Hacker News Reader

Secular philosophy has failed to produce enough value for ordinary people living ordinary lives embedded in the ordinary matrix of threats and opportunities presented by every day life.

I don't there's much, if any, evidence for this claim. Religion is in a steep decline in Europe but there's little evidence for more anti-social behavior. The American mid-west, where your quote comes from, in contrast is especially religious for an advance industrial area and it's noted for it's horrific social problem.

I think you misunderstood me a bit. I was not agreeing with that quote, or disagreeing for that matter. I was commenting on the phenomenon.

On religion and social health I do have to ask which way the arrow of causation goes. Is Europe healthier in many ways because people are less religious, or are people less religious because they experience less crises and dysfunctions that drive them toward religion?

When someone's father just died of an overdose or their marriage is failing and their family is breaking apart, which secular philosopher would you recommend that they read?

I think you misunderstood me a bit. I was not agreeing with that quote, or disagreeing for that matter. I was commenting on the phenomenon.

I understood you as "entertaining the possibility" of your original quote. I don't think that you can take such a statement in terms of "big if true" without looking at a larger context.

On religion and social health I do have to ask which way the arrow of causation goes. Is Europe healthier in many ways because people are less religious, or are people less religious because they experience less crises and dysfunctions that drive them toward religion?

I don't think there's a strong arrow of causation either way. The US is very religious (for a developed nation) for it's historical/social and economic reasons and Europe less-so similarly. The one thing I'd say is that, statistically, there's little plausible evidence that "turning to religion" helps the US' problems.

When someone's father just died of an overdose or their marriage is failing and their family is breaking apart, which secular philosopher would you recommend that they read?

It seems half this thread has been riding the strawman of "secular philosophers". I could mention a variety of secular sources that make an effort to provide hope or reconciliation or whatever from the Sartre and Camus to the latest self-help, non-religious stuff claims to provide a lot.

But the real way these argument are faulty is that they assume religious approaches are somehow the tried and true approach for dealing with tragedy and that assumption is just unjustified. If we throw the gates open to discussion of how to deal with all of life's difficulties it's a big topic and one I'm going to claim I have all the answers to. But I don't want let the assumption "religious is well known for dealing well this stuff" just slip in. That's not my experience. I've seen religious people spend a lot of time blaming the people who've experienced these tragedies. I've seen people turn away from religion and not find it useful and I've with a variety of personal tragedies without religion and done just fine. That's anecdotal but it's mostly refusing to accept your presupposition.

Religion may be the opium of the masses but opium isn't usually isn't a cure for what ails it's average user.

What is the horrific midwest social problem?

Specifically I'd like to see some quantifiable data because any region (including the EU) can be claimed to have horrific social problems without anything other than subjective data to back up those claims.

To be honest, I've never heard of the midwest referred to anything other than boring, which seems like it would be a strong contradiction to "horrific social problems"

We can start by the fact that their political leanings have led most of these states to have the highest COVID 19 death ratios because they don't believe in vaccines, nor science.

None of the top 11 states by COVID 19 death rate are in the Midwest.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...

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

The top Midwest state is South Dakota, in 12th place.

This is overhyped ragebait masquerading as news. The reality is more nuanced - not everyone is on board with the idea that the government gets to mandate medical practice, and those people get framed as stupid or stubborn or antisocial.

There are deep and rigorously rational and ethical reasons to be against the current vaccine narratives promulgated by this administration. It's ignorant and disingenuous to dismiss the arguments as equivalent to the "vaccines are made of mercury, cause autism, the lord is my vaccine,etc" single digit iq cretins.

It got politicized because apparently both parties decided it was OK to fuck with America's pandemic response, because it justifies expansion of power and control. Never let a crisis go to waste.

I will like to say I've been to anti-vaccine mandate rallies. I have found all of them with no exception to be anything matching the description.

Everyone I talked to believed in one or in most cases many conspiracies up and down the list. There was alot of anti joe-biden pro trump activity and a lot of Evangelical Christian crap (main speaker led everyone in Christian prayer).

Lots of Bill Gates and Fauci hate and lots of 5g is a world domination conspiracy.

I don't deny there may be some people only there about the mandate. But I've found that , that sort of person seems to be rare

Rallies of that sort aren't attended by rational people anyway. That's not where most people opposed to mandates align politically. The rallies are political stunts and attract the same crowd you'd expect at an old circus freak show. Just like framing Republicans based on what you saw at MAGA rallies, or democrats by whatever drama AOC is up to at the moment - those are the 2-5% fringe folks that make for salacious clickbait, while the remaining 90% of adults in the country are more boring and complicated.

I'm a counterexample. I was hesitant about getting vaccinated for covid because it was developed so quickly and all medical interventions carry some risk, so you shouldn't completely abandon decision-making. I eventually got vaccinated because it felt like the risks favored that. But at that time, in my country, only 1 person this year had died from covid and also 1 person had died from the vaccine (yes, the vaccine does kill people occasionally). In a covid-free country, the relative risk of vaccine is much higher.

Also, orthodox Jews are idiot conspiracy theorists? Yes, I guess so. People neglect to include Jews when they criticize religious people because they have their favorite demonized religion (Christianity) and somehow venerate the others.

Secular philosophy has failed to produce enough value for ordinary people living ordinary lives embedded in the ordinary matrix of threats and opportunities presented by every day life. Religion has done that for thousands of years.

There are zillions of ordinary people living ordinary lives all over the world who are largely areligious, especially in industrialized countries so this doesn't seem very accurate beside coming off as somewhat condescending. Additionally, for most ordinary people over many of the thousands of years in question, participation in the dominant religion of the time and place was compulsory.

The value system (and its underlying philosophical premises) which is being perpetuated by the society in which those areligious people live was crafted by religious tradition.

> Additionally, for most ordinary people over many of the thousands of years in question, participation in the dominant religion of the time and place was compulsory.

This is kind of a weird statement; for most of human history there was no line between religion and culture. So if participation in human culture is "compulsory" then I suppose you are technically correct, but then your statement is vacuously true.

Rites and aesthetics have existed independent of culture -- consider the Romans, who adopted, adapted, and incorporated others' rites but left the culture mostly unchanged. I don't know that the equivalence or dominance of religion-as-culture paradigm is conclusive.

>>>> "Creationism is true if it will keep my kids off oxycontin."

The thing is, it won't.

It would be a second or third order effect. It stands to reason that someone who is a part of a strong religious community would have a much better social life, support structure, and network. All of these things reduce the likelihood of getting addicted to hard drugs. You could also take it a step further and say that having such things makes breaking an addiction/rehab more likely to be successful, too.

> It stands to reason that someone who is a part of a strong religious community would have a much better social life, support structure, and network.

Remove "religious" from this sentence and it is still true. Now the question remains whether a religious community is better than other communities. I doubt it, because religion usually comes with a lot of extra baggage and can become outright dangerous.

It can be better because it exists even if it's worse than some ideal but mostly non-existent community.

Drug use and abuse levels do differ between religious and irreligious folk, but one explanation for that might be regional availability rather than religion.

https://drugabuse.com/featured/drugs-and-devotion/

Indeed, and to make it even more of a mess, regional issues also correlated with economic issues. My unorthodox opinion is that the opioid crisis started with an actual pain crisis due to the kinds of jobs that people were working, coupled with a lack of strong labor law enforcement and safety net. People were turning to pills because they were in pain.

It seems like religious people would be far less likely to seek professional help for abuse and that would skew these numbers greatly, considering the methodology.

Religious community members have far more reason to avoid acknowledging their drug problem in a way that might make that information public.

Surely that is circular - if religion did cause less drug addiction (and/or dealing) then you'd expect less distribution and thus availability in religious areas because there's less demand.

> One can find examples of both religion and secular philosophy promoting irrational thinking

This is whataboutism to an absurd degree.

"Yeah, religion is not perfect, but atheism is not perfect either, so they're both on par".

No, they're not.

> and I don't see any evidence that people who abandon religion automatically become more rational.

They just abandoned an irrational belief, so by definition, they are immediately more rational.

Given what we now know about the structure of the oxycontin problem in the US that’s profoundly depressing. It’s little to do with religious versus secular philosophy and everything to do with the political structure of society and a lack of action. Most often in the US by professed religious people at every level of the oxy trade and government.

Secular philosophy (including science) and religion address different concerns, and can coexist cooperatively so long as there is a willingness on both sides to do so. The first step in that cooperation is to put aside the question of which side is not cooperating.

> One can find examples of both religion and secular philosophy promoting irrational thinking.

Can you please give one example of secular philosophy promoting irrational thinking?

In my own experience having debates and discussions in this day and age, there’s this pervasive notion that you can’t assert anything without some citation or study to prove your point. This isn’t necessarily bad, per se, but it does mean people are offloading reasoning about a problem to letting some citation’s abstract make the point for them. There is a massive replicability crisis in academia and we know that the publish or perish culture means null results put careers into jeopardy. It is also heavily biased towards studying things that can be measured empirically.

So, here is my example, up until the mid 90’s it was widely believed in the medical community that babies could not feel pain. Anyone who has ever spent time around newborns knows that these little humans can indeed feel pain. Yet somehow, secular men of science came to the conclusion that no, they could not, and what we thought were pain responses were just reflexes. Besides, the infant wouldn’t remember it. They would perform surgeries without anesthesia on babies up to a year old.

Part of the problem as to why this profoundly wrong notion held on for so long was that there really wasn’t a good way to quantify infant pain. Eventually some researchers finally got around to devising some kind of measurement and the science eventually came around. But for a good part of the 20th century an incredible amount of pain was inflicted because a scientific notion couldn’t be refuted by a non-scientific argument (of course that baby feels pain, just look at him).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3523036

This isn’t a scathing indictment of secular values, but rather, a cautionary tale. Not everything needs to be proven via peer-reviewed papers. A lot of the human experience can still be asserted and known using unscientific or pre-scientific reasoning.

How is your example specific to secular values? I'm sure there are many doctors who are religious.

> there’s this pervasive notion that you can’t assert anything without some citation or study to prove your point

Yes. That's to prevent people from making false assertions. I can't believe you're arguing that people shouldn't need facts to back up their statements.

>” I can't believe you're arguing that people shouldn't need facts to back up their statements.”

I never said people shouldn’t need facts to back up their statements. I am trying to say that there are other ways to make assertions without having to cite peer reviewed studies.

And, that when people get stuck in a mindset of dismissing any idea that doesn’t have a citation to justify it, when subjects come up that aren’t easily studied empirically you end up with a blind spot. In my example the blind spot was infant pain. In my mind, any rational person would look at a crying baby and come to the conclusion that the little baby feels pain. But, if you demanded I bring a fact to back that assertion up, for the longest time I couldn’t provide you with one.

Yet again, your complaint about people asking for citations for doubtful claims doesn't seem to have any relation to secularism or its lack thereof. You might want to reconsider whether you are forcefully bringing religion into things where it doesn't belong just to make an argument against secularism for the sake of it.

Intuition can be secular. It is possible to conclude that the crying baby is feeling pain, or make many other types of hypotheses, without providing citations or using a religious framework.

That isn't intuition. That's a learned response.

I thought learned responses were tied to some form of conditioning.

https://dictionary.apa.org/learned-response

Anyway, my point is that a religious framework isn't needed to have a gut feeling about something.

Yes, which isn't intuition. Intuition is when you have a correct feeling about something even though you have no knowledge of the situation.

That's too strict of a definition, in my opinion, and I don't understand how conditioning is related to the crying baby example. Intuition can produce incorrect judgments and doesn't need the person to be clueless. Here's a dictionary definition:

> (knowledge from) an ability to understand or know something immediately based on your feelings rather than facts

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/intui...

No, it really isn't, not unless you have alternative definitions for "understand" or "know."

It's trivial to find examples of intuition being incorrect. The APA has a cover story on this:

https://www.apa.org/monitor/mar05/misfires

I view the emphasis on the scientific method and empiricism as the legitimate means of determining truth to be a major component of secular values. And for what it’s worth it’s a really valuable mindset for most real world phenomena, but not all.

I know plenty of religious people also like the scientific method and empiricism, but probably only as much as where it won’t conflict with their beliefs. I’m sure a pious doctor would easily dismiss a paper refuting the efficacy of prayer. So to me, at least, this kind of scientific worldview is not really a feature of religious thinking, but the two can coexist up to a point.

We used to believe that diseases were the result of bad smells and physicians used to go from cutting up corpses to delivering babies without substantial sanitary measures. The difference isn't lack of irrationality. To err is human after all. The difference is how science and religion move forward in response to new data.

I’m skeptical of this last sentence; I’m not sure that science is so responsive to new data either. After the myriad papers published on the replicability crisis, citation rings and the like, academic institutions have failed to change substantially with regards to either structure or process.

Science is done by humans and we're not very good at changing our opinions, in particular at institutional levels. However there is a difference between a priori stating that your dogma is infallible like religions typically do, and at least trying to follow the scientific process.

Religions hold that their positions are that of the immortal and infallible creator of the universe and hold them sometimes on pain of executing nonbelievers thousands of years later. These lies created from nothing are so resilient because its difficult to amend what you held to be divine truth.

Scientific theories carry with them the premise that they are merely the best theory so far and are subject to revision as new data comes to light. Some may jealously guard the fruits of their labor against newer better understanding and people both lie and fail to do the proper due diligence but the process though flawed because it is carried out by flawed humans is fundamentally different and better.

I'm interested in knowing, how exactly would you suggest institutions go about fixing the replicability crisis? With how things are as of now, I can't think of any way the scientific community can easily fix this problem.

Contemporary academic philosophy has some rather crazy ideas in it. David Lewis claimed that every possible parallel universe exists (modal realism), and is just as real as this one – our universe is the "real" or "actual" one only because it is ours. Takashi Yagisawa takes that one further, and argues that possibility is simply another dimension like space and time (extended modal realism), and that my existence includes not just who I am in this world, but extends to equally include my existence in other possible worlds, and even impossible worlds (logically contradictory universes).

Daniel Kolak claims that only one person actually exists (open individualism), and everyone is the same person, it is just that most of us haven't realised this fact yet. Graham Priest rejects the law of non-contradiction, and argues that it is possible for a proposition to be equally true and false, at exactly the same time and in exactly the same way (dialetheism), and has even suggested that these true contradictions may exist in the real physical world, not just in abstract thought about paradoxes. Nick Bostrom argues that we may be living in a computer simulation, and if we are not, that's bad news, it is evidence that humanity is doomed, or at least that our prospects as a species are not as bright as many hope (the simulation argument). David Chalmers argues that conscious awareness is a property not just of humans and (higher?) animals, but rather that everything in the universe is conscious, even inanimate objects such as rocks, stars, planets, galaxies, even cells and molecules and atoms and subatomic particles (panpsychism).

Are these ideas "irrational"? Rationality is in the eye of the beholder. But they are just as much "out there" as those of many of the great religious philosophers–whether Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, etc.

The entire "self-help" genre.

> "Creationism is true if it will keep my kids off oxycontin."

I think this highlights that while the specific claims of religion (on the age of the earth, origin of species, existence of God, etc) may well be false, religion nevertheless can be a useful social technology.

But this is a problem, because:

(1) many people who might otherwise become religious adherents can't be expected to beleive what to them is silly bafflegab (they could always just pretend to, but that has its own costs too)

and (2) religions tends to be really keen that new adherents actually do belief in their belief systems.

One solution might be an idea Scott Alexander had, of separating true-with-respect-to-external-reality from true-with-respect-to-human-psychology (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/15/raikoth-history-religi...):

>Raikothin religion, sumurhe in its own language, recognizes two aspects of God, called Truth and Beauty. The existing world is a poorly ordered mishmash of these two aspects, whereas God is the two aspects artfully and perfectly combined.

>Truth includes everything that actually objectively exists, in the exact way that it actually exists. This aspect is mathematical, precise, and completely devoid of subjectivity. It is symbolically associated with winter, stars, the colors blue and silver, and all the hard sciences as well as math.

>Beauty includes feelings, dreams, hopes, personality, meaning. This aspect is numinous, charged with emotion, and fantastic. It is symbolically associated with summer, roses, the colors green and gold, and all the arts, especially poetry and especially especially music.

>This philosophy cashes out into a formalization of two different ways of looking at things, the Elith-mirta and Ainai-mirta (Perspective of Truth and Perspective of Beauty). The sumurhe religion itself is a perfect example. In the Elith-mirta, it is a useful metaphor for the fact that some things are easier to understand using mathematics and other things are easy to understand using native anthropomorphic intuitions, as well as a recognition that religion promotes psychic health and strengthens community ties. In the Ainai-mirta, Truth and Beauty are literal anthropomorphic deities (the god Elith and the goddess Ainai) who are worshiped through prayer and sacrifice and invoked for strength in times of need.

Sounds to me like you’re saying that churches are interested in brainwashing kids because their existence depends on it, while secular philosophy as a branch of science is not an agent that could act at all.

To compare apples to apples somebody should start a church of secular philosophy.