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Thread: Religion and rationality

  1. #501
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    Wasn't going to return to this but what the heck: Critique topples Nature paper on belief in gods:

    A widely-touted 2019 study in Nature which argued that large societies gave rise to belief in fire-and-brimstone gods — and not the other way around — has been retracted by the authors after their reanalysis of the data in the wake of criticism diluted the strength of their conclusions.

    The article, “Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history,” came from a group of scholars in the United Kingdom, the United States and elsewhere....

    As Scientific American put it, Whitehouse’s group found that the advent of moralizing gods did not lead to the formation of complex societies. Rather:

    the study suggests pro-social religions appeared after complex societies had already emerged. Although these religions may have helped sustain and grow large societies, the analysis makes the case that they were not necessary for societies to expand in the first place.

    ...Immediately after publication, a group led by Bret Beheim, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, submitted a response to the journal questioning the validity of the results....

    This blog post on ArcheoThoughts describes the controversy, which, as the author notes, boils down to this:

    The core challenge from Beheim et al. is rather that the original paper treats absence of evidence for moralizing gods as evidence of their absence. It changes all N/A (not available) values to absent. In other words, the original paper considers that if there is no information on the presence of moralizing gods in a certain region at a certain time, there is no moralizing god.

    After reanalyzing their results in light of the challenge, Whitehouse’s group agreed that the findings weren’t quite as robust as they’d initially claimed.

    According to the retraction notice:

    ...Since this Letter was published, we have thoroughly refined our data and analyses, and have found that our original conclusions are still strongly supported. However, the differences between our revised analyses and the original Letter are substantial enough to warrant a Retraction of the original Letter....

    ...

    Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    Quote Originally Posted by Chris View Post
    Too much leisure time on our hands. Outside the West, religious belief wouldn't be questioned.
    lol What I find hilarious about Wolf's comment is that these threads have an irresistible allure to him. He can't help himself and here he is again! Why does he spend "hour after hour" arguing about "the most arcane and trivial bull$#@!"?

    What does that tell you?
    Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.


    ~Alain de Benoist


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    Quote Originally Posted by Mister D View Post
    lol What I find hilarious about Wolf's comment is that these threads have an irresistible allure to him. He can't help himself and here he is again! Why does he spend "hour after hour" arguing about "the most arcane and trivial bull$#@!"?

    What does that tell you?

    Answers appear in the following.

    THE INNER LOGIC OF RELIGION(S) is an essay on psycho-sociological methodology but interesting just the same if you want to understand religion, religious people, religious beliefs.

    In this essay, we discuss the “inner logic” of religion(s). That is, how religious thinking and acting is important to understand on their own terms and not simply as merely psychological or sociological in nature. Unfortunately, across the social sciences, a typical approach to the study of religion and religions is to reduce religion to sociology or to psychology by imposing sociological or psychological perspectives onto religion.

    ...In a highly-cited article on the influence of religion on American adolescents, Smith proposed nine factors that explain, or at least hint at, religion’s unique effects on what social scientists commonly term “pro-social behaviors.” Of these, he includes such items as the ability of religion to provide moral directives, embodied role models, coping skills, and cultural and social capital, to name a few....

    ...he says, each religion’s peculiar content, its specific beliefs and expectations, are inseparably linked to the outcomes the religion produces.

    In short, he argues that there is something distinctly religious about religion that cannot be understood in “other than religious” terms. ...We follow Smith in suggesting the need to preserve and even enhance a formal appreciation of the explanatory power of religion.

    In a wonderful book (with a subtitle that summarizes it well) called Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What To Do About It, author and Episcopalian minister David Zahl argues that it is not so much that Americans are less religious than we used to be but, rather, that we have transferred our innate religiosity to a variety of secular matters. Similarly, sociologist Roger Friedland argues that there is something religious about even the most secular aspects of modern life, rather than something secular, social, or utterly other-than-religious about religion.

    ...Each unique Christian, or Muslim, or Jewish denomination has its own particular set of beliefs and practices—and families have particular ways they live out those beliefs and practices. The philosopher George Santayana (2014) noted that “every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy” and that religion’s power consists in its special and surprising message and in the bias which that revelation gives to life. As he puts it, “The vistas it opens and the mysteries it propounds are another world to live in; and another world to live in—whether we expect ever to pass wholly into it or not—is what we mean by having a religion.”

    Trying to understand a given religion without attending to its particular manifestations throughout time and space is, Santayana argues, to “attempt to speak without speaking any particular language.” To try and understand religious-ethnic families without attempting to understand their particular religions, logics, and/or lived experience would be to devise a theory of those families that is not actually about them....

    ...In our efforts to better understand and better serve religious families, both the processes of how religions work and the content of the diverse religious traditions that carry out these processes must be understood in their own distinctly religious language and on their own terms.

    As humans, we tend to hunger for and seek ultimate meaning—and many do so through a particular religion and religious logic....
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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  5. #504
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    Quote Originally Posted by Chris View Post
    Answers appear in the following.

    THE INNER LOGIC OF RELIGION(S) is an essay on psycho-sociological methodology but interesting just the same if you want to understand religion, religious people, religious beliefs.
    That looks very interesting. Thanks. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann began arguing similar lines decades ago. A Rumor of Angels looks great. I may pick that up.
    Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.


    ~Alain de Benoist


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    Quote Originally Posted by FindersKeepers View Post
    Gehenna was a real place--a community where human sacrifices likely took place.
    Yes, Gehenna was a real place--it is a corruption of the term Valley of Hinnom--which is where past kings regularly sacrificed children, and residents of Jerusalem eventually came to burn their trash.

    Quote Originally Posted by FindersKeepers View Post
    The term became generic after that, but how can there be a real place of continual torment?
    Because the Valley of Hinnom (Gehenna) burned perpetually, it came to symbolize exactly that.

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  8. #506
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    Quote Originally Posted by FindersKeepers View Post
    Okay. Okay. I've been meaning to get to this but just keep getting side tracked.

    My opinion -- what they're "embracing" in Christianity is a system of values, that if we all follow, we would have a much gentler, kinder society. That, in itself, lends importance and acknowledgement of the religion.

    However, Christianity is at odds with science at times, and as people learn more about how the world works, superstitionism falls away.

    The values are still valuable. The stories are still heartwarming--who doesn't love the story of baby Jesus?

    But, as we learn it's unlike that the neither the virgin birth nor the immaculate conception took place, and that other scriptural tenets and stories are pretty much unbelievable as well, we segregate the religion. We can accept the values while rejecting the stories. At least some can.
    This would make sense--except that those segregating the "values" from Christianity itself still call themselves "Christians"--and may even attend church services regularly.

    Does this really make any sense to you?

    Why not just call themselves humanists, and be done with it?

    (Oh, by the way: Wherever Biblical teaching--whether in the Old Testament or the New Testament--diverges from science, I will opt for the latter. This is not to imply that science is always right--it simply is not--but I would imagine that in a showdown, it would more often be correct. After all, the Bible was never intended as a book of science.)

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    Quote Originally Posted by FindersKeepers View Post
    But that's the thing -- just my lowly opinion -- we cannot separate ourselves. We don't have the ability to do so. We come up with all sorts of beliefs and rules in our human form, but we are still what we we're created to be. Our opinions can change, but our reality cannot.
    You express your opinions on religion without the bitterness and condescension I'm unfortunately become accustomed to here at tPF. Well, you don't express them that way to me anyway. Standing Wolf once made what I thought was a truly interesting comment about the need of religious people for "control". Religion entails the exact opposite. It is ultimately an act of submission. We come up with all sorts of beliefs and rules because I think many of us want things are own way. We demand autonomy. Non serviam

    So, yes, we are what we were created to be but we can't always accept that. There is a reason that the Sin of Pride is the worst of the 7 Deadly Sins of the Christian tradition. It is the origin of all the disorders of the human soul.
    Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.


    ~Alain de Benoist


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    Quote Originally Posted by Standing Wolf View Post
    I understand. A Christian, for example, takes his or her belief in Jesus Christ and the absolute truth of Christian doctrines on faith, and in that sense it is an axiomatic "truth" that is not to be disproven. St. Paul writes about faith as being "the evidence of things not seen". Does that which is seen - the complexity of the universe, the emergence of life from non-living materials, etc. - constitute some sort of supporting evidence for the belief that has already been accepted as absolutely and irrevocably true? I suppose it might, if one were so oriented, but to someone who hasn't made that commitment to a "truth" solely on the basis of faith, it proves nothing of the sort.

    Can a conclusion arrived at solely by faith, and held onto regardless of any physical evidence or logical arguments that might be presented, really be said to be a rational belief?

    To someone who considers their own Faith to be rational, I would simply address the question - respectfully - "What makes your particular chosen Faith rational and all the other major religious Faiths not so much?"
    I'm not good with the big words but whether it is religion, agnostic or atheism each the three aforementioned are based on faith

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    Quote Originally Posted by Mister D View Post
    Hell has been thought of in various ways in the Christian tradition.
    The exact nature of hell evolved, in Jewish thought, throughout the centuries. (Sheol--the Hebrew word for "hell"--was generally considered to be a place of eternal death--which is to say, separation from God.)

    By New Testament times, the Valley of Hinnom--i.e. Gehenna--superseded this.

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