randomc

They did make the attempt though, and religiosity jsut sort of morphed. Is it so unreasonable to suggest that even in a true atheist society, people who are disposed toward religiosity will also be disposed toward ceding autonomy to institutions other than religions, such as governments?

If prevalence of belief in a supernatural agent is low, it's an atheistic society isn't it? But the transition to atheism was a peripheral thing in communism even in principle, so could definitely make too much of it. In terms of religiosity i don't suppose there was much of a decline outside of party members anyway. I just thought communism might be an example that there could be some parallel in atheistic society to religiosity in terms of the extent people are prepared to invest in group consensus, and that it might be difficult to deal with.

Communism attempted a transition from majority religious to majority atheist society. That it failed doesn't mean all atheist societies must, but it's pretty much the only reference we have for such a transition. Communism was atheistic in principle, but in practise religiosity reared up again in the form of personality cults. Religiosity is in part the outcome of the motivation to pool decision making, particularly moral decision making. This motivation will exist with or without religion, and is likely to be exploited for power in an atheist society, as in communism. The transition taking place now differs significantly from the communist attempt in that we have a far better quality of life; religiosity is strongly linked to poverty. I suppose this implies the motivation to pool decision making declines as well so maybe less of a problem. Even so, i think it's going to be necessary to find a way to make sure the state can't exploit morality for power - moral authority needs to be kept seperate from exucutive authority. that's what the commies failed to do.

Denmark and Sweden can't have been significantly non-religious for more than a couple of generations, so the most you could assert as strong fact is that atheistic societies needn't immediately decline into chaos. The decline of the institutional structure supplied by religion will take longer than decline of belief itself. I think the absence of religion has only really been put to the test in communism, where it seemed to get sucked into the state and reincarnated as personality cults.

If you start from the premise that people tend to cede moral decision making to group consensus, it follows that the concept of god comes from morality - i.e. god is a personification of group moral authority (ignoring some other bells and whistles attached to the idea of god). I don't know whether this is another discussion, but, religion seems to occupy what in some sense is an office of moral authority, in the same sort of sense that a president or PM occupies an office of state administration. The office itself is far more important than the entity that fills it. What worries me is that this office of moral authority could be subsumed into the office of sovereignty, and if you're prepared to accept the intial premise of this post, that people tend to cede moral decision making to group consensus, this seems likely, if the office of moral authority is not either filled or restructured somehow.

Aha, you're arguing against the notion that law/morality in the US is based on christianity, which presumably some people claim is the case. Excuse me. I emphasised the law bit while you meant to emphasise the morality aspect.

"morality", "objective", "subjective" - words so steeped in connotation that we're just guessing what we each mean when we use them. Anyway, for me, specific moral rules are simply a product of our capacity to reason. Moral behaviour is to some extent innate, in the sense that we are by our nature not capable of entirely not giving a fuck about each other. I don't know that law in America or elsewhere in the "west" depends on revealed knowledge. Why do you think it does?

Did you find that this was attainable without any kind of institution? Groups of people seem to create mini-institutions around morality/codes of conduct whatever the circumstances, so i think institutions governing moral behaviours are not so much necessary as inevitable.

If secular morality is to really serve people i think maybe it would be necessary to make an institution of it. For e.g., how does secular morality provide counsel for people? Trying to balance individual autonomy and societal well-being during some moral crisis can be difficult, and secular morality provides very little in the way of support networks, counseling, that sort of stuff. Needs to be an institution, a place people can go to, a banner to gather around (for community cohesion, and that sort of thing). Something more than just vids on youtube trolling existing institutions.

What facts?

That's a crappy definition of life because it places the origin at the big bang. It equates life with just any other stuff.

Yes, evolution should be taught. As to the analogy with physics/mechanics, i worked as a fitter for close to a decade and never knew for e.g. kepler's law. Did this affect my competence? i mean, at all? Not really. Dammit, i meant in trems of knowledge.

Muslims just wants us to become them, though, they don't actually want to destroy anything. With christianity dead in Europe maybe Islam is the best thing for us... people need moral authority, and it seems to me that that moral authority shouldn't be in the hands of the state. Wasn't that why church and state were seperated in the first place? To disseminate power? Isn't that the basic function of democracy, to disseminate power? In the abscence of any other moral authority islam will do. Islam is just christianity 2.0 anyway.

How much physics does a mechanic need to fix a car? EVolution and medicine can't be so different.

there were some muslim med students in the uk not so long ago who won an internal dispute with their univerisity over non-attendance of evolution classes.

I was brought up atheist and i've never really experienced religion but for vague teenage dalliances. What this means is that i deny god not because i have reasoned carefully about it, but because existential god concepts largely just bore me; they are uninteresting. So am i broken? I suppose i must be if religious people are because they don't reason about it.

I dunno, seems like there are still quite a lot of religious people around. I don't think it matters either way. Populations will create moral truths with or without religion, and these truths will likely always be arbitrarily defined. The more interesting question here is the association of morality with authority. That some people tend to make this association and some tend not to seems an intractable social problem to me. It will survive an end of religion, i think.

The fact that the bible contradicts itself so much shows that christian morality is not intended to be invariable. There are different mores for different times, and God's representatives interpret as appropriate. For as long as people follow them, they are moral authority and they legitimately define moral truths. OK, as far as i know, moral behaviour defines very little in the way of specifics. Specific moral truths are arbitrarily defined societal constructs, they are a contract really, an agreement. Therefore, that religion is subordinate to moral behaviour is entirely moot. Defining specific moral truths is a part of moral behaviour, religion is simply a means of definition. The evolutionary function of moral behaviour can be considered to be such things as social cohesion, cooperation, etc, and so really systems of moral definition, such as religion, succeed or fail on the basis of selective advantage and not the correspondence of their rationalizations with reality. It doesn't matter how objectively true these constructs are, only that they succeed. Christianity has been very successful, and what reason is there to suppose that it wouldn't continue to be?

This is scripture and not religion. If a senior person within an influential church were actually to endorse your strawman, you might then have a leg to stand on.

The only issue religion addresses with any authority is morality. The other issues you present are outside of it's purview. Evidence suggests moral emotions define categories of behaviour in which moral sanction of some sort always exists. But since this does not lead to actual specific moral truths, religion is arguably as good a moral compass as any. Reason is another good one. If morality is defined in terms of harm and potential for harm, a balance between personal liberty and social cohesion should be possible without too much need for authoritative edict. For example; running a gas-guzzling vehicle instead of something more fuel efficient involves a potential for harm to the environment and therefore to people in general. So running such a vehicle without good justification can be considered immoral. I would say use of such a vehicle by a haulage company involves good justification, whereas recreational use does not. Morality could maybe just be reduced to risk analysis altogether, i don't know.

How could i possibly direct you to anything other than cod psychology? That's exactly what is used to support the notion that gender is entirely a social construct. Gender feminism being the lunatic fringe i mentioned. Unless you mean you want to be directed to evidence of difference? I don't disagree. Gender feminism is nevertheless still bullshit. The opposing view would appear to be in fact your view, assuming that by 'not a straightforward proposition' you mean 'not very well supported by evidence'... "it is not a straightforward proposition to say that men and women are entirely similar apart from societal barriers." ...it's just obfuscated by your pandering to gender feminism. Unless, that is, you are actually advocating gender feminism? I just think your position is slanted. That is all i'm pointing out. I'm not asking you to be strident, just straightforward.

Is it really necessary to mince quite as gracefully as that around the fact that men and women are different? Surely it's only the lunatic fringe of feminist theory that claims otherwise, and such pandering just lends an undeserved legitamacy.

Seems like any definition of altruism first requires an absolute determination of self, i.e it must be assumed that the self is capable of being determined without variation so that the concept of altruism means anything. All organisms with agency (motor, reproductive, whatever) must determine self in order that agency can be advantageous in terms of natural selection, so it seems like self must be far more fundamental in biology in general than is human conscious awareness of self. But even if biologically determined self must exist in all creatures that possess agency, surely how that determination is made can't be assumed to be uniform across all species. I can't think of any reason why the self in social species should be limited to an individual organism; why couldn't a biological determination of self be extended to include kin or wider groups? So then altruism is redundant as a concept because it relies on a definition of self that is limited to the individual. An absolute definition of self in which self is reduced to such a precise unit of self-hood seems wrong to me - For e.g., myself now, myself tommorow, myself in ten years - seem to be continuous concepts. They are not an extension of some unit that self-hood can be reduced to, rather self-hood is the product of all of them. Likewise; me, my family, my friends, my community - it seems very plausible to reduce 'self' to the individual as the unit of self-hood, but i don't see that a biologically determined concept of self in social species would necessarily be that inflexible. So is it possible tha rather than altruism, we've a variable determination self-hood?

My source for the autism link with mating systems is this paper. While the authors aknowledge that it is speculative, it does appear to give a really good explanation for the increasingly documented population variations in the epidemiology of autism and psychosis. I know i'm piling wild speculation on reasonable speculation by claiming our dynamic mating system is integral to our species rather than a product of culture, but i just wanted to see what people made of it. Is it implausible, highly improbable, fatally flawed in some way? It's fascinating that the renaissance period in Italy was characterized not just by it's art, but also by an appaernt surge in promiscuity. Schizotypal 'disorders' have been (strongly?) linked wiith creativity, and also mating intelligence. The correlation is striking in light of the paper i linked. Also, the enlightenment period and all it's scientific output correlates with the spread of puritanism, and if the sexual selection hypothesis of the epidemiology of autism is correct, it all amounts to an explanation of how these golden periods of culture come about. I thought a species innate balancing principle between these strongly schizotypal and autistic cultures (if that's what they were) made sense.

Is it plausible that humans have evolved to alternate between monogamy and an effective polygonous system? Recent research seems to me to be building toward an association of schizotypal 'disorders' and autism with sexual selection, either of which would potentially be detrimental under feedback loop conditions. Monogamy would tend to fix autism spectrum traits in a population, which traits have been suggested to involve low mating effort and high paternal investment, whereas effective polygyny would tend to fix schizotypal traits, which conversely have been suggested to involve high mating effort and low paternal investment. There seems to be a trade off in this; a long-term monogamous population with a high representation of autism spectrum traits stands to gain increased social cohesion resulting from relatively low mate competition, but discriminates less about the quality of genes passing to subsequent generations. A long-term effective polygonous population with a high representation of schitzotypal traits gains in genetic fitness, but stands to lose out in social cohesion. So assuming the key variables to be paternal investment (social cohesion) and mating effort (genetic quality), neither monogamy nor effective polygyny make sense over the long term; either on it's own would be detrimental. If these feedback loops significantly affected oUr distant ancestors, an adaption in a population to alternate between mating systems would be a significant advantage over populations that did not alternate. I suppose the most likely adaption would be some response to environmental cues, e.g. maybe female sexual selection preferences vary with observed environmental cues. Or (much) less likely (but quite interesting!) we've evolved a two-cycle in which our mating system is a function of time or age or generations, or something. Anyway, my conjecture is that the current 'sex positive' movement is not an artifact of culture, but a consequence of a natural cyclical adaption that mitigates poor overall genetic quality in a population.