> If you believe you are not religious, it just means that you don’t have the cognitive tools to recognize the secular ideology that you have adopted.
Not all secular beliefs are ideologies. I think there are two key common factors between religious beliefs and ideologies that call themselves "secular":
First, people don't acquire the beliefs by considering and weighing evidence; they acquire them by being told them, usually at a young age, by people they trust, and making them part of their identity. That's why people are so resistant to changing such beliefs.
Second, the set of beliefs acquired in this way is not just a few isolated ones, but a whole network of beliefs that cover every aspect of life and are all asserted as justification for each other in what amounts to a logical circle. That's why it's so hard to penetrate such a belief system and get people to doubt it, even if it flies in the face of easily obtainable evidence.
Let’s be honest, most people don’t have the time to weigh the evidence of say 90% of their beliefs. They go to school & watch television, and generally adopt the beliefs of their surroundings.
And believing that religious believers accept 100% of religious belief without reasoning about them is a misunderstanding.
> believing that religious believers accept 100% of religious belief without reasoning about them is a misunderstanding.
I didn't say anything about religions and ideologies not using reasoning. Anyone who has read, say, Thomas Aquinas is perfectly aware that religious people can use all kinds of complicated reasoning to justify their beliefs.
What I did say is that the set of beliefs in question are "all asserted as justification for each other in what amounts to a logical circle". For example, Thomas Aquinas spent a lot of time building up a huge edifice of interlocking propositions about God, all logically related to each other--but they don't connect to anything else. They're just a free-standing, self-consistent logical structure that can't be justified in any way except by claiming that it justifies itself. It's not that Aquinas didn't use reasoning; as noted above, he did--lots of it.
“ They're just a free-standing, self-consistent logical structure that can't be justified in any way except by claiming that it justifies itself. It's not that Aquinas didn't use reasoning; as noted above, he did--lots of it.”
Interestingly, this also describes all of math, logic, and philosophy.
One of the more interesting axioms or assertions is whether there exists free will, which is, by any interesting definition, a supernatural entity.
Yes, but the stories and abilities regarding that greater entity will be as varied and inconsistent as those found all over the world. And most importantly will not be the same as any of them. How many wildly different stories are there regarding the creation of the world?
Whereas the axioms of math will be substantially similar to the point that any modern mathematician would recognize it. We see this on ancient tablets where folks were calculating the square root of 2. Or any of the cultures all around the world that had no significant contact with one another that deal with pi. Sure we'll see base-12 number systems as with the Babylonians or base-20 as with the Maya, but the underlying principles and lessons are largely IDENTICAL.
The worlds of math and the metaphysical could not be more different in that regard. Rather than being a very shallow statement, it is one of the most all-encompassing and profound in all of human history. It gave rise to the principles of the scientific method: humans are biased, so multiple people performing the same steps should come to the same results and predictions made based on those results should yield their own repeatable consistent results.
Funny enough we discuss in such religious discussions often being religious vs. not being and ignoring the huge difference of existing religons.
I had a discussion about this topic with a more hard core christian: I said 'look if it is a good god, it doesn't even matter if i worship her right?' and he said 'nope, its written that you have to worshop'.
So one believe doesn't equal to another believe.
Your underlying base changes based on your believe.
"An axiom, postulate or assumption is a statement that is taken to be true, to serve as a premise or starting point for further reasoning and arguments." this is not true for two religions being created independently from each other while this is very well true for science.
Math is based on human chosen axioms. Actually, there are a lot of different sub fields of math that have different subsets of axioms to solve different types of problems. The axioms can never be proven though, they are just grounding.
Isolating a human is analogous to removing oxygen. Few would argue that someone brain dead could create anything.
I'm really not sure how you can missread my example to come up with 'isoalting a human is analogous to removing oxygen'.
My comparison is based on sciencse vs. fiction. 1+1 = 2 is a reality which works in german, africa, usa and everywhere else. There might be a difference on how those symbols (1, 2...) look like but the axiom is true and valid and is discoverable.
In religion its not.
Concept of god exists but it looks different depending on your believe. Multiply gods, one god, good god, bad god...
Even the stuff written down is based on someone who wrote it down and still people interpretate it totally different.
Never seen someone implying they are right that 1+1=3 if the interpretation of 3 is not 'next after one'.
1+1=2 is not really an axiom. There's a set of axioms that lead to that. They are even more primordial statements like "1 is a number" and "x=x" and "all numbers n have a successor number S(n) such that m=n if and only if S(m)=S(n)". Even if it seems clear (to most of us, at least) that these axioms represent some part of reality, they are still human-chosen -- and they have to be agreed upon. At some point, nearly everyone would have agreed that Euclid's 5th postulate was obviously true, and anyone alive could verify this for themself. Well, sometimes it's "true" and sometimes it isn't.
That said, the Peano axioms seem less nebulous that the varying axioms relating to the existence of god, as that concept can change so much from person to person.
> free will, which is, by any interesting definition, a supernatural entity
How so? I can think of at least one interesting definition by which free will is a perfectly good physical process going on in human brains, not supernatural at all.
Depends on which definition of free will you are using. Some definitions are compatible with determinism.
Also, even if we go with a non-deterministic definition of free will, "non-deterministic" is not the same as "supernatural". Quantum mechanics is not deterministic.
Compromise depends on the understanding of the hierarchy.
When ancient texts list God as Love, they note that Love is an act of (free) will (free will being considered a supernatural entity, even today).
Free will is placed high on the hierarchy, which has interesting consequences. E.g. humans are free to do horrible things, and are free to choose not to love. If humans had no free will and were all instinct, there would be no love.
So you're saying there's evil and suffering in the world, but God can't prevent it because he created free will? Sounds like a limit on his omnipotence.
Your explanation makes it out that free will is inherently prone to evil and suffering. If so, that would make free will somewhat inherently evil even though it arises from God. Strikes at the heart of omnibenevolence.
Either there's a limit to his ability or a limit to his goodness. No amount of hand waving can remove that.
If He is all good but can create creatures that corrupt his good works… You see the logical conundrum there, right?
I would understand if you don't WANT to see it. It feels wrong to see it. But it's there if you're being honest. You can ignore it. Many do. It's still there despite any aversion to it.
The munchausen trilemma undermines the concept of “weighing the evidence”. Everything anybody believes to be true is either founded upon circular reasoning, a reasoning of infinite regression, or an arbitrary set of unprovable axioms. The consequence is that any level of belief in any truth can only be based upon faith. People who believe that their world view is based entirely upon facts and universal truths tend to have a very hard time accepting this. They will often say that scrutinizing something to that level is a pointless waste of time for things that are so obviously true, which is perhaps ironically the exact behaviour also exhibited by the most closed minded of the true believers that they often find themselves so frustrated by.
While your first statement is correct, you may want to acknowledge that "faith" in ideas can be seen as a continuum from completely subjective to mostly objective. For instance: believing in QAnon conspiracies isn't the same as believing in, say, climate change. Yes, both require your definition of "faith", but the former requires you to suspend your belief in reality while the latter is congruent with your observations of reality.
This isn’t true at all. I would characterize faith as being a belief in any truth that you cannot prove. There is no such thing as a truth that can be proven (or at least none has been discovered so far). All truths are equally non-probable.
Your stance seems to be that a set of unprovable axioms you prefer to have faith are somehow superior to some other set of unprovable axioms that some other people may choose to have faith in. You might have all sorts of perfectly reasonable justifications for the axioms you have faith in, but if you want to claim your beliefs transcend faith then you’ll have to present a logical proof that survives the munchausen trilemma.
I see the example you related, and by using it as a proxy... It seems that you are saying that religious beliefs aren't really valid because they aren't based in reality.
> It seems that you are saying that religious beliefs aren't really valid because they aren't based in reality.
For the specific example I gave (Thomas Aquinas), it's not really a question of the beliefs being "valid" or not; it's just that they have no practical impact at all, which means it doesn't really matter whether you believe them or not, at least not if the beliefs are taken in isolation.
However, it is a problem if people then try to use such beliefs to justify actions that do have practical impact. For example, consider the split between different branches of Christianity after the Council of Chalcedon over "homoousios" vs. "homoiousios", which caused several wars over the next few centuries.
> it's just that they have no practical impact at all,
That's funny because a system that kept a civilization together for 1000 years is being claimed to have "no value" by someone who has no idea how to keep any society together and is mimicking the conventional wisdom of those overseeing a disintegrating society as a result of this ignorance.
Not only does the work of Aquinas have value, it has more value over the long run than anything being produced today, as no ethical system that we hold dear has a chance of keeping anything going for even three generations, let alone 100. Modern society is suffering from collapsing birthrates and social disintegration at an alarming rate, and we are pretending to be smarter than those who set the rules of a civilization that was far more stable and productive than our own, with far more profound accomplishments.
> a system that kept a civilization together for 1000 years
The fact that most people in a given civilization were Christians does not mean that the particular religious beliefs I was talking about were the ones that kept the civilization together. In fact, as the example I gave of religious wars over "homoousios" vs. "homoiousios" illustrates, those particular beliefs often caused problems that created huge rifts in the civilization.
> someone who has no idea how to keep any society together
If you are referring to me, I have no idea what you are talking about.
> Not only does the work of Aquinas have value
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about that, at least as far as the particular beliefs I was referring to are concerned, since that's the particular work of Aquinas that I was discussing.
> no ethical system that we hold dear has a chance of keeping anything going for even three generations, let alone 100
Ethical systems are not the same as the kinds of religious beliefs I was talking about. Ethical systems have practical consequences that can be tested. I agree with you that many people today appear to have ethical systems that don't work well; we know that because they have bad practical consequences.
However, when you talk about keeping things going for 100 generations, we don't have any single ethical system that has done that. Ethical systems have changed many times over the course of human history.
> Ethical systems are not the same as the kinds of religious beliefs I was talking about. Ethical systems have practical consequences that can be tested.
Good luck testing one of the currently accepted "ethical system"-type religious beliefs.
The only kind of outcome of such a test that is "allowed" is full agreement with the ethical system. A lot of these systems are just as self-reinforcing and barely based in reality as Christian apologetics of Aquinas or Chesterton. The people holding these beliefs know this on some subconscious level and will viciously attack anyone who disagrees. It is only over time with many such "attacks" that a mass belief will die and be replaced by another one.
In fact, every one of these "ethical" religious beliefs came about the same way: it defeated another commonly agreed upon dogma.
This mechanism by the way is what runs civilization. One meme fighting another.
This is actually a really good analogy that applies to some other argument, but not the one I was trying to make :)
Git forks and merges still share a common ancestral history and are basically an evolution of the same idea. This is true of a real Git repo (it's one software project after all) and the kind of churches you are likely talking about (it's all just a theist religion after all). Christianity is a branch in the same repo as the ancient Roman gods. The Saturnalia feature is even there still :)
I was thinking more about ideas like:
- can people be property?
- is it a good thing to kill "infidels"?
- can women vote?
- can a 10 year old get married?
These are "religious" questions because there is no objective truth to the answer either way. It's all based on beliefs and consensus.
Before you downvote me into oblivion: the answers to all of these have historically been different than they are today. People in both times (past and present) would attack you if you disagreed with the status quo (there was even a certain civil war fought about the people=property one). I am not actually disagreeing with the status quo on any of the above.
However, it would be naive to think that we do not presently collectively believe some things that would be appalling to a future human. A good heuristic for these is: would I get attacked or mocked for questioning this?
Indeed ethical systems have changed throughout the lifespan of a religion. Religions are not set in stone and change more than what most religious people are willing to admit.
For example, people used to believe the Book of Genesis literally, and now (I believe) most denominations take it allegorically. I wonder how many similar stories like that will we have in the future.
For me, it always felt like the interpretation of the Holy Books are changing through time as we understand science more and more. And it feels ironic to me.
That's true. But even leaving science aside, and focusing only on non-falsifiable aspects of human ethics, there are many examples such as slavery where Christianity for example has changed over time quite radically (and not even linearly)
I asked about slavery in Reddit's DebateAChristian forum. Most Christians say that those part of the Bible needs to be understood in the context of those times where debt slavery was quite common and not considered evil. So we can't apply today's morality there. Well, at least these were the most common answers I got. There were also a person who told me that what "moral"/"good" means is _completely_ subjective (which is true to some extent), so I should not judge Exodus 21.
Religious people asking others to judge the Word Of God by whatever standards humans happened to have at the time the books were written is an implicit acceptance that their religion is completely made up. What happened, God Changed their mind in the meantime?
FWIW, slavery in antiquity was rarely purely a "racial" thing. You became slave because of losing a war, which often was waged in response to some a refusal to just pay some reason indecent amount of taxes or whatever one side insisted was "due".
Surely all christians today believe that tricking somebody with dubious pretexts into debt-based slavery (as often happens with human trafficking of sex workers, where women have to formally pay up their debts and incurring the costs that they captors incur in hosting them in sub-human conditions).
> Literal interpretation of Genesis is a fairly recent phenomenon.
Um, no, it isn't. It's how Genesis was interpreted by most people of the Jewish and Christian religions throughout most of the time since it was written. What is a fairly recent phenomenon is people of those religions not interpreting Genesis (and the Bible in general) literally.
Indeed they change more than their zealous detractors, whose rigid mindsets cannot update priors despite abundant evidence contradicting their sacred beliefs, namely that the pious and meek are to be looked down upon, either pitied or scorned.
>The fact that most people in a given civilization were Christians //
It's somewhat orthogonal to your argument, but I'd doubt that most people in "Christian countries" (which is a heterodox notion) are/were Christians. Mostly people in the past seem to have followed a societal model, largely imposed as a firm of control.
Where I grew up in the UK the village vicar was not a Christian according to most definitions (they didn't believe in central tenets of the faith as espoused in all the main creeds).
Catholicism has a lot of things that are contradictory to biblical Christianity from basic things like having "special" people, to indulgences which are so contradictory to biblical teachings the only possibly way they were accepted is because most people were ignorant to Scripture. And of course those in power keenly maintained that ignorance.
> Catholicism has a lot of things that are contradictory to biblical Christianity
That's only true if you consider the Bible as the only source of revelation, which is not the case for Catholics, where Tradition is equally important.
Not only is it true for sola scriptura but also under prima scriptura (followed by Anglicans and Methodists amongst others) -- so under an "Anglican triad" this position is still valid.
Catholicism still has things that are contradictory to biblical Christianity, such as priesthood of all believers, even if you accept other sources of revelation those sources would still be contradictory.
> That's funny because a system that kept a civilization together for 1000 years is being claimed to have "no value" by someone who has no idea how to keep any society together and is mimicking the conventional wisdom of those overseeing a disintegrating society as a result of this ignorance.
Value changes with time. Horse whips had a lot of value at one time. Now, not so much.
Religion is prevalent in many societies, and it isn't the same religion. This talk of the value of aquinas ignores the fact that all his reasoning only really applied to christian religions. Yet other religions without deities or with many of them provided the same social structures christianity has.
Consider, for example, China. Just as old and grand as European civilization with a religion mostly focused on the mandate of heaven given to their leaders.
Now consider modern China, which is an atheist state that's been thriving. Certainly, not without problems, but it's hard to argue their civilization hasn't become a major world power.
I've been fascinated listening to a podcast on the History of Rome (highly recommend). Rome wasn't built in a day, but also the fall of the empire was a period of about 300 years during which Rome itself was still called the "eternal city".
Not saying this as proof that the world is definitely going to shit, the point is that it I don't think we've achieved some new level of eternal civilisation that couldn't possibly fail. Every civilisation believed that right up until the point it stopped being true, so we should be on the look out for threats and not assume it will all end up OK.
This shows you lack understanding of the fundamental philosophical system by which his arguments are built, espcially Aristotle. Dispute what many think, Aristotle did a lot of experimentation. He was not an arm chair philosopher. St Thomas' arguments are anything but circular.
> most people don’t have the time to weigh the evidence of say 90% of their beliefs.
Most of the "beliefs" you refer to actually don't have to be beliefs at all. They have no practical consequences; they don't change anything about what the person who claims to have them actually does. Such beliefs don't have to have their evidence weighed because they make no practical difference. When people say they "believe" them, they don't mean they're actually using them to decide their actions; they are just signaling.
For most beliefs that do have practical consequences, people do weigh evidence for them. However, this does suggest a clarification to the characteristics I gave for religions and ideologies: that they start from beliefs that are in the "don't have practical consequences, so saying you believe them is just signaling" category, but then use them to justify beliefs that are in the "do have practical consequences, so should be judged by weighing evidence" category.
The difference is that there is usually at least the presumption or expectation of evidence, even though many don't know all the details. Don't expect me to be able to explain all of cosmology or evolutionary history either, but I do know enough to know that it's based on the best available evidence available today. Mistakes do happen, and are corrected.
With religion, there is no such presumption or expectation.
I've been told bad things would happen to me if I stick my head in a hungry lion's mouth. I've never tried it to verify. Is not-sticking-my-head-into-the-mouth-of-a-hungry-lionism a religion?
They reason within the framework of those ideas. If you accept a religious text is accurate and find an obvious contradiction then rather than rejecting the religious text you’re going to try and justify both statements as true.
So if Osiris was said to have red hair in one passage and was blond in another then they may have been referring to different people, one statement was a metaphor, he has hair of both colors at the same time, he had each at different ages, he dyes his hair at some point, etc. And of course people feel such ideas are worth fighting over.
>First, people don't acquire the beliefs by considering and weighing evidence; they acquire them by being told them, usually at a young age, by people they trust, and making them part of their identity. That's why people are so resistant to changing such beliefs.
Second, the set of beliefs acquired in this way is not just a few isolated ones, but a whole network of beliefs that cover every aspect of life and are all asserted as justification for each other in what amounts to a logical circle.
Those two hold for, say roughly, 90% of what most people believe, secular or not.
Even most scientific theories people believe, they haven't examined and are incapable of following their theories and experiements personally - they were just being told they are truth and they trust it to be so.
(Heck, most people are even incapable of deriving the math answers somebody like Archimedes or Pythagoras arrived at 2.5 milenia ago, and all they know of a work as basic as Newton's is that there was some falling apple involved, or, if they really paid attention at school, that f=ma).
This idea that science and technology is just another random religion is so frustrating, but I encounter it online way more often than I would expect. I don’t need to personally review and understand the details of why electricity and the internet work, because I am literally typing this message on an electronic device and sending it via the internet. No faith needed, and anyway.. I can go build a simple computer and prove it all out myself. The nature of the trinity, or sorting out whether hell exists or not and which religions are going there for which behaviors, is just a totally different endeavor.
Which is not to say that philosophy or religion are pursuits that should be banned or are worthless. I am just tired of the overused rhetorical trick of muddying the waters between them to confuse people and win arguments on the internet.
I think there’s an important distinction to be made here, as I’ve had a lot of the same frustrations as you. Science itself is genuinely NOT religious, and can truly be used to understand the nature of the world, and make practical use of that understanding.
But, if it’s true that man is a religious animal, it’s going to mean that people will always take a religious bent on any major topic in their lives. And so the way that many people experience and understand science may in fact have religious qualities, but this is actually going to be true of any major topic in people’s lives.
At the risk of mis-stating the hypothesis, the book is more about the active coupling or entrainment of bio-rhythms between individuals as what 'love' is. That we are able to regulate the bio-rhythms of others with our own, and we do so when we feel 'close' to those people in some way or other.
The argument is not that the science is same as religion.
The argument is that individuals dont rationally objectively verify or figure out every experiment and scientific claim. I stead, we all rely on trust to institutions and processes to tell us how it is.
Which is how it is. Most people dont even know how science actually work beyond elementary school level of simplification. And even if you actually do science as a job, you know only small part of it relying on trust everywhere else.
Yes, and my response is that the average person doesn’t rationally need to intellectually revalidate every scientific and technological fact from first principles because we are surrounded by overwhelming evidence, and that highlighting that not everyone has done that is not actually all that clever or relevant if you think about it. No faith in shadowy institutions is required to see the facts of technological and scientific progress all around me.
And then you have done validation of some of the proposition of modern science and technology.
But quite a lot "science" can not verified in the same manner as some physics, math, chemistry and biology can.
And to go from the fact that some science is verifiable and then conclude that everything which tries to take on the label science or follow similar rituals to the verifiable sciences, also deserves the same respect is quite a long jump.
In fact "science" or scientism seems to be one of the more dangerous religions nowadays, as the rituals of peer-review, papers and conferences, holy institutions like universities and sacraments of tenure and ph.d are very easy to adopt without being even remotely verifiable (or even slightly rational).
the person of faith would also counter you with 'overwhelming evidence' of what God is doing for him...
sometimes, this evidence is just subjective, at other times, it is clear and can be measured.
Another analogy that I have heard is that 'magic' is when one is just wowed by what they see without being able to understand how it happens. Apple products bring that 'magic' though it can all be explained away in technical terms if one tried.
-this ‘Universe’ (seems to me) is so incredibly intelligible and information rich (information theory rise, e.g. entropy timeline of the observable universe).
-there seems to be something rather than nothing
-there doesn’t seem to be anything that happens without a cause (except, it seems to me, our will).
The problem is your clear and measurable points don't actually point to a god. If you see some meaning in them that enriches your life that's great but they don't really count as evidence to those outside your religion (except perhaps when they also claim it as 'evidence' of their flavour of goddess).
1. Your brain/body evolved to interpret this richness in a universe that is unintelligible to us a conscious brain that evolved in that universe would almost certainly view those unintelligible to us rules as intelligible lest there be no purpose to that consciousness. Our brains also quite demonstrably processes unintelligible (to us) things as intelligible when they are not.
2. This is true in any universe where someone is around to point out that something exists and is a priori with or without creator beings.
3. Our will is either deterministic (happens with a cause) or it is not. In the case that it is deterministic we can ignore this example (which personally is my view). In the case it is not then the non deterministic part is reduced to the result of quantum coin flips altering the result in the larger scale world. Assuming so there are two possibilities either everything else is also happening at that level without a cause (which is counter to your point that it is only will that behaves this way) or the quantum coin flips are in some way deterministic which means so is will.
There is a lot of work in the social sciences showing that whether one asserts there is free will or not (as you allude to) is correlated heavily towards belief in God.
If there is no free will, it is interesting that the universal laws of Physics would create clouds of atoms that assert there is a God :)
Trust develops over time. We can trust scientific institutions because of past successes and how their construction promotes future successes. Scientific institutions are also constrained in their function. It is not the case that all forms of trusting institutions are intellectually equal.
> We can trust scientific institutions because of past successes
For those that have them, yes. Not all institutions that are called "scientific" have them, though.
> and how their construction promotes future successes.
For those for which this is true, yes. It's not true for all institutions that are called "scientific".
> Scientific institutions are also constrained in their function.
I'm not sure how true this actually is. Top tier universities like Harvard call themselves "scientific institutions", but they're really just hedge funds that happen to do research and teaching as a side gig. And the fact that almost all university research is funded by governments means that along with the expansion of government into more and more areas of our lives, comes the expansion of what is called "scientific" for purposes of getting government funding.
Which is why the blanket "lying media" and "fake news" rhetoric is so dangerous. It removes that trust—often unjustifiably and usually in total—without specifying what other institutions or processes can be trusted instead for reliable information besides a known orange-tinted salesman with an affection for Mein Kampf.
GANs and other deep fakes are going to be weaponized and absolutely obliterate the foundations of this country if that trust in legitimate journalism cannot be adequately restored in time. All journalism is biased, but we're not talking about bias; we're talking about up is down.
Very soon literally anyone can be shown saying anything… to anyone else… anywhere… wearing anything (or nothing)… with resources akin to a typical gaming computer. As a nation, we are woefully unprepared for that day, and we will pay dearly for that lack of preparation.
Okay, you've made the claim they all lie. It's up to you to provide the evidence since I can't prove a negative. I can't point to a news story that lacks lies and claim they're all true. It's up to you to put up specific examples and demonstrate a pattern of deception.
PBS News Hour
Frontline
Reuters
BBC News
NPR's morning and evening news
Associated Press
Then papers of record (excluding editorial column or op-ed):
Washington Post
Chicago Tribune
Miami Herald
etc.
Please provide specific examples of their lies. I'll even take honest errors that never received a retraction.
Move on to more opinion-based outlets like:
The Hill
The Atlantic
Pro Publica
Mother Jones
In these, provide examples where what's written goes beyond bias or persuasion into "lie" territory.
While we're here, show where dedicated fact checkers like FactCheck.org have lied or omitted their sources so as to prevent outside verification.
Even Fox News rarely if ever lies. Biased as all hell, but no outright lies at the main news desk. Their opinion shows on the channel on the other hand, it's hard to find an honest hour among them.
And local NBC, CBS, and ABC affiliates? Yeah, I'm gonna need some specific examples where they regularly lie to the American public beyond, "They were mean to Trump."
> It's up to you to provide the evidence since I can't prove a negative.
If you honestly can't come up with a mountain of evidence on your own, then either you have not been paying attention at all, or we live on different planets. Or you have simply not bothered to independently check anything they say. (More on what "independently" means below.)
And if you honestly believe that the sources you cite (and yes, I'm talking about what is billed as straight "news", not opinion) are reliable, then good luck with that. I hope for your sake that it doesn't catch up with you at some point, but I won't be holding my breath.
And btw, my claim is not that everything they say is lies. Much of what they say is true. The problem is that you can't trust them not to lie; given any statement they make, you have to consult independent information (more on that below) to decide whether you can trust it or not. And the more politically charged the topic--in other words, the more that is at stake in terms of power--the less you can trust them not to lie. Whenever the chips are down, they have shown that they will put ideology and spin, to protect their own power and the power of those in government whom they agree with, above truth.
As far as independently checking what they say is concerned, that's the problem I referred to in the GP: there are no "independent" reliable sources you can use. You have to do it entirely on your own, cobbling together what information you can from as close to primary sources as you can get it. (For example, whenever I see, say, a report issued by a government agency, or a scientific paper, mentioned in the media, I don't even bother reading the media article; I go looking for the actual report or paper itself and read that. The report or paper might still be telling me things that are questionable, but at least I'm reading the primary source.) And of course most people don't have the time or the wherewithal to do that, which is why this terrible state of affairs persists. But that doesn't make it any less terrible. At least now, with the Internet, with so many ways for people to post first-hand information about things, we have some ability to collect our own data instead of having to live with whatever the media gives us. We used to have none at all, except for the rare cases where either we ourselves were first-hand witnesses to some event (and btw, pretty much anyone who has had first-hand knowledge of something that got covered in the media will tell you that the media account was nothing at all like what they saw first-hand), or we knew personally someone who was and could evaluate what they told us based on our knowledge of their past track record of reliability.
Asked for specific examples of lying from any of those sources. Show me one. Put just a single link and say why it's a lie. It shouldn't be hard considering the depth of claimed journalistic malfeasance.
You made the claim. Now prove it. My claim is that these news outlets are on the up and up. I have listed the ones I trust.
Don't just say, "They all lie." That's lazy and disingenuous. Put up just a single example of a lie, and I'll be listening to your side of things. Otherwise you're just the crazy guy on the corner with the tin foil hat talking about lizard people. "You can't trust anyone" sounds conspicuously paranoid.
I made an account just to respond to this, for that guy. It will be easiest if I just post the original pieces which gathered such information, but you can follow the links within them yourself.
NPR, Washington Post, NY Times, CNN, etc etc "independently confirmed" that Trump had protestors gassed to stage a photo op [1], that the officer in DC was beaten to death with a fire extinguisher [2], that Russia placed bounties on US soldiers [3], absolutely none of which happened, as we now have proof. Few retractions were made. You absolutely cannot trust a single word coming from the media apparatus, about anything, at any point.
You'll notice your one source is Glenn Greenwald. One.
Be a shame if his account of the tear gassing in front of the church were backed up by the pastor of said church. Except the pastor (who was also hit with the tear gas) backs up the accounts of the protestors. Protestors who were still out because the curfew had not begun yet. Details. Details.
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/01/867532070/trumps-unannounced-...
You will hopefully note that CNN (who Greenwald calls out) is NOT on my list of credible sources. Saying that CNN is guilty of airing half-baked stories buys you little in this discussion.
Greenwald is not a source, his posts are just an aggregate of sources. Washington Post, which you did list, is implicated in 2 or 3 of the three I posted.
I don't expect outlets to never make mistakes, but I do expect that a dozen outlets don't all independently confirm the same lie. That's not journalism, it's coordinated propaganda. And because the retraction come quietly or not at all, you'll never know if what you read was real or fake at any given moment. For that reason none of them can be trusted.
In regards to your paragraph about the tear gassing, it's quite clear you did not read the articles I posted. They were in fact gassed, but it had nothing to do with Trump or his photo op; that is the lie.
As an alternative, since you brought up primary sources, you could always show a case where one of the news outlets I mentioned took a story from somewhere else, who took it from somewhere else, who either made it up or turned the chain of citations into a self-referencing circle.
That would be a perfectly acceptable demonstration of "fake news" that would draw me in to listen to your side of things.
> This idea that science and technology is just another random religion is so frustrating
That's not my idea, take it to people who are treating science as such. You know, "believe the science" crowd, that will just take at face value whatever media happens to say at the time.
Electricity and the internet are out of scope for religion. Religion is closer to humanist subjects, sociology, psychology, ethics etc.
When Ben Franklin invented the lightning rod, he had to be persuasive enough to get people to believe that electricity wasn't just a parlor trick you do with a glass rod and a silk scarf. It's also how clouds create lightning, and the fundamental forces are the same.
You have to remember in the 18th century, lightning killed a lot of people. The fact that lightning rods did, in fact, do what Franklin said they would do was persuasive evidence.
I'm not an expert on the history of Ben Franklin, so I don't know if he ever had to explain that lightning doesn't exist to provide divine retribution. But he did have to get each local church to allow a lightning rod on the steeple with a proper connection to grounding, so I'm sure there were some interesting conversations.
>This idea that science and technology is just another random religion is so frustrating, but I encounter it online way more often than I would expect.
Well, "frustrating" is not a scientific argument itself, it's a subjective feeling. More like what a faithful would feel against blasphemy. Isn't it at least a little ironic?
>I don’t need to personally review and understand the details of why electricity and the internet work, because I am literally typing this message on an electronic device and sending it via the internet.
Which is neither here, nor there. You still need to trust tons of abstractions you can't evaluate and don't control, the claims of experts and snake-oil salesmen, the policy of goverments, the products and initiatives of corporations, advertising, statistical data, etc. all of which are telling you they're "based on science" but nonetheless contain loads of p-hacking, cherry-picking, bad methodology, non-reproducable BS, and downright snake-oil selling, to the point of often doing the opposite of what actual concrete science would advise.
The fact that you have some artifacts you can use just tells you that science can produce concrete things. Doesn't tell you evaluate different courses of action, evaluate science results and scientists, understand science-drive policy decisions, and so on.
>I can go build a simple computer and prove it all out myself.
99.999% of the people can't and never will (practically, not merely potentially). So for them it's more like the junkie saying "I can quit heroin anytime I want, I'm not addicted".
Science and technology would not be able to produce concrete things if understanding it was practically beyond 99.999% of people or if it was remotely nearly as fundamentally corrupt as you are describing.
"Science and technology" are a vague abstraction. What people mean when they describe science as becoming a religion is more specific - they're using "science" as a shorthand for academic institutions specifically and the various maladies that go along with that, maladies like:
- The reproducibility crisis in social sciences
- The floods of BS coming out of public health research, a crisis for which we don't even have a name yet
- The journals who only care about impact and not about scientific integrity
- Politicians who appear to be completely controlled by modellers who never validate their models and whose predictions are always wrong
- People who are instinctively loyal to that whole set of power structures and rituals, such that they dismiss any claim of scientific misconduct as conspiracy theories, as ignorance, etc.
and so on. The fact that certain fields of study and other parts of society have been able to use the scientific method to produce concrete things doesn't automatically imply that all (so-called) scientists do so, and given the proliferation of scientific fields that produce nothing concrete, doesn't even imply the majority do.
> Those two hold for, say roughly, 90% of what most people believe, secular or not
See my response to tonymet upthread.
> Even most scientific theories people believe, they haven't examined and are incapable of following their theories and experiements personally - they were just being told they are truth and they trust it to be so.
For some theories that are called "scientific", yes, this is true--but that's because the scientists themselves don't have a track record of correct experimental predictions to begin with. (String theory, for example.)
But for theories like, say, General Relativity, there is a huge track record of correct experimental predictions, and those predictions include things in our everyday experience now, like GPS. It's true that most people cannot verify for themselves the entire chain of reasoning that leads from the Einstein Field Equation to how their GPS device works, but they know that GPS works from their personal experience, so they know that whatever theory scientists are using to make GPS work, works. They don't have to take that on trust.
In other words, for scientific theories that actually have practical impacts, you don't have to just accept what scientists say on trust; you can look at their track record of correct predictions.
Yep, you are correct. At some point "scientific theories" become practical stuff.
One thing that's missing in a lot of books is: how sure are we about the various statements? How much of it is well tested (Newton, Einstein - though we still had a lot of recent confirmation), how much is still out there (example: BCS theory), how much of it is a "feel good explanation" (hybridization theory) or how much is "the math works out wonderfully if we ignore the skeletons in the closet and the theory sounds a bit crazy" (QFT/QED)
> for scientific theories that actually have practical impacts, you don't have to just accept what scientists say on trust; you can look at their track record of correct predictions
What do you think of economic theories or theories behind psychotherapy? Lot's of real world impact, low confidence in experiments, imo
> What do you think of economic theories or theories behind psychotherapy?
Not much.
> Lot's of real world impact
Because the theories have influence far out of proportion to their actual track record, yes.
> low confidence in experiments, imo
You can't run controlled experiments in either of those fields, so it's not so much a matter of low confidence in experiments as no ability to do them in the first place. There are some general patterns that can be picked out, but both disciplines deal with non-repeatable human situations that require non-repeatable human judgments to deal with them. Even to call them "sciences" is a stretch, except on a very general usage of the term "science" to basically mean "something people study".
A layperson doesn't need to be able to reproduce mathematical proofs to understand something that is obvious and material in front of them that is explained by the proof.
How did you acquire the belief that it is better to consider and weigh evidence? And on what scale are you weighing the evidence? And where did you acquire that scale?
>First, people don't acquire the beliefs by considering and weighing evidence; they acquire them by being told them, usually at a young age, by people they trust, and making them part of their identity. That's why people are so resistant to changing such beliefs.
I've come across countless counter-examples to this in my life. A lot of the socialists/Marxists I've known come from relatively well of conservative families for example.
I've no real evidence for this except personal anecdotes, but I suspect gravitating towards an ideology is often as much motivated by what you are against as it is motivated by what you are for. If there's a hierarchy in power, political, religious, whatever, that you think is corrupt you're going to naturally gravitate towards an ideology that provides a narrative as to why it is corrupt and what can be done about it.
People fed up with corruption in catholicism gravitated to protestantism. People fed up with feudal or capitalist hierarchies gravitate towards Marxism. People in the Muslim world fed up with the economic and military domination of the West gravitate towards islamic fundamentalism. People fed up with Communist totalitarianism gravitate towards democracy. These counter-narratives provide a framework for opposition and an agenda that opposition can rally around and unify on.
I think all ideologies you list support your thesis. These are all examples of counter-ideologies. All of them have also led to ideological wars, including some of the most bloody conflicts in history.
But there are counterexamples. The Scientific Revolution grew out of Christianity more gradually, and with somewhat less friction. Although the Church did try to fight back, the output of the scientists was simply too valuable to local populations and leaders to be suppressed.
Likewise, many countries saw royalty and nobility gradually be replaced by the burgeoisie in a non-violoent manner. The main exception, France, was a lot less successful in this.
Later on, while Marxism led to revolution in the Russian Empire, the labor movement in northern Europe decided to distance themselves from Marx, and instead work for the proletariat by reform rather than revolution. Not by attacking the burgeoisie, but rather by collaborating with it, and by leveraging capitalism to fund a welfare state.
But then again, neither the burgeoisie or the labor movement represented a fundamentally new ideology. Rather, they both adopted and adapted the ideology already in place, which was carredi by some combination of religion, scientism and patriotism/nationalism. The ideologies DID evolve, but in these cases, not in an abrupt manner, dictated by a few "intellectual" ideologes. And most importantly, they did not treat the pre-existing system as a mortal enemy.
History will show where the new ideologies will lead. At the momement, they seem to be very concerned with identifying enemies and not very interested in compromise. There seems to be more appetetite for conflict than the world has seen since the 1930's, and it may be wise to prepare for some kind of rupture within the next 5-30 years.
> A lot of the socialists/Marxists I've known come from relatively well of conservative families for example.
That just means they got told about socialism/Marxism by some other authority figure besides their parents. I never said that parents were the only ones that could tell people such beliefs and have them accepted and made part of the person's identity.
> I suspect gravitating towards an ideology is often as much motivated by what you are against as it is motivated by what you are for.
This can quite often explain why people accept beliefs by being told them and making them part of their identity, instead of considering and weighing evidence, yes.
Not all secular beliefs are ideologies. I think there are two key common factors between religious beliefs and ideologies that call themselves "secular":
First, people don't acquire the beliefs by considering and weighing evidence; they acquire them by being told them, usually at a young age, by people they trust, and making them part of their identity. That's why people are so resistant to changing such beliefs.
Second, the set of beliefs acquired in this way is not just a few isolated ones, but a whole network of beliefs that cover every aspect of life and are all asserted as justification for each other in what amounts to a logical circle. That's why it's so hard to penetrate such a belief system and get people to doubt it, even if it flies in the face of easily obtainable evidence.