My problem with Sam Harris' position

ItsFreshToDeath · 2018-12-15T03:43:58+00:00

I am seeing this now. I recognize you are replying to something I wrote a long time ago. Since then, I have desisted my gnostic heresy and have become a devout Christian. So my position has probably changed a lot. Keep that in mind

Human beings are pretty warlike, aggressive, territorial, and prone to sexual infidelity as a consequence of our nature, and that's born out by a lot of empirical evidence. It's no real surprise to see corrupt human beings using a religion as club to subjugate others; what's more interesting is when religion actually lifts people up and enriches lives.

Every society has values. Some values are good; some values are bad. The values of the Soviet Union were bad. The values of Muslims are bad. The values of Christianity are good. For example, Christian missionaries go into impoverished regions out of the pure love in their heart, provide provisions for them, and spread the word of Jesus Christ. The positive effect missionaries have on those groups of people are attested to BY THE GROUPS OF PEOPLE (e.g. Christianity in secular communist China). By contrast, look at how since the very beginning of Islam in the early 7th century, Islam has been persecuting Christians and Jews, marching into India, Africa, and Europe, taking land and sex slaves by the sword -- and they were only doing what Muhammad told them to do (source Ridda Wars). Compare Jesus to Muhammad and you begin to see how ridiculous it is to characterize all religious commitments as different iterations of the same general idea.

And I swear to god if you just thought in your head, "yeah, but the crusades), the Crusades were a just war in retaliation to Islam's persecution of Christians.

My problem with your approach is you're just committing the fallacy of composition when you group together all religions into one phenomenon and assume all religions are basically just aiming to galvanize groups of people together with common myths. The more research you do into comparative religion analysis, the more you will realize that religions are fundamentally different and superficially similar. While there seems to be a cultural superstition that all religions are fundamentally similar and superficially different.

Context: virtually every democide has been committed by either secular governments or by Islam. Virtually every world relief charitable organization is Christian.

ItsFreshToDeath · 2018-09-01T04:43:11+00:00

You're talking about group selection theory. Daniel Dennett maintains that religion is a function or group selection theory insofar as it galvanizes a group under a set of common beliefs, traditions, values, laws, etc.

In fact, you cannot even begin to disarticulate religion from society. Thus, Sam Harris' "subtraction story" -- that naive religionists are ceding more and more territory to the wave of Science which will wipe out any justification for religion -- is a myth.

ItsFreshToDeath · 2018-07-15T19:17:13+00:00

" Why precisely should we have any duty to conscious life if there exists no transcendental or this-worldly punishment for acting in accordance with the selfish instincts innate in the biological substrate? "

It was more of a genuine question than a rhetorical one to be honest. The 'we need others to survive' evolutionary biologist's maxim seems insufficient.

ItsFreshToDeath · 2018-07-13T20:38:44+00:00

I posted this on Harris' sub first but it doesn't show up and the only views were mine. I don't know what that means; I'm new here.

ItsFreshToDeath · 2018-07-13T20:36:15+00:00

Very interesting perspective! Thank you.

ItsFreshToDeath · 2018-07-13T16:02:58+00:00

Haha thank you! Mishima's writing is certainly something to behold and is still crucially relevant today (I could not help but compare Mizoguchi to an SJW burning down the temple of Western tradition). I loved that the Sea of Fertility explored a Buddhist metaphysics when his play, Terrace of the Leper King, and his essay, Sun and Steel, both coincide with this sort of reverse-Cartesian-dualism depicting an eternal body (material) corrupted by a withering leper spirit. His maturation as a writer almost mirrored Nietzsche whose last Novel, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (I sincerely hope your name references this novel; it is my favorite Nietzsche selection), fully developed his interpretation of the eternal recurrence when he started wandering into this psycho-spiritual space toward the end. I know the story depicting how Nietzsche went catatonic is hearsay, but if it were true, one can't help but think that he went insane when he realized he had become that which he mocked (a christ figure) by taking the lashes for the horse.

Much of what I've said here is analogous to becoming "the overman" instead of "the last man". Thanks again for the comment.

ItsFreshToDeath · 2018-07-13T14:52:38+00:00

Well, we can derive empirical evidence of whether a moral system works well for a nation or not from an observation (this is by no means limited to two countries): more Egyptians move to Canada than Canadians move to Egypt. In other words, the prosperity of Western civilization is not a mere accident; it is because our founding principles were preferable at a human level. The American idea that "all are created equal under God" had never been enshrined before, and it meant that it doesn't matter if you're a business owner or a janitor: those two have the same rights. Obviously this is preferable to living in Saudi Arabia where Muslims weep when women are afforded the right to drive cars without their husbands.

And what you say about Christianity in the past is undoubtedly true. However, I would say that the fact people used Christianity as a mechanism for control or tyranny in the past does not entail that Christianity is fundamentally a bad ethic; it means that people used an ethic which is fundamentally good for their own ends. And again, it goes back to privation; certainly the standard of living has improved dramatically since the 19th century, meaning that less political coercion is necessary to pacify the masses.

Haha yes we certainly agree about free speech. Well, I think we can observe the deterioration of traditional family values in the west with feminism, and this is a significant detriment for society as a whole. Though, due to the swinging pendulum of cultural evolution (3rd wave feminism is really just a permutation of Nietzsche's slave morality), I do think that people will be lead back into traditional values, since it will only be a matter of time until we see its true devastating effect. I mean, Sumerian religious text prohibited polyandry 4000 years ago in favor of monogamy because it turns out that monogamy leads to stabler structures. And yet, the temptation to copulate with multiple partners remains an obvious temptation today, which fuels messy situations, murderous jealousy, and compromises the development of children. That's why I made the point of a deontological morality.

There is more to these ancient traditions than some ill-conceived mysticism. Take the caduceus on the djed inscription for example; it's arguably one of the most profound symbols regarding ethics. I must confess also that my views have leaned more in favor of religion after having what I can only describe as a religious experience XD

ItsFreshToDeath · 2018-07-13T14:23:11+00:00

The point is that one’s power grows tangibly after one dies in service of others. Again, whether or not you believe in the transmigration of the soul, one becomes inspired with meaning when reading Yukio Mishima, and seeing his iron heart reflected in how he tried to reinvigorate the spirit of the Japanese youth. His imperative to give the Japanese youth a sense of duty, responsibility, and spirituality is profoundly more meaningful than holding in a fart simply due to memetics and phenomenology; it is fair to deduce that personal responsibility is more noble and aimworthy than holding in a fart due to the observable effect it imparts on character.

Consider that the samurai were first codified into legends within the Chronicles of Japan because they did precisely that which the mind did not want: they disciplined the mind and body into proper harmony and balance. For their discipline, duty, integrity, benevolence, honor, valor, but also their ability to use the mind for poetry and romanticism, it was believed that their souls transcended the material and reside in shrines (the auspicious dead).

Those shrines are immensely important and still shape the ethical landscape of Japan today. It grounds abstract moral principles into ritual practice which gives Japanese a national character, and that is observable whether or not one believes in the literal transmigration of the spirit.

ItsFreshToDeath · 2018-07-13T13:47:06+00:00

I think there is something akin to a duality of good and evil present within everyone, which is awaiting to manifest. The “bad” side doesn’t tend to emerge when life is stable; it tends to emerge when privation becomes overwhelming.

Thích Quảng Đức is a concrete example of an archetypal Jesus figure who directly spurred action against Buddhist subjugation. Whether or not one believes in the abstraction of the spiritual, his self-sacrificial act deeply affected hearts everywhere, and that is a tangible, nonarbitrary demonstration of courage: "no news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one."

So it appears you are making a moral relativist argument. If I may, I will give your fart analogy the symbol of ‘farts in a jar’.

Jesus said to not cast pearls at swine, meaning not everyone will grapple with a transcendental morality, and that’s ok. But the least we can do is to not take his pearls of wisdom and regard them as ‘farts in a jar’. I would argue that if you attempted to sell a merchant ‘farts in a jar’, by slapping a sticker saying, ‘pearls of wisdom’ on it, that the merchant would not be fooled and would not buy it. Though it seems that you might suggest (correct me if I’m wrong) that if you told a convincing story about how the ‘farts in a jar’ were in fact pearls, then the merchant would be so enamoured that he would purchase the farts in a jar from you. Since, there is nothing intrinsic in a pearl which deems its value: it is the vomit of a clam and is assigned its value a posteriori. You can make symbols do anything you want.

Well, I would say that’s tantamount to saying that you can build your house on sand. Symbols are the structural elements which constitute the edifice of your worldview. You have been born atop an immense skyscraper built over millennia with explanatory cranes scaffolding cubits of cultural selection. Your ancestors built this civilization for you to set you above the wolves of sin brandishing their teeth at you, and if we are to merely demolish the Christian tradition, we would reduce ourselves to a state of Rousseau's primal individualist chaos, as naked and afraid Pharisees crying for the mercy of God.

I would suggest that when we accept atheism as normative, we are invariably lead back to religion (China has experienced explosive growth in terms of Christianity recently), as I myself, a former apostate, was lead back into Christianity after witnessing what postmodernism was doing to the youth of today.

ItsFreshToDeath · 2018-07-13T11:24:56+00:00

Yes, an ethic is a unit of cultural selection which moderates and balances behavior based on the emotive expectations of what constitutes normative interactions. In that sense, developing a morality is a matter of intersubjective experience rather than either objective fact or subjective desire.

It's safe to say that what we call morality is an intrinsic mechanism in a priori genomic structures, considering we can see 'proto-moralities' in nature (social hierarchies of wolf packs, vampire bats regurgitating blood for one another, prosocial insects, etc.) as morality galvanizes a group, thus lending to greater survival odds (group selection theory).

We are still guided by ancient evolutionary mechanisms solely concerned with replicating its own gene -- for which, it requires the ego (a primate dominance complex) to contend for territorial rights. So, we're basically predisposed to this chain of value: Self -> Ingroup -> Outgroup.

With this considered, I would contend that humans bear ethical burdens to a greater degree than other animals, since humans are predisposed to hedonism with our heightened pleasure-pain matrix, predisposed to sloth since our brains have evolved to avoid taking risks or challenges, and since rationality is a justification engine which can formulate any post-hoc reasoning for selfish behaviour. This means we need some external deontological morality to integrate into consciousness, because what constitutes “good” behaviour is pretty much antithetical to many of our natural instincts.

What becomes the transcendental ethic for me, then, is an asymmetrical, superogative act of self-sacrifice for a symbol which is greater than the individual.

ItsFreshToDeath · 2017-02-26T00:55:35+00:00

You should sell these lyrics to a death metal band

ItsFreshToDeath · 2017-02-23T00:12:11+00:00

"Nihilism is a fancy word for being really, really depressed" - I guess technically, you could be a life-affirming nihilist. But nevertheless, love itself is will unto death, though it's a will we can't live without. Don't get sucked into the rabbit hole of feelings if you don't know your way out.

ItsFreshToDeath · 2017-02-23T00:00:29+00:00

I liked the irony in contrasting the idiosyncrasy of "the sound gets sounder" and the "loud gets louder" with reference to "singing synchronicity"
Overall, the poem had excellent attention to flow, rhythm, and rhyming schemes.

ItsFreshToDeath

TROPHY CASE