= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
advancedatheist comments on Stupid Questions February 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (198)
A few centuries back, did almost all the Ashkenazi Jews live like today's ultra-orthodox ones? Or do the current groups like the Haredi represent a recently emergent kind of Judaism which has rejected certain aspects of modernity, but it doesn't necessarily reflect how the ancestors of these Jews lived?
The Haredi seem to show how a lot of the stereotypes about Jews come from the ones who moved out of the ghetto and into gentile society. Many of the Haredi avoid useful education and try to get on welfare in their host societies, for example, while integration-minded Jews have a reputation for doing well in secular schools and supporting themselves by running businesses or entering certain high-status professions.
Like people said, also a few centuries ago welfare programs did not exist.
The Ultra-Orthodox as they stand are a relatively modern thing. The charedi movement arose as a reaction to the rise of the Reform movements and the enlightenment. None of the current movements in Judaism really do a good job of mimicking what Ashkenazi Jews were like in the 1700 or 1800s because the forced ghettoization and constant fear of pogroms was such a major aspect in so much of Europe.
It is worth noting in this context that many "fundamentalist" (for lack of a better term) religions are similar in this regard: they are modern reactions which have only a romantic connection to the past.
I've suspected that modern christianity in general has turned into a form of Creative Anachronism. The Enlightenment seems to have caused a discontinuity in the West's spiritual traditions, so that today's fundamentalists have to reconstruct these traditions from several centuries back from what they can read about them in books. Fundamentalists can imitate the forms of this lost christianity, but it lacks authenticity because too many of the supporting conditions for it have disappeared in the last few centuries.
I think it's more along the lines of "the mythic forms that held people's attention and allegiance X hundred years ago tend to not do so in the modern era for a wide number of reasons, so people either jump ship or create something new from the framework which can only gain 'authenticity' with time".
One of those reasons is that now people know things they didn't know back then. (Like age of the Earth, dinosaurs, evolution, etc.) In the past people could believe religious explanations because they honestly seemed to them as the best explanations. Now you have to actively suppress education, or support some kind of doublethink, or invent a new interpretation of the old writings -- these are all modern elements that the honest ancient faiths didn't have.
The ancient religious people believed that evidence would support their faith. This is why in the past many religious people were also great scientists: they believed they were studying God's work, thus contributing to understanding of God. The modern religious people know that evidence is the enemy of their faith. On some level they are aware that their religion is a "noble lie". Sufficiently intelligent people realize that noble lie is still a lie.
Beware triumphalism. The gods not being real has never stopped them for long before. Or rather whenever one religious sensibility becomes untenable another springs up. Its the way we work. One particular mythology losing its grip on people's worldviews won't stop people from having religious experiences and building cultures and communities and mythologies around them.
An understanding of reductionism isn't a stop sign to this either. To use an example I have spoken about before, one of my good friends being an atheist materialist reductionist doesn't stop the hindu god Kali from appearing to her at important junctures in her life to push her to change her life, or prevent her from attending the Kali Puja. It doesnt matter to her that she is dealing with a 'local instance' of a cultural construct, people have been dealing with Kali for millennia and she can and will do it too, and not being physically external to her doesn't change the experience or the importance it holds for her.
Religious cultural forms are pretty much a human universal and if you break one down another will spring up or the old forms will get modified and appropriated. I actually argue that a lot of social phenomena of the last 300 years are the result of Christianity slowly losing its grip on the collective imagination of the European diaspora and a whole slew of substitutes springing up, from classic 19th century nationalism to Marxism (which has fascinating isomorphisms to Christian eschatology) to the broad 'mythology of progress' of which singulatarian thought is a fundamentalist subset.
EDIT: I suspect we are living in a bit of a transitional period in which mythic forms in the West are in flux. It will be very interesting to see what durable mythic forms congeal out of Western civilization over the next few hundred years.
The idea of a large subculture of nonworking religious scholars, supported by state welfare, appears to be relatively novel and limited —
— Encyclopædia Judaica
sounds suspiciously like an abbey to me... just "the state" instead of "the king/pope"
(note: lots of the other bits don't sound quite the same... but still, there are some similarities)
Well, a lot of abbeys were self-supporting.