Not all secular beliefs are ideologies. I think there are two key common factors between religious beliefs and ideologies that call themselves "secular":

First, people don't acquire the beliefs by considering and weighing evidence; they acquire them by being told them, usually at a young age, by people they trust, and making them part of their identity. That's why people are so resistant to changing such beliefs.

Second, the set of beliefs acquired in this way is not just a few isolated ones, but a whole network of beliefs that cover every aspect of life and are all asserted as justification for each other in what amounts to a logical circle. That's why it's so hard to penetrate such a belief system and get people to doubt it, even if it flies in the face of easily obtainable evidence.

And believing that religious believers accept 100% of religious belief without reasoning about them is a misunderstanding.

I didn't say anything about religions and ideologies not using reasoning. Anyone who has read, say, Thomas Aquinas is perfectly aware that religious people can use all kinds of complicated reasoning to justify their beliefs.

What I did say is that the set of beliefs in question are "all asserted as justification for each other in what amounts to a logical circle". For example, Thomas Aquinas spent a lot of time building up a huge edifice of interlocking propositions about God, all logically related to each other--but they don't connect to anything else. They're just a free-standing, self-consistent logical structure that can't be justified in any way except by claiming that it justifies itself. It's not that Aquinas didn't use reasoning; as noted above, he did--lots of it.

Interestingly, this also describes all of math, logic, and philosophy.

One of the more interesting axioms or assertions is whether there exists free will, which is, by any interesting definition, a supernatural entity.

Math is based on fundamental global laws which exist and can be checked from everyone and they can come up all with the same math.

We could isolate a baby and it could create the same math while it couldn't create the same religion.

An isolated baby could derive simple math but also similarly deduce there is a greater entity out there.

Whereas the axioms of math will be substantially similar to the point that any modern mathematician would recognize it. We see this on ancient tablets where folks were calculating the square root of 2. Or any of the cultures all around the world that had no significant contact with one another that deal with pi. Sure we'll see base-12 number systems as with the Babylonians or base-20 as with the Maya, but the underlying principles and lessons are largely IDENTICAL.

The worlds of math and the metaphysical could not be more different in that regard. Rather than being a very shallow statement, it is one of the most all-encompassing and profound in all of human history. It gave rise to the principles of the scientific method: humans are biased, so multiple people performing the same steps should come to the same results and predictions made based on those results should yield their own repeatable consistent results.

I had a discussion about this topic with a more hard core christian: I said 'look if it is a good god, it doesn't even matter if i worship her right?' and he said 'nope, its written that you have to worshop'.

So one believe doesn't equal to another believe.

Your underlying base changes based on your believe.

"An axiom, postulate or assumption is a statement that is taken to be true, to serve as a premise or starting point for further reasoning and arguments." this is not true for two religions being created independently from each other while this is very well true for science.

Isolating a human is analogous to removing oxygen. Few would argue that someone brain dead could create anything.

My comparison is based on sciencse vs. fiction. 1+1 = 2 is a reality which works in german, africa, usa and everywhere else. There might be a difference on how those symbols (1, 2...) look like but the axiom is true and valid and is discoverable.

In religion its not.

Concept of god exists but it looks different depending on your believe. Multiply gods, one god, good god, bad god...

Even the stuff written down is based on someone who wrote it down and still people interpretate it totally different.

Never seen someone implying they are right that 1+1=3 if the interpretation of 3 is not 'next after one'.

That said, the Peano axioms seem less nebulous that the varying axioms relating to the existence of god, as that concept can change so much from person to person.

https://m-g-h.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale-4fecf80...

How so? I can think of at least one interesting definition by which free will is a perfectly good physical process going on in human brains, not supernatural at all.

Depends on which definition of free will you are using. Some definitions are compatible with determinism.

Also, even if we go with a non-deterministic definition of free will, "non-deterministic" is not the same as "supernatural". Quantum mechanics is not deterministic.

Which is totally fine, as long as people accept that God exists the same way math exists.

Many do accept that love exists in the same way math exists.

Like the CAP theorem, you can only have two without substantial compromise.

When ancient texts list God as Love, they note that Love is an act of (free) will (free will being considered a supernatural entity, even today).

Free will is placed high on the hierarchy, which has interesting consequences. E.g. humans are free to do horrible things, and are free to choose not to love. If humans had no free will and were all instinct, there would be no love.

Your explanation makes it out that free will is inherently prone to evil and suffering. If so, that would make free will somewhat inherently evil even though it arises from God. Strikes at the heart of omnibenevolence.

Either there's a limit to his ability or a limit to his goodness. No amount of hand waving can remove that.

If He is all good but can create creatures that corrupt his good works… You see the logical conundrum there, right?

I would understand if you don't WANT to see it. It feels wrong to see it. But it's there if you're being honest. You can ignore it. Many do. It's still there despite any aversion to it.

Your stance seems to be that a set of unprovable axioms you prefer to have faith are somehow superior to some other set of unprovable axioms that some other people may choose to have faith in. You might have all sorts of perfectly reasonable justifications for the axioms you have faith in, but if you want to claim your beliefs transcend faith then you’ll have to present a logical proof that survives the munchausen trilemma.

For the specific example I gave (Thomas Aquinas), it's not really a question of the beliefs being "valid" or not; it's just that they have no practical impact at all, which means it doesn't really matter whether you believe them or not, at least not if the beliefs are taken in isolation.

However, it is a problem if people then try to use such beliefs to justify actions that do have practical impact. For example, consider the split between different branches of Christianity after the Council of Chalcedon over "homoousios" vs. "homoiousios", which caused several wars over the next few centuries.

That's funny because a system that kept a civilization together for 1000 years is being claimed to have "no value" by someone who has no idea how to keep any society together and is mimicking the conventional wisdom of those overseeing a disintegrating society as a result of this ignorance.

Not only does the work of Aquinas have value, it has more value over the long run than anything being produced today, as no ethical system that we hold dear has a chance of keeping anything going for even three generations, let alone 100. Modern society is suffering from collapsing birthrates and social disintegration at an alarming rate, and we are pretending to be smarter than those who set the rules of a civilization that was far more stable and productive than our own, with far more profound accomplishments.

The fact that most people in a given civilization were Christians does not mean that the particular religious beliefs I was talking about were the ones that kept the civilization together. In fact, as the example I gave of religious wars over "homoousios" vs. "homoiousios" illustrates, those particular beliefs often caused problems that created huge rifts in the civilization.

> someone who has no idea how to keep any society together

If you are referring to me, I have no idea what you are talking about.

> Not only does the work of Aquinas have value

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about that, at least as far as the particular beliefs I was referring to are concerned, since that's the particular work of Aquinas that I was discussing.

> no ethical system that we hold dear has a chance of keeping anything going for even three generations, let alone 100

Ethical systems are not the same as the kinds of religious beliefs I was talking about. Ethical systems have practical consequences that can be tested. I agree with you that many people today appear to have ethical systems that don't work well; we know that because they have bad practical consequences.

However, when you talk about keeping things going for 100 generations, we don't have any single ethical system that has done that. Ethical systems have changed many times over the course of human history.

Good luck testing one of the currently accepted "ethical system"-type religious beliefs.

The only kind of outcome of such a test that is "allowed" is full agreement with the ethical system. A lot of these systems are just as self-reinforcing and barely based in reality as Christian apologetics of Aquinas or Chesterton. The people holding these beliefs know this on some subconscious level and will viciously attack anyone who disagrees. It is only over time with many such "attacks" that a mass belief will die and be replaced by another one.

In fact, every one of these "ethical" religious beliefs came about the same way: it defeated another commonly agreed upon dogma.

This mechanism by the way is what runs civilization. One meme fighting another.

Git forks and merges still share a common ancestral history and are basically an evolution of the same idea. This is true of a real Git repo (it's one software project after all) and the kind of churches you are likely talking about (it's all just a theist religion after all). Christianity is a branch in the same repo as the ancient Roman gods. The Saturnalia feature is even there still :)

I was thinking more about ideas like: - can people be property? - is it a good thing to kill "infidels"? - can women vote? - can a 10 year old get married?

These are "religious" questions because there is no objective truth to the answer either way. It's all based on beliefs and consensus.

Before you downvote me into oblivion: the answers to all of these have historically been different than they are today. People in both times (past and present) would attack you if you disagreed with the status quo (there was even a certain civil war fought about the people=property one). I am not actually disagreeing with the status quo on any of the above.

However, it would be naive to think that we do not presently collectively believe some things that would be appalling to a future human. A good heuristic for these is: would I get attacked or mocked for questioning this?

See also: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

For me, it always felt like the interpretation of the Holy Books are changing through time as we understand science more and more. And it feels ironic to me.

Surely all christians today believe that tricking somebody with dubious pretexts into debt-based slavery (as often happens with human trafficking of sex workers, where women have to formally pay up their debts and incurring the costs that they captors incur in hosting them in sub-human conditions).

Um, no, it isn't. It's how Genesis was interpreted by most people of the Jewish and Christian religions throughout most of the time since it was written. What is a fairly recent phenomenon is people of those religions not interpreting Genesis (and the Bible in general) literally.

It's somewhat orthogonal to your argument, but I'd doubt that most people in "Christian countries" (which is a heterodox notion) are/were Christians. Mostly people in the past seem to have followed a societal model, largely imposed as a firm of control.

Where I grew up in the UK the village vicar was not a Christian according to most definitions (they didn't believe in central tenets of the faith as espoused in all the main creeds).

Catholicism has a lot of things that are contradictory to biblical Christianity from basic things like having "special" people, to indulgences which are so contradictory to biblical teachings the only possibly way they were accepted is because most people were ignorant to Scripture. And of course those in power keenly maintained that ignorance.

The powerful hoping to keep people ignorant seems like conspiracy/folklore.

That's only true if you consider the Bible as the only source of revelation, which is not the case for Catholics, where Tradition is equally important.

Catholicism still has things that are contradictory to biblical Christianity, such as priesthood of all believers, even if you accept other sources of revelation those sources would still be contradictory.

Value changes with time. Horse whips had a lot of value at one time. Now, not so much.

Religion is prevalent in many societies, and it isn't the same religion. This talk of the value of aquinas ignores the fact that all his reasoning only really applied to christian religions. Yet other religions without deities or with many of them provided the same social structures christianity has.

Consider, for example, China. Just as old and grand as European civilization with a religion mostly focused on the mandate of heaven given to their leaders.

Now consider modern China, which is an atheist state that's been thriving. Certainly, not without problems, but it's hard to argue their civilization hasn't become a major world power.

The simple reality is that it's always been this way and will likely be this way for a long time.

Not saying this as proof that the world is definitely going to shit, the point is that it I don't think we've achieved some new level of eternal civilisation that couldn't possibly fail. Every civilisation believed that right up until the point it stopped being true, so we should be on the look out for threats and not assume it will all end up OK.

Most of the "beliefs" you refer to actually don't have to be beliefs at all. They have no practical consequences; they don't change anything about what the person who claims to have them actually does. Such beliefs don't have to have their evidence weighed because they make no practical difference. When people say they "believe" them, they don't mean they're actually using them to decide their actions; they are just signaling.

For most beliefs that do have practical consequences, people do weigh evidence for them. However, this does suggest a clarification to the characteristics I gave for religions and ideologies: that they start from beliefs that are in the "don't have practical consequences, so saying you believe them is just signaling" category, but then use them to justify beliefs that are in the "do have practical consequences, so should be judged by weighing evidence" category.

A belief that does not affect your actions, but implies or causes a belief that does affect your actions. Well, that does affect your actions. :)

But serioulsly, joke aside, that was an interesting concept

With religion, there is no such presumption or expectation.

These are vastly different situations.

There is a difference between belief and faith.

Had they reasoned about them, most 2000 year old customs would have hardly survived.

So if Osiris was said to have red hair in one passage and was blond in another then they may have been referring to different people, one statement was a metaphor, he has hair of both colors at the same time, he had each at different ages, he dyes his hair at some point, etc. And of course people feel such ideas are worth fighting over.

Second, the set of beliefs acquired in this way is not just a few isolated ones, but a whole network of beliefs that cover every aspect of life and are all asserted as justification for each other in what amounts to a logical circle.

Those two hold for, say roughly, 90% of what most people believe, secular or not.

Even most scientific theories people believe, they haven't examined and are incapable of following their theories and experiements personally - they were just being told they are truth and they trust it to be so.

(Heck, most people are even incapable of deriving the math answers somebody like Archimedes or Pythagoras arrived at 2.5 milenia ago, and all they know of a work as basic as Newton's is that there was some falling apple involved, or, if they really paid attention at school, that f=ma).

Which is not to say that philosophy or religion are pursuits that should be banned or are worthless. I am just tired of the overused rhetorical trick of muddying the waters between them to confuse people and win arguments on the internet.

But, if it’s true that man is a religious animal, it’s going to mean that people will always take a religious bent on any major topic in their lives. And so the way that many people experience and understand science may in fact have religious qualities, but this is actually going to be true of any major topic in people’s lives.

For example, the scientific method has little to no utility about whether your grandma loves you, or what love is even.

Much of a life is built around areas of thought like this. Politics, for example, is mostly preference.

Many people believe in the assertion that there is free will though, which is a supernatural belief.

If we are just chemicals, than those that believe there exists free will believe that out of no volition of their own.

E.g. the laws of physics happened to be tuned for the eventual existence of a cloud of atoms seeming to contemplate this on a HN forum ;)

In either case, both seem amazing.

The argument is that individuals dont rationally objectively verify or figure out every experiment and scientific claim. I stead, we all rely on trust to institutions and processes to tell us how it is.

Which is how it is. Most people dont even know how science actually work beyond elementary school level of simplification. And even if you actually do science as a job, you know only small part of it relying on trust everywhere else.

But quite a lot "science" can not verified in the same manner as some physics, math, chemistry and biology can.

And to go from the fact that some science is verifiable and then conclude that everything which tries to take on the label science or follow similar rituals to the verifiable sciences, also deserves the same respect is quite a long jump.

In fact "science" or scientism seems to be one of the more dangerous religions nowadays, as the rituals of peer-review, papers and conferences, holy institutions like universities and sacraments of tenure and ph.d are very easy to adopt without being even remotely verifiable (or even slightly rational).

sometimes, this evidence is just subjective, at other times, it is clear and can be measured.

Another analogy that I have heard is that 'magic' is when one is just wowed by what they see without being able to understand how it happens. Apple products bring that 'magic' though it can all be explained away in technical terms if one tried.

Soon our bodies will go back to the dust that we began as:)

-this ‘Universe’ (seems to me) is so incredibly intelligible and information rich (information theory rise, e.g. entropy timeline of the observable universe).

-there seems to be something rather than nothing

-there doesn’t seem to be anything that happens without a cause (except, it seems to me, our will).

These seem to be important data points… :)

1. Your brain/body evolved to interpret this richness in a universe that is unintelligible to us a conscious brain that evolved in that universe would almost certainly view those unintelligible to us rules as intelligible lest there be no purpose to that consciousness. Our brains also quite demonstrably processes unintelligible (to us) things as intelligible when they are not.

2. This is true in any universe where someone is around to point out that something exists and is a priori with or without creator beings.

3. Our will is either deterministic (happens with a cause) or it is not. In the case that it is deterministic we can ignore this example (which personally is my view). In the case it is not then the non deterministic part is reduced to the result of quantum coin flips altering the result in the larger scale world. Assuming so there are two possibilities either everything else is also happening at that level without a cause (which is counter to your point that it is only will that behaves this way) or the quantum coin flips are in some way deterministic which means so is will.

There is a lot of work in the social sciences showing that whether one asserts there is free will or not (as you allude to) is correlated heavily towards belief in God.

If there is no free will, it is interesting that the universal laws of Physics would create clouds of atoms that assert there is a God :)

For those that have them, yes. Not all institutions that are called "scientific" have them, though.

> and how their construction promotes future successes.

For those for which this is true, yes. It's not true for all institutions that are called "scientific".

> Scientific institutions are also constrained in their function.

I'm not sure how true this actually is. Top tier universities like Harvard call themselves "scientific institutions", but they're really just hedge funds that happen to do research and teaching as a side gig. And the fact that almost all university research is funded by governments means that along with the expansion of government into more and more areas of our lives, comes the expansion of what is called "scientific" for purposes of getting government funding.

GANs and other deep fakes are going to be weaponized and absolutely obliterate the foundations of this country if that trust in legitimate journalism cannot be adequately restored in time. All journalism is biased, but we're not talking about bias; we're talking about up is down.

Very soon literally anyone can be shown saying anything… to anyone else… anywhere… wearing anything (or nothing)… with resources akin to a typical gaming computer. As a nation, we are woefully unprepared for that day, and we will pay dearly for that lack of preparation.

No, often justifiably. If the media didn't lie so often and so consistently, they wouldn't have a problem rebutting accusations of lying.

> without specifying what other institutions or processes can be trusted instead for reliable information

That's the problem: there aren't any. Our society has no institutions that can be trusted for reliable information.

PBS News Hour Frontline Reuters BBC News NPR's morning and evening news Associated Press

Then papers of record (excluding editorial column or op-ed):

Washington Post Chicago Tribune Miami Herald etc.

Please provide specific examples of their lies. I'll even take honest errors that never received a retraction.

Move on to more opinion-based outlets like:

The Hill The Atlantic Pro Publica Mother Jones

In these, provide examples where what's written goes beyond bias or persuasion into "lie" territory.

While we're here, show where dedicated fact checkers like FactCheck.org have lied or omitted their sources so as to prevent outside verification.

Even Fox News rarely if ever lies. Biased as all hell, but no outright lies at the main news desk. Their opinion shows on the channel on the other hand, it's hard to find an honest hour among them.

And local NBC, CBS, and ABC affiliates? Yeah, I'm gonna need some specific examples where they regularly lie to the American public beyond, "They were mean to Trump."

If you honestly can't come up with a mountain of evidence on your own, then either you have not been paying attention at all, or we live on different planets. Or you have simply not bothered to independently check anything they say. (More on what "independently" means below.)

And if you honestly believe that the sources you cite (and yes, I'm talking about what is billed as straight "news", not opinion) are reliable, then good luck with that. I hope for your sake that it doesn't catch up with you at some point, but I won't be holding my breath.

And btw, my claim is not that everything they say is lies. Much of what they say is true. The problem is that you can't trust them not to lie; given any statement they make, you have to consult independent information (more on that below) to decide whether you can trust it or not. And the more politically charged the topic--in other words, the more that is at stake in terms of power--the less you can trust them not to lie. Whenever the chips are down, they have shown that they will put ideology and spin, to protect their own power and the power of those in government whom they agree with, above truth.

As far as independently checking what they say is concerned, that's the problem I referred to in the GP: there are no "independent" reliable sources you can use. You have to do it entirely on your own, cobbling together what information you can from as close to primary sources as you can get it. (For example, whenever I see, say, a report issued by a government agency, or a scientific paper, mentioned in the media, I don't even bother reading the media article; I go looking for the actual report or paper itself and read that. The report or paper might still be telling me things that are questionable, but at least I'm reading the primary source.) And of course most people don't have the time or the wherewithal to do that, which is why this terrible state of affairs persists. But that doesn't make it any less terrible. At least now, with the Internet, with so many ways for people to post first-hand information about things, we have some ability to collect our own data instead of having to live with whatever the media gives us. We used to have none at all, except for the rare cases where either we ourselves were first-hand witnesses to some event (and btw, pretty much anyone who has had first-hand knowledge of something that got covered in the media will tell you that the media account was nothing at all like what they saw first-hand), or we knew personally someone who was and could evaluate what they told us based on our knowledge of their past track record of reliability.

You made the claim. Now prove it. My claim is that these news outlets are on the up and up. I have listed the ones I trust.

Don't just say, "They all lie." That's lazy and disingenuous. Put up just a single example of a lie, and I'll be listening to your side of things. Otherwise you're just the crazy guy on the corner with the tin foil hat talking about lizard people. "You can't trust anyone" sounds conspicuously paranoid.

Evidence matters.

NPR, Washington Post, NY Times, CNN, etc etc "independently confirmed" that Trump had protestors gassed to stage a photo op [1], that the officer in DC was beaten to death with a fire extinguisher [2], that Russia placed bounties on US soldiers [3], absolutely none of which happened, as we now have proof. Few retractions were made. You absolutely cannot trust a single word coming from the media apparatus, about anything, at any point.

[1] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/yet-another-media-tale-trum...

[2] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-media-lied-repeatedly-a...

[3] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/journalists-learning-they-s...

Be a shame if his account of the tear gassing in front of the church were backed up by the pastor of said church. Except the pastor (who was also hit with the tear gas) backs up the accounts of the protestors. Protestors who were still out because the curfew had not begun yet. Details. Details. https://www.npr.org/2020/06/01/867532070/trumps-unannounced-...

This is not to say that journalists are perfect. Far from it. They are after all human. But reputable outlets issue public corrections to errors they've made. https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-donald-trump-afghanista...

Looking at Sicknick's death, I see a large number of outlets all noting he died of stroke. https://www.google.com/search?q=Brian+Sicknick%27s+Death

You will hopefully note that CNN (who Greenwald calls out) is NOT on my list of credible sources. Saying that CNN is guilty of airing half-baked stories buys you little in this discussion.

I don't expect outlets to never make mistakes, but I do expect that a dozen outlets don't all independently confirm the same lie. That's not journalism, it's coordinated propaganda. And because the retraction come quietly or not at all, you'll never know if what you read was real or fake at any given moment. For that reason none of them can be trusted.

In regards to your paragraph about the tear gassing, it's quite clear you did not read the articles I posted. They were in fact gassed, but it had nothing to do with Trump or his photo op; that is the lie.

That would be a perfectly acceptable demonstration of "fake news" that would draw me in to listen to your side of things.

All it takes is a little evidence.

That's not my idea, take it to people who are treating science as such. You know, "believe the science" crowd, that will just take at face value whatever media happens to say at the time.

Electricity and the internet are out of scope for religion. Religion is closer to humanist subjects, sociology, psychology, ethics etc.

You have to remember in the 18th century, lightning killed a lot of people. The fact that lightning rods did, in fact, do what Franklin said they would do was persuasive evidence.

I'm not an expert on the history of Ben Franklin, so I don't know if he ever had to explain that lightning doesn't exist to provide divine retribution. But he did have to get each local church to allow a lightning rod on the steeple with a proper connection to grounding, so I'm sure there were some interesting conversations.

Well, "frustrating" is not a scientific argument itself, it's a subjective feeling. More like what a faithful would feel against blasphemy. Isn't it at least a little ironic?

>I don’t need to personally review and understand the details of why electricity and the internet work, because I am literally typing this message on an electronic device and sending it via the internet.

Which is neither here, nor there. You still need to trust tons of abstractions you can't evaluate and don't control, the claims of experts and snake-oil salesmen, the policy of goverments, the products and initiatives of corporations, advertising, statistical data, etc. all of which are telling you they're "based on science" but nonetheless contain loads of p-hacking, cherry-picking, bad methodology, non-reproducable BS, and downright snake-oil selling, to the point of often doing the opposite of what actual concrete science would advise.

The fact that you have some artifacts you can use just tells you that science can produce concrete things. Doesn't tell you evaluate different courses of action, evaluate science results and scientists, understand science-drive policy decisions, and so on.

>I can go build a simple computer and prove it all out myself.

99.999% of the people can't and never will (practically, not merely potentially). So for them it's more like the junkie saying "I can quit heroin anytime I want, I'm not addicted".

- The reproducibility crisis in social sciences

- The floods of BS coming out of public health research, a crisis for which we don't even have a name yet

- The journals who only care about impact and not about scientific integrity

- Politicians who appear to be completely controlled by modellers who never validate their models and whose predictions are always wrong

- People who are instinctively loyal to that whole set of power structures and rituals, such that they dismiss any claim of scientific misconduct as conspiracy theories, as ignorance, etc.

and so on. The fact that certain fields of study and other parts of society have been able to use the scientific method to produce concrete things doesn't automatically imply that all (so-called) scientists do so, and given the proliferation of scientific fields that produce nothing concrete, doesn't even imply the majority do.

See my response to tonymet upthread.

> Even most scientific theories people believe, they haven't examined and are incapable of following their theories and experiements personally - they were just being told they are truth and they trust it to be so.

For some theories that are called "scientific", yes, this is true--but that's because the scientists themselves don't have a track record of correct experimental predictions to begin with. (String theory, for example.)

But for theories like, say, General Relativity, there is a huge track record of correct experimental predictions, and those predictions include things in our everyday experience now, like GPS. It's true that most people cannot verify for themselves the entire chain of reasoning that leads from the Einstein Field Equation to how their GPS device works, but they know that GPS works from their personal experience, so they know that whatever theory scientists are using to make GPS work, works. They don't have to take that on trust.

In other words, for scientific theories that actually have practical impacts, you don't have to just accept what scientists say on trust; you can look at their track record of correct predictions.

One thing that's missing in a lot of books is: how sure are we about the various statements? How much of it is well tested (Newton, Einstein - though we still had a lot of recent confirmation), how much is still out there (example: BCS theory), how much of it is a "feel good explanation" (hybridization theory) or how much is "the math works out wonderfully if we ignore the skeletons in the closet and the theory sounds a bit crazy" (QFT/QED)

What do you think of economic theories or theories behind psychotherapy? Lot's of real world impact, low confidence in experiments, imo

Not much.

> Lot's of real world impact

Because the theories have influence far out of proportion to their actual track record, yes.

> low confidence in experiments, imo

You can't run controlled experiments in either of those fields, so it's not so much a matter of low confidence in experiments as no ability to do them in the first place. There are some general patterns that can be picked out, but both disciplines deal with non-repeatable human situations that require non-repeatable human judgments to deal with them. Even to call them "sciences" is a stretch, except on a very general usage of the term "science" to basically mean "something people study".

I've come across countless counter-examples to this in my life. A lot of the socialists/Marxists I've known come from relatively well of conservative families for example.

I've no real evidence for this except personal anecdotes, but I suspect gravitating towards an ideology is often as much motivated by what you are against as it is motivated by what you are for. If there's a hierarchy in power, political, religious, whatever, that you think is corrupt you're going to naturally gravitate towards an ideology that provides a narrative as to why it is corrupt and what can be done about it.

People fed up with corruption in catholicism gravitated to protestantism. People fed up with feudal or capitalist hierarchies gravitate towards Marxism. People in the Muslim world fed up with the economic and military domination of the West gravitate towards islamic fundamentalism. People fed up with Communist totalitarianism gravitate towards democracy. These counter-narratives provide a framework for opposition and an agenda that opposition can rally around and unify on.

But there are counterexamples. The Scientific Revolution grew out of Christianity more gradually, and with somewhat less friction. Although the Church did try to fight back, the output of the scientists was simply too valuable to local populations and leaders to be suppressed.

Likewise, many countries saw royalty and nobility gradually be replaced by the burgeoisie in a non-violoent manner. The main exception, France, was a lot less successful in this.

Later on, while Marxism led to revolution in the Russian Empire, the labor movement in northern Europe decided to distance themselves from Marx, and instead work for the proletariat by reform rather than revolution. Not by attacking the burgeoisie, but rather by collaborating with it, and by leveraging capitalism to fund a welfare state.

But then again, neither the burgeoisie or the labor movement represented a fundamentally new ideology. Rather, they both adopted and adapted the ideology already in place, which was carredi by some combination of religion, scientism and patriotism/nationalism. The ideologies DID evolve, but in these cases, not in an abrupt manner, dictated by a few "intellectual" ideologes. And most importantly, they did not treat the pre-existing system as a mortal enemy.

History will show where the new ideologies will lead. At the momement, they seem to be very concerned with identifying enemies and not very interested in compromise. There seems to be more appetetite for conflict than the world has seen since the 1930's, and it may be wise to prepare for some kind of rupture within the next 5-30 years.

That just means they got told about socialism/Marxism by some other authority figure besides their parents. I never said that parents were the only ones that could tell people such beliefs and have them accepted and made part of the person's identity.

> I suspect gravitating towards an ideology is often as much motivated by what you are against as it is motivated by what you are for.

This can quite often explain why people accept beliefs by being told them and making them part of their identity, instead of considering and weighing evidence, yes.

Open to talking about it, sure, but the crucial element that separates apologetics from real debate is that one side is forbidden from changing their mind. In religion there is a rule overshadowing the exchange of ideas that says, "no matter how convinced you are, or how weak your own case is, you should stick with it, because it's virtuous to stick with this belief no matter what."

When I say I am allowed to be atheist or agnostic according to Vedas, your typical dumb Purohit also screams and tries to justify it's not that.

It's almost like Vedas or Upanishads or the values they emphasize have no place in preist centered medieval / modern "Hinduism".

Edit: And 'Dharma' in texts is used to refer to qualities such as 'dhriti' (courage) and r'ta (truthfulness), much more than its being used to refer to rituals. So I don't necessarily even need to read any of these to follow "dharma".

A religion is a set of assertions or axioms that, like any mathematical or logical system, cannot ever be proven or disproven (by their very definition).

When one goes about living one’s life, they require life experiences that guide them one way or the other.

For prior art see arguments that "something must be the first mover, and that thing we call God". Curiously, the sudden leap to "therefore the Judeo-Christian deity is proven to exist" keeps getting snuck in there without any extra proof.

In other words, you're attempting to define a term of art using an existing word, and this just obscures the argument because most people will use its common definition, and not the meaning you're defining for it.

1. Precise definitions

2. Not proven inconsistent

(As for 2, we know we can't prove the bulk of mainstream maths consistent. However, since the crisis triggered after Russell's paradox was discovered and set theory was formalised in a better way, nobody has been able to poke a fundamental hole into current mathematics. Moreover, there are certain subsets of mathematics - say, Presburger Arithmetic - that are provably consistent.)

I have never seen a definition of "God" that is both precise and not self-contradictory.

Conflating mathematics and religion is just disingenuous.

(Assuming, by conflate, it is the combining two into one, per definition).

‘God is Love’ doesn’t seem contradictory.

That's because it doesn't mean anything.

Others have been beheaded asserting it. Life is certainly interesting though.

edit: let's just play the game, shall we?

"God is Love", first of all - is this a definition of God or one of love? I have a feeling it's trying to be both, but that is invalid. It's probably trying to tap into some intuitive understanding of what "love" is and to connect it to some other concept, such as God.

In any case, a) we haven't defined what "love" is and that's not gonna be an easy definition - maybe we should start there; b) suppose we know what love is: if you say "God is love", and you use that as a definition for God then... why do we need a concept of God? We can just go and rewrite the entire bible and substitute every occurrence of God with "love"? So, in the beginning, love created the universe? Love died for our sins? Love sent the great flood and told Noah to build an ark? Even if you don't take these stories at face value, the bible clearly ascribes agency to God, but if God is just love, then love supposedly has agency something that... probably doesn't make sense with most people's definition of love. See point a)

I would suggest for you to pick up an introductory textbook to some topic in analytic philosophy and compare the rigour of the explanations therein with "God is love".

This is probably not the “Taoism” which you read about in western pop-culture paperbacks or hippie-age TV.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neidan

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neidan

Its certainly frowned upon in general

Do you believe that becoming religious made you smarter / more aware, or that it made you more eager to seek reassuring comparisons outside your religion?

> The secular world would benefit from adopting more formal definitions of their belief system.

Benefit whom? The 'secular world' is perhaps not as centrally organised as you may believe or wish for. (We meet at the Fox & Hound every second Wednesday.) Whether this is inconvenient for members of the secular world, members of various fantasy clubs, or both - is hard to say.

Personally I don't feel that a codification of my understanding of the universe (I struggle to think of it as a belief system, as that has connotations of faith and rigidity in the absence of evidence) is necessary. I do undeniably like the idea that my understanding of the universe (roughly) aligns, AFAICT, with that of other intelligent people I know, or whose works I see or read - but I'm not sure that's the same thing.

> If you believe you are not religious, it just means that you don’t have the cognitive tools to recognize the secular ideology that you have adopted.

Do you accept that perhaps intentionally non-religious people may not be as dumb as that assertion demands?

As in it's equipped me with mental models to understand which components of secular life are acts of faith & ritual vs reason.

> 'secular world' is perhaps not as centrally organised as you may believe or wish for

Nor is it uniform. But there are some overt and some covert aspects. the covert forces benefit from being nebulous.

One reason religions are so open to attack is that they have a clear identity and value system (not necessarily good, but at least clearly stated). If you think about it, you can have a healthier relationship with a religious opponent– as long as you have equal power, you can oppose each other in a healthy way.

The secular world is applying all sorts of demands & social pressures on you, and there's no way to oppose them, because secular ideology doesn't have an identity, an institution or value system open to attack. It's like fighting smoke or a swarm of bees.

That's because there is no such thing as "secular ideology". It's a meaningless phrase.

There is no such thing as "secular ideology". There are many. Just as there are many religions.

There is materialism+work ethic, there is materialism without work ethic, there is "wokeism" (to pin a definition, the belief that oppression is a fundamental societal force and clearly directional based on some enumerated characteristics), there is nationalism. There's even "startups" :P

But perhaps you have a grain of truth in that rarely is a "secular ideologist" a "monotheistic" (monoidealistic?) one. Usually one's identity holds a plurality of those identifications.

Also, people can have a strong identification to ideas without a community to back it up (another grain of truth, and the saddest part)

Overall the point isn’t to say that all secular belief is the same. The point is that any secular ideology you follow will have the same characteristics of religious belief despite lacking definition.

Yes, there is no such thing, but it does not become meaningless, and so such be called 'something'

It is the opposite, the repudiation of 'religious ideology'

just like there is no such thing as 'cold' - it is the opposite of 'heat' which is measured, but 'cold' as such, holds some value in dialogue, so it is for 'secular ideology'

Just want to point out that Jewish apologetics is not the same as Christian apologetics. Christian apologists are working in furtherance of the Christian goal of converting everyone to Christianity. Jewish apologists are working only to prevent other Jews from being swayed by the arguments made by other religions (primarily those from Christian missionaries, who often target Jews specifically).

That aside, what makes you think apologetics represents an openness to debate? I cannot speak for Christians, but Jewish apologetics only exists because other groups are trying to lead Jews to conversion to another faith, and apologetics holds little value within the framework of Judaism itself. What non-Jews think of Judaism is irrelevant because proselytizing is not a requirement (it is not forbidden, but it is also not encouraged and conversion is a deliberately difficult process). Judaism certainly has an openness to debate, but the debate is within Judaism itself -- what is the right way to practice the Jewish religion? What is the right way to interpret and understand Jewish holy books? Judaism is not open to debates about the need for Jews to practice Judaism; the covenant between Jews and God is an axiom.

The Judaism when the Talmud was written was a fanatically proselytizing sect, as is clear if you read the talmud. They created seed outposts all over the Roman empire of new converts, as they sought (and obtained) special dispensation to be the only religion allowed to proselytize in ancient Rome and they had an active missionary service travelling all over the world seeking converts. These missionary efforts were quite successful, spreading judaism to the far reaches of the Roman Empire, creating enclaves of newly converted Jews in the major cities of the Western world. It is these enclaves that were most receptive to Christianity during its initial expansion, and in that period when Christianty was considered another sect of Judaism, the Christians also used the special dispensation given to Jews to gain converts. This created tension, where some of the Jews complained to the Roman authorities that these Christian Jews were not real jews and thus should not be allowed to proselytize under the dispensation alloted to jews. This information also forms the backdrop that helps understand early Christian history. For example, in the first apostolic council recorded in acts, what was meant by saying "Moses is preached in all the synagogues" when referring to new converts in Corinth, Rome, and Ephesus. It is because those new converts were either fully converted jews, themselves converted a few generations previously by Pharisee missionaries, or they were in some other stage of the conversion process, and so they, too, met in Synagogues, even in places like Ephesus, and thus the early Christian missionaries just went from Synagogue to Synagogue all over the Roman Empire, winning over the descendents of converts in communities that were previously won over to judaism.

The Pharisee missionary work is also mentioned in the New Testament, when Christ accuses the Pharisees, saying "You travel over land and sea to make one convert and when you do, he is twice the son of hell that you are."

This missionary program was so successful that much of the Talmud was written by the children of new converts, in new communities all over the Roman Empire. Rabbi Hillel's famous retort to a man demanding to know the meaning of the Talmud while standing on one leg was in a debate that was attempting to convert his (gentile) questionner to judaism. In fact the background to many of the famous passages in the talmud were attempts at conversion and evangelization. Knowing that is an important part of understanding these passages. These jewish communities also provided sancturary to fleeing Jews after the Romans expelled them from Palestine in the wake of the third revolt - they were taken in by the descendents of new converts created by Pharisees, and these cities became the seed communities of jews in Europe and North Africa.

But it is true that modern Judaism does not try to convert others and has become a racial identity as much or moreso than a religious identity, however this was not the case for those rabbis when the mishna was compiled or when the oldest portions of the Gemara were first written.

In any case, what difference does it make if Jews in the first and second centuries were proselytizing? The religion changed since then and everyone knows it. Traditions we take for granted today like the Passover Seder had only just started to develop in the second century. There was no Jewish Calendar at that time and there was no canon of scripture (there was a collection of holy writings that overlapped with the Tanakh, but what was actually in that collection depended on who you asked).

In this century, and for at least the ten centuries prior (likely longer), Jewish apologetics has only been in response to efforts by non-Jews to convert Jews to other religions, and that is very different from Christian apologetics.

Very few religions require proselytizing. I think Mormons are expected to go on missionary trips, but that's all I'm familiar with. In most religions, missionaries are selected from the group and sent out, so the job of proselytizing is a corporate, not personal job, and the role of "missionary" can mean anything from establishing universities and hospitals in Africa to preaching on a street corner in Atlanta. But no churches I'm aware of require some type of missionary effort from all of their members - maybe I missed one.

> In any case, what difference does it make if Jews in the first and second centuries were proselytizing?

It continued up through the middle ages, so this is over 1000 years. Pope Gregory famously complained about jews proselytizing, but perhaps he was making it all up. See https://www.jstor.org/stable/24659643 and also https://repository.yu.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.12202/6076...

In terms of what difference does it make, it's up to you to decide how much you care, I was only pointing out that rabbinical judaism, at least in the past, had similar missionary efforts to Christianity today. You can take that for whatever you want - I don't want to get into a debate as to whether judaism in the 20th Century is the "true" judaism versus judaism in the 10th Century or 5th Century. There are different sects with different beliefs as to what is authentic and what is not.

> The New Testament makes proselytizing a requirement for every Christian (the Great Commission).

Woah. Even in evangelical churches, the commission applies to corporate bodies and the verb "go" is passive, not active. "Make disciples" is active, e.g. . E.g. "make disciples as you go into the world". Now there are many passages where Paul asks for help to be bold and open his mouth, so it depends on how you define missionary efforts or proselytization. In the early church, would be converts were turned away three times before being admitted in some places, even as there was public preaching and mass baptisms in other places. But there was no general requirement that everyone do these things, rather there were special roles of evangelists who do them, again modelled on the Pharisees and their system. The notion of being "born again" and water baptism - john the baptist for example, these all came from jewish practices.

Now today, some evangelical churches have come to interpret a casual relationship in the great commission, in the sense that once there are Christians in every tribe, the end will come, and so to hasten that end they are trying to convert some from every tribe, but I don't think this is a mainstream view or a view that was part of historical Christianity.

But I agree there is certainly a practical difference in that there are evangelical churches that actively proselytize and send missionaries out which are funded by church members, but for example Orthodox churches don't do this and they don't interpret the Matthew in the same way as evangelical churches.

> There was no Jewish Calendar at that time and there was no canon of scripture

There was absolutely a jewish calendar that predates the Babylonian captivity. Most of the content of the book of leviticus is concerned with special feast days and observances, and these must occur at certain times of the year. That requires a calendar. Now regardless of whether you believe the law dates to Jeremiah or Moses, at whatever point in time the law was observed a calendar needed to exist before then.

It is doubtful that Jewish proselytizing occurred to any significant degree under Christian or Muslim rule, which would have been the majority of the lands where Jews lived during the medieval period. It was made illegal by various emperors, kings, and councils. Jews were already suffering the persecution of Christian rule toward the end of the classical period -- among other things, the Sanhedrin was abolished (its last act was the creation of a fixed Jewish calendar; the biblical system you mentioned was based on observing the moon and having religious authorities make announcements of those observations, which could not continue without the Sanhedrin). Judaism remains open to conversion by people who want to convert, but there have be no active efforts to find or win converts for at least 1000 years, and I suspect even longer than that.

The passage you cite refers to a gentile that wants to convert , not a tentative at active pproselytizing

Demonstrably nonsense. They were clearly written in Israel and Persia (latterly). Little is mentioned of communities elsewhere.

> Palestine in the wake of the third revolt

Oh... now I see you're gaslighting and re-writing history. Your sources will be the same ones Mahmoud Abbas used for his "thesis"

This is a poisonous reversal of reality, to the extent that I wonder if you're just trolling.

Fact is, more religious people, especially the evangelical Christian sect that is most vocal and influential in America, is not about examining implicit beliefs, nor is it open to debate. It's about falling into line, and adopting a strict set of ideological beliefs that are not negotiable. In fact, religion is often explained in terms of faith as an opposition to analysis: after all, if your first principle is that you believe in something, why question further?

In contrast, modern secular culture, although not immune to tribalism and ideological blindness, is much more open to building belief through analysis and understanding, i.e. the scientific method.

Again I’m not saying that religion is better or worse. Actually this is a defense of religion as a framework for defining belief.

I’m arguing that secularism when taken on face value lacks the tools to recognize it’s own belief system.

I know trivial beliefs e.g. today was 85º – we can agree that calling those religious would not be useful.

Using your original logic, -any- belief can be religious in nature. “Today was 85” -is- religious from your original position because perhaps people ritualistically check the weather every morning like a prayer. The weathermen are like priests disseminating knowledge, and small talk is used to find other weather checker cultists.

It does not matter what belief Id offer up, because it will match your original definition because your original definition is so broad as to be meaningless. Other comments have already said this in fewer words. If you are unable to identify what it would look like if you were mistaken, then you shouldn’t be confident that you are correct. So how could someone identify the difference between a secular belief and a religious belief?

Truly a bonkers assertion when secularism includes enormous institutions to fund and perform tasks as various as the hard sciences to the most abstract philosophical investigations and the entire gamut of cultural production around and between.

The average person doesn't much participate in these institutions but the average Catholic hasn't read Humanea Vitae either.

People are often not secularist because they don't reflect, usually they have specific reasons that they are aware of and that they might question in the future.

I think this was true, at a certain point in or for a window of time, but it certainly isn't true today. There are well known axioms that are not-to-be-challenged, and doing so risks expulsion (i.e. Excommunication). So maybe what's happening is Secularism is going through its own phase of Fundamentalist Revival.

And that's where so called 'atheism is just a religion' got it wrong. No, it's not about getting a result. Scientific method is a way of processing information. It's about the process, not the result. It's not about believe the god exist or not(the result). It's about find out a way to prove (process). And it's perfectly fine if u can't produce a solid proof(provability). 'I don't know' is perfectly fine. You don't even have to believe, use the scientific method to analyze, do you best to deduce, and move on to the next topic. 'Religion' is just a topic to study. If people can't really grasp how scientific method and critical thinking works, they would never move past 'to believe' or 'not to believe'.

I'm going to split out some terms here. Scientific Method, Academic Science, and Secularism. The latter two are connected to atheism, at least in this era, and are more in line with ideologies and I do not desire to further address or describe them in this post except to say that they do not have a monopoly on the merits of the scientific method.

To speak of the method itself, which is religion agnostic and, as you say, it is a function to provide information as well as the ability to duplicate results. I would append that applying the scientific method to religion works, and that you can, indeed, learn as well as duplicate results through it - as well as reject results that do not work.

A major challenge is that the resultant artifacts aren't readily transferable or inspectable. Many secularists get hung up on this and say it's an invalid application. Essentially that only what the eye can see or the hand can measure is real. I can't really show you my happiness, or peace, or share with you the the depth of experience or knowledge that heals and transforms. I can tell you about it, about how Christ can lead you to peace. I can describe the inputs and results, the complete formula, and then you can walk it and experience the fruits first hand.

Another part of the challenge is that lack of transferability also applies to the instrumentation. I can't provide you a properly calibrated conscience, or the concept of true humility before God like I could a measure of mass or distance. It's all internal to you. Experimentation on that is time consuming and difficult. Some people run experiments with improperly calibrated instrumentation and then fail to get the expected results.

Because it was not about result. Or rather, it's never about the result. It's about the process, in same vain of procedural justice. It's about finding the provability.

The thing is if you can't move past that you have to make a result. Or the extreme, result is ignoble. That the process of proving the utmost important part. You will never get what scientific method is about. Just like your last paragraph. Sure, there are so many theories. Maybe even someone claimed that that harry porter is real! But why do you have to believe or not to believe if you only care about the process of proving and provability.

It's not about proving that the religious people are wrong(or proving irreligious people are wrong). It's about the fact that, for some people , they truly don't care about the result or take the result itself so far as undetermined (still care about the proving process though) and moved past it.

In general, cult of personalities are clearly examples of secular religion although one that can become supernatural in the case of the Kim dynasty in North Korea.

Ceremonies and traditions that we continue because 'that is just how it has always been done'. There isn't some binary notion of you are religious or your rationalist, non religious people can hold non-rationalist thought.

Personally I don't really understand what you're on about with the scientific method, the parent didn't mention anything on it.

Because there is a clean distinction between athism(not relying on belief) and antithesim. Scientific method is a lens of analysis tool and it's beyond the framing of belief as how religious people claims, or even how antithesim people claims. Just like how I would explain the same to the some antithesim group that science doesn't prove the god don't exist. That's still a misuse of the tool of scientific method. To believe the opposite is still a belief, and missing the mark of the scientific method where the most important part is the process not the result.

Ideologies are a set of ethical/moral assumptions about what is right and just, i.e. they are about human practice, about what humans ought to do.

Religions are ideologies, but they are also a set of beliefs about the world itself, about the physical and metaphysical reality - which are thought as true a priori. This part is almost universally wrong, as we could learn by a competing concept: science.

Ideologies can only be falsified insofar as they base their arguments on statements about human nature - these can be questioned empirically.

More recently though, it seems to me that ideologies DO have a pretty strong impact on what people believe about the world itself, especially by people who have a tight coupling between their identiy and the ideology.

At the very least, this seems to apply to both sides of the current right/left divide in the west. For instance, if I ask you to predict how climate change will affect the world over the next 300 years, and your response lies in what is predicted by the 5% most optimistic climate scientists, you are very likely to be on the right. On the other hand, if your response corresponds to the 5% most pessimistic, you are very likely to be on the left.

As ideological polarization, an increasingly large part of the population will fall into one of theose extreme groups, which I interpret as a way that the ideology promotes beliefs that are not supported by science.

It seems to me that the underlying motivation is that people who believe axiomatically that a free market is good, see global warming as a threat to that belief. The leftists may believe the opposite because they see the free market as evil, or just to oppose the right.

There are plenty of other cases where ideologies cause beliefs that are not well founded in "real" science, even though there may be plenty of ideologes that promote them. Some beliefs are so sacret that any challenge to them will be punished as evil/heresy, which itself is a clear indication that the ideology does not value open inquiry.

I would even go so far as to see some of the principles and ideas involved as somewhat metaphysical. Capitalists can see the "invisible hand" in such a light, while leftists seem to imagine some sort of oppression to determine every social interaction (not very diffrent from how Christians in Europe believing that demons were virtually everywhere).

In the end, I think it is about the people following a given ideology. It used to be that atheist were a relatively small minority composed of mostly people with an above-average level of scepticisim to ways of thinking not supported by hard evidence.

But as the percentage of non-religious people increase, more and more poeple that have a religious inclination become "atheists", and those (I think) may be much more likely to accept incredible (literally) statements as fact, with little or no evidence.

I think classical vs quantum physics is a good example. It gave us information on determinism, but it didn't explain who / what is setting the odds.

Science can give us estimates for all the universal constants. It cannot tell us how they came to being.

We know there was a big bang, we don't know in which medium the big bang occurred.

Al lot of what you call "religious tendencies" are just cognitive and organizational tools. Religions use and codify (some of) them in their own ways, and other aspects and approaches to human life use and / or codify in their own ways too.

Whatever leads you to wish for more structure and codification in your life and the world that surrounds, and you find them in religion, that's fine. Other people find them in military life, others in self-discipline, others in ascetism, others in their professional career, etc. But trying to impregnate your religious beliefs and choices onto everyone else is, I think, just trying to justify and shut down your own doubts. If you don't see this then, if I may put it this way, you may lack certain cognitive tools to recognize it.

What OP talked about regarding ideology reminds me of the stuff that Zizek talks about. I'm no philosopher, but the thought that ideology has subsumed religion doesn't seem too far fetched. We, as a species, do seem to have a tendency to form religions and hold different biases.

Specially when religious people are so fond of calling something religious when that something has nothing to do with religion

It clearly hits a nerve too.

The sources of those beliefs are decentralized though, and the individual person can pick beliefs which suit their whereabouts, environment, and sub culture best.

Religion however is a centralized source of belief systems, which comes with problems:

- One size fits all solution leads to problems like this: Oh your best friend is gay? Too bad, our 2k year old manifest says they are bad people/subhuman/sick. (This makes me SO angry)

- Central authorities can and will exploit their power if possible: Witch hunts, crusades etc

- Self-actualization is constrained by a fixed set of rules: Tolerable in times where basic needs are often not met and are more urgent, but becomes an issue when 95% live better than a Pharao.

They are not well debated in a sense that it would be called reasonable in a normal and educated world. Thats why we call it believe. Its much easier to say 'whats written in a book from some people from some 2000 years ago is true' and start to philosoph around it than actually not stoping questioning until there is a real truth to it. My discussion with a very religios person stoped after i realizied they are convinced that stuff in that book is relevant and true and moving the debate of it to 'our old people studied it and gave those learnings to future people'.

Interesting to read that for you, becoming more religiuos made you aware of other religious tendencies. For me it actually started in school with discovering group dynamic and then after that, questioning religion which lead me to being non religious and i'm very very aware of how other cognitive biases and media and co are forming us.

The biggest problem you might not understand in your world of codified: 'the other believe system' is universal and doesn't need to be codified its just that you might need to discover it for yourself or accept the truth yourself.

Ah it sounds much more spirital than i wanted it to be. Effectively my family/friends are normal good people. We don't identify us through religion and we don't hurt each other. We basically are all on the same planet, we know who birthed us but we don't know why. Single wall of truth: the big bang. Single simplest rule: Don't harm others / don't do things you don't want others to do to you.

And actually, certain states have very well defined law books which answers a ton of questions. Even slightly weirder ones that if someone had an accident with a car, to a degree both parties can be in fault. Its basically us wo build our believe system through living together.

But a Roman citizen 2000 years ago didn't have faith. They just knew that God(s) exist. It was obvious, self-evident and compelling. The greatest thinkers of the time really believed.

Most Christians talk about faith and belief because that is the only thing left that science hasn't overturned. Our understanding of the world is dominated by science not religion. We won (mostly).

Or maybe you have a different definition of "religious" than I do? But no, it must be that I lack the right cognitive tools. Sheesh.

If you are a member of a religion, the things you have “faith” in are right there in front of your awareness. If you don’t have religion, the metaphysics/mythos/philosophy your reality is based on is often never acknowledged. The “super rational” can be the worst at denying this and best at handwaving away anything that doesn’t fit into their sense of reason.

Maybe I live in some kind of intellectual bubble, but me and the vast majority of my atheist friends are all too aware of the fact that the rationality ends at some point, so I've gotta disagree with this pretty hard. In fact, I'd be hard pressed to find anyone I know personally who thinks it's rational all the way down.

Overall these pitfalls can be avoided by following some principles: reject taboos, seek more information, avoid metaphor, accept that some things you can't know

OP is correct. Religion is a subset of ideology, and not being religious does not in any sense guarantee that one isn't trapped inside an ideological frame.

But OP is wrong to suggest religion is a cure for this, or even a workable substitute.

Ideological thinking is a template - a kind of psychological design pattern. It may well be innate, and can only be sidestepped by learning a different set of philosophical habits.

Collectively, we don't have that. Neither critical thinking nor science do the job. They do other useful jobs, but teaching how to avoid tribal identification among followers and competitive authoritarian individualism among leaders - the real core of all ideologies - isn't something they're designed for.

One of the main points of Zizek regarding ideology, relevant to what you said, is that as religious ideology has waned in importance, other ideologies have taken their place, yet because they do not come from religions we do not recognize them as ideologies, though they are. But ideology has always existed in this form, in the background. It is just without religion taking a forefront in life that the importance of other ideologies has grown.

Anyway, I bring it up because I do not think it is possible for us to explicitly address all ideology. Ideology is part of the human condition, not in a metaphysical sense, but because we have only limited abilities to perceive and understand the world - finite lifetimes, limited senses, limited cognitive abilities. We must make assumptions and generalizations, take things for granted, and trust people and ideas so that we can spend our time thinking about other things.

Why? Because it's exhausting to explicitly address all ideology. I'll give you some examples: Country, Culture, Government, Justice, Love, Fairness, Ownership, Work. In discourse we take on only limited slices of what these concepts mean, yet we take their existence and high level concepts for granted (though one person's concept of fairness may not match another's). These are heavy, complicated topics in themselves.

> If you believe you are not religious, it just means that you don’t have the cognitive tools to recognize the secular ideology that you have adopted.

Depends on how you define religion. In my opinion what separates religion from philosophy or just ideology, is claims regarding the supernatural and divine. You can absolutely appreciate religions for their wonderful philosophy and theology while rejecting what I would consider very core parts of what makes one a believer in a religion, like belief in supernatural events or divine beings.

Based on my opinion that religion requires a belief in supernatural events, I would not call those religion per se. Definitely dogmatic. I think the parallels come from the tendency for human organizations to all take essentially the same structure, if you squint.

+political factions +institutionalized science +media

They all tell us what to think, "trust us we did and will do the hard thinking for you".

Hubris is a sin. I'm sure someone with your sharp cognitive tools can recognize that.

"Free markets" are just turning loose an optimizer that optimizes for - something. Central planning just pushes the problem back to the planning level. Combining the two for political ends tends to produce strange results because economics has very poor predictive power.

This uncertainty tends to drive people to faith-based positions. That doesn't work either, but it satisfies some basic human need.

When you start to see the level of obsession people have over certain topics, it’s hard to call it anything else.

That sounds like twaddle. It could just be that the person recognises their secular ideology - and knows that it doesn't constitute a religion.

You had something interesting to say, why'd you have to go and close it out with flamebait?

Maybe: "it just means that you haven't recognized the secular ideology that you have adopted"?

Essentially groups and ideas survived better when there was an organization and social rules built up around this human tendency. Left unchecked reckless nonsense ideologies spring up too easily, an organized religion gives this human trait an outlet (and often becomes an unchecked wreckless ideology itself, but... less often).

Or in another sense, the big organized religions are the winners in a centuries long evolutionary race of ideas. The nonsense ones destroy themselves eventually, the less nonsense ones survive and spread (seriously, judaism is thousands of years old and has a health code, much of which in context is decent advice).

There were religious answers to all these questions. God's were just the best explanation going for why things happened. And over the next 2000 years science slowly chipped away at that. And then the origin of species was published. To the point where in 2021 most people will have answers based on science. Even religious people.

Science has won the battle of ideas again and again. Religion has retreated into faith and existential fear. And slowly but surely science will shine a light on that fear.

In a liberal bubble in an atheist society? I remember the South Park episodes on the prophet, and I remember my countrymen executed for "insulting" the said prophet. At least the "cancel culture" chills some racism.

> If you believe you are not religious, it just means that you don’t have the cognitive tools to recognize the secular ideology that you have adopted.

You can understand the simple fact that all us humans being shitty doesn't imply that some aren't even shittier? When we say someone is "selfish," it means they are more selfish than a majority of people.

Well this one may differ if you ask a Sunni or a Shi'ite.

Prophets are the same in both denominations. I am not sure why you think otherwise.

I don't think that's necessarily true though. Religion is synthetic: it's practice, it's discipline and existence is rooted in how easily it can be synthesized in different communities. Man can exist without knowledge of God: that's the very premise that fueled colonialism and, to an extent, feudalism.

- anthropology

- problem of evil/sin

- redemption

- eschatology

If your system he answers to these, you basically have a religion.

Sin/evil isn’t really a thing in many religions. Polytheistic religions for example can have multiple contradictory ideas for what the correct actions are.

Buddhism is really interesting here because there was such a wide range of different beliefs involved some of which fit that idea and others don’t. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_eschatology

Here's an alternative definition from Merriam Webster:

> a belief concerning death, the end of the world, or the ultimate destiny of humankind

Religion is made up of things that did not happen and have no evidence. If something does have evidence of being true, it is called history.

You are confusing obsession and focus with religion.

Truth has no relation to news and news is not about observation of fact.

Even if you witness events yourself, your understanding of what occurred is a narrative you tell, not truth.

All truths and history are interpretations within religious (or ideological) frameworks. Truth as we use the word is not attainable.

There are no exceptions to this!

Is this statement in the set of "all truths ... within religious (or ideological) frameworks" or is it an exception, as it were, to the rule?

In an ideal situation maybe, but very frequently it is manipulation. Videos are taken out of context or outright modified to fit a narrative. When you watch the complete video it is very often different than the 10 second clip shown on the so called news.

> Religion is made up of things that did not happen and have no evidence

Do you believe everything in the Bible is false or just certain parts? If you believe certain parts are accurate then I don't see how it is any different than news in your view.

Even so I am far less dogmatic in my worldview and conclusions than I ever was a religious person. To imply that my lack of religion is somehow a religion itself just hilariously misses the point.

They have arguments that they make to nonbelievers. That's not the same as being genuinely open to debate.

I saw a few comments interpreting the last line as snarky or condescending. I just meant that my experience helped equip me with tools to understand the world better, like learning a new language or programming language does. There are other paths e.g. through philosophy that many seculars pursue as well.

I'll admit that in the absence of religion, some people pick up ideological causes and treat them as a religion. However, I'm interested in knowing what "rituals, origin stories, deities, saints, priesthood, blasphemy, vice & virtue" you think I have.

Is it generally seen as an arm open to debate? I have a very religious friend who has gotten into apologetics in the last 6mo or so, and he explicitly describes it as "defending the faith." That seems much less drawing conclusions from evidence and much more drawing evidence from conclusions.

Maybe he's an exception to apologetics, though, as I know he has some admittedly extreme views in some ways.

I also don't really consider myself an atheist, either. Ignostic is accurate. Maybe that's worse ;-)

A value system is not a set of beliefs. I think it's important to treat people fairly. But I don't believe that the "universe" or whatever cares about fair treatment of people. What matters to me personally or what I find ethical has nothing to do with any sort of deep truth about the world. I like ice cream, that doesn't mean that I ascribe any metaphysical importance to the taste and texture of ice cream.

I also don't have "deities" or anything that affects my life in a supernatural way, and I'm not sure what gave you the idea that secular people (in general) do - maybe you talked to a bunch of esoteric-minded people, or to the kind of environmentalist that turns nature into some sort of mystical deity, but that's not every secularist (nor every environmentalist).

Maybe you should try talking to actual atheists instead of strawmanning them.

An alternative view, and one that, IMHO, is favored by Occam's razor (to name just one cognitive tool), is that both religious and secular ideologies are consequences of a more general human nature.

Are you saying science method is a secular ideology then? Nothing else is required to analyse, understand and explain the world around us. Nothing.

Just to note that preistocracy tends to be corrupt in almost all religions.

This also makes it a less important

I don’t think it’s purely a semantic argument though, religion is predicated on the supernatural whereas ideology isn’t.

How would that statement apply to your god? And would they be religious?

That's just a trick religious evangelizers use as bait to unleash their barrel of canned answers.

And boy, you really have a lot of ammunition to use.

But, and this is an important but: In the end, it is all just rhetoric to justify what you already believe and are unwilling to change.

How is that different from what the atheist side offers?

The fact is, the big questions in life tend to be complicated to figure out, so canned answers are a practical way to not devote your entire lifetime to redeveloping the conclusions from scratch. Ideally, you'd also do some due diligence and try to figure out whether they agree with reality as you understand it.

There's a reason why we use caching in computer science. Cached answers should of course be invalidated in cases where they are found to be incorrect, so one should remain open to the possibility of being wrong about their beliefs (though just how open, is a subject of individual opinion).

That one is easy: we don't pretend we have the answer to everything. In fact, that's the first thing we say.

Is the sun going to appear in the sky tomorrow? Probably yes, as far as I know, with 99.99999 certainty, but it is never 100%.

Pure theological questions are answered by me with: is that even a useful question? I don't even care if a god exists, because so far they have been unable to interact with the world in any meaningful way. And you people worry so much about your next life, you are forgetting to live this one.

It's called (analytic) philosophy.

The label "not religious" doesn't mean anything. People use it to refer to atheists, in which case you are alleging that atheists by definition don't have the tools to understand their own position - which is absurd. Others use the term to refer to minimally-practicing members of a faith who basically only show up to places of worship when there is an official event, in which case you argue that these people don't understand the reasons why they avoid their own religion until they become active practitioners.

> The secular world would benefit from adopting more formal definitions of their belief system.

First of all, a secular world doesn't preclude the population from being religious. Having a secular world that is explicitly separate from religion only means that society itself is not regulated by religion.

If by secular world you mean the percentage of the population who is atheist or agnostic, then you're not talking about a specific belief system. You're talking about a diverse group who have chosen to not believe in deities, and that often extends to not believing in the supernatural altogether. The allegation that this absence of belief happens without reflection is simply untrue. On the contrary, being an atheist is still a thorny path to take, even today. It doesn't happen passively.

> In the secular world these aspects exist but they are implicit, making them difficult to debate and attack.

When you say that these aspects are well codified in religion, what you really mean is that specific religions have behavioral codices that members must adhere to. The consequences of non-adherence depend on the religion and the society. But when you look at different religions, these codices are all quite different.

As soon as a population contains more than one religion, what you are touting as a benefit quickly becomes just as impossible as if you were dealing with an atheistic society.

What you find difficult to debate and attack is non-uniformity in general. I consider that a plus.

You are of course completely correct that a diverse society can appear more nebulous, and in some ways individuals can have a much harder time finding a path in life if they, well, have to actually go and find a path. This is a consequence of the freedom to choose. Systems that don't give you those freedoms are assigning a path to you from on high, or at least they heavily constrain your choices. No doubt some people would prefer that.

But the benefit of living in an open society is that you have the option of choosing to be religious, and you are free to choose any religion and any flavor. A secular society doesn't take that away in any form, it just means that your religion doesn't get to make the rules for people living outside of it.

To get a sense of how condescending that comes across, imagine if I turned that around by saying: "Religious people have more atheistic tendencies than they're aware of. By understanding atheism and/or science, these tendencies can be recognized."

A huge number of HNers would immediately see all the things that are wrong with this sentence: it generalized a diverse group, it alleges their world view is invalid and incomplete, and it's an obvious attempt of the speaker to redefine other people's convictions in terms that are easier to attack.

Namely; "we may be in the midst of the discovery that the only thing worse than religion is it's absence"

Although it's not conclusive that absence of religion is worse than religion itself, there's tons of evidence for it (e.g. communist & fascist atrocities, medical experiments) – I'd wish that secular believers were more self-critical and introspective.

My biggest concern of modern culture is the sense of inevitability. That progressiveness by definition is beneficial, without any sort of reflection. May things have regressed, and we should take account of the many benefits and setbacks.

"In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it." G.K. Chesterton - The Drift from Domesticity

Such an ego!

"I alone know the truth about the universe! The rest of you are lacking in cognitive tools, i.e, stupid."

All while claiming other people don't have the cognitive tools you do. I'm amazed this comment didn't get downvoted.

it's the HN psuedo-intellectualism. Most HN readers tend to believe in their above-average intelligence, and that their view point comes from a place of rationalism and superior intellectual capability to analyse the world.

I myself, also fall into this category.

There is no mechanism by which the ABSENCE of a belief in your parent's invisible sky wizards becomes just evidence of an alternative belief system.

Not believing in the tooth fairy does not make my understanding and endorsement of say, the periodic table, an equivalent, dogmatic, religious, ineherited-from-parents belief.

The two are not the same. One is better.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

It's the Dunning-Kröger in action; people like you believe that somehow our universe, reality, the nature of humans, are perfectly definable. What you're not realizing is that the concept of God goes beyond any attempt to rationalize; I don't use rationalize in the context you're thinking, but in the mathematical concept of rationality. Language, how we code information into words, is based upon rational polynomials whose coefficients and values take on the alphabet; binary systems being something you may be familiar with. As soon as you codify 'God' as something rational ('sky wizard?') you imply a limit and impose boundaries on a limitless and indescribable entity.

But if you're trying to just mock people for believing something you don't understand, that's fine too, I've always found the most insecure and least intellectual to be the ones that try to show others how "smart" they are.

That's just mumbo-jumbo of the "not even wrong" category.

If you want to make the claim that there are things in the universe that we can't ever understand and/or are fundamentally non-computable (in some mathematical sense), I can't fundamentally disagree. Nobody knows whether that's true or not.

It's a long stretch from there to any notion of God, though.

Other branches are definitionally critical of various binary systems(all of the LGBTQ things), describing them instead as continuous systems, or even complex planes.

I don't think such definitions are very useful. They're very limiting since the world is full of edge cases, and your ideology is unlikely to handle all of them well, but is also likely to require you to handle some of them poorly

That is Marxist false consciousness and should not be brought up in a debate.

As for the difference between the two, for me a religious belief is one that is without evidence, a non religious belief is one that has some evidence for it, even if it is still wrong (e.g if you believe in the misama theory and so avoid stinking food you are less likely to catch a food born illness).

I do agree without you that it would be better if we adopted some better understanding of the secular beliefs, but that would also cause a lot of infighting because not everybody who hates the current system wants to replace it with the same and they may hate each other more than they hate the current system.

As an example: Malcom X and MLK. They didn't want to be under the boot of Jim Crow. They disagreed about what they wanted and how to get there.

Religion has one fundamental cognitive device - faith. It’s not a tool, it’s malware.

If it did that, it wouldn't be able to use it a source of social control. What we have is a society of true believers, that's why they can't see it as a religion, it's just reality to them. I really don't think you can be a true believer and call your religion anything but "reality," especially a "religion."

Anyway, there have been some attempts at documenting American religion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_religion

> If you believe you are not religious, it just means that you don’t have the cognitive tools to recognize the secular ideology that you have adopted.

I think there are still a few people who aren't religious and I don't really think your criterion here is the most useful. It just begs the question.