Comment by tmptmp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tmptmp | Hacker News Reader

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>>And familial obligations (especially filial obligations, e.g. obeying your parents) serve to prime people's acceptance of external authority, such as adoption of framing devices and conceptual models.

Can you elaborate a bit on framing devices and conceptual models? I didn't quite get it.

>>In any event, like a Zen Koan if you think to literally about the problem--filial vs individual vs community obligations--you'll miss the forest for the trees.

By forest exactly what are you referring to? BTW, we must not miss the parental and other familial obligations too.

>>Obviously how you qualitatively and quantitatively measure things will strongly dictate where the optimum is, and different religions will counsel different equilibriums for identical circumstances.

Very well said. I liked this very much. So much for the people (especially some religion apologists) who insist that all religions are equal as their core messages are same.

By framing devices I meant things like, most simply, obedience to authority. Arguably one of the defining elements of Confucianism is an equivocation between filial duties, on the one hand, and duties to increasingly distant and abstract social relations on the other. By contrast, in Christianity you just have "obey your parents" on the one hand, and "render unto ceasar what is his" on the other, which doesn't dictate the particulars of how authority operates in a society to the same degree that it's dictated by Confucianism.

But also, for example, devices that teach you to think of the good of the community as a good accruing directly to you. In other words, a hijacking of selfishness. Many religions teach that good deeds and sacrifice will accrue a benefit to you in an afterlife.

I just didn't want to suggest that religion necessarily turns people into sheeple, to be inevitably abused by elites. That's often a consequence, but that's hardly always the case. And that's a possible consequence of culture more generally, not just religion. In this sense I think of culture as the underlying phenomenon that makes religion and other forms of complex social organization possible in the face of the counter-veiling Darwinian genetic forces; as opposed to culture referring to the beliefs and habits of a particular community. And I usually distinguish religion from other social structures by reliance on magical thinking, though magical thinking is hardly exclusive to religion.

I don't have a degree in psychology or anthropology or anything, so my personal models and definitions aren't academically rigorous. Though I studied international relations in undergraduate school, and I ended up reading quite a lot of economic, sociologic, and anthropologic literature on these issues.

Thanks a lot. It helped.

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