> Few people understand that most religions e.g. Judaism and Christianity have an apologetic discipline – a deliberate arm open to debate.
The range of permissible debate is quite narrow in reality, and usually start from an assumption that the core tenets are more or less true.
> 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.
You're basically defining all belief as religious belief. You're welcome to it, but it's not particularly useful or constructive. And suggesting those that don't have the belief haven't actually thought about it, or lack the tools to do so, is a bit antagonistic, really.
I had an otherwise enjoyable conversation with a just recently-turned-religious person. As soon as core tenets, as you nicely put it, where up for discussion, conversation came to a screeching halt. People who think the ten amendments must be strictly followed have a lot of cognitive dissonance to resolve, and reasoning is not welcome.
The same person asked me into great detail why vaccinations should be a good idea, and expected me to provide all the answers.
We both remained at our positions - she‘s now contemplating homeschooling her kid because of mask requirements, and I still don’t believe in a religion that says my gay friends need to become straight.
That's hilarious. I'm not sure if that's a typo or joke. It also makes me think of the US Bill of Rights, which are the first ten amendments to the US Constitution.
You can't think of anything you believe in that if someone came to you to "discuss" you wouldn't react instantly negative and start calling the other person insults?
Why bother? I don’t hold any belief strongly enough to merit such a reaction, though I might react negatively for other reasons. For example, past experience showing the insincerity of their own debate tactics and a lack of patience for rehashing it all yet again.
I don't know you and can't speak for you. But my point that all the people on here criticizing people on their moral systems are baseless stands. These same people would've been in the mob in salem executing so called witches a couple hundred years ago and would have been just as certain in their beliefs then.
Religion is dividing our society. Its reasonable to wish for an independent believe system for our whole society.
Nonetheless arguing on hn is not a mob.
But yes discriminiation of woman is a bigger problem than religion. Forced marriages, hanging gay people, raping children, religious conflicts are a huge issue still today.
Unfortunate for us, sciencse or a global believe system doesn't need to have a church. It happens trhough alignment, communication etc.
We are already more aligned through knowledge but we just don't promote that. My friend and i are not going to our science church on sunday because we don't need to. We don't need to discuss 1+1=2 because its proven. And while social norms are not that explicit, we see big progress here as well: In germany for example, we don't hang people on carcranes because they are gay.
Its just harder to keep track of this and doing the right thing if you don't get it pushed in every sunday. And indepenedent of this, in bavaria you had one hour every week christian religion in school. I grew up with plenty of assholes. Clearly religioun did not brought us as humans together.
AFAIK witch hunts were often driven by political reasons and the church lent their credibility for it. Sometimes the church initiated them. Claiming atheists would have been a part of this is a bit far fetched, to put it mildly.
> These same people would've been in the mob in salem executing so called witches a couple hundred years ago and would have been just as certain in their beliefs then.
Not being able to speak for someone implies you do not know their thoughts or motivations.
So in the second sentence, you acknowledge that you do not know the thoughts or motivations of the person you are responding to, but the preceding sentence implies that you do know the thoughts and motivations of some other people, and what they would or would not have done a couple hundred years ago.
I.e. a very strong claim about one group of people you do not know, followed by an acknowledgement that said strong claim cannot be made for another group of people you do not know.
>The range of permissible debate is quite narrow in reality, and usually start from an assumption that the core tenets are more or less true.
The purpose of apologetics is to defend the faith debates with people of other religions or atheists. If there are rules about not allowing certain things to be debated that's not going to work at all.
> usually start from an assumption that the core tenets are more or less true.
You use this as a criticism of religion but I find it's true of secular people as well who have baseless beliefs that are just as deeply ingrained.
Telling someone on hackernews you are religious you will probably get a ton of criticism and downvotes. You know what will get the same reaction? Telling someone you are a moral nihilist.
Why is murder evil? Why is stealing evil? Why is anything evil or good for that matter? At least religious people have answers to these questions. (Although I don't think they are necessarily good answers, why is something good because some omnipotent being said so? what if that omnipotent being was evil?)
I feel like I'm screaming at windmills but everything people get hysterical over in our modern world is baseless. All values do not stand up to scrutiny and can be argued against using the one word question "why?"
edit: I was predictably downvoted, please don't take this as me complaining and trying to claim victimhood because it truly doesn't affect me. I just find it funny how uncomfortable my comment makes people that are supposedly open minded and critical of their beliefs but surprisingly share the same beliefs as their entire social group.
People have spent millenia thinking about rational answers to those questions. It's easy enough to find answers, but much like with religion there is no consensus. The answers follow a much more rigorous logic then "god said so" though. I'm not a moral nihillist because that's not a thing, but I am a moral anti-realist because it's clear that there are no intrinsic moral laws. It's all preference based.
It is not all preference based, as very few moral systems lead to thriving societies that are stable and able to self-reproduce rather than collapsing back into chaos. In fact, almost none do.
Take a look at the ten commandments. "Honor thy father and mother so that it may be well with you and you may live long in the land". What happens when generation n+1 thinks they are morally superior to generation n? The same also holds for n+2, and so you do not have a stable society, you have a disintegrating society. Or half the commandments banning envy. Why ban envy and wanting what your neighbor has? Because envy-based moral systems lead to less successful societies than charity based moral systems, where the rich are told they should be generous to the poor versus telling the poor that they have a right to something possessed by the rich. It is not arbitrary -- some ethical codes lead to stable, successful societies and others do not.
One of the problems with modernism is that we have thrown away this notion of reverence and replaced it with a belief in moral progress, which has only led to an ocean of murders and social disintegration. In 10 generations, there will be no modernism left, it will be re-absorbed into more traditional societies, because modernist societies aren't able to reproduce themselves. Not biologically, not ethically, not economically. Yes, there are a few Gene Roddenberry holdouts that believe in generic liberalism as a system on which a society can be based. But the voice of LaFayette is always drowned out by the voice of Robespierre. Lafayette was a fool, thinking that whatever seemed right to him could be the basis of a society.
So it's not so much that I believe I can win an argument with someone who believes moral systems are preference based, but that those who do believe that will simply be outcompeted. Societies in which large numbers hold to such views will be unable to reproduce themselves and they will be eclipsed by societies that adopt ethical codes that form specific templates. A painter can paint a picture of any creature, but actual living, successful organisms are under strict constraints. A philosopher can imagine any moral code, but living, successful societies have to stick to what actually works.
There is such a wide gulf between what religious folk (well, American religious folk at least) think they represent, and how they actually act. E.g. my brother-in-law is a devout Christian and is extremely fond of saying 'What would Jesus do' and then proceeding to do the opposite.
What is tearing apart America right now? Politics? No. Evangelical politics. It does not bring stability.
I think you're arguing against something the grandparent didn't claim? They didn't say that various moral systems wouldn't have different outcomes, just that none of them would be intrinsically correct.
We can note, for instance, that "produces a thriving society" is a thing for which you're imposing a preference. There's no inherent reason why that's the true system, just that we think it'd be nifty if that was an outcome.
We have countries today that treat women as second class citizens and still practice slavery and they can be considered "thriving" societies which are completely different from the Western world which can also be considered to be made up of "thriving" societies.
So if the requirement for a moral system to be "true" is for it to result in a thriving society we have a problem because we still have competing moral systems.
And even if we somehow whittled down to one global system, just because people believe in it doesn't make it true (do you need me to provide examples of nearly universal beliefs that were proven untrue later?)
The UN does not decide what is _evil_ or not, and empathy is not some self-evident trait from which all objective morality comes from. You could possibly argue that empathy is evolutionary and aids society and in that way has some objective merit, but the GP is right, we have to accept that our moral systems are rooted in some assumptions.
It's actually very simple. There is no such thing as objective morality. However, social norms are explained by people acting in their own rational self-interest. For example, I want to live in a society where I don't get murdered. Therefore, I want to live in a society that criminalizes murder. That's all there is to it. That is your "Why?" answered.
To go one step further, the why of questions like "Why don't you want to get murdered?" are because I come from a long line of organisms that didn't get murdered because of a high drive to not get murdered. The ones without that drive got weeded out. There's still no morality involved, I just axiomatically don't want to get murdered.
When I think of religion in the context of Hacker News I think of things like Michael O. Church evangelizing functional programming or the people who challenged the epistemological paradigm of the cladistics journal which must be parsimony. So I feel confused when I see the other kind of religion here. One way you could make us feel even more uncomfortable is by sharing information we haven't considered, like a weakness in a computer system or a contradiction in a generally accepted practice.
There is an entire branch of Philosophy called Ethics that gives us better answers to these questions and a better framework for grappling with them then religion ever has. It is quite arrogant to assume that atheists have no answers at all to these questions.
> The range of permissible debate is quite narrow in reality
What? Christian apologetics meets atheists, Satanists, Darwinists, whoever. I don't even know how restricting apologetics to a very narrow permissible debate would work, unless like the MSM one can control which opponent gets on the mic.
Christians enforce a narrow range of theological divergence acceptable as orthodox, but that is not apologetics.
> You're basically defining all belief as religious belief
No he isn't. He's defining humans as religious, and observing that the absence of affiliation with a major organized religion doesn't change this.
I live in a Communist country in which the Party sometimes explicitly substitutes for a church. In the USA, congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, which means that naturally a state church will evolve that denies being a state church -- both the "state" and "church" parts. Humans being both religious and hierarchical, it's often tricky to determine whether state is running church or vice versa. The ball is always under the other cup.
If you dare, I'm sure you can think of a few recently-invented blasphemies which if violated would result in censure of a progressively more official nature. Whoever can hunt witches, holds the pulpit, even if it comes with a press badge rather than a funny hat.
You raised a good point about all belief vs religious belief.
Which beliefs do you take on faith? Which would have you outcast if you didn’t believe them? Which lead you to a personal sacrifice? Which beliefs cause great anxiety or pleasure with no tangible evidence?
Not comprehensive but those are categories of beliefs elevated to religious in nature.
For example, believing that the Lakers are the best basketball team probably is not religious, but believing that your life got substantially better or worse following an election would be a religious belief.
Religion has a meaning, and it specifically relates to the supernatural. If something makes no supernatural claims, it's not a religion.
To whit, "believing that your life got substantially better or worse following an election" would not be a religious belief. This is because it can be tested, and would have a simple cause/effect based in physical reality. It might be an intangible "I feel better about things because I know people agree with me, and think that people in positions of political power will support my interests" -- but there's nothing supernatural about that.
As was said, if you want to redefine the word "religion" to mean "any sort of belief system", then sure, go for it. It's a great way to troll and provoke arguments.
There can be natural objects with supernatural reverence like god emperors . Money, covid, climate change are all supernatural phenomenon with a material basis
For me atheism & nihilism go a bit hand in hand, but there are atheists who aren't nihilists, which then have to still level their disbelief in god with faith in meaningfulness
The range of permissible debate is quite narrow in reality, and usually start from an assumption that the core tenets are more or less true.
> 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.
You're basically defining all belief as religious belief. You're welcome to it, but it's not particularly useful or constructive. And suggesting those that don't have the belief haven't actually thought about it, or lack the tools to do so, is a bit antagonistic, really.