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

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

#421

Post by mrone » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 3:13 AM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #376

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 –…

Christians, Muslims, etc, cannot even agree among themselves what their "belief system" is! I think you're overestimating how well-defined people's religious beliefs are, especially the average person's.

Muslims agree on who God is and who are his prophets.

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

#422

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 3:14 AM UTC

tharkun__ wrote: post #393

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…

Picking up on the "is there a god" and who believes in it? I have always wondered how many of the high priests or whatever their titles might be in any religion over the millenia (this includes Aztecs and Vikings etc) really just saw religion as another way of holding power (vs. kings or what have you). I.e. "just pretending" to believe and in reality just using it to to wield power and influence over people. Please…

[deleted]

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

#423

Post by vxNsr » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 3:14 AM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #383

The ten commandments have things to say about working on Saturdays or fucking people whom you have not married, but don't have a word on the topic of slavery (in fact it is amply condoned in the Bible, incl. by Jesus, together with myriad other atrocities). This is trash morality which you should have zero respect for. It's only understandable if you take it for what it really is: Bronze age Middle-Eastern mythology.…

> fucking people whom you have not married,

This is false, it says don't covet your neighbors wife.

> working on Saturdays

This has been shown time and again to boost productivity immensely to say nothing for mental health.

You seem to have a bone to pick but don't understand the thing you're arguing against.

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

#424

Post by astrange » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 3:19 AM UTC

icelancer wrote: post #63

remarkEon wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s interesting seeing this point, which has been around the internet for at least a decade now, start to get printed in what are otherwise mainstream publications these days. I don’t know that I buy it, but I certainly understand and see the merit of the argument.

"Believe science." Vox and others stealth-editing articles, people yelling at you if you don't blindly believe the CDC/WHO, etc. Science by its very nature is heretical, questioning, skeptical. "Belief" in science is exactly what we should not be doing, yet is pushed by the academic elites.

> Vox and others stealth-editing articles, people yelling at you if you don't blindly believe the CDC/WHO

These two things are the opposite of each other. Would you prefer Vox not edit articles?

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

#425

Post by vxNsr » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 3:21 AM UTC

rsj_hn wrote: post #406

betterunix2 wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Few people understand that most religions e.g. Judaism and Christianity have an apologetic discipline – a deliberate arm open to debate." Just want to point out that Jewish apologetics is not the same as Christian apologetics. Christian apologists are working in furtherance of the Christian goal of converting everyone to Christianity. Jewish apologists are working only to prevent other Jews from being swayed by the…

> Jewish apologists are working only to prevent other Jews from being swayed by the arguments made by other religions (primarily those from Christian missionaries, who often target Jews specifically). The Judaism when the Talmud was written was a fanatically proselytizing sect, as is clear if you read the talmud. They created seed outposts all over the Roman empire of new converts, as they sought (and obtained) speci…

As a jew who has studied the talmud extensively I would love to know where the sources for this whole comment are. I've never seen anything even close to this anywhere in the talmud or any history book on the roman empire or jewish history.

> Palestine in the wake of the third revolt

Oh... now I see you're gaslighting and re-writing history. Your sources will be the same ones Mahmoud Abbas used for his "thesis"

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

#426

Post by mEATsack » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 3:24 AM UTC

friedman23 wrote: post #293

sidlls wrote: post #199

> Few people understand that most religions e.g. Judaism and Christianity have an apologetic discipline – a deliberate arm open to debate. The range of permissible debate is quite narrow in reality, and usually start from an assumption that the core tenets are more or less true. > If you believe you are not religious, it just means that you don’t have the cognitive tools to recognize the secular ideology that you hav…

> usually start from an assumption that the core tenets are more or less true. You use this as a criticism of religion but I find it's true of secular people as well who have baseless beliefs that are just as deeply ingrained. Telling someone on hackernews you are religious you will probably get a ton of criticism and downvotes. You know what will get the same reaction? Telling someone you are a moral nihilist. Why i…

> Why is murder evil? Why is stealing evil? Why is anything evil or good for that matter?

These are covered by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Evil in this context is any violation of rights as defined by the UDHR

https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...

Why resort to a religion when you can have empathy for your fellow human, seems like a waste of time :)

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

#427

Post by betterunix2 » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 3:24 AM UTC

rsj_hn wrote: post #406

betterunix2 wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Few people understand that most religions e.g. Judaism and Christianity have an apologetic discipline – a deliberate arm open to debate." Just want to point out that Jewish apologetics is not the same as Christian apologetics. Christian apologists are working in furtherance of the Christian goal of converting everyone to Christianity. Jewish apologists are working only to prevent other Jews from being swayed by the…

> Jewish apologists are working only to prevent other Jews from being swayed by the arguments made by other religions (primarily those from Christian missionaries, who often target Jews specifically). The Judaism when the Talmud was written was a fanatically proselytizing sect, as is clear if you read the talmud. They created seed outposts all over the Roman empire of new converts, as they sought (and obtained) speci…

Proselytizing is not forbidden. It is also not required, and for all that proselytizing activity of the ancient rabbis there is very little in the Talmud that actually discusses seeking out converts and Jews are not actually required to do so. The New Testament makes proselytizing a requirement for every Christian (the Great Commission). Likewise, Christians are called on by the New Testament to engage in apologetics; the Talmud only suggests that Jews should know how to answer a "heretic" (which, as I said, means the debate is only meant to be between Jews) and only (to my knowledge) in Pirkei Avot which does not even have a Gemara.

In any case, what difference does it make if Jews in the first and second centuries were proselytizing? The religion changed since then and everyone knows it. Traditions we take for granted today like the Passover Seder had only just started to develop in the second century. There was no Jewish Calendar at that time and there was no canon of scripture (there was a collection of holy writings that overlapped with the Tanakh, but what was actually in that collection depended on who you asked).

In this century, and for at least the ten centuries prior (likely longer), Jewish apologetics has only been in response to efforts by non-Jews to convert Jews to other religions, and that is very different from Christian apologetics.

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

#428

Post by BackBlast » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 3:37 AM UTC

flyingchipmann wrote: post #412

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 –…

It's so funny when people intentionally define anything as kind of religion in order to fit their worldview. Take it this way, scientific thinking/method is about a system to analyze. It can be used analyze anything(yourself, math, religion). It's like a function, where you put input data and try your best analyze critically to get an reasonable output. And it can even be used to analyze itself!(like higher order fun…

You seem to believe that the scientific method and religion are mutually exclusive.

I'm going to split out some terms here. Scientific Method, Academic Science, and Secularism. The latter two are connected to atheism, at least in this era, and are more in line with ideologies and I do not desire to further address or describe them in this post except to say that they do not have a monopoly on the merits of the scientific method.

To speak of the method itself, which is religion agnostic and, as you say, it is a function to provide information as well as the ability to duplicate results. I would append that applying the scientific method to religion works, and that you can, indeed, learn as well as duplicate results through it - as well as reject results that do not work.

A major challenge is that the resultant artifacts aren't readily transferable or inspectable. Many secularists get hung up on this and say it's an invalid application. Essentially that only what the eye can see or the hand can measure is real. I can't really show you my happiness, or peace, or share with you the the depth of experience or knowledge that heals and transforms. I can tell you about it, about how Christ can lead you to peace. I can describe the inputs and results, the complete formula, and then you can walk it and experience the fruits first hand.

Another part of the challenge is that lack of transferability also applies to the instrumentation. I can't provide you a properly calibrated conscience, or the concept of true humility before God like I could a measure of mass or distance. It's all internal to you. Experimentation on that is time consuming and difficult. Some people run experiments with improperly calibrated instrumentation and then fail to get the expected results.

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

#429

Post by jart » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 3:38 AM UTC

skissane wrote: post #420

jart wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rational means you'll make choices that benefit yourself. It's one of the core assumptions of game theory, economics, and policymaking. All the math breaks as soon as that's not the case because irrational is unpredictable. What's nice about rational agency is that it makes cooperation without hierarchy possible so it's been known to rustle the jimmies of the first estate.

There are at least two forms of rationality – epistemic rationality (aka theoretical rationality), and instrumental rationality. Your comment doesn't clearly draw the distinction between them. In the context of discussions about the rationality of religious belief, we are primarily talking about epistemic/theoretical rationality, although non-epistemic rationality does sometimes come up (for example, Pascal's wager).…

I'm familiar with the rationalist movement and all the rationalists I've met have been wonderful people with few exceptions. I hadn't heard of epistemic rationality, but I find it interesting how the LessWrong definition (top search result) makes it sound like self-criticism and atonement.

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

#430

Post by nikolay » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 3:42 AM UTC

Yeah, people need to believe in something - faith is part of our human nature, and that's why it's a phenomenon across the globe. As an Eastern Orthodox, I don't need any ideology other than Orthodoxy, which defines my value system and which pretty much gives me an answer for all the good and bad happening; it's unifying, not dividing. That's why I have a hard time associating myself with any secular ideology, as they all conflict with Orthodoxy in one or many ways. I always found it funny that Republicans in the States often present themselves as Christians. Still, they don't act as such - in fact, their values predate Christ and are based on the Old Testament ("An eye for an eye," etc.) and ignore the existence of the New Testament and the teachings of Christ.