The BITE Model of Authoritarian Control (2020)
proquest.com
proquest.com
http://www.crustaceansingles.com/2016/04/inquiring-minds.htm...
>"Of course you're allowed to ask questions. Here is the list of approved questions."
Why aren't candidates for office all tested by <my pet kook> to make sure they aren't really lizard people? Why don't flat-earthers get equal academic research funding? What are the real reasons why we haven't gone back to the Moon?
>"You're absolutely free to study and investigate for yourself. Here is the list of approved sources."
These YouTube videos all tell me I'm right. So do all these people on Twitter. Academic journals, mainstream media and PhD are all in on the scam, except for this one who agrees with what I think.
>"We're not trying to stifle thought! We want you to learn everything you can as you reach the approved conclusions."
Why does no one take my concerns about cancer from 5G wifi seriously? Why do you all look at me strangely when I saw the Earth is really only 6000 years old? Lamarckian evolution really makes sense. You're all sheep for believing in that Darwin crap!
You would probably disagree with how Christianity framed the common worldview in Europe in the Middle Ages. Or how Islamic beliefs did the same in the Islamic countries. Or Ancient India. Etc. But you are convinced that you are closer to a true understanding of reality now than they were. Why? Can you explain why your view of reality is better via the use of reason alone, without reference to your culture?
I would think you would struggle. Perhaps some older views of the world were as well or better reasoned than the beliefs we presently take for granted. And I say 'belief' because even if we think such-and-such is 'known to us' unless you have personally verified it, is is a belief not knowledge to you. It is an illusion of knowledge.
Questions about understanding objective reality are mostly answered by consensus answers ('palmed off', is more accurate). Most of us live in a world of belief, where we cannot truly claim to know very much. For example - how did you prove the earth was a ball to yourself such that you can call that knowledge, even though the intuitive working assumption that we all share is that it is flat? Most likely you assume that some scientist has got this, so you don't need to know.
I say that accepting this sort of 'fast and loose' belief despite any personal experience, is to do a dis-service to oneself. It leaves one susceptible to common misunderstandings, unable to evaluate things for oneself, demanding an authority figure to guide one through the morass of difficult questions.
This is plainly a dis-empowered position. There are surely lots of nefarious characters that would seek to take advantage of people's misplaced faith, no?
All cults use that but all religions do too to a certain degree.
No sane religion will allow members that can think for themselves to do an independent research and decide if they want to join or not. That would remove the easiest prey, children. Children have an implicit trust in his parents so religion will hijack that and insert themselves at the center of their lives. As Paine said: All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
Also, every ideology seems to be enemies with the others. No seeking of common ground. Each painting the other as pure crazy evil. That's an interesting constant.
Tantric buddhism adds a fourth target of reverence: the guru. And reverence for the guru in tantra extends to absolute obedience to your personal teacher.
Buddhism is very culty.
See, for example, the history and works of Francis Schaeffer and C.S. Lewis. I also think the work of John Frame on epistemology might reveal some of the underlying presuppositions seemingly evident in the above comment.
I'm not making any other assertion about their works or perspectives on religion, faith, or lack thereof. I point it out solely as a counter to the above perspective, which is a bad caricature at best.
Dostoesvsky and lewis changed my life and brought my from a mild agnosticism to traditional Catholicism and my life has never been better.
Testimonials are not evidence.
I don't understand why a god would care what a human does, in any case, especially in the case of an all-knowing god who would already know every detail of what the human will do before they are even born, or an all-powerful god, who wouldn't be emotionally hurt by the choices a human makes.
The same thing is practically true for almost everything we believe. For the most part, we blindly trust the evidence of our senses and "authority", whether that be the "experts" or the social consensus or something else.
And even for the things we can demonstrate, it ultimately relies on the assumption of unprovable axioms.
> I don't understand why a god would care what a human does, in any case, especially in the case of an all-knowing god who would already know every detail of what the human will do before they are even born, or an all-powerful god, who wouldn't be emotionally hurt by the choices a human makes.
I don't see why the qualities and motives an all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the universe would be fully understandable by limited human reason. I see this kind of argument a lot, but I don't get it - the same thing is ultimately true even of natural things, Nietzsche has a great passage on this.
> It is no different with the faith with which so many materialistic natural scientists rest content nowadays, the faith in a world that is supposed to have its equivalent and its measure in human thought and human valuations-a "world of truth" that can be mastered completely and forever with the aid of our square little reason. What? Do we really want to permit existence to be degraded for us like this-reduced to a mere exercise for a calculator and an indoor diversion for mathematicians? Above all, one should not wish to divest existence of its rich ambiguity: that is a dictate of good taste, gentlemen. the taste of reverence for everything that lies beyond your horizon. That the only justifiable interpretation of the world should be one in which you are justified because one can continue .to work and do research scientifically in your sense (you really mean.mechanistically?)-an interpretation that permits counting, calculating, weighing, seeing, and touching. and nothing more that is a crudity and naivete, assu~ing that it is not a mental illness, an idiocy. Would it not be rather probable that, conversely, precisely the most superficial and external aspect of existence-what is most apparent, its skin and sensualization-would be grasped first-and might even be the only thing that allowed itself to be grasped? A .. scientific, interpretation of the world, as you understand it, might therefore still be one of the most stupid of all possible interpretations of the world, meaning that it would be one of the poorest in meaning. This thought is intended for the ears and consciences of our mechanists who nowadays like to pass as philosophers and insist that mechanics is the doctrine of the first and last laws on which all existence must be based as on a ground floor. But an essentially mechanical world would be an essentially meaningless world. Assuming that one estimated the value of a piece of music according to how much of it could be counted, calculated, and expressed in formulas: how absurd would such a •'scientific" estimationof music be! What would one have comprehended, understood,grasped of it? Nothing, really nothing of what is "music" in it!
The second trap is to say that everything just comes down to which authority you believe, and it's all just a matter of aesthetics, or personal taste, or perhaps you'll just stick with whatever you were indoctrinated with as a child. In that case, it's an arbitrary choice whether you want to be a Christian, a Moonie or a QAnon follower. There's no right or wrong, valid or invalid. The demands of religions seem suspiciously human-orientated from what I've seen: it's far more likely that they are demands from various individuals or groups about how other people should live. I see no sign of any involvement by an "all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the universe".
I'll stick with science, regardless of what Nietzsche may have said, as the only option that makes any sense for flawed human nature. Science can be wrong, but it's based on generally repeatable observations, and is ultimately self-correcting: it's the best we can do to understand the Universe.
Yes, conceptually similar philosophical ideas could be reached from first principles, but those would not come in the same exact packaging as Christianity (and it is packaging that makes many religions not that different from cults preying on vulnerable people).
To the extent it played that function, indoctrinating children was no different than teaching them to hunt or gather.
I fundamentally dislike religion and the tribal, irrational cult like mind control they seem to all exhibit. But I have seen it in a different light after reading "Sapiens" by Yuval Harari. So I now acknowledge that it has probably played a useful role in human society, despite its large negative traits.
We need a modern social construct that fulfills and replaces some of what religion provided. I don't think we've nailed that yet.