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

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

#481

Post by arp242 » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 5:45 AM UTC

tonymet wrote: post #170

pdonis wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 have adopted. Not all secular beliefs are ideologies. I think there are two key common factors between religious beliefs and ideologies that call themselves "secular": First, people don't acquire the beliefs by considering and weighing evidence; they acquire them by being told them,…

Let’s be honest, most people don’t have the time to weigh the evidence of say 90% of their beliefs. They go to school & watch television, and generally adopt the beliefs of their surroundings. And believing that religious believers accept 100% of religious belief without reasoning about them is a misunderstanding.

The difference is that there is usually at least the presumption or expectation of evidence, even though many don't know all the details. Don't expect me to be able to explain all of cosmology or evolutionary history either, but I do know enough to know that it's based on the best available evidence available today. Mistakes do happen, and are corrected.

With religion, there is no such presumption or expectation.

These are vastly different situations.

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

#482

Post by sometimesshit » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 5:57 AM UTC

SubuSS wrote: post #137

sometimesshit wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ardit, You need to measure purchasing power using PPP rate, but even still NY and SF known to be expensive areas with high tax rates. SF engineer could earn 200k year but this money could be much low as 80k in another state if you compare purchasing power. It's complex. The Americans can always buy a car but never foods. This become a meme in my home country. There are always trade offs.

But are the trade offs equivalent? There is a reason folks flock more to SF rather than to nowhere state. If you save 10%, it is still 20k saved compared to 8k. If you lose your job, there are 10 choices compared to one (or none), access to cutting edge of tech rather than reading about it on hacker news and so on.

> access to cutting edge of tech

Any examples?

I have not seen any cutting edge tech for while.

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

#483

Post by slim » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 6:16 AM UTC

irrational wrote: post #464

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…

>I just don't think there is a god. This would be agnostic (militant agnostic?), wouldn't it? I think a true atheist would say "I know that there is not a god."

Agnostics actually don't think the question of "is there a god?" is interesting or can have an answer

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

#484

Post by selfhoster11 » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 6:19 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.…

Please look deeper into what version of slavery is described by the Bible. It's very, very different to Southern USA style slavery, and much less cruel. You can criticize it all you want, but please don't tar both with the same brush.

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

#485

Post by jart » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 6:25 AM UTC

skissane wrote: post #459

jart wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One concern I have is how closely many people associate "rationality" with the "rationalist movement" (LessWrong, etc). Rationality has been discussed by philosophers for well over 2000 years. Aristotle famously declared that rationality was the feature that distinguished human beings from lesser animals. Most of those philosophers had radically different views from those of the contemporary "rationalist movement". E…

Well now they get to be a footnote in Plato's Republic. I'm not concerned about what people believe. If they want to get excited about Bayes theorem then that's great. I'm not concerned if people disagree on what it's called or how it's defined. Do you think the people who get paid to be rational understand rationality? I've seen things like software that earned billions in additional revenue get rolled back because we couldn't explain how it made decisions. The answer is that I don't have the answers and no one else does too. What's remarkable is how philosophers like Charles Babbage helped us make thousands of years of philosophy executable and we've unleashed it unto the world. How do we begin to understand that let alone explain it to the world?

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

#486

Post by slim » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 6:29 AM UTC

keiferski wrote: post #447

If you are interested in this topic, I really cannot recommend reading A Secular Age by the philosopher Charles Taylor enough. It’s a huge book but the basic takeaway is this: the modern secular world is a thing that was created over the course of many centuries and cultural developments. It is not merely the subtraction of so-called primitive beliefs. The “subtraction thesis” is the predominant model of how most peo…

It is not concerned about the world beyond, but is concerned about the future. That's why it has beliefs too

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

#487

Post by selfhoster11 » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 6:30 AM UTC

Shorel wrote: post #220

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 –…

> Few people understand that most religions e.g. Judaism and Christianity have an apologetic discipline – a deliberate arm open to debate. That's just a trick religious evangelizers use as bait to unleash their barrel of canned answers. And boy, you really have a lot of ammunition to use. But, and this is an important but: In the end, it is all just rhetoric to justify what you already believe and are unwilling to ch…

> That's just a trick religious evangelizers use as bait to unleash their barrel of canned answer

How is that different from what the atheist side offers?

The fact is, the big questions in life tend to be complicated to figure out, so canned answers are a practical way to not devote your entire lifetime to redeveloping the conclusions from scratch. Ideally, you'd also do some due diligence and try to figure out whether they agree with reality as you understand it.

There's a reason why we use caching in computer science. Cached answers should of course be invalidated in cases where they are found to be incorrect, so one should remain open to the possibility of being wrong about their beliefs (though just how open, is a subject of individual opinion).

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

#488

Post by pdonis » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 6:31 AM UTC

rsj_hn wrote: post #475

pdonis wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems that you are saying that religious beliefs aren't really valid because they aren't based in reality. For the specific example I gave (Thomas Aquinas), it's not really a question of the beliefs being "valid" or not; it's just that they have no practical impact at all, which means it doesn't really matter whether you believe them or not, at least not if the beliefs are taken in isolation. However, it is a pr…

> it's just that they have no practical impact at all, That's funny because a system that kept a civilization together for 1000 years is being claimed to have "no value" by someone who has no idea how to keep any society together and is mimicking the conventional wisdom of those overseeing a disintegrating society as a result of this ignorance. Not only does the work of Aquinas have value, it has more value over the…

> a system that kept a civilization together for 1000 years

The fact that most people in a given civilization were Christians does not mean that the particular religious beliefs I was talking about were the ones that kept the civilization together. In fact, as the example I gave of religious wars over "homoousios" vs. "homoiousios" illustrates, those particular beliefs often caused problems that created huge rifts in the civilization.

> someone who has no idea how to keep any society together

If you are referring to me, I have no idea what you are talking about.

> Not only does the work of Aquinas have value

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about that, at least as far as the particular beliefs I was referring to are concerned, since that's the particular work of Aquinas that I was discussing.

> no ethical system that we hold dear has a chance of keeping anything going for even three generations, let alone 100

Ethical systems are not the same as the kinds of religious beliefs I was talking about. Ethical systems have practical consequences that can be tested. I agree with you that many people today appear to have ethical systems that don't work well; we know that because they have bad practical consequences.

However, when you talk about keeping things going for 100 generations, we don't have any single ethical system that has done that. Ethical systems have changed many times over the course of human history.

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

#489

Post by gbronner » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 6:32 AM UTC

The issue isn’t so much that Americans have become less religious, it is that many fewer of them were raised in homes that had at least one religious parent. the experience of practicing a religion, even if you don’t believe it, tends to protect you from the single minded politics as religion thought process

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

#490

Post by betwixthewires » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 6:45 AM UTC

meowface wrote: post #478

betwixthewires wrote: post #445

I also think that religiosity is a neurological phenomenon and is as much a part of being a human as language, music, money or tool use. Nobody, including myself, can escape it. I see a lot of talk in this thread about making the definition of "religion" meaningless by broadening it too much, but I think the definition that gets narrowed in is "the phenomenon of humans engaging in dogmatic belief." A good example of…

>A good example of this is transhumanism, specifically, the idea that you can upload your mind to a computer. It is all but given based on our current scientific understanding that the mind is inseparable from the body, yet somehow particularly atheist people behave as if they are separate things. This is a dogmatic belief. It's unknown if such a technology will be possible one day, but I don't find transhumanism or…

Belief that your mind can be moved is a dogmatic belief, if you hold it, seeing as our current scientific understanding of the brain precludes it. That isn't to say a machine cannot be conscious, or that a different type of consciousness cannot exist.