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Comment by slibhb | Hacker News Reader

Criticizing modern medicine makes a lot of sense if you're a devout Catholic because the afterlife tempers the sadness of death.

For non-believers, though, earthly life is all there is, so reducing suffering, disease, and poverty are much more pressing goals -- goals that might be worth a little alienation.

I would emphasize choice: people can (and do) embrace alternative ways of life, from the Amish to kibbutzim. Similarly, we don't have to drag out our final years: we're free to opt out of medical treatments. You can also opt out of modernity in smaller ways, decisions like not owning a car, not watching TV, and so on.

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I would contest the notion that a lack of religiosity must magnify discontent with death. Also it remains rather difficult to "opt out" of a protracted, likely intubated decline, at least in the US. Moreover there is no opting out of modernity writ large. This is the nature of multi-polar traps: choosing not to join an arms race is a local, temporary reprieve.

The optionality modernity seems determined to optimize for is narrow at best. At worst it threatens its own end

>I would contest the notion that a lack of religiosity must magnify discontent with death

It’s the other way around. Lack of religiosity is the default state and with it you get the default discontent with death, but a religion with an afterlife could reduce discontent with death.

> Lack of religiosity is the default state

On the contrary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_irreligio...

> and with it you get the default discontent with death

That is a huge assumption. There is a huge variety of ways in which societies, cultures and individuals relate and have related with death.

Popular or widespread doesn't mean it’s default. Religion is part of culture and that’s something that’s passed down person to person. A blank culture or no culture has no religion. Tabula rasa.

I’m not assuming anything, I’m not pegging the default discontent with death to a particular value, I don’t know what it is and it’s irrelevant. I’m just saying the some religions, with certain concepts of afterlife, like catholicism, would reduce that discontent.

Why do you assume a tabula rasa person would assume that consciousness ceases to continue on death? I don't think there's anything obvious that would suggest this goes one way or the other and that different people could end up settling for different conclusions. An obvious natural guess would be that it'd be similar to sleeping, as in, you would see dreams

Because why would consciousness continue after death when it didn't continue before birth?

What's different about the post-birth state compared to post-death?

Why would you assume that I assume a tabula rasa person assumes that consciousness ceases to continue with on death? I assume that they wouldn’t know what happens and have some baseline level of feelings about death.

isn't it more that people cleave to magical thinking, archaic though it is, because they have trouble dealing with the despair of poor health and final death?

one big support for this is the gradual decline of religiosity in areas of the world where life is improving. conflated, of course, with the hegemonistic aspect of organized religion.

One argument is that we simply replaced the archaic (religion-focused) dogma with a modern (consumerist, individualist, hyperpoliticized) one, but their function is the same, to serve as complex death denial rituals.

That doesn't sound likely to be a compelling argument.

Hm, consider it the flaw of my botched paraphrasing/summarizing/application of it, and maybe give it another chance in a better form:

https://www.philosophizethis.org/podcast/episode-158-the-cre... (the URL is misleading, it's about Ernest Becker's ideas, there's a transcript too ... if for some reason that link doesn't work, you can listen to it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-43zh_za_eQ )

Possibility remains that adverse conditions are not being masked by psychological devices, rather that these conditions are conducive to heightened spirituality (which may be present in varying degree in all humans).

one big support for this is the fact that many saints came from affluent backgrounds and chose the device of asceticism ("harsh life", "corporal despair", "terminal denial of certain pleasures", "dying to earthly life") to heighten their experience of spiritual communion and worship.

> Criticizing modern medicine makes a lot of sense if you're a devout Catholic because the afterlife tempers the sadness of death > Similarly, we don't have to drag out our final years: we're free to opt out of medical treatments

OTOH, Catholicism also is strongly against euthanasia, which is arguably at odds with the sentiment of not having to drag out final years. I think there's plenty of room for a philosophy to "not drag out final years" as a non-believer who doesn't need to rule out certain measures like that.

It isn't at odds, since in both cases (euthanasia and medically-prolonged end-of-life), it is the human person that is trying to control the ultimate outcome of life. The Catholic approach is to say "let God decide".

I guess to me it sounds like it's at best orthogonal to the idea of dragging out life; sometimes it drags out longer than it might otherwise have to, sometimes it ends much earlier than it would otherwise have to. I think my confusion was over mentioning "opt out of medical treatments" right after "we don't have to drag out life" in a way that sounded to me like it was calling them equivalent, and from my perspective, sometimes forgoing medical treatments can itself drag life out longer than someone might want.

Ultimately it sounds like we mostly agree that people can make personal decisions for themselves about their medical care; I just found the way you described it above fairly confusing.

(edit: I apparently missed that the response was from a different person than I originally responded to)

The Catholic approach is economical: it's expensive to keep dying people alive if you need resources to do so, but a religion promising eternal paradise is going to have a real propagation problem if a significant number of adherents commit suicide - and trying to carve out euthanasia exceptions wasn't going to play well to medieval peasants.

If economics ruled the Church, there are many dogmas that do not "play well to peasants" that could be dropped tomorrow for the sake of propagation.

This is an odd take considering the Catholic church via the Vatican was one of the most powerful and wealthiest organizations in Europe for many centuries, able to topple monarchs.

The point stands: if your argument were true of the Catholic Church being ruled by money and doing whatever it economically can do to propagate, the Church would behave much differently than it currently does. But, the Church is not doing everything economically possible to propagate today, so there must be some other ruling principle.

"economics" doesn't mean "money", it means the allocation of resources.

You're treating this whole idea as though there's a nefarious organization deliberately managing things (which there is in some cases, but the why is unacknowledged).

But a cell in your body has an energy economy that means it adopts certain strategies based on it's constraints.

Similarly, successful religions have an economy of beliefs that they have to adopt based on constraints. Almost all religions portray an afterlife, so all religions have a problem where they need to stop people short-cutting to get there - otherwise they promptly stop existing. But then they also have followers with limited resources so they also can't preach infinite life-extension since that undermines the afterlife narrative, and is economically unfeasible for followers (particularly since you also need to collect donations to your church to keep the organizational structure running).

A belief is economical if it exists today, and existing beliefs are economical. This tautological line of reasoning doesn't help explain the Catholic approach to anything.

What's tautological? How are the Branch Davidians doing? Heaven's Gate?

I note you keep insisting "they would change beliefs" but you've neglected to ever include what changes you think would obviously disprove this hypothesis.

Doing everything possible to prolong life has consequences beyond the life of the individual: it's a significant cost to the economy and to family members. There's the cost of the medical treatment itself, but people living longer now also have to finance their life with their savings or even keep working instead of retiring, so their kids get a smaller inheritance, and have to compete with their parents in the labour market.

> You can also opt out of modernity in smaller ways, decisions like not owning a car, not watching TV, and so on.

Sure, if you reduce the effects of "modernity" to only your own ability to consume goods and services. One cannot "opt out" of the degeneration of social will, or the increasing demand for control over each part of our lives by unaccountable bureaucracies.

I, too, would like an anarchist time machine

It's a bit offensive to give us all “non-believers” zero metaphysical depth

You only get so much time on earth either way!

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