The world was created or just is?

Oh, thanks.

 

Yes, I imagine there are plenty of formerly chaotic or lost souls who have found structure or discipline and changed their lives through kick boxing, rock climbing or yoga.

 

The language is metaphoric, but more than a bit descriptive of what's going on in the U.S. today. Some things are predictable and repetitive.

One of the most vicious arguments I ever had the misfortune to witness was over politics between My d-i-l's father and sister. They have not spoken to each other in almost 3 years.

 

The language is metaphoric but ALSO a harbinger of future violent events through which Jesus made (past tense) his presence felt in what we now call the Fall of Jerusalem. The only Jesus of whom we have a record cannot be tamed or domesticated. He is the Rider on the White Horse in Revelation.

Also, do you believe the U.S. is more fractured than ever or has social media amplified and exacerbated existing division ? After all, Americans engaged in bloody conflagration.

I’m thinking my way through that subject.

 

I disagree with:
1. people have to want to be good or have to be good to act good
2. that religion is necessarily the explanation for the Jewish Diamond merchant behavior.

There are many situations where cooperation is the best reply whether you are good, bad or indifferent. In the merchant ex, it seems to be repeated interaction with an indefinite end pt. I would expect behavior that is observationally equivalent to being trustworthy & "good". I suspect if anyone deviated from the cooperative solution they would face swift & unpleasant consequences. (brain scans show that sanctioning people that have be unfair to others triggers the same part of our brains as sex & chocolate.

Having said that, my friend at Emory showed that people tend to attribute good behavior to people rather than institutions/rules/law. She had people interact in a situation with a strong control system & a weak control system. It was more costly to screw someone over with a strong sys. What she found was people attributed both good & bad behavior to the people rather than the sys & when the sys were removed, the ones under the strong sys continued to cooperate.

 

A subject worth thinking about. Too bad more people don't give it serious contemplation.

Yes, I do think the nation is more fractured and I do attribute much, or even most of it to social media and hucksters. The internet is an echo chamber, a cacophony of angry and assertive voices, each side seeking traction to promote their political views and advance their agendas. Both sides boast their liars who are looking to gain influence and advance their agendas, making their political preferences the law of the land. Yes, I do believe one side of this divided spectrum is more responsible for the fracturing than the other, but that was not the question.

Some years back, 1017 as I recall, one regular contributor to this forum posted he would not hesitate to lie to see his party's agenda advanced. Why I asked. He replied he felt entitled to do it because the "other side" lied. Without the anonymity of the internet would he lie or have admitted he lies? Would there be as many conspiracy theories, lies or rumors circulating without the Internet?

Mark Zuckerburg has dismissed the charge his Facebook site promotes divisiveness. Others disagree. A Brookings paper had this to say. How tech platforms fuel U.S. political polarization and what government can do about it | Brookings

Contrary to Facebook’s contentions, however, a range of experts have concluded that the use of social media contributes to partisan animosity in the U.S. In an article published in October 2020 in the journal Science, a group of 15 researchers summarized the scholarly consensus this way: “In recent years, social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have played an influential role in political discourse, intensifying political sectarianism.” In August 2021, a separate quintet of researchers summed up their review of the empirical evidence in an article in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences: “Although social media is unlikely to be the main driver of polarization, they concluded, “we posit that it is often a key facilitator.”

"Polarization is a complicated phenomenon. Some divisiveness is natural in a democracy. In the U.S., struggles for social and racial justice have led to backlash and partisan animosity. But the extreme polarization we are now witnessing, especially on the political right, has consequences that threaten to undermine democracy itself. These include declining trust in institutions; scorn for facts; legislative dysfunction; erosion of democratic norms; and, in the worst case, real-world violence.

"All of this cannot be attributed to the rise of Silicon Valley, of course. Polarization began growing in the U.S. decades before Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube appeared. Other factors—including the realignment of political party membership, the rise of hyper-partisan radio and cable TV outlets, and increased racial animus during Donald Trump’s uniquely divisive presidency—have contributed to the problem.

But that doesn’t exonerate the tech platforms, as Facebook would have us believe. One study published in March 2020 described an experiment in which subjects stopped using Facebook for a month and then were surveyed on their views. Staying off the platform “significantly reduced polarization of views on policy issues,” researchers found, although it didn’t diminish divisiveness based strictly on party identity. “That’s consistent with the view that people are seeing political content on social media that does tend to make them more upset, more angry at the other side [and more likely] to have stronger views on specific issues,” Matthew Gentzkow, a Stanford economist and co-author of the study, told us in an interview.
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Unless we gain some sanity I fear we are headed for a cataclysm of epic proportions.

 

Hey Wes, I’ve enjoyed your and @murphree_hall’s conversation. I side with murph on the whether we can have true knowledge of god, but I think you raise an important point in suggesting that no knowledge is absolute. Still, I do think that some ideas must be judged more justified than others, and the process of science is the best of our imperfect options for deciding this. Among the crucial tenets that give science its value are testability and replicability.

Anything, such as personal experience, that cannot be validated via testing and replication, likely should not be considered science. That isn’t to say that our personal experiences aren’t important, or even true, but that we cannot validate them from the outside. As such, I think this experience cannot rightly be called knowledge, as I think this distinction is reserved for communal experience, and I am unfortunately locked away from your personal experience. Indeed, most of us have unique experiences. As John Locke keenly noted, if strong personal feeling is evidence that it be from God, God would become the author of contradictory truths.

In the end, I certainly don’t want to diminish your experience or relationship to the divine. These seem to be most excellent experiences for you, which I am most happy to see. I just do think they have to remain in a different epistemic category than, say, how effective is a particular toothpaste. As boring as that topic is compared to the nature of the creator, it is one in which we can all participate in seeing.

 

Minor point: scientists, by and large don’t insist on the scientific method and, as far as I can see, they don’t generally employ it. More and more science is a guy in a labcoat who told me what to believe.

 

This appears reasonable to my lights and may indeed be entirely true. However, it would seem that there must be some traits that we would like to see in citizens in order to have a good society. Probably we would not all agree on these traits, but maybe a lot of us would say cooperation, commitment, kindness, etc. If Christianity instilled those traits on people (and not all of us would likely agree here either), perhaps it could be a beneficial force even as a minority belief system.

 

I think this is a challenging topic, as we don’t all seem to agree on what it means to behave as a Christian. We often seem to see different things in the Bible. As I wrote to wgb above, I am kind of viewing this more through your low bar of personal codes of behavior, rather than a model for governmental legislation. I am certainly no expert on Christianity or the Bible, but Paul was cited above, and I will cite him here:

“Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life. You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders.”

Clearly not all of the Bible sounds like this, but mind your own business and win the respect of outsiders through quiet deeds sounds to me to be a lovely way to live with others in a society.

 

Paul does call Christians to live a quiet life and insofar as possible to get along with others. At the same time, his manner of living for the Christ got him harassed, imprisoned and eventually killed.

 

I don’t necessarily disagree with you. I just mean that nothing will appeal to someone unless it appeals to them. You cannot take over someone’s mind, you can only offer things that they may or may not accept.

As for the diamond merchant / religion hypothesis, it certainly isn’t proven. However, if the Jews ended up being the most trustworthy only because they selfishly want more in future exchanges, we would still need to explain why most other rival groups of people failed to perform this task as well as they did.

I also agree with you that the most functional cooperative societies are those that evolved norm enforcement mechanisms. The functional religion hypotheses suggest that religion can act as such an enforcement mechanism. It certainly isn’t the only one.

And interesting data from your friend. Thanks.

 

We’ve been though this territory before, and I would just say that I am of the mind (along with modern philosophers of science) that there is not such thing as the scientific method. The norms, standards, and practices that evolved in the different branches of science are quite divergent from one another. I don’t think this result means that there is no such thing as science, but science cannot be demarcated from non-science via a single objective rubric.

 

Certainly there are people that believe that all are worthy of mercy and grace, secular and religious, but more often than not cooperation, kindness, commitment seem contingent. So much has replaced or backgrounded a secular or religious ideal of the universality of man, the most notable being a capitalist market logic, a notion of exchange value in all relationships. I dont think this can completely overtake our humanity, but society certainly has conditioned us to see exchange as an opportunity to advantage ourselves over others rather than a Christian or humanist notion of obligation without reward. The whole notion of a "underserving poor" (which implies some people deserve their miserable state) which informs our welfare state and dealings with poverty and homelessness is counterintuitive to Christianity and the teachings of Christ.

 

I wonder what lesson we should take from this? Is it that Paul was wrong? Or could we say that we would prefer to live in a world where people followed Paul’s advice rather than the one that Paul himself seemed to have actually inhabited?

 

Well said, wgb. While I have a higher regard for markets than you do, I think we should not deny that our economic system almost certainly has to influence our way of viewing the world and each other and often in ways that our sober selves would not appreciate.

 

Its pretty wild that figures like Rod Dreher have gone from the "Benedict Option" circa 2017 (which is basically Christians should live a quiet life and not worry about politics and culture wars) to "lets get our own Viktor Orban and do institutional capture and remake society" in the span of less than a decade. I guess all it took was a 6-3 right wing Supreme Court to change his mind.

 

A not so well known system of social cooperation involving sharing a common resource are the Spanish land grants in NM & Colo. Probably even less known is the woman (Elinor Ostrom) who got the nobel prize in econ for studying the mechanisms that made them work. My wife worked with her in the 90s.

 

It is pretty interesting and certainly not a development that I welcome.

 

Elinor Ostrom is one of my heroes (though I have to confess that I haven’t gotten around to reading this book myself). That’s so cool that your wife worked with her.