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As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

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

#791
post #789

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be an antidote, if one asserts that humans are just chemicals. Many people believe in the assertion that there is free will though, which is a supernatural belief. If we are just chemicals, than those that believe there exists free will believe that out of no volition of their own. E.g. the laws of physics happened to be tuned for the eventual existence of a cloud of atoms seeming to contemplate this on a HN…

At the risk of mis-stating the hypothesis, the book is more about the active coupling or entrainment of bio-rhythms between individuals as what 'love' is. That we are able to regulate the bio-rhythms of others with our own, and we do so when we feel 'close' to those people in some way or other.

There is another book “the complete idiot’s guide to chemistry of love”, which talks a lot about chemicals. (Great book too)

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

#792
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 –…

You are confusing different concepts: ideology and religion. Ideologies are a set of ethical / moral assumptions about what is right and just, i.e. they are about human practice , about what humans ought to do . Religions are ideologies, but they are also a set of beliefs about the world itself, about the physical and metaphysical reality - which are thought as true a priori. This part is almost universally wrong, as…

Science itself assumes a metaphysical reality. Science can only make observations on the material world. Science cannot confirm or deny metaphysical underpinnings.

I think classical vs quantum physics is a good example. It gave us information on determinism, but it didn't explain who / what is setting the odds.

Science can give us estimates for all the universal constants. It cannot tell us how they came to being.

We know there was a big bang, we don't know in which medium the big bang occurred.

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

#793
post #640
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 –…

> 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. The label "not religious" doesn't mean anything. People use it to refer to atheists, in which case you are alleging that atheists by definition don't have the tools to understand their own position - which is absurd. Others use the term to refer to minimally-practicing…

I'm saying that secular people have more religious tendencies than they are aware of. By understanding religion and/or philosophy, those tendencies can be recognized.

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

#794
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 –…

This is a good summary of what I think Douglas Murray was explaining in this discussion with Sam Harris: https://youtu.be/yTtuCNPebDE Namely; "we may be in the midst of the discovery that the only thing worse than religion is it's absence"

Shame you got downvoted.

Although it's not conclusive that absence of religion is worse than religion itself, there's tons of evidence for it (e.g. communist & fascist atrocities, medical experiments) – I'd wish that secular believers were more self-critical and introspective.

My biggest concern of modern culture is the sense of inevitability. That progressiveness by definition is beneficial, without any sort of reflection. May things have regressed, and we should take account of the many benefits and setbacks.

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

#795
post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Good luck testing one of the currently accepted "ethical system"-type religious beliefs. The only kind of outcome of such a test that is "allowed" is full agreement with the ethical system. A lot of these systems are just as self-reinforcing and barely based in real…

In my experience having been near many church splits I still feel this simply isn’t true. Churches operate like git forks and merges of ideas.

This is actually a really good analogy that applies to some other argument, but not the one I was trying to make :)

Git forks and merges still share a common ancestral history and are basically an evolution of the same idea. This is true of a real Git repo (it's one software project after all) and the kind of churches you are likely talking about (it's all just a theist religion after all). Christianity is a branch in the same repo as the ancient Roman gods. The Saturnalia feature is even there still :)

I was thinking more about ideas like: - can people be property? - is it a good thing to kill "infidels"? - can women vote? - can a 10 year old get married?

These are "religious" questions because there is no objective truth to the answer either way. It's all based on beliefs and consensus.

Before you downvote me into oblivion: the answers to all of these have historically been different than they are today. People in both times (past and present) would attack you if you disagreed with the status quo (there was even a certain civil war fought about the people=property one). I am not actually disagreeing with the status quo on any of the above.

However, it would be naive to think that we do not presently collectively believe some things that would be appalling to a future human. A good heuristic for these is: would I get attacked or mocked for questioning this?

See also: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

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

#796
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

“ They're just a free-standing, self-consistent logical structure that can't be justified in any way except by claiming that it justifies itself. It's not that Aquinas didn't use reasoning; as noted above, he did--lots of it.” Interestingly, this also describes all of math, logic, and philosophy. One of the more interesting axioms or assertions is whether there exists free will, which is, by any interesting definitio…

The case for the existence of free will can be analyzed from several bodies of evidence (it is a bias)

https://m-g-h.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale-4fecf80...

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

#797
post #787
post #418

I grew up in a Protestant home (southern baptist church, 3x/week + youth activities). I have nothing against religion and I like religious people, I just don’t have strong faith anymore; the older I get the more skeptical I get of everything. It always makes me grin how much secular political issue adherents act like religious people. You can just listen to the language (“climate deniers” etc., “the end is near in 12…

Please don't take HN threads further into religious or ideological flamewar. This comment did both, god help us. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry Dang, didn’t mean to.

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

#798
post #788
post #782

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which is why the blanket "lying media" and "fake news" rhetoric is so dangerous. It removes that trust—often unjustifiably No, often justifiably . If the media didn't lie so often and so consistently, they wouldn't have a problem rebutting accusations of lying. > without specifying what other institutions or processes can be trusted instead for reliable information That's the problem: there aren't any . Our society…

Okay, you've made the claim they all lie. It's up to you to provide the evidence since I can't prove a negative. I can't point to a news story that lacks lies and claim they're all true. It's up to you to put up specific examples and demonstrate a pattern of deception. PBS News Hour Frontline Reuters BBC News NPR's morning and evening news Associated Press Then papers of record (excluding editorial column or op-ed):…

> It's up to you to provide the evidence since I can't prove a negative.

If you honestly can't come up with a mountain of evidence on your own, then either you have not been paying attention at all, or we live on different planets. Or you have simply not bothered to independently check anything they say. (More on what "independently" means below.)

And if you honestly believe that the sources you cite (and yes, I'm talking about what is billed as straight "news", not opinion) are reliable, then good luck with that. I hope for your sake that it doesn't catch up with you at some point, but I won't be holding my breath.

And btw, my claim is not that everything they say is lies. Much of what they say is true. The problem is that you can't trust them not to lie; given any statement they make, you have to consult independent information (more on that below) to decide whether you can trust it or not. And the more politically charged the topic--in other words, the more that is at stake in terms of power--the less you can trust them not to lie. Whenever the chips are down, they have shown that they will put ideology and spin, to protect their own power and the power of those in government whom they agree with, above truth.

As far as independently checking what they say is concerned, that's the problem I referred to in the GP: there are no "independent" reliable sources you can use. You have to do it entirely on your own, cobbling together what information you can from as close to primary sources as you can get it. (For example, whenever I see, say, a report issued by a government agency, or a scientific paper, mentioned in the media, I don't even bother reading the media article; I go looking for the actual report or paper itself and read that. The report or paper might still be telling me things that are questionable, but at least I'm reading the primary source.) And of course most people don't have the time or the wherewithal to do that, which is why this terrible state of affairs persists. But that doesn't make it any less terrible. At least now, with the Internet, with so many ways for people to post first-hand information about things, we have some ability to collect our own data instead of having to live with whatever the media gives us. We used to have none at all, except for the rare cases where either we ourselves were first-hand witnesses to some event (and btw, pretty much anyone who has had first-hand knowledge of something that got covered in the media will tell you that the media account was nothing at all like what they saw first-hand), or we knew personally someone who was and could evaluate what they told us based on our knowledge of their past track record of reliability.

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

#799
post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Trust develops over time. We can trust scientific institutions because of past successes and how their construction promotes future successes. Scientific institutions are also constrained in their function. It is not the case that all forms of trusting institutions are intellectually equal.

> We can trust scientific institutions because of past successes

For those that have them, yes. Not all institutions that are called "scientific" have them, though.

> and how their construction promotes future successes.

For those for which this is true, yes. It's not true for all institutions that are called "scientific".

> Scientific institutions are also constrained in their function.

I'm not sure how true this actually is. Top tier universities like Harvard call themselves "scientific institutions", but they're really just hedge funds that happen to do research and teaching as a side gig. And the fact that almost all university research is funded by governments means that along with the expansion of government into more and more areas of our lives, comes the expansion of what is called "scientific" for purposes of getting government funding.

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

#800
post #563
post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those two hold for, say roughly, 90% of what most people believe, secular or not See my response to tonymet upthread. > Even most scientific theories people believe, they haven't examined and are incapable of following their theories and experiements personally - they were just being told they are truth and they trust it to be so. For some theories that are called "scientific", yes, this is true--but that's because…

> for scientific theories that actually have practical impacts, you don't have to just accept what scientists say on trust; you can look at their track record of correct predictions What do you think of economic theories or theories behind psychotherapy? Lot's of real world impact, low confidence in experiments, imo

> What do you think of economic theories or theories behind psychotherapy?

Not much.

> Lot's of real world impact

Because the theories have influence far out of proportion to their actual track record, yes.

> low confidence in experiments, imo

You can't run controlled experiments in either of those fields, so it's not so much a matter of low confidence in experiments as no ability to do them in the first place. There are some general patterns that can be picked out, but both disciplines deal with non-repeatable human situations that require non-repeatable human judgments to deal with them. Even to call them "sciences" is a stretch, except on a very general usage of the term "science" to basically mean "something people study".

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