Chesterton's Fence - Atheism and Culture

[7Wannabe5]

I thought you were looking for most popular convincing secular ethics?

Should I put this speck down?
Horton thought with alarm.
If I do, these small persons
may come to great harm.
I can't put it down.
And I won't! After all
a person's a person.
No matter how small.

Of course, I am some kind of non-practicing Unitarian Universalist neo-Pantheist Systems Theorist, not an Atheist, so grain of salt. The only sense in which I believe in one God is tautological definition of emergent property of consciousness. But, I still like to hear little children sing Christmas Carols, and the Call to Prayer, and every sort of holiday party, and even this jam:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axKNNp7RDpw

[Jason]

@Jason:

I fail to see what the concept of radical paradigm shift in science has to do with the absurd notion that literal document creationism is science.

You mean "absurd" as opposed to your pantheism that exists in its million existing permutations? Or the world self-emanating out of chaos which opposes your pantheism but you do not call absurd despite it being completely antithetical to your belief system?

It's funny on how websites that bask in their "openness" and "tolerance" and "Personal growth" go ad hominem once an intellectual system based on supernatural revelation is introduced. How intolerant the tolerantists really are. I do not agree with pantheism, I think its absurd, as we all think metaphysical systems we disagree with are absurd. However, in this discussion I was giving them the respect their adherents demand in order to carry on the discussion/argument from the three philosophical categories that are employed when such debates are conducted.

The radical paradigm shift in science was addressed to the point that their is no universally agreed upon, monolithic, stagnant scientific methodology.

[7Wannabe5]

@Jason:

You are the one who started the discussion from the premise that an individual has to choose (1) Theism, Pantheism or Atheism. I do believe that the world self emanated out of chaos, but also that our consciousness constructs the concept of chaos from which our consciousness which emanates from biological structure was constructed, and also that our consciousness constructs the concept of God. None of this is mutually exclusive except within the confines of your rather rigid rule-of-thumb which seems to me to be inherently more humanist than theist.

IOW, all I am getting from what you are writing is that you have read a hell of a lot more philosophy than hard science , because otherwise you would get that arguing about evolution vs. creationism these-a-days is like arguing about how your refrigerator works on the level of "Jack Frost comes and visits it at night" " vs. PV = nRT. It's like you don't even understand what evolution means, and you don't get that it is still happening around you every day. For instance, you don't know that there are species of birds that have adapted their beaks in the region of Britain in order to benefit from the activities of human hobbyist bird-feeders, and you don't understand why you have to get a new flu vaccine this year, etc. etc. etc.

Also, the fact that the concept of radical paradigm shift is well-accepted within the scientific community can only serve as proof that scientists are generally willing to be proven wrong.

[7Wannabe5]

@Jason: I apologize if the above came off as a personal attack. I respect your intelligence. What I am attempting to communicate is like when I wanted to make the argument to Jacob that the answer to the puzzle 8*3-6/4+7 wouldn't immediately be apparent to Pythagoras.

What I mean when I describe myself as a neo-Pantheist is that I center myself in the belief that there is an irreconcilable difference between open living/growing systems and closed systems. Therefore, the plausibility of the heat death of the universe does not speak to the purpose of my life, and the purpose of my life does not speak to the plausibility of God.

[jacob]

in the very least, it seems that widespread atheism is no guarantee for ethical behavior. perhaps religion and ethics are simply unrelated, as suggested by chenda.

China is the other big outlier on the religiosity~GDP curve. Given the low amount of "pie on the ground" in China, the correlation predicts that there should be more "pie in the sky"(*), but that's not the case. Possible explanation: Two thousand years of Confucianism runs very deep in the culture and its ethical system is mainly based on a system w/o an all powerful being.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucianism#Ethics (see, no gods here)

(*) Given the 1/x shape of the curve, it's almost like the level of pie to consider is constant for all humans and only the form matters. In general, anyway ...

of the problems in US society today, brute would say that on average, atheists have more overlap with those who brute finds acting inappropriately. maybe it's simply because faithful humans are in the minority and mostly not in power (at least socially/in the media, where many of these battles are fought today), therefore making it harder to abuse their (non-existent) power.

This! I have a somewhat unique perspective on this having lived 13 years in the US and 24 in Denmark, which are respectively in the top 3 and bottom 3 of religiosity for rich developed countries w/o trench warfare (at least within their own borders).

In either case, the public figures on the minority side come across as a bunch of crazies to the majority---while of course simultaneously "making a lot of sense" to the minority. Non-public people on the minority side range from expressing their "orientation" in a flamboyant/obnoxious way or to going about it quietly. This behavioral dynamics is to be expected when one side completely dominates the culture. Also note that neither country actively persecutes religious minorities.---Well, both countries (or individuals therein) are showing an increasing desire to persecute Muslim minorities within the past 10-20 years, but that's a different issue.

Overall, there are so few in the minority, that one is unlikely to know more than a handful. In my cumulative life experience, I know/have known exactly two (TWO!) seriously practicing Danish Christians. And by "seriously practicing" I mean people who pray, say grace and mean it, and go to church on Sundays. One was a classmate and a good friend of mine in HS. I ran into him on years later and he had become a priest---in retrospect there were certain things about him/his interests that made more sense, but I never put the pieces together before. The other was also a classmate who was a professed Christian and more than happy to let everybody else know about it too. I recall at one point she informed the class that she was praying for guidance on whether she should get a boyfriend. Everybody was weirded out and the teacher was fishing for more detail to figure out whether maybe social services or maybe a psychologist needed to get involved to see if she was being abused in some kind weird cult.

Enter the US. When atheism has come up it's typically to imply/explain why a person would not only lacks moral character but also lacks any foundation for building one(*). "This guy is a pretty unsavory character. I also hear he's an atheist! *sneer*". As an exercise in how strong the effect is, consider the number of self-professed atheists in congress. IIRC, there's at least 1, but there might be a few more. Congress, essentially, being about legislating morality ... turning morality into laws... so saying you're an atheist if you're a politician tells most Americans that you're too crazy to do your job. Parallel to the practicing Christians in the Danish story, practicing American atheists either go about it quietly or they can be obnoxious or weird about it when interacting with other humans who are most likely not atheists. Insofar one is not part of a club that actively encourages seeking out the "other side" for either missionary or crusader work, I think obnoxious behavior fades with life experience. For example, when someone says they're praying for you, you learn not to take it as an attack on your beliefs or a starting point for a debate but in the spirit/sentiment it was offered.

(*) So, there's a tendency in both countries to view out of the norm behavior as crazy or heading towards insane along some dimension. In Denmark, that dimension is reason (of the secular humanist kind). In the US, the dimension is morality. In both cases, there's a failure to fully understand that the "other side" may be operating from an internally coherent world-view from another perspective... because it's so much easier to not bother and just declare it crazy from one's own perspective by singling out behaviors that appear odd from one's own. See, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

[7Wannabe5]

@jacob:

So, you agree that order of operations is arbitrary within Overton Window that is of adequate width to be inclusive of highly intelligent individuals familiar with varying number systems?

Anyways, I fully concede that I am lacking in tolerance if the definition of tolerance would necessitate neutrality in choice between getting my child vaccinated at the Creationist Science Clinic vs. some (any!) clinic in Denmark. However, that is not to say that I have not met some highly competent engineers who believed in the prophecies of Nostradamus, who I was happy to have as neighbors.

[BRUTE]

so (cultural) power corrupts. is it even possible for a culture to "win" and not become oppressive? or is the only solution not to let any one culture "win", ever?

[jacob]

@7wb5 - Not really. Coming from a scientific background, my ontological outlook is one of instrumentalism ... and by honestly looking at my behavior, I fall closer to Dewey than Popper.

Both agree on points 1/2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism ... And if you accept 1/2 as your "foundation", it's becomes impossible to simultaneously hold that all beliefs are just equally valid narratives based on one's cultural perspective. Some beliefs clearly achieve their ends with their means better. IOW, from that perspective evolution is handily a much better theory than creationism because it's more functional towards its ends. Insofar one insists that ends are different, then you're really comparing apples and oranges. But at least anyone doing so has surrendered the position that creationism is a science.

I see the disagreement between 3/4 as more of a practical issue. I bet it comes down to theoreticians vs experimentalists. Adopting Dewey for 3 makes it a lot more conducive to trying to understand new things. Adopting Popper for 4 makes it a lot easier to give up on bad theories. In practice, scientists do both at different times.

If you ultimately want to settle it, you need to have the argument on premises you can both agree on. So war it is! So maybe one team gets to build bronze-age weapons based on biblical specs; and the other team gets to use STEM based weaponry(*). It's non-contested who wins the fight on the surface of Planet Earth, but the former can claim they went to Heaven during the nuclear fireball... and that the latter didn't follow; and therefore that the former really won. So yeah ... ultimately, it comes down to the "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin"..

.. and it seems that finding the answer to that question is more of a want than a need from where I'm standing (here on Planet Earth with all the implications that has).

(*) We should all thank the gods that scientists haven't mastered gravity (beyond dropping heavy stuff on people's heads) as a means of destruction unlike the other three forces of nature.

PS: I have never run into any scientist who has pretended to care about these distinctions on a daily basis or even once in a lifetime. To most scientists, this is the water fish swim in. If anyone wants my copy of Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery (Rutledge) they can paypal me $5 and I'll mediamail it. (US only)

[7Wannabe5]

@jacob:

I never read Dewey, and I read Popper over 30 years ago. So, that likely informed my rather weak notion of how most scientists think. One of the natural roles or interests of the ENTP is promotion or popularization of the work of the dark-abyss-dwelling scientists and artists. We often hold generalist professions such as art gallery owner. We can't stay still or quiet long enough to work in laboratories or garrets, but we are rational enough to be able to quickly intuit the quality of the production of those who can. The problem is that there is often a very, very long period before the buying public can also be convinced of value. This is especially true of "black period" or "push against repulsion barrier" art and scientific theories or research that tend toward status threatening or gloomy conclusions for the human species.

Also, there is an inherent distrust of extreme reductionist procedure towards instrumentalism. For instance, the largest medical conglomeration in my region is named after William Beaumont. He was a frontier military doctor who over the course of many years performed ground-breaking experiments in the realm of human digestion on another man who was left alive with his guts literally exposed after being wounded in an explosion. The notion of human as lab rat, with parts more interesting than the whole, kind of skeeves most people out. Statistical analysis has similar/opposite problem due to denial of uniqueness and also well-earned reputation for deceitful misuse.

So, from the semi-conscious perspective of somebody who would like to be able to "sell" modern science on the general market, systems analysis seems to have a lot going for it, if it could be rendered comprehensible. I don't know if it is a positive or a negative that it "seems" to share a good deal of conceptual vocabulary with New Age Spirituality. One of the most interesting applications I have recently witnessed was when a master teacher of emotionally impaired children explained to a child that if he exhibited UNEXPECTED (not bad, not unacceptable) behavior in the lunch room, he might not like the results himself, and this 5 year old child exhibited that he understood what she meant. It was like lightbulb-going-off-brilliant IMO, and I immediately started applying the technique myself.

IOW, circling back around to Brute's question, "When in Rome..." is secular intelligent systems level analysis, but it need not reek of moral relativism because the definition of arbitrary boundary is clear. One can always choose the "higher ground" which is the phrase the embodied mind constructs to describe a perspective that is better informed, more inclusive, and fully aware that boundaries are arbitrary. IOW, whether you are in Rome, Vegas, Copenhagen, or Cement City, Michigan, you can choose to do your best to exhibit intelligent behavior that would not be unexpected or unwelcome within any of these boundaries. Super-hard, but not impossible.

[fiby41]

What Jason is trying to say may be more directly applicable to economics than any other exact science
Macroeconomics: Religion Or Science?

[BRUTE]

economics is just harder than physics or chemistry. no need to bash it.

[Riggerjack]

@7w5
Wait. I want hear hear more about this UNEXPECTED Revelation. Details, please.

[7Wannabe5]

@Riggerjack:

Bear in mind that I am not anything resembling competent in either of these realms. I have been reading a number of books meant for layperson on the topic of systems theory recently, and my part-time-job-which-is-what-I-would-do-as-volunteer-work has recently found me working one-on-one with a variety of special needs children.

Systems analysis is the newbie scientific method for approaching problems that are too complex for simple analysis, but too small or unique for statistical analysis. Sociology is a very squishy soft branch of science, even squishier than economics, because you can't very well replicate human social cultures in a laboratory. So, it was one of the first realms in which systems analysis gained popularity; even though systems analysis, like statistical analysis and simple analysis, is a method or model applicable across all fields. The problem of educating an emotionally impaired child is addressed by the fields of psychiatry, psychology, education and social work. Social work can be seen as the application of the science of sociology.

Emotions can be defined as biochemical states within your physiological structure. Feelings can be defined as your conscious realization of your emotional state. For instance, an uncomfortable biochemical state emerges and THEN you know you are angry. The emotionally impaired 5 year old I was working with was a cute little monster who would do things like jump out of his chair, yell and throw things around, and with a grin on his face announce/narrate his own out-of-control behavior, "I am being bad! I am throwing these scissors! I am ripping this paper!" I had to stop myself from laughing sometimes. A 2 or 3 year old throwing the occasional major temper tantrum is a very normal occurrence. A 5 or 6 year old who is still throwing major temper tantrums on a daily basis would be judged to be relatively emotionally impaired. However, this is obviously a problem that can be greatly exacerbated by social influences. For instance, if the child was being raised in a household in which an adult exhibited such behavior on a regular basis, the child would obviously be likely to mimic.

So, you can guide a child exhibiting these sorts of problematic behaviors through a very basic analysis. How were you feeling when you threw the scissors? What other things to you sometimes do when you feel angry? What do other people sometimes do when you throw scissors and yell? Why do you think they do those things? What do you see the other children doing in the lunchroom? Do you know what a surprise is? Do you think it would be a surprise to the other children if you threw your lunchbox? IOW, you can facilitate the child's own ability to name his emotional states and choose his behavior, AKA self-organize. Human beings can't control their own emotional states except at level of 2nd degree rational behavior, and that is a bit much to expect from a possibly neurologically damaged child from a disadvantaged background. Self-organization, like clutter-control closet cleaning, can proceed forward from any first state.

Important note would be that this level of addressing such a problem was only possible due to high level of accumulated and incoming resources in the school and the community in which the school was located. In an open social system that was already highly disorganized with low flow of resources/energy coming into the system, highly unlikely that such a child would be facilitated towards self-organization in such a manner. Triage towards tourniquet would apply.

[Lillailler]

It is not so much in my view, Atheisim vs belief in God which is the critical issue, it is more the collateral damage that has ensued when Christianity has been abandoned, Christianity having been not just one belief but a whole set of beliefs and behaviours which reach far into the culture.

There are a number of teachings of Christianity which provide support to our industrial civilisation (*), and to discard them is, perhaps, to put that civilisation in jeopardy.

Civilisation itself is not the realisation of a design, it is an emergent phenomenon, as is language, weather / climate, and indeed life itself. Since we don't understand what caused our industrial civilisation to develop, we don't know what we can change without risking the whole.

The modern monkey-tinkering urge to 'change everything right now' simply amplifies the risks. Any engineer will tell you to improve your system one element at a time, so you can tell what changes are helpful, and what are unhelpful, and so you can undo an improvement which turns out to make things worse.

It seems to me the 20th Century was marked by a series of 'improvements which made things worse', for example Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and Maoism, none of which were undone before catastrophe was reached (Socialism in Venezuela seems to be well down the same path even in the 21st Century). Many of us fortunately escaped the worst effects of these disasters, but civilisation will have to be very strong to withstand all the people working away, knowingly or unknowingly, to find the keys to its destruction.

(*) I think civilisation is reasonably safe with people who do not believe in God, but who do show behaviours such as 'love thy neighbour', 'be a good samaritan', 'welcome the prodigal son', 'turn the other cheek', 'honour the widows mite', 'cast out the beam in their own eye', 'render unto Ceasar', 'not cast the first stone', 'see the labourer as worthy of his hire', 'regard peacemakers as blessed', etc etc. I do not think it is safe in the hands of people who adhere to the maxim 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law', in other words, unconstrained Bandits.

[BRUTE]

There are a number of teachings of Christianity which provide support to our industrial civilisation (*), and to discard them is, perhaps, to put that civilisation in jeopardy.

'love thy neighbour', 'be a good samaritan', 'welcome the prodigal son', 'turn the other cheek', 'honour the widows mite', 'cast out the beam in their own eye', 'render unto Ceasar', 'not cast the first stone', 'see the labourer as worthy of his hire', 'regard peacemakers as blessed'

this is exactly what brute is talking about. it seems that a large percentage of humans in The West got their morals/ethics from a certain subset of Christianity, brute will call it Nice Christianity.

other cultures arrived at similar rules, sometimes through other religions (Judaism), sometimes through non-deistic religions (Buddhism, Confucianism), sometimes simply without any connection to faith at all (Scandinavian Humanism).

some humans advocate for religion or Christianity based on the "useful fiction" it provides. brute thinks he is unable to pretend to believe in a god when he doesn't, so he'd much rather join some kind of Humanist Cult.

interestingly to brute, Mormonism seems to be a pretty explicit attempt of building a Humanist Cult of Nice Christianity.

the cult dimension in this is interesting, too. Atheists tend to view humans as very rational and capable, therefore advocating for individual responsibility and some type of Enlightened Humanism, like what Dear Leader Jacob is describing in Denmark.

Mormonism seems to take a different view of humans: they are gullible, chaotic, but can be nudged in the "right" direction. to brute, Mormonism seems like a very simple and effective, barely disguised, attempt to rope gullible humans into doing The Right Thing.

Scientology is the Evil Cult, Christianity and many other major religions have too much crazy history to really make a call on their effective benefit/cost. but Mormonism seems just about as harmless as a cult can be, yet has all the advantages that Nice Christianity offers: work ethic, frugality, benevolence, forgiveness, family, community, health.

if one takes the somewhat pessimistic view of humanity that 75%+ are gullible, don't want to be enlightened, don't enjoy agency, and enjoy external rewards and rules, then maybe a benevolent cult like Mormonism is the best strategy, with Cynic Humanism for those humans that would rather Do The Right Thing without believing in god.

[suomalainen]

Funny. My take of Mormonism is more along the lines of old white guys in power using the fear of god to get people to 1) act the way the old white guys think they should and 2) more particularly, to pay them 10% of their income.

Mormons aren't harmless. Gay conversion therapy was a big thing. Racism was a big thing. Anti-feminism and anti-gays remains a big thing. The number of suicides they are responsible for is > 0.

- former mormon

[CS]

There was a high number of Mormon 'refugees' in my writing program. They all seemed a little shell shocked. Whatever else their experience was, it was also definitely traumatic.

[suomalainen]

I can attest to this as well. When I went to see Book of Mormon (the musical) with 3 other ex-Mormons, I laughed and clapped much louder than I “should” have. The reason for this is how cathartic laughing at it was. Authoritarian religions are abusive by (their human) nature, in my limited experience. My take of Catholics is the same from conversations with several Catholic friends. YMMV.

[BRUTE]

in all fairness, brute has 100% of his knowledge about Mormons from South Park.

[chenda]

This guy practiced 12 different religions in a year, one every month. http://projectconversion.com/blog/
He took it seriously and found merit in all of them (including Mormonism) before settling on Catholicism. Its a good and very honest read.