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Around the World, Many People Are Leaving Their Childhood Religions

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Re: Around the World, Many People Are Leaving Their Childhood Religions

#71

Post by sepositus »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #69
sepositus wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not make them right from the beginning? I don't intend to come off as obtuse here, but this was my original point. Our current understanding suggests this is a design flaw and is "wrong." However, there are plenty of cases where new discoveries have changed our understanding of a system. So, I'm simply putting forward the question: At what point can we confidently say something is poorly designed? I'm not disag…

Ah, the unbeatable “the lord acts in mysterious ways, not meant for mere mortals to understand” argument.

I came to this realization long before I embraced religion. It seems pretty fundamental to the way we do science.

Re: Around the World, Many People Are Leaving Their Childhood Religions

#72

Post by mrob »

balamatom wrote: post #63
dmd wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad to hear it. I could use more meaning in my life. Please sign over all your wealth to me, so you can suffer some more.

"I could use more meaning in my life." Telling. (Me, I could definitely use even less .) I think GP has a point, but it kinda works the other way around. (Which is common among unexamined intuitions.) Basically, you can't represent any data with just ones, or just zeros. And the most basic unit of meaningful sensory data is "suffering/not suffering". As long as there's any difference between "more preferable" and "le…

You're not working with just suffering and non-suffering, you also have death. The existence of death makes the concept of an absolute threshold of suffering meaningful. If, assuming an experience lasts an entire lifetime, you would rationally prefer to be dead, that experience is below the absolute threshold of suffering. In practice most experiences do not last entire lifetimes, but this isn't relevant to the definition. Something can still be below the absolute threshold of suffering even if you willingly and rationally endure it because you know it's temporary.

You could encode the same meaning using only experiences above the absolute threshold of suffering, i.e. as 1 and 2 instead of 0 and 1. I believe a world with no experiences below the threshold of absolute suffering would be strictly superior to our world. Relative suffering is sufficient for meaning.

Re: Around the World, Many People Are Leaving Their Childhood Religions

#73

Post by throwanem »

ctrlp wrote: post #64
throwanem wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what? Obviously I have touched something within you, so unless you mean me to believe I should consider your interest beneath my effort - which I assume would be less ambiguously stated, were that your intent - I don't understand what you could be getting at here.

You are fond of the expressive trope of the gnomic and obscure NPC from a fantasy game. Do you have any magic potions you could sell me? I have gold. Maybe I could trade a battle axe for a spell of regeneration?

Have you and I played games before? You have an abrasive and needlessly antagonistic style I think I recognize.

Re: Around the World, Many People Are Leaving Their Childhood Religions

#74

Post by card_zero »

wincy wrote: post #18

I was a hardcore Dawkins fan at 16. Insufferable edgelord sort, and thought I’d stay that way. Then again I grew up Mormon and their theological rigor is… extremely tenuous. My grandmother was Catholic but I wasn’t really exposed to it as a kid. I’m 38 now and in the process of becoming Catholic. I’ve started going to mass every day. I’m not really sure why but I feel really great. Our goal is to inoculate our childr…

Dawkins has a nostalgic fondness for the Church of England, for its cosiness. Humanist congregations are supposed to provide the social aspects of church without the faith. Being a nihilistic edgelord is not compulsory. I don't know what your "atheist church" was, but it sounds like you're rebounding from some unfortunate existential crisis club to the opposite extreme (being meaningfully wrong?), neglecting the possibility of just being reasonable.

Re: Around the World, Many People Are Leaving Their Childhood Religions

#75

Post by card_zero »

TylerLives wrote: post #60
dmd wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad to hear it. I could use more meaning in my life. Please sign over all your wealth to me, so you can suffer some more.

I never claimed that all suffering is good, or that we should maximize suffering, only that eradicating all suffering would be highly undesirable, and even impossible, as lack of suffering would inevitably bring about new suffering.

This is true of being wrong, and problems, and lacking rationality - those are all incidental necessities in a world where we have something to do: otherwise we'd be like Q from Star Trek, stuck in his heaven at the end of time, with no remaining purpose except to mess with Picard's head.

But is it true of suffering? That seems possible, but not obvious. I think it implies that suffering evolves with culture. Like I got cake crumbs on my silk sheets! Such discomfort! How I suffer! ... in this way "suffering" just means viscerally-felt problems that we didn't choose, and it's plausibly an eternal part of existing in a physical world with problems to solve - if we can't manipulate all upcoming problems to be always fun.

Ensuring all problems are always fun probably entails seeing into the future, and wouldn't be possible. So, OK, I'll buy it, suffering is a side effect of living well.

Kind of raises the question of how much we can reduce suffering, though - if at all. Is there a particular percentage of the time that an average human spends suffering, whether in ancient times or today or in the future?

Re: Around the World, Many People Are Leaving Their Childhood Religions

#76

Post by zoogeny »

I think the trend of "Spiritual But Not Religious (SBNR)" is the most interesting.

I suspect a large number of people leaving religions aren't militant atheists convinced by the logic of Dawkins/Hitchens/Harris et al. Instead they are people who believe in some kind of higher power or spiritual unity in a way that is totally compatible with deism (or even light theism).

However, the traditional religions have left a lot of progressive minded individuals behind. Rigid dogmas and suspicious meta-physical commitments seem to turn people off.

This is an interesting space to explore. Many of these people would happily affiliate if there was some organization that met their needs.

Re: Around the World, Many People Are Leaving Their Childhood Religions

#77

Post by missedthecue »

mrob wrote: post #56
missedthecue wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It always seemed a logistical disconnect to me that people conclude god isn't good, therefore he doesn't exist. It's a non-sequitur.

It's not a non-sequitur. The usual reason people believe in a god is because some religious group says that the god exists. Those religious groups usually also claim that their god is good. If they're wrong about the goodness, why shouldn't they be wrong about the existence too?

Just because someone is wrong about one thing does not mean they're wrong about everything else too. That does not follow, rationally.

Re: Around the World, Many People Are Leaving Their Childhood Religions

#78

Post by mrob »

missedthecue wrote: post #77
mrob wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a non-sequitur. The usual reason people believe in a god is because some religious group says that the god exists. Those religious groups usually also claim that their god is good. If they're wrong about the goodness, why shouldn't they be wrong about the existence too?

Just because someone is wrong about one thing does not mean they're wrong about everything else too. That does not follow, rationally.

When both things are claimed based on the same evidence it follows to judge them together.

Re: Around the World, Many People Are Leaving Their Childhood Religions

#79

Post by zoogeny »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #70

Religion means very little to most people --- even those who say they believe. Their actions are the proof.

I just want to jump on this because I was thinking about it just yesterday. I was raised Catholic but I am not religious and based on the creeds I would not qualify as a "true" Christian since I reject miracles like virgin births and resurrections of the dead.

But I have read selections of the bible, as well as a bunch of other religious texts like selections from the vedas and sutras.

The first parable in the gospel of Mark, the oldest gospel known, is Jesus talking about a farmer sowing seeds. Some of the seeds end up on rocks and birds eat them. Some seeds end up in shallow soil and wither quickly. Some end up surrounded by thorns and are choked out. Only a few land in fertile soil. But the crop that results from the grain grown from the fertile soil is massive, enough to feed people and leave over seeds to repeat the process.

The entire point of the literal first teaching of Jesus is: most people won't actually do what is taught. For various reasons, they will hear the teaching but it won't stick in them. But it doesn't matter because the few people who actually listen to the teaching and actually change their lives will be enough for goodness to spread.

So the criticism of "some (or even most) believers don't act as they profess to believe" is accounted for in the teaching pretty explicitly. Jesus even states later on how at the time of judgement many people will call his name and he will tell them that they never knew him.

Re: Around the World, Many People Are Leaving Their Childhood Religions

#80

Post by card_zero »

balamatom wrote: post #63
dmd wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad to hear it. I could use more meaning in my life. Please sign over all your wealth to me, so you can suffer some more.

"I could use more meaning in my life." Telling. (Me, I could definitely use even less .) I think GP has a point, but it kinda works the other way around. (Which is common among unexamined intuitions.) Basically, you can't represent any data with just ones, or just zeros. And the most basic unit of meaningful sensory data is "suffering/not suffering". As long as there's any difference between "more preferable" and "le…

No, you're wrong. It took a while to parse all that. But suffering involves being upset. We routinely have preferences while accepting that they're out of reach, and feeling happy despite this. The equivalence you draw between "less preferable states" and suffering is incorrect.

Suffering has to involve being coerced (even if merely by physics). Something has to upset you, knock you off balance. If you're prepared for it, if it isn't an intrusion, it isn't suffering. We are always in a less than ideal state, but not always suffering - unless you want to make the term meaningless by stretching it.

But problems, which may be welcome and enjoyable, are endless. And it's true that suffering is relative, and people who seem to be having a tantrum are most likely suffering for real.

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