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ChristianKl comments on State of the Solstice 2014 - LessWrong
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Comments (47)
The "Beyond the reach of God" text partly does advocate atheism but it does more than that. It's not like explaining addition. It also about challenging people who believe that democracy is always good and in general things will turn out well. It's about the idea that nothing will protect us from an X-risk wiping out humanity and we have to take responsiblity for preventing that to happen.
As far as the songs go, "God Wrote the World" doesn't seem to me like it's very offensive.
Did you have at your solstice other texts that fit into that frame that you consider to be problematic?
The light/dark/light structure does call for speeches that aren't completely positive in the middle. Ray's book doesn't speak only about fun celebration but says that a solstices should be scary.
Avoiding sensitive issues is a recipe for being boring and shallow.
It's worth noting that if someone has a negative reaction to an event, "but the Ray/the-book says we should do it this way" isn't actually much of a counter-argument. If everyone was reacting negatively to the darkness I'd change the darkness.
It may be that Jayson just isn't the target audience for what the Solstice is trying to do. I have a feeling this was not so much about things getting negative/dark, but that they were dark in a way specifically reminiscent of Christian mass. (Being somewhat preachy and advocating transhumanist ideals that slot in, for good or for ill, very cleanly where the "live forever in heaven" elements are slotted out).
He hadn't. He said he liked the event in general.
If someone watches a horror movie and then criticises the movie for raising uncomfortable emotions, that criticism misses the point.
If you analyse indivudal elements of an event without looking at the purpose of why those elements are there, that often leads to flawed conclusions.
Raising uncomfortable emotions to release them at the end, can make the dark portion feel uncomfortable but make the following light phase feel awesome.
Oh, I totally think you can argue the darkness is necessary. But I was made uncomfortable by the argument "Ray said it's necessary" as opposed to "it's useful because it helps appreciate the light."
I had the impression that he considered uncomfortable feelings to have been created accidently.
Just to clarify, Beyond the Reach of God isn't what I felt was overly disrespectful (it seems more like frank disagreement, which I think is still compatible with respect). It was the song that had a chorus of "goddamn".
Also, my comment about cargo-culting church services wasn't meant as a criticism. Often cargo-culting something known to work is the best you can do as a first step (at least until more data comes in). I have no better ideas and think the planners did a better job than I could have done (by far).
In short, I don't think we should mock/disrespect those people/institutions, because (besides being mean for little benefit) it makes it hard to take them seriously enough to learn from them the things they are currently doing better (of which there are several).
Okay, I can understand that sentiment. It doesn't seem to be one of the songs published in http://humanistculture.bandcamp.com/album/brighter-than-today-a-secular-solstice
I think it makes more sense to focus songs on our positive shared values for the light periods and on uncomfortable issues like death in the dark period.
Huh. That song struck me as so silly and almost content-free (it's vaguely bemoaning that winter sucks, I think) that I didn't even think of it as something that might be controversial (except for being silly and almost content free).
But it was not a very popular song (different people had different criticisms, some more addressable than others), so I wouldn't be too worried about it next year.