Politics/Slapfights - Ancient history to modern day!

[Vol]

The loss of religion in the west is bad because it's the bedrock for western morality and from there, rights, and from there, culture. Think of it similar to herd immunity, where a community can suffer only so many individuals who aren't immune to a disease before an outbreak or mutation is likely to occur. You can already see the gouges in "secular morality" that cannot be patched, because it's a fundamentally arbitrary belief system. Which is fine, if it's a small group of academics, atheists, or people who don't care about any of it. They are carried by the rest, and behave accordingly.

File off the edges of Christianity, you still have a good system, but it's not going to endure the test of time without traditionalism to hold it together. And as the joyful hedonism spreads, so long as resources are plentiful, you're losing the bedrock that holds the structure together. Hence the stark hypocrisies that secular faith has found itself preaching. To say nothing of the community building and social cohesion of a more or less shared faith.As that erodes, and people choose a la carte beliefs or none at all, the ability for a functional society to absorb them lessens until the tipping point is reached, and everyone dies.

I'm being a touch facetious, but humans are innately spiritual, and without the traditions of the past, we have the news one, and they're imitations without the logical roots. "All people are the the same so racism is bad. But not literally, everyone's unique and special. But if you have power you're not protected from racism. And by have power, we mean people who looked like you in certain places and times. Then racism is good. Unless you're an ally. But only if the people who have no power can grant you the title of ally. This is not power, because we've redefined words so it's not. Also there are modifying factors if your brain doesn't work right, or you're a woman. Unless you smother the voice of powerless people, who can never be criticized, and will be pushed into positions of power and celebrated. Also essentialism is completely true, unless it's something bad about powerless groups. Also-"

It's silly. Not even getting into what's true or likely or not, but the rise of secular western states has, if not causative scope, strongly contributed to the erosion. How do you earnestly pitch equality, or any noble goal, if your foundational belief is drawn from social osmosis?

Not sure what the answer to that is though. Genie cannot be put back into the bottle, the traditional power structures are gone. There's nothing left to pressure or sculpt people into the way things were, much less the will. Only individuals taking their own journeys. And I'm surely not qualified to tell people which group has the right belief, if any. But, as history recent and relatively recent has shown, this new way isn't working at all. In a decade we've seen morality radically shift several times, for no apparent reason, because enough loud voices said so. Rather like primitives creating society from first principles, only on an exponentially larger scale, with exponentially less useful people heralding the change.

@Sine: Negative growth was the result of many factors, and it's a bad thing in the sense that your people are either unable to sustain families, or, they don't want to, and both are terrible for a nation's long term prospects. Again, herd immunity, you can absorb so many spinsters and eunuchs before you have a major problem for the future labor market, to say nothing of how other systems rely on numbers. But negative growth in and of itself isn't a bad thing, healthy even, if you've expanded beyond your carrying capacity. What makes it bad in our case are leaders who try to cover the gap by convenient measures, while also continuing the trends that depress the native birth rate. Trying to replace every worker who was never born, or aborted, by bringing in the third world is patching a hole in the dike with a finger.

@Raga: Given current trends, and historical precedent, do you think it likely that in a time of advanced automation, and minimal need for human labor, that the people in charge would be likely to allow us all to live free with plenty?

I suspect the idea that the peasants need busy hands will outlive our resource-based need to.

[Sinekein]

The loss of religion in the west is bad because it's the bedrock for western morality and from there, rights, and from there, culture.

I cannot overstate how strongly I disagree with that statement.

Architecture and some art aside, everything that is great about western cultures came from people detaching themselves from christianity, if not outright opposing it. Republics and democracies stemmed from rebellion against the unfair privileges of the clergy. Technological and scientific progress often had to fight tooth and nail against "what the good book says". Social progresses such as allowing women to do something else than giving birth, not burning down weirdos and having homosexuals live normal lives - all of it came by fighting the church.

Historically, religion has never been the reason a civilisation or a culture have achieved greatness. When religion was at its most influent in Europe - 800 to 1300, roughly - also coincided with an era of stagnation while other civilisations in Asia or Africa thrived (and not thanks to religion either).

The only reason religion seems necessary is because it had so much influence for centuries people never even tried to look for alternatives.

The loss of religion in the west is the reason it's great to live there. And the faster what remains is shed, until its political influence is reduced to zero, the better. People should absolutely have the right to believe in whatever they want, but that should in no way have even the remotest influence on society as a whole.

[Mazder]

The loss of religion in the west is bad because it's the bedrock for western morality and from there, rights, and from there, culture.

What absolute bollocks.
I have never once been religious in my life and I know I am more moral that a great deal of American "Christians" who barely know their bible and religion condone Slavery, Rape, Subjugation of women, Race War and blind dogma.

The notion that religion is the bedrock for my moraltiy, rather than common sense and stuff that is evolutionary instinct is just ridiculous.
I am my own moral compass. My rights are determined through compassion, logic and justice.
My culture is so much more than religion, hell a big part of my culture is the rebellion from one religious sect to another, and flipping between the two until they both fell out of favour and now the nation is more secular then not.

What about the Eastern world where their religion is not even a religion?!?!
Is Japan a land of scum and villainy because they have no religion like in the West? No. It has differences but it's still as strong as the USA culturally, some would argue stronger.

And if the gods in the religions were so good they'd have been able to prove themselves existing and there would not be so many different contradictory religious beliefs in the same religion.
Hell there are Christians in the USA that think the Catholic Church are "not true Christians".
Yeah, the original Christian Church isn't Christian, for fuck sake!

How about all those dumbfucks down South that are pro-Teenage pregnancy because they don't want to teach about contraceptives and also don't want to teach about sex and also are against abortions when teens finally fall to their urges?
"Y'all can't have an abortion because every bundle of cells in a womb is sacred!!!!!"

Or how about the amount of anti-LGBT practices.
Pray the Gay away? Fucking hell.

[Ragabul]

Lol, I intentionally didn't step in that hole because it's really hard for people to discuss it and remain even remotely open-minded about it. But since Vol already stepped in it...

The point isn't that individual morality comes from religion. Basic morality has very heavy roots in evolution. As evidence just go read Frans de Waal or someone similar for all the evidence of basic "moral" reciprocity in primates and other higher social animals. Human beings are wired from birth to soak up a social context. We are hungry for it. It teaches us who we are and what we should and shouldn't do. Human civilization is based on it.

The issue is that the justifications for *all* of these contexts are arbitrary in a cosmic sense (yes including human rights, antiracism, socialism, democracy, or whatever other thing liberals have tried to use instead of "traditions"). They are either treated as an axiomatic first principle that everybody in society must accept to be part of that society or they are just some stuff someone made up. These positions are mutually exclusive.

Humans are also deeply spiritual. Some of the oldest human artifacts we have are spiritual in nature (like cave paintings and the temple of Gobekli Tepe which is something like 10000 years old).

It makes perfect sense that one of the chief things that provides the social context a given group needs for society will come from spiritual or religious traditions. Given how interwoven all this was with daily life for most people until the day before yesterday, it's completely fair to say it's *the* chief thing. Given that Gobleki Tepe predates agriculture and it was built by hunter-gatherers, it's actually thrown a wrench in the idea that it was chiefly agriculture that got us to settle down. This provides nontrivial evidence that it was actually religion. (Realistically it was probably some mix of both and other things). Removing it just means replacing it with something else that calls itself secular but isn't or everybody fracturing into their little tribes of choice that have the axiomatic principles they most want.

This doesn't mean society has to be based on Christianity, but it has to be based on *something* and banal, watery "be nice" statements simply won't suffice. And obviously relentless individual pursuit of one's own idiosyncratic truth and pleasure makes it impossible for that *something* whatever it might be to take root. Whether it's Christian fellowship or Muslim Ummah or that Solidarity thing the left so often tries vainly to get society to take up, they are all dead in the water without a moral tradition that enshrines them and with which you mostly may not argue without getting society stink eye.

And again, I'm feeling lazy but the modern West evolved out of Christian philosophy. There is no modern West (and most of the things that make it good to live in) without this. Since my laziness is still epic, I will once again just plug a book:



This post is sloppier than this topic deserves but I really am feeling lazy at the moment.

*Edit*

One thing that makes Christianity specifically better than antiracism, which is the main spiritual fad of the elite at the moment, is that Christianity has the concept of forgiveness baked into it. (Obviously individual Christians and certain Christians institutions have done a shite job of living by that commandment). Antiracism doesn't even pretend to have this. It has original sin but no way out. Christianity says we are all sinners and to love your crooked neighbor with your crooked heart.

[Sinekein]

One thing that makes Christianity specifically better than antiracism, which is the main spiritual fad of the elite at the moment, is that Christianity has the concept of forgiveness baked into it. (Obviously individual Christians and certain Christians institutions have done a shite job of living by that commandment). Antiracism doesn't even pretend to have this. It has original sin but no way out. Christianity says we are all sinners and to love your crooked neighbor with your crooked heart.

I am going to be a little bit ironic here:

One thing that makes antiracism specifically better than Christianity, which is the main spiritual fad of the conservatives at the moment, is that antiracism has the concept of tolerance baked into it. (Obviously individual antiracists and certain antiracist movements have done a shite job of living by that commandment). Christianity doesn't even pretend to have this. It has arbitrary rules but no way out.

You can be spiritual without being religious, as Maz pointed out, that's the whole point of Shinto. That also was how pre-christian Western beliefs worked, whether you look at Greeks, Romans, Gauls, Celts or Saxons. They had "Gods" in the sense that they gave a name to all the forces they did not yet understand.

They also were VASTLY more tolerant than monotheisms (that's not true for all polytheisms, see Hinduism). The main reason Christians were persecuted and martyred was not because of some B-movie villainy from Jupiter priests, it's because Christians preached that only their beliefs were valid and real. And Roman cults did not like that very much since their whole belief system was an early form of multiculturalism - you can find Etruscan, Gallic, Greek and even Egyptian roots in their deities because many were adopted after they conquered (or made contact with) foreign lands.

Pretty much every single serious historian has noted that with Christianity came a dark age for human knowledge. Greeks knew Earth was round 2000 years before Galileo, and they knew that Aristotle was funny but not entirely right about everything. Christianity trying to give an absolute answer to everything killed progress for centuries - thankfully Islam was way less backwards back then, so pretty much all smart people between 500 and 1400 came from the East.

[Ragabul]

@Raga: Given current trends, and historical precedent, do you think it likely that in a time of advanced automation, and minimal need for human labor, that the people in charge would be likely to allow us all to live free with plenty?

I suspect the idea that the peasants need busy hands will outlive our resource-based need to.

I don't know. My hunch is that they will not. Historically elites do not tend to commit to systemic changes that weaken their position unless they are under threat. In those instances, they will amend their positions just enough to keep them. I usually try to avoid tech Nostradamus stuff because they are particularly dime a dozen nowadays and every ass who thinks he is smart likes to trumpet assurances about what's going to happen next. That being said, my personal wild speculation of choice is that the dystopia we are headed towards (if we are indeed headed towards one) is most likely to look like A Brave New World.

[Ragabul]

I am going to be a little bit ironic here:

One thing that makes antiracism specifically better than Christianity, which is the main spiritual fad of the conservatives at the moment, is that antiracism has the concept of tolerance baked into it. (Obviously individual antiracists and certain antiracist movements have done a shite job of living by that commandment). Christianity doesn't even pretend to have this. It has arbitrary rules but no way out.

You can be spiritual without being religious, as Maz pointed out, that's the whole point of Shinto. That also was how pre-christian Western beliefs worked, whether you look at Greeks, Romans, Gauls, Celts or Saxons. They had "Gods" in the sense that they gave a name to all the forces they did not yet understand.

They also were VASTLY more tolerant than monotheisms (that's not true for all polytheisms, see Hinduism). The main reason Christians were persecuted and martyred was not because of some B-movie villainy from Jupiter priests, it's because Christians preached that only their beliefs were valid and real. And Roman cults did not like that very much since their whole belief system was an early form of multiculturalism - you can find Etruscan, Gallic, Greek and even Egyptian roots in their deities because many were adopted after they conquered (or made contact with) foreign lands.

Pretty much every single serious historian has noted that with Christianity came a dark age for human knowledge. Greeks knew Earth was round 2000 years before Galileo, and they knew that Aristotle was funny but not entirely right about everything. Christianity trying to give an absolute answer to everything killed progress for centuries - thankfully Islam was way less backwards back then, so pretty much all smart people between 500 and 1400 came from the East.

Religion/spirituality is a distinction without a difference in the way that I am talking about it here. I am talking about spiritual traditions and rituals and moral explanations and commandments handed down across time and space that are treated as having truth and authority. I am talking about extramaterial justifications given as a logic for what holds society together with the counterpoint of whatever specific beliefs an individual might have that does not rise to that level of complexity or authority. Call that whatever you want. All of the traditions you care to name be they pantheistic, monotheistic, animistic, or whatever are "organized" in that sense.

And there is no massive historical consensus that Christianity was singularly wretched. For one, historians long ago backed off of the idea of the "Dark Ages." There is a reason it gets called the Middle Ages now. Also, the phenomenon of the "dark age" is not unique and has happened in many times in many places and usually has to do with the collapse of a formally powerful state, ecological disruption, or something else. There have been multiple ones in China following the collapse of various dynasties. There is also one in ancient Greece. I am aware of 0 instances where it can be chiefly attributed to a religion.

Also, Christianity is a huge religion and existed all over Asia and North Africa as well with many of those places having communities of Jews, pagans, Christians, Manicheans, and many other things living together in relative peace long before Islam ever arose in the region. The transition of Rome into a Christian state took most of the 4th century with several emperors including Constantine issuing toothless proclamations against sacrifices they knew wouldn't be enforced and slowly allowing the destruction or conversion of old temples. Some of these Christian emperors even went on performing various pagan religious roles expected of Roman emperors and they all had prominent pagans serving in their administration. They were in fact "tolerant" at roughly the same level of tolerance for Jews and Christians in medieval Islam. The issue arose in that Christianity was organically popular and enough people converted (and especially enough social elites converted) that a vested struggle erupted as to who would get to control the fate of the empire. There was even a backlash pagan emperor with some "Make Rome Great Again" stuff in the form of Julian. (He also ironically was emperor for only 4 years). As the balance of power tipped more towards Christianity the conflict became more heated and you did see outbreaks of temple smashing and other violence like the destruction of the Serapeum in Alexandria.

This says nothing about the intrinsic evilness or lack thereof in Christianity and everything to do with what humans will do when they get their tribal allegiances stoked. There are periods of tolerance and intolerance in every major religion that I know of. The Buddhists of Myanmar are currently deeply intolerant to the Rohingya and are forcibly expelling them. There were mass mutual killings between Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims during the breakup of India and Pakistan. The Jews' Holy Book is full of the stories of their crusade against the religions of the Canaanites. The Japanese engaged in a mass killing and/or forced reconversion of people when they expelled the Portuguese who had successfully convinced tens of thousands of Japanese to convert.

There's nothing in Christianity (at least the New Testament which is usually considered the binding book for Christians with many/most of the old Jewish laws no longer applying) that says "Go on Crusade or start the Inquisition!" There's also nothing like this in Shinto or Buddhism or most of these other religions so far as I know. (Islam is the trickiest one here I'm aware of and even it has the Jizya tax).

Tolerance tends to be a natural state of affairs that humans fall into when they do not feel threatened. When they feel threatened, they become intolerant. And as I said before, since religious and spiritual traditions are a form of societal glue, if people feel threatened it makes absolute sense that they would band together on those lines against the big bad other.

Also, I would argue pretty heartily that antiracism does not actually teach tolerance in the sense of "tolerate people you don't like and whom you don't agree with" as was happening with ancient pagans and Christians. It teaches the psuedo tolerance of "learn to live by the antiracism creed that prioritizes and centers the voices of marginalized people or suffer the consequences."

Also, the idea that nothing was discovered or invented and there was no particular learning after the dominance of Christianity is overstated. You do not build Hagia Sophia by throwing some bricks in a pile and hoping. It takes engineering and math and all of that. It is true that the Muslim World was better at the natural sciences during that time, but the natural sciences are hardly the only or even the best way of ascertaining how 'worthwhile' a society is in a creative sense. As an example, both the USA and China are currently science powerhouses but that doesn't actually tell you as much about the intrinsic worth of either of those societies as you might think.

We can also argue about what entrenched and corrupted religion in authority can do (the state of the Church in the High Middle Ages) but that's a whole other discussion. Even so, there's nothing intrinsic about Christianity or religion there and everything to do with a universal decadence and degradation that institutions that last a long time and confer political power to their members tend to slip into.

*Edit* typos

[Sinekein]

And there is no massive historical consensus that Christianity was singularly wretched. For one, historians long ago backed off of the idea of the "Dark Ages." There is a reason it gets called the Middle Ages now. Also, the phenomenon of the "dark age" is not unique and has happened in many times in many places and usually has to do with the collapse of a formally powerful state, ecological disruption, or something else. There have been multiple ones in China following the collapse of various dynasties. There is also one in ancient Greece. I am aware of 0 instances where it can be chiefly attributed to a religion.

I mentioned a dark age insofar as the "Western civilizations" are concerned. There always have been culturally, scientifically or militarily dominant civilisations throughout history, and before the Renaissance, countries like France, England, "Italy" or "Germany" which had not real existence at that time were absolutely not leading the world in culture or scientific advancement. Which does not mean that everyone's life sucked, but the reasons we advanced from cavemen to our current state, for better or worse, has next to nothing to do with those 800, post-Roman Western years.

There were other factors, but the one thing that unified those countries was Christianism. Spain was spared because a large part of it was led by the Moors, which while not perfect was by pretty much every possible standard the most tolerant place in Europe, if not the World - and it was not a Christian in charge. You had to wait for the Reconquista and Isabella for the Jews to be kicked out, before that they had lived in relative peace for centuries.

I mean, in France we had one king who is a saint, Louis IX - Saint Louis - and he did persecute the Jews. And he's considered one of the great kings of the Middle Ages and one of the few Western monarchs that was known outside of the neighboring countries. Standards were really shit.

Now, those are not "dark ages" in the sense of global collapses like China experienced regularly throughout its long history, I meant an age of stagnation and lack of progress, which not coincidentally was dominated by christianity. Maybe it is catholicism more than christianity, because some orthodox countries seem to have fared a little bit better, and the Byzantines had some very nice eras - but it is arguable how much Orthodox Christians have to do with the use of "Western" civilizations, as those mostly link to Western Europe: the modern UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal.

We can also argue about what entrenched and corrupted religion in authority can do (the state of the Church in the High Middle Ages) but that's a whole other discussion. Even so, there's nothing intrinsic about Christianity or religion there and everything to do with a universal decadence and degradation that institutions that last a long time and confer political power to their members tends to slip into.

The problem is that it's what people actually call for when they want to make religion political. If it was really about "freedom of religion", then people wouldn't try to push what their books says in regards to the law, whether we are talking about gay rights, gay marriage or abortion. They would say "fine, people can do it, I don't, but that's not my problem".

People claim they want their freedom of religion, but what they actually require is for their religion to rule over as many people as possible. Evangelicals aren't even shy about it (or Mormons, but they don't spread as quickly), and we can experience the influence they're having in Brazil for example.

I don't think there has been a single example of someone using the "defense of religion" as a platform without giving political power to that religion. Even when it was obviously not out of personal interest for religion in itself (Trump).

I fully agree that religion, or spirituality, or whatnot, can be a fantastic thing. I am pretty confident that having been raised spiritual would have saved me a lot of time spent in depression or with psychologists or questioning my life. However, the people who want to enjoy their spirituality without bothering everyone are...I wouldn't say a minority, but they act like one because they are not the ones who speak. Every single one of the bible (or any other book)-thumpers, as far as I am concerned, is bothersome at the very best, and most likely can be considered outright dangerous.

I am especially hard on catholicism because that's the one religion whose organized crimes I have been the most exposed to, and because with the secularism in France we have been a bit earlier than most checking what they did (in Ireland for example, they have only recently processed the unspeakable shit that was pulled by the Church, like what single mothers went through). I do not think Christianity is inherently better or worse than other organized religions (although, maybe it's like singers, but I tend to like dead polytheisms more - their myths are so much more entertaining).

It's just that I think evangelicals are the fucking worst, because they come at developing countries with smiles and offers for help, and end up brainwashing entire generations. It's much harder to fight that than islamists that obviously come at you with guns and knives and don't even act like they're friendly. They're the biggest hypocrites of all, the first to cry about "my freedom of religion" while happily deciding that their religion should be followed by as many as possible.

So basically, I'm fine for any religion without proselytism. There are some - I don't think Sikhs are very much proselytes nowadays - but if you plan on converting others, I think you should be written of as a nuisance at best.

[Ragabul]

A lot of that stagnation of Western Europe also has to do with the collapse of Roman trade networks. It's not a coincidence that many of the most prosperous, bustling parts of the world at the time were either literally on the Silk Road or were heavily involved in that trade somehow. Consider that the Renaissance started in Italian ports like Genoa and Venice mostly because they became prosperous from all that trade with the East.

I don't think proselytizing is inherently problematic. It has to do with how you proselyte. Obviously people who do so coercively or who use bribery (I will feed you starving people but you have to come to Bible lessons) are engaging in duplicitous behavior. I think it's generally healthy in a democratic society for people to try to convince each other via persuasion or argument or outreach or whatever. I don't see any particular reason religious ideas are intrinsically different from other secular ideological or moral ones. I get that the Mormons that come knock on the door might be annoying but I don't see how they are committing any greater offense than somebody showing up to try to convince me to vote for Joe Blow for the schoolboard or to sell girl scout cookies.

I am also not going to die on a hill defending the current state of American Christianity because it is pretty dreadful indeed. They don't even read their own books. If they did, they would see that they are according to their own teachings committing idolatry by raising Donald Trump and the USA to a level higher than God in their esteem and obedience.

For the record, I am not religious in that I don't go to church and I don't practice any rituals or traditions. I am a gnostic theist by which I don't mean the old school Gnostics but that I believe in God out of some internal knowledge that compels me in that direction. I thoroughly admit I can't prove God exists so in that sense I am agnostic theist. It's rather like one of the New Atheists (I forget which one) who said something like "I'm technically an agnostic because you can't prove God doesn't exist and so I can't 'know' he doesn't exist but I'm so convinced he doesn't that saying I'm agnostic is a waste of time." I was raised deeply religious in an obscure Restorationist sect called the Church of Christ. My parting with the church was amicable and I was never persecuted for being a heretic while I was in it or after I left it, which probably allows me a more mellow take on it all than somebody who was thrown or driven out. Also, my mother was deeply religious but also deeply valued education and learning so she let me read anything and filled the house with books. I loved dinosaurs as a kid and reading about them will obviously show that the Earth is billions of years old and teach you evolution and so on. Because of that, I was able to synthesize the religious teaching and the science and there was never any conflict between them. I get this is an atypical experience for many people and that I am lucky. However, I think my luck and amicable falling out gives me some perspective on how needless the science/religion dichotomy really is and shows me that holding both at once is entirely possible.

Also, on old polytheism, I read the Poetic Edda a while back and it was not at all what I was expecting and was super entertaining. I came at it expecting like Greek epics but that's not how it is at all. One section consisted of nothing but Thor yelling insults at this boatman across a fjord because he wouldn't cross the fjord so Thor could ride over. "I'd cross this fjord and feed you your own intestines but I don't want to get my balls wet!" and other gems. Another consists of nothing but every God at this banquet telling Loki what a pigfucker and a cunt he is with like 5 or 6 pages of very creative insults. Then there was just long sections that were like proverbs with some real funny stuff in it. I heard it described as "frat boy mythology" which is pretty accurate but it was surprisingly funny and entertaining in a way that actually epic epics are not.

*Edit* typos

[Ragabul]

On the more general topic of "it's actually often a bad thing when people lose their traditions," a really good post on a generally good blog:

Tradition is Smarter Than You Are

[Sinekein]

I don't think proselytizing is inherently problematic. It has to do with how you proselyte. Obviously people who do so coercively or who use bribery (I will feed you starving people but you have to come to Bible lessons) are engaging in duplicitous behavior. I think it's generally healthy in a democratic society for people to try to convince each other via persuasion or argument or outreach or whatever. I don't see any particular reason religious ideas are intrinsically different from other secular ideological or moral ones. I get that the Mormons that come knock on the door might be annoying but I don't see how they are committing any greater offense than somebody showing up to try to convince me to vote for Joe Blow for the schoolboard or to sell girl scout cookies.

But spirituality is by its essence personal and impossible to value. Discussing and convincing has sense as long as long as it is somewhat grounded in reality or in reason. I can understand someone trying to convince me that a behavior, in itself, is more valuable than another. But if the root of that behavior is grounded in something arbitrary like "going to mass", what's the point? If you're going to mass, good. If you're praying in front of a stone, fine too.

Proselitizing secular ideas is different in that you have to find a justification for what you are preaching that is not "God said". You should not commit genital mutilation on kids because it's painful and they don't get a say in it. You should not kill gays because there's nothing wrong in being gay and we can't abide murder in a functional society.

Someone calling to say "vote for X" is, usually, implying that some actual, earthly changes might await if you do vote for X and enough people do the same. A girl scout selling cookies is a way, for you, to trade some money for food, and to do so by, I assume, financing a cause you deem worthy.

But a Mormon's argumentation is based on an abstract book entirely.

A lot of that stagnation of Western Europe also has to do with the collapse of Roman trade networks. It's not a coincidence that many of the most prosperous, bustling parts of the world at the time were either literally on the Silk Road or were heavily involved in that trade somehow. Consider that the Renaissance started in Italian ports like Genoa and Venice mostly because they became prosperous from all that trade with the East.

I just recently watched a French youtube video about the silk road in the Roman era, which...well, already existed, even if the hostility between Rome and Parthia meant that it was not as developped as it would be later. And obviously, Middle-East civs thrived on trade - and some still do. I did not imply that Christianity destroyed Rome, there were obviously other factors, such as overextending and relying too much on what were basically mercenary forces.

But there is that talk about "Western civilization" being the pinnacle of human achievements with the implied message that Christianity is at its root since it's the common denominator between those Western civilizations. It's funny to hear about it in the US since so many of the founding settlers coming from Europe did so because Christians were literally killing each other over religious issues. But it's not any truer in mainland Europe. It is true some WE nations have dominated the world over the last few centuries, but christianity played absolutely no positive role in it, except maybe if you consider culling indigenous populations as a positive, because it's true, christianity played a role in that.

You can actually trace in significant part the European domination since the Renaissance to the thriving of the Silk Road, as the Columbus or Vespuccis travelled first and foremost because they wanted to make money. Columbus going West mostly happened because the Ottoman Empire was utterly dominant in the Mediterranean see by way of Barbary corsairs, so it left the Atlantic Ocean as an unopened road. Also explains why the Portuguese opened so many maritime roads and counters around Africa, because going around Africa was the only way not to cross the Barbarossa brothers or their pals.

However, I think my luck and amicable falling out gives me some perspective on how needless the science/religion dichotomy really is and shows me that holding both at once is entirely possible.

I know full well that you can be an adept of both science and religion. When I was in Uni, a brilliant colleague of mine was a catholic. She made a fantastic PhD in neurosciences, spent six months in an Antarctic station studying penguins, and the only difference with your average uni student was that she went to Church on Christmas and Easter. I also have a very good friend who was part of a Catholic group within (what was) the main left-wing political party in France, Parti Socialiste (called the Pink Fishes IIRC - pink for the party colours, fishes because symbol). He is a lovely fellow and while we have spent hours debating and discussing politics, at no point have his religious beliefs entered the conversation. Even when we talked about the legalization of gay marriage - he just stated his position as a catholic but he separated his religious beliefs, and his beliefs as a member of the French society, which are two different things.

Problem being that people like them are not loud. They are not supporting bible-thumpers, but they are not screaming that they're not the same either (because that would be pointless).

[Ragabul]

But spirituality is by its essence personal and impossible to value. Discussing and convincing has sense as long as long as it is somewhat grounded in reality or in reason. I can understand someone trying to convince me that a behavior, in itself, is more valuable than another. But if the root of that behavior is grounded in something arbitrary like "going to mass", what's the point? If you're going to mass, good. If you're praying in front of a stone, fine too.

Proselitizing secular ideas is different in that you have to find a justification for what you are preaching that is not "God said". You should not commit genital mutilation on kids because it's painful and they don't get a say in it. You should not kill gays because there's nothing wrong in being gay and we can't abide murder in a functional society.

Someone calling to say "vote for X" is, usually, implying that some actual, earthly changes might await if you do vote for X and enough people do the same. A girl scout selling cookies is a way, for you, to trade some money for food, and to do so by, I assume, financing a cause you deem worthy.

But a Mormon's argumentation is based on an abstract book entirely.

There's a thousand different ways that people can proselytize. C. S. Lewis did it by making appeals to the universal truth that humans have moral systems and that there is massive overlap in them like "running away in battle is shameful" and "you should take care of and respect old people" and that that must all mean something.

Some take the salt of the Earth, city on a hill approach in that they intentionally engage in acts of seemingly ostentatious charity or amiability in the hope that people will ask them why they are that way.

Some actually do use apologetics and attempt logical or rational explanations and/or why society would be better if everybody does this.

Others make appeals to community and how belonging to the church can give you purpose and fellowship and help with loneliness and listlessness.

Others make appeals to beauty and those times when people have felt the sacred or the profound and point out that that must come from somewhere.

Some unfortunately use the "you will burn in hell if you don't convert" approach.

I've also seen many of the exact same kinds of rationales used for secular ideological ideas and policy numerous times.

Appeals to this, that, or the other are actually almost always grounded in some grab-bag of "it will make things materially better for X reasons" and "it's just the right thing to do" and "you will be happier if you do this" and "if you don't do this some horrible catastrophe will happen."

I don't think there is any actual usable metric for what unquestionably separates a "spiritual" idea from a "secular" idea.

Different societies are going to have different standards for how best to handle public displays of religion that are informed by their own history, religiosity, and so on. On that front, I don't see much usefulness in a long drawn out debate about whether the French approach or the American approach is better. I will say that however messy public religion is in the USA right now the French style probably never would have worked here and probably never will work here.

On the topic of the Silk Road, I know I have been doing never-ending book plugging, but it really is better than just trying to summarize the contents of every single book and I am also just dumping them out there in case anybody happens to notice one and think they are interesting enough to read. If even one of them gets a bite than hey great I helped somebody find a book.

So a couple good ones I read in the last few years on the Silk Road:





Also relevant in establishing that while Europe was a comparative backwater it was hardly a big splat of nothing. There was actually very robust trade on the North Sea and the Vikings did extensive trade down into Byzantium and the Middle East during the Middle Ages.

[Ragabul]

*Edit* Last post and then I am done spamming this thread for a while.

As a sidenote pretty much every book I post is available on audiobook. I would get nothing read without audiobooks. They might be the single greatest invention. It's how I get pretty much all my reading done these days, listening to audiobooks while I'm doing something else.

[Sinekein]

There's a thousand different ways that people can proselytize. C. S. Lewis did it by making appeals to the universal truth that humans have moral systems and that there is massive overlap in them like "running away in battle is shameful" and "you should take care of and respect old people" and that that must all mean something.

...

I don't think there is any actual usable metric for what unquestionably separates a "spiritual" idea from a "secular" idea.

Appealing on values is still different to trying to convert someone. Some people might adhere to 99.9% of the values C.S. Lewis values without being Christians. You do not need to be a Christian to think that running away in battle in shameful, or that the elderly should be respected. There is nothing inherently Christian in that.

Some people have blurred the line between what belongs to religion and what doesn't. I mean, last holidays when I was with some (equally a-religious as me) friends, we still went to visit the churches we encountered, because Churches are spectacular pieces of architecture, and some of them are 700+ years old. You don't need to be a Christian to appreciate Christian art or architecture. You can advocate that this or that Church should be restored without planning on using it to pray.

But only a handful of religious people today are sincerely trying to spread the ideas without also spreading their cult. They absolutely exist, but again - they're not the noisy ones, or the politically active ones.

I will say that however messy public religion is in the USA right now the French style probably never would have worked here and probably never will work here.

Maybe, but the point is that at the moment, France is not trying to soft-power its way so that its system becomes the norm everywhere, unlike another country I won't mention.

After the murder of Samuel Paty - the history teacher that was beheaded last October - a couple of U.S. newspapers published some sickening opeds on why the French system was the cause of it all, and why the president condemning the religion behing which the murderer hid himself was wrong. Liberal newspapers, I might add. There is no push for French secularism or universalism to be put in place everywhere, but there are a ton of people trying to convince us or public-shame us that we should ditch them and go the U.S. way instead. That might be why I - and other French people - am slightly more hostile than I should on that topic.

I'm not pointing fingers at you obviously, but every time secularism is discussed these days you get U.S. drones, often from the "woke" aisle, trying to explain to us why it's racist or whatever, that we should let the muslim communities basically manage themselves - as if the cause of many problems in the muslim youth today wasn't related to a complete lack of political care for decades.

[Vol]

Architecture and some art aside, everything that is great about western cultures came from people detaching themselves from christianity, if not outright opposing it. Republics and democracies stemmed from rebellion against the unfair privileges of the clergy. Technological and scientific progress often had to fight tooth and nail against "what the good book says". Social progresses such as allowing women to do something else than giving birth, not burning down weirdos and having homosexuals live normal lives - all of it came by fighting the church.

From what do you base this on? The near totality of every worker, thinker, and leader in the west, until very recently, have had faith of one form or another. Which in turn colors their behavior and thinking, which is turn colors their actions. Though I have noticed a pattern of some of the most notable minds of the past being closer to deists than Christians, I don't have the knowledge to make a broader claim.

But the philosophy you're espousing, right now, is presupposing that there exists a metaphysical moral code. That's not secular. There exists no biological basis for equality or tolerance of non-reproductive, socially deleterious behavior. If it's bad to force women into their traditional role, to burn weirdos, and to keep gays in the closet, then there must exist an objective good we can sense, aspire to, and fail to achieve.

The notion that religion is the bedrock for my moraltiy, rather than common sense and stuff that is evolutionary instinct is just ridiculous.
I am my own moral compass. My rights are determined through compassion, logic and justice.

In addition to my previous paragraph, consider the following.

1) Moral culpability requires agency. There must have existed the capability to have chosen to do or not do something. A rock falling has no agency, it is the immutable laws of reality acting on atoms. A cat scratching someone rubbing it's belly has no agency, it's an animal reacting instinctively to stimuli. A severely mentally ill person committing an assault has no agency, as their ability to know what they're doing is wrong does not exist.

2) Only humans have agency. While it appears several kinds of animals are extremely intelligent, compared to the average for life on Earth, none approach the sophistication of humans, nor possess the anatomy to make effective use of it, nor can communicate with us in a meaningful way. Therefore, we only hold humans morally culpable, as we only know that ourselves, and each other by extension, possess agency.

3) Agency requires a degree of free will. Not total free will, but enough that when faced with a situation, we made a choice of how to act. Within our range of possible reactions, we chose one. If you present me with a Coke, a Pepsi, or a coffee, my choice is not predetermined by biological factors. There may be a probabilistic model for what I choose, depending on the time of day, my tastes, my mood, what I've had already, what I intend to do later, how much I'm thinking about the experiment, and so on. But until the moment I pick one up, there does not exist a definitive answer to what I will choose. This extrapolates out to moral situations, where hating a group of people, committing violence, giving charity, or helping the elderly, must require that the actor involved chose to do so. A reaction, like swatting a ball flying at your face, or kicking your leg when your knee is hit, or turning to face a loud noise, are reflexive, instinctive. They are automatic actions that we, ourselves, recognize as distinct from other bodily actions.

4) There exists no evolutionary or biological basis for free will existing. Nothing in the foundation of the secular world has provided any evidence of any sort of free will, and thus agency, and thus morality, existing. The brain is fully mapped, there are no hidden structures or power sources, no space where "you" reside or a non-causal "decision" center. Based on current empirical study and extrapolation, our sense of self is an emergent illusion of the brain's complexity, that then additionally tricks itself into thinking it's real, and has agency, for presumably evolutionary reasons.

5) Therefore, moral culpability does not exist. If a metaphysical self innate to humans does not exist, then free will does not exist. If free will does not exist, there is no agency. If there is no agency, humans are not mentally distinct from any creature or inanimate object, we operate totally and purely on the evolutionary instinct of atoms moving atoms around. And therefore, moral culpability does not exist. Nothing can be moral, it is a totally amoral existence, and nothing anyone ever does can be condemned or praised, as it's all nothing but atoms going through motions.

What about the Eastern world where their religion is not even a religion?!?!
Is Japan a land of scum and villainy because they have no religion like in the West? No. It has differences but it's still as strong as the USA culturally, some would argue stronger.

And if the gods in the religions were so good they'd have been able to prove themselves existing and there would not be so many different contradictory religious beliefs in the same religion.
Hell there are Christians in the USA that think the Catholic Church are "not true Christians".
Yeah, the original Christian Church isn't Christian, for fuck sake!

They did and do. Japan I know the best, native animism codified into Shinto along with Buddhism. Hence the nature of their past, they earnestly believed in reincarnation and spirits. They're stronger culturally because they're an ethnostate that has, so far, largely resisted the revolutionary beliefs coming out of the west.

How do you figure? There could be a creator God who has never interacted with our universe. Or, God might micromanage life on Earth constantly, but in a way we cannot perceive. Or maybe sometimes we can. Or only a few times to get us moving on the right track. We don't have the perspective, as limited, mortal beings to make those kinds of species-level claims of how a creator aught behave. Plus, you know, that's appealing to a metaphysical goodness, that doesn't exist in secular thought, for what would be the necessary originator of goodness, to do what you perceive as a good thing (revelation).

That humans could take a theoretically divine message and screw it up, twist it, pervert it, and fight each other over it, would reinforce the message quite well. As I understand it, a great deal of the Old Testament is about the Hebrews doing just that, and I fairly assume a lot of the other major extant faiths as well.

That being said, my personal wild speculation of choice is that the dystopia we are headed towards (if we are indeed headed towards one) is most likely to look like A Brave New World.

I'll drink to that.

[Alienmorph]

I've read Brave New World just last month, as I was gifted a copy during Xmas season.

Not going to lie, the racial and cultural segregation, the mass-censorship of history and art meant to remove anything that could make people upset and less productive, the general "just consume more and stop worrying" attitude...

... yeah, people like to bitch and moan about Orwell every time they want to go on rant about how we're walking toward a dystopia, but reading Huxley and his "happy dystopia" concept legit gave me a few shivers. Orwell was pretty much just describing the authoritarian regimes of last century on steroyds, I feel like we managed to dodge that bullett. At least for the time being. But Brave New World felt scarily more actual now than it probably did when it was written, if you ignore the fact the author of course couldn't predict things like the Internet.

[Mobius_118]

Religion needs to die. All it does is give people reasons to kill other people over who has the best imaginary friend.

Anyway, some loon in Buffalo, MN decided to shoot up and bomb a medical clinic over a government conspiracy with masks and Covid.

Things are getting real sporty around here with the Q conspiracy theorists and right wing extremists.

[Mazder]

In addition to my previous paragraph, consider the following.

1) Moral culpability requires agency. There must have existed the capability to have chosen to do or not do something. A rock falling has no agency, it is the immutable laws of reality acting on atoms. A cat scratching someone rubbing it's belly has no agency, it's an animal reacting instinctively to stimuli. A severely mentally ill person committing an assault has no agency, as their ability to know what they're doing is wrong does not exist.

2) Only humans have agency. While it appears several kinds of animals are extremely intelligent, compared to the average for life on Earth, none approach the sophistication of humans, nor possess the anatomy to make effective use of it, nor can communicate with us in a meaningful way. Therefore, we only hold humans morally culpable, as we only know that ourselves, and each other by extension, possess agency.

3) Agency requires a degree of free will. Not total free will, but enough that when faced with a situation, we made a choice of how to act. Within our range of possible reactions, we chose one. If you present me with a Coke, a Pepsi, or a coffee, my choice is not predetermined by biological factors. There may be a probabilistic model for what I choose, depending on the time of day, my tastes, my mood, what I've had already, what I intend to do later, how much I'm thinking about the experiment, and so on. But until the moment I pick one up, there does not exist a definitive answer to what I will choose. This extrapolates out to moral situations, where hating a group of people, committing violence, giving charity, or helping the elderly, must require that the actor involved chose to do so. A reaction, like swatting a ball flying at your face, or kicking your leg when your knee is hit, or turning to face a loud noise, are reflexive, instinctive. They are automatic actions that we, ourselves, recognize as distinct from other bodily actions.

4) There exists no evolutionary or biological basis for free will existing. Nothing in the foundation of the secular world has provided any evidence of any sort of free will, and thus agency, and thus morality, existing. The brain is fully mapped, there are no hidden structures or power sources, no space where "you" reside or a non-causal "decision" center. Based on current empirical study and extrapolation, our sense of self is an emergent illusion of the brain's complexity, that then additionally tricks itself into thinking it's real, and has agency, for presumably evolutionary reasons.

5) Therefore, moral culpability does not exist. If a metaphysical self innate to humans does not exist, then free will does not exist. If free will does not exist, there is no agency. If there is no agency, humans are not mentally distinct from any creature or inanimate object, we operate totally and purely on the evolutionary instinct of atoms moving atoms around. And therefore, moral culpability does not exist. Nothing can be moral, it is a totally amoral existence, and nothing anyone ever does can be condemned or praised, as it's all nothing but atoms going through motions.

Morality requires agency. Yes, so why does religion have you remove your Agency for the magic sky daddy? Do as I tell you to and you'll get into heaven and will have eternal bliss. It's essentially a threat to get you to be good. So why not just be good because it's easier and better for you and everyone around you?
And equating a mentally ill person being unable to see their own actions is a MASSIVE disservice to the entire human race. Equating being non-religious to the mentally ill, even in an allegorical sense, implies that being religious is of sound mind.
Is the keeping of slaves immoral?
Because the bible condones it, moreso it gives specific instructions to how to treat said slaves.
I have never wanted to own another human being, hence my morality is stronger than that of the bible, and any Christian who purports to follow it by my reckoning.

So empathy is not an evolutionary trait? Not wanting to see harm done to another living thing because you are also a living thing and do not want to impart pain on something because you also know pain and know what it's like? That's not beneficial at all to a tribe?
The brain being mapped doesn't even remotely mean we understand it, so claiming that secularity has no basis for the evidence of free will doesn't automatically make religion the answer. Not knowing doesn't make the existence of a god or the reason for a lack of morals true.
If we are all just atoms then religion has even less basis on morality than secularity. Making up a story to provide the sense of right and wrong is not better than just saying "I don't know, but we all talked and agreed that this is bad/wrong", or "my brain is telling me I don't like that so I'll make sure not to do that".

They did and do. Japan I know the best, native animism codified into Shinto along with Buddhism. Hence the nature of their past, they earnestly believed in reincarnation and spirits. They're stronger culturally because they're an ethnostate that has, so far, largely resisted the revolutionary beliefs coming out of the west.

How do you figure? There could be a creator God who has never interacted with our universe. Or, God might micromanage life on Earth constantly, but in a way we cannot perceive. Or maybe sometimes we can. Or only a few times to get us moving on the right track. We don't have the perspective, as limited, mortal beings to make those kinds of species-level claims of how a creator aught behave. Plus, you know, that's appealing to a metaphysical goodness, that doesn't exist in secular thought, for what would be the necessary originator of goodness, to do what you perceive as a good thing (revelation).

That humans could take a theoretically divine message and screw it up, twist it, pervert it, and fight each other over it, would reinforce the message quite well. As I understand it, a great deal of the Old Testament is about the Hebrews doing just that, and I fairly assume a lot of the other major extant faiths as well.

That doesn't make them stronger.
The age of consent over there is 14 for fuck sake.
Only after being exposed to "revolutionary beliefs coming out of the west" did they agree to an age of consent in law to be closer to 18. If not their culture would have continued the relative paedophilia compared to our culture.

Because the onus is not on me to prove a god doesn't exist. It's the ones who say there is a god to prove that it does exist.
If a religious mindset claims that a god created the universe then they must prove it if they wish for me to believe their case. If not I will go along the current scientific and secular idea of "we don't know but we have a theory that can be explained and corroborated with evidence as to why we think it may be this that can not be waved away as 'my experience that no-one else can see but makes me closer to god'."
Simply saying "we don't know" doesn't make the religious argument true, nor do they make them the default and why a religious mindset is more beneficial.

Revelation is never been able to be proven. If, in the Christian faith, the revelation is available to all beings and if I have not yet received it then the omniscient and omnipresent god just can not exist because if they had I would have had the revelation by now. That is all I need to know that the religion of Christianity is bogus. Because if the god from that religion isn't even doing what the religion says then why do I need to pay attention to that religion, or it's rules?
And, if the case can be made that the religion is filtered through the imperfection of mankind then why do I need to listen to it at all?
If it's all just mankind then the supposed god is even less needed than before as it's all just man, Even the most moral of bibles written at it's inception 2000 years ago is less moral than a normal person today.

A lot of the Old Testament also has the worst morality as well.
Slavery, slaughter of tribes that have "false Gods", rape, Cannibalism. All condoned in the Old Testament.
So, where was the Omnipresent, Omniscient god then? Oh, right, he was the one ordering it. Even if he was not he was also the one who could have stopped it, and didn't. So either way that god is not worth listening to if they do in fact exist. That doesn't make the claim of a divine stronger, nor does it make the claim to follow the divine stronger.
It is just humans doing human things.

Religion needs to die. All it does is give people reasons to kill other people over who has the best imaginary friend.

Anyway, some loon in Buffalo, MN decided to shoot up and bomb a medical clinic over a government conspiracy with masks and Covid.

Things are getting real sporty around here with the Q conspiracy theorists and right wing extremists.

Yeah, I have never agreed with religion and I am honestly still shocked when people I know just go "because God" rather than be honest and say "I don't know".
There is no shame in not knowing.

BUT I do know those Q conspiracy wankers need to wake the fuck up from their delusion.
I can't wait for this age of "I watched a youtube video so now I am an expert on the hidden secrets of society" bullshit goes away.
No Dave, those aren't chemtrails, that's exhaust from a jet engine.
"That's just what they want you to think so they can microchip you easier!"
Why?
"To track you!!"
Like your phone already does?
"No, so they can brianwash you!"
You're not that important.

[Sinekein]

From what do you base this on? The near totality of every worker, thinker, and leader in the west, until very recently, have had faith of one form or another. Which in turn colors their behavior and thinking, which is turn colors their actions. Though I have noticed a pattern of some of the most notable minds of the past being closer to deists than Christians, I don't have the knowledge to make a broader claim.

But the philosophy you're espousing, right now, is presupposing that there exists a metaphysical moral code. That's not secular. There exists no biological basis for equality or tolerance of non-reproductive, socially deleterious behavior. If it's bad to force women into their traditional role, to burn weirdos, and to keep gays in the closet, then there must exist an objective good we can sense, aspire to, and fail to achieve.

And what says there isn't such a code? You can support a philosophy that says morality is built within our genes or an artificial construct that has to appear for our society to develop, without accompanying that with an organized cult.

And having to oppose "bad" and "good" is a false dichotomy, one that actually comes from judeo-christian religions of "heaven" and "hell" that is not always present in religions, but that Christians love to death - makes the world simpler and easier to understand than shades of grey, as Garrus would put it.

It's arguable "objective good" exists in nature. Life is a race for survival, but surviving is not good in itself - it's just when your species doesn't survive that it's bad. So it's basically a choice between something that is bad, and something that just is.

[Ragabul]

And what says there isn't such a code? You can support a philosophy that says morality is built within our genes or an artificial construct that has to appear for our society to develop, without accompanying that with an organized cult.

Unless you believe that the behaviors you want people to engage in are so encoded into their innate nature that they cannot help but do it, you do in fact need some mechanism that teaches them what they should and shouldn't do. Any such teaching mechanism that is more elaborate and widespread than "my daddy taught me" could defensively be called organized, and it seems pretty unquestionable that something at the level of civics taught in public schools would certainly qualify as that. What I've taken to pejoratively calling DIE training (Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion) would certainly also qualify as this.

And "good" and "bad" is about making appeals to an objective standard that people assume everybody must believe in. That is really just another description for "things you ought to do" and "things you ought not to do" and that duality exists everywhere on Earth. It is not unique to western monotheisms.

There is another meaning to good and bad in the way that we use it today which is actually making an appeal to natural law. Old school natural law incorporated the natural law of morality and not just the laws of nature like gravity as we currently employ it. This does indeed say that things have innate natures and are as such good or bad of themselves independent of what anybody might choose to do with them. Such is the usage that we mean when we say things like "Babies are good" and "Pollution is bad." To quote C. S. Lewis in the Abolition of Man:

In early Hinduism that conduct in men which can be called good consists in conformity to, or almost participation in, the Rta—that great ritual or pattern of nature and supernature which is revealed alike in the cosmic order, the moral virtues, and the ceremonial of the temple. Righteousness, correctness, order, the Rta, is constantly identified with satya or truth, correspondence to reality. As Plato said that the Good was ‘beyond existence’ and Wordsworth that through virtue the stars were strong, so the Indian masters say that the gods themselves are born of the Rta and obey it.

That usage of good and bad is an anachronism in the West that carries over in nothing but some vague sentiments and lingering usages in linguistics. The "ought to" and "oughtn't to" part is still very much alive in the West and everywhere else.

The divide between the secular and the religious (if one truly exists) does not exist on a moral basis. Organized secular systems make all of the same kinds of appeals to morals that religions do. The difference lies in whether the supernatural does or does not exist. This is, of course, unprovable one way or the other as the supernatural by definition transcends the physical world if it exists and cannot be explained in terms of the physical. In operation, we end up with a standard that is something like "appropriate moral systems must be based in material truth and the people who get to decide what constitutes material truth are X people." That is not an unusable standard, but it certainly not a standard that will ever provide a nice, tidy, incontestable line between "this is material/true" and "this is supernatural/false" in all instances in all places.

[Sinekein]

The divide between the secular and the religious (if one truly exists) does not exist on a moral basis. Organized secular systems make all of the same kinds of appeals to morals that religions do. The difference lies in whether the supernatural does or does not exist. This is, of course, unprovable one way or the other as the supernatural by definition transcends the physical world if it exists and cannot be explained in terms of the physical. In operation, we end up with a standard that is something like "appropriate moral systems must be based in material truth and the people who get to decide what constitutes material truth are X people." That is not an unusable standard, but it certainly not a standard that will ever provide a nice, tidy, incontestable line between "this is material/true" and "this is supernatural/false" in all instances in all places.

Since the secular exists, the religious has no reason to. I'm not talking about morality, just their mere existence. Most functional secular systems have that gigantic edge over religious ones in that they are not trying to gain adepts, they are merely trying to function for the people that are living here. That is the most fundamental difference and why religions as a whole are the cancer of the world. Remove religious proselytes, and suddenly they will become much more healthy, the problem of course being that for a religion to have become major, it had to convert. After all, they're nothing more than successful sects. Maybe there is a parallel universe in which Earth is mostly Zoroastrian, or Molochian, or where most christians are Cathars.

You can have set of laws and working societies without religion. That's proof in and of itself that religions are unnecessary, and are going to become less and less necessary as knowledge develops and what constitutes the supernatural or unknown shrinks. And that is absolutely fantastic news for our planet.

And hopefully, in time, religion will become what it should be - a personal garden, something that people can believe in or not but that will not have any influence outside of their places of worship and their homes.

[Ragabul]

Most functional secular systems have that gigantic edge over religious ones in that they are not trying to gain adepts, they are merely trying to function for the people that are living here.

The ones that already exist and are endorsed by state power don't always try to expand for the simple reason that they don't have to because they can dictate things by fiat by virtue of having state power. Ones that are ascendant and hope to wield state power someday absolutely try to spread. And some of the ones *with* state power try to spread. Certainly the Soviet Union was very interested in spreading its secular policies and so is the USA currently. So was France during the Napoleonic wars.

*Edit* I'm not stating that religions are necessary. I *am* saying that systems that are so much like religions that the difference starts to get really arbitrary and fuzzy are necessary.

[Sinekein]

But then France now isn't trying to do that anymore, like the EU as a whole. It's arguable a majority in countries in the world are not trying to spread their influence.

Religions always do. They do not exist in a state of stagnation. You can have a secular system reaching balance. Doesn't mean that it won't decline, but it means that it can evolve in an infinitely healthier way than a religion.

[Ragabul]

Some religions don't proselyte either. Shinto doesn't. Judaism doesn't. Some Native American religions are so not proselytizing that they actually keep their rituals highly secret because they believe it's a kind of defilement for non-tribe members to see them. They do all involve passing the religion down to children if that counts as proselytizing but then again so do secular systems by way of civics taught in schools.

You might can extract some kind of "proselytizing of moral ideas is bad" thing out of all of this (which I disagree with), but you can't establish a rule which is "religions are bad because they always proselytize, and secular systems are always better because they don't" rule out of this.

[Vol]

The difference lies in whether the supernatural does or does not exist. This is, of course, unprovable one way or the other as the supernatural by definition transcends the physical world if it exists and cannot be explained in terms of the physical.

To snipe a specific sentence, this is a really important question. Because defining what specifically a supernatural even would be entails more than "Yeah the scientist said he saw the ghost too."

Does a supernatural event necessarily have to violate the laws of reality? How do we differentiate a violation of the laws from following the laws in a way we don't understand? And can a supernatural event occur entirely through the natural laws?

Consider the lottery. Winning is, effectively, a zero chance. However, so many people play, that the odds of a winner occurring is likely. If a specific person wins, is that a miracle? No, because someone was going to win, so even if the specific person winning had strange circumstances around them, the occurrence of the event is common.

My own anecdote; I play a local lottery game. Odds are better than the big drawings, because exact order of numbers is not required. The very first time I played it, while sitting in the work truck at a gas station, 6 numbers came to my sleep-deprived head. I wrote them down, played them, and won the pool. Not in exact order or on the first draw, but I won. Extremely unlikely, but miraculous? Probably not. A weird event? Quite. But thinking of numbers to play in a lottery is not an uncommon situation, it presumably followed the same biological process as any other thought.

But let's say it was the big lottery. Would a person having a vision of the specific winning numbers, in order, be an unlikely enough event for you believe there might be a supernatural nudging? There is no test for that, because there is no apparent delineation between thinking up 6 random numbers that are correct or wrong, but for the later validation. Given the odds of randomly drawing the winning numbers, having a premonition of them would be enough to make me question the event, though not likely be convinced.

That said, from what I've seen and read, if a brazen, undeniable supernatural event did occur, in violation of the laws of nature, it would have been rare and important enough as to change the course of the world. As in, perhaps a few times in recorded history, ever, if that. A supernatural event that utilizes known natural processes would be nearly indistinguishable from one that isn't, but not necessarily totally. The cases of inexplicable, unexplainable occurrences around the world probably all have rational explanations, even if they're never known, but science of the gaps is as unfulfilling as the god of the gaps.

I believe CS Lewis wrote a book on this I've yet to read, actually.

[Ragabul]

If you mean Miracles that's by his own admission one of his weakest books. It was like ten years ago that I read it, but I don't remember it leaving much of an impression on me. I don't have an answer as to what is the mostly likely way that the supernatural was to manifest in the real world if it did manifest. My hunch is either "infrequently" or "subtly" or both.

More book plugs on this topic that point to the absolute ubiquitous and enduring human belief in the supernatural and the spiritual and how that ties into life everywhere and is absolutely showing 0 sign of disappearing even if old school monotheistic religions are:

[Vol]

My hunch is either "infrequently" or "subtly" or both.

Well, if you want to be succinct about it.

Morality requires agency. Yes, so why does religion have you remove your Agency for the magic sky daddy? Do as I tell you to and you'll get into heaven and will have eternal bliss. It's essentially a threat to get you to be good. So why not just be good because it's easier and better for you and everyone around you?
And equating a mentally ill person being unable to see their own actions is a MASSIVE disservice to the entire human race. Equating being non-religious to the mentally ill, even in an allegorical sense, implies that being religious is of sound mind.
Is the keeping of slaves immoral?
Because the bible condones it, moreso it gives specific instructions to how to treat said slaves.
I have never wanted to own another human being, hence my morality is stronger than that of the bible, and any Christian who purports to follow it by my reckoning.

Depends on which god you're thinking of. I don't know much about the moral philosophy of ones that are humans with superpowers, like the Greek pantheon. The God of the philosopher's has a better case, not being a human, and instead a necessary, intelligent creation force that logically possess a number of characteristics, such as defining what objective good is.

Yes, slavery is immoral. Humans kept slaves for as long as we've existed, until the last few centuries in the west. How were we able to ignore our natural moral knowledge that slavery is bad that entire time? Why did we stop? Right now, virtually every person in the west will tell you slavery was evil, had to stop, always was bad, but for thousands of years, it was normal as could be. What changed in our biology to make us aware of how evil it was?

So empathy is not an evolutionary trait? Not wanting to see harm done to another living thing because you are also a living thing and do not want to impart pain on something because you also know pain and know what it's like? That's not beneficial at all to a tribe?
The brain being mapped doesn't even remotely mean we understand it, so claiming that secularity has no basis for the evidence of free will doesn't automatically make religion the answer. Not knowing doesn't make the existence of a god or the reason for a lack of morals true.
If we are all just atoms then religion has even less basis on morality than secularity. Making up a story to provide the sense of right and wrong is not better than just saying "I don't know, but we all talked and agreed that this is bad/wrong", or "my brain is telling me I don't like that so I'll make sure not to do that".

Of course it is. We need a physical system for everything we physically do. But if empathy is solely an evolutionary adaption, then it's no more or less than any other instinct we have. Which seems wrong, because selective empathy is one of the greatest parts of being human.

It does, free will breaks causality. If you deny anything beyond the material world, where in the natural order do you have large scale indeterminate events? I mean, you can claim causality isn't absolute in a secular view, but I don't see the coherence.

The metaphysical claim is that there exists an immaterial self, that is not emergent from or completely subject to the laws of reality. Part of it, yes, but with some capability beyond what is naturally possible (free will, qualia, etc).

Revelation is never been able to be proven. If, in the Christian faith, the revelation is available to all beings and if I have not yet received it then the omniscient and omnipresent god just can not exist because if they had I would have had the revelation by now. That is all I need to know that the religion of Christianity is bogus. Because if the god from that religion isn't even doing what the religion says then why do I need to pay attention to that religion, or it's rules?

I've never actually heard a Christian claim you receive personal revelation for being a believer. Or pretending to, as the case may be. That seems rather contrary to the motif of faith. I've heard plenty of people who claim they _did_ experience some sort of supernatural presence, but I cannot do anything useful with that information. Though there is Pascal's night of fire, which makes for an interesting read.

Don't quote me on this tho, I could be wrong.

A lot of the Old Testament also has the worst morality as well.
Slavery, slaughter of tribes that have "false Gods", rape, Cannibalism. All condoned in the Old Testament.
So, where was the Omnipresent, Omniscient god then? Oh, right, he was the one ordering it. Even if he was not he was also the one who could have stopped it, and didn't. So either way that god is not worth listening to if they do in fact exist. That doesn't make the claim of a divine stronger, nor does it make the claim to follow the divine stronger.
It is just humans doing human things.

Consider the alternative then. If there is no God, then all those horrible things were entirely natural to us. Just humans doing human things, listening to our biology to murder, rape, and eat each other. Our instinct to do those things was stronger than our instinct to not, for some reason.

And what says there isn't such a code? You can support a philosophy that says morality is built within our genes or an artificial construct that has to appear for our society to develop, without accompanying that with an organized cult.

And having to oppose "bad" and "good" is a false dichotomy, one that actually comes from judeo-christian religions of "heaven" and "hell" that is not always present in religions, but that Christians love to death - makes the world simpler and easier to understand than shades of grey, as Garrus would put it.

It's arguable "objective good" exists in nature. Life is a race for survival, but surviving is not good in itself - it's just when your species doesn't survive that it's bad. So it's basically a choice between something that is bad, and something that just is.

Absolutely. An arbitrary, secular code of conduct would work fine, for a while, if people truly believed in it. It lacks the foundational credibility of a metaphysical one, more prone to mutation and weaponization, so on and so forth, but it's not like most people think about their beliefs beyond what they grew up with.

Seems like they have a harder time of it, actually. What with the endless writings, sects, and reformations, to say nothing of the body of rabbinical rulings. Whereas shades of grey is quite easy, I should know.

[Ragabul]

I've never actually heard a Christian claim you receive personal revelation for being a believer. Or pretending to, as the case may be. That seems rather contrary to the motif of faith. I've heard plenty of people who claim they _did_ experience some sort of supernatural presence, but I cannot do anything useful with that information. Though there is Pascal's night of fire, which makes for an interesting read.

Don't quote me on this tho, I could be wrong.

Takes on revelation are actually extremely diverse. You do get revelation according to charismatic movements which is what all the speaking in tongues and laying on of hands is about. You receive revelation by the entrance of the Holy Spirit whose role in the Trinity is loosely to provide a bridge between the physical and the metaphysical.

Most all talk about revelation provided to the genuine seeker after truth: "Knock and the door shall be opened unto you. Seek and ye shall find." Though this isn't revelation in the sense of "Now I get free premonitions of the future!" and more just a revelation about the the truth of the Christian message.

The CoC (Church of Christ) take was historically very skeptical though they have become more like mainstream Evangelicals in recent years. I was actually taught that the age of ostentatious miracles and interventions was over and occurred only for brief periods of time in the past because God was setting up a particular trajectory in history, specifically the preparation of the state of Israel as a birth place for Jesus and then the initial wildfire spread of the Christian Church in the first century. God might still intercede but one should be really skeptical about it.

I know less about the Catholic theological take on it but they are very...administrative. They have a bunch of procedures for determining what is and isn't an example of a divine manifestation.

[Mobius_118]

trump was acquitted for a second time for being a cock-sucking traitor.

I have no words for how disappointed I am in the 43 GOP senators who decided reality wasn't for them. Good thing is he is still on the hook for civil cases in New York and soon Georgia, which should be more than likely to convict his traitorous ass and put him in prison.

Fuck everyone who supports him.

[Vol]

Takes on revelation are actually extremely diverse. You do get revelation according to charismatic movements which is what all the speaking in tongues and laying on of hands is about. You receive revelation by the entrance of the Holy Spirit whose role in the Trinity is loosely to provide a bridge between the physical and the metaphysical.

Most all talk about revelation provided to the genuine seeker after truth: "Knock and the door shall be opened unto you. Seek and ye shall find." Though this isn't revelation in the sense of "Now I get free premonitions of the future!" and more just a revelation about the the truth of the Christian message.

The CoC (Church of Christ) take was historically very skeptical though they have become more like mainstream Evangelicals in recent years. I was actually taught that the age of ostentatious miracles and interventions was over and occurred only for brief periods of time in the past because God was setting up a particular trajectory in history, specifically the preparation of the state of Israel as a birth place for Jesus and then the initial wildfire spread of the Christian Church in the first century. God might still intercede but one should be really skeptical about it.

I know less about the Catholic theological take on it but they are very...administrative. They have a bunch of procedures for determining what is and isn't an example of a divine manifestation.

I stand corrected then. What makes me so skeptical of these personal claims of revelation, in the Christian tradition, is that as far as I'm aware, the central act of revelation was years of men following Jesus around for years and not quite grasping the message, and doubting, until the resurrection. So beaming knowledge of the immaterial into the heads of people directly does not seem to logically follow.

Though interestingly, the Orthodox, whom focus more heavily on the mysticism of faith, have people who are able to enter detectable altered physical states purely through prayer and meditation. There have been studies on their brain activity during these trances. You see that in other places too, like that Dutch fellow who can somehow consciously regulate his body heat so well he can sit in ice water or climb Everest in bare skin. It seems as if with a trained will, we could live much more comfortable lives, if nothing else.

But yeah, the CoC sound like the most rational take on it, if true. I've mostly been reading apologetics who don't try and contort biblical literalism into their message. As far as any of us can really know, it's a "light touch" reality at best.

[TTTX]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENQfBzAnns0&ab

[Ragabul]

The south is never ready.

*Edit* I thought better of this post. It accomplishes nothing.

[Mobius_118]

The south is never ready.

*Edit* I thought better of this post. It accomplishes nothing.

Ted Cruz practically abandoned Texas while AOC, that dirty Democrat, raised millions to help out. He also threw his daughters under the bus for the whole fiasco.

Might be time for a change, since your leadership sucks so goddamn hard. This is a direct result of deregulation, and y'all are suffering for it.

[Ragabul]

The problems with the Texas grid do not lend themselves to simple reductionism. Anything that gets done requires trade offs which nobody wants to talk about. Repubs want to pretend like everything was caused by solar and wind being unreliable. Dems want to pretend like everything is a nice tidy little story about how anything run by markets sucks and anything run by government is great. It's just not that simple.

There are trade offs. We could winterize everything. Part of the winterization of colder places is that their plants are housed inside. This radically reduces efficiency here because it creates overheating in the summer. We could switch from a scarcity market to a capacity market. This would mean that once every 30 years when we have an epic freeze, we don't have several million people with no power for 3ish days. It also means that 30 million people pay notably higher energy prices all the rest of the time.

We *do* need some stronger standards on winterization for things like protecting wind turbines and instrumentation and we should probably have a look at putting in consumer protections to prevent the dodgiest variable rate plans from gouging people in rare events like this.

But there is no magical "make Texas look like the rest of the country" fix. California had a hell of a time with wildfires and power last year. It's got a *very* regulated energy sector and is on the Western grid. If New York got hit with an insane heat wave you would see severe infrastructure problems. (Or a hurricane. Sandy was a fart as far as hurricanes go and look what it did. Can you imagine what would happen if the monster that slammed southwest Louisiana last year hit it?)

Some of it is just that freak weather events are indeed freak weather events and you simply can't plan for every contingency. Some of it is climate change and everybody is going to be dealing with more and more of this. And on that front, we could do better but Texas actually produces more wind energy than any other state and we're in the top half of the states for general usage of renewables. The renewable sector is also growing like weeds here because as it turns out Texas business is actually pretty keen on keeping the "energy capital of the world" bonafides and making money speaks louder than Republican bloviating.

[Ragabul]

I finished the "surveillance capitalism" book and I'm now rereading Brave New World because it's been some years since I read it and I was reminded of it a great deal. It's made me start to reconsider something. I had sort of taken it for granted that a large part of what ails modern society is intense atomization and the cult of hyper individualism. And it's true that people are suffering from that on an individual basis. But at the society level, the issue is that the atomization primes people to find a particular kind of collectivism more appealing because it gives them that sense of belonging and purpose. This is all sort of standard, accepted modern misanthrope and pessimist thought.

The thing I'm now questioning a little is that I previously was inclined to think you had to undermine the atomization and hyper individualism by reconstructing healthy communal life. And that's still true in the long term. But maybe the better method to fight the current species of growing corporate-backed collectivism is to *stoke* atomization and hyper individualism.

Individual identity *is* actually under a pronounced assault because the internet is all about social performance. It's like perpetual high school: who is popular, who is shunned, who has the most invisible popularity points, and so on. And how do you get over high school? Largely by figuring out who the fuck you are as an individual and ceasing to care what every random fucker you barely know thinks of you. By figuring out who your actual friends are and not using people as accessories.

There may be something to this. I have to think about it some more.

[Sinekein]

There are trade offs. We could winterize everything. Part of the winterization of colder places is that their plants are housed inside. This radically reduces efficiency here because it creates overheating in the summer. We could switch from a scarcity market to a capacity market. This would mean that once every 30 years when we have an epic freeze, we don't have several million people with no power for 3ish days. It also means that 30 million people pay notably higher energy prices all the rest of the time.

Is energy that cheaper in Texas compared to anywhere else in the country?

Because from the outside, it looked like Texas was the only place in which you had people freezing to death, and yet I assume it was not the only State in the country in which it was cold. You would need some amazing price gouging to justify such a difference in service.

[Ragabul]

Texas does have cheaper energy than much of the rest of the country, yes, with the caveat that because the summer is so hot here, we spend a lot on energy in the summer because of the sheer quantity consumed even if the overall price is low.

And I'm not an economist so I can't sit here and provide the exact number differentials on how much a full capacity market would cost relative to the current scarcity market. But for point of reference my power bill in summer is usually approximately 5 times higher than in winter. If we are paying to maintain capacity all the time capable of handing peak summer demand (which is how high demand got during the winter storm), it seems like we are looking at the doubling or trebling of bills in winter to cover that at the very least. For most people that amounts to hundreds of dollars a year. Multiple thousands over the course of 10 years. Is saving multiple thousands of dollars worth having no power for 2 days every 10 years? Maybe.

And in this case, paying plants to maintain reserves regardless of demand levels wouldn't have solved the problem anyway because the issue was not just unprecedented levels of demand. It was also (and actually mostly) unprecedented levels of plants that would have been in production anyway going offline due to inclement weather. I don't actually know if everything had been 100% winterized and literally nothing went offline if that would have been enough to meet demand or not. This wasn't a natural gas vs renewables problem either. *Everything* got slammed because nothing was winterized. Since we happen to use mostly natural gas, we had a massive problem with natural gas infrastructure. If we had been using 80% wind power but none of the turbines were winterized we would have still seen a massive drop-off in generation.

Clearly we need higher standards for winterization for black swan events. This is the only regulatory conclusion that is 100% clear (and which frankly even Abbott and other Republicans have been talking about as well).

The question is "what exact price is reasonable to pay to protect the grid from black swan weather events?" Winterizing all this stuff costs money. Paying plants to stay in operation all the time when there is not high demand costs money. Saying there are trade-offs to this is not a controversial thing to say.

New York City could pay a whole bunch of money to make itself less susceptible to hurricane damage. Does it make sense to do that? Yes, probably. Does it make sense for them to make it as big of a priority as New Orleans? Probably not.

*Edit*

A more succinct way of putting it. It doesn't matter if you pay the plant to stay online when it looks like this:



That plant is not going to be online whether you've paid it or not. It's also not going to be online whether it's natural gas or wind. The question is how much are you willing to spend to prevent that?

[Vol]

I finished the "surveillance capitalism" book and I'm now rereading Brave New World because it's been some years since I read it and I was reminded of it a great deal. It's made me start to reconsider something. I had sort of taken it for granted that a large part of what ails modern society is intense atomization and the cult of hyper individualism. And it's true that people are suffering from that on an individual basis. But at the society level, the issue is that the atomization primes people to find a particular kind of collectivism more appealing because it gives them that sense of belonging and purpose. This is all sort of standard, accepted modern misanthrope and pessimist thought.

You'll notice that it started with the conscious subversive efforts after WW2, which in turn took on a sort of mindless autonomy as it was integrated into society by opportunistic sorts, which peaked around our time. There was tradition and community, as our grandparents were still vital enough to hold it together, and people weren't conditioned specifically to dislike their heritage quite so fully, but it wasn't nearly what our parents had, that golden time of prosperity _and_ coherence.

Then the economic realities of globalism caught up with us, and we've seen the hard reversal from "Fuck the past, be free, be yourself!" to bug-like conformity to nonsensical beliefs. I don't see the atomization of individuals so much as the disintegration of the social structures that kept us in one house. Who advocates for individualism? There's people who say the words, and they're lying. Nobody wants disaffected young men who feel no belonging or purpose to "be individuals."

The ADD fad of the 90's opened my eyes to this, where a legion of little boys were drugged into compliance for being too much like little boys. Men are inherently going to trend towards individualism because we're more unstable, and right there was the punishment. Be yourself, express yourself, unless you don't listen to the teacher, as it were.

The thing I'm now questioning a little is that I previously was inclined to think you had to undermine the atomization and hyper individualism by reconstructing healthy communal life. And that's still true in the long term. But maybe the better method to fight the current species of growing corporate-backed collectivism is to *stoke* atomization and hyper individualism.

Individual identity *is* actually under a pronounced assault because the internet is all about social performance. It's like perpetual high school: who is popular, who is shunned, who has the most invisible popularity points, and so on. And how do you get over high school? Largely by figuring out who the fuck you are as an individual and ceasing to care what every random fucker you barely know thinks of you. By figuring out who your actual friends are and not using people as accessories.

There may be something to this. I have to think about it some more.

What you're describing appears to me to be a form of limited accelerationism. Which isn't the worst idea, honestly. Taking the long view, the current state will not last, but it's a matter of how miserable and violent it gets on the way out. And then human nature will assert itself and create new hierarchy and community.

I'd prefer a metaphorical version of planting the flag on Iwo Jima, instead of stumbling from the ruins of Hiroshima, but as someone staring down the barrel of sanctioned discrimination, this sort of (metaphorical) fight seems rather meaningful given my lot in life and prospects for the future.

Why not subvert the subversives in turn? Mock and undermine their beliefs and social systems, corrode their sacred values, and let the (metaphorical) warlords figure out whose in charge.

I'm being flippant, but after the naked malice I've seen in the last week, I can imagine worst outcomes then purposefully dissolving the ties that bind.

[Sinekein]

That plant is not going to be online whether you've paid it or not. It's also not going to be online whether it's natural gas or wind. The question is how much are you willing to spend to prevent that?

I don't know, but it's not like there is a shortage of friendly countries in which an event like that occurs every week during winter, whether you look at Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway or Denmark (not saying Iceland because of their geothermy). You don't see their grid breaking down like Texas, so clearly it is possible to winterize efficiently even when there is a crazy cold wave.

It looks strange to pay more in summer than in winter honestly. Even when I lived on the Mediterranean coast where summer was super hot the bill was higher in winter. Maybe progresses also have to be made on insulation so people don't have to run their air conditioners all the time, I don't know.

Is saving multiple thousands of dollars worth having no power for 2 days every 10 years? Maybe.

That's a gamble at best. Especially considering the cost of healthcare in the U.S. Or funerals.

[Sinekein]

You'll notice that it started with the conscious subversive efforts after WW2, which in turn took on a sort of mindless autonomy as it was integrated into society by opportunistic sorts, which peaked around our time. There was tradition and community, as our grandparents were still vital enough to hold it together, and people weren't conditioned specifically to dislike their heritage quite so fully, but it wasn't nearly what our parents had, that golden time of prosperity _and_ coherence.

Then the economic realities of globalism caught up with us, and we've seen the hard reversal from "Fuck the past, be free, be yourself!" to bug-like conformity to nonsensical beliefs. I don't see the atomization of individuals so much as the disintegration of the social structures that kept us in one house. Who advocates for individualism? There's people who say the words, and they're lying. Nobody wants disaffected young men who feel no belonging or purpose to "be individuals."

Citation needed on the superior diversity of previous generations.

As for "disliking your heritage", well that's the bummer when you're the heir of the civilization that ransacked the planet for its own benefit for centuries. Eventually it catches up and it's hard to see your "golden traditions" without the gigantic caveat that they were built on wealth and prosperity that came by, well, screwing over others.

Individually, you might not profit too much, and indeed many white people are struggling right now, but if you want the "golden past" previous generations enjoyed, you need to find some new minority to trample and/or exploit, and apparently not everyone is okay with it anymore. Alternatively, you might debate the validity of a social model that looks like it has been designed in an objectivist laboratory, as such a model, without racial laws to keep minorities in oppressed positions, will eventually lead to someone using you as a stool towards prosperity.

But nowadays, the mere thing of saying, as a white guy, that indeed your kind profited like crazy from colonization, conquests and foreign exploitation marks you with the "mindless SJW seal", even if you don't express guilt or the need to flog yourself in public for crimes committed centuries ago.

But that's communautarism for you. If you build your country so that blacks stay with blacks, whites stay with whites and asians stay with asians, it shouldn't be a surprise that all those groups will unite against each other instead of together in trying times. And the more you perpetuate "notlikeusism", the less likely it is to find some common ground.

[Ragabul]

I don't know, but it's not like there is a shortage of friendly countries in which an event like that occurs every week during winter, whether you look at Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway or Denmark (not saying Iceland because of their geothermy). You don't see their grid breaking down like Texas, so clearly it is possible to winterize efficiently even when there is a crazy cold wave.

Of course it's *possible.* The question again is how worthwhile is it to do that? Here's an informative thread on how heavily infrastructure was impacted: https://twitter.com/arvindpawan1/status ... 7423513603

If you are talking about trying to turn us into Sweden or Minnesota level resiliency to cold, you are basically saying "Okay, Texas, rebuild your entire natural gas extraction, refining, and transmission infrastructure and your whole power grid." And one of the reasons that so much of this stuff is open-sided whereas facilities like this are inside up north is because of overheating in summer.

And I think you are underestimating the climate difference. Again as I pointed out in the main thread the other day, if you draw a line across the Atlantic from Houston, it ends in Southern Morocco. On a whim I looked up the climate of both Gibraltar and Sicily, which are among the most southerly places in Europe and they are neither as hot or as humid as South Texas. It stays over 90 (32 C) with 50%+ humidity for bare minimum of 3 straight months here.

I park my thermostat at around 65-68 degrees in winter with the result that my heater may not come on for weeks at a time. In summer I park it at 72-75 and the AC blows pretty much nonstop from mid May to early October.

Deer season opens in early October and I travel four hours north to the place where I usually hunt. It is not unusual to be hunting in temperatures of high 80s or low 90s even in October.

Maybe Europe has some microclimates around somewhere that is analogous to this, but the closest analogue to the Mediterranean overall in the USA is Southern California which has relentlessly wonderful weather. The climate of the SE USA is closer to that of Southern China.

[Ragabul]

But that's communautarism for you.

Communitarianism is neither intrinsically right nor left wing. It actually has 0 to say about racial segregation as such.

The flagship left wing communitarian argument:



At core, it's a simple (IMO axiomatic) assertion about human nature which to quote the Wikipedia page says:

Communitarianism is a philosophy that emphasizes the connection between the individual and the community. Its overriding philosophy is based upon the belief that a person's social identity and personality are largely molded by community relationships, with a smaller degree of development being placed on individualism. Although the community might be a family, communitarianism usually is understood, in the wider, philosophical sense, as a collection of interactions, among a community of people in a given place (geographical location), or among a community who share an interest or who share a history.[1] Communitarianism usually opposes extreme individualism and disagrees with extreme laissez-faire policies that neglect the stability of the overall community.

Useful image from that same page:



Of course that image is still not perfect because there are such things as right wing cultural defenses of individualism and left wing cultural defenses of communitarianism.

[Ragabul]

Then the economic realities of globalism caught up with us, and we've seen the hard reversal from "Fuck the past, be free, be yourself!" to bug-like conformity to nonsensical beliefs. I don't see the atomization of individuals so much as the disintegration of the social structures that kept us in one house. Who advocates for individualism? There's people who say the words, and they're lying. Nobody wants disaffected young men who feel no belonging or purpose to "be individuals."

To say that people are atomized is not to say they become independent and self-contained. It just means they become listless and lonely. They are bowling alone. Passive atomization is not something that society resists in any meaningful way. Hyper individualism is the actual philosophical construct that preaches the extreme uniqueness and autonomy of the individual creature. Atomization is just a name for the listless, passive state so many find themselves in in modern life. It has roots in economics, technological change, and cultural change all three. Atomization + the philosophical argument of hyper individualism is especially pernicious because on top of being generically lonely and directionless, it also makes people feel like a failure. You are *supposed* to be unique but you are just a generic lonely person. It makes you desperate both for something that gives you company and a sense of self worth.

To go with the young men analogy, society mostly doesn't care if said young man sits around being a passive bum. It only cares if he becomes destructive of the system in some way. He *can* be destructive of the system in some lone wolf rabid dog type way, but more often his atomization opens him up to malignant community in the form of political radicalization, street gangs, or whatever.

This is central to Hannah Arendt's argument for what makes a society susceptible to totalitarianism. People become atomized. It is only when they have been passively atomized and cut off from ties that bind them from others that they become willing (even eager) for the state to start building a massive infrastructure of group integration.

Also, an essay on the topic of "Western culture" vs "universal culture" that is pertinent here.

How the West Was Won People mix them up.

Done with thread spam for now.

[Sinekein]

Communautarism is not Communitarianism.

"Communautarisme" as we use it is the fact that people identify with a given ethnic or religious subgroup before they identify as a citizen of the country.

You are not "American", you are "White/Black/African/Latinx/Asian/Indian/Native/... Evangelist/Jewish/Muslim/Orthodox/... American".

That is the US society. In Europe you mostly find it in rather dysfunctional areas - Catholic/Protestant Irish, or the Balkans. But - at least in Europe - we never say that Omar Sy is "Afro-français" or that Zlatan Ibrahimovic is "Balkano-Swedish". That does not mean that their origins are ignored, just that they do not matter as much for the rest of society.

Of course it's not perfect, and there is a push by both extremes sadly to adopt the US system, but I still find it infinitely preferable.

[Ragabul]

Okay, I had heard of that as a concept in France but didn't know the official word for it.

And I don't disagree with that. It's one reason that while I am philosophically and temperamentally a conservative, I end up being a generic liberal in practice a lot of the time because generic old-school Enlightenment liberalism is pretty much the best system humans have invented yet to prevent us from murdering each over mostly stupid differences. Liberalism is really terrible at a lot of things but it's actually pretty good at that.

I strongly believe that humans are highly tribal and we *need* group identity to thrive but we are also remarkably flexible and adaptive in what "group identity" can mean so it's a strong argument for using that instinct in positive ways to forge a common identity across mostly stupid differences instead of doubling down on the stupid differences.

[Ragabul]

I started reading this now. This is a topic I know absolutely nothing about and it isn't one I really do much reading in. I don't even remember how I stumbled across it or found it interesting enough to add to my to-read list, but since it's one of the more time sensitive ones (being about cutting edge warfare) and gets more obsolete the longer it sits around, I bumped it to the front of the queue.

The premise is apparently something like "our military equipment/strategy is highly outclassed by China because it's dedicated to a last century understanding of war and China is focusing on mobile, high tech techniques to render conventional approaches inert."

[Alienmorph]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgjWT0Tgj6c

Again... this woman said a lot of stupid shit I disagree with, but this is messed-up.

[Vol]

Citation needed on the superior diversity of previous generations.

"Diversity" is a poisoned term, so let's say a greater breadth of individual behavior and belief was tolerated by the dominant culture.

As for "disliking your heritage", well that's the bummer when you're the heir of the civilization that ransacked the planet for its own benefit for centuries. Eventually it catches up and it's hard to see your "golden traditions" without the gigantic caveat that they were built on wealth and prosperity that came by, well, screwing over others.

As opposed to what? Everyone else is the heir of civilizations that ransacked the planet for their own benefits for centuries, built on the wealth and prosperity that came about by screwing over others, but weren't able to beat my ancestors. What is the standard for "disliking your heritage" that all people of all places should adhere to?

Individually, you might not profit too much, and indeed many white people are struggling right now, but if you want the "golden past" previous generations enjoyed, you need to find some new minority to trample and/or exploit, and apparently not everyone is okay with it anymore. Alternatively, you might debate the validity of a social model that looks like it has been designed in an objectivist laboratory, as such a model, without racial laws to keep minorities in oppressed positions, will eventually lead to someone using you as a stool towards prosperity.

There is no way to go back. The structures have been subverted and/or destroyed, and there no longer exists enough living people to have a go at recreating the past, nor should we. We have to learn from the past to avoid the mistakes, and clearly in America, the creeping rot was not foreseen by the Founders. Either they did not anticipate, or could not implement strong enough safeguards, to handle a situation like today.

In my fantasy world, we'd recreate America from the basic principles and documents they left us, but hardened against what we've seen go wrong. And in a few centuries, that would become corrupted too, and require another renewal. As Raga pointed out, western liberalism is as of yet the best, functional system we've invented for the common good. And as opposed to the inevitable civil war or conquest that herald needed reform in other systems, ours seem to need a periodic shut down and cleaning off the cogs to keep the machine running smoothly.

But nowadays, the mere thing of saying, as a white guy, that indeed your kind profited like crazy from colonization, conquests and foreign exploitation marks you with the "mindless SJW seal", even if you don't express guilt or the need to flog yourself in public for crimes committed centuries ago.

But that's communautarism for you. If you build your country so that blacks stay with blacks, whites stay with whites and asians stay with asians, it shouldn't be a surprise that all those groups will unite against each other instead of together in trying times. And the more you perpetuate "notlikeusism", the less likely it is to find some common ground.

If you added the caveat of, "as everyone else did or would have if they could," it would be a far more agreeable claim. In addition, you're using the philosophy created by those same people to condemn them. Presumably, if they had not profited, conquered, and exploited, and thus achieved the success and power to pontificate on those actions, that belief system wouldn't exist. Unless you're a moral objectivist, I don't want to assume. But I'm of the opinion that "original sin" has a very specific, theological meaning, and secular moral culpability is not transferred through blood.

It would be quite nice if everyone could pull together, share common beliefs in philosophy and social norms, and that race would be largely reduced to a cosmetic feature. Essentialists are in control of American culture now, sadly, so we're actively moving away from that sort of unity.

*atomization*

I don't largely disagree with any of that then. I truly believe that because of the actions of today, the US is heading towards totalitarianism of one flavor or another. We're running janky, third party software on the OS of our republic, it functions just enough to not constantly crash.

National Guard are still garrisoning DC by the way.

[Mobius_118]

\

National Guard are still garrisoning DC by the way.

Maybe, just maybe, trump supporters encouraged by the former president shouldn't have tried to kill Congress.

Just saying. Inciting an insurrection tends to cause the NG to stick around.

[Sinekein]

"Diversity" is a poisoned term, so let's say a greater breadth of individual behavior and belief was tolerated by the dominant culture.

According to your perception, because you probably singularize various conservative behaviors and beliefs, while you aggregate many progressive behaviors and beliefs as some kind of monolith. It is more of a shift than a loss.

As opposed to what? Everyone else is the heir of civilizations that ransacked the planet for their own benefits for centuries, built on the wealth and prosperity that came about by screwing over others, but weren't able to beat my ancestors. What is the standard for "disliking your heritage" that all people of all places should adhere to?

Not all, no. Native Americans, Australian aboriginals, Pygmies, Polynesians are among the people coming to mind whose society relied on something else than ransacking the planet. Even Northmen, for all the Viking imagery, were not too keen on populating countries themselves - they conquered but more often than not were more than happy to let the locals go as they please as their subjects.

So saying "Western Europeans were just better at it" is just straight up bullshit. They perfected an unnecessary art. You don't always have to expand, conquer and eliminate to thrive. The Japanese people would still be an amazing civilization to look at even without their 1850-1945 expantionism.

In my fantasy world, we'd recreate America from the basic principles and documents they left us, but hardened against what we've seen go wrong. And in a few centuries, that would become corrupted too, and require another renewal. As Raga pointed out, western liberalism is as of yet the best, functional system we've invented for the common good. And as opposed to the inevitable civil war or conquest that herald needed reform in other systems, ours seem to need a periodic shut down and cleaning off the cogs to keep the machine running smoothly.

That was a system that worked for an extremely specific, even unique time in history: large swaths of land populated by nomatic societies to claim, no one to feel indignant when said nomads "disappeared", extremely lax control of homelands due to backwards technology, and the eye of the world pretty focused on European land. Also a couple of World Wars that allowed the industry to thrive without having to pay a significant toll both in human lives or in infrastructure damage.

You cannot "recreate" all of that. Like all thriving civilizations, the U.S. profited from fate, it was not inherently better designed than others. It cannot be perpetuated on the hopes that the planets will align again in the same way.

And honestly - the hands-off approach of the Founding Fathers worked in an era of bountiful resources and, again, ton of new land to claim. Now that said land has been claimed, I'm not sure the most libertarian states in the country exactly are the wealthiest and most successful. And I don't think it's a coincidence.

If you added the caveat of, "as everyone else did or would have if they could," it would be a far more agreeable claim. In addition, you're using the philosophy created by those same people to condemn them. Presumably, if they had not profited, conquered, and exploited, and thus achieved the success and power to pontificate on those actions, that belief system wouldn't exist. Unless you're a moral objectivist, I don't want to assume. But I'm of the opinion that "original sin" has a very specific, theological meaning, and secular moral culpability is not transferred through blood.

Again, not all societies throughout history have worked this way. There are many examples of tolerant rulers benefitting from letting people interact with each other. You had golden ages like this in Persia, in Moor Spain, in Norman Italy - so it's not like you need a specific religion or cultural background to manage it, it's mostly a question of individual mindsets.

And the inability to change and adapt to the evolution of society has been the cause of the fall of all powerful civilizations. And the most long-lasting ones tend not to be the most rigid either.

It would be quite nice if everyone could pull together, share common beliefs in philosophy and social norms, and that race would be largely reduced to a cosmetic feature. Essentialists are in control of American culture now, sadly, so we're actively moving away from that sort of unity.

And sadly, they seem to be in control of both sides.