I think his point was that this WHO document used highly filtered patient reports, so it would be wrong to look at it and infer you were getting something representative of the distribution of patient outcomes. Which, purportedly, the NYT did so infer.
>Do you have *any* underlying unease at the extensive physical force and coercion, even prolonged imprisonment in psych wards, that is commonplace in Western psychiatry?
I'm guessing Scott has given it some thought along the way. One such post (but it has come up other times):
I don't think this is quite right - they describe themselves as the Hearing Voices Movement, not as the Schizophrenic Movement or whatever.
I also think it's fine to say there's a natural cluster of eg autistic people (which is obvious enough that things like "aspie" have entered the lexicon even though psychiatrists would kind of prefer that not happen) and that you can believe this and still be angry with people who think this cluster should be treated with powerful medication.
Hypertension is famously the "silent killer"--without a doctor's appointment and a trip to the syphgmomanometer no one would ever know they were hypertensive before they died of a sudden stroke. Yet the actual phenomenon of blood pressure is as objective, quantifiable sign as a person could ask for: it's the literal pressure of the blood in the vessels. You can quibble about at which exact point it becomes a concern (and no one actually believes that something magical happens when your blood pressure increases by 1/1 and you cross into the hypertensive category, the line is drawn because you have to draw it somewhere) but you can't argue that 121/80 is actually 128/10. It's a poor analogy to mental health conditions, which necessarily create symptoms that the patients are aware of, but which are very difficult to objectively measure, and which can be interpreted through any number of theoretical lenses which radically change the meaning of those experiences.
I agree with the thrust of your ontological concerns about mental health conditions but I actually think the HVM (which I'm not a part of) is coming it from another epistemic place altogether and so avoids many of those concerns. People in the Hearing Voice Movement are gathering around a shared experience that they would be aware of with or without professional intervention. People who are having certain kinds of auditory hallucinations might fret about whether they are truly "hearing voices", but if I understand them right I think the ethos of HVM is very much unconcerned with that kind of line-drawing. I mean, if you exist in modern society and have certain kinds of abnormalities of psyche, psychiatric concepts will have mediated some of your understanding of your experiences, but I don't think that's much of a gotcha for the people who have the abnormalities in the first place.
So what makes people believe they are different, abnormal in this way? The voice-hearing case is pretty straightforward, but I think you might be more interested in other examples. When it comes to autism spectrum, I think the subjective experience that many people who come to identify as AS are gathering around is a lifetime of inexplicable social friction and rejection. I think the gravity that holds those social groups together is less about meeting particular psychological/developmental criteria and more about whether being picked last on the dodgeball team over and over for reasons beyond your comprehension is something that resonates with you--and, you broadly fit the phenotype, so you can bond over the shared similarities. I mean, I happen to think AS is close enough to something of a real thing that it can explain why these people with this broadly similar phenotype are socially rejected over and over, but I don't think that explanatory framework is necessary for those folks to get together on non-hypocritical grounds.
" You can quibble about at which exact point it becomes a concern (and no one actually believes that something magical happens when your blood pressure increases by 1/1 and you cross into the hypertensive category, the line is drawn because you have to draw it somewhere) but you can't argue that 121/80 is actually 128/10."
Except when I was trying to find out about what exactly constituted hypertension, the information online was "we used to think 140/80 was normal but now that has been revised downwards":
“The risk of cardiovascular disease begins at 115/75 mm Hg and doubles with each increment of 20/10 mm Hg; individuals who are normotensive at 55 years of age have a 90% lifetime risk for developing hypertension,” the guidelines say."
I hope you all are rigorously maintaining 115/75 BP! And striving to lower it even more!
Okay, and why did they pick "120/80" or "120/70" OR EVEN LOWER as the new "normal blood pressure range"? What studies, what measures, what incidences of cardiac events and strokes at 140/80 versus 120/80?
Scientific American doesn't know, but it knows LOWER IS BETTER:
"The exact origin of the designation of 120/80 as the threshold for "normal blood pressure" is unknown. It may have come from the large amount of data available early in the 20th century from life insurance exams and what happened to these people as they aged, or it could have arisen from the beliefs of medical practitioners, as so much traditional knowledge has."
I do like the 'traditional knowledge' bit; yes, the ancient and venerable all of thirty years that 120/80 was considered normal BP!
Scientific American may be puzzled by this conundrum of the sphinx, but I know: Brazilian tribe in the rainforest, was the answer. Some study measured their blood pressure levels and found that they had an average of 120/80, so this was set as the new ideal:
"Four remote population samples (Yanomamo and Xingu Indians of Brazil and rural populations in Kenya and Papua New Guinea) had the lowest average blood pressures among all 52 populations studied in INTERSALT, an international cooperative investigation of electrolytes and blood pressure. Average systolic blood pressure was 103 versus 120 mm Hg in the remaining INTERSALT centers; diastolic blood pressure in these four population samples averaged 63 versus 74 mm Hg in the 48 other centers. There was little or no upward slope of blood pressure with age; hypertension was present in only 5% of the rural Kenyan sample and virtually absent in the other three centers"
I went "Dude, I am not a Brazilian tribesperson living in the Amazon, I kinda think personal circumstances and genetics might be a teensy bit different for what you are saying I should be aiming for?" I mean, sure I would *like* "hunt monkeys for two hours, then lie around in a hammock the rest of the day" lifestyle but that's not going to happen in the Western world, you know?
The European Heart Journal is as confused as I am:
"No wonder that many are confused at a higher level: what should we use in our daily practice? When we strive for truly normal blood pressure, we might look back at the days when humans still lived in their natural environment as hunters and gatherers. Of note, there are tribes still living today as our ancestors did thousands of years ago. For instance, blood pressure of Tsimane Indios who live in the Bolivian Amazon forest averages ∼116/73 mmHg throughout life. Interestingly, they also have rather low average cholesterol values of 2.4 mmol/L, much lower than Westeners of today’s world. Furthermore, they exhibit much less coronary calcification than age- and gender-matched US citizens. Obviously, they move a lot and hunt all day long in order to feed themselves and their family, and they eat fish, meat, and fruits; however, the downside of their style of living is an elevated C-reactive protein and eosinophils in their blood due to chronic parasitic infections.
The Yanomami Indios who live across the border in the Brazilian Amazon region, have similar blood pressure values throughout their life span. Finally, the Kuna Indios who live near the coast on small islands outside mainland Panama in the Atlantic also have blood pressure values of ∼100/70 mmHg throughout their life in spite of the fact that they eat a lot of salt, in particular, in addition to cacao plants which are one of their major nutrients. Of note, when they move to mainland Panama or to its capital Panama City, they do show the age-dependent increase in blood pressure typical for Western populations.
If naturally living people have lifelong blood pressures of 100–120/70–80 mmHg, are we all hypertensive? Why do we have so much higher blood pressures and a consistent increase in systolic blood pressure with age? Several factors might contribute: (i) genetic changes; (ii) increasing life expectancy; (iii) the obesity epidemic; (iv) sedentary lifestyle; and (v) the composition of our diet. Gene drifts and selection are a possibility, but hard to prove at this point. The increasing life expectancy may explain the marked rise in systolic blood pressure in the very elderly, but not in the population at large. Indeed, Indios reaching retirement age still maintain low blood pressures.
...What would be the appropriate management in the context of diverging recommendations for optimal blood pressure? Not all hypertensives are made equal; some may be younger and have just recently been diagnosed with elevated blood pressure, but are otherwise healthy. Others may already have end-organ damage such as left ventricular hypertrophy or intima media thickening of the carotid arteries, while others may already have coronary artery disease with or without diabetes. Finally, elderly hypertensives may be frail, have a low gait speed, and a risk for falls. Thus, hypertensives have quite divergent cardiovascular and safety risks. It is obvious that one cannot and should not treat all these hypertensives with the very same approach—we must treat a patient and not a risk factor."
I have never met these people who "insist [polyamory] is good for everyone". I think this is part of the problem: people are really bad at separating "please tolerate me when I do this" from "I think everyone should do this".
(not accusing any specific person, my guess is people on all sides have this problem - both the people making the requests and the people hearing them)
I think assuming someone saying, 'please tolerate me', means 'everyone should do this', is an easy jump to make when the person is saying something to the effect of, 'please tolerate me being more moral than you'. In fact, that is basically just taking them seriously. I think this is why so much vitriol gets spewed at vegans, for example.
I am pretty sure you know poly people who advocate that jealousy is silly (or, in your words, a paper tiger), and the throughline from that to moral superiority is straightforward; you are affected by negative emotion, but we poly people are not.
"when the person is saying something to the effect of, 'please tolerate me being more moral than you'"
Yeah, that's the impression I get from people advocating for poly who are often all "Jealousy? Oh we've solved jealousy!" and while they may not *intend* it, it comes across as "because we are superior to you monos, whose tiny brains cannot handle the work of feeling joy for your partner's happiness, but it's not your fault you are stuck on a lower evolutionary level than we are".
It's like the Bike Thief cartoon: it's a lovely *ideal* to have, but the *expression* of it makes me want him to get run over by his own bike ridden by the druggie who stole it to sell for his next fix.
Actually anti-anti-psychotics would be dopamine agonists like amphetamine, which can generate psychotic symptoms.
Those peak spiritual experiences are not at all promised in psychosis and tend to be rare and brief, not lasting states. It must not be especially energetically stable to be so blissful and all-is-one-y. And when you tumble off that peak you often land differently configured. some-is-nothing? who-is-not? etc. Takes a while to get back to this-is-this and that-is-that. Inducing these states via psychosis seems an especially dangerous route.
My recollection is that virtually everything in DMV (4 and 5) requires "negative impact on patients life" for a diagnosis. It doesn't require that the negative impact be worse than that of the drugs needed to solve the problem(for a diagnosis). Thus there are going to be diagnosed people who may well be better off untreated or at least chemically untreated...
This even-handed analysis is so needed -- and I think it also applies to the movement of people treating psychosis as a "spiritual emergency." Thank you.
I'd say that NYT-bashing is a bit excessive, if the goal is to reach reasonable people who aren't already part of this bubble. Like it or not, it's still the newspaper of record, and if your first experience with a rando blogger is their seemingly blind rage towards it, that's probably about as reliable a red flag as they come.
eh, Scott is perfectly allowed to write to his regular readers rather than trying to optimise for outsiders and sanding off everything that made the regulars follow him
Sure, but my impression is that he aspires to more. Like, the general idea seems to be that legacy media is largely discredited and teeters on obsolescense, and brave new solutions are all but ready to replace it, like, say, the Substack-osphere. But for this promise to be realized you actually need to consistently adhere to a higher standard than the legacy media.
If legacy _news_ media were able to go back to the way I remember them - when they had more reach and bigger budgets - I'd be a happy subscriber.
Substack isn't better, and it isn't even serving the same customer wants - nor, AFAICT, attempting to do so.
It also doesn't seem to me to be replacing Life Magazine et al., or Readers Digest, or much of anything that ever appeared on television.
Maybe substack is an adequate or better replacement for types of media I never consumed. (Literary magazines? High brow opinion journals?)
More likely, it's another example of adaptations to the way that modern technology too often makes it impossible for people to get nice things. ;-)
I.e. trad media aren't viable on an ad based model, with google et al taking the lion's share of the ad revenue. All we can get are the clickbait-oriented leftovers, controlled by an ever-decreasing set of oligarchs. Substack is little more than a workaround for one of the resulting problems. Plus, of course, an opportunity for some people to make more money than they otherwise would.
No,not reallt, because this blog doesnt make a claim to be "the blog of record" In fact,m one could argue that making such a claim, which was possible when there weremore limited media sources,is part of the problem and the thing should be acknoweldging whatevr perspectives and biases you may have and not try to claim yourself asthe "official"objective source for things.
I thought Scott was being tongue in cheek. Like he obviously doesn't have a great impression of them but I didn't take his lightly ribbing them as anything but him lightly ribbing them.
If it's *not* your first experience with this particular blogger, then the rage seems justified (albeit crass, even if it is a literary reference), and his behavior is on average consistently better than theirs.
A joke at the expense of a massive media corporation with a history of dishonesty is hardly a more reliable red flag than anything else that gives a "rando blogger" distinction from any other.
Should he also take out the knocks against religious people? Should he remove any mention of trans people, or should his mentions of trans people be more fawning and less skeptical? Those, too, are "reliable red flags" that could alienate outsiders.
"Should he also take out the knocks against religious people? Should he remove any mention of trans people, or should his mentions of trans people be more fawning and less skeptical? Those, too, are "reliable red flags" that could alienate outsiders."
Probably yes for both of those, since those comments generate far more heat than light. The actual topic of the article is controversial enough, why court even more controversy by bringing up two largely or entirely unrelated topics? It risks having any discussion on the article turn into an argument on religion or an argument on trans people, while the actual point of the article gets ignored!
Though I don't really care about the New York Times put-downs. Anyone who'd clutch their pearls about a blogger insulting a giant media conglomerate is probably unlikely to read this blog in the first place. But religion and LGBT issues are topics that quite a lot of people feel extremely passionate about, and while that doesn't mean he should never talk about those topics, it does mean that it's probably unwise to bring them up as casual examples or analogies or jokes in essays about other topics.
Right. Its definitely "culture war" territory, but theres definitely an issue where people utilize that "well,its an established thing" reputation of the Times and other institutions to see control of that as an important part of gatekeeping- the hysterical reaction to the possibility that Musk might buy Twitter shows that a lot of people are very personally invested in this and believe it on if not a conscious level at least a semi-conscius one, and I suppose as a rationalist whose seen this specific community attacked by dubious means(intentionally) its fair to dismiss that combination of "uses shady suggestive means to attack things that are not partof their gatekeeping while still trying to hold the image of journal of record"
It may not be necessary for x-rationalists to givesome special consideration to a media outlet that has attacked them not for what they actually believe but for insinuations that are based on a desire for controlof a "gatekept,this is the official view of reasonable people" paper, and the argument that people,especially rationalists, should stop treating the Times as anything other then a similar partisan news source as that acknowledgement of its "legitmacy" creates legitimacy.
For example., the times can be cited on wikipedia while ACT probably could not.Thats a problem if you're interested in an ability to understand information without first having to pass a certain political/cultural filter.
I thought there was a slight tongue in cheeksness about it given Scott's personal issueds with the times, and it was assumed readers would interpret it in that context.
There is totally successful "church, but for athiests"! I, and most of the practicing Jews I know, are atheists, love going to temple and singing, bar mitzvah our kids, sing praise to the lord, honor our traditions, and think that literally believing in god is infantile.
I'm slightly jealous of my friends who grew up Jewish or Unitarian for this reason - it doesn't seem likely to fill the need for someone who didn't grow up with it though.
This is a reasonable point. I think I meant that the thing where atheists try to create something where people go to church and sing hymns about science or liberalism, without even the slightest pretense of association with a previous God-centered religious tradition, doesn't work.
(this *has* worked for rationalists, but we also have some pretty kooky-by-mainstream-standard beliefs, which seems to be an irreplaceable element. For whatever reason, atheism isn't kooky enough, even when it's extreme atheism in an otherwise religious society)
I asked myself the honest probability of whether something like the God of the Bible existed back when I was in college and admitted the answer was epsilon... and I might not have been willing to do that if not for the fact that I was already sleeping in on Sundays once I'd moved into a dorm.
I love the morning, but going to church isn't one of my top 100 ways of spending it. FWIW, I'm probably one of the most anti-Marxist people around but Freddie, I'm glad you're in the world. You're a stand-up guy and refreshingly honest. I loved "The Cult of Smart". Well, except for the end, which didn't say much about undoing the Cult, just basically "enact everything Bernie says."
When I had my first religious experience, at age 14, my main conscious reason for not doing more with it was because I valued my Sunday lie-ins too much.
Then at 18 I had another one that I couldn't ignore so easily (but still went to evening church for preference). I still do prefer evening church and like lie-ins, but kids who get up at 7am anyway have made that a less-relevant factor.
(Of course, the rationalist credo of "I want to believe what is true" very much applies. If God is real, it's more valuable to believe he's real, even at the cost of Sunday lie-ins. I didn't see things that way at age 14, though.)
I've participated in some rationalist rituals and ceremonies, but personally, I've found them missing something essential that's common to almost all religious practices. That something is a genuine sense of reverence, the idea that a ritual should be designed to evoke sincere and heartfelt emotion, and then actually taken seriously. A lot of the time the rituals go through the motions of nodding to some kind of deep sentiment, but the participants tend to treat the actual expression as a joke.
Individual atheists may feel deep reverence for some things, but I don't think most of them have a shared sense that they ought to feel and express *shared* reverence in a specific thing, that the experience is made deeper and more significant to the participants if it feels like everyone is in it together and not making a joke out of it.
If you'd like to witness the Next Generation of hippies being inculcated into the faith, https://www.retreatfarm.org/ during food truck night is a good place to go.
Having grown up in a place that had lots of Unitarians, had a serious high school girlfriend whose father was one the most eminent Unitarian theologians of his time, etc....your first paragraph is pretty doggone close to what Unitarianism is.
(Nowadays anyway -- one thing I learned from the professor was that it originally had a stronger God-centering aspect.)
The jokes that we all learned [How does a Unitarian start the Lord's Prayer? 'To Whom It May Concern....'] were funny in part cause they were so close to true.
Secular Judaism of the kind described above and the modern UUs both are continuing orthopraxy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthopraxy) and ritualism rather than orthodoxy, and are the inheritors of a genuine religious tradition that they have cored out the "believing in supernatural stuff" but kept the rest, and the rest is thick enough with content to provide cultural capital for the unbelieving generations to consume.
How long that capital will last is another thing; I give Judaism a way better chance at surviving than the UUs.
"For whatever reason, atheism isn't kooky enough, even when it's extreme atheism in an otherwise religious society"
Except we're not living in an otherwise religious society. We're living in a secular society that has a non-religious basis for its social, cultural, moral, political, and legal norms. So in that regard, being an atheist is not very "kooky," because being a secular atheist doesn't result in any noticably different behaviors or lifestyles or values or non-theological beliefs than being a functionally secular theist. In that regard, being devoutly religious in a highly visible way is far more "kooky," even if being a nominal theist is technically the norm.
Being an "extreme atheist" might be seen as weird in an exclusively negative way, if "extreme atheism" implies an active and vitriolic hostility to religion. But that's less because of the belief itself and more because hostility towards other people's beliefs is seen as rude, belligerent, and antisocial.
I agree. I think atheists might have a better shot at having a religion-like thing in a setting where actual religious feeling predominates. Maybe it doesn't even have to predominate, they just have to plausibly believe that is the case (the reddit atheists of earlier in this century come to mind). Nowadays, it's very hard to pretend we live in very Christian communities, so they died out accordingly.
I think just being an "atheist" isn't enough to sustain any kind of movement because its just a "not" movement. It doesn't head towards anything it only heads away. After you've all finished congratulating yourselves for not believing in God, then what?
One issue is that Judaism isn’t a proselytizing religion and seems fairly ambivalent about welcoming converts (refuse three times, etc.). So to the extent that something like the Bright (lol) movement was intended to provide community while defanging the harms caused by most revealed religion, Judaism doesn’t really fit the bill. At times I’ve been lowkey jealous of secular Jews because of the dynamic you describe, but being insular appears to be a key part of making it work. Something like Mormonism for atheists would be great (family home evening!) but just hasn’t gotten any traction.
I was also thinking of music and dance communities. I grew up in an pretty intensely committed multi-generational folk music community with a charismatic leader that 100% served this niche. Even decades later I have only positive reflections on how the structure and values of the group influenced my life. Contra dancing scenes can have this dynamic as well. Toward more quirky, inclusive, and high functioning affinity groups!
But can a music subculture persist over multiple generations? I was in an intense music subculture in my twenties, but it kinda went away eventually as people got older.
I'm seeing a bit of this direction in Catholicism among people my age (late 20s early 30s). People who keep a lot of the traditions and rituals but don't really believe genuinely anymore.
That's interesting, because I've had the opposite experience. I was raised Catholic, and I think a lot of Catholics in my parents' generation did keep the traditions without really believing. I know my dad waffled in his beliefs while I was growing up, and the mother of one of my childhood friends didn't believe in the resurrection, but she still raised my friend Catholic and attended church with the family. But among people I know around my age who were raised Catholic, most have left the church, and the ones who stayed are actual believers who abide by the more difficult rules.
I think this just implies your peer group is at a later stage than GlacierCow's in the multigenerational process of dissolving strong religious bonds. Scott actually wrote about this on SSC in a post called The Ideology Is Not The Movement (Section IV-4):
I believe a critical mass needs to actually believe everything, though. In the Catholic setting, a certain subset of women come to mind.
Edit: arguably in most settings, since, as far as I know, women report more religious feelings in most of the world. But women were certainly very important for the early successes of the Catholic church.
Yeah I see a very similar thing with my friends at home with (rural, European) Catholicism. It is just part of the village traditions/customs, believing anything is not required, just proper protocol.
[And from a Catholic angle you are saved anyway by eating the bread at communion, so there is no need to really believe in anything ;) ]
(2) "Get saved" - this is a very American Protestant Evangelical term. First, and again this is a big deal for some of those denominations, Catholicism does not have 'eternal assurance/eternal security', it is entirely possible to lose your salvation:
Second, just receiving Communion will not 'save' you and indeed can damn you:
1 Corinthians 11: 27-30
"27 Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. 28 Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. 29 For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. 30 That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died."
(3) "No need to really believe in anything" - this is also incorrect. I'd have to end up quoting the entire Catechism to you to refute this one, so have a snippet from this publication:
I swear, I have no idea how I turned into an evangelist, but whatever nit-picking module of my brain gets engaged when I read incorrect statements of doctrine kicks into high gear. I don't expect anyone to *believe* all this, but I would like if they could state the things they don't believe in correctly.
I remember having transubstantiation explained to me before my First Communion. “It really happens. It becomes the body of Christ. Don’t chew it. Swallow it quickly.” We were to fast from the previous day until we received the sacrament. My fourth grade teacher gave me a religious medallion to mark the occasion. Miss Kaye, nice woman, smart as a sack of hammers. I never could convince her that magnetism could pass through glass or that Mexican jumping beans have a larva inside.
That was in 1962. My autobiographical memory is weirdly reliable.
Oh it has changed *so much* since our day! Did you get the little lecture too about "what do you do if the priest drops the Host before you receive it in your mouth? No, you don't touch it! You *let* it fall to the ground, because lay people cannot hold the Host, their hands are not consecrated!"
And then communion in the hand came in decades later 😁
Fasting from midnight until you received at Mass - this was why people used to faint in church (I saw a couple of instances when I was a small child). Now it's only an hour's fast, and I wonder if even that is observed.
Yeah, the changes are pretty dramatic. As I understand it people don’t go to confession much anymore. There used to be a big line every Saturday evening to prep for communion on Sunday morning.
Dropping the host was an inconceivable event so we I never got that lecture. Even if it were to somehow happen an altar boy held a small gold plate under it so it could never reach the floor.
Hey, my remark was about 50% a throwaway joke, but thank you for responding still. Let me write out a non-joke reply.
(1), (2). English is not my native language (I even had to google what a chick tract is) and I have to admit I was too lazy to look up the translation for "Hostie" (which is "host"), so I just wrote bread. The point about me translating "getting saved" is super interesting though, I wasn't aware that this was such an Evangelical term, but I must have picked it up unconsciously from Evangelicals in the US.
I was thinking of "Sündenvergebung", meaning "forgiveness of sins", during mass as in "mein Blut was für euch und für alle vergossen wird, zur Vergebung der Sünden, tut dies zu meinem Gedächtnis".
(3) I'm not trying to refute my catechesis(?) here, I am giving an accurate (in my worldview) statement how Catholicism is lived in my home town, and closely connected to tradition and protocol.
------
Catholicism, or really any religion, is lived more differently than people think, even when they think there are regional variations.
For one thing, the German bishop conference does have a different focus and interpretation of the catechism. There are also over-regional practices that are common all over German-speaking areas, such as large easter fires (which are lit from a single bonfire in the church yard during easter night), that are, as far as I know, not common in other areas. These are definitely seen as "a Catholic thing" where I am from and there is no separation of "village tradition" and "religion".
I am not arguing that these are schism-level differences, people do agree on broad strokes, but I would argue the way they conceptualize the same words is different. I am also not saying this as a total outsider, I did spend a lot of time in church - as altar server during my teenage years. You have all these people coming to church, murmuring "Herr ich bin nicht würdig, dass du eingehst unter meinem Dach, aber sprich nur ein Word, so wird meine Seele gesund", because that is the proper thing you do, and the actual words don't need to have meaning. You are part of the community by coming and saying them and (in mine/their eyes, not necessarily the catechism), makes you a decent Catholic.
The google translation is not great, but I think good enough to examine various differences. For example, the German version explicitly mention that work is forbidden on Sundays and holy days. The suggestion to go to church every day, on the other hand, is omitted here, only requirements to go on Easter and in danger of death are mentioned. The bullet point regarding marriage is ommited completely. Assisting the church does not mention financial aid. Below the commandments is an interview with a guy who is explaining and further relativising them, saying that context matters and things shouldn't be taken too literally. Maybe you'd find this comparison interesting.
Hello again, and thanks for the reply. Let me take this in no particular order:
(1) I have a high view of the Eucharist, so I do get twitchy at terms like "bread" because they were part of Reformation polemic and because online atheists like to toss about terms like "crackers" when referring to the Host (and in part because of a stunt like this one back in 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PZ_Myers#Eucharist_incident)
(2) We're translating between English and German here, so linguistic and cultural differences ahoy!
(3) I would not be one bit surprised by anything you say about the understanding the ordinary Catholic globally has of the faith; the state of catechesis has been abysmal over the past few decades. I could do the usual "blame Vatican II" bit, but it has always been so, my father was an altarboy himself during the days of the Latin Mass, and he had been trained to just parrot off the responses but never told what they meant, so he had no idea what he was saying. Pope-Emeritus Benedict XVI back when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger also mentioned the likes about not having false nostalgia for the 'good old days', that even back then there were the bulk of Catholics in Germany who just went to church because that is what you were supposed to do but they had very shallow understanding and no real faith.
(4) You are not obliged to attend Mass every day, but you must atttend on Sundays and holy days of obligation.
(5) Yes, the words of institution which you quote in German are the same for the Mass in English; recent translation of Eucharistic Prayer I: "TAKE THIS, ALL OF YOU, AND DRINK FROM IT: FOR THIS IS THE CHALICE OF MY BLOOD, THE BLOOD OF THE NEW AND ETERNAL COVENANT, WHICH WILL BE POURED OUT FOR YOU AND FOR MANY FOR THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. DO THIS IN MEMORY OF ME."
This is the acknowledgement of the saving sacrifice on the Cross which redeemed fallen humanity, but this is already turning into a theological tract so I'll keep it short. It's not "go up and receive communion and all your sins are forgiven even if you haven't been to confession and you will never lose your salvation" theology.
I have probably been arguing/discussing with American Protestants on the Internet too much, since they tend to have a much different view of salvation and the Lord's Supper, so I was interpreting your words in their sense. Sorry for that.
(6) Lighting bonfires outside the church door on Easter? Yes, that's the new fire - you extinguish all other lights and fires, kindle the new fire, light the Easter Candle from it, and in turn light all other candles from it so you have the new light. It was not alone a tradition but part of the rubrics until very recently; churches over here seem to have given up on it a bit but I am glad that your parish is keeping it up 😀
It's the incident mentioned in the Life of St. Patrick:
Regarding the new fire. Yeah, the core idea is Catholic, I am trying to say that the way people act and interpret it can be very different. I really mean a bonfire, here is an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIIrnrmdFJg&t=249s
(You see them coming up to the bonfire at about 4 minutes with candles coming from Easter mass.)
I know some people like this as well. But for myself, I can’t bring myself to see the point of restricting how I eat or how I spend my time, given that I don’t actually believe in the underlying belief system.
I suggest not following the rules that seem pointless, but asking people around you if they go to a church, synagogue, mosque, or other temple that they absolutely love (especially if there is good music), and checking it out. Most people who think of themselves as following the rules are super inconsistent and intellectually lazy about it anyway -- you're doing what they do, but just being more honest about it.
I hear you, but lots of Jews aren't even very ethnically Jewish. My kids are less than 1/4 Jewish by ancestry. Everyone just adopts the identity they want, you can too. You can just show up, sing along with the singing, disagree somewhat with the sermon, go home, read a Dilbert and go to bed.
There's no Jewish card. You just start going to stuff. I guess some Jews are annoying about ancestry or whatever, and the official policies of the state of Israel are designed to exclude people, but just find a temple with gay couples and I promise it'll be cool and not annoying about if you're Jewish enough. As with most of the world history of the last 200 years, places that treat gay people well are safest and best
It's ironic how atheists get more obsessed with religion than the religious. It's also interesting to me how many atheists seem to latch on to Abrahamic stereotypes, especially Christianist stereotypes, when they argue against the existence of god and religious practices in general.
Not all religions require a belief in a particular god or gods. Buddhists, for instance, can get along quite well without a belief in a god or gods (Buddhists can believe or not believe as they wish deity-wise, and it makes no difference for their practices or how they're regarded by their fellow Buddhists). Likewise, Marxism displays many of the beliefs of millenarian religion without a godhead—but they substitute historical inevitability for god's will—and True Communism for the rapture. And in extreme sects of Marxism, a god-like cult is built up around a leader and large-scale worship rituals are promoted and enforced.
Meanwhile, (many) US atheists who think the worship of god is infantile stand for the Pledge of Allegiance (though they might remain silent or mumble "under god" part). And even without the "under god" component, Jehovah's Witnesses long ago sussed out that American flag worship is a bizarre cult where the US flag has become an idol. Their refusal stand for for the pledge is because they see flag worship as violating the 1st and 2nd Commandments, and the enforcement of flag worship rituals in US society as a violating their 1st Amendment rights (BTW: we owe the Witnesses a lot for bringing and *winning* many free-speech 1st Amendment cases before SCOTUS).
But most atheists seem to be as ignorant of religion as Christian Fundamentalists are of science.
3. Many people who claim God is talking to them are, at best, misinterpreting their experience.
4. It would be nice to have some basis, experience, or expertise for claiming there is no God. As someone I respect once said, "That God you don't believe in? I don't believe that God, either!"
"Born again Christians are constantly having what would normally get classified as psychotic experiences - I have asked a bunch of evangelicals who say “God told me to X” whether they actually heard God in a, you know, hearing God type way, and they usually say yes"
Regarding that, the Catholic Church is very "hmmmm" about people claiming to be hearing the voice of God directly communicating with them. (Yes, all the Reformation Protestants will now chime in about putting intermediaries between God and man).
There is a distinction between the voice of conscience, the promptings of Providence, and God Almighty speaking directly to you, and some of that distinction may have been lost in the more enthusiastic denominations in the USA. So you might say "I know Bill is perfectly genuine and sincere, but I don't believe God spoke to him" and I would agree, but not on the grounds that "of course not, God doesn't exist, Bill is just hearing voices".
" -The natural conscience is no distinct faculty, but the one intellect of a man inasmuch as it considers right and wrong in conduct, aided meanwhile by a good will, by the use of the emotions, by the practical experience of living, and by all external helps that are to the purpose.
- The natural conscience of the Christian is known by him to act not alone, but under the enlightenment and the impulse derived from revelation and grace in a strictly supernatural order.
- As to the order of nature, which does not exist but which might have existed, St. Thomas (I-II:109:3) teaches that both for the knowledge of God and for the knowledge of moral duty, men such as we are would require some assistance from God to make their knowledge sufficiently extensive, clear, constant, effective, and relatively adequate; and especially to put it within reach of those who are much engrossed with the cares of material life. It would be absurd to suppose that in the order of nature God could be debarred from any revelation of Himself, and would leave Himself to be searched for quite irresponsively.
- Being a practical thing, conscience depends in large measure for its correctness upon the good use of it and on proper care taken to heed its deliverances, cultivate its powers, and frustrate its enemies.
- Even where due diligence is employed conscience will err sometimes, but its inculpable mistakes will be admitted by God to be not blameworthy. These are so many principles needed to steady us as we tread some of the ways of ethical history, where pitfalls are many."
"It is a misconception that the church is quick to accept mental illness or drug abuse, such as schizophrenia or hallucinogens, for private revelation and demonic activity. The church is skeptical, and only accepts private revelation after discernment, because it is "the pillar and bulwark of the truth" and because it has a long history of dealing with fraudulent visionaries."
"all the Reformation Protestants will now chime in about putting intermediaries between God and man"
Now you are putting an intermediary between me and my "Yes, but!" comments. Typical Papist!
Anyway, a large number of canonizations happen exactly because people claim to have seen an intermediary like Mary or a saint in the sky or whatever. And not metaphorially seen, but seen the same way a cloud or sun is seen in the sky.
The Catholic church, while ostensibly ruled by the Pope, is in a constant tension between very serious Jesuits and wacky superstitious Mexican abuelas. The superstitious abuelas are always getting visions, the very serious Jesuits are always saying that this kind of thing doesn't happen, and occasionally they agree to compromise.
Sounds very similar to Eastern Orthodoxy. Lots of woo-woo from babushkas about visions, reincarnation, basically anything mystical, that often contradicts basic biblical tenets. Hopefully it's not just from the Russian state media's ability to obliterate critical thinking from its populace.
Catholicism is weird along a lot more vectors than that. I was raised Catholic, but I didn’t realize how weird it could be until I went to Europe. Sure, 600-year-old relics of saints’ body parts are easily written off as “back then”, but at Fatima there is still a huge oven for burning wax effigies of body parts and human figures as offerings. You can buy a wax breast and throw it in as an offering with prayers for someone with breast cancer. My Catholic mother would have screamed “Witchcraft!” at things still done by Catholics in other times and places.
If you spend several hours a day for ten years visualizing your meditation deity, it's very likely to appear to you (it did for me, and it scared the shit out of me). Rather than seeing it as dissociative, a better rational explanation for phenomena like tulpas would self-hypnosis through ritual focus (although I think that explanation is also facile). But it suggests to me that the mind is much more flexible in what it can perceive than standard rationalist dogmas allow for.
I didn't want to say the actual reason I posted the above but now that I'm seeing your comment, might as well: I have a comparably long personal practice of meditation and have seen a similar thing happen with a different sort of a visualization. AFAIK, it can be done via hypnosis and faster as well. It didn't quite change my beliefs on the mind though: it seems that if you imagine a sufficiently elaborate entity while in a certain state for long enough, you can make the idea loop and become self-sustaining... Dreams where one talks to imaginary convincing people are a common phenomenon, this must go in a similar vein, or at least so I keep telling myself to stay sane. :)
Dissociation, however, might be related to how one might do such a thing unconsciously.
This occurrence didn't become self-sustaining for me, and I'm happy it didn't. After it left, I realized that I had forgotten an important instruction from my first meditation instructor — "don't undertake meditation practices without the supervision of your teacher". Later in an informal seminar on Buddhism, given by Robert F. Thurman, he echoed that dictum with the codicil, "because you might find yourself in a mental space you'll find very frightening or one that's difficult to escape from without assistance."
Silly me for not taking these warnings seriously.
And this is why I'm against teaching meditation in schools. Are people still pushing that stupidity?
It was more or less an attempt to remember a deceased relative over multiple longer sessions. I don't even know whether that's something one is supposed to do at all, but, well, when that unexpectedly happened, it felt like talking to what I best remembered of them and then the image went away after a while, it was self-sustaining in the sense that I stopped feeling like I was focusing at some point. Never did it again, but at least I gave them remembrance one last time, figment or not and found out just how terrifyingly realistic tulpas of the familiar may seem.
While you definitely can do damage with deep meditation, standard mindfulness stuff might be alright? I'd also assume the Zen approach is built around safety, though that's not what I did and I'm not really familiar with it, so it's just a guess. I stuck with the practice for far longer than most should just as at first it helped me learn to tolerate chronic pain better than prescription meds in terms of not slowing me down, then I kept doing it out of habit as I saw it more as focus training than a rite. Schoolkids are unlikely to practice since it's really easy to get distracted with any other hobby over it unless you have a very good reason, but I've never seen that idea brought up somehow. Wonder if they already do it in any country?
But if you suddenly start realizing what some of the normally silly sounding terms in something like Tantric Buddhism might mean to your own surprise, yeah, I'd really stop joking around and find an expert to talk to, as at that point you might be 'painting' with mixed psychiatric failure states to some degree. I didn't even figure what exactly I was doing at first and still can't be 100% sure either. I think the specific intention 'saved' me from longer term consequences there.
Nothing here I intrinsically disagree with. Not familiar with "the order of nature". I would quibble pretty seriously with "derived from revelation and grace...." I think that may be true, but it's not clear to me that the person operating with "natural conscience" is aware that they are operating under revelation and grace.
Yes, I asked an evangelical I knew well if she actually heard God's voice, and she was quite clear that yes she actually heard it. It was an actual auditory experience, just like hearing me talk -- but she knew it was God's voice. She was not the least bit crazy. I just do not know what to make of it. I wouldn't exactly call myself the sanest of the sane, but I have never once heard a a piece of actual audible speech from someone who was not there -- except when in bed, on the verge of sleep, & I'm pretty sure auditory hypnogogic hallucinations are common and normal. I keep thinking that she must have just *thought about what God would say,* and rounded that up to actually hearing a voice, because direct communication with God was regarded as normal in her community, and in fact was highly valued. And yet she was an extremely honest person, in fact one of the most honest I have ever met. About most other things she would tell me the actual, literal truth, even if the truth was embarrassing, socially undesirable and made her look foolish. So why think she was lying about hearing God's voice?
Re "bell curves all the way down", how would tinnitus fit into this? Very high prevalence (on the order of 10% of the population). A high pitched hum doesn't suggest an alternate reality... Does this count as a hallucination or as a sense organ problem? There seem to be something like nine different theories of the cause
I think it's a common phenomenon with multiple causes which can both be independent and coexisting. I have tinnitus, it varies, it seems related to physiology more than psychology.
Many Thanks! Certainly there could be multiple causes (e.g. analogous to type I and type II diabetes). It would be nice if the possibilities could be disentangled as definitively as e.g. checking insulin levels distinguishes those.
FWIW, for me it correlated very strongly with experienced stress. Once I realized that, i took steps to reduce stress externally (people and situations in my environment) and internally (meditation, counseling). I got an immediate drop of 30%, and now I'd say on most days about 70% less than at the peak. I'm also taking a diuretic, which seems to help, too.
I have something that might be tinnitus, but it's subjectively extremely quiet; I can only hear the tones in extremely quiet settings or if I plug my ears with something.
It's perhaps too complex to go into here, including the nature of evidence. IMHO, there's plenty of evidence. There are many credible reports of experiences of the divine-some more or less replicable. To assume that the mundane, untrained experience of quotidian reality is accurate is as ungrounded as assuming that a person lacking the appropriate training can understand AI or string theory. And to be clear, there are many false claims for the existence of God-I'm not arguing against that assertion. Perhaps a rough analogy: at some point, there was no evidence for virii or bacteria. That didn't establish their non-existence. At the least, agnosticism seems a more reasonable stance.
I'm agnostic, with respect to both God and the photon. Both seem like useful ideas, even if hard to nail down. Truth may not be as important as utility.
The Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal a few days had "running the arguments for god in reverse". It puts some rigor in arguing for that default, and end up making it look more than a little ridiculous.
What is this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal you speak of? And why should I consider that a bowl of soggy corn flakes has any insight to the existence or non-existence of god? The image of eating Froot Loops from the Holy Grail came immediately to mind, though. ;-)
OTOH, I can't stop chuckling over the idea of breakfast cereal arguing over the existence or non-existence of god. Do they have religious wars—Kellogian's vs the Postians? In my younger more slovenly days, some bowls of breakfast cereals became science experiments, but none of the evolved consciousness let along became a philosopher of religion.
It is straightforward to prove that there is no God that likes people and is able to verifiably communicate: observe that all communication that appears to be from God is via unreliable channels, and there are things He should have been saying but didn't, such as various practical medical things some thousands of years ago.
The other options are a God that dislikes people or is unable to communicate. Nobody seems to believe in those much, for emotional reasons. Loki is on the Disney channel because hardly anyone believes in him, but Loki seems like a more plausible deity to me than the others I come across.
3. You, obviously, aren't capturing all claimed communication from God.
4. "Should have been saying" has too many assumptions buried into it to address in this forum. That said, for instance, it seems to anthropomorphize God.
5. Again, it's less that God is unable to communicate than that humans are unable to hear, so to speak. For instance, to understand, oh, say, bio-neurology n a deep way takes, I'll arbitrarily say, a Ph.D. and a post doc--call it 6 years? I'm positing that it takes at least that much time, in the equivalent of a good Ph.D. program and post doc, to communicate with God. At least for most folks.
6. There are factors in the human being which interfere with the ability to "hear God"-fear, shame, anger, impatience, ego (in a negative sense), etc. These have to be cleared out of the way for communication to occur. Otherwise it's like trying to talk with a friend at 120db+ rock concert.
>You, obviously, aren't capturing all claimed communication from God.
Okay, you are saying that you know of claimed communication from God that came through reliable channels. What would that be? If it actually is reliable, we should have a talk with Him (or Her, or Them). Which God do you have in mind?
The best lead I currently have is a bald assertion from some stranger on Astral Codex Ten. I would be happy to accept a videoconference projected in the empty air, or letters written on the sky, or a chat with some guy who demonstrates He can walk on water so long I can verify that the water doesn't have transparent objects inside and He doesn't have ridiculous buoyant shoes. There are many other reliable communication channels that could be used so should we assume that part of the problem is uninteresting? A God Who made the universe doesn't have to be subtle, and He is claimed not to be subtle in many holy books.
>"Should have been saying" has too many assumptions buried into it to address in this forum. That said, for instance, it seems to anthropomorphize God.
Seems like you are withdrawing from the conversation abruptly. Okay, fine, but that's not consistent with "It would be nice to have some basis, experience, or expertise for claiming there is no God." If you think it's nice to have a such a thing, you ought to be open to a conversation about whether you already have it or not.
We're calling this thing a God, and as a consequence I am assuming that this God has recognizably goal-directed behavior. I posit that that is part of what we mean by "God". As a non-example, a God that behaves exactly like the laws of physics is the laws of physics, not a God.
>Again, it's less that God is unable to communicate than that humans are unable to hear, so to speak.
>There are factors in the human being which interfere with the ability to "hear God"-fear, shame, anger, impatience, ego (in a negative sense), etc. These have to be cleared out of the way for communication to occur.
I could read letters written on the sky describing a cure for aging. More generally, humans can communicate with each other, a God can do more than humans, therefore a God can communicate with humans if He chooses to and He actually deserves to be described using the word "God". Subtlety is not required or useful.
Not withdrawing more than from anything else given the heavy demands on my time at work and at home, and in groups I'm involved with.
Let's try this: What do you think are the characteristics of this God? God can do everything that humans, can do, and more? I disagree with that. The customary line is that God is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. Where I disagree with that is with respect to omnipotence. My understanding is that all potency is God's but it is not all exercised by God.
Again, what do you think the characteristics of this God are? Like a human being, only God can do anything? God wants what human's want? I mean, no insult intended, the concept you seem to be arguing against is sort of the same general Christianist all powerful hairy thunderer Father in the skies. That's not what i'm talking about. What are you talking about?
The argument gets to the conclusion that God doesn't exist if we assume God likes people, is able to communicate reliably, and knows anything useful to people that He obviously chose not to communicate to them. "God likes people" is also implicitly assuming that God is purposeful enough to be said to like people.
If He is omnipotent and chooses not to exercise that for the benefit of the people He allegedly likes, that implies either not liking people or not being omnipotent (and therefore not being God). I don't care which.
He only has to be omnipotent enough to be able to communicate reliably, so the amount of omnipotence required depends on the communication channel. I will leave out the tradeoffs there because I hope they are obvious.
This conversation seems repetitive. Now I doubt that you really want to "have some basis, experience, or expertise for claiming there is no God". If you did, you would have defined your terms by now instead of making me repeat my best guess about what you mean.
My definition of omnipotent is different from yours. In my understanding, "omnipotent" means that all potency belongs to God, and some of it is delegated to human beings. It doesn't mean that God can do anything.
And, again in my understanding, God isn't "conscious" in the way you seem to be thinking. It's more like God is dreaming, and it's the role of the completed or completing human being to be part of God's awakening.
It seems reasonable to me that if someone is claiming there is no God, that they define what it is that they are saying does not exist. I'm not trying to have you guess what I mean; I'm trying to you to tell me what you mean. You don't seem to be doing so, instead saying things like "God likes people, is able to communicate reliably, and knows anything useful to people". So those sound like aspects of God, or characteristics.
Lastly, I would say that "communicate reliably" is trying to do too much work here. I'd argue that God is trying to communicate all the time, but just because a person breathes, eats, eliminated, and can read a blog doesn't mean that they have done the preparation to communicate reliably with God. You seem to think that if God is omnipotent (and I think I disagree with your definition, as I understand it), that God can communicate to anybody, any time. The record shows that's not true. The record also shows that some people have made credible claims to communicate with God- one could start with Ibn Arabi, or Rumi, or Jesus, or Shefa Gold.
OK sure, but I'm thinking about a different kind of god. God on a meta level, so there is no 'real' god. But the idea that there is a god, which mostly just means you should behave nicely, 'Do unto others as you would have others do unto you'. Is actually a pretty good first guess on how to behave in the world. At least that's my experience. I'm not sure I believe in god, but I like the idea of a god. And so, on some meta level, I guess I do believe in god... I believe that the idea of a god is a good thing, and I want to hold onto the idea, that I don't have to believe in any specific god... Christian, Buddhist, or otherwise.
I don't understand how you got the premise that "there is a god" means "you should behave nicely". (I agree that behaving nicely is a good thing, if we could figure out a definition for it, and I even believe that describing it is feasible so I'm not accusing you of being uselessly vague here. The connection with god is the part I'm missing.)
I can imagine god perhaps wanting all sorts of things. Many holy books describe gods who want things other than behaving nicely, so apparently the people who wrote those books could too. Maybe you are unaware of this (unlikely) or you are doing wishful thinking (much more likely), but my dominant hypothesis is that you're having thoughts about this that I can't anticipate.
"if you’re desperate enough to join the KKK or your university’s Black Student Alliance"
This is too tasteless for a throwaway "murder arson and jaywalking" joke, too short and off-topic for a serious "what are the implications of some races having much better options than others" digression.
Yeah, this was, in Scott's words, pretty cringe. I immediately wondered whether Scott thinks that you have to be desperate to join a campus Hillel group.
Joining a group based on shared religious activities and beliefs does seem to be a step up from joining a group based on shared melanin levels. Even joining a group based on shared ethnic background makes more sense to me than joining one based on race alone. But then I married a foreigner so maybe race matters less to me than normal people? Still, I would at least aim for "shared hobby" group membership before race.
People join racial affinity groups because race correlates with shared culture, shared experiences (of discrimination _and_ of other things), etc. I think the Hillel comparison is very apt. It's not just melanin.
I don't know about that. I am not sure a black student from Brooklyn would have more in common with a black student from Botswana than with a white student from Brooklyn. I agree there is probably some common "black culture" in the USA that is somewhat distinct and maybe shared across regions to an extent, but seems a very weak thread compared to religion or hobbies and other interests.
Like I said, maybe I don't identify super strongly with my own racial group compared to other group markers, and that makes me strangely unable to see the appeal, but shared race seems like the lowest common denominator to use to meet friends.
That's because "race" doesn't exist outside of the shared social context in which it is defined/enforced. Two "black" people from Brooklyn have "race" in common with each other but not with the Botswanan. Botswana certainly has its own "racial" or ethnic identities but they will be wildly different. If the Botswanan moves to America and spends significant time within the sociocultural context, they may well "become" a different "race" than when they arrived, despite the fact that "race" is nominally something you are born having.
Isn't the reason that there is a Black culture in America that a lot of ex-slaves had been disconnected from their national cultures, so they made one to fill the gap? So there is a genuine culture there that is primarily linked to melanin levels because that determined who needed it, whereas everyone else had their national culture still and didn't need a skin colour based replacement?
Also, the assumption that members of Hillel have shared religious beliefs is wrong. I'm Jewish. I'm also an atheist. In my experience of secular, American Judaism, this is more common than not.
Black people in America are obviously not a monolith, but they do have shared ethnic background(s) in much the way that American Jews do.
I don't like woke-ism, but I do have a hard time associating myself with anti-wokeism when it comes with opinions as dumb as yours.
I thought about pulling my punches, and then I thought otherwise. Usually I agree with what you're saying. In this case, I don't. I think it's completely relevant to point out that Doctor Hammer's comment is not only wrong but also that it's insanely, idiotically glib and ignorant. It is an incredibly dumb opinion.
It's also dressed up with the kind of pseudo-high minded condescension that characterizes a lot of this kind of dopey commentary. Oh, look, "race matters less" to this person. He obviously isn't infected with the kind of base tribal impulses that cause his lessers to want to associate with their co-melanists.
Sometimes it's worth puncturing this kind of arrogance and pointing out that the person with the terrible opinion really isn't very clever.
I have a different opinion on this, maybe you can help me understand it. Race strikes me as a categorically different quality than one's skin pigment. A Hadza hunter, a Caribbean farmer, and a Portland professor might all have functionally identical levels of melanin, but I can hardly a imagine a situation in which it is appropriate to say that they are all the same race. Is that your position?
"Black people in America are obviously not a monolith, but they do have shared ethnic background(s) in much the way that American Jews do."
Really? Genetically and linguistically the ancestors of afroamericans are probably much more diverse than those of jewish americans. So the shared ethnic background refers to slavery and some generations of afroamerican cultures? Is the ethnic background of american jews considerably less shared?
Thanks, I also found it wildly offensive, bordering on evil. One is a group dedicated to perpetrating oppression and the other is built around the shared experience of being on the receiving end of that oppression (among other things). Maybe it was a joke (?), but if so, it landed very very poorly.
The KKK and its affiliates and offshoots has obviously murdered more people than has Black Lives Matter and its affiliates and offshoots. The effect of the KKK on American policy and culture has also obviously resulted in more death, destruction, and misery than has the effect of Black Lives Matter and its affiliates.
Amen to this. It turns out that anarchy and mob justice don't magically solve all societal problems just because it's "oppressed" people doing the anarchy and mob justice instead of "privileged" people. Who knew?
I think a one-dimensional concept of "oppression" that justifies everything is both superficial and causes a lot of damage, but I don't super want to get in a fight right now.
Interesting that you would read oppression justifying everything into my comment. I only stated the obvious, that the two are very different. Something does need to be desperate or wrong with you to join the KKK. Nothing needs to be wrong or desperate in you to join a black student union. I'd be very disappointed if you thought otherwise.
Regardless of whether you think that you would be interested in joining the Black Student Union if you were black, lots and lots of nice, normal, well-adjusted Black students join Black Student Unions. I've had several black students who were involved with our college's Black Student Alliance, and none of them were Black Supremacists, antiwhite racists, or anything of the sort.
I haven't met a lot of KKK members, so I can't speak from experience, but my strong suspicion is that most of them are racists, and most of them are losers.
I think basic respect for other people should mean that if an organization like a campus BSA draws a bunch of nice, normal, well-adjusted people, onlookers should consider that it might have some value for such people. You might even want to talk to some people who have been part of such an organization before deciding it's the equivalent of the KKK.
And if you've never been friends with someone who was a member of a Black Student's Association, or an Asian Student's Association, or something similar, maybe your own social life is more identarian than you imagine.
You might find it bordering on evil, but I think the double standard in who may or may not join race-based groups is itself bordering on evil. Either we say that race should be de-emphasized and other, less immutable shared characteristics should take precedence as the basis of group identity, or we say that people can and should feel pride in their race. Saying that everyone except white people can and should be proud of their race is rapidly becoming exposed as a cynical double standard used by some (not necessarily minorities) to silence and dominate others.
The problem is that, as was pointed out above, indigenous black Americans (American descendants of slaves) are an *ethnicity*, not a race. They possess a genuine shared culture and history.
A Black Student Association is therefore much more like Hillel (which accepts non-religious ethnic Jews) than it is like a hypothetical White Students' Association.
EVEN IF you believe that BLM and the KKK are morally equivalent (which, living in an area where there's still KKK successor groups and having known an ex-Klansman before the ex part AND having known people involved in BLM activism, I'll inform you the former are more dangerous), the BLM and black student orgs certainly aren't equivalent. I don't see many Black Campus Republicans marching around chanting Black Lives Matter.
Thanks for this comment; I was going to post something like "really, Scott????" but you said it better. I almost stopped reading at that point (but I'm glad I didn't because this is a really interesting piece otherwise).
I've stopped being surprised at this point. The race takes on this blog are really bad, as a rule. I'm just disappointed that they've started showing up in otherwise-unrelated posts.
He's doing what he said in the body of the article: trying to get people to read his article by aggressively signaling he's anti-woke so that anti-woke types will listen to him. I just wish he didn't feel the need to do it every time he writes about politics.
No, there are a handful of wokes in the comments who are mad that their sensibilities are not being especially catered to every post, but pretty much everyone else is fine with it.
I was honestly surprised to see anything like this reaction in the comments. There is a threshold of time past which historical groups which committed heinous acts cease to be regarded with reflexive horror. I think of (as a previous commenter said) the Huns, or the Inquisition. I suppose I underestimated the extent to which other commenters associate the KKK (largely a relic, current membership 3000-6000) with broader recent white supremacist violence in the US. In retrospect, this was probably a pretty stupid assumption by me.
I think the saliency of the KKK disproportionate to current membership is primarily the result of recency; burning crosses and child murders are in living memory still. Surely "exit living memory" is a necessary condition for the threshold of time passed.
As Sourdough points out, "the crimes and victims thereof exiting living memory" is a necessary element of the hatchet-burying. I doubt many people are eager to cast the Holodomor or the Holocaust or the Cambodian Genocide or the Rwandan genocide into the "forgive and forget" categories alongside their enactors quite yet.
Many people are completely willing to deny that the Holodomor, the Cambodian Genocide, or the Great Leap forward were all that bad IF they happened at all, and really even to mention them is an act of gaslighting in defense of White Cishetereopatriarchy and its corporate arm, the GOP.
You contribute less than nothing to this conversation. Those people are rightly considered to be politically-braindead ghouls. Even pretty hardcore leftists think tankies are mouth-breathing imbeciles.
This is being debated as if it were not a joke. Obviously it is a joke, so the debate should actually be "can you joke about this?" You can be super woke, and also be OK with irreverent humor. Can't you?
I'm not super-woke. I thought it was unfunny joke in extremely bad taste. And if you look at some of the other responses in this thread, you can see the type of mouth breathers this type of "humor" brings out of the woodwork.
Here's a pro tip: if you want to make the case against wokeness (which I think is a worthwhile thing to do), you're not going to win a lot of converts to your side by drawing equivalences between the KKK and Black campus groups.
I think his point was that this WHO document used highly filtered patient reports, so it would be wrong to look at it and infer you were getting something representative of the distribution of patient outcomes. Which, purportedly, the NYT did so infer.
>Do you have *any* underlying unease at the extensive physical force and coercion, even prolonged imprisonment in psych wards, that is commonplace in Western psychiatry?
I'm guessing Scott has given it some thought along the way. One such post (but it has come up other times):
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/22/navigating-and-or-avoiding-the-inpatient-mental-health-system/
Good luck! :)
I don't think this is quite right - they describe themselves as the Hearing Voices Movement, not as the Schizophrenic Movement or whatever.
I also think it's fine to say there's a natural cluster of eg autistic people (which is obvious enough that things like "aspie" have entered the lexicon even though psychiatrists would kind of prefer that not happen) and that you can believe this and still be angry with people who think this cluster should be treated with powerful medication.
Hypertension is famously the "silent killer"--without a doctor's appointment and a trip to the syphgmomanometer no one would ever know they were hypertensive before they died of a sudden stroke. Yet the actual phenomenon of blood pressure is as objective, quantifiable sign as a person could ask for: it's the literal pressure of the blood in the vessels. You can quibble about at which exact point it becomes a concern (and no one actually believes that something magical happens when your blood pressure increases by 1/1 and you cross into the hypertensive category, the line is drawn because you have to draw it somewhere) but you can't argue that 121/80 is actually 128/10. It's a poor analogy to mental health conditions, which necessarily create symptoms that the patients are aware of, but which are very difficult to objectively measure, and which can be interpreted through any number of theoretical lenses which radically change the meaning of those experiences.
I agree with the thrust of your ontological concerns about mental health conditions but I actually think the HVM (which I'm not a part of) is coming it from another epistemic place altogether and so avoids many of those concerns. People in the Hearing Voice Movement are gathering around a shared experience that they would be aware of with or without professional intervention. People who are having certain kinds of auditory hallucinations might fret about whether they are truly "hearing voices", but if I understand them right I think the ethos of HVM is very much unconcerned with that kind of line-drawing. I mean, if you exist in modern society and have certain kinds of abnormalities of psyche, psychiatric concepts will have mediated some of your understanding of your experiences, but I don't think that's much of a gotcha for the people who have the abnormalities in the first place.
So what makes people believe they are different, abnormal in this way? The voice-hearing case is pretty straightforward, but I think you might be more interested in other examples. When it comes to autism spectrum, I think the subjective experience that many people who come to identify as AS are gathering around is a lifetime of inexplicable social friction and rejection. I think the gravity that holds those social groups together is less about meeting particular psychological/developmental criteria and more about whether being picked last on the dodgeball team over and over for reasons beyond your comprehension is something that resonates with you--and, you broadly fit the phenotype, so you can bond over the shared similarities. I mean, I happen to think AS is close enough to something of a real thing that it can explain why these people with this broadly similar phenotype are socially rejected over and over, but I don't think that explanatory framework is necessary for those folks to get together on non-hypocritical grounds.
" You can quibble about at which exact point it becomes a concern (and no one actually believes that something magical happens when your blood pressure increases by 1/1 and you cross into the hypertensive category, the line is drawn because you have to draw it somewhere) but you can't argue that 121/80 is actually 128/10."
Except when I was trying to find out about what exactly constituted hypertension, the information online was "we used to think 140/80 was normal but now that has been revised downwards":
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC514035/
“The risk of cardiovascular disease begins at 115/75 mm Hg and doubles with each increment of 20/10 mm Hg; individuals who are normotensive at 55 years of age have a 90% lifetime risk for developing hypertension,” the guidelines say."
I hope you all are rigorously maintaining 115/75 BP! And striving to lower it even more!
Okay, and why did they pick "120/80" or "120/70" OR EVEN LOWER as the new "normal blood pressure range"? What studies, what measures, what incidences of cardiac events and strokes at 140/80 versus 120/80?
Scientific American doesn't know, but it knows LOWER IS BETTER:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-is-normal-blood-press/
"The exact origin of the designation of 120/80 as the threshold for "normal blood pressure" is unknown. It may have come from the large amount of data available early in the 20th century from life insurance exams and what happened to these people as they aged, or it could have arisen from the beliefs of medical practitioners, as so much traditional knowledge has."
I do like the 'traditional knowledge' bit; yes, the ancient and venerable all of thirty years that 120/80 was considered normal BP!
Scientific American may be puzzled by this conundrum of the sphinx, but I know: Brazilian tribe in the rainforest, was the answer. Some study measured their blood pressure levels and found that they had an average of 120/80, so this was set as the new ideal:
"Four remote population samples (Yanomamo and Xingu Indians of Brazil and rural populations in Kenya and Papua New Guinea) had the lowest average blood pressures among all 52 populations studied in INTERSALT, an international cooperative investigation of electrolytes and blood pressure. Average systolic blood pressure was 103 versus 120 mm Hg in the remaining INTERSALT centers; diastolic blood pressure in these four population samples averaged 63 versus 74 mm Hg in the 48 other centers. There was little or no upward slope of blood pressure with age; hypertension was present in only 5% of the rural Kenyan sample and virtually absent in the other three centers"
I went "Dude, I am not a Brazilian tribesperson living in the Amazon, I kinda think personal circumstances and genetics might be a teensy bit different for what you are saying I should be aiming for?" I mean, sure I would *like* "hunt monkeys for two hours, then lie around in a hammock the rest of the day" lifestyle but that's not going to happen in the Western world, you know?
The European Heart Journal is as confused as I am:
https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/article/39/24/2233/5035212#118044043
"No wonder that many are confused at a higher level: what should we use in our daily practice? When we strive for truly normal blood pressure, we might look back at the days when humans still lived in their natural environment as hunters and gatherers. Of note, there are tribes still living today as our ancestors did thousands of years ago. For instance, blood pressure of Tsimane Indios who live in the Bolivian Amazon forest averages ∼116/73 mmHg throughout life. Interestingly, they also have rather low average cholesterol values of 2.4 mmol/L, much lower than Westeners of today’s world. Furthermore, they exhibit much less coronary calcification than age- and gender-matched US citizens. Obviously, they move a lot and hunt all day long in order to feed themselves and their family, and they eat fish, meat, and fruits; however, the downside of their style of living is an elevated C-reactive protein and eosinophils in their blood due to chronic parasitic infections.
The Yanomami Indios who live across the border in the Brazilian Amazon region, have similar blood pressure values throughout their life span. Finally, the Kuna Indios who live near the coast on small islands outside mainland Panama in the Atlantic also have blood pressure values of ∼100/70 mmHg throughout their life in spite of the fact that they eat a lot of salt, in particular, in addition to cacao plants which are one of their major nutrients. Of note, when they move to mainland Panama or to its capital Panama City, they do show the age-dependent increase in blood pressure typical for Western populations.
If naturally living people have lifelong blood pressures of 100–120/70–80 mmHg, are we all hypertensive? Why do we have so much higher blood pressures and a consistent increase in systolic blood pressure with age? Several factors might contribute: (i) genetic changes; (ii) increasing life expectancy; (iii) the obesity epidemic; (iv) sedentary lifestyle; and (v) the composition of our diet. Gene drifts and selection are a possibility, but hard to prove at this point. The increasing life expectancy may explain the marked rise in systolic blood pressure in the very elderly, but not in the population at large. Indeed, Indios reaching retirement age still maintain low blood pressures.
...What would be the appropriate management in the context of diverging recommendations for optimal blood pressure? Not all hypertensives are made equal; some may be younger and have just recently been diagnosed with elevated blood pressure, but are otherwise healthy. Others may already have end-organ damage such as left ventricular hypertrophy or intima media thickening of the carotid arteries, while others may already have coronary artery disease with or without diabetes. Finally, elderly hypertensives may be frail, have a low gait speed, and a risk for falls. Thus, hypertensives have quite divergent cardiovascular and safety risks. It is obvious that one cannot and should not treat all these hypertensives with the very same approach—we must treat a patient and not a risk factor."
I have never met these people who "insist [polyamory] is good for everyone". I think this is part of the problem: people are really bad at separating "please tolerate me when I do this" from "I think everyone should do this".
(not accusing any specific person, my guess is people on all sides have this problem - both the people making the requests and the people hearing them)
I think assuming someone saying, 'please tolerate me', means 'everyone should do this', is an easy jump to make when the person is saying something to the effect of, 'please tolerate me being more moral than you'. In fact, that is basically just taking them seriously. I think this is why so much vitriol gets spewed at vegans, for example.
I am pretty sure you know poly people who advocate that jealousy is silly (or, in your words, a paper tiger), and the throughline from that to moral superiority is straightforward; you are affected by negative emotion, but we poly people are not.
"when the person is saying something to the effect of, 'please tolerate me being more moral than you'"
Yeah, that's the impression I get from people advocating for poly who are often all "Jealousy? Oh we've solved jealousy!" and while they may not *intend* it, it comes across as "because we are superior to you monos, whose tiny brains cannot handle the work of feeling joy for your partner's happiness, but it's not your fault you are stuck on a lower evolutionary level than we are".
It's like the Bike Thief cartoon: it's a lovely *ideal* to have, but the *expression* of it makes me want him to get run over by his own bike ridden by the druggie who stole it to sell for his next fix.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/my-bike-got-stolen-recently
See my response to Jeff above: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/in-partial-grudging-defense-of-the/comment/6767996
Actually anti-anti-psychotics would be dopamine agonists like amphetamine, which can generate psychotic symptoms.
Those peak spiritual experiences are not at all promised in psychosis and tend to be rare and brief, not lasting states. It must not be especially energetically stable to be so blissful and all-is-one-y. And when you tumble off that peak you often land differently configured. some-is-nothing? who-is-not? etc. Takes a while to get back to this-is-this and that-is-that. Inducing these states via psychosis seems an especially dangerous route.
My recollection is that virtually everything in DMV (4 and 5) requires "negative impact on patients life" for a diagnosis. It doesn't require that the negative impact be worse than that of the drugs needed to solve the problem(for a diagnosis). Thus there are going to be diagnosed people who may well be better off untreated or at least chemically untreated...
This even-handed analysis is so needed -- and I think it also applies to the movement of people treating psychosis as a "spiritual emergency." Thank you.
I agree. It was an extremely good post.
I'd say that NYT-bashing is a bit excessive, if the goal is to reach reasonable people who aren't already part of this bubble. Like it or not, it's still the newspaper of record, and if your first experience with a rando blogger is their seemingly blind rage towards it, that's probably about as reliable a red flag as they come.
eh, Scott is perfectly allowed to write to his regular readers rather than trying to optimise for outsiders and sanding off everything that made the regulars follow him
Sure, but my impression is that he aspires to more. Like, the general idea seems to be that legacy media is largely discredited and teeters on obsolescense, and brave new solutions are all but ready to replace it, like, say, the Substack-osphere. But for this promise to be realized you actually need to consistently adhere to a higher standard than the legacy media.
Do you actually think that's a difficult? I suspect Scott does so without even really trying.
If legacy _news_ media were able to go back to the way I remember them - when they had more reach and bigger budgets - I'd be a happy subscriber.
Substack isn't better, and it isn't even serving the same customer wants - nor, AFAICT, attempting to do so.
It also doesn't seem to me to be replacing Life Magazine et al., or Readers Digest, or much of anything that ever appeared on television.
Maybe substack is an adequate or better replacement for types of media I never consumed. (Literary magazines? High brow opinion journals?)
More likely, it's another example of adaptations to the way that modern technology too often makes it impossible for people to get nice things. ;-)
I.e. trad media aren't viable on an ad based model, with google et al taking the lion's share of the ad revenue. All we can get are the clickbait-oriented leftovers, controlled by an ever-decreasing set of oligarchs. Substack is little more than a workaround for one of the resulting problems. Plus, of course, an opportunity for some people to make more money than they otherwise would.
No,not reallt, because this blog doesnt make a claim to be "the blog of record" In fact,m one could argue that making such a claim, which was possible when there weremore limited media sources,is part of the problem and the thing should be acknoweldging whatevr perspectives and biases you may have and not try to claim yourself asthe "official"objective source for things.
I thought Scott was being tongue in cheek. Like he obviously doesn't have a great impression of them but I didn't take his lightly ribbing them as anything but him lightly ribbing them.
My impression too.
I agree - pretty clearly comedic hyperbole.
If it's *not* your first experience with this particular blogger, then the rage seems justified (albeit crass, even if it is a literary reference), and his behavior is on average consistently better than theirs.
A joke at the expense of a massive media corporation with a history of dishonesty is hardly a more reliable red flag than anything else that gives a "rando blogger" distinction from any other.
Should he also take out the knocks against religious people? Should he remove any mention of trans people, or should his mentions of trans people be more fawning and less skeptical? Those, too, are "reliable red flags" that could alienate outsiders.
"Should he also take out the knocks against religious people? Should he remove any mention of trans people, or should his mentions of trans people be more fawning and less skeptical? Those, too, are "reliable red flags" that could alienate outsiders."
Probably yes for both of those, since those comments generate far more heat than light. The actual topic of the article is controversial enough, why court even more controversy by bringing up two largely or entirely unrelated topics? It risks having any discussion on the article turn into an argument on religion or an argument on trans people, while the actual point of the article gets ignored!
Though I don't really care about the New York Times put-downs. Anyone who'd clutch their pearls about a blogger insulting a giant media conglomerate is probably unlikely to read this blog in the first place. But religion and LGBT issues are topics that quite a lot of people feel extremely passionate about, and while that doesn't mean he should never talk about those topics, it does mean that it's probably unwise to bring them up as casual examples or analogies or jokes in essays about other topics.
I am glad he talks about these things reasonably, I think the blog would be much worse if he worried about causing offense too often.
I wouldn't call it NYT-bashing. I think what you propose would be NYT sycophanting.
Right. Its definitely "culture war" territory, but theres definitely an issue where people utilize that "well,its an established thing" reputation of the Times and other institutions to see control of that as an important part of gatekeeping- the hysterical reaction to the possibility that Musk might buy Twitter shows that a lot of people are very personally invested in this and believe it on if not a conscious level at least a semi-conscius one, and I suppose as a rationalist whose seen this specific community attacked by dubious means(intentionally) its fair to dismiss that combination of "uses shady suggestive means to attack things that are not partof their gatekeeping while still trying to hold the image of journal of record"
It may not be necessary for x-rationalists to givesome special consideration to a media outlet that has attacked them not for what they actually believe but for insinuations that are based on a desire for controlof a "gatekept,this is the official view of reasonable people" paper, and the argument that people,especially rationalists, should stop treating the Times as anything other then a similar partisan news source as that acknowledgement of its "legitmacy" creates legitimacy.
For example., the times can be cited on wikipedia while ACT probably could not.Thats a problem if you're interested in an ability to understand information without first having to pass a certain political/cultural filter.
I thought there was a slight tongue in cheeksness about it given Scott's personal issueds with the times, and it was assumed readers would interpret it in that context.
Yeah, I agree.
I am a subscriber to both ACX and NYT.
Adorn my head with the bipartisanship crown!
I'm sorry you waste your money on the shitrag NYT.
The NYT is a complete shitrag. Scott would be a coward if he pretended otherwise.
bravery 10/10
I mean, there was the time a NYT reporter tried to destroy Scott's life. Effectively just "for the lulz".
That might potentially be a factor in his hostility towards them in the article.
There is totally successful "church, but for athiests"! I, and most of the practicing Jews I know, are atheists, love going to temple and singing, bar mitzvah our kids, sing praise to the lord, honor our traditions, and think that literally believing in god is infantile.
I'm slightly jealous of my friends who grew up Jewish or Unitarian for this reason - it doesn't seem likely to fill the need for someone who didn't grow up with it though.
I grew up Unitarian, and the main thing I can say is that "growing up Unitarian" is a very silly sentence.
What do you guys get up to?
They believe there is at most one god.
Actually, since the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans was recognized, it's "We believe in one god, more or less".
The Ku Kluxer Unitarians have been known to go around burning question marks.
I’m told they address their prayers, To whom it may concern
I grew up a different kind of Unitarian.
I believe in a divinity U whose conjugate transpose U* is also His inverse
In terms of actual substance, Unitarian Universalism doesn't reach the level of the "Coexist" bumper sticker.
OMG, it all makes sense now
This is a reasonable point. I think I meant that the thing where atheists try to create something where people go to church and sing hymns about science or liberalism, without even the slightest pretense of association with a previous God-centered religious tradition, doesn't work.
(this *has* worked for rationalists, but we also have some pretty kooky-by-mainstream-standard beliefs, which seems to be an irreplaceable element. For whatever reason, atheism isn't kooky enough, even when it's extreme atheism in an otherwise religious society)
my favorite part of being an atheist is that I get to sleep in Sunday mornings
I asked myself the honest probability of whether something like the God of the Bible existed back when I was in college and admitted the answer was epsilon... and I might not have been willing to do that if not for the fact that I was already sleeping in on Sundays once I'd moved into a dorm.
I love the morning, but going to church isn't one of my top 100 ways of spending it. FWIW, I'm probably one of the most anti-Marxist people around but Freddie, I'm glad you're in the world. You're a stand-up guy and refreshingly honest. I loved "The Cult of Smart". Well, except for the end, which didn't say much about undoing the Cult, just basically "enact everything Bernie says."
Have you ever interviewed Scott or vice versa?
my favorite part of being a Christian is that I get to sleep in Sunday mornings (and then go to evening church) 😉
My favorite part of going to church is dropping my kids - who have been awake since 6am - off at the nursery and children's church.
When I had my first religious experience, at age 14, my main conscious reason for not doing more with it was because I valued my Sunday lie-ins too much.
Then at 18 I had another one that I couldn't ignore so easily (but still went to evening church for preference). I still do prefer evening church and like lie-ins, but kids who get up at 7am anyway have made that a less-relevant factor.
(Of course, the rationalist credo of "I want to believe what is true" very much applies. If God is real, it's more valuable to believe he's real, even at the cost of Sunday lie-ins. I didn't see things that way at age 14, though.)
And you can work on Saturdays, too!
I've participated in some rationalist rituals and ceremonies, but personally, I've found them missing something essential that's common to almost all religious practices. That something is a genuine sense of reverence, the idea that a ritual should be designed to evoke sincere and heartfelt emotion, and then actually taken seriously. A lot of the time the rituals go through the motions of nodding to some kind of deep sentiment, but the participants tend to treat the actual expression as a joke.
Individual atheists may feel deep reverence for some things, but I don't think most of them have a shared sense that they ought to feel and express *shared* reverence in a specific thing, that the experience is made deeper and more significant to the participants if it feels like everyone is in it together and not making a joke out of it.
If you'd like to witness the Next Generation of hippies being inculcated into the faith, https://www.retreatfarm.org/ during food truck night is a good place to go.
Having grown up in a place that had lots of Unitarians, had a serious high school girlfriend whose father was one the most eminent Unitarian theologians of his time, etc....your first paragraph is pretty doggone close to what Unitarianism is.
(Nowadays anyway -- one thing I learned from the professor was that it originally had a stronger God-centering aspect.)
The jokes that we all learned [How does a Unitarian start the Lord's Prayer? 'To Whom It May Concern....'] were funny in part cause they were so close to true.
Secular Judaism of the kind described above and the modern UUs both are continuing orthopraxy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthopraxy) and ritualism rather than orthodoxy, and are the inheritors of a genuine religious tradition that they have cored out the "believing in supernatural stuff" but kept the rest, and the rest is thick enough with content to provide cultural capital for the unbelieving generations to consume.
How long that capital will last is another thing; I give Judaism a way better chance at surviving than the UUs.
"For whatever reason, atheism isn't kooky enough, even when it's extreme atheism in an otherwise religious society"
Except we're not living in an otherwise religious society. We're living in a secular society that has a non-religious basis for its social, cultural, moral, political, and legal norms. So in that regard, being an atheist is not very "kooky," because being a secular atheist doesn't result in any noticably different behaviors or lifestyles or values or non-theological beliefs than being a functionally secular theist. In that regard, being devoutly religious in a highly visible way is far more "kooky," even if being a nominal theist is technically the norm.
Being an "extreme atheist" might be seen as weird in an exclusively negative way, if "extreme atheism" implies an active and vitriolic hostility to religion. But that's less because of the belief itself and more because hostility towards other people's beliefs is seen as rude, belligerent, and antisocial.
I agree. I think atheists might have a better shot at having a religion-like thing in a setting where actual religious feeling predominates. Maybe it doesn't even have to predominate, they just have to plausibly believe that is the case (the reddit atheists of earlier in this century come to mind). Nowadays, it's very hard to pretend we live in very Christian communities, so they died out accordingly.
I think just being an "atheist" isn't enough to sustain any kind of movement because its just a "not" movement. It doesn't head towards anything it only heads away. After you've all finished congratulating yourselves for not believing in God, then what?
What, rationalists sing hymns? Is there a book of them?
"Le semeur" https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Semeur_(chant) -- sung at Brussels University since 1890: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e8dWqMa4Rg
One issue is that Judaism isn’t a proselytizing religion and seems fairly ambivalent about welcoming converts (refuse three times, etc.). So to the extent that something like the Bright (lol) movement was intended to provide community while defanging the harms caused by most revealed religion, Judaism doesn’t really fit the bill. At times I’ve been lowkey jealous of secular Jews because of the dynamic you describe, but being insular appears to be a key part of making it work. Something like Mormonism for atheists would be great (family home evening!) but just hasn’t gotten any traction.
Other successful secular churches are various intense music subcultures. Straight edge is a particularly clear example.
I was also thinking of music and dance communities. I grew up in an pretty intensely committed multi-generational folk music community with a charismatic leader that 100% served this niche. Even decades later I have only positive reflections on how the structure and values of the group influenced my life. Contra dancing scenes can have this dynamic as well. Toward more quirky, inclusive, and high functioning affinity groups!
But can a music subculture persist over multiple generations? I was in an intense music subculture in my twenties, but it kinda went away eventually as people got older.
Yes they can. I've seen it with contra and folk dancing in New England. The New England Folk Festival started in 1944 and is still going strong.
I'm seeing a bit of this direction in Catholicism among people my age (late 20s early 30s). People who keep a lot of the traditions and rituals but don't really believe genuinely anymore.
That's interesting, because I've had the opposite experience. I was raised Catholic, and I think a lot of Catholics in my parents' generation did keep the traditions without really believing. I know my dad waffled in his beliefs while I was growing up, and the mother of one of my childhood friends didn't believe in the resurrection, but she still raised my friend Catholic and attended church with the family. But among people I know around my age who were raised Catholic, most have left the church, and the ones who stayed are actual believers who abide by the more difficult rules.
I think this just implies your peer group is at a later stage than GlacierCow's in the multigenerational process of dissolving strong religious bonds. Scott actually wrote about this on SSC in a post called The Ideology Is Not The Movement (Section IV-4):
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/
I am slowly realising that the church my parents and grandparents would have went to was almost entirely like this.
Then my idiot generation had to go and ruin it by saying the "well ackshually god doesn't exist so I'm not going to church" part out loud.
I believe a critical mass needs to actually believe everything, though. In the Catholic setting, a certain subset of women come to mind.
Edit: arguably in most settings, since, as far as I know, women report more religious feelings in most of the world. But women were certainly very important for the early successes of the Catholic church.
Yeah I see a very similar thing with my friends at home with (rural, European) Catholicism. It is just part of the village traditions/customs, believing anything is not required, just proper protocol.
[And from a Catholic angle you are saved anyway by eating the bread at communion, so there is no need to really believe in anything ;) ]
"And from a Catholic angle you are saved anyway by eating the bread at communion, so there is no need to really believe in anything"
Did you get your Eucharistic theology from a Jack Chick tract?
(1) "Eating the bread" - I would recommend you read up on transubstantiation; this was a big deal during the Reformation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation
(2) "Get saved" - this is a very American Protestant Evangelical term. First, and again this is a big deal for some of those denominations, Catholicism does not have 'eternal assurance/eternal security', it is entirely possible to lose your salvation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_security
Second, just receiving Communion will not 'save' you and indeed can damn you:
1 Corinthians 11: 27-30
"27 Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. 28 Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. 29 For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. 30 That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died."
(3) "No need to really believe in anything" - this is also incorrect. I'd have to end up quoting the entire Catechism to you to refute this one, so have a snippet from this publication:
https://www.dummies.com/article/body-mind-spirit/religion-spirituality/christianity/catholicism/basic-requirements-for-catholics-193154/
I swear, I have no idea how I turned into an evangelist, but whatever nit-picking module of my brain gets engaged when I read incorrect statements of doctrine kicks into high gear. I don't expect anyone to *believe* all this, but I would like if they could state the things they don't believe in correctly.
I remember having transubstantiation explained to me before my First Communion. “It really happens. It becomes the body of Christ. Don’t chew it. Swallow it quickly.” We were to fast from the previous day until we received the sacrament. My fourth grade teacher gave me a religious medallion to mark the occasion. Miss Kaye, nice woman, smart as a sack of hammers. I never could convince her that magnetism could pass through glass or that Mexican jumping beans have a larva inside.
That was in 1962. My autobiographical memory is weirdly reliable.
Oh it has changed *so much* since our day! Did you get the little lecture too about "what do you do if the priest drops the Host before you receive it in your mouth? No, you don't touch it! You *let* it fall to the ground, because lay people cannot hold the Host, their hands are not consecrated!"
And then communion in the hand came in decades later 😁
Fasting from midnight until you received at Mass - this was why people used to faint in church (I saw a couple of instances when I was a small child). Now it's only an hour's fast, and I wonder if even that is observed.
Yeah, the changes are pretty dramatic. As I understand it people don’t go to confession much anymore. There used to be a big line every Saturday evening to prep for communion on Sunday morning.
Dropping the host was an inconceivable event so we I never got that lecture. Even if it were to somehow happen an altar boy held a small gold plate under it so it could never reach the floor.
Hey, my remark was about 50% a throwaway joke, but thank you for responding still. Let me write out a non-joke reply.
(1), (2). English is not my native language (I even had to google what a chick tract is) and I have to admit I was too lazy to look up the translation for "Hostie" (which is "host"), so I just wrote bread. The point about me translating "getting saved" is super interesting though, I wasn't aware that this was such an Evangelical term, but I must have picked it up unconsciously from Evangelicals in the US.
I was thinking of "Sündenvergebung", meaning "forgiveness of sins", during mass as in "mein Blut was für euch und für alle vergossen wird, zur Vergebung der Sünden, tut dies zu meinem Gedächtnis".
(3) I'm not trying to refute my catechesis(?) here, I am giving an accurate (in my worldview) statement how Catholicism is lived in my home town, and closely connected to tradition and protocol.
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Catholicism, or really any religion, is lived more differently than people think, even when they think there are regional variations.
For one thing, the German bishop conference does have a different focus and interpretation of the catechism. There are also over-regional practices that are common all over German-speaking areas, such as large easter fires (which are lit from a single bonfire in the church yard during easter night), that are, as far as I know, not common in other areas. These are definitely seen as "a Catholic thing" where I am from and there is no separation of "village tradition" and "religion".
I am not arguing that these are schism-level differences, people do agree on broad strokes, but I would argue the way they conceptualize the same words is different. I am also not saying this as a total outsider, I did spend a lot of time in church - as altar server during my teenage years. You have all these people coming to church, murmuring "Herr ich bin nicht würdig, dass du eingehst unter meinem Dach, aber sprich nur ein Word, so wird meine Seele gesund", because that is the proper thing you do, and the actual words don't need to have meaning. You are part of the community by coming and saying them and (in mine/their eyes, not necessarily the catechism), makes you a decent Catholic.
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Another tangent: I didn't remember the church laws to be that strict. I looked up a German version, and quickly found one here: https://www.katholisch.de/artikel/13650-das-sind-die-fuenf-gebote-der-kirche (This is from the news portal of the German Catholic church)
The google translation is not great, but I think good enough to examine various differences. For example, the German version explicitly mention that work is forbidden on Sundays and holy days. The suggestion to go to church every day, on the other hand, is omitted here, only requirements to go on Easter and in danger of death are mentioned. The bullet point regarding marriage is ommited completely. Assisting the church does not mention financial aid. Below the commandments is an interview with a guy who is explaining and further relativising them, saying that context matters and things shouldn't be taken too literally. Maybe you'd find this comparison interesting.
Hello again, and thanks for the reply. Let me take this in no particular order:
(1) I have a high view of the Eucharist, so I do get twitchy at terms like "bread" because they were part of Reformation polemic and because online atheists like to toss about terms like "crackers" when referring to the Host (and in part because of a stunt like this one back in 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PZ_Myers#Eucharist_incident)
(2) We're translating between English and German here, so linguistic and cultural differences ahoy!
(3) I would not be one bit surprised by anything you say about the understanding the ordinary Catholic globally has of the faith; the state of catechesis has been abysmal over the past few decades. I could do the usual "blame Vatican II" bit, but it has always been so, my father was an altarboy himself during the days of the Latin Mass, and he had been trained to just parrot off the responses but never told what they meant, so he had no idea what he was saying. Pope-Emeritus Benedict XVI back when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger also mentioned the likes about not having false nostalgia for the 'good old days', that even back then there were the bulk of Catholics in Germany who just went to church because that is what you were supposed to do but they had very shallow understanding and no real faith.
(4) You are not obliged to attend Mass every day, but you must atttend on Sundays and holy days of obligation.
(5) Yes, the words of institution which you quote in German are the same for the Mass in English; recent translation of Eucharistic Prayer I: "TAKE THIS, ALL OF YOU, AND DRINK FROM IT: FOR THIS IS THE CHALICE OF MY BLOOD, THE BLOOD OF THE NEW AND ETERNAL COVENANT, WHICH WILL BE POURED OUT FOR YOU AND FOR MANY FOR THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. DO THIS IN MEMORY OF ME."
This is the acknowledgement of the saving sacrifice on the Cross which redeemed fallen humanity, but this is already turning into a theological tract so I'll keep it short. It's not "go up and receive communion and all your sins are forgiven even if you haven't been to confession and you will never lose your salvation" theology.
I have probably been arguing/discussing with American Protestants on the Internet too much, since they tend to have a much different view of salvation and the Lord's Supper, so I was interpreting your words in their sense. Sorry for that.
(6) Lighting bonfires outside the church door on Easter? Yes, that's the new fire - you extinguish all other lights and fires, kindle the new fire, light the Easter Candle from it, and in turn light all other candles from it so you have the new light. It was not alone a tradition but part of the rubrics until very recently; churches over here seem to have given up on it a bit but I am glad that your parish is keeping it up 😀
It's the incident mentioned in the Life of St. Patrick:
https://www.libraryireland.com/Wonders/St-Patrick-5.php
The pope still does it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kBdYFlitwE
It is a very big ceremony in the Eastern Orthodox Churches:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb6fcZSU2qM
> my father was an altar boy himself during the days of the Latin Mass
I read it phonetically off a cheat sheet. Didn’t stick with it long enough to memorize it.
Hi, thanks for the additional info.
Regarding the new fire. Yeah, the core idea is Catholic, I am trying to say that the way people act and interpret it can be very different. I really mean a bonfire, here is an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIIrnrmdFJg&t=249s
(You see them coming up to the bonfire at about 4 minutes with candles coming from Easter mass.)
That's not "church, but for atheists." That's "atheists participating in other people's religious activities, usually largely for social reasons."
Nah. It's just putting the "ethno" in "ethnoreligion".
Unitarianism seems sort of like a social workers convention to me.
Unitarianism seems sort of like a social workers convention to me.
I know some people like this as well. But for myself, I can’t bring myself to see the point of restricting how I eat or how I spend my time, given that I don’t actually believe in the underlying belief system.
I suggest not following the rules that seem pointless, but asking people around you if they go to a church, synagogue, mosque, or other temple that they absolutely love (especially if there is good music), and checking it out. Most people who think of themselves as following the rules are super inconsistent and intellectually lazy about it anyway -- you're doing what they do, but just being more honest about it.
Careful though, this is how I started attending Mass and now I'm a legit Catholic.
It’s because being Jewish is also an ethnic identity that, historically, had lots of issues assimilating. Not a church for atheists.
I hear you, but lots of Jews aren't even very ethnically Jewish. My kids are less than 1/4 Jewish by ancestry. Everyone just adopts the identity they want, you can too. You can just show up, sing along with the singing, disagree somewhat with the sermon, go home, read a Dilbert and go to bed.
Isn’t becoming a Jew comparatively hard?
There's no Jewish card. You just start going to stuff. I guess some Jews are annoying about ancestry or whatever, and the official policies of the state of Israel are designed to exclude people, but just find a temple with gay couples and I promise it'll be cool and not annoying about if you're Jewish enough. As with most of the world history of the last 200 years, places that treat gay people well are safest and best
You don't feel ridiculous singing "praise to the lord" when you think belief in that lord is "infantile?"
It's ironic how atheists get more obsessed with religion than the religious. It's also interesting to me how many atheists seem to latch on to Abrahamic stereotypes, especially Christianist stereotypes, when they argue against the existence of god and religious practices in general.
Not all religions require a belief in a particular god or gods. Buddhists, for instance, can get along quite well without a belief in a god or gods (Buddhists can believe or not believe as they wish deity-wise, and it makes no difference for their practices or how they're regarded by their fellow Buddhists). Likewise, Marxism displays many of the beliefs of millenarian religion without a godhead—but they substitute historical inevitability for god's will—and True Communism for the rapture. And in extreme sects of Marxism, a god-like cult is built up around a leader and large-scale worship rituals are promoted and enforced.
Meanwhile, (many) US atheists who think the worship of god is infantile stand for the Pledge of Allegiance (though they might remain silent or mumble "under god" part). And even without the "under god" component, Jehovah's Witnesses long ago sussed out that American flag worship is a bizarre cult where the US flag has become an idol. Their refusal stand for for the pledge is because they see flag worship as violating the 1st and 2nd Commandments, and the enforcement of flag worship rituals in US society as a violating their 1st Amendment rights (BTW: we owe the Witnesses a lot for bringing and *winning* many free-speech 1st Amendment cases before SCOTUS).
But most atheists seem to be as ignorant of religion as Christian Fundamentalists are of science.
My understanding is that you can combine pretty vague deism with Catholicism, happy to have someone tell me that I'm wrong though.
It is wrong, not sure where you got this idea from.
1. Nice analysis.
2. It's pretty much bell curves all the way down.
3. Many people who claim God is talking to them are, at best, misinterpreting their experience.
4. It would be nice to have some basis, experience, or expertise for claiming there is no God. As someone I respect once said, "That God you don't believe in? I don't believe that God, either!"
Well, it depends what you mean by "God".
At last I am understood!
I often specifically say that it's the God of Abraham that doesn't exist.
"Born again Christians are constantly having what would normally get classified as psychotic experiences - I have asked a bunch of evangelicals who say “God told me to X” whether they actually heard God in a, you know, hearing God type way, and they usually say yes"
Regarding that, the Catholic Church is very "hmmmm" about people claiming to be hearing the voice of God directly communicating with them. (Yes, all the Reformation Protestants will now chime in about putting intermediaries between God and man).
There is a distinction between the voice of conscience, the promptings of Providence, and God Almighty speaking directly to you, and some of that distinction may have been lost in the more enthusiastic denominations in the USA. So you might say "I know Bill is perfectly genuine and sincere, but I don't believe God spoke to him" and I would agree, but not on the grounds that "of course not, God doesn't exist, Bill is just hearing voices".
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04268a.htm
" -The natural conscience is no distinct faculty, but the one intellect of a man inasmuch as it considers right and wrong in conduct, aided meanwhile by a good will, by the use of the emotions, by the practical experience of living, and by all external helps that are to the purpose.
- The natural conscience of the Christian is known by him to act not alone, but under the enlightenment and the impulse derived from revelation and grace in a strictly supernatural order.
- As to the order of nature, which does not exist but which might have existed, St. Thomas (I-II:109:3) teaches that both for the knowledge of God and for the knowledge of moral duty, men such as we are would require some assistance from God to make their knowledge sufficiently extensive, clear, constant, effective, and relatively adequate; and especially to put it within reach of those who are much engrossed with the cares of material life. It would be absurd to suppose that in the order of nature God could be debarred from any revelation of Himself, and would leave Himself to be searched for quite irresponsively.
- Being a practical thing, conscience depends in large measure for its correctness upon the good use of it and on proper care taken to heed its deliverances, cultivate its powers, and frustrate its enemies.
- Even where due diligence is employed conscience will err sometimes, but its inculpable mistakes will be admitted by God to be not blameworthy. These are so many principles needed to steady us as we tread some of the ways of ethical history, where pitfalls are many."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_revelation
"It is a misconception that the church is quick to accept mental illness or drug abuse, such as schizophrenia or hallucinogens, for private revelation and demonic activity. The church is skeptical, and only accepts private revelation after discernment, because it is "the pillar and bulwark of the truth" and because it has a long history of dealing with fraudulent visionaries."
"all the Reformation Protestants will now chime in about putting intermediaries between God and man"
Now you are putting an intermediary between me and my "Yes, but!" comments. Typical Papist!
Anyway, a large number of canonizations happen exactly because people claim to have seen an intermediary like Mary or a saint in the sky or whatever. And not metaphorially seen, but seen the same way a cloud or sun is seen in the sky.
The Catholic church, while ostensibly ruled by the Pope, is in a constant tension between very serious Jesuits and wacky superstitious Mexican abuelas. The superstitious abuelas are always getting visions, the very serious Jesuits are always saying that this kind of thing doesn't happen, and occasionally they agree to compromise.
Sounds very similar to Eastern Orthodoxy. Lots of woo-woo from babushkas about visions, reincarnation, basically anything mystical, that often contradicts basic biblical tenets. Hopefully it's not just from the Russian state media's ability to obliterate critical thinking from its populace.
I was actually thinking of 19th century French and Spanish revelations but yeah that's how it shakes out these days
Catholicism is weird along a lot more vectors than that. I was raised Catholic, but I didn’t realize how weird it could be until I went to Europe. Sure, 600-year-old relics of saints’ body parts are easily written off as “back then”, but at Fatima there is still a huge oven for burning wax effigies of body parts and human figures as offerings. You can buy a wax breast and throw it in as an offering with prayers for someone with breast cancer. My Catholic mother would have screamed “Witchcraft!” at things still done by Catholics in other times and places.
Hey, whatever works to gain money and power
The abuelas are better company, better people, and better cooks.
It makes sense once you realize that tulpas are a real phenomenon in people high on the dissociative scale.
If you spend several hours a day for ten years visualizing your meditation deity, it's very likely to appear to you (it did for me, and it scared the shit out of me). Rather than seeing it as dissociative, a better rational explanation for phenomena like tulpas would self-hypnosis through ritual focus (although I think that explanation is also facile). But it suggests to me that the mind is much more flexible in what it can perceive than standard rationalist dogmas allow for.
I didn't want to say the actual reason I posted the above but now that I'm seeing your comment, might as well: I have a comparably long personal practice of meditation and have seen a similar thing happen with a different sort of a visualization. AFAIK, it can be done via hypnosis and faster as well. It didn't quite change my beliefs on the mind though: it seems that if you imagine a sufficiently elaborate entity while in a certain state for long enough, you can make the idea loop and become self-sustaining... Dreams where one talks to imaginary convincing people are a common phenomenon, this must go in a similar vein, or at least so I keep telling myself to stay sane. :)
Dissociation, however, might be related to how one might do such a thing unconsciously.
This occurrence didn't become self-sustaining for me, and I'm happy it didn't. After it left, I realized that I had forgotten an important instruction from my first meditation instructor — "don't undertake meditation practices without the supervision of your teacher". Later in an informal seminar on Buddhism, given by Robert F. Thurman, he echoed that dictum with the codicil, "because you might find yourself in a mental space you'll find very frightening or one that's difficult to escape from without assistance."
Silly me for not taking these warnings seriously.
And this is why I'm against teaching meditation in schools. Are people still pushing that stupidity?
It was more or less an attempt to remember a deceased relative over multiple longer sessions. I don't even know whether that's something one is supposed to do at all, but, well, when that unexpectedly happened, it felt like talking to what I best remembered of them and then the image went away after a while, it was self-sustaining in the sense that I stopped feeling like I was focusing at some point. Never did it again, but at least I gave them remembrance one last time, figment or not and found out just how terrifyingly realistic tulpas of the familiar may seem.
While you definitely can do damage with deep meditation, standard mindfulness stuff might be alright? I'd also assume the Zen approach is built around safety, though that's not what I did and I'm not really familiar with it, so it's just a guess. I stuck with the practice for far longer than most should just as at first it helped me learn to tolerate chronic pain better than prescription meds in terms of not slowing me down, then I kept doing it out of habit as I saw it more as focus training than a rite. Schoolkids are unlikely to practice since it's really easy to get distracted with any other hobby over it unless you have a very good reason, but I've never seen that idea brought up somehow. Wonder if they already do it in any country?
But if you suddenly start realizing what some of the normally silly sounding terms in something like Tantric Buddhism might mean to your own surprise, yeah, I'd really stop joking around and find an expert to talk to, as at that point you might be 'painting' with mixed psychiatric failure states to some degree. I didn't even figure what exactly I was doing at first and still can't be 100% sure either. I think the specific intention 'saved' me from longer term consequences there.
Nothing here I intrinsically disagree with. Not familiar with "the order of nature". I would quibble pretty seriously with "derived from revelation and grace...." I think that may be true, but it's not clear to me that the person operating with "natural conscience" is aware that they are operating under revelation and grace.
Yes, I asked an evangelical I knew well if she actually heard God's voice, and she was quite clear that yes she actually heard it. It was an actual auditory experience, just like hearing me talk -- but she knew it was God's voice. She was not the least bit crazy. I just do not know what to make of it. I wouldn't exactly call myself the sanest of the sane, but I have never once heard a a piece of actual audible speech from someone who was not there -- except when in bed, on the verge of sleep, & I'm pretty sure auditory hypnogogic hallucinations are common and normal. I keep thinking that she must have just *thought about what God would say,* and rounded that up to actually hearing a voice, because direct communication with God was regarded as normal in her community, and in fact was highly valued. And yet she was an extremely honest person, in fact one of the most honest I have ever met. About most other things she would tell me the actual, literal truth, even if the truth was embarrassing, socially undesirable and made her look foolish. So why think she was lying about hearing God's voice?
I believe she wasn’t lying about her experience. I’d have to
Know her a lot better to know whether I thought she was actually having an experience of, hmmm, enlightenment.
Re "bell curves all the way down", how would tinnitus fit into this? Very high prevalence (on the order of 10% of the population). A high pitched hum doesn't suggest an alternate reality... Does this count as a hallucination or as a sense organ problem? There seem to be something like nine different theories of the cause
( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2686891/ )
( Doesn't anyone succeed in ruling _out_ a hypothesis anymore? )
A good question!
I think it's a common phenomenon with multiple causes which can both be independent and coexisting. I have tinnitus, it varies, it seems related to physiology more than psychology.
Many Thanks! Certainly there could be multiple causes (e.g. analogous to type I and type II diabetes). It would be nice if the possibilities could be disentangled as definitively as e.g. checking insulin levels distinguishes those.
FWIW, for me it correlated very strongly with experienced stress. Once I realized that, i took steps to reduce stress externally (people and situations in my environment) and internally (meditation, counseling). I got an immediate drop of 30%, and now I'd say on most days about 70% less than at the peak. I'm also taking a diuretic, which seems to help, too.
Many Thanks! ( I'm lucky - I have some tinnitus, but at the level of a minor nuisance, so I haven't attempted to chase down what might reduce it. )
Sure. Oh, I sometimes get relieve by creating alternating suction and pressure with my thumb over my ear canal.
I have something that might be tinnitus, but it's subjectively extremely quiet; I can only hear the tones in extremely quiet settings or if I plug my ears with something.
"It would be nice to have some basis, experience, or expertise for claiming there is no God."
A default to not believing things there isn't good evidence for?
It's perhaps too complex to go into here, including the nature of evidence. IMHO, there's plenty of evidence. There are many credible reports of experiences of the divine-some more or less replicable. To assume that the mundane, untrained experience of quotidian reality is accurate is as ungrounded as assuming that a person lacking the appropriate training can understand AI or string theory. And to be clear, there are many false claims for the existence of God-I'm not arguing against that assertion. Perhaps a rough analogy: at some point, there was no evidence for virii or bacteria. That didn't establish their non-existence. At the least, agnosticism seems a more reasonable stance.
I'm agnostic, with respect to both God and the photon. Both seem like useful ideas, even if hard to nail down. Truth may not be as important as utility.
Fair
I agree. That's why I don't believe there is a god, but I don't n believe there is not a God. God is unfalsifiable, as is Atheism.
The Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal a few days had "running the arguments for god in reverse". It puts some rigor in arguing for that default, and end up making it look more than a little ridiculous.
What is this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal you speak of? And why should I consider that a bowl of soggy corn flakes has any insight to the existence or non-existence of god? The image of eating Froot Loops from the Holy Grail came immediately to mind, though. ;-)
Google is a thing. Give it a try, you might learn something. Or at least be more funny.
OTOH, I can't stop chuckling over the idea of breakfast cereal arguing over the existence or non-existence of god. Do they have religious wars—Kellogian's vs the Postians? In my younger more slovenly days, some bowls of breakfast cereals became science experiments, but none of the evolved consciousness let along became a philosopher of religion.
God is so powerful, that she doesn't need to exist, in order to save the world.
Well, it depends on what you mean by "exist", I guess.
Yeah, I guess, belief is enough.
Miles might be my favorite sci-fi male lead ever.
Me, too. I'm listening to an audiobook of "The Vor Game" as I'm typing.
More fulsomely, if one has an experience of God, belief is irrelevant. It's like asking if you believe in iron, or electricity.
It is straightforward to prove that there is no God that likes people and is able to verifiably communicate: observe that all communication that appears to be from God is via unreliable channels, and there are things He should have been saying but didn't, such as various practical medical things some thousands of years ago.
The other options are a God that dislikes people or is unable to communicate. Nobody seems to believe in those much, for emotional reasons. Loki is on the Disney channel because hardly anyone believes in him, but Loki seems like a more plausible deity to me than the others I come across.
1. That's not a proof; it's an observation.
2. I agree with your observation, generally.
3. You, obviously, aren't capturing all claimed communication from God.
4. "Should have been saying" has too many assumptions buried into it to address in this forum. That said, for instance, it seems to anthropomorphize God.
5. Again, it's less that God is unable to communicate than that humans are unable to hear, so to speak. For instance, to understand, oh, say, bio-neurology n a deep way takes, I'll arbitrarily say, a Ph.D. and a post doc--call it 6 years? I'm positing that it takes at least that much time, in the equivalent of a good Ph.D. program and post doc, to communicate with God. At least for most folks.
6. There are factors in the human being which interfere with the ability to "hear God"-fear, shame, anger, impatience, ego (in a negative sense), etc. These have to be cleared out of the way for communication to occur. Otherwise it's like trying to talk with a friend at 120db+ rock concert.
7. Etm.
>You, obviously, aren't capturing all claimed communication from God.
Okay, you are saying that you know of claimed communication from God that came through reliable channels. What would that be? If it actually is reliable, we should have a talk with Him (or Her, or Them). Which God do you have in mind?
The best lead I currently have is a bald assertion from some stranger on Astral Codex Ten. I would be happy to accept a videoconference projected in the empty air, or letters written on the sky, or a chat with some guy who demonstrates He can walk on water so long I can verify that the water doesn't have transparent objects inside and He doesn't have ridiculous buoyant shoes. There are many other reliable communication channels that could be used so should we assume that part of the problem is uninteresting? A God Who made the universe doesn't have to be subtle, and He is claimed not to be subtle in many holy books.
>"Should have been saying" has too many assumptions buried into it to address in this forum. That said, for instance, it seems to anthropomorphize God.
Seems like you are withdrawing from the conversation abruptly. Okay, fine, but that's not consistent with "It would be nice to have some basis, experience, or expertise for claiming there is no God." If you think it's nice to have a such a thing, you ought to be open to a conversation about whether you already have it or not.
We're calling this thing a God, and as a consequence I am assuming that this God has recognizably goal-directed behavior. I posit that that is part of what we mean by "God". As a non-example, a God that behaves exactly like the laws of physics is the laws of physics, not a God.
>Again, it's less that God is unable to communicate than that humans are unable to hear, so to speak.
>There are factors in the human being which interfere with the ability to "hear God"-fear, shame, anger, impatience, ego (in a negative sense), etc. These have to be cleared out of the way for communication to occur.
I could read letters written on the sky describing a cure for aging. More generally, humans can communicate with each other, a God can do more than humans, therefore a God can communicate with humans if He chooses to and He actually deserves to be described using the word "God". Subtlety is not required or useful.
Not withdrawing more than from anything else given the heavy demands on my time at work and at home, and in groups I'm involved with.
Let's try this: What do you think are the characteristics of this God? God can do everything that humans, can do, and more? I disagree with that. The customary line is that God is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. Where I disagree with that is with respect to omnipotence. My understanding is that all potency is God's but it is not all exercised by God.
Again, what do you think the characteristics of this God are? Like a human being, only God can do anything? God wants what human's want? I mean, no insult intended, the concept you seem to be arguing against is sort of the same general Christianist all powerful hairy thunderer Father in the skies. That's not what i'm talking about. What are you talking about?
The argument gets to the conclusion that God doesn't exist if we assume God likes people, is able to communicate reliably, and knows anything useful to people that He obviously chose not to communicate to them. "God likes people" is also implicitly assuming that God is purposeful enough to be said to like people.
If He is omnipotent and chooses not to exercise that for the benefit of the people He allegedly likes, that implies either not liking people or not being omnipotent (and therefore not being God). I don't care which.
He only has to be omnipotent enough to be able to communicate reliably, so the amount of omnipotence required depends on the communication channel. I will leave out the tradeoffs there because I hope they are obvious.
This conversation seems repetitive. Now I doubt that you really want to "have some basis, experience, or expertise for claiming there is no God". If you did, you would have defined your terms by now instead of making me repeat my best guess about what you mean.
My definition of omnipotent is different from yours. In my understanding, "omnipotent" means that all potency belongs to God, and some of it is delegated to human beings. It doesn't mean that God can do anything.
And, again in my understanding, God isn't "conscious" in the way you seem to be thinking. It's more like God is dreaming, and it's the role of the completed or completing human being to be part of God's awakening.
It seems reasonable to me that if someone is claiming there is no God, that they define what it is that they are saying does not exist. I'm not trying to have you guess what I mean; I'm trying to you to tell me what you mean. You don't seem to be doing so, instead saying things like "God likes people, is able to communicate reliably, and knows anything useful to people". So those sound like aspects of God, or characteristics.
Lastly, I would say that "communicate reliably" is trying to do too much work here. I'd argue that God is trying to communicate all the time, but just because a person breathes, eats, eliminated, and can read a blog doesn't mean that they have done the preparation to communicate reliably with God. You seem to think that if God is omnipotent (and I think I disagree with your definition, as I understand it), that God can communicate to anybody, any time. The record shows that's not true. The record also shows that some people have made credible claims to communicate with God- one could start with Ibn Arabi, or Rumi, or Jesus, or Shefa Gold.
OK sure, but I'm thinking about a different kind of god. God on a meta level, so there is no 'real' god. But the idea that there is a god, which mostly just means you should behave nicely, 'Do unto others as you would have others do unto you'. Is actually a pretty good first guess on how to behave in the world. At least that's my experience. I'm not sure I believe in god, but I like the idea of a god. And so, on some meta level, I guess I do believe in god... I believe that the idea of a god is a good thing, and I want to hold onto the idea, that I don't have to believe in any specific god... Christian, Buddhist, or otherwise.
I don't understand how you got the premise that "there is a god" means "you should behave nicely". (I agree that behaving nicely is a good thing, if we could figure out a definition for it, and I even believe that describing it is feasible so I'm not accusing you of being uselessly vague here. The connection with god is the part I'm missing.)
I can imagine god perhaps wanting all sorts of things. Many holy books describe gods who want things other than behaving nicely, so apparently the people who wrote those books could too. Maybe you are unaware of this (unlikely) or you are doing wishful thinking (much more likely), but my dominant hypothesis is that you're having thoughts about this that I can't anticipate.
"if you’re desperate enough to join the KKK or your university’s Black Student Alliance"
This is too tasteless for a throwaway "murder arson and jaywalking" joke, too short and off-topic for a serious "what are the implications of some races having much better options than others" digression.
Yeah, this was, in Scott's words, pretty cringe. I immediately wondered whether Scott thinks that you have to be desperate to join a campus Hillel group.
Joining a group based on shared religious activities and beliefs does seem to be a step up from joining a group based on shared melanin levels. Even joining a group based on shared ethnic background makes more sense to me than joining one based on race alone. But then I married a foreigner so maybe race matters less to me than normal people? Still, I would at least aim for "shared hobby" group membership before race.
People join racial affinity groups because race correlates with shared culture, shared experiences (of discrimination _and_ of other things), etc. I think the Hillel comparison is very apt. It's not just melanin.
I don't know about that. I am not sure a black student from Brooklyn would have more in common with a black student from Botswana than with a white student from Brooklyn. I agree there is probably some common "black culture" in the USA that is somewhat distinct and maybe shared across regions to an extent, but seems a very weak thread compared to religion or hobbies and other interests.
Like I said, maybe I don't identify super strongly with my own racial group compared to other group markers, and that makes me strangely unable to see the appeal, but shared race seems like the lowest common denominator to use to meet friends.
That's because "race" doesn't exist outside of the shared social context in which it is defined/enforced. Two "black" people from Brooklyn have "race" in common with each other but not with the Botswanan. Botswana certainly has its own "racial" or ethnic identities but they will be wildly different. If the Botswanan moves to America and spends significant time within the sociocultural context, they may well "become" a different "race" than when they arrived, despite the fact that "race" is nominally something you are born having.
Isn't the reason that there is a Black culture in America that a lot of ex-slaves had been disconnected from their national cultures, so they made one to fill the gap? So there is a genuine culture there that is primarily linked to melanin levels because that determined who needed it, whereas everyone else had their national culture still and didn't need a skin colour based replacement?
Yes, that's what race is: shared melanin levels.
Also, the assumption that members of Hillel have shared religious beliefs is wrong. I'm Jewish. I'm also an atheist. In my experience of secular, American Judaism, this is more common than not.
Black people in America are obviously not a monolith, but they do have shared ethnic background(s) in much the way that American Jews do.
I don't like woke-ism, but I do have a hard time associating myself with anti-wokeism when it comes with opinions as dumb as yours.
I agree with you on this issue, but I wish you wouldn't be rude. It worsens a comment thread just as much as "stupid" opinions do.
I thought about pulling my punches, and then I thought otherwise. Usually I agree with what you're saying. In this case, I don't. I think it's completely relevant to point out that Doctor Hammer's comment is not only wrong but also that it's insanely, idiotically glib and ignorant. It is an incredibly dumb opinion.
It's also dressed up with the kind of pseudo-high minded condescension that characterizes a lot of this kind of dopey commentary. Oh, look, "race matters less" to this person. He obviously isn't infected with the kind of base tribal impulses that cause his lessers to want to associate with their co-melanists.
Sometimes it's worth puncturing this kind of arrogance and pointing out that the person with the terrible opinion really isn't very clever.
I agree with this, but I’m usually too exhausted to respond.
I have a different opinion on this, maybe you can help me understand it. Race strikes me as a categorically different quality than one's skin pigment. A Hadza hunter, a Caribbean farmer, and a Portland professor might all have functionally identical levels of melanin, but I can hardly a imagine a situation in which it is appropriate to say that they are all the same race. Is that your position?
"Black people in America are obviously not a monolith, but they do have shared ethnic background(s) in much the way that American Jews do."
Really? Genetically and linguistically the ancestors of afroamericans are probably much more diverse than those of jewish americans. So the shared ethnic background refers to slavery and some generations of afroamerican cultures? Is the ethnic background of american jews considerably less shared?
"Even joining a group based on shared ethnic background makes more sense to me than joining one based on race alone."
At least in some parts of the world, this is a distinction without a difference.
Fine, I'll take that out.
Thanks, I also found it wildly offensive, bordering on evil. One is a group dedicated to perpetrating oppression and the other is built around the shared experience of being on the receiving end of that oppression (among other things). Maybe it was a joke (?), but if so, it landed very very poorly.
Ah yes, I do remember when black university clubs took over all three branches of government in 2020. Never again.
Crime is also up in red states.
The KKK and its affiliates and offshoots has obviously murdered more people than has Black Lives Matter and its affiliates and offshoots. The effect of the KKK on American policy and culture has also obviously resulted in more death, destruction, and misery than has the effect of Black Lives Matter and its affiliates.
Crime is still lower than in the 1980s and 1990s.
Amen to this. It turns out that anarchy and mob justice don't magically solve all societal problems just because it's "oppressed" people doing the anarchy and mob justice instead of "privileged" people. Who knew?
I think a one-dimensional concept of "oppression" that justifies everything is both superficial and causes a lot of damage, but I don't super want to get in a fight right now.
Interesting that you would read oppression justifying everything into my comment. I only stated the obvious, that the two are very different. Something does need to be desperate or wrong with you to join the KKK. Nothing needs to be wrong or desperate in you to join a black student union. I'd be very disappointed if you thought otherwise.
He means that you focused on the evil<->good axis. They're pretty different in that aspect.
They're similar in some other aspects (like focus on race).
> Nothing needs to be wrong or desperate in you to join a black student union
It seems nakedly identitarian. "White student union" would be cringe; this less so due to history, but still...
Regardless of whether you think that you would be interested in joining the Black Student Union if you were black, lots and lots of nice, normal, well-adjusted Black students join Black Student Unions. I've had several black students who were involved with our college's Black Student Alliance, and none of them were Black Supremacists, antiwhite racists, or anything of the sort.
I haven't met a lot of KKK members, so I can't speak from experience, but my strong suspicion is that most of them are racists, and most of them are losers.
I think basic respect for other people should mean that if an organization like a campus BSA draws a bunch of nice, normal, well-adjusted people, onlookers should consider that it might have some value for such people. You might even want to talk to some people who have been part of such an organization before deciding it's the equivalent of the KKK.
And if you've never been friends with someone who was a member of a Black Student's Association, or an Asian Student's Association, or something similar, maybe your own social life is more identarian than you imagine.
But which is which?
eww
Ditto
Very perverse comment.
You might find it bordering on evil, but I think the double standard in who may or may not join race-based groups is itself bordering on evil. Either we say that race should be de-emphasized and other, less immutable shared characteristics should take precedence as the basis of group identity, or we say that people can and should feel pride in their race. Saying that everyone except white people can and should be proud of their race is rapidly becoming exposed as a cynical double standard used by some (not necessarily minorities) to silence and dominate others.
The problem is that, as was pointed out above, indigenous black Americans (American descendants of slaves) are an *ethnicity*, not a race. They possess a genuine shared culture and history.
A Black Student Association is therefore much more like Hillel (which accepts non-religious ethnic Jews) than it is like a hypothetical White Students' Association.
Funny, I take pride in being Irish-American and no-one has tried to silence OR dominate me about it. Am I doing it wrong?
I'd leave it in. Those two are merely opposite sides of the same coin.
EVEN IF you believe that BLM and the KKK are morally equivalent (which, living in an area where there's still KKK successor groups and having known an ex-Klansman before the ex part AND having known people involved in BLM activism, I'll inform you the former are more dangerous), the BLM and black student orgs certainly aren't equivalent. I don't see many Black Campus Republicans marching around chanting Black Lives Matter.
Just registering my vote for "don't take it out."
It's fine if people are offended. Just let them be.
Please dont. And ignore everyone who ever asks you to again.
Thanks for this comment; I was going to post something like "really, Scott????" but you said it better. I almost stopped reading at that point (but I'm glad I didn't because this is a really interesting piece otherwise).
I've stopped being surprised at this point. The race takes on this blog are really bad, as a rule. I'm just disappointed that they've started showing up in otherwise-unrelated posts.
He's doing what he said in the body of the article: trying to get people to read his article by aggressively signaling he's anti-woke so that anti-woke types will listen to him. I just wish he didn't feel the need to do it every time he writes about politics.
No, there are a handful of wokes in the comments who are mad that their sensibilities are not being especially catered to every post, but pretty much everyone else is fine with it.
I was honestly surprised to see anything like this reaction in the comments. There is a threshold of time past which historical groups which committed heinous acts cease to be regarded with reflexive horror. I think of (as a previous commenter said) the Huns, or the Inquisition. I suppose I underestimated the extent to which other commenters associate the KKK (largely a relic, current membership 3000-6000) with broader recent white supremacist violence in the US. In retrospect, this was probably a pretty stupid assumption by me.
I think the saliency of the KKK disproportionate to current membership is primarily the result of recency; burning crosses and child murders are in living memory still. Surely "exit living memory" is a necessary condition for the threshold of time passed.
As Sourdough points out, "the crimes and victims thereof exiting living memory" is a necessary element of the hatchet-burying. I doubt many people are eager to cast the Holodomor or the Holocaust or the Cambodian Genocide or the Rwandan genocide into the "forgive and forget" categories alongside their enactors quite yet.
Many people are completely willing to deny that the Holodomor, the Cambodian Genocide, or the Great Leap forward were all that bad IF they happened at all, and really even to mention them is an act of gaslighting in defense of White Cishetereopatriarchy and its corporate arm, the GOP.
You contribute less than nothing to this conversation. Those people are rightly considered to be politically-braindead ghouls. Even pretty hardcore leftists think tankies are mouth-breathing imbeciles.
This is being debated as if it were not a joke. Obviously it is a joke, so the debate should actually be "can you joke about this?" You can be super woke, and also be OK with irreverent humor. Can't you?
I'm not super-woke. I thought it was unfunny joke in extremely bad taste. And if you look at some of the other responses in this thread, you can see the type of mouth breathers this type of "humor" brings out of the woodwork.
Here's a pro tip: if you want to make the case against wokeness (which I think is a worthwhile thing to do), you're not going to win a lot of converts to your side by drawing equivalences between the KKK and Black campus groups.
Why are you bigoted against people with severe sinus congestion?