That is one reason why "christianity" needs to die. The best way to kill it, however, is by studying the teachings of Jesus Christ. It becomes very difficult to listen to retarded christian bullshit if you know the actual teachings of The Christ.
There are other excellent teachings as well. Buddha has great insights, and The Tao for those who actually like to think.
Jews/progressives are infiltrating Hindu and islamic societies. They are absolutely trying to re-engineer those religions. Dive in to hindu twitter and you will see many parallel ideological debates between traditional hindus and more progressive ones, as well as so-called sick-ulars who are sympathetic to foreign religions like christianity and islam. Jews/progressives and their globalist ideology are spreading everywhere like a cancer.
Jews have been infiltrating Islam since at least the 60s or 70s by using the Muslim brotherhood, al qaeda, isis, and most especially Wahhabism. The Jews don’t want the Muslim world united against the Zionist that is why they promoted wars in the Middle East for regime change to dispose of their leaders like Saddam, color revolutions like in Egypt to get rid of any pro b’aathist elements in the government, or promote liberalism and cultural Marxism to weaken the Arabs much like what they’re doing to Whites.
They have behaved stupidly (ALL the rong reasons). But the FAITHFUL will prevail ultimately. The Great Apostacy (near the end) is EXPECTED. You SHOULD have READ the Bible, instead of having it TOLD to you.
Lack of theism is really not lack of religion. As you say, these people worship the magic of government. Or they tend to.
We have in instinctual need to believe that government hierarchy has a special quality, and holds more authority than some random dude on the street. This is because it is often useful for a population to hold this belief, which is essentially an irrational superstition. It helps us to cooperate which improves survival. I think our funny beliefs about the nature of government probably arise in the parts of the brain responsible for religious beliefs as well But its not useful to believe government is magic for this regime anymore. This regime is ZOG
Ya know, if you put a moldable substance having no form into a mold, the result will be a molded substance. If you were to remove the machine so that any observer was unable to know anything about it, they could look at the molded thing and gather from it certain features that must have been present in the mold.
Evolution is supposed to be a process in which the environment molds a moldable thing through natural selection. In the case of evolution of human beliefs, we are told that we do have the mold to analyze in addition to the molded thing (the human mind). Yet we find features in the molded thing that do not match any of the features of the mold.
Now, in some cases, such a feature could be dismissed as accidental. Weird things happen sometimes. Maybe there was a defect in the molding substance that caused it to turn out differently than the rest, without any change in the molder.
But in this case, we have such a feature that shows up in every molded thing for the entire history that the machine has been running. Even in cases (dropping the analogy for a second) where no two cultures ever had contact, and were separated by great distances in time. Yet, we are still being told that this feature, which is not explainable by any of the material facts of the molder, comes from something that doesn't exist.
Now if we also suppose that evolutionary theory is correct, then by analogy it would follow that all molded things that had features which were not directly tied to the molder itself would be tossed out in the trash (eliminated from history).
So it is either the case that (a) this so-called unreal feature in the molded things is actually a real feature of the mold, or (b) the feature should have stopped appearing in the molded things.
It's funny if we just consider this category of belief called supernatural, because it really is one category, pertaining to something with exactly the same kind of characteristics.
A person might argue (against the above) by saying, evolution has favored the development of false human beliefs. For example, people frequently get bad ideas about who they are, they have totally inflated and unrealistic views of themselves or of possibility. A person could continue to spend money wastefully with the real belief they would win the lottery.
And yet we can contrast all such beliefs of the latter kind with beliefs of the supernatural kind. Because all of the former pertain to things which are real, and where the actual error in the belief is a misapprehension of probability, but not of the reality of the thing wished for. A lottery is real. It has winners. Any person with a few dollars can win it.
But beliefs of the supernatural kind are not explicable by evolution over the material facts of reality; their contents have no equal and no explanation in the world which is evolving things. And yet we find them without exception arising in every human group.
they could look at the molded thing and gather from it certain features that must have been present in the mold....But in this case, we have such a feature that shows up in every molded thing for the entire history that the machine has been running....Yet, we are still being told that this feature, which is not explainable by any of the material facts of the molder, comes from something that doesn't exist.
I get what you are saying. Every time a new society gets popped out of the mold its got God written all over it. Or good and evil. Or government is magic. Occam’s razor: maybe its just God dummy.
Lets look for an alternative scenario. Lets say this religious circuitry is old, very old. Certainly dating back to our common ancestry as humans or genus Homo, maybe even older. This explains its ubiquity. We should expect this circuitry to be implemented efficiently to process enough information necessary for survival not enough information to accurately recreate reality. It categorizes reality in to good and evil, that which promotes survival of genes and that which does not— a very binary efficient algorithm that only needs to get things right most of the time. As a group, a society of individuals tends to compare the results of their processing and reinforce something like the “group average” so that the group tends to be following the same rules for categorizing things which are good and evil, which facilitates cooperation within the society. The ability of the individual to modify its own conclusions to be closer to the group average may be some sort of error detection correction function within a massively distributed parallel moral logic machine. The result is survival of the society. The result is a common set of rules of behavior through which a population of individuals can succeed, like a colony of ants coordinating together.
How are the rules for ant behavior implemented? What does this mental process seem like to the ant? We don’t know. The ant mind is essentially a black box. Lets treat the human religious and moral mental processing as a black box as well. People are generally inclined to help fellow members of their tribe or at least not to kill them or steal from them. This helps the survival of the society and its genes. The behavioral result is the features of the mold.
If we peer inside the black box to see how the process is implemented— how the molder makes its molded product— we should be careful what conclusions we draw from the data we see halfway through processing. Its not the finished product. If there is a broad trend of people anthropomorphizing their notions of good and evil into God, is this really surprising? I sometimes see a human face on a cloud or the coastline on a map. The human brain is a people analyzer. We are social animals very focused on what other people want from us. If we imagine a human-like being is in charge of our magical (but efficient) notions of good and evil — which we believe has a supernatural quality— it isn’t random. It would be random if it was a rock. A few people worship rocks. It seems kinda random.
We live in the illusion our mind creates for us. But if we are to analyze why we have these beliefs which don’t at face seem utilitarian, we should try to think of the brain as a black box that produces a given behavior. Focusing on a snapshot of that process or that circuitry before its finished execution could be misleading.
I know this is all very cold and analytical and presumes we are basically robots. But these are the uncomfortable truths we are confronted with when we look under the hood. I really try not to think about it too much. I try to enjoy my illusion because that’s what Im built to do. No sense fighting it. People who think christianity is dumb really don’t get that its a perfectly good illusion to live with and you’re going to be living in a superstitious illusion anyway, nobody else has come up with a really great alternative illusion. Lol.
And yet we can contrast all such beliefs of the latter kind with beliefs of the supernatural kind. Because all of the former pertain to things which are real, and where the actual error in the belief is a misapprehension of probability, but not of the reality of the thing wished for. A lottery is real. It has winners.
This isn’t a really good argument and I think you know why. It doesn’t matter if I believe I will win the lottery or grow wings and fly away. What matters is how I will behave when I believe I will. If my behavior as a result of my belief of my immanent acquisition of wings is beneficial to my society, tribe, whatever, then some sort of gene/meme pertaining to growing wings will succeed.
Its not really random when concepts like father figures and animals and the sun and moon and fucking and states of extreme pleasure and pain end up in many religions. They aren’t random things, they are things the are always floating around in human brains for pragmatic purposes. Processing for practical tasks and processing for religious beliefs may be overlapping on some common ciruitry, if you know what I mean. All that matters is results to evolution. Hell, I even anthropomorphize evolution.
I'm stopped right away by this phrase 'religious circuitry', which immediately begs the question. By circuity we mean neurons. Cells. What is a religious circuit? I suppose that in order to clarify this you'd need to be quite specific about what religious means in this context. Does a religious circuit specify God? Or just to gather with your fellows? If neurons are physical, and the brain is a neurological system for representation, what is a religious circuit representing. Maybe you'd say the religious circuit is just what promotes the behavior of getting together to worhsip, or even just convene to dance wildly around fires and walk over coals. If we are going to agree there is such a circuit, then to place it further and further backward in time will probably require identifying it with another circuit entirely (at some point). Therefore we will have to talk about how one circuit that is not religious, per se, becomes religious also as a matter of evolution. I would think this is the commonest evolutionary psychological approach. I recall a paper we looked at once that said costly displays and communal meals and the like might have been examples of 'circuits' that converged in just this way (both having been favored independently).
I think this was the primary failure of my previous 'mold argument'. I'd wondered if you'd point it out. My argument was premised on the idea that features were independent and did not interact. Really, it posited structure as entirely relevant but not function. In reality, one feature can impact whether another feature 'molds properly'. Possessing some feature that might not represent anything in the molder (this being negative in itself), could aid some other very important feature in functioning better, and thereby the first one justifies itself this way. Going a bit further, it means that relations between features - in this case, brain structures and behaviors - are another substrate that evolution can act on. Since these relations have top-down effects on the features themselves which are relating, then the relations are like another object altogether. Evolution can select not only features of the mold, but relations between features. So I think the evolutionary argument for the 'religious circuit' would be something like what emerges from several related circuits for social behaviors, becoming a 'new object' in itself.
To put it one other way, there is this molder-to-mold relationship between environment and brain, but in addition to this, there is a self-contained evolutionary environment in the brain. Where the brain is both the molder and the molded thing. Circuits competing with other circuits. One circuit by itself is at a disadvantage compared to a group of circuits that are all selected (or tend to be) as a group. Therefore, the brain acts like an environment that naturally selects circuits. If the relation we might call 'religiosity' brings together many circuits under roughly one aggregate behavioral outcome, and that collection of related behaviors is beneficial, then evolution could favor some emergent belief in God that tended to relate these circuits. We could imagine that without this belief, a certain coherence would be lost, and people might be less inclined to cognitively group these behaviors, thus, that group of circuits would stop acting like a troupe, and they'd lose the advantage they had together.
> If we peer inside the black box to see how the process is implemented— how the molder makes its molded product— we should be careful what conclusions we draw from the data we see halfway through processing. Its not the finished product
The problem that is baked into the situation I've given above is an example of an 'origination problem'. Once we get to the belief and grasp how it is represented, great. But it has an isomorphism with other origin problems. Once we have a universe, great. Once we have biology, great. It's usually these moments of real change where rubber meets the road. In the case I made above, for a microcosm of evolution to be occurring in the brain that involves relations between circuits, there is no problem when we can explain what physical mechanism/structure/process embodies that relation. It's hard to figure belief in God as relating different behavioral circuits, when all we have are properties like voltage differentials. So say three circuits are activated simultaneously, resulting in X behavior. It still doesn't answer how their simultaneity yields a new physical object for evolution to act on.
I suppose the only solution would be that there isn't natural selection as such in the brain. A myriad of strange things could be going on there, but all that really matters is the aggregate behavior displayed by the whole organism. So maybe no new physical object has to be produced in the brain for evolution to act on. Whatever the state of 'belief' is just happens (we don't understand it), but whatever it is, it brings together a set of behaviors that evolution can physically act on.
Based on your quote immediately above, this notion of the 'black box' suggests you endorse a kind of strict behaviorism. I took from what you said that you are calling the intermediary mental states between stimulus and behavioral response the 'unfinished products'. This implies that finished products are observable behaviors (and therefore selectable behaviors from the standpoint of nature).
My only problem is that these intermediary products, the mental states, are crucial for the convergence of the plurality of behaviors into an association. These must be products unto themselves. If we are required to say that evolution only acts on the outward behaviors, then every brain (in terms of just the belief states) would be as disconnected from natural selection as an other (just so long as whatever the beliefs were, related just the same circuits together). A person could believe in a flying spaghetti monster just so long as the right circuits were related together by that belief. The obvious problem is that this isn't what we find. There is no massive deviation in the mental state that relates all of the 'religious behavioral circuits'. It's always God.
But you say that you have an answer for that as well. You say that we are people analyzers. This is supposed to account for why the belief in question tends to form contents representing a person (and not a spaghetti monster or some impersonal machine). So the mental attitude that relates behaviors like communal gathering, costly expenditures, sacramental rites and ceremony, must be a belief with the contents of a person. The only viable thing I could imagine would be dead ancestors.
I think where all of this tends to fail is on the issue of morality. Dead ancestors might be able to explain the convergence of religious-type social behaviors and ceremonial 'calendars', but it is totally insufficient to explain universal moral behavior. You also said that such a circuit does not need to model all of reality, but in the case of our concept of goodness, this is just what it does. As a universal, there is nothing in principle that can exist which is not assimilable under this concept of goodness, and we find that it is philosophically resistant to analysis. G.E. Moore called it an open question as to what goodness is. I don't know of a single satisfying evolutionary account that could unify the notion of moral universality, with our moral accountability to God, and religious-type behaviors. Dead ancestors, fine. But it is not obvious that we would ever feel morally accountable in all of our various judgments in life to dead ancestors. We weren't that accountable to them in life, so this does not explain how we could feel accountable to them in death, at the risk of eternal punishments.
> This isn’t a really good argument and I think you know why.
It's better than you might think. It has to do with the notion of logical and natural possibility. Belief states are not arbitrary, but you seem comfortable to allow that by adopting this strict behaviorist approach, where everything in the 'middle' (all mental states) can just be black boxes in terms of explanation. On most consistent accounts of human action, we are motivated by beliefs. What we believe matters. It is one thing to explain how a belief that one will win the lottery is possible, and another to explain a belief in a supernatural thing. Although the former might be a pathological belief to hold, its contents are something real (lotteries and lottery winners). The question of supernatural beliefs is how their contents can possibly originate in a completely materialistic worldview. On such a worldview, there is only matter. Matter interacting with more matter on your body to stimulate the brain. How a belief state with contents that have no material cause is the question. I think any atheistic answer would have to involve some process of over-generalizing. Again, the dead ancestor possibility is there. Or a Theory of Mind perhaps, where mentality just is how we explain complex things. For me, morality is the true sticking point. No socially determined or evolutionary theory of morals seems to work, unless you want to accept moral relativism.
But most people don't want to accept that. If you poke their skin, you'll find most moral relativists are realists to one degree or another. For example, if you think the rape and torture of a child is immoral in all possible worlds, you are a moral realist. Now you've got to explain why that fact is necessarily true. I'm not doing an excellent job of stating the significance of morality, but I've already typed a long message here, and these kinds of conversations are almost necessarily long-form. But I don't want to drag this one out any longer. I know it's a haul to read these things.
I suspect there's some immigration tainting those numbers. We'll see how it plays out in the end. Revivals happen from time to time throughout history. Ask a jew.
One does not need to know everything possible about electricity to know how to turn on the lights, or change a bulb. Nor does one need to know a lot about Abrahamic-based religions (although I do), to know enough to realize they are turds-on-a-stick, masquerading as chocolate hotdogs. Once a reasonably intelligent person comes to know beyond shadow of doubt that a good 90% of xtian evangelicals (and over 50% of the 101 flavors of xtian offbrands) are either jew lapdogs, or at the very least, defenders/enablers of the jews....nothing more needs to be known...unless one believes the BS about jews being poor, misjudged, harmless, never dindunuffin humanitarians.
So you can judge a book by it's cover? You judge a movie by its audience? There are a lot of Christians that have been misguided. Some of it was intentional, some of it was error. That doesn't make the underlying philosophy wrong.
[ - ] Redhairin 1 point 3.4 yearsJan 8, 2022 12:34:39 ago (+1/-0)
Hey now, that's a good thing, to quote Martha Stewart! Think about it...the foaming-at-the-mouth evangelicals will no longer have to send their ministry teams all the way to Timbuktu or North Sentinel Island, to convert the heathens. No longer will they have to dip into the tithes to pay that expensive airfare, teach their proselytizers some obscure language (or have their biblical BS translated). Canada is just a car ride away, and there already are French bibles aplenty. Once the xtian 'religion' goes belly up, Canada will be ripe for jesusfreako recolonization...plus the canucks are unlikely to eat the foul missionaries, or shrink their heads!
Everything God created is good, including you I must assume. Sin is man's creation, but not all men are judged equal in the end. Christians don't loathe their nature because they know they were created by God and purified by Jesus, and they know Jesus lives. This self whipping crap isn't Christianity. Only Jesus saves, and that is to be celebrated not mourned.
Is it ironic or sad that your avatar is of a devoted Christian Catholic who takes issue with how the church is run?
Because that's his identity right and everything revolves around that one point of contention?
You see I don't find it ironic because I find millennial users are all about identity politics and are either all in or all out of something. Not everything is black and white and I can like Mad Mel and still disagree with his christcuckery.
Do you find it weird that if you have a point of contention with someone, then you have to disagree with every point they have ever made?
In some circles thats called the No True Scotsman fallacy.
It's like people that don't like Queen because Freddie was a faggot in his private life even though it has nothing to do with his music.
I guess I have to clone every Mel mannerism and opinion, be in complete agreement with every nuance of his being or you have to completely hate him then.
Only fools deal in absolutes, it's why our movement never gets any traction.
When Christianity goes do you change your country’s flag?
We'll change our flag when we depart from the commonwealth, its a matter of politics not religion.
Are you a white person first and foremost, or are you a civic national mixing with shitskins, a conglomerate of collective Christians?
If Christianity goes a large part of your culture goes with it.
Norway is one of the most Agnostic/Atheist countries in the world and is still a largely monoethnic and cultural cohesive nation. Did they lose their language, culture, history because most don't believe in Christianity anymore?
Just because religion was a coping mechanism 2K years ago doesnt mean we need it today, we understand more about the natural world today than can be attributed to sky jews.
Do you still ride a horse to work or do you have a car? Think about all that you have lost giving up livestock, parts of your lifestyle you never even knew you could have.
[ + ] ModernGuilt
[ - ] ModernGuilt 7 points 3.4 yearsJan 8, 2022 11:32:23 ago (+7/-0)
I'll keep searching for some orthodox based church that doesn't suck dick
[ + ] Deleted
[ - ] deleted 3 points 3.4 yearsJan 8, 2022 11:47:17 ago (+3/-0)
[ + ] FalseRealityCheck
[ - ] FalseRealityCheck 0 points 3.4 yearsJan 8, 2022 17:08:16 ago (+0/-0)
There are other excellent teachings as well. Buddha has great insights, and The Tao for those who actually like to think.
[ + ] PostWallHelena
[ - ] PostWallHelena 5 points 3.4 yearsJan 8, 2022 11:12:55 ago (+5/-0)
[ + ] Ironcrusader88
[ - ] Ironcrusader88 1 point 3.4 yearsJan 8, 2022 15:20:50 ago (+1/-0)
[ + ] thebearfromstartrack4
[ - ] thebearfromstartrack4 4 points 3.4 yearsJan 8, 2022 09:54:53 ago (+4/-0)*
[ + ] TopTierCIAShill
[ - ] TopTierCIAShill 2 points 3.4 yearsJan 8, 2022 11:57:10 ago (+2/-0)
[ + ] CHIRO
[ - ] CHIRO 0 points 3.4 yearsJan 8, 2022 13:41:41 ago (+0/-0)
[ + ] PostWallHelena
[ - ] PostWallHelena 1 point 3.4 yearsJan 8, 2022 16:41:06 ago (+1/-0)
[ + ] CHIRO
[ - ] CHIRO 0 points 3.4 yearsJan 8, 2022 17:00:52 ago (+0/-0)
[ + ] PostWallHelena
[ - ] PostWallHelena 3 points 3.4 yearsJan 8, 2022 11:26:28 ago (+3/-0)
We have in instinctual need to believe that government hierarchy has a special quality, and holds more authority than some random dude on the street. This is because it is often useful for a population to hold this belief, which is essentially an irrational superstition. It helps us to cooperate which improves survival. I think our funny beliefs about the nature of government probably arise in the parts of the brain responsible for religious beliefs as well But its not useful to believe government is magic for this regime anymore. This regime is ZOG
[ + ] CHIRO
[ - ] CHIRO 0 points 3.4 yearsJan 8, 2022 13:59:11 ago (+0/-0)
Evolution is supposed to be a process in which the environment molds a moldable thing through natural selection. In the case of evolution of human beliefs, we are told that we do have the mold to analyze in addition to the molded thing (the human mind). Yet we find features in the molded thing that do not match any of the features of the mold.
Now, in some cases, such a feature could be dismissed as accidental. Weird things happen sometimes. Maybe there was a defect in the molding substance that caused it to turn out differently than the rest, without any change in the molder.
But in this case, we have such a feature that shows up in every molded thing for the entire history that the machine has been running. Even in cases (dropping the analogy for a second) where no two cultures ever had contact, and were separated by great distances in time. Yet, we are still being told that this feature, which is not explainable by any of the material facts of the molder, comes from something that doesn't exist.
Now if we also suppose that evolutionary theory is correct, then by analogy it would follow that all molded things that had features which were not directly tied to the molder itself would be tossed out in the trash (eliminated from history).
So it is either the case that (a) this so-called unreal feature in the molded things is actually a real feature of the mold, or (b) the feature should have stopped appearing in the molded things.
It's funny if we just consider this category of belief called supernatural, because it really is one category, pertaining to something with exactly the same kind of characteristics.
A person might argue (against the above) by saying, evolution has favored the development of false human beliefs. For example, people frequently get bad ideas about who they are, they have totally inflated and unrealistic views of themselves or of possibility. A person could continue to spend money wastefully with the real belief they would win the lottery.
And yet we can contrast all such beliefs of the latter kind with beliefs of the supernatural kind. Because all of the former pertain to things which are real, and where the actual error in the belief is a misapprehension of probability, but not of the reality of the thing wished for. A lottery is real. It has winners. Any person with a few dollars can win it.
But beliefs of the supernatural kind are not explicable by evolution over the material facts of reality; their contents have no equal and no explanation in the world which is evolving things. And yet we find them without exception arising in every human group.
[ + ] PostWallHelena
[ - ] PostWallHelena 0 points 3.4 yearsJan 8, 2022 16:06:21 ago (+0/-0)*
I get what you are saying. Every time a new society gets popped out of the mold its got God written all over it. Or good and evil. Or government is magic. Occam’s razor: maybe its just God dummy.
Lets look for an alternative scenario. Lets say this religious circuitry is old, very old. Certainly dating back to our common ancestry as humans or genus Homo, maybe even older. This explains its ubiquity. We should expect this circuitry to be implemented efficiently to process enough information necessary for survival not enough information to accurately recreate reality. It categorizes reality in to good and evil, that which promotes survival of genes and that which does not— a very binary efficient algorithm that only needs to get things right most of the time. As a group, a society of individuals tends to compare the results of their processing and reinforce something like the “group average” so that the group tends to be following the same rules for categorizing things which are good and evil, which facilitates cooperation within the society. The ability of the individual to modify its own conclusions to be closer to the group average may be some sort of error detection correction function within a massively distributed parallel moral logic machine. The result is survival of the society. The result is a common set of rules of behavior through which a population of individuals can succeed, like a colony of ants coordinating together.
How are the rules for ant behavior implemented? What does this mental process seem like to the ant? We don’t know. The ant mind is essentially a black box. Lets treat the human religious and moral mental processing as a black box as well. People are generally inclined to help fellow members of their tribe or at least not to kill them or steal from them. This helps the survival of the society and its genes. The behavioral result is the features of the mold.
If we peer inside the black box to see how the process is implemented— how the molder makes its molded product— we should be careful what conclusions we draw from the data we see halfway through processing. Its not the finished product. If there is a broad trend of people anthropomorphizing their notions of good and evil into God, is this really surprising? I sometimes see a human face on a cloud or the coastline on a map. The human brain is a people analyzer. We are social animals very focused on what other people want from us. If we imagine a human-like being is in charge of our magical (but efficient) notions of good and evil — which we believe has a supernatural quality— it isn’t random. It would be random if it was a rock. A few people worship rocks. It seems kinda random.
We live in the illusion our mind creates for us. But if we are to analyze why we have these beliefs which don’t at face seem utilitarian, we should try to think of the brain as a black box that produces a given behavior. Focusing on a snapshot of that process or that circuitry before its finished execution could be misleading.
I know this is all very cold and analytical and presumes we are basically robots. But these are the uncomfortable truths we are confronted with when we look under the hood. I really try not to think about it too much. I try to enjoy my illusion because that’s what Im built to do. No sense fighting it. People who think christianity is dumb really don’t get that its a perfectly good illusion to live with and you’re going to be living in a superstitious illusion anyway, nobody else has come up with a really great alternative illusion. Lol.
This isn’t a really good argument and I think you know why. It doesn’t matter if I believe I will win the lottery or grow wings and fly away. What matters is how I will behave when I believe I will. If my behavior as a result of my belief of my immanent acquisition of wings is beneficial to my society, tribe, whatever, then some sort of gene/meme pertaining to growing wings will succeed.
Its not really random when concepts like father figures and animals and the sun and moon and fucking and states of extreme pleasure and pain end up in many religions. They aren’t random things, they are things the are always floating around in human brains for pragmatic purposes. Processing for practical tasks and processing for religious beliefs may be overlapping on some common ciruitry, if you know what I mean. All that matters is results to evolution. Hell, I even anthropomorphize evolution.
[ + ] CHIRO
[ - ] CHIRO 0 points 3.4 yearsJan 8, 2022 21:23:59 ago (+0/-0)
I'm stopped right away by this phrase 'religious circuitry', which immediately begs the question. By circuity we mean neurons. Cells. What is a religious circuit? I suppose that in order to clarify this you'd need to be quite specific about what religious means in this context. Does a religious circuit specify God? Or just to gather with your fellows? If neurons are physical, and the brain is a neurological system for representation, what is a religious circuit representing. Maybe you'd say the religious circuit is just what promotes the behavior of getting together to worhsip, or even just convene to dance wildly around fires and walk over coals. If we are going to agree there is such a circuit, then to place it further and further backward in time will probably require identifying it with another circuit entirely (at some point). Therefore we will have to talk about how one circuit that is not religious, per se, becomes religious also as a matter of evolution. I would think this is the commonest evolutionary psychological approach. I recall a paper we looked at once that said costly displays and communal meals and the like might have been examples of 'circuits' that converged in just this way (both having been favored independently).
I think this was the primary failure of my previous 'mold argument'. I'd wondered if you'd point it out. My argument was premised on the idea that features were independent and did not interact. Really, it posited structure as entirely relevant but not function. In reality, one feature can impact whether another feature 'molds properly'. Possessing some feature that might not represent anything in the molder (this being negative in itself), could aid some other very important feature in functioning better, and thereby the first one justifies itself this way. Going a bit further, it means that relations between features - in this case, brain structures and behaviors - are another substrate that evolution can act on. Since these relations have top-down effects on the features themselves which are relating, then the relations are like another object altogether. Evolution can select not only features of the mold, but relations between features. So I think the evolutionary argument for the 'religious circuit' would be something like what emerges from several related circuits for social behaviors, becoming a 'new object' in itself.
To put it one other way, there is this molder-to-mold relationship between environment and brain, but in addition to this, there is a self-contained evolutionary environment in the brain. Where the brain is both the molder and the molded thing. Circuits competing with other circuits. One circuit by itself is at a disadvantage compared to a group of circuits that are all selected (or tend to be) as a group. Therefore, the brain acts like an environment that naturally selects circuits. If the relation we might call 'religiosity' brings together many circuits under roughly one aggregate behavioral outcome, and that collection of related behaviors is beneficial, then evolution could favor some emergent belief in God that tended to relate these circuits. We could imagine that without this belief, a certain coherence would be lost, and people might be less inclined to cognitively group these behaviors, thus, that group of circuits would stop acting like a troupe, and they'd lose the advantage they had together.
The problem that is baked into the situation I've given above is an example of an 'origination problem'. Once we get to the belief and grasp how it is represented, great. But it has an isomorphism with other origin problems. Once we have a universe, great. Once we have biology, great. It's usually these moments of real change where rubber meets the road. In the case I made above, for a microcosm of evolution to be occurring in the brain that involves relations between circuits, there is no problem when we can explain what physical mechanism/structure/process embodies that relation. It's hard to figure belief in God as relating different behavioral circuits, when all we have are properties like voltage differentials. So say three circuits are activated simultaneously, resulting in X behavior. It still doesn't answer how their simultaneity yields a new physical object for evolution to act on.
I suppose the only solution would be that there isn't natural selection as such in the brain. A myriad of strange things could be going on there, but all that really matters is the aggregate behavior displayed by the whole organism. So maybe no new physical object has to be produced in the brain for evolution to act on. Whatever the state of 'belief' is just happens (we don't understand it), but whatever it is, it brings together a set of behaviors that evolution can physically act on.
Based on your quote immediately above, this notion of the 'black box' suggests you endorse a kind of strict behaviorism. I took from what you said that you are calling the intermediary mental states between stimulus and behavioral response the 'unfinished products'. This implies that finished products are observable behaviors (and therefore selectable behaviors from the standpoint of nature).
My only problem is that these intermediary products, the mental states, are crucial for the convergence of the plurality of behaviors into an association. These must be products unto themselves. If we are required to say that evolution only acts on the outward behaviors, then every brain (in terms of just the belief states) would be as disconnected from natural selection as an other (just so long as whatever the beliefs were, related just the same circuits together). A person could believe in a flying spaghetti monster just so long as the right circuits were related together by that belief. The obvious problem is that this isn't what we find. There is no massive deviation in the mental state that relates all of the 'religious behavioral circuits'. It's always God.
But you say that you have an answer for that as well. You say that we are people analyzers. This is supposed to account for why the belief in question tends to form contents representing a person (and not a spaghetti monster or some impersonal machine). So the mental attitude that relates behaviors like communal gathering, costly expenditures, sacramental rites and ceremony, must be a belief with the contents of a person. The only viable thing I could imagine would be dead ancestors.
I think where all of this tends to fail is on the issue of morality. Dead ancestors might be able to explain the convergence of religious-type social behaviors and ceremonial 'calendars', but it is totally insufficient to explain universal moral behavior. You also said that such a circuit does not need to model all of reality, but in the case of our concept of goodness, this is just what it does. As a universal, there is nothing in principle that can exist which is not assimilable under this concept of goodness, and we find that it is philosophically resistant to analysis. G.E. Moore called it an open question as to what goodness is. I don't know of a single satisfying evolutionary account that could unify the notion of moral universality, with our moral accountability to God, and religious-type behaviors. Dead ancestors, fine. But it is not obvious that we would ever feel morally accountable in all of our various judgments in life to dead ancestors. We weren't that accountable to them in life, so this does not explain how we could feel accountable to them in death, at the risk of eternal punishments.
It's better than you might think. It has to do with the notion of logical and natural possibility. Belief states are not arbitrary, but you seem comfortable to allow that by adopting this strict behaviorist approach, where everything in the 'middle' (all mental states) can just be black boxes in terms of explanation. On most consistent accounts of human action, we are motivated by beliefs. What we believe matters. It is one thing to explain how a belief that one will win the lottery is possible, and another to explain a belief in a supernatural thing. Although the former might be a pathological belief to hold, its contents are something real (lotteries and lottery winners). The question of supernatural beliefs is how their contents can possibly originate in a completely materialistic worldview. On such a worldview, there is only matter. Matter interacting with more matter on your body to stimulate the brain. How a belief state with contents that have no material cause is the question. I think any atheistic answer would have to involve some process of over-generalizing. Again, the dead ancestor possibility is there. Or a Theory of Mind perhaps, where mentality just is how we explain complex things. For me, morality is the true sticking point. No socially determined or evolutionary theory of morals seems to work, unless you want to accept moral relativism.
But most people don't want to accept that. If you poke their skin, you'll find most moral relativists are realists to one degree or another. For example, if you think the rape and torture of a child is immoral in all possible worlds, you are a moral realist. Now you've got to explain why that fact is necessarily true. I'm not doing an excellent job of stating the significance of morality, but I've already typed a long message here, and these kinds of conversations are almost necessarily long-form. But I don't want to drag this one out any longer. I know it's a haul to read these things.
[ + ] Reawakened
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[ + ] Reawakened
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[ + ] UncleDoug
[ - ] UncleDoug -1 points 3.4 yearsJan 8, 2022 13:09:32 ago (+0/-1)
^
They've been convinced they are fighting for a white belief, not a loaned semitic one.
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[ + ] UncleDoug
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[ + ] UncleDoug
[ - ] UncleDoug -1 points 3.4 yearsJan 8, 2022 19:57:28 ago (+0/-1)
Because that's his identity right and everything revolves around that one point of contention?
You see I don't find it ironic because I find millennial users are all about identity politics and are either all in or all out of something. Not everything is black and white and I can like Mad Mel and still disagree with his christcuckery.
Do you find it weird that if you have a point of contention with someone, then you have to disagree with every point they have ever made?
In some circles thats called the No True Scotsman fallacy.
[ + ] Deleted
[ - ] deleted 1 point 3.4 yearsJan 8, 2022 22:20:08 ago (+1/-0)
[ + ] UncleDoug
[ - ] UncleDoug 0 points 3.4 yearsJan 8, 2022 22:47:40 ago (+1/-1)
It's like people that don't like Queen because Freddie was a faggot in his private life even though it has nothing to do with his music.
I guess I have to clone every Mel mannerism and opinion, be in complete agreement with every nuance of his being or you have to completely hate him then.
Only fools deal in absolutes, it's why our movement never gets any traction.
We'll change our flag when we depart from the commonwealth, its a matter of politics not religion.
Are you a white person first and foremost, or are you a civic national mixing with shitskins, a conglomerate of collective Christians?
Norway is one of the most Agnostic/Atheist countries in the world and is still a largely monoethnic and cultural cohesive nation.
Did they lose their language, culture, history because most don't believe in Christianity anymore?
Just because religion was a coping mechanism 2K years ago doesnt mean we need it today, we understand more about the natural world today than can be attributed to sky jews.
Do you still ride a horse to work or do you have a car? Think about all that you have lost giving up livestock, parts of your lifestyle you never even knew you could have.
[ + ] Deleted
[ - ] deleted 1 point 3.4 yearsJan 9, 2022 08:36:37 ago (+1/-0)