Well a conspiracy is something where people conspire, that is in a hidden fashion. And you admit that businessmen do conspire and lobby. I think you’ve created a strawman here, “the secret lobby” that is ruling capitalist societies, but what most leftists and centrists believe is that capitalists run, or dominate, capitalist society. Which is as conspiratorial as believing that feudalists ran feudalism.
I too think that Douthat's "Bad Religion" was a very interesting read, and that American church history is probably a neglected topic, particularly given the exceptional uniqueness of American Christianity.
I've also had the thought that it's the logical endpoint of Protestantism. And I say this as a devout American Protestant, who concludes that at this particular moment in time our system looks like it's somehow, amazingly, the best one. While I also recognize the very apparent flaws that might lead people of other traditions -- Christian or not -- to conclude it's actually the worst one.
The difference between hardcore atheists and the “soggy middle” atheists isn’t belief in god, by definition. The former are generally angry anti-theists and the latter being just atheist or agnostic.
I don’t think the middle is where the conspiracy theories flourish either.
Yes, you are strawmanning. Let me remind you that people retiring today were 8 years old when Jim Crow laws stopped being enforced, so no one has ever claimed that unconscious bias is the only problem for blacks. Conscious, codified-as-law bias literally shaped generations alive today, which undoubtedly has substantial effects on today's youth as well. That's on top of not-legally-enforced racism, with unconscious racism being only a fraction of that. I would also remind you that, if you're going to accuse others of believing in mind-viruses, it would behoove you to make sure that you are not spouting one in the very same breath. A very, very common mind virus is "the out group believes [obviously false thing X]". Consider whether you have this virus. (In fact, I would hypothesize that you don't actually have this virus, are smart enough to know that your out group does not believe this, and are just making bad arguments online to score points with your in group. A thing I'm guilty of at times too!)
Per your last paragraph, the distinction here is that conspiracy theorists do actually endorse the beliefs you accuse them of having. SJWs would look at you cross-eyed if you said they believe that the only bias is unconscious bias.
Thank you for admitting to the straw man. I do think that knowingly strawmanning an opponent is a bad thing to do, and comes across particularly poorly when accusing others of bad, motivated reasoning and/or being brainwashed. I agree about the general point that debunking Bigfoot et al is basically mean and pointless, though I think I’m missing what you mean in this context.
No SJW will disagree with you on that one and I’m surprised you think otherwise. Did you know we paid the victims 20,000$ in reparations in 1988 and had even passed ineffective reparations in the 40’s? Given your other comment that SJWism is ineffective, then maybe you should join them in fighting for reparations for Jim Crow subjects? It’ll never make up for the actual abuse they suffered, but at least it’s a real action to try to help people.
I don't know why people should get more worked up about the fact that Japanese-Americans got forced into camps during WW2 than about the fact that non-Japanese-Americans got forced into the Army during WW2.
The US government violated everyone's rights during its involvement in WW2, not just those of Japanese descent. And if the government is going to be violating my rights anyway I'd rather that they send me to some crappy camp for a few years than that they send me to a crappy camp for a few weeks then drop me on the beaches of Normandy or Guadalcanal.
Why all the outrage about Japanese internment and not about conscription?
The objectionable belief isn't "Blacks are affected by prejudice", it's "*All* the negative outcomes in the black community are the result of prejudice" -- a much stronger, and less well-evidenced, claim.
I’m replying specifically to the claim the poster made, which was about unconscious bias only. A statement that is obviously and transparently not believed by anyone at all. In other words, a strawman!
You’ll note that the original poster’s writing implies something much closer to the exact opposite of what you said (that there are no prejudice effects whatsoever, since unconscious effects are clearly negligible) than to your statement. So if you want to claim that the other side is the one making extraordinary claims, then you’ll have a hard time.
I've personally experienced interacting with highly-educated young people who hold forth some pretty wacky levels of belief in systemic racism/sexism, gender and everything else currently popular. Racism Is In The Air We Breathe. I once knew a woman who insisted that her father was colluding with other powerful men to take away her rights. Her proof of this was that he got re-married to a woman from Thailand and was himself white.
They say we're killing the planet, to the point where one of them got emotionally angry at the ecological costs of...leaving garbage in an alley for a week because the landlords stopped paying for a dumpster, to force them to put the dumpster back. Just a garbage bag containing garbage briefly not being in a dumpster caused a conniption fit about plastic straws and all the People of Color being drowned.
As a white man married to an Asian woman, I can tell you from firsthand experience that there's a crazy amount of hatred in the air these days for such pairings.
How does this actually express itself in real life? Honest question, I'm not trying to make a point. Do people bring it up TO you, or do you notice it around you more?
I'm still confused as to how progressives can bring up crap like that without the heads exploding; isn't that...Criticizing a Woman Of Color's Life Choices? Doesn't that violate some woke rule or other?
Right, but the question is what actions are necessary/effective in the face of this history? Should you put your ancestors in the dock? Or make sure those alive today aren’t able to treat others differently based on race? I’d argue the SJW approach is not only ineffective, but it is doing more harm than good. Even if you accept that historical racism affects people in the present, an effective approach can only be based on actions. Trying to improve black lives by demonizing whiteness does not actually help either.
Apparently, Saudi housewives blame The Jews whenever a ceiling fan breaks down. A young Ayan Hirsi-Ali, who didn't know what a "Jew" was, assumed it was some kind of household mischief spirit, like a gremlin or kikimora.
It's also correlated with believing that masturbation drains cerebro-spinal fluid, that salt and fresh water don't mix (I'm not really clear on what this would even look like), and, amusingly, human fetuses get their souls at 4 months.
That last part was also the dominant Christian belief throughout most of the Middle Ages, at least if you assume that European Common Law was reflective of religious views.
That depends on what exactly you mean by "Freudian psychoanalysis". For example, I agree with the following things:
* Psychological problems that can be cured by hypnosis, can also be cured by talking to a therapist. (It may require more time.)
* Human mind does many things we are not consciously aware of. Some of those we may realize when we start paying attention. For example, you may be tapping your fingers without realizing it, but it's still your brain doing it.
* It is useful to model a human mind as a collection of agents with different goals. Some agents care about fulfilling desires, such as food, sex, addictions. Some agents care about social status, or approval by other people. There is also some mechanism that seeks to achieve a balance between the competing agents.
* Civilization requires a lot of self-control, which results in a lot of frustration. There are a few stereotypical ways how humans deal with emotions they are not allowed to act upon -- pretending that the emotion does not exist; redirecting the emotion to another target; attributing the emotion to another person; reshaping the emotion into e.g. an artistic impulse; (and perhaps some more I forgot).
* Suppressed emotions related to sexual desires are way more frequent than Freud's contemporaries would be willing to publicly admit. (Not necessarily true for our culture, because we have already updated on this fact, thanks to Freud.)
* Frustrated desires can appear in dreams, often in a coded (plausibly deniable) form. For example, a child who was not allowed to eat ice cream, may dream about walking in mountains of snow.
* Humans have a complicated love/hate relationship with authority. (This would require a longer explanation, I am not sure I could do it properly.)
This is roughly what I remember from Freudian psychoanalysis. On the other hand, here are my objections against it:
* Although I like the framework in general, when Freud goes into more specific details, he gets many of them wrong. (Not a fatal objection in my mind, as those details can be fixed later. Analogically, Darwin didn't discover genes, but that doesn't make evolution "debunked".)
* Missing from the picture are considerations of hereditary traits, hormonal imbalance, or simply brain damage. Not all things were caused by one's past experience; not all can be cured by talking.
* The psychoanalytical couch talk may be more efficient than hypnosis, but still less efficient than other therapeutic approaches. Psychoanalytic therapy is famous for literally taking years, that seems like a waste of time and money.
* The chance of a therapist projecting their thoughts on the patient is extremely high. Yes, it is a thing that Freud explicitly warned about, but the proposed solutions (such as: the therapist should first spend a lot of time in therapy himself) don't seem sufficient to me.
What about the consistent finding that all therapies are roughly as effective as each other? So, if following Freudian framework doesn't make you a more effective therapist, then it sure would seem that it doesn't have a better than chance correlation to reality (to the extent that it still says stuff that hasn't become conventional wisdom).
Is that “50% effective” stat just a statistical measurement across disciplines and the populace, or is it that if there’s only a 50% chance psychoanalysis works on me there’s only a 50% chance hypnosis will work? Might differing therapies have results dependent on the practitioner and the patient or are they all intrinsically a coin toss?
It's a statistical measure, and it says that all of them are somewhat better than 50% on average, which may or may not be a placebo effect. You wouldn't know before trying which will work better for you, but you probably can expect any of them to be better than nothing.
Well, if *all* therapies are roughly equally effective, isn't it curious why Freudian psychoanalysis is always singled out as an example of embarassing pseudoscience? (Why don't people say things like "haha, I wonder how many rationalists actually believe in crazy stuff like astrology or behaviorism"?)
But honestly, I don't know what to think about that finding. -- Scott, if you are reading this, please write a meta-review. The fate of thousand internet debates depends on it. -- I don't want to dismiss inconvenient evidence. I also wouldn't want to just take it on your word that the study was replicated and doesn't have obvious flaws. And I have neither time nor skills necessary to review it myself. So I can only provide a few guesses:
Guess #1: There might be some huge flaw in the study that proved that all therapies are similarly effective. The easiest way to prove that all therapies are the same would be to make a half-assed attempt at each of them. This would even be super easy to replicate! It doesn't require any bad intentions; it could happen naturally as a result of a limited budget.
Guess #2: Diagnosing a problem and fixing it are two different skills. I could recognize a broken leg, but it doesn't mean I could also heal it. Maybe it is similar in psychotherapy: better descriptions of human mind do not necessarily translate into more efficient therapies. Correct theories may be unactionable, and incorrect theories may benefit from the power of placebo effect.
It might also be that the mere act of talking about things that are bothering you with an authoritative and empathetic person and then having that person give you some generic advice and some ritualistic behaviors to do just makes a lot of people feel better about things, and let go of obsessions and such, and it doesn't really matter if it's a priest, a shaman, or a psychologist.
I think there is no controversy that talking to a high-status empathetic person makes you feel better.
The curious part is that either (1) all schools of psychotherapy are equally wrong about human mind, or that (2) being more right is not actually helpful for therapy.
What you said would suggest the option 1, but that just sounds too pessimistic. Like, if you say that a specific school of therapy is wrong (could also be Freudian, for the sake of this argument), that alone sounds very plausible. I mean, if they disagree with each other, then naturally some of them should be wrong.
The difficult part is that they are *all* wrong, and all *equally* wrong. Like, come on, there were so many different approaches. At least the parts like "Pavlov successfully made the dogs salivate" should be beyond any controversy. So how likely is it that they are all wrong to the *same* degree? Do we all really have literally *zero* valid insights into human mind? That sounds like a too strong statement.
The option 2 is also pessimistic, but it sounds to me more plausible. As an analogy, look at the anti-aging research. On one hand, we have tons of knowledge about human metabolism, and I would say that a large part of that knowledge is true. On the other hand, we still do not have the pill of eternal youth, and maybe we will never have it. So we have a precedent in medicine how tons of true knowledge fail to translate into efficient therapy, because things are just too complex, too interdependent, would require billions of tiny precise interventions, etc.
Maybe something like this is also true for psychology -- that when things go seriously wrong in the mind, it is not one belief or emotional reaction that needs fixed, but thousands of mutually reinforcing beliefs and emotions, that you would need to fix all, plus the therapy itself is a process that creates all kinds of reactions that also need to be noticed and fixed... but this against starts to sound like something that (steelman) Freud would say.
Noticing that something is wrong and knowing how to fix it are very different things. Physicians have known about cancer and plagues etc for millenia, and yet until quite recently average medical intervention had a negative expected value (and people like Robin Hanson say that it's still the case).
My understanding (which is largely an impression from a combination of this blog, a psychology class, and therapist friends) is that modern-day psychoanalysis/psychodynamic therapy is fairly different from what Freud himself was doing, basically taking the parts that actually worked okay and leaving aside the parts that were complete nonsense. When people lambast psychoanalysis, they’re thinking of psychoanalysis as Freud did it (this being the only version that many people learn about), and not of how it’s practiced currently.
> When people lambast psychoanalysis, they’re thinking of psychoanalysis as Freud did it (this being the only version that many people learn about)
Even this is too optimistic, I think. When I see people who are *not* professional therapists trying to do "psychoanalysis", it goes kinda like this:
The "therapist" makes the "client" talk, and keeps pushing their buttons, until the "client" starts crying. At that moment the "therapist" assumes that the problem is solved; that after a moment of crying, the "client" will suddenly feel better and say that their problem was magically solved. Except, that almost never happens; the "client" often feels even worse than before. So the "therapist" gets annoyed, and starts accusing the "client" of not cooperating and being in denial. The "client" starts crying more, then runs away from the room...
The actual therapists usually take the parts that work in their experience, and often add parts from other schools of therapy that work in their experience. Just like a good programmer is familiar with more than one programming language (even if they clearly prefer one of them), a good psychotherapist is familiar with more than one school of therapy (even if they clearly prefer one of them).
The version I heard was that hypnosis usually only provided a temporary relief for various symptoms, and had to be repeated regularly, indefinitely. Which made it a reliable source of income, of course!
I don't remember the source of the following story, and maybe it's made-up, like with the apple falling on Newton's head... anyway... the story says that Freud once had a patient who was unable to drink water from a glass cup, because for some mysterious reason it felt very repulsive to her. Before hypnotizing her, he asked her, out of curiosity, when did this symptom start. She said it was since her college age, then she reminisced about various things that happened at the college, and said that she had a classmate who had a dog, and how the classmate often let the dog drink water from a glass cup for humans, which she found extremely disgusting. And... after she mentioned this memory, suddenly the symptom disappeared, and she just poured herself a cup of water and drank it, no problem. So the hypnosis turned out not to be necessary that day, and the symptom didn't return even later. Since this experience, Freud started designing his "talking therapy" as an attempt to reproduce this effect.
I tried to find more info by google, but instead I mostly found insinuations that Freud invented "talking therapy" because he sucked at hypnosis, ha ha. I find this a bit unlikely (more like something the hypnotists of that era would have invented as an excuse why Freud's inventions should not make their methods obsolete), because Freud was actually a huge fan of hypnosis at the beginning of his career -- hypnosis was probably the thing that made him become a therapist. However, Freud dramatically changed his professional opinion on various things several times in his life, so I found it plausible he would also dramatically change his opinion on hypnosis.
> I read Freud stopped using hypnosis when a patient became embarrassingly familiar and a servant walked in with tea. I can find the quote if desired.
I never heard this version and find it amuzing. If it's not a big problem to find, I am curious about the source... but I suspect that this is probably also made up.
"Freud dramatically changed his professional opinion on various things several times in his life"
This is, IMO, an often glossed over complication of citing an 'authority.' Respected thinkers hold nuanced opinions that often change subtly or dramatically over their lifetime.
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"If it's not a big problem to find, I am curious about the source... "
Not at all - source at end:
'Early in his clinical experience Freud became aware of the process of transference, whereby a patient might develop romantic and sexual feelings toward the doctor. When he first began treating neurotic patients, he used hypnotism to help them bring unconscious thoughts into awareness. He found, however, that this method had certain limitations. First, not all patients could be hypnotized. Second, he realized that the success or failure of his treatment depended in large measure on the feelings of the patient for the doctor. These feelings could not be explored or controlled if the patient was under hypnosis. He noted that “the most brilliant results were liable to be suddenly wiped away if my personal relation with the patient became disturbed.” Finally an unexpected event pursuaded him to give up hypnosis: “. . . one day I had an experience which showed me in the crudest light what I had long expected. One of my most acquiescent patients, with whom hypnotism had enabled me to bring about the most marvellous results, and whom I was engaged in relieving of her suffering by tracing back her attacks of pain to their origins, as she woke up on one occasion, threw her arms round my neck. The unexpected entrance of a servant relieved us from a painful discussion, but from that time onwards there was a tacit understanding between us that the hypnotic treatment should be discontinued.” Freud quickly adds: “I was modest enough not to attribute the event to my own irresistible personal attraction, and I felt that I had now grasped the nature of the mysterious element that was at work behind hypnotism.” In a paper titled “Further Recommendations on Technique,...”'
Thank you! This actually sounds completely plausible to me.
I have almost no experience with hypnosis, but once I discussed the topic with a guy who does it professionally, and he told me the following, if I remember it correctly:
* Some people are easier to hypnotize, some are very difficult. A part of this is about who they are; specifically STEM students are often difficult to hypnotize. (Now that I think about it, could there be a possible relation to autism?)
* But another part is some kind of personal compatibility between the client and the therapist. It often happens that one therapist completely fails to hypnotize a client, and another hypnotizes the same client easily; and it is not necessarily about one therapist being generally better, because with another client it may be the other way round. So this guy had a mutual arrangement with a colleague next door, that if any of them fails to hypnotize a client on the first attempt, they will tell them to try the other colleague first, before trying something more complicated.
* Different clients are more susceptible to different techniques. Most therapists do the "your body is relaxed, your eyelids are heavy" way. But this guy told me that he knows some weird therapist who specializes on drug addicts, and he just screams at them "SLEEP!!!", and some of them immediately fall down "sleeping"; then he proceeds with hypnosis as usual. (This reminds me of "slaying in the spirit"; possibly the same mechanism.) Again, techniques that work well with some people will fail with others, and vice versa.
* Finally, it is sometimes possible to "tire out" a difficult client by repeated long sessions, making them watch huge rotating spirals, etc. So you could have like a 30-minute session every week, the first three sessions zero success, the next one the spiral starts rotating and you "sleep". Possibly a consequence of getting used to the situation, and therefore relaxing better.
* The stage hypnotists have a few tricks how to find the most susceptible individuals among the audience, which is why they have such high success rates so quickly. You should not base your expectations on stage performances, this is not how it works in the typical case.
I don't know much about hypnosis. It always seemed strange that people would volunteer to be hypnotized on stage for entertainment purposes. To give up basic control...
I do remember reading in Huxley's Brave New World Revisited(50's copyright) that while some people are resistant there is an injection that will overcome it. I think he wrote that as a caution not as a therapeutic recommendation!
My personal viewpoint is that we're inclined to want an easy, external fix to correct all our perceived shortcomings but in my reading and reflection I keep being brought back to the old adage: Know Thyself.
In my view, when people make statements like this now, they don't so much mean astrology and Q anon as they do wokery, with its Manichean religious elements.
It's worth noting that "religion", writ broadly, has an _awful_ lot of overlap with what many people would call woo and conspiracy theories. If you believe that Satan is orchestrating a grand design to corrupt the United States into secularism, is that a conspiracy theory or just evangelicalism? Is believing that visiting particular locations popularly associated with saints will bring you miraculous healing all that distinct from believing in crystal healing?
Yeah, I think this argument is used by two sets of people: actual believers, who would prefer people believe the true religion to false religions. And Jordan Peterson types who think that religion isn't necessarily true, but is a socially beneficial falsehood, and this is partly *because* it's productive against socially maladaptive falsehoods.
Part of what I'm saying is that the arguments by the latter set look much weaker if instead of lumping all "religious" belief together, you think of conspiracy and woo as optional add-ons to either religion or secularism.
The religious person who believes all of society is under assault by Satan may not be terribly different psychologically than the secular person who thinks that society is run by a pedophile cabal - they probably get along great on the QAnon Facebook page - but if you think of the latter as "conspiracy" and the former as just "religion", then sure, it'll look like religion defends against crazy beliefs.
You could say that religion has the advantage of dogma here, but I'm not sure that that's borne out by these data since Catholicism - the most hierarchical of the major religions - doesn't come out looking too good.
AFAICT there are more "cultural Catholics" -- people who identify as Catholic despite not believing and rarely if ever attending Church -- than there are cultural Evangelicals or whatever, so I expect that would skew the data quite a bit.
That's my take as well. I know a lot of cultural Catholics who rarely or never attend mass. They identify as Catholic, but may never read the Bible, attend services, pray, or any other outward expression of belief. I know some cultural Protestants (usually something specific like Methodist or Lutheran), but it seems to be far less common.
I think that while it's possible to have characteristics that may be typical of majority-protestant areas or countries, it's not necessarily conceptualized as being tied to religious practice in the same way by the people to whom such a description applies.
Speaking solely for myself, the first time I was told that it was possible to be "culturally Catholic" it struck me as a category error for precisely this reason--unlike being Jewish, where there's an ethnic component and a religious component such that one can be "culturally Jewish" without any baseline level of observance of Judaism, the entire content of Christianity (from a Protestant perspective, at any rate) is solely the religious prong, so (from the Protestant perspective) you can have a culture, and you can be Christian, and the culture can be (often quite strongly!) influenced by Christianity, but claiming to be "Culturally Christian" without actually engaging in religious observance seems like something that doesn't actually have any content, because the "Christian" part of it is literally all the specifically-religious parts of your life and everything else just falls under the general category of "culture."
I've since come to believe that, as you say, this is probably an asymmetry in worldview between Protestantism and Catholicism. I would presume it comes in part from majority-Catholic European countries being so overwhelmingly Catholic that the distinction between religious and secular practice dissolves away in the same way it does for the (large, in my experience) category of atheistic-but-kind-of-observant Jews, where even if you don't go to mass you still get your kids baptized because That's Just What People Do in (France / Italy / Poland / wherever).
I think there is caricature of what it means to be a believer or religious.
Should the atheists who "believe" in the transcendental idea of "love" have their non-believer materialist membership cards revoked?
That 31% percent of self-identified Catholics believe in astrology is pretty pathetic. Especially since the official church teaching is that astrology and superstition is nonsense and in fact sinful!
Well, I haven't checked what their beliefs in the last few centuries are, but Catholics used to believe that one shouldn't read the Bible, but instead trust the priest's interpretation. Reading the Bible is/was much more a Protestant thing.
Catholicism is the most hierarchical but I think in many ways the least dogmatic. As others say, what’s important to being Catholic is that you recognize the hierarchy and participate in the culture (including confessing your sins) more than not sinning or believing what it says in the Bible.
Have to disagree at least partially here. Catholicism seems like the ur-example of dogmatic Christianity - although on the ground what believers do relative to what they're nominally *supposed* to do has long differed. Catholic teachings on the use of birth control are pretty unambiguous, it's just that people ignore them anyway -- I think what you're referring to (relative to Protestant denominations that often place a bigger emphasis on a personal relationship with God and the importance of personal conscience) reflects a divide between theology and praxis rather than an an actual tabula rasa absence of dogma *per se.*
Relative to Protestantism, consider that papal infalliblity is not only a Catholic origination but wouldn't even mean anything in Protestantism inter alia because there is no pope. Granted this goes to your point regarding hierarchy, but the point is that the hierarchy is intrinsically tied to the promulgation of dogma, even if in practice it's often ignored.
AIUI regarding the Bible, a big difference is that in practice the RCC has not placed nearly as much emphasis on worshipper's studying the Bible itself because subsequent Church tradition and interpretation is accorded higher status than it is in Protestantism, and the mediation of the hierarchy between the faithful and the texts isn't considered intrinsically suspect (in this sense RCC tradition is more analogous than Protestantism to the rabbinical Jewish tradition including acceptance of midrash. AIUI the Karaites would be the rough Jewish analog of Protestantism vis a vis relation to text).
From the perspective of someone with a mainline Protestant upbringing, the RCC approach has the upside of nipping in the bud some of the absolutely bizarre stances of Evangelicalism via a vis biblical literalism and corollary beliefs like creationism, but the downside of an enormous amount of historical syncretism, ritual, and practices that come across as tantamount to idolatry (relics, the intercession of saints / literally directing prayer to entities other than God, the inscrutable emphasis on Mary far beyond what's in any of the Gospels,) that not only don't have any textual basis but seem to be against the direct spirit and letter of the Bible--most obviously Commandments One and Two, but also e.g. the teaching that Mary remained a virgin throughout her life despite no particularly compelling doctrinal reason to believe this and *literal reference to Jesus's brothers* in the Gospel of Luke. Also (albeit in this day and age I don't think anyone on either side really *cares* all that much) Transsubstantiation -- seems obviously metaphorical from the mainline Protestant perspective, taken as literal by the RCC in an inversion of the Catholic tradition successfully avoiding creationism by emphasizing a metaphorical rather than literal interpretation of Genesis.
>on the ground what believers do relative to what they're nominally supposed to do has long differed
It seems to me that the longer a particular denomination has been around, the mellower it becomes towards enforcing its dogmas, which of course is partly responsible for periodical fundamentalist schisms where the most extreme factions are most eager to separate and establish a much more rigorous practice.
"what believers do relative to what they're nominally supposed to do has long differed"
--
I recently read this and found it helpful:
”Turning to God without turning from self"—the formula is absurdly simple; and yet, simple as it is, it explains all the follies and iniquities committed in the name of religion."
--Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 1945
Not that we can completely turn from self but if we don't make a frequent effort we end up doing worse than without belief. Pascal had some choice words for this!
I think if you define "Catholic" as "someone that believes all the things that the church officially requires you to believe", then Catholicism probably does OK. If you define it as "someone who ticks the 'Catholic' box on a survey", then you get lots of Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans who last went to church on their wedding day.
Surveys don't require you to pass catechism to qualify as an official Catholic in their numbers, though.
One way to think about it is that both religion and conspiracy theories are ways of outsourcing the decision of what to believe in (as are all kinds of more sensible things, like reading the newspaper or listening to a famous scientist), but religious authorities tend to have much less perverse incentives than conspiracy-theorist authorities.
(Most of the time, anyway. Too bad if you were relying on the Peoples Temple to protect you against mind virii!)
How about the difference between the religious person who believes society is under assault by Satan and the rationalist who believes it's under assault by Moloch?
I mean, if you accept that low of a bar of proof, I can experimentally establish the existence of God!
There are dozens (at least) of possible explanations for any such single experimental outcome. Establishing that something your belief predicts will come true, does, isn't very strong evidence for your belief. Which is why the sequences recommend making predictions about what would definitely NOT happen if your beliefs were true. (This was actually the insight that made me leave religion; when I made predictions about what would happen if my beliefs were true, they nearly always came true. When I made predictions about what wouldn't happen, I found contradiction.)
"if you accept that low of a bar of proof, I can experimentally establish the existence of God!"
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An impersonal higher power is IMO, easy to figure due to tremendous amount of order(Systems Theory) and oddities like the properties of water. Beyond that a certain amount of faith is required to actively believe or disbelieve.
Moloch in the sense that Scott uses the term is not an actual agent, but rather a representation of all the forces that make coordinating large groups of people difficult. This is basically the exact opposite of a conspiracy theory.
If by "Moloch" you mean the actual child-eating demon from Carthaginian mythology, then this would indeed be basically the same thing, but I'm not aware of any rationalists who believe that.
> The religious person who believes all of society is under assault by Satan may not be terribly different psychologically than the secular person who thinks that society is run by a pedophile cabal
Believing that society is under assault by Satan and that society is run by a pedophile cartel aren't very different in their evidential support, but their social psych roles are very different. "Society is under assault by Satan" is a hoary, traditional belief. That specific form dates back a millenium or so at least as a mainstream element of the christian faith. There's a parchment from Martin Luthor with an ink blotch on it, and he says it's from when he thought he saw the devil and threw the ink well at him. It's taught in every evangelical sunday school and church as a simple fact of history and theology. It's accepted background context for most evangelicals and 80+% of their social groups. (Plus, it's fundamental archetype is "the avatar of corruption is constantly trying to corrupt society" which is old as stories, and completely tautological if you accept the existence of an avatar of corruption.)
It's traditional, accepted, and boring.
On the other hand 'cabal of pedophiles' is lurid, new and innovative. It's a secret truth of the world, kept under wraps. Very different socially, so very different psychologically.
Thank you. I was looking for a way to articulate this. These things may look the same from the outside to a Rational Observer, but they *feel* different from the inside. And that's crucial.
In addition, as someone who grew up very white evangelical, I can confirm at least anecdotally Scott's paragraph on "people with coherent worldviews already have strong opinions on what's true." As an evangelical child, I was taught specific things about some of these other beliefs. Astrology was *wrong*. It fell under the kind of "divination" that the Bible forbade, to the point where I read a spoof horoscope once and worried I might have sinned. The existence of aliens was very, very dubious, because trying to fit it with the Genesis account of creation, which we saw as geocentric thematically though not physically, just didn't work that well. So no, you're not going to find evangelicals believing in these things in large numbers. And Bigfoot doesn't seem to me to be the exception Scott thinks it is: isn't the exciting thing about Bigfoot that he's maybe-kinda-sorta sentient? If he were just a weird ape, wouldn't we leave him to Jane Goodall and her successors and go haring off after aliens instead? As with aliens, Bigfoot simply doesn't fit the revealed story: the Bible says God made a big deal of creating humans on the sixth day and giving them souls; if God had made a rough prototype first, the Bible would have *said.*
But if this were true, then wouldn’t we still expect to see religion being positively correlated with these conspiracies? Since accepting one conspiracy theory seems to make you more predisposed to accept others (people who believe Bush did 9/11 seem more likely to be Q-Anon) rather than negatively? If not, why do *these* theories protect people against other theories.
The Jordan Peterson angle on this is not really universal, though: what exactly constitutes a socially maladaptive falsehood is strongly culturally dependent. So the benefits of the falsehood may vary strongly with an observer's viewpoint.
A lot of these folks just want to give SJWs something to do, like traditional "feed the poor because Jesus" stuff, so they stop inventing new and annoying ways that child proof caps on tylenol are ableist and transphobic.
The probelm with SJWs (cringe name btw, wokies is the new deragotary label) types is that they're poisonous no matter what ideology tries to contain them. In the1000s their attitude-ancestors were the ones calling for the crusades, in the 1950s their attitude-parents were the ones freaking out about the commies in western countries. Their attitude-siblings are there in middle-eastern countries, freaking out because a pop-sci show doesn't mention the islamic god when discussing cosmology. As we speak right now there is probably a chinese kareen is gruelling a poor guy about how his book is offensive (or whatever word they use in china) toward the legacy of the great mao. Wokism is everywhere & forever. It's basically guaranteed by a certain mutation of ideologies, a mutation that ideologies often develop.
When you think about the ways to stifle and de-activate wokies, you will find pretty soon they are ideology-agnostic. Strong norms against busy-bodism and self-appointed-police, strong norms for standing up to yourself and defending oneself with evidence, strong norms against struggle sessions and for intra-group etiquette. Those are just general group hygiene. Religion isn't particularly anti-woke.
Actually, this is why Catholicism is superior as a religion. Monasticism removes the aggressively pious from society and diverts most of their energy into getting up for 3 AM prayers to show how morally superior they are to everybody else, with a small surplus of doing something productive for wider society. They can grouse all they want in there about how impious and immoral the normies are and everyone around them will agree with them, and they get to live in a much nicer house than the stupid peasants, all the while being completely controlled by church superiors who are never chosen from among the woke ("eh, Sister Assumpta could never become abbess, she's too... fervent in her faith. It makes her impractical").
(You're largely wrong about the Crusades: those were mostly set off by a surplus of regular old fighty lads who weren't going to inherit land because they were born second, yet had a significant capacity for violence. Better to use them to destabilize the Saracen's country than your own. Sure, Peter the Hermit was woke, but it only caught on because it was so useful.)
EDIT: I should probably clarify that I'm talking about culturally hegemonic Catholicism here – it doesn't work if you can just opt out.
Ha, good comment, even though I don't precisely agree with your take on monks, there's probably a lot of truth to it -- both humble and good people and unsufferable self-righteous snobs. I'm a Protestant but I've long been fascinated by the idea of monasticism. The Protestant reformers really disliked it, and I understand their objections (yes, Protestant monarchs had cynical motives, but I think Luther and Calvin were sincere), but I still wonder if it's better to have the monasteries around than not. Though you're also right that the benefit you describe only really works if it's hegemonic.
And you're correct about the Crusades. One thing I seldom hear called out is the far-reaching Norman explosion of the second half of the 11th century, and I really see the Normans as exemplifying the crusading spirit, but it was certainly present elsewhere.
Over the course of a few decades, adventuring warriors from that one section of France conquered and took for themselves England and Wales (as is much-discussed), but also Southern Italy, the Principality of Antioch, and extensive holdings within the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Kingdom of Aragon. They moved into Ireland and Scotland a bit later. That's quite a spread, and it represents quite a lot of aggressive energy that would be nice to direct towards one's enemies and away from one's friends.
This thing about the Normans is very true, and it's also interesting that they were only a couple generations removed from Viking ancestors – what really separates a Viking raiding army from a crusade? That one section of France was *also* conquered, not that much earlier, by the same people and in the same way as all the rest, and I don't think there's any *paradigmatic* distinction between conquering Normandy and the Holy Land.
I forget where I read this, but I've even seen a claim that there's documentary evidence of the Norman crusaders raising their old ancestral battlecry when they stormed the walls of Jerusalem – a cry whose words they no longer understood, and used because it was traditional, but which was in fact an invocation of Týr, left-handed battle god of the Danes, in Old Norse.
I dunno, people in modern Spain, Italy, Portugal and Mexico can opt out, and those countries are significantly less woke than the United States, Britain and (I think?) Germany.
I think there is an interesting evolutionary corollary to the JP take on religion, in that he doesn't take into account the potential confounding variable that the most devout religious are also the most intellectually incurious. It seems probable that they are less susceptible to conspiracies and woo because they are simply uninterested in ideas and more closed-minded than the average person.
Interesting to note that Catholicism seems broadly accepting of some of the woo - according to the graphs above that's 31% believe in astrology and 61% in UFOs - more than any other religious / non-religious affiliations listed. As a teenager in the 1980s I transitioned from Irish Catholic childhood to Fortean mystic then via a degree in biology with Dawkins et. al. to hard-core evolutionist / born-again atheist. Several peaks and valleys beyond, I'm feeling much better now, thanks...
That really surprised me because, as you point out, belief in astrology is contrary to dogma. However, I suspect that a great many Catholics *don't know that*, because (a) only a small proportion of churchgoers read the Cathechism, and (b) you don't really get many homilies on astrology (perhaps we need them).
People suggest the Galilean debates was about science and religion, but it was really more about preserving the Aristotlean paradigm.
I think John the Grammarian, 5th century, a Christian, was the first to attack Aristotle. One of the important things he proposed was that what is UP there is the same substance of what is down here.
People from Catholic backgrounds are more likely to self-identify as Catholic despite not/no longer going to Church, so I expect they'd skew the data somewhat.
Evangelicalism in practice has a sort of skepticism around magic that's justified without materialist reasoning. Occult and witchcraft is the worst because you could be communicating with demons. They snark at certain Catholic rituals because "uhh... saints' relics? gross, guys, and those things aren't magic anyway, just pray to God."
Miracles, prophecy, angels, etc., all cool though, as long as it's God who's sending them.
St. Bonaventure, a doctor of the church, wrote about "extraterrestrials" - in fact, it is another word for "angels". The possibility of life and intelligent life beyond this planet has never by excluded. You might investigate Michael Crowe from Notre Dame, a specialist in the history of modern physical science and pretty nice and thoughtful fellow, "The Extraterrestrial Life Debate 1750–1900: The Idea of a Plurality of Worlds from Kant to Lowell". https://reilly.nd.edu/people/faculty/michael-crowe/
I'll admit that part of the arguement basically boils down to "if you have religion, conspiracy theories and woo don't really provide much extra" - the Illuminati, the healing power of crystals and the guidance of the stars are all a bit redundant when Satan, prayer and the divine plan of God are already part of your worldview.
I don't think so. Religions (as the combination belief system, culture and sometimes organization) have immune systems against new beliefs, and the strength of those immune systems varies a lot. Some polytheistic systems, like Rome's, had an adopt-and-corrupt approach; you can easily and happily add a new pantheon, provided they bow to Jupiter or your head god is actually just Jupiter as worshipped by different people. Others, like Christianity, have rather strong immune systems. The successful attempts to mutate the faith largely ended in schisms (see LDS, seventh day adventists, gnostics, unitarians, etc.) Even *relatively* minor points of faith like when people should be baptized have led to multiple schisms.
Most 'woo' belief systems have very weak immune systems. You can believe in Wicca, Astrology, the Flat Earth, Ley Lines and Auras all at the same time, and noone will think anything of it. If you add on that you believe in Jesus Christ as well, and have it all worked out in your head how he fits in your worldview, they largely won't care.
In so far as Christianity is protective against woo, it's because of its strong immune system. If you are a Christian (socially+belief+organization), and you tell another Christian that you ALSO believe in Wicca and think that crystals have auric power to heal, they'll tell you that you're sinning grievously, and probably try to stage an intervention. Or at least, tell everyone in the church to keep their kids and impressionable youth away from you. There will be serious consequences, so those who might be tempted to add to the faith generally don't.
Edit: It's also worth noting that on this level ("beliefs + culture + organization?") it's completely fair to include New Atheism as a religion. And if you think about it's immune system, it's really strong. If Dawkins comes out and says he doesn't believe in any God or supernatural forces because he can't observe them, but there are hundreds of barely observed giant hominids in the world, he will be WIDELY rebuked and admonished. New Atheism is not tolerant of those who deviate in any particular. Which is probably why there are very few people who identify as atheist and also believe in woo.
I mean, technically that was the Bavarian Illuminati's stated goals:
"The society's goals were to oppose superstition, obscurantism, religious influence over public life and abuses of state power."
I will concede that Christians are uniquely vulnerable to complimentary conspiracy theories and woo - a satanic/atheist conspiracy (what's even the difference, am I right?) is more plausible if you already believe Satan is plotting against the Church, but you don't actually need the Illuminati for that unless you want to get more specific.
I guess the point is that if you test for religious conspiracy theories you're basically doing the same as the guys testing right-wing conspiracy theories. Of course, you're free to skip the whole discussion by classifying all religions as conspiracy theories, but then that strategy works both ways...
How are you using "conspiracy theory" here? It doesn't seem like anyone would have to conspire for Satan to be corrupting the US. And even if it did require a conspiracy, why would that let you dismiss it out of hand?
Imagine if you could use that in court. "Ladies and gentleman of the jury - yes, the prosecution has DNA evidence, fingerprints on the murder weapon that match my client, and 4K video of my client committing the murder. However, one of the charges against my client is 'conspiracy to commit murder'. That makes it a conspiracy theory, so it can't possibly be true. I rest my case."
The first step in understanding is actually ATTEMPTING to understand...
There are many ways to interpret the relationship between Evangelicals and Satan, and the one you presented is a strawman.
A better interpretation is that Satan represents the part of ourselves that wants something different from what our "concious" or "primary?" self wants. In other words it represents an acceptance of the divided self, as opposed to the standard social sciences model (paging Gary Becker...) of the unitary self.
Now you can look at this and say "stupid evangelists, there's no such thing as a red anthropoid with cloven hooves living at the center of the earth". Or you can say "stupid social scientists, obviously the lived reality of every person is of a divided self, and to pretend otherwise is hardly a great starting axiom for your cargo cult 'science'". Which is the greater degree of woo?
I say all this not because I'm an evangelist (I'm not, I'm hardcore atheist) but because I think, not to toot my own horn, there's an easy explanation for this bimodal distribution, namely consilience, as I described in a previous comment:
The median strongly religious person, like the median atheist, may be dumb by themselves, but they both feel that they are part of a tradition that has attempted hard to connect multiple cross-cutting pieces of data to multiple cross-cutting theories, and in both cases the result is a degree of skepticism to anything that doesn't link very well with that pre-existing background.
The alternative of a self-created culture is every bit as lunatic as you would imagine, whether on the right (QAnon) or on the left (humans are blank slates on which we can impose whatever gender, sexual and other preferences we like). In both cases there are pseudo-links between factoids, but in both cases the primary goal of the infrastructure is to define and demonize an Other, it's not to approach Truth (hell, on the left it's an article of faith that Truth does not exist...), so inconvenient facts are ignored, analogies are cherry-picked, and incompatible arguments are papered over. (A very obvious version of this happening before our eyes is as we see Team Trump and Team Hillary [with a small admixture of Team Hunter Biden] each asserting the exact same arguments that they mocked four years ago.)
With enough time, it's possible that a self-constructed culture can grow rich enough and self-critical enough to start caring somewhat about truth. I suspect this has been the case for all the large religions; to last a few thousand years and not be conquered, you need a set of policies that are, at least in practice, somewhat conformant with physical and social reality even if the words used to describe those policies are nonsensical. But neither the hysterical left nor the know-nothing right have been around for nearly long enough for that to happen. Most people get sick of the fights, the finger pointing, the crazy attacks and struggle sessions and the rest of it, the use of everyday life as a weapon.
The Mormons seem to have reached that point today. The Russian seem to have given up the serious crazy around the 60s, likewise the Chinese around the 1990s. Of course in the past things move slower. The seriously Christian Crazy flared up on and off till Nicaea, then again with Iconoclasm; the seriously Protestant Crazy lasted about 100 years.
Perhaps today's crazy can last about 50 years before enough people either get sick of it (specifically the constant, on-going use as a weapon against anyone part) or see through its hypocrisies and lies (there comes a point at which you simply cannot paper over the inconsistencies any longer)...
But right now we're really only about ten years into the true crazy; quite a few more to go...
And meanwhile, well, you can choose to embrace one of the sides – and live with the consequences. Or you can, as the kids say, Touch Grass. Anchor your belief system in something that wasn't put together by some seriously disturbed individuals over the past twenty years, and ignore everything that either does not fit that belief system, or is simply not important even where it may fit.
A conspiracy requires two or more members, so if you believe *Satan* is orchestrating a grand design, then that doesn't count. If you believe that Satan, Barack Obama, the Queen of England, and Lady Gaga are all deliberately acting in concert, then yes.
And pedantry about the definition of "conspiracy" aside, that's a real difference. The belief that Satan is orchestrating a grand design is not actionable, except maybe as an excuse to not be evil. It's a bit of generic cosmology mixed with a bit of generic morality. The belief that specific living human beings are a part of that conspiracy, whether you are then called upon to kill them or just to denounce them and vote against them, is something very different.
But the latter version is very similar to the belief that Obama, Lizzie II, and Gaga are all secretly secular lizard people, or Illuminati or whatnot. So it would be interesting to know whether that sort of conspiracy, independent of whether L. Morningstar is assumed to be a member, is more prevalent among the religious or irreligious (and again whether hardcore atheists are their own category).
Atheism has overlap with conspiracy theories as well. The many atheists who write off the early accounts of the life of Jesus and the early church as having been fabricated by later believers are literally engaged in a conspiracy theory.
One way to interpret this data is just to look at where people source their beliefs. Which of the following talks about Bigfoot most often: a pastor (religious Christians), your social circle (less-religious Christians/agnostics), or public atheist intellectuals (atheists)? I think this heuristic maps pretty well to all of the examples here. Non-believers will believe anything that their preferred source of truth prescribes. One thing that's perhaps nice about having a specific religious belief system is that it is seemingly less "hackable" than the other alternatives, e.g. social knowledge can seemingly easily be modified via a small but dedicated Twitter campaign, so if this is someone's primary source of truth, it's easy to manipulate them.
I'm basically claiming "willing to believe anything" is a description of people whose beliefs are acquired primarily socially, because those are the people whose beliefs are easiest to modify; it seems reasonable that this is less true of both religious people and hard-core atheists, though for somewhat different reasons.
I think the distinction of socially acquired beliefs vs other beliefs is less clear-cut than you make it out to be.
While there are probably some people who pick up a bible or Dawkins and become religious or atheists, even for these a socialization where the new belief is acceptable is probably helpful. I would estimate that the vast majority of church-goers was baptized during childhood. Does not get much more "socially acquired" than that.
I can however imagine that there are people with a preference for a fixed, coherent(ish), closed world view and people who are willing to engage with all sorts of conflicting theories on a provisional, perhaps even Bayesian basis.
This is also a function of the social environment, of course. In a heterodox environment, the social costs to subscribe to a minority belief (e.g. Bigfoot) is vastly smaller than an orthodox one. (Does Bigfoot have a soul? Are they structurally oppressed?)
Furthermore, while the coherent world views preclude most smaller conspiracy theories (if the devil is corrupting the US through the Democrats, Bigfoot can be a diversion at best), smaller, domain-limited conspiracy theories actually support each other some of the time (if "they" can cover up Bigfoot, they can also cover up UFOs, fake the moon landing etc).
from random sources. I think the solution here is that religious people and skeptics alike have beliefs determined by very well defined algorithms, whether that be Bayesian probability or just doing whatever the Bible says, both of which are hackable with only a lot of work. If you have no beliefs in particular to guide you, then why not believe whatever random thing comes across your plate.
IF the beliefs have been around for a "long" time, then they pretty much have to be smoothed and shaped to match reality. The words stay the same but the interpretations change: the words are allegories of this that or the other.
This pretty much has to be a multi-generational thing because the generation that adopted the first round of craziness is more or less immune to ever admitting they were wrong. The kids grow up seeing the pathologies and hypocrisies, but maybe not enough so (especially since generations don't have smooth boundaries). It takes about two generations at least before there's enough general disillusion that no-one takes the words too literally or seriously any longer, and the whole thing morphs from cult to religion. It will be interesting to see what happens to Scientology after David Miscavige dies...
So: point is not where did the beliefs come from.
It's: have the beliefs survived in the real world long enough to have to adapt to reality.
(And of course beware of names, especially when they're being used as weapons.
Protestantism was something different from "Christianity" (ie western european catholicism) even if you claim the same name, and had to go through its generations of being molded to sanity. I suspect "Militant Islam" or whatever their preferred term for it is the same sort of thing – superficially it's Islam, but in terms of understanding the appeal and the crazy, it's something new that glommed onto (some of) the pre-existing Islamic infrastructure.)
I think "hack" is the wrong word here, or at least misleading, because it implies too much intent. I think it's difficult for any one individual to intentionally set out to influence the twitter conversation and succeed, yes. But it's self-evidentially true that a single person can *accidentally* influence the whole of twitter for a day, as the concept of "twitter main characters" shows. Evocative memes (in the original sense) spread more easily and rapidly on twitter, where the only gatekeeper is what people find engaging, than in the church, where there are specific appointed gatekeepers with strong predetermined dogma who are focused on spreading memes that are thousands of years old.
You do get ideological capture though - if Jerry Falwell chooses to embrace a political party, then that will bring his whole movement over, in a way that a less centralized group won't.
I think arguably we can see precisely this sort of thing happening with the Republican party, where Donald Trump has nearly single-handedly changed a lot of official party viewpoints in a way that couldn't happen through any single individual to the much less centralized Democratic party.
I don't think Trump is a good analogy here. The Republican Party wasn't actually all that centralised until he showed up, and he was an outsider who brought in his own viewpoints rather than an existing leader.
This wasn't "the Pope was convinced of [stuff] and took the faith with him", this is more like "a messiah candidate came in and stole the congregation out from under the priests".
As someone who has attended several Churches of Christ and also become an atheist, no, they do not. This is just a weird gotcha that honest consideration of both groups pretty much annihilates.
Lutherans do put a lot of stuff in my mailbox unasked, though. It's true that evangelism isn't the defining feature, though.
The real difference is that said Lutherans have a particular doctrine, a particular supernatural worldview, holy scripture, particular ceremonies and sacraments, a moral system that believers are at least supposed to adhere to, particular views about the future of the world, sacred buildings, professional clergy, and so on, and so on. Atheism doesn't have anything like that.
Yes, most atheists reject the idea that they sound or behave like true believers, but the rest of us, from the outside looking in, find it a pretty accurate description.
The thing is that many atheists like to draw themselves into a category with ‘apatheists’—people who don’t care about the existence of God, don’t see any reason to believe, are as unmoved by the subject as I am unmoved by late-night commercials for the Slap Chop. But these people don’t really resemble atheists, despite being atheists technically. The biggest difference is obvious: they would not read this article—it would be boring. They would not care what is said about atheists—that’s somebody else’s problem. When somebody implies that atheists believe in materialism which is very much faith, they don’t type any response into the comment field because they don’t care and they’re not there.
I stipulate that these people are, in fact, atheists of a kind. But if you quiz them about God they are likely to shrug and say that God might be out there, who knows? These are the true nonbelievers in that they cannot muster any passion about the subject whatever.
There’s a huge behavioral gulf between these people and the usual sort of people who call themselves atheists. The usual sort of atheist is not apathetic about religion. He may define himself as ‘lack of belief in a God or gods,’ just like the apatheist. But he is deeply interested in religious matters, contrary to the apatheist: he usually finds religious matters quite stupid and worthy of contempt; sometimes this extends to finding religion a social ill, or accusing it of thwarting scientific progress or starting wars. He shows up in debates about whether God exists to complain of the lack of proof: he’s usually convinced that the proofs for God are poor. He *may* aver strong atheism, but more frequently says that he doesn’t *disbelieve* in God, he just doesn’t see any *evidence* for God and therefore fails to believe (he has fine-grained epistemology and is sensitive to accusations of counter-belief). Many do, in fact, proselytize. They don’t go door to door as Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses do, but then most Christians don’t do that either: they do start YouTube channels. For the most devoted and passionate there are things like Street Epistemology or Pastafarianism.
There are of course many differences between e.g. Christians and devoted atheists under the hood. It would be a very poor look for Christianity if there were not! But the usual sort of *avowed* atheist usually reminds others of a true believer for good reason.
People who believe in homeopathy and people who actively work to disconfirm homeopathy (who, btw, are not *most people* who do not believe in homeopathy, or who strongly disbelieve in homeopathy - the same is true of atheists) are also exactly the same by this inane logic.
The difference is that the homeopath goes to take his 9C pills when he feels poor, and the anti-homeopath does whatever medicine he actually believes works instead (probably going to the doctor, but also possibly exercise, CBT, multivitamins, keto, or some other woo besides homeopathy). This is, similarly, the vast and enormous difference between even the most obnoxious atheist and the Christian.
“People who believe in homeopathy and people who actively work to disconfirm homeopathy (who, btw, are not *most people* who do not believe in homeopathy, or who strongly disbelieve in homeopathy - the same is true of atheists) are also exactly the same by this inane logic.”
Weird, not sure who you’re replying to: I explicitly said that atheists and theists were not ‘exactly the same.’ I don’t think you understand the argument, unless you meant to post this elsewhere.
No, but on the other hand, you do have the Eliezer Yudkowskys of the world, who prophesy that with certainty the end of this age is at hand; even now, brothers and sisters, our wickedness hastens the coming of the Adversary, who shall blot out the kings of the earth and punish every man according to his misdeeds, even after death.
That there are differences between atheists and the religious is undeniable. What is in question are whether there are distinct similarities in behavior, and I’m not seeing an argument against that.
This seems to boil down to "atheism is a religion because atheists have opinions on religion". I have strong oppositional opinions on fundamentalist Islam; does that make me a Muslim?
"I stipulate that these people are, in fact, atheists of a kind. But if you quiz them about God they are likely to shrug and say that God might be out there, who knows?"
That's the very definition of an agnostic, not an atheist.
Atheism isn’t a religion and I am not arguing that it is. What I am arguing is that atheists share a tremendous amount of social behavior and intellectual features with committed believers in religion.
“That's the very definition of an agnostic, not an atheist.”
Not according to many atheists!
(Incidentally, I agree with you, to an extent. Agnosticism is compatible with atheism.) But many atheists aver that having no belief in God is not a belief, and therefore that the definition of an atheist is not *disbelief* in the existence of God/gods, which is equivalent to *belief* in the nonexistence of God/gods, but rather the *absence* of a belief in God/gods.
I don’t really care about this. Obviously unqualified atheism is the active disbelief in the existence of God. However, if we choose to go with atheism-as-many-atheists-define-it, then we must include people I would term apatheists, agnostic atheists: people with no belief in God because they don’t care about the question and don’t know the answer. If we say these people are *not* atheists, then the atheists who claim that ‘absence of belief makes one an atheist’ are themselves not atheists: they’re agnostics.
This is a semantic battle; I insist on rigor but don’t really care if the answer is that atheists must disbelieve in God or that atheists are anybody who don’t know or care. I just won’t let them have it both ways, motte-and-bailey.
Also, there's nothing about atheism that orders your experience, worldview or stance on the supernatural. There's no moral or ethical teaching in it. Atheism is a _state of mind_, the state of not actually believing in any gods.
This doesn't mean that something like this can't be created that is also atheist - Communism for instance looks a *lot* like a religion apart from excluding the supernatural. There, you have Holy Writ, Heresies and Excommunication, prophecies about the future (and inevitable) paradise, organizations that take on a lot of of the properties of churches, and so on, and so on.
But not believing in god doesn't actually lead you to *anything*. There are plenty of atheists that believe in other nonsense anyway, any number of ethical systems that might attract them, and a lot aren't even physicalists.
We can coin a term "Azeusist", person who don't believe in Zeus. Is Azeusism a religion? Of course not, that's obviously ridiculous. Do azeusists in fact have *anything* in common apart from not believeing in Zeus? No. Expand that to not believing in any other god either, and the same conclusions obtain.
Taboo the question as to whether atheism is a religion, and talk about whether atheism has the particular characteristics you are interested in in this instance.
The reason athieism is not a religion, even incu luding people actively skeptical of religion: religions put great stress on beliefs that are unverifiable like the existence of a diety, effectiveness of prayer, life after death. There are a lot of arguments against religion, but probably the most salient that an acceptance of unprovable assertions is for suckers.
Religious people do say many things that are true and that can be verified, or that are intuitively reasonable. Thou shalt not kill, let he who is without sin cast the first stone. But they mostly also say stuff that a martian psychologist would say is plainl y delusional. The reasonable stuff is available in lots of ways that dont sound nuts.
If you want to go by that definition, then atheism is definitely a religion.
How does the atheist worldview answer "What created the universe?"
Monotheism has an easy answer to that - the unmoved mover.
Atheists will either say "I don't know" or mumble something about the big bang, but if you ask them what caused the big bang, they still don't know what came before it. Sometimes they'll say that the big bang created time itself, but how could the big bang have "happened" or "started" or "banged" without the concept of time already existing? Those words only have a coherent meaning in the context of an existing timeline. 13.7 billion years ago, the universe "started", but how could it have started at the exact "moment" that it did when there was no such thing as a "moment"?
The atheist worldview must accept on faith that "something created the universe, and I have absolutely no idea what or why, but it definitely wasn't God."
Possible selection bias? If there is a hardcore atheist who never talks about, you are unlikely to find out. The hardcore believers usually have to do some observable things.
If it's about the social behaviour, presumably that implies that a committed Christian who doesn't like to publicly discuss their faith isn't actually religious.
You are trying to use definitions to draw conclusions. It doesn't work that way - you just find out that words are ambiguous as they usually are.
The point here is that the two groups, although in firm disagreement, exhibit similarities in social behavior (that other groups, such as agnostics, do not).
If the definition of the word "religion" is so ambiguous that it is not worthwhile to discuss whether a particular belief is or is not religious, then your original comment ("This data simply supports the claim that ideological atheism is a religion") was not worthwhile.
It is worthwhile as long as we don't try to mix different meaning of the word. And the meaning is explained in my previous comment: this is just one more common behavior, so it is useful in many cases to bundle those groups together (call it religion or anything you'd like). Not always - but it's also not always useful to bundle Shia and Sunni together.
And what's the significance of the similarity in social behavior? Is it supposed to discredit atheists, or the religious? Unless the similarities are precisely what atheists object to in religion, they are curious but inconsequential, and vice versa if the similarities are supposed to discredit religion.
I'd agree that some atheists can behave like evangelists in the sense of aggressively trying to persuade, but I don't think that makes atheism "a religion."
You can be an evangelist for lots of things, it's basically just (at least as I define it) a particularly aggressive and irritating form of attempted persuasion - people are evangelists for less oil drilling/more oil drilling, for "natural" birth, for particular views of history, etc etc, but it doesn't necessarily make all those things into religions.
Yeah, whether atheism is a "religion" depends entirely on exactly what you mean by "Religion" and "Atheism." It's a disguised query. Sure, New Atheism had evangelists, a social structure, a common set of beliefs, and a set of informal thought leaders. It even had congregations in some places who did meetups occasionally.
If you're discussing religions purely as social phenomena, sure, New Atheism is a religion for the purpose of the discussion. That's quite distinct from discussing what's likely to be true, or discussing the beliefs in general. New Atheism's beliefs are very different from any religions, so it doesn't make sense to group it with them when talking about beliefs.
But when people evangelise for those other things, they generally don't claim that they entail you renouncing your religion. Because talking (and sometimes more extreme measures) people out of their religions pattern-matches to religious behavior, it's not hard to see why this meme is so persistent.
Maybe its jsut my age, but my friends and I were mostly atheists who were in college 10 years before "new atheism" and while in college there was some mild "evangelizing(we had a non-religious students club where we talked about the history of religion, and ethics and whatnot). But by say 2005 we were all mostly done talking about atheism, none of our beliefs change, but once you are out of college it just doesn't really come up ever.
So many people seem to characterize atheists by the 1% of them that are really outwardly performative about it, but a huge number of us are totally invisible other than you know glancing around at each other during a funeral prayer when everyone has their heads down praying.
This is primarily because atheism was subsumed by leftism. I can think of two reasons why:
1. The vast majority of internet atheists are white men. Leftism told them that their slight annoyance at being evangelized at is irrelevant compared to the struggles of "people of color".
2. While many whites have become apatheists in recent decades, a lot of black people are still religious, so it's now considered passé to talk about religious people as being stupid and ignorant because the archetype of a "religious person" is more black-coded than it used to be. It's only acceptable to criticize "religious people" if you make it very clear that you're talking about white southern evangelicals. (A similar phenomenon could be observed recently with media coverage of vaccines: whites are "anti-vax, anti-science conspiracy theorists" while blacks have "vaccine hesistancy" or "mistrust").
That seems to lump together people who self-identify as atheists, people who self-identify as agnostics, and people who self-identify as “nothing in particular”, who behave very differently when they are broken out here.
"Not collecting stamps" is clearly not a hobby, but "trying to convince stamp collectors to quit collecting stamps" certainly can be.
So I suppose it really depends on the atheist in question. Most are just living their own lives, completely un-invested in the religion question, but it's hard to deny that there aren't a loud minority that behave more like evangelists for the cause.
To be fair, though that doesn't make atheism a "religion" though, you can be an evangelist for lots of causes.
*edited - wow, that was a rather important "doesn't" I left out.
Sounds about right. I think the whole “atheism is a religion” thing is really confusing religion and evangelism.
You can evangelize about pretty much anything, religion and atheism included, but just doing that doesn’t make the thing a religion - it just makes the evangelist in question a bit annoying.
"Religion is usually defined as a social-cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements"
It's blatantly obvious that this doesn't apply to atheism. It might be possible to construct an atheistic religion that includes these things without in fact having a god (some forms of Buddhism could even be said to already do so), but this clearly isn't the mainstream.
Oh? Then tell me more about this moral system, worldview, ethics, and organization that all (or even just most) atheists share in? And just what the supernatural, transcendental and spiritual elements are?
Nope. A religion has one or more deities (or at a very minimum, elements of metaphysics). Being vigorous, restrictive, or prescriptive about an ideology - even *way too vigorous* as some atheists are - does not satisfy that very basic definition.
I think the eastern Germany case is best explained by the fact that if you've grown up with the Powers that Be lying to you all the time about everything, often quite brazenly defying you to call them out on it (and bringing the full might of the State down on your head if you did), you will naturally expect the next set to continue doing so, because - why wouldn't they?
To be fair, this is hardly an absurd thing to believe, given the number of corruption, incompetence, and other scandals that emerge on a depressingly regular basis. I mean, look at what's happening with Olaf Scholz as we speak.
Trust is an easy thing to lose and very difficult to regain.
Yes the problem with any academic or journalistic attempt to study "conspiracy theories" is that they invariably pick beliefs that satisfies their own ideology and ignore any conspiracy theories by their own side.
E.g. here the Economist picks "illegal votes" as a "conspiracy theory" but ignores Russiagate, which is by far the bigger and more influential conspiracy theory. It also ignores things like the COVID lab leak - a conspiracy theory that by now anyone familiar with the evidence accepts is an actual conspiracy - a the meta-conspiracy surrounding it that tried to suppress all discussion of the possibility of a conspiracy.
Oh yeah - illegal votes in 2020 isn't some right wing evangelical conspiracy theory. I live outside the USA and had forgotten what day the US election was. I was reminded by friends (local friends!) suddenly starting to text me, asking if I was "watching what's happening". I was like, um, no, why, what's going on? Is something on fire in the city? No no, the US election. I said no, I'm busy, I'll see what the results are tomorrow in the papers. Then they started to tell me they were seeing people post crazy evidence of vote stealing. These people were NOT right wing, or at least mostly were not at the time (COVID countermeasures changed their politics for some of them). Only one was even American (an ex-pat). But they were convinced bad things were happening and they were seeing it in real time. So the idea that nobody on the left had these beliefs is just wrong.
Incidentally, it's so sad what a rag the Economist has become. I stopped subscribing a few weeks after ZMB became editor because the quality nosedived massively and immediately. I was shocked how much difference a single chief editor could make.
I guarantee that belief that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from the rightwing candidate via mass voter fraud was far more widespread among rightwing people than among leftwing people both on election day and on every subsequent day. This is why people call these theories rightwing.
Some of Bernie Saunders' supporters claimed that Hillary Clinton's supporters committed voter fraud to get Hillary elected as the Democratic Nomination for President.. I don't live in North America, but I think 'distrust in polling results' is already a bipartisan problem in the USA
Um, yes. Your phrasing sounds sarcastic, but why *wouldn't* "my preferred left-wing candidate is being targeted by a shadowy cabal to have the election stolen from him/her" be a left-wing conspiracy theory?
No sarcasm meant at all. I am just not finding anything particularly left wing or right wing about the notion 'we do not believe we can trust our election results'. Seems to me that it is bipartisan belief. EDIT: ah, I see now that you weren't replying to me but to Philo Vivero, sorry.
But your reply is exactly what I would have written.
I don't get how voter fraud is a conspiracy when applied to USA elections. Whether it was Bernie vs Hillary, or Trump vs Biden isn't really important. There's no "wing" on this thing, left or right.
In America maybe? But I don't see how that applies the people I know. The idea that this is a "right wing" concern is false. People who aren't really into politics, who aren't American and don't live in America were sounding the alarm to me about it.
Re: the votes thing, it probably doesn't help that US election security is shockingly bad compared to almost any other Western country. I don't know whether the Trump vs. Biden election actually was hacked, but I do know it would be considerably easier to hack than an election in France or the UK.
Something like 10-15% of the eligible voter population doesn’t have a valid ID, because most of the population doesn’t travel internationally, and some populations (particularly old and poor) don’t drive, and those are the contexts for which ID is given out.
I’m not sure why you’re saying people who care about the poor being able to vote don’t care about the poor being able to access banking. This is a major issue, but not one that is easily fixed.
If you look old enough (and being poor can make you look older), people at stores often don't bother to check IDs. Bank accounts aren't necessary. Cash cards can be used in place of credit cards where cash isn't accepted (I used one when subscribing here!). The definition of "ID" necessary for work can mean a lot of things, which may not overlap with ID necessary to vote, and that's putting aside "informal" (illegal) employment, as well as situations where the employer tacitly overlooks obvious falsehoods. I'm not aware of ID being legally required to rent an apartment (although it probably is required by the owner for any apartments where either of us would want to live).
Most of all that stuff can be done by just showing up in person and presenting a familiar face, which has the extremely important advantage of working after someone just stole all your stuff, including the ID. IMO, any identification requirement that isn't robust to frequent changes of address and frequent "someone stole all my stuff" incidents, isn't going to function for an unfortunately large number of people.
Yeah but so what? Large parts of Europe have an ID card system and everyone gets such a card whether you travel or not. It's not for any specific purpose, it's for every case where ID is needed. You're explaining what the present situation in the USA is, but that doesn't make it easier to understand, or why people claim fixing the ID situation would be racist.
They tried to fix the ID card system in the 1990s by creating a national form of identification that isn’t a passport, but it was criticized from both the right and the left as government intrusion in privacy. It’s weird that there are groups that are against national ID but for a requirement to show ID to participate in national elections, but that’s how it is.
Huh? That would void the point of having ID cards in the first place. Who do you mail them to exactly? Implementing schemes like that does involve a bit of up front work by each person who gets the card to prove who they are to a sufficient standard, although of course that can be just presenting a passport. But if you just mail them to anyone who asks lots of your ID cards will be faked and nothing was solved.
No idea about France, but the UK has more-or-less no election security. I've had someone go and cast my vote twice now (both by people I was living with who picked up the wrong polling card and were very apologetic about it). The polling card itself is something you could easily make if you knew someone's name and address. Postal voting has even less security, and no-one checks the electoral register to see if you're just making people up when you fill in the form.
And note that some Conservatives, especially ones in close seats with high immigrant populations (which unfortunately have correlated in the past with caught election fraud) have requested that election security be tightened for those exact reasons.
Unfortunately, the Conservatives haven't done anything about it for the usual reasons.
British election security is indeed dire, but at least the vote counts are generally finished by the morning after the election, making it harder to conveniently "discover" ballot boxes filled with just enough votes to put your preferred candidate in the lead.
...the polling card in UK elections is just a reminder to vote, it's not a document you have to take to the polling station to 'claim' your vote. That's why it's not difficult to forge, and also why you can bin it them moment it turns up if you like and still go and vote without a problem.
When you go to the polling station you are asked to give your name and address and those are manually crossed off a list of voters registered at your address. I suppose if, instead of replying, you handed over a polling card with somebody else's name printed on it, the election worker might cross their name off instead of yours; I think they are supposed to confirm who you are directly, though (they always have done when I've voted, whether I had the polling card with me or not).
When you register to vote the info you are asked to provide includes your name and date of birth as well as your NI number and your main place of residence. That is enough information for your identity to be checked against eg birth, tax, employment, and passport databases (reference: the paper registration form for those who don't want to do this online: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/931882/Register-to-vote-if-youre-living-in-England.pdf). You couldn't 'just make someone up', you would have to find an unregistered eligible voter and register them. Note that the form explicitly says that giving less information is fine but might mean you get contacted and asked for more evidence - if you can't give the electoral registry office enough to check up on your existence then that's when they come asking for ID.
Since the 'just make someone up' route is blocked any widespread voter fraud would be something of a logistical challenge. You'd have to get hold of the names and details of a large number of people who are eligible but unlikely to vote, and since one piece of information held (for example) in tax and employment records (which can be searched with the NI number) is primary address, you would really need to know where they all lived. Then you'd need to register them for postal voting, and make sure that none of them receive the letter confirming that they're registered for postal voting as that would rather give the game away.
Not saying that the system is perfect, or even particularly good, but it's not quite as doors-wide-open as your post implies. Just because there's not much security theatre doesn't mean there's no security.
Out of curiousity, what did you do when someone went and cast your vote accidentally? Did you get the vote back?
Both times, I decided that the joy I could get for sanctimoniously chiding them about how using their vote would be fraud and I was now disenfranchised was worth more to me than voting was.
In theory if you had gone to the polling station - assuming the election worker checked the name of the person voting as they're trained to - you would have found that it was the other person's name and not yours that had been checked off and your vote was still available for you to cast.
Belief in conspiracy theories probably correlates inversely with wealth and education, in which Eastern Germany hasn't fully caught up. Having had freedom of thought and speech for multiple generations might also be something of a cultural advantage for Western Germany.
I think the German Democratic Republic period oversaw both a decline in religion (which was not really compatible with the state ideology) and economic power (relative to West Germany).
(I am unsure why the long term effects on religion were so much higher in East Germany than in neighboring Poland, though. Perhaps in post-communist Poland, Christianity was seen as a Polish thing (setting them apart from the Soviets) while in East Germany, it was seen as a West German thing instead?)
I would mostly blame the economic situation for any excess anti-establishment ressentiments in eastern Germany.
Can't really speak for Germany, but in Poland Christianity was absolutely a Polish thing setting us apart from the Soviets.
Only, it was Catholicism and it set us apart from the Russians.
In fact, both approaches work just as well, because Poland had well over a hundred years of prior beef with Russia over (at the time) preferred flavours of Christianity. When the Soviets rolled in after WWII with their brand new ideas about religion (atheism, this time), it was merely a case of "not this shit again".
People who come from former Soviet states are super conspiratorial IME. I think it's more likely a result of growing up in a place where conspiracies were commonplace.
Yeah, I agree...I know many people from former "Eastern Block" countries, and they are really the "Trumpy" type quite often (at least the older ones)...
Saw this the other day but didn't really know what to make of it. Authors conclude that "spiritual understanding of life in the absence of a religious framework are vulnerable to mental disorder". I know the type, so to speak, but still seems like a wild conclusion.
I combed through the whole comment section to see if anyone else recognized that somewhere along the line the original sense of the aphorism had been lost and had been nonsensically redirected to things like UFOs and conspiracy theories.
Sure, Chesterton never said the words exactly but his obvious point about the atheism of his day predicted things like "my girlfriend's penis is bigger than mine", not "atheists think UFOs are real". "Believe any old damn thing" includes (from Chesterton's point of view) every single fence-tearing-down that has happened in the last century, including a large number of things that everyone in this comment section thinks are good: socialism, legalizing abortion or gay marriage, contraception, perhaps even giving women the vote -- and no, don't quibble with me that religious people like these things now, they mostly didn't in 1920 and Chesterton was speaking specifically about a traditional Catholic belief in God anyhow. Understood in this original sense, the aphorism is so tritely true as to not even be worth talking about.
Businesses conspire all the time. That’s why there is so much lobbying.
Well a conspiracy is something where people conspire, that is in a hidden fashion. And you admit that businessmen do conspire and lobby. I think you’ve created a strawman here, “the secret lobby” that is ruling capitalist societies, but what most leftists and centrists believe is that capitalists run, or dominate, capitalist society. Which is as conspiratorial as believing that feudalists ran feudalism.
I too think that Douthat's "Bad Religion" was a very interesting read, and that American church history is probably a neglected topic, particularly given the exceptional uniqueness of American Christianity.
I've also had the thought that it's the logical endpoint of Protestantism. And I say this as a devout American Protestant, who concludes that at this particular moment in time our system looks like it's somehow, amazingly, the best one. While I also recognize the very apparent flaws that might lead people of other traditions -- Christian or not -- to conclude it's actually the worst one.
The difference between hardcore atheists and the “soggy middle” atheists isn’t belief in god, by definition. The former are generally angry anti-theists and the latter being just atheist or agnostic.
I don’t think the middle is where the conspiracy theories flourish either.
Yes, you are strawmanning. Let me remind you that people retiring today were 8 years old when Jim Crow laws stopped being enforced, so no one has ever claimed that unconscious bias is the only problem for blacks. Conscious, codified-as-law bias literally shaped generations alive today, which undoubtedly has substantial effects on today's youth as well. That's on top of not-legally-enforced racism, with unconscious racism being only a fraction of that. I would also remind you that, if you're going to accuse others of believing in mind-viruses, it would behoove you to make sure that you are not spouting one in the very same breath. A very, very common mind virus is "the out group believes [obviously false thing X]". Consider whether you have this virus. (In fact, I would hypothesize that you don't actually have this virus, are smart enough to know that your out group does not believe this, and are just making bad arguments online to score points with your in group. A thing I'm guilty of at times too!)
Per your last paragraph, the distinction here is that conspiracy theorists do actually endorse the beliefs you accuse them of having. SJWs would look at you cross-eyed if you said they believe that the only bias is unconscious bias.
Thank you for admitting to the straw man. I do think that knowingly strawmanning an opponent is a bad thing to do, and comes across particularly poorly when accusing others of bad, motivated reasoning and/or being brainwashed. I agree about the general point that debunking Bigfoot et al is basically mean and pointless, though I think I’m missing what you mean in this context.
This. Where is the Japanese-American rage? Seriously that was a gross violation of the norms of western civilization, let alone the constitution.
No SJW will disagree with you on that one and I’m surprised you think otherwise. Did you know we paid the victims 20,000$ in reparations in 1988 and had even passed ineffective reparations in the 40’s? Given your other comment that SJWism is ineffective, then maybe you should join them in fighting for reparations for Jim Crow subjects? It’ll never make up for the actual abuse they suffered, but at least it’s a real action to try to help people.
Why doesn't 50 plus years of affirmative action count as reparations?
I don't know why people should get more worked up about the fact that Japanese-Americans got forced into camps during WW2 than about the fact that non-Japanese-Americans got forced into the Army during WW2.
The US government violated everyone's rights during its involvement in WW2, not just those of Japanese descent. And if the government is going to be violating my rights anyway I'd rather that they send me to some crappy camp for a few years than that they send me to a crappy camp for a few weeks then drop me on the beaches of Normandy or Guadalcanal.
Why all the outrage about Japanese internment and not about conscription?
The objectionable belief isn't "Blacks are affected by prejudice", it's "*All* the negative outcomes in the black community are the result of prejudice" -- a much stronger, and less well-evidenced, claim.
This.
I’m replying specifically to the claim the poster made, which was about unconscious bias only. A statement that is obviously and transparently not believed by anyone at all. In other words, a strawman!
You’ll note that the original poster’s writing implies something much closer to the exact opposite of what you said (that there are no prejudice effects whatsoever, since unconscious effects are clearly negligible) than to your statement. So if you want to claim that the other side is the one making extraordinary claims, then you’ll have a hard time.
I've personally experienced interacting with highly-educated young people who hold forth some pretty wacky levels of belief in systemic racism/sexism, gender and everything else currently popular. Racism Is In The Air We Breathe. I once knew a woman who insisted that her father was colluding with other powerful men to take away her rights. Her proof of this was that he got re-married to a woman from Thailand and was himself white.
They say we're killing the planet, to the point where one of them got emotionally angry at the ecological costs of...leaving garbage in an alley for a week because the landlords stopped paying for a dumpster, to force them to put the dumpster back. Just a garbage bag containing garbage briefly not being in a dumpster caused a conniption fit about plastic straws and all the People of Color being drowned.
As a white man married to an Asian woman, I can tell you from firsthand experience that there's a crazy amount of hatred in the air these days for such pairings.
How does this actually express itself in real life? Honest question, I'm not trying to make a point. Do people bring it up TO you, or do you notice it around you more?
I'm still confused as to how progressives can bring up crap like that without the heads exploding; isn't that...Criticizing a Woman Of Color's Life Choices? Doesn't that violate some woke rule or other?
Right, but the question is what actions are necessary/effective in the face of this history? Should you put your ancestors in the dock? Or make sure those alive today aren’t able to treat others differently based on race? I’d argue the SJW approach is not only ineffective, but it is doing more harm than good. Even if you accept that historical racism affects people in the present, an effective approach can only be based on actions. Trying to improve black lives by demonizing whiteness does not actually help either.
Yes
Or even non-American Western countries. Are Church-going Finns more likely believe in UFOs? Do French Catholics have an opinion on the moon landings?
Apparently, Saudi housewives blame The Jews whenever a ceiling fan breaks down. A young Ayan Hirsi-Ali, who didn't know what a "Jew" was, assumed it was some kind of household mischief spirit, like a gremlin or kikimora.
"Is belief in Islam correlated with believing in the Protocols of Zion?"
Nomak already kinda pointed it out, but yes. Absolute yes on this one.
It's also correlated with believing that masturbation drains cerebro-spinal fluid, that salt and fresh water don't mix (I'm not really clear on what this would even look like), and, amusingly, human fetuses get their souls at 4 months.
That last part was also the dominant Christian belief throughout most of the Middle Ages, at least if you assume that European Common Law was reflective of religious views.
Interesting. I wonder about grey-area stuff like acupuncture and Freudian psychoanalysis.
That depends on what exactly you mean by "Freudian psychoanalysis". For example, I agree with the following things:
* Psychological problems that can be cured by hypnosis, can also be cured by talking to a therapist. (It may require more time.)
* Human mind does many things we are not consciously aware of. Some of those we may realize when we start paying attention. For example, you may be tapping your fingers without realizing it, but it's still your brain doing it.
* It is useful to model a human mind as a collection of agents with different goals. Some agents care about fulfilling desires, such as food, sex, addictions. Some agents care about social status, or approval by other people. There is also some mechanism that seeks to achieve a balance between the competing agents.
* Civilization requires a lot of self-control, which results in a lot of frustration. There are a few stereotypical ways how humans deal with emotions they are not allowed to act upon -- pretending that the emotion does not exist; redirecting the emotion to another target; attributing the emotion to another person; reshaping the emotion into e.g. an artistic impulse; (and perhaps some more I forgot).
* Suppressed emotions related to sexual desires are way more frequent than Freud's contemporaries would be willing to publicly admit. (Not necessarily true for our culture, because we have already updated on this fact, thanks to Freud.)
* Frustrated desires can appear in dreams, often in a coded (plausibly deniable) form. For example, a child who was not allowed to eat ice cream, may dream about walking in mountains of snow.
* Humans have a complicated love/hate relationship with authority. (This would require a longer explanation, I am not sure I could do it properly.)
This is roughly what I remember from Freudian psychoanalysis. On the other hand, here are my objections against it:
* Although I like the framework in general, when Freud goes into more specific details, he gets many of them wrong. (Not a fatal objection in my mind, as those details can be fixed later. Analogically, Darwin didn't discover genes, but that doesn't make evolution "debunked".)
* Missing from the picture are considerations of hereditary traits, hormonal imbalance, or simply brain damage. Not all things were caused by one's past experience; not all can be cured by talking.
* The psychoanalytical couch talk may be more efficient than hypnosis, but still less efficient than other therapeutic approaches. Psychoanalytic therapy is famous for literally taking years, that seems like a waste of time and money.
* The chance of a therapist projecting their thoughts on the patient is extremely high. Yes, it is a thing that Freud explicitly warned about, but the proposed solutions (such as: the therapist should first spend a lot of time in therapy himself) don't seem sufficient to me.
What about the consistent finding that all therapies are roughly as effective as each other? So, if following Freudian framework doesn't make you a more effective therapist, then it sure would seem that it doesn't have a better than chance correlation to reality (to the extent that it still says stuff that hasn't become conventional wisdom).
Is that “50% effective” stat just a statistical measurement across disciplines and the populace, or is it that if there’s only a 50% chance psychoanalysis works on me there’s only a 50% chance hypnosis will work? Might differing therapies have results dependent on the practitioner and the patient or are they all intrinsically a coin toss?
It's a statistical measure, and it says that all of them are somewhat better than 50% on average, which may or may not be a placebo effect. You wouldn't know before trying which will work better for you, but you probably can expect any of them to be better than nothing.
Thanks. I’d upvote but I think they feature is disabled.
Well, if *all* therapies are roughly equally effective, isn't it curious why Freudian psychoanalysis is always singled out as an example of embarassing pseudoscience? (Why don't people say things like "haha, I wonder how many rationalists actually believe in crazy stuff like astrology or behaviorism"?)
But honestly, I don't know what to think about that finding. -- Scott, if you are reading this, please write a meta-review. The fate of thousand internet debates depends on it. -- I don't want to dismiss inconvenient evidence. I also wouldn't want to just take it on your word that the study was replicated and doesn't have obvious flaws. And I have neither time nor skills necessary to review it myself. So I can only provide a few guesses:
Guess #1: There might be some huge flaw in the study that proved that all therapies are similarly effective. The easiest way to prove that all therapies are the same would be to make a half-assed attempt at each of them. This would even be super easy to replicate! It doesn't require any bad intentions; it could happen naturally as a result of a limited budget.
Guess #2: Diagnosing a problem and fixing it are two different skills. I could recognize a broken leg, but it doesn't mean I could also heal it. Maybe it is similar in psychotherapy: better descriptions of human mind do not necessarily translate into more efficient therapies. Correct theories may be unactionable, and incorrect theories may benefit from the power of placebo effect.
>why Freudian psychoanalysis is always singled out as an example of embarassing pseudoscience
Maybe because it made the biggest splash culturally and arguably still remains the most well-known/influential?
It might also be that the mere act of talking about things that are bothering you with an authoritative and empathetic person and then having that person give you some generic advice and some ritualistic behaviors to do just makes a lot of people feel better about things, and let go of obsessions and such, and it doesn't really matter if it's a priest, a shaman, or a psychologist.
I think there is no controversy that talking to a high-status empathetic person makes you feel better.
The curious part is that either (1) all schools of psychotherapy are equally wrong about human mind, or that (2) being more right is not actually helpful for therapy.
What you said would suggest the option 1, but that just sounds too pessimistic. Like, if you say that a specific school of therapy is wrong (could also be Freudian, for the sake of this argument), that alone sounds very plausible. I mean, if they disagree with each other, then naturally some of them should be wrong.
The difficult part is that they are *all* wrong, and all *equally* wrong. Like, come on, there were so many different approaches. At least the parts like "Pavlov successfully made the dogs salivate" should be beyond any controversy. So how likely is it that they are all wrong to the *same* degree? Do we all really have literally *zero* valid insights into human mind? That sounds like a too strong statement.
The option 2 is also pessimistic, but it sounds to me more plausible. As an analogy, look at the anti-aging research. On one hand, we have tons of knowledge about human metabolism, and I would say that a large part of that knowledge is true. On the other hand, we still do not have the pill of eternal youth, and maybe we will never have it. So we have a precedent in medicine how tons of true knowledge fail to translate into efficient therapy, because things are just too complex, too interdependent, would require billions of tiny precise interventions, etc.
Maybe something like this is also true for psychology -- that when things go seriously wrong in the mind, it is not one belief or emotional reaction that needs fixed, but thousands of mutually reinforcing beliefs and emotions, that you would need to fix all, plus the therapy itself is a process that creates all kinds of reactions that also need to be noticed and fixed... but this against starts to sound like something that (steelman) Freud would say.
Noticing that something is wrong and knowing how to fix it are very different things. Physicians have known about cancer and plagues etc for millenia, and yet until quite recently average medical intervention had a negative expected value (and people like Robin Hanson say that it's still the case).
Scott has written about this here and there. See for example https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/19/scientific-freud/ and https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/20/book-review-all-therapy-books/ and probably elsewhere. I feel like there was a longer post on this or a related topic, but can’t seem to find it.
My understanding (which is largely an impression from a combination of this blog, a psychology class, and therapist friends) is that modern-day psychoanalysis/psychodynamic therapy is fairly different from what Freud himself was doing, basically taking the parts that actually worked okay and leaving aside the parts that were complete nonsense. When people lambast psychoanalysis, they’re thinking of psychoanalysis as Freud did it (this being the only version that many people learn about), and not of how it’s practiced currently.
> When people lambast psychoanalysis, they’re thinking of psychoanalysis as Freud did it (this being the only version that many people learn about)
Even this is too optimistic, I think. When I see people who are *not* professional therapists trying to do "psychoanalysis", it goes kinda like this:
The "therapist" makes the "client" talk, and keeps pushing their buttons, until the "client" starts crying. At that moment the "therapist" assumes that the problem is solved; that after a moment of crying, the "client" will suddenly feel better and say that their problem was magically solved. Except, that almost never happens; the "client" often feels even worse than before. So the "therapist" gets annoyed, and starts accusing the "client" of not cooperating and being in denial. The "client" starts crying more, then runs away from the room...
The actual therapists usually take the parts that work in their experience, and often add parts from other schools of therapy that work in their experience. Just like a good programmer is familiar with more than one programming language (even if they clearly prefer one of them), a good psychotherapist is familiar with more than one school of therapy (even if they clearly prefer one of them).
I may have misunderstood but re:
you wrote: '"That depends on what exactly you mean by "Freudian psychoanalysis". For example, I agree with the following things:
* Psychological problems that can be cured by hypnosis'
I read Freud stopped using hypnosis when a patient became embarrassingly familiar and a servant walked in with tea. I can find the quote if desired.
The version I heard was that hypnosis usually only provided a temporary relief for various symptoms, and had to be repeated regularly, indefinitely. Which made it a reliable source of income, of course!
I don't remember the source of the following story, and maybe it's made-up, like with the apple falling on Newton's head... anyway... the story says that Freud once had a patient who was unable to drink water from a glass cup, because for some mysterious reason it felt very repulsive to her. Before hypnotizing her, he asked her, out of curiosity, when did this symptom start. She said it was since her college age, then she reminisced about various things that happened at the college, and said that she had a classmate who had a dog, and how the classmate often let the dog drink water from a glass cup for humans, which she found extremely disgusting. And... after she mentioned this memory, suddenly the symptom disappeared, and she just poured herself a cup of water and drank it, no problem. So the hypnosis turned out not to be necessary that day, and the symptom didn't return even later. Since this experience, Freud started designing his "talking therapy" as an attempt to reproduce this effect.
I tried to find more info by google, but instead I mostly found insinuations that Freud invented "talking therapy" because he sucked at hypnosis, ha ha. I find this a bit unlikely (more like something the hypnotists of that era would have invented as an excuse why Freud's inventions should not make their methods obsolete), because Freud was actually a huge fan of hypnosis at the beginning of his career -- hypnosis was probably the thing that made him become a therapist. However, Freud dramatically changed his professional opinion on various things several times in his life, so I found it plausible he would also dramatically change his opinion on hypnosis.
> I read Freud stopped using hypnosis when a patient became embarrassingly familiar and a servant walked in with tea. I can find the quote if desired.
I never heard this version and find it amuzing. If it's not a big problem to find, I am curious about the source... but I suspect that this is probably also made up.
A thoughtful response. Thanks.
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"Freud dramatically changed his professional opinion on various things several times in his life"
This is, IMO, an often glossed over complication of citing an 'authority.' Respected thinkers hold nuanced opinions that often change subtly or dramatically over their lifetime.
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"If it's not a big problem to find, I am curious about the source... "
Not at all - source at end:
'Early in his clinical experience Freud became aware of the process of transference, whereby a patient might develop romantic and sexual feelings toward the doctor. When he first began treating neurotic patients, he used hypnotism to help them bring unconscious thoughts into awareness. He found, however, that this method had certain limitations. First, not all patients could be hypnotized. Second, he realized that the success or failure of his treatment depended in large measure on the feelings of the patient for the doctor. These feelings could not be explored or controlled if the patient was under hypnosis. He noted that “the most brilliant results were liable to be suddenly wiped away if my personal relation with the patient became disturbed.” Finally an unexpected event pursuaded him to give up hypnosis: “. . . one day I had an experience which showed me in the crudest light what I had long expected. One of my most acquiescent patients, with whom hypnotism had enabled me to bring about the most marvellous results, and whom I was engaged in relieving of her suffering by tracing back her attacks of pain to their origins, as she woke up on one occasion, threw her arms round my neck. The unexpected entrance of a servant relieved us from a painful discussion, but from that time onwards there was a tacit understanding between us that the hypnotic treatment should be discontinued.” Freud quickly adds: “I was modest enough not to attribute the event to my own irresistible personal attraction, and I felt that I had now grasped the nature of the mysterious element that was at work behind hypnotism.” In a paper titled “Further Recommendations on Technique,...”'
--Armand Nicholi, The Question of God, 2002
Thank you! This actually sounds completely plausible to me.
I have almost no experience with hypnosis, but once I discussed the topic with a guy who does it professionally, and he told me the following, if I remember it correctly:
* Some people are easier to hypnotize, some are very difficult. A part of this is about who they are; specifically STEM students are often difficult to hypnotize. (Now that I think about it, could there be a possible relation to autism?)
* But another part is some kind of personal compatibility between the client and the therapist. It often happens that one therapist completely fails to hypnotize a client, and another hypnotizes the same client easily; and it is not necessarily about one therapist being generally better, because with another client it may be the other way round. So this guy had a mutual arrangement with a colleague next door, that if any of them fails to hypnotize a client on the first attempt, they will tell them to try the other colleague first, before trying something more complicated.
* Different clients are more susceptible to different techniques. Most therapists do the "your body is relaxed, your eyelids are heavy" way. But this guy told me that he knows some weird therapist who specializes on drug addicts, and he just screams at them "SLEEP!!!", and some of them immediately fall down "sleeping"; then he proceeds with hypnosis as usual. (This reminds me of "slaying in the spirit"; possibly the same mechanism.) Again, techniques that work well with some people will fail with others, and vice versa.
* Finally, it is sometimes possible to "tire out" a difficult client by repeated long sessions, making them watch huge rotating spirals, etc. So you could have like a 30-minute session every week, the first three sessions zero success, the next one the spiral starts rotating and you "sleep". Possibly a consequence of getting used to the situation, and therefore relaxing better.
* The stage hypnotists have a few tricks how to find the most susceptible individuals among the audience, which is why they have such high success rates so quickly. You should not base your expectations on stage performances, this is not how it works in the typical case.
I don't know much about hypnosis. It always seemed strange that people would volunteer to be hypnotized on stage for entertainment purposes. To give up basic control...
I do remember reading in Huxley's Brave New World Revisited(50's copyright) that while some people are resistant there is an injection that will overcome it. I think he wrote that as a caution not as a therapeutic recommendation!
My personal viewpoint is that we're inclined to want an easy, external fix to correct all our perceived shortcomings but in my reading and reflection I keep being brought back to the old adage: Know Thyself.
Cheers!
In my view, when people make statements like this now, they don't so much mean astrology and Q anon as they do wokery, with its Manichean religious elements.
It's worth noting that "religion", writ broadly, has an _awful_ lot of overlap with what many people would call woo and conspiracy theories. If you believe that Satan is orchestrating a grand design to corrupt the United States into secularism, is that a conspiracy theory or just evangelicalism? Is believing that visiting particular locations popularly associated with saints will bring you miraculous healing all that distinct from believing in crystal healing?
Yeah, I think this argument is used by two sets of people: actual believers, who would prefer people believe the true religion to false religions. And Jordan Peterson types who think that religion isn't necessarily true, but is a socially beneficial falsehood, and this is partly *because* it's productive against socially maladaptive falsehoods.
Part of what I'm saying is that the arguments by the latter set look much weaker if instead of lumping all "religious" belief together, you think of conspiracy and woo as optional add-ons to either religion or secularism.
The religious person who believes all of society is under assault by Satan may not be terribly different psychologically than the secular person who thinks that society is run by a pedophile cabal - they probably get along great on the QAnon Facebook page - but if you think of the latter as "conspiracy" and the former as just "religion", then sure, it'll look like religion defends against crazy beliefs.
You could say that religion has the advantage of dogma here, but I'm not sure that that's borne out by these data since Catholicism - the most hierarchical of the major religions - doesn't come out looking too good.
AFAICT there are more "cultural Catholics" -- people who identify as Catholic despite not believing and rarely if ever attending Church -- than there are cultural Evangelicals or whatever, so I expect that would skew the data quite a bit.
That's my take as well. I know a lot of cultural Catholics who rarely or never attend mass. They identify as Catholic, but may never read the Bible, attend services, pray, or any other outward expression of belief. I know some cultural Protestants (usually something specific like Methodist or Lutheran), but it seems to be far less common.
I think that while it's possible to have characteristics that may be typical of majority-protestant areas or countries, it's not necessarily conceptualized as being tied to religious practice in the same way by the people to whom such a description applies.
Speaking solely for myself, the first time I was told that it was possible to be "culturally Catholic" it struck me as a category error for precisely this reason--unlike being Jewish, where there's an ethnic component and a religious component such that one can be "culturally Jewish" without any baseline level of observance of Judaism, the entire content of Christianity (from a Protestant perspective, at any rate) is solely the religious prong, so (from the Protestant perspective) you can have a culture, and you can be Christian, and the culture can be (often quite strongly!) influenced by Christianity, but claiming to be "Culturally Christian" without actually engaging in religious observance seems like something that doesn't actually have any content, because the "Christian" part of it is literally all the specifically-religious parts of your life and everything else just falls under the general category of "culture."
I've since come to believe that, as you say, this is probably an asymmetry in worldview between Protestantism and Catholicism. I would presume it comes in part from majority-Catholic European countries being so overwhelmingly Catholic that the distinction between religious and secular practice dissolves away in the same way it does for the (large, in my experience) category of atheistic-but-kind-of-observant Jews, where even if you don't go to mass you still get your kids baptized because That's Just What People Do in (France / Italy / Poland / wherever).
Genetics - Mendel - Catholic religious
Heliocentricism - Copernicus - Catholic religious
Big Bang - Georges Lemaître - Catholic religious
Germ Theory - Pasteur - Catholic lay Jesuit
I think there is caricature of what it means to be a believer or religious.
Should the atheists who "believe" in the transcendental idea of "love" have their non-believer materialist membership cards revoked?
That 31% percent of self-identified Catholics believe in astrology is pretty pathetic. Especially since the official church teaching is that astrology and superstition is nonsense and in fact sinful!
Well, I haven't checked what their beliefs in the last few centuries are, but Catholics used to believe that one shouldn't read the Bible, but instead trust the priest's interpretation. Reading the Bible is/was much more a Protestant thing.
Maybe Catholics are just less invested in whether Bigfoot exists or not.
Catholicism is the most hierarchical but I think in many ways the least dogmatic. As others say, what’s important to being Catholic is that you recognize the hierarchy and participate in the culture (including confessing your sins) more than not sinning or believing what it says in the Bible.
Have to disagree at least partially here. Catholicism seems like the ur-example of dogmatic Christianity - although on the ground what believers do relative to what they're nominally *supposed* to do has long differed. Catholic teachings on the use of birth control are pretty unambiguous, it's just that people ignore them anyway -- I think what you're referring to (relative to Protestant denominations that often place a bigger emphasis on a personal relationship with God and the importance of personal conscience) reflects a divide between theology and praxis rather than an an actual tabula rasa absence of dogma *per se.*
Relative to Protestantism, consider that papal infalliblity is not only a Catholic origination but wouldn't even mean anything in Protestantism inter alia because there is no pope. Granted this goes to your point regarding hierarchy, but the point is that the hierarchy is intrinsically tied to the promulgation of dogma, even if in practice it's often ignored.
AIUI regarding the Bible, a big difference is that in practice the RCC has not placed nearly as much emphasis on worshipper's studying the Bible itself because subsequent Church tradition and interpretation is accorded higher status than it is in Protestantism, and the mediation of the hierarchy between the faithful and the texts isn't considered intrinsically suspect (in this sense RCC tradition is more analogous than Protestantism to the rabbinical Jewish tradition including acceptance of midrash. AIUI the Karaites would be the rough Jewish analog of Protestantism vis a vis relation to text).
From the perspective of someone with a mainline Protestant upbringing, the RCC approach has the upside of nipping in the bud some of the absolutely bizarre stances of Evangelicalism via a vis biblical literalism and corollary beliefs like creationism, but the downside of an enormous amount of historical syncretism, ritual, and practices that come across as tantamount to idolatry (relics, the intercession of saints / literally directing prayer to entities other than God, the inscrutable emphasis on Mary far beyond what's in any of the Gospels,) that not only don't have any textual basis but seem to be against the direct spirit and letter of the Bible--most obviously Commandments One and Two, but also e.g. the teaching that Mary remained a virgin throughout her life despite no particularly compelling doctrinal reason to believe this and *literal reference to Jesus's brothers* in the Gospel of Luke. Also (albeit in this day and age I don't think anyone on either side really *cares* all that much) Transsubstantiation -- seems obviously metaphorical from the mainline Protestant perspective, taken as literal by the RCC in an inversion of the Catholic tradition successfully avoiding creationism by emphasizing a metaphorical rather than literal interpretation of Genesis.
>on the ground what believers do relative to what they're nominally supposed to do has long differed
It seems to me that the longer a particular denomination has been around, the mellower it becomes towards enforcing its dogmas, which of course is partly responsible for periodical fundamentalist schisms where the most extreme factions are most eager to separate and establish a much more rigorous practice.
"what believers do relative to what they're nominally supposed to do has long differed"
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I recently read this and found it helpful:
”Turning to God without turning from self"—the formula is absurdly simple; and yet, simple as it is, it explains all the follies and iniquities committed in the name of religion."
--Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 1945
Not that we can completely turn from self but if we don't make a frequent effort we end up doing worse than without belief. Pascal had some choice words for this!
I think if you define "Catholic" as "someone that believes all the things that the church officially requires you to believe", then Catholicism probably does OK. If you define it as "someone who ticks the 'Catholic' box on a survey", then you get lots of Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans who last went to church on their wedding day.
Surveys don't require you to pass catechism to qualify as an official Catholic in their numbers, though.
What does "concertsy" mean?
In Scott's final graph, the wit to woo relationship seems both unquantified and uncertainly correlated. More controversially, is it cyclic?
Extrapolating, will our super-intelligent AGI saviour/nemesis be more or less prone to crazy beliefs than your average protestant pastor?
One way to think about it is that both religion and conspiracy theories are ways of outsourcing the decision of what to believe in (as are all kinds of more sensible things, like reading the newspaper or listening to a famous scientist), but religious authorities tend to have much less perverse incentives than conspiracy-theorist authorities.
(Most of the time, anyway. Too bad if you were relying on the Peoples Temple to protect you against mind virii!)
How about the difference between the religious person who believes society is under assault by Satan and the rationalist who believes it's under assault by Moloch?
One difference is that it's pretty easy to check the existence of Moloch - for example, you could run the fish farming experiment discussed in the original post (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/).
I mean, if you accept that low of a bar of proof, I can experimentally establish the existence of God!
There are dozens (at least) of possible explanations for any such single experimental outcome. Establishing that something your belief predicts will come true, does, isn't very strong evidence for your belief. Which is why the sequences recommend making predictions about what would definitely NOT happen if your beliefs were true. (This was actually the insight that made me leave religion; when I made predictions about what would happen if my beliefs were true, they nearly always came true. When I made predictions about what wouldn't happen, I found contradiction.)
"if you accept that low of a bar of proof, I can experimentally establish the existence of God!"
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An impersonal higher power is IMO, easy to figure due to tremendous amount of order(Systems Theory) and oddities like the properties of water. Beyond that a certain amount of faith is required to actively believe or disbelieve.
Moloch is an analogy, I don't think anyone takes a literal reading seriously.
Now I wonder If non-friendly AGI becomes a reality, would that be an embodiment of literal rationalist Moloch....
Moloch in the sense that Scott uses the term is not an actual agent, but rather a representation of all the forces that make coordinating large groups of people difficult. This is basically the exact opposite of a conspiracy theory.
If by "Moloch" you mean the actual child-eating demon from Carthaginian mythology, then this would indeed be basically the same thing, but I'm not aware of any rationalists who believe that.
I don't agree with this:
> The religious person who believes all of society is under assault by Satan may not be terribly different psychologically than the secular person who thinks that society is run by a pedophile cabal
Believing that society is under assault by Satan and that society is run by a pedophile cartel aren't very different in their evidential support, but their social psych roles are very different. "Society is under assault by Satan" is a hoary, traditional belief. That specific form dates back a millenium or so at least as a mainstream element of the christian faith. There's a parchment from Martin Luthor with an ink blotch on it, and he says it's from when he thought he saw the devil and threw the ink well at him. It's taught in every evangelical sunday school and church as a simple fact of history and theology. It's accepted background context for most evangelicals and 80+% of their social groups. (Plus, it's fundamental archetype is "the avatar of corruption is constantly trying to corrupt society" which is old as stories, and completely tautological if you accept the existence of an avatar of corruption.)
It's traditional, accepted, and boring.
On the other hand 'cabal of pedophiles' is lurid, new and innovative. It's a secret truth of the world, kept under wraps. Very different socially, so very different psychologically.
Thank you. I was looking for a way to articulate this. These things may look the same from the outside to a Rational Observer, but they *feel* different from the inside. And that's crucial.
In addition, as someone who grew up very white evangelical, I can confirm at least anecdotally Scott's paragraph on "people with coherent worldviews already have strong opinions on what's true." As an evangelical child, I was taught specific things about some of these other beliefs. Astrology was *wrong*. It fell under the kind of "divination" that the Bible forbade, to the point where I read a spoof horoscope once and worried I might have sinned. The existence of aliens was very, very dubious, because trying to fit it with the Genesis account of creation, which we saw as geocentric thematically though not physically, just didn't work that well. So no, you're not going to find evangelicals believing in these things in large numbers. And Bigfoot doesn't seem to me to be the exception Scott thinks it is: isn't the exciting thing about Bigfoot that he's maybe-kinda-sorta sentient? If he were just a weird ape, wouldn't we leave him to Jane Goodall and her successors and go haring off after aliens instead? As with aliens, Bigfoot simply doesn't fit the revealed story: the Bible says God made a big deal of creating humans on the sixth day and giving them souls; if God had made a rough prototype first, the Bible would have *said.*
But if this were true, then wouldn’t we still expect to see religion being positively correlated with these conspiracies? Since accepting one conspiracy theory seems to make you more predisposed to accept others (people who believe Bush did 9/11 seem more likely to be Q-Anon) rather than negatively? If not, why do *these* theories protect people against other theories.
The Jordan Peterson angle on this is not really universal, though: what exactly constitutes a socially maladaptive falsehood is strongly culturally dependent. So the benefits of the falsehood may vary strongly with an observer's viewpoint.
Sure, but why does this only start applying now, and not when the left are calling everyone on the right a bunch of conspiracy theorists?
It applies equally on both sides, I'd say. There's no shortage of brainwashed commie/woke npc accusations from the right.
A lot of these folks just want to give SJWs something to do, like traditional "feed the poor because Jesus" stuff, so they stop inventing new and annoying ways that child proof caps on tylenol are ableist and transphobic.
Not all Tylenol caps are transphobic. Only the name brand ones.
The probelm with SJWs (cringe name btw, wokies is the new deragotary label) types is that they're poisonous no matter what ideology tries to contain them. In the1000s their attitude-ancestors were the ones calling for the crusades, in the 1950s their attitude-parents were the ones freaking out about the commies in western countries. Their attitude-siblings are there in middle-eastern countries, freaking out because a pop-sci show doesn't mention the islamic god when discussing cosmology. As we speak right now there is probably a chinese kareen is gruelling a poor guy about how his book is offensive (or whatever word they use in china) toward the legacy of the great mao. Wokism is everywhere & forever. It's basically guaranteed by a certain mutation of ideologies, a mutation that ideologies often develop.
When you think about the ways to stifle and de-activate wokies, you will find pretty soon they are ideology-agnostic. Strong norms against busy-bodism and self-appointed-police, strong norms for standing up to yourself and defending oneself with evidence, strong norms against struggle sessions and for intra-group etiquette. Those are just general group hygiene. Religion isn't particularly anti-woke.
I know hardly anyone calls them SJWs anymore. I just hate the term "woke" and refuse to use it lol.
To your point, yeah, I don't think the "make people religious again and all of this will go away" strategy has a (pardon the pun) prayer of working.
Actually, this is why Catholicism is superior as a religion. Monasticism removes the aggressively pious from society and diverts most of their energy into getting up for 3 AM prayers to show how morally superior they are to everybody else, with a small surplus of doing something productive for wider society. They can grouse all they want in there about how impious and immoral the normies are and everyone around them will agree with them, and they get to live in a much nicer house than the stupid peasants, all the while being completely controlled by church superiors who are never chosen from among the woke ("eh, Sister Assumpta could never become abbess, she's too... fervent in her faith. It makes her impractical").
(You're largely wrong about the Crusades: those were mostly set off by a surplus of regular old fighty lads who weren't going to inherit land because they were born second, yet had a significant capacity for violence. Better to use them to destabilize the Saracen's country than your own. Sure, Peter the Hermit was woke, but it only caught on because it was so useful.)
EDIT: I should probably clarify that I'm talking about culturally hegemonic Catholicism here – it doesn't work if you can just opt out.
Ha, good comment, even though I don't precisely agree with your take on monks, there's probably a lot of truth to it -- both humble and good people and unsufferable self-righteous snobs. I'm a Protestant but I've long been fascinated by the idea of monasticism. The Protestant reformers really disliked it, and I understand their objections (yes, Protestant monarchs had cynical motives, but I think Luther and Calvin were sincere), but I still wonder if it's better to have the monasteries around than not. Though you're also right that the benefit you describe only really works if it's hegemonic.
And you're correct about the Crusades. One thing I seldom hear called out is the far-reaching Norman explosion of the second half of the 11th century, and I really see the Normans as exemplifying the crusading spirit, but it was certainly present elsewhere.
Over the course of a few decades, adventuring warriors from that one section of France conquered and took for themselves England and Wales (as is much-discussed), but also Southern Italy, the Principality of Antioch, and extensive holdings within the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Kingdom of Aragon. They moved into Ireland and Scotland a bit later. That's quite a spread, and it represents quite a lot of aggressive energy that would be nice to direct towards one's enemies and away from one's friends.
This thing about the Normans is very true, and it's also interesting that they were only a couple generations removed from Viking ancestors – what really separates a Viking raiding army from a crusade? That one section of France was *also* conquered, not that much earlier, by the same people and in the same way as all the rest, and I don't think there's any *paradigmatic* distinction between conquering Normandy and the Holy Land.
I forget where I read this, but I've even seen a claim that there's documentary evidence of the Norman crusaders raising their old ancestral battlecry when they stormed the walls of Jerusalem – a cry whose words they no longer understood, and used because it was traditional, but which was in fact an invocation of Týr, left-handed battle god of the Danes, in Old Norse.
I dunno, people in modern Spain, Italy, Portugal and Mexico can opt out, and those countries are significantly less woke than the United States, Britain and (I think?) Germany.
I think there is an interesting evolutionary corollary to the JP take on religion, in that he doesn't take into account the potential confounding variable that the most devout religious are also the most intellectually incurious. It seems probable that they are less susceptible to conspiracies and woo because they are simply uninterested in ideas and more closed-minded than the average person.
Interesting to note that Catholicism seems broadly accepting of some of the woo - according to the graphs above that's 31% believe in astrology and 61% in UFOs - more than any other religious / non-religious affiliations listed. As a teenager in the 1980s I transitioned from Irish Catholic childhood to Fortean mystic then via a degree in biology with Dawkins et. al. to hard-core evolutionist / born-again atheist. Several peaks and valleys beyond, I'm feeling much better now, thanks...
So how much wit is too much wit to woo?
That really surprised me because, as you point out, belief in astrology is contrary to dogma. However, I suspect that a great many Catholics *don't know that*, because (a) only a small proportion of churchgoers read the Cathechism, and (b) you don't really get many homilies on astrology (perhaps we need them).
Question: Why do the Vatican maintain a number of active astronomical observatories? Why did they start studying the stars?
Because they were responsible for calendars.
> The Gregorian calendar is the calendar used in most of the world. It was introduced in October 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII
You can read an interview with the chief astronomer:
https://www.science.org/content/article/talking-science-and-god-popes-new-chief-astronomer
Yes, I know Guy, he was teaching at MIT when I was there.
Because the Church was the scientific community!
People suggest the Galilean debates was about science and religion, but it was really more about preserving the Aristotlean paradigm.
I think John the Grammarian, 5th century, a Christian, was the first to attack Aristotle. One of the important things he proposed was that what is UP there is the same substance of what is down here.
People from Catholic backgrounds are more likely to self-identify as Catholic despite not/no longer going to Church, so I expect they'd skew the data somewhat.
Evangelicalism in practice has a sort of skepticism around magic that's justified without materialist reasoning. Occult and witchcraft is the worst because you could be communicating with demons. They snark at certain Catholic rituals because "uhh... saints' relics? gross, guys, and those things aren't magic anyway, just pray to God."
Miracles, prophecy, angels, etc., all cool though, as long as it's God who's sending them.
If you believe that magic can contact demons, then you believe magic is real. That's hardly being skeptical about magic!
St. Bonaventure, a doctor of the church, wrote about "extraterrestrials" - in fact, it is another word for "angels". The possibility of life and intelligent life beyond this planet has never by excluded. You might investigate Michael Crowe from Notre Dame, a specialist in the history of modern physical science and pretty nice and thoughtful fellow, "The Extraterrestrial Life Debate 1750–1900: The Idea of a Plurality of Worlds from Kant to Lowell". https://reilly.nd.edu/people/faculty/michael-crowe/
I'll admit that part of the arguement basically boils down to "if you have religion, conspiracy theories and woo don't really provide much extra" - the Illuminati, the healing power of crystals and the guidance of the stars are all a bit redundant when Satan, prayer and the divine plan of God are already part of your worldview.
I don't think so. Religions (as the combination belief system, culture and sometimes organization) have immune systems against new beliefs, and the strength of those immune systems varies a lot. Some polytheistic systems, like Rome's, had an adopt-and-corrupt approach; you can easily and happily add a new pantheon, provided they bow to Jupiter or your head god is actually just Jupiter as worshipped by different people. Others, like Christianity, have rather strong immune systems. The successful attempts to mutate the faith largely ended in schisms (see LDS, seventh day adventists, gnostics, unitarians, etc.) Even *relatively* minor points of faith like when people should be baptized have led to multiple schisms.
Most 'woo' belief systems have very weak immune systems. You can believe in Wicca, Astrology, the Flat Earth, Ley Lines and Auras all at the same time, and noone will think anything of it. If you add on that you believe in Jesus Christ as well, and have it all worked out in your head how he fits in your worldview, they largely won't care.
In so far as Christianity is protective against woo, it's because of its strong immune system. If you are a Christian (socially+belief+organization), and you tell another Christian that you ALSO believe in Wicca and think that crystals have auric power to heal, they'll tell you that you're sinning grievously, and probably try to stage an intervention. Or at least, tell everyone in the church to keep their kids and impressionable youth away from you. There will be serious consequences, so those who might be tempted to add to the faith generally don't.
Edit: It's also worth noting that on this level ("beliefs + culture + organization?") it's completely fair to include New Atheism as a religion. And if you think about it's immune system, it's really strong. If Dawkins comes out and says he doesn't believe in any God or supernatural forces because he can't observe them, but there are hundreds of barely observed giant hominids in the world, he will be WIDELY rebuked and admonished. New Atheism is not tolerant of those who deviate in any particular. Which is probably why there are very few people who identify as atheist and also believe in woo.
The original Illuminati conspiracy theory was spread by Christians who believed the Illuminati were undermining religion.
I mean, technically that was the Bavarian Illuminati's stated goals:
"The society's goals were to oppose superstition, obscurantism, religious influence over public life and abuses of state power."
I will concede that Christians are uniquely vulnerable to complimentary conspiracy theories and woo - a satanic/atheist conspiracy (what's even the difference, am I right?) is more plausible if you already believe Satan is plotting against the Church, but you don't actually need the Illuminati for that unless you want to get more specific.
I guess the point is that if you test for religious conspiracy theories you're basically doing the same as the guys testing right-wing conspiracy theories. Of course, you're free to skip the whole discussion by classifying all religions as conspiracy theories, but then that strategy works both ways...
How are you using "conspiracy theory" here? It doesn't seem like anyone would have to conspire for Satan to be corrupting the US. And even if it did require a conspiracy, why would that let you dismiss it out of hand?
Imagine if you could use that in court. "Ladies and gentleman of the jury - yes, the prosecution has DNA evidence, fingerprints on the murder weapon that match my client, and 4K video of my client committing the murder. However, one of the charges against my client is 'conspiracy to commit murder'. That makes it a conspiracy theory, so it can't possibly be true. I rest my case."
The first step in understanding is actually ATTEMPTING to understand...
There are many ways to interpret the relationship between Evangelicals and Satan, and the one you presented is a strawman.
A better interpretation is that Satan represents the part of ourselves that wants something different from what our "concious" or "primary?" self wants. In other words it represents an acceptance of the divided self, as opposed to the standard social sciences model (paging Gary Becker...) of the unitary self.
Now you can look at this and say "stupid evangelists, there's no such thing as a red anthropoid with cloven hooves living at the center of the earth". Or you can say "stupid social scientists, obviously the lived reality of every person is of a divided self, and to pretend otherwise is hardly a great starting axiom for your cargo cult 'science'". Which is the greater degree of woo?
I say all this not because I'm an evangelist (I'm not, I'm hardcore atheist) but because I think, not to toot my own horn, there's an easy explanation for this bimodal distribution, namely consilience, as I described in a previous comment:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-society-of-the/comment/8281543
The median strongly religious person, like the median atheist, may be dumb by themselves, but they both feel that they are part of a tradition that has attempted hard to connect multiple cross-cutting pieces of data to multiple cross-cutting theories, and in both cases the result is a degree of skepticism to anything that doesn't link very well with that pre-existing background.
The alternative of a self-created culture is every bit as lunatic as you would imagine, whether on the right (QAnon) or on the left (humans are blank slates on which we can impose whatever gender, sexual and other preferences we like). In both cases there are pseudo-links between factoids, but in both cases the primary goal of the infrastructure is to define and demonize an Other, it's not to approach Truth (hell, on the left it's an article of faith that Truth does not exist...), so inconvenient facts are ignored, analogies are cherry-picked, and incompatible arguments are papered over. (A very obvious version of this happening before our eyes is as we see Team Trump and Team Hillary [with a small admixture of Team Hunter Biden] each asserting the exact same arguments that they mocked four years ago.)
With enough time, it's possible that a self-constructed culture can grow rich enough and self-critical enough to start caring somewhat about truth. I suspect this has been the case for all the large religions; to last a few thousand years and not be conquered, you need a set of policies that are, at least in practice, somewhat conformant with physical and social reality even if the words used to describe those policies are nonsensical. But neither the hysterical left nor the know-nothing right have been around for nearly long enough for that to happen. Most people get sick of the fights, the finger pointing, the crazy attacks and struggle sessions and the rest of it, the use of everyday life as a weapon.
The Mormons seem to have reached that point today. The Russian seem to have given up the serious crazy around the 60s, likewise the Chinese around the 1990s. Of course in the past things move slower. The seriously Christian Crazy flared up on and off till Nicaea, then again with Iconoclasm; the seriously Protestant Crazy lasted about 100 years.
Perhaps today's crazy can last about 50 years before enough people either get sick of it (specifically the constant, on-going use as a weapon against anyone part) or see through its hypocrisies and lies (there comes a point at which you simply cannot paper over the inconsistencies any longer)...
But right now we're really only about ten years into the true crazy; quite a few more to go...
And meanwhile, well, you can choose to embrace one of the sides – and live with the consequences. Or you can, as the kids say, Touch Grass. Anchor your belief system in something that wasn't put together by some seriously disturbed individuals over the past twenty years, and ignore everything that either does not fit that belief system, or is simply not important even where it may fit.
A conspiracy requires two or more members, so if you believe *Satan* is orchestrating a grand design, then that doesn't count. If you believe that Satan, Barack Obama, the Queen of England, and Lady Gaga are all deliberately acting in concert, then yes.
And pedantry about the definition of "conspiracy" aside, that's a real difference. The belief that Satan is orchestrating a grand design is not actionable, except maybe as an excuse to not be evil. It's a bit of generic cosmology mixed with a bit of generic morality. The belief that specific living human beings are a part of that conspiracy, whether you are then called upon to kill them or just to denounce them and vote against them, is something very different.
But the latter version is very similar to the belief that Obama, Lizzie II, and Gaga are all secretly secular lizard people, or Illuminati or whatnot. So it would be interesting to know whether that sort of conspiracy, independent of whether L. Morningstar is assumed to be a member, is more prevalent among the religious or irreligious (and again whether hardcore atheists are their own category).
Atheism has overlap with conspiracy theories as well. The many atheists who write off the early accounts of the life of Jesus and the early church as having been fabricated by later believers are literally engaged in a conspiracy theory.
One way to interpret this data is just to look at where people source their beliefs. Which of the following talks about Bigfoot most often: a pastor (religious Christians), your social circle (less-religious Christians/agnostics), or public atheist intellectuals (atheists)? I think this heuristic maps pretty well to all of the examples here. Non-believers will believe anything that their preferred source of truth prescribes. One thing that's perhaps nice about having a specific religious belief system is that it is seemingly less "hackable" than the other alternatives, e.g. social knowledge can seemingly easily be modified via a small but dedicated Twitter campaign, so if this is someone's primary source of truth, it's easy to manipulate them.
Doesn't this just pass the buck down a level? Where did those people get their beliefs?
I'm basically claiming "willing to believe anything" is a description of people whose beliefs are acquired primarily socially, because those are the people whose beliefs are easiest to modify; it seems reasonable that this is less true of both religious people and hard-core atheists, though for somewhat different reasons.
I think the distinction of socially acquired beliefs vs other beliefs is less clear-cut than you make it out to be.
While there are probably some people who pick up a bible or Dawkins and become religious or atheists, even for these a socialization where the new belief is acceptable is probably helpful. I would estimate that the vast majority of church-goers was baptized during childhood. Does not get much more "socially acquired" than that.
I can however imagine that there are people with a preference for a fixed, coherent(ish), closed world view and people who are willing to engage with all sorts of conflicting theories on a provisional, perhaps even Bayesian basis.
This is also a function of the social environment, of course. In a heterodox environment, the social costs to subscribe to a minority belief (e.g. Bigfoot) is vastly smaller than an orthodox one. (Does Bigfoot have a soul? Are they structurally oppressed?)
Furthermore, while the coherent world views preclude most smaller conspiracy theories (if the devil is corrupting the US through the Democrats, Bigfoot can be a diversion at best), smaller, domain-limited conspiracy theories actually support each other some of the time (if "they" can cover up Bigfoot, they can also cover up UFOs, fake the moon landing etc).
from random sources. I think the solution here is that religious people and skeptics alike have beliefs determined by very well defined algorithms, whether that be Bayesian probability or just doing whatever the Bible says, both of which are hackable with only a lot of work. If you have no beliefs in particular to guide you, then why not believe whatever random thing comes across your plate.
IF the beliefs have been around for a "long" time, then they pretty much have to be smoothed and shaped to match reality. The words stay the same but the interpretations change: the words are allegories of this that or the other.
This pretty much has to be a multi-generational thing because the generation that adopted the first round of craziness is more or less immune to ever admitting they were wrong. The kids grow up seeing the pathologies and hypocrisies, but maybe not enough so (especially since generations don't have smooth boundaries). It takes about two generations at least before there's enough general disillusion that no-one takes the words too literally or seriously any longer, and the whole thing morphs from cult to religion. It will be interesting to see what happens to Scientology after David Miscavige dies...
So: point is not where did the beliefs come from.
It's: have the beliefs survived in the real world long enough to have to adapt to reality.
(And of course beware of names, especially when they're being used as weapons.
Protestantism was something different from "Christianity" (ie western european catholicism) even if you claim the same name, and had to go through its generations of being molded to sanity. I suspect "Militant Islam" or whatever their preferred term for it is the same sort of thing – superficially it's Islam, but in terms of understanding the appeal and the crazy, it's something new that glommed onto (some of) the pre-existing Islamic infrastructure.)
Well, it depends on how easy it is to hack the general Twitter conversation vs how easy it is to hack the small group of authorities.
I think "hack" is the wrong word here, or at least misleading, because it implies too much intent. I think it's difficult for any one individual to intentionally set out to influence the twitter conversation and succeed, yes. But it's self-evidentially true that a single person can *accidentally* influence the whole of twitter for a day, as the concept of "twitter main characters" shows. Evocative memes (in the original sense) spread more easily and rapidly on twitter, where the only gatekeeper is what people find engaging, than in the church, where there are specific appointed gatekeepers with strong predetermined dogma who are focused on spreading memes that are thousands of years old.
You do get ideological capture though - if Jerry Falwell chooses to embrace a political party, then that will bring his whole movement over, in a way that a less centralized group won't.
I think arguably we can see precisely this sort of thing happening with the Republican party, where Donald Trump has nearly single-handedly changed a lot of official party viewpoints in a way that couldn't happen through any single individual to the much less centralized Democratic party.
I don't think Trump is a good analogy here. The Republican Party wasn't actually all that centralised until he showed up, and he was an outsider who brought in his own viewpoints rather than an existing leader.
This wasn't "the Pope was convinced of [stuff] and took the faith with him", this is more like "a messiah candidate came in and stole the congregation out from under the priests".
This data simply supports the claim that ideological atheism is a religion.
Under what definition of religion?
"Atheism is a religion in the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby."
It's not about the informational content of the belief. It's about the social behavior; many hard-core atheists talk like hard core evangelists.
As someone who has attended several Churches of Christ and also become an atheist, no, they do not. This is just a weird gotcha that honest consideration of both groups pretty much annihilates.
You don't exactly see atheists go around knocking on doors and talking about the nonexistence of God, no.
You don't exactly see Lutherans go around knocking on doors and talking about the existence of God either. Or Jews. That's not a useful standard.
Lutherans do put a lot of stuff in my mailbox unasked, though. It's true that evangelism isn't the defining feature, though.
The real difference is that said Lutherans have a particular doctrine, a particular supernatural worldview, holy scripture, particular ceremonies and sacraments, a moral system that believers are at least supposed to adhere to, particular views about the future of the world, sacred buildings, professional clergy, and so on, and so on. Atheism doesn't have anything like that.
Yes, most atheists reject the idea that they sound or behave like true believers, but the rest of us, from the outside looking in, find it a pretty accurate description.
The thing is that many atheists like to draw themselves into a category with ‘apatheists’—people who don’t care about the existence of God, don’t see any reason to believe, are as unmoved by the subject as I am unmoved by late-night commercials for the Slap Chop. But these people don’t really resemble atheists, despite being atheists technically. The biggest difference is obvious: they would not read this article—it would be boring. They would not care what is said about atheists—that’s somebody else’s problem. When somebody implies that atheists believe in materialism which is very much faith, they don’t type any response into the comment field because they don’t care and they’re not there.
I stipulate that these people are, in fact, atheists of a kind. But if you quiz them about God they are likely to shrug and say that God might be out there, who knows? These are the true nonbelievers in that they cannot muster any passion about the subject whatever.
There’s a huge behavioral gulf between these people and the usual sort of people who call themselves atheists. The usual sort of atheist is not apathetic about religion. He may define himself as ‘lack of belief in a God or gods,’ just like the apatheist. But he is deeply interested in religious matters, contrary to the apatheist: he usually finds religious matters quite stupid and worthy of contempt; sometimes this extends to finding religion a social ill, or accusing it of thwarting scientific progress or starting wars. He shows up in debates about whether God exists to complain of the lack of proof: he’s usually convinced that the proofs for God are poor. He *may* aver strong atheism, but more frequently says that he doesn’t *disbelieve* in God, he just doesn’t see any *evidence* for God and therefore fails to believe (he has fine-grained epistemology and is sensitive to accusations of counter-belief). Many do, in fact, proselytize. They don’t go door to door as Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses do, but then most Christians don’t do that either: they do start YouTube channels. For the most devoted and passionate there are things like Street Epistemology or Pastafarianism.
There are of course many differences between e.g. Christians and devoted atheists under the hood. It would be a very poor look for Christianity if there were not! But the usual sort of *avowed* atheist usually reminds others of a true believer for good reason.
People who believe in homeopathy and people who actively work to disconfirm homeopathy (who, btw, are not *most people* who do not believe in homeopathy, or who strongly disbelieve in homeopathy - the same is true of atheists) are also exactly the same by this inane logic.
The difference is that the homeopath goes to take his 9C pills when he feels poor, and the anti-homeopath does whatever medicine he actually believes works instead (probably going to the doctor, but also possibly exercise, CBT, multivitamins, keto, or some other woo besides homeopathy). This is, similarly, the vast and enormous difference between even the most obnoxious atheist and the Christian.
“People who believe in homeopathy and people who actively work to disconfirm homeopathy (who, btw, are not *most people* who do not believe in homeopathy, or who strongly disbelieve in homeopathy - the same is true of atheists) are also exactly the same by this inane logic.”
Weird, not sure who you’re replying to: I explicitly said that atheists and theists were not ‘exactly the same.’ I don’t think you understand the argument, unless you meant to post this elsewhere.
What some true believers sound like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ4114XO-Xo
You don't see much of that from Richard Dawkins
No, but on the other hand, you do have the Eliezer Yudkowskys of the world, who prophesy that with certainty the end of this age is at hand; even now, brothers and sisters, our wickedness hastens the coming of the Adversary, who shall blot out the kings of the earth and punish every man according to his misdeeds, even after death.
That there are differences between atheists and the religious is undeniable. What is in question are whether there are distinct similarities in behavior, and I’m not seeing an argument against that.
This seems to boil down to "atheism is a religion because atheists have opinions on religion". I have strong oppositional opinions on fundamentalist Islam; does that make me a Muslim?
"I stipulate that these people are, in fact, atheists of a kind. But if you quiz them about God they are likely to shrug and say that God might be out there, who knows?"
That's the very definition of an agnostic, not an atheist.
Atheism isn’t a religion and I am not arguing that it is. What I am arguing is that atheists share a tremendous amount of social behavior and intellectual features with committed believers in religion.
“That's the very definition of an agnostic, not an atheist.”
Not according to many atheists!
(Incidentally, I agree with you, to an extent. Agnosticism is compatible with atheism.) But many atheists aver that having no belief in God is not a belief, and therefore that the definition of an atheist is not *disbelief* in the existence of God/gods, which is equivalent to *belief* in the nonexistence of God/gods, but rather the *absence* of a belief in God/gods.
I don’t really care about this. Obviously unqualified atheism is the active disbelief in the existence of God. However, if we choose to go with atheism-as-many-atheists-define-it, then we must include people I would term apatheists, agnostic atheists: people with no belief in God because they don’t care about the question and don’t know the answer. If we say these people are *not* atheists, then the atheists who claim that ‘absence of belief makes one an atheist’ are themselves not atheists: they’re agnostics.
This is a semantic battle; I insist on rigor but don’t really care if the answer is that atheists must disbelieve in God or that atheists are anybody who don’t know or care. I just won’t let them have it both ways, motte-and-bailey.
Also, there's nothing about atheism that orders your experience, worldview or stance on the supernatural. There's no moral or ethical teaching in it. Atheism is a _state of mind_, the state of not actually believing in any gods.
This doesn't mean that something like this can't be created that is also atheist - Communism for instance looks a *lot* like a religion apart from excluding the supernatural. There, you have Holy Writ, Heresies and Excommunication, prophecies about the future (and inevitable) paradise, organizations that take on a lot of of the properties of churches, and so on, and so on.
But not believing in god doesn't actually lead you to *anything*. There are plenty of atheists that believe in other nonsense anyway, any number of ethical systems that might attract them, and a lot aren't even physicalists.
We can coin a term "Azeusist", person who don't believe in Zeus. Is Azeusism a religion? Of course not, that's obviously ridiculous. Do azeusists in fact have *anything* in common apart from not believeing in Zeus? No. Expand that to not believing in any other god either, and the same conclusions obtain.
Everyone in this conversation needs to reread this https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb
Taboo the question as to whether atheism is a religion, and talk about whether atheism has the particular characteristics you are interested in in this instance.
The reason athieism is not a religion, even incu luding people actively skeptical of religion: religions put great stress on beliefs that are unverifiable like the existence of a diety, effectiveness of prayer, life after death. There are a lot of arguments against religion, but probably the most salient that an acceptance of unprovable assertions is for suckers.
Religious people do say many things that are true and that can be verified, or that are intuitively reasonable. Thou shalt not kill, let he who is without sin cast the first stone. But they mostly also say stuff that a martian psychologist would say is plainl y delusional. The reasonable stuff is available in lots of ways that dont sound nuts.
If you want to go by that definition, then atheism is definitely a religion.
How does the atheist worldview answer "What created the universe?"
Monotheism has an easy answer to that - the unmoved mover.
Atheists will either say "I don't know" or mumble something about the big bang, but if you ask them what caused the big bang, they still don't know what came before it. Sometimes they'll say that the big bang created time itself, but how could the big bang have "happened" or "started" or "banged" without the concept of time already existing? Those words only have a coherent meaning in the context of an existing timeline. 13.7 billion years ago, the universe "started", but how could it have started at the exact "moment" that it did when there was no such thing as a "moment"?
The atheist worldview must accept on faith that "something created the universe, and I have absolutely no idea what or why, but it definitely wasn't God."
Possible selection bias? If there is a hardcore atheist who never talks about, you are unlikely to find out. The hardcore believers usually have to do some observable things.
If it's about the social behaviour, presumably that implies that a committed Christian who doesn't like to publicly discuss their faith isn't actually religious.
You are trying to use definitions to draw conclusions. It doesn't work that way - you just find out that words are ambiguous as they usually are.
The point here is that the two groups, although in firm disagreement, exhibit similarities in social behavior (that other groups, such as agnostics, do not).
If the definition of the word "religion" is so ambiguous that it is not worthwhile to discuss whether a particular belief is or is not religious, then your original comment ("This data simply supports the claim that ideological atheism is a religion") was not worthwhile.
It is worthwhile as long as we don't try to mix different meaning of the word. And the meaning is explained in my previous comment: this is just one more common behavior, so it is useful in many cases to bundle those groups together (call it religion or anything you'd like). Not always - but it's also not always useful to bundle Shia and Sunni together.
Is the idea that "religion" is ambiguous and hard to precisely define new to you?
And what's the significance of the similarity in social behavior? Is it supposed to discredit atheists, or the religious? Unless the similarities are precisely what atheists object to in religion, they are curious but inconsequential, and vice versa if the similarities are supposed to discredit religion.
I'd agree that some atheists can behave like evangelists in the sense of aggressively trying to persuade, but I don't think that makes atheism "a religion."
You can be an evangelist for lots of things, it's basically just (at least as I define it) a particularly aggressive and irritating form of attempted persuasion - people are evangelists for less oil drilling/more oil drilling, for "natural" birth, for particular views of history, etc etc, but it doesn't necessarily make all those things into religions.
Yeah, whether atheism is a "religion" depends entirely on exactly what you mean by "Religion" and "Atheism." It's a disguised query. Sure, New Atheism had evangelists, a social structure, a common set of beliefs, and a set of informal thought leaders. It even had congregations in some places who did meetups occasionally.
If you're discussing religions purely as social phenomena, sure, New Atheism is a religion for the purpose of the discussion. That's quite distinct from discussing what's likely to be true, or discussing the beliefs in general. New Atheism's beliefs are very different from any religions, so it doesn't make sense to group it with them when talking about beliefs.
But when people evangelise for those other things, they generally don't claim that they entail you renouncing your religion. Because talking (and sometimes more extreme measures) people out of their religions pattern-matches to religious behavior, it's not hard to see why this meme is so persistent.
Maybe its jsut my age, but my friends and I were mostly atheists who were in college 10 years before "new atheism" and while in college there was some mild "evangelizing(we had a non-religious students club where we talked about the history of religion, and ethics and whatnot). But by say 2005 we were all mostly done talking about atheism, none of our beliefs change, but once you are out of college it just doesn't really come up ever.
So many people seem to characterize atheists by the 1% of them that are really outwardly performative about it, but a huge number of us are totally invisible other than you know glancing around at each other during a funeral prayer when everyone has their heads down praying.
This is primarily because atheism was subsumed by leftism. I can think of two reasons why:
1. The vast majority of internet atheists are white men. Leftism told them that their slight annoyance at being evangelized at is irrelevant compared to the struggles of "people of color".
2. While many whites have become apatheists in recent decades, a lot of black people are still religious, so it's now considered passé to talk about religious people as being stupid and ignorant because the archetype of a "religious person" is more black-coded than it used to be. It's only acceptable to criticize "religious people" if you make it very clear that you're talking about white southern evangelicals. (A similar phenomenon could be observed recently with media coverage of vaccines: whites are "anti-vax, anti-science conspiracy theorists" while blacks have "vaccine hesistancy" or "mistrust").
That seems to lump together people who self-identify as atheists, people who self-identify as agnostics, and people who self-identify as “nothing in particular”, who behave very differently when they are broken out here.
Depends on the non-stamp collector.
"Not collecting stamps" is clearly not a hobby, but "trying to convince stamp collectors to quit collecting stamps" certainly can be.
So I suppose it really depends on the atheist in question. Most are just living their own lives, completely un-invested in the religion question, but it's hard to deny that there aren't a loud minority that behave more like evangelists for the cause.
To be fair, though that doesn't make atheism a "religion" though, you can be an evangelist for lots of causes.
*edited - wow, that was a rather important "doesn't" I left out.
So, you are saying that both atheism and religion can be hobbies but only religion can be a religion.
Sounds about right. I think the whole “atheism is a religion” thing is really confusing religion and evangelism.
You can evangelize about pretty much anything, religion and atheism included, but just doing that doesn’t make the thing a religion - it just makes the evangelist in question a bit annoying.
"Atheism is a religion in the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby."
I don't think this is a good analogy. I have yet to meet anyone that spends a lot of effort telling other people that they do not collect stamps.
Wikipedia, "Religion":
"Religion is usually defined as a social-cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements"
It's blatantly obvious that this doesn't apply to atheism. It might be possible to construct an atheistic religion that includes these things without in fact having a god (some forms of Buddhism could even be said to already do so), but this clearly isn't the mainstream.
Everything except for "sanctified places" and "prophecies" seems to apply to atheism.
Oh? Then tell me more about this moral system, worldview, ethics, and organization that all (or even just most) atheists share in? And just what the supernatural, transcendental and spiritual elements are?
Nope. A religion has one or more deities (or at a very minimum, elements of metaphysics). Being vigorous, restrictive, or prescriptive about an ideology - even *way too vigorous* as some atheists are - does not satisfy that very basic definition.
I thought about the same question when I read that the most atheist region in the whole wide world is...
...eastern Germany.
Pretty much Germany's premier location for anti-establishment ressentiments and conspiracy theory.
But I expect it to be co-evolution, one cause that makes two independent things develop in the same direction.
I think the eastern Germany case is best explained by the fact that if you've grown up with the Powers that Be lying to you all the time about everything, often quite brazenly defying you to call them out on it (and bringing the full might of the State down on your head if you did), you will naturally expect the next set to continue doing so, because - why wouldn't they?
To be fair, this is hardly an absurd thing to believe, given the number of corruption, incompetence, and other scandals that emerge on a depressingly regular basis. I mean, look at what's happening with Olaf Scholz as we speak.
Trust is an easy thing to lose and very difficult to regain.
Yes the problem with any academic or journalistic attempt to study "conspiracy theories" is that they invariably pick beliefs that satisfies their own ideology and ignore any conspiracy theories by their own side.
E.g. here the Economist picks "illegal votes" as a "conspiracy theory" but ignores Russiagate, which is by far the bigger and more influential conspiracy theory. It also ignores things like the COVID lab leak - a conspiracy theory that by now anyone familiar with the evidence accepts is an actual conspiracy - a the meta-conspiracy surrounding it that tried to suppress all discussion of the possibility of a conspiracy.
Oh yeah - illegal votes in 2020 isn't some right wing evangelical conspiracy theory. I live outside the USA and had forgotten what day the US election was. I was reminded by friends (local friends!) suddenly starting to text me, asking if I was "watching what's happening". I was like, um, no, why, what's going on? Is something on fire in the city? No no, the US election. I said no, I'm busy, I'll see what the results are tomorrow in the papers. Then they started to tell me they were seeing people post crazy evidence of vote stealing. These people were NOT right wing, or at least mostly were not at the time (COVID countermeasures changed their politics for some of them). Only one was even American (an ex-pat). But they were convinced bad things were happening and they were seeing it in real time. So the idea that nobody on the left had these beliefs is just wrong.
Incidentally, it's so sad what a rag the Economist has become. I stopped subscribing a few weeks after ZMB became editor because the quality nosedived massively and immediately. I was shocked how much difference a single chief editor could make.
I guarantee that belief that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from the rightwing candidate via mass voter fraud was far more widespread among rightwing people than among leftwing people both on election day and on every subsequent day. This is why people call these theories rightwing.
Ah. So if Biden had lost, the conspiracy would have become left-wing. That makes sense.
Some of Bernie Saunders' supporters claimed that Hillary Clinton's supporters committed voter fraud to get Hillary elected as the Democratic Nomination for President.. I don't live in North America, but I think 'distrust in polling results' is already a bipartisan problem in the USA
Um, yes. Your phrasing sounds sarcastic, but why *wouldn't* "my preferred left-wing candidate is being targeted by a shadowy cabal to have the election stolen from him/her" be a left-wing conspiracy theory?
No sarcasm meant at all. I am just not finding anything particularly left wing or right wing about the notion 'we do not believe we can trust our election results'. Seems to me that it is bipartisan belief. EDIT: ah, I see now that you weren't replying to me but to Philo Vivero, sorry.
But your reply is exactly what I would have written.
I don't get how voter fraud is a conspiracy when applied to USA elections. Whether it was Bernie vs Hillary, or Trump vs Biden isn't really important. There's no "wing" on this thing, left or right.
In America maybe? But I don't see how that applies the people I know. The idea that this is a "right wing" concern is false. People who aren't really into politics, who aren't American and don't live in America were sounding the alarm to me about it.
cf. Stacey Abrams
Re: the votes thing, it probably doesn't help that US election security is shockingly bad compared to almost any other Western country. I don't know whether the Trump vs. Biden election actually was hacked, but I do know it would be considerably easier to hack than an election in France or the UK.
Yes I think that's part of it. I'm not American and I can't believe that requiring ID to vote is a contentious issue there. It's absurd.
Something like 10-15% of the eligible voter population doesn’t have a valid ID, because most of the population doesn’t travel internationally, and some populations (particularly old and poor) don’t drive, and those are the contexts for which ID is given out.
I’m not sure why you’re saying people who care about the poor being able to vote don’t care about the poor being able to access banking. This is a major issue, but not one that is easily fixed.
If you look old enough (and being poor can make you look older), people at stores often don't bother to check IDs. Bank accounts aren't necessary. Cash cards can be used in place of credit cards where cash isn't accepted (I used one when subscribing here!). The definition of "ID" necessary for work can mean a lot of things, which may not overlap with ID necessary to vote, and that's putting aside "informal" (illegal) employment, as well as situations where the employer tacitly overlooks obvious falsehoods. I'm not aware of ID being legally required to rent an apartment (although it probably is required by the owner for any apartments where either of us would want to live).
Most of all that stuff can be done by just showing up in person and presenting a familiar face, which has the extremely important advantage of working after someone just stole all your stuff, including the ID. IMO, any identification requirement that isn't robust to frequent changes of address and frequent "someone stole all my stuff" incidents, isn't going to function for an unfortunately large number of people.
Yeah but so what? Large parts of Europe have an ID card system and everyone gets such a card whether you travel or not. It's not for any specific purpose, it's for every case where ID is needed. You're explaining what the present situation in the USA is, but that doesn't make it easier to understand, or why people claim fixing the ID situation would be racist.
They tried to fix the ID card system in the 1990s by creating a national form of identification that isn’t a passport, but it was criticized from both the right and the left as government intrusion in privacy. It’s weird that there are groups that are against national ID but for a requirement to show ID to participate in national elections, but that’s how it is.
So mail every single person in the United States a free ID card, and require them to use that card to vote?
Yes, that would be great. Especially if you can just easily get a free replacement.
Huh? That would void the point of having ID cards in the first place. Who do you mail them to exactly? Implementing schemes like that does involve a bit of up front work by each person who gets the card to prove who they are to a sufficient standard, although of course that can be just presenting a passport. But if you just mail them to anyone who asks lots of your ID cards will be faked and nothing was solved.
No idea about France, but the UK has more-or-less no election security. I've had someone go and cast my vote twice now (both by people I was living with who picked up the wrong polling card and were very apologetic about it). The polling card itself is something you could easily make if you knew someone's name and address. Postal voting has even less security, and no-one checks the electoral register to see if you're just making people up when you fill in the form.
And note that some Conservatives, especially ones in close seats with high immigrant populations (which unfortunately have correlated in the past with caught election fraud) have requested that election security be tightened for those exact reasons.
Unfortunately, the Conservatives haven't done anything about it for the usual reasons.
British election security is indeed dire, but at least the vote counts are generally finished by the morning after the election, making it harder to conveniently "discover" ballot boxes filled with just enough votes to put your preferred candidate in the lead.
...the polling card in UK elections is just a reminder to vote, it's not a document you have to take to the polling station to 'claim' your vote. That's why it's not difficult to forge, and also why you can bin it them moment it turns up if you like and still go and vote without a problem.
When you go to the polling station you are asked to give your name and address and those are manually crossed off a list of voters registered at your address. I suppose if, instead of replying, you handed over a polling card with somebody else's name printed on it, the election worker might cross their name off instead of yours; I think they are supposed to confirm who you are directly, though (they always have done when I've voted, whether I had the polling card with me or not).
When you register to vote the info you are asked to provide includes your name and date of birth as well as your NI number and your main place of residence. That is enough information for your identity to be checked against eg birth, tax, employment, and passport databases (reference: the paper registration form for those who don't want to do this online: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/931882/Register-to-vote-if-youre-living-in-England.pdf). You couldn't 'just make someone up', you would have to find an unregistered eligible voter and register them. Note that the form explicitly says that giving less information is fine but might mean you get contacted and asked for more evidence - if you can't give the electoral registry office enough to check up on your existence then that's when they come asking for ID.
Since the 'just make someone up' route is blocked any widespread voter fraud would be something of a logistical challenge. You'd have to get hold of the names and details of a large number of people who are eligible but unlikely to vote, and since one piece of information held (for example) in tax and employment records (which can be searched with the NI number) is primary address, you would really need to know where they all lived. Then you'd need to register them for postal voting, and make sure that none of them receive the letter confirming that they're registered for postal voting as that would rather give the game away.
Not saying that the system is perfect, or even particularly good, but it's not quite as doors-wide-open as your post implies. Just because there's not much security theatre doesn't mean there's no security.
Out of curiousity, what did you do when someone went and cast your vote accidentally? Did you get the vote back?
Both times, I decided that the joy I could get for sanctimoniously chiding them about how using their vote would be fraud and I was now disenfranchised was worth more to me than voting was.
Sorry to hear that.
In theory if you had gone to the polling station - assuming the election worker checked the name of the person voting as they're trained to - you would have found that it was the other person's name and not yours that had been checked off and your vote was still available for you to cast.
I was curious as to what would happen if you turned up at the polling station and found that the election worker hadn't checked and had got your name rather than your friend's crossed off - whether the 315 cases reported in England in 2021 include this kind of confusion or whether they're solely cases where somebody alleged deliberate fraud: https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/who-we-are-and-what-we-do/our-views-and-research/our-research/electoral-fraud-data/2021-electoral-fraud-data.
Thank you
Belief in conspiracy theories probably correlates inversely with wealth and education, in which Eastern Germany hasn't fully caught up. Having had freedom of thought and speech for multiple generations might also be something of a cultural advantage for Western Germany.
I think the German Democratic Republic period oversaw both a decline in religion (which was not really compatible with the state ideology) and economic power (relative to West Germany).
(I am unsure why the long term effects on religion were so much higher in East Germany than in neighboring Poland, though. Perhaps in post-communist Poland, Christianity was seen as a Polish thing (setting them apart from the Soviets) while in East Germany, it was seen as a West German thing instead?)
I would mostly blame the economic situation for any excess anti-establishment ressentiments in eastern Germany.
Can't really speak for Germany, but in Poland Christianity was absolutely a Polish thing setting us apart from the Soviets.
Only, it was Catholicism and it set us apart from the Russians.
In fact, both approaches work just as well, because Poland had well over a hundred years of prior beef with Russia over (at the time) preferred flavours of Christianity. When the Soviets rolled in after WWII with their brand new ideas about religion (atheism, this time), it was merely a case of "not this shit again".
People who come from former Soviet states are super conspiratorial IME. I think it's more likely a result of growing up in a place where conspiracies were commonplace.
Yeah, I agree...I know many people from former "Eastern Block" countries, and they are really the "Trumpy" type quite often (at least the older ones)...
Tangentially related:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233749943_Religion_spirituality_and_mental_health_Results_from_a_national_study_of_English_households
Saw this the other day but didn't really know what to make of it. Authors conclude that "spiritual understanding of life in the absence of a religious framework are vulnerable to mental disorder". I know the type, so to speak, but still seems like a wild conclusion.
Recently I have seen a lot of conspiracy theories turn into just conspiracies.
And a lot of non-believers believe some pretty strange stuff.
They are scissors statements.
A man can become a woman and at that point he was never a man. And her penis is a woman's penis.
A woman can become a man, and then can have a baby because men can have babies.
To a religious believer these statements can seem a lot stranger than a conspiracy theory.
Scissors statements.
10-20 years ago most atheists and agnostics would also have found these statements absurd.
There are plenty -- the majority? -- of atheists and agnostics who find these statements absurd today.
I combed through the whole comment section to see if anyone else recognized that somewhere along the line the original sense of the aphorism had been lost and had been nonsensically redirected to things like UFOs and conspiracy theories.
Sure, Chesterton never said the words exactly but his obvious point about the atheism of his day predicted things like "my girlfriend's penis is bigger than mine", not "atheists think UFOs are real". "Believe any old damn thing" includes (from Chesterton's point of view) every single fence-tearing-down that has happened in the last century, including a large number of things that everyone in this comment section thinks are good: socialism, legalizing abortion or gay marriage, contraception, perhaps even giving women the vote -- and no, don't quibble with me that religious people like these things now, they mostly didn't in 1920 and Chesterton was speaking specifically about a traditional Catholic belief in God anyhow. Understood in this original sense, the aphorism is so tritely true as to not even be worth talking about.
That's a very good point. Lewis made a very similar point in his (prophetic) book The Abolition of Man.