What is actually a heretical view?
marginalrevolution.com
marginalrevolution.com
In order to find a heretical idea, you'd really have to find something shocking. Not just distasteful, unfashionable, or rude, but alien and disturbing. Something that must be destroyed (or at least reckoned with) in order for you to avoid losing a lot of sleep, or having a major crisis of identity. By definition, those are not ideas you and I can sit here and list off.
These ideas can be disturbing, or alien. But they can also be just unexpected.
The more advanced cases are the ones who insist, as an apparent matter of dogmatic faith, that people who claim to not have a religion are Satanists who will rape and murder for lack of an explicit Commandment telling them not to.
First, atheism answers at least some of the same questions as religions answer, though it gives different answers and in different terms.
Second, atheism isn't provable by scientific means. Some believe it more firmly than they have evidence for.
Third, at least some atheists seem to hold their atheism in a religious way; that is, with a religious fervor and intensity. Some even seem to be "evangelists", determined to spread the "good news" of atheism.
That's what (at least some) people mean when they call atheism a religion. They don't literally mean that atheists believe in some god; they mean that people hold atheism in a religious way.
And how many atheists actually do that? I think what GP meant was more about people who just somehow can't imagine being religionless (and "the more advanced cases" paragraph hints it very strongly), not about people who point out that some atheists hold their atheism religiously.
Anyway, your points seem wrong to me. After Wikipedia - "Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities." Absence of belief does not answer any questions by itself, and considering its provability doesn't even make sense at all. What you said may make sense for the less broad definition ("In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities"), but that's not what "atheism" usually means without any further qualifiers.
For me, atheism is a natural consequence of realizing that I have no more reason to believe in existence of any particular god than any other fictitious being - and even if I did assume that a god exists, I would still have a hard time choosing which god is it, as there are many contesters and none of them has any obvious advantage when it comes to believability. There are many believable reasons why religions exist, but none of them implies that any religion is actually true (to the contrary, the history of some well-known religions seems to make it pretty clear that they were products of human culture).
Take off your engineer hat for a minute and read it again with your anthropologist hat on. I think you may come away with a better understanding of some people.
And yes, in other discussions, part of that may be an explanation of why some theists cannot fathom that atheists do not believe in a god. much of this is definitional. What atheists call "no god," some thesist call "a god of their own definition."
And these two just continue to talk past each other. Perhaps they want it that way, they don't need to think on uncomfortable things, then.
And that's wrong, just on a basic level, and it's part of those theists being incapable of understanding a worldview without theism. They can't understand my philosophy, so they're compelled to shove me into a box they can understand, and then refuse to listen when I tell them their worldview is making them comprehensively misinterpret what I'm saying.
(And, no, a person can't dictate someone else's own philosophy to them. No matter how condescending that dictation is.)
The thing is, you can stomp your foot and throw a fit all you want about others not using your definitions that flow from your worldview, but it doesn't change reality. You're approaching epistemological and psychological differences as though they're a battle of authority. You can claim authority over a lot of things, even legal authority, but you cannot force someone to "understand differently."
This is what I mean by theists and atheists talking past each other. They each employ a form of ethnocentrism that frames every conversation as an argument. They do NOT want to understand each other. They want to WIN.
When someone says I believe in something I don't believe in, and gets condescending about it, I get somewhat annoyed, but I mostly want to know what's going on in their head. I think I have some of it figured out, but you just accuse me of dishonest debating tactics. Why do you think I'm so wrong? Why do you think the people who think I'm a monster necessarily have a point?
- Yes, you are right that many theists equate "does not believe in God" with "would perform the most perverse and tortuous murder if given the chance." That would agitate anyone, and is not what I'm critiquing. But beyond this, do keep in mind that theists are like any other segment of the general population. If you let the beliefs and actions of some color your vision of all before you've met them, you very literally have a bias against a legally-protected class. This doesn't mean you're acting on it, but it is there. Some people like to know it is there, some don't care.
- Secondly, you're speaking contradictions. When you say that you want to understand why some people think such and such about you, and someone else gives you some insight into their thinking (and this wasn't me), and your reaction is to defend yourself, your actions show you aren't attempting to understand, you're attempting to CORRECT. But you can't correct what you don't understand. You also can't correct epistemological and psychological concerns by shouting from the top level that all they understand about you is wrong. I mean, you CAN. But you won't like the results.
I passed the yelling phase a while ago. I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused, and I am annoyed but I do attempt to keep it out of my voice. I think people projecting a massive amount of anger onto me is their problem, not mine. As for trying to correct the condescending people who think I believe in some supernatural ethos or entity, maybe it's a bad habit, but thinking I must be angry to do so is a worse one.
Can anyone recommend places to discover more of these (books, forums, or thought patterns)?
“I took the view it wasn't blasphemous. It was heretical because it criticised the structure of the church and the way it interpreted the Gospels. At the time religion seemed to be on the back burner and it felt like kicking a dead donkey. It has come back with a vengeance and we'd think twice about making it now."
I believe this is referring to Obama's semi-recent admission that we've captured aerial footage of phenomena that the government can't explain. Some officials, but not all, have convinced themselves: therefore aliens.
But "therefore aliens" is just the "fun" answer. It's not the rational answer. There are many other more likely explanations, all too boring to be click-bait-worthy, and therefore news of these explanations spreads slower.
Plus, of course, "UFO" is a badly-defined term: It either means an unidentified flying object, or it means a spacecraft piloted by extraterrestrial beings, and that poisons the whole discussion around them. There's nothing you can talk about in regards to UFOs as long as people refuse to agree to a single basic definition.
Here's something that might actually be heretical: Jesus died for nothing, He wasn't intended as some sort of sacrifice, we killed Him before He could complete His work. Now we're damned forever, with no hope of salvation from a justifiably merciless God. If you really want to see some shit that will likely ruin your day, boot up Wargame: Red Dragon and read General chat. There's some truly awful and weird takes in there, last I played.
Instead we mostly got mainstream 2022 conservatism. I mean there's a nugget of good idea in there, I just really wish it was expressed better before tribal chants kicked in.
Paradox grand strategy games also have this effect, but that community is better about shutting down their edgelords.
Many people believe themselves to be more radical and iconoclastic than they are because those beliefs tend to be nurtured in reality bubbles which assume the rest of the world to be far more rigidly dogmatic than it is.
Because we don’t _need_ the type of strongly held beliefs, or mythology, that we had in the past: we have science to guide us through what we know we know and what we know we don’t know. Sure, in practice people will believe all sorts of ridiculous things, but the separation of church and state went a long way towards making the concept less useful.
In the former case the ideas are just wrong (note that this is not a moral judgment), and in the latter case they fall outside the realm of science, meaning the two can probably be reconciled with enough mental gymnastics.
I think there are more suitably nuanced words we can use than “heresy” to more accurately describe ideas in this context.
Does anyone believe this one and have a strong argument for it?
The shows are better for me, more entertaining, more exciting, etc, but not better for everyone in the house. The sharding of entertainment into different age groups leads to people not sitting together and watching a show together, and instead we're all in different rooms with headphones. imo that's worse.
Meanwhile, I can watch shows with violence, nudity and adult themes because there aren't only three channels and not everything has to be child appropriate.
That seems better to me.
So if we were looking specifically at the major broadcast channels: ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS, then I think the TV of the 60s/70s is probably easily much better.
There are strong arguments that the change in media since that time has led us to and/or fuels the division in the US over all kinds of issues.
It's indeed interesting indeed how the meaning moved from the "dangerous mistaken beliefs held despite firm evidence" (today this could be antivaxers) to "challenging mainstream views in interesting and possibly productive ways" (a century ago that would be quantum physics).
Heresy is about elevating your opinions into moral imperatives so you can say people that disagree with you are evil, with the added note that the opinions would usually be entirely inconsequential if you were more relaxed about the whole thing. (I’m looking at you, people who killed each other over the “real meaning” of the holy trinity)
Heresy isn’t about the mainstream, but about fanatics in power obsessively gibbering over details to try to own concepts, or just to keep up their power.
Heretical values are interesting because they allow you to explore things the establishment ignores. While heretical facts are probably just wrong.
But mostly, it's the fact actual eugenicists have all been deeply ignorant of genetics and allowed pure, baseless prejudice to drive their whole programs. Unless we consider Dor Yeshorim to be eugenicist, of course.
A truly universal idea that is heretical to start with rapidly gets a cult following because of human novelty impulses and our meme replication ability.
Therefore, most useful heretical ideas likely are/were heretical in some place at some time. The lab leak hypothesis earlier on. Kneeling at a football game. Things like that.
In a temporal sense, interesting heretical ideas suffer from either the Seinfeld isn’t funny effect or from othering different cultures.
I would contend that I have a truly unique heretical idea for the domestic US at this specific time. I hope to build an organ sale marketplace where people sell their own organs at their death. I think this will improve humanity. I know of very few people who agree with me, but none for any reason that stands scrutiny.
You have kneeling at a sports game and talking about a probable lab leak that killed millions in the same list of examples.
Personally the word heresy should be reserved for religious contraries or at least when an extreme is needing to be denoted.
It was forbidden or taboo to talk about the lab leaky. It was controversial for players to bring politics into sports. I'd view controversial as a lesser as you could still speak dissent.
If one view is "heretical", generally the other side wouldn't be "heretical" as well. Which is what you get if you interchange controversial. It was controversial to be against kneeling in football as well. It wasn't controversial to be against the lab leak censor, because you couldn't talk about it at all.
And my view wasn’t that the lab leak thing was suppressed at all since I heard people talk about the idea frequently. It was just dismissed outright.
However, I do agree with you that simple controversy does not imply heresy. Though I do believe that anything truly heretical will result in widespread condemnation. And because of the rapidity of meme replication in humans, it will have parties that adopt it rapidly if it has some value, and will appear as controversy.
For the kneeling, the norm at the time was to play the game and pledge to the country. Then kneeling came in and it was controversial among a group of people that believed it should stay about the game and viewed kneeling during the pledge as a sign of disrespect. The other side viewed it as controversial to say something against those kneeling under their reasoning of racism. You could say people weren't against kneeling before but it didn't really exist so that wasn't a norm. Similar to trying to prove a negative, it doesn't make sense.
For the lab leak, it was banned from all social media sites under and anytime it was mentioned in mainstream news it was shot down as anti-asian racism. It was taboo and banned from discussion. Recently you can talk about it now. It was few months ago that permission was received. There was a big thread here about it. I can find it later today.
Like I know in the outside world there was this lab leak thing but in the SF startup crowd it was so common. Everyone was suspicious.
But that seems to be a pattern. Excepting me (I thought the pandemic was going to be handled well by American bureaucracy), everyone I know adapted well before the government, cancelling trips, taking money out of the market, stuff like that. So it’s possible that in this group, what is heretical is different.
Taking a knee is mild compared to the precedent of raising a black gloved fist on the podium at the Olympic Games. Still heretical to the nationalist-lite orthodoxy.
Also, I agree that the notion of heresy among a lot of these people is just low brow edgelordism. PG is so guilty of this.
I'm tempted to be snarky and try to tie Cowen's "economics curmudgeon" reputation into this and say that Cowen is just trying to toot his own horn, like the "Intellectual Dark Web" folks did, but that's uncharitable.
How about "heresy is a canon law thing and doesn't make sense outside of some rigid system of religious authority" as a take? I mean, Triclavianism is (maybe) a Catholic heresy, but virtually all the world's population would either shrug it off, or laugh. Of course Triclavianism is in Cowen's #3, Not globally heretical.
TFA seems to use the term to mean "mainstream" or "popular"?
I'm sure it doesn't mean "sanctioned by the Catholic Church", which is the meaning I had associated with that term before thinking about it.
That lowers the bar considerably, plus it opens it up to things that are merely unlikely: Man Utd will win the premier league this year, world war 3 will break out in Ukraine, Trump will be restored.
To have a heresy, you need an official orthodoxy for it to be against, but an official orthodoxy is an enforced belief - which means it is not necessarily willing, which further means the orthodoxy is not a belief in truth at all, but the effect of compliance. Heresy is a non-compliant view.
However, the classic heretic error is they think other people are ignorant of what's going on, when they're really just trying to hide any doubt that would set them up for exile. It's the Assange/wikileaks view of "if only people knew how sausage was made, they would revolt!" without realizing the reason all those people are climbing over each other to parrot absurditiies is because they don't want to be the ones left without sausage.
Also, not all heresies are true, but they must be logically equivalent to be the true counter-point of an orthodoxy. The crappier the logic of the orthodoxy, the more broad and absurd the heresies. This is where you get into Big Lie territory, where Kim Jong Un hitting 11 holes in one on the golf course is the absurd orthodoxy that makes all truth that deviate from it heresy, and that's a filter to catch people who can't sustain the dissonance and submission.
I'm optimistic that few people really believe strongly in absurd orthodoxies, but we align with them because it's strategic or wise to stay out of the way of the enforcers. Stalin's totalitarianism was based on millions of people knowing everything authorities said was absurd but still competing with each other in the zero sum attrition game of staying ahead of those who could not sustain the dissonance.
It's trivial to set up. You put an absurdity at one end, and a plausible or merely spectacular threat of violence on the other, and give people the option of compliance or exile/death, and their fear will drive them to compete with each other to demonstrate their alignment to the absurdity. The minority who cling to truth even at the risk of the violence become an internal enemy, as the ones competing at being absurd need a flow of people to sacrifice behind them, and you get a snitch culture. This is basically a playbook.
To absurdity, everything is heretical. Given this logical relationship between an orthodoxy and a heresy, it's less interesting what a given herectical idea might be than it is whether the quality of its logic is equivalent to that of the orthodoxy it is in reaction to.
In other contexts, like the case of science or popular opinion, it does not seem to make sense to speak of heresy. It would be odd for me to deny something rather well-established without giving substantive reasons for my denial, but it would not constitute heresy. But perhaps something analogous to the spirit of heresy can be said to exist in principle when someone has an attitude of selectivity where truths in general are concerned.
The article is, in this sense, using the common figurative meaning of "heresy", and not the technical meaning, which is to say a belief that contradicts something not only widely held, but dearly held within some milieu. This is why lately people have spoken of cancel culture as the excommunication of heretics for breaking ranks with the prevailing orthodoxy. At the same time, one is tempted to conclude that the use of "heresy" is not so figurative as one might imagine, even if not bona fide heresy[1]. The ideologies that underpin cancel culture, for example, are functionally religious (all men are religious in this sense since all men construe something to be the highest good, which is to say their god or rather idol, and thus that which they worship and order their lives in accordance with). Now, if you do not accept these ideologies, then you cannot be said to be a heretic, only an infidel. But within the group that holds to a general common ground (in this case, "the Left"), those within the ranks who depart from the reigning ideology are something like heretics. Those who migrate to "the Right" are thus something like apostates.
[0] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07256b.htm
[1] Bona fide in the sense that in order for something to be heretical, it must pick and choose from a body of doctrine that is true and not merely held as true. If a body of doctrine is riddled with error, picking the truths out of the whole is not heretical in any objective sense, though in a relative sense (that is, as merely seen by those who hold that body of doctrine to be fully correct), we often say that such people are heretics vis-a-vis that body of doctrine.
We live in a relatively un-hegemic time, with the intellectual power of orthodoxy at all time lows (not alas, the financial and legal power); trying to find shocking things to say is essentially a solved problem. Trying to discover truth, and motivate ourselves and our peers to do what truthfully needs doing, that has not gotten old, nor made trivially solvable.