Comment on Stupid Questions March 2015

Wed, 04 Mar 2015 11:55:23 GMT

or are unwilling to lie to their loved ones about their disbelief

I think this, again, is some kind of a very conservative Bible Belt thing. Outside that area in the Western world very few people do it because of real belief. For example my grandpa (Central Europe) went to church because everybody did, because it was the custom in the village. Nobody cared if he believes or not. How to put it... they were not as egalitarian as to ask a rural blacksmith to ponder about the mysteries of theism and atheism. It was more like, shut up and do the moves, and leave high thoughts to high ranking people. He never spent five minutes thinking if he is theist or atheist. He went to church, then had some kind of fallout with the priest, he disliked drunk people and the priest was drinking or something, and then just did not go anymore, basically withstood the social pressure from that on saying I don't go there that guy is an ass. But beliefs never came into question. They were not exactly expected to think, only to behave as said. He did not think it is lie or truth. He was not supposed to think and did not care about thinking about it at all he literally said "The paternoster is the priest's job. Mine is working with iron."

In many cases, the institution uses its access to members to advocate specific political and social positions which are opposed to humanist values;

Humanism sounds like a dangerous thing. I am not entirely sure what it entails, however I have seen cases where people who were no longer able to pour their wishful thinking and hopefulness into other-wordly religions have invested them into this Earth and life and thus ended up making utopias and forcing and fighting others to comply to them, replaying the whole crap of religion: fighting heretics and unbeliveres, establishing theocracy etc. the most obvious example is communism.

Another issue was that for example when people stopped believing in original sin they started to believe in crap like "human nature is good only society makes us bad" which is obivously hugely unscientific. This went back as far as Rousseau and influenced modern history a lot.

So I would not base my values on the explicit rejection of religious values. If anything, I would borrow some out of it, like not investing much hope and wishful thinking into the world and society, considering it largely unredeemable and seeing society as something easily broken, and seeing human nature as something rife with factory bugs and not trusting much in the goodness of people.

I am afraid that humanism teaches optimism and that is the worst mistake of them all, because it leads to underestimating the costs of mistakes.

If anything, I would try to go back to pre-Christian value systems, like Stoicism.

This is generally a good idea. Christianity was originally a fringe utopian universalist pacifist world-hating, society-hating hippie stuff. Jesus was an SJW :-) The whole reason it could become solid, functional, and build the rather magnificent and efficiently organized Middle Ages is that it calmed down and learn a lot from pagan philosophy and pagan practices and customs. If pagans could make crazy Christians become wise and functional, maybe they can also make atheists become wise and functional. So that is where I would look for values - pagans.

Discuss