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Comment by kakacik | Hacker News Reader

Its not a rambling but sad fact of life, one of the failures of mankind so far.

And we don't need to talk about some backwater 3rd world country (actually we do) - US has big issues allowing basic science to be taught to kids, because of some set of stories and anecdotes from various people gathered over centuries together about some potential events around one mason who started yet another sect 2k years ago, and they guard it with fanatical zeal to the last word, regardless how misguided and contradictory some of it is.

When society fails to deliver even basic known and proven truths to its most vulnerable, then don't be surprised that same people are later trivially manipulated into believing into many simply untrue things and behave accordingly ie in voting, to their own direct detriment.

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I just yesterday watched a scathing video about why the US has always had a major strain of anti-intellectualism, starting from the very first colonists:

https://youtu.be/j9MubNsh3rs?si=wpG1YLDz_Y9cOECQ

I feel like I wasted 25 min watching that (at 2x).

If your thesis is "The US was founded on anti-intellectual principles" and your only supporting facts are:

   - Some of the early colonists were religiously-driven
   - The inconvenient examples otherwise (e.g. the Enlightenment-influenced founders) can be ignored because some people at the time disliked them
   - Some presidents since have been populists

Then that's a weak argument.

... and also, that could have been a 15 min video without the histrionics.

You missed the education related points.

Different strokes. I found it extremely entertaining.

>I found it extremely entertaining.

Forgive me for being nitpicky, but I think that is the entire point that they were making. Entertaining, but not informative. Fun, but not well-argued.

Example: I can be extremely engaged while listening to a stand-up comedian deliver an anecdote about why they believe what they believe. It can be incredibly interesting, engaging, and well put. It is not, however, an argument which supports their assertions, but merely a conduit which makes that position more palatable.

Insight is often dreary and frustratingly complex in terms of nuance and substance because what matters is everything, and what doesn't makes headlines. Entertainment is a broad stroke of a premise; a hand wave that says "like this".

Let me nitpick the nitpick: we're in an attention economy and it's all to easy to have something salient dismissed with TLDR/TLDW. A more cursory glance that makes it easier to ease into a concept is more important than the subject matter expert making an ironclad argument that no one reads.

In the context of the internet forum, that was an appropriate video to post.

> I think that is the entire point that they were making. Entertaining, but not informative. Fun, but not well-argued.

Thanks for missing my point. Informative doesn't win over as many minds in this day and age. Staying principled in a land of grifts only gets you torn apart.

You're welcome.

It was a history of anti- intellectualism in the US. I'm not sure what kind of argument they should be making.

I think she violates her own rules. It also doesn't help that the music gives that forbidding feeling and sense of disaster. Even if well intentioned she ends up doing the very thing she is criticizing. Emotion precedes analysis...

A good example of a problem in the video is she makes the strong claim (multiple times) that America was founded on anti-intellectualism. Even stronger, that it's the only one. She jumps from saying it was ingrained in the culture before the constitution, then talks about the founding fathers, and moves straight to "early 19th century" with the discussion of Jackson. Jackson was president from 1829-1837. She's playing a bit fast and loose with the timelines here. Importantly, by the 8 minute mark she's done supporting the claim but there's no strong evidence. Then she launches into more with the education system but it feels weird that she's stressing things like sitting in rows. Europe has... classrooms too.

That isn't to say that everything she says is hogwash. But I don't exactly buy that this was all planned and coordinated. There's much better explanations than a deep state. As George Carlin put it, you don't need a deep state when everyone in power goes to the same schools and hangs in the same social circles; they end up thinking alike. Bubbles, not coordinated action. This also adequately explains the dysfunction across the US education system where different regions have different styles and curriculum. It would sound silly to say that Europe was designed for dysfunction with France having a different curriculum than Germany. The US was highly federated and became more centralized. That fracturization perpetuated through to today. It's also easier to buy this explanation given the premise of dysfunction and lack of critical thinking.

The reality of it all is much more complex than she explains. Maybe she left that because it's hard to convey in a video and is less engaging (which would undermine what she's trying to teach). Or maybe she didn't do enough research (she is a self described polyglot. Though she also criticized polyglots).

Asimov wrote about it[0], and talked about it quite a bit.

So did Sagan. If you haven't watched Cosmos in awhile it might hit a little different these days, for multiple reasons (not all bad). The book is great too. Not to mention Sagan wrote "The Demon Haunted World".

There's a new form and an old form of this same thing happening today too. We have flat earthers, but other cults too. One of the common features of this cult of ignorance: having a little knowledge and thinking it is much more general. We all know those people who read a sentence or two and extrapolate. This happens all the time. Even in flat earthers. It's often seeking evidence to support the prior belief rather than updating that belief. Updating that belief can either strengthen the belief it weaken it. But if you're seeking truth you need you be willing to throw your beliefs out the window. Resistance to that is ego

[0] https://aphelis.net/cult-ignorance-isaac-asimov-1980/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

Religion is a lot broader than Christian fundamentalism and zealots. It's sort of like applied philosophy: how do you live a flourishing life in relationship to other people and to the god(s). Modernity has an implicit materialist worldview (matter is all that is) and an explicit rejection of the divine. However, if matter is all there is, then there is no meaning in the world. This is not a way to flourish in the world. (And if we cannot flourish with materialist consequences, that is some evidence that the materialist assumption is incorrect.) So religion is not just some silly, backwater thing, and Marx was absolutely wrong.

The Christian fundamentalism you decry is the shriveled remains of a branch of Christianity that failed to protect itself from drying out in the heat of modernity. Fundamentalism is actually a reaction against modernity, but the East/West split cut off part of the philosophical richness, and the Protestant reformation cut off most of the rest of the philosophical richness, as well as the pathway to the mystical/transcendent. The Fundamentalists couldn't separate the indisputable truths of materialist analysis (Science) from the assumptions necessary for that analysis (materialism), and so they just rejected both. (Except, not really; they live as functional materialists with an exception for God.)

>However, if matter is all there is, then there is no meaning in the world. This is not a way to flourish in the world.

Things like this really make it hard, as an atheist, to receive the argument that my problem is with Christianity, and not with religion.

You're saying that my beliefs mean there's no meaning, and are incompatible with flourishing in the world. I understand you feel the need to defend your beliefs as valuable and important, but somehow it seems almost impossible for religious people to do so without denigrating atheism.

And yes, a lot of atheists are dismissive of religion too. But look, I'll show you: I personally don't find religion necessary to live an ethical and fulfilling life, but I understand that many people find it valuable and compelling, and that's ok as long as they let other people live their lives too. I think people can be intelligent, rational, and respectful of the beliefs of others, while still maintaining their own religious beliefs.

There, that wasn't so hard, was it?

> I personally don't find religion necessary to live an ethical and fulfilling life

"I personally don't find science necessary to live a modern and fulfilling life"

(I say, as I type using a computer on the internet)

People love to remove attribution when it suits their short-sighted view.

Just as you can attribute something I enjoy today to science, I can attribute something you enjoy today to religion.

And I can attribute something you enjoy today to a butterfly, flapping its wings on the shore of the Atlantic, seventeen years ago. People love to take a selective view of complex systems (for example, by picking only some nodes in the web of causality to call "attribution"), using biases like "relevance" and "significance" and "a non-omniscient positionality", and many especially love to call other views "ignorant" or "short-sighted".

That's true, you don't need to be a practitioner of science to live a modern and fulfilling life.

Are you trying to argue that some things I consider valuable were first developed within religion (which I won't argue with, though I think there's more to dig into there than might be immediately obvious), or that I need to personally practice religion to live an ethical and fulfilling life, and I just don't realize it?

Because, if it's the latter, you're again refusing to consider the possibility that I don't need religion. And again, my argument isn't even that that isn't true, though I fervently believe that, it's that telling me that I'm wrong and I need religion even if I don't think I do is a terrible way to convince me that we can find common ground.

the contradiction is with the words - ethical:religion ~ modern:science.

ethics comes from religion. modernity comes from science.

if you say - "I don't need religion to tell me not to kill people"

then i say - "ok. so, why don't you go around killing people?"

you say - "i just don't have the desire to". or "i am compassionate"

i say - "ok. you do you. what about me? I wish to kill people. what's stopping me?"

you say - "consequences. police. law & order"

i say - "so if there was no police in a suburb, or no punishment for killing, I can kill people?"

Your argument falls dead.

Because religion tells us one thing - the law of Karma - there is no place or time in the universe where an action does not have a consequence. Regardless of your belief in God or the soul or spirit or afterlife or past lives.

Almost sounds like newton drew inspiration from the old golden rule - Treat others as you'd like to be treated.

Why? Because every action has an equal and opposite reaction - you WILL be treated exactly as you treated others, whether in this life or the next. Ergo, if you don't want to be killed, don't kill. if you want to be killed, go ahead.

This is the way!

You need stories, preferable positive stories. Not those about endless wars and horrors, those stories work like a contraceptive. They are pure poison, no matter how true, scientific and educational.

I don't know how to say that you can have positive stories without believing in god without feeling like I'm arguing against a strawman. Can you please give me something with a little more substance?

Yes, life has no inherent meaning in and of itself. It's up to you to find what's meaningful. If that's praying to the FSM, father of all pastas, hoping his sauce never goes bad, so be it, if it's a more mainstream religion, or something else entirely that's all on you. I don't understand how you connect that to not flourishing though.

The modern west is still very religious, they just switched to a new religion without a mascot.

If you don’t believe me, explain to me how human rights, universal equality, democracy etc are based in science. You can’t, because they aren’t. Sorry for blaspheming. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do them, by the way, it just means that it’s our religion to do them.

> it just means that it’s our religion to do them.

No, "religion" is the wrong word for that. "Ideology" might be more what you are referring to, something like "societal philosophical principles".

It's a strange christian sect that is generally atheistic but borrows values from the western tradition.

This is a strange definition of religion, to basically mean anything that isn't science. Are all aesthetics and ethics a matter of religion?

People believe it because they learn to believe it in childhood.

People who don’t believe it are bad.

If you even question it, people get angry and say you’re bad.

People support wars against other people solely on the basis of their disagreement with it.

People think we should spread it to other people.

Functionally, how is that different from religion?

Sure, I am using a different definition of religion because the normal definition focuses on the mascot, but I believe that is wrong and the presence or absence of a mascot is not the important part of religion. Believing things for reasons other than evidence or logic is the important part. Which doesn’t mean we need to stop doing it, to be clear, we should just be labeling it accurately to avoid becoming confused about what we are doing.

> we should just be labeling it accurately to avoid becoming confused about what we are doing.

I think you are doing quite the opposite, and your overexpansion of the term obfuscates things rather than clarifies them. As another user wrote, there is a perfectly good word that covers all your points: ideology.

And that way you don't get the side effect of claiming that cultural food preferences are religion, since they also can't be scientifically validated.

It's a good word to use because it has so much in common with western religious traditions.

This is a religion: https://hex.ooo/library/why_not_unitarian.html

You don't need to believe in Jesus, but you do need to hold all the right beliefs. Many self described atheists would fit right in in this church.

> People believe it because they learn to believe it in childhood.

In human rights or democratic rule of law?? What a preposterous notion. Precisely what separates religious belief from non-religious is the fact that the latter is dogmatic while the latter is not.

That's nothing to do with religion. It's just having values. You can have values without religion.

> If you don’t believe me, explain to me how human rights, universal equality, democracy etc are based in science.

I'm always blown away by people who need religion to tell right from wrong.

Care to elaborate?

Then you define religion as information about a god. Other people define religion as metaphysical beliefs. Other people just define it as irrational staunch beliefs.

Like "don't use goto". That's religion.

Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_religion

Religion and values are two different things. Human rights, universal equality, democracy are values, not religion.

They are also result of constant wars, genocide and general destruction. And Europe mainland was war free better place to live when we seek to sort of have those things. They dont even need to be perfect for making life better.

The fact that a government that isn't derived from the will of the people is unstable and likely to be overthrown can be logically and empirically observed, but we can and should test different forms of democracy by experimentation and observation. We can and should test which rights should take precedence over others. Holding the particular rights encoded in the Bill of Rights as sacred is a fallacy rooted in the deification of America's founders. Ultimately, individuals are interested in their own survival and should rationally build societal structures that serve that goal.

The foundation of human rights, universal equality, & democracy is empathy, which is basically a peer-reviewed scientific theory at a personal level that those with similar capabilities to you deserve equal respect ...or else, violence.

How did you miss out on learning this life lesson as a child?

Rambling in the sense of not being well prepared, like he had an idea and some points to hit, but not a script. The content was good, for me.

there is a specific, very modern strain of mostly anglosphere protestant christian religion that can hinder intellectual progress. When I say "very modern" I mean within the last 2-300 years. Most of intellectual history in post-Roman Europe is linked to religious institutions. countless philosophers, mathematicians and scientists were clergy or members of religious orders.

The conflict thesis is, at best, a reaction to this modernist milieu and at worst an ahistorical narrative cooked up by 19th century edgelords.

(inb4 "MUH GALLEY LEGO TRIAL!")

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