• Brendan Golledge
    114
    I have discussed before that I believe values are the core of an animal's control system. I'll give some examples to illustrate.


    Role of Values in Directing Thought:
    I've commonly used the example that if you thought somebody stole your money, you'd be mad, because anger is the emotion that you feel when someone is attacking something that you care about. However, if you decided that you really didn't care about the money anymore (perhaps you won the lottery, or got a large inheritance?), then the anger would disappear. Or if you realized that you had just lost the money, and that nobody had deliberately stolen it, the anger would probably be replaced by some combination of sadness and embarrassment. But whatever you are feeling about the situation, the feelings drive the thoughts. Anger tends to incline one towards seeking revenge against the enemy, and sadness tends to make one dwell on the sad event.

    A new example that has just come to mind is that whereas I have always been intellectually inclined, I did not much care for money or practical matters in my youth (beyond avoiding bullying). However, after I went through puberty, I wanted to have sex, marriage, and a family. I had difficulty with this however, due to my lack of social skills and lack of money, which I realized through experience and testimony are attractive to women. I had never been interested in other people or in money before, but my interest in women caused me to try to learn about these things. So, my interest in sex caused me to think about women, and that caused me to realize that I ought to care about money and social skills, and that caused me to learn about those things.

    Humans are Social
    Anyway, now I can start the main point. It seems to me that most people are very highly socially oriented. That is to say, they care a great deal about what other people want. Because the typical person values other people's wants so highly, his brain cannot truly turn on until it has been set on a socially accepted task. This is why the Overton window exists; most people have no motivation to even seriously consider a thought if they have not heard it previously espoused in a socially sanctioned way.

    Most People Don't Think
    I have heard that Schoppenhauer said that a person cannot actually think unless he likes thinking for its own sake. If a person has some ulterior motive for thinking, then he finds a quick and dirty answer, and then stops thinking.

    I have also heard, I believe from some other famous person, something of the nature that 90% of people do not think, 7% of people think that they think, and 3% of people actually think. This seemed very pessimistic and mysterious to me at the time, but I think I understand it now. Most people do not actually turn on their brains and independently process the information they receive. They are so focused instead on trying to please other people, that they try to repeat those words, phrases, and actions which they have seen socially sanctioned by others. Within a social setting, they can give a very convincing illusion that they are thinking, since they are replying in a manner that other people expect. However, when it comes to anything new, for which no known social consensus exists, they show themselves to be very stupid.


    My Experience With Previous Posts
    I have experienced this (people making irrelevant replies) myself with several posts I have made on forums in the last several months. I had several thoughts that I had never heard anyone else say before, and I thought I should share them. I was disappointed to find that most of the replies did not even attempt to address the content of what I said, but replied superficially to some tertiary thing.

    For instance, I made a couple posts on God, in a variety of contexts. One context might have been God merely as the ordering principles of nature (the laws of nature), and I think I even might have explicitly said this. But I still got replies stating that God does not exist. This is very stupid, since science depends on there being reliable ordering principles in nature, and I was using God in that context as being pretty much interchangeable with the laws of nature, and I don't think anyone was suggesting that nature has no logic or consistency to it. I suspect that in popular culture, "God" has become associated with "irrational" (which is bad), and "skepticism" of God has been associated with goodness, so that they see the word "God" and immediately react with derision in order to be on the good side of the social consensus rather than the bad side. But it really made no sense in that context, because I could have replaced "God" with the "the laws of nature" and it would have made little difference to that particular argument. The main essay that got the most pushback was "God as Experienced, and as Metaphysical Speculation". Since it was dealing with "God as Experienced", I treated God as the laws of nature, social consensus, and as a projection of one's inner values (so lots of separate topics in parallel which are often associated with God). So, I was dealing with tangible things that can be experienced, and trying to make sense of them, but most of the replies would have been appropriate only in response to a cartoonish Christian representation of God (not merely Christian, but cartoonishly Christian). After a couple pages I did get a reply which convinced me that that person had understood what I said. He said something like, if God is a projection of one's inner values, then it's possible that someone could make up some BS that makes him happy and call that God. My response was, yes, that's entirely consistent with what I was talking about! But the essay went on for several pages, and the last I checked, the consensus in the replies seemed to conclude only that perhaps there was something of merit in the opening sentence of my essay.

    I have written several posts on several forums in the last several months, and typically I got very few replies (I suppose I didn't use any buzzwords that lit up people's social brains), or else I reliably got +3/4 of the replies only in response to a particular buzzword, like "God", and the topic I wanted to discuss was left mostly unaddressed.


    Guesses on Why People are so Socially Oriented

    Typically we think of a person living by his labor (unless you are a socialist), but I think in truth, a person earns money according to the perception of his value, rather than according to his actual value. Convincing your boss that you've done a good job is more important for your success than in actually delivering good work. This is extremely important for our development, because economic development among humans typically necessitates specialization and trade. It's the trade part that determines the reward for your work, and trade is a negotiation rather than materially fruitful labor. Delivering what is expected is the most crucial element to material success in productive labor, and what is expected can sometimes deviate from what is materially optimal.

    I have thought of a more brutal example of how it is that we may have come to be like this. There is DNA and archeological evidence that when agriculture was developed in the Stone Age, land was passed down from father to son within a tribe, and women were traded between tribes. Cities developed for the first time for protection, because neighboring tribes often warred with each other. Every once in a while, one tribe would be completely wiped out, with the men being killed and the women being abducted (there are even a few references to this happening in the Old Testament). Because land was passed down from father to son, male DNA was typically geographically isolated, so that wars which killed men tended to reduce male genetic diversity in the Y chromosome. This caused a drastic decrease in the diversity of the Y chromosome, so that it appeared for a while that there was only 1 man alive for every 17 women. I believe that it is a practical impossibility that there could have been so few men remaining alive generation after generation, so I believe what actually happened was that the lack of genetic diversity just made it appear as though there were very few men. It could be that maybe only 1% of male genetic diversity was wiped out after every generation, and after several generations, very little of the original genetic material remained. Anyway, the point is that for thousands of years, genocide and rape was the norm in our species. Being a social outcast would have meant certain death. Chimpanzees also have wars, which indicates that the proclivity for violence may have been in our species for a very long time, and the advent of agriculture just exacerbated the issue by forcing people to stay put instead of being able to flee when there was a conflict.

    Prior to the advent of the scientific method, the only known method for ascertaining truth in the human species was by appeal to authority. The reason is that authority killed you if you didn't agree with it, so that free thinkers were weeded out of the gene pool. This is still our default method of finding truth.

    Humans are Made to Live in Cults

    Here is my definition of a cult: A social unit which claims for itself the right to decree truth. If the social authority (it could be democratic vote, or a charismatic leader) decrees that the sky is green and the grass is blue, then the adherents of the cult will believe it. If it decrees that a penis is interchangeable with a vagina, and that a person can change his biology by his chosen identity, then members of the cult will believe it. I could give more examples of cult-asserted truth, but I will not do that, because then everyone would hate me.

    It is my belief that humans are hardwired to live in cults, and that identification with a cult is actually what passes for thinking most of the time. People do not actually care about the meaning of words like, "truth", "justice", "equality", "freedom", etc, but only say those words so that other cult members who say the same words will accept them.

    Actually, I will give an example of a special cult, because it is socially accepted at the present time to poke fun at this cult. Christianity seems to me to be the ultimate anti-cult cult. In form, it is the ultimate cult, but in teaching, its teachings run counter to all of our instincts. It asserts that a man IS truth (the ultimate form of authority being able to assert truth). It asserts that affiliation with the cult will bring ultimate blessings, and dissociation with it will bring ultimate punishments. This is the most extreme example of a cult I can think of. But the teachings are very strange. It also teaches that truth is higher than any human social organization on Earth (apart from churches, which typically have some claim to infallibility), which is the ultimate nullification of any other cult. It also teaches that while on Earth, we are to love our neighbors as ourselves, which runs directly counter to our cult instinct to attack and kill the stranger and take what is his. It is my belief that the Christian cult was a prerequisite for the scientific method to occur, because it asserted objective truth beyond any Earthly authority. The teachings of loving one's neighbor as one's self were probably also the prerequisite to equality under the law and individual liberty. What has been more typical in other times and places was that a person's true value was not different than his perceived social value.

    The communist cult which was the basis of the Soviet Union is an obvious example of authority being able to assert truth independently of material reality. This cult is dead, so it's also safe to poke fun at it. But most people still live in cults. If you want to find out which cult you belong to (or any irrational belief, really), it would be instructive to go look for those things that offend you.

    On Love of Truth for Happiness Machines
    Schopenhauer said that a person cannot think unless he likes thinking for its own sake. I prefer rather to think that a person has to value truth for its own sake, in order to be able to recognize the truth.

    It seems to me to be hardwired into us to want to improve our emotional state. If it's possible to lie to trick ourselves into feeling better about ourselves, this is what we typically do. It's very hard to avoid doing this, because that means sitting on top of negative feelings rather than positive ones. The only way to avoid it is to have a love of truth for its own sake, and a sufficient disdain for our own comfort, as well as for the opinions of others. I think love of comfort and people pleasing are the greatest sources of lies in the world.

    Until most people love truth above all else, lies will rule the world. It must be this way. Because lies are not restricted like the truth is, they are better able to satisfy our emotional needs, and in so doing, they have our support.


    Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom

    I was a strange child, so I became the school scapegoat. Whenever the children did something naughty and the teacher didn't see it, they'd blame it on me, and I'd get punished, often without even knowing what the crime was. This was extremely stressful and confusing for me as a child. I didn't realize it at the time, but I believe this set me psychologically apart, and made it possible for me to learn wisdom.

    I understood viscerally from my life situation that there were forces bigger than my own wants and desires which would come and do harm to me if I did not understand them and avoid them, and I understood very well that I knew next to nothing about them. This made me very curious and eager to learn everything I could and improve myself as much as possible.

    I think in general, "Fear of the Lord" is when a person realizes that there is an objective reality which is bigger than any of his own personal fancies, and bigger even than the social consensus, and that ignoring it will bring doom. This seems to me to be an objective fact. Ancient people (due to our proclivity to identify with cults) tended to see personality and agency where it really might not have been, and so they called the objective reality "God". Calling the objective reality "God" is unpopular today, but it is still out there, and it still goes about its own business without the slightest regard to our wishes. I believe it is fear of this reality which overrides our tendency to tell ourselves comforting lies and to people please.
  • Arne
    816
    You begin with "On the Values Necessary for Thought" and end with 3 paragraphs on "Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom." And you raise many issues in between. I do not wish to discuss all the issues raised and I do not know which of the many issues raised is the one you wish most to discuss.

    I too am concerned about the almost knee-jerk disrespect for those wishing to affirm or entertain the possibility of the existence of God. And my experience is that I receive more disrespect from those who consider themselves enlightened than from believers. Such disrespect is okay on Facebook. It is out of place on this forum.
  • Vera Mont
    4.3k
    Calling the objective reality "God" is unpopular today,Brendan Golledge

    It's about time!
  • Wayfarer
    22.4k
    I have written several posts on several forums in the last several months, and typically I got very few repliesBrendan Golledge

    Well, this post is idiosyncratic, and contains a great many sweeping statements and value judgements. The use of the word 'thought' is not well-defined, save with reference to Schopenhauer (mispelled, by the way.) It's too long, and tries to cover too many topics - eight headings, and many different sub-threads. I'd suggest tightening your focus a bit, try to lead with one or two major points and then raise further points in the ensuing debate.

    Have a look at the thread on how to write an OP.

    I agree that posts about God generally get a lot of unjustified hostility, but there are worse forums than this in that respect. But nevertheless, point taken.
  • 180 Proof
    15.3k
    As a freethinker IMO, courage for warranted doubt (and error-correction) seems the indispensible virtue "necessary for thought" (with adaptive judgment sufficient for thinking)
  • Lionino
    2.7k
    This cult is deadBrendan Golledge

    I wish.

    One context might have been God merely as the ordering principles of nature (the laws of nature)Brendan Golledge

    There is no such thing as "God as". God has a definition that has to be used. Redefining god to mean something else is a cheap trick that people use when modern knowledge has pulled them away from their faith but still want to run away from the cold pessimism of materialism towards some easy absolute.

    I am enlightened and God is actually the fruits lying on my kitchen bowl. The fruits exist. Evidently God exists!
  • Ciceronianus
    3k
    It also teaches that truth is higher than any human social organization on Earth (apart from churches, which typically have some claim to infallibility), which is the ultimate nullification of any other cult. It also teaches that while on Earth, we are to love our neighbors as ourselves, which runs directly counter to our cult instinct to attack and kill the stranger and take what is his. It is my belief that the Christian cult was a prerequisite for the scientific method to occur, because it asserted objective truth beyond any Earthly authority. The teachings of loving one's neighbor as one's self were probably also the prerequisite to equality under the law and individual liberty. What has been more typical in other times and places was that a person's true value was not different than his perceived social value.Brendan Golledge

    None of this is peculiarly Christian, I'm afraid. These "teachings" as you call them were arrived at by pagan philosophers long before Jesus was a twinkle in his father's (or his own or and his own, if you're a fan of the Trinity) eye. While Christianity was relentless in extinguishing much of pagan civilization, it was also exceedingly eager to assimilate pagan philosophy and, in certain respects, religions.

    For my part, I'm with Dewey in believing that we only think when confronted by problems or situations we wish to resolve. What we consider problems or wish resolved will be determined by what we value in many cases, obviously.
  • jgill
    3.8k
    If I see references to God, or when an OP is very lengthy and rambling I usually lose interest very quickly. That's just me. As for thinking and solving problems, I recall Richard Feynman saying something to the effect that one should attack problems that one feels are within one's capabilities to solve.
  • Philosophim
    2.6k
    But whatever you are feeling about the situation, the feelings drive the thoughts.Brendan Golledge

    This is really more the essence of what drives thinking instead of being social alone. Its our emotions. Our desires. What we want. Most people are rationalizing beings, not rational beings. And this makes sense if you think about it. We have desires to get things that we want, and we use our thoughts to get what we want. We don't use our thoughts innately to deny what we want.

    Being rational is not innate. I believe it is a skill. It requires effort, technique, honesty, and a willingness to objectively look at one's emotional tendencies and wants, and reasonably control them. Its extremely difficult and can take years to master.

    You and I are not immune to this. I'm constantly tempted to let my emotions about a subject override the conversation. I want to be right in every discussion I'm in. But that HAS to be reigned in. It must be beaten into its proper corner and place. :) Its a hard ask for many people to do. Take a look at your own motivations for posting the topic. What ultimately do you want out of it? Is it to justify God? To imply that other people are stupid whereas you are mentally superior? I don't mean that you've done any of this intentionally or to hurt you. But examining oneself in an honest life can be painful. A true thinker whose honest about their own motivations and rationalizations will be willing to hurt themselves far more than anyone else can hurt them.

    However, when it comes to anything new, for which no known social consensus exists, they show themselves to be very stupid.Brendan Golledge

    One way we can look at it is, "They're stupid, I'm not." Which trust me, we all have the thought that everyone else is stupid and we're smarter than everyone else. :) Truly rational people have to fight to avoid falling into this poisonous thinking. Another way we can look at it is, "Thinking about new things is hard for most people without motivation to." Its not stupidity. Its about what people want. Why should someone think about something completely new when what they hold in their thoughts functions perfectly fine? Ask yourself this: Are you willing to think about a logically viable world where a God does not exist? Or are you more concerned with getting other people to think of a logically viable world where a God must exist?

    You're not stupid. Neither are (necessarily) the people replying. Its about what you're motivated to think about. Someone replying to you may not care about your point because their idea that "There is no God," serves them great and they see the tendency to push, "There is a God," as a negative in their or other people's lives. So they're not really interested in exploring your new tendency. They're not curious as to whether there really is a God, they just want to preserve the emotional comfort and benefit their worldview gives them.

    A second thing to consider is that this a public forum. It is not limited to trained philosophers, academics, or those who have practice and training in rational thought. A lot of times its just people with opinions. "Oh hey, this guy is arguing for God. Yeah, that's no good, let me just post real quick to shut that down." Again, this is not explicitly thought by some, but definitely comes across in their posts. I understand your frustration, as I have spent many years trying to get people to engage with particular posts of mine, yet found most people lacked the patience or curiosity to explore them. Keep at it though, I found at least one person on these forums who is willing to engage, and its wonderful when you can find someone like that.

    I was disappointed to find that most of the replies did not even attempt to address the content of what I said, but replied superficially to some tertiary thing.Brendan Golledge

    True. My advice is to attempt one time to redirect someone back to the larger point, or address it one time if you feel that's showing good faith in the other person's engagement. If someone continues to show no interest in the actual argument, just move on. Don't ever take personal offense unless a person is intentionally trying to offend you.

    I have written several posts on several forums in the last several months, and typically I got very few replies (I suppose I didn't use any buzzwords that lit up people's social brains), or else I reliably got +3/4 of the replies only in response to a particular buzzword, like "God", and the topic I wanted to discuss was left mostly unaddressed.Brendan Golledge

    You have to get people emotionally invested to click on your topic. Keep experimenting in titles. It doesn't have to be 'click bait', but you should put your self in the shoes of a random bored person. "Would I want to click on this and read what this random person is saying?" Remember that you are a nobody online. You are part of "the stupid people" that most everyone thinks everyone else is. :)

    Second, try to keep your topic focused. The values of necessary thought started with complaints about other people not reading or thinking about your topic, accusations that we're all cultists, and then a reference to fear of God. Its a bit all over the place right? And as you can tell from the replies that you got, people are going to take one or two salient points and address those.

    You begin with "On the Values Necessary for Thought" and end with 3 paragraphs on "Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom." And you raise many issues in between. I do not wish to discuss all the issues raised and I do not know which of the many issues raised is the one you wish most to discuss.Arne

    This was said better than I could.

    I want to end this not with a sense of beration, but one of encouragement. We all feel frustrated at times on these forums. Its perfectly normal, and you're in good company. Just don't get caught in the trap of thinking "I'm better and smarter than all of these other people." Its too easy to do. If it ever helps tell yourself say, "The better and smarter person wouldn't need to view themselves as better and smarter, they would work tirelessly to learn how to connect and convey their ideas an interesting way with people of all types and backgrounds." Keep at it. Focus on the ideas, and how to connect with others on those ideas. You have things to say and I think a little more organization in how you say it combined with some well written titles to get people in may get you more engagement.
  • Arne
    816
    Remember that you are a nobody online. You are part of "the stupid people" that most everyone thinks everyone else is. :)Philosophim

    I love that line. And there is no end to the disrespect some feel entitled to heap upon a member of "the stupid people." Just like Facebook!

    As a philosophy major, I was surrounded by faculty who considered the failure to be theirs' whenever a student failed to grasp the ideas presented. Sadly, that nurturing environment produced some thin-skinned graduates unprepared for the disrespect heaped upon "the stupid people."

    Law school was a swift and brutal cure for a thin skin. :smile:
  • Brendan Golledge
    114
    I guess this is hard for most people to understand because it's a new way of thinking about it, but when I was thinking about God, I was thinking about, "What things do people actually experience that they associate with God? What are these things and how do they work?"

    So then you get God as morality, God as creator of the universe, God as the ordering principle of the universe, God as social consensus, etc. These are things that people actually experience and associate with God. You are free to redefine God as a bowl of fruit if you want, but I don't think very many people experience God as a bowl of fruit, so, it wouldn't really explain much about our behavior.

    Because people experience these other things, you can ask questions like, "How do they work?" So like, for instance, Christians, and especially Protestants, seem to associate their conscience with the Holy Spirit, which they believe is infallible. If the conscience is actually just a subjective private voice, then this would go a long way towards explaining why there is so much confusion in the church when so many people are convinced that they are right.

    God as the ordering principle of the universe is not distinguishable from the laws of nature. If you imagine that there is an unconscious God who makes matter operate according to fixed laws, then this is really not different than a secular person's conception of the laws of nature.

    It is a whole other question entirely to what degree the ordering principle of the universe is associated with a persons' conscience, but they are related by both being things that people typically associate with the idea of God.

    The main point of this post, however, was that it seems like a lot of people reply only to buzzwords and do not try to understand the content. So they see an argument like this, and reply as if I were asserting that God were a magic man in the sky who tangibly answers prayers.
  • Brendan Golledge
    114
    For my part, I'm with Dewey in believing that we only think when confronted by problems or situations we wish to resolve. What we consider problems or wish resolved will be determined by what we value in many cases, obviously.Ciceronianus

    So we are not really in disagreement on that point.
  • Brendan Golledge
    114
    You begin with "On the Values Necessary for Thought" and end with 3 paragraphs on "Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom." And you raise many issues in between. I do not wish to discuss all the issues raised and I do not know which of the many issues raised is the one you wish most to discuss.Arne

    I see that it is rambling. I suppose if I wanted to summarize the things I thought were most important for this particular post they would be: humans are hardwired to lie to themselves to please themselves, and to lie to themselves for social consensus, and these are blocks to understanding truth.

    I started with talking about the importance of values (because otherwise the argument that values determine one's success in finding truth would not make sense). Then I talked about how it is I believe that humans are hardwired to live in cults, and evolutionary reasons for how this might have happened. Then I talked about what I consider to be the main point (how people lie to themselves, described in the above paragraph). Then the conclusion is basically that fear of having big problems from real life causes people to not want to lie to themselves.

    BTW, I didn't get any replies to this thread so far that I thought were stupid. I don't agree with absolutely everything that was said, but everyone wrote coherent thoughts that were on topic that I was able to understand. What I consider to be most stupid is when people are completely off-topic, or when I am not able to figure out a coherent argument from what they have written. Maybe pointing out the behavior that I didn't like made people self-conscious and not post those things.
  • Brendan Golledge
    114
    I am a bit handicapped in pointing out what I believe to be the most stupid in arguments about things that are in the social consensus, because I believe that if I mention the topic, I might get immediately booted from the forum. But I have made arguments in the past (not on this forum), such as, "The same person cannot get killed twice," "Causes must precede effects", and then linked to some New York Times articles about the relevant subject. I got replies which denied all of these points. I literally got a reply that quoted me saying, "Causes must precede effects" and it gave a one word answer, "false". I also got a reply denying the existence of the New York Times articles which they could have found themselves on the New York Times website. These are the replies which are most stupid, and I believe that they are so stupid because it is a matter of social consensus, and most people are unable to think outside of the social consensus because of the extreme discomfort that it would cause them. If you are willing to understand the argument, it is easy, because it is kindergarten level deduction. But it is impossible to understand if you do not want to understand.
  • Brendan Golledge
    114


    My motivation for writing it was that I was lonely because nobody lived in the same world that I did, I was trying to understand why it's so hard to convince people of things, and I was woken up at 3am by my baby and couldn't get back to sleep,

    I do not believe that my motivation was to make myself feel better than other people. I remember what this feels like. The main way it feels is that I feel better about myself when I convince myself of the truth of what I'm saying, and I feel offended when people don't agree. I was not feeling superior, but lonely and depressed, but if I imagined that it's just not in human nature to love truth and that most people are not going to ever understand what I care about if I care about the truth, then everything became simple, if a bit disappointing. I think I was also a bit curious to see what kinds of replies I'd get.


    Ask yourself this: Are you willing to think about a logically viable world where a God does not exist? Or are you more concerned with getting other people to think of a logically viable world where a God must exist?Philosophim

    I was concerned with understanding and describing how people actually experience and think about God. I was concerned with phenomenology rather than ontology (apart from some speculative metaphysics related to the cosmological argument which I have not mentioned in this post). Since I was thinking about how people think about God, removing God from the equation would make no sense.

    They're not curious as to whether there really is a God, they just want to preserve the emotional comfort and benefit their worldview gives them.Philosophim
    . This is the main point of this post.


    Second, try to keep your topic focused. The values of necessary thought started with complaints about other people not reading or thinking about your topic, accusations that we're all cultists, and then a reference to fear of God. It's a bit all over the place right? And as you can tell from the replies that you got, people are going to take one or two salient points and address those.Philosophim
    . I agree with this criticism. But I do genuinely believe that humans are hardwired to live in cults. This is most of our social organization. This belief makes everything easier to understand. Of course, some cults are more extreme in their detachment from reality than others.


    I am not so thin-skinned that I am not able to receive your criticisms. I have said much worse to myself.

    I suppose I do think I am intellectually more capable than most people, but that is not what I meant in this post when I was talking about "stupid". I meant that a lot of people choose not to use what intelligence they have, because they just don't care about the truth. I would imagine that choosing to post to a philosophy forum is an intelligence filter, so that probably at least 1 person replying to my original thread has a higher IQ than me. At any rate, IQs are given to you for free at your birth, so they are nothing to be proud of.

    It is a bit ironic, maybe, that I felt lonely because of how rare it is to be able to talk to someone who understands the things that trouble me (this is probably my own cult-instinct trying to find a group to attach myself to). But if everyone were in perfect agreement, I feel like there'd be nothing to discuss, and it would be boring.
  • wonderer1
    2.2k
    But I do genuinely believe that humans are hardwired to live in cults. This is most of our social organization.Brendan Golledge

    Why "Cults" rather than "relatively small social bands"?

    Pan troglodytes (chimpanzees), Pan paniscus (bonobos), Gorilla beringei, Gorilla gorilla, and Homo sapiens are related species hardwired for life in relatively small social bands.
  • Brendan Golledge
    114
    Human cults are much bigger. Based on the definition I invented, which is a social unit which claims for itself the right to decree truth, then cults can be huge. The entire Soviet Union was a cult for instance. They cared more about the truth of their doctrine than the empirical evidence that their country was falling apart. I would argue that the political affiliations in the USA (Democrat & Republican) are also cults. For instance, it is argued by some that gender is a social construct, even though this would have appeared absurd even to medieval peasants. There is also the view that criminals are victims and need support, and thus some large cities have done bail reform and let out lots of prisoners. These cities have seen an increase in crime and closure of stores such as Wallmart and Walgreens as a result, but the cult members blame the stores for closing rather than the city government for not punishing looters. My view is that cults are THE primary way that humans organize themselves in large groups, and thus you should expect to see them wherever there is large scale social cohesion. Some cults have more absurd beliefs than others. Identification with a cult is basically the same as asserting agreement with the truth statements of that cult.
  • Lionino
    2.7k
    These are things that people actually experience and associate with GodBrendan Golledge

    Many religions associate God with cows, that does not mean they believe the cow is a literal god.

    So they see an argument like this, and reply as if I were asserting that God were a magic man in the sky who tangibly answers prayers.Brendan Golledge

    Because that is what "God" means.
  • Brendan Golledge
    114
    If I were speaking from a Hindu context, I probably would have talked about cows. My best guess is that cultures can evolve the same way biological organisms do (the unfit varieties die), and that caring about cows was useful for the people living in India. I've heard an argument that cattle are very important for agriculture in that region, so that a tribe which killed and ate their cows during a famine would not have been able to continue farming next year. So, those who by chance happened to really love their cows flourished and spread out across the whole region.

    I do not know if there is some psychological significance to cows being holy, as I believe there is psychological significance to much of Christian teachings. I don't know much about the Hindu religion.
  • Lionino
    2.7k
    If I were speaking from a Hindu context, I probably would have talked about cows.Brendan Golledge

    And you would not be right, cows are still not gods, even if they are associated with them.
  • jgill
    3.8k
    I meant that a lot of people choose not to use what intelligence they have, because they just don't care about the truthBrendan Golledge

    There are those on the Forum who think of "truth" as a relative concept. As a retired mathematician, I know mathematical truth is dependent upon certain axioms. One changes the axioms and the notion of truth becomes a bit more vague. But you seem to refer to the existence or character of God. Am I correct? Possibly I misinterpret what you have said.

    You mention being awakened by your baby crying. Isn't that a form of truth?
  • Ciceronianus
    3k


    No, not on that point. And just to be clear, my other comments weren't intended to address what seems to be your acceptance of Christianity, which is something I can't do, but rather what appeared to me to be a failure to recognize the enormous debt Christianity owes to the ancient pagan world.
  • Arne
    816
    What I consider to be most stupid is when people are completely off-topic, or when I am not able to figure out a coherent argument from what they have written. Maybe pointing out the behavior that I didn't like made people self-conscious and not post those things.Brendan Golledge


    I agree.
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