Systems often get locked into standards. For example, computer systems get locked into programming language and operating system standards. When people notice that existing standards have unsatisfactory features, they often try to create and promote alternate standards. Such attempts usually fail, however, due to the large costs of coordinating to switch to new standards, including the loss of complementary investments into old standards. In order to induce a switch, expected gains from a new better standard have be large enough to compensate for switching costs, and users need to coordinate their actions in order to switch.
1) The ability of religion to perpetuate itself depends on it's continued relevance to people's lives. Given the inherent conservativity of established religions I wonder if they will be able to make the necessery adaptations to stay relevant during the coming radical cultural and social shifts brought on by computers and telecommunications.
2) Yes, obviously religious beliefs aren't really the same sort of beliefs as 'the loan shark will break my legs in a year if I can't pay him back' as demonstrated by our much weaker response to the punishment of hell. Of course there are always some true believers but they are a small minority.
However, it's unfair to critisize the atheist for speaking as if religious beliefs were no different than any other kind of belief since this is how religious people insist they mean it. Atheists are unpopular enough as it is if they told people they don't really believe what they say so should stop using the misleading terminology they would only generate more anger.
3) I'm quite skeptical that early man had some deeply more satisfying religious experience as the quotes suggest.
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In particular I suspect that religious belief, pushed by the need to have respectful views of contradictory faiths, will simply become less and less propositional over time and more openly symbolic/metaphorical. In another 200 years I wouldn't be surprised if religious belief was more a kind of cultural identification mixed with simple superstition (if I pray/whatever I will have a good day) than anything resembling a belief system.
"It seems to me that religion will handily win this contest for a long time to come."
Religion is losing that contest, i.e., the contest of the dialectic. (The religious are deconverted at a higher rate the irreligious converted.) The contest religion is winning is the contest of reproductivity. So the barrier to a secular transformation isn't transaction costs but breeding dynamics.
Memetic evolution faces the same problem that genetic evolution faces: A blind process cannot take on temporary setbacks with future rewards in sight, because a blind process has no foresight. A blind man won't walk over coals to get to a Perfect Paradise on the other side. He will take one step onto the coals, feel the pain, and go back.
Human beings, individually, have some foresight. If we truly believe that developing a belief system without the supernatural will ultimately make us happier, we can tolerate the painful adjustments needed to get there. Of course, therein lies the problem: generally speaking, people whose belief systems rely on supernatural explanations do NOT think that a different belief system will be better.
It is people like me, who accidentally fell out of a supernatural belief system into a natural one, who are screaming, "It's so much better over here!" and are only retrospectively glad that we went through the temporary, painful adjustment period.
While any given individual is capable of enduring temporary setbacks with future rewards in sight, human super-organisms have far less foresight, and tend to move with the blind advancement of Natural Selection.
That said, religion HAS ALWAYS been receding, as small concessions are made every time the payoff of acknowledging natural explanations is bigger than the cost of giving up the old supernatural explanations. Every passing generation attributes less and less to supernatural phenomenon. But the changes do not happen as abruptly as they do in individual humans.
How about the resistance of many religions towards family planning?
Here I suspect the Chinese Communist Party comes off a bit heroic and many religious leaders and organizations a bit destructive for humanity's welfare.
Thursday, your points are well-taken. Their validity, however, seems to depend on the details. An analysis of the net utility of religion is hard to do, and it probably differs with nuances between religions and the practical scope of their claims.
Right to die = problems on both sidesSTD prevention = the research says sex ed (of any kind) basically has no effect in Western countries, as for Aids in Africa:http://www.nybooks.com/arti...Biotech = that "if done right" is a big if
As I said, the case against religion on utilitarian grounds is weak.
I guess I find all ideologies--such as "Hope Change", "Mein Kampf", "Das Capital"--have supernatural attributions placed on their philosophical premises as well as their figurehead archetypes, so the lines are pretty blurry with Islam, or any other religion. So the problems may not simply arise from the leading proponents; they can rise with the followers, too. That voter telling us all in 2008 that President Obama would pay for her mortgage and gas sounded a bit supernaturalistic to me.
I appreciate your corrective lens. Still squinting here, though.
Look at Kaufmann's book before you talk about these things. The only place secularism seems to be growing by conversion is the United States, which seems to have had an artificially high level of religiosity relative to otherwise very similar societies in Western Europe.
Modern science, medicine, and politics/economics have supplanted a large portion of what religion traditionally did. But you're right that the remaining functions of religion will be difficult to supplant, and religion comes roaring back to fill the gap whenever society breaks down to the point that secular alternatives are overpressured.
You left out that most religious people realize that atheist are just as irrational as religious people, although perhaps on different issues. Actually a better way to say it is that atheists just have religious beliefs concerning non religious ideas, e.g. environmentalism, communism, various political beliefs, etc.
oops, my reply was not correct. I missed your distinction. We do not have a surplus of agreement. I will take a look at Vox Day. However, I contend--perhaps incorrectly to others--that religion can be classified differently by different people. I tend to take a broader view of religion, as informed by Kuhn, so that scientists and atheists can be as religious as muslims. So I would say that the western European theater in WWII pitted many worshipers of the God of the Bible against many worshipers of Hitler. I wouldn't say that religion caused WWII as much as envy did. But I would say that it seems that many Lutherans seemed to discount their biblical beliefs relative to their belief in Hitler.
But perhaps I am engaging in a non-constructive conflation here. What makes religious worship different from Hitler worship?
Vox Day went through a military encyclopedia looking up every war:
1. Religion has only been involved in 7% of all wars throughout history.2. That is "involved in" not the "the primary cause of."3. Half of those involved one particular religion: Islam.
Several points
1) The ability of religion to perpetuate itself depends on it's continued relevance to people's lives. Given the inherent conservativity of established religions I wonder if they will be able to make the necessery adaptations to stay relevant during the coming radical cultural and social shifts brought on by computers and telecommunications.
2) Yes, obviously religious beliefs aren't really the same sort of beliefs as 'the loan shark will break my legs in a year if I can't pay him back' as demonstrated by our much weaker response to the punishment of hell. Of course there are always some true believers but they are a small minority.
However, it's unfair to critisize the atheist for speaking as if religious beliefs were no different than any other kind of belief since this is how religious people insist they mean it. Atheists are unpopular enough as it is if they told people they don't really believe what they say so should stop using the misleading terminology they would only generate more anger.
3) I'm quite skeptical that early man had some deeply more satisfying religious experience as the quotes suggest.
---
In particular I suspect that religious belief, pushed by the need to have respectful views of contradictory faiths, will simply become less and less propositional over time and more openly symbolic/metaphorical. In another 200 years I wouldn't be surprised if religious belief was more a kind of cultural identification mixed with simple superstition (if I pray/whatever I will have a good day) than anything resembling a belief system.
"It seems to me that religion will handily win this contest for a long time to come."
Religion is losing that contest, i.e., the contest of the dialectic. (The religious are deconverted at a higher rate the irreligious converted.) The contest religion is winning is the contest of reproductivity. So the barrier to a secular transformation isn't transaction costs but breeding dynamics.
Memetic evolution faces the same problem that genetic evolution faces: A blind process cannot take on temporary setbacks with future rewards in sight, because a blind process has no foresight. A blind man won't walk over coals to get to a Perfect Paradise on the other side. He will take one step onto the coals, feel the pain, and go back.
Human beings, individually, have some foresight. If we truly believe that developing a belief system without the supernatural will ultimately make us happier, we can tolerate the painful adjustments needed to get there. Of course, therein lies the problem: generally speaking, people whose belief systems rely on supernatural explanations do NOT think that a different belief system will be better.
It is people like me, who accidentally fell out of a supernatural belief system into a natural one, who are screaming, "It's so much better over here!" and are only retrospectively glad that we went through the temporary, painful adjustment period.
While any given individual is capable of enduring temporary setbacks with future rewards in sight, human super-organisms have far less foresight, and tend to move with the blind advancement of Natural Selection.
That said, religion HAS ALWAYS been receding, as small concessions are made every time the payoff of acknowledging natural explanations is bigger than the cost of giving up the old supernatural explanations. Every passing generation attributes less and less to supernatural phenomenon. But the changes do not happen as abruptly as they do in individual humans.
Not futile but long term. It has been taking decades, and there is progress.
How about the resistance of many religions towards family planning?
Here I suspect the Chinese Communist Party comes off a bit heroic and many religious leaders and organizations a bit destructive for humanity's welfare.
Thursday, your points are well-taken. Their validity, however, seems to depend on the details. An analysis of the net utility of religion is hard to do, and it probably differs with nuances between religions and the practical scope of their claims.
Right to die = problems on both sidesSTD prevention = the research says sex ed (of any kind) basically has no effect in Western countries, as for Aids in Africa:http://www.nybooks.com/arti...Biotech = that "if done right" is a big if
As I said, the case against religion on utilitarian grounds is weak.
I guess I find all ideologies--such as "Hope Change", "Mein Kampf", "Das Capital"--have supernatural attributions placed on their philosophical premises as well as their figurehead archetypes, so the lines are pretty blurry with Islam, or any other religion. So the problems may not simply arise from the leading proponents; they can rise with the followers, too. That voter telling us all in 2008 that President Obama would pay for her mortgage and gas sounded a bit supernaturalistic to me.
I appreciate your corrective lens. Still squinting here, though.
And yet, secularism grows.
Look at Kaufmann's book before you talk about these things. The only place secularism seems to be growing by conversion is the United States, which seems to have had an artificially high level of religiosity relative to otherwise very similar societies in Western Europe.
Religion at a minimum should have some sort of supernaturalism. The word you seem to be looking for is ideology.
Modern science, medicine, and politics/economics have supplanted a large portion of what religion traditionally did. But you're right that the remaining functions of religion will be difficult to supplant, and religion comes roaring back to fill the gap whenever society breaks down to the point that secular alternatives are overpressured.
You left out that most religious people realize that atheist are just as irrational as religious people, although perhaps on different issues. Actually a better way to say it is that atheists just have religious beliefs concerning non religious ideas, e.g. environmentalism, communism, various political beliefs, etc.
And yet, secularism grows. Heritability of religiosity is far from complete.
We owe it to religious people to try to rescue them. Imagine if you had been born into a religious family!
oops, my reply was not correct. I missed your distinction. We do not have a surplus of agreement. I will take a look at Vox Day. However, I contend--perhaps incorrectly to others--that religion can be classified differently by different people. I tend to take a broader view of religion, as informed by Kuhn, so that scientists and atheists can be as religious as muslims. So I would say that the western European theater in WWII pitted many worshipers of the God of the Bible against many worshipers of Hitler. I wouldn't say that religion caused WWII as much as envy did. But I would say that it seems that many Lutherans seemed to discount their biblical beliefs relative to their belief in Hitler.
But perhaps I am engaging in a non-constructive conflation here. What makes religious worship different from Hitler worship?
Hence my choice of 'fueled' over 'caused. I think we are drowning in agreement here.
Wars are usually fueled by religious conflict
This is false.
Vox Day went through a military encyclopedia looking up every war:
1. Religion has only been involved in 7% of all wars throughout history.2. That is "involved in" not the "the primary cause of."3. Half of those involved one particular religion: Islam.