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Anyone else want to add to the list of things Kaki won’t ever question?
Take a deep breath my friend. The United States isn't in a state of perpetual tribal warfare
A day will come for believer of old, existing or brand new god of any type, to be dragged onto mental facility.
As an agnostic in terms of his religious commitments, in this excerpt Tom Holland nevertheless describes the way that the birth of Christianity has shaped much of what we value in Western society in terms of human rights, culture and rule of law.
No one can bring Atheist back to barn.
Perhaps you didn't get the memo...
Christianity has shaped much of what we value in Western society in terms of human rights, culture and rule of law.
The benefits of being an atheist are:
That is, even if Christianity itself isn't scientifically true, it does have the objective benefit ...
Churches in the USA are more like social clubs than cults.
Lightweight Christians
It's becoming a fashion to claim religions has benefits even if it's not true .
That is: let's all believe something we know is not true - i.e. we don't really believe - because of the side effects of such beliefs.
If this ever worked, imagine what believing in the real reasons to act in a beneficial way will do for you.
So far as we know, religion reconciling people to their existing social conditions and incentivize people to self-supervise, tends to be a far more effective tool for social stability than just about anything else.
do you need to believe in God so as to not want to rob your neighbor? That's a specious argument. Most atheists do believe in being part of a larger community (tribe), being good people and helping others. No state required.
HeadSet saysLightweight Christians
This Christianity you call lightweight is most of Christianity. Catholics, Lutheran, Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians and all the other protestant offshoots.
What are the heavyweights ? Mormons ? Christian Scientists ? Baptists ? Perhaps the Greek Orthodox ?
The individual incentives: do you need to believe in God so as to not want to rob your neighbor? That's a specious argument. Most atheists do believe in being part of a larger community (tribe), being good people and helping others. No state required.
How do you explain the less traditionally religious political Left's penchant for robbing their neighbors via "taxes"
Reality saysHow do you explain the less traditionally religious political Left's penchant for robbing their neighbors via "taxes"
How do you explain atheist libertarians?
There is a giant false dichotomy circling in the head of conservatives: if we lose religion, the statism will automatically take its place, probably in the form of soviet style collectivism.
How about no bullshit?
Altruistic punishment in humans by Ernst Fehr & Simon Gachter published in Nature.
Human cooperation is an evolutionary puzzle. Unlike other creatures, people frequently cooperate with genetically unrelated strangers, often in large groups, with people they will never meet again, and when reputation gains are small or absent. These patterns of cooperation cannot be explained by the nepotistic motives associated with the evolutionary theory of kin selection and the selfish motives associated with signalling theory or the theory of reciprocal altruism. Here we show experimentally that the altruistic punishment of defectors is a key motive for the explanation of cooperation. Altruistic punishment means that individuals punish, although the punishment is costly for them and yields no material gain. We show that cooperation flourishes if altruistic punishment is possible, and breaks down if it is ruled out. The evidence indicates that negative emotions towards defectors are the proximate mechanism behind altruistic punishment. These results suggest that future study of the evolution of human cooperation should include a strong focus on explaining altruistic punishment.
Reality saysHow do you explain the less traditionally religious political Left's penchant for robbing their neighbors via "taxes"
How do you explain atheist libertarians?
There is a giant false dichotomy circling in the head of conservatives: if we lose religion, the statism will automatically take its place, probably in the form of soviet style collectivism.
How about no bullshit?
The deeper reality is that most people have no qualms about robbing their neighbors when necessary and can get away with it.
how do you explain the less traditionally religious political Left's penchant for robbing their neighbors via 'taxes' and transfers to themselves
It's not a false dichotomy but a valid expectation born out of numerous historical experience and precedence. French Revolution, Russian Revolution, Chinese Revolution, Cambodian Revolution, etc. etc. were all militantly atheistic and quickly turned into personality cults built around the living political leaders.
The most important reason for the flourishing of West was political fragmentation
most likely banned outright in a big unified political entity that give priority to preserving existing political/economic interests while facing no competitive pressure from the outside
Where did a "big unified political entity" faced no competitive pressure from the outside?
China maybe? This is why they stagnated so long.
Not the West where many smaller countries were always competing against each others.
As time passed, power was increasingly concentrated. You had city states, then in nation states, then united states.
What made civilization possible was the progressive lifting of the carcan of obscurantism brought on by the church, seeking to maintain its power. This resulted first in the renaissance. And from there science and technology progressed to the point where new industries were possible. We know the hiccups: Galileo and others.
Reality sayshow do you explain the less traditionally religious political Left's penchant for robbing their neighbors via 'taxes' and transfers to themselves
I can look around in the BA and many wealthy people are in favor of this. Robbing themselves, not exactly to their benefits. Why? Because they truly have pity and compassion for the poor. However you call it "robbing", you can't escape the fact that the left at least partially acts out of compassion.
Reality saysThe deeper reality is that most people have no qualms about robbing their neighbors when necessary and can get away with it.
That's a very depressing view of humanity that quite obviously doesn't match reality. People in times of need are very often helping others in their community. Why? Because human beings have empathy for others. They have compassion. And most do believe in an orderly community, and where they expect to be respected they understand they have to provide the same respect for others.
We already established in previous discussions that you are confused regarding the ideological anchors of the French revolution.
It was certainly not based on personality cults.
No one can bring Atheist back to barn. But can make them pretended believer with discrimination etc.
In US about 26% are out of barn, this number is about 40% for young and its growing. This will make a great country. A day will come for believer of old, existing or brand new god of any type, to be dragged onto mental facility.
Every society, every single one, has had some sort of deity or religious belief. This is a natural evolutionary trait of the human species. When it is removed, it's FORCIBLY removed, and so far, it's never been an improvement. People instead of looking for a deity, are then programmed to view the government as a god.
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On ego
"How much vanity must be concealed—not too effectively at that—in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?" — Christopher Hitchens, God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
Here comes logic
"Monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: To argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe—and He's evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief." — Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
The difference is often language
"In America, belief in the unreal seems to be very fungible. Individuals don't so much abandon religious fantasy in favor of reason as find different fantasies that better suit their particular excitement and credulity quotients." — Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire
A Buddhist approach
"Mindfulness accepts as its focus of inquiry whatever arises in one's field of awareness, no matter how disturbing or painful it might be. One neither seeks nor expects to find some greater truth lurking behind the veil of appearances. What appears and how you respond to it: that alone is what matters." — Stephen Batchelor, Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist
Enter Darwin
"Comprehension, far from being a Godlike talent from which all design must flow, is an emergent effect of systems of uncomprehending competence: natural selection on the one hand, and mindless computation on the other." — Daniel Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds
The physical can be spiritual
"Evolution simply happened—foresightless, by chance, without goal. There is nobody to despise or rebel against—not even ourselves. And this is not some bizarre form of neurophilosophical nihilism but rather a point of intellectual honesty and great spiritual depth." — Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self
Superego
"Supernatural thinking is simply the natural consequence of failing to match our intuitions with the true reality of the world." — Bruce M. Hood, The Science of Superstition: How the Developing Brain Creates Supernatural Beliefs
Out of body is still in the body
"Out-of-body flight "really happens," then—it is a real physical event, but only in the patient's brain and, as a result, in his subjective experience. The out-of-body state is, by and large, an exacerbated form of the dizziness that we all experience when our vision disagrees with our vestibular system, as on a rocking boat." — Stanislas Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts
Randomness produces beautiful (or efficient) results
"If you let something tumble long enough, it comes out almost perfect. Such is the power of random collisions and patience, and that constitutes the sum total of nature's intelligence. All the rough edges, the flaws, the things that don't work are systematically dispatched by natural selection. What remains and carries on into the next generation and the next after that and so on are the advantageous aspects, what does work what makes survival easier. And survival is the fuel of natural selection." — Rodolfo R. Llinas, I of the vortex: From Neurons to Self
"Everything happens for a reason"
"A long line of research in cognitive science has documented that people make causal attributions about events as a means of maintaining personal control. It is the feeling that things are spinning out of control that motivates the human brain to find a pattern in events and try to predict what is going to happen next. The left-brain interpreter thus will be activated whenever the individual senses a lack of control. Superstitions and conspiracy theories can be seen as the societal consequences of the interpreter's drive to find a causal explanation for events that are seemingly out of control." — Ronald T. Kellogg, The Making of the Mind: The Nueroscience of Human Nature
https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/10-atheist-quotes-that-make-you-question-religion?rebelltitem=3#rebelltitem3
#Religion #Beliefs