ways to indoctrinate our children
That certainly does explain my atheist parents! Actually, their indoctrination was based on knee jerk emotionalism, politics, and personal wounds and rebellion from their own past.
I can hear the same anger and hostility right here in this thread, it echos back to those days of indoctrination and you better believe your kids will sense it and come to know it well. It’s really an unpleasant form of psychological abuse. A child raised to believe they are being encouraged to think freely when they are clearly getting the message that to believe differently from their own parents is delusional, illogical, irrational, will at times come to doubt the very nature of reality itself. (Insanitybytes)
I think it’s obvious that any person from any background, faith or culture can place uncomfortable psychological burdens on their children, in an attempt to force them to do and think as they are told. There are harmful parenting approaches that both religious and atheist parents can be guilty of.
Let’s look at a few:
- threats: making it clear that if the parental line on some kind of belief is not followed, there will be negative consequences, including punishment, disapproval, mocking or even shunning
- quashing diversity: teaching the idea ‘we’ have all the answers, there is one correct way to live, and those not living in our manner are wrong/foolish/evil
- promoting ignorance/categorically denying human knowledge: teaching acceptance of stories that fly in the face of current scientific understanding and historical evidence about the world e.g. creation stories, worldwide floods, ghosts, curses etc
However, religion (and Christianity specifically) has additional ways of reinforcing adherence from children, ways that families with no particular faith cannot replicate.
Let’s look at a few:
- rituals: ensuring at least weekly attendance at formalised group rituals that present the religious belief as fact and involve repetitive chanting or singing on key messages
- regular teaching: ensuring frequent lessons on the correct things to believe and a correct way to behave
- daily home mentions: reinforcing rituals and teaching with daily prayers and discussions to and about the god
- invisible threats: if the god is not followed, there will be negative consequences ranging from the god being disappointed and sad, to the god tormenting you (the level of cotton wool wrapping varies from church to church, but the threat is ubiquitous)
While we all to some extent will present our own point of view on life at the expense of other outlooks, it seem clear that religious parents have more of a tendency to employ the first set of indoctrination techniques, while having a whole section of additional indoctrination techniques at their disposal.
Christians are keen to suggest that atheist parents indoctrinate their children in the same manner. But even the most blinkered, preachy atheist parents can’t resort to the reinforcing ritualistic, daily brainwashing wrapped up in invisible threats that Christianity most assuredly relies on.
Remember this meme for ages and ages ago?
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It is very hard to evaluate wether oneself was indoctrinated, or not, by one’s own parents. I was raised in an all atheist family. My parents were very keen on encouraging me to learn critical thinking skills, educate myself and to keep an open mind to differnet views. Just as an example, my dad put me to religion classes in school, even though as a non-believer I could have been exempted from those. He told me, I should learn what the religious people teach about their religion, so that my view on it would not be limited on what my parents tell me about religions and that I would learn to appriciate the motives of others. I was, and still am, somewhat fascinated by the subject. It was a totally new world of fiction to me. Actual adults who seriously believed in a particular group of obvious fairytales, though in other issues they seem perfectly rational! It was also an eyeopener as to how not all authorities are reliable, because they might be wrong about a number of things, especially when they actively autosuggest themselves in believing in stuff they would prefer even without any good evidence to back it up.
Over all I would say, I was never indoctrinated. Naturally, I have assumed some of my parents views and values. Of course their views have influenced me. Yet, most of the things we agree upon are not stuff, that I believe because I learned it from them, but more like stuff we have come to the same, or at least similar conclusions from the same or different reasons for. Our views resemble each other, because we have pretty much the same skills to evaluate reality and those I have learned initially from them. I guess, this is pretty much the same for most religious people too, though their skills in evaluating the truth value of particular religious stories seems somewhat impeded…
However, my values also differ in some very big issues from those of my parents. For example, when I joined the army, my mother a devout pacifist cried, but she accepted my choise when I told her, I did not share her core values on the issue. That did not change our relationship in any way, even though it was a big thing for the both of us.
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I read that comment on the last thread, Violet. Oh, my. You did an excellent job of debunking her assertions.
IB might want to read this article on Libby Anne’s blog; she’s one of my favourites; a formerly home-schooled young woman whose perspective is enlightening.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2015/09/my-atheist-daughter-and-her-evangelical-grandmother.html
She very much reminds me of the young(er) people in my life who are bringing up their children in secular homes; it’s heartwarming to see and experience.
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“But even the most blinkered, preachy atheist parents can’t resort to the But even the most blinkered, preachy atheist parents can’t resort to the reinforcing ritualistic, daily brainwashing wrapped up in invisible threats that Christianity most assuredly relies on.
I assure you they can, Violet. I grew up within atheism and it was precisely that, “reinforced ritualistic, daily brainwashing wrapped up in invisible threats, ” and many not so invisible threats. However, If it makes you feel better to deny the existence of such things, I suppose I should just leave you to it.
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@Insanitybytes22, I find this curious. What sort of daily brainwashing and especially what sort of ritualistic reinforcing and daily threats exactly were you subjected to? It would be very hard for me as an atheist even to come up with such from my atheistic viewpoint and I think, that the same lack of imagination – so to speak – in this matter is propably why Violetwisp has assumed what she wrote, not so much as to simply “feel better” about herself… Help us in our ignorance to learn and understand your position and personal experience.
I am sorry if this gets too personal, or if you find it hard to tell about such traumas in this public arena, but it might actually help others in the future to avoid subjecting their kids to anything similar, those who might have experienced something similar to come to terms with their traumas, and me who has not experienced anything like that, having been born in a thoroughly atheist family, to understand you.
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Websters: to teach (someone) to fully accept the ideas, opinions, and beliefs of a particular group and to not consider other ideas, opinions, and beliefs.
I think the key part of the definition of indoctrination is not allowing your kids the freedom to consider other ideas (and punishing them when they do.) A good parent, religious or non-religious, should strive to teach children “how” to think, not exactly “what” to think on certain topics. That will serve them better in the long run.
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I’m still curious about this “ritual as indoctrination” trope. Any religious ritual is primarily about worshiping the divinity, because that is what divinities deserve. Ritual does do a certain amount of education: there are quite a few metaphysical implications of, say, a birthday party that people unconsciously imbibe, but you don’t celebrate birthdays in order to convince someone of their ontological goodness, or break them of the belief that birth is an unfortunate event in the wheel of Karma. It is also possible for ritual to lose all relation to doctrine, or to change its significance over time. Passover was likely a lambing festival that became conflated with memories of the Exodous over time.
Classical Greco-Roman religion had no orthodoxy, but it did have strict traditions of orthopraxy. The ritual had to be preformed a certain way: sacrifice a goat of such and such a color on such and such a day, in such a manner etc; but there was no particular doctrine about the god to whom the sacrifice was offered. What then is the “indoctrination”?
The pattern of Jewish worship was similar but monotheism is a different category of religion: paganism is about archetypal myths from the nebulous time before time, monotheism claims that God is real, active, and talking to you. Pagan ritual tries to conform human life to the mythic ideal, but Jewish ritual was about remembrance – commemorating the deeds of God. So there is the educational aspect: it is implied that there is a certain responsibility on the part of the human community preforming the ritual (if God has done such things for us, we should behave in a certain manner), but that does not make any sense without the primary purpose of worship, honoring the god or remembering the deeds of Yahweh.
What this apologetic trope is trying to accomplish is ignore the real intentions and experiences of the worshipers, focus on a secondary aspect and say that is the “real” sneaky intention. A cute trick, really. Nietzsche was good at that sort of argument and he is always a hoot, but in the end you are not talking about what people actually experience.
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@Dpmonahan, I agree with you, that the passover was originally most likely a seasonal ritual. That is indeed the source of most regular rituals. All the divinities and other superstitious elements seem like to be reinforced ideas through their “remembrance” in rituals, that would take place anyway. Sometimes even long after the actual “reason for the season” – being the particular seasonal marking point in various livelihoods – has been forgotten, the superstition may well carry on, even if it was only a later cultural addition to the date. A bit like Christmass, just for an example. Does that not in itself implicate a certain level of indoctrination as part of the rituals? A reinforcement in a belief about an entity alledgedly outside time-space, that does not seem to appear anywhere?
Insanitybytes22 has clearly been too busy elswhere as to give an answer to my question what the ritualistic indoctrination her atheist parents subjected her to actually was, but clearly she is convinced, that ritualistic indoctrination does happen. Do you disagree with her?
I have to admit, I see very little, if any, difference in particularly Jewish ritual thinking and a good number of polytheistic ritualistic thinking. With all honesty, Christianity seems like a bit of a mix of these. This is only expectable, when we look at, the history and origins of the movement. Naturally it also has it’s own traits, like all human cultural endeavours. For it’s validity, the traits where it resembles other cultural movements is more important, than where it differs, because the differences are rather minor in comparrison to the similarities, and as with all mythologies, the differences are unprovable, while the similarities are rather mundane.
No doubt that part of the success story of Christianity has been the emphasis on orthodoxy over orthopraxy, because in a sense it leaves people free to act as they please as long as they can tell themselves they do believe right.
Why do the divinities require reverence, worship or even remembrance, is a nother question. It would seem though, like rituals have an in common purpose for people not forgetting any of their gods.
Perhaps you are right and the ritual itself is not in itself in any way dangerous, but the danger lies in, what is being reinfocred in the minds of especially the woulnerable kids through the ritual. As you say, all sorts of rituals are typical to most cultures, but are they indeed always harmless, like it seems with birthday parties?
I have always thought that the idea of birhtdayparties is to ritualistically reinforce the value of the celebrated individual, of their intristic value their family and friends give to them. That is not harmless as such, but it does have a darker side to it, in that if a person suffers from loniliness, and this ritual is missing from their lives, as they have grown to expect it, they might loose their view of their own value, even subconsciously by the lack of the ritual, and it may have a deepening effect on their predicament, in the sense that they may find it ever more harder to go out and find friendship, or even in the sense, that it might be one among many reasons to cause depression. On that note, I do not think we should stop having birthday parties, rather I think we as a society should be more adept at taking a catch when a person is falling into this trap…
If however, ritualistic behaviour makes people more sucseptible to certain kinds of ideas, then one ritual may cause people to be more inclined to accept a certain kind of view on the likelyhood of any supernatural entities and as such make the conversion work easier for the representative of any other religion. On the other hand ritualistic behaviour may also make people more inclined to accept only a particular kind of supernatural suggestion, wich might make the introducing the particular “right” religion to them harder. Wich do you think might have more effect on people? Having been born and raised in an atheistic family, all claims about the divine have always seemed absurd to me, as they all mostly resemble fairy tales and ancient myths from times when people were indeed very ignorant about a great many things, though they may have had much more accurate information about some traits of their lives, now lost to us.
There are also more subtle ways of indoctrination, that may cause people to be more supceptible to certain kinds of ideas. Like authoritarianistic social values, that make people often rather easily persuasible by any presentation of authority or even lies masquerading as such, or alternatively anti-authoritarianistic when people suspect all authority, but do not have the tools to evaluate the validity of any authority. Or do you think, am I including stuff that is not strictly speaking indoctrination, to the discussion?
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Let us try to keep things pithy this time:
What does the person engaging in a religious ritual intend to do? What is his mental state? Is his goal to indoctrinate himself and others, or to honor the divinity?
What you are all doing is ignoring the real person and community, the actual phenomena, and retreating to a hermenutic of suspicion.
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@Dpmonahan, fair enough. Let us try to keep things, as you put it pithy. Though, you might find me terribly bad at this game. 😉
Do you honestly think, that the intent of the action defines the end results of the action?
Is there no doubt in your mind, that a particular ritualistic social function might serve as indoctrinating, regardless wether if the participants only view it as a form of reverence to their culturally relevant deities?
Is the meaning of such reverence, or “honouring” of the particular deities never even meant as a reinforcing mechanism of the blind faith, to these deities? You must admit, that some reinforcing is most likely required for people to hold on to their faith, regardless wether if their reverence is to divinities, of whose existance there are no doubts, like the sun, or if they are immaterial yet alledgedly always present entities, for wich there is no objective evidence of existance.
Many a believer have suggested to me as a non-believer auto-suggestion (though they rarely use that word) as a means to find their gods. Is ritualistic honouring of gods not ever supposed to be a form of auto-suggestion to reinforce baseless beliefs?
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The intention does not create the results, but yes, the intent does define the act. I would think this is obvious: I act as I intend, though the effects might not always come out as I want. If I intend to sacrifice a bull to Zeus, I am sacrificing a bull to Zeus. My intent is to honor Zeus and enter communion with him and my friends at the subsequent barbecue, not to fool myself and my friends into thinking something we would not think otherwise.
Any action we do has a formative aspect: if I help an old lady across the street I become a better person; if I push her into traffic I become a worse person. But the immediate goal of either action is not to be a good or bad person, but to help or hurt someone. The intention is primary, the effect on me as the doer is secondary.
The fact that I preform many good acts, and become habituated to act, think and feel as a good person, does not make me “indoctrinated”. Likewise if I preform many evil acts, and become an evil person, I’m not “indoctrinated”.
Now, it may happen that someone, somewhere, has devised a ritual with the purpose of lowering his followers’ capacity for critical thought; I’m sure if we thought hard enough we could find examples. Sometimes people fake virtue for evil ends. But that would be an exceptional thing, I’m talking about the straightforward meaning of an action, not an abused version of it.
Lastly, I would think that someone who “autosuggests” himself into belief already believes, but feels like his emotions are inadequate. Why else would one attempt something silly like that?
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@Dpmonahan, I did not ask wether if intent defines the act, but wether if it defines the end results of any action. You replied yes, so we are in agreement about that. Hence, could it not be possible – just possible – that religious ritual regardless of the conscious intent of the act itself, served as a form of indoctrination?
It is a very strong reinforcement for a belief in something as untangible as a god to exist, that this god is regularly worshipped, honoured, or sacrificed to, even though the act itself obviously is a result of already held beliefs. Such rituals often become part of the very identity of the people engaged in such from their impressionable early age. In addition to that, any rituals are often cultural cutoms, that are repeated without second thought to their actual usefullness, or wether if for example, there is any evidence, that these gods require, or expect any sort of rituals. Not to mention wether if these gods actuall even exist. Are they not?
Merriam-Webster dictionary gives this example of indoctrination: “The goal should be to teach politics, rather than to indoctrinate students in a narrow set of political beliefs.” Is it not then, in this light, actually evident, that cultural indoctrination into beliefs about any particular divinities are reinforced, either purposefully, or inadvertently, through the rigours of coded (sometimes even dogmatic) ritualistic repetition of recognition for the existance of any particular gods, that themselves can hardly be otherwise called self evident? Or can they? Is it not also obvious, that such repetition of rituals is used as a means to both be a mechanism to auto-suggest adult participants and to indoctrinate children into taking any particular culturally relevant gods at face value, again wether it is by conscious, or through disingenious, yet functioning social mechanisms?
Religious beliefs in all religions are held by religious faith, that is blind faith. By far most religious people do not believe in any particular gods because of some clever arguments, or because of actual verifiable data and evidence about these entities, but because they are expected to believe in a particular suggestion taken at face value in their personally respective cultural heritage. (Besides, it all comes back to blind faith in the end anyhow, because there is no verifiable evidence of any kind. Or is there?) Such beliefs do need some form of reinforcement, and wether if the person themselves feels only to act on the “knowledge” that their god is in need of a bit of honouring, or what ever, the ritual is still there to reinforce the beliefs of the individual, and to teach the religious faith to the next generation.
You could just as well just have the barbecue and have a social event with all the benefits, without the blind religious faith, that Zeus was somehow part of the ritualisitic event. Right?
If one allready has firmly held beliefs, that they feel they have every good reason to hold onto, then why would they need any reinforcement, or auto-suggestion to add to that? I do not need a ritual, or any other form of auto-suggestion to confirm me, that gravity works, or that evolution does happen. I think the auto-suggestion comes to play, when a person is not so sure, but has a need to believe even against any odds, or evidence. But what should it tell me about the beliefs of the religious people who have told me to use some form of (often ritualistic) auto-suggestion to find blind religious faith in their particular suggestions about divinities?
I think, there are repeated acts, that people engage in, wich may provide people with a sense of social security net, that could sometimes also be called rituals, and that have a habit of becoming inculturation (as you so well put it). They could also cause a form of indoctrination, especially if this culture of repetition is to reinforce beliefs in matters, that otherwise hold so poor ground in reality, that they are not supported by any even remotely objective evidence, and infact to counter that weakness, dogmatically demand both religious blind faith and often even the social recognition of that faith. Yet, I do not think that such indoctrination is always intended as such, any more than mere inculturation is always purposefull, or even that they are intended to provide for the percieved social security net (though that may infact be a big reason, both consciously and inadvertently for people to participate). Rather, that such are often the results of social evolution. Because in it, like in the rest of the nature, things that promote themselves, or merely fit into their environment, survive and evolve better at surviving in the relevant conditions from generation to generation.
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“If one allready has firmly held beliefs, that they feel they have every good reason to hold onto, then why would they need any reinforcement, or auto-suggestion to add to that?”
That is exactly it. They preform the ritual not because they need reinforcement, but because they believe it is a good and proper thing to do. The ritual grows out of the world view, not vice versa.
You attempt to draw a distinction between the education and indoctrination with the example of students learning about politics. Now, let us imagine an Athenian in the 4th century BC learning about different forms of government: he studies the Persian, the Spartan, the Theban, the Egyptian, etc. But all while doing that should he cease to participate in Athenian civil life? Should he refuse to go to the Agora, or gymnasium? Should he not vote? Not serve as a hoplite, attend the theater or learn Homer or do any of the innumerable rituals and acts that make him culturally Greek and Athenian for fear of losing objectivity? And what kind of objectivity would he be achieving by doing that? A real one, or just swapping one set of cultural presuppositions for another, much poorer set?
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@Dpmonahan, yes indeed. However, for some reason a good number of Athenian youths in that time frame found the simplicity of the Spartan social model and military prowess it resulted in highly more admirable than the Athenian political model ( they grew long hairs even to imitate and “honour” Spartan male fashion). They were, of course, scorned for their position by older Athenian dudes. There is no question wether if these young men were inculturated to think the Athenian model was the best one, yet they could choose to vision something else as even better. Wether it was, or not is a nother matter…
But there is a clear distinction between gods and social models. Though people often – and understandably – confuse social models and religions, the gods are rather elusive in comparrison are they not? Going to Gymnasium had direct and irrefutable effect on their lives, while as offering sacrifices, praying, or otherwise paying homage to gods is not quite as effective. Is it? One has to take on blind religious faith, that Zeus grants his blessings as a trade off for what ever the expected method to honour him might be. Correct?
Hence, such honouring might in itself be a method to auto-suggest oneself and to indoctrinate the impressionable kids in to believe one has the support of Zeus. Or do you think praying to Zeus or otherwise honouring him might have some direct results as in him actually acting on behalf of the adherent?
Nobody said indoctrination is about lying. Any indoctrination is most often done in the most sincere faith, that what is taught, is indeed correct. The question is wether the method of teaching reveals, that people are not taught how to think critically and analyze the subject, but what to think. In case of ritualistic thinking it is most often very precise and rigorous, what is expected of the participant. In fact it is hard to find a more indoctrinating method of teaching culturally relative values and unsubstantiated claims, than participation in repetitious religious ritual. Repetition of religious ritual of giving homage to a particular god, is not about how to approach the suggestions of gods in general (like in your analogy of Athenian view on politics), but in effect about creating a confirmation of the existance of the otherwise unsubstantiated divinity, be it Zeus, or Jesus.
Neither of these deities are in any more in need to be honoured, than the person honouring them has any real need to honour these, though they may have a percieved need to do so as a result of childhood indoctrination into relying on invisible forces on their side. Yet, the effects of such honouring are exactly zilch, exept that they do confirm the belief in the divinities.
Truths do not need “honouring” or other rituals. You do not “honour” gravity, or mathematics. But, elusive and unverifiable stories seem to need a lot of that to make people believe in them. What would you think would happen to any gods, if their ritualistic “honouring” would end?
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Not sure what you are driving at with the example of Athenians growing long hair. I don’t see quite how it relates to my assertion.
You assert the difference between culture-politics and religion is that the object of one exists and the object of the other does not, rendering the rites of the former education, and the rites of the later indoctrination.
But there are all kinds of unproven and unprovable metaphysical presuppositions of a given culture: that all men are equal, that rights exist, that we ought not let untouchables starve in the streets, etc, so I’m not sure how the distinction stands.
You assert the god has no effect, but that is not true. Earlier you asked what the point of an ancient sacrifice was if you could have the barbecue without the ritual. But there is a huge difference between a mere barbecue and a sacrificial meal. The former is just friends getting together, the latter is an attempt to conform the temporal world to the eternal cosmic ideal: men and gods-the guardians of cosmic and social order- in communion. The community created among men in the sacrifice is a very different sort than people just getting together to satisfy hunger through the division of labor. The social significance is different and the sacrifice and meal become something foundational to the community. The men gather to honor the god and in so doing create a a certain kind of community. So without asking a metaphysical question, on a social level “Zeus” is as real as “human rights”.
As for why people feel a need to sacrifice a bull to Zeus and not to gravity: no one imagines gravity is a person. Pagan religion does not have the same sort of intensely personal divinities as monotheistic religions tend to have, paganism usually ends up becoming pantheism, but the gods are thought to be personal in some way.
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@Dpmonahan, agreed, that a ritual is a method of forming a community. But the “metaphysical” assumption that Zeus is needed to seal that union between the participants of a barbeque is bogus. Is it not? The fact, that religious communities have their own distinctive characteristics in comparrison to other human communities, is no excuse for their need. That need for religious ritual is often formed through indoctrination into religious rites in impressionable age. It also serves as a reinforcing into the belief of the existance of the subject of the “honouring” does it not? Is it then not a form of indoctrination?
Using such authorative imaginary characters, as Zeus, for ritualistic purposes, may grant some emotional satisfaction to the participants, who most likely have first been indoctrinated into having a need for such outside support, though often in exchange for a leverage for a clever demagogue to weild political power within the group. No support ever comes from Zeus in real life, but the rites confirm people of the justification into the blind religious faith of the existance of Zeus, and/or what ever divinity, and excuses them to believe, that what ever happenstance, or even human action supports them in in their hour of need, they may freely and without the slightest shred of evidence, attribute to Zeus/any other gods. Correct? However, for a social community to form around a barbeque, no supernatural – or anything else unnatural – needs to be assumed. Yet, such assumptions may smuggle into the community all sorts of problems and indeed the ritual may serve as indoctrination into the commonly recognized religious blind faith, that Zeus exists. Right?
Human rights, equality of humans, or that we should not let anyone starve on the streets, or anywhere, are not some metaphysical assumptions. These are very real choises of human behaviour, that have a direct effect on the verifiable material reality and the wellbeing of all of us humans socially. While praying to, or “honouring” any deities have absolutely no bearing on the reality, much other than in indoctrinating people into taking such deities at face value and thus granting political power to individuals who dare speak as the representatives of these deities.
We have no method of verifying any personal, or other sorts of gods to exist, and thus we are rendered without any rational excuse to assume or warrant a belief that such exist, are in need of honouring, or anything of the kind.
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I’m shocked at your lack of empathy. Why is it so hard to place yourself in the position of a Homeric Greek rendering honors to Zeus without this suspicion that it is all really an underhanded political plot?
The key metaphysical concept in old Greek religion was that the cosmos is an ordered place. It is what is evoked in the sacrifices. In the sacrifice you are ordering the human world according to the eternal and cosmic orders. That conviction was essential to Greek culture, and essential to Western Civilization. It is not inconsequential, it is foundational.
If a human right is not a metaphysical concept, please tell me where I can see one. Do I need a microscope?
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@Dpmonahan, oh, it seems you got me somehow wrong. Naturally I can set myself in the position of an ignorant person acting in good faith. I do this regularly. It is one of my hobbies, as my gravatar might reveal. However, knowing what I know, I am still aware of the ritualistic repetition of recognizing the existance of gods, that are not themselves observable, inherent to all religious movements, virtually as indoctrination. To be honest, I would like to think, I could have recognized it as indoctrination even as a member of their society and culture. From your example I now realize, that there seems to be some psychological barriers for accepting ritualistic indoctrination as what it is, when one shares the cultural heritage of paying homage to imaginary deities. Still, I am a bit surprized how strongly it affects, for example you to have this need for denial. After all, we are talking about the worship of Zeus, and you hardly share a heritage, that takes Zeus at face value. Is it just, that if you would recognize the worship of Zeus as cultural indoctrination into to the belief and worship of nothing, you might have to also critically examine your own cultural heritage of religious ritualistic repetition in the same light?
The fact, that western civilization has it’s history and how it has been acted out, has no bearing on wether Zeus, or any other gods are true, or wether if the religious rituals are infact indoctrination. Correct? The history of the western civilization is hardly the most perfect imaginable chain of events? However, we are allready outgrowing the ritualistic heritage of religious indoctrination. We have long since given up barbeque sacrifices to Zeus and other thunder gods as anything necessary, or even beneficial. It is time for us to let the rest of these fantasies, born to satiate our ignorance, to go and take responsibility of ourselves and each other as humanity…
You can see the human rights at work all around you. Here in real space-time. They are written down, actively pursued and they have direct and observably beneficial effects on real life. We have plenty of examples of life without the human rights and I bet neither of us would opt to live without them. I hope we could agree, that we would choose to issue the same rights on everybody who wanted them, and not just the people who belong to the same cultural heritage as we do, for example even in the afterlife, if such a thing existed. Could we? They are not dependant on metaphysical concepts like Zeus or any other divinities or other imaginable entities outside space-time. Human rights have exactly the same direct and observable consequenses on reality wether one is a believer in Zeus, or not.
Saying human rights are “metaphysical” concepts is like saying a tractor is a metaphysical concept. Yes, it is first a concept, but when it is materialized, it is clearly visible and functional. No, you do not need a microscope to see a tractor being driven, or a human right being acted out. A prayer, or “honouring” of gods has no such bearing on real life because Zeus like all the other gods, simply do not exist. Prayer and other religious rituals are like trying to put together a tractor from supernatural parts. It surmounts to nothing at all, exept perhaps a confirmation of a belief that an immaterial tractor has been built and that it ploughs, immaterial fields, to yeild immaterial bread to immaterial deities. Or even worse, a belief that it was the supernatural tractor that made the crops grow and not the material tractor on the material fields. You can not see gods even with a microscope, do you? But tractors and human rights do exist in physical reality. Just like prayer and other “honouring of gods” exist in the form of indoctrination into a false sense of security, but hardly as anything else substantial.
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Of course I’m teasing when I say you lack empathy, but I do think you lack some mental flexibility on this issue, for example, you use the phrase “ignorant people of good faith”. A Homeric Greek was not sacrificing to Zeus out of ignorance, he was doing it out of a specific vision of the world. You are equating your strange, specifically modern form of materialism with universal wisdom, which of course shows a lack of cultural imagination.
I don’t share the pagan vision of mystical experiences, mythology, and a tendency to pantheism, but I can imagine myself in such a world and operating under its presuppositions, which are anything but stupid. Mystical pantheism is a perfectly coherent worldview, as is materialism (though your version strikes me as incoherent) neither of which I happen to share, but both of which I’m willing to defend as coherent.
One’s vision of the ultimate reality (it is god, it is matter, matter is really god, etc) eventually determines one’s culture. That is why I compared belief in human rights with belief in god. It is the same sort of culture-structuring metaphysical belief. Belief in a non-material reality such as human rights (which is itself dependent on other metaphysical beliefs) structures human culture. So does belief or non-belief in god, even more so.
For example, a pantheist and pessimist culture like pre-modern India did not, and could not, develop an idea like human rights, because the highest reality is impersonal. Neither could a materialist culture. Neither, I believe, will a modern tenchocracy be able to sustain a belief in universal human rights: the metaphysical presuppositions don’t bear it.
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@Dpmonahan, excuse me, you lost me there. What are you saying that is relevant to our previous discussion and wether if religious repetition of rituals is infact indoctrination, or not?
Have you now changed your position from: religious repetition of rituals is not a form of indoctrination, to it is a form of indoctrination, but a form of indoctrination, that is somehow necessary for metaphysical assumptions about human rights? Or are you simply trying to change the subject?
You could say, that a “materialist culture” could not have come up with human rights. No, indeed not, if you predetermine human rights as “metaphysical”, but they are not.
Human rights are as much metaphysical as the police. We can percieve a society with, or without a police and we have had several of those (and several with a very bad police). Wich do we prefer? Why? Because of some metaphysical assumptions, or because of the reality? We can also perciecve a society with, or without human rights, and we have had several of those too. Wich do we prefer? Why? It is a matter of choise. A moral choise. The better choise is based on the reality, that if all people always acted beningnly, selflessly, or even if people had a healthy balance of selfishness and selflessness, not to harm others and help out when possible, no police or declarations of human rights were necessary. Nothing metaphysical about the either of them.
Exactly like we can percieve a society without doctors or medical treatment for everybody, and we still have plenty of those around the globe. Wich do we prefer? Why? No doctors would be necessary, if there were no diseases… How metaphysical is that? There is nothing metaphysical about a very practical choise to either act out and protect human rights, or simply not. The practical question being wich is the form of society we would prefer to live in. The one in wich no human rights of anybody are protected, or the one in wich all of our human rights are protected? Why would you choose one over a nother? For metaphysical assumptions or for the practical effects of one or the other? It all happens in this physical world, material and observable universe, in this space-time continuum to us material beings in it. No gods, or other imaginative metaphysical assumptions from our physical brains are really required. Are they?
Of course the ancient Greek thought that the honouring, worship and even prayer to Zeus was necessary. But was it? For them really? To what ever end? That we in the western culture could obtain human rights thousands of generations later? I think it is terribly patronizing to assume, that a form of ritualistic indoctrination is necessary for a society, because they have an impression of it’s necessity based on ignorance of these deities not really existing. Or does Zeus exist? If we can agree, that Zeus does not exist, am I warranted to say, their IGNORANCE of the fact of the matter was manifested in rituals indoctrinating them from generation to generation to believe Zeus existed?
It may even be, that the ancient Greek did not percieve their ritual behaviour as indoctrinating, or perhaps they were more honest about it to themselves, than you are to yourself. Does that change the direct effects of ritualistic repetition of religious dogma? Dogma, that Zeus exists and having barbeques in his name, make a difference to the world, by Zeus actually acting out in return to this ritual.
Indoctrination is a form of teaching. Agreed? A ritual may serve as a form of teaching. Agreed? Is the form of ritualistic teaching even likely to be non-indoctrinating? Especially when we are talking about religious repetition of recognition of the existance of deities, be it Zeus or what ever, that can hardly be called obvious, nor even observable otherwise? Is faith in such deities based on anything else, exept indoctrinative rituals that demand the member of the social group to take these claims about Zeus and bunch at face value? Why do religions demand faith – blind faith – in their respective deities, sometimes even by backing up the demand by the most horrid, but totally unsubstantiated and unverified, claims of violence in this or the imagined next life?
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I can see how that can be confusing. My above comment is driving at this:
There is a first level of primary, foundational beliefs (implicit or explicit) that express themselves on secondary cultural levels, things like morals and rituals and forms of education, all those expressions that make up a culture.
You argue that the secondary expressions exist to indoctrinate people about the primary. I argue that the secondary is an expression of the primary. My position is more rational, because it is simpler than positing a convoluted process of self-deceit.
You ask if indoctrination is a form a teaching: yes it is; in common use the term denotes a coercive form of teaching.
You ask if ritual is a form of teaching: no it is not. The purpose of a religious ritual is to honor the god; that is the common experience of anyone preforming the ritual. Any educational effect is secondary. I’m sure there are other secondary effects too.
You pay a great deal of attention to the fact that the existence of Zeus is not demonstrable, or whatever, which pretty much misses the point of why people believe in divinities at all. It is a question of the meaning of the universe and human existence; it is not a problem for physics.
As for the rights discussion, there are functional societies that have very different notions of rights. Native Americans roughly equated humanity with tribal membership. Someone from outside the tribe for example had no inherent “right to life”, there was no concept of property rights, etc. Native American culture lasted for thousands of years so it must be measured as an evolutionary success: not their fault that a rapid external change wiped it out, it will happen to every culture some day.
So your concept of rights is not self-evident for anyone who cares to look at the evidence, as you make it out to be. It is much more likely based on implicit metaphysics.
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@Dpmonahan, it is true enough, that simplier suggestions are to be taken as more likely, than complex, when we can not verify the reality of the suggestion. Therefore, my position that there likely are no gods at all as we can not observe, or in any way verify their existance is more rational, because it is simpler than a claim that any particular personal god exists outside time-space. Yes?
However, culture is full of both complex and simple phenomenons. Something being described as simple, does not alone make it any more true. We are able to observe that complex phenomenons exist as much as simple ones. We do know, that ritual repetition does strengthen the beliefs in gods. Does it not? It is observable. Is it not? Particularly because these beliefs are based on suggestions, that are literally expected to be taken at face value, though no gods Zeus or any other, are in any way observable. Or are they?
You run around the idea, that because ritual has a specific purpose to “honour” the gods, it is not meant to be indoctrination. But that is beside the point, because it often is indoctrination as it often results in indoctrination. That is not even very complex suggestion and as I already said, it is observable. Is it not?
Wether if the indoctrination is a “primary” or “secondary” effect of the ritual, does not make any difference on wether it actually is indoctrination or not. Repetition is one of the most effective methods of teaching. Repetition of rituals is teaching how to “honour” gods and that it is somehow preferable, or even necessary to all the newcomers in the crowd. There is a doctrine that a particular god exists behind every ritual. Is there not? The rituals incorporate the idea that said god has to be taken at face value. Do they not? Rituals to “honour” gods also incorporate an act of common recognition to the existance of this or that god. Do they not? It is a social pressure to believe in the doctrine about the god even existing and how that god should be “honoured” and that there is this need to “honour” said god. How is this not indoctrination?
You wrote: “You pay a great deal of attention to the fact that the existence of Zeus is not demonstrable, or whatever, which pretty much misses the point of why people believe in divinities at all.” No, I do not miss that point. That is exactly my point. That for a number of reasons people believe particular suggestions about gods to exist, but demonstrability is not among those reasons. On the contrary, a typical reason is indoctrination through ritualistic repetition and the social pressure to believe as others do. No, ritual of “honouring” a particular god demands contemplating other possibilities, do they? Rituals are doctrinal behaviour models expected to be taken at face value along with the blind religious faith.
It is not in any way “metaphysical” suggestion, that many a philosopher and religious teacher from Laoze, Buddha and Zoroaster to Jesus and bunch have suggested – that seems rather basic when looking at any social animals – that you can only expect to be treated as well as you treat others. Wether if those who suggested it thought it was metaphysical or not. Human rights are a particular set of conclusions from the reality in wich social species live in – Not some magical “metaphysics” from beyond observable time-space.
Would you prefer to live as a P.O.W. and subsequently as a slave in a pre-columbian Native American society? Why not? Perhaps, because you do realize your inherent human rights would not be recognized? What about as a serf in Medieval Europe?
Both the many medieval European cultures and the numerous pre-columbian Native American cultures lasted for ages, and some of them could be counted as successes in their own right. However, that has nothing to do with human rights. Neither the medieval Europeans nor the pre-columbian Native Americans had at large as such even a notion of what we today call human rights, so they hardly could even make the choise. Neither of them had much a notion about police either, but would you prefer a society without police? Would you choose a tribally moralistic culture, or a moral culture to live in, if you could?
There having been societies without human rights, or a limited vision on whom they chose to appoint those, has absolutely nothing to do wether the notions of human rights are “metaphysical” or not. Human rights are something we have learned about human behaviour and general human wellbeing. About our very natural empathetic abilities and skills of compassion as a social species. Calling such “metaphysical” is an excuse for not fully grasping the observable causation behind them.
We have also discovered a number of other very practical, material, observable and real points about ourselves and our relation to each other and our environment since the so called discovery of the Americas. As we did before it. For example the germ theory, but we do not consider it in any way “metaphysical”. Do we?
There used to be time of long lasting societies that seriously thought that diseases caused by germs were infact caused by demons, spirits and gods. They also thought that mental disablilites and disorders were caused by demons, sprits and gods, and there still are people who consider it to be thus. There are even still rituals acted out meant to drive the demons and spirits away from the person with the mental problem. The “primary” purpose of such a ritual may indeed be to have an effect on these “spirits”, but the “secondary” effects of the ritual have far more serious impacts on the individual, and the social group they belong to. A momentary relief through the placebo effect, suggestion and auto-suggestion may be one and as a result an indoctrinating effect on the subject and others as confirming the belief on a culture specific “spirit world”, but there is absolutely no evidence at all that these problems are caused by any sort of “spirits” and such treatment extremely rarely leads to positive results concerning the actual cause, or even symptoms of the mental health issue.
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Hi Rautakyy!
I just wanted to jump into the conversation to tell you that I am enjoying the sensible, logical, comprehensive points you are making. I appreciate that you are both taking the time to put forward your ideas on this subject. I am learning something and you know what they say about teaching a teacher. 🙂
Thanks again for the stimulating discussion – to both of you!
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Whether or not an answer is simple depends on the question being asked. Invoking the gods to explain a material process is needlessly complex. Positing a self-sufficient being as an answer to the question “why being and not nothing?” is simple.
But the question is not the existence or non-existence of the gods, but the nature of ritual – specifically religious ritual, though I don’t see any major differences between a civil ritual and a religious one.
I’d think the repetitive nature of ritual serves a communal and quasi legal function rather than an indoctrinating one. The only way to get a group of people to preform a single act is to have a ritual. Really any formal public act needs to be ritualized: swearing in a president, contracting a marriage, etc, to make sure you do it right. “Rite”, if I recall correctly, is a Latin adverb meaning “done correctly, by the rules”.
Another function of ritual, at least in a pagan religion, is to conform the passing material world to the eternal ideal. A repeatable ritual is in a sense timeless.
You speak as if the ritual is nothing other than a means of imparting doctrine, but there is no clear procession from doctrine to ritual in world religions. Shintoism has lots of ritual and little doctrine. To a lesser degree, the same can be said for Hinduism. It seems more likely that ritual grows organically out of a need to express a feeling or conviction, than a need to convince third parties.
Here is an area where we might find common ground: You trot out the idea that if it were not for people being brought up in a certain culture, no one would believe in gods. Well, that is partly true, of course someone had to start the traditions, and every generation develops them, but when you are talking about world religions you basically talking about cultures. When a person converts from one religion to another, he is changing the core of his culture and taking on a different one. The essential vision of man, god, and the world changes. He is joining a different community.
So you might describe ritual in that sense, not as existing to impart a doctrine, but as something that creates a community. The Greeks gather to honor Zeus and in so doing they create a fellowship among themselves. The community is extended across generations because the community has common rituals that are passed on.
But it would still be wrong to say that the ritual would be nothing other than a means of social adhesion. No one preforming the ritual actually thinks that. Ask the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier engaging in this highly ritual act if he is promoting social adhesion, he would say no, he is honoring the dead.
The problem with saying “No, silly soldier, from my vaunted perspective of pure objectivity you are either promoting social adhesion or indoctrinating the youth, not honoring the dead.” is that (besides getting yourself beat up) you are not really being objective. You are discounting the real lived experience of the man guarding the tomb which ought to be the primary evidence, because it is the actual phenomena being examined.
If I were to have grown up in a tribal culture I’d probably prefer it. Tribalists often reject attempts to modernize them, witness the whole middle east. Plenty of people from modern rights-based regimes seem to prefer security to their rights. I can’t think of any facts we know about human interactions that were not obvious to a pre-Colombian Indian: they were different, not stupid. Anything else is not “fact” but a cultural peculiarity based on metaphysical assumptions. After all the difference between germs and human rights is that I can see the former using a microscope. No one has ever seen the later.
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@Carmen, thanks! 🙂 No, in all honesty, I do not know what they say about teaching a teacher.
English is my second language, and I sometimes have trouble in comprehencing some ideas, because I have no clue of the common proverbs. But I am willing to learn and I would appriciate it, if you could explain this one about teachers to me. Could you?
Certainly this discussion has become rather repetative already. Perhaps, it can serve as to teach through that at least. 😉 Though I am not bored yet, we are slowly getting there, by running around the same issues again and again – and not getting anywhere, exept perhaps, bored. But it is nice to know, that you have found it interresting enough thus far. That at least aliviates the danger of being bored to death.
Dpmonahan can be a good sparring partner in teaching me English and the concepts used in English on this field of cultural phenomenons such as religions are, because he/she, unlike so many other Theists in the net, does not easily fall back on blind faith. I can only hope he/she has, at least on some level, understood how absurd religious faith is. Or perhaps, he/she only recognizes my inability to accept it as a model of thought for the rational person and is being polite towards me about it. If that is the case, I am gratefull.
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Rautakyy,
You do just fine in English – I commend you! I have no trouble understanding what you are trying to convey and I’m impressed that you develop such comprehensive responses.
The thing about teaching a teacher is that I’ll be able to pass it on! 🙂 (and I also think that the saying suggests that teachers are perhaps inclined to WANT to learn something. . maybe (?). . although a few of us are a little ‘thick-headed’ 🙂 )
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@Carmen, thank you. Now I see what you mean. Yes, teaching a teacher might indeed have benefits, and though reaching even one person, if you have something to say, is important, it is far more important to reach a person who is going to have an impact on a number of people.
Well, Indoctrination is an important issue, because people should not be indoctrinated even to good behaviour and positive truths, rather taught how to reach such themselves. It is hard though…
@Dpmonahan, perhaps we can reach some common ground in this after all. It seems to me there has been a misunderstanding between us and we might be able to settle it.
You wrote: “You speak as if the ritual is nothing other than a means of imparting doctrine…” But that is not at all what I am trying to convey. I am truly sorry, if that is what you got from my comments. I must have expressed myself poorly. I mean to say, that the indoctrinating effect may and often does hide within the ritual. Be it birthdayparty, tea seremony, a barbeque to honour the thunder god, a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier, a military parade, or a prayer to give thanks for food, meditation to reach nirvana, or what ever. That it is the nature of the ritualistic behaviour model, that regardless wether if it really is meant to form a sense of community or simply to honour the dead or gods or what ever that people for cultural reasons percieve to be in need of a bit of honouring, it also serves as an indoctrination to a cultural norm, be it a certain and well defined religious doctrine, or simply a vague sense of cultural value held even without the full awarence to the causation of why such a value is held precious, to confirm that doctrine and value. Religious rituals are a good example of such, mainly because of the otherwise unverifiable nature of such beliefs. If social values are held for unverifiable reasons, they also sometimes need ritual confirmation, like for example patriotism confirmed through military parades, waving of flags, guards at the tombs of soldiers and such.
Most social values are held for good reasons, but sometimes such are a bit obscure to people. For example why do we think murder is wrong? It is a social value, often agreed upon and held not because we actually understand the causation behind it, that we value such as wrong simply because we do not wish to be murdered or that any of the poeple we value should be allowed to be murdered, rather than that there is some obscure metaphysical reason behind it.
Could we agree, that though the intention of a ritual is not indoctrination, it may have an indoctrinating effect to cultural values, be those positive or negative?
People do all sorts of things that have inadvertant effects and end results, do they not?
You wrote: “But it would still be wrong to say that the ritual would be nothing other than a means of social adhesion. No one preforming the ritual actually thinks that.” Never did I claim any of that. I did not claim it was “nothing other”. But that it is blatant, that such exists within ritualistic behaviour. Nor did I claim that the person performing the ritual thinks they are indoctrinating themselves. Did I? But there still seems to be a form of auto-suggestion emergent within ritual behaviour models. I am assuming this was not meant as a strawman, but that my self-expression is lacking and you simply misunderstood me. Right?
As you say there is this social adhesion going on in rituals. Is that not a form of indoctrination? Could that social adhesion even be a form of indoctrination? Is it not more likely that it serves as a form of inadvertant indoctrination, when people act out rituals to honour something that they can not verify otherwise, but the ritual itself confirms their beliefs about and in it. Do many rituals not have the specific purpose of teaching the youth as new members of the community to think and believe right about a good number of things, rather than to seek out truth in any objective manner?
Even a civil ritual such as the guard at the tomb of an unknown soldier may have an indoctrinating effect to the social structure of the particular soceity and values like patriotism and such, even though the guard only thought to honour the dead heroes. Such rituals could be argued to have been set in place with a specific purpose to reinforce a national sense of unity and patriotism. Those are the tools by wich nations are forged. After all, the dead heroes themselves or the tomb are in no actual need to be honoured, nor guarded. Are they? Any more than gods, or other immaterial, unverified entities are.
I have stood guard (bayonnets and all) at a tomb of soldiers who died for their country, and as such I know the perspective of the guard. Yet it is not merely the experience and perspective of the individual guard we are talking about here, is it? But about what impact such behaviour actually has on the guard and the society regardless wether the guard realizes the declared value of the ritual, or the causation and effect it may have on him/her or the surrounding society, or not. Infact, if the guard does not come to terms with the bigger picture, the guard is more likely to be indoctrinated a little bit more deeper into the set of values upheld by the ritual. Is that not so?
Any even remotely aware attempt to indoctrinate anyone on anything would be somewhat of a wasted effort, if the person realized that they are under such an attempt. Would it not? Same applies ot inadvertant indoctrination (like in a ritual) if the person realizes they are under an indoctrinating effect of cultura habit the process of indoctrination breaks down. Because the realization of the indoctrination, be it purposefully meant to be there or even if it is an inadvertant cultural phenomenon, would already have the effect that the person was forced to consider the value of the doctrine being force fed. Even then, they might come to the conclusion about the doctrine, that it is indeed valuable, but they’d be less likely to be actually indoctrinated, or at very least they would be less inclined to have been affected by the process.
You wrote: “If I were to have grown up in a tribal culture I’d probably prefer it.” Yes, indeed. You would be incultured and one could even say indoctrinated to believe it was the best way for you to live. But you were not grown up in such, were you? So, you have a different perspective, but if there is some objective truth between the two different cultures, one wich holds slaves, and one wich does not, then with your current modern western perspective and knowledge, would you not feel confident in saying that the objectively better culture to live in, is the one without the slavery? Objective in the sense, that objectivity requires you to also take into account the perspective of the slave. Or are you a cultural relativist?
Nobody said the pre-Columbian Native Americans were stupid. Who said that? I agree with you they were not stupid, but that they were different. Does that make it ok to own slaves and treat people who do not come from your particular tribe poorly, or as unhuman? I bet there were some among even them who questioned the justification of such behaviour. And in fact there had to be, or otherwise their small tribal groups would soon have developed a set of eyes closer than their nostrils and simply died out.
You wrote: “After all the difference between germs and human rights is that I can see the former using a microscope. No one has ever seen the later.” Have you already forgotten my previous comments, or did you even read them through? I already gave you plenty of examples of how human rights are quite visible and that you do not even need a microscope to see them. If you have never seen human rights acted out, then that is too bad for you.
Look, I try this again. Like I said repetition is a form of teaching. 😉 Nobody saw a tractor before someone built one, but the concept existed first in the physical brain of one individual and then after communication a number of others, before the concept was acted out. Yet, we do not think tractors exist because of some metaphysical assumptions. The concept of human rights was first a concept in the physical brain of one individual and was then communicated to others like it, and they were acted out and written down, like the blueprints of a tractor. The blueprint itself can not plough a field, but people acting out human rights, can reach similarly positive results, as the tractor being built and used. Tractors exist because they stem from the value we give to food, agriculture and technology. Human rights exist because they stem from what value we in our physical brain give to other people and ourselves in this physical observable material reality where we do exist as the biological agents that we are. They exist and are visible because we chose to act out those values. They do not come from some obscure metaphysical assumptions. We were perfectly able to exist before tractors, and there was even resistance to tractors when they were new. We were able to exist even before agriculture was introduced, but we have chosen to eat agricultural products and feed ever greater masses by that. Similarly in some societies we have chosen to follow human rights, even though we existed long before any of those had been declared anywhere. They are the results of choises, but they also answer some deep needs we have as biological species. Seeds were sometimes eaten before the advent of agriculture and people were sometimes treated well before human rights declarations. We get hungry and in our interaction we yearn for some rules. We thrive and experience higher wellbeing by acting out human rights as it satiates our natural needs for social justice and rules much like bread satiates our hunger and agriculture both produces variability to our diet and confirms a more secure continuity in food suply.
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I’ve never denied that ritual can have an educational aspect, just the thesis that education, or the more pejorative “indoctrination”is the purpose of ritual.
I’m sure the solider guarding the tomb is aware of a social aspect as he honors the dead: he is aware that he is preforming the ritual act on behalf of the nation. He is serving a priestly function, preforming the rite on behalf of the people. That doesn’t change the whole structure of the ritual as directed towards the dead, the object of veneration.
If you convince the soldier standing guard that there is not object of veneration, that “the dead” strictly speaking do not exist, nor were their lives in any way “sacred”, and hence there is nothing to venerate, then the ritual would necessarily change meaning: it would have no purpose other than a social one, and pretty soon people would think it had no purpose at all.
If ritual existed only for an educational or social purpose, and not for the stated purpose, then no one would ever preform the ritual.
And not everybody yearns for human rights the way they yearn for food. You argue that rights exist because some people like them. Other people like other systems, that have in fact had more evolutionary success. What makes your system correct and not just temporarily convenient?
And what makes you think that our feelings about wanting to die or not has any bearing on whether we are going to die, or “should” die? I put “should” in quotations because it is another one of those metaphysical concepts.
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As a soldier who has stood guard on a tomb of fallen heroes, I must say that I was aware of the social issues involved. Hence, I would percieve myself less inclined to be indoctrinated by the event, though even I felt the emotional appeal of patriotism, when I was made a part of that particular social adhesion. As I was an atheist while doing it, I did not think that the dead required me honouring them. To me it was quite clear that there was this reinforcing of the value of the sacrifice they did in the minds of the living. Not only us the guards, but also the military that had set us, the officers who had adopted this protocol from other armies generations before our time, and the officers who originally invented such practices and the public who saw us repeatedly doing it and watches such being done repeatedly all over the globe every day. It was a method to teach, both us the guards and the public, the value of the sacrifice – in effect, that the society values soldiers for being prepared to risk their lives for the fatherland. There is little doubt wether the repetition of the ritual re-enforced some of those assumed values also on the officers who sent us to do this, and I doubt wether the officers who invented such practices in the first place themselves were totally immune to the re-enforcing effect of it – simple as it may seem, that they, nor anyone involved, only wanted to honour the dead.
Within the ritual of a guard at a tomb there are no aspects of examining the assumed value of the sacrifice of the fallen at any other angle than that the value is assumed inherent. If the situation is in any way educational about the values being presented (as you have already admitted), it is not a method of teaching people how to reach some logical objective conclusion, wether if the value of the dead soldiers risking and in effect sacrificing themselves was, or is going to be in the future valuable, or not. On the contrary, it is teaching people what to think. That the risk and the sacrifice of the “heroic fallen” are valued even afterwards and presented as some sort of unchanging value, and a risk worth taking in the future too.
It is indoctrination to teach someone what to think, instead of how to reach objective conclusions, is it not? Rituals to honour the dead, or the gods, do teach people what to think about the dead or the gods, do they not? Hence, rituals serve as indoctrination, wether intentionally meant as such, or inadvertently causing it. Right?
The only metaphysical assumption presented here is, that the human rights are based on metaphysical assumptions.
Was my self expression too complicated for you? Am I really this bad at explaining things, that even you – clever person, that you are – could not follow me? I did not say, people yearn for human rights like they yearn for food. Did I? What I said was that people are perfectly able to survive without bread, or all of the human rights, but that we have chosen to have both of those, for the simple reason that they give us better existance. That is not based on some more, or less metaphysical assumptions, but on our experience and aquired understanding generation by generation, of the reality around us. In any case any human society to survive requires both sustenance and rules. Human rights are merely a honed and better version of some of the social rules. I expect we shall have even better versions of them in the future as our understanding of social issues grows. Because that direction of development has brought us here. Or perhaps it will not grow and we will succumb back to some tribally moralistic authoritarianistic systems of rules, that we can merely survive, but not as much thrive under…
To be sure, any metaphysical assumptions could not possibly make any system correct in comparrison to “temporarily convinient”, because metaphysical assumptions do not give any objective perspective on anything. Do they? Such assumptions are necessarily tied to the temporal cultural values. Are they not? They may be correct guesses, but the method to resolve wether something is “correct” is to examine it in as objective way as possible and with as much quality information about it as possible. Right? What is the most, if indeed not the only, objective method to measure anything? The scientific method is the only way to reach reliable conclusions. Is it not? Objectivity of the method is the only way to ensure, that temporal perspective has less effect on how we percieve things, than any mere assumptions – metaphysical or not.
Through the scientific method we have already established, that humans indeed, like all animals, have a desire to survive as individuals and as a species. It has also been established, that as a byproduct of that need for survival evolution has provided us with built in needs to thrive. The biological measurement for us thriving is our general wellbeing. It has been established, that we are a social species and, that is so because, we are among the species, that have this method of survival. As a social species and as individuals, however, we present certain kinds of different social behaviours, not all of wich actually add to our wellbeing, but we often live under the misguided impressions (or metaphysical assumptions, if you will), that they do.
What people “should” do, is not in any way a metaphysical question. One can make up all sorts of metaphysical assumptions as answers to it, or any question, but merely providing an answer to a question does not, by any means, require the answer to be, as you put it, “correct”. For example, do you think the world was born from the guts of the giant Ymir and humans from his sweat? This is a perfect example of a metaphysical assumption for the origin of the world and human kind. Why would you not accept it as “correct”, or true? Because some equally unvalidated metaphysical assumption claims some other equally unnatural explanation, temporally and culturally less alien to you personally? Or because of what we do and do not know through science of the origin of the world and human species? What people “should” do, is derived from the particular question in comparrison to reality, and in moral terms ultimately from their own individual and general human wellbeing as a part of the reality. Balancing between the wellbeing of the individual and the general wellbeing is where the objectivity to draw our morality comes from.
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I’d think that once a ritual is generally “seen through” as you describe, that the dead are not really being honored, rather we are brainwashing you to die in wars caused by politicians, then it ceases to be a useful ritual. The social function (social cohesion) depends on the primary stated function (honor the dead). Once the primary end is lost, once it is not intelligible and obvious to people, then the ritual becomes a pointless display, or an occasion of brainwashing.
I don’t accept the distinction you make between “objective” education and indoctrination for two reasons. First, I think education should include cultural formation. A Swiss person and an American might receive the same education in math, but not in what it is to be a good citizen. A good American and good Swiss person are two different things, both good for their own cultural context, not for the other.
And what we call critical thinking is itself culturally formed. Critical thinking in contemporary American education means looking at all social phenomena as power struggles between classes, races, and sexes. It is based on Marxist analysis (adjusted of course to a comfortable middle class lifestyle), which in turn is based on the unproven metaphysical presupposition of deterministic materialism.
Ethics has very little to do with science. You argue that a human rights regime works better than other systems, which is unproven from an evolutionary perspective. We will only know that once the rights-based regime outlasts the tribal systems that have been around for millennia and show no signs of stopping. Science can’t tell humans how they should act. Science can build an atomic bomb, but can’t say whether or not it should be used. You say humans have an innate desire to survive and under certain circumstances may thrive: so what? You may as well be talking about a bacteria culture. The simple fact of an organism eating and breeding has no moral significance – none – unless you posit – with no physical evidence – that the clump of cells has a spooky metaphysical “dignity” or set of “rights” or “duties”.
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@Carmen, this is as much for you as it is for dpmonahan. 😉 I really do not expect to be able to influence her/him much, but perhaps my views may help you in your encounters with similar views as those presented here by either of us.
@Dpmonahan, yes indeed. Sometimes rituals lose their meaning and “usefullnes” when they are seen through. That is why practically nobody “honours” Zeus anymore. It has been seen through, that Zeus is not in need of any actual “honouring” as he does not even exist. Any more than the “heroic fallen” do. Does he? The indoctrination of repeated religious ritual to honour, strengthen the metaphysical assumption that there exits this entity called Zeus who manifests in lightning and indoctrination processes to confirm that faith, through ritualistic social pressure to recognize his existance have lost their appeal and siezed to be “usefull”.
What is usefull to whom and in what sense? A ritual to indoctrinate young people to be ready to throw away their lives for a particular metaphysical assumption about concepts, such as the fatherland, motherland, some happless god, king and country may be usefull to some powerhungry leader, but is it that to the young people as individuals, or people in general? If it is, they should be able to determine such “usefullness” through some much more objective method, than to rely on an accumulation of indoctrination recieved through mindless rituals of “honouring” the dead, military parades, flags and such. Should they not? Lest they be used by someone else as mere tools to satiate an unhealthy amount of hunger for power. Right?
You wrote: “I don’t accept the distinction you make between “objective” education and indoctrination for two reasons. First, I think education should include cultural formation. A Swiss person and an American might receive the same education in math, but not in what it is to be a good citizen. A good American and good Swiss person are two different things, both good for their own cultural context, not for the other.” Well, if you do not accept the distinction that I make, then do you even accept that there exists such a thing as indoctrination and how would you define it? I ask, because the distinction I make is based on the very definition of what indoctrination is.
As I already said, Merriam-Webster dictionary gives this example of indoctrination: “The goal should be to teach politics, rather than to indoctrinate students in a narrow set of political beliefs.” If we are to replace the concept of politics, we should express the same sentiment, through: The goal should be to teach to understand religion, rather than to indoctrinate students in a narrow set of religious beliefs. You’ll notice I added two words – to understand – because religious culture has in itself a problematic approach to this, when people percieve teaching religion as something in wich indoctrination to a particular set of religious beliefs is an assumed part of the process.
Objective information may point to the direction, that we should rather strive to be good human beings, than good citizens of Switzerland, Finland, or the US, but objective information can also recognize the value of the objectively good values held by different cultures. Wich would you rather be foremost? A good American or a good person? If those two ever contradict, then why would you choose the other over the nother?
Everything humans do is culturally formed. Everything, at least in how we do it. But that does not by any means mean, that we should not strive for objectivity. Everyone has their own perspective and it unavoidably affects our preception, but it affects it less, the more aware we are about the most objective methods we have at our disposal to evaluate things. Agreed? Truth is about objectivity, not about metaphysical – or any other sort of – assumptions.
You wrote: “Ethics has very little to do with science.”
Ethics is all about choises. Right? Better choises are made with better information. Right? Better ethics is therefore reached through actual information and the quality of choises are based on the quality of the information. The scientific method is the most objective means we have to aquire any quality information. In fact if it is disregarded, we have nothing we may call objective method to aquire quality information. All we are left with are temporally relevant more or less “metaphysical” assumptions (that is pure and simple – guesses) and blind religious faith (a nother form of guessing) of various cultural heritages (read: guesses made by previoug generations). These contradict each others on a number of occasions, and again the only way to reach any truth, is an as objective as possible evaluation of those. Right? Now, what would be the method to evaluate and compare these even remotely objectively?
Then you said: “You argue that a human rights regime works better than other systems, which is unproven from an evolutionary perspective. We will only know that once the rights-based regime outlasts the tribal systems that have been around for millennia and show no signs of stopping.”
In evolutionary perspective, a social system, that values human rights has been shown to be more sustainable, than many contemporary systems that have disregarded them. What happened to the Nazi Germany, or Soviet Union? Why? The first died out, largely, because it could not compete militarily with the nations that were more free, and valued human rights more and because it, despite having technological advantage and the advantage of arrogance, had to divide it’s strength to subdue the human rights of so many subject nations and individuals. Soviet Union fell, because the people got tired to the lack of democracy and human rights. Or did it fall because the Russians wanted to drive Mercedes and wear blue jeans? If that really is so, it is a bleak notion and we may ask was it in any way better for it to fall.
In evolutionary terms, we do not know wich will outlast the other. Authoritarianism, tribalism, both very much inbedded in all religious social systems, or human rights a result of secularism. But do you not think you have objective reasons to value human rights? Or do you merely value them based on some assumptions you have made, or possibly, that someone else has made for you? How do you know, that those assumptions are as you say “correct”? Or do you simply have a relgious blind faith, that the ones inherent to your culture are “correct” within your own cultural context? Are you a cultural relativist?
Future is always unknown. We may make metaphysical or other assumptions about it, but those tell us precious little, unless our assumptions about the future are based on actual as objective as we can possibly achieve information. To me the most objective reasons to value human rights are that when valued they observably produce general wellbeing. Do they not? More precisely, they provide us as both individuals and as societies an environment, in wich our individual resources are better utilized to benefit the community. They provide an atmosphere in wich we as individuals recieve the respect from others, that we prefer, by providing the same respect to all. Do you not value human rights from these observable reasons? Do you require more reasons, like in the form of some particular “metaphysical” assumption? What would that even be?
You wrote: “Science can’t tell humans how they should act. Science can build an atomic bomb, but can’t say whether or not it should be used. You say humans have an innate desire to survive and under certain circumstances may thrive: so what? You may as well be talking about a bacteria culture. The simple fact of an organism eating and breeding has no moral significance – none – unless you posit – with no physical evidence – that the clump of cells has a spooky metaphysical “dignity” or set of “rights” or “duties”.
No, no, no. Science provides us with the best information like how to build an a-bomb when it tells us what the results of using an atom bomb are. But it is not limited at that. It also tells us, what it does to us humans, how it affects both the victims of the bomb and those who used it. Does it make those people more or less empathetic and how does their empathy affect their society. What the fear of your enemies having an atom bomb does to you and how do you react to it. Is that reaction beneficial or harmfull to humanity. What it does to the environment and how humans can survive in it after the use of the bomb. Plus an enormous amount of other things about it. Based on that information we make our descisions to either use it or not. The descision is the part where ethics step in. But with poor information people usually make the worst assumptions. Do they not?
We are not bacteria, but humans – I assume you are too? 😉 Human culture is a result of us being humans and bacterial culture would be the result of being bacteria. Morality is all about human interaction and human wellbeing. We are more affected by issues that concern sentient beings, than by bacteria. There is no moral question between bacteria eating a nother bacteria, unless it affects a human being. Right?
Clumps of cells do not have spooky metaphysical dignity, sets of rights, or duties. Humans have these as values we have chosen from among other sorts of behaviour models, not becaue of spooky metaphysical guesses, rather because such things as dignity, sets of rights and duties directly and observably affect our wellbeing. Do they not? We can observe those, they have objective and subjective significances. As such, we are not required to make any sort of – metaphysical, or other sort, assumptions about them. We are perfectly able to act based on our actual and as objective information we can get, to choose – to make the moral choise – to act selfishly, selflessly, or through healthy balance of those two, to create a better functioning society to increase our own wellbeing and that of others. That is what making a moral choise is all about. Simple really, if you think about it. 🙂
There is this need within us to survive and thrive. Is there not? That is an evolutionary survival trait, that has brought us this far. A nother evolutionary survival trait we have aquired somewhere along the line, long before we became humans is that we are social animals. Social animals have rules of behaviour, empathetic abilities and skills, and that is where morality originally stems from. Our close relatives, the apes for example, have a values they recognize, like dignity, sets of rights, and social duties. They are much more tribal than we humans tend to be, but then they also have a lot less ability to critically evaluate any objective information about such through any methodology. Correct?
Even animals that are not very sociable, have traits of behaviour that help them to survive and progenite their species. Nature is full of mutation, and not all of the traits we as animals have are beneficial. Evolution is slow. It rarely happens within the timespan of few generations, but eventually seriously harmfull traits, that may once have been beneficial do die out, like the sabertooths if they become a serious impediment for the survival. However, traits that are neither beneficial, or harmfull enough to be an actual impediment for the survival of the species, or a group within it do not necessarily die out even within a billion years.
There is nothing moral about choosing between random, or socially, temporally, nor culturally relevant assumptions – be they “metaphysical”, or not – though in making such a choise to guess what might be right one might get lucky and end up doing the same thing as a nother person who made the choise based on critical evaluation of quality information. After all we all share a good number of varying information about issues, that invoke our intuition in our conscience, affected both by our own individual experience and by temporally and culturally relevant social pressure. We often end up in the same place through our intuition driven by our previous experiences and natural abilities such as empathy driven by our subconscious, as we might trhough our more analytic mind aware of the processes that brought us there. Do we not? Why? Because both processes work on the same set of information within our very physical brain.
However, if you ever needed to trust something to be true, based on an analyze of best possible and most objective information about the subject or pure intuition, wich would you choose?
Intuition is an evolutionary survival trait we have for situations, that are too fast for a long process of analysis. Just like analysis is an evolutionary survival trait for situations in wich we have plenty of time to spend on contemplating the various possibilities and what we do know about them to make the choise, that benefits us as individuals, us as part of our societies, our societies as part of our species, and finally our species.
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Once you posit that Zeus does not exist, then the ritual becomes personally meaningless. If on top of this you have a post-modern mentality, seeing everything as a power dynamic, then you naturally see it as indoctrination and manipulation. You have no option but to view it with suspicion, because that is the way modern people learn to think critically.
Why is it so impossible to not believe in Zeus but to still accept at face value the intentions of his devotees?
You say that the indoctrinating ritual keeps people believing in Zeus, and once people stop believing in Zeus the ritual makes no sense, but isn’t this a circular argument? Which is it, does the ritual cause belief or is it the result of belief?
The discussion is otherwise getting too broad. Let me sum it up best I can: I think that people are capable of knowing truth and choosing moral action, but they always, always know and chose in a human way, that is, in a cultural way.
You admit you can’t tell the best evolutionary outcome, and yet you can say what the best evolutionary choices are? All you can do is see the past, which says tribal societies have been around the longest, and are therefore the most successful.
You claim science tells us when to use an atomic bomb because science tells us what such bombs do? That is absurd. One man decides to not use an atomic bomb because he does not want to kill civilians, and another uses it PRECISELY because he wants as many civilians as possible to die. Knowledge of atomic physics has nothing to do with either choice.
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@Dpmonahan, you wrote: “Once you posit that Zeus does not exist, then the ritual becomes personally meaningless. If on top of this you have a post-modern mentality, seeing everything as a power dynamic, then you naturally see it as indoctrination and manipulation. You have no option but to view it with suspicion, because that is the way modern people learn to think critically.” Indeed and agreed. 🙂 We have come a long way from primitive thinking skills of ancient people who made up the gods and other unnatural concepts to fill in the gaps in their lack of knowledge about the reality around themselves. It seems there still lies a long way ahead of us towards the unknown, but hopefully you agree, we should embark the journey with the best intentions to the wellbeing of us all according to the best and most objective information awailable to us. Do you?
You wrote: “Why is it so impossible to not believe in Zeus but to still accept at face value the intentions of his devotees?”
You keep referring to the intentions of the devotees. As if their intentions were the sole factors that define the end results of their actions. That is not the case. Is it? Indoctrination is indoctrination wether if it is intentional or inadvertent. The question is, how do people become blind to the fact that their “honouring” of the dead, or gods may actually serve as an indoctrinating process to the blind faith, that the dead, or gods are in any need of “honouring”. Or that the living or the adherents of said gods are in need of acting out this “honouring”. You answer this by referring to culture and I agree to a degree. There are many cultural beliefs. However, if those beliefs are false, ie. that the dead or the gods are in no need of “honouring” any more than the people engaged in need of such confirmation that the dead or gods are, then the people have been infact indoctrinated throgh such processes to believe false things – like that Zeus exists. Personally I would prefer, that people believe as many true things as possible and as few false things as possible, because in my experience of the reality, when people believe in true things they are far less likely to do harmfull stuff, to me or anyone else, than when they have false beliefs. Do you not share this experience with me?
Indoctrination is a poor way to teach people things, because it is a self replicating process, that does not leave out options and closes the minds of people from new discoveries. It may serve to pass on both true and false beliefs, but it obviously does not allow questioning and truth is better seved by new discovery, critical thinking skills and pragmatic methodology for discovery. Would you not agree?
You wrote: “You say that the indoctrinating ritual keeps people believing in Zeus, and once people stop believing in Zeus the ritual makes no sense, but isn’t this a circular argument? Which is it, does the ritual cause belief or is it the result of belief?”
No, the circular argument here is that Zeus is true, because the adherents are taught that it is true, through ritual, that tells them explicitly, that people believe in Zeus, because Zeus is true. This is infact indoctrination to believe Zeus exists. Is it not? My argument is actually, that ritual keeps people believing in Zeus, or what ever god, or other unnatural entities, that can not be verified. There is nothing circular about that. Is there?
However, when people stop believing in such deities for other reasons, they see the ritual as for what it is. A process of indoctrination to a baseless belief. Yet even before they realize as much, they might become suspicious about the existance of such gods, through the fact, that the belief in them requires this indoctrination process. Rather than, that the gods were observable – like all other things we have good reasons to believe to exist. Could they not?
Or do you know of any religion in wich there were no rituals to re-inforce the beliefs that the particular unverified divinity actually is in need of having a bit of honouring, remembrance and mutual recognition, that this god exists, despite there is no actual evidence of it ever having existed anywhere?
Instead, it seems, from your example, that people who do believe in gods, or what ever unnatural fairies, are willing to squirm any sorts of mental gymnastics to produce excuses for why they do not even see the process of the indoctrination there in the rituals at all. Even to the extent, that because the intent of the acting parties in a ritual is supposedly not to indoctrinate their young (or merely each other, or even themselves) to the same beliefs they hold about the unnatural and unverifiable entities, rather to simply “honour” their gods there is no indoctrination going on.
Now, I have already time and time again demonstrated, it makes the process no less indoctrination wether it is the intended meaning of those who run the processes. Still, do you not see the rituals to “honour” gods, fallen heroes, or what ever ritualistic cultural events also sometimes as meaningfull to the people who engage in such as a method to teach a specific view onto the youth of their community? If that ever is done with more or less intent to teach through ritual about something the adults hold dear and valuable about a religious, or some other social system, is it then indoctrination? Does a ritualistic method of teaching ever leave any options open, or is it more likely a way to teach people what to think, rather than how to think?
Even when a person prays alone, are they not while doing this also reinforcing their blind faith, that the entity they pray to, actually exists? If they are, is it not a part of indoctrination process, regardless what they tell themselves are their own motives to engage in the act?
You wrote: “The discussion is otherwise getting too broad. Let me sum it up best I can: I think that people are capable of knowing truth and choosing moral action, but they always, always know and chose in a human way, that is, in a cultural way.” Agreed. 🙂 That is a nice way of putting it in short. But apart from the culturally relevant information they hold, what is and where does the “truth” you refer to, come from? Is it not, then the most objective possible information, they can get a hold of? 😉
You wrote: “You admit you can’t tell the best evolutionary outcome, and yet you can say what the best evolutionary choices are? All you can do is see the past, which says tribal societies have been around the longest, and are therefore the most successful.” You have the wrong way of measuring success. That is like saying the shark are more succesfull in evolutionary terms than the apes, because the sharks have lasted for longer with lesser change. But evolution is not about conservativity, rather it is about progress. The measuring tape we should use for social models is our wellbeing, because that is the measuring tape with wich we measure everything else morally relevant. If you even try to make an objective analysis of different types of human cultures in moral terms, wich sort of society would you prefer to live in? A social system where you might end up as a slave or one in wich that danger is not one of your concerns? Wich provides the higher level of wellbeing for all it’s members?
You see, morals is a matter of choises based on information. What do we prefer and why? Are our preferences based on good solid information, or metaphysical guess work? Cultures affect our choises and social concepts of morals, but if there is some objective measure to morals, it is not to be found from the alledged, but totally unverified revelations of gods and their temporally relevant interpretations, or other unnatural entities of any particular culture, but rather in the best and most objective knowledge we can discern to make the descision. How do you reckon such objective knowledge should be determined?
You wrote: “You claim science tells us when to use an atomic bomb because science tells us what such bombs do? That is absurd. One man decides to not use an atomic bomb because he does not want to kill civilians, and another uses it PRECISELY because he wants as many civilians as possible to die. Knowledge of atomic physics has nothing to do with either choice.” You are deliberately limiting what science can tell us about the use of the a-bomb to what atomic physics can tell us. I do not really blame you for this. I have often enough run into this same problem when discussing with religious people from Anglo-Saxon heritage. (Does that include you?) Science seems to be to them culturally limited to what is taught under that particular name in their basic school education. In reference, here in Finland we do not call teaching of chemistry, atomic physics and biology in schools “science”. Because that would be a bit, like you put it – “absurd”.
Almost all the knowledge in our and your schools taught is basicly based on the scientific method. For example history and psychology are researched throught the scientific method and tell us together with biology how our ethics have evolved and what we value and why. History especially is difficult because it gravely lacks the repeatable research results, but so does often the natural history, and that is one of the major reasons, it seems to me, why such nonsense as creationism can have such a big impact on the western culture.
The choise between using the a-bomb not based on atomic physics is basicly a straw man argument, but I expect you did not make it intentionally as such. The knowledge on wich the person making the choise of the bomb is of course not based on his/her knowledge of the atomic physics alone, but on what the future might be after using or not using the bomb through history of what such large scale devastation causes and on social values of wether or not he/she values life of the victims or humans and finallly through their own emotional state, call it compassion or empathy.
Now, if that person having to make the choise to use an a-bomb believes in a god, that speaks to them through their subconscious, that person might get this god to tell them to use the bomb and not even have emotional stress while doing it. Sincerely believing that their god has given them the moral justification to use the bomb. What would you call such a person? A devout follower of his/her god, or a madman? If the person making the choise about using an a-bomb understands the nature of morals to not be the orders handed out by a particular cultural notion of a god, rather than the general wellbeing of humans him/her included as part of this social species, what would you call such a person? Wich of the two would be more likely to drop the bomb, regardless of their other beliefs in gods or other unnatural unverified entities?
The scientific understanding of what precisely follows from an a-bomb on atomic level is hopefully not the only information, that drives the choise of a persom making the choise about using an a-bomb. Both you and I would not prefer, that the person having to make the choise would act on very limited information, would we? Neither would we prefer that person to act on a command from Zeus, because it could be anything, now would we? However, science tells that person, if they are interrested, what the social reprecussions are, what the environmental reprecussions are, what the emotional reprecussions are. What the short term and long standing reprecussions would most likely be. All these things, among others, are the best method we have to predict future and within that knowledge make the choise wether or not to use the bomb. All these things, among others, tell the person what the ultimate effects of the choise are to that person, their offspring, their social group, humanity in general, and the environment on wich the wellbeing of humanity is dependant. Wellbeing is the moral reference point and measure. Not some arbitrary metaphysical guesses. No truly scientific view on the reprecussions of using the bomb are limited on to what happens on atomic physics, or even on how many people are killed in the immidiate future, and what can be gained by killing this particular group of people. But if the scope of the person making the choise is so limited, that she/he is only interrested in themselves, in their very own offspring, their very own social group, religious sect, tribe, or nation are, and if the person is not interrested on the negative reprecussions using the weapon are even to the tribe, religious sect, or nation who might have won a war by using it, they are far more inclined to use the weapon, than if they have a larger and better informed view and position on the wellbeing of humanity. Or if their morals is limted to absolute command of “thou shalt not kill” EXEPT, if it is war and the enemies are infidels, that we need to destroy to win. Right?
Our motives to do this or that do not exist in a vacuum. They are affected greatly by our culture, and our cultural understanding of what passes and follows. The less false beliefs we hold, the less likely we are to pass poor judgement on what the actual, long standing reprecussions of our actions are on both the short term close to us individually and on a grand scale to everything. Information largely defines our motives. Our motives are always individual, as we are complex beings, but they are also higly social, because we happen to be a higly social species. What is the best, if not the only, method we have to gain even remotely objective information?
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Looks like we are just going around in circles. The problem is epistemological: do we take human experiences simply, as they present themselves, or do we hold them under suspicion. Suspicion – paranoia even – is the hallmark of modern thought: it is NOT an advancement in critical thinking but an impoverishment.
Nietzsche looks at an act of worship and says “Ahh, this is nothing other than a life-denying expression of people who are too weak to will themselves to power.” Freud says “It is nothing other than totemism, expiating feelings of guilt for the first patricide and incest with the mother.” Marx says “It is nothing other than an opiate to distract the people from their economic exploitation.” The atheists around here say “It is nothing other than an instrument of mind control”, because that is how they are taught to think, and because it makes them feel smart. Notice all the above contradict each other but what they have in common is an attitude of suspicion, facile dismissal and an inability to look at the event that is actually happening. All they see is their own ideology, not the object of study. This is not critical thinking.
According to me a man believes in Zeus and therefore he prays. According to you, a man prays to Zeus, then he believes is Zeus. Which is circular?
You are pretty poor materialist if on top of rights you also believe in progress. Evolution is not about “progress”, contemporary evolutionary theory does not believe in that mythological idea. “Progress” does not exist in evolution, only survival and adaption. Some animals adapt more successfully than others given the environment, that isn’t progress, it is dumb luck. Change the environment, and what seemed to be progress turns into extinction. A shark is not more “advanced” than a bacteria: each is either adequate for its environment or it dies.
In a religious culture people generally do not make decisions based on private divine commands, like God telling someone to drop the bomb, but on traditions which are seen as having their remote origin in a public encounter with the divine. They are stable systems. There are acceptable and unacceptable forms of public and private morals which do not admit wild exceptions, so your madman with a bomb thing is a caricature.
You always equate ethics and morality with public policy: why is that?
Anyway, for you ethics is simply a consideration of long term benefits. The problem is that not everyone agrees with what is a benefit. A European and a Middle-Easterner have radically different notions of why society exists, and what pubic goals should be. For the European or American, it is prosperity and comfort right now, without concern for the past or future. For a Middle Easterner it is preserving the identity of the tribe across generations. Science can’t say which is right. Science simply does not enter.
You are also much too blithe about the predicative powers of science in social issues. We can’t predict economic activity, we can’t predict foreign events, can’t predict the weather, etc. How on earth should a community know what the best course of action is over 50 years if its point of reference is scientific predicative models that simply don’t work?
And a scientific predicative model says absolutely nothing about the millions of moral choices people face every day.
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@Dpmonahan, you wrote: “Looks like we are just going around in circles.”
Agreed. Why is that?
You also wrote: “The problem is epistemological: do we take human experiences simply, as they present themselves, or do we hold them under suspicion. Suspicion – paranoia even – is the hallmark of modern thought: it is NOT an advancement in critical thinking but an impoverishment.”
Paranoia??? Impoverishment?!! How is that an impoverishment? Are you “paranoid” for not believing in Zeus at face value? Suspicion and not taking wild claims at face value is the hallmark of all critical thinking. That is why it is called CRITICAL thinking. It critiques any and all wild claims we are expected to take at face value. What exactly would you want us to take at face value? What is the metaphysical claim, you could not base on reality, but would prefer we take at face value?
You wrote:
“Nietzsche looks at an act of worship and says “Ahh, this is nothing other than a life-denying expression of people who are too weak to will themselves to power.” Freud says “It is nothing other than totemism, expiating feelings of guilt for the first patricide and incest with the mother.” Marx says “It is nothing other than an opiate to distract the people from their economic exploitation.” The atheists around here say “It is nothing other than an instrument of mind control”, because that is how they are taught to think, and because it makes them feel smart. Notice all the above contradict each other but what they have in common is an attitude of suspicion, facile dismissal and an inability to look at the event that is actually happening. All they see is their own ideology, not the object of study. This is not critical thinking.”
No, Nietzsche, Freud and Marx do not contradict each other, other than by saying “nothing other” in your example. But you are being a little dishonest here, are you not? These are not exact quotes, are they? It seems by adding the “nothing other” as you have done to my claims, you conviniently got them to disagree and contradict each other, did you not? Why would you succumb to such underhanded rethorics? Or do you have actual quotes, in wich they define religious ritual as “nothing other” than what each of them have to say about religion in general? They are merely describing the same act from different views, some of wich are not that far from the truth. Are they? For example, is Marx not right? There exists this benefit to the ruling classes, in a lot of religions, that the religion and rituals serve as an indoctrination to and reinforce beliefs in gods that are a make belief distraction, while the poor concentrate to be rewarded for being meak, all the while the rich exploit this model of behaviour and in turn excuse their own behaviour by telling themsleves, that a god has set them on the position to exploit others they are justified in doing so? Is this quote mining of yours merely a desperate attempt to create a red herring? Or what?
I however have not said it is “nothing other”. Have I? How many times and in how many different ways do you need me to tell you, that I do not plead for rituals to be “nothing other” than indoctrination. It is not like a ritual has to be either just indoctrination, or “nothing other”. But you completely and utterly fail to show how religious rituals do not serve as indoctrination. You simply want to bitch about it being indoctrination. Why? Is it because you would not want to recognize yourself as having been indoctrinated through ritualistic behaviour models to belive as you do about a particular issue, a part of your identity even, like for example an unnatural entity, that you are unable to verify to really exist? Zeus? 😉
You wrote: “According to me a man believes in Zeus and therefore he prays. According to you, a man prays to Zeus, then he believes is Zeus. Which is circular?”
Well, now obviously it is circular to reinforce beliefs in unnatural unverifiable entities like Zeus by religious ritual indoctrination. Is it not? What of it? But taking at face value what the adherents of Zeus, or Xipe Totec tell us, each other and even themselves sincerely believe what they are doing while acting out rituals of worship, honouring, and not be “suspicious” about the real life consequenses is just stupid. Is it not? You do not expect, that the barbecue to honour Zeus, makes the fields any more fertile, than you think a human sacrifice to Xipe Totec does, do you? Of course the ritual is acted out because adherents of Zeus, or Xipe Totec allready hold the belief that these deities exist and that worshipping, honouring and sacrificing to them has an effect on their lives. But should you not be a little bit “suspicious” about wether it has that precise effect, or not? Or that the ritual itself might infact be a form of indoctrination in that it teaches through indoctrinative methods the new generations of adherents to the doctrine of Zeus or Xipe Totec and reinforces the participants to hold the beliefs they have about these deities even in the future, even though the gods themselves are nowhere to be observed? Or are they? You do know, that when the rains came the adherents of these gods were all too eager to attribute the natural phenomenon to their gods and that they themselves were sure it was somehow a direct result of their acts of worhsip, prayer, honouring and sacrifice, do you?
You wrote: “You are pretty poor materialist if on top of rights you also believe in progress. Evolution is not about “progress”, contemporary evolutionary theory does not believe in that mythological idea. “Progress” does not exist in evolution, only survival and adaption.”
That depends on what we mean by progress. What would be progress in your book then? Do you demand that progress has a goal, or what?
Some animals adapt more successfully than others given the environment, that isn’t progress, it is dumb luck.
Sure dumb luck and survival of the fittest are the conditions that cause evolution. Does that not quite obviously spell out, that there is no design in nature?
You wrote:
“Change the environment, and what seemed to be progress turns into extinction. A shark is not more “advanced” than a bacteria: each is either adequate for its environment or it dies.”
Indeed, that is how evolution works. The Merriam-Webster gives this example of progress: “the act or process of going from simple, or basic to complex or advanced.” Has the shark not become more complex through evolution, in comparrison to it’s rather simple bacterial ancestor? To me this seems like it has had evolutionary progress. But it becoming stagnant survivor for a lot longer period than many species that have evolved and fitted into plenty of different environments during the last 200 million years is not really evolution as such. Therefore I think I am warranted to use the word progress to describe evolution. Am I not?
You wrote:
“In a religious culture people generally do not make decisions based on private divine commands, like God telling someone to drop the bomb, but on traditions which are seen as having their remote origin in a public encounter with the divine. They are stable systems. There are acceptable and unacceptable forms of public and private morals which do not admit wild exceptions, so your madman with a bomb thing is a caricature.”
Yes, of course it is a caricature, but it is a caricature that exists and has existed for generations. Hopefully, it is removed alltogether, when people stop providing such caricaturistic individuals with power. But the actions of individuals matter. Be they motivated by religious or other sorts of ideology, that may still cause people to fly a plane into a skyscraper, gun down dozens of kids because they are from socialist families, throw a Molotov cocktail to an abortion center or an immigration center. Or if the person has actual religious influence and political power to forbid the use of condoms as somehow magically immoral. However, the “stable systems” you refer to, are and have always been also full of stable practices of slavery, political and religious murder, like the systematic burning of heretics in good faith, that this is what the divine entities expect of people. Right? Are there no objective reasons to oppose slavery, or burning heretics alive? Just for an example.
You wrote:
“You always equate ethics and morality with public policy: why is that?”
Do I? How?
You wrote:
“Anyway, for you ethics is simply a consideration of long term benefits. The problem is that not everyone agrees with what is a benefit. A European and a Middle-Easterner have radically different notions of why society exists, and what pubic goals should be. For the European or American, it is prosperity and comfort right now, without concern for the past or future. For a Middle Easterner it is preserving the identity of the tribe across generations. Science can’t say which is right. Science simply does not enter.”
Oh, but that is exactly why and whence the scientific method enters. Because even though the social moral ethics vary from culture to culture, from religion to religion, from era to era, there might be something we could call objective morals. Would you not agree? How should we go about to determine what that is? Or even hope to get close to what it might be? By the best awailable and most objective methods to evaluate reality as in the scientific method? Or by making any number of metaphysical guess work temporally relevant to our particular cultural? Or to follow some particular arbitrary, temporally and culturally relevant interpretation of a particular alledged, but unproven divine revelation?
Or are you a cultural relativist? I asked this before, but even though you did not answer directly, it seems as if you are advocating a culturally relativist position. On the other hand you have accused me of being a temporal relativist, so it is unclear as to what exactly is your position.
You wrote:
You are also much too blithe about the predicative powers of science in social issues. We can’t predict economic activity, we can’t predict foreign events, can’t predict the weather, etc. How on earth should a community know what the best course of action is over 50 years if its point of reference is scientific predicative models that simply don’t work?”
It seems to me, you have had a grave misconception about what you could possibly expect from scientific predictive models these days and that it has led you to become disappointed by the inaccuracy. How did that misconception come about? Were you indoctrinated to believe, that predictions in general should be something absolutely true, as one would expect if the deity behind a specific prediction were an all knowing entity? Like along the lines, some of you shall be alive when I make my comeback, and then this deity had made said comeback before all those dudes were dead? Was there a ritual involved in this indoctrination, you were possibly subjected to?
Scientific models do predict weather, climate, “foreign events” (if you mean politics in other countries, or how a particular nation will react to for example an invasion), how a community shall react and function, if it makes a particular choise. Not everything can possibly be predicted, because there are a lot of moving parts in for example a society, but it is not like it was impossible to predict anything. The accuracy of the prediction depends on any number of things, from how the weather model fits the climate, to how drastic is the choise made by the community and how much quality information exists of the community making the choise and about the actual reprecussions the choise has caused if it ever has been previously tested out and so on.
For example here in Finland there was this social project to tell people how salt is dangerous. It was well established how dangerous salt is and how popular it’s use was, how the Finns would react to a certain kind of publicity program, and even humour about the serious life threatening effects of over use of salt. It was predicted that this program would help people to become aware of the dangers of salt, and that in doing so, it would also cause people to give up too much salt. It worked and the prediction was correct. Science told what to do, why it was necessary, and it predicted the outcome, wich came to pass because the prediction was based on good quality information.
You wrote: “And a scientific predicative model says absolutely nothing about the millions of moral choices people face every day.”
Pfff… And who ever said anything to that effect? But each of these moral choises is informed by something. By their relevant culture, religion and a vast number of other social values. But most importantly each and every choise we make is informed by the information we as individuals hold. Can we agree, that the scientific method is the best way we have to have anything even remotely objective information. The quality of our information affects what we decide to do. The quality of the information we have on the possible reprecussions of our actions affects and informs our choises. The quality of the information, that we are in possession, on the short term, and long standing and from individual to grand scale, even world wide possible reprecussions our choise may have determines our actions. If we have the misconception, that our choise only affects us and that the reprecussions to others, even harmfull ones, do not affect us we are able to make a choise based on that. It does not mean there are no reprecussions to ourselves, and sometimes there are none.
Our responsibility is to ourselves, but also to others. Why? Because we are individuals, but also a member of social species. However, there are no divine arbitrators to punish us, if we can get away with doing wrong. It is quite possible, that we harmed ourselves in doing so, but we could very well be able not to even notice. That again is dependant on the quality of our information on the issue. That is also why choosing between a selfish act and a selfless act is a moral choise. Yet, we are warranted to demand responsibility from each other to act so, that it will not harm others. Are we not? Is this not based on our shared experience of the reality, and confirmed by our scientific understanding of ourselves, or did it require a specific and somehow “metaphysical” assumptions?
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The argument is going in circles because we are not talking about basic things like epistemology.
The question at hand is: what is the essence of a ritual act. Is it a sneaky act of indoctrination and self deception, or is it an honest act of honor, respect or gratitude.
Whether or not the particular god exists is not relevant to the essence of the act.
The modern mentality seeks to reduce an act to some other ideological principle: sex drive or will to power or economics or whatever. When I said “nothing other than” it is because those authors -obsessive one trick ponies that they were- really thought that every important human act can be reduced that way.
Now, it may be that these authors are occasionally correct. Marx says class creates consciousness: well, sometimes it does. For example, in my country the people who always argue for the expansion of government powers generally work for the government: class creates consciousness. But that does not mean that the mentality of the governing class is really nothing other than self-promotion, that the basic attitude of a civil servant is not in fact one of service, or that the expansion of government authority is automatically bad. It does not mean that government, in its essence, is nothing other than a racket.
I am not presuming the existence of Zeus when I take the attitudes of his worshipers at face value. I am in fact actively trying to avoid making a metaphysical assumption, but only looking at the structure and intentions of the essential act.
You however make a metaphysical assumption that the only thing that exists is matter, evidenced by your constant appeals to “reality”: alas, the question of what constitutes reality is a metaphysical one which is beyond the scope of the question at hand.
No time for anything else today, but hopefully this clarifies the conversation.
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I’m not sure if in a myth-based religion the practitioners had a strict notion that ritual X was a cause of result Y in a physical sense, but it was more about bringing the human world in tune with the mythic ideal. They might say the sacrifice makes the crops grow, but I don’t think they would have meant the same thing we would mean by it. But I’m not an expert in such thing, I might be wrong.
I know you’ve said that you acknowledge other things going on in a religious ritual, but you seem keep reverting to a reductivist view. For my part I acknowledge an educational aspect to religious ritual, but I deny that it is the essential attribute, or that it is the cause of belief.
Yes, progress implies finality. If one posits “progress” the natural question is “towards what?”. Evolutionary theory as it now stands denies the existence of finality. Complexity of itself is not a goal in evolution, only survival. In this view, a shark is a less successful life form than an amoeba, it has not survived as long. In fact, complexity does not have much to recommend it either in evolution or in human systems. It seems to make survival less likely in the long term. Dinosaurs are gone, viruses remain. I help streamline manufacturing processes: complexity means wasted money. It is to be avoided.
One can’t extrapolate progress from human evolution, or interpret human cultural events as progressing, unless there is a finality to human existence beyond breeding. And even breeding is not much of a goal: we are going extinct some day.
As for science informing ethics, again, you argue points from public policy… when I think ethics I think of individual action first, public policy second. Science doesn’t have much impact on public policy, instead we have different economic models, Keynesian, Marxist, Austrian school, which we argue about without much success. We have climate models that do not predict climate change, from the global cooling models of the 70s to the global warming models of the 90s. The planet’s temperature has been steady for the last 20 years in spite of either model. Even when science does give useful information, it cannot determine the goals of the people making the choices. Science is about means, not ends.
And no scientific model can tell an individual whether he should seek revenge against an enemy, sleep with his wife or somebody else, or cheat on his taxes. Science is moot on the point.What more information is necessary for a person to navigate any of those moral choices than the obvious facts he has at hand? How does scientific research give him any new information that was not available to his remote ancestors?
As for my relativism: yes and no. One might know the truth, but there is no supercultural pure objective truth to be known.
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@Dpmonahan, this is a bit long as I seek to answer both of your previous comments.
You wrote: “The argument is going in circles because we are not talking about basic things like epistemology.
The question at hand is: what is the essence of a ritual act. Is it a sneaky act of indoctrination and self deception, or is it an honest act of honor, respect or gratitude.”
Concepts are not divided only to proclamations of truth and “sneaky” lies and deceptions. There lies also the great realm of misconception. There is a great risk, that if we take the meaning, effect and results of the ritual only by the person engaged and indoctrinated to act thus, at face value, we grow blind to the misconceptions the participants of the ritual have on what the actual effects and results, or ultimately even the actual meaning of the ritual essentially is in the reality. Especially so, when rituals are so often engulfed by layers of symbolism, myth and other made up stuff, that are demanded to be taken at face value – ie indoctrinated to be true without providing actual evidence, or any critical evaluation.
Previously you said: “According to me a man believes in Zeus and therefore he prays.”
You would have us take rituals only in the most superficial emic view of the person performing the ritual as if it had no other effects, or consequenses, than those presumed by the person engaged in the ritual. I do not deny the emic view, it exists and has it’s meaning to the participant of the ritual, but there is also the etic view of the outsider, that sheds more light on what really happens. Though even most participants of a ritual might hold the most superficial view, that it is nothing else exept the very act of honouring, an emic view could very well hold also an understanding of the ongoing teaching and even indoctrination. Why is your scope so superficial and limited? An even remotely objective examination of a phenomenon, such as a ritual, requires both insider and outsider view to be taken into account and not simply take any particular insider view at face value. From the outsider perspective the indoctrination is blatantly obvious and as such hard to miss, but it is unclear to me why it is so hard for you and many others to percieve it from the insider view.
You constantly claim, that I, Marx, Freud and Nietchze demand to only look at the act of ritual from some particular outsider view. This is not the case. We present different views to it. The views of the famous old researchers you listed mostly did not even talk about ritual itself, but about religions as social constructs, of wich ritual is only a small, but significant part of.
When you and I talk about Zeus, that neither of us thinks a real entity, both of us could have an outsider view, but it seems you put an effort to see the issue only from the insider view. Why? To pretend neutrality in regards to the acts of ritual? I have already told I have participated in rituals, because I have seen their value, despite I also saw their negative side in form of indoctrination to something potentially dangerous. Howcome I am able to see the indoctrinative effects of rituals I value (standing guard at the tomb of fallen heroes), when you are unable to see the indoctrinative effects of a ritual (like honouring Zeus, or sacrificing humans to Xipe Totec) you should have no personal reasons to value?
You wrote: “Whether or not the particular god exists is not relevant to the essence of the act.”
Oh, but it is. How could it not be? However, what is even much more important to the rituals is, wether if people are otherwise warranted in their beliefs in a particular deity. If a deity exists, but has decided to hide from plain sight and simply is not observable, it affects the reasons how people come to believe such a deity even exists. In context to the ritual and the faith people put into it this hidden deity could just as well not exist, because there simply is no reason to believe it exists. But people come to believe all sorts of nonsensical claims through cultural indoctrination. If there are no other reasons to believe a particular suggestion about a god, other than being indoctrinated to believe such an unobservable entity even exists, the essense of the act to “honour” this unobservable entity easily becomes to indoctrinate new generations into believing it does exist and to reinforce the blind religious faith of the allready indoctrinated people. You see people may overcome their indoctrination, or at least become suspicious of it, but peer pressure is an effective tool to push people back into the fold, without any need to making an effort to provide any actual evidence that this imaginary entity really exists. Is it not?
You wrote: “The modern mentality seeks to reduce an act to some other ideological principle: sex drive or will to power or economics or whatever. When I said “nothing other than” it is because those authors -obsessive one trick ponies that they were- really thought that every important human act can be reduced that way.
Well, even if this is your view of “modern mentality” it was still somewhat disingenious, even if it were not dishonest, because we can harldy honestly claim, that Nietchze, Freud, or Marx were actually thinking they could disprove each others and totally dismiss the other perspectives on the issue.
You wrote: “Now, it may be that these authors are occasionally correct. Marx says class creates consciousness: well, sometimes it does. For example, in my country the people who always argue for the expansion of government powers generally work for the government: class creates consciousness. But that does not mean that the mentality of the governing class is really nothing other than self-promotion, that the basic attitude of a civil servant is not in fact one of service, or that the expansion of government authority is automatically bad. It does not mean that government, in its essence, is nothing other than a racket.”
That is a completely different issue and I am not going to delve deeper into it, other than to point out, that secular rituals to confirm the powers invested in government are infact also a form of indoctrination to form the minds of people to respect that authority. Are they not?
You wrote: “I am not presuming the existence of Zeus when I take the attitudes of his worshipers at face value. I am in fact actively trying to avoid making a metaphysical assumption, but only looking at the structure and intentions of the essential act.”
Sadly, the view of the actor is not all that is essential in an act. For example: Even if the drunk driver would not remember having driven over someone when he was caught, it does not exclude that he drove over someone and killed that person in the process. The subjective view of any particular individual is rarely the full story of an act.
You wrote:
“You however make a metaphysical assumption that the only thing that exists is matter, evidenced by your constant appeals to “reality”: alas, the question of what constitutes reality is a metaphysical one which is beyond the scope of the question at hand.”
That is not a metaphysical assumption, it is an observation of reality. I do not know wether if anything else than the material universe exists and I am not making any assumptions about anything outside it. I simply have no means to evaluate anything beyond the material universe, so for now I can simply dismiss it. Any claims about anything beyond the natural, material universe that is observable to us all, are mere assumptions as long as someone presents a method to evaluate these. In my view we are warranted beliefs about unnatural events and entities outside time-space and the material universe only when we have ample evidence of such ever existing. Without even a method or mechanism to be even remotely objectively evaluate of such or even to verify the existance of any such they remain in the realm of imagination. Now, imagination is a material phenomenon in the material universe and has been widely researched and I dear say, I expect it shall be examined more in the future. As is indoctrination, wich seems to affect people into believing all sorts of wild claims and subjective views at face value, now does it not?
Finally you wrote: “No time for anything else today, but hopefully this clarifies the conversation.”
Yes, thank you. 🙂 It clarified alot why we started to talk past each other. I hope my response also helps us to understand each others.
You wrote: “I’m not sure if in a myth-based religion the practitioners had a strict notion that ritual X was a cause of result Y in a physical sense, but it was more about bringing the human world in tune with the mythic ideal. They might say the sacrifice makes the crops grow, but I don’t think they would have meant the same thing we would mean by it. But I’m not an expert in such thing, I might be wrong.”
Yes well, what does the person performing the act of ritual prayer, or sacrifice expect to acheive? Are they not hoping for a particular thing to happen in the future, like to get rid of athletes foot, or to bargain the crops to grow? If there are no expectations for the great power of these gods to act on their behalf, the rituals have no meaning, other than to growell for such mighty entities to not hurt them, wich again is a sort of gain from the act itself. Of course people may act purely out of habit, but that also kind of diminishes the essence of the act. Does it not? If there are some with more mythical and obscure notions of the idea, because they have very little evidence that the means of communing to gods do not really have a direct impact on real life, because gods are fickle or because gods are mysterious, to each and every mystic, there are dozens of people who a) expect or at very least hope for end results, that would be beneficial to them, and only count the hits, or b) forget all about the particulars of the ritual right when it is over and only get the social adhesion in absorbing the indoctrinative part of the act in common acceptance of religious beliefs as facts.
You wrote: “I know you’ve said that you acknowledge other things going on in a religious ritual, but you seem keep reverting to a reductivist view. For my part I acknowledge an educational aspect to religious ritual, but I deny that it is the essential attribute, or that it is the cause of belief.”
Well, I am no expert either, but I have taken religion studies in the university, and it is a recognized scientific fact today, that religious rituals do have an indoctrinating aspect to them. I try not to appeal to authority, because any claim should stand on it’s own merit and I honestly do not know, if you recognize science as an authority. It seems at least, that you are very suspicious, if not even a bit “paranoid” about scientific research. Suspicion is healthy grow to include religious myths to include into your suspicion, even the ones familiar to you through your own particular cultural heritage.
If it seems to you I am reverting to a reductivist view, I can hardly help that. It is all in your own mind. I have repeatedly expressed, that I do not reduce social rituals as only indoctrination and I have never expressed it is “nothing other” than indoctrination. However, indoctrination is an essential attribute of rituals and it is indeed a major cause of beliefs – both religious and secular. The only difference between religious beliefs and secular beliefs is, that secular ones are more easily verified. There are very few methods of verifying religious beliefs, are there? A matter of a fact, that makes religious beliefs more dependant on acts of ritual and other forms of indoctrination.
You wrote:”Yes, progress implies finality. If one posits “progress” the natural question is “towards what?”. Evolutionary theory as it now stands denies the existence of finality. Complexity of itself is not a goal in evolution, only survival. In this view, a shark is a less successful life form than an amoeba, it has not survived as long. In fact, complexity does not have much to recommend it either in evolution or in human systems. It seems to make survival less likely in the long term. Dinosaurs are gone, viruses remain. I help streamline manufacturing processes: complexity means wasted money. It is to be avoided.”
I do not posit a goal or any sort of finality for evolution, nor have I ever done. You expecting a certain goal for the use of progress, is your personal problem, because neither the common use of the word “progress”, nor any dictionary demand finality or goal. I used the word only as in movement or evolution from simple to complex, wich does not even imply a goal. We were not even discussing any goals before you brought it up. Hence, the measuring stick for morality is not who can survive longest in their particular environment, rather it is the wellbeing. That is the means by wich evolution has provided us with (totally unintended, but it exists), by wich we measure the social aspect of our relations and the results of our actions, both as individuals and as social groups. At the moment at least we are stuck with it, like we are stuck with other natural, observable and material facts.
Streamlining is not what evolution or the survival of the fittest means. Because there are no goals in evolution other than survival. That is not determined by any design, but by as you put it “dumb luck” the luck of a particular form surviving in a particular environment AND to survive any changes to that environment. The more streamlined a species is to a very particular environment, the more voulnerable it becomes to changed environments. It is the constant change that drives towards more complex entities, the complexity prepares life forms to better survive change. Dinosaurs are dead because they faced far more greater rapid change than the sharks who overlived the dinosaurs. Then again evolution transferred the genes of the dinosaurs to their descendant animals more adept to the changed environment in birds. Particular forms of viruses and bacteria may be a success story so far, but now humans are destroying entire populations of bacteria and viruses are next in line. This is only possible to us, through the complexity of our brain. That makes us more fit to survive than for example polio.
You wrote: “One can’t extrapolate progress from human evolution, or interpret human cultural events as progressing, unless there is a finality to human existence beyond breeding. And even breeding is not much of a goal: we are going extinct some day.
Of course one can. It is quite a natural and often used meaning of the word progress when we describe human cultures ascending from ignorance towards education. Have you never encountered this? What would you call it? Simply a change, but a change with no direction? Would it not be ultimately conservative, if we had chosen to not use fire ever, or even more so, if we had remained as single cell species? But direction does not necessarily imply a goal.
You wrote: “As for science informing ethics, again, you argue points from public policy… when I think ethics I think of individual action first, public policy second. Science doesn’t have much impact on public policy, instead we have different economic models, Keynesian, Marxist, Austrian school, which we argue about without much success. We have climate models that do not predict climate change, from the global cooling models of the 70s to the global warming models of the 90s. The planet’s temperature has been steady for the last 20 years in spite of either model. Even when science does give useful information, it cannot determine the goals of the people making the choices. Science is about means, not ends.
Oh, you are a climate change denialist, are you? You do not respect scientists as authorities in their fields of expertise then, but rather think you are better at solving these problems with your common sense? Is that it? A bit like Ben Carson who thinks he has better resolved the purpose of the pyramids than all the Egyptologists and Archaeologists in the field? Or are you perhaps a climate research scientist, who just happens to disagree with the peer reviewed majority?
Science informs us daily both as individuals and as societies in our more or less moral choises, like all information we have. Scientific information is most often however, far more higher quality, than most other forms of information we have today at our disposal. For example; If you need to decide wether or not to use a condom or not, there are plenty of superstitious notions, that it is ordained immoral by the highest imaginable supernatural authority, or that it is magically contaminated, or that a particular government has contaminated a condom to cause AIDS , but then there is the scientific information also awailable, that it is the best protection from AIDS and other venerable diseases. Of course science has an impact on public policy and in private lives of individuals. The more scientific research impacts our common conceptions of reality, the less likely we are to fall on superstitions or other misconceptions of reality. Right?
You wrote: “And no scientific model can tell an individual whether he should seek revenge against an enemy, sleep with his wife or somebody else, or cheat on his taxes. Science is moot on the point.What more information is necessary for a person to navigate any of those moral choices than the obvious facts he has at hand? How does scientific research give him any new information that was not available to his remote ancestors?
It seems you have a very limited scope on what science actually can tell you. Do not worry, you can expand on that. Just for an example, the revenge has been studied a lot and in a growing number of countries that information has been put to both public policy, through wich it affects our individual lives also. The psychological reprecussions of revenge to the avenger are not unknown. They are generally deemed unhealthy and mostly negative, in ultimately not relieving the individual from the anguish and pain suffered. Many perceptive individuals have observed that much about the act itself even in much more primitive times before the advent of the actual scientific model and many a religious leader and philosopher have expressed such points. Later science has not only confirmed some of their intuitive observations, but gone much further in the study of the psychological and social reprecussions of revenge. But there have also been religious leaders, social and political leaders and philosophers who have claimed the opposite based on their intuition. These are now being refuted by scientific research. In the meantime modern society relying on science has developed the social structure to reach a society in wich a vengeance should no longer be necessary means of keeping the order and to stop acts that evoke such primitive emotions within us in the first place.
Science can inform us about the risks, both emotional and social involved in adultery, but in the end the individual needs to decide wether the risk is worth taking, even if science determines the odds. That is the moral choise the individual faces. If there were easy black and white answers to social issues, that actually related to reality, no moral choises could even be made. Same applies to cheating on taxes or on what ever moral choises we face every day. Science is the method through wich we can verify wether these risks on an individual level are worht taking, but also why some risks are not something that should be taken on the grand social level, because of the negative effects they have on the general wellbeing of all.
Look, morals is about right and wrong. How do we determine what is right or wrong? By what is actually harmfull and what is not, or even if it is beneficial. As social animals it is natural to us deem matters the way Dr. Spock put it: “The needs of many outweight the needs of the few.” 😉 Right? That is why we have social norms, but they are often formed by individuals from their very own emic views and as such are less than even remotely objective. They are also ridden by superstition and other forms of misconceptions.
Evolution of our morals and ethics is not merely about survival of the fittest, but that is included, it is a driving force behind many of our complex behaviour models as in survival of the fittest species. That is not some sort of fascistic competition of individuals, but a species most adept not only to it’s own particular environment, but also to diverse environments and changing conditions. But we reflect our complex evolution also through our individualism and selfishness. Morals is a healthy balance between the individual and the society and environment in wich the individual, the society and the entire species try to survive and thrive. Wellbeing is the measuring stick to thriving, thriving is a concept that describes the evolutionary force, that makes us more adept at surviving.
Life is not simple like ritual being either simply a means to honour the gods, or simply an indoctriantion process only engaged to cause indoctrination. Nor simple like evolution was only about survival and surviving longest without changes, because the environment in wich a species survives did not change by sheer dumb luck. Evolution is not streamlined, because it was not caused by a human like mind to reach some simple goal.
You wrote: “As for my relativism: yes and no.”
How so? When it suits you, or your point, but not otherwise, or what? 😉
You wrote: “One might know the truth, but there is no supercultural pure objective truth to be known.”
Well, that is the problem of knowledge anyway. Of course there is objective truth out there, but how ot approach it? Absolute truth is impossible to know. Yet, we can rely on as objective truth as we possibly can discern. We do not know what we do not know. Even if we were the creator entity of the entire universe, we would not be free of the problem of solipsism. However, we can set limits to what we actually can say we know, and those are warranted by what can be observed through the most objective methods at our disposal – namely the scientific method. That is exactly why each and every religion has in it the demand for blind faith, because the supernatural is an unobservable concept of the creative human mind to fill in gaps of knowledge in the natural world. Add in ritual indoctrination to blind obidience and what you get is abuse of social power by actual observable human individuals.
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Lets try to shorten this back up:
The reason your outsider’s view fails to be objective is that the outsider always projects himself into his subject. Ask a Marxist to analyze a situation, and what do you always get? A Marxist analysis. Ask a Freudian, you get a Freudian analysis, etc. And yes, those authors would say their ways of analyzing were the only ways: they each believed they had figured out the key to understanding human actions. The only way to avoid this error to return to the actual experience.
Your metaphysical presumption of materialism runs through your epistemology: you assume that questions about the gods are answered with the tools of modern physics. Why should they be if the gods are not material?
Science can tell a man what he already knows, and what in fact everybody has always known: unlimited sexual partners can lead to STDs, seeking revenge will not necessarily make him happy, etc, and he will still go ahead and do it anyway. You haven’t proven to him that the risks are not worth the reward, because how he values the risks and rewards are either idiosyncratic or are culturally formed.
If you are defining progress as nothing other than change, then just call it change. Progress implies finality and a movement from worse to better: why else do people call themselves “progressives”?
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@Dpmonahan, this format sort of requires some simplicity. That does not mean the issues we are dealing with are simple, or black and white. You demand we keep this conversation simple, and then you accuse the outside view on ritualistic indoctrination to fail, because it is too simple? But those simple views from outside are only a fraction of the reality as observed by the outsiders. Yet, they may hold a key part to how a particular cultural phenomenon works, to wich equally obviously the practitioner of the ritual is totally blind to. Your claim that these outsider views are trying to reduce a cultural phenomenon into “nothing other” than their view is false and at this point it is turning into a strawman argument. Because I have repeatedly said I do not reduce the ritual into any particular “nothing other” and never did. So, please drop it.
Are you saying you did not project yourself and your ritual habits to the worshipper of Zeus, to excuse such practices, even though you seem aware that Zeus does not exist and thus might be in need of a bit of indoctrination to make people believe Zeus actually exists? It seems to me, you have fallen prey to the very thing you are accusing Freudians and Marxists. How did that happen? Through some Theistic analysis? Or because, even as much as admitting that worshipping of Zeus may have had indoctrinative effects on the participants of such rituals, would inevitably render all rituals you have participated in good faith to having possibly had indoctrinative effects on you? What would that mean? Perhaps, that because you were unable to evaluate those rituals as possibly indoctrinative, you may have been indoctrinated? Is the possibility of such so terrifying, that you would have to look at your cultural heritage with a critical eye, that you are willing to perform any mental gymnastics not to look behind with any critique? What if the real reason why you believe in any particular god, is actually that you have been indoctrinated to do so, regardless of your god hiding pretty much as Zeus has done from the dawn of times and still remaining unverifiable as all the other gods human kind has conjured up in their imaginations?
Quite a number of human acts are not merely about the “actual experience” of the individual or community taking part. Human actions are often far more complex than that. Especially rituals that involve imaginary entities alledgedly in Olympos, or even beyond time-space weiled in layers of myth. Be these gods seen as mere expressions of ideals, rather than actual active participants in the actual world, they need to be installed to the minds of people as real, because they do not appear anywhere, exept in the most pantheistic form ever imaginable, like in the lightning, or the rains to grow the crops. People have been indoctrinated to all sorts of ideals through rituals. The more pompous the ritual indoctrination processes are the more suspicious the outsider becomes. Right? When you look at the Nazis waving their torches and marching under their swastica standards, do you only see the “honouring” of Hitler, or do you also see a form of indoctrination working to exite the audience? When you look at old footage of a military parade on the Red Square, do you only see the “honouring” of Stalin or do you see a form of indoctrination at work to impress the audience to believe in the “progress” and security Stalin is portrayed to represent to the Soviet people? Stalin and Hitler undoubtedly existed, yet the ideals connected to these two dudes with moustaches, required quite a bit of indoctrination, did they not? Are these secular rituals removed far enough from your Theistic view, that you are able to see the indoctrination without any talk of reducing these rituals to mere indoctrination, or merely the experience of the individual participant? Does it not seem like the participants of these were mostly unaware of them having any indoctrinative effect on them, even though they may have been deeply emotionally moved by them? Is it not more likely that such emotionally effective events had an indoctrinative effect, if the participants and even the designers were not fully aware of the indoctrinative effect? These festivities were secular, but they borrowed the idea of how a ritual can translate a ready set mind to masses of people and indoctrinate them on a particular view from religions.
Why do you try to put the word “metaphysical assumption” into my observation of the material universe? I can not observe gods, and they are not observable even through the scientific methods of physics, since they are as alledged beyond time-space, why should anyone think they are there? Psychology however, can observe how such beliefs form and history bears testament to it. I have my cultural heritage, and it affects my perspective, but do not have to make any assumptions about stuff like fairies, pixies, or gods. I simply do not believe them to be anything but the workings of the physical human mind. Not before I am warranted to believe any of these unnatural entities actually has an impact on the observable reality or that anything at all lies beyond the physical and observable time-space. How did you come to believe in such? Were you infact indoctrinated to believe so, or did you have some compelling evidence? Would that evidence stand to scientific scrutany? Do you accept that the most objective information we have comes through using the scientific method?
How an individual values risks is indeed often culturally formed. Cultures do not appear from nothing nor do they exist in vacuums. They are human attempts to live together as groups, present both individual and group identity and to evaluate the reality around them. They are informed by what people think they know. The higher the quality of information, the less likely they are to make false assumptions about reality and mess up our interaction between each other, within any particular culture or with people from a different culture. Science works to verify what we are warranted to believe and to reveal what is falsely believed. It helps morality to grow from for example tribalism, vendictiveness, pollutive habits, religious “interpretations” of alledged revelations, that demanded persecution of any particular group of people and so forth. It may in the future even reveal to us, that something we all today hold agreeable, is infact harmfull to us all, or to many enough that we should stop it.
Again, I did not define progress as “nothing other”, than change. What is it whith you and trying to make all people define things in terms of “nothing other”? Have you yourself observed this habit of yours, or do you think you have no such habits, since in your own “actual experience” you are unable to percieve it? I used the word progress in one of it’s well known and frequently used meanings of moving from simple to complex as such is observable in the physical realm of evolution. Why did I need to explain this to you again? Why did I need to explain it to you in the first place? Have you never heard of words having multiple meanings, or did you just grab onto a single word, when you really had nothing to argue your own point? Are you not the clever person I took you for, but a dimwit, in this respect? 😉
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Not simple, short. ie, keep to the essentials. But since we both tend to run off on tangents that probably isn’t a realistic request.
Lets wrap it up as I’ve been very busy, and you are getting annoyed.
Once again, I don’t deny a ritual has a social function, or that it can have an educational function, but I deny that education, or as you say indoctrination, is the essence of it. Why? Because that is simply not why people do it. The essential motives are my starting point, for reasons explained above.
You cast suspicion on the simple meaning of the act because the gods are not physically verifiable. But you are talking about the actions of people who don’t care about physics when it comes to questions of the divine. It is not a scientific question, but a question of metaphysics and global meaning. Why do people believe in gods? Because it is an answer to the problem of the meaning of human life in the cosmos. It is an answer to questions materialism can’t answer.
Now, it is possible that I project my own thoughts into the worshiper of Zeus, but I make an effort to imagine myself having a pagan vision of the meaning of life and the world. If I were to psychoanalyze those people, as you would have me do, I’d just be projecting a modern materialist ideology back on them, and be forced to attribute their actions to motives which they do not in fact have.
Back to science: modern science starts by narrowing its field of inquiry from questions of meaning to questions of physically observable causes and effects. It starts by excluding finality and values. You however are trying to get science to answer value questions: sorry, you cannot derive an “is” from an “ought” with the tools of physics no matter how hard you try. You posit your own notions of well-being as the goals of human existence when huge percentages of the human population reject those goals. Tell a militaman from Mosul that seeking revenge will not bring him any happiness beyond the immediate satisfaction of it it, and he will shrug and seek revenge anyway, not because he is stupid but because he rejects your notions of what human life is all about.
You may be using the word progress in a merely relative sense: one minute you can define it as a movement from simplicity to complexity, and another from complexity to simplicity, but that is not how most people use it. Political Progressives don’t imagine themselves as agents of a process of complexification, but as directing a human community towards a moral goal. That is why evolution is usually defined as change over time – no finality implied. Atheists will often use words like progress with regard to evolution or human history as a way of sneaking finality in through the back door, which is incoherent. Try as they might, they just can’t be good materialists. Now, I could get away with it since I believe in God and finality, but you don’t, so I suggest you not use progress but a more neutral term like change, or “compelxification”.
I’m all done. Feel free to take the final word.
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@Dpmonahan, I am sorry it took me this much time to answer, but I was on a pretty hectic working gig out of town. Thank you for letting me have the final word.
I was only a little bit annoyed for having to repeat myself. Obviously you felt you needed to repeat yourself too, and to me that seems like we both failed to communicate our messages to each other, even though from my viewpoint it seems like I replied to your thoughts, but you talked past mine… Keeping something simple or short seems to be over the limits of my abilities, especially when we are talking about complex issues.
You wrote: “Once again, I don’t deny a ritual has a social function, or that it can have an educational function, but I deny that education, or as you say indoctrination, is the essence of it. Why? Because that is simply not why people do it. The essential motives are my starting point, for reasons explained above.”
However, it is not even essential to the question of if there is indoctrination involved in religious or secular ritual behaviour, be it the essence of the act. There lies indoctrination in ritual behaviour, be that intended, of wether or not it is the actual essence of the act. You can not remove the indoctrination, nor call it a “trope” when recognized in it, by demanding that the essence of the act is something other.
If a ritual has a teaching element to it, as they most often do, and if what is taught is expected to be taken at face value, without evidence – and most often by appealing to emotions, and emotionally involved behaviour such as social adhesion – the act becomes indoctrinative.
You wrote: “You cast suspicion on the simple meaning of the act because the gods are not physically verifiable. But you are talking about the actions of people who don’t care about physics when it comes to questions of the divine. It is not a scientific question, but a question of metaphysics and global meaning. Why do people believe in gods? Because it is an answer to the problem of the meaning of human life in the cosmos. It is an answer to questions materialism can’t answer.”
That is not the sole reason why people believe in gods. It is actually not even a verifiable answer to the questions that the scientific method can not answer. It is superstition. Made up answers that only create further more questions when used as an answer. People believe in gods and other unnatural and imaginary answers mostly because they have been indoctrinated to take such at face value. Indoctrinated, through ritual and other sort of authoritarianistic modes of teaching to take the people who invented these answers and people who retell the imaginary (and often very andropocentric) explanations at face value. And you should cast suspicion on anyone who expects you to take anything at all at face value, be it a religious demagogue, political leader, or even a scientist. Because without even an attempt to evaluate what people tell you, whose “truth” are you going to choose? The one culturally relativisticly most easiest for you to assume? How could that ever provide you with even remotely objective data, other than by mere chance? Are you taking a chance, that a particular religion provides you with an eternal bliss, just because you happened to be born into it? This is not a rational choise, it is a choise made by a ready set mind through indoctrination. Only by becoming aware of the possible indoctrination your own cultural heritage offers, can you set your self free to evaluate anything even in a remotely objective way. But many people are scared of the complexity of reality and prefer the comfort of a ready made choises not needing to take responsibility themselves. Do they not?
You wrote: “Now, it is possible that I project my own thoughts into the worshiper of Zeus, but I make an effort to imagine myself having a pagan vision of the meaning of life and the world. If I were to psychoanalyze those people, as you would have me do, I’d just be projecting a modern materialist ideology back on them, and be forced to attribute their actions to motives which they do not in fact have.”
Yes, but sometimes you may end up projecting a modern materialist “ideology” on superstitions. Do you not? Would you prefer a modern medical doctor, or a woodoo priest to heal you, or anyone? Why? Is there a method to evaluate wether wich of them is actually and objectively more likely to heal their patient? I think there is. The subjective view of the patient on wich of these two might actually have better chances of curing them, might even work to the benefit of the patient through the woodoo priest and magic cures by sheer placebo effect, but that is not the entire truth. Is it? Even the patient sharing the culture of the priest and possibly not having any cultural reference to respect the skills of the modern doctor, does not change the reality around them. The patient might be suffering a disease even the modern medicine is unable to cure, but that does not warrant us to generalize, that any patient is better off in the hands of a woodoo doctor. You do understand why we are better warranted to assume the modern doctor is generally better equipped to cure a patient – almost any patient – in comparrison to the priest. It is because his work is based on the scientific and as such a skeptic methodology to reach conclusions, instead of superstitious assumptions.
You wrote: ” modern science starts by narrowing its field of inquiry from questions of meaning to questions of physically observable causes and effects. It starts by excluding finality and values.”
Indeed, that is where science needs to start, but all values are based on information, be it quality information, as in something verified about the reality to the extent we can verify things with the scientific methodology, in physics, chemistry, mathematics, psychology, sociology and for example historical research, or on obscure guesses and more or less “metaphysical” assumptions. There are plenty of choises about values, that are either verified, unverified, or even debunked by the most objective information we may obtain. The more unnatural the guesses and assumptions are, the less able we are to verify them by any means, but that does not validate such guesses in any way at all.
You wrote: “You however are trying to get science to answer value questions: sorry, you cannot derive an “is” from an “ought” with the tools of physics no matter how hard you try.”
No, no, no. You have gotten me utterly wrong and you are projecting your own thoughts unto me. I am sorry, but it works the other way around. You should get to what ought to be from what is. Not make metaphysical guesses what should be. Science merely tells us what is and with that somewhat limited information we make the choises of what we think ought to be. Or we can rely on our guesses on what might be and make our choises according to that. To me it is clear wich of these two is the better option to reach choises based on reality. If we had absolute knowledge, there would not even exist any choise to be made at all. As a rethorical question: Does your god have a choise, or does your god know full well what the choise needs to be and infact is going to be?
You wrote: “You posit your own notions of well-being as the goals of human existence when huge percentages of the human population reject those goals. Tell a militaman from Mosul that seeking revenge will not bring him any happiness beyond the immediate satisfaction of it it, and he will shrug and seek revenge anyway, not because he is stupid but because he rejects your notions of what human life is all about.”
All humans seek their own wellbeing, exept the ones perhaps, who see no venue open to ever achieve any of it. Wether their emic view of how to reach that wellbeing are correct or simply false (metaphysical or not) assumptions is a nother matter. The quality of information matters, because it relates to the reality, regardless of our held values. The scientific method has already confirmed us very much about what many a man from religious leaders to philosophers and us laymen has observed, how our wellbeing is dependant on the wellbeing of other people – as we are a social species – and the “wellbeing” of the environment we try to survive in. Your example militiaman from Mosul is simply wrong and mistaken. Why? Because he took at face value the culturally relative value set, given to him by religious and other sort of leaders and based on obscure metaphysical assumptions. Wether if there are more such people like him or me, is irrelevant to wether one of is right or wrong about the matter. Truths about the reality are not based on counting noses or opinions. Is the militaman going to get the emotional satisfaction, he seeks when he achieves his revenge, or is the search for the revenge going to wound him for the rest of his life, is a complicated question, but one the scientific method can actually answer us. Would he be happier and his wellbeing be increased in a society, in wich he would not even need to seek vengeance, because his and his most immidiate social group felt secured by other means, than by the means of a personal revenge? I would say, that this is something we can already answer through scientific research, and without the need to make any metaphysical assumptions of any kind.
You wrote: “You may be using the word progress in a merely relative sense: one minute you can define it as a movement from simplicity to complexity, and another from complexity to simplicity, but that is not how most people use it. Political Progressives don’t imagine themselves as agents of a process of complexification, but as directing a human community towards a moral goal.”
Now, I never changed the use of the word progress to mean a movement from complexity to simplicity, nor did the Merriam-Webster dictionary. I doubt that even you have a dictionary that does? I do not even know where you get your notion of how most people use the word progress. It is like many other words, in that it has several meanings. That depend on the context. In the context of evolution, in wich I did use it, it is used to imply movement from simple to complex. You make the comparrison to political views, and I do not even see how that was relevant to our discussion. However, since you brought it up, political progressives may percieve themselves as agents of this or that, but what the actual effects of their actions are, is possible to be evaluated in the light of best and most objective information we have about it. Evolutionary change advances new possibilities for a species to survive changing environmental conditions. Sometimes this is indeed manifested in progress from simple to complex. As the more complex form opens new avenues of survival in the ever changing universe, the cause and effect are survival and survival. We do not need to posit other goals other than survival to that. Yet, as we are complex results of such progress, we have – as a result – inbuilt to us means to achieve such a goal, through our need for wellbeing. Morals is about the harm and benefit evaluation we are capable of, and as we are social animals it involves our empathetic natural ability. That is why our wellbeing is the ultimate measuring stick of our morals. Morals is merely a result of our evolutionary progress towards survival. What else could it be? If it is reduced to culturally relative miss- and dissinformed metaphysical assumptions, we might get the guesses right, or not. However, since it is impossible for any entity to achieve a certainty of absolute knowledge, we are stuck at making false conclusions from time to time. That does not mean we should not try to minimize such.
You wrote: “That is why evolution is usually defined as change over time – no finality implied.”
Well, evolution is a change over time, and sometimes it progresses from simple to complex, sometimes, as in the case of humans as we can observe, that progress might become so complex, that it becomes even more self aware, than most other living organisms. Morals is a behaviour model of this rather complex animal. The human behaviour is moral when it is ultimately beneficial to the individual human animal. The human is a social animal, so it is interconnected through it’s behaviour to the needs of other human animals, and like all animals it is also interconnected to the environment where it is trying to survive. Evolution has made humans complex and part of that complexity is our need for wellbeing, wich is just a nother factor that benefits our survival as a species. No metaphysical assumptions are required to explain, or more likely to not explain, simply demand any particular kind of human behaviour. We are fully capable of looking at the actual results of our choises for action or inaction. The results do determine our wellbeing and survival as a species.
You wrote: “Atheists will often use words like progress with regard to evolution or human history as a way of sneaking finality in through the back door, which is incoherent. Try as they might, they just can’t be good materialists. Now, I could get away with it since I believe in God and finality, but you don’t, so I suggest you not use progress but a more neutral term like change, or “compelxification”.”
I do not see any “finality” to anything unless you mean the ultimate end of time-space, wich is as far as I can see the end of all. All in this material observable universe. But that is a fact as far as we can call anything a fact, through the most objective method to achieve any understanding or reality around us. Namely – science.
I do not try to sneak in any sort of “finality” – at least in the terms it seems to me you are referring to it, to anything and if this seems like that to you, my emic view on my own thoughts is in disagreement. I leave it to the outsiders (including you as you are no insider to my thoughts) to evaluate from their etic views wether I actually did do something I do not see myself as having even tried.
Infact, I have never observed any atheists trying to do anything you are trying to describe here. Perhaps, my inside view to atheism has made me blind to such. Have I been indoctrinated to take at face value that the atheists do not succumb to such? At very least I have not participated in any rituals wich demand that I take it at face value they do not. I very much doubt it, but I am willing to question myself and the reality to find out, instead of just calling your claim a “trope”. In comparrison religious rituals do demand it to be taken at face value that a particular deity exists. In my book, that is indoctrination and as such an essential part of the ritual itself.
You wrote: “I’m all done. Feel free to take the final word.”
Thank you again for me having the “final word”. I hope you could sometimes not only set yourself in the shoes of the worshipper of Zeus, but also the atheist. It might widen your horizons. 🙂 Remember though, that even if I was never a believer, most atheists today have once been, so it is not unlike atheists to actually know what is the insider view of the Theists to worship. That could tell you quite a bit about why they are able to see the religious rituals as not only as the most superficial acts of worship, but also the other social implications and even inbuilt indoctrination to the beliefs held by the worshippers.
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You may be interested in this blog:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nolongerquivering/2015/10/dear-christian-friend-and-former-parishioner-am-i-a-good-person/
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