randomc

Too right! Many of those who criticize religion are anti-religious bigots.

Even science is a religion.

Many religions support the teaching of science however the behaviour of adherents may not always be consistent.

There is clearly double standards going on here.

Oich. Science is not a religion. For example, i am trying to start multiple rows on the unifying theme of human nature. The fact that nobody round here is prepared to take it up is not representative of science generally. This forum is slanted to answer american politics more than scientific inquiry. But this is just a bunch of people, not science.

Oh, and i am an anti-religious bigot, in that i can't be arsed to answer religious truth claims.

Ah, well, i hate everybody so i'll have to take your word for it

I still say tell her something you like about her, rather than how you feel about her. The difference may seem subtle but it's huge.

Or even better, tell her you like something she likes about her. I'm a cynic.

You know what else makes someone less likely to be depressed? Downs Syndrome. Should we work on a way to give it to everyone?

Apparently a spiritual element in our thinking is common to all of us.

That sexual preference is no more entirely biological than gender is.

I was adressing this...

a person is gay or not, one can't encourage it.

which you in no way qualified.

Gender essentialism is slanted. Sexual preference essentialism is slanted.

As far as i remember he was saying if you place (i.e. migration) a child at any age under 12, they'll gain native-like fluency.

"I know that the ability to differentiate unfamiliar phonemes drops off much earlier than that. "

Citation? I'm not disagreeing, just interested.

I do wonder how much, for example sex education and gay-rights awareness etc. at school can be seen as "normalising" gay behaviour to the point of encouragement? I am not saying it is, or that such a thing is right or wrong, just wondering...

Careful now, you live in the UK, right?

You will notice that as long as a baby of any race is in any area of language before the age of about 3 they can speak the language with no accent. They also have the ability to learn multiple languages accentless so long as the exposure time is early enough as well as ongoing for much of their live's.

The age suggested in Pinker's book is 12 for native-like fluency.

i suppose the flip side of that is that a believer is more likely to ignore inconvenient facts. I prefer nuts-and-bolts politicians .

I don't suppose it's starkly different elsewhere, just less pronounced.

 

It's not that he doesn't have the courage of his convictions, it's that he has no convictions at all. He's Renault from Casablanca "I have no conviction, if that's what you mean. I blow with the wind, and the prevailing wind happens to be from Vichy."

I don't understand that. What's automatically superior about a conviction poilitician, a believer? It's a peculiarly american political thing, at least from my perspective, a faith in faith.

In general, a trait might be selected and sustained in a sub-population in the short term by environmental conditions, but over the long term there'll be a regression to genotypic mean when selection differential disappear, unless canalization.

There's no reason to suppose that this doesn't apply also to at least some behavioral traits, and the epidemiology of conditions such as psychopathy and autism provide some evidence that this is the case (?).

So culture can be affected by phenotypic expression of deviations from genotypic mean?

Oligarchy is rule by the few - and I think the EU manages to avoid this tag in many ways; the power is founded through the member states and their elected representatives and governments (all the member states are democratic), the executive is appointed by the member states, a directly elected parliament have controlling powers/veto over the executive, and susstantive changes need to be ratified by the individual parliaments a/o governments of member states.

I don't know what to say to you, i don't feel like i've got a shred of influence over what happens in the EU. Anything that's rejected just seems to get put the vote again and again until accepted. Who are the people who introduce policy for the vote? Are they elected or civil servants?

The EU is far from perfect - but the fact that one of the largest media organisations in the world is deadset against it and yet the most common complaint in the press is about bananas (and even that isn't really accurate) , shows in my opinion that a large amount of the work done by the EU is pretty good.

Tito did a lot of good work. It's the office that matters not what fills it.

An idea exists only in the mind; The EU exists in reality Europe. I believe the de facto headquarters are in Brussels which if you are so inclined you can visit. Unlike an idea, the EU can and does take action, just like a person does.

Yeah it does, but how representative is it? I'm not a particularly ardent europhobe, i just think there's a disconnect. Maybe an oligarchy.

EDIT: But ok to call it just an idea is too much

the EU is still just an idea. Might as well award the Nobel Peace Prize to peace, generally.

I don't know how true that is, but it seems plausible to me that churches, or any organisation really, would more likely reform for self-protection than any other reason. Kinda cynical, but incentives of self-interest always seems to win out over other incentives. So a slow reforming church is better in terms of preserving whatever it is in the influence of a church that is useful to a society.

Actually I think there is a third option that no one seems to ever hit on and that is that god, or religion at least, is completely man made and the bible reflects the morals of the time it was written. I think the real disconnect occurred when religion was first written down.

 

Before it was written down the stories about god changed as the morals and needs of the times changed, story tellers could change the story to please the locals and to reflect changes that were occurring, but once it became "carved in stone" there was no wiggle room the stories were the same everytime and if you tried to tell a story different it could easily be shown to be different than last time.

 

Why can't the story tellers change the story even today? I mean, if, for example, there was a flaw in the institutional structure of a church that could be identified as a cause of conflict between clergy and followers, and if some convenient document showed up that legitimised change, the church would use it, right? Even the most conservative church is capable of reform.

 

Myths told about god and what he wanted reflected the wants and needs of the people until this disconnect happened. After that religion became more of a grindstone around the necks of the people, locking them into behaviors that may or may not have net the needs of the people.

 

This is what i find fascinating about religion; which institutions were nurturing and which superfluous. I suppose you'd need a complete understanding of human nature to answer such questions. The difficulty providing answers lends legitimacy to general social conservatism.

i think this video displays this quite well, things that we immediately see as immoral in our modern society are obviously written down in the bible as being the law of god. People who are religious either ignore the things they don't want to believe or they do their best to make non believers turn more toward the fundamentalist view.

 

I think it's important to point out the logical moral disconnect between what the bible says and what people think it says or want to believe it says...

Probably you're right.

Okay...

"How do we know God exists?"

"The bible says so."

"Well, how do we know the Bible is true?"

"It's inspired by God, and anything inspired by Him must be righteous and true." (said hitlers supporters, btw)

Okay...

"Exactly how long is a meter?"

"The distance light travels travels en vacuo in 1/299792458 of a second." "Well, exactly how much time is a second?"

"The time it takes for light to travel en vacuo 299792458 meters."

Okay...Nothing can really be defined. Only in relation can anything have understandable meaning.

 

You're almost making a point, but i'm not religious so the frame your argument isn't all that interesting to me.

Yah, more scripture is religion nonsense. You will need to provide evidence that the bible is the actual word of Christ.

EDIT: why assume religion is a set of truth claims? Why not assume that religion, at least successful religion, is a set of cultural innovations?

Seem, suppose, think, I have it... All these support that this is a matter of opinion.

That's just the way i talk.

Can anyone here explain why it isn't okay to eat puppies? Without claiming they are sentient? Sentience is, once again, a matter of opinion in this case. No one can know for sure if puppies are sentient, except, of course, a sentient puppy.

Therefore the sanction against you i can justify is limited. As is sanction against women to terminate pregnancy. The autonomy of women to terminate pregnancy, on the other hand, can be well justified.

OK,OK, try this: assume moral relativism.

A principle moral 'faculty' (might not be such a good way to put it, but, onward) is that of fairness. So in any circumstance in which sanction is considered on a moral basis, that sanction must be justified in order to be fair sanction.

The quality of a justification is a philosophical issue and not a moral one, so moral relativism needn't apply in selecting our framework for justification, but fairness should dictate that we pick the framework best suited to arbitrating moral differences. Obviously reason is better than gut-reaction in this.

I suppose since moral relativism is assumed you could still simply say fairness isn't all that important to you, but you definitely do have that faculty so would be a dodge.

Most people would say that puppies are cute, not sentient. I don't find puppies to be sentient. Wish as you might, logic is not evidence. If you were raised in a society that used ground puppies as it's food source, you would find it highly logical, and morally correct. Logic and reason, or at least your ideas of logic and reason, seem to be very subject to cultural and personal bias. Why does intelligence make something above being eaten? That's not how nature works. Any natural species physically able to would gladly munch down a human baby or two, if it was hungry for meat.

The puppy-eating issue seems to fall largely in the context of purity or sanctity, which is probably the most from-the-gut moral faculty hence relative to indivduals and cultures (i don't eat veal BTW; not an ethical position, i just can't get it down). But i don't think moral relativism is particularly applicable in other moral contexts, such as harm or autonomy.

I suppose you could argue that insisting on grounding morality in reason and evidence is unessential, therefore relative. But then you've wandered out of moral relativism and into metaphysical relativism, and you run into the contradiction that if relativism then all postulates not true therefore relativism not true.

Anyway, i think morality is most usefully defined and debated whithin the framework of reason and evidence, and moral relativism has validity in some but only some contexts.

To the thread topic, the pro-life position falls in the context of sanctity, and arguments for autonomy don't supercede those of sanctity on this issue when it comes to my personal morality. When it comes to legality, i have it the other way around, any position based on sanctity is a highly relative gut response whereas autonomy can be objectively grounded and considered universal even with dissenters. The dissenters are just wrong.

 

What is making us so stupid?

Effective birth control? Two/three generations of a true monogamous mating system rather than the effective mild polygny resulting from traditional monogamy-with-infidelity style reproduction. Got to have an effect eventually.

 

Swansont is not the only one playing this nasty game of baiting people, leading a person to believe a sincere request for information has been made, when in fact the moderator, and several of the posters, are only for an excuse to attack.

I hope you don't include me in that. I asked you a question because your ideas are interesting, even if a bit inappropriately expressed for a forum that's focused on establishing facts. Which isn't to say that my style of posting is any more appropriate.

I am editing to connect what said here with what others are saying about institutions. Government is about governing, and it is an institution. There are different forums of government. Most governments are some combination of democracy and autocracy.

 

Democracy begins with two questions. First a question about the gods. "How do the gods who quarrel among each other resolved their differences?" The answer is, they argue until there is a consensus on the best reasoning.

 

The second question is," To whom does give His authority"? The answer is, He gives it to everyone. None of us have more authority than another, however, we all have different abilities and different natures, and this answer goes with the first question about how the gods resolve their differences. When we all come together with our different points of view and different abilities, and argue until we have a consensus on the best reasoning, we are imitating the gods, and this is called politics. It is rule by reason, as opposed to rule by brute force, or I suppose rule by fear and superstition. It is in our nature to be political creatures and to live by rule by reason.

 

We can also turn to science and see it is in our nature to be moral. Instinctively we have a conscience, and we have mirror neurons that inform us about others, and help us make moral decisions. When we know, dumping in the river is bad for the river and the life in the river and bad for the people down stream who drink from the river, we can not dump in it without feeling guilty of wrong doing, and we become aware of wanting to be sure someone else does not comment this wrong, against us, so we form governments for our protection. Knowledge, and conscience, effect our moral decision making. I think our best approach to understanding our morality and the breakdown in morality, is science and reason. We should come to the table with the best science of our nature, and nature in general, that is available to us.

 

However, as some of you may have noticed, democracy is also about understanding the gods. Oh I know this is not "technologically correct", because these gods are not real beings, but the stories come with great wisdom and serve as an excellent foundation for discussion.

http://ancienthistor...heuspandora.htm

 

Being a secular society does not have to mean a society with no wisdom, and this is what we tend to be lacking today. Being technologically correct, is too separated from wisdom, and this is the problem we need to resolve, because just being smart is not good enough. We also need wisdom, and unlike all those before us, we can easily access all the wisdom of the world, and use it. The problem I see here is, an unwillingness to do that. Education has lead us to believe all we need is technological correctness, and this education has not prepared us for wisdom, or to even value wisdom.

 

You can certainly educate to provide tools for moral reasoning and decision making, but how do you motivate people to actually use these tools? A powerful and lasting appeal to emotion, conscience, would be needed, and i doubt any educational system can provide that.

That's the cultural innovation that i would want to see retained from religion, an institution that appeals to emotion thus motivating people to listen to conscience.

So, rapid (which you define as a few generations) political change is too quick for the inevitable descent into atheistic chaos when the examples are modern Denmark and Sweden, but rapid change turning into chaos is valid evidence with regards to Nazi Germany and the USSR?

I don't think i argued for an inevitable decline.

I didn't mention nazis or germany either, and any reference to the ussr was at most implied. I just thought communism might be an interesting case study for societies movining toward majority atheism. Which isn't to say that communism failed because of atheism, or even that it was truly an athesitic society (i tacitly assumed so occasionaly in earlier posts which was incorrect). There was a restructuring of critical institutions, and i think any society moving from religious to atheist will quite likely undergo some such restructuring.

Denmark and Sweden hasn't yet, so i don't see them as a useful guide, a couple of generations is not enough time to consider them successful atheist societies. OK, so they are much better examples of atheistic society than communism, in the sense that they are in fact athesitic societies whereas communist weren't really. I'm contradicting what i said in other posts but they were already a mess of contradictions and non-sequiturs anyway, so yeah.

Even if these were good examples, you'd still be cherry picking the data.

I'm not trying to show that atheist society is inherently inferior/superior, just to think about what some of the changes might be in order to make a success of it. Religiosity is declining what with better education and better standards of living regardless.