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Comment by rimantas | Hacker News Reader

One can find much more objective meaning to existence without outsorcing it to some imaginable friend.

  > Christians believe that for folks who don't know Jesus,
  > nihilism is essentially true

And folks who don't give a rat ass about what Christians believe do know that nobody has monopoly on meaning and don't see the need to reduce everything else to nihilism. It would be much nicer if religious people would only use religion to measure those who are part of it, not those who are outside.

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> It would be much nicer if religious people would only use religion to measure those who are part of it, not those who are outside.

In my experience, they do focus most of that measurement internally. Christians attend Sunday morning sermons, weekly Bible studies, confess their sins to one another, read the Bible, read books on Christian living, etc. all in an attempt to measure themselves against the tenets of their faith. The Christian faith even talks about the ways in which Christians should be more strict on fellow members of the Church than on outsiders.

But if you genuinely think you've found salvation and meaning, isn't it kind of selfish to keep that to yourself?

In my experience[0], most religious people use their religion to create and foster a sense of difference with Others, and do not keep the focus internally. American politics is a crucible of religious sources of obligational determinism locked in combat with secular forces.

If you genuinely think you've found meaning, it's not selfish to keep it to yourself, until such time as someone asks for your thoughts in their own search for meaning. Which means it's likely to only happen with people you've grown close enough to that they open their private selves to you.

[0]: A born-and-raised ethnic Christian who helped start two churches, whose family is still extremely religious, and who lives in the still very religious southeastern US.

>In my experience[0], most religious people use their religion to create and foster a sense of difference with Others, and do not keep the focus internally.

Having lived in both religious and secular communities, it seems to me that tribalism is a human universal. Secular people have no trouble judging the religious by secular standards. I'm not saying that's bad, I'm just not clear about what the secularist complaint is at that point.

Also, my point was not that Christians (and religious people in general) never pass judgement on the rest of the world, but that most outsiders don't see the investment Christians make in subjecting themselves to scrutiny by the standards of their beliefs.

Complaints about religious hypocrisy are sometimes relevant, but sometimes they are a red-herring.

> American politics is a crucible of religious sources of obligational determinism locked in combat with secular forces.

Could you clarify what you mean by "obligational determinism"? The only google search results I could find lead me back to this thread.

> If you genuinely think you've found meaning, it's not selfish to keep it to yourself, until such time as someone asks for your thoughts in their own search for meaning. Which means it's likely to only happen with people you've grown close enough to that they open their private selves to you.

I'm as annoyed by the door-to-door evangelists as the next person (I think there are better approaches) but if you genuinely think other people might be missing out on eternity, then isn't it a bit schadenfreude to not reach out to them at all?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I can respect a secular person who says to a religious person "please don't talk to me about religion". Assuming the secularist agrees to do the same, the theist should generally respect that wish. I can also respect the secularist who engages theists and attempts to dissuade them of their beliefs. It makes no sense to me that secularists should ask theists in general to keep their beliefs private, as if they were talking about the color of their underwear or something.

Apologies for missing your reply till now, first of all.

> Having lived in both religious and secular communities, it seems to me that tribalism is a human universal.

Unfortunately, this is all too true. I did not mean to imply the non-religious were excluded from being tribal and differentiating themselves from Others, as well. I was only responding from my experience that, particularly within the public sphere, religion occupies just as strong a force in identity politics as other personal features.

> Could you clarify what you mean by "obligational determinism"? The only google search results I could find lead me back to this thread.

Thanks for asking. You've caused me to go back to an old text and discover I had, somewhere over the years, inadvertently mis-remembered a particular phrasing. The phrasing I should have used is "sources of religious obligation" or "religious sources of obligation". Basically, minus the determinism—too much time between studying and recalling philosophy led to a pretty boneheaded error. I draw the phrase from the excellent debate between Robert Audi and Nicholas Wolterstorff in Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate. My error, over the years, is rooted in a careless recollection of the role religious sources of obligation play in determining what a person thinks should or should not be done, particularly where coercive public policies are concerned.

I apologize for the error.

Thank you for the response, and for finding the reference.

> I was only responding from my experience that, particularly within the public sphere, religion occupies just as strong a force in identity politics as other personal features.

That is true. In contrast, one of my main points was that there is a significant amount of private, sincere religious practice that is not (primarily) political in nature.

I did not wish to downplay the role of religion in politics (which you correctly point out is significant) but rather the role of politics in religion.

Now, the question of what role religion should play (or should be afforded) in politics is an interesting one; one that I don't have a clear position on at present. I read some Wolterstorff while I was studying philosophy, but I don't recall that specific book. From what I have sampled so far it seems quite interesting.

> Now, the question of what role religion should play (or should be afforded) in politics is an interesting one; one that I don't have a clear position on at present.

I definitely recommend the Audi-Wolterstorff book. They both tackle this specific issue from opposing perspectives, and I found it highly illuminating at the time. It has remained with me to this day—even in misremembered form.

>But if you genuinely think you've found salvation and meaning, isn't it kind of selfish to keep that to yourself?

And isn't it stupid not to double-check the evidence and figure out how to demonstrate the ostensible truth you've gained to others?

That depends. If your definition of epistemic justification is some variant of Positivism, then my answer is "no".

If your definition of epistemic justification is not so utterly self-defeating, then "yes", but then we can no longer automatically infer that religious beliefs are unjustified.

> It would be much nicer if religious people would only use religion to measure those who are part of it, not those who are outside.

Only speaking for Catholicism here, but the fact that official Catholic doctrine touches so heavily on so many areas of life, making objective and universal claims about human nature, means that Catholicism can't help but make assertions about people who aren't Catholic or even Christian. This tends to deeply piss off a lot of people, even when no individual Catholic is actually applying those principles to specific non-Christian individuals. In other words, many people tend to not it when religions have anything to say about people who aren't in that religion.

There's a certain amount of amusement to be found when differing religions' assertions conflict.

I'm thinking specifically of a certain elderly Irish Catholic gentleman's response to the LDS' efforts to retroactively save ancestors by means of genealogical research. He was more upset than I thought he would be, given that the process was completely off the wall from his viewpoint as I understood it.

>One can find much more objective meaning to existence without outsorcing it to some imaginable friend.

Care to elaborate on this? I'm an atheist myself and I've been struggling with this a lot.

Aesthetics is one possibility. When someone straitens a picture frame they don't need that to last past the heat death of the universe for it to be worth it. Expanding this to say a painting or poem which also has a finite lifespan and you can even learn to appreciate a Mandala. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandala

Keep going in that direction and a life well lived is it's own reward. And by well lived I mean occasional cliff diving not devoting oneself to charitable giving.

There is a lot of pressure for 'success' but I suspect many people are happier with a career in dog grooming than they would be as CEO of IBM. High status can be fun, or endless drudgery.

The issue is defining what it is to be "well lived". With out a sky daddy, you're pretty much unable to declare anything good or bad.

Some men want to watch the world burn. Tell me why that is wrong? You will say that human life has value. I will ask, honestly, why? From a purely reductionist perspective it doesn't. It's all just atoms. I kill cockroaches without a negative thought. There is no reason to not have the same view of people in a purely materialistic worldview.

Again, if one's aesthetics is gruesome, but enjoyable to that person, you cannot tell them they are wrong. You cannot interfere with them from an ethics perspective. They want to kill, steal and rape, you have to let them. Otherwise you're forcing an external model that you deem good onto them. We've already established that there is no actual good model.

The result is that we must accept hypocrisy. We must all realize that might makes right. The most powerful, flawed group of people are correct. They are the law.

You are presupposing a suicide bomber somehow had a bad life. I am rejecting that assumption and saying a swat team and the person their shooting could both have lived a great life.

Following the rules of society results in lower friction, and is generally a net positive trade off. That does not mean it's always the correct path. After-all George Washington could easily have been shot as a traitor.

It may seem the strange for a hangman to respect the hanged, but morality and rules need not be 1:1.

PS: This also set's up an interesting freedom duality where someone is free to impose rules and others are free to break them. With the right set of rules you end up with a Darwinian system with huge pressures to enjoy conforming. And a safety valve of people rebelling if the rules are unacceptable. Oddly enough this actually maps fairly well to the real world.

No, I make no assumption about the the suicide bomber. I'm say he didn't do anything bad. He could kill thousands. Not bad. The reason is that "bad" is meaningless. There is no such thing as right or wrong in a materialistic view. Aesthetics doesn't get you there. If the bomber things that the death of thousands looks good, it is. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

You are trying to add morality where there is zero need for it. "Tell me why that is wrong? ... You cannot interfere with them"

My point was you don't need to say what someone did was "bad" to stop them. As long as more people prefer an ordered world then the dissidents can be dealt with.

If majority rule says giving to the homeless is a capital offense then so be it. Physics and thus biology are going to impose a few rules. Further, completion kicks in at the social level. But, that does not mean Anarchy is "bad" just out competed.

Thus, while morality does not impose any rules collective groups of people do. Not because might makes right, but might exists and there is no right.

PS: At the extreme at one point I realized I was being paid in part to help maintain nuclear weapons. Not because I believed in them instead I liked money and other people want them.

Killing thousands might not be "bad" for a suitably vague definition of the word, but it's undeniably rude.

Philosophy has many different shades and colors (Philosophy of language, science, mathematics), and there is also a "branch" asking questions related to the meaning of life.

I can't tell you where you could/should start, because I feel like I would already influence you too much by taking some sort of choice away from you.

I will link a few essays I could find that are available for free and are not too long. I'm already influencing you a little bit by making this selection, but I urge you to do your own research: If you like one of the stories, try to find out who was influenced by whom (e.g. Kafka doesn't directly address meaning but influenced Camus; Nietzsche was influenced by Schopenhauer), and consider reading things challenging the author.

[1] The Last Question - Isaac Asimov (http://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf)

[2] Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5200)

[3] A Clean, Well-Lighted Place - Ernest Hemingway (http://www.url-der.org/a_clean_well_lighted_place.pdf)

[4] On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense - Friedrich Nietzsche (http://www.jpcatholic.com/NCUpdf/Nietzsche.pdf)

I've often see people link the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, so I'm gonna do it as well: http://plato.stanford.edu/index.html

While I'm writing this gutenberg.org seems to have some problems, but just search for "Metamorphosis Kafka", and you should find plenty of other sources.

Interesting that you seem to be like me in wanting people to find their own path instead of influencing them in one direction too much. My meta is that this gives them more ownership over their chosen path, from which they'll potentially derive more pleasure and more meaning :)

Trying hard to have people make up their own mind can be hard for dating, though.

That's rather hypocritical though, right? Athiests measure religious people with their conceptions of science and reason, why can't it go the other way?

Speaking entirely for myself here as an atheist, I think most of us just want to be left alone to believe what we believe without having religious people constantly approaching us with "Well, you don't know Jesus, that's why you believe X,Y, Z." As if they're somehow certain that a God exists and that we simply aren't enlightened enough to see it.

I agree, but having some close Christian friends, I can tell you that some of them indeed are certain about some things. That's what they call faith.

Well, the devout most decidedly are certain a god exists and that everyone else aren't enlightened enough to see it—where it is the given devout person's chosen god.

Hitchen's Razor - "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

Like Hitchen's Razor?

I try not to police grammar, but it ought to be Hitchens' or Hitchens's. On a side note, he is sorely missed in a lot of contemporary conversations.

I agree. I did not agree with everything he wrote, but everyone of his articles were insightful and I came out a better person for having read and thought about them.

How can you have a world view that doesn't encapsulate the whole world?

At most you can encapsulate the world you have perceived (+ stuff you imagine) which is much smaller then the whole world, and even that is a stretch, because we have limited computation available to us, so there is a lot you might be unable to account for due to limited time for accounting.

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