Welcome back TaT....Went by Starburst on here years ago when I rejoined I could not remember my e-mail or password so I joined as Under-taker...Been out of this religious debate for years now as I found it was a total waste of energy and time...Debating religion is pointless in my book its had to long to dig its blood sucking fangs into society as a whole. But I am glad to see that you and Robert are still going strong at it.

Was real sorry to hear about Murdock I am sure she is sorely missed by those that enjoyed her work....

Harry Marks wrote:
I'm sorry to hear that the other forum shut down. What will happen to Popelissima Karen, and Island Girl, and the moderator who used to go around bumping old threads (I can't believe I have forgotten his name ,.-)
and Skoorby (?) and all the others? Those were good times.

Looking back, that whole thing was more important to me than I was willing to admit at the time. I'm glad we did it.

Karen, of course, is indefatigably friendly, and keeps in touch with several of the Amazon regulars on Facebook. Skoorby is married now with two little boys, but is still his passionate Aristotelian self. He must be finishing up his doctorate about now. Sad to say, I expect that contact with 'probabilist is lost. He is a great guy.

And it's kind of you to ask: mom-in-law is 95 now and totters around the house doing things she thinks will be helpful, like putting the bananas away in a dresser drawer so we can find them two months later. She is a full time job and I would have been driven crazy long ago if not for elder day care services.

I want to give more thought to listening to authority while thinking for myself. Obviously one aspect of making that work is humility, which our current Dear Leader is making clear is also not a characteristic of American culture. I mean, one has to recognize that one is unable to fully appreciate the wisdom of an authority even while responding to the light it gives one.

Yes, humility is the key, surely. The pessimists I read claim that America has never been good at humility, even long before the current arrogance-in-chief. It continues to shock me the way people are willing to dismiss wonderful things, based on absolute trust in their own opinions.

My question is where the arrogance of the counterculture of authoritarianism comes from. Why is wisdom threatening to some people, requiring them to circle the wagons around their own little lamppost? (Still love to pyle on the mixed metaphors.) Is it just normal anxiety about life, and they are more sensitive to it, or more likely to react in terms of some need to get everyone to agree on a party line? Or is it something that comes of ignorance itself, making anything that challenges one's ideas seem too threatening?

Nice to see the correct spelling of pyle for a change.

Freud wrote somewhere that rebellion against authority can happen for two reasons: as an attempt to redress injustice, or as an expression of our animal desire to be free of restrictions -- even though such restrictions are required for civilization. I suppose that any individual is too close to the problem, and too full of subconscious and ulterior motives, to know quite which one is going on.

tat tvam asi wrote:
I just mean loosely speaking, on the new political scales that go left to right (liberal to conservative) as well as top to bottom (between authority and liberty). The vast majority of ex christians there come out as liberal libertarians, left of center and about mid way down in the libertarian lower left quadrant. It's just where most of us wound up after leaving christianity. By and large, most ex christians were GOP Republican's prior to deconverting. Right wing and more authoritarian. So there's some resentment towards conservatism for it's relation to the religious right, but that's been changing due to the rise of radical extremism on the left. There's more ex christians going atheist and agnostic but staying right of center leaning than there probably was ten years ago. The point being, that after submitting to the authority of the churches we're just not a very authoritative lot after transitioning to disbelief. We tend not to like authoritarianism from the left or right.

This is really interesting to me.

A lot of people who leave Christianity treat it as a conclusion simply from empirical evidence concerning the existence of God. They say they are switching from religion to no-religion in the same way that a person might go from believing in Bigfoot to not believing in Bigfoot. But I suspect there is way more to it than that.

Since Christianity has never been solely, or even mainly, about belief as intellectual assent to a proposition, leaving it will entail a big change in one's view of the whole world, I would think. And what ex-Christians move away from (in their perception) and what they choose instead (in their view) will be pretty much all-encompassing.

It makes sense that when leaving an authority-based worldview, they would opt for something more free. Since I can't read minds, I can't say exactly whether they are fleeing foolish religion, or running toward self-indulgence. Or something else, which we could certainly phrase in less accusatory terms than I just used.

Anyway, if I were a sociologist, I think I would study this.

Belaqua wrote:Looking back, that whole thing was more important to me than I was willing to admit at the time. I'm glad we did it.

Well, the time during which you were accused of being a secret theist, an agent provocateur perhaps, for not being categorical enough in your condemnations, was very eye-opening for me. I should have known that simply claiming the mantle of reason and evidence would not mean a person really believed in them, but it kind of hit home at that point.

Belaqua wrote: Sad to say, I expect that contact with 'probabilist is lost. He is a great guy.

Well, maybe some day I will go searching for stories of swashbuckling programmers and turn him up under another name. Stranger things have happened.

Belaqua wrote:And it's kind of you to ask: mom-in-law is 95 now and totters around the house doing things she thinks will be helpful, like putting the bananas away in a dresser drawer so we can find them two months later.

Best of luck coping. It is a trying time of life, though not necessarily for the one who is slipping into senility.

Belaqua wrote:Freud wrote somewhere that rebellion against authority can happen for two reasons: as an attempt to redress injustice, or as an expression of our animal desire to be free of restrictions -- even though such restrictions are required for civilization.

Many analysts these days are putting the authoritarian wave down to libertarian urges. Is it just me or does that sound like a total contradiction? We have this looking glass world in which "liberals" are out to control people (take away guns in order to mount a coup d'etat, take away pickup trucks to protect the envrionment, persecute the religious, etc.) but is the answer to have government be more committed to securing liberty? No, of course not, because government is where the threat lies, so the answer is to build a bigger military. Or something. I can't follow it, frankly.

Belaqua wrote:A lot of people who leave Christianity treat it as a conclusion simply from empirical evidence concerning the existence of God. They say they are switching from religion to no-religion in the same way that a person might go from believing in Bigfoot to not believing in Bigfoot. But I suspect there is way more to it than that.

Since Christianity has never been solely, or even mainly, about belief as intellectual assent to a proposition, leaving it will entail a big change in one's view of the whole world, I would think. And what ex-Christians move away from (in their perception) and what they choose instead (in their view) will be pretty much all-encompassing.

Surely this is correct, and I know few exceptions within the list of stories of such changes of worldview. Yet it is also true, in the "emic" view (i.e. from within the transition) that it feels like being about the intellectual issue. One can often take an "etic" view of one's own process after gaining some distance with time, but the contrast is striking. Haidt should study this.

Of course the "all encompassing" nature of the new worldview is easy to exaggerate. When people leave cults they do not usually go looking for some similarly unifying picture of things. Rather they remember what it is like to trust ordinary people, including family.

A lot of the transition out of evangelical religion is a transition from trusting familiar people about things they cannot possibly know for sure to trusting that unfamiliar (e.g. not personally known) people have studied something enough to know it pretty well for sure. Who you trust is the big issue. But of course central to that is trusting yourself enough to evaluate claims about truth for yourself. This comes up in the next chapter of the "Finding Meaning" book.

Belaqua wrote:

tat tvam asi wrote:
I just mean loosely speaking, on the new political scales that go left to right (liberal to conservative) as well as top to bottom (between authority and liberty). The vast majority of ex christians there come out as liberal libertarians, left of center and about mid way down in the libertarian lower left quadrant. It's just where most of us wound up after leaving christianity. By and large, most ex christians were GOP Republican's prior to deconverting. Right wing and more authoritarian. So there's some resentment towards conservatism for it's relation to the religious right, but that's been changing due to the rise of radical extremism on the left. There's more ex christians going atheist and agnostic but staying right of center leaning than there probably was ten years ago. The point being, that after submitting to the authority of the churches we're just not a very authoritative lot after transitioning to disbelief. We tend not to like authoritarianism from the left or right.

This is really interesting to me.

A lot of people who leave Christianity treat it as a conclusion simply from empirical evidence concerning the existence of God. They say they are switching from religion to no-religion in the same way that a person might go from believing in Bigfoot to not believing in Bigfoot. But I suspect there is way more to it than that.

Since Christianity has never been solely, or even mainly, about belief as intellectual assent to a proposition, leaving it will entail a big change in one's view of the whole world, I would think. And what ex-Christians move away from (in their perception) and what they choose instead (in their view) will be pretty much all-encompassing.

It makes sense that when leaving an authority-based worldview, they would opt for something more free. Since I can't read minds, I can't say exactly whether they are fleeing foolish religion, or running toward self-indulgence. Or something else, which we could certainly phrase in less accusatory terms than I just used.

Anyway, if I were a sociologist, I think I would study this.

There's a lot to psycho analyze just reading around through the forums. Many different thinking trends that various people fall into following the leaving behind of an orthodox belief system. You could pick out a bunch.

Under_Taker wrote:Welcome back TaT....Went by Starburst on here years ago when I rejoined I could not remember my e-mail or password so I joined as Under-taker...Been out of this religious debate for years now as I found it was a total waste of energy and time...Debating religion is pointless in my book its had to long to dig its blood sucking fangs into society as a whole. But I am glad to see that you and Robert are still going strong at it.

Was real sorry to hear about Murdock I am sure she is sorely missed by those that enjoyed her work....

Hey Starburst!!!

Good to hear from you too!!!

tat tvam asi wrote:Have you guys heard of it?

https://www.ex-christian.net/

The MO is helping struggling christians and new exchristians along in their stages of deconversion.

Yeah, I've heard of them when looking up Christian online communities on various search engines. Considering the supernatural coincidences that I've experienced over the years, any attempt to "deconvert" me is somewhere at the border between comical and sad. God is as real as it can get, in my opinion.

Lucian Hodoboc wrote:God is as real as it can get, in my opinion.

So God exists to you just as much as a piece of apple pie that sits in front of you? You can see, feel taste and even hear a piece of apple pie. How is an invisible God as real as apple pie?

Lucian Hodoboc wrote:

tat tvam asi wrote:Have you guys heard of it?

https://www.ex-christian.net/

The MO is helping struggling christians and new exchristians along in their stages of deconversion.

Yeah, I've heard of them when looking up Christian online communities on various search engines. Considering the supernatural coincidences that I've experienced over the years, any attempt to "deconvert" me is somewhere at the border between comical and sad. God is as real as it can get, in my opinion.

I'm curious. Would you be willing to talk about one of these supernatural coincidences? In my mind, you see, even calling the phenomenon a coincidence takes it out of the supernatural realm.

I'd enjoy discussing one of your more convincing supernatural experiences.