Another interesting study pertinent to the possible adaptive nature of a group having religious beliefs.
Obviously the subjects did not think the eyes were real or able to punish/reward them but the concept of being watched was enough to motivate greater compliance with the groups rules.
Obviously a god concept introduces the “someone is always watching” element into a group.
Another fun one! Priming people with religious words reduces cheating on a later task and “participant’s intrinsic religiosity had no influence on rates of cheating with the prime received.”
So people may have no conscious religiosity but the triggered concept of being watched, even by something that you believe or even know is not real and has no power to reward or punish you, still controls their behavior.
Some slight even farther tangents …
Is it rational for anyone to stay stopped at a red light at 3 am with no traffic for miles and clearly no authorities around?
What do you believe is the basis of objective moral truths?
No problem. As I said, I’m an agnatheist, i.e. an atheist for all practical purposes, without the vehement certainty (but don’t tell the proselytizers that!).
You’re right that any explanation of the question you posed is going to sound half assed. My way of resolving it is to match my expectations to the reality. I don’t question why God (if there is such an entity) isn’t all love and kindness to everyone; that’s not something I expect from a higher power. If anything, my idea is a God as conceived by Spinoza - an indifferent God - not an anthropomorphic entity who cares about humanity. Maybe that’s what makes the anti-theists so angry; their expectations of God are unrealistic, and they are disappointed.
I do lean towards protecting the “delicate sensibilities” of the (non extremist) believers (in some circumstances). Antisemitism and Islamophobia are still big problems in most parts of the world, and Christians are persecuted in non Christian majority countries. In many cases, people come into atheism with their personal baggage: bigotry, anger issues, etc., and use atheism as a cover for attack. And to be fair, atheists have also been maligned, and continue to be so. I’ll defend them as well when I encounter that.
But I had the benefit of both worlds: free thinking and free biscuits. Atheism needs better pr and marketing… and some biscuit recipes.
camille, thanks for understanding and sharing your views.
What got me into this thread was specious tu quoque arguments against atheism.
What kept me here was my perception that religion is being given a special treatment here. Special treatment means just that, special.
I’m not going to assign all the of the blame in this very sad and unfortunate tragedy to Orthodox Judaism. It’s very plausible that carelessness played a role too, and many other factors. But I can’t assign NO blame. Others might disagree but it needn’t be a binary proposition and anyone who dares to think otherwise is shouted down as intolerant.
That’s a reasonable response. I think some of the heat against the atheists was due to the emotional nature of the incident (dead children). And there were gratuitous insults thrown from some on the atheist side as well. If it had been a less lethal incident related to Orthodox behavior we might have had a more reasonable debate.
I don’t completely agree with your assessment, but I will grant you that the use of an unattended hot plate is more specific to the Orthodox Jewish community. And it is stupid, and unnecessary! As I said early on, I live in the neighborhood, and I didn’t realize this was so prevalent. Time for some community awareness action.
However, I don’t think you can blame the lack of functioning smoke detectors on anything but carelessness. But to add to this debate: The fire department reached out to the community with free batteries, smoke detectors, and fire safety brochures. On Saturday! :smack:
I can definitely agree with that. I try not to let emotions cloud my judgement. I’m not saying I’m always successful but I think I have a pretty decent track record.
At the risk of upsetting an improved tenor of discussion I must point out that not only had there been (unless I missed them) no tu quoque arguments against atheism, there were no arguments against atheism at all. There were criticisms against the particular intolerant behaviors of some posters in this thread. It is not a tu quoque fallacy, nor specious, to point out that intolerance and hatred of others’ beliefs is just as despicable whether it is coming from someone of an atheist mindset or from a fundamentalist mindset. Atheism as a belief was respected … easy to do since many finding offense at the behaviors are minimally closer to the atheist POV than to any theistic one. What others were not willing to say is that only an atheist perspective is to be respected and all other conclusions are stupid and deserving of being, at best, mocked,if not outright attacked.
The “special treatment” that religion was getting was its being held to blame by many, including you, for any poor decision made in pursuit of a religious goal while poor decisions made in pursuit of a secular goal, like “good eating” or dry clothes (or secularish goals like Christmas tree lights, or even mainstream religious goals like driving to Mass) would not be similarly have the goal held as the root cause. It would be recognized that the poor decision was the cause, not the goal the decision was in service of.
That said I must agree with the point made by camille (whose linking to full papers is appreciated!): given the history of persecution that so many have endured because of their religious beliefs, by those of other religions and atheists alike, religious (and for that matter atheistic) freedoms do deserve special protections. If a religion (and again, or an atheist perspective) is being used to attack the beliefs of others, to foster hatred and disrespect, to cause harm to society as a whole (such as by trying to shut down science), or is being attempted to be imposed upon others, then it crosses the line. But a even a belief that seems very silly to both of us that adds value to someone else’s life, in their estimation at least … well if you can’t treat it with respect and attempt to understand it then minimally just leave it alone.
DSeid, if I may, I would like to address something you said earlier.
I never described religious people as “brainwashed” in this thread - I only compared Catholic school to brainwashing. I don’t think I’m misremembering that.
I do think many children go through a brainwashing process. Not that I was beaten up or severely punished for bad thoughts or anything like that, not at all.
I was just had to endure boring bible readings and mass and confessions. But it is very difficult for a child, in those age brackets, in that kind of setting, to form his or her own critical opinion of faith based beliefs and church dogma.
Other than that some cults of the more fundamentalist persuasion may also have elements of brainwashing.
In general I don’t think the term applies to people of faith, although I may have used it in a less than kind sense at some time or another.
Well I did that, and will probably do so again sometime in the future. Absolutely no disrespect intended to the grieving family, of course. But honestly, what is there to mock back about atheism? I’m just not seeing it but maybe it’s me.
From memory, my first interaction with you was to say that just because someone who believes in elves is tolerant that I don’t, that doesn’t mean that I need to be tolerant back or that that is necessarily a good thing to be. Note that I didn’t say I shouldn’t be tolerant. That’s a personal choice. You then called me arrogant. That’s fine, I can take it.
Sorry but I think you have been aiming for some kind of world record of specious reasoning. I think you have a lot of cognitive biases. That’s just my brutally honest impression, which of course is not all that different from ad hominem attack, since I haven’t substantiated it. But you are just assuming I would reject those causes (Christmas tree lights, etc) without any basis in fact. I never said Judaism was the ROOT cause. Only that its beliefs played a significant role in the outcome. Significant means not to be ignored.
“Tu quoque” (annoying name IMO) was just shorthand for a few different posts criticizing atheism I found objectionable, some of which fit that definition and some not. I could have been more careful with my wording there. The point remains that that is what brought me into the thread. Not the criticism itself but some types of criticism I found (arguably) misguided. Example:
I found this to be a particularly annoying way to make an OK point.
I am all in favor of freedom and against persecution, of course, but I guess I don’t get so teary eyed at “attacking belief”. There is no such thing as freedom from criticism. Saying I don’t understand it is just your supposition. Understanding is not agreement.
Many other beliefs have been attacked and flourished just fine. Others were attacked and thankfully retreated or perished.
I’m not seeing the hatred on my part either.
And atheism is not on the same level as theism. What am I supposed to be afraid of, attack on the fact that I may become dust tomorrow? I do fear discrimination, death, etc.
I think the point DSeid was making was that no one who isn’t harming or forcing their beliefs on others should be gratuitously mocked or attacked. Not because religion can’t be criticized, but because it is counterproductive, and also hypocritical:
Believing there is no God, and that it is a duty to mock and attack the religious, is also a system of belief.
Consider this: Almost all the heat and name calling in this thread were arguments between fellow non believers. Isn’t that a small proof that the end of religion wouldn’t lead to the end of hate and divisiveness? We’ll still find a way to form tribes and argue with other tribes for some reason or another.
Angry people will still be angry, violent people will still be violent, idiots will be idiotic, the intolerant will remain intolerant, oppressors will oppress - whether they believe in a God or not. As I said before, believing that atheism will resolve those problems is also magical thinking, because there is no evidence that will happen.
The problem isn’t religion, the problem is humanity. As Sartre said, “Hell is other people”.
Of course it is bad form to gratuitously attack people. I don’t go around chasing believers to berate. In fact, I rarely think about religion. Really, I’m not going for World Peace here, but I can still share a (hopefully interesting but probably not) thought once in a while.
It can be a stimulating conversation. I haven’t gone in to “Spinoza’s God” because I can’t be bothered to give it a single thought. If you believe in an indiferent entity that does nothing whatsoever, sorry, I can’t tell you apart from an atheist and I don’t know what we should be conversing about.
Empirically, this seems unlikely. Theologically, this idea is silly, at least with respect to Jews leaving hotplates on during the Sabbath. That’s just not part of Jewish tradition.
And here we will have to just disagree about which of us is being specious.
When you show me similar levels of outrage at the idea of wanting dry clothes as having caused the house fire that killed five because the dryer was, in pursuit of that goal, run with to much lint in it trap and while no one was watching it … that the goal of wanting to see the baseball game was responsible for the man who then drove drunk when he left having had too many beers at the game and crashed and killed three … that the goal of going to Mass is what caused the deaths when the parents failed to buckle the kids up and had a car accident that killed them all … and many other possible so ons … then I will believe that minority religious beliefs are not being subject to this “special” treatment. Until then I maintain that claiming otherwise is specious to an extreme.
As to you being disturbed because I responded in the Pit to a long series of posts that included:“Jewish religious stupidity”; “you fucking liberal douchebags”; “nonsense from the ass-end of antiquity”; “[a]ll religion is nonsense”; a host of claims about what Orthodox Jews belief that were plain untrue but were still repeated after multiple corrections; “some smelly desert dwellers with huge parasite loads and matted beards”; “morons reflexively defend their religion’s stupidity because they’re too weak to cast it into the garbage heap of history”; “I’m sorry retard”; “Nothing about their beliefs deserves respect”; making a joke about the Jewish kids obviously “smoked” on Shabbat … by calling them jerks and scum. … and you finding the latter reaction to be the uncalled for annoying part … we will also have to disagree about who has the cognitive bias.
And yes that was our first interaction, your not saying a no-particular-entity damned word about all that hateful shit but busting my chops for saying that such was tarring a fine intellectual tradition.
And then making your thoughts clear:
The problem to you was not the tragedy, but your disrespect for the tradition. Period. There was no question to me that the concept in this thread was to find a way to exploit a tragedy to service the goal of disrespecting the beliefs of a minority other and you you clearly identified yourself as a member of that thought process, giving this tragedy “special” consideration that would not and are not given for secular or even religious mainstream beliefs because you think the belief to be idiotic a priori and have neither any understanding of how it adds value to those who choose to follow it, nor any interest in understanding how it might.
It really is a very basic thing: if you treat others with complete disrespect you should not be surprised when are treated similarly in kind. Attack complete belief systems and groups of people in the lowest possible ways in the Pit, then do not be surprised to be attacked back but doubled down. Don’t slap and be surprised and offended that someone hits back. It may be religious traditions that have stated in various formulations the principle “do not do unto others that which you would not have done unto you” (Hillel, Jesus, Taoism, Hinduism, so on) but the basic principle also underlies many secular ethical constructs.
You’re right about that. Except I was only aware of some of the context, not all of it, and I wasn’t reacting to the “scum” insult. That’s a natural reaction and it doesn’t make me bat an eye. I was only reacting to the way you chose to phrase it with that preface about atheism. That really rubbed me the wrong way but it doesn’t seem important now. This is what I meant by my lazy attack on you:
Why does anyone have to show you or anyone else similar levels of “outrage” about other events to have an opinion that this is an idiotic Jewish tradition? That is just ridiculous.
Can you address what I have been writing, if you care to of course, instead of that rant?
Yes. But you are suggesting that this supports the idea that the tradition is “idiotic”, and you are wrong, and committing a logical fallacy. Your hated of Judaism seems to be driving you into this fallacy, and that is why you are getting the reactions you are getting.
