Random Thread

[Linguoboy]

I think if someone's going to believe in astrology, they're going to believe in it.

I'm not so fatalistic. I think our current understanding of social behaviour demonstrates that what people believe is largely determined by what's normalised within their social circles.

Just try to steer them away from anyone asking for money based on psychic abilities or card readings if you have enough sway that they'd listen to you.

I used to think this was enough. I don't any more due to what I've observed since becoming widowed.

On both the widowed support groups I belong to, there's a sizable proportion of folks who believe that life continues after death and that the deceased can communicate with the living. These folks only occasionally talk about visiting mediums and more frequently talk about seeing "signs" of these attempts to communicate in daily life. A lot of them are pretty pathetic--I don't remember turning the tap on but when I walked into the room it was running! But if folks take comfort in trivial occurrences like these, what's the harm?

Well, it's hard to maintain that this is all harmless activity after you've read anguished posts by survivors who don't find the signs they're looking for and conclude from this that their loved ones are upset with them. Or who don't make positive changes in their lives because they don't see indications that this is what their loved ones want. Or who do end up wasting money on psychics, who can compound these issues, even when operating with the best of intentions and not out of a profit motive.

Addendum: the more new-age-inclined parts of the Left seem to have moved closer to the far Right recently, though, with some of them becoming full-fledged Q followers.

Yeah, the problem with believing one kind of nonsense is that it makes you more inclined to believe other kinds of nonsense. And the line between "harmless nonsense" and "harmful nonsense" is not as easy to draw as people think it to be.

[Ares Land]

On both the widowed support groups I belong to, there's a sizable proportion of folks who believe that life continues after death (...)

I draw the line at psychisms and spiritism. One of my uncles died young, in a very tragic way... Pretty soon, his wife -- my aunt and her mother -- my grandmother were holding seances and trying to 'contact' him, so to speak.
I was at several of these seances -- I was about 10 at the time and I remember how creepy it all felt.
I don't want to get into the details, but it all ended extremely badly for my aunt.

[Ryusenshi]

Honestly, there's a lot to criticise in the atheism movement. I don't think it as a whole should be considered part of the Left or even closely allied with it. Not all conservatives are religious and not all religious or spiritual people are conservative.

Well, during the Bush II era, right-wing religious conservatives had a lot of influence on U.S. politics; so atheists ended up considered "leftists" by default. (The enemy of my enemy is my friend!) Nowadays, neither Trump nor the alt-right are particularly religious, so this association no longer holds.

[Vijay]

On both the widowed support groups I belong to, there's a sizable proportion of folks who believe that life continues after death (...)

I draw the line at psychisms and spiritism. One of my uncles died young, in a very tragic way... Pretty soon, his wife -- my aunt and her mother -- my grandmother were holding seances and trying to 'contact' him, so to speak.
I was at several of these seances -- I was about 10 at the time and I remember how creepy it all felt.
I don't want to get into the details, but it all ended extremely badly for my aunt.

There's a 1960 Indian movie by Bengali director Satyajit Ray called Devi that's about exactly that sort of thing. CW: suicide I honestly don't think it's graphic, more implied, but the content warning is probably warranted anyway

That being said, IMO, if (some form of) neo-Paganism ideologically appeals to you, far-right believers in it shouldn't have the right to stop you from believing what you want. You don't necessarily have to be part of the community in order to hold beliefs. I'm certainly not part of any particularly atheist community myself.

[Richard W]

Honestly, there's a lot to criticise in the atheism movement. I don't think it as a whole should be considered part of the Left or even closely allied with it. Not all conservatives are religious and not all religious or spiritual people are conservative.

I've a horrible feeling there's a lot to be said for restoring recusancy laws.

[Vijay]

Nowadays, neither Trump nor the alt-right are particularly religious, so this association no longer holds.

It actually does among (at least some) minorities, though. This is why, to this day, the Republican Party's most loyal Indian supporters are all (people who see themselves as) devout Christians, including probably most of my first cousins (at least in the US ).

[Travis B.]

I've a horrible feeling there's a lot to be said for restoring recusancy laws.

Umm what is to be gained by punishing people for not engaging in state-sanctioned religion?

[Linguoboy]

I draw the line at psychisms and spiritism. One of my uncles died young, in a very tragic way... Pretty soon, his wife -- my aunt and her mother -- my grandmother were holding seances and trying to 'contact' him, so to speak.
I was at several of these seances -- I was about 10 at the time and I remember how creepy it all felt.
I don't want to get into the details, but it all ended extremely badly for my aunt.

I'm sorry. That sounds really terrible.

I think there are some spiritualists who are essentially therapists working with a nontraditional approach. They're good at intuiting what their clients need to hear to find closure and then, consciously or unconsciously, supplying them with it. I couldn't tell you though whether they are 1 in 10 or 1 in 100. The whole practice is entirely unregulated and even the regulations and certification requirements we have in place for counselors and therapists allow a lot of unqualified, unscrupulous, and harmful people into these profession.

[Richard W]

I've a horrible feeling there's a lot to be said for restoring recusancy laws.

Umm what is to be gained by punishing people for not engaging in state-sanctioned religion?

The idea is to ensure that everyone gets preached at regularly, getting some sort of moral code reinforced. The aim would be compliance rather then raising revenue in fines. One could promote attendance as a tax-avoidance dodge.

[Travis B.]

I've a horrible feeling there's a lot to be said for restoring recusancy laws.

Umm what is to be gained by punishing people for not engaging in state-sanctioned religion?

The idea is to ensure that everyone gets preached at regularly, getting some sort of moral code reinforced. The aim would be compliance rather then raising revenue in fines. One could promote attendance as a tax-avoidance dodge.

Why do you think that one needs to be preached at regularly to have some sort of moral code, or even why do you think that atheists are less moral than church/synagogue/mosque/whatever-going theists?

[Vijay]

Or for that matter, why is there a need for a moral code in the first place?

[zompist]

The idea is to ensure that everyone gets preached at regularly, getting some sort of moral code reinforced. The aim would be compliance rather then raising revenue in fines. One could promote attendance as a tax-avoidance dodge.

I assume you're advocating sociopathy for the lulz? Religious imposition is oppressive, and frequently genocidal; and preaching at uninterested people produces either unbelief or hypocrisy.

If you're hoping to impose your favorite religion by force, perhaps consider a) what's happened when people have tried that in the past; b) what if another religion gets imposed instead?

[Richard W]

The idea is to ensure that everyone gets preached at regularly, getting some sort of moral code reinforced. The aim would be compliance rather then raising revenue in fines. One could promote attendance as a tax-avoidance dodge.

I assume you're advocating sociopathy for the lulz? Religious imposition is oppressive, and frequently genocidal; and preaching at uninterested people produces either unbelief or hypocrisy.

If you're hoping to impose your favorite religion by force, perhaps consider a) what's happened when people have tried that in the past; b) what if another religion gets imposed instead?

Hypocrisy is the tribute paid by vice to virtue. There could be be multiple state-sanction religions - the Roman state expected people to continue in the religion of their ancestors, and got concerned when people, such as Christians, rejected the religion of their ancestors.

Enthusiastic imposition of a religion works. One just has to retain the enthusiasm. Forced converts may not be good adherents, but two generations later there will be enthusiastic adherents.

The worry is that I don't see atheism encouraging a moral code; I fear one sees a hangover from a previous religion, and that that will erode. I don't like the idea of recusancy laws, but I do worry about the preservation of an effective sense of right and wrong.

[zompist]

I don't like the idea of recusancy laws, but I do worry about the preservation of an effective sense of right and wrong.

What's baffling is your idea that religions promotes morality.

Note, I'm not against religion, far from it. But some of the most dangerous and immoral people in the world today are the highly religious.

[Civil War Bugle]

My observation is that religiosity and morality are orthogonal to each other - using whatever reasonable and commonplace standard of morality we like, how religious someone is tends to drive how they justify their moral behavior rather than determining whether they are moral. I have seen moral and immoral religious people, moral and immoral atheists, and I find it laughable that level of religiosity is the driving force. Perhaps level of intellectual honesty but that's not the same thing.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that religion actually does promote moral behavior in the way I take is being argued for, I suspect the reason largely boils down to certain veins of religion making the point that 'hey, we live in a society, you know', and if we* conclude that the other tenets of the religion are wrong, why can't we just say 'hey, we live in a society, you know', and skip the metaphysical bits we want to skip? You can have a sophisticated argument in favor of morality which doesn't require religion, so if the religion isn't determined to be true, let's just move on to the other justification which doesn't require hypocritical advocacy of falsehoods.

I happen to be an atheist; I will note that I do think (depending on the details of the religion) if a religion were determined to be true, that would be a good argument in favor of following the religion, but I take the argument here as assuming the truth of the religion is more or less irrelevant in terms of whether people should be exposed to it; Catholicism is as good as Confucianism is as good as Islam is as good as Buddhism, etc...

[Ares Land]

Hypocrisy is the tribute paid by vice to virtue. There could be be multiple state-sanction religions - the Roman state expected people to continue in the religion of their ancestors, and got concerned when people, such as Christians, rejected the religion of their ancestors.

That's not quite how things happened with the Romans. The Roman paganism of the 1st or 2nd century was nothing like the religion of their ancestors anyway. We can get a sense of what the upper class believed through Marcus Aurelius -- it's not terribly far from Christianity. The Romans routinely adopted foreign gods. Along with Christianity, they were into Mithra and Sol Invictus, and a lot, lot more Jewish converts that you'd expect. (I believe Ashkenazi Jews often have Southern Italian ancestry in the maternal line.)
Why the Romans rejected Christianity is a complex issue. The gist of it, is, you had people still insisting they were Christians even when a very angry centurion made it clear it would be political to drop the subject. The attitude was so weird, alien and worrying that they figured it was worth punishing for its own sake, no matter what 'Christian' actually meant.
We like to think of the Romans as vicious oppressors of wholesome peaceful Christians. There's some truth in that -- the Romans weren't very nice people, to put it mildly -- but Christian dogma was yet to be fixed, and many early Christians were into heresies that make the Branch Davidians look like the Church of England.

I truly believe Christianity has mostly been a force for good -- but I still think the world would be a better place if Julian the Apostate had won out in the end.

Enthusiastic imposition of a religion works. One just has to retain the enthusiasm. Forced converts may not be good adherents, but two generations later there will be enthusiastic adherents.

Sure, it works, it's just a very immoral thing to do. Not even ISIS insists on forced conversion.

The worry is that I don't see atheism encouraging a moral code; I fear one sees a hangover from a previous religion, and that that will erode. I don't like the idea of recusancy laws, but I do worry about the preservation of an effective sense of right and wrong.

It's not necessarily atheism -- we now choose to consider that people are adults and can figure out right and wrong on their own. This, I believe, is a lot more moral thing to do than anything they teach you in Sunday school.
Churches lost their moral legitimacy by insisting on things that were morally wrong. Would you trust, say, the Catholic Church, an institution that protected pedophiles for decades, insisted on marriage being a sacred bond even when your husband beats you up, rejected contraception and treated homosexuality as a disease at best? I can accept hypocrisy as a necessary evil, but all that's a tad bit above my tolerance level.

[Richard W]

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that religion actually does promote moral behavior in the way I take is being argued for, I suspect the reason largely boils down to certain veins of religion making the point that 'hey, we live in a society, you know', and if we* conclude that the other tenets of the religion are wrong, why can't we just say 'hey, we live in a society, you know', and skip the metaphysical bits we want to skip? You can have a sophisticated argument in favor of morality which doesn't require religion, so if the religion isn't determined to be true, let's just move on to the other justification which doesn't require hypocritical advocacy of falsehoods.

I just don't see the 'we live in a society...' argument being pushed hard.

[alynnidalar]

As someone who both is religious and derives my morality from my religious beliefs... this would be a terrible idea. I'll give a real-world example, because I think it illustrates my major problems with the proposal. (obligatory caveat that anecdotes are not data, this is only an example, yadda yadda yadda)

I know a woman about my age. When we were kids, we attended Sunday School every week together. She then, as a teenager, proceeded to burn an abandoned house down, followed by an assortment of various other crimes, followed by jail. Multiple times. Turns out that a half-hour of hearing the Bible every week did not automatically turn her into a morally upstanding member of society.

Now, there's a lot of reasons for that. We could talk about her deeply messed-up home life, the total lack of parenting by her mother, the "bad crowd" she fell into as a teenager. We could go deeper into societal issues and discuss how she grew up in an impoverished, racially-divided neighborhood and how that may have made her tragic choices later in life basically inevitable. But, that's kind of my point. Simple exposure to religion/moral codes did not outweigh every other factor in her life leading her to do bad stuff. I don't think Sunday School made her choices worse, but it's hard to argue they made them better, either. And we're talking about someone who attended mostly of her free will (albeit probably because some of her friends also came and there were snacks), not someone forced by the government to attend.

At the end of the day, being religious is a choice. A person can sit through all the church services in the world and still only pay lip service to the things they're hearing, especially if they're only there because they have to be. And this isn't even getting into the very relevant issues others have mentioned regarding people who are deeply into a religion and then use it to justify anything they want. Or about what religions/moral systems would be acceptable and what would happen to people who didn't subscribe to them.

Do I think religion can be a very positive force? Sure, I wouldn't believe in God if I didn't truly think He exists and is good! But forcing it on people isn't going to get us anywhere. If you think society needs more religious morals, then get out and proselytize to find genuine converts--don't try to legally mandate it.

[Civil War Bugle]

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that religion actually does promote moral behavior in the way I take is being argued for, I suspect the reason largely boils down to certain veins of religion making the point that 'hey, we live in a society, you know', and if we* conclude that the other tenets of the religion are wrong, why can't we just say 'hey, we live in a society, you know', and skip the metaphysical bits we want to skip? You can have a sophisticated argument in favor of morality which doesn't require religion, so if the religion isn't determined to be true, let's just move on to the other justification which doesn't require hypocritical advocacy of falsehoods.

I just don't see the 'we live in a society...' argument being pushed hard.

By who? By random people on the street? I think if we are judging by random people on the street, that can lead to a bit of a circular argument: people on the street aren't saying this, therefore we should make people do that, so that people on the street will say this. If we instead mean people who might actually push the idea, then yeah, I see bishops and imams and people like that saying some variation of the argument but I also see nonreligious professors in philosophy departments at secular universities saying some variation of the argument. Just because the followers of the Pope and the Aga Khan AND ALSO the followers of Richard Dawkins and Derek Parfit are variable in terms of how much they follow their leaders' teachings doesn't mean that thinkers aren't pushing it. (Specific individuals are named as random representatives of religion and atheism, respectively.)

I think part of the problem may be saying religion teaches x and atheism teaches y, when really we should be thinking of some particular ideology which happens to be religious or atheist and judging that. What is the track record of buddhism or christianity or communism or Dawkinsism or whatever? Someone who has consciously opted into one of these ideas may be more moral than someone who is just succumbing to peer pressure to join 'religion' or 'atheism' in the abstract.

[rotting bones]

I will try to present an outline of a morality so atheistic that it may be incompatible with any religious preaching.

The world contains only vice. "Virtue" is another name for absolute evil, an evil so pervasive that it has to power to violently decree that certain types of evil are to be regarded as "good".

If you think that's absurd, consider that God is the ultimate criminal in Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. Of course, Chesterton was a religious man.

An atheistic political interpretation could be, for example, that property is the ultimate theft. (This is a rigid oversimplification of my real position. For my real position, refer to the Capitalism thread.)

The psychoanalytic interpretation is that any world of subjective meaning is sustained by a repressed trauma. If the trauma can be expressed, the entire edifice collapses.

For example, the world where petty theft is sinful and property is virtuous is sustained by repressing the fact that property is the most successful form of theft. If you are dying of hunger and try to eat food that doesn't belong to you, you would be violently prevented from taking what's rightfully yours, and the public will hate you for even trying. Where does their hate come from? It comes from repressing the truth that property is theft. If this truth could be lived in everyday social practice, then this world of subjective meaning in which theft is sinful and property is virtuous collapses.