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As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

theatlantic.com

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

#571

Post by bserge »

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…

Good old "the world is going to shit".

The simple reality is that it's always been this way and will likely be this way for a long time.

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

#573

Post by fighterpilot »

irrational wrote: post #466
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.

Do we want people to make choices that benefit themselves? That seems to be the root of so many problems in the world. Shouldn't we encourage people to make choices that benefit others, benefit the wider community, etc.?

No, we should encourage choices that maximize the benefit over all individuals including the person who is making the choice. The person making the choice is in no way morally less important than others.

We should also avoid thinking in terms of a false dichotomy. Most voluntary exchanges and relationships in the world are win-win-win, in that both counterparties are gaining and the externality is positive. In such a context, self-maximizing through profit seeking is the choice that maximizes the benefit to others.

What we want to discourage is a much more narrow cone of behavior. Corruption. Negative externalities. Things that aren't win-win-win.

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

#574

Post by kharak »

kazen44 wrote: post #140
rsj_hn wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you have 'an army of low skilled workers' then there's no room 'to absorb so many low skilled migrants', surely? Why? The world doesn't work by laws of semantic symmetry. The Swedish economy is structured on automation, on lack of personal service roles, and on skilled industry. Swedish furniture manufacturers use robots and those on the shop floor that remain are required to have skills to operate those robots.…

dutch farming (especially kasbouw/greenhouses) are absolutely crazy. in 2019, they exported roughly 95 billion euro's. And they are the second exporter globally. Mind you the country is absolutely tiny in comparison to the number one exporter (the USA). [0] https://www.government.nl/latest/news/2020/01/17/dutch-agric...

Thanks! That lead me down the rabbit hole.

Here is an interesting article with some pictures, demonstrating what Dutch high-tech farming looks like: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/holland-...

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

#575

Post by andrepd »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #484
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.

[flagged]

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

#576

Post by AmericanChopper »

pdonis wrote: post #198
tonymet wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> believing that religious believers accept 100% of religious belief without reasoning about them is a misunderstanding. I didn't say anything about religions and ideologies not using reasoning. Anyone who has read, say, Thomas Aquinas is perfectly aware that religious people can use all kinds of complicated reasoning to justify their beliefs. What I did say is that the set of beliefs in question are "all asserted as…

The munchausen trilemma undermines the concept of “weighing the evidence”. Everything anybody believes to be true is either founded upon circular reasoning, a reasoning of infinite regression, or an arbitrary set of unprovable axioms. The consequence is that any level of belief in any truth can only be based upon faith. People who believe that their world view is based entirely upon facts and universal truths tend to have a very hard time accepting this. They will often say that scrutinizing something to that level is a pointless waste of time for things that are so obviously true, which is perhaps ironically the exact behaviour also exhibited by the most closed minded of the true believers that they often find themselves so frustrated by.

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

#578

Post by [deleted] »

fighterpilot wrote: post #565
keiferski wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phyllis Tickle wrote a book on this about a decade ago. Her argument is that every ~500 years there is a major shakeup in the Christian world, and we’re in the midst of one right now. https://www.amazon.com/Great-Emergence-How-Christianity-Chan... This post explains it well: https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/are-we-in-a-500-year-reli...

What's the proposed mechanism behind the 500-year periodicity? Without a plausible mechanism it's hard to take seriously.

[deleted]

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

#579

Post by _teyd »

watwut wrote: post #562
_teyd wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This idea that science and technology is just another random religion is so frustrating, but I encounter it online way more often than I would expect. I don’t need to personally review and understand the details of why electricity and the internet work, because I am literally typing this message on an electronic device and sending it via the internet. No faith needed, and anyway.. I can go build a simple computer and…

The argument is not that the science is same as religion. The argument is that individuals dont rationally objectively verify or figure out every experiment and scientific claim. I stead, we all rely on trust to institutions and processes to tell us how it is. Which is how it is. Most people dont even know how science actually work beyond elementary school level of simplification. And even if you actually do science…

Yes, and my response is that the average person doesn’t rationally need to intellectually revalidate every scientific and technological fact from first principles because we are surrounded by overwhelming evidence, and that highlighting that not everyone has done that is not actually all that clever or relevant if you think about it. No faith in shadowy institutions is required to see the facts of technological and scientific progress all around me.

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

#580

Post by markvdb »

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),…

This could be useful as a metaphor, as an aid for some religious people to help them understand atheists and agnostics.

Imposing that metaphor as a truth when interacting with an atheist is not useful though. If anything, insisting on defining an atheist as religious shows an elementary lack of respect.

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