It's impossible to "stand back" from perceptions, beliefs and opinions. — Terrapin Station

I can assure you that it is possible. It is commonly called "critical thinking".
Some people practice it ( I am among them) and some are even good at it.

I'd say that the difference between philosophy in the 19th century (and , say, the first half of the 20th too) and the situation today is that at that time philosophers used to be also public intellectuals, they opened - as philosophers - new horizons of thoughts and then fed these insights into the public debate, whereas professional philosophy has become during the last decades a rather esoteric occupation: professionals sitting in their "ivory tower" and their "bubbles" talking at each other, citing each other, debating ultra-subtle questions that have no significance for the public.
This came to my mind because Habermas - who always has been the 'public intellectual' par excellence celebrates these days his ninetieth birthday

Sounds good, but what does this mean? Could you put some meat on these bones? Care to elaborate?
When philosophers discuss "qualia" for decades without arriving at a conclusion (any conclusion!): what kind of methodological progress is achieved in this debate?

I'd say that the times when professional philosophers defined their profession as "pursuit of wisdom" are long gone. Quine, Davidson, Sellars, Rorty, Dennett, Searle... they are IMHO not pursuing "wisdom" - whatever that might be - but they try to be as rigorous in their endeavor as any scientist or mathematician (just look at all the formalizing, not only in logic!). It looks, and it is certainly intended to be , intellectual research, more science than art (not so with philosophers like Derrida or Heidegger, but they belong to a different tribe).

What really bugs me is that they never seem to come to a conclusion, not even in a minor detail, so that they could say: Now, this question (about, say, 'qualia') has been solved. On the contrary: the more they debate, the more questions arise, which fuels more debates... and so on.
Is this really is virtuous circle?

Canada is the type of thing that can exist by virtue of it being agreed to exist. As can 'marriage', 'the office of the president' etc. It's ontological status is that of a social fact. God is posited as having an existence independent of both society and human beings. 'His' ontological status is therefore more fundamental, metaphysically. So, the question is misframed. A God that exists only by virtue of agreement (as a social fact) is not a God at all (is in fact only the atheist conception of God), but a Canada that exists only by virtue of agreement is fully the Canada we know. — Baden

You are correct: my post was written from the perspective of an atheist. I take it to be self-evident that the theistic deity, whatever its name may be, is a socially constructed fiction. Well... even if I were a Christian, I'd say that my (!) God is the fundamental reality, whereas Zeus and Ganesha and Ishtar ... are just figments of imagination, or collective imagination , to be precise.

I am busy on atheist forums like agnostic.com or Reddit/atheism and whenever I mention that all those institutional facts that we use and take for granted every day (our country, the US Dollar or Euro, laws etc....) are fictitious as well, as fictitious as "god", I often get angry replies like "Are you kidding??, I know that Canada exists because I am a Canadian so I should know, and the Dollar exists also, I can touch it" , and so on.

Therefore I am sure that a lot of people are quite confused about the ontological status of these all too familiar institutions that are part of our daily lives.

Now that we have settled that and that you have seemed to understand that this thread is about (social) institutions and not names given to objects, be they salt or a piece of land or any other object of the world 'out there' that does not on human minds for its existence...., is there anything pertinent you'd like to contribute? , something that refers to "Canada as a set of institutions"?
Or is this one of your favorite pastimes: playing silly games with newbies, to scare them away?

"In one common sense of "Canada," you certainly can see and touch and smell it."
>> No, you cannot.
People who claim to do so are deluded. What they can touch and smell are objects (trees, hills, rivers...) they believe (!) to be parts of Canada.

It is the same with other institutions.
Can you touch "POTUS" ? No, you can touch a person who is the POTUS at a given moment. Can you touch "US Dollar". No you can touch coins and bills that people believe to be US Dollars. Twenty years later, when cash will have disappeared, "US Dollar" will still "exist" but you can't touch it anymore.

Therefore if people (atheists, to be precise) claim that the difference between God and Canada is that the former is purely fictitious whereas the latter is real and can be touched or smelled, they are erroneously reifying a concept, in this case an institution.

That is the difference between "salt" and "Canada": if all human beings disappeared tomorrow, sodium chloride would still exist (although nobody would be left to call it "salt". But "Canada" would vanish with the human race, because "Canada" is an invention of human brains.

Monopoly on truth, and contempt or hostility towards other religions is specific to monotheistic religions, not to religions in general. Adherents to Hinduism or Shinto are not hostile towards Christians or any other religions, neither are members of religions of small-scale societies, like hunter-gatherers. Just on the contrary: from the point of view of a tribe it would be absurd to impose its own religion on the tribe next door, given that their religions are linked to a certain territory and to their own ancestors.

But in this case the problem is not cultural appropriation, but economic exploitation. The problem is not that Whites adopted the music style of the Blacks, but that Black people were considered to be an inferior race.
The central question remains: Do human groups own their culture?

And you are ignoring the topic of this thread. The topic is not "how do we name objects?" (if - for the sake of argument - we'd call a piece of land an'object'), but "what is the ontological status of institutions?"
I did not choose "Canada" as an example of an object but as an example of a set of institutions. My guess is that you keep harping on the topic "naming objects" because it is your pet subject and you have nothing to say about the topic I had in mind with my original post.

One could say that X is alive if X is capable of Darwinian evolution (with its three basic principles "Variation - reproduction - selection")

I do not know your mailman, but my mailman is not an mediator between my daily word and the world beyond, the superhuman world of spirits and supernatural forces.

Don't be so obtuse. "Canda" is above all a set of institutions: a constitution (if this country has a constitution), a set of laws, administrations etc... And this instititutional "Canada" can then claim that a certain piece of land belongs to it. Other people or institutions can contest that claim (for example the Native Tribes living on that piece of land since times immemorial, or a neighboring country).
The piece of land existed before Canda came into being, and it will exist if , say, Canada ceases to exist because they fusion with the USA.
- When you read in the newspaper that "Canada is a member of NATO" or that "Canada is part of a trade agreement", or that "Canada beats the USA" (in sport), do you think that the rivers, mountains, hill, trees.... are doing this?
Again: "Canada" is an institutional fact; the land with its rivers, trees and so on is secondary, because Canada in the sense of "Canadian piece of land" only exists because an institution called "Canada" exists. If the institution Canada disappears, the piece of land called Canada will disappear too, but not the brute facts: the trees, rivers, hills etc... they will revert to the status quo ante , what they have been before humans showed up and created an imaginary entity called "Canada".

And if this example with Canada is too difficult for you and confuses you , rephrase my question in the OP: "What is the difference between God and the Euro ?" (you know: the currency in many countries in Europe)

(It really seems to me that you have never heard about "institutions" or "institutional facts".
That would be quite a gap in your philosophical education...
https://yandoo.wordpress.com/tag/institutional-facts/

A shaman is always religious because she or he is by definition a mediator between 'this world' and the entities (spirits or forces...) of the supernatural or superhuman world.

It is simply a "non sequitur" because in 1. you talk about Jesus, in 2. you talk about the Church. Although there is a historical connection between the two, they are not identical or logically connected in a way that you can deduce from one to the other.
It is like
1. My father stayed out of politics
2. Therefore I should stay out of politics

Wrong. "Canada" is not just a name for a piece of the world 'out there'. Your argument would be valid if I had used "Stuart Lake" or "Mount Robson" instead, because these are objects to which we have attached a name, just as we call a certain molecule "salt". - -
But "Canada" is not a piece of land, it is above all a fairly complex set of *institutions*, therefore it is an institutional fact, just like "US Dollar". There is no objective reality *out there* that corresponds to these institutions, unlike salt or Mount Robson which exist regardless of whether we think about it or have an intentional stance towards it or not.
Unlike *brute facts* like salt or Mount Robson, institutional facts only 'exist' because there is collective intentionality.
Put simply: if people cease to believe in an *institutional fact* is ceases to exist. "US Dollar" or "Canada" have no existence whatsoever outside this collective intentionality.

Appeal to authority is not a common feature of religions of small-scale societies (hunter-gatherers). Even a shaman is not an authoritarian figure in the sense that he/she can boss around other members of the group or tell them what they have to do or think.

The object "salt" (with all its features) does not vanish even if you stop believing in it, or if we give it another name. But entities like "Canada" can vanish from one second to another, or be created. Just think what happened with "Yugoslavia" .
There was a moment in history when all those trees and mountains and rivers... existed, but "Canada" did not exist. And an hour later nothing has changed except that all those trees and hills and rivers ... were part of "Canada", which just had been created by 'fiat'. And since that moment Canada exists in the minds of all those who share this belief
(There are about 30,000 people in Germany who are sure that the country "Federal Rep. of Germany" does NOT exist, they are called "Reichsbürger" because they believe that the German Reich never ceased but still lives on.

NO, you cannot see or smell or lick at Canada. You can visit a certain region of this Planet, and do all these things, but that is not "Canada". How could you smell an idea?

Being an atheist myself, I do not see any fundamental difference concerning the ontological status. It is funny because a lot of fellow atheists are all too ready to agree that God is just a fictitious entity, a social "fact" so to speak, but they insist that Canada is real in some sort of way that God is not. Just look at the comment of Terrapin Station who claimed that you can lick at Canada and smell it. Of course you cannot. You can smell the air of a region that people have convened to call "Canada".
That is the upshot of my post: that even if we do not believe in God, all of us live in a web of beliefs, dealing with fictitious entities, whether you call them "imagined orders" or "social facts" or "institutional facts"... Canada, the Dollar, laws, human rights... all "exist" because millions of people assume/believe that they exist, and this assumption/belief creates a virtual reality that we can navigate and deal with without realizing that its "existence" is as fictitious as "Zeus" or "pink unicorn on the back of the moon"

That is not what I said. I said that the basic moral preferences we are born with are quite universal, they can be found in all babies and toddlers regardless of their cultural or ethnic origin. And it is up to culture ("enculturation") to built and teach specific moral systems (of norms and values) - -
Have you ever read a book about human developmental psychology or the psychology of morality, or do you talk about morality only on the basis of how "agents" act in philosophical thought experiments?

The way you describe moral behavior it can be applied to all social species (apes, wolves, dolphins...) but nobody - not even Frans de Waal! - in his right mind would say that wolves have morality.
A moral norm or value is not the same as "Well, I like this behavior, let's have more of it." Human beings are born with moralistic preferences and intuitions (even babies like agents who show a fair behavior), but if these hard-wired moral feelings were all there is to morality, all cultures on earth would have the same moral norms.

writes: "Meaning is subjective for example. It only occurs in persons' heads."

Not true.

If your sentence was true, Humpty Dumpty would be right ("When I use a word,it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.") But that is obviously not how it works, otherwise communication would break down...

If your sentence was true, you could access a meaning of an unknown word by introspection (but again that is not how it works: you have to ask other people or look it up in a dictionary, therefore it is NOT only in your head. The very existence of dictionaries shows that meanings of words are not subjective

Seen from the perspective of a subject (you or me), the meaning of "dog" is a real as the meaning of 2+2=4: we have to learn (!) it and neither you nor me can change it. The meaning of "dog" does not depend on the opinion of a subject (unless you call the totality of all speakers of English a "subject", which would be rather mystical...)

Subjective entities depend for their existence and for their characteristics on a subject. If they depend on many subjects, they are social or inter-subjective entities.

(See also John Searle. "The construction of social reality" - - who distinguishes "brute facts" (objects) from "institutional facts" (what I would call *intersubjective entities*)

I do not understand the question. What is the ontological status of words and their meanings? If you can answer that question, you'll have the answer to your question.

There is a way out of this conundrum about God and Evil: The "Chain of Being" as in the philosophy of Plotin.
"God" - according to this philosophy - is just what we might call the highest order of the *Chain of Being*, the lower orders are all necessary manifestations of Being, and what we call "evil" is a necessary feature of the lowest order ( i.e. "matter")

Therefore, what we call "good" and "evil" are just necessary (!) features of the lower levels of Being / Reality itself, no God could abolish evil, because God does not "exist" outside Reality but is "part" of it. The problem of "theodicy" only exists if people treat God as an independent actor outside of Being, like a man building a model railroad in his basement.

See also : "Philosophia perennis" or "Perennial philosophy" in Wikipedia

True, but when the minds of many individuals are linked, their judgments converge and create intersubjective entities that are neither subjective nor objective.
Just think of the meaning of a word like "awesome": is this meaning objective or subjective? Neither, it is intersubjective, because one individual cannot change its meaning (that would be the case if the meaning was subjective), and it is not "out there" as an objective entity that could be studied by science.

I have consulted several textbooks on Human evolutionary psychology - none of them stipulates that the mind has to be studied as a "computational" device. And if this expression is used, it is more of a metaphor than a corner-stone of this topic. Psychologists know that our mind is not literally a computer.

Moral norms are IMO neither subjective nor objective; they are inter-subjective (or simply "social") phenomena:
An *objective* phenomenon exists independently of human consciousness and human beliefs. Radioactivity, for example, is not a myth.
The *subjective* is something that exists depending on the consciousness and beliefs of a single individual.
The *inter-subjective* is something that exists within the communication network linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals. Inter-subjective phenomena are neither malevolent frauds nor insignificant charades. They exist in a different way from physical phenomena such as radioactivity, but their impact on the world may still be enormous. Many of history’s most important drivers are inter-subjective: law, money, gods, nations.

Similarly, the dollar, human rights and the United States of America exist in the shared imagination of billions, and no single individual can threaten their existence. If I alone were to stop believing in the dollar, in human rights, or in the United States, it wouldn’t much matter. These imagined orders are *inter-subjective*, so in order to change them we must simultaneously change the consciousness of billions of people, which is not easy.

Evolutionary psychologists just study the human mind from an evolutionary perspective, as a set of evolved capacities and faculties. Most of them (as far as I can see) follow the scientific method as other varieties of psychology. I do not see any reason why this should be considered to be a "pseudo-science" (unless only physics, biology, chemistry are the only true sciences and everything else is denigrate as non-science or pseudo-science)