Doug,
I promise you, it's not personal. To me, you are, Universal Man. But the question does interest me: What IS the difference, in principle, between the kind of faith for which you and I would let people off the hook, and the kind of faith that makes us kind of nauseous. . They believe in God and somewhere, way down, you and I believe in turtles. For some reason, you and I believe that their belief in God is not as good as our belief in turtles. Why is that. Right now, I beginning to think that belief is like soil. Soil is a lot better if you can dig deep before you hit bedrock. Nick From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Douglas Roberts Sent: Friday, September 14, 2012 3:06 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: America and the Middle East: Murder in Libya | The Economist Nick, you're in fine form. Can't wait until you come back to Santa Fe so that I may better experience it once again in person. It's been a rather full Friday of trying to get my work done while communicating with my colleagues on the off-topics of politics and religion. One closing note, however on the latter selection: you may have faith that when it comes to religion, I am totally faithless. I didn't buy into the concept while they were trying to brainwash it into me at the tender age of 8 in Sunday school at the United Church in Los Alamos, and I'm still not buying. But thank you for once again taking such an interest in my own particular world view! --Doug On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 12:31 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[email protected]> wrote: Here we go again, indeed. "Blind faith" is a redundancy, right? All faith is blind. We do not have faith in what we doubt. As Peirce would say: Doubt is not a guest. We do not entertain it. When it moves in, it sleeps in our bed, eats at our table, goes to work with us, and listens to NPR with us when we drive home in the car. Ditto belief. Descartes notion that we doubt everything that we cannot assert with certainty was . to coin a phrase . crap. So we are talking about faith, full stop. And we are talking about the claim, made by a single man, Doug Roberts, as it happens, although it could be any man, that he lives without faith. I stipulate that I am wrong if it can be shown that Doug Roberts lives without faith. How to test such a proposition? I could put the burden on Doug. I could say, "Doug, show me that every proposition you believe is founded in explicit premises for which you know the evidence, which evidentiary premises are themselves founded on explicit premises for which you know the evidence. Etc. " In other words, prove the null. This seems harsh, but just, given the boldness of the claim. I would predict that whatever belief Doug (or any other human) might choose to hold, if we walk him backward through his premises, we will eventually find a place where he appeals to stubbornness ("I have always believed that"), authority ("my orals committee told me it was true"), or consensus ("the guys in the lab all agree it's true"), and these, in my book, are all forms of faith. We are all capable of thinking scientifically for a bit. After that, Sahib, it's turtles all the way down. I think it's fair to say that the sooner such a place is reached in some person's thinking on a subject, the less interesting that person's thinking on that subject is.. For that reason, I would assume that Doug shares my distaste for "short loop" explanations such as "God's will" or "because the spirit moved me". If this is what he means by faith, then I absolutely agree with him. But the problem here is not faith, itself, which always lies somewhere down there amongst the turtles, but the rapidity to which a shallow thinker appeals to it. Coming back to Santa Fe in a couple of weeks. Aren't you guys GLAD?! I am excited. Nick From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Douglas Roberts Sent: Friday, September 14, 2012 1:19 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: America and the Middle East: Murder in Libya | The Economist Well see, here we go again. To which I come back again with the point of view that any philosophy, or religion that is human-centric in nature as both Christianity or Islam are, is inherently bad. A narrow world view, enabled, promoted, and enforced with even narrower strict fundamentalist practitioners is by definition destructive. There can be no greater moral deficiency than having been born with an intellect and then refusing to use it. Blind faith is exactly that: blind. "Faith" in religion is defined as having accepted, unquestioningly, what someone else has told you is the one true way. I personally have no respect for religious faith. I respect people's right to chose to live that way, right up to the point where they attempt to influence how I live and think. But not their decision to unquestioningly commit to a dogma. Religion, because it requires "faith" to become a subscriber, is inherently bad. And as long as we're on the subject, if religion is bad for the reasons described above, then the opposite of religion is cosmology: the science of trying to understand the universe rather than attempting to explain it away with fairy tales. --Doug On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 10:56 AM, Victoria Hughes <[email protected]> wrote: Religion is not inherently bad. It is the use of it for mundane power that is the problem. All religious traditions began with a prophet / visionary / mystic who urged tolerance, peace and self-awareness. Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha... In most cases, that person's initial followers began to leverage their own closeness and supposed 'superior understanding' to that original figure to justify behaviour that benefited their mundane activities. Every religion has gone through this. Every creed of any kind has gone through this. The challenge is our use of belief. Nick could speak to this too: there are developmental lines in the psychology of individuals, groups, nations, tribes, etc: and these will use powerful innate tools (like the human need to believe in something) for different purposes, depending on their development. And there is nothing inherently wrong or flawed in the things in which people embed their beliefs. Science, truth, the divine, all those have positive beneficial elements. Again, it is the use of those concepts as tools to persuade others into actions that destroy that is the problem. Self-awareness in all this is the key. Tory On Sep 14, 2012, at 10:41 AM, Douglas Roberts wrote: One semi-final note from me about culture and religion: I lived in Libya for a year in 1976 when I was a consultant to Occidental Petroleum. I traveled extensively between Tripoli, Benghazi, and several points about 900 miles southeast of Tripoli in the northern tip of the Sahara during that year. I quickly learned that the culture of the Arabic half of Libya (as compared to the Berber Bedouin culture that comprises the eastern half of the country) is dominated by the Islamic religion. You cannot separate them. Religion is interwoven into every aspect of their culture. Any attempt to exclude the impact of religion on their culture will fail. --Doug On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 10:24 AM, Douglas Roberts <[email protected]> wrote: Let's see if I understand you correctly, Owen. There are a bunch of fundamentalist Islamists all up in arms shouting "Allahu Akhbar" whilst burning down our embassies and killing our diplomats because there is a film out that is derogatory of the Muslim religion. And this is not about religion? I don't see it. Or you don't see it. What I do see is that there is one very large disconnect on this particular issue. --Doug On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 10:17 AM, Owen Densmore <[email protected]> wrote: I do not believe this to be a religious issue at all. The question is of groups and institutions. When a faction of a group becomes apparently insane, do we not expect the entire group, its leaders and majority, to speak up and to mend? When civil rights were an issue in the south, many of us (I was at Georgia Tech) spoke up, and indeed many churches of all stripes did so. Many NRA members also speak up about the extreme position the organization takes. Examples abound. And yes, I consider this a Complexity domain, much like Miller's Applause model. Isn't this possibly a cultural issue? Possibly regional? The largest Muslim population is not Libya or Egypt or even all of the middle east, its Indonesia. They do not appear to have this issue. So my question stands as Kofi stated: "Where are the leaders? Where is the Majority? Nobody speaks up." NOT the religious leaders but the leaders of the culture in which the religion lies. And Hussein, forgive me, but your inward religious stance has nothing to do with speaking out against injustice. It is not a religious issue, but a civic, cultural one. -- Owen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org -- Doug Roberts [email protected] [email protected] http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins 505-455-7333 - Office 505-670-8195 - Cell -- Doug Roberts [email protected] [email protected] http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins 505-455-7333 - Office 505-670-8195 - Cell ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org -- Doug Roberts [email protected] [email protected] http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins 505-455-7333 - Office 505-670-8195 - Cell ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org -- Doug Roberts [email protected] [email protected] http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins 505-455-7333 - Office 505-670-8195 - Cell
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