As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen • Hacker News Board

Re: As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

#281

Post by ukj » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 12:39 AM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #251

bobthechef wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an extremely ignorant position that trivializes "religion". First of all, as I have written elsewhere, everyone is religious. The question is: how good and true is your religion? To call it merely irrational is to show a total lack of understanding of the subject. And because religions are many, it makes little sense to speak of "religion" categorically in this way because they often have little or nothing in…

This is an extremely ignorant position that trivializes "religion". First of all, as I have written elsewhere, everyone is religious. -- I can't see how that statement doesn't trivialize religion at least as much. IE, if everyone is "religious", you've set a very low bar for what qualifies as religious I think made it clear you have religious beliefs, which involve ... clearly false views of the cosmos (with the poss…

> if everyone is "religious", you've set a very low bar for what qualifies as religious

And if everyone has “beliefs” then you have set a very low bar for what qualifies as belief which makes everyone a believer.

You are playing a silly power game where you dismiss other people’s conceptual schemes so you can peddle your own.

My view of the cosmos is that it is a computer simulation.

It isn’t clearly false. But it is clearly a religion. Even though it is backed up by the fact that all asymmetrical/equational reasoning (all of the Mathematics supporting Physics/Cosmology) is computational.

Re: As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

#282

Post by lisper » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 12:39 AM UTC

beaconstudios wrote: post #48

lisper wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evolution fits species to their environments in exactly the same sense (though not quite by the same mechanism) that gravity fits puddles to theirs.

That's also a teleological approach (looking at the final state of the interaction of rain, terrain and gravity) - I used evolution as an example because its the first thing that came to mind. Evolution is also a good touchpoint because everybody who considers themselves "rational" accepts it, and yet it is taught, and reasoned about, teleologically - compared to most pop-science topics which are analytical in nature…

I don't think most people would think of puddles as having telos. Telos goes beyond what is and looks at purpose and meaning in terms of what ought to be. Puddles don't really have a purpose in that sense, and neither does evolution. Puddles fill voids, not because that's their purpose, but simply because that's what happens when you have water, gravity, and the right kind of void. Likewise for evolution. I know some people like to ascribe telos to evolution, but they're simply wrong, at least as adjudicated by the evidence.

Re: As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

#283

Post by 8note » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 12:39 AM UTC

tonymet wrote: post #93

Becoming more religious has helped me identify religious tendencies in the secular world. Ideology doesn’t imply supernatural deities, and some worldly phenomenon can be elevated to a supernatural level. Secular belief contains rituals, origin stories, deities, saints, priesthood, blasphemy, vice & virtue just as religion does. One aspect of religion I appreciate is that these aspects are well codified and debated –…

A lot of the secular world is just neoliberalism, which is pretty clear about what it is and how you criticise it.

Other branches are definitionally critical of various binary systems(all of the LGBTQ things), describing them instead as continuous systems, or even complex planes.

I don't think such definitions are very useful. They're very limiting since the world is full of edge cases, and your ideology is unlikely to handle all of them well, but is also likely to require you to handle some of them poorly

Re: As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

#284

Post by joe_the_user » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 12:39 AM UTC

slibhb wrote: post #257

gameswithgo wrote: post #123

>The secular world would benefit from adopting more formal definitions of their belief system. Just as the religious world contains Christians, Jews, Scientologists, Muslims, Hindus, et cetc" with sometimes radically different ideas, the secular world too has a great many different people with different belief systems. >If you believe you are not religious, it just means that you don’t have the cognitive tools to rec…

Regardless of whether "everyone is religious," everyone certainly has revelatory beliefs, i.e. beliefs that were not reasoned to. Christian thinkers have spilled a lot of ink attempting to clarify the boundary between reason and revelation whereas, in the secular world, many people do not seem to understand that many of their beliefs (particularly the foundational ones) are revealed.

As a non-religious person, certainly I understand many of my beliefs come from convention or intuition or whatever non-rational source, sure.

But I don't have any meta-belief telling me to hold onto given beliefs-that-seem-implausible-or-unverifiable because I'll be rewarded in the end or because it's a test or whatever. I don't continually change whatever belief I know is arbitrary but that's because consistency has some utility so point remains.

Basically, I have no trouble with non-rational beliefs and behaviors. But religious specifically espouses irrationalist beliefs - irrationalism being the exhortation to keep, cultivate and fixate beliefs beyond the rational. Institutions other than religion, various flavors of Stalinism say, promote faith, fixating one's beliefs and so-forth. I'm against those too. But a wide variety of secular belief systems are against the irrationalist approach - some versions of liberal religion try to escape it too but as people observe, these folks are kind of becoming non-religious.

Edit: Just generally, "everything not-wholly-rational is a religion" is a slippery argument that's being way-abused in this thread.

Re: As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

#285

Post by parineum » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 12:40 AM UTC

deertick1 wrote: post #223

rootusrootus wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give me an example or two to clarify? Many things might not be well known to someone, but could be if they wanted to track down that information. That's a little different than something which has to be taken on faith by everyone .

Well the scientific method is fundamentally faith based in that we assume that there are immutable properties of thebuniverse that can be discovered and that our perception allows us to interrogate these properties. Yes this is a very well corroborated claim, but fundamentally faith based nonetheless.

The scientific method does not make that assumption. The scientific method only assumes/requires that doing the same thing exactly the same twice will produce the same results. Everything is built on top of that.

> that our perception allows us to interrogate these properties.

That's not about science, that's about logic. Anything that can interact with people can be detected and interrogated. It does not exclude the possibility that other things may exist but there is both no way for us to interact with those things and, as such, they have no relevance to our lives.

Re: As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

#286

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 12:40 AM UTC

sudosteph wrote: post #194

> In his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King Jr. wished that “one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.” The very idea that a nation might have a creed—a word associated primarily with religion—illustrates the uniqueness of American identity as well as its predicament. That was a quote from the _Reverend_ Martin Luther King Jr, no less, so it's fair to say he knew the…

[deleted]

Re: As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

#287

Post by kortilla » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 12:40 AM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #185

tonymet wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money, medicine, “tolerance”, “racism”, politically incorrect language, natural selection, “the self,” public figures (CEOs, scientists, figureheads), celebrities, recycling, wearing masks, the super bowl, the oscars, the multiverse, the big bang, psychotherapy, anti-depressants, over-eating & dieting, conspicuous traveling, visiting nature, architecture. You can throw those into the religious categories e.g. virtue,…

... cheese, machine screws, steering wheel covers, arriving on time for appointments, the CIA, and Thursday. Have we left anything out?

Horses and paper too

Re: As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

#288

Post by fallingfrog » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 12:41 AM UTC

f38zf5vdt wrote: post #43

FridayoLeary wrote: post #9

>Immigrants to America tend to become American; emigrants to other countries from America tend to stay American. Is that true, or just the authors' speculation? Although it is easily explained. Everyone wants to be American because the USA, of all the countries in the world offers the greatest opportunities to the greatest number of people. They are the top of the food chain, in less nationalistic terms. (i'm not Ame…

From the 1880s to 2000 this may have been the case, but I don't think it is anymore. Any country with public health insurance that is decent is more attractive than the US. People are not blind, they see Americans dying of diabetes because they can't afford insulin that they attempted to crowdfund. [1] The US has evolved into a modern dystopia under the first-past-the-post system and cloture in the senate. I think th…

We never had a true working class party or the same kind of safety net as they have in Europe, because all the class divisions could be papered over with free stuff and money- first, a whole continents worth of free land, and then when all Europe was destroyed, a 60 year burst of huge profits. So you know, it’s material conditions in the end. Matt Christman and Sean KB did an excellent podcast on this called History is a Weapon: Q is You.

Re: As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

#289

Post by mslm » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 12:41 AM UTC

tonymet wrote: post #211

gameswithgo wrote: post #123

>The secular world would benefit from adopting more formal definitions of their belief system. Just as the religious world contains Christians, Jews, Scientologists, Muslims, Hindus, et cetc" with sometimes radically different ideas, the secular world too has a great many different people with different belief systems. >If you believe you are not religious, it just means that you don’t have the cognitive tools to rec…

Atheism is actually polytheistic. The Gods can be identified by answering these questions: “why am I here?”, “who am i?”, “what should I do?”, “what is true?”, “why should I suffer & die?”, “what will happen tomorrow?”, “who matters more: myself or others?”. The deities of the secular religion would be “the self”, your parents, “the government/state and its figureheads“ , money (and the institutions controlling it),…

You're likely going to get poured with downvotes from the large number of atheists that browse this forum, but I commend you for the brave comment. Now let me join you.

Effectively, yes, the primary atheist deity is material and worldly pleasure. How that's particularly expressed is of course different per person, but the core is that the atheist follows the deity of their whims.

Re: As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

#290

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 12:41 AM UTC

sudosteph wrote: post #194

> In his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King Jr. wished that “one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.” The very idea that a nation might have a creed—a word associated primarily with religion—illustrates the uniqueness of American identity as well as its predicament. That was a quote from the _Reverend_ Martin Luther King Jr, no less, so it's fair to say he knew the…

[deleted]