xabotage

The Fremen Mirage - https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...

It's clearly been working for decades. The only reason modern software needs so much attention is because 1) Internet connectivity requires constant security updates and 2) new features to sell, neither of which should apply here.

Homelessness doesn't exactly sound "solved" in Utah... https://www.sltrib.com/news/2022/12/22/this-year-least-159-h...

Empathy is a survival strategy that benefits society as a whole whereas sociopathy is a survival strategy that benefits the individual. Humans are complex and diverse enough to display both sets of behaviors within the population.

I thought it should be fairly obvious that social instincts are "blindly inherited," I can't imagine why you think that any institution, scientific or religious, would need to manufacture them.

Which civilization has been built in honor of nothing?

It turns out, civilizations are built to serve the purpose of human existence, not to venerate mythical deities. You must be confusing them with churches, temples, synagogues, etc.

https://www.crisismagazine.com/opinion/the-growth-of-the-lat...

Relevant quote: "TLM-attending Catholics still make up a very small minority in the Church ... only 4% of parishes offer even one TLM on a regular (although not necessarily weekly) basis"

Not to mention, that is explicitly tagged as an opinion piece from a pro-Catholic publication.

I don't help the poor as a hobby or because I was told to. I help the poor because I have compassion and empathy. Animals also demonstrate these same pro-social behaviors, and I'm pretty sure none of them are Jewish or Hindu.

You are assuming that magical thinking is the optimal survival strategy as opposed to a lesser-evil byproduct of advanced cognition in a particular environment. This is like assuming that because all humans have appendices, having an appendix is necessarily a better survival strategy. It's not. It may have once served a purpose, but now the best it can do is kill you.

Nukes could wipe out the human race, but so could an asteroid. Coincidentally I'd be much less worried about having nukes if there was a lot less magical thinking in the world.

Why do civilizations need to be built to the honor of something? I see plenty of art and architecture created independent of any mythical deity. I can't remember the last time I listened to a popular or well-renowed song that was religious-themed. Humans create and appreciate art all the time without it.

Attendance at TLM is increasing, not decreasing.

Unclear what you mean by "TLM" but church attendance at least in the US is decreasing. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decli...

I somewhat agree, but I am optimistic that society will change in other ways to fill this gap. It need not be any single activity or institution.

There won't be an exact replacement because the circumstances that led to the community cannot (or rather, should not) be replicated. For the sake of the survival of the planet/species, I also don't think any institution based around magical thinking should fill the gap.

Keep in mind that high-demand religions require a huge investment of time and money. Devoting even just a fraction of those resources to hobbies, art classes, and/or other local activities tends to yield much better social results. While this might not perfectly fill the gap, neither did the religion, which is why people are leaving it.

There is definitely a massive breakdown of old social institutions that have not adapted to the modern world. People don't need to be closely knit to their families and local religion in order to survive anymore, and they are simultaneously discovering how awful these institutions habitually are.

To improve families, I imagine we'd have to wait for a significantly large generation to mature whose parents started a family through informed choice rather than social/cultural/religious pressure.

Alternatively, we could regress by taking away people's freedoms (especially women's) and force everyone to be dependent on traditional power structures just like the "good old days."

Personally, I'd rather move forward, but it's not entirely clear what that looks like.

You're looking at weekly religious gatherings through rose-colored lenses. A crossfit gym membership and book club could very well produce a far healthier local community than a church. Religion does not have a monopoly on the variables that attract healthy, thoughtful, intelligent people (in fact, trends in the US suggest quite the opposite).

Interesting how you just said science "cannot be used to explain everything" and yet now you're claiming "proof" and "evidence" (i.e. science) for your particular religion. Make up your mind.

Numbers are a human construct, just like words in a language. They don't "exist" in the same sense as anything physically real. Nobody has "faith" in the number one, it's just a concept that's proven to be universally useful. If it weren't useful, people wouldn't (and couldn't) conceptualize it. Again, faith is believing in something despite lack of evidence or despite evidence to the contrary.

I trust scientific facts proportional to the evidence I have that these facts are true. This is not the case for faith, wherein disproportionately large amounts of trust are demanded without any evidence.

Our model of the atom allows us to accurately predict chemical reactions. Religion has no predictive power whatsoever, and none of its unique "truth" claims are provable or falsifiable.

People who uncritically trust "science" as regurgitated by pop-culture media are more akin to theists.

Faith is not commitment to "truth," but rather commitment to a belief regardless of its veracity. Science has nothing to do with "believing" something - its a process for determining what actually is true based on evidence. Historically, science has only been allowed to flourish as long as it tiptoed around the religious powers-that-be.

If you really think science boils down to a "minor variation on what has come before," I'm curious to know what millenia-dead philosophers managed to launch a JWST equivalent.

How did I know before I clicked that link that it was going to be apologetics.

Faith is not a shortcut to knowledge. "Hey, we can't yet find the answer to big questions through rational means, so let's try irrational means!"

Where and when, throughout all human history, have there been significant populations not subject to a religion? It seems strange to suggest that demonstrably unscientific belief systems with incompatible differences tied mainly to geographic location somehow have a unifying impact on scientific progress.

It's kind of like saying a person contributed to science because of their hair color while simultaneously conceding that people of all hair colors contribute to science.

No. Faith is belief without evidence or belief in the presence of contrary evidence. If we were to suppose the "base presumptions" of science were on the same level as religious claims, then they could be arbitrarily ignored without real-world consequences.

You're saying scientific processes (petri dish experiment) may have created life because we can't yet explain what scientific processes may have created life? And ancient, unscientific mythological fairy tales may somehow have encoded this event, despite having always been taken at face-value up until they were scientifically and rationally disproven?

You seem to be missing the point. Cults thrive on manipulating social interactions and slowly chipping away at others' boundaries. No cult pitches the shadiness up-front for the incredibly obvious reason that it scares away targets; instead they slowly coax people into taking one "reasonable" step after another until they can't recognize the shadiness for what it is in the moment. The compelling conclusion is that people who think they can easily spot cult recruitment tactics are in fact perfect targets for cults.

Of course Lewis isn't explicitly humanist - Humanism is a "worldly" movement, and we can't let the "evil", "fallen" world take credit for anything good. I would be more inclined to buy Lewis' depiction of the Christian god if it didn't clash with all of Christian history up until, serendipitously, humanistic principles gained traction.

Testimonials are not evidence.

Trash epistemology is the norm. But it would be nice at the very least to normalize evidence-based knowledge as the default instead of religious mythology. Just because the ideologies are enemies, doesn't mean one of them isn't significantly less wrong than the other.

Faith is belief without evidence or belief in the presence of contradicting evidence - people don't "reason their way" into faith, they rationalize. C.S. Lewis is popular because he uses humanist principles to spin a fundamentally authoritarian, controlling religion into something easier for the modern mindset to rationalize. The GP's perspective is extremely accurate - child indoctrination is religion's primary mechanism to maintain it's power and control.

Buses would be way better if roads were designed to prioritize them over single passenger cars. Instead (in the US), you're just stuck in traffic with extra stops, so you might as well drive.

More appropriately, Religion is the rent-seeking landlord of the bookshop who skims all the profits, provides little to no value, and takes all the credit for the literacy of the townsfolk.

In the end it's just falsely attributing divinity to pro-social human programming developed over millennia of natural selection. Religion came much later than pro-social behavior, and in fact it more resembles "let's agree on that": When it serves you, quote the bible verses that forbid killing, and when it serves you, quote the verses that justify killing indiscriminately.

The post title implies religiosity != happiness, the parent implied other results might differ, my comment was a response to that possibility, for the sake of argument as you said.

I never said it was, I'm not sure why you think I did.

It's not the point of religion, it's a side-effect. While religion is a remarkably effective control/coercion tool, there are more ethical ways to establish universal shared values. "Thou Shalt Not Kill" isn't exactly inspirational coming from a book filled with god-sanctioned rape, incest, genocide, and infanticide. People didn't adopt that principle because religion told them to, they adopted it because it allowed them to outcompete the primitive societies that didn't.