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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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I've said it before and I'll say it again. Christianity is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as transgender ideology.

It has much more of a track record of encouraging adaptive behavior and institutions though.

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.

If Christianity is not true then I don't care about what kind of record it has at encouraging adaptive behavior and institutions.

That is a value judgment (arguably a very Christian one) you're entitled to make. It's not just a fact.

I don't want to build society on a bedrock of delusions.

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.

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.

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.

Name a less insane society organizing religion then.

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.

Religion is, for better or worse, not optional. The very rise of the Woke is proof of it.

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.

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.

Categorically impossible? In the sense that either the laws of logic, physics or biology prevent it?

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.

At the very least, we have systems of metaphysics that have been stripped of supernatural elements

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.

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.

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.

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