Salman Rushdie Stabbed in New York

[Deledrius]

I wouldn't even call it a small minority. It is a distressingly large movement with lots of political power behind it.

It's a distressingly large movement with a lot of political power behind it, but that power is coming from an even more distressingly small minority of people.

[Frustration]

As it ever was. That's how the instinctual forms of human dominance work. We're regressing to the mean defined by inborn drives.

Oh, we're going to see more religion intermixed with politics, just not of the sort you think of.

The old pre-Christian outlook on the world is coming back in ways and one can see that in how many an ersatz religion is pushed in politics. I'd argue that it's been happening for quite some time as one of the earliest and largest of the ersatz religions has been nationalism.

Previously the doctrines of organized religion gave an outlet for people's desires to mark tribal identity with arbitrary beliefs that can't be anticipated or plausibly duplicated by outsiders. As formal religion has declined, those desires are manifesting in countless demands for conformity to a large number of varying social and political customs, all distinguishing in-groups and out-groups.

I'm starting to wonder if the old argument that religion is useful because it creates a relatively harmless outlet for tribalism might actually be correct.

[Beastro]

As it ever was. That's how the instinctual forms of human dominance work. We're regressing to the mean defined by inborn drives.

Oh, we're going to see more religion intermixed with politics, just not of the sort you think of.

The old pre-Christian outlook on the world is coming back in ways and one can see that in how many an ersatz religion is pushed in politics. I'd argue that it's been happening for quite some time as one of the earliest and largest of the ersatz religions has been nationalism.

Previously the doctrines of organized religion gave an outlet for people's desires to mark tribal identity with arbitrary beliefs that can't be anticipated or plausibly duplicated by outsiders. As formal religion has declined, those desires are manifesting in countless demands for conformity to a large number of varying social and political customs, all distinguishing in-groups and out-groups.

I'm starting to wonder if the old argument that religion is useful because it creates a relatively harmless outlet for tribalism might actually be correct.

That is a secular outlook spawned by the divisions in seeing religion that have come from Christianity. People today do not understand how deeply "Render unto Caesar" has impacted the world because nothing like it had existed before. One could argue it greatly helped abstract thinking even (for good and bad) because the idea of "just" having ideas to Greek philosophers was alien. Orthopraxis reined and every philosopher practiced what his philosophy.

Religion isn't a "harmless outlet": it's what you sacrifice to (and you can't help but. Even if you refuse to and try to be monastic, you're renouncing it and redirecting that aspect elsewhere).

What do you find yourself sacrificing for more than anything else?

I always point to the example of a Wall Street type. He spends all his time working, ignores his family, barely relaxes. His fixation is making money to make more money, Whether he is a devout Christian or someone who thinks he is completely irreligious, he is worshiping Mammon and sacrificing much at that Temple in New York to get what he desires from his god.

One of the major elements of Abrahamic religions (most of all Christianity) is that you find balance by focusing upon God above all else. You do not deny the rest or the world, but through that focus on God the principalities and powers of the world do not dominate your life. That is the essence of "You shalt have no other gods before me).

A problem has been that principalities and powers have been abstracted to the point where we do not recognize how deeply they influence us (Which is a mistake we Christians must acknowledge that we started going back all the way to the Apostles), something which seeing them as spirits and gods does as being transcendent, unmanifested beings in our world. By being blind and thinking they aren't there, we are left open at varying levels to their influence depending on how much linger religiosity remains in you, and I'd argue that the most genuinely atheist and irreligious are in fact still very much religious; their culturally inculcated religiously motivated irreligiousity is a barrier which protects them and allows them the freedom to act secular, as much as human beings can. I increasingly have come to see such types as militant atheists and such as being highly radical Protestants in sentiment.

The changes happening now are opening people up again and they are falling to the gods once more, old and new. I saw that years ago with how people in MeToo turned on that one Argentinian guy who was a part of it and who committed suicide (the girl who accused him later admitted she'd lied). That beast enraptured people as any mob does, then pointed its finger and said "I want that one" and everyone leaped on him no differently than people thousands of years ago looking to put an burnt offering, animal or human, before an alter.

Hell, we even have fools in Silicon Valley who openly speak of AI either saving us with their great powers or rightfully replacing us by being "better" and able to "progress" after we cannot. They worship such would-be conceptual being alongside the great worship of progress.

[Beastro]

But don't get me wrong, there is small but vocal minority in the US at least that would love if they could bring religion into the government. Religion as in their version of Christianity.

Religion is the dark glass we see through. We always colour things. The work it to try to maintain the universality of Christianity despite the differences and seek to keep them to a minimum (which is a major criticism I have of my fellow Protestants as fracturing is what we're REALLY good at).

The issue you're speaking of is if the religion is actually dedicated to God or to the prejudices and desires of such people. My reply to that is what is true lasts, and I see too much of North American Christianity tied up in Modern Materialism (that is really what Fundamentalists are despite a genuinely decent sense that they are trying to save something that is being discarded because of ignorance; they are only ignorant in different ways) for it to last.

[McAvoy]

As it ever was. That's how the instinctual forms of human dominance work. We're regressing to the mean defined by inborn drives.

Oh, we're going to see more religion intermixed with politics, just not of the sort you think of.

The old pre-Christian outlook on the world is coming back in ways and one can see that in how many an ersatz religion is pushed in politics. I'd argue that it's been happening for quite some time as one of the earliest and largest of the ersatz religions has been nationalism.

Previously the doctrines of organized religion gave an outlet for people's desires to mark tribal identity with arbitrary beliefs that can't be anticipated or plausibly duplicated by outsiders. As formal religion has declined, those desires are manifesting in countless demands for conformity to a large number of varying social and political customs, all distinguishing in-groups and out-groups.

I'm starting to wonder if the old argument that religion is useful because it creates a relatively harmless outlet for tribalism might actually be correct.

That is a secular outlook spawned by the divisions in seeing religion that have come from Christianity. People today do not understand how deeply "Render unto Caesar" has impacted the world because nothing like it had existed before. One could argue it greatly helped abstract thinking even (for good and bad) because the idea of "just" having ideas to Greek philosophers was alien. Orthopraxis reined and every philosopher practiced what his philosophy.

Religion isn't a "harmless outlet": it's what you sacrifice to (and you can't help but. Even if you refuse to and try to be monastic, you're renouncing it and redirecting that aspect elsewhere).

What do you find yourself sacrificing for more than anything else?

I always point to the example of a Wall Street type. He spends all his time working, ignores his family, barely relaxes. His fixation is making money to make more money, Whether he is a devout Christian or someone who thinks he is completely irreligious, he is worshiping Mammon and sacrificing much at that Temple in New York to get what he desires from his god.

One of the major elements of Abrahamic religions (most of all Christianity) is that you find balance by focusing upon God above all else. You do not deny the rest or the world, but through that focus on God the principalities and powers of the world do not dominate your life. That is the essence of "You shalt have no other gods before me).

A problem has been that principalities and powers have been abstracted to the point where we do not recognize how deeply they influence us (Which is a mistake we Christians must acknowledge that we started going back all the way to the Apostles), something which seeing them as spirits and gods does as being transcendent, unmanifested beings in our world. By being blind and thinking they aren't there, we are left open at varying levels to their influence depending on how much linger religiosity remains in you, and I'd argue that the most genuinely atheist and irreligious are in fact still very much religious; their culturally inculcated religiously motivated irreligiousity is a barrier which protects them and allows them the freedom to act secular, as much as human beings can. I increasingly have come to see such types as militant atheists and such as being highly radical Protestants in sentiment.

The changes happening now are opening people up again and they are falling to the gods once more, old and new. I saw that years ago with how people in MeToo turned on that one Argentinian guy who was a part of it and who committed suicide (the girl who accused him later admitted she'd lied). That beast enraptured people as any mob does, then pointed its finger and said "I want that one" and everyone leaped on him no differently than people thousands of years ago looking to put an burnt offering, animal or human, before an alter.

Hell, we even have fools in Silicon Valley who openly speak of AI either saving us with their great powers or rightfully replacing us by being "better" and able to "progress" after we cannot. They worship such would-be conceptual being alongside the great worship of progress.

Good good.

Now what I want to do is step back and view the world in non religious terms.

Think about what I mean by that.

[Madner Kami]

Can Baestro even do that? I feel he means well, but he tends to argue from a perspective of simply not being able to understand and extrapolate the thoughts and positions of a non-believing entity. That filter of "You can not believe in anything" never seems to go down.

[McAvoy]

Can Baestro even do that? I feel he means well, but he tends to argue from a perspective of simply not being able to understand and extrapolate the thoughts and positions of a non-believing entity. That filter of "You can not believe in anything" never seems to go down.

Maybe.

[Beastro]

Yes, I know what you mean, McAvoy. I can see it and I see its flaws.

The issue is from what I know of how we view and live in the world, that is trying to given an allowance for something that otherwise wouldn't work. It is like a philosopher saying "If you just ignore this one part of the world my philosophy is completely correct and sums up everything perfectly.".

Yes it, might, but it's ignoring the wider picture.

In this case it is like someone who stares at the ground all the time who then sees someone looking up who reminds them of the sky above. They correct them saying to look at the material things, the ground and ignore what isn't it which misses that there is more to see than what is downward in our lives.

Can Baestro even do that? I feel he means well, but he tends to argue from a perspective of simply not being able to understand and extrapolate the thoughts and positions of a non-believing entity. That filter of "You can not believe in anything" never seems to go down.

Yes, you can't, that will be your schema from which you'll see things.

The fundamental basis from how we perceive the world is through meaning and belief. You cannot view it any other way given how we are built to see the world through a hierarchy of values. You can dispute if conventional religions are incorrect, but I'd like to see how you can explain how one can live without a belief structure. It can be argued that one cannot even use language without it given the inherent nature of symbolism and how religious language is. Even McAvoy's reply to me expresses that religious language of "stepping back and viewing the" implying within that symbolism that my view is too overly focused (and the non-religious one isn't?).

The Modern view is that if you clear away everything, you'll see things for "how they really are".

We can't, we aren't made to. We evolved to get the job done of living as best we can and stumbled (or rather, Fell) into being able to conceive of the world far greater than any other living beings that we know of. We can build models from science trying to see things neutrally, but they will never be completely accurate, they will just workable and they do not apply towards living in the wider scheme of things. The very fact that we are conversing as if the other is a "person" and not a mass of cells built up as a great biological machine is part of that. There is something "higher" in each of us that we recognize which rises over the mundane elements of who we are, even if you'd discount the transcendent or divine above us.

One or both of you may say that there isn't anything higher there, but what you say means little compared to how you act in the world and what you embody. This is where types like Sam Harris and Steven Pinker run into problems thinking that if you get people to see the world "for how it really is" then they'll act perfectly rational. They then turn around and scratch their heads asking why people acting contrary to that by voting the they do and other odd foibles of humanity regardless of their religiosity.

But what exactly is a "non-believing entity" in your words?

[Riedquat]

The fundamental basis from how we perceive the world is through meaning and belief. You cannot view it any other way given how we are built to see the world through a hierarchy of values. You can dispute if conventional religions are incorrect, but I'd like to see how you can explain how one can live without a belief structure. It can be argued that one cannot even use language without it given the inherent nature of symbolism and how religious language is. Even McAvoy's reply to me expresses that religious language of "stepping back and viewing the" implying within that symbolism that my view is too overly focused (and the non-religious one isn't?).

By recognising that belief and values are essentially personal opinions. The idea of a "belief structure" though, that sounds dubious in extreme. And I very much refute your point about language.

You're in trouble when you start letting them shape your perceptions of facts.

But what exactly is a "non-believing entity" in your words?

Whilst I might sometimes use the phrase "I believe that..." about something it's a synonym for "in my opinion." Or perhaps "based on memory, evidence and experience I think it's likely that..." as in "I believe the bus arrives at 10:30."

[McAvoy]

He didn't really do what I said. Everything he wrote is exactly written like before. So I guess he can't.