coffee_enjoyer
☕️
No bio...
User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
People take things seriously which have some benefit to them; my assertion is that the mental practice of God is greatly beneficial. Once someone learns the benefits they would pursue it with seriousness just like they would with weight-lifting, the silly fictional shows they like, their video games, etc. If God is the mental practice of imagining the most serious possible state of mind in relation to the most important Being, then that alone is a good reason to take it seriously.
I think we forget that many statistically “devout” people are not doing daily prayers or giving away all their possessions or what you would expect someone who “literally believes” to do.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
Literalist religion is not only dying, it’s exactly what gave birth to the secular West and its identity-consumerism. We have had 100 years of attempted revision because the old interpretations are insufficient. I don’t know if you read my post but “inspirational message” has nothing to do with the points I made. I do not think “inspirational messages” are something that secular culture can absorb from religion.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
Reclaiming religious social technology by rejecting literalism
We have had discussions on secular culture and the consequences of the old “religious impulse”. But usually there’s a focus on the worst examples and experiences of religion. I want to bring up a different angle: what is the best that religion has to offer? What does religion accomplish best, beyond what we all know (fostering a community with moral rules)? And how can we reclaim and reorganize only the good and useful aspects of religious social technology?
The worship of God as therapeutic mental and emotional practice
Let us assume that there is no God. With this assumption, God is still the greatest possible Being that can be conceived in our mind. This is one of the more popular definitions of God. (Theologians have entertained many ways of construing God, including that He is “being itself”, the ultimate Good, or the ultimate Reality, yet what unites all of these is a desire to imagine the greatest possible thing in a given framework). If a person is using his mind to imagine the greatest Being, he is engaging in an activity that brings psychological and emotional benefits. When we dwell on an aspect of God, we dwell on a greater experience, straining our mind to understand something that brings awe and reverence. If the aspect we focus on is God’s eternal nature, we are attempting to know and feel the fact that something can be eternally existent throughout all of time, reminding us of the grandeur of existence and the insignificance of passing vanity. If it’s God’s truthfulness, we call to mind the idea of perfect certainty and logic, while praising truth itself. If it’s God’s power, we imagine the greatest experiences of power, and applying these experiences to one Thing (one Being, Idea, Cue, or Point in the mind: God). Thunder, waves, the magnitude of the sun, various imagined metaphors (“the earth in his hand”) or personal experiences may apply. If it’s God’s peace and love, we reach into our memory to pull out the greatest experiences of peace and love we know, and then associate God with the underlying experience of love. When someone is worshipping God as “King of Kings”, they imagine a perfect ruler over their life. The perfect goodness and purity of God is a way for us to strain our mind to imagine and feel perfect goodness and purity. The act of worship is a mental reorganization around greater experience, growing in our mind the experience that we attend to.
The triumph of monotheism is that all of these are associated with one “thing”. We might call it one god, one experience, one Word, one “inner gaze”, or one ineffability. Since a person can only focus on one thing at a time, the monotheistic God is just the greatest possible single thing to focus on — not as a consequence of his being real or his being God (we are assuming He is not), but purely on definitional grounds as a phenomenological activity. It’s a mental and emotional activity, a meditation or exercise, which results in benefits even for a 100% atheistic person.
Experiences of greatness, awe, reverence, and the “sublime” are associated with life satisfaction in numerous studies [1]. It is not surprising then that “awe directed at God” collects all of these benefits and more [2]. What I would assert is that God, understood in the way above, is the greatest mental practice of ordering these feelings or states of being. If there is any great thing you have in your mind, then unless it is perfectly great, there is going to be something greater to conceive. That “something greater” is nothing other than the ancient practice of worshipping God, minus the insistence on His existence and providential qualities.
God as Optimal Social Relationship
Leaping from this ground of defining the divine, we can consider what’s going on with a personal Christianized God. Can’t all this be done without “believing in a personal God”, let alone a Christian God, let alone a god? I will supply two answers. (1) Yes, but it never is. In fact, it is not often done by nominally religious people despite thousands of years of poetic tradition. It’s the realm of ancient philosophers, mystics, and the obscurely devout. So while it is not necessarily religious, it is still distinctly religious, and nevertheless a great part of religion that should be recreated. But to be double-minded: (2) no, because there is an essential variable left out of the equation: the primacy of social relationships.
We are not rational creatures first, we are social creatures first. From the standpoint of evolution, social cooperation comes before rationality. Our motivations are traced to social acculturation and values and not pure rationality. Actually, there is no rationality without social cooperation and values. Social life is the father of rational thought and has dominion over it. This is evident when looking at scientific cheating scandals, marketing, and in-group biases. I’d say you can also find this when looking at rationalist communities: it requires a community to draw people toward rationalism and to have them think and consider within the rationalist framework.
Due to evolution, our animal mind comes with large disk space exclusively dedicated to social life. This means that, if we want the greatest thing in our mind, it must be understood socially. We do not love and serve an idea in the way we do a Being, simply because we are not designed to do that. Evolution has deigned to make us social animals with deity-forming instincts when left unattended.
If we cannot grasp in our mind the fullness of an idea as we can the fullness of a Being, and our desire is to grasp the greatest thing in our mind, then it must be conceived of as a being. While we might stand in awe at a mountain, the sea, and the celestial heavens (hence why these are used abundantly in religious poetry), we have more reverence for an individual than a theory. This is the purpose of a personal God and the purpose of prayer. To maximize the use of our mind toward the greatest single object of attention, we must see God as person-like, or in other words, a Being.
Creating a community around the greatest conceived Being is creating the optimal conditions for community
Here’s where the idea of secular culture reclaiming religious practice gets interesting. If a group of people attend the same place to focus on and grow the experience of “perfect love”, then that is the best community for cultivating love. If they do the same thing for “perfect virtue”, then that is the best community for perfect virtue. Organizing people around each person’s conception of the Greatest Being is the best way to organize people together. It is the best way to share positive emotions, because despite each person having a slightly different understanding of perfect love, they are all feeling and sharing the emotion together.
Imagine for a moment that you have wrapped all of Life’s great and optimal experiences together in your mind under the dominion of one Being. You, and your neighbors, go to a dedicated place to worship that Thing, using all the same cues. (By worship, we mean simply increasing our love and interest in the Thing.) This is an extraordinary way to come together as a community. I would argue it’s considerably better than how most people form communities today, structuring them around hobbies, drugs, or suboptimal political aspirations.
The psychological magic of the Christian celebration as optimal religious experience: can an atheist culture recreate something Christian?
Christians come together to celebrate the story of how they (personally) escaped certain death due to the goodness and virtue of a Perfect Man. They celebrate also the wisdom that the Perfect Man bestowed humanity, which they leads to perfect felicity. They consider this Perfect Man to be their teacher who hears them when they speak and who provides support and favor. The Perfect Man is Perfect Teacher, Perfect Friend, and will one day be Perfect Judge. As icing on the cake, the book that unites Christians together (the Gospel) is about mankind’s evil inclinations causing this Perfect Guy’s torture and death!
The benefits of this celebration are remarkable as something felt and experienced (phenomenological) rather than analyzed or asserted. How would you feel if an amazing person saved you and your friends from death? What if your evil inclinations led to his death, but he forgave you? What if he came with good news about living life well and serving wisdom, and you just imitate him? What if he is your perfect friend? The point of focus here is imagining these experiences as if they unfold in your own reality, almost like a great movie that you’re watching rapt with attention. Just like a person can be changed from a movie or a song, while knowing the events are not physically real, a person can be changed from a dramatic religious experience. And this experience is accessible to anyone who simply forgets the question of reality or unreality and attempts in context to imagine this as having happened. It can literally just be appreciated as non-literal, poetry and “living drama” rather than limited-in-scope factual assertions about biographical detail or the archaeological record.
The underlying social technology of uniting a community around an imagined ideal human and an ideal relationship with him is simply profound. It’s so compelling that the element is recreated across all religions, with Buddhists imagining the Buddha, Muslims imagining Muhammad, and even Ultra-Orthodox Jews spontaneously seeing their Rabbi as the Messiah. The utility is that, as a social species, we can’t actually approach Greatness outside of our social understanding — there’s a chronic need for an intermediary between Man and the Divine. I think Christianity does this particularly well because Jesus can be related to through all the powerful emotional dimensions.
Why?
Why should we take a step back to religious social technology? Well, I think we’re in a social dark ages. Our attention is consistently brought down to matters of consumerism and social strife. The idea of genuinely talking about and encouraging virtue among peers is Don Quixote levels of comical. We have lost the religious language that allows us to succinctly reference optimal experience. Our youth are worshipping pop singers, rappers, dim-witted athletes, and absurd political Utopianism. Meanwhile, adults are training their mind for outrage and doom through scrolling and news. Negative emotional states and corrupt social infrastructure have far-ranging consequences on health and civic engagement, and religious social technology offers an improvement.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
You can solve the opiate crisis by setting up “pro-social behavioral clinics” where opiates are administered surreptitiously under the contextual cues of prosocial behavior. This works to create a natural association where the addict expects to receive opiates during the behavior in which it is released endogenously. This would be iterative, so maybe the first time they have an opiate when coming in to visit, next time it’s when they talk about positive behaviors, etc. The opiate would he administered without any cues, in the form of either a drink or a food or a gum. Then what you do is you implement the reverse side of the equation: put them in a room filled with the cues of drugs (needles, pills, shady people, etc), then administer an opiate blocker like ibogaine, which has the added benefit of increasing up regulation of endogenous opioid receptors! (I’ve thought also either electric shocks or cold plunges to increase endogenous opioid up regulation as much as possible, along with curcumin and sulforaphane which do the same)
This could be an easy daily regimen, it’s very cost effective, at the tail end of the regimen you would have them exercise to receive ever-decreasing opioid administration — this is ideal because eventually their body will just release them naturally which happens from exercise.
I would bet all of my money that this is the most efficient and effective way to solve addiction and am confident in a few decades it will be implemented and proven
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
The anointing oil of ancient Judaism is very likely to have had cannabis in it.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
The BLR was excellent for interesting information that did not warrant its own post. Not every interesting link requires its own post.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
Do people ever purposefully sell their social currency among the highest status to purchase social currency among the lower status? He works in pharma finance. Pro-establishment Jews and pro-establishment gentiles are his clientele, colleagues, and social judges.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
I think signing on the R ticket and declaring we give too much money to Ukraine and Israel is a really bad way to grift. If you’re alleging he is in it for pure personal gain, that’s the last thing he would do. That’s alienating establishment political apparatus and pro-Israel donors.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
Maybe, but I also see no evidence anywhere that he was ever an “accomplished pianist”. This phrase has a very specific meaning that is unevidenced. It doesn’t mean that you’ve played an instrument for a decade, but have won competitions or appeared in legitimate productions.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
I might wind up supporting him, but a lot of your information is (at best) misleading. “Moonlighting as a rapper” is actually just occasionally singing the lyrics to Eminem at coffee houses. “Came with nothing” means being a landed aristocratic Brahmin-born engineer with a degree from India. He’s an “accomplished pianist” in the sense that he can hit some keys with graceful mediocrity. I’m too lazy to fact check everything but I’m going to assume large Ramaswathes of it are wrong, and I find the adulation a bit Ramaswarmy.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
my first crush included the confusing and intense desire to be the girl I was crushing on
I wonder if there are studies on the internal/external Identity-Object relationship in transgender psychology. Is this limited to the sexual, or does it hold broadly? For instance, are transgenders more likely to believe that they are of the same kind as their idols, without being able to discern a mismatch in personality/looks/skills? We might see, for instance, that transgenders interested in music are more likely to believe they are better musicians than they are, or those interested in writing are more likely to believe they are already a good writer when they are not. I wonder if you couldn’t do a test to see how well a transgender can objectively discern their characteristics and skills in relation to the social standards and affinities that they have. I also wonder if there is any relationship to parenting histories — when the child professed a desire to be an astronaut did the mom immediately give him a NASA shirt and tell him he will be an astronaut, are there differences in static vs growth mindset, lack of objective judgment by parenrs, etc
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
Maybe not what you’re looking for, but the most accurate heuristic I found is “health” broadly (inclusive to sexual fitness). So you can understand bodily attraction this way — fat in the right places is conducive to healthy children (the fat stores are transferred to the child), good skin quality is conducive to hormonal bonding with a child which takes place from skin contact, face can signal someone’s mental health. Then there’s “personality” which usually comes down to high energy (a consequence and costly signal of health) and stress resilience (a consequence of health). Innocence can be attractive because it means a woman is capable of a healthy level of sexual bonding, and at the same time a dominant personality can be attractive because it signals good health and high energy and high stress resilience. I haven’t found one thing commonly considered attractive that does not signal health. Even gait signals health and you can diagnose mental status by someone’s gait. Dressing beautifully means the intelligence to discern beauty from ugliness which actually requires skill in pattern-matching (there’s a reason humans under 16 will usually dress silly).
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
In a country of 330 million, not everyone can pursue a STEM degree. There will be those with lower income, and the song is about their quality of life being worsened. Complaining is wildly effective at causing change when you look at LGBT or Jewish issues, so I’m not sure why we should presume a song like this is ineffective. Do you think the protest songs in the 60s were effective?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
The song accomplishes the following:
-
Sympathy for the white lower and middle class, which may reach the ears of the near-damned rich men north of Jerusalem.
-
Focuses the cause of the complaints on the greedy.
-
Creates a rallying point around the artist.
Music is important for social and political movements, and in-groups are formed by complaining. This song may lead to concrete accomplishments through indirect influences down the road. Will other artists be inspired to make similar music? What about social organizers?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
The OP does not shy away from responding to critics and providing sources (see his other threads). His posts are content-heavy and often use primary sources. I don’t think it’s a good idea if we all start saying “I don’t like this person’s views, can someone from my in-group verify these claims”? If you don’t trust OP then you can wait for someone’s attempted debunk or take on that role yourself, no?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
“Participants in God’s salvation” in an “unfathomable divine mystery” is not a clear assertion that Jews are saved ceteris paribus. It is consciously ambiguous language. The relevant text is Romans 11: https://biblehub.com/esv/romans/11.htm
So too at the present time there is a remnant, chosen by grace. But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works; otherwise grace would no longer be grace. What then? Israel failed to obtain what it was seeking. The elect obtained it, but the rest were hardened
This indicates that the true remnant of Israel were the Jews who accepted Christ, as well as the gentiles grafted in:
But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, although a wild olive shoot, were grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing root of the olive tree, do not be arrogant toward the branches. If you are, remember it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you. Then you will say, “Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in.” That is true. They were broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand fast through faith. So do not become proud, but fear. For if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will he spare you.
The above mentions that unbelieving Jews are “broken branches” which “God does not spare”. Next we read that some of the natural branches will be grafted in again,
And even they, if they do not continue in their unbelief, will be grafted in, for God has the power to graft them in again. For if you were cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree, and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these, the natural branches, be grafted back into their own olive tree. Lest you be wise in your own sight, I do not want you to be unaware of this mystery, brothers: a partial hardening has come upon Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. And in this way all Israel will be saved.
Lastly, we have this pretty ambiguous passage, which any side can use for their argument I suppose,
As regards the gospel, they are enemies for your sake. But as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. For just as you were at one time disobedient to God but now have received mercy because of their disobedience, so they too have now been disobedient in order that by the mercy shown to you they also may now receive mercy. For God has consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
This is bizarre just from the perspective of politicking. You’re a politician, in Ohio, how do you not know enough about Christians to expect this kind of response? I’m reading and apparently there was another politician in Ohio who also called on her to delete the tweet, Casey Weinstein, but he then deleted his tweet. This is just basic religion literacy. Christians as part of their religion are obliged to “confess the name of Jesus”, this is commanded of them and it’s a minor plot point during the Passion. This should be tolerated in the public sphere just as everyone should tolerate Jews professing a chosen status and Muslims calling Muhammad a prophet.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
choosing to believe in its importance is an opinion
Right, it’s a faith statement unevidenced by the atheistic framework. Why an animal would care about “animal species as a whole” does not make sense scientifically in an evolutionary sense. “Thinking atheism” does not support the importance of human flourishing as a personal pursuit.
Choosing to believe into an external source of objectivity, especially deliberately, is self-brainwashing.
It’s no less unevidenced than your dogma that a human is motivated by species-global flourishing.
The rest is just "you simply haven't prayed hard enough" goalpost moving
Not at all. You failed the exercise in being able to imagine a “loving God”. That’s not goalpost moving, that’s an inability to understand religious language.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
If you’re anticipating the judgment of an imagined perfect Being, that is phenomenologically the same as anticipating the judgment of a perfect being. Provided that you actually buy into it, of course.
Re: athletics, there’s probably nothing more “animalistically” motivating than college athletics. As in, the motivations are very primitive. Money, women, war. It’s the least civilized thing we still do in civilization. The problem is that the rest of civilized life actually requires effort in motivation. Certainly morality requires this. It also happens to be the case that student athletes are more religious than non-athletes. Probably because the stress reduction of belief allows more focus on the sport.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
I mean, I might just agree. Why shouldn’t we motivationmax? If we admit all three characters are making leaps then we might as well judge which one has the superior leap. Which athlete is motivated to leap the highest? Now we just have to ask who has the most satisfying “why”. Is it the person who believes humanity should be maximized as an article of faith, or a person who believes there is a greatest possible being to conceive who has decided that humanity ought to be maximized as an article of faith and who judged you. Which one is, well, better for maximizing humanity? I vote against the mere “humanity maximizer” because there is no judgement apart from social standard and self-guilt, which is inferior to judgment from the perfect being.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
I appreciate your responses a lot, they’re great.
I agree that humans can enjoy things and be motivated to enjoy things in the face of annihilation of the human race and a lack of objective judgment. I agree that humans will help others if it means they feel good. My disagreement is that things like the motivation to pursue the betterment of humanity and the amelioration of suffering and a general non-hedonic existence is greatly diminished in the atheist framework.
But maybe we should look at concrete examples. Let’s say two humans are deciding how to go about their career as doctors.
-
Theo believes that his conduct as a doctor will be judged by a powerful and important and loving Person. Theo believes this Person’s opinion of him is more important than any human being he knows. Theo loves this Person because this Person gave his life for him. As a result, Theo ignores the temptation to overcharge and over-medicate, he ignores the temptation to see too many patients to acquire money. The hospital’s management is upset with him; his coworkers are enjoying life more than him. But Theo believes that the Great Person is doubly proud of him for withstanding social pressure.
-
Athena believes that her conduct is never judged except by other people who are only privy to how she presents herself publicly. Athena believes that life is about enjoyment, that she will die and never live again, and that feeling good is the most important thing. She overcharges patients, she over-medicates, and she rushes appointments. She loves the praise she gets from her manager. If she ever feels guilty, she goes on social media and signals her virtue as a feminist doctor, and instantly she feels better. She knows that she can feel less guilty more effectively by ignoring the substance and focusing on appearances. A lot of people suffer because of her, but she can hide this from her mind easily, as the other people around her do.
We would certainly agree that Theo is greater than Athena here. I bet our disagreement solely lies in my description of Athena. I’m describing the worst possible atheist, or something. But I think my description is accurate for a “thinking atheist” who has plotted out all the consequences of her belief system. Theo has also plotted out the consequences of his belief system, and it leads to morality and a qualitatively different happiness predicated on human affection in the face of suffering. Perhaps there’s someone similar to Athena — let’s call him Athanasius — who believes that he must behave morally to better humanity. That would be an act of faith and does not follow from atheism. Athanasius is willing a new belief into existence in the same way Theo does. I would then just say that Athanasius should take a few more steps and try to imagine the most motivating belief system, and this would look awfully similar to theism — hell maybe he would develop something even better than religion.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
If the whole human endeavor disappears without a trace, leaving no influence, and no one remembers them, then by definition it has no impact or significance on the universe. In human life, when something has no greater significance, like we make a medicine that was ineffective or we build a building that collapses, we say it was meaningless. If I give someone a kidney but they die immediately, it had no greater significance. In other words, it didn’t matter.
If I will die, and every human will die, then what I do has no greater significance because it is only temporarily affecting things that will disappear shortly. Those “good feelings” I create in others will cease to matter one day, so what were they for? It’s almost the same thing as if I do heroin and then face withdrawals — temporary happiness that doesn’t matter. What’s more, my moral intuitions have no greater purpose and are just an accident. This we know from science. So I have no need to listen to my moral impulse and can completely ignore it for my own gain, as if I’m playing GTA. The only duty remaining is to feel good, because only pleasure is real. If someone tries to shame me (which feels bad), I can pretend that he is wrong and that I am right. We already have humans doing this today in fact!
It’s a worldview that can’t help but breed dysfunction if you actually dwell on it. Like yeah, you can ignore the atheistic truth, but then you might as well develop some theistic view for fun. An atheistic man who confronts the ultimate purpose of things head on would say: “I exist as an accident, there is no greater significance to morality, morality is an accidental instinct that I can ignore, and I need not care about humankind because I won’t be judged for it.”
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
You’ve already brainwashed yourself into believing that “human flourishing” matters, when objectively it does not as all of humanity will die and be forgotten — mere blip on the timeline, an accident, a nanosecond to eternity’s year. So I’m asserting that there is a superior way for you to brainwash yourself for maximal happiness.
When you imagine the perfect Father-Son relationship, is it one of smothering? If not, then you haven’t even succeeded in imagining a perfectly loving deity, let alone trying out belief. When you imagine perfect justice, do you imagine shackles? If not, you haven’t succeeded in creating in your mind the image of a perfectly just creator. By definition, imagining a perfectly loving deity can’t make you feel smothered. It would make you feel “loved such that there is no greater experience of love”, that’s what perfect means.
Well a mystical experience, which is rare and comes on its own, is different than a stable object of attention that can be accessed daily. What we’re after is something which can be conceived in the mind with some reliability, not a transient “high” feeling when chance and gratuitous conditions are met. But I’d agree that “ecstasies” (religious or otherwise) are not always social, books like the Cloud of Unknowing and various testimonies of Saints often describe something where a sense of self is lost.
More options
Context Copy link