People act as if the world is as each of them sees it.
Nobody does anything unless they are convinced that there is some merit in ‘that’ particular something being put into practice. Otherwise put, nobody starts doing anything before believing that the thing being started is well worth the effort.
In fact, doing – anything, in a voluntary manner – is an act of faith.
‘OK, I can live with that. But which faith? Cause there are many…’
This is the moment when I’ll start commenting on the difference between creed and faith. Creed is very specific. Personal creed, Christian creed, Islamic creed, even professional creed… Faith, on the other hand, is more general. The concept itself encompasses creed and goes a lot further.
Personal faith is both the conviction which drives each of us to do something and the specifics about how we implement that something. Those of us who are faithful Christians derive their energy from their faith and the particulars of their action from their Christian creed. Those of us who are faithful Muslims derive their energy from their faith and the particulars of their action from their Islamic creed. Those of us who are agnostics – or atheists, derive their energy from their faith and the particulars of their action from their specific creed. In this sense, faith is more like a state of mind – shared by all faithful people, while creed is specific to each category of people. Down to each individual.
The human head works like an organic computer. It has a ‘hard’ component. Which is actually soft. The brain tissue. And many levels of ‘software’.
You might want to skip this introductory part if you’re not familiar with/interested in how computers work The ‘machine code’. The inner workings of the brain. The ‘things’ which continue to function when we’re not at all conscious. Breathing, coordination of the of various organs which keep us alive, etc. ‘Assembly language’. The level which works on ’emotions’/’feelings’. A not yet conscious baby suckles when hungry and cries when uncomfortable. A patient with dementia is not a ‘fully functional human being’ but can learn/retain many human functions. ‘High-level language’. Human conscience. While the ‘machine code’ and the ‘assembly language’ levels run in the ‘background’, human conscience constantly evaluates ‘what’s going on’ and decides ‘the next move’.
Humans, like computers, work a lot better when ‘put together’. Each individual’s human conscience develops only ‘in concert’ with other people while the most powerful computer chip is ‘dead’ before the operating system has been installed. A (mature) individual human being might survive in isolation, but not for very long. A computer is completely useless if not ‘put to work’ by an ‘operator’. Alone or ‘inside’ a network.
Computers can ‘cooperate’ because we made them so. Even if using various operating systems and communication protocols, we – humans, have developed them – computers, in such a way that we can communicate with them and they can communicate among themselves.
For humans to be able to communicate among themselves, they need a common language.
Computers do not need to coordinate among themselves. We’ve made them, instructed them, in such a manner that they (still) do what they are told.
For humans to be able to coordinate themselves – to act in a congruent manner, they need to use – or at least to acknowledge, the same referential system.
To think ‘alike’ or, at least, to acknowledge that ‘those who do not think like me/us might have a point’.
Historically speaking, humankind has achieved ‘coherence’ through the use of ‘religion’.
‘Reality’ – which was far more complex ‘before’ simply because the unknown is the place where fantasy is free to give birth to anything, had to be tamed. Translated into ‘operable’ things. Into generally accepted concepts. Into generally accepted ‘myths’. And for as long as a given set of ‘foundational myths’ had maintained their ‘magic’, the religion which had been developed starting from those myths had continued to be ‘the coalescing factor’ for the community which believed those myths. Or, at least, behaved as if those myths were still ‘valid’. Whenever those myths had failed – or were no longer enough, the corresponding religion had been quickly replaced. By another. This was the heave-ho approach. Wholesale replacement of the referential system, which is both ‘wasteful’ and time-consuming.
In time, people have learned that it was far more ‘efficient’ to pay ‘lip service’ to each-other’s opinions when the other side was too ‘strong’ for outright ‘coercion’. Read “conversion”.
When/where things had become ‘ripe’, some people had invented ‘science’.
Science, like religion, is a manner of thinking. A manner of translating reality into something which can be managed by the human brain.
Religion relies on a set of ‘axioms’. Which had been considered true – by those who had established any given religion, at the moment when that particular religion had been established. When freshly acquired knowledge diverges too far – and too convincingly, from the until then generally accepted ‘founding myths’, the religion which depends on those myths conserving their ‘allure’ is abandoned in totum.
Science, on the other hand, relies on a different set of ‘beliefs’. Derived from the basic tenet of the Judaeo-Christian creed and no less axiomatic but still different. The point being that instead of trying to fit any new information into the previously held set of ‘teachings’ science mandates the diligent use of the ‘scientific method’ whenever we attempt to evaluate any ‘piece of knowledge’:
Reproducibility: ‘do I find/learn the same thing each and every time I examine this phenomenon/class of objects using this particular procedure?
Peer review: Does everybody else who examines the same subject, using the same procedure, reach the same results? In earnest?
Falsifiability: Does the subject of our musing have a correspondent in reality? Are we concerned about something which has consequences? Can this particular ‘piece of knowledge’ be proven wrong? Or, at least, incomplete?
The three paragraphs above have described the scientific method yet I still have to mention the Judaeo-Christian belief without which science makes absolutely no sense.
According to the Old Testament, God had made man to “rule… over all the earth itself”. Which means that God was going to refrain himself from performing other miracles. The Earth being entrusted to the rule of man means that man was going to ‘see’ the same thing each and every time he was looking at the same thing. From that moment, ‘things’ were going to ‘happen’ in a ‘rigorous’ manner. No more ‘hanky-panky’, no more divine intrusion. From then on, things were going to happen according to the ‘law’. ‘Regularly’, hence ‘reproduciblely’. In a consistent manner! Again according to the Old Testament, ‘God had made man in His image’. Hence all men – and women, had been created equal. In the same image, that is. And all men – and women, harbor something ‘special’. A spark of divinity! They have all been created in the image of God itself, hence they all should respect each-other. And each-others’ opinions! Hence ‘peer-review’. All that remains to be ‘explained away’ is the small matter of falsifiability. Of science concerning itself only with verifiable subjects. Which brings us back what was the man supposed to rule over. ‘The earth itself’. The realm of reality. Man – men and women, were supposed to rule over ‘reality’, not over other people. They were supposed to concern themselves with ‘evident’/measurable things found ‘on earth’, not with ‘fancy’ figments of ‘unaccountable imagination’.
Ooops! If both religion – well, at least the Judaeo-Christian one, and science depend on the same axiom/fundamental myth, then where’s the difference? As I mentioned before, whenever fresh knowledge contradicts ‘irreparably’ the before held religious convictions, the community who upholding those convictions reaches a ‘passage rite’. Has to either ‘close its eyes’ – actually denying reality, or change its religion. The very definition of the ‘heave-ho’ approach. For those using the ‘scientific method’, things are a lot simpler. And smoother. For them, reality suffers a constant change. Piece-meal instead of wholesale. ‘Easy-does’ it instead of ‘gung ho’.
One other thing before I let you go.
“If you’re not a scientist, and disagree with scientists about science, that’s not disagreement! You’re just wrong!”
Well, this is the most unscientific thing I’ve read for a long time. What comes next makes absolute sense. If you apply the scientific method to “Science is not truth. Science is finding the truth.” you determine that the message is consistent, agreed among the peers and falsifiable. Science can be misused and, potentially, the very meaning of the word can change in time. For now, the generally accepted meaning of ‘science’ is, indeed, ‘the path towards truth’. And, by definition, all scientific knowledge is considered to be ‘improvable’. Hence forever ‘not yet true’. Coming back to the ‘disagreement’ part, this is an obvious ‘sleigh of hand’. For starters, ‘scientists’ do not concern themselves with ‘science’. Each of them controls an area of expertise. Which is not the entire science… Furthermore, what does it mean ‘you’re not a scientist’?!? You don’t have a formal accreditation? Anybody who uses the scientific method when examining the reality is a scientist, regardless of their credentials. I presume the author meant well. There are quite a few people out there who are in the ‘business’ of sowing doubt. Who contradict whatever ‘starts their ire’. Who very ‘skillfully’ spin apparently convincing words about subjects of utmost importance. But if we want to remain true to our words, if we want to remain on the straight and narrow path to truth, we must convince our audience with arguments. We must un-spin those ‘words’ in a rigorous manner. Using the very same set of ‘spinning skills’ downgrades us to ‘their’ level. As the saying goes, ‘Don’t allow your opponents to drag you to their level of expertise. Remain on yours. Any attempt to beat the other guy using their weapons will, more often than not, yield the undesired result. For the obvious reason that they have used those weapons for far longer than you’.
You can’t have religion without faith. But not all faith is beneficial to the believers…
Religion is when a community comes together/works better because its members share a common set of beliefs. Of explanations about how the world works. Of ‘values’ which guide day to day life.
Faith, on the other hand, is unchallenged belief in a narative. Can be good – as the Christian faith had been so useful for the Northern Atlantic area of the Earth until recently, but it can also be bad.
It’s not as much the content of the belief which is bad but the fact that the content is unchallenged. Sacrosant! Christian faith had been good because it had taught us that we were both equal and of divine nature – made in the image of God, and had become bad when nobody was allowed to challenge it. When people were literally burned at stake after being perceived as challenging the established order.
As it had happened to William Tyndall. For translating the Bible into English…
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As much as I love writing, I do have to eat. And to provide for my family. Earning money takes time. If you’d like me to write more, and on a more regular basis, hit the button. Your contribution will be appreciated!
As much as I love writing, I do have to eat. And to provide for my family. Earning money takes time. If you’d like me to write more, and on a more regular basis, hit the button. Your contribution will be appreciated!
The first quote comes from the letter sent by the 105 pastors to the school districts in Ohio. The second expresses Terry Firma’s own thoughts. Terry Firma being the author of the article…
Until reading his opinion I was convinced nobody else but those 105 pastors actually believed yoga could be considered a religion. Not in the First Amendment’s sense, anyway.
Here being the problem. A huge one. By enlarging the definition of religion to encompass yoga – which is basically a practice, you end up with a wide enough definition to ‘engulf’ many other things. Science, and atheism, included.
Which, at some point, will be bundled with the items banned from being studied in schools.
What’s going on here? Nothing much. This is how ‘being rational’ works. You marshal all the resources you can identify towards reaching your goal. Can the First Amendment be ‘helpful’ towards what ever I have in mind? Does it mean that I’m going to actually weaponize it?
This was how the United States’ Supreme Court was reading the US Constitution in 1973.
Pro-lifers oppose this view. Their main argument being that life is sacred and needs to be protected. Period. For them, abortion equals infanticide. Plain murder.
What we have here is a clash of absolutes.
The absolute right to life and the absolute right to dispose of your own body.
Let’s see where lie the differences between Pro-Choice and Pro-Life.
Pro-Choice say that agency must be reserved for those who 1. are alive and 2. are directly implied in the matter.
Pro-Life extend the definition of ‘alive’ to cover everything they consider to be ‘living matter’ and thus take the final decision from those who are directly implied into the mater. And give it to those who have to decide the seriousness of the “health risk to the unborn child’s mother”.
In both cases the absolute becomes relative.
In the first case, the absolute becomes relative to the person directly involved in the matter.
In the second case, the absolute becomes relative to those powerful enough to insert themselves, and others, into the equation.
And both sides clamor they are acting in the name of individual liberty…
Populism is scientific because its ‘adepts’ have a very rational behavior and use scientific tools to increase the appeal of their public messages. And, on the other hand, populism is scientific because its advent is perfectly explainable given what we currently know. About our society, about our brains, about our psychology….
Let me start from the beginning. In Thomas Kuhn’s terms, the last 60 or so years have witnessed a tremendous paradigm shift. Science has replaced religion as the main paradigm and ‘religion’ has been demoted to ‘religions’.
Science becoming the main paradigm means that we have grown confident about our knowledge. We might be aware that we don’t know everything yet but we continue to believe that we’re able to learn everything. That if we are diligent enough we’ll sometimes be able to look under every rock that is. This attitude has led us to search for ‘perfection’. ‘Efficiency’ has displaced ‘redemption’. We have ceased our quest for salvation and are now obsessed with ‘buy low, sell high’. In other words, ‘make the most of it but strain yourself as little as possible’.
Which makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?
A lot of sense… mainly when you no longer perceive the guy next to you as being a full-fledged member of your community. Your religious community, that is. Of your church.
You see, ever since Emil Durkheim, the sociologists have been aware that religion was not so much a story about the making of the world as a ‘common ground’. The ‘common core’ shared by the members of a given community. Which ‘common core’ makes it possible for those who share it to have respect. For themselves and for the other faithful members of the community. By sharing that common core, the individuals find their bearings in the ‘wide, wide world’ and, thus, know how to behave relative to their ‘neighbors’. With enough mutual respect among the individual members that the community is able to function. To survive, that is.
We no longer have that kind of community. Our primary allegiance is no longer towards ‘church’. Most of us consider themselves primarily as members of a nation – something governed more by formal laws than by public sentiment, and only secondarily – if at all, as members of a ‘religious’ community.
Now, putting two and two together, it’s very simple to understand that in the given circumstances ‘populism’ was inevitable, right?
Too many of the would be leaders have no qualms about how they get what they want. Power. ‘Buy low, sell high’ is the current mantra, remember? Accepted by all of us. Buyers, sellers, by-standards… Too many members of the general public are willing to accept promises which are in line with their own expectations, even if those promises being put in practice means a lot of misery for OTHERS. Who cares about those others, anyway? They are not members of OUR ‘church’!
I’ll let you decide how sustainable is such a situation. I was going to use ‘community’ instead of ‘situation’ but it would have been horribly wrong. We no longer live in communities. We only happen to live in the same place.
The early believers were convinced that God’s ‘real’ name could not be uttered by their ‘mortal’ lips.
Their logic was simple. Using a single word to ‘differentiate’ something from everything else is somewhat arrogant. It implies that the ‘god-father’ knows all that there is to be known about that something – or at least enough to give credence to that naming.
After writing for long enough about their beliefs, the worshipers had become emboldened enough to transform their convictions into precepts. To be not only followed by the believers themselves but also imposed upon others.
The quote defining freedom as stemming from the relation between your fist and my nose logically leads us to observe that those who define liberty in this manner are a bunch of tired, and maybe wised up, fist-fighters.
Who have finally reached the understanding that it’s better to negotiate it rather than fight over it.
‘Negotiate? What is here to be negotiated?’
‘The distance between our noses? How close am I allowed to bring mine to yours before you becoming allowed to defend your intimacy?
After all, if my nose is so far away that you’ll never be able to touch it, this particular definition of liberty ceases to make any sense while if you’re never allowed to punch mine then I’ll be able to use it to crowd you out of your own life.
And vice-versa.
Capisci?’
Which points out the cruel reality that we cannot negotiate everything.
To start any negotiation we must first have something in common.
A common language would be fine indeed but I have something else in mind.
Both sides involved in any negotiation need to share the same attitude.
This is the hardest thing to convey.
To convince the other side that you’re going to keep your end of the bargain.
Only after both sides have reached this ‘belief’, they will feel free enough to discuss the real issues.
This is where ‘religion’ comes in handy. It teaches us that all people are to be treated equally – all of them have been molded in a single cast, and that they share a spark from the same divine fire.
“God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them“.
Is any liberty possible, outside the one we continuously build ourselves, through constant negotiation?
Is any bona-fide negotiation possible without a healthy dose of mutual respect among all those involved in it?
Why do we, grown-ups, still need our father to constantly remind us to stop bickering?
ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape Claiming the Quran’s support, the Islamic State codifies sex slavery in conquered regions of Iraq and Syria and uses the practice as a recruiting tool. Written by RUKMINI CALLIMACHI; Photographs by MAURICIO LIMAAUG. 13, 2015
This is not as much about a particular religion as it is about the dominant religion of a certain place loosing its ability to fulfill its mission.
By ‘religion’ I understand the set of ties that transforms a certain population into a community, the rest is ritual.
When those ties no longer do what they are meant to do – make the individual feel that he belongs and therefore impart a certain sense of safety – many members of that erstwhile community start to loose their marbles.
Some kill themselves, pretending to be martyrs who die for a sacred cause, some others rape the innocents that happen to cross their paths.
The fact that some ‘religious leaders’ use the teachings of a particular religion to encourage these abominations only proves that the so called leaders are nothing but fraudsters that feed on other peoples’ misery.
More than a hundred years ago Emile Durkheim, one of the founding fathers of sociology, had wrote ‘Le Suicide’ and fully explained all this. Maybe what we need is to re-read it. All you have to do is follow the link.
I haven’t read the book so I’m not going to comment on it, yet.
What bothers me is the idea of countering ‘religion’.
Why would anyone do something like that?
If any of us sees an error in the ‘scientific’ realm that error is brought forward and fixed but nobody questions the entire realm.
Meanwhile if a religious individual does a stupid thing, like all of us have done in our lives, quite a lot of people blame it on ‘religion’ and ‘faith’.
Rather irrational – hence unscientific – don’t you think?
After all science and religion are about something different.
Science is about how the nature works while religion (‘reliegare’ in Latin means ‘connecting’) is about the ties that transform a mob into a community. Some religions use Gods to achieve this, some don’t – Buddha was a ‘mere’ teacher and Buddhism has no need for any God.
So, again, why counter ‘religion’?
The real problem produced by ‘organized religion’ is that it encourages some people to act in blind faith instead of thinking with their own heads while it offers come callous manipulators the opportunity to use religious teachings as a way to further their petty interests.
‘Faith’ can induce blindness very easily, you know. No matter if that faith is placed in a religious hierarchy/teaching or in the power of rational thinking.
Just as reputable scientists, Herbert Simon and Daniel Kahneman among others, have amply demonstrated the human thinking process is not at all infallible.That’s why our pride about our ability to think scientifically should not be allowed to grow into self-sufficiency. After all that was how Marx, on the footsteps of Plato, reached the conclusion that it was possible for a small number of people (the ‘enlightened’ communists) to know better than the rest of the population how things must be organized… The Soviet Union, the biggest social experiment ever, was ample proof that he was plain wrong.
On the other hand the one thing that all religions have in common is that they teach their members to respect each other – something that the ‘scientific communists’ never did. Some religions even teach that all human beings, irrespective of their creed, are to be respected. Just think about how most nomad people welcome visitors – those that come in peace, of course.
So how come there are so many ‘scientists’ are ready to counter, entirely, something as wide as ‘religion’?
For instance I know that the Earth exists – I am able to walk on it and I eat things that grow out of it.
I also believe – without ever having seen it from far enough – that the Earth is round. Just as my ancestors used to believe that the Earth was flat. Both I and my ancestors were told what to believe and we did that. Because we believed in those who were offering us that particular piece of information and because the issue wasn’t of any real importance for us, personally.
I do trust that Neil Armstrong did land on the Moon. I’m not going to share with you my reasons for that here, this post is about something else. My point is that belief is casual while trust is active. I did research the matter, as I could, and I considered it carefully before reaching the conclusion that ‘Yes, I am convinced that Neil Armstrong did land on the Moon’.
As we all know ‘know’ is a verb. The corresponding noun is ‘knowledge’, information that we are aware of. And so familiar with that we don’t even remember how we have arrived to accept it as true.
Believe is also a verb. It’s corresponding noun is ‘belief’, information we are aware of and believe it to be true just because we were told so by a seemingly credible source.
Trust is both a verb and a noun. And here comes the really interesting part. While trust as a verb means more or less the same thing as believe, trust as a noun has nothing, but absolutely nothing in common with belief. Trust is a state of mind while belief is a piece of information with a ‘value’ attached to it.
In fact ‘trust’ is something you consciously choose to invest while ‘believing’ is something you are led to, sometimes even without you being aware of what is going on, by a person or even by the circumstances you happen to find yourself in.
Now it is time to introduce another notion. Faith. It exists only as a noun and that’s why I didn’t brought it up from the beginning.
It has something in common with both belief and trust. Similar to belief no proof is usually attached to faith and similar to trust faith is something that the individual has to willingly accept/profess/invest.
Coming back to knowledge we discover there are many kinds of it.
We have factual knowledge, the kind we have either witnessed or otherwise seems so evident that we’d never even dreamed of questioning. So evident that if somebody asks us to be specific and put it squarely in one of the ‘belief’, ‘trust’ or ‘faith’ drawers we’d be at a loss and protest vehemently ‘it’s plain knowledge, what’s wrong with you guys?’
Then we have our beliefs. For instance we know that we love our partners and our kids and we believe that they love us back. We also have faith in a lot of things. Some of us have faith in God, some others put their faith in politicians, market analysts or even the weather-man. For a longer or shorter period of time. When gravely ill we put our faith in doctors and in medicines. And so on.
And finally there is the trust problem. For a real trust to develop we need an actual understanding of what is going on. That’s where science and technology comes is. If we’d done something for a long enough period of time we gradually become confident in our ability to do that thing over and over again with consistent results. If the results are reproducible, if other people can obtain results similar to ours by following our methods then our endeavor is deemed scientific and, hence, trustworthy. Same goes for information gathered following scientific methods.
And here lies the pitfall. Science has to be constantly challenged in order to remain valid. If we reach that point where we start to put faith in science and scientists instead of continuously demanding proof and doing our best to understand with our own heads what is going on then we are doomed. Science morphs not in ‘religion’ – that is something else – but in hoax.
The ‘thing’ with science is that the only trustworthy aspect of it is the method, not at all the results. We’ll never be able to find the absolute truth – no result will ever be 100% accurate – but if we keep using the ‘scientific method’ – consistency and unhidden-ness – then we’ll remain on the safe side.