As Above, So Below - the religion thread (formerly: People of California, beware)

Religion and reform are always a troubled couple. Thankfully, there IS a development for most of them (some faster than others).

Next time a fanatic Jihadist blows up a bunch of kids (which will sadly happen sooner than we want to think) tell their mothers about the history of Islam and their initial good intentions.

Hey plindboe, we had moved on to Islam now. Keep up with the flow of discussion!

Seriously, though, we won't see eye to eye on that issue (nor in the chosen rhetoric for debate), so it's probably futile to discuss it further.



I'll be the first to admit that there are questionable passages in all religious texts, and they should always be brought up for scrutiny and criticism as society develops. Much of the anti-gay attitudes in various religions sicken me, for example. But that doesn't in any way invalidate the value of the religion, IMO. You'll have to evaluate the totality of it, as well as the way the texts are interpreted and acted upon.

And that's very much the point. Unless you're right-wing crazy, nobody endorses slavery and urges to kill homosexuals in today religion except (in the latter case only) radical Islamic extremists. But generally those passages (as much of the original Torah law) is not anymore applied to everyday life.

Ah. A tripwire in the religion thread. I should have known better than to bait.

A 'straw man' is a flimsy stereotype, mostly used as the basis for argument. For example, there are already 3 straw men in this exchange:
All of Islam reduced to jihadists.
All of Greece reduced to insolvency and Mediteranean passion.
All of Australia reduced to blissful financial utopia and larrikinism. (Jihad-free, at that.)

Forgive my characterising you as a Greek -- if you think of the way I talk about Norway and Thor, or Martijn and the Netherlands, I have a tendency to refer to the person by way of the country. I was in effect criticising you (softening it with a wink), not your country, and not because of anything about your country. I apologise for the intent, and all that was unintended that was subsequently felt. It wasn't spiteful, but I feel you were using a straw man in the face of fairly reasoned discussion, which is now ironically what you're accusing me of.

To that point -- I will not bring up the historical context of Islam to explain to the survivors of a bomb the greater system of actions within which we are all caught the day after the bomb goes off. But some time later, a few months, a year, if it seems appropriate to make the point, I will make point. Anything else affirms the bomber's view of the world, which should have exited the stage with them.

Fuck the Catholic church. Seriously.

I read that as 'superhero' powers for a moment.

That would wrap up the zeitgeist in one nice neat bundle, admittedly. (Since the superhero genre is the dominant modern incarnation of the action movie, and the action movie is typically where American shows its colours to the rest of the world. Sam Raimi's flag-waving in Spiderman.)

Oops. Too slow. *sniff*

But to contribute a little, I'm not a fan of Islam either. The Muslim world hasn't really had their age of enlightenment yet though, so these days Christianity seems more peaceful in comparison. Were all things but the religions equal, I'm not sure which religion would produce worse effects. Muhammed was a conquering warlord though, and there's a significant emphasis on war in Islam, while Jesus was pretty much a pacifist communist hippie, ahead of his times in some his views, so it wouldn't surprise me if Islam is inherently more violent.




I concede that I should probably have avoided such charged words, even though I think my usage was valid, but let's drop that discussion for now. Was getting a bit frustrating, but you are still my favourite Norwegian.




I agree that one shouldn't oversimplify and only focus on whatever bits is in line with one's bias. All religions have good and bad elements, and they all need to be taken into account to reach a proper estimate of the religion in question. Overall I find the Abrahamic religions harmful, but I fully acknowledge that there are some positives in all three religions that secular society doesn't always manage to do equally well. For instance, churches often function very well as community centres and some have really perfected the art of charity collecting, in ways that the rest of society can learn much from. These religions also provide the ultimate death denying fantasies, giving people hope that they'll be with their loved ones forever after death in a wonderful after life. Whether the hope is false or not, the joy and comfort the fantasies bring are very real.

But I could write books on all the harm stemming from these religions, so I certainly think that mankind would move forward by leaving these archaic beliefs behind. The hate and intolerance the scriptures promote (against homosexuals, other perceived sodomites, nonbelievers, heretics, blasphemers, dissenters and even non-existent groups like witches); the needless sexual guilt that has plagued our societies throughout history; the rejection of skepticism and the emphasis on dogma and faith as core tenets; the countless false claims concerning the natural world, that people are expected to take on faith, thereby making them pigheaded and resistant to scientific advances; the black-and-white thinking (for instance the sharp division between good and evil); simplistic thinking (just look at the 10 commandments); the us vs. them thinking (which when combined with the concepts of good and evil, essentially permits just about any cruelty towards 'them'); the archaic, meaningless and often fucked up moral teachings (scape-goating, blood sacrifice, the idea of Hell and that non-believers deserve everlasting torture, inheritable sin and guilt, cutting off part of your children's genitals is good, might makes right, put your religion before your family, selling your daughter into slavery is fine too, oh and under no circumstance must you boil a goat in its mother's milk); the superstitions (demons causing diseases, talking animals, unicorns, witches, giants, fire-breathing monsters, the dead rising from their graves); the conservative tendencies that throughout history and to this day holds back progress; the countless ways that scriptures can be twisted to support any agenda; the divine permission that we can do with the planet as we please; the way it depreciates humanity and our current existence (Earth is pretty much a dirty doormat that people wipe their feet on before they go and live blissfully, forever in an infinitely better life).

We see these negative effects throughout the world every time we turn on the news, and whenever we open a history book we read about the genocides over doctrinal disagreements, the wrongs done by the Church, for example ridiculous things like opposing and holding back anaesthetics and analgesics for decades (because suffering brings us closer to God), torturing and threatening people for disagreeing with the geocentric model, and recently causing the deaths of millions (essentially destroying whole countries), by aggressively and deceptively campaigning against condoms. I don't think the good things that religions do, comes anywhere close to justifying these wrongs.

Anyway, there are of course interpretations and translations that make it possible to reject most of the negative stuff, so many Christians today are quite harmless and wonderful and easygoing people to be around. But the thing is that as long as all the sickening verses are kept intact, harmful interpretations will inevitably continue, and even though we like to think that our societies have moved past the point where certain archaic verses (say, the ones pertaining to slavery) no longer causes any harm, we only need a societal relapse before these extremely harmful interpretations could gain a foothold again. Get rid of the garbage and keep the good verses, the beneficial beliefs, the sense of community and the beautiful poetry, and you'll hear no more complaints from me about your religion.

I think I'll stop now before I've actually written a book.

Peter

PS.Sorry for the long post. I'm too busy these days to write posts like this, but my brain decided that I should procrastinate, instead of doing actual work.

Will you marry me, Peter?

I see the irony of that was not lost on you, excellent.

In what way? Endorsing rationality and speaking against irrational beliefs (i.e. anti-theism) does not in anyway deprecates the importance of spiritual experiences. It merely places those experiences within a rational framework which doesn't appeal to supernatural explanations. We are, partly, irrational beings living in a rational world.



See above. Rationality does not in anyway require us to ignore the importance of spiritual experience. Rational thinking will, in fact, tell us that spirituality is, or at least can be, an extremely important part of life that doesn't require unjustifiable claims about the external world to either explain, enjoy or gain insight from these experiences.



Depends what you mean by metaphysics? I don't feel like I'm repressing anything.



See, now you've lost me... again. Isn't admitting that kinda the whole point of rationality? (At least when applied to theism.)

Admitting to irrationality rarely happens on a discursive level. The point of spirtuality, really, is that it can't be often rationally defined.

Metaphysics is hard to define partly because the origins of the term itself is quite vague: Aristotle's students, after they collected his writings on nature (Physics and so on, it has to be stressed, that it's writings on nature, because the Greek word physis was basically translated to Latin as "natura", which is why for a very long time physicists were called "natural philosophers" or "naturalists") couldn't find a name for them, so they called it ta meta ta physika (after physics, which once led me to make a joke that "metaphysical love" is having a cigarette after sex), but the way I define it (based on my understanding of Ludwig Wittgenstein) is:

The physical realm is the set of logically connected sentences describing reality, as Wittgenstein states: the world is every (logically and "realistically") true statement we say. Beyond that lies metaphysics, which could be argued to be not the description and explanation of the world, but our definition of the world. If the physical concerns itself with how things work, the metaphysical is finding the answer to what it is.

Now, as I believe, there is nothing more personal than defining the world we live in (which concerns itself with what is called "our own world", that is the world as we perceive it and fill it with our experience and our emotions). In that case the definition mostly isn't something we make in a rational way. Reading philosophy may prepare a more or less subtle and logical arguments for defending our personal definitions, but it's still rationalizing something that we rather feel out than speculate on. In this case loving the stars because the their chemical components are the source of our life is a combination of our knowledge (which can be philosophical, can be scientific, as the case of deGrasse-Tyson shows, but at a very high level physics and mathematics becomes a sort of philosophy) is on the basic level as justified as what you call "unjustifiable claims".

It's something I want to stress strongly: as much as the concept of science and falsifiability (to use a criticized, I know, notion), the concept of theory and hypothesis, is, in case of the physical approach and our intellectual capability the basic and most fair and honest way to express our knowledge about the world, for our basic conduct in life, it's not everything and science, of course, never states (unless we are talking social sciences, which sometimes look for a program to solve certain social problems, but that's when it stops being science and starts being politics, I'd argue). Our basic conduct should, of course, be as rational as we can get, but there is an emotional aspect to it and that's where the metaphysical foundation of our personal philosophy kicks in.

I am a proponent of hermeneutics, which is called the philosophy of understanding. Ever since Nietzsche, Dilthey and later Heidegger, there is the notion that we have a pre-conceived vision of the world we live in and what we try to do is understand the world as it appears to us, while changing the vision, but we are still trying to understand what's happening and act upon that understanding. It's difficult to describe in less convoluted way (Heidegger himself is very convoluted at times), but the way I see it is that our existence, our everyday functioning, is shaped by the pre-conceived vision we apply to our actions. These actions themselves are elements of our understanding. Basically every philosophy asking "what does it mean?" could be called hermeneutics. Because it's about finding the meaning: of works of art (it's a very important methodology of humanities!) and, in fact, our very lives and reality itself. Nietzsche of course, stops a bit earlier, stating that we are left on our own to find the meaning of our lives on our own.

In that case, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone, religion is as justified as anything rational. It speaks to emotions, it can influence our actions positively (it did quite a few times, but the media choose not to discuss that bit recently), there is that possibility which you called genuinely good advice. I feel it great that atheism and antitheism found a voice and can speak publicly, but I'd like there to be a bit more respect for religious thinking. It's hard to understand even for religious people, it's not making things as easy as you may think they are. But there is a value to that. I appreciate and generally accept all rational arguments, but keep that little irrational element to myself. Call me naive, but I think there is that bit that may be just that bit necessary in this world.

I don't know what is your "metaphysical keyword", so I can't tell what you repress and what you don't repress. In other words, I can't tell (and I don't want to try before I get insight) how you define the world and what definition do you act upon. You may base it on reason and that's very much fine. Spirituality though isn't only elation.

Now, to the definition of beliefs... Belief doesn't have necessarily to stand to scrutiny at all. Wikipedia: "Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a conjecture or premise to be true". I think you are making the fallacy of thinking that belief and knowledge are on the same cognitive spectrum. They're not. If belief is (and the way I see it as well) a mental state, then it doesn't really compute to treat it as a scientific hypothesis. Because forming hypotheses is a process, not a different state, of the mind.