Sorry for the silence, "real life" etc... :) > I hear people say stuff like "God for me is Nature" all the time. Don't > you? > > No, I don't. But if I did, I'd take it as metaphor, "I worship nature." I > hear people say, "Time is money." and "Valentino Rossi is a motorcycle god." > but I don't take them literally.
Some people worship nature in some sense, but most of the time when people say that god for them is nature, they mean that transcendental reality is nature itself. This is a very common position in Europe, perhaps not so much in the US, I don't know. You are right that there are also metaphors, of course. I'll give you two examples. Yesterday I listened to a presentation by a mathematician who is working on a very abstract model of knowledge discovery. She kept saying "god knows" for the set of truths in her system that are not accessible to humans within their limited viewpoints. This seems to be an intuitive sense of the word -- some entity that transcends the reality we can observe. My second example is this song by Nick Cave (who, I assume, is not secretly following this mailing list): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG0-cncMpt8 You only need the first sentence. He says he does not believe in an "interventionist god". What could he mean? > I think you have jumped over millenia of human experience to arrive at > industrial age angst. I wasn't referring to 'miracles' of nature. Miracles > can only exist in contrast to a mechanistic model of un-miracleous nature. You can look at existence itself as a miracle. Or not. I will spare you the famous Einstein quote. Nowadays religiously-inclined people point to qualia themselves. "Look around you, how can you see all this and not believe in god?". I am not saying that this is a good argument (I don't "believe" in any god), but I am open to the possibility of transcendence, and this is what they are appealing to. They are using god in the sense that you reject as bait. Once again, this seems intuitive to them. > Fear of hell is an invention of the priesthood. Primitive religions, and > even Judaism, don't teach punishment in an afterlife. It seems to have been > invented by Zoroaster; who at least made the punishment limited. Yes, but fear of hell is just one example. There is also karma, divine retribution etc. The game theoretical approach of religion seems to rely on some cognitive features that are universal to humans. Animist religions appears independently all around the globe, and then evolved into their own branches, but there are universal. It is hard to believe that evolution does not play a role here. > I think you have the cause and effect backwards. Agriculture made > civilization possible - tribes didn't have to move and so could build > cities. Religion adapted by going from explaining nature to explaining why > the city had to be ordered around certain principles of behavior and > ownership, and why there was a leader who the gods would favor in war with > other cities. I don't think it's a good idea to see these hyper-complex systems in terms of linear chains of cause and effect. Religion adapted to civilization and civilization to religion. Some aspects of religion helped agriculture, some aspects of agriculture changed religion. The point is: humans seem to need some unifying narrative and religion historically provides it. My point is not to defend religion, but to recognise that some basic human needs need to be met. Look at how old soviet or nazi propaganda looks so much like something a religious cult could come up with. Why? > People had no prisoner's dilemma when they lived in tribes. If you didn't > cooperate you'd be ejected from the tribe. Not really. Ethnografies tell a much more complex and richer story. > Existential crises result from > questions about "meaning" and "purpose" which were invented along with > religions. All good marketers know that to sell something you first create > a demand for it. Religion did not come out of any centralised effort. It seems to appear naturally anywhere there is a group of humans. Claiming that religion invented existencial angst seems quite bold to me... > > People don't lose sleep at night because they don't know how the wind > works, > > > For millenia they lost sleep worrying about whether a storm would kill their > flock or blow away their tents. > > they lose sleep because they feel that they are unimportant or > that their lives are meaningless. > > > Only since they became comfortable and secure from the wind. Worshiping wind god did not solve the wind problems, but people still did it. Can they not learn from past mistakes? Perhaps, but it is also possible that attributing these events to some transcendental entity helps them process them. Take funerals. Surely people know that funerals will not bring their loved ones back to live, and yet most cultures do them in some for or another. They are trying to process their own experiences in a way that saves them from despair. > And the religionist, trying to keep their comfort and influence, keep > fuzzing up the target and spreading it out because it's center keeps getting > hit by facts. That is true, but it might be a good idea to not be so hard on them. I still feel that the (modern) catholic church is much better than ISIS. > So they get really annoyed > when one enters into such nuanced discussions of what people mean by > "god". > > > Listen to any preacher in any religion and tell me how often he says God is > to give meaning to your life...and that meaning is to serve God. Even to > write it out is to show how ridiculous it is. Not any religion for sure. What you are describing is essentially judaic-christian religions. A zen buddhist will tell you nothing of the sort. And before you tell me they have no god: they just remain silent about it, because they claim there is no reason for one to worry about that. Maybe it exists, maybe it doesn't, in any case it is unknowable (quite close to the definition I started with) so it doesn't matter. Again, I am not saying that I agree with the zen buddhists (I will admit I like some of their views), what I am saying is that you are operating on a very narrow cultural territory. > How so? The atheists I know are all of Hume's opinion, "Belief should be > proportioned to the evidence." Are you saying that human nature demands > fairy tales? I don't think so and I know a lot of humans to prove it. To a degree, I do think human nature demands fairy tales. It is possible to have a healthy or unhealthy relationship with them. Take Star Wars again: why is it so popular? And yet, the vast majority of people realize that it is pure fiction. > But will you resist them spreading beliefs that imply you should live a > certain way? Yes, I will argue against them. > The authors of the Holy Inquisition were quite rational and > humane. Given the terrible torture that awaited anyone who died in unbelief > it was perfectly justified to burn heretics at the stake less they spread > false beliefs. Yes, the holy inquisition is a rational response to absurd beliefs. The same can be said of fundamentalist evangelic sects or ISIS. The stupid beliefs should be argued against -- as I said before, we are in agreement on the important stuff, I think. > > What I won't do is pretend that religion was not evolutionarily > selected *because it helps the species survive*. > > > Certainly at the level of civilization it helped some cities prevail over > others. I don't see how you can maintain the religion of Australian > aborigines or Aztecs or ISIS helps humans survive as a species. I know very little about Australian aborigines. Can you say what you're referring to? ISIS is both fascinating and horrifying. I think, in part, it explores the religious instinct, but evolution is very slow and human culture has been changing too rapidly for evolutionary fixes to show up at our time scales. It is also a very complex situation. How does some guy with a western education, raised in a liberal democracy, decide to join a movement such as ISIS? I do not think anyone has the full answer, but I would say it is something that superficially looks very medieval, but it is also very modern in a sense. For example, there are good reasons to think that ISIS is a product of the internet. > You've bought into the myth of religionists that without God we will be at > one another's throats - yet that is exactly where religion puts us. As > Voltaire said, "Man will cease to commit atrocities only when he ceases to > believe absurdities." No, I am against organised religion and I don't really care what people call god: I am just arguing with you that people do not have such a narrow definition of god as you claim. I do believe that humans need a reason for not killing themselves, and that that is something that science and technology can not fully provide. Our big neocortices are both a blessing and a curse: on one hand they allow us to ask question about reality, on the other hand they allow us to ask questions about reality. I frequently envy my cat. > We are > possibly witnessing the early stages of collapse of western > civilisation because too many people find no meaning in their lives, > no sense of belonging to anything at all and no reason to cooperate. > > We cooperate because if I help you and you help me we can both achieve more > of goals than if we each acted alone. Of course that assumed we have goals > beyond just cooperating or serving someone else (however divine). As George > Carlin quipped, "If we're here to serve other people, what are those other > people here for?" > > It seems to turn out that a society can't run on money- and status- > seeking alone. We are so smart that we figured out that the gods are > bullshit, but unfortunately not smart enough to solve that one... > > > You may think you need God to give your life meaning, but ask yourself what > that meaning would be? If it's not your meaning then what use is it? Would > it give your life meaning to satisfy my demands? To say one gives one's > life meaning by serving God is like giving oneself style by donning the > Emperor's new clothes. It's abdictating responsibility while assuming moral > superiority. I do not think that I, or anyone else, needs god to give their lives meaning. What I do think is that there must be some opportunity for transcendence. I have my personal answers for this, and I am sure you have yours -- even if you don't admit them. This claim has nothing to do with defending religions or gods, or even about defending any given belief system. It does have something to do with the idea that science does not cover all there is (in a deep ontological sense). Telmo. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
