I'd go a step further and say that we've replaced traditional religion with consumption, or more specifically consumerism. Most of the art produced in antiquity existed within the framework of religion, now it's advertising.

I think it's important to subscribe to some kind of overall framework with a worldview and community. We're hard wired for it and if you don't choose it, then consumerism will fill that vacuum and you will find yourself ensnared in mindless consumption.

I have an 80 year old aunt who is a nun who I consider to be one of the wisest people I know. I'm not religious and I have frank and honest discussions with her about religion and philosophy, completely free from judgement. Once we were sharing a drink at a family event and I asked her something to the extent of "at what point did you find yourself?". She replied that she's still finding herself will continue as long as she's alive.

>>you are the god, or the only one that matters anyway.

> you will find yourself ensnared in mindless consumption.

Funny how you're both following the religion thing only on the surface. Take a bite, already! Western culture is based on a specific religion whose philosophy hinges around the realization of slave morality as the superior state of being. Following a school of fish is all you get from consumerism, but all those fishes take away things. The reason why it's not going to fill you up is exactly that there's no interest between you and the next fish, and you weren't going to give them anything, anyway. The only thing you effectively give is a few cents towards blood, sweat and tears in some Asian factory or sweatshop. And you're feeling that somewhere, deep down there.

"That obviously doesn’t mean a sincere belief in one’s own omniscience, more that the the aura of ‘importance’ bestowed upon things naturally emanate from the centre of the Universe, which is you.

Mind that humans are already pretty much hardwired to do this."

I had trouble parsing your perspective as it was written in a unique way. I don't think humans are hardwired for this, can you back up that claim?

If you study evolutionary biology, there is a wealth of information and studies suggesting we are reciprocally altruistic and help others if they have helped us previously or we think they might help us in the future i.e. reciprocal altruism.

From a innate neuroscientific perspective, mirror neurons respond to actions that we observe in others which, if I recall correctly (correct me if I'm wrong), suggests several counterpoints to people in the west believing they are the "only one that matters" when our brains are constantly lighting up by noticing the actions of others which we are inclined to notice and react to (e.g. help those in need, whether family, friends, relatives, or stranger on the street).

This is a fascinating subject, hope others who know more about Neuroscience can chime in, I only minored in it in undergrad. Also, fusiform face area might be worthy of exploring w.r.t. noticing other and what this implies for the notion of human altruism.

The West replaced God not with the self, but with shopping.

That and "Science." "Scientists" (catch-all term nobody seems to have a problem using with increasing frequency) are the new priest class.

There's definitely something to this. We HN readers see the occasional article about the crisis of reproducibility in science, which leads to some thoughtful discussion about the trustworthiness of the phrase "studies have shown," especially when it conflicts with one's own common sense.

Sadly, this reflection is quickly forgotten.

I think that the overwhelming evidence of reality of modern existence - the fact that we don't live neolithic lives with neolithic lifespans - is sufficient proof that science has been overwhelmingly constructive and reflective of how the universe works.

Yes, there are issues, the incentivisation around publication etc makes it easy to game the system. However, to extrapolate this to a blanket attitude of distrusting science, "especially when it conflicts with one's own common sense", is incredibly dangerous because it's partly what has made large numbers of us so susceptible to overt manipulation.

"Common sense" is no such thing, and much of proven science could be construed as contradicting common sense. The light-speed limit, quantum spookiness, spacetime curvature, biological evolution - all were once considered contrary to "common sense" - mainly because "common sense" is ultimately derived from the extremely narrow and limited range of human experiences.

A post showed up on my twitter timeline the other day saying something to the effect of, "hey, these guys just landed a thing on a tiny thing in space, so hey, maybe listen to them about climate change, you idiots," completely devoid of sarcasm. A friend of mine had retweeted it. This is how many, if not most, people think these days; instead of looking to people wearing vestments and robes for guidance, they look to people they've never met who they assume probably wear white lab coats while "doing" their "science"—which naturally encompasses all scientific fields because all "scientists" are of course good at doing ALL the "science." (Sure, if you press them, they'll admit that there's different fields of science and not all "scientists" literally know it all... but that doesn't stop that from being the mental shortcut they make whenever they read a headline about whatever "Science" is saying today.) Instead of looking to Scripture, they look to headlines declaring "science" having been "settled" on the matter. We've moved away from religion as a people, yet all it seems to have done is instilled a false sense of rationality in everyone.

It's not about trusting or distrusting "science," it's about trusting or distrusting people who put too much trust into "science," on the principle of it being "science" that "scientists" have determined is truth. I'm not saying let's all go full Amish (or Kaczynski) and live off the land, I write code for a living. I'm just saying that it's easy to fall into the "religion is an old and outdated concept, only idiots and traditionalist fools would believe in such a thing, yet putting complete faith in anything said by anyone who calls themselves a 'scientist' that gets sufficient attention, that's completely totally different, Because Science" trap.

Belief in science is nothing like belief in religion. The former, ultimately, is a belief, based on evidence, in the scientific method (empirically acquiring knowledge).

So yes, I would argue that even if someone doesn't understand all the scientific principles behind climate change, they can still reasonably trust "science" and "scientists", since that work is built on top of empirically-backed, peer-evaluated research. In fact, this is necessary since the expertise required to have a critical opinion of the vast majority of scientific research is well beyond us.

"Science" and religion are both equally fallible because both are interpreted, disseminated, and perpetuated by man, which as we all know is about the most fallible thing there is. It's obvious and demonstrable that various religious institutions have had varying levels of corruption over the years as their power has waxed and waned based upon how much faith the people have in them. Why is it such a stretch to see that in this modern era where religion has been pretty much been given up on in favor of a more or less blind belief in whatever headlines tell us "scientists" now say, that once again, power and political motivations corrupt once-pure institutions?

Imagine trying to convince someone of incredible religious conviction that their earthly Church demonstrably has repeatedly fallen victim to corruption over the years, only to have her respond to you with, "but that can't be; the Word of God is unquestionably infallible!" There shouldn't be any problem in holding both of those ideas ("the Word of God (Bible) is literally Gospel and infallibly true" and "absolute power corrupts man") in your head at the same time (if anything, the former explicitly reinforces the latter!), and you'd be hard-pressed to find a Catholic today that won't admit that their earthly Church hasn't gone through periods of incredible corruption and downright evil.

Nobody's going to argue the validity of the scientific method, but when you look at the innate nature of man (demonstrated time and again over the course of all recorded history), it's easy to believe that modern "science" is just as corrupt as any other institution man has made at any point in time that rose to power in the minds of the people, i.e. "very"

Okay, here's where I see an important difference.

Let's break it down into a few constituent parts. We have a thing (scripture / spiritual belief OR the scientific method as applied to the world). Then, nasty, messy fallible people who probably don't floss... do stuff with that thing: they teach it, they do it, they investigate it in their own messy wayd. And then regular joe-schmo's who aren't so involved in the doing-something-with-the-thing get reallll impressed by these doing-stuff people (priests/rabbis/gurus whatever OR scientists of all sorts).

Okay, well here's the thing. I agree that everybody is messy and fallible. I agree that hand-wavy "Science people are right!" talk is wrong, imprecise and has potential to be harmful. At the same time, I believe in the scientific-method-applied-to-the-world. I believe in its power to reveal truth. I do not have that same belief in scripture-or-organized-religion-applied-to-the-world. And I think that's REALLY important. Of course people do stupid things and make mistakes, but when someone puts blind faith in people-trying-to-adhere-to-science, it scares me a lot less than when someone puts blind faith in people-trying-to-adhere-to-a-religion. In fact, I'd much rather people put blind faith in "scientists" than in... any other type of group, really, at least when it comes to revealing knowledge.

Hopefully that made sense, if anyone has thoughts or disagrees, I'm more than happy to hear it.

Let's put it this way, do you feel a monarchy is as equally corruptible as a democracy?

Both are institutions constructed by greedy, corrupt, stupid, fallible human beings. It's just that the latter has built in several mechanisms to address this. Like science.

So over a long period of time, democracies have proven to be less corrupt then monarchies, and like-wise, science has proven to be less wrong then religion.

Define "democracy." Purely democratic systems are absolutely fallible; mob rule is a thing man is prone to falling prey to in such systems. This is why basically nobody uses straight-up direct democracy today, especially in the age of everyone having read/write access to a global information network in their pockets at all times.

But even putting that aside, and accepting for sake of the argument that the political system in use in countries such as the United States is a "democracy" ...still, yes. Did political corruption magically disappear overnight when we stopped being ruled by monarchs? Were all monarchies corrupt to begin with?

"Democracy is to monarchy as science is to religion" is an incredibly muddled comparison that does not make much sense when you break it down. Modern Christianity would not be where it is today without Protestantism questioning core fundamental beliefs and then-current leadership. When does what is accepted as "Science" get to have its version of Protestantism, questioning not just the dogma of "settled science" (the most hilarious oxymoron of all time), but those who spread it to the masses as well?

Why is it that Christians, even Catholics have no problem admitting to the fallibility of what they consider to be their holiest of institutions, yet atheists seem to believe that "science" is inherently always impossible to be anything but utterly pure use of the scientific method conducted with nothing but the utmost honesty, at every level?

The motivations of man are not always pure, especially when in positions of power and/or authority. Even if you want to disregard religion entirely, at least take lessons from the history it has given us.

You keep raising the straw man of "settled science" - who here, or in fact in the scientific community, believes this let alone proclaims it? Even in broader (non-scientifically literate) society, there are few people (in my experience) that believe science knows everything already.

Science had its "protestant" moment - it was called the Enlightenment, and it result from questioning the dogma of settled knowledge as promulgated by religions through the infallibility of scripture.

I'm not going to list politically-charged examples because that's highly unlikely to lead to productive discussion and everyone here knows it.

I'm not knowledgeable about philosophy or metaphysics but is there even anything approaching consensus on whether or not there even is a "knowledge ceiling" that an individual or even society could ever achieve? (If so, I'd love to know how anyone came to that conclusion lol)

>Science had its "protestant" moment - it was called the Enlightenment, and it result from questioning the dogma of settled knowledge as promulgated by religions through the infallibility of scripture.

You seem to have misunderstood the analogy I was making. I'm a practicing Roman Catholic, yet view Protestantism as having been a positive thing for Christianity as a whole, including Roman Catholicism. When is dogmatic belief in whatever passes for "science" these days going to be scrutinized? Systemic corruption of any sufficiently powerful institution of man is inevitable, and just because the scientific method is about as pure of a means of reasoning about the world around us as we can come up with and has led to profound advancements in technology and our understanding of our world... doesn't mean that everyone's just going to ignore the fact that using the now-widespread dogmatic belief in its infallibility is a pretty powerful means of achieving external political and personal goals unrelated to the pursuit of truth. It's naive to think otherwise.

You keep bringing in disparate arguments as if they are part of the same thing - infallibility, knowledge ceiling, dogmatism - and also throwing in the odd barb - "whatever passes for science these days" (the answer to which, is "science!").

Yes, agreed that human systems have a tendency to corruption, however the scientific method at least has within it the seeds to "keep the bastards honest" (as we say where I come from). i.e.

1. Nothing stops you from learning and becoming a scientist. 2. Nothing stops you from attempting to repeat published experiments, or if you can't, then to point out why (which are likely to be faults in either the description or execution of the original experiment).

In other words, there is transparency and a basis for objective comparison. Lack of transparency (either through gatekeeping or lack of detail) is considered a bad sign in science. That's what differentiates the scientific method, from say, the "political method", or "the religious method".

I think you’re not going to win this argument, but I will point out that you can’t look at a giant meadow of grass, focus on a few weeds and say, “see, it’s not grass!”.

As a system, science has brought about a better understanding of the physical world around us and has dramatically improved the lives of every human on the planet.

You keep beginning your responses with formal criticisms of my posts instead of the content within, starting with "You keep..." This time it accuses my previous post of "bringing in disparate arguments," but said post contains three paragraphs excluding the pull quote; the first two address pieces of the first paragraph of the post of yours my post was responding to, while the third paragraph directly responds to the second paragraph, indicated by a pull quote. It's clear you're either not really interested in discussion, or we're talking past each other, so there really isn't a need to continue this conversation thread.

Science as a system of producing knowledge (and rules for what to do and how to live) differs from religion in key ways:

1. It places empirical observation as the ultimate form of evidence, as opposed to scripture/existing knowledge.

If you observe something that contradicts existing theories and other people can make that observation then existing theories are disproven, the end. This still takes time to propagate, but really only for highly complicated abstract theories(of which climate change might be one!)

2. Science has a built in competitive market type process for selecting 'scripture' and an incentive to constantly be updating it.

Religions have more bureaucratic/despotic approaches to updating knowledge(college of cardinals/pope, influential preachers etc).

3. The core questions science tackles are physical and amenable to observation and maths. The core questions religion tackles are metaphysical, or to put them in evo-psych terms to do with selecting and reproducing rules of behavior that produce good societies in which to live over tens/hundreds of generations.

In as much as science tries to enter into that hyper-long term planning game it should be treated with extreme suspicion, it's a different statistical environment to that of physics and the existing statistical tools of science are probably not up to the task. It's the land of Taleb's fat tails and iterated games and exponential chaos, not statistically modelable quantum experiments(top pick a complicated but tractable problem).

Shitty metaphor: Hard sciences are about solving P problems, or at worst approximating NP or worse, but still computable, problems. Religion and social science are about providing heuristics to uncomputable problems(if you have a C program and all it does is return then it definitely halts etc). In as much as people take the NP approximations as seriously as the P solutions, they're in for some rude awakenings. In as much as a lot of our society does then we're in for a bumpy ride.

I dunno; there are vastly more people doing "science" now than in 1850, and a hell of a lot fewer technological changes, improvements and so on. I look at the people claiming the mantle now (used to be one of them!) as about as credible as if some MBA showed up and took credit for the Hoover dam.

it's funny to see this observation here. HN is one of the worse places for scientism. Having an argument? Drop a citation to NIH. Doesn't matter that neither of you read the paper, the title loosely alludes to your point so you win.

I really like and recommend CS Lewis articles and essays on Scientism

What are examples the term "scientist" being used in an inappropriate way? To me, a scientist is someone who is educated in the scientific method and experience using it to perform experiments. It's mostly applied to people for whom it's their profession but you can be an amateur scientist.

Yes, day to day there's a certain level of trust put in what scientists say based on their research, everyone can't know everything, but it's not blind faith. With priests, ultimately there's an expectation of belief without evidence.

It's other way around. Priests used to be the science class, but a few hundred years ago they split into 2 camps.

Hence our fetishization that results in a watermill of these intellectuals

shopping is making material sacrifices on the altar of the Self. How is buying some designer nonsense at 1000% markup to appease your ego much different from sacrificing a prize animal to appease an external God? Neither are likely to actually help you in return.

Isn't shopping/consumerism deeply entwined with a distorted notion of the "self" ? I am what I have, what I wear, where I fall on the status-totempole.

An alternative would be a community-outlook. I am part of a greater whole. I don't really own anything. We are living a story, together.

Simple skinnerism would also explain consumerism. Oh look! Shiny! That could stimulate my dopamine receptors briefly, I'll get it.

I would say impulses rather than shopping. West is obsessed with being "free" i.e. do whatever I want at anytime

Yes. What's missing from modern life is somewhat intended by corporations and the political elite: the atomizing of people from each other via glowing screens and burning down of community that churches functioned to anchor people together. The multitude of consequences are loneliness, isolation, friendlessness, depression, anxiety and more suicidal than ever. I'm not arguing magical thinking in any form has any inherent value, but the caring about each other and the social commonwealth collectivism, empathy and support it provided are indispensable to sane, decent, good and successful people. The charity, forgiveness and nonviolent disobedience by deed part of many traditional religous traditions embody virtues that to most are inherently inspirational, noble and provide the foundation of civilization as functional, decent and possessing integrity. If we let society devolve into Orwellian, Kafkaesque, social Darwinism, then feudalism, inverted or outright totalitarianism, bullshit and brutality will comprise the primary palette of the social contract.

You are the messiah. Money is the god.

Have you read the book "Stand Firm" ? It was a best-seller in Denmark, with the idea that our new religion is "find yourself inside." The author advises that most who look inside won't find anything, and that we should look outward instead.

Ultimately, the author is making a case for a modern version of Stoicism.

"Wherever you go, there you are." I've that saying a couple of times.

> I think we in the west ended up replacing religion with, not an absence of it, but with a religion of the Self

More like objectivisim or individualism. Many of my small talks with people in the west include discussion about Ayn Rand and her work on FountainHead and Atlas Shrugged. After hearing about it for a long time I read the book. And frankly, the whole concept of individualism is strange to me.