trees101

When you go for a walk, you act as if the earth is flat. When you plan a journey, you act as if the earth is flat. It is a valid approximation that works.

I think that some of the rise of Flat Earth belief, is a rebellion against being told very strange, abstract and foreign things that directly contradict our everyday experience.

In this sense, Flat Earth theory is "true" in a limited Phenomenological sense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg0i-4m2L0g

The word "supernatural" is such a worn-out rut of a word. It invokes paranormal movies or Caspar the friendly ghost. The very dichotomy of supernatural/natural is a recent, post-Enlightenment invention.

What I'm trying to do in this conversation is take something that exists in many people's mental framework, and use it to point to something outside that framework.

"Large groups doing weird things" must have a cause, right? And in an example like Patriarchy, no one claims that there is some king Patriarch sitting on a throne somewhere calling the shots. No, the story goes, Patriarchy is in all of us, even in women, perhaps even professing feminists. Patriarchy has real world effects, it isn't consciously controlled by any one person or group, it lives beyond any individual. According to some versions, Patriarchy is more than an impersonal force, it almost has some kind of malicious agency or intent. So much so that we gave it a name, like we do for conscious agents such as dogs or people.

I'm not trying to suggest that Patriarchy is a spirit, or that religious views of spirituality are exactly the same as feminist interpretations of Patriarchy.

I'm just using something from inside your framework to try to explain something outside your framework, because all the words designed for this purpose are worn out and no longer convey the meaning that they once did.

It also pays to think about the word "natural" and all that it implies. our desires are not simply rational thoughts that independently arrive in our minds - look at the different objects of desire among different cultures. There is no untouchable "natural" desire that is so holy that it should be off limits to regulation.

Religion shouldn't be criticised simply for having a framework for moderating response to desire, and because it offends some sacred cow of "natural" desire.

I think that we live in a time where our understanding of what a spirit is, is very different to what religions traditionally believed. We only think of some kind of ghostly person which might be in some kind of other dimension which science has yet to discover. But I think that the way we think of Patriarchy is actually much closer to the way that a spirit was thought of in the past. It's not exactly the same, and it lacks some aspects, but it is a much better starting point for a secular person to understand what a spirit is, rather than childhood memories of caspar the friendly ghost.

Patriarchy and institutional racism are even ascribed agency, they "want" to hurt people, rather than merely being general forces such as gravity or a fluid flow.

You might think that some people change their values on a whim, but that in fact shows that something like their Self is their top value.

Unless our behaviour was completely random, I don't know how this could be any other way.

If you insist on a citation, I'll refer to St Augustine. Here's a popular culture level article about it https://www.huffpost.com/entry/augustine-sin-quote_n_56980d5...

Without wanting to take sides on any culture war issues, I think that people from any political persuasion will agree that such higher powers do indeed exist.

I put it to you that much talk of "spirits" is far more aligned to the kind of higher power that you already believe in, rather than the dualistic way of seeing spirits as some kind of invisible smoke hiding inside living creatures. This kind of thinking is a curse of our modern age, handed down from the likes of Descartes and the "Enlightenment".

A data packet from a streaming movie is meaningless when you look at the 1's and 0's going over a wire. You have to step back and impose a framework of understanding, protocols and specifications that exist outside of the computer itself, before you can watch the movie. An atheist transistor could never be given "proof" that a movie exists using a sequence of bits. The concept of "movie" exists outside of the world of binary. Religion is to humanity what protocols and specifications are to a stream of binary data. This is frustrating to the types who consider themselves to be rational and fact based, because by definition it cannot be proven within the system. The difficulty for the hard nosed atheist is that all of the most important human questions, including their desire to convert us all to atheists, cannot be accounted for in their reductionist framework. This is usually dealt with by simply ignoring the dissonance.

What you call "religiosity" I would call fundamentalism, and it is a natural human phenomenon which will manifest no matter what the professed religion or non religion of a person.

Human concern about the ultimate questions of life will not go away no matter what religion we ascribe to ourselves. The good thing about formal religion like Christianity, is that it incorporates thousands of years of debates by some of the best minds about these issues. Throwing it away and making these questions ad-hoc or even worse, subconscious, is asking for the serious consequences you alluded to in your comment.

Once you reframe the conversation like this, you realise that there is no such thing as "non religious" people, and in fact denying a religious aspect of life is a form of suppression that could cause damage, because driving the most important questions of life into the subconscious realm makes a person vulnerable to ideological possession, e.g. through politics.

The article contains a "just so" origin story, without any proof, but with a lot of social cues and nods to authorities that are likely to be unquestioningly trusted by the target audience. An actual mythical origin story is told, with lots of handwaving and name dropping, about how we lived in tribes and needed to signal our membership.

Then, in a giant logical leap, the hand-wavy "just so" origin myth is presented as the true reason why we don't have a strict adherence to "facts" as the author thinks we should.

The proper way to understand why facts don't change minds, is to understand that there are no such things as "facts". Our minds carve out blocks of meaning from the sea of chaos in front of us. There could always be a different way to carve up what lies before us. This is not to deny that what in front of us is real, or to claim that we can make up whatever we want. Not at all. But it fails to understand that the reality we see is much more like a mythical or narrative structure at its base. We are completely integrated into it and can't separate ourselves from it.

You can see that what I'm saying is true, by simply examining the article itself. Although it purports to be about "facts", the article is a narrative. It even has a mythical origin story from beyond the mists of time which can't ever be "proven" using "facts".

I don't know what use the article is. Perhaps it can make a certain type of person feel superior as they sit at the family Christmas dinner and silently judge their relatives' differing beliefs as being somehow inferior because they don't meet this imaginary criteria of being "fact" based. How do "facts" even motivate a "fact based" person to want to change someone else's ideas?

The slightest amount of critical thinking shows that we are all deeply immersed in narrative, value judgement and goals. This false concept of "facts" is merely a weapon for a certain worldview in its attempts to coopt other worldviews.

The author uses the story of Odysseus blinding the Cyclops in the cave as an example of techne (guile/cunning), and of the emergence of the self/ego out of the dark, primitive child state. Thrusting a sharpened beam into the Cyclops eye suggests the power of the focused, penetrating individual intellect overcoming an older, perhaps more innocent vision of the world.

There is a parallel between physical mechanical devices and contrivances we make, and devices and contrivances of the mind. The contrivances of the mind are associated with deceit and guile, this also occurs in Homer's greek.

The lame craftsman god Hephaestus is lame, representing the bias that is inevitable with technology, which implements only one aspect of our mental activity.

Technology can "serve as midwife" to the birth of the individual

This midwifery requires a well-calculated balance between the challenges we take on and our self-possession, our wide-awake, conscious resourcefullness.

Technology assists the birth of the individual by separating him from the natural world.

Today, 3K years after Odysseus, the technical world is much bigger and more powerful than wild nature. It is the ravening beast of technology that we must restrain. Techne helped Odysseus escape from anonymity, but today it cocoons us and promises endless entertainment, distraction, freedom from cares.

We are engaged in a continual conversation between what might be called frozen techne and the conscious, living techne within ourselves.

The powers of our minds crystallise almost immediately into gadgetry, we live within a crystal palace indistinguishable from a prison. The machinery we make, this inert cleverness, is the greatest threat to our future.

This essay reminded me of "The Abolition of Man"; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gux4Ldy8cN8

...* distressing and functionally impairing meditation experiences of 60 Western Buddhist meditators. They documented 59 types of adverse effects in their study, including involuntary convulsions, panic, anxiety, dissociation and perceptual hypersensitivity—a far cry from the mainstream branding of mindfulness meditation as a panacea for all our woes.*

I agree with him, but suggest a few further considerations. Wouldn't a truly open minded scientist be forced to consider that the real world impact of religious practice is evidence (not necessarily proof) for the causal effect of something that is outside of empirical measurement? Only a mind that has the improvable a-priori belief in physicalism could reject this possibility. A commitment to physicalism is not itself provable by science, and therefore is merely a religious belief, although it is disguised and subconscious most of the time so we don't notice.

And how does he think that we can decouple the "theology" of the religion from the practices? Could a hall full of strangers start swaying together like in the Jewish Shuckle, feel the same unity felt by the synagogue? What came first, the theology or the swaying? This sounds like a cargo cult mentality, where by imitating the behavior of the rich, you, too can become rich. Even if it worked a little bit, it's hard to imagine that it could become popular or last. I think team sports played in Stadiums is the best imitation we have so far, and even that is only sustained by a narrative ("your" team "battling" an "enemy" team).

It would be interesting to see if an idiosyncratic hodge-podge of different rituals cobbled together from various religions could ever work. As far as I can tell, that is exactly what New Age religion is, and that is far from impressive.

The way forward is to stop and re-think the blind philosophical pre-commitments of our day, which are a slowly eroding set of modernist beliefs from the Enlightenment era. This gave us a dualistic world view, with the complete separation of a "spiritual" and "physical" realm. As science is built to only examine the physical, it naturally produces confirmation bias that there is no "spiritual" and gradually we went from dualism to believing only in the "physical". It is this erroneous background assumption which leads us to misunderstand what scripture even means when it talks about heaven/earth and angels and other "spiritual" beings.

https://thesymbolicworld.com/articles/how-the-scientific-rev...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXOdlIXDsr8&t=0s

I think there are lots of different thinkers with this perspective, here is one concise formulation:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPByuAeFxwE