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Spent some time with a Legend of Freethought and a Champion of Reason today...

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Harry Marks
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Re: Spent some time with a Legend of Freethought and a Champion of Reason today...

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DWill wrote:This strikes me as defining what I've been uncomfortable with regarding these writers, so thanks.
And thank you for the reflection in response. I am getting more intrigued by the perspective of holism and wisdom, which I think is beginning to make some real progress in helping us understand life. Sad that it may require research with brain imaging and electrodes in the brain to bring around the general intellectual community to respecting these priorities.
DWill wrote:It also occurs to me that certain members of the humanist class look down on aspects of religious faith as frailties, notions that would not be necessary if people would courageously lash themselves to fact and reason.
Well, I can't help feeling that way about many of the mythologically literalist aspects of fundamentalism, but I am beginning to question that response as an attempt by left-brain culture to dominate and even silence the right-brain modes of encountering life. Not that I mind humanism, but if it has to define itself as opposition to the frailties of religion, it will come up short on its ability to inspire people to flourishing.
DWill wrote: But what if devotion to reason/science could itself be called a frailty, that is, just as much of a potential mind-monopoly as thinking by the guidance of faith revelation? At the advent of the Enlightenment, the humanists gained the upper hand in the debate, but that doesn't mean they've won.
I love the phrase "mind monopoly". That puts a finger right on the problem. It works a little better than the concept of empire in matters of the intellect, which is how I have been formulating the issue.

I do thing that Enlightenment methods and values were an advance for the human mental map. But there is a tendency to progress in spurts, very much the way a biological organism does: we have physical growth spurts, social growth spurts, and intellectual growth spurts, evidently as some kind of process reaches pre-conditions for progress or passes a trigger in the biological unfolding that every organism goes through. The same thing may be happening in human society with rationalism passing the baton to more holistic approaches to integrating moral wisdom with practical wisdom, due to the pressing need to engage with problems of broad society such as climate change and the divisiveness that the internet institutions breed.
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Harry Marks
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Re: Spent some time with a Legend of Freethought and a Champion of Reason today...

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Mr. P wrote:Any one-sided, all encompassing, shut off way of thinking is to be received with skepticism. While I agree that there is a militant, ignorant faction within the humanist worldview, it's just not that pervasive and, personally, not reflected in my thoughts today.

However, I do respect what Dawkins, Hitch, Dennett, and Harris have brought to the table over the past decades. But in no way do these folks exert any hold on me more than others I also read, and I feel confident that I am not in any danger of anything close to a mind-monopoly. In fact, I find that this concern is often a strawman erected by those who wish to defend against the decline of religious and superstitious paradigms. Whataboutism.
Yes, in much the same way that Young Earth Creationists easily drop one misguided claim to evolution's weakness when it is debunked, glomming on to some other claim that still has not yet been investigated, the institutions of authoritarian religion tend to deal in flimsy, shallow "talking points" rather than trusting that their truth can be elucidated in a way that is compatible with facts. Whataboutism is one of the more obvious ways this tendency shows its silliness.

I worry that mind monopoly is an inevitable sort of problem. Like those dual images which we can flip from one way of seeing things to another way of seeing a different "truth" in the same image, we may be forced by mental processes to see either one thing as truth or something very different that is essentially incompatible with the first. Unlike Hegel, I do not think every thesis-antithesis pair will resolve naturally into a synthesis. The left brain is more given to this problem of "forced resolution", since it deals more in "checking" our intuitions and imposing logical consistency, but the right brain deals in holistic perception and may have some of the same issues under different guise.

I'm inclined to guess that the protection against this pitfall may be in maintaining an open mind, much the way you keep some distance from the overreach that some humanists may be subject to. That is not always easy, and life often demands that we decide "which side am I on?", but I guess I have always had an ability to commit myself to action despite remaining open to the possibility that I am wrong. We are currently living through a time when social processes powerfully oppose that openness.
Mr. P wrote:I do not even use the term atheist or humanist anymore, because a label is the shortest path to being caught in a meaningless position. I am not a label, I am a conversation.
If I put that last sentence on T shirts, how should I identify the author?
Mr. P wrote:There is room for more when searching for meaning in life that facts and science. But shit sure science and facts need to be considered. What I find concerning is the complete disregard of facts, truth, and science these days by those obviously wanting, so desperately needing, to remain in their outdated mind-monopolies.
What, you don't think fact-free policy will get us out of all problems that arise? Don't you know that free markets solve everything?
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Re: Spent some time with a Legend of Freethought and a Champion of Reason today...

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There are so many interesting points in this discussion thread. I particularly liked the inscription in Mr P’s photo. http://thomas-paine-friends.org/historical-places.htm explains “this statue of Paine was sculpted by Lawrence Holofcener and dedicated on 7 June, 1997 by the Bordentown Historical Society. It sits on a grass median in a quiet residential section of town. The statue contains the following written message: "Father of the American Revolution. Paine's words and deeds put the concepts of independence, equality, democracy, abolition of slavery, representative government and a constitution with a bill of rights, on the American agenda.”

The first thing I want to point out about Paine’s achievements serves as a critique of the very interesting Atlantic article by Shadi Hamid that DWill kindly linked. The article states “This is the danger in transforming mundane political debates into metaphysical questions. Political questions are not metaphysical; they are of this world and this world alone.”

In this statement the author exhibits an all too common basic misunderstanding of the meaning of the metaphysical. The mundane political ideas immortalised on Paine’s statue are totally metaphysical, simply because none of them can be justified solely by the descriptive evidence of facts. They are ‘beyond the physical’ in that Paine’s vision of the rights of man and the age of reason rests within a spiritual framework of moral values.

Now to be sure, Paine’s enlightened framework itself arose in response to the scientific enlightenment, which was a purely physical fact-based system. And yet just as man cannot live by bread alone, so too a merely scientific descriptive account is inadequate to provide ethical vision of the meaning and purpose of life. This ethical vision is exactly what Paine delivers with his metaphysical concepts of independence, equality, etc.

One way to approach this problem is to see the moral value within these ideas as all about the priority of connection over description. Paine sought to transform how society connects people together. Any merely descriptive account of how existing society functioned would necessarily lack the electric excitement generated by Paine’s revolutionary agenda for America.

This theme of connection helps to illustrate the importance of Harry and DWill’s conversation about the weakness of the new atheism, how as Harry said “The Four Horsemen and other militant atheists have not demonstrated great openness to holistic approaches to life's deep questions.” Holistic approaches ask how we connect to reality. The answers to that question involve moral ideas that are intrinsically spiritual, like Paine’s great themes.

The confusion here goes back to the philosophy of science, with the difficulty that writers like Dawkins have in explaining a coherent philosophy when their training has so strongly focused on matters of description rather than connection, leading to intense suspicion of any claims about some metaphysical connection between us all. And yet, scientific description itself has immense moral power, since denial of evidence is a cardinal sin against modern scientific knowledge.

The Atlantic article cites Paine indirectly in its analysis of America itself as “almost a religion,” saying “the American civic religion has its own founding myth, its prophets and processions, as well as its scripture—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and The Federalist Papers.” To suggest this civic religion has nothing of the metaphysical about it presents a basic mistake in epistemology, based on the false assumption that metaphysical simply means supernatural.

This unjustified dismissal of metaphysics appears in the idea in the article that “Whereas religion sees the promised land as being above, in God’s kingdom, the utopian left sees it as being ahead, in the realization of a just society here on Earth.” That distinction between religious and political visions is widely shared, but it creates a misleading confusion – what the article terms the spiritual void in “the various strains of wokeism.” And it is a distinction directly contradicted by Jesus Christ in The Lord's Prayer line 'thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven'.

Religion is not necessarily about ‘the promised land above’, but rather more about how we connect to each other in this world. The linguistic meaning of religion as ‘rebinding’ shows how central this theme of connection is to spiritual identity. The supernatural theory of heaven is not intrinsic to religious sentiment, despite the majority view to the contrary. The more enlightened wisdom traditions see supernatural language as allegory for natural discussion of this world. Literal belief in heaven is something from popular emotional fantasy, which naturally tends to crowd out more enlightened understanding.

Going back to writers like Thomas Paine with their integral connecting vision is an important way to help dispel the muddled views that beset modern politics and religion. Harry’s point against Hegel that thesis and antithesis do not always produce a synthesis may be true, but in this case, seeing modern politics as presenting an antithesis to traditional religion does offer a framework to look for a new integral connecting synthesis.
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Re: Spent some time with a Legend of Freethought and a Champion of Reason today...

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DWill wrote:But what if devotion to reason/science could itself be called a frailty, that is, just as much of a potential mind-monopoly as thinking by the guidance of faith revelation? At the advent of the Enlightenment, the humanists gained the upper hand in the debate, but that doesn't mean they've won.
No, they have not won. Humanists argued for an evidence based approach with a link to reality. But this is slipping away: one's own opinion has become sacrosanct, earning as much validity as any expert, providing personal pleasure, impervious to perceived outside influence, and is therefore permanent. We will see this exemplified soon as the global resistance to vaccinations continues and the pandemic evolves into a long term threat instead of being vanquished. I'm not very interested in the linguistics of metaphysics, but if politics is somehow considered a religion, Covid-19 is probably another one.
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Re: Spent some time with a Legend of Freethought and a Champion of Reason today...

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DWill wrote:what if devotion to reason/science could itself be called a frailty, that is, just as much of a potential mind-monopoly as thinking by the guidance of faith revelation?
The problem here is that we are all subject to irrationality, and to imagining our irrational opinions are in fact rational. With scientific thinking, the psychology is that people extrapolate from actual fact based knowledge to justify irrational beliefs, trading on the cachet of science to give credibility to their political opinions.

The most vivid example is the ideological response to climate change. It is very clear from science that CO2 emissions are heating the planet. This leads to the refrain "follow the science", whereby believers in emission reduction extrapolate from scientific knowledge of what is the case to insist 'the science' requires cutting emissions as the only reasonable response, even though actual science indicates that decarbonisation of the economy is far too small and slow to be the main factor in stabilising the climate.

The science is settled on the cause of climate change but not on what to do about it. Denial of this observation is an example of what the Atlantic article called 'wokeism': the insistence that progressive ideology is entirely based on evidence, an insistence that itself is not based on evidence.
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Re: Spent some time with a Legend of Freethought and a Champion of Reason today...

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With scientific thinking, the psychology is that people extrapolate from actual fact based knowledge to justify irrational beliefs, trading on the cachet of science to give credibility to their political opinions.


You must be following that other science, because I do not see this happening in any real way at all. Unless you are just going with a false equivalency to set up...

This leads to the refrain "follow the science", whereby believers in emission reduction extrapolate from scientific knowledge of what is the case to insist 'the science' requires cutting emissions as the only reasonable response...
I have never heard this before...that cutting emissions is the ONLY response. Sounds Straw-y. But at the least, cutting emissions is still better than prayer.
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Re: Spent some time with a Legend of Freethought and a Champion of Reason today...

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“The Four Horsemen and other militant atheists have not demonstrated great openness to holistic approaches to life's deep questions.” Holistic approaches ask how we connect to reality. The answers to that question involve moral ideas that are intrinsically spiritual, like Paine’s great themes.
So here again, I am not sure what you are reading from these folks, but I NEVER got that they simply offered calculations with no consideration of something more. Many folks seem to use the term spiritual because of a need to conflate every basis of morality with religion or religious thought. And guess what, I admit that the spiritual and religious basis came first...it may have even been necessary because progress always requires an antecedent. But if we are being honest, spiritual and religious thought processes are all about the very physical mind reasoning things out. It did it poorly in the past, based on limited knowledge and understanding...as you would expect from children, but that is exactly what it did. Faulty reasoning created religion, thus the mind created the basis for morality.

Are Paine's ideas spiritual? I guess you can use that as a term to help some folks understand it. But it is not spiritual in the same way that the experience of eating flesh and drinking blood is. Freedom, equality, etc... These are real concepts, based on the realization of the fact that we are all individuals trying to live together in a society. It's not an appeal to some mythical or mystical thing.

This is where I stand on rejecting a spiritual or religious basis for connecting with reality. I don't think approaching matters with a fact based approach necessarily precludes identifying holistic approaches to reality. I just think that I reject the hypocrisy of what the religious basis has shown, precisely because it is based on myth.
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Re: Spent some time with a Legend of Freethought and a Champion of Reason today...

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Robert Tulip wrote:
DWill wrote:what if devotion to reason/science could itself be called a frailty, that is, just as much of a potential mind-monopoly as thinking by the guidance of faith revelation?
The problem here is that we are all subject to irrationality, and to imagining our irrational opinions are in fact rational. With scientific thinking, the psychology is that people extrapolate from actual fact based knowledge to justify irrational beliefs, trading on the cachet of science to give credibility to their political opinions.

The most vivid example is the ideological response to climate change. It is very clear from science that CO2 emissions are heating the planet. This leads to the refrain "follow the science", whereby believers in emission reduction extrapolate from scientific knowledge of what is the case to insist 'the science' requires cutting emissions as the only reasonable response, even though actual science indicates that decarbonisation of the economy is far too small and slow to be the main factor in stabilising the climate.

The science is settled on the cause of climate change but not on what to do about it. Denial of this observation is an example of what the Atlantic article called 'wokeism': the insistence that progressive ideology is entirely based on evidence, an insistence that itself is not based on evidence.
Hi there, Robert. I see psychology entering in when it comes to assessing means to get such a job--managing climate--done. Then, although different parties agree that science has shown us we have a big problem, still they can find ways to deny that drastic steps are needed. And maybe, without saying it, we accept that we are screwed to a degree, and all we can hope to do is make the future less awful. With the IPCC 1.5 degree (now often 2 degree) limit on temperature rise, we're essentially saying that some serious damage is inevitable. Whether, assessing results of mitigation so far and what commitments may promise, we are justified to be optimistic about 1.5, is a big question. I think you have said, "No way," and I'm not optimistic, either.

There has been some recognition that emissions reduction won't be enough. Joe Biden called for massive investment in carbon removal, but I don't see any mainstream political advocacy for direct geoengineering to lower temperature. Even the experts, such as Peter Wadhams, who urge us to research such methods, part ways with you in saying that geoengineering is a stop gap to buy us time to fully decarbonize. Bill Gates, in How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, gives geoengineering a couple of pages, and says we should be researching and experimenting in order to be ready to deploy it if the time should come. But he sees decarbonizing and carbon removal as more practical in view of the huge difficulty of getting the world to agree on geoengineering.
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Re: Spent some time with a Legend of Freethought and a Champion of Reason today...

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Mr. P wrote: This is where I stand on rejecting a spiritual or religious basis for connecting with reality. I don't think approaching matters with a fact based approach necessarily precludes identifying holistic approaches to reality. I just think that I reject the hypocrisy of what the religious basis has shown, precisely because it is based on myth.
There is quite a following for myth among the non-religious; witness Joseph Campbell's popularity. I'm not knowledgeable on Campbell, but I believe that he values myth as more than an area of academic study, in other words as something from which to derive deep meaning.

The way I've been thinking about religion lately is as a thing with many, many manifestations but really only one designation in parlance-"religion." When this happens it becomes so difficult to summarize the thing as good or bad. A parallel example might be social media--or the entire internet. Can we say whether they're bad or good? I can't. They have so many different looks, just as religion has for me.
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Re: Spent some time with a Legend of Freethought and a Champion of Reason today...

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Harry Marks wrote:The Four Horsemen and other militant atheists have not demonstrated great openness to holistic approaches to life's deep questions. As long as they can stay on the "solid rock" of issues of fact, they feel secure.
For every "militant atheist" there are probably hundreds of fundamentalists and evangelicals who push a faith-over-facts authoritiarian worldview, much to the detriment of reason and logic. Much of this is politics cloaked in religion and so it gets a free pass in terms of vetting in the marketplace of ideas. Delusional fantasies such as: 1) the Bible is the inerrant word of God, 2) Noah and the ark really happened, 3) God made humans about 10,000 years ago, 4) Jesus was literally the son of God and was resurrected after death, and 5) the souls of good "Christian" people go to heaven when they die are assumed to be true. Indeed, as this editorial says, Donald Trump "rose to power with the determined assistance of a movement that denies science, bashes government and prioritized loyalty over professional expertise."

I can't think of his exact words, but I think Joseph Campbell said something about the poor state of modern myth. I would argue that the beliefs listed above hardly qualify as myth anyway. They are tenets of religious dogma.

So be kind to "militant atheists" because they fight a very hard battle indeed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/opin ... icals.html
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