy in history, and provided a sense of community and fellowship for humanity. For all of the atrocities committed in its name, suggesting that nothing good came of religion is inarguably false. We'll see where communism/socialism and atheism stands in a few centuries but, to date, it's hard to say their track record is as good as religion if we're being intellectually honest.
To play the devil's advocate, I'll point out that religion has also inspired acts of charity, large and small, for millennia, a not insignificant number of the greatest works of art and philosophy in history, and provided a sense of community and fellowship for humanity. For all of the atrocities committed in its name, suggesting that nothing good came of religion is inarguably false. We'll see where communism/socialism and atheism stands in a few centuries but, to date, it's hard to say their track record is as good as religion if we're being intellectually honest.
> For example, it's no accident that most major religions heavily encourage their followers to have a lot of kids.
I noticed looking at my family tree, that basically all the secular branches have below replacement fertility, while the more religious branches have above replacement.
Ironically it seems secularism is the ultimate proselytizing ideology, it seems it can't grow its own base through reproduction, it can only tempt the religious to abandon their religion and enjoy secular freedoms with fewer responsibilities (like fewer kids) - but it has to repeat this process at every generation to survive.
Also ironic that secular society holds up the theory of evolution as a reason we no longer need religion, yet it seems evolution itself favors the religious with more descendents!
I noticed looking at my family tree, that basically all the secular branches have below replacement fertility, while the more religious branches have above replacement.
Ironically it seems secularism is the ultimate proselytizing ideology, it seems it can't grow its own base through reproduction, it can only tempt the religious to abandon their religion and enjoy secular freedoms with fewer responsibilities (like fewer kids) - but it has to repeat this process at every generation to survive.
Also ironic that secular society holds up the theory of evolution as a reason we no longer need religion, yet it seems evolution itself favors the religious with more descendents!
How does secular society hold up the theory of evolution as a reason we no longer need religion?
I don’t really see the relation. Some major religions have a creation story that relies on spontaneous creation and found it really important to not consider anything else. But what is secular society proposing exactly?
I don’t really see the relation. Some major religions have a creation story that relies on spontaneous creation and found it really important to not consider anything else. But what is secular society proposing exactly?
> How does secular society hold up the theory of evolution as a reason we no longer need religion?
The so called "secular society" will not be able to digest a moral system based on theory of evolution.
The so called "secular society" will not be able to digest a moral system based on theory of evolution.
science theory do not offer any moral guide. we exist because our ancient was cruel do not mean we should be cruel. we got intellengence, we can chose we want.
The way I see it, the rise of the chieftan and shaman go hand and hand. Listen to my orders, bring me resources, make war with who I please, for I am your leader and your living god, and they are the unknown other who aren't like us and don't believe what we believe about the universe. For all of our available history, this was the case. Tribalism.
In my view, early bands of humans who weren't following a charismatic leader, who weren't following a strong religious practice, were killed off by those bands of humans who did follow the word of a charismatic leader who assured their followers that the divine itself were guiding their decision making. Fast forward though millions of years of evolution, and of course we are predisposed to religion, to xenophobia, to answering some call of duty and dying in someone else war. Our cultist ancestors killed off anyone they came across who didn't follow with this program. This behavior of humans hasn't even gone away today, its so entrenched.
In my view, early bands of humans who weren't following a charismatic leader, who weren't following a strong religious practice, were killed off by those bands of humans who did follow the word of a charismatic leader who assured their followers that the divine itself were guiding their decision making. Fast forward though millions of years of evolution, and of course we are predisposed to religion, to xenophobia, to answering some call of duty and dying in someone else war. Our cultist ancestors killed off anyone they came across who didn't follow with this program. This behavior of humans hasn't even gone away today, its so entrenched.
I would warmly recommend the last chapter(s) of 'The Selfish Gene'. Now an aged book but still largely up to date. In those last chapter(s) Dawkins invented the word meme as analogy to gene: a meme is a self-replicating piece of information. Like genes that are successful (in the environment they are in) propagate so do memes that are successful. Religion is the ultimate meme complex, it is a set of ideas that lives 'on top of' us and as long as it doesn't kill its host it may spread further.
In that sense, while I would guess at minimum religion can't kill its host, it does from this logic not necessarily benefit the host. An aggressively missionising or crusading religion might outcompete one that is peaceful and better for its host. And even a peaceful variant (see original Buddhism or zen Buddhism) might evolve into an aggressive, exclusive and murderous ones (see Buddhist monks in Myanmar firing up and demanding the genocide of the mostly muslim rohingya ethnic group).
In that sense, while I would guess at minimum religion can't kill its host, it does from this logic not necessarily benefit the host. An aggressively missionising or crusading religion might outcompete one that is peaceful and better for its host. And even a peaceful variant (see original Buddhism or zen Buddhism) might evolve into an aggressive, exclusive and murderous ones (see Buddhist monks in Myanmar firing up and demanding the genocide of the mostly muslim rohingya ethnic group).
I don't think you have correct examples of memes not benefiting their hosts. Those are examples of them not benefiting other people who aren't the hosts. A better example would be something like martyrdom. A religion that's perfect for its host might turn out to be one that exterminates or enslaves all non-hosts - if it could somehow achieve that without sacrificing its own hosts.
The articles premise that Americans acted kinder for a little while after doing some Buddhist meditation.... Completely ignoring the fact that Buddhism has extremists just like other religions...
The people didn't act kinder because of Buddhism. The experimental setup primed them to act in a certain way.
The people didn't act kinder because of Buddhism. The experimental setup primed them to act in a certain way.
and also heavily penalize suicide, promoting self preservation instincts! allowing proponents to fall back on many options making suicide more of a non option
Chesterton's fence comes to mind
I was fortunate enough to be involved with a modern secular community that aimed to become a non-religious church: Sunday Assembly.
Take the best bits of religion, including purpose, structure, community, and tradition, but make it available for non-believers.
We even got so far as making the interview stage of Y Combinator:
https://benrmatthews.com/meeting-heroes-y-combinator-intervi...
During the interview, Sanderson (Sunday Assembly co-founder) had a brilliant back and forth with Sam Altman, but ultimately the idea didn’t stand.
I still think the ethos of Sunday Assembly has merit.
Take the best bits of religion, including purpose, structure, community, and tradition, but make it available for non-believers.
We even got so far as making the interview stage of Y Combinator:
https://benrmatthews.com/meeting-heroes-y-combinator-intervi...
During the interview, Sanderson (Sunday Assembly co-founder) had a brilliant back and forth with Sam Altman, but ultimately the idea didn’t stand.
I still think the ethos of Sunday Assembly has merit.
I've attended a few Unitarian Universalist services, and they're very open to "non-believers", as well as pretty much any type of personal belief. They seemed to be much more interested in community and rite than to forcing dogma. Still, while they were certainly a friendly and pleasant group of people, I found it all a bit too fuzzy with objective truth to be my cup if tea. I don't have anything like Sunday Assembly in my area, and occasionally thought of trying to start some kind of weekly humanist gathering. Rather than the UU message that "any belief is welcome", I wanted to convey more of a "everyone is welcome, personal religious beliefs aside" message. Where we could just work on humanistic goals together.
There's an old joke: Catholics believe in transubstantiation. Baptists believe in the Rapture. Unitarian Universalists believe in donuts on Sunday.
[deleted]
This is very interesting to me. I am just "Saturday browsing" but plan to try to read what I can about your community. My first impression is surprise that the group was trying to raise venture capital :) I will find out more as I read i guess.
This excerpt is from a widely prayed Orthodox Christian akathist hymn. [0] Akathist means not sitting as it is usually prayed standing up. It was composed during the persecution in communist Russia by Metropolitan Tryphon [1]
"The breath of Thine Holy Spirit inspires artists, poets and scientists. The power of Thy supreme knowledge makes them prophets and interpreters of Thy laws, who reveal the depths of Thy creative wisdom. Their works speak unwittingly of Thee. How great art Thou in Thy creation! How great art Thou in man!
Glory to Thee, showing Thine unsurpassable power in the laws of the universe
Glory to Thee, for all nature is filled with Thy laws
Glory to Thee for what Thou hast revealed to us in Thy mercy
Glory to Thee for what Thou hast hidden from us in Thy wisdom
Glory to Thee for the inventiveness of the human mind
Glory to Thee for the dignity of man's labour
Glory to Thee for the tongues of fire that bring inspiration
Glory to Thee, O God, from age to age"
[0] http://www.saintjonah.org/services/thanksgiving.htm
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryphon_(Turkestanov)
"The breath of Thine Holy Spirit inspires artists, poets and scientists. The power of Thy supreme knowledge makes them prophets and interpreters of Thy laws, who reveal the depths of Thy creative wisdom. Their works speak unwittingly of Thee. How great art Thou in Thy creation! How great art Thou in man!
Glory to Thee, showing Thine unsurpassable power in the laws of the universe
Glory to Thee, for all nature is filled with Thy laws
Glory to Thee for what Thou hast revealed to us in Thy mercy
Glory to Thee for what Thou hast hidden from us in Thy wisdom
Glory to Thee for the inventiveness of the human mind
Glory to Thee for the dignity of man's labour
Glory to Thee for the tongues of fire that bring inspiration
Glory to Thee, O God, from age to age"
[0] http://www.saintjonah.org/services/thanksgiving.htm
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryphon_(Turkestanov)
I love this Akathist, and it should be noted that Metropolitan Tryphon wrote it in a literal gulag. The ability to see and be thankful for the beauty of our world, even under those conditions, is a testament to the power of religion, and some would say God.
Beautiful, thanks for sharing.
I am one of Jehovah's Witnesses - Please read on before you just dismiss what I have experienced.
Going door to door I have meet plenty of people who say "I don't believe in God, we got here thru evolution!".
So I ask the simple question which theory of evolution do they think is probably has the right idea.
Too often I hear, "Survival of the strongest." or "What? There is more than one theory about how evolution works?".
What is clear to me is that to these people evolution is a BELIEF and not something they thought of, it is as much a religion to them as mine is to me. Worse, I can study and agree or disagree with things I was taught, too often people are just blindly accepting because they do not want to put any efforts in.
Going door to door I have meet plenty of people who say "I don't believe in God, we got here thru evolution!".
So I ask the simple question which theory of evolution do they think is probably has the right idea.
Too often I hear, "Survival of the strongest." or "What? There is more than one theory about how evolution works?".
What is clear to me is that to these people evolution is a BELIEF and not something they thought of, it is as much a religion to them as mine is to me. Worse, I can study and agree or disagree with things I was taught, too often people are just blindly accepting because they do not want to put any efforts in.
100% no.
Faith in religion is a completely different thing to believing the scientific method works. Science is self correcting. Religious faith is, by definition, the surrendering of any and every impulse to question the faith to a higher earthly authority. Those earthly authorities are notoriously unreliable (c.f. history of the Jehovah's Witness "end of the world" scenarios).
I know this is hard for religious people to understand, but if you have no belief in religious deities you can't just magic it up out of nowhere. There are people like me who simply can't believe in gods. We just aren't wired that way. I've had well meaning religious folk explain to me that I have apparently "hardened my heart" against (their) god and I need to stop doing that and he will sort it out but it simply isn't true
This certainly hasn't stopped people like me being involved in religions but it makes it a bit...difficult. This attitude that somehow the atheists in the community "do not want to put any efforts in" is wrong, plain and simple. There is no effort we can put in.
Faith in religion is a completely different thing to believing the scientific method works. Science is self correcting. Religious faith is, by definition, the surrendering of any and every impulse to question the faith to a higher earthly authority. Those earthly authorities are notoriously unreliable (c.f. history of the Jehovah's Witness "end of the world" scenarios).
I know this is hard for religious people to understand, but if you have no belief in religious deities you can't just magic it up out of nowhere. There are people like me who simply can't believe in gods. We just aren't wired that way. I've had well meaning religious folk explain to me that I have apparently "hardened my heart" against (their) god and I need to stop doing that and he will sort it out but it simply isn't true
This certainly hasn't stopped people like me being involved in religions but it makes it a bit...difficult. This attitude that somehow the atheists in the community "do not want to put any efforts in" is wrong, plain and simple. There is no effort we can put in.
> There is no effort we can put in.
Well, that's not quite true. I'm an atheist, and I run a weekly Bible study (which has lately morphed into more of a general theological/philosophical study and discussion group) [1]. Religious traditions are worth studying even if you don't believe in them, if for no other reason, than as a way of better understanding the thought processes of people who do believe in them.
[1] https://www.meetup.com/Bible-Study-for-Skeptics-Agnostics-an...
Well, that's not quite true. I'm an atheist, and I run a weekly Bible study (which has lately morphed into more of a general theological/philosophical study and discussion group) [1]. Religious traditions are worth studying even if you don't believe in them, if for no other reason, than as a way of better understanding the thought processes of people who do believe in them.
[1] https://www.meetup.com/Bible-Study-for-Skeptics-Agnostics-an...
That's not what I meant - I meant that there is no effort that I can put in that would turn me into a deist.
How do you know? Maybe if you studied the Bible you'd end up believing in it. :-)
It turns out that you actually can induce subjective experiences in yourself that I believe are similar to what religious people describe as "feeling the presence of God". It's an interesting and worthwhile exercise (though not what we do in my study group, that's a more academic format). But it's worth doing at least once in your life. It actually feels pretty good, not unlike taking certain psychoactive drugs.
It turns out that you actually can induce subjective experiences in yourself that I believe are similar to what religious people describe as "feeling the presence of God". It's an interesting and worthwhile exercise (though not what we do in my study group, that's a more academic format). But it's worth doing at least once in your life. It actually feels pretty good, not unlike taking certain psychoactive drugs.
Like a lot of atheists, I have studied the bible. My parents had me confirmed as an Anglican in my teens (ironically one of the first steps that took me from "I don't know if this is true" to "this particular religion is patently false").
It's impossible to understand western literature without a decent working knowledge of the bible (although choosing which one is problematic in itself), it's useful for that alone.
However, studying the bible made me less religious, not more.
It's impossible to understand western literature without a decent working knowledge of the bible (although choosing which one is problematic in itself), it's useful for that alone.
However, studying the bible made me less religious, not more.
> studying the bible made me less religious, not more.
Yep, same here.
Yep, same here.
After 20y of trying I'm done with mass hysteria, "you're holding it wrong", survivorship bias, and magical thinking. Give me consistently repeatable, experimental evidence.
Erm, the only way to know that is to put every effort you can into becoming a deist. "Every effort" is a lifetime of work, so you haven't done that, which makes your statement a statement of faith.
It sounds like you've already decided that you will never be a deist, and so you never will. How is that different from religious belief?
It sounds like you've already decided that you will never be a deist, and so you never will. How is that different from religious belief?
It's different because there is one less thing I have to invent. You might as well ask somebody to believe in a giant hamburger that circumnavigates the earth that only the truly faithful can see. I know you don't see the giant hamburger because you just haven't tried hard enough.
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Is this going to eventually be meeting in person or will it be online from here on out?
It started as an in-person meetup and moved on-line because covid. We now have more out-of-town members than in-town so it will probably be on-line forever. We may have the occasional in-person get-together, but I doubt it will ever go back to being regularly in-person.
> Faith in religion is a completely different thing to believing the scientific method works. Science is self correcting.
This is not at all accurate; the faith people express in science is generally identical to the faith other people express in religion, with no difference in the reasons, motivations, or justifications offered.
It is true that science is often self-correcting. The same is true of religion - you don't hear much about the Xhosa cattle-killing cult anymore.
This is not at all accurate; the faith people express in science is generally identical to the faith other people express in religion, with no difference in the reasons, motivations, or justifications offered.
It is true that science is often self-correcting. The same is true of religion - you don't hear much about the Xhosa cattle-killing cult anymore.
> This is not at all accurate; the faith people express in science is generally identical to the faith other people express in religion, with no difference in the reasons, motivations, or justifications offered.
I think this is fundamentally incorrect. People believe in science because it produces results in the form of correct predictions and devices.
I think this is fundamentally incorrect. People believe in science because it produces results in the form of correct predictions and devices.
Just look at nutrition science as an example for why this isn't so.
Salt, fat, cholesterol, fructose, etc have each gone through several wild swings in good for you / bad for you. The science is entirely unsettled, yet forms the backbone of many doctors' recommendations.
Then, when the science gets taken in by mainline cultural space, it gets blown up into all sorts of utterly nonsensical, mystical woo-woo. Somehow moderation turns into paleo, vegan, fruitarian, or alkaline based diets.
People shoot wheatgrass or fast on lemon juice. All sorts of vaguely scientific sounding bullshit that isn't backed up by actual data.
Salt, fat, cholesterol, fructose, etc have each gone through several wild swings in good for you / bad for you. The science is entirely unsettled, yet forms the backbone of many doctors' recommendations.
Then, when the science gets taken in by mainline cultural space, it gets blown up into all sorts of utterly nonsensical, mystical woo-woo. Somehow moderation turns into paleo, vegan, fruitarian, or alkaline based diets.
People shoot wheatgrass or fast on lemon juice. All sorts of vaguely scientific sounding bullshit that isn't backed up by actual data.
You can't just pick and choose what is scientific and what isn't to try an conflate reason with religion. That is an argument in bad faith (ahem).
Further, using statements like "entirely unsettled" in reference to science is a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works. It's not "settled" like religious arguments where everybody agrees to a particular interpretation of the holy book. Science either works and we make stuff with it, or it doesn't and it gets tossed away.
Further, using statements like "entirely unsettled" in reference to science is a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works. It's not "settled" like religious arguments where everybody agrees to a particular interpretation of the holy book. Science either works and we make stuff with it, or it doesn't and it gets tossed away.
I mean, you're responding to an example of "science" that doesn't work and we make stuff with it.
"making stuff with it" is not the entirety of the scientific method. I suspect you know this. What you are arguing here is nonsense. Science isn't perfect and doesn't claim to be, so pointing out some corner case and saying "here, this bit is wrong" can't be used to dismiss the entire scientific method.
If you want to argue in that fashion, I'd like to point out to you that praying doesn't always work, so all religions must therefore be bunk.
If you want to argue in that fashion, I'd like to point out to you that praying doesn't always work, so all religions must therefore be bunk.
The word 'science' has been co-opted by con men. Yet it's basic tenants like the critical method and repeatable experiments have provided me with far more value than half a life filled with religious 'teaching'.
Sure, so do religions.
But people make no distinction between believing in science in the same area where it makes correct predictions, and believing in "science" in an area where it has nothing valid to say, because it makes correct predictions somewhere else.
To most people, science is just a word, and they support it because they know that that is the right thing to do.
But people make no distinction between believing in science in the same area where it makes correct predictions, and believing in "science" in an area where it has nothing valid to say, because it makes correct predictions somewhere else.
To most people, science is just a word, and they support it because they know that that is the right thing to do.
What correct predictions and functional devices do religions create?
Here's an example from The Secret of Our Success:
> In Indonesia, the Kantus of Kalimantan use bird augury to select locations for their agricultural plots. The anthropologist Michael Dove argues that two factors will cause farmers to make plot placements that are too risky. First, Kantu ecological models contain the Gambler's Fallacy and lead them to expect that floods will be less likely to occur in a specific location after a big flood in that location (which is not true). Second [...], Kantus pay attention to others' success and copy the choices of successful households, meaning that if one of their neighbors has a good yield in an area one year, many other people will want to plant there in the next year.
> Reducing the risks posed by these cognitive and decision-making biases, the Kantu rely on a system of bird augury that effectively randomizes their choices for locating garden plots, which helps them avoid catastrophic crop failures.
> The patterning of bird augury supports the view that this is a cultural adaptation. The system seems to have evolved and spread throughout this region since the seventeenth century when rice cultivation was introduced. This makes sense, since it is rice cultivation that is most positively influenced by randomizing garden locations.
> Whatever the process, within 400 years, the bird augury system had spread throughout the agricultural populations of this Borneo region. Yet it remains conspicuously missing or underdeveloped among local foraging groups and recent adopters of rice agriculture, as well as among populations in northern Borneo who rely on irrigation.
> This example makes a key point: not only do people often not understand what their cultural practices are doing, but sometimes it may even be important that they don't understand what their practices are doing or how they work.
> In Indonesia, the Kantus of Kalimantan use bird augury to select locations for their agricultural plots. The anthropologist Michael Dove argues that two factors will cause farmers to make plot placements that are too risky. First, Kantu ecological models contain the Gambler's Fallacy and lead them to expect that floods will be less likely to occur in a specific location after a big flood in that location (which is not true). Second [...], Kantus pay attention to others' success and copy the choices of successful households, meaning that if one of their neighbors has a good yield in an area one year, many other people will want to plant there in the next year.
> Reducing the risks posed by these cognitive and decision-making biases, the Kantu rely on a system of bird augury that effectively randomizes their choices for locating garden plots, which helps them avoid catastrophic crop failures.
> The patterning of bird augury supports the view that this is a cultural adaptation. The system seems to have evolved and spread throughout this region since the seventeenth century when rice cultivation was introduced. This makes sense, since it is rice cultivation that is most positively influenced by randomizing garden locations.
> Whatever the process, within 400 years, the bird augury system had spread throughout the agricultural populations of this Borneo region. Yet it remains conspicuously missing or underdeveloped among local foraging groups and recent adopters of rice agriculture, as well as among populations in northern Borneo who rely on irrigation.
> This example makes a key point: not only do people often not understand what their cultural practices are doing, but sometimes it may even be important that they don't understand what their practices are doing or how they work.
> not only do people often not understand what their cultural practices are doing, but sometimes it may even be important that they don't understand what their practices are doing or how they work.
this is so wrong, it's "not even wrong".
It's always important to determine why something worked or didn't. If we did not do that, we would never be able to produce enough food to feed ourselves. Ignorance and blind adherence to nonsense is what creates famines in the first place.
this is so wrong, it's "not even wrong".
It's always important to determine why something worked or didn't. If we did not do that, we would never be able to produce enough food to feed ourselves. Ignorance and blind adherence to nonsense is what creates famines in the first place.
Which people are these? Can you cite some examples?
If the people who believed in evolution more out of faith than true understanding actually did the legwork to remove their biases and objectively study/experiment on the subject, they would come to find that evolution is real. And if Jehovah's Witnesses actually did the legwork to remove their biases and objectively study/experiment on their religion, most of them would run as far away as they could.
Some things just have to be taken on faith because life is too short to get a PhD in every subject, but I sure hope the world continues to move towards evidence-based rather than magic-based foundations of default belief.
Some things just have to be taken on faith because life is too short to get a PhD in every subject, but I sure hope the world continues to move towards evidence-based rather than magic-based foundations of default belief.
People believe in quantum mechanics not because they personally understand it, but because they believe/trust in the experts. How do the experts demonstrate their authority? ...by making electronics that do magic.
The difference between a belief of religious person and say a scientist is that the former asks you to trust them on blind faith while the latter asks you to trust them by proving they have more control over something than you do.
The difference between a belief of religious person and say a scientist is that the former asks you to trust them on blind faith while the latter asks you to trust them by proving they have more control over something than you do.
I share your frustration, the people who you were talking to likely also had a misconception of what evolution and scientific theories in general are, or were stating it poorly. It's not accurate to describe it as a "belief" it's more like "best current guess that we have but we'll change our mind if a new guess comes up that is better able to explain things".
Just because you met a few people with a fragile grasp of complex scientific topics doesn't mean the science is wrong.
Evolution is a fact. It has been demonstrated over and over again, is observable, and has predicative powers.
Religion has none of these things, and your particular religion is well known for being absolutely traumatic for people who follow it and even more so for people who leave it.
Evolution is a fact. It has been demonstrated over and over again, is observable, and has predicative powers.
Religion has none of these things, and your particular religion is well known for being absolutely traumatic for people who follow it and even more so for people who leave it.
A belief does not constitute a religion, people have all sorts of irrational beliefs, but that doesn't make them religion.
That seems like a trivial "gotcha" question. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "which" theory.
Do you mean Lamarckism vs Darwinism? The correct answer is that Lamarckism is wrong.
Do you mean gradual change vs punctuated equilibrium or similar? That's not a "which theory of evolution", which is why people are confused by your question.
It really comes across as a classic "confuse people with trick questions and then try to inject religion into them while they're distracted" tactic. I'm glad I'm done with that sort of thing.
Also, belief in evolution is great, faith in evolution is not. Belief != faith, and religious people need to stop conflating them. If someone came up with an alternate theory for how we got here that explained all of the evidence better, I'd have no trouble believing it, because I don't have "faith in evolution" or any such thing.
Do you mean Lamarckism vs Darwinism? The correct answer is that Lamarckism is wrong.
Do you mean gradual change vs punctuated equilibrium or similar? That's not a "which theory of evolution", which is why people are confused by your question.
It really comes across as a classic "confuse people with trick questions and then try to inject religion into them while they're distracted" tactic. I'm glad I'm done with that sort of thing.
Also, belief in evolution is great, faith in evolution is not. Belief != faith, and religious people need to stop conflating them. If someone came up with an alternate theory for how we got here that explained all of the evidence better, I'd have no trouble believing it, because I don't have "faith in evolution" or any such thing.
> too often people are just blindly accepting because they do not want to put any efforts in.
Sure but nonbelievers experience the same thing with believers. I was asking a Christian about his interpretation of the two creation stories in Genesis. He didn't even know there were two. Most Christians don't.
And they always shut down when I want to discuss in detail the possibility of mistranslation changing their understanding of God. They seem to not understand that it's possible to lose meaning or change meaning when translating from one language to another. Even if you try hard not to.
I am totally respectful in these interactions. I'm not ambushing them with questions... I just genuinely want to learn something from someone who apparently should have deep and intimate knowledge of Christianity... and it's always disappointing.
Sure but nonbelievers experience the same thing with believers. I was asking a Christian about his interpretation of the two creation stories in Genesis. He didn't even know there were two. Most Christians don't.
And they always shut down when I want to discuss in detail the possibility of mistranslation changing their understanding of God. They seem to not understand that it's possible to lose meaning or change meaning when translating from one language to another. Even if you try hard not to.
I am totally respectful in these interactions. I'm not ambushing them with questions... I just genuinely want to learn something from someone who apparently should have deep and intimate knowledge of Christianity... and it's always disappointing.
You see this with COVID too. Many people are only accidentally on the right side with respect to “the science.”
I ask a simple question: why do blood transfusions work?
> What is clear to me is that to these people evolution is a BELIEF and not something they thought of
Everything you consider to be true is a belief. That's the very definition of a belief: beliefs are the things you consider to be true. So you saying that this is a belief to them carries little information.
Everything you consider to be true is a belief. That's the very definition of a belief: beliefs are the things you consider to be true. So you saying that this is a belief to them carries little information.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28656023.
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The main difference is that for evolution most people can point to (or try to point to) a legitimate source of authority for why they believe evolution is true.
Whereas for religion, there is nothing to point to other than blind faith.
Whereas for religion, there is nothing to point to other than blind faith.
Who decides legitimacy and why is a university a more legitimate source of knowledge than a church?
> why is a university a more legitimate source of knowledge than a church
Because knowledge has to be justified in order to be knowledge. Universities produce justifications (in form of repeatable experiments, studies, proofs, etc.), churches don't.
Because knowledge has to be justified in order to be knowledge. Universities produce justifications (in form of repeatable experiments, studies, proofs, etc.), churches don't.
Perhaps because at a university you can learn skills that you can utilize to create things and outcomes with relatively more predictable results.
If you need a complex surgery, would you like to go to a doctor or a priest?
If you need a complex surgery, would you like to go to a doctor or a priest?
So blindly believing in something is fine unless you're right in the end?
There’s a big difference between trust in a process that has so consistently yielded results vs something like faith or political adherence. It’s about the foundations upon which those results lie more so than the belief themselves, and also an amenability to update beliefs. If humanity really gets something wrong about how the natural world operates it will usually be revealed. The trust ergo is largely warranted, even if the human execution of said process is flawed.
The canard that every individual has to maximally recapitulate the entirety of hundreds of years of human discovery is just absurd. Trust exists at all levels of human intellectual discourse.
The canard that every individual has to maximally recapitulate the entirety of hundreds of years of human discovery is just absurd. Trust exists at all levels of human intellectual discourse.
Disappointed that this is downvoted. You are absolutely right: most people don’t actually investigate the origins of their beliefs and just adopt whatever their social tribe believes. The average urbanite atheist knows as much about evolution as the average rural creationist. It is almost entirely a social phenomenon, not an epistemological one.
Is this an American thing? I remember being taught the basics of evolution in year 8 or 9 science class in a way that was impossible to misunderstand ("children resemble their parents" + "some parents more likely to survive" => small changes in distribution of traits among each child generation => specialisation to local environment over many generations).
I do have a Christian friend who believes that it was God who set the wheels of evolution in motion, but there seems to be little misunderstanding where I am (Melbourne, AU) about what Darwinism is or denial that it's a strong force at play.
I do have a Christian friend who believes that it was God who set the wheels of evolution in motion, but there seems to be little misunderstanding where I am (Melbourne, AU) about what Darwinism is or denial that it's a strong force at play.
Yes, evolution is taught in schools. But that doesn’t mean the average person can explain how evolutionary theory works beyond a few sentences, in the same way that the average person cannot tell you more than 2 or 3 of the amendments to the Constitution.
There is no basis for this assertion. Furthermore, your "average urbanite atheist" probably knows more than you think:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2010/09/28/130191248...
Linked article conveniently forgot to mention the relevant footnote from original article:
> This may seem paradoxical, since atheists and agnostics have very low levels of religious commitment and yet score very well on the survey questions. However, atheists and agnostics account for a relatively small share of the total number of people with low levels of religious commitment; 4% of Americans describe themselves as atheists or agnostics, while fully 35% have low religious commitment. Atheists and agnostics answer an average of 20.9 questions correctly, compared with an average of 15.4 correct answers among people with low religious commitment who do not describe themselves as atheists or agnostics.
Btw survey questions them selfs are a bit nitpicky.. (who cares if jesus realy changed water into wine or if that was just symbolic)
Original article: https://www.pewforum.org/2010/09/28/u-s-religious-knowledge-...
> This may seem paradoxical, since atheists and agnostics have very low levels of religious commitment and yet score very well on the survey questions. However, atheists and agnostics account for a relatively small share of the total number of people with low levels of religious commitment; 4% of Americans describe themselves as atheists or agnostics, while fully 35% have low religious commitment. Atheists and agnostics answer an average of 20.9 questions correctly, compared with an average of 15.4 correct answers among people with low religious commitment who do not describe themselves as atheists or agnostics.
Btw survey questions them selfs are a bit nitpicky.. (who cares if jesus realy changed water into wine or if that was just symbolic)
Original article: https://www.pewforum.org/2010/09/28/u-s-religious-knowledge-...
Religious people seem to care quite a bit about whether the bible is literally true.
Further to that, some religions also heavily use traditions that don't appear in the bible at all. Catholics, for example, are meant to believe that the sacrament literally turns water and wine into the flesh of Christ. As in, it's actual flesh and blood (Transubstantiation).
So either Jesus was a walking breadstick or Catholicism as it is currently practised is obviously wrong.
There are so many varieties of Christianity based on "those other christians are definitely wrong" that I guarantee you somebody cares about those distinctions.
Further to that, some religions also heavily use traditions that don't appear in the bible at all. Catholics, for example, are meant to believe that the sacrament literally turns water and wine into the flesh of Christ. As in, it's actual flesh and blood (Transubstantiation).
So either Jesus was a walking breadstick or Catholicism as it is currently practised is obviously wrong.
There are so many varieties of Christianity based on "those other christians are definitely wrong" that I guarantee you somebody cares about those distinctions.
Consider the calming power of slow rhythmic breathing; meditative practices are found in every religion.
Basing anything on false or inexact beliefs won't leads to lasting desirable outcomes IMO*. Some argues to read religious texts as metaphors but I think it's just a way to circumvent the reality.
*except for charities but benevolence is obviously not (only) tied to religions
Scientific method gives you only falsifiable theories and inexact beliefs. Anything “universally true” and “exact” is a religion.
This is something I've thought about a lot, and I say this as a diehard atheist. Historically (and even now), religion has served two useful purposes:
1. As a provider of community. There are of course other ways to socialize with wider groups. Sports clubs, going to the pub, classes, that sort of thing. But it's a lot more interest-driven and haphazard.
2. As a provider of and enforcer for a moral code.
Here are some things I believe to be true:
1. A lot of people like being told what to do. This isn't necessarily unhealthy or bad. I also believe in decision fatigue. We defer decisions to others all the time;
2. Fear is an easier tool for keeping people in line than any alternative. There's a carrot and a stick with religion. The carrot is paradise in the afterlife (depending on your flavour of religion). The stick is partly eternal damnation but much more important than that, it's the fear of losing that community.
3. The majority of people only act in an ethical manner out of fear of the consequences.
Now looking at the political situation in the US, we have the rise of Christian conservatives. Just the name "conservative" is worth examining. It is of course derived from "conserve". The intent is obvious: it is to resist change, to maintain traditions and generally to keep doing things the way we "always" have. It almost seems like to be a conservative requires you to believe things were better in the past and changes are just making everything worse. At least that's how it seems.
It shouldn't really surprise anyone that religion and conservatism tend to be correlated but does one cause the other? I honestly don't know.
But what I find fascinating is that the desire to be told what to do combined with the mistrust in government fomented by religions (as in, the person is to put their faith in [deity] and the church rather than government) means these people are so easily manipulated.
Take the Covid vaccine (and masks). Every current and former president (including Trump), every governor, every Senator and all but a handful of Congressmen are vaccinated. I'm also sure every Fox News host is too. Yet these same vaccinated people are quite happy and willing to pander to whack job conspiracies as a means of control.
I find it ironic that the people who I'm sure genuinely think they're standing up for "freedom" by fighting against mask mandates are in fact least free because they're so easily manipulated.
So I guess my point is, I'm not sure these problems go away if, say, religion goes away.
1. As a provider of community. There are of course other ways to socialize with wider groups. Sports clubs, going to the pub, classes, that sort of thing. But it's a lot more interest-driven and haphazard.
2. As a provider of and enforcer for a moral code.
Here are some things I believe to be true:
1. A lot of people like being told what to do. This isn't necessarily unhealthy or bad. I also believe in decision fatigue. We defer decisions to others all the time;
2. Fear is an easier tool for keeping people in line than any alternative. There's a carrot and a stick with religion. The carrot is paradise in the afterlife (depending on your flavour of religion). The stick is partly eternal damnation but much more important than that, it's the fear of losing that community.
3. The majority of people only act in an ethical manner out of fear of the consequences.
Now looking at the political situation in the US, we have the rise of Christian conservatives. Just the name "conservative" is worth examining. It is of course derived from "conserve". The intent is obvious: it is to resist change, to maintain traditions and generally to keep doing things the way we "always" have. It almost seems like to be a conservative requires you to believe things were better in the past and changes are just making everything worse. At least that's how it seems.
It shouldn't really surprise anyone that religion and conservatism tend to be correlated but does one cause the other? I honestly don't know.
But what I find fascinating is that the desire to be told what to do combined with the mistrust in government fomented by religions (as in, the person is to put their faith in [deity] and the church rather than government) means these people are so easily manipulated.
Take the Covid vaccine (and masks). Every current and former president (including Trump), every governor, every Senator and all but a handful of Congressmen are vaccinated. I'm also sure every Fox News host is too. Yet these same vaccinated people are quite happy and willing to pander to whack job conspiracies as a means of control.
I find it ironic that the people who I'm sure genuinely think they're standing up for "freedom" by fighting against mask mandates are in fact least free because they're so easily manipulated.
So I guess my point is, I'm not sure these problems go away if, say, religion goes away.
I'm not sure the bottom part of your argument makes sense. Religious people trust God, but I don't see a reason they would trust or distrust any specific government or news organization unless that government or news organization claimed to be divinely backed. I don't see why religion would cause someone to be more likely to blindly trust a news organization over the government. There's been a lot of US patriotism tied to religion ("In God we trust.", "God bless America.", "endowed by their Creator").
It's the authority to interpret the word of god. The authority is delegated by people you already trust to people they are trust themselves. It creates a hierarchy of power. It's easy to manipulate millions of people if you are at the top of that hierarchy. Especially when the people we're talking about have their sense of truthfulness broken at a very young age by forcing them to believe in an entity they can't see
Is Fox News part of a hierarchy of power interpreting the word of God? Is QAnon? I'm not really seeing how your comment supports cletus's comment about Fox News and wack job conspiracies.
>forcing them to believe in an entity they can't see
People can't see the big bang either, at least at a young age. In my mind there's a pretty clear argument for God's existence from the laws of thermodynamics. You can define God to be whatever caused mass and energy to exist, and more foundationally whatever caused the laws of the universe to exist.
>forcing them to believe in an entity they can't see
People can't see the big bang either, at least at a young age. In my mind there's a pretty clear argument for God's existence from the laws of thermodynamics. You can define God to be whatever caused mass and energy to exist, and more foundationally whatever caused the laws of the universe to exist.
You could also said that the conservative are looking at understanding was worked in the past and not throwing everything out the window for the newest fad.
To me, it seems like a precautionary principle, let’s take our time and not throw the baby with the bathwater, things a changing fast, we must preserve what was good or we risk falling into some traps like communism/fascism (that where secular endeavours)
Ultimately, we need to find out what was great about our roots and also what need to change to face up modern problems.
A problem we have now, is that these stories were written in the bible which prevented them from being updated as they would have been in an oral tradition, and now the update is way overdue.
To me, it seems like a precautionary principle, let’s take our time and not throw the baby with the bathwater, things a changing fast, we must preserve what was good or we risk falling into some traps like communism/fascism (that where secular endeavours)
Ultimately, we need to find out what was great about our roots and also what need to change to face up modern problems.
A problem we have now, is that these stories were written in the bible which prevented them from being updated as they would have been in an oral tradition, and now the update is way overdue.
The politics of today are in the context of the most un-religious America in its history.
Whether that is related is left as an exercise for the reader.
Whether that is related is left as an exercise for the reader.
Fezzik(1)
[deleted]
Sir Isaac Newton was a devout Christian theologist. Perhaps his adopted philosophy offers discipline features that aided in the production of fruit prized by the scientific community. Islamic discipline gave us fundamental mathematical systems. Nikola Tesla thought of his brain as an antennae for the universal core ("I don't know its secrets, but I know it exists"). George Carlin has a bit about how the aliens don't talk to us because of our own self-centered hubris.
Religious thought is there for a reason. Science searches for explanations for observable phenomena. If you call yourself an "atheist" and announce your belief in "nothing", then you will shut yourself off from fellow citizens (complete with their own unique knowledge) who are inheriting rehearsed traditions. I've been taught to never tell someone they're wrong. Why would you want to become someone's ideological enemy? Perhaps there are fundamental, ancient gears turning if you embrace religion. When describing my complicated views about religion to my own "simple", hard working father - I was told "Well, I just go to church because everybody is there." You must speak their language so that they sing for you. Their willingness to profess their view of the world is a beautiful, valuable thing.
An honorably discharged American marine with a missing leg told me that Islam preaches punishment, while Christianity preaches forgiveness. Both of these concepts are necessary to steer a population, and both can be issued excessively. Forgiveness can mean more intimate personal data released to the priest in a confessional booth, and punishment can mean less corrosive civil behavior overall.
I've had hail strike my car seconds after sending the sarcastic chat message "the algorithms replaced the priesthood". I've had lightning strike dozens of feet away from where I slept in the middle of the night in a parking lot mere hours after watching the clip [0] of Christof demanding his team "DO IT!".
If you want proof, you've incentivized your industry to make my car constantly connected to an LTE tower by default. In a Faraday cage protected HDD somewhere, I'm sure my file is residing along with billions of others, courtesy of Pegasus (et al). Unless you are going to say "lightning struck the same place 4 times in a row." [1]
“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”
[0] https://youtu.be/wcMCS_6oung?t=248
[1] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/212586-google-data-cen...
Religious thought is there for a reason. Science searches for explanations for observable phenomena. If you call yourself an "atheist" and announce your belief in "nothing", then you will shut yourself off from fellow citizens (complete with their own unique knowledge) who are inheriting rehearsed traditions. I've been taught to never tell someone they're wrong. Why would you want to become someone's ideological enemy? Perhaps there are fundamental, ancient gears turning if you embrace religion. When describing my complicated views about religion to my own "simple", hard working father - I was told "Well, I just go to church because everybody is there." You must speak their language so that they sing for you. Their willingness to profess their view of the world is a beautiful, valuable thing.
An honorably discharged American marine with a missing leg told me that Islam preaches punishment, while Christianity preaches forgiveness. Both of these concepts are necessary to steer a population, and both can be issued excessively. Forgiveness can mean more intimate personal data released to the priest in a confessional booth, and punishment can mean less corrosive civil behavior overall.
I've had hail strike my car seconds after sending the sarcastic chat message "the algorithms replaced the priesthood". I've had lightning strike dozens of feet away from where I slept in the middle of the night in a parking lot mere hours after watching the clip [0] of Christof demanding his team "DO IT!".
If you want proof, you've incentivized your industry to make my car constantly connected to an LTE tower by default. In a Faraday cage protected HDD somewhere, I'm sure my file is residing along with billions of others, courtesy of Pegasus (et al). Unless you are going to say "lightning struck the same place 4 times in a row." [1]
“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”
[0] https://youtu.be/wcMCS_6oung?t=248
[1] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/212586-google-data-cen...
But if we remove the theology—views about the nature of God, the creation of the universe, and the like—from the day-to-day practice of religious faith, the animosity in the debate evaporates.
Of course, then it's no longer a religion. It's a social organization.
It seems to be quite possible to overdose on religion. Some religions do that as policy, as a form of brainwashing. The religions with mandatory prayer several times a day work like that. It's really hard to break people free of that brainwashing if they grew up with it. It's not the theology, it's the repetition. Both haredi Judaism and Islam use that approach to induce some degree of fanaticism. The Catholic Church, in previous centuries, was into that sort of thing, but has lightened up a bit.
Of course, then it's no longer a religion. It's a social organization.
It seems to be quite possible to overdose on religion. Some religions do that as policy, as a form of brainwashing. The religions with mandatory prayer several times a day work like that. It's really hard to break people free of that brainwashing if they grew up with it. It's not the theology, it's the repetition. Both haredi Judaism and Islam use that approach to induce some degree of fanaticism. The Catholic Church, in previous centuries, was into that sort of thing, but has lightened up a bit.
My experience with Buddhism was that theology was very much not the point, but most people still consider it a religion.
I was a practicing Mahayana Buddhist for many years and I can assure you it is a religion. There is an entire pantheon with Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, ancestors are worshipped. There are temples, rituals, idols, altars, prostration, chanting, incense lighting, religious texts, etc. There is an afterlife via rebirth which you are trying to end via merit making (virtuous acts). Most of the religious practices are there. There is even a religious rite similar to the Christian sacrament of confirmation called taking the precepts where you make certain religious commitments, and you are given a Buddhist name after time of religious study.
I think it is pure fantasy that people believe Buddhism is not a religion. I think some people want to convert Buddhism into just philosophy because they want to take out the interesting content and drop the baggage (rituals, worship, etc.). Many are leaving Christianity with the hope of finding a spiritual community without all of the negatives of religion. However without the baggage there is no meaning or purpose and people will fill in the blanks with their own culture and religious upbringing.
I think it is pure fantasy that people believe Buddhism is not a religion. I think some people want to convert Buddhism into just philosophy because they want to take out the interesting content and drop the baggage (rituals, worship, etc.). Many are leaving Christianity with the hope of finding a spiritual community without all of the negatives of religion. However without the baggage there is no meaning or purpose and people will fill in the blanks with their own culture and religious upbringing.
Buddhism can in practice be very religious. The life of your typical buddhist monk really doesn't look that different from the life of your typical christian monk, they just utter different prayers while lighting their candles. The Pali Cannon reads a lot like the new testament too
> it's no longer a religion. It's a social organization.
That's a rather narrow definition of religion. Perhaps consider one suggested by Paul Tillich in his writings - "faith is not simply the will to believe" - such as The Dynamics of Faith and The Courage to Be
- concern with the nature of ultimate reality
- doubt is included in every act of faith
- courage to make a personal commitment
- the will to believe does not create faith
- venture: acting when the outcomes are beyond one's own control
That's a rather narrow definition of religion. Perhaps consider one suggested by Paul Tillich in his writings - "faith is not simply the will to believe" - such as The Dynamics of Faith and The Courage to Be
- concern with the nature of ultimate reality
- doubt is included in every act of faith
- courage to make a personal commitment
- the will to believe does not create faith
- venture: acting when the outcomes are beyond one's own control
Different forms of human organisation seem to find their own specialised elements of esssential waste. Essential in the sense that they're necessary for function, waste in that in a strictly rational sense, they're inefficient.
Market-based corporations develop planned obsolescence, redundant marketing, feature churn, and style-over-function in mass market appeal.
Government bureaux tend to be adversarially structured against political adversaries, internal, partisan, or foreign.
Militaries are structured around political, cultural, and martial requirements, as well as an environment of infrequent but extreme risks. "Hurry up and wait", inefficiencies of troops and materiel, and actions which lack apparent consistency from the front-line tactical to the general headquarters strategic level are common.
And in religious organisations, you'll find that a number of social functions (see Max Weber on the sociology of religion) such as trust, group-cohesion, longevity, tradition, uniformity of faith and doctrine, etc., create structures and behaviours which don't make sense on first blush, but which do seem to have at least some logic when viewed at scale in both space, time, and population.
I find it interesting that it is religions and academic institutions which seem to be among the most long-lived. They greatly outlive virtually all commercial enterprises, and all but the most durable governments. Arguably cities might be another contender.
Market-based corporations develop planned obsolescence, redundant marketing, feature churn, and style-over-function in mass market appeal.
Government bureaux tend to be adversarially structured against political adversaries, internal, partisan, or foreign.
Militaries are structured around political, cultural, and martial requirements, as well as an environment of infrequent but extreme risks. "Hurry up and wait", inefficiencies of troops and materiel, and actions which lack apparent consistency from the front-line tactical to the general headquarters strategic level are common.
And in religious organisations, you'll find that a number of social functions (see Max Weber on the sociology of religion) such as trust, group-cohesion, longevity, tradition, uniformity of faith and doctrine, etc., create structures and behaviours which don't make sense on first blush, but which do seem to have at least some logic when viewed at scale in both space, time, and population.
I find it interesting that it is religions and academic institutions which seem to be among the most long-lived. They greatly outlive virtually all commercial enterprises, and all but the most durable governments. Arguably cities might be another contender.
One of the more profound statements I once heard on the problem with modern secular philosophy was this throwaway comment I read online years ago:
"Creationism is true if it will keep my kids off oxycontin."
(I'm guessing the poster was from the rural Midwestern US.)
I'm not saying I agree with that statement, but I can see where they are coming from. I found it to be one of the more profoundly honest and deep statements I've ever encountered.
Secular philosophy has failed to produce enough value for ordinary people living ordinary lives embedded in the ordinary matrix of threats and opportunities presented by every day life. Religion has done that for thousands of years. Sometimes it does that quite well and sometimes it does it very badly, but at least it tries.
Yes sometimes religion is full of shit, but secular philosophy and ideology is sometimes full of shit as well. One can find examples of both religion and secular philosophy promoting irrational thinking. I think things like antivax and Qanon can be blamed as much on postmodernism as religion, and I don't see any evidence that people who abandon religion automatically become more rational. Many just glom onto other forms of superstition or secular but totally insane ideas.
Go read some academic philosophy. The older stuff is deeply abstract, looking down at the world from orbit and drawing a lot of deep but distant conclusions. The newer stuff is completely impenetrable to someone who has not studied the subject in depth. Very little of it is relevant to someone working a regular job and trying to raise kids.
Speaking of kids... much secular philosophy barely mentions children at all, or seems indifferent to them. The fact that the central generative process of all organic life gets barely a mention in secular philosophy is to me a profound indicator of something very deeply wrong. It's like physics avoiding the subjects of electromagnetism or gravity and trying to make sense of everything else.
The marketplace of ideas is like any other marketplace. If your store does not stock what people need they will shop elsewhere. If you don't like where they are shopping, it's your problem for not producing the right products. The customer is always right.
"Creationism is true if it will keep my kids off oxycontin."
(I'm guessing the poster was from the rural Midwestern US.)
I'm not saying I agree with that statement, but I can see where they are coming from. I found it to be one of the more profoundly honest and deep statements I've ever encountered.
Secular philosophy has failed to produce enough value for ordinary people living ordinary lives embedded in the ordinary matrix of threats and opportunities presented by every day life. Religion has done that for thousands of years. Sometimes it does that quite well and sometimes it does it very badly, but at least it tries.
Yes sometimes religion is full of shit, but secular philosophy and ideology is sometimes full of shit as well. One can find examples of both religion and secular philosophy promoting irrational thinking. I think things like antivax and Qanon can be blamed as much on postmodernism as religion, and I don't see any evidence that people who abandon religion automatically become more rational. Many just glom onto other forms of superstition or secular but totally insane ideas.
Go read some academic philosophy. The older stuff is deeply abstract, looking down at the world from orbit and drawing a lot of deep but distant conclusions. The newer stuff is completely impenetrable to someone who has not studied the subject in depth. Very little of it is relevant to someone working a regular job and trying to raise kids.
Speaking of kids... much secular philosophy barely mentions children at all, or seems indifferent to them. The fact that the central generative process of all organic life gets barely a mention in secular philosophy is to me a profound indicator of something very deeply wrong. It's like physics avoiding the subjects of electromagnetism or gravity and trying to make sense of everything else.
The marketplace of ideas is like any other marketplace. If your store does not stock what people need they will shop elsewhere. If you don't like where they are shopping, it's your problem for not producing the right products. The customer is always right.
Secular philosophy has failed to produce enough value for ordinary people living ordinary lives embedded in the ordinary matrix of threats and opportunities presented by every day life.
I don't there's much, if any, evidence for this claim. Religion is in a steep decline in Europe but there's little evidence for more anti-social behavior. The American mid-west, where your quote comes from, in contrast is especially religious for an advance industrial area and it's noted for it's horrific social problem.
I don't there's much, if any, evidence for this claim. Religion is in a steep decline in Europe but there's little evidence for more anti-social behavior. The American mid-west, where your quote comes from, in contrast is especially religious for an advance industrial area and it's noted for it's horrific social problem.
I think you misunderstood me a bit. I was not agreeing with that quote, or disagreeing for that matter. I was commenting on the phenomenon.
On religion and social health I do have to ask which way the arrow of causation goes. Is Europe healthier in many ways because people are less religious, or are people less religious because they experience less crises and dysfunctions that drive them toward religion?
When someone's father just died of an overdose or their marriage is failing and their family is breaking apart, which secular philosopher would you recommend that they read?
On religion and social health I do have to ask which way the arrow of causation goes. Is Europe healthier in many ways because people are less religious, or are people less religious because they experience less crises and dysfunctions that drive them toward religion?
When someone's father just died of an overdose or their marriage is failing and their family is breaking apart, which secular philosopher would you recommend that they read?
I think you misunderstood me a bit. I was not agreeing with that quote, or disagreeing for that matter. I was commenting on the phenomenon.
I understood you as "entertaining the possibility" of your original quote. I don't think that you can take such a statement in terms of "big if true" without looking at a larger context.
On religion and social health I do have to ask which way the arrow of causation goes. Is Europe healthier in many ways because people are less religious, or are people less religious because they experience less crises and dysfunctions that drive them toward religion?
I don't think there's a strong arrow of causation either way. The US is very religious (for a developed nation) for it's historical/social and economic reasons and Europe less-so similarly. The one thing I'd say is that, statistically, there's little plausible evidence that "turning to religion" helps the US' problems.
When someone's father just died of an overdose or their marriage is failing and their family is breaking apart, which secular philosopher would you recommend that they read?
It seems half this thread has been riding the strawman of "secular philosophers". I could mention a variety of secular sources that make an effort to provide hope or reconciliation or whatever from the Sartre and Camus to the latest self-help, non-religious stuff claims to provide a lot.
But the real way these argument are faulty is that they assume religious approaches are somehow the tried and true approach for dealing with tragedy and that assumption is just unjustified. If we throw the gates open to discussion of how to deal with all of life's difficulties it's a big topic and one I'm going to claim I have all the answers to. But I don't want let the assumption "religious is well known for dealing well this stuff" just slip in. That's not my experience. I've seen religious people spend a lot of time blaming the people who've experienced these tragedies. I've seen people turn away from religion and not find it useful and I've with a variety of personal tragedies without religion and done just fine. That's anecdotal but it's mostly refusing to accept your presupposition.
Religion may be the opium of the masses but opium isn't usually isn't a cure for what ails it's average user.
I understood you as "entertaining the possibility" of your original quote. I don't think that you can take such a statement in terms of "big if true" without looking at a larger context.
On religion and social health I do have to ask which way the arrow of causation goes. Is Europe healthier in many ways because people are less religious, or are people less religious because they experience less crises and dysfunctions that drive them toward religion?
I don't think there's a strong arrow of causation either way. The US is very religious (for a developed nation) for it's historical/social and economic reasons and Europe less-so similarly. The one thing I'd say is that, statistically, there's little plausible evidence that "turning to religion" helps the US' problems.
When someone's father just died of an overdose or their marriage is failing and their family is breaking apart, which secular philosopher would you recommend that they read?
It seems half this thread has been riding the strawman of "secular philosophers". I could mention a variety of secular sources that make an effort to provide hope or reconciliation or whatever from the Sartre and Camus to the latest self-help, non-religious stuff claims to provide a lot.
But the real way these argument are faulty is that they assume religious approaches are somehow the tried and true approach for dealing with tragedy and that assumption is just unjustified. If we throw the gates open to discussion of how to deal with all of life's difficulties it's a big topic and one I'm going to claim I have all the answers to. But I don't want let the assumption "religious is well known for dealing well this stuff" just slip in. That's not my experience. I've seen religious people spend a lot of time blaming the people who've experienced these tragedies. I've seen people turn away from religion and not find it useful and I've with a variety of personal tragedies without religion and done just fine. That's anecdotal but it's mostly refusing to accept your presupposition.
Religion may be the opium of the masses but opium isn't usually isn't a cure for what ails it's average user.
What is the horrific midwest social problem?
Specifically I'd like to see some quantifiable data because any region (including the EU) can be claimed to have horrific social problems without anything other than subjective data to back up those claims.
To be honest, I've never heard of the midwest referred to anything other than boring, which seems like it would be a strong contradiction to "horrific social problems"
To be honest, I've never heard of the midwest referred to anything other than boring, which seems like it would be a strong contradiction to "horrific social problems"
We can start by the fact that their political leanings have led most of these states to have the highest COVID 19 death ratios because they don't believe in vaccines, nor science.
None of the top 11 states by COVID 19 death rate are in the Midwest.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwestern_United_States
The top Midwest state is South Dakota, in 12th place.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwestern_United_States
The top Midwest state is South Dakota, in 12th place.
This is overhyped ragebait masquerading as news. The reality is more nuanced - not everyone is on board with the idea that the government gets to mandate medical practice, and those people get framed as stupid or stubborn or antisocial.
There are deep and rigorously rational and ethical reasons to be against the current vaccine narratives promulgated by this administration. It's ignorant and disingenuous to dismiss the arguments as equivalent to the "vaccines are made of mercury, cause autism, the lord is my vaccine,etc" single digit iq cretins.
It got politicized because apparently both parties decided it was OK to fuck with America's pandemic response, because it justifies expansion of power and control. Never let a crisis go to waste.
There are deep and rigorously rational and ethical reasons to be against the current vaccine narratives promulgated by this administration. It's ignorant and disingenuous to dismiss the arguments as equivalent to the "vaccines are made of mercury, cause autism, the lord is my vaccine,etc" single digit iq cretins.
It got politicized because apparently both parties decided it was OK to fuck with America's pandemic response, because it justifies expansion of power and control. Never let a crisis go to waste.
I will like to say I've been to anti-vaccine mandate rallies. I have found all of them with no exception to be anything matching the description.
Everyone I talked to believed in one or in most cases many conspiracies up and down the list. There was alot of anti joe-biden pro trump activity and a lot of Evangelical Christian crap (main speaker led everyone in Christian prayer).
Lots of Bill Gates and Fauci hate and lots of 5g is a world domination conspiracy.
I don't deny there may be some people only there about the mandate. But I've found that , that sort of person seems to be rare
Everyone I talked to believed in one or in most cases many conspiracies up and down the list. There was alot of anti joe-biden pro trump activity and a lot of Evangelical Christian crap (main speaker led everyone in Christian prayer).
Lots of Bill Gates and Fauci hate and lots of 5g is a world domination conspiracy.
I don't deny there may be some people only there about the mandate. But I've found that , that sort of person seems to be rare
Rallies of that sort aren't attended by rational people anyway. That's not where most people opposed to mandates align politically. The rallies are political stunts and attract the same crowd you'd expect at an old circus freak show. Just like framing Republicans based on what you saw at MAGA rallies, or democrats by whatever drama AOC is up to at the moment - those are the 2-5% fringe folks that make for salacious clickbait, while the remaining 90% of adults in the country are more boring and complicated.
I'm a counterexample. I was hesitant about getting vaccinated for covid because it was developed so quickly and all medical interventions carry some risk, so you shouldn't completely abandon decision-making. I eventually got vaccinated because it felt like the risks favored that. But at that time, in my country, only 1 person this year had died from covid and also 1 person had died from the vaccine (yes, the vaccine does kill people occasionally). In a covid-free country, the relative risk of vaccine is much higher.
Also, orthodox Jews are idiot conspiracy theorists? Yes, I guess so. People neglect to include Jews when they criticize religious people because they have their favorite demonized religion (Christianity) and somehow venerate the others.
Also, orthodox Jews are idiot conspiracy theorists? Yes, I guess so. People neglect to include Jews when they criticize religious people because they have their favorite demonized religion (Christianity) and somehow venerate the others.
Secular philosophy has failed to produce enough value for ordinary people living ordinary lives embedded in the ordinary matrix of threats and opportunities presented by every day life. Religion has done that for thousands of years.
There are zillions of ordinary people living ordinary lives all over the world who are largely areligious, especially in industrialized countries so this doesn't seem very accurate beside coming off as somewhat condescending. Additionally, for most ordinary people over many of the thousands of years in question, participation in the dominant religion of the time and place was compulsory.
There are zillions of ordinary people living ordinary lives all over the world who are largely areligious, especially in industrialized countries so this doesn't seem very accurate beside coming off as somewhat condescending. Additionally, for most ordinary people over many of the thousands of years in question, participation in the dominant religion of the time and place was compulsory.
The value system (and its underlying philosophical premises) which is being perpetuated by the society in which those areligious people live was crafted by religious tradition.
> Additionally, for most ordinary people over many of the thousands of years in question, participation in the dominant religion of the time and place was compulsory.
This is kind of a weird statement; for most of human history there was no line between religion and culture. So if participation in human culture is "compulsory" then I suppose you are technically correct, but then your statement is vacuously true.
> Additionally, for most ordinary people over many of the thousands of years in question, participation in the dominant religion of the time and place was compulsory.
This is kind of a weird statement; for most of human history there was no line between religion and culture. So if participation in human culture is "compulsory" then I suppose you are technically correct, but then your statement is vacuously true.
Rites and aesthetics have existed independent of culture -- consider the Romans, who adopted, adapted, and incorporated others' rites but left the culture mostly unchanged. I don't know that the equivalence or dominance of religion-as-culture paradigm is conclusive.
>>>> "Creationism is true if it will keep my kids off oxycontin."
The thing is, it won't.
The thing is, it won't.
It would be a second or third order effect. It stands to reason that someone who is a part of a strong religious community would have a much better social life, support structure, and network. All of these things reduce the likelihood of getting addicted to hard drugs. You could also take it a step further and say that having such things makes breaking an addiction/rehab more likely to be successful, too.
> It stands to reason that someone who is a part of a strong religious community would have a much better social life, support structure, and network.
Remove "religious" from this sentence and it is still true. Now the question remains whether a religious community is better than other communities. I doubt it, because religion usually comes with a lot of extra baggage and can become outright dangerous.
Remove "religious" from this sentence and it is still true. Now the question remains whether a religious community is better than other communities. I doubt it, because religion usually comes with a lot of extra baggage and can become outright dangerous.
It can be better because it exists even if it's worse than some ideal but mostly non-existent community.
Drug use and abuse levels do differ between religious and irreligious folk, but one explanation for that might be regional availability rather than religion.
https://drugabuse.com/featured/drugs-and-devotion/
https://drugabuse.com/featured/drugs-and-devotion/
Indeed, and to make it even more of a mess, regional issues also correlated with economic issues. My unorthodox opinion is that the opioid crisis started with an actual pain crisis due to the kinds of jobs that people were working, coupled with a lack of strong labor law enforcement and safety net. People were turning to pills because they were in pain.
It seems like religious people would be far less likely to seek professional help for abuse and that would skew these numbers greatly, considering the methodology.
Religious community members have far more reason to avoid acknowledging their drug problem in a way that might make that information public.
Religious community members have far more reason to avoid acknowledging their drug problem in a way that might make that information public.
Surely that is circular - if religion did cause less drug addiction (and/or dealing) then you'd expect less distribution and thus availability in religious areas because there's less demand.
> One can find examples of both religion and secular philosophy promoting irrational thinking
This is whataboutism to an absurd degree.
"Yeah, religion is not perfect, but atheism is not perfect either, so they're both on par".
No, they're not.
> and I don't see any evidence that people who abandon religion automatically become more rational.
They just abandoned an irrational belief, so by definition, they are immediately more rational.
This is whataboutism to an absurd degree.
"Yeah, religion is not perfect, but atheism is not perfect either, so they're both on par".
No, they're not.
> and I don't see any evidence that people who abandon religion automatically become more rational.
They just abandoned an irrational belief, so by definition, they are immediately more rational.
Given what we now know about the structure of the oxycontin problem in the US that’s profoundly depressing. It’s little to do with religious versus secular philosophy and everything to do with the political structure of society and a lack of action. Most often in the US by professed religious people at every level of the oxy trade and government.
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Secular philosophy (including science) and religion address different concerns, and can coexist cooperatively so long as there is a willingness on both sides to do so. The first step in that cooperation is to put aside the question of which side is not cooperating.
> One can find examples of both religion and secular philosophy promoting irrational thinking.
Can you please give one example of secular philosophy promoting irrational thinking?
Can you please give one example of secular philosophy promoting irrational thinking?
Contemporary academic philosophy has some rather crazy ideas in it. David Lewis claimed that every possible parallel universe exists (modal realism), and is just as real as this one – our universe is the "real" or "actual" one only because it is ours. Takashi Yagisawa takes that one further, and argues that possibility is simply another dimension like space and time (extended modal realism), and that my existence includes not just who I am in this world, but extends to equally include my existence in other possible worlds, and even impossible worlds (logically contradictory universes).
Daniel Kolak claims that only one person actually exists (open individualism), and everyone is the same person, it is just that most of us haven't realised this fact yet. Graham Priest rejects the law of non-contradiction, and argues that it is possible for a proposition to be equally true and false, at exactly the same time and in exactly the same way (dialetheism), and has even suggested that these true contradictions may exist in the real physical world, not just in abstract thought about paradoxes. Nick Bostrom argues that we may be living in a computer simulation, and if we are not, that's bad news, it is evidence that humanity is doomed, or at least that our prospects as a species are not as bright as many hope (the simulation argument). David Chalmers argues that conscious awareness is a property not just of humans and (higher?) animals, but rather that everything in the universe is conscious, even inanimate objects such as rocks, stars, planets, galaxies, even cells and molecules and atoms and subatomic particles (panpsychism).
Are these ideas "irrational"? Rationality is in the eye of the beholder. But they are just as much "out there" as those of many of the great religious philosophers–whether Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, etc.
Daniel Kolak claims that only one person actually exists (open individualism), and everyone is the same person, it is just that most of us haven't realised this fact yet. Graham Priest rejects the law of non-contradiction, and argues that it is possible for a proposition to be equally true and false, at exactly the same time and in exactly the same way (dialetheism), and has even suggested that these true contradictions may exist in the real physical world, not just in abstract thought about paradoxes. Nick Bostrom argues that we may be living in a computer simulation, and if we are not, that's bad news, it is evidence that humanity is doomed, or at least that our prospects as a species are not as bright as many hope (the simulation argument). David Chalmers argues that conscious awareness is a property not just of humans and (higher?) animals, but rather that everything in the universe is conscious, even inanimate objects such as rocks, stars, planets, galaxies, even cells and molecules and atoms and subatomic particles (panpsychism).
Are these ideas "irrational"? Rationality is in the eye of the beholder. But they are just as much "out there" as those of many of the great religious philosophers–whether Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, etc.
The entire "self-help" genre.
In my own experience having debates and discussions in this day and age, there’s this pervasive notion that you can’t assert anything without some citation or study to prove your point. This isn’t necessarily bad, per se, but it does mean people are offloading reasoning about a problem to letting some citation’s abstract make the point for them. There is a massive replicability crisis in academia and we know that the publish or perish culture means null results put careers into jeopardy. It is also heavily biased towards studying things that can be measured empirically.
So, here is my example, up until the mid 90’s it was widely believed in the medical community that babies could not feel pain. Anyone who has ever spent time around newborns knows that these little humans can indeed feel pain. Yet somehow, secular men of science came to the conclusion that no, they could not, and what we thought were pain responses were just reflexes. Besides, the infant wouldn’t remember it. They would perform surgeries without anesthesia on babies up to a year old.
Part of the problem as to why this profoundly wrong notion held on for so long was that there really wasn’t a good way to quantify infant pain. Eventually some researchers finally got around to devising some kind of measurement and the science eventually came around. But for a good part of the 20th century an incredible amount of pain was inflicted because a scientific notion couldn’t be refuted by a non-scientific argument (of course that baby feels pain, just look at him).
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3523036
This isn’t a scathing indictment of secular values, but rather, a cautionary tale. Not everything needs to be proven via peer-reviewed papers. A lot of the human experience can still be asserted and known using unscientific or pre-scientific reasoning.
So, here is my example, up until the mid 90’s it was widely believed in the medical community that babies could not feel pain. Anyone who has ever spent time around newborns knows that these little humans can indeed feel pain. Yet somehow, secular men of science came to the conclusion that no, they could not, and what we thought were pain responses were just reflexes. Besides, the infant wouldn’t remember it. They would perform surgeries without anesthesia on babies up to a year old.
Part of the problem as to why this profoundly wrong notion held on for so long was that there really wasn’t a good way to quantify infant pain. Eventually some researchers finally got around to devising some kind of measurement and the science eventually came around. But for a good part of the 20th century an incredible amount of pain was inflicted because a scientific notion couldn’t be refuted by a non-scientific argument (of course that baby feels pain, just look at him).
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3523036
This isn’t a scathing indictment of secular values, but rather, a cautionary tale. Not everything needs to be proven via peer-reviewed papers. A lot of the human experience can still be asserted and known using unscientific or pre-scientific reasoning.
How is your example specific to secular values? I'm sure there are many doctors who are religious.
> there’s this pervasive notion that you can’t assert anything without some citation or study to prove your point
Yes. That's to prevent people from making false assertions. I can't believe you're arguing that people shouldn't need facts to back up their statements.
> there’s this pervasive notion that you can’t assert anything without some citation or study to prove your point
Yes. That's to prevent people from making false assertions. I can't believe you're arguing that people shouldn't need facts to back up their statements.
>” I can't believe you're arguing that people shouldn't need facts to back up their statements.”
I never said people shouldn’t need facts to back up their statements. I am trying to say that there are other ways to make assertions without having to cite peer reviewed studies.
And, that when people get stuck in a mindset of dismissing any idea that doesn’t have a citation to justify it, when subjects come up that aren’t easily studied empirically you end up with a blind spot. In my example the blind spot was infant pain. In my mind, any rational person would look at a crying baby and come to the conclusion that the little baby feels pain. But, if you demanded I bring a fact to back that assertion up, for the longest time I couldn’t provide you with one.
I never said people shouldn’t need facts to back up their statements. I am trying to say that there are other ways to make assertions without having to cite peer reviewed studies.
And, that when people get stuck in a mindset of dismissing any idea that doesn’t have a citation to justify it, when subjects come up that aren’t easily studied empirically you end up with a blind spot. In my example the blind spot was infant pain. In my mind, any rational person would look at a crying baby and come to the conclusion that the little baby feels pain. But, if you demanded I bring a fact to back that assertion up, for the longest time I couldn’t provide you with one.
Yet again, your complaint about people asking for citations for doubtful claims doesn't seem to have any relation to secularism or its lack thereof. You might want to reconsider whether you are forcefully bringing religion into things where it doesn't belong just to make an argument against secularism for the sake of it.
Intuition can be secular. It is possible to conclude that the crying baby is feeling pain, or make many other types of hypotheses, without providing citations or using a religious framework.
That isn't intuition. That's a learned response.
I thought learned responses were tied to some form of conditioning.
https://dictionary.apa.org/learned-response
Anyway, my point is that a religious framework isn't needed to have a gut feeling about something.
https://dictionary.apa.org/learned-response
Anyway, my point is that a religious framework isn't needed to have a gut feeling about something.
Yes, which isn't intuition. Intuition is when you have a correct feeling about something even though you have no knowledge of the situation.
That's too strict of a definition, in my opinion, and I don't understand how conditioning is related to the crying baby example. Intuition can produce incorrect judgments and doesn't need the person to be clueless. Here's a dictionary definition:
> (knowledge from) an ability to understand or know something immediately based on your feelings rather than facts
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/intui...
> (knowledge from) an ability to understand or know something immediately based on your feelings rather than facts
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/intui...
No, it really isn't, not unless you have alternative definitions for "understand" or "know."
It's trivial to find examples of intuition being incorrect. The APA has a cover story on this:
https://www.apa.org/monitor/mar05/misfires
https://www.apa.org/monitor/mar05/misfires
I view the emphasis on the scientific method and empiricism as the legitimate means of determining truth to be a major component of secular values. And for what it’s worth it’s a really valuable mindset for most real world phenomena, but not all.
I know plenty of religious people also like the scientific method and empiricism, but probably only as much as where it won’t conflict with their beliefs. I’m sure a pious doctor would easily dismiss a paper refuting the efficacy of prayer. So to me, at least, this kind of scientific worldview is not really a feature of religious thinking, but the two can coexist up to a point.
I know plenty of religious people also like the scientific method and empiricism, but probably only as much as where it won’t conflict with their beliefs. I’m sure a pious doctor would easily dismiss a paper refuting the efficacy of prayer. So to me, at least, this kind of scientific worldview is not really a feature of religious thinking, but the two can coexist up to a point.
We used to believe that diseases were the result of bad smells and physicians used to go from cutting up corpses to delivering babies without substantial sanitary measures. The difference isn't lack of irrationality. To err is human after all. The difference is how science and religion move forward in response to new data.
I’m skeptical of this last sentence; I’m not sure that science is so responsive to new data either. After the myriad papers published on the replicability crisis, citation rings and the like, academic institutions have failed to change substantially with regards to either structure or process.
Science is done by humans and we're not very good at changing our opinions, in particular at institutional levels. However there is a difference between a priori stating that your dogma is infallible like religions typically do, and at least trying to follow the scientific process.
[deleted]
Religions hold that their positions are that of the immortal and infallible creator of the universe and hold them sometimes on pain of executing nonbelievers thousands of years later. These lies created from nothing are so resilient because its difficult to amend what you held to be divine truth.
Scientific theories carry with them the premise that they are merely the best theory so far and are subject to revision as new data comes to light. Some may jealously guard the fruits of their labor against newer better understanding and people both lie and fail to do the proper due diligence but the process though flawed because it is carried out by flawed humans is fundamentally different and better.
Scientific theories carry with them the premise that they are merely the best theory so far and are subject to revision as new data comes to light. Some may jealously guard the fruits of their labor against newer better understanding and people both lie and fail to do the proper due diligence but the process though flawed because it is carried out by flawed humans is fundamentally different and better.
I'm interested in knowing, how exactly would you suggest institutions go about fixing the replicability crisis? With how things are as of now, I can't think of any way the scientific community can easily fix this problem.
> "Creationism is true if it will keep my kids off oxycontin."
I think this highlights that while the specific claims of religion (on the age of the earth, origin of species, existence of God, etc) may well be false, religion nevertheless can be a useful social technology.
But this is a problem, because:
(1) many people who might otherwise become religious adherents can't be expected to beleive what to them is silly bafflegab (they could always just pretend to, but that has its own costs too)
and (2) religions tends to be really keen that new adherents actually do belief in their belief systems.
One solution might be an idea Scott Alexander had, of separating true-with-respect-to-external-reality from true-with-respect-to-human-psychology (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/15/raikoth-history-religi...):
>Raikothin religion, sumurhe in its own language, recognizes two aspects of God, called Truth and Beauty. The existing world is a poorly ordered mishmash of these two aspects, whereas God is the two aspects artfully and perfectly combined.
>Truth includes everything that actually objectively exists, in the exact way that it actually exists. This aspect is mathematical, precise, and completely devoid of subjectivity. It is symbolically associated with winter, stars, the colors blue and silver, and all the hard sciences as well as math.
>Beauty includes feelings, dreams, hopes, personality, meaning. This aspect is numinous, charged with emotion, and fantastic. It is symbolically associated with summer, roses, the colors green and gold, and all the arts, especially poetry and especially especially music.
>This philosophy cashes out into a formalization of two different ways of looking at things, the Elith-mirta and Ainai-mirta (Perspective of Truth and Perspective of Beauty). The sumurhe religion itself is a perfect example. In the Elith-mirta, it is a useful metaphor for the fact that some things are easier to understand using mathematics and other things are easy to understand using native anthropomorphic intuitions, as well as a recognition that religion promotes psychic health and strengthens community ties. In the Ainai-mirta, Truth and Beauty are literal anthropomorphic deities (the god Elith and the goddess Ainai) who are worshiped through prayer and sacrifice and invoked for strength in times of need.
I think this highlights that while the specific claims of religion (on the age of the earth, origin of species, existence of God, etc) may well be false, religion nevertheless can be a useful social technology.
But this is a problem, because:
(1) many people who might otherwise become religious adherents can't be expected to beleive what to them is silly bafflegab (they could always just pretend to, but that has its own costs too)
and (2) religions tends to be really keen that new adherents actually do belief in their belief systems.
One solution might be an idea Scott Alexander had, of separating true-with-respect-to-external-reality from true-with-respect-to-human-psychology (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/15/raikoth-history-religi...):
>Raikothin religion, sumurhe in its own language, recognizes two aspects of God, called Truth and Beauty. The existing world is a poorly ordered mishmash of these two aspects, whereas God is the two aspects artfully and perfectly combined.
>Truth includes everything that actually objectively exists, in the exact way that it actually exists. This aspect is mathematical, precise, and completely devoid of subjectivity. It is symbolically associated with winter, stars, the colors blue and silver, and all the hard sciences as well as math.
>Beauty includes feelings, dreams, hopes, personality, meaning. This aspect is numinous, charged with emotion, and fantastic. It is symbolically associated with summer, roses, the colors green and gold, and all the arts, especially poetry and especially especially music.
>This philosophy cashes out into a formalization of two different ways of looking at things, the Elith-mirta and Ainai-mirta (Perspective of Truth and Perspective of Beauty). The sumurhe religion itself is a perfect example. In the Elith-mirta, it is a useful metaphor for the fact that some things are easier to understand using mathematics and other things are easy to understand using native anthropomorphic intuitions, as well as a recognition that religion promotes psychic health and strengthens community ties. In the Ainai-mirta, Truth and Beauty are literal anthropomorphic deities (the god Elith and the goddess Ainai) who are worshiped through prayer and sacrifice and invoked for strength in times of need.
Sounds to me like you’re saying that churches are interested in brainwashing kids because their existence depends on it, while secular philosophy as a branch of science is not an agent that could act at all.
To compare apples to apples somebody should start a church of secular philosophy.
To compare apples to apples somebody should start a church of secular philosophy.
Right on.
I challenge anyone who disagrees to come up with a benefit that religion offers that cannot be offered by a secular organization.
I challenge anyone who disagrees to come up with a benefit that religion offers that cannot be offered by a secular organization.
Please don't take HN threads into religious flamewar. The unsubstantiveness of this comment, combined with its argumentativeness, pretty well guaranteed that. We want the needle to say in the thoughtful/curious range here.
You perpetuated it too (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28657137). That's not cool.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28655948.)
You perpetuated it too (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28657137). That's not cool.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28655948.)
Religion generally claims to offer salvation. Of course, not all people believe that. However, that is probably its biggest difference from any secular organization.
[deleted]
The motivation to do good, and stay away from evil. The idea that a person if being watched. You can never get that with atheism.
Atheism is just ruthless "survival of the fittest", when push comes to shove.
Atheism is just ruthless "survival of the fittest", when push comes to shove.
Please do not take HN threads further into religious flamewar. It's not what this site is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You think that doing good only because you are being watched is a good value to have? IF yes, then please, by all means, continue believing in your god if that's all that keeps you from raping and killing people.
Atheists do good because it's the right thing to do. You seem to do it because you are afraid of getting punished.
Atheists do good because it's the right thing to do. You seem to do it because you are afraid of getting punished.
> Atheists do good because it's the right thing to do.
Or is remnant from religious generation? (parents programm kids that doing good is right thing to do because God says so. Certain generation starts omitting "God says so" part)
Or is remnant from religious generation? (parents programm kids that doing good is right thing to do because God says so. Certain generation starts omitting "God says so" part)
>You think that doing good only because you are being watched
Never said "only because" of being watched. Being watched is an added measure.
> Atheists do good because it's the right thing to do
Many atheists, from personal experience, most don't really care to do good when no one's watching. Not saying it applies to all atheists, but for many. It's simply not rational. Why do good? For "karma"? So, the atheist has replaced "God" for "karma"?
Never said "only because" of being watched. Being watched is an added measure.
> Atheists do good because it's the right thing to do
Many atheists, from personal experience, most don't really care to do good when no one's watching. Not saying it applies to all atheists, but for many. It's simply not rational. Why do good? For "karma"? So, the atheist has replaced "God" for "karma"?
Human psyche is not rational. Reason takes work that most are not willing to invest in most of the time, regarding most things. Not even scientists, whose job is to be rational about things, live their lives fully rationally, or even "50+% rationally". Yes, it's not rational to feel good when doing good things for someone. Yet, most people do feel good when doing good things for someone. It's called empathy. And while that feeling is not rational, it is very handy. I don't see how you could have humanity as we know it without it. Whatever the reason for its existence, I'm glad that it exists. Who knows, maybe that's just the anthropic principle in action here? Maybe without it, you really wouldn't have humanity to wonder about it.
We do good because it feels good to do good, but also because evolution allowed us to develop empathy.
We feel a natural need to help other people because we hope that other people would help us if we needed it to.
"Today, you. Tomorrow me".
We hold the door to strangers, help them carry stuff, or pick them up they have a flat tire, and none of that requires the existence of a vengeful god who will send us into a lake of eternal fire if we don't comply to his wishes. We help each other because we are a social species.
We do it because most people on this planet are good people who want to be happy and who want people around them to be happy.
Religion and gods are unnecessary for any of this.
We feel a natural need to help other people because we hope that other people would help us if we needed it to.
"Today, you. Tomorrow me".
We hold the door to strangers, help them carry stuff, or pick them up they have a flat tire, and none of that requires the existence of a vengeful god who will send us into a lake of eternal fire if we don't comply to his wishes. We help each other because we are a social species.
We do it because most people on this planet are good people who want to be happy and who want people around them to be happy.
Religion and gods are unnecessary for any of this.
[deleted]
[flagged]
Please do not take HN threads further into flamewar. It's not what HN is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is 100% wrong.
IMHO, this is a specious statement. [Edited to remove flamewar].
You made the assertion that "being good" requires religious faith. This is demonstrably not true. Is that better?
I would make the assertion that a religious person who is only "being good" because they are afraid of divine punishment is a good working definition of a sociopath.
I would make the assertion that a religious person who is only "being good" because they are afraid of divine punishment is a good working definition of a sociopath.
[deleted]
So much of the US population cruises along unconsciously on an implicit set of Judeo-Christian values and morals. Increasingly many citizens claim to have left religion behind and subscribe to an exclusively scientific worldview, but the majority of their upstanding behavior still stems from religious beliefs. Pressed to reveal its true character, a purely scientific worldview produces no inherent sense of meaning, morality, or right v. wrong.
Sure, you get the hemming and hawing about evolutionary hunter-gatherer behavior and other various strains of pseudo-scientific bullshit, but all of those are equally as faith-bound as religion given that there is no possible way to devise reasonable (or ethical) experimentation on how past humanity might have evolved various senses of "right and wrong" or even a capacity for wanting meaning.
It's entirely rational to glean from religion what continues to influence a large portion of our success and stop pretending like science is our new "one true god" and all of the churches need to be burnt to the ground in favor of some absolute separation of church and state.
Sure, you get the hemming and hawing about evolutionary hunter-gatherer behavior and other various strains of pseudo-scientific bullshit, but all of those are equally as faith-bound as religion given that there is no possible way to devise reasonable (or ethical) experimentation on how past humanity might have evolved various senses of "right and wrong" or even a capacity for wanting meaning.
It's entirely rational to glean from religion what continues to influence a large portion of our success and stop pretending like science is our new "one true god" and all of the churches need to be burnt to the ground in favor of some absolute separation of church and state.
> evolutionary hunter-gatherer behavior and other various strains of pseudo-scientific bullshit, but all of those are equally as faith-bound as religion given that there is no possible way to devise reasonable (or ethical) experimentation on how past humanity
What past humanity? There are hunter gatherer bands roaming around the Amazon right now. They seem to exhibit at least as much "upstanding behavior" as the evangelicals sloshing around the US.
Scandinavia is fairly secular and has many nice attributes, the US is off the charts in terms of religion, violent behavior, gun deaths etc. I don't see how irrational beliefs about burning bushes, virgin births, walking on water, resurrections result in "upstanding behavior". If this were the case evangelicals would be the epitome of "upstanding behavior", but they are not.
What past humanity? There are hunter gatherer bands roaming around the Amazon right now. They seem to exhibit at least as much "upstanding behavior" as the evangelicals sloshing around the US.
Scandinavia is fairly secular and has many nice attributes, the US is off the charts in terms of religion, violent behavior, gun deaths etc. I don't see how irrational beliefs about burning bushes, virgin births, walking on water, resurrections result in "upstanding behavior". If this were the case evangelicals would be the epitome of "upstanding behavior", but they are not.
> There are hunter gatherer bands roaming around the Amazon right now. They seem to exhibit at least as much "upstanding behavior" as the evangelicals sloshing around the US.
Considering how violent are cultures of hunter-gatherers, I’d say that they are much less morally upstanding. But, they provide a good data point here: the hunter gatherers are typically highly religious. It’s just their religions are pretty bad at creating positive societal outcomes. Not all religions are created equal in that aspect.
> Scandinavia is fairly secular and has many nice attributes, the US is off the charts in terms of religion, violent behavior, gun deaths etc.
If you look at the reality instead of aggregated statistics and packaged narratives, you will find that gun deaths in US very much are not of the charts in places where religiosity is off the chart. If anything, these two things are negatively correlated: the more religious a place is, the fewer gun deaths (despite no scarcity of firearms among the religious).
Considering how violent are cultures of hunter-gatherers, I’d say that they are much less morally upstanding. But, they provide a good data point here: the hunter gatherers are typically highly religious. It’s just their religions are pretty bad at creating positive societal outcomes. Not all religions are created equal in that aspect.
> Scandinavia is fairly secular and has many nice attributes, the US is off the charts in terms of religion, violent behavior, gun deaths etc.
If you look at the reality instead of aggregated statistics and packaged narratives, you will find that gun deaths in US very much are not of the charts in places where religiosity is off the chart. If anything, these two things are negatively correlated: the more religious a place is, the fewer gun deaths (despite no scarcity of firearms among the religious).
> If you look at the reality instead of aggregated statistics and packaged narratives, you will find that gun deaths in US very much are not of the charts in places where religiosity is off the chart. If anything, these two things are negatively correlated: the more religious a place is, the fewer gun deaths (despite no scarcity of firearms among the religious).
We can debate what off-the-chart means, but when we cross-reference the states with the highest gun death per capita (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/...) with the states that are the most religious (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/02/29/how-religio...), we find a lot of overlap.
Correlation is not causation, but I can't see how we can claim these two are negatively correlated.
We can debate what off-the-chart means, but when we cross-reference the states with the highest gun death per capita (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/...) with the states that are the most religious (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/02/29/how-religio...), we find a lot of overlap.
Correlation is not causation, but I can't see how we can claim these two are negatively correlated.
Okay, and in those states, where do those gun deaths happen? The religious parts? The believers are doing the killings?
Look, I’ll make this straight, because there is a lot of willful ignorance here. Overwhelming majority of gun homicides happen in large cities, where the religiosity is low, and very few in suburbs and rural areas, where religiosity is high. Moreover, people committing those gun homicides are very rarely practicing religious people, and neither are most of their victims.
Look, I’ll make this straight, because there is a lot of willful ignorance here. Overwhelming majority of gun homicides happen in large cities, where the religiosity is low, and very few in suburbs and rural areas, where religiosity is high. Moreover, people committing those gun homicides are very rarely practicing religious people, and neither are most of their victims.
Not sure if that is true, did you know that Black people are significantly more religious than White people?
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/26/black-men-a...
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/26/black-men-a...
>how violent are cultures of hunter-gatherer
WW2 killed 75 million people. Tell me again, who has the more violent culture?
WW2 killed 75 million people. Tell me again, who has the more violent culture?
Context matters. The proper tool to use is to compare what percentage of lives met a violent end annually.
Normally in the US it's about 1 in 17,000 according to the CDC
https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/datasources/nvdrs/ind...
In Sweden its more like 1 in 83,000
Ancient stats are a little hard to come by and different groups were more or less warlike losing between an estimated 1 in 100 to 1 in 3000
Big events like WW2 are very noticeable but ancient people were in fact very violent because not shockingly people are violent.
As importantly is the context in which violence appears in ancient society driven not my large scale political movements but by resource scarcity. A continually expanding human population in the absence of modern civilization would not have achieved present population size but they would certainly have continued to grow leading to greater scarcity and increasing conflict. That is to say that they were more violent on average already and they would be more so in the modern context.
Normally in the US it's about 1 in 17,000 according to the CDC
https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/datasources/nvdrs/ind...
In Sweden its more like 1 in 83,000
Ancient stats are a little hard to come by and different groups were more or less warlike losing between an estimated 1 in 100 to 1 in 3000
Big events like WW2 are very noticeable but ancient people were in fact very violent because not shockingly people are violent.
As importantly is the context in which violence appears in ancient society driven not my large scale political movements but by resource scarcity. A continually expanding human population in the absence of modern civilization would not have achieved present population size but they would certainly have continued to grow leading to greater scarcity and increasing conflict. That is to say that they were more violent on average already and they would be more so in the modern context.
It's a lot of facts and figures, but it kind of misses the mark. Wars today are also from resource scarcity.
Leibingsraum was explicitly part of the reasoning for invading France.
I know it's a natural instinct to defend modern living as more peaceful, and to some extent that may be true. But modern society has also created atrocities that ancient people could never dream of.
Leibingsraum was explicitly part of the reasoning for invading France.
I know it's a natural instinct to defend modern living as more peaceful, and to some extent that may be true. But modern society has also created atrocities that ancient people could never dream of.
Science deals with “is” and thus cannot answer “ought”, which has to come from elsewhere, but moral precepts don't need to come from religion (and arguably ultimately don’t, instead, religions are invented as rationalizations and tools for communicating moral principles rather than existing independently and providing them.)
Well, there are a couple billion people who didn't grow up in a Judeo-Christian societies. And, yet, they seem to have morality and life meaning. So, I think you mean, religion in general.
Also, I'm not aware of record of hunter gatherer societies that didn't have religion. Religion is probably something baked in. At least I know that it's baked into me, so I run with it and enjoy it. It's possible to be both rational and religious.
Also, I'm not aware of record of hunter gatherer societies that didn't have religion. Religion is probably something baked in. At least I know that it's baked into me, so I run with it and enjoy it. It's possible to be both rational and religious.
> It's possible to be both rational and religious.
Except the person who is religious will always have a limit to their rationality, because they choose "believe in magic" instead of "knowing and not knowing".
Except the person who is religious will always have a limit to their rationality, because they choose "believe in magic" instead of "knowing and not knowing".
> Except the person who is religious will always have a limit to their rationality, because they choose "believe in magic" instead of "knowing and not knowing".
I do not agree. Being religious does not necessarily mean that you will be "magic" instead of rational. One who is rational can do and figure out things fully rationally, independently from the relgious things and from "magic", just as much as you can speak two languages without having to speak both languages at the same time, or liking a book without having to believe that it is a true story.
I do not agree. Being religious does not necessarily mean that you will be "magic" instead of rational. One who is rational can do and figure out things fully rationally, independently from the relgious things and from "magic", just as much as you can speak two languages without having to speak both languages at the same time, or liking a book without having to believe that it is a true story.
A person might believe and be rational, but it seems like believing makes being rational harder, so you have less rational people among believers.
Whenever you can shut down any discussion with "god willed this" or similar then rationality will suffer. How do you get around that problem? I feel the only way to fix that is to remove that ability from them, ie state that God is just nonsense and they can't just invoke his name to shut down discussions since people don't care about God. People are still dumb even without God, but they seem a bit less dumb.
Whenever you can shut down any discussion with "god willed this" or similar then rationality will suffer. How do you get around that problem? I feel the only way to fix that is to remove that ability from them, ie state that God is just nonsense and they can't just invoke his name to shut down discussions since people don't care about God. People are still dumb even without God, but they seem a bit less dumb.
> Whenever you can shut down any discussion with "god willed this" or similar then rationality will suffer.
Yes, but being religious does not automatically mean that you have to shut down any discussion with "god will this" (although some religious people are, not all religious people are).
There are less rational people among both religious and nonreligious. (Although, the nonreligious will not say "God willed this", that does not necessarily mean that they will not say a different answer that is just as worthless as the religious answer.)
Yes, but being religious does not automatically mean that you have to shut down any discussion with "god will this" (although some religious people are, not all religious people are).
There are less rational people among both religious and nonreligious. (Although, the nonreligious will not say "God willed this", that does not necessarily mean that they will not say a different answer that is just as worthless as the religious answer.)
You don't think that having an entire community to support your irrational arguments makes a difference to your level of irrationality?
The problem is that their religious peers would take their side, find "good willed this" to be a more reasonable argument than the facts, and thus they as a group wont accept the truth. Without organized irrationality they wouldn't create a support group of irrational peers to back up their irrational arguments so in most cases they would have to adapt. And such irrational support groups doesn't often materialize randomly, religion absolutely helps them. There are a few of those who aren't religious, but I condemn the irreligious ones just as much, Homeopathy is just nonsense etc.
So for me the rest doesn't matter, if an organization is first and foremost organized irrationality I'll argue that the organization is bad. Maybe you don't use it that way, but others do, and that hurts everyone.
The problem is that their religious peers would take their side, find "good willed this" to be a more reasonable argument than the facts, and thus they as a group wont accept the truth. Without organized irrationality they wouldn't create a support group of irrational peers to back up their irrational arguments so in most cases they would have to adapt. And such irrational support groups doesn't often materialize randomly, religion absolutely helps them. There are a few of those who aren't religious, but I condemn the irreligious ones just as much, Homeopathy is just nonsense etc.
So for me the rest doesn't matter, if an organization is first and foremost organized irrationality I'll argue that the organization is bad. Maybe you don't use it that way, but others do, and that hurts everyone.
Comparatively these cultures have substantially different values. The question is how much of this difference is caused by religion
Why is religion the stopping point for those beliefs? What if religion is just an expression of something fairly benign relating to social cohesiveness(against external threats) and hierarchy(against internal threats).
Morality can be bootstrapped from selfish means. I don't need religion to understanding that punching someone in the face may end up with me getting punched in the face, and I don't like getting punched in the face. Primates exhibit similar behaviors without religion and merely having a developed sense of cause and effect.
Morality can be bootstrapped from selfish means. I don't need religion to understanding that punching someone in the face may end up with me getting punched in the face, and I don't like getting punched in the face. Primates exhibit similar behaviors without religion and merely having a developed sense of cause and effect.
Our culture / morality are clearly influenced by Judeo-Christian morals. I don't think churches need to be burnt.
However, IMO morality has a deeper source than organized religion. Human beings experience pain, hunger, will to live, and so on. We want to live in a society that allows us to thrive and we can deduce that if we were to kill people randomly then the same could happen to us. This applies to any other moral issue as well. This is social contract theory.
Edit: prior to the development of this philosophy along with liberalism, many people (in the West) were still Christian, but I'd say society was constructed in a less moral manner.
However, IMO morality has a deeper source than organized religion. Human beings experience pain, hunger, will to live, and so on. We want to live in a society that allows us to thrive and we can deduce that if we were to kill people randomly then the same could happen to us. This applies to any other moral issue as well. This is social contract theory.
Edit: prior to the development of this philosophy along with liberalism, many people (in the West) were still Christian, but I'd say society was constructed in a less moral manner.
> "However, IMO morality has a deeper source than organized religion."
Toxicity on social and other online media, the prevalence of scams in online marketplaces, the willingness of people (even on HN) to be employed by businesses that cause environmental and social ills as an externality, etc. all point there being a very limited radius of innate human morality, even among modern civilization. While that isn't to say that religion is a good solution, it's hard to argue that some powerful mechanism to reinforce feelings of human fellowship and community at from the individual level to the societal level wouldn't be beneficial.
Toxicity on social and other online media, the prevalence of scams in online marketplaces, the willingness of people (even on HN) to be employed by businesses that cause environmental and social ills as an externality, etc. all point there being a very limited radius of innate human morality, even among modern civilization. While that isn't to say that religion is a good solution, it's hard to argue that some powerful mechanism to reinforce feelings of human fellowship and community at from the individual level to the societal level wouldn't be beneficial.
From my naive perspective, the Bible itself has a lot of warts that are pretty indefensible. This isn’t to say the Bible has nothing of value to contribute to society; but as an authority on morality there’s a lot of amoral things god does. Easy example: Exodus and the plagues.
God wants to free His people from Egypt (why aren’t all people his people if he created them?) so he tells Moses to tell Aaron to tell Pharaoh that if he doesn’t free the Israelites God will punish the Egyptians - and eventually kill a bunch of kids.
Wouldn’t a better solution be to just teleport the Israelites to the Holy land and not kill children? Or possess Pharaoh and make him issue a decree. Put yourself in Gods shoes and see if you can’t come up with a better solution that doesn’t involve a bunch of innocents dying.
Ditto Noah’s arc, sodom and Gomorrah. Even in the New Testament he tells Joseph to hide from Herod to avoid the slaughter of the innocents but doesn’t stop the innocents being slaughtered.
God wants to free His people from Egypt (why aren’t all people his people if he created them?) so he tells Moses to tell Aaron to tell Pharaoh that if he doesn’t free the Israelites God will punish the Egyptians - and eventually kill a bunch of kids.
Wouldn’t a better solution be to just teleport the Israelites to the Holy land and not kill children? Or possess Pharaoh and make him issue a decree. Put yourself in Gods shoes and see if you can’t come up with a better solution that doesn’t involve a bunch of innocents dying.
Ditto Noah’s arc, sodom and Gomorrah. Even in the New Testament he tells Joseph to hide from Herod to avoid the slaughter of the innocents but doesn’t stop the innocents being slaughtered.
> Judeo-Christian values and morals
Just no.
Normal human values were co-opted by various religion-based memeplexes to justify themselves.
> a purely scientific worldview produces no inherent sense of meaning, morality, or right v. wrong.
Absolute morality does not exist. Fundamentally, morality is selfish (i.e. relative).
I don't murder someone because I don't want to live in a society where I myself can be murdered. That's what all the religious bloviating boils down to. That's it. That's all that really is.
Just no.
Normal human values were co-opted by various religion-based memeplexes to justify themselves.
> a purely scientific worldview produces no inherent sense of meaning, morality, or right v. wrong.
Absolute morality does not exist. Fundamentally, morality is selfish (i.e. relative).
I don't murder someone because I don't want to live in a society where I myself can be murdered. That's what all the religious bloviating boils down to. That's it. That's all that really is.
>Absolute morality does not exist.
>Claims to have a statement about what morality ultimately boils down to.
Pick one bro. You can't even stay consistent within your own supposedly relative belief system. Morality clearly cannot boil down to some simple statement if its truly relative.
>Claims to have a statement about what morality ultimately boils down to.
Pick one bro. You can't even stay consistent within your own supposedly relative belief system. Morality clearly cannot boil down to some simple statement if its truly relative.
Judeo-Christian values are just that, values.
Many of those values have existed before that kind of religion and many will long after those religions have seized to exist in thair current form.
One could even argue that some form of values is genetically ingrained in us as a social species, as they are in many other species
This is a challenging article. To paraphrase, it suggests that a suite of religious practices have been shown to have real world benefits. The author suggests that scientists should overcome their personal allergy to religion and instead trust the data. He suggests the compromise of rejecting the "theology" of the religion, presumably because it is "unscientific", and instead focusing on the empirically observable physical social practices.
I agree with him, but suggest a few further considerations. Wouldn't a truly open minded scientist be forced to consider that the real world impact of religious practice is evidence (not necessarily proof) for the causal effect of something that is outside of empirical measurement? Only a mind that has the improvable a-priori belief in physicalism could reject this possibility. A commitment to physicalism is not itself provable by science, and therefore is merely a religious belief, although it is disguised and subconscious most of the time so we don't notice.
And how does he think that we can decouple the "theology" of the religion from the practices? Could a hall full of strangers start swaying together like in the Jewish Shuckle, feel the same unity felt by the synagogue? What came first, the theology or the swaying? This sounds like a cargo cult mentality, where by imitating the behavior of the rich, you, too can become rich. Even if it worked a little bit, it's hard to imagine that it could become popular or last. I think team sports played in Stadiums is the best imitation we have so far, and even that is only sustained by a narrative ("your" team "battling" an "enemy" team).
It would be interesting to see if an idiosyncratic hodge-podge of different rituals cobbled together from various religions could ever work. As far as I can tell, that is exactly what New Age religion is, and that is far from impressive.
The way forward is to stop and re-think the blind philosophical pre-commitments of our day, which are a slowly eroding set of modernist beliefs from the Enlightenment era. This gave us a dualistic world view, with the complete separation of a "spiritual" and "physical" realm. As science is built to only examine the physical, it naturally produces confirmation bias that there is no "spiritual" and gradually we went from dualism to believing only in the "physical". It is this erroneous background assumption which leads us to misunderstand what scripture even means when it talks about heaven/earth and angels and other "spiritual" beings.
https://thesymbolicworld.com/articles/how-the-scientific-rev...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXOdlIXDsr8&t=0s
I agree with him, but suggest a few further considerations. Wouldn't a truly open minded scientist be forced to consider that the real world impact of religious practice is evidence (not necessarily proof) for the causal effect of something that is outside of empirical measurement? Only a mind that has the improvable a-priori belief in physicalism could reject this possibility. A commitment to physicalism is not itself provable by science, and therefore is merely a religious belief, although it is disguised and subconscious most of the time so we don't notice.
And how does he think that we can decouple the "theology" of the religion from the practices? Could a hall full of strangers start swaying together like in the Jewish Shuckle, feel the same unity felt by the synagogue? What came first, the theology or the swaying? This sounds like a cargo cult mentality, where by imitating the behavior of the rich, you, too can become rich. Even if it worked a little bit, it's hard to imagine that it could become popular or last. I think team sports played in Stadiums is the best imitation we have so far, and even that is only sustained by a narrative ("your" team "battling" an "enemy" team).
It would be interesting to see if an idiosyncratic hodge-podge of different rituals cobbled together from various religions could ever work. As far as I can tell, that is exactly what New Age religion is, and that is far from impressive.
The way forward is to stop and re-think the blind philosophical pre-commitments of our day, which are a slowly eroding set of modernist beliefs from the Enlightenment era. This gave us a dualistic world view, with the complete separation of a "spiritual" and "physical" realm. As science is built to only examine the physical, it naturally produces confirmation bias that there is no "spiritual" and gradually we went from dualism to believing only in the "physical". It is this erroneous background assumption which leads us to misunderstand what scripture even means when it talks about heaven/earth and angels and other "spiritual" beings.
https://thesymbolicworld.com/articles/how-the-scientific-rev...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXOdlIXDsr8&t=0s
Well, the interesting thing is that the blind philosophical pre-commitments of our day are dying off, as the religious are the only ones having replacement rates of children. Darwin was right.
> Secular philosophy has failed to produce enough value for ordinary people living ordinary lives
Consider the situation: you want to get an abortion. Or you know someone who does.
I don't think I need to spell out the debate. But the secular world view is producing value for people who don't want to be afraid that they will spend literally INFINITY TIME being tortured. (And arguably it produces value for the religious, who do utilize secular services even when their religion forbids it).
The secular world view offers you freedom from judgement, both mortal and immortal. Many people find value in the freedom to not worry about superstition.
Consider the situation: you want to get an abortion. Or you know someone who does.
I don't think I need to spell out the debate. But the secular world view is producing value for people who don't want to be afraid that they will spend literally INFINITY TIME being tortured. (And arguably it produces value for the religious, who do utilize secular services even when their religion forbids it).
The secular world view offers you freedom from judgement, both mortal and immortal. Many people find value in the freedom to not worry about superstition.
Please don't take HN threads further into religious flamewar. We don't want that here, and the last thing we need is abortion on top of it.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28656583.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28656583.
I am totally atheist, but I am against most abortion. You don’t have to be religious to be against abortion.
Be secular doesn’t make anybody free from judgement.
Be secular doesn’t make anybody free from judgement.
I am pro choice and against abortion.
I don't like abortion. Nobody likes abortions. Women who feel that they need to get an abortion don't like it either. It's a horrible, traumatic procedure.
But it's a reality that it needs to be legal, regulated, and safe.
It's absolutely critical to civilization that women have a choice to undergo an abortion if they choose to. It's their body, their life, their future. Nobody else's business, especially not the government's.
The government should never require them to carry a pregnancy to term in much the same way that it shouldn't force you to give an organ (and it doesn't).
I am not pro abortion, I am pro choice.
People opposed to abortions are not pro life, they are anti choice.
I don't like abortion. Nobody likes abortions. Women who feel that they need to get an abortion don't like it either. It's a horrible, traumatic procedure.
But it's a reality that it needs to be legal, regulated, and safe.
It's absolutely critical to civilization that women have a choice to undergo an abortion if they choose to. It's their body, their life, their future. Nobody else's business, especially not the government's.
The government should never require them to carry a pregnancy to term in much the same way that it shouldn't force you to give an organ (and it doesn't).
I am not pro abortion, I am pro choice.
People opposed to abortions are not pro life, they are anti choice.
If it's a choice between the mother's life and the baby's life, because of the medical condition, I would say let the mother make the choice.
But if it's a choice between the mother's feeling / opinion and the baby's life, I would say the baby's life overwrites the mother's feeling / opinion. The reason is simple, nobody gets to decide to kill the other person just because he/she doesn't like it. And the existing of the baby is the consequence of the mother's behavior.
The only exception is the that the conception is a result of rape, in this case the conception is not a consequence of the mother's voluntary behavior. But I still struggle with this, because the baby does not become less human because it's a result of rape.
I don't think there is a valid choice between someone's life and someone's feeling / opinion. And remember, pregnancy is something totally normal for women to do. And many women do several times in their life. It's not a punishment, nor a definite suffering or torture.
Also the "nobody else's business" argument is wrong, murder is the government's business.
As for when is the OK time to conduct the abortion, this is the question for people who support abortion. I don't really see the point here. The development is a continuum process. I don't believe there is a definite cut point where the humanness changes from zero to non-zero. Even when it's a embryo, it's a human embryo living in its natural environment, with the full potential to grow to a full human. I also don't see the need of a spiritual concept like soul or whatever.
Typing the above paragraph leads me to think about lab-grown human embryo. Google leads me to this webpage: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02343-7 "Researchers are now permitted to grow human embryos in the lab for longer than 14 days." Of course I don't believe humanness changes from zero to non-zero on day 14. Also I don't believe it's ethical to experiment on some human to gain knowledge to save other human.
But if it's a choice between the mother's feeling / opinion and the baby's life, I would say the baby's life overwrites the mother's feeling / opinion. The reason is simple, nobody gets to decide to kill the other person just because he/she doesn't like it. And the existing of the baby is the consequence of the mother's behavior.
The only exception is the that the conception is a result of rape, in this case the conception is not a consequence of the mother's voluntary behavior. But I still struggle with this, because the baby does not become less human because it's a result of rape.
I don't think there is a valid choice between someone's life and someone's feeling / opinion. And remember, pregnancy is something totally normal for women to do. And many women do several times in their life. It's not a punishment, nor a definite suffering or torture.
Also the "nobody else's business" argument is wrong, murder is the government's business.
As for when is the OK time to conduct the abortion, this is the question for people who support abortion. I don't really see the point here. The development is a continuum process. I don't believe there is a definite cut point where the humanness changes from zero to non-zero. Even when it's a embryo, it's a human embryo living in its natural environment, with the full potential to grow to a full human. I also don't see the need of a spiritual concept like soul or whatever.
Typing the above paragraph leads me to think about lab-grown human embryo. Google leads me to this webpage: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02343-7 "Researchers are now permitted to grow human embryos in the lab for longer than 14 days." Of course I don't believe humanness changes from zero to non-zero on day 14. Also I don't believe it's ethical to experiment on some human to gain knowledge to save other human.
> But if it's a choice between the mother's feeling / opinion and the baby's life, I would say the baby's life overwrites the mother's feeling
You are avoiding 100 percent of the actual dilemma. Nobody is OK with murder they disagree on what constitutes a human life. That is as they say the entire ball game which you have neatly sidestepped as if it were irrelevant. I suggest we return to it shortly.
> The only exception is the that the conception is a result of rape
This is a profoundly illogical position. It cannot possibly be OK to murder a baby regardless of whether its existence is the result of free choice of its mother. You say you "struggle with it" but how can you possibly struggle with the decision to allow infanticide? If its a person you can't kill it for your convenience.
> And many women do several times in their life. It's not a punishment, nor a definite suffering or torture.
Many people get kidney stones often multiple times. The fact that its natural doesn't mean that the experience isn't even when planned and desired torturous. Only the mother is in a position to make that judgment. Many people choose to live in small domiciles from which they only but rarely leave. This doesn't mean that for example prison isn't punitive. It is in many ways the denial of free exercise of the will over ones own person that is in fact punitive.
Let us return to the most important point.
At what point do you consider it a child and why? I think a reasonable person would agree that an unfertilized egg isn't a child but calling it a person 2 seconds after conception is very nearly as absurd. Any given egg and sperm has the potential to create life so potential wont serve as a dividing line. Some harking back to pre-scientific understanding would like to set the milestone at a heart beat but no matter how essential it may be to our existence a heart doesn't make you human. A mouse whose neck you snap in a trap to keep it from your larder has one.
There is one singular thing without which all characteristics that make you human are moot the brain. In fact one particular segment of the brain without which you would display zero meaningful human behavior, the cerebral cortex. Prior to the third trimester your brain is less meaningfully you than a squirrel. In the third trimester the surface area of the cerebral cortex increases by 30 times.
https://www.whattoexpect.com/pregnancy/fetal-development/fet...
You seem to want to sidestep this once again.
> As for when is the OK time to conduct the abortion, this is the question for people who support abortion. I don't really see the point here. The development is a continuum process. I don't believe there is a definite cut point where the humanness changes from zero to non-zero.
This is a complete cop out. As human beings we deal with situations where there is a continuum all the time. There are reasonable strategies to deal with such. Given a situation where one must pick a hard line in a complex situation where one side of the line is safe and the other dangerous you select a position far enough towards the safe side as to be certain to avoid negative consequences. This is how we are able to hire some, fire others, declare some doctors, others dropouts.
For example if nearly all fetal brain development happens between week 27 and week 38 if you select week 24 as the limit or for example week 14 by which 92% of abortions that are going to happen, happen you won't be offing what we would properly think of a human.
I hold that a fertilized egg is zero on the humaness scale. Agree or disagree? I hold that a baby viable outside of the womb is a 1. Agree or disagree? I hold that a fetus in the 27th week of development is still nearly indistinguishable from zero with a nearly nonfunctional brain incapable of consciousness or thought as we know it.
I believe that it goes from near zero to 1 almost entirely between week 27 and 38 ergo someone taking a pill to stop their pregnancy from progressing at 9 weeks is unambiguously moral.
I think the most interesting statement in your post is the statement
> in this case the conception is not a consequence of the mother's voluntary behavior.
This hints at a moralistic view as opposed to a logical one.
I suggest if you intend to defend the position that life begins at conception without benefit of the fig leaf of the fiction of the human soul you need to beg borrow or steal a different argument than life is a continuum so we can't possibly apply argumentative tools developed over thousands of years to crack that egg.
You are avoiding 100 percent of the actual dilemma. Nobody is OK with murder they disagree on what constitutes a human life. That is as they say the entire ball game which you have neatly sidestepped as if it were irrelevant. I suggest we return to it shortly.
> The only exception is the that the conception is a result of rape
This is a profoundly illogical position. It cannot possibly be OK to murder a baby regardless of whether its existence is the result of free choice of its mother. You say you "struggle with it" but how can you possibly struggle with the decision to allow infanticide? If its a person you can't kill it for your convenience.
> And many women do several times in their life. It's not a punishment, nor a definite suffering or torture.
Many people get kidney stones often multiple times. The fact that its natural doesn't mean that the experience isn't even when planned and desired torturous. Only the mother is in a position to make that judgment. Many people choose to live in small domiciles from which they only but rarely leave. This doesn't mean that for example prison isn't punitive. It is in many ways the denial of free exercise of the will over ones own person that is in fact punitive.
Let us return to the most important point.
At what point do you consider it a child and why? I think a reasonable person would agree that an unfertilized egg isn't a child but calling it a person 2 seconds after conception is very nearly as absurd. Any given egg and sperm has the potential to create life so potential wont serve as a dividing line. Some harking back to pre-scientific understanding would like to set the milestone at a heart beat but no matter how essential it may be to our existence a heart doesn't make you human. A mouse whose neck you snap in a trap to keep it from your larder has one.
There is one singular thing without which all characteristics that make you human are moot the brain. In fact one particular segment of the brain without which you would display zero meaningful human behavior, the cerebral cortex. Prior to the third trimester your brain is less meaningfully you than a squirrel. In the third trimester the surface area of the cerebral cortex increases by 30 times.
https://www.whattoexpect.com/pregnancy/fetal-development/fet...
You seem to want to sidestep this once again.
> As for when is the OK time to conduct the abortion, this is the question for people who support abortion. I don't really see the point here. The development is a continuum process. I don't believe there is a definite cut point where the humanness changes from zero to non-zero.
This is a complete cop out. As human beings we deal with situations where there is a continuum all the time. There are reasonable strategies to deal with such. Given a situation where one must pick a hard line in a complex situation where one side of the line is safe and the other dangerous you select a position far enough towards the safe side as to be certain to avoid negative consequences. This is how we are able to hire some, fire others, declare some doctors, others dropouts.
For example if nearly all fetal brain development happens between week 27 and week 38 if you select week 24 as the limit or for example week 14 by which 92% of abortions that are going to happen, happen you won't be offing what we would properly think of a human.
I hold that a fertilized egg is zero on the humaness scale. Agree or disagree? I hold that a baby viable outside of the womb is a 1. Agree or disagree? I hold that a fetus in the 27th week of development is still nearly indistinguishable from zero with a nearly nonfunctional brain incapable of consciousness or thought as we know it.
I believe that it goes from near zero to 1 almost entirely between week 27 and 38 ergo someone taking a pill to stop their pregnancy from progressing at 9 weeks is unambiguously moral.
I think the most interesting statement in your post is the statement
> in this case the conception is not a consequence of the mother's voluntary behavior.
This hints at a moralistic view as opposed to a logical one.
I suggest if you intend to defend the position that life begins at conception without benefit of the fig leaf of the fiction of the human soul you need to beg borrow or steal a different argument than life is a continuum so we can't possibly apply argumentative tools developed over thousands of years to crack that egg.
It seems you are trapped in the idea that humanness is defined by brain function. Which is obviously wrong to me, but I am not interested in expanding the discussion.
Also it is important whether it is a consequence of the mother's voluntary behavior, because if it is not then the human embryo would not have end up inside her body. So yes, it matters.
Thanks, I am just saying atheist can be against abortion. No more argument with me is needed.
Also it is important whether it is a consequence of the mother's voluntary behavior, because if it is not then the human embryo would not have end up inside her body. So yes, it matters.
Thanks, I am just saying atheist can be against abortion. No more argument with me is needed.
As an atheist it would seem dualism would be out of bounds so given that your brain is you in a very literal sense what other factor do you believe defines humanness? I think therefore I am seems like the strongest possible argument here.
No. Brain alone does not define humanness. You can do a few thought experiments, such as:
lab-grown full function brain, would it be treated as a human?
lab-grown baby with brain development stopped at day x, would it be treated simply as a pile of meat?
adult after accident left with x% brain function, would it be treated simply as a pile of meat?
Just use your brain, you will see it is not that easy.
lab-grown full function brain, would it be treated as a human?
lab-grown baby with brain development stopped at day x, would it be treated simply as a pile of meat?
adult after accident left with x% brain function, would it be treated simply as a pile of meat?
Just use your brain, you will see it is not that easy.
A fully functional lab grown brain would BE a human regardless of how it would be treated.
If the baby or the human had a sufficiently damaged or deficient brain it WOULD be a pile of meat. If they weren't treated as such it would be because of an emotional connection as opposed to a logical reason. This is all you've posited in this comment. Emotional situations designed to confuse the issue. I am using my brain, specifically to cut through the fog.
If the baby or the human had a sufficiently damaged or deficient brain it WOULD be a pile of meat. If they weren't treated as such it would be because of an emotional connection as opposed to a logical reason. This is all you've posited in this comment. Emotional situations designed to confuse the issue. I am using my brain, specifically to cut through the fog.
This is interesting insofar as most arguments against addiction seem to be philosophically connected with either spiritual guilt or assigning a clump of cells person status at conception due to the presumed presence of a soul. How precisely do you arrive at your stance in the absence of a soul?
Virtually all the actual brain development happens very late in the game and almost all abortions happen in the first or early second.
Virtually all the actual brain development happens very late in the game and almost all abortions happen in the first or early second.
See my response to the above comment.
Once you study Christianity, you will realize it actually offers you true freedom from the crap happening in the secular world.
> After only eight weeks of study with a Buddhist lama, 50 percent of those who we randomly assigned to meditate daily spontaneously helped a stranger in pain.
I'm waiting for the follow up study after 520 weeks, where a certain percentage of them become radicalized zealots.
I'm waiting for the follow up study after 520 weeks, where a certain percentage of them become radicalized zealots.
I feel like my life would be better if I believed in some supernatural being who loved me and cared for me and was going to bring me into his paradise of eternal ecstasy after I die. I don’t see how that couldn’t make a person happier and more able to cope with the deaths of loved ones, their own death, etc. It seems like being on a very powerful narcotic that still lets you function day to day.
But I don’t see any way I can make myself believe that stuff.
But I don’t see any way I can make myself believe that stuff.
the point of genuine faith isn't to be a narcotic that let's you function in day-to-day life, it's not some sort of theological Soma out of Brave New World, it's supposed to transform, which involves a fair amount of suffering.
Your life wouldn't be better if you you could believe any of that stuff, and no genuine believer treats religion or God like some sort of spiritual Xanax.
Your life wouldn't be better if you you could believe any of that stuff, and no genuine believer treats religion or God like some sort of spiritual Xanax.
I don’t think that genuine believers treat religion like a spiritual Xanax... but I do think, and have observed, that that’s what it can often be. Especially seeing the religious people I know coping with the deaths of loved ones, and in one case the death of their child.
I have no problem believing that religion may serve useful social and cultural functions. Unfortunately, this article is founded on findings in social psychology, and we already know that social psychology is largely bunk[0].
What are the chances that this "meditation leads to kidness" result (with a total of 39 participants) would actually stand up to attempts to replicate it? The claimed effect size - "8 weeks of meditation resulted in such a large effect—increasing the odds of acting to relieve another person’s pain by more than 5 times"[1] - defies belief.
[0]: https://replicationindex.com/2020/01/05/replication-crisis-r...
[1]: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52853b8ae4b0a6c35d3f8...
What are the chances that this "meditation leads to kidness" result (with a total of 39 participants) would actually stand up to attempts to replicate it? The claimed effect size - "8 weeks of meditation resulted in such a large effect—increasing the odds of acting to relieve another person’s pain by more than 5 times"[1] - defies belief.
[0]: https://replicationindex.com/2020/01/05/replication-crisis-r...
[1]: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52853b8ae4b0a6c35d3f8...
I read the paper, and agree with your impression of its quality. With training, it is possible to navigate a shaky field like social psychology, so I'll provide my estimates here.
The paper was written in 2013, so it's not pre-registered.
The sample size of 39 is suspicious given its date. People became upset about junk papers two years before, so the authors should have known better. However, I would hesitate to draw conclusions about the integrity of the paper's authors, because each participant was paid $60, which makes expanding the sample size somewhat expensive.
The authors declared no conflicting interests, but I looked up the first author and he has major conflicts of interest.
The last author, DeSteno, is ranked very poorly at https://replicationindex.com/2021/01/19/personalized-p-value....
Combining these factors, I'd adjust the p-value from .02 to .45, if it were a pre-registered paper which you have pre-committed to read. This paper is worthless.
The paper was written in 2013, so it's not pre-registered.
The sample size of 39 is suspicious given its date. People became upset about junk papers two years before, so the authors should have known better. However, I would hesitate to draw conclusions about the integrity of the paper's authors, because each participant was paid $60, which makes expanding the sample size somewhat expensive.
The authors declared no conflicting interests, but I looked up the first author and he has major conflicts of interest.
The last author, DeSteno, is ranked very poorly at https://replicationindex.com/2021/01/19/personalized-p-value....
Combining these factors, I'd adjust the p-value from .02 to .45, if it were a pre-registered paper which you have pre-committed to read. This paper is worthless.
Besides, associating meditation to religion is like assuming fasting == religion.
They are both practices that can exist without mythology, sacred texts or believes of what happens after death.
They are both practices that can exist without mythology, sacred texts or believes of what happens after death.
> They are both practices that can exist without mythology, sacred texts or believes of what happens after death.
While I agree with your main point, that they are equating things that and not the same, you seem to be to be making the same mistake. None of the things you list are required for religion either.
While I agree with your main point, that they are equating things that and not the same, you seem to be to be making the same mistake. None of the things you list are required for religion either.
I think you have the sense of things reversed. The point is that mythology, sacred texts, and afterlife beliefs usually aren't a thing unless religion is involved.
> Besides, associating meditation to religion is like assuming fasting == religion.
Meditation and fasting are both integral parts of Sanatana Dharma (called hinduism by westerners).
Dont mix these with you perception of Christianity.
Meditation and fasting are both integral parts of Sanatana Dharma (called hinduism by westerners).
Dont mix these with you perception of Christianity.
Intersection != Equality
I fast. I meditate. I'm not religious.
One may be religious and not fast nor meditate.
I fast. I meditate. I'm not religious.
One may be religious and not fast nor meditate.
It’s bogus. Social scientists are locked in their own need to be social by seeming to be scientific.
A problem of sociology that now extends to our public-policy-facing sciences, as well.
A problem of sociology that now extends to our public-policy-facing sciences, as well.
Every culture has some version of the golden rule yet religions claim to originate it. Most of what was studied in this article is common across all religions. Calling such practices "religion" is like calling smiling "religion". Religion co-opts nature and then, for a fee, hands it back to you. Human nature is not religion, religion puts an artificial price on that which should be enjoyed sans grift.
If you think human nature (i.e. the free and ordinary expression of a person unperverted by social conditioning) comprises something like "do unto others and you would have them do unto you," I have several billion pieces of bad news for you. There is no evidence for this, and the only rebuttal you could have to all the counterexamples will be some form of No True Scotsman -- "yes, those people acted badly, bad that's their conditioning, not their True Human Nature..."
But by your own definition none of those billion can be expressing their human nature since all of them have been subject to social conditioning.
What I think the OP is getting at is the concept of universal human traits. There’s a big old list of them compiled by an anthropologist here: https://condor.depaul.edu/~mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm
The thing to note is that the golden rule could be a universal as much as murder is. Which is to say the golden rule is continuously reinvented by humans but not necessarily followed by them all. What factors in this are innate versus conditioned are opaque.
What I think the OP is getting at is the concept of universal human traits. There’s a big old list of them compiled by an anthropologist here: https://condor.depaul.edu/~mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm
The thing to note is that the golden rule could be a universal as much as murder is. Which is to say the golden rule is continuously reinvented by humans but not necessarily followed by them all. What factors in this are innate versus conditioned are opaque.
> The thing to note is that the golden rule could be a universal as much as murder is.
Which is not a helpful understanding of human nature at all, which is my point. What I am trying to argue against -- and maybe this is not the intent of the original commenter -- is the idea that the Golden Rule is an innate and inevitable expression of our nature, but say, the horrors of Communism are not.
Which is not a helpful understanding of human nature at all, which is my point. What I am trying to argue against -- and maybe this is not the intent of the original commenter -- is the idea that the Golden Rule is an innate and inevitable expression of our nature, but say, the horrors of Communism are not.
I quite like Alain de Bottons attempt at trying to mine religion for "good ideas". He wrote a book "Religion for Atheists" on this idea https://www.amazon.com/Religion-Atheists-Non-believers-Guide...
At a personal level, one very visible difference I have seen religion make in people is that it makes them more disciplined. Pious people who regularly and "religiously" perform their rituals every day tend to have a nice bonus effect of being easily able to start and adhere to good habits and exercise self-control over superficial cravings.