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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   20969 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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But given that there's something of a renaissance of religious (or just generally pre-modern) thinking going on

Ooh! Coming straight out of the gate with the whip going already! 🤣

I don't get into that fight on here because I generally like you guys and it's not going anywhere. The STEM people are convinced that Science Explains It All, us religious types have been in this fight once too often before, and we end up talking past each other. There's not much room for debate when one side lays out "yeah but just because you felt the presence of the Holy Spirit, that is more easily explained by [launch into neurochemistry, neurobiology, and psychology explanation]" as their standard of proof. I mean, I've had the "St Paul was an epileptic, ackshully, which is why he fell off his horse and hallucinated Jeebus was talking to him" stuff already, I don't need more of it.

As I said, I like you guys and getting into what is sure to degenerate into name-calling and mutual insulting of intelligence and sanity isn't fruitful. There are lots of better theologians, philosophers, and apologists out there online. I'd prefer to keep my powder dry for the really important fights to come (like the third season of Rings of Power, dropping upon us like Fat Man on Nagasaki in November this year).

You seem to be attacking straw New Atheists who mostly aren't actually here.

I have a lot of reasons to disbelieve in a Holy Spirit even while believing you and my mother are sincere (and not crazy) when you claim to have experienced it. I don't need a "scientific" explanation to debunk every single supposed miracle in the Bible. I can just accept that every culture has these stories and lots of people experience things that are, IMO, either misunderstood or not real.

Also, STEM and religion aren't automatically mutually exclusive.

I can just accept that every culture has these stories and lots of people experience things that are, IMO, either misunderstood or not real.

Feck it, and I said I wouldn't get into an argument.

But that's it in a nutshell right there: not real. By what metric? Science, which tells us that gods and spiritual experiences are not things that happen, so it's not real and here's the real explanation.

Also, STEM and religion aren't automatically mutually exclusive.

I do accept that, but I think some people are very uncomfortable with the idea that one can be both, not either/or. A kind of Unitarian Universalist 'religious/spiritual' nice polite makes no demands of belief that will contradict Science Says? That's fine, but keep it in your pants, buster, when it comes to making real-world decisions.

Remember the furore over Francis Collins being an Evangelical and leader of the Human Genome Project, then director of the National Institutes for Health? Sam Harris remembers, as does P.Z. Myers:

Collins read in the Times that many of his colleagues in the scientific community believed that he suffered from “dementia.” Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard, questioned the appointment on the ground that Collins was “an advocate of profoundly anti-scientific beliefs.” P. Z. Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota at Morris, complained, “I don’t want American science to be represented by a clown.”

Cool Buddhism-derived meditation for me, but not Bible-bashing literalism for thee:

In 2006, Collins published a bestselling book, The Language of God, in which he claims to demonstrate “a consistent and profoundly satisfying harmony” between 21st-century science and Evangelical Christianity. Let it be known that “consistency” and “harmony” can be in the eye of the beholder.

In fact, to read The Language of God is to witness nothing less than an intellectual suicide. It is, however, a suicide that has gone almost entirely unacknowledged: The body yielded to the rope; the neck snapped; the breath subsided; and the corpse dangles in ghastly discomposure even now—and yet, polite people everywhere continue to celebrate the great man’s health.

But that's it in a nutshell right there: not real. By what metric? Science, which tells us that gods and spiritual experiences are not things that happen, so it's not real and here's the real explanation.

Science doesn't "tell us that gods and spiritual experiences are not things that happen." Science provides a methodology that tests the nature of observable reality.

If you tell me there is a God that exists that is outside any means of testing his existence, and you have spiritual experiences that no one who is not you can verify, science doesn't, strictly speaking, say "That's not real." It says "There is no way to verify that."

People can of course choose to believe in things that cannot be verified. I imagine if I had a spiritual experience that I was convinced was real, I would believe it was real regardless of whether it could be detected by anyone else.

Since I don't, however, and since such experiences fall outside anything explainable with what we know about the universe using observable and testable criteria, you can get offended that I disbelieve, but why should I believe?

I'm not saying you should believe. I'm saying people treat it not as "science says it's not verifiable" but "science says it's not real". And you're logical chopping there with "I believe you believe you experienced that".

Why should 'observable and testable criteria' be limited to what we currently have in our toolbox? This is the same "love is only oxytocin" reasoning that gets us tangled up in the same kinds of arguments about what is real/actual and why then it degenerates into "all that romance crap is stupid, Valentine's Day is only commercial opportunity, you don't love that woman, it's evolution acting on you to fuck her to spread your genes nothing more and certainly nothing special" kind of fighting.

I'm not offended, I'm just tired of the fight.

I'm not trying to fight! But what am I supposed to say to 'you're logical chopping there with "I believe you believe you experienced that"?

Let's say you say you saw an angel. I can:

  1. Believe you.
  2. Assume you're lying or delusional.
  3. More charitably, assume you experienced something that you can't explain or prove but which you believe was an angel.

It seems only (1) will not offend you. Problem: I don't believe in angels. You cannot convince me angels exist. What do you want from a non-believer that doesn't get your back up?

Love is at least a relatable experience. And we know humans experience emotions because even sociopaths do. Love can be explained as an evolutionary adaption in our neurology, but that doesn't make it not real.

Love can be explained as an evolutionary adaption in our neurology, but that doesn't make it not real.

But the reduction to "it's all just neurochemicals" does anger or hurt people who lay a very great emphasis on the importance of love (all kinds of love). "Yeah we could just shoot you with a syringe full of hormones to make you feel that way and it would be just the same as if you met the right person for you" is not what people want to hear, or would accept. And is that all that love is, in fact? I don't think it is, and I think a lot of humanity believes and has believed that it is not all that it is.

The neurochemicals are just the causal mechanism behind love. There has to be one; what would it mean for there not to be? Your brain just started wanting to be with another person for literally no reason? But any other casual mechanism could be just as easily dismissed.

I am reminded of the argument that it is immoral to hold someone accountable for their low intelligence because intelligence is genetic and they didn't choose to get bad genes, and all I can think is, as opposed to what? If intelligence is instead caused by the environment, nobody chooses how they are raised. And if intelligence is caused by the soul, then nobody chooses what soul gets put into their bodies. And so on. The objection is not to genes, but to any casual mechanism which can be understood.

Falling in love was the single most important experience of my life, though it was 20 years ago. Knowing that the feeling was triggered by neurochemicals in my brain does not change that. Nor does knowing that my brain was executing an adaptation that was selected for in the ancestral environment because it made my ancestors pair-bond and therefore more likely to successfully raise offspring who would survive in turn to have offspring of their own. Chemicals and evolution explain love; they do not explain it away.

And if intelligence is caused by the soul, then nobody chooses what soul gets put into their bodies

Nope, that one works. And you reversed the quote you linked. The quote says "You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily". You seem to have reversed it as you are a body and you are inhabited by a soul. If the soul is the "you", and your personal qualities are attached to it, then there is no separate independent "you" who received that soul, but you are that soul. That's logically coherent.

But also this is folk religion and not Christianity, which emphasizes both body and soul and the resurrection of both at the end of time, though in somewhat different and vague form, like a spiritual body etc. but that's beside the point.

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