(04-06-2018 06:16 AM)Piankhi Wrote:  Believing that there is no after life has made this life more meaningful for me. And I wouldnt want some invisible entity watching my every move and knowing my thoughts. Like Hitchens said that is totalitarianism and celestial tyranny.

That invisible entity is called your conscience. If you've got a problem with it watching your every move and knowing your thoughts your issues go a lot deeper than atheism.

(04-06-2018 07:45 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

(04-06-2018 06:16 AM)Piankhi Wrote:  Believing that there is no after life has made this life more meaningful for me. And I wouldnt want some invisible entity watching my every move and knowing my thoughts. Like Hitchens said that is totalitarianism and celestial tyranny.

That invisible entity is called your conscience. If you've got a problem with it watching your every move and knowing your thoughts your issues go a lot deeper than atheism.

Yeah, and this is what listening to Hitchens about Christianity looks like:

(04-04-2018 10:32 AM)debeguiled Wrote:  People who don't believe in God literally tune out any mention of prayer. They literally cannot see or hear it.

I know what it is, I've seen it, I've heard it, I understand what it is, I have analyzed it and spoken in many who do it.
I have even done it when I was a small, naive child afraid of things I didn't understand.

Likewise I have done the same to other people who have other similar experiences (meditation, enlightenment, revelations, shamanic rituals etc)

(04-04-2018 10:32 AM)debeguiled Wrote:  Please don't take this personally Mr. RitW, because we all have our blindspots, and even as I write this, I can think of countless times I have been the one blocking out things I didn't want to deal with. Denial is purely and simply the human condition, and we all engage in it constantly.

My post was making the point (not related to prayer) that "absolute morals" are not actually handed down by deities, only his very human intermediaries.

Which I think destroys the claim that they are divine, and is evidence that they are the result of human processes exactly as described by Dawkins in the clip.

Thats not necessarily a good or bad thing, but it is a thing.

(04-06-2018 07:45 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  That invisible entity is called your conscience.

And the "conscience" is?

Empathy? - We know that doing bad things to others is wrong because we can imagne how we would feel if it was done to us.

Fear? - Humans are inclined to revenge, which means doing bad things will result in others doing bad things back to us.

Reason? - Humans have a sense of what is a productive thing to do, and wasting time hurting others isn't productive when you could be helping yourself.

Reward? - Humans success is based on teamwork. If we are nice to each other and don't do bad things to each other we will be rewarded by others not doing bad things to us

(04-04-2018 03:34 PM)Cobra Wrote:  I've met god and we daygamed a bit. Also gave each other rep points. Nice guy!

I hung out with Thor the other day, and beat him at pool and in an arm wrestle!

@RatInTheWoods

Quote:The problem with saying your gods give you "absolute morality" is that your god never actually tells you in person, does he?

"His wisdom" always gets handed down by some corrupt, shady, self interested, altar boy fiddling intermediate.

This was your point.

Corrupt, shady, self interested, etc.

You are clearly insinuating that these people, from prophets on down to local priests, are making up their own rules for their own benefit.

So I was putting prayer in the mix because that is where it belongs. Believers are not at the mercy of corrupt intermediaries, they also have their own direct line which will never be tried or understood by people who do not do it.

(04-06-2018 07:45 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

(04-06-2018 06:16 AM)Piankhi Wrote:  Believing that there is no after life has made this life more meaningful for me. And I wouldnt want some invisible entity watching my every move and knowing my thoughts. Like Hitchens said that is totalitarianism and celestial tyranny.

That invisible entity is called your conscience. If you've got a problem with it watching your every move and knowing your thoughts your issues go a lot deeper than atheism.

If God wasnt invisible.

(04-07-2018 08:00 AM)Piankhi Wrote:  

(04-06-2018 07:45 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

(04-06-2018 06:16 AM)Piankhi Wrote:  Believing that there is no after life has made this life more meaningful for me. And I wouldnt want some invisible entity watching my every move and knowing my thoughts. Like Hitchens said that is totalitarianism and celestial tyranny.

That invisible entity is called your conscience. If you've got a problem with it watching your every move and knowing your thoughts your issues go a lot deeper than atheism.

If God wasnt invisible.

You already posted that earlier in the thread, bro. As I already said, and which RITW seemed not to actually get: if you're paranoid about the prospect of someone seeing and morally judging your decisions, you must have a real hard time living with yourself already.

(04-06-2018 05:51 PM)RatInTheWoods Wrote:  

(04-06-2018 07:45 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  That invisible entity is called your conscience.

And the "conscience" is?

Empathy? - We know that doing bad things to others is wrong because we can imagne how we would feel if it was done to us.

Nope. Conscience can exist well outside empathy, and therefore is not synonymous with it since it is entirely possible to feel the weight of conscience over victimless crimes.

Quote:Fear? - Humans are inclined to revenge, which means doing bad things will result in others doing bad things back to us.

Conscience often compels us to perform actions that will cause others to do bad things to ourselves, hence the old saying that character is who you are when no one is watching. Ergo, it isn't fear either.

Quote:Reason? - Humans have a sense of what is a productive thing to do, and wasting time hurting others isn't productive when you could be helping yourself.

Conscience often stings most when you've already done something wrong, not to mention that it's typically expressed as a felt emotion, hence it is not synonymous with reason either.

Quote:Reward? - Humans success is based on teamwork. If we are nice to each other and don't do bad things to each other we will be rewarded by others not doing bad things to us

Humans frequently betray one another and there is often considerable reward to the person who does so. Ergo, conscience is not an expression of reward either.

(04-06-2018 06:16 AM)Piankhi Wrote:  Believing that there is no after life has made this life more meaningful for me. And I wouldnt want some invisible entity watching my every move and knowing my thoughts. Like Hitchens said that is totalitarianism and celestial tyranny.

Hitchens had daddy issues. Like every classical narcissist, he preferred his own personal brand of tyranny over others.

(04-08-2018 09:14 PM)Super_Fire Wrote:  

(04-06-2018 06:16 AM)Piankhi Wrote:  Believing that there is no after life has made this life more meaningful for me. And I wouldnt want some invisible entity watching my every move and knowing my thoughts. Like Hitchens said that is totalitarianism and celestial tyranny.

Hitchens had daddy issues. Like every classical narcissist, he preferred his own personal brand of tyranny over others.

Hitchens and Dawkins are such bitter, sarcastic and arrogant sophists I do not understand how people can look at them and say "I want to be like this man/follow his movement."

Hitchens was hilarious though. And he had some insane real talk moments on CNN and C-Span before anyone else was doing it. I heard him on CNN, out of the blue, in the nineties, say that if Elizabeth Taylor had more plastic surgery she'd have beard.

On tv he was one of the first to be rude to callers who deserved it. Sometimes he wouldn't even answer their questions, but say, listen to that, there are people who think like that.

When the war in Bosnia was raging it was almost impossible to get information in the West, and the only mainstream I ended up trusting was his columns in The Nation.

He had a lot of intellectual, political, and personal good will going into his later years when he became a Mother Theresa hater. I think he was riding on that for a while.

(04-09-2018 10:52 AM)debeguiled Wrote:  Hitchens was hilarious though. And he had some insane real talk moments on CNN and C-Span before anyone else was doing it. I heard him on CNN, out of the blue, in the nineties, say that if Elizabeth Taylor had more plastic surgery she'd have beard.

On tv he was one of the first to be rude to callers who deserved it. Sometimes he wouldn't even answer their questions, but say, listen to that, there are people who think like that.

When the war in Bosnia was raging it was almost impossible to get information in the West, and the only mainstream I ended up trusting was his columns in The Nation.

He had a lot of intellectual, political, and personal good will going into his later years when he became a Mother Theresa hater. I think he was riding on that for a while.

You're probably a decade plus older than me, guess I missed the era when he brought a penny of value.

(04-09-2018 10:54 AM)godfather dust Wrote:  You're probably a decade plus older than me, guess I missed the era when he brought a penny of value.

Correctamundo. Nothing but a distant memory.


Red pilling some feminists in '95.

(04-03-2018 09:40 AM)godfather dust Wrote:  

(04-03-2018 12:35 AM)Scoundrel Wrote:  

(04-02-2018 08:34 AM)godfather dust Wrote:  C: Murder is wrong.
Atheist: Why?
C: You're gonna leave a lot of people heartbroken
Atheist: So what?

What's the other side of this argument? Murder is wrong because God says it is?

Yes. Let's say murdering someone down the street will pay a years salary. As an atheist you could say, "well, it's probably kind of bad but on balance I can raise my kids better and I'll donate to charity."

Tell me why this is wrong (if God didn't say so.)

"Well society would break down!"
"So what. Gotta feed the family right?"

You see the results of Christianity becoming less popular in America every single day.

"The Bible tells me so" is not impressive to thinking people. An authoritarian view of ethics — which is exactly what you are advocating — renders moral insight, indeed moral understanding, impossible. The authority figure (or His representatives on earth) has decreed it, our task is simply to accept and to obey.

Of course, this only begs the question: Which moral authority happens to be right? The authoritarian has a similarly easy answer: The authority he follows!

This is not a view which leads to peace and freedom, but to statism and tribal warfare.

(04-03-2018 06:13 AM)Piankhi Wrote:  ^Are you a staunch theist and there is nothing that could make you change your mind? Or are you open to the idea that there is no god?

The question goes to the atheists, is there something that would alter your opnion? I am open minded, if I saw or heard god himself I would believe.

Anything is possible. I was an agnostic in high school/university like all the other edgelords. Unless my life was going badly, then all of a sudden I believed in God.

Moving on, the Big Bang still cannot be explained. Nor can the fact that there is a rational design to all of nature and the Universe. I've already typed this here, but when asked to explain the Big Bang, scientists begin equivocating and shifting around, saying that's where their knowledge gets hazy. If asked why the Big Bang even occurred and what caused it to occur they've now copped out and said it wasn't even an event, it was simply a quality of the vacuum. And why is there a vacuum? It's my understanding that outer space is not, and perhaps has never been a perfect vacuum, and thus gaseous elements have existed in perpetuity. Why? Science can say how, but not why. It still can't answer why there is a mathematical symmetry in nature. That's purely a metaphysical topic for the time being. The agnostic answer would be, "Well, shit happens."

I don't believe in God, but I do have a default respect for religious belief and for religious people. Many highly intelligent people have been believers. I envy believers because they seem to have more satisfaction in life.

It's preening atheists I can't tolerate.

I'm largely skeptical of extreme atheism since it seems to be in league with dumbing us down, pushing relativism (Islam is the religion of peace), and other useful idiocy. Not to mention, many proponents of it are just as Homo and Pedo as the catholic crooks they love to point out.

"The Bible tells me so" is not impressive to thinking people.

Let me make a few observations here regarding this line of thought; these should not be taken personally. We're also going to leave aside the supernatural element of it.

This phrase, along with "Which authority is the right one?" indicates a mode of thought known as epiphenomenology, which in short means I can tell everything I need to know about how a future event will turn out by studying past behaviours.

There isn't anything wrong with it as such, it's been practiced fairly successfully in the West since roughly the time of Aristotle. But it also contains a blind spot, one that people like Nassim Taleb have identified: the conceit that the future is wholly definable and knowable from what has already happened in the past. The answer to this conceit is contained in Taleb's book The Black Swan: because of reasoning blind spots and our tendency to rationalise past disasters, we do not appreciate that complex systems often set up disasters much larger than occurred in the past, and that these disasters are not, in fact, predictable from previous data. Thus, the subprime crisis.

In its most pure, and flawed, form of scientific philosophy, this form of epiphenomenology is called determinism - the idea that if we collect sufficient knowledge about how the world behaved up until now, we'll eventually know the precise future position and velocity of all particles into the future. Fittingly, then, it was in the realm of pure physics that this idea ended -- in the realm of quantum mechanics, where subatomic particle positions and velocities cannot correspond, i.e. you can never know a photon's position and velocity at the same time, you can only determine one with certainty and assign a probability to the other. This is not a matter of having refining our instrumentation, Einstein's own law that nothing travels faster than light combined with the knowledge that we can only observe particles via photons sets this as a hard limit on what we can know about the universe.

This shift from certainty to probability is important in these discussions, too, because it allows atheists to understand that religion has much, much more to do with heuristics that work rather than absolute rules of reality as such. Indeed the great conceit that atheism goes through when it idolises science as the ultimate arbiter of reality is that atheism then believes it's discovered an absolute truth to existence ... something it lambasts religions for.

The next concept to understand is that life has a potent way of winnowing out those heuristics that work and those that don't. It's called time. In general, if something has been around a long time, it's lasted either because it does no harm to the human condition or is beneficial to it. The same can be said of practices, and in particular, religious practices. Taleb goes so far as to suggest that it's a workable rule of life to take the presumption that something you encounter - a book, a piece of art, a government, a religion - is generally in its middle age, halfway through its life. Things that have been standing up for a long time as a general rule will tend to stay standing up the longer they last.

Religious or religious-form practices are no different.

And now I'm going to let Taleb take over entirely.

Quote:Rory Sutherland claims that the real function for swimming pools is allowing the middle class to sit around in bathing suits without looking ridiculous. Same with New York restaurants: you think their mission is to feed people, but that’s not what they do. They are in the business of selling you overpriced liquor or Great Tuscan wines by the glass, yet get you into the door by serving you your low-carb (or low-something) dishes at breakeven cost. (This business model, of course, fails to work in Saudi Arabia).

So when we look at religion and, to some extent ancestral superstitions, we should consider what purpose they serve, rather than focusing on the notion of “belief”, epistemic belief in its strict scientific definition. In science, belief is literal belief; it is right or wrong, never metaphorical. In real life, belief is an instrument to do things, not the end product. This is similar to vision: the purpose of your eyes is to orient you in the best possible way, and get you out of trouble when needed, or help you find a prey at distance. Your eyes are not sensors aimed at getting the electromagnetic spectrum of reality. Their job description is not to produce the most accurate scientific representation of reality; rather the most useful one for survival.

Ocular Deception
Our perceptional apparatus makes mistakes –distortions — in order to lead to more precise actions on our parts: ocular deception, it turns out, is a necessary thing. Greek and Roman architects misrepresent the columns of the temples, by tilting them inward, in order to give us the impression that the columns are straight. As Vitruvius explains, the aim is to “counteract the visual deception by an change of proportions”[2]. A distortion is meant to bring about an enhancement of your aesthetic experience. The floor of the Parthenon is curved in reality so we can see it straight. The columns are in truth unevenly spaced, so we can see them lined up like a marching Russian division in a parade.

Should one go lodge a complain with the Greek Tourism Office claiming that the columns are not vertical and someone is taking advantage of our visual weaknesses?



Ergodicity First
The same applies to distortions of beliefs. Is this visual deceit any different from leading someone to believe in Santa Claus, if it enhances his or her holiday aesthetic experience? No, unless the person engages in actions that ends up harming him or her.

In that sense harboring superstitions is not irrational by any metric: nobody has managed to reinvent a metric for rationality based on process. Actions that harm you are observable.

I have shown that, unless one has an overblown and (as with Greek columns), a very unrealistic representation of some tail risks, one cannot survive –all it takes is a single event for the irreversible exit from among us. Is selective paranoia “irrational” if those individuals and populations who don’t have it end up dying or extinct, respectively?

A statements that will orient us for the rest of the book:
Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later

In other words, you do not need science to survive (we’ve done it for several hundred million years) , but you need to survive to do science. As your grandmother would have said, better safe than sorry. This precedence is well understood by traders and people in the real world, as per Warren Buffet expression “to make money you must first survive” –skin in the game again; those of us who take risks have their priorities firmer than vague textbook notions such as “truth”. More technically, this brings us again to the ergodic property (I keep my promise to explain it in detail, but we are not ready yet): for the world to be “ergodic”, there needs to be no absorbing barrier, no substantial irreversibilities.

And what do we mean by “survival”? Survival of whom? Of you? Your family? Your tribe? Humanity? We will get into the details later but note for now that I have a finite shelf life; my survival is not as important as that of things that do not have a limited life expectancy, such as mankind or planet earth. Hence the more “systemic”, the more important such a survival becomes.

Three rigorous thinkers will orient my thinking on the matter: the cognitive scientist and polymath Herb Simon, pioneer of Artificial Intelligence, and the derived school of thought led by Gerd Gigerenzer, on one hand, and the mathematician, logician and decision theorist Ken Binmore who spent his life formulating the logical foundations of rationality.

From Simon to Gigerenzer
Simon formulated the notion now known as bounded rationality: we cannot possibly measure and assess everything as if we were a computer; we therefore produce, under evolutionary pressures, some shortcuts and distortions. Our knowledge of the world is fundamentally incomplete, so we need to avoid getting in unanticipated trouble. Even if our knowledge of the world were complete, it would still be computationally near-impossible to produce precise, unbiased understanding of reality. A fertile research program on ecological rationality came out of it, mostly organized and led by Gerd Gigerenzer, mapping how many things we do that appear, on the surface, illogical have deeper reasons.

Ken Binmore
As to Ken Binmore, he showed that the concept casually dubbed “rational” is ill-defined, in fact so ill-defined that much of the uses of the term are just gibberish. There is nothing particularly irrational in beliefs per se (given that they can be shortcuts and instrumental to something else): to him everything lies in the notion of “revealed preferences”, which we explain next.

Binmore also saw that criticism of the “rational” man as posited by economic theory is often a strawman argument distorting the theory in order to bring it down. He recounts that economic theory, as posited in the original texts, is not as strict in its definition of “utility”, that is, the satisfaction a consumer and a decision-maker derive from a certain outcome. Satisfaction does not necessarily have to be monetary. There is nothing irrational, according to economic theory, in giving your money to a stranger, if that’s what makes you tick. And don’t try to invoke Adam Smith: he was a philosopher not an accountant; he never equated human interests and aims to narrow accounting book entries.


^^^^
An illustration of the Bias-Variance tradeoff. Assume two people (sober) shooting at a target in, say, Texas. The top shooter has a bias, a systematic “error”, but on balance gets closer to target than the bottom shooter who has no systematic bias but a high variance. Typically, you cannot reduce one without increasing the other. When fragile, the strategy at the top is the best: maintain a distance from ruin, that is, hitting a point in the periphery should it be dangerous. This schema explains why if you want to minimize the probability of the plane crashing, you may make mistakes with impunity provided you lower your dispersion.

Revelation of Preferences
Next let us develop the following three points:
(1) Judging people on their beliefs is not scientific
(2) There is no such thing as “rationality” of a belief, there is rationality of action
(3)The rationality of an action can only be judged by evolutionary considerations

The axiom of revelation of preferences states the following: you will not have an idea about what people really think, what predicts people’s actions, merely by asking them –they themselves don’t know. What matters, in the end, is what they pay for goods, not what they say they “think” about them, or what are the reasons they give you or themselves for that. (Think about it: revelation of preferences is skin in the game). Even psychologists get it; in their experiments, their procedures require that actual dollars be spent for the test to be “scientific”. The subjects are given a monetary amount, and they watch how he or she formulates choices by spending them. However, a large share of psychologists fughedabout the point when they start bloviating about rationality. They revert to judging beliefs rather than action.

For beliefs are … cheap talk. A foundational principle of decision theory (and one that is at the basis of neoclassical economics, rational choice, and similar disciplines) is that what goes on in the head of people isn’t the business of science. First, what they think may not be measurable enough to lend itself to some scientific investigation. Second, it is not testable. Finally, there may be some type of a translation mechanism too hard for us to understand, with distortions at the level of the process that are actually necessary for think to work.

Actually, by a mechanism (more technically called the bias-variance tradeoff), you often get better results making some type of “errors”, as when you aim slightly away from the target when shooting. I have shown in Antifragile that making some types of errors is the most rational thing to do, as, when the errors are of little costs, it leads to gains and discoveries.

This is why I have been against the State dictating to us what we “should” be doing: only evolution knows if the “wrong” thing is really wrong, provided there is skin in the game for that.


he classical “large world vs small world” problem. Science is currently too incomplete to provide all answers –and says it itself. We have been so much under assault by vendors using “science” to sell products that many people, in their mind, confuse science and scientism. Science is mainly rigor.

What is Religion About ?
It is therefore my opinion that religion is here to enforce tail risk management across generations, as its binary and unconditional rules are easy to teach and enforce. We have survived in spite of tail risks; our survival cannot be that random.

Recall that skin in the game means that you do not pay attention to what people say, only to what they do, and how much of their neck they are putting on the line. Let survival work its wonders.

Superstitions can be vectors for risk management rules. We have as potent information that people that have them have survived; to repeat never discount anything that allows you to survive. For instance Jared Diamond discusses the “constructive paranoia” of residents of Papua New Guinea, whose superstitions prevent them from sleeping under dead trees. [1] Whether it is superstition or something else, some deep scientific understanding of probability that is stopping you, it doesn’t matter, so long as you don’t sleep under dead trees. And if you dream of making people use probability in order to make decisions, I have some news: close to ninety percent of psychologists dealing with decision-making (which includes such regulators as Cass Sunstein) have no clue about probability, and try to disrupt our organic paranoid mechanism.

Further, I find it incoherent to criticize someone’s superstitions if these are meant to bring some benefits, yet not do so with the optical illusions in Greek temples.

The notion of “rational” bandied about by all manner of promoters of scientism isn’t defined well enough to be used for beliefs. To repeat, we do not have enough grounds to discuss “irrational beliefs”. We do with irrational actions.

Now what people say may have a purpose –it is not just what they think it means. Let us extend the idea outside of buying and selling to the risk domain: opinions in are cheap unless people take risks for them.

Extending such logic, we can show that much of what we call “belief” is some kind of background furniture for the human mind, more metaphorical than real. It may work as therapy.

“Tawk” and Cheap “Tawk”

The first principle we make:
There is a difference between beliefs that are decorative and a different sort of beliefs, those that map to action.
There is no difference between them in words, except that the true difference reveals itself in risk taking, having something at stake, something one could lose in case one is wrong.

And the lesson, by rephrasing the principle:
How much you truly “believe” in something can only be manifested through what you are willing to risk for it.

But this merits continuation. The fact that there is this decorative component to belief, life, these strange rules followed outside the Gemelli clinics of the world merits a discussion. What are these for? Can we truly understand their function? Are we confused about their function? Do we mistake their rationality? Can we use them instead to define rationality?

What Does Lindy Say?
Let us see what Lindy has to say about “rationality”. While the notions of “reason” and “reasonable” were present in ancient thought, mostly embedded in the notion of precaution, or sophrosyne, this modern idea of “rationality” and “rational decision-making” was born in the aftermath of Max Weber, with the works of psychologists, philosophasters, and psychosophasters. The classical sophrosyne is precaution, self-control, and temperance, all in one. It was replaced with something a bit different. “Rationality” was forged in a post-enlightenment period[2], at the time when we thought that understanding the world was at the next corner. It assumes no randomness, or a simplified the random structure of our world. Also of course no interactions with the world.

The only definition of rationality that I found that is practically, empirically, and mathematically rigorous is that of survival –and indeed, unlike the modern theories by psychosophasters, it maps to the classics. Anything that hinders one’s survival at an individual, collective, tribal, or general level is deemed irrational.

Hence the precautionary principle and sound risk understanding.

It may be “irrational” for people to have two sinks in their kitchen, one for meat and the other for dairy, but as we saw, it led to the survival of the Jewish community as Kashrut laws forced them to eat and bind together.

It is also rational to see things differently from the “way they are”, for improved performance.

It is also difficult to map beliefs to reality. A decorative or instrumental belief, say believing in Santa Claus or the potential anger of Baal can be rational if it leads to an increased survival.

The Nondecorative in the Decorative
Now what we called decorative is not necessarily superfluous, often to the contrary. They may just have another function we do not know much about –and we can consult for that the grandmaster statistician, time, in a very technical tool called the survival function, known by both old people and very complex statistics –but we will resort here to the old people version.

The fact to consider is not that these beliefs have survived a long time –the Catholic church is an administration that is close to twenty-four centuries old (it is largely the continuation of the Roman Republic). The fact is not that . It is that people who have religion –a certain religion — have survived.

Another principle:

When you consider beliefs do not assess them in how they compete with other beliefs, but consider the survival of the populations that have them.

Consider a competitor to the Pope’s religion, Judaism. Jews have close to five hundred different dietary interdicts. They may seem irrational to an observer who sees purpose in things and defines rationality in terms of what he can explain. Actually they will most certainly seem so. The Jewish Kashrut prescribes keeping four sets of dishes, two sinks, the avoidance of mixing meat with dairy products or merely letting the two be in contact with each other, in addition to interdicts on some animals: shrimp, pork, etc. The good stuff.

These laws might have had an ex ante purpose. One can blame insalubrious behavior of pigs, exacerbated by the heat in the Levant (though heat in the Levant was not markedly different from that in pig-eating areas further West). Or perhaps an ecological reason: kids compete with humans in eating the same vegetables while cows eat what we don’t eat.

But it remains that whatever the purpose, the Kashrut survived approximately three millennia not because of its “rationality” but because the populations that followed it survived. It most certainly brought cohesion: people who eat together hang together. Simply it aided those that survived because it is a convex heuristic. Such group cohesion might be also responsible for trust in commercial transactions with remote members of the community.
This allows us to summarize

Rationality is not what has conscious verbalistic explanatory factors; it is only what aids survival, avoids ruin.

Rationality is risk management, period.

[1] “Consider: If you’re a New Guinean living in the forest, and if you adopt the bad habit of sleeping under dead trees whose odds of falling on you that particular night are only 1 in 1,000, you’ll be dead within a few years. In fact, my wife was nearly killed by a falling tree last year, and I’ve survived numerous nearly fatal situations in New Guinea.”
[2]Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture Book III, Chapter 1, v. 4, 1 A.D.

The overall point being: the salient fact so far as survival is concerned isn't which religion, it's religion itself. Atheists can say that the source of these behaviours is not divine: too bad, that's not a scientific question and therefore the statement has no weight. On the other hand, the survival rate of atheist cultures (zero) versus religious cultures (too many to immediately count) does seem to indicate which one is the more rational course as Taleb would put it.

Beyond that, science has nothing to say about the existence of God. It's not a falsifiable concept. And when you start missing religion as belief and practice, you wind up being the same tired old nerd who sneers that Pascal's Wager Is Not Logically Supportable. Pascal's Wager isn't a rule of logic, it's a rule of heuristics.

The men who have been the leaders and changers of the world have been accused of being atheists. Both Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln were called atheists in their time and even Socrates was accused at his trial. Paul Tillich, who is considered the greatest Christian theologian of the 20th century, believed that Christianity only made sense as a metaphor and all literal interpretations of the Bible were wrong. Conservatives say that he bordered on atheism.

The intelligent way to proceed is to accept the current state of scientific knowledge and go forward with beliefs that respect the truth. That is what all smart people did in the past. Even Descartes took the trouble to dissect a human being and find the pineal gland to support his mind/body duality theory. He was wrong, but the important thing to notice is his commitment to empirical evidence and mastering the current state of scientific knowledge. If Descartes were alive today, he would be studying cosmology and evolution.

^^^^^

Are you able to make a better argument than one shot through with appeal to authority fallacy?

(04-10-2018 01:57 PM)Sherman Wrote:  The men who have been the leaders and changers of the world have been accused of being atheists. Both Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln were called atheists in their time and even Socrates was accused at his trial. Paul Tillich, who is considered the greatest Christian theologian of the 20th century, believed that Christianity only made sense as a metaphor and all literal interpretations of the Bible were wrong. Conservatives say that he bordered on atheism.

The intelligent way to proceed is to accept the current state of scientific knowledge and go forward with beliefs that respect the truth. That is what all smart people did in the past. Even Descartes took the trouble to dissect a human being and find the pineal gland to support his mind/body duality theory. He was wrong, but the important thing to notice is his commitment to empirical evidence and mastering the current state of scientific knowledge. If Descartes were alive today, he would be studying cosmology and evolution.

Reminds me of the people who point to the handful of famous women throughout history to support their argument that women are equal to men. Atheism is blue-pill.

Taleb is so brilliant because he shows that atheism fails by its own standard. Atheists believe in natural selection but natural selection selects for religion. Atheists hold beliefs that will render them extinct. Not to mention observable behaviours in many of them.

This is why I suspect atheism is more to do with psychological issues than "empirical evidence", "truth", "scientific method", "rational thinking", and whatever other scientism virtues and dogma they preach.

Someone mentioned above about weak relationships with their fathers. I listened recently to E Michael Jones expound on the same angle. In a metaphysical sense one's father is the representation of the logos to a child, and is responsible for guiding the child on his first steps towards discovering the truth.

Everybody believes in what he/she wants to believe. Personally, I think that we are here just by mere casualty.

People are naturally superstitious. Golems, witches, elves, demons etc etc. God is just apart of that ensemble.

I agree, God can be set entirely apart from superstition.