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If Christianity is not true then I don't care about what kind of record it has at encouraging adaptive behavior and institutions. I don't want to build society on a bedrock of delusions.
Neither do I, yet I note that much that replaced Christianity as social bedrock has been quite explicitly delusional. Secular Materialism talked a good game, and then when people actually committed to it, they went utterly mad. Meanwhile, us Christians continue to chug along, succeeding by the Materialists' standards as well as our own.
Some variants of secular materialism went utterly mad. Stalinism, for example, or the Khmer Rouge. But Western society as a whole is not mad, at least not by the standards of the typical society throughout history, and it is chugging along just fine for the most part.
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Okay, I was inclined to be snarky, but if this is your basic problem with it, then I have to respect that. I too much prefer "is it true or not?" than "is it prosocial or not, even if it's a heap of bullshit?"
An honest atheist is a more worthy opponent than all the patronising "of course it's dumb as a description of reality but if you look as it as early sociology..." rationalisations.
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That is a value judgment (arguably a very Christian one) you're entitled to make. It's not just a fact.
I'd prefer a non-deluded, rational secular humanism where we dispense with all superstitions and life is improved in every way by it, as was promised to me by Dawkins and Harris (PBUT) at a formative point in my teens.
But I'm no longer certain that truth and value are the same (especially when it comes to an individual life). And I'm not sure that option is available. What I see in that clip are dueling "delusions", except one has a longer track record of encouraging kids and pro-social behavior.
Humanity is not stuck in the ridiculous position of having to choose between the rock of trans-ideology and the hard place of Christianity. Choosing these two specific species of insanity is eliding the fact there are plenty of less insane alternatives.
It's true that there are lots of society-wide ideologies to choose from with staying power, but none of them are liberal rationalism.
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Name a less insane society organizing religion then.
We know what the cult of reason begets, we tried that one pretty thoroughly since 1789. Positivism turned out a lot more insane than Abrahamism.
You're not going to get out of the need for a metaphysics. Better men than you have tried and they all failed. Religion is, for better or worse, not optional. The very rise of the Woke is proof of it.
If you’re looking for alternatives, I’d point to Buddhism, Confucianism, and possibly Zarathustrianism. They all have decent track records of producing high civilizations.
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I deny the need for religion in the first place. Or if there's a "need" for it in the psyche of the average human, poor thing, it needs to be excised, not fed.
I obviously disagree, even if Wokism has plenty of traits of religion.
I simply can't think of any society throughout the history of man that has lacked a religion, in the sense of a shared metaphysics.
It seems to me you're arguing for something that's categorically impossible, so please explain.
Categorically impossible? In the sense that either the laws of logic, physics or biology prevent it? If you want an existence proof, I'm right here.
We know very rough correlates for religiosity in the human brain, so it's plausible enough to me that there's likely a biological means of removing such tendencies. At the very least, we have systems of metaphysics that have been stripped of supernatural elements, that would be philosophy. The fact that Wokism, as you initially brought up, is largely lacking in the same while being quite convincing and virulent, is proof of possibility.
There's obviously no society in existence that doesn't have a shared culture/memeplex, but that's not what I'm positing, it's the removal of supernatural bullshit from its underpinnings.
Precisely.
And much as I can understand it being frustrating from your point of view (I too used to think of myself as an atheist in this sense), I do not believe you are not religious, I just think you don't consider your religion one.
This is an absolute, complete and total lie. And any reasonable skeptic must concede that all knowledge lies on foundations of metaphysical assumption.
We can have this conversation in as much detail as you wish as this particular line of thought is something I have contemplated in detail, but I'll give the gist of it to save us time.
Let's take the sum of all scientific knowledge. That is, knowledge about nature obtained through empiricism. The truth of it live and dies on the validity of the scientific method and its accuracy in depicting the world or obtaining a true appraisal of it.
But this in turn requires of the world one absolute and undeniably metaphysical property: that the world is logically consistent. That is to say that the world obeys laws of causality, that the same causes produce the same effects and that observation has the ability to make accurate predictions. In other words, that miracles are not possible. That there is no Cartesian demon pulling the wool over our eyes.
This is not something science and logic can ascertain, since it is axiomatic, and it must be believed purely on reasonable faith. And it is also essentially metaphysical since it is a belief about the very structure of the world.
Let's damn empiricism for the sake of argument, and restrict our question to a priori knowledge. Mathematics and all the truths that can be obtained by logic.
These also rely on a base axiomatic presupposition, one that is made explicit by Randian Objectivism and other deduction edifices such as Praxeology: the faith in the very ability of deductive logic to produce truth. Yet again we arrive at a metaphysical axiom. A=A and other such base presuppositions that are, if quite reasonable in themselves, still faith based statements about the nature of the world.
All systems of thought have this issue, the grounding problem, and metaphysical skeptics such as myself deny the necessary truth of all statements that rely on merely reasonable grounding propositions, and therefore of all statements.
Consider Newtonian physics: a very useful model of the world, one that we use in engineering on the daily. But also one that we know from observation to be wrong and mere approximation. I believe all knowledge to be thus.
I understand your position (I think), but I am convinced it is untrue. For the aforementioned reasons. Positivism is a metaphysical doctrine that is, if not supernatural in the literal sense (since it's a kind of realism), certainly requires faith in an unfalsifiable metaphysical doctrine.
I will strongly state that I think this is an exceptionally useless, entirely non-standard definition of "religion".
An ideology or a philosophy is not a religion, there's a reason they're distinct words with specific connotations.
If I had to self-describe, then the description with the best tradeoff between verbosity and utility is "transhumanist classical liberal with libertarian tendencies".
I invite you to show me which aspect is necessarily religious. Transhumanism might laud the improvement of the human form and transcendence over its limitations, but there's nothing remotely supernatural about it. Wearing glasses, taking performance enhancing drugs or getting a pacemaker are innately transhumanist acts.
I am well aware that axioms exist, and must stand alone until you can show that they potentially arise from the implications of even fewer axioms. Or that value is inherently subjective, and there's nothing to decry as being objective false about them. Rationalists coined the phrase Orthogonality Hypothesis.
Fundamental assumptions about ontology/epistemics != supernatural beliefs. Those are defined by their claims of relevance to the material world, as well as (usually) a denial they can be defined or derived from the same laws of physics it obeys and willful denial that the preponderance of evidence empirically available or theoretically robust rules against it.
God as an Omnipotent, Omniscient, and Omnibenevolent entity outside the laws of physics or empirical investigation is supernatural.
"God" as a superintelligent AGI or alien running us in a simulation is not.
A Communist who desires communism despite knowing the human costs and economic downsides is not succumbing to supernatural thinking. They're biting a bullet and admitting they accept that tradeoff. A Communist who claims that it's a more efficient and wealth-increasing/wellbeing-maximizing alternative to capitalism is wrong, and I would still not call this a supernatural belief.
I deny that faith is the appropriate/correct word for this association.
At the very least mathematicians and logicians go to great lengths to minimize such assumptions, hence why they bothered to prove that 1+1=2 in Peano Arithmetic as opposed to waving their hands and declaring it obvious.
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Your use of that metaphor is telling, we need hard objects to cling to, we need something to serve as an epistemological bedrock. Something is going to be unquestionable in whatever worldview we eventually settle on, and so far us/the secularists haven’t done a good job building something on top of the bedrock of rational observation.
Who's "we", white man? Jokes aside, I am personally entirely content with having my subjective goals and desires be the bedrock on which I build my existence. I don't aspire for more because it's not possible to have an "objective" morality or foundation in the first place.
What policy preferences or cultural peccadilos a society has doesn't particularly matter to me, as long as the central tenets don't violate our best understanding of the laws of physics, as Christianity does, or biology, as Wokism is guilty of.
The problems crop up when someone else wants their subjective goals and desires to be fulfilled, and you are standing in their way. How does society's institutions satisfy you both? If they can't, who wins? That's where we get the Progressive Stack. On what do we base 'this is how we run things so that as a whole we can muddle along'? Great, we've settled the law of gravitational attraction, but how does that apply to deciding if Sparklina-formerly-Bob can now take your stuff because xe is the mostest oppressed and you owe xer, cis scum?
That's not the progressive stack that's just society. If some people want abortion outlawed and some people do not, there is no objective answer that will satisfy both, just as with Trans ideology. And the answer is the same, whoever can get more popular and institutional support.
Which means the people who are all "abortion is a human right!" have no grounds to complain if their opponents manage to win on that one, and yet they do. People will still fight over principles, no matter how much anyone wants to implement a society of "just lemme have my fun and leave me alone".
Sure, it doesn't stop people complaining or trying to change, but it is how we decide generally.
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Classical liberalism seems pretty peachy to me, let people do as they please as wrong as they don't infringe on a narrowly defined set of rights that belongs to everyone else.
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No, it's going to be some flavor of insanity because it's purity spirals all the way down. The so-called less insane alternatives are just stepping stones between there and here.
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