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RasperFat posted:poo poo I hadn’t heard that he died it just happened yesterday randi was into eugenics instead. it really bummed me out when i learned that.
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Oct 22, 2020 23:46
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Zongerian posted:You haven't provided any proof to support your claim that it couldn't You need proof that energy is required to make any changes in our universe? Every piece of information interpreted by your brain is energy, whether its sight or smell or taste or touch or sound or even balance. It’s a fundamental law of reality. Even a super-dimensional all powerful being would only be capable of making their world knows through the medium of energy. What are you looking for exactly?
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Oct 22, 2020 23:52
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:randi was into eugenics instead. it really bummed me out when i learned that. it's also sad that he's beyond our coming up with a way to refer to him a randian and then clarify that we meant ayn rand he is beyond our slings and arrows
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Oct 22, 2020 23:53
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RasperFat posted:You need proof that energy is required to make any changes in our universe? one problem is that energy is a really tempting metaphor for all sorts of mental processes which, although they ultimately depend on the substrate of matter and energy, don't really work much like actual physical matter and energy these only directly cause change in that they cause change within ourselves. in principle this can then cause change in others and therefore vast change in the physical world. however this should not be confused for the energy cost of the physical and mental work being done, because that is a related material phenomenon which is distinct from the subjective and intersubjective experience of the process. i'm sure that totally makes sense Hodgepodge has issued a correction as of 00:01 on Oct 23, 2020 |
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Oct 22, 2020 23:55
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RasperFat posted:It’s a fundamental law of reality. Even a super-dimensional all powerful being would only be capable of making their world knows through the medium of energy. Wrong
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Oct 23, 2020 00:00
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Hodgepodge posted:separating a kid from their family for their material benefit is ultimately horrible, yes. what is more horrible is having a king, even a literally enlightened philosopher king. religion didn't create this disparity, and it criticizes it and renders it explicit just as often as it obscures it. however, all this is ultimately to say that as a means of truly creating justice and ending suffering, it has failed. in a sense, the horror of the situation is that the vast disparity is made explicit when an effectively random infant is chosen as king when, in principle, he may have otherwise starved to death. the sheer leverage of wealth and power is evil, but this evil we see here in the example of a small agrarian feudal monastic kingdom was crushed utterly by the evil of the vastly greater power disparity inherent in colonialism. it is true that religion obscures power relationships; one of the ways it does so is by selective criticism of religion from a nominally neutral standpoint. even if we're doing so as a thought exercise to further discussion, the point of criticism of former tibetan practices is not in any meaningful sense to determine a political position on the subject. our ability to do so in good faith amoung ourselves masks the purpose of directing our criticism at an indigenous and colonized culture in order to obscure the fact that our own relationship to that culture and others is far more monsterous. There’s pretty much agree with all of this. Religion isn’t even close to the origin of societal inequities. I’m not going to pretend that if people started all being secular humanist materialists suddenly we take care of the poor and nobody gets exploited. Where my contention comes in is that religions further entrench these power structures. While still not easy, it’s much easier to convince someone that policies will be good society if you’re not contending against someone’s spiritual truth and identity. Hell I even think Buddhism is far less destructive and coercive than Abrahamic religions, I only brought that up to point out problems systemic to all spiritual institutions.
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Oct 23, 2020 00:00
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Hodgepodge posted:one problem is that energy is a really tempting metaphor for all sorts of mental processes which, although they ultimately depend on the substrate of matter and energy, don't really work much like actual physical matter and energy That’s exactly how I view it. Computers don’t work exactly like brains either but it’s the closest thing we’ve conceptualized so far. Regardless brains, just like computers, are composed entirely of the energy (matter and light) that everything in our universe is made of. They are incapable of receiving any stimuli without the matter that composes our brain cells and nerves have a physical energy transfer.
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Oct 23, 2020 00:04
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:randi was into eugenics instead. it really bummed me out when i learned that. drat it. Ah well I already said I’m open to canceling him. Almost every historical or public figure is a piece of poo poo so whatever.
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Oct 23, 2020 00:05
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Zongerian posted:Wrong You’ve really gotta expand here I’m trying to be pretty precise with definitions. I’m sure that hypothetical superdementional being is capable of doing all sorts of crazy poo poo beyond our imaginations. But if they want it to affect anything humans do or perceive it has to effect the energy in our universe
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Oct 23, 2020 00:07
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:randi was into eugenics instead. it really bummed me out when i learned that. lol holy poo poo not even lampshaded James Randi interviewed by Will Storr at TAM! 2013 posted:I quote some of [Randi's] comments that have concerned me, about his wish for drugs to be legalised so that users will kill themselves. But, to my surprise, he does not dismiss them. Not even slightly.
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Oct 23, 2020 00:09
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tried to make a homunculus but i accidentally created hillary clinton
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Oct 23, 2020 00:10
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RasperFat posted:You’ve really gotta expand here I’m trying to be pretty precise with definitions. An all powerful being can do anything, that's the whole point of being all powerful
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Oct 23, 2020 00:10
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RasperFat posted:There’s pretty much agree with all of this. Religion isn’t even close to the origin of societal inequities. I’m not going to pretend that if people started all being secular humanist materialists suddenly we take care of the poor and nobody gets exploited. even buddhism we tend to see through rose-coloured glasses and japan is a ready example of how easily it can be bent to evil in the service of imperialism when reconfigured into the state religion of a colonial power and there's just the fact that the advantages of this or that metaphysical premise in terms of being a better opioid for the suffering of imperial feudalism (even if by the medium of some genuinely transcendent truth) doesn't translate into actually making the past good or even better; if anything it is simply more literal in the manner in which it states that spiritual truth is at the very best compassionate care for human suffering, supportive treatment, not the cure. well it does offer a cure but universal enlightenment in a buddhist sense would basically be a mass extinction event from a material perspective. but it's not really the point because in my rough understanding, universes tend to run out of the ability to support life at a much faster rate than karma is resolved at any rate.
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Oct 23, 2020 00:13
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*tips fedora* m'thready
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Oct 23, 2020 00:19
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Liberation Theology is the way forward. It’s deeply touched my life. Jesuit Mysticism and Benedictine Monasticism are great but their appeal isn’t as great.
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Oct 23, 2020 00:24
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:randi was into eugenics instead. it really bummed me out when i learned that. He really wasn't. That whole thing was him saying we needed to end the war of drugs since the only thing it does is making criminal drug traders rich. The social darwinism stuff was him arguing against the argument that if heroin was legal that a bunch of people would go take it and die, saying that even if that was true that it doesn't justify keeping drugs illegal forever, since the issue of people kept alive by heroin being illegal would sort itself out pretty quick and good riddance to them. Like, it's not at all the most woke opinion on drug policy, it's a bad take, but people used it forever as a gotcha that he suddenly was the master eugenicist who loved to cleanse the gene pool and was basically a nazi. There was no indication he ever generally liked eugenics beyond like two quotes that were saying "gently caress the drug war" in a tasteless and sort of meanspirited way.
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Oct 23, 2020 00:29
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Hodgepodge posted:even buddhism we tend to see through rose-coloured glasses and japan is a ready example of how easily it can be bent to evil in the service of imperialism when reconfigured into the state religion of a colonial power Admittedly I know a lot more about European history and it’s evil imperialist history than Asian history. It’s easy to miss a lot of the historical baggage I’m sure the religious institutions in Asia have. Especially because Buddhism doesn’t seem to have as much violence and sexism hard baked into the important texts.
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Oct 23, 2020 00:32
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i eat an ounce of mushrooms and talk to god when i do i lay on the floor crying for two hours and hallucinating heavily
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Oct 23, 2020 00:33
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Frosted Flake posted:Liberation Theology is the way forward. It’s deeply touched my life. I like liberation theology it’s one of the few solid religious philosophies that promotes community and equality. It’s just hard for me not to take the positive aspects of it and detach them from the historical baggage of Christianity.
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Oct 23, 2020 00:35
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TheLemonOfIchabod posted:Thanks for the clip. The guy seems like a bonehead, but his explanation for why his "powers" didn't work actually speaks to what I see as the limitation of Randi's project. There really is no way to prove that this dude cannot in fact move a phone book page with his mind when he is by himself and following a specific procedure that he has established. There is no way to prove that the light or the other conscious minds there in the room without didn't stop him from doing what he seems certain he can do. Personal experience and introspective analysis are very difficult and at times impossible to reconcile with the empirical standards of the scientific method. If something happens in one observer's presence and cannot be replicated for the other observer, it is labeled as false and the effect of "confirmation bias" or something similar. I disagree, there are all sorts of ways they could have changed it around if they weren't constrained by being in the middle of a TV show. They could do the same thing in the cold so you can see his breath, same thing but look at him with a FLIR camera, have him wear a scuba rebreather, probably a bunch of other ways too. If the only way he can turn the pages can be duplicated exactly by an old man breathing on them it doesn't seem unfair to say he's not doing anything beyond our comprehension. Like someone said up thread the Randi challenge is set up to be a slam dunk for anyone who really does have supernatural powers. You don't have to be able to explain how you are doing it, just be able to do the thing you claim you can do with people versed in stage trickery watching you to make sure you aren't a fraud. Owlofcreamcheese posted:He really wasn't. That whole thing was him saying we needed to end the war of drugs since the only thing it does is making criminal drug traders rich. To add to that, Randi was a teetotaler who claimed to have never done any drugs or alcohol ever, and those people always have hosed up ideas about drug use.
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Oct 23, 2020 01:01
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ppl create imaginary worlds all the time to escape into and what is imaginary ends up applying to the real world
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Oct 23, 2020 01:04
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also i'm sorry but your religion is a superstition that is okay though because people believe in lots of crazy superstitious things, it is part of the human experience
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Oct 23, 2020 01:08
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nobody gives a poo poo dude
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Oct 23, 2020 01:12
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BitcoinRockefeller posted:
Yeah, he wasn’t great on that stuff, but the twisting of his hot take of “well if you want to do drugs till you die then good riddance to you” into a big claim he was generally into eugenics as a thing always felt like deliberate character assassination. Like it’s a bad opinion but people that don’t like him always seemed like they were super disingenuously making it more broad than it was. Like he was generally a good guy so they tried to do some “well he’s actually basically a nazi if you think about it” thing
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Oct 23, 2020 01:47
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RasperFat posted:I like liberation theology it’s one of the few solid religious philosophies that promotes community and equality. That’s just it. For a while I was grappling with how to be a Catholic and a Socialist. Liberation theology powerfully and coherently welds them together. If religion is the opiate of the masses, syncretism with Socialism is a good way to reach people who would otherwise stay away, especially when the Left is tainted by edgy fedora athiests.
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Oct 23, 2020 02:03
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Frosted Flake posted:That’s just it. For a while I was grappling with how to be a Catholic and a Socialist. Liberation theology powerfully and coherently welds them together. It’s so sad we didn’t have more Carl Sagans to represent atheism in the media. Secular humanism is what speaks the most to me, and it’s generally a pretty chill group of nonbelievers that respect people’s culture and is socially conscious. As long as we’re human we’ll probably always have weird beliefs about the universe. I’m sure I’ve got things wrong despite my best efforts to stick to rational materialism.
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Oct 23, 2020 02:18
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RasperFat posted:Admittedly I know a lot more about European history and it’s evil imperialist history than Asian history. It’s easy to miss a lot of the historical baggage I’m sure the religious institutions in Asia have. Especially because Buddhism doesn’t seem to have as much violence and sexism hard baked into the important texts. one thing you see when you look closer at all is that misogynists have tried to bake their bullshit into buddhism and in some cases successfully inserted their memes to the degree that you can run into them as a white person who's just curious, but there are what appear to be counter memes. in the west you tend to find the evidence of the patriarchy (an appropriate label because the literal roman patriarchs and early christian patriarchs, again the actual title, were some of the most successful cases) editing poo poo, making it up, and suppressing alternatives. otoh there are places now listed on the map as "buddhist athiest" in which the men will tell you their sophisticated, abstract, atheist buddism is the true buddishm, and their wives and daughters who do all the work to support them and have no time for education or philosophy and get precious little support from actual people merely worship personal buddhist deities because they are too ignorant and too dumb to grasp the real truth or practice properly
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Oct 23, 2020 05:27
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the way to learn about religion is to immerse yourself in the world through drugs, friendship, yoga, adversity, prayer. reading things on the internet doesn’t teach anyone anything about god, one way or the other.
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Oct 23, 2020 20:07
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- hi
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TheDon01 posted:he came out as gay at like 86 or something, I dont think he turned into a dick dorkins, seems like he just spent the last few years being a very very old man and probably napping a lot He's in Epstein's black book so
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Oct 23, 2020 20:15
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chair on the advisory board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation too lol
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Oct 23, 2020 20:34
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jesus christ: vampire hunter really deserves to be in this thread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IblzBerSFk
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Oct 23, 2020 20:38
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Oct 23, 2020 20:41
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if you aren't a materialist you're a bad leftist, but a bad leftist is still better than a liberal, and prioritizing (anti-)religious divides over class divides is counter-revolutionary
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Oct 23, 2020 20:47
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Dr. Killjoy posted:chair on the advisory board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation too lol No way lol
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Oct 23, 2020 21:15
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Generally my spirituality is an inner journey. I'll freely talk about it but like it generally doesn't impact anyone and I use materialism to understand the world otherwise lol vOv
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Oct 23, 2020 23:33
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I grew up in the bill gothard cult and it's really hard for me to see religion as anything other than a mechanism for control. Even the most benign faith is used as a method to control one's self to behave in a certain way or have less bad feelings. I have absolutely no reason to believe in an actual diety and honestly I don't think anyone else does either. A god is just a way of giving your mythology a frame of reference. That's while I like secular humanism. While still a framework for control it's a bit more honest with itself and the frame of reference for the mythology is a shared human struggle for life, love, meaning, exploration, curiousity, and stewardship of the earth. Also, secular humanism was the big boogey man and satan's own tool to corrupt the youth in all of the curriculum I was force fed in school and there's something kinda satisfying about joining the dark side.
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Oct 24, 2020 00:31
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Leroy Diplowski posted:I grew up in the bill gothard cult and it's really hard for me to see religion as anything other than a mechanism for control. both true although we at best approach the ecstatic "dionysian" aspect with trepidation, and of course that loss of control is maybe the same vulnerability which makes the whole endevour ultimately open to predatory behavior also hail satan
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Oct 24, 2020 00:39
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In some alternate world where religion wasn't intrinsically tied to our world history and wasn't a medium for cultural expression, it'd probably be better to just say gently caress it, but we don't live on that world. From a Marxist perspective, material conditions determine history. To put it another way: religion was the lens by which society was contextualized but it was a tool to understand reality, not reality (material conditions) itself. The Catholic Church may have been used to justify feudalism, but it didn't cause it - the material conditions did. Decentralization of empire led to feudalism, while the labor shortages from the Black Death began the end of it. It's also important to recognize religions are a reflection of class forces. History is written by the oppressor, not the oppressed, but that doesn't mean only oppressors have religion just that those are the "mainstream". During the Middle Ages, the opposition used religion to justify itself as well. Various neoplatonist movements were used to frame adversity to the rigid (and corrupt) hierarchy, but there would be that resentment whether there was a 'gently caress communion' to take on or not. The Kharijites took a religious stance to opposition to the caliphs but you can bet your rear end those same folks would have been saying 'gently caress you dad' even if the empire was secular. Trying to frame these as religious struggles rather than as class struggles is falling into a trap of history being determined by ideas rather than by materialism.
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Oct 24, 2020 02:10
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Hodgepodge posted:jesus christ: vampire hunter really deserves to be in this thread: Lol I’ve never seen that before. Is it a full length movie?
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Oct 25, 2020 01:25
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I'm a Buddhist chaplain working in a healthcare setting at the moment, I'll throw my two cents in. I'll start off by saying that I recognize the exploitation and destruction that has been engendered by religion and none of this is meant to ignore that - I want to be sensitive to the fact that religious trauma is real and I do not wish to be dismissive of that pain despite my involvement with religion. With regard to my own personal experiences, I initially found value in engagement with religion because in a period of great suffering I was desperately seeking some form of community within a capitalist society that pushes us more and more towards atomization and alienation with each passing day. As traditional models for community continue to breakdown, I find very little is offered up as a substantial alternative. Within religion I also discovered the importance of ritual and liturgy for making meaning out of our lives, for sharing grief as well as joy, for creating communal memory, for providing otherwise absent material relief/social safety nets, and for providing a way for people to explore the human condition together. Obviously, as others have pointed out, this has historically been done poorly, but I've encountered a number of healthy religious communities who've managed to do this in such a way that brings value into the lives of their members without traumatizing them with hateful baggage. I wish that was more common. I don't believe religion is the only way to accomplish community like this, but I personally haven't found many alternatives that emulate this well. We are creatures of language - we employ narrative and symbolism to organize our conceptualization of the world, and religion provides a way of doing that which can be aesthetically rich and meaningful in a way that I personally didn't really find possible with secular humanism since it by and large lacks the liturgical, symbolic, and shared communal life that is embodied in religious communities. Even if the literal cosmology is false, I think there are elements with these stories and symbols that have the potential to communicate profound insight into what it means to be human and can be the the source of some serious wisdom. Again, I will preface that this is my personal take on it, and I'm not dissing on secular humanism. If that's what works for you, more power to you. I don't think everyone needs religion, but I think there a lot of people who do end up finding a need for it in some way or another. I end up seeing most of my patients while they're in a time of incredible crisis/suffering/loss, and most of them, even those who don't have a particular religious affiliation, turn to the chaplain to provide some sort of framework for them to articulate their suffering. I don't provide concrete answers and it's certainly not my job to evangelize to them (nor would I find it ethical to do so), but I do help explore what it all means for them through these symbols/stories while providing a presence that lets them know they're not alone. I think that's what I find is the work of authentic spiritual praxis - alienation lies at the heart of the human condition, and the work of a healthy spirituality is to wake up to our relationality and the intimate existence we all share with one another. The material and social conditions engendered by capitalism, unfortunately, provides added difficulties in actualizing/realizing this. Additionally, I found within Buddhism what I presently deem to be an accurate assessment of the ontological status of reality in the concept of Emptiness - there's no individual there, but an interconnected web of interdependent phenomena that is subject to flux. This had powerful implications for me, and provided the framework for me to challenge a lot of the western individualist freewill bootstrapping bullshit that I think is really harmful to our world. Suddenly there were no free willed agents there simply choosing right or wrong, there were people whose lives were the direct result of causes and effects stretching throughout history into the present that shaped their psychological, social, ideological, and material conditions (i.e. karma). I saw this in direct contradiction to the way our criminal justice system will simply mangle someone's life by locking them away in a living hell for "choosing" evil instead of considering the ways in which systemic issues might motivate individuals to engage in certain behaviors out of survival among other things. The lesson for me was that we don't exist in a vacuum - we inherit certain conditions which give definition to our lives and shape the way we act in the world, and reshaping systems becomes a way to change those conditions which people inherit, hopefully for their benefit. When considering all of this in terms of our political landscape, I began to consider more and more the need to dismantle capitalism on an ideological and practical level - the destructive notions of free willed individualism that is wrapped up in it may as well be pseudo-science. I'd like to a see system that recognizes our interconnectedness and moves us to wonder what was missing from someone's life, or what factors were at play in shaping their destructive behavior that we might be able to address instead of shoving people into the violent hell of the prison industrial complex and pretending it's somehow therapeutic, restorative, or positively constructive. I was especially inspired by the Buddhist monk Uchiyama Gudo, who was an active anarcho-socialist that interpreted his political philosophy through the lens of Buddhist thought and the Great Vow to save all sentient beings. He advocated for radical land reform/wealth redistribution, the dissolution of the prisons, and the abolition of the Meiji government before being executed by the state for his activism. Obviously religions are institutions, and even if there are aspects of the religion that speak to something true about the nature of our reality or the way we experience our humanity, and thus provide a way for us to address the human condition, they are still subject to the same ossifying forces and bullshit that plagues every other ideology or institution. I'm personally in favor of more decentralized religions - smaller communities/networks over the grand imperial institutions of the past that served as a way to reinforce class/caste systems. Though, I understand there will always be grifters no matter the size or the power of the institution and that the state inevitably capitalizes on that if it's not already outright supporting it. I'm not sure that's a reason to abandon religion though since that's essentially a problem in everything. I'm not saying religion is a panacea or that everyone ought to be religious in some ways - I don't think you necessarily need religion to find transcendence or community or whatever you might be seeking, but as for myself I have a profound sense of gratitude for the opportunities of religious engagement that I've had, up to and including the current community I'm a part of. Religions aren't monolithic, and some of the more "progressive" factions are going through a period of growing pains where they're trying to figure out how to be relevant in an era that has moved away from ancient models for conceptualizing the world - maybe they will die off and something new will emerge that communicates whatever wisdom is there in another way. Maybe not. Buddhism taught me we continually mistake the map for the territory - I recognize there are a lot of problems within theistic religions whose theological imaginings of the world are grossly at odds with what we've learned through the scientific method (I also won't pretend Buddhism doesn't have its own problems which others in this thread have already pointed out). Maybe we can find a way to reinterpret those stories, symbols, and rituals going forward and discard what isn't useful anymore. Maybe they're better off fading away, I don't have a solid answer. At any rate, I'm not sure how much of that was coherent. It's late, I'm high, and I'd just thought I'd speak to some of my personal experiences and thoughts. Pulvis Sumus has issued a correction as of 06:45 on Oct 25, 2020 |
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Oct 25, 2020 02:39
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