Respect for the religious + religion - where does it start/stop?

robindch

silverharp wrote: »

Dystopian fiction has a place , atlas shrugged is no different to 1984 or animal farm. 1984 is a better read I'll grant it.

Animal Farm is a masterpiece, and becoming faintly applicable to Russia today too. 1984 is good, but a lesser work all around. Rand's enthusiasm for dystopia, however, was quite excessive.

PopePalpatine

You know, for a while I've thought of the film "Elysium" as a sequel to "Atlas Shrugged".

K4t

daUbiq wrote: »

What I can not understand is why apparently sane people believe in fairytales?

Not to mention scientists, mathematicians, lawyers etc. - Compartmentalization.

What really makes a religion? What is the necessary condition? An exclusive faith that trumps other sources of truth. The sane people who believe in fairytales might say: "what is wrong with that when we have so many educated religious people who are scientists, mathematicians, philosophers etc.?" The reason is because it is an intellectual contradiction; To think scientifically about the rest of your life, but to leave your enquiring, rationalist self at the door of the church. The scientists, the mathematicians, the philosophers who all hold religious beliefs are engaged in compartmentalized thinking.

And it is so common because it is so socially conditioned and culturally pervasive. And "What's wrong with that they say?" What's wrong is that the scientists and mathematicians religious belief perpetuates faith. It gives the "real believers" intellectual cover, many of whom involve religious extremists and Jihadists and so on (many of whom would only love governments to follow their religious beliefs and what the bible or Koran says when writing legislation for all citizens). "And how is that completely the scientists and mathematicians fault they say?" It's not either, there is nothing wrong with having faith per se, but it does involve a scary amount of doublethink and it can be dangerous as I'll explain.

The main reason why it can be dangerous is because the "real believers", who are given intellectual cover by the intelligent, rational, more enlightened people of faith like the scientists and the mathematicians, are the ones who lobby our governments in the name of religion and religious beliefs and attempt to force their beliefs on others. And governments are delighted to give in. Really, it's the moderates who are the greatest threat, the liberal apologists if you like. It's why say Cameron and Blair support faith schools in Britain and a string of same such measures exist in Ireland.

swampgas

daUbiq wrote: »

What I can not understand is why apparently sane people believe in fairytales?

There is another factor too, I think - at least it applied to me when I was a believer. And that's early indoctrination and how that affects your fundamental understanding of reality.

As you grow and learn about the world, you build a mental model. As you learn more things, you fit them into the mental model, adding here, tweaking there. Unfortunately you also tend to see all new information through the prism of the mental model as it is right now.

So if religious concepts are embedded deeply in your understanding of reality, at a really fundamental level, then it's very difficult to process facts that challenge that mental model. It can mean rethinking just about everything you know, a bit like when in a film or book a twist in the end makes you go back and see everything that went before from a new angle.

If you really believe (even subconsiously) in God, heaven and hell, the afterlife, whatever, and someone asks you to consider that there is no God, no heaven, no hell, no afterlife .... even merely contemplating such a suggestion can be very uncomfortable, even overwhelming, for many people.

It's a bit like the matrix - to stop believing in God, sometimes you have to take the red pill, and let your understanding of the world around you be transformed.

smacl

swampgas wrote: »

There is another factor too, I think - at least it applied to me when I was a believer. And that's early indoctrination and how that affects your fundamental understanding of reality.

As you grow and learn about the world, you build a mental model. As you learn more things, you fit them into the mental model, adding here, tweaking there. Unfortunately you also tend to see all new information through the prism of the mental model as it is right now.

Also very much my understanding of how people operate. Given the complexity of modern life, we take on board articles of faith all the time based on trusted sources. Diet is a good example of this. Saturated fat was the root of all evil until quite recently, whereas now cardiologists say that they got it wrong and actually carbohydrates threaten the heart more than fats. We largely trust science, because we understand it to be our most informed source of correct information, but if you examine it, outside of our own particular specialities, we don't individually understand the bulk of it. We have faith in the conclusions that science arrives at on the basis that it is an open book that we are free to question and ask evidence of. In reality, most people never do.

The problem as I see it with religion is misplaced trust. Parents introduce religion as a reliable and trustworthy source of information at an early age. No one likes being wrong, so dumping a source of trust is difficult.

K4t

swampgas wrote: »

no afterlife ....

I think Arcade Fire painted an excellent (rather ironic) picture of the idea of an afterlife on their most recent album. Great song too imo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcKinnMXuKg

MrPudding

smacl wrote: »

Why the need for a label? I've no problem criticising Catholicism without need for words like Catholiphobia. Islamophobia seems very much like a term developed by the apologists for Islam in order to play the victim card on one hand, and polarise mixed communities into Islamic and non-Islamic on the other. Seems to be working quite well for them.

A very good question. One of the things that irritates me greatly is the attempt to simply shutdown any discussion of Islam that might be even remotely critical. By the way, I don't beleive criticism of Islam is either racist or islamaphobic, I really dislike the term islamaphobic, specifically because it is used to try to shut down discussion.

MrP

Brian Shanahan

robindch wrote: »

Animal Farm is a masterpiece, and becoming faintly applicable to Russia today too. 1984 is good, but a lesser work all around. Rand's enthusiasm for dystopia, however, was quite excessive.

I'd rate Ninteen Eighty-Four as much the better book myself. It was more prophetic of what was to come (the erosion of people's rights and subsumation into a totalitarian state is being mirrored daily with what is going on in the "war on terror", giving us a horrifying picture of what our world will be if the current trend continues, and Goldstein's economic criticisms in the book within a book section do run true for the world today, except that instead of wasting our resources in an endless war we waste them by giving them to a tiny privileged minority).

In response to silverharp, the difference between the dystopias of Rand and Orwell is that Orwell looked at the world, saw what was wrong (especially with those he had a natural affinity with, hence the strong criticisms of socialism and communism which permeate all his writing) and based his criticisms of those truth. Rand on the other hand had an ideology she considered to be the one true right (just like with a religion) and threw her toys out of the pram any time anybody disagreed with her, or when reality showed her ideology to be bat guano insane. Her books can all be boiled down to this one sentence: "I'm right, you're all wrong. Wait until your system collapses and see how I trample all over ye then! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!oneoneoneone11111eleven!"

silverharp

Brian Shanahan wrote: »

In response to silverharp, the difference between the dystopias of Rand and Orwell is that Orwell looked at the world, saw what was wrong (especially with those he had a natural affinity with, hence the strong criticisms of socialism and communism which permeate all his writing) and based his criticisms of those truth. Rand on the other hand had an ideology she considered to be the one true right (just like with a religion) and threw her toys out of the pram any time anybody disagreed with her, or when reality showed her ideology to be bat guano insane. Her books can all be boiled down to this one sentence: "I'm right, you're all wrong. Wait until your system collapses and see how I trample all over ye then! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!oneoneoneone11111eleven!"

Both books are still good polemics against societies don't defend the rights of people. The economic shambles in the west in recent years could easily have been a chapter out of atlas shrugged

Brian Shanahan

silverharp wrote: »

Both books are still good polemics against societies don't defend the rights of people. The economic shambles in the west in recent years could easily have been a chapter out of atlas shrugged

The economic shambles is a direct cause of the kind of thinking that Rand extolled as the true thought of visionaries. The chicago school of economics (the dominant economic conjecture* in political circles since Thatcher) is a direct descendant of Randian "thought". Leading chicago boys such as Greenspan are also avid Randbots.

silverharp

Brian Shanahan wrote: »

The economic shambles is a direct cause of the kind of thinking that Rand extolled as the true thought of visionaries. The chicago school of economics (the dominant economic conjecture* in political circles since Thatcher) is a direct descendant of Randian "thought". Leading chicago boys such as Greenspan are also avid Randbots.

I dont agree. You might want to explain why many western countries are near default when many of them ought to be creditor nations from Greece to Italy France and even the UK. or why Greek or Irish citizens can be made responsible for debts they had no say in running up. We appear to be living in a time when the state's primary job is to prop up itself and take away freedoms from the public in the process.
As for Greenspan he behaved like any other central banker , he bailed out problems to keep his banking and political buddies happy

Brian Shanahan

silverharp wrote: »

I dont agree. You might want to explain why many western countries are near default when many of them ought to be creditor nations from Greece to Italy France and even the UK. or why Greek or Irish citizens can be made responsible for debts they had no say in running up. We appear to be living in a time when the state's primary job is to prop up itself and take away freedoms from the public in the process.
As for Greenspan he behaved like any other central banker , he bailed out problems to keep his banking and political buddies happy

And that is not a core Randian philosophy how?

Her ideology is essentially that the rest of us be slaves to the few at the top, those psychopathic enough to kill until they're on top of a mountain of skulls.

RikuoAmero

Brian Shanahan wrote: »

And that is not a core Randian philosophy how?

Her ideology is essentially that the rest of us be slaves to the few at the top, those psychopathic enough to kill until they're on top of a mountain of skulls.

Yeah...found this little gem on the interwebz
http://michaelprescott.freeservers.com/romancing-the-stone-cold.html

robindch

silverharp wrote: »

As for Greenspan he behaved like any other central banker , he bailed out problems to keep his banking and political buddies happy

While Greenspan's extreme laissez-faire "oversight" failed to catch either Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers before they collapsed and precipitated a worldwide credit freeze, the actions of the Federal Reserve and other Central Banks following the freeze were critical to restoring order to the international financial system, which had stopped working, almost overnight.

Claiming that these actions were done "to keep his banking and political buddies happy" is manifestly untrue and reduces a complex, systemic problem to the status of populist slogan.

silverharp

Brian Shanahan wrote: »

And that is not a core Randian philosophy how?

Her ideology is essentially that the rest of us be slaves to the few at the top, those psychopathic enough to kill until they're on top of a mountain of skulls.

Im not setting myself up here to defend her but from Atlas Shrugged not all the "goodies" were the rich businessmen, if anything her view could be seen as a secular version of the protestant work ethic. However based on the dystopian view in Atlas I'd imagine she wouldnt be happy where the interest of banks are pecfectly aligned with the state, thats a policy that a fascist would be happy with. Also it is a good critique of countries that have bankrupted everyone