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> If you believe you are not religious, it just means that you don’t have the cognitive tools to recognize the secular ideology that you have adopted. Not all

• tonymet 5y ago
  Let’s be honest, most people don’t have the time to weigh the evidence of say 90% of their beliefs. They go to school & watch television, and generally adopt the beliefs of their surroundings. And believing that religious believers accept 100% of religious belief without reasoning about them is a misunderstanding.
  • pdonis 5y ago
    > most people don’t have the time to weigh the evidence of say 90% of their beliefs. Most of the "beliefs" you refer to actually don't have to be beliefs at all. They have no practical consequences; they don't change anything about what the person who claims to have them actually does. Such beliefs don't have to have their evidence weighed because they make no practical difference. When people say they "believe" them, they don't mean they're actually using them to decide their actions; they are just signaling. For most beliefs that do have practical consequences, people do weigh evidence for them. However, this does suggest a clarification to the characteristics I gave for religions and ideologies: that they start from beliefs that are in the "don't have practical consequences, so saying you believe them is just signaling" category, but then use them to justify beliefs that are in the "do have practical consequences, so should be judged by weighing evidence" category.
    • savingsPossible 5y ago
      This was interesting, but also somewhat paradoxical. A belief that does not affect your actions, but implies or causes a belief that does affect your actions. Well, that does affect your actions. :) But serioulsly, joke aside, that was an interesting concept
    • tonymet 5y ago
      This 90% figure includes core beliefs of the world, right and wrong, history, epistemology and so on.
  • pdonis 5y ago
    > believing that religious believers accept 100% of religious belief without reasoning about them is a misunderstanding. I didn't say anything about religions and ideologies not using reasoning. Anyone who has read, say, Thomas Aquinas is perfectly aware that religious people can use all kinds of complicated reasoning to justify their beliefs. What I did say is that the set of beliefs in question are "all asserted as justification for each other in what amounts to a logical circle". For example, Thomas Aquinas spent a lot of time building up a huge edifice of interlocking propositions about God, all logically related to each other--but they don't connect to anything else. They're just a free-standing, self-consistent logical structure that can't be justified in any way except by claiming that it justifies itself. It's not that Aquinas didn't use reasoning; as noted above, he did--lots of it.
    • BackBlast 5y ago
      I see the example you related, and by using it as a proxy... It seems that you are saying that religious beliefs aren't really valid because they aren't based in reality.
      • pdonis 5y ago
        > It seems that you are saying that religious beliefs aren't really valid because they aren't based in reality. For the specific example I gave (Thomas Aquinas), it's not really a question of the beliefs being "valid" or not; it's just that they have no practical impact at all, which means it doesn't really matter whether you believe them or not, at least not if the beliefs are taken in isolation. However, it is a problem if people then try to use such beliefs to justify actions that do have practical impact. For example, consider the split between different branches of Christianity after the Council of Chalcedon over "homoousios" vs. "homoiousios", which caused several wars over the next few centuries.
        • rsj_hn 5y ago
          > it's just that they have no practical impact at all, That's funny because a system that kept a civilization together for 1000 years is being claimed to have "no value" by someone who has no idea how to keep any society together and is mimicking the conventional wisdom of those overseeing a disintegrating society as a result of this ignorance. Not only does the work of Aquinas have value, it has more value over the long run than anything being produced today, as no ethical system that we hold dear has a chance of keeping anything going for even three generations, let alone 100. Modern society is suffering from collapsing birthrates and social disintegration at an alarming rate, and we are pretending to be smarter than those who set the rules of a civilization that was far more stable and productive than our own, with far more profound accomplishments.
  • chakkepolja 5y ago
    > And believing that religious believers accept 100% of religious belief without reasoning about them is a misunderstanding. Had they reasoned about them, most 2000 year old customs would have hardly survived.
    • Retric 5y ago
      They reason within the framework of those ideas. If you accept a religious text is accurate and find an obvious contradiction then rather than rejecting the religious text you’re going to try and justify both statements as true. So if Osiris was said to have red hair in one passage and was blond in another then they may have been referring to different people, one statement was a metaphor, he has hair of both colors at the same time, he had each at different ages, he dyes his hair at some point, etc. And of course people feel such ideas are worth fighting over.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  • arp242 5y ago
    The difference is that there is usually at least the presumption or expectation of evidence, even though many don't know all the details. Don't expect me to be able to explain all of cosmology or evolutionary history either, but I do know enough to know that it's based on the best available evidence available today. Mistakes do happen, and are corrected. With religion, there is no such presumption or expectation. These are vastly different situations.
  • colordrops 5y ago
    People have plenty of time, they just don't have the motivation.
  • jjk166 5y ago
    I've been told bad things would happen to me if I stick my head in a hungry lion's mouth. I've never tried it to verify. Is not-sticking-my-head-into-the-mouth-of-a-hungry-lionism a religion? There is a difference between belief and faith.
• coldtea 5y ago
  >First, people don't acquire the beliefs by considering and weighing evidence; they acquire them by being told them, usually at a young age, by people they trust, and making them part of their identity. That's why people are so resistant to changing such beliefs. Second, the set of beliefs acquired in this way is not just a few isolated ones, but a whole network of beliefs that cover every aspect of life and are all asserted as justification for each other in what amounts to a logical circle. Those two hold for, say roughly, 90% of what most people believe, secular or not. Even most scientific theories people believe, they haven't examined and are incapable of following their theories and experiements personally - they were just being told they are truth and they trust it to be so. (Heck, most people are even incapable of deriving the math answers somebody like Archimedes or Pythagoras arrived at 2.5 milenia ago, and all they know of a work as basic as Newton's is that there was some falling apple involved, or, if they really paid attention at school, that f=ma).
  • hellotomyrars 5y ago
    A layperson doesn't need to be able to reproduce mathematical proofs to understand something that is obvious and material in front of them that is explained by the proof.
  • pdonis 5y ago
    > Those two hold for, say roughly, 90% of what most people believe, secular or not See my response to tonymet upthread. > Even most scientific theories people believe, they haven't examined and are incapable of following their theories and experiements personally - they were just being told they are truth and they trust it to be so. For some theories that are called "scientific", yes, this is true--but that's because the scientists themselves don't have a track record of correct experimental predictions to begin with. (String theory, for example.) But for theories like, say, General Relativity, there is a huge track record of correct experimental predictions, and those predictions include things in our everyday experience now, like GPS. It's true that most people cannot verify for themselves the entire chain of reasoning that leads from the Einstein Field Equation to how their GPS device works, but they know that GPS works from their personal experience, so they know that whatever theory scientists are using to make GPS work, works. They don't have to take that on trust. In other words, for scientific theories that actually have practical impacts, you don't have to just accept what scientists say on trust; you can look at their track record of correct predictions.
• simonh 5y ago
  >First, people don't acquire the beliefs by considering and weighing evidence; they acquire them by being told them, usually at a young age, by people they trust, and making them part of their identity. That's why people are so resistant to changing such beliefs. I've come across countless counter-examples to this in my life. A lot of the socialists/Marxists I've known come from relatively well of conservative families for example. I've no real evidence for this except personal anecdotes, but I suspect gravitating towards an ideology is often as much motivated by what you are against as it is motivated by what you are for. If there's a hierarchy in power, political, religious, whatever, that you think is corrupt you're going to naturally gravitate towards an ideology that provides a narrative as to why it is corrupt and what can be done about it. People fed up with corruption in catholicism gravitated to protestantism. People fed up with feudal or capitalist hierarchies gravitate towards Marxism. People in the Muslim world fed up with the economic and military domination of the West gravitate towards islamic fundamentalism. People fed up with Communist totalitarianism gravitate towards democracy. These counter-narratives provide a framework for opposition and an agenda that opposition can rally around and unify on.
  • trashtester 5y ago
    I think all ideologies you list support your thesis. These are all examples of counter-ideologies. All of them have also led to ideological wars, including some of the most bloody conflicts in history. But there are counterexamples. The Scientific Revolution grew out of Christianity more gradually, and with somewhat less friction. Although the Church did try to fight back, the output of the scientists was simply too valuable to local populations and leaders to be suppressed. Likewise, many countries saw royalty and nobility gradually be replaced by the burgeoisie in a non-violoent manner. The main exception, France, was a lot less successful in this. Later on, while Marxism led to revolution in the Russian Empire, the labor movement in northern Europe decided to distance themselves from Marx, and instead work for the proletariat by reform rather than revolution. Not by attacking the burgeoisie, but rather by collaborating with it, and by leveraging capitalism to fund a welfare state. But then again, neither the burgeoisie or the labor movement represented a fundamentally new ideology. Rather, they both adopted and adapted the ideology already in place, which was carredi by some combination of religion, scientism and patriotism/nationalism. The ideologies DID evolve, but in these cases, not in an abrupt manner, dictated by a few "intellectual" ideologes. And most importantly, they did not treat the pre-existing system as a mortal enemy. History will show where the new ideologies will lead. At the momement, they seem to be very concerned with identifying enemies and not very interested in compromise. There seems to be more appetetite for conflict than the world has seen since the 1930's, and it may be wise to prepare for some kind of rupture within the next 5-30 years.
• prossercj 5y ago
  How did you acquire the belief that it is better to consider and weigh evidence? And on what scale are you weighing the evidence? And where did you acquire that scale?