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This discussion is fascinating, anthropologically speaking. Some observations: * Many commenters seem to be holding to this weird idea that if you don't believ

by kaitai 4y ago

This discussion is fascinating, anthropologically speaking. Some observations: * Many commenters seem to be holding to this weird idea that if you don't believe God will smite you, you will not be able to behave responsibly, give your word in a trustworthy manner, etc. If there's not a supernatural enforcer then there are no consequences to lying/breaking your oath. Interestingly, it looks to me that even atheists are endorsing this false idea here! * An understanding of symbolism and its nuances is also lacking. Perhaps this isn't a surprise, as Enlightenment thinking and literalist Protestant thought have largely erased cultural understanding of symbolism. Thus we have confusion in two ways: many folks swear on the Bible out of convention or lack of critical thought, rather than belief, but will rationalize if pressed, and then folks who are very thoughtful may choose the Bible (looking "normal") or something else (looking "different"). The document chosen, if there is a conscious choice made, symbolizes something about their approach to the ceremony and the position. It is not necessarily a magical choice. (A magical approach takes symbolism a step further and imbues the symbolic object with supernatural power. Contrary to popular belief, this is not a universal approach vis a vis the Bible. Remember that the Christian church and Christian faith and practice existed before the Bible was written, easy to forget in a "sola scriptura" cultural milieu!) * Amusingly, some really Bible-believing folks will not swear, on a Bible or on anything else, due to Matthew 5:34-37. This intellectual consistency is lost of course when we reduce swearing on the Bible to either convention or magic. Human rituals cannot be usefully be interpreted as legal acts or as declarations of intellectual belief in a set of propositions. They are symbols. The intellectual incoherency of commonly swearing on a book that says not to swear alone ought to tip you off. I sympathize, folks! I grew up quite literal-minded and so have had quite a struggle coming to terms with the Protestantism I grew up with. Learning the intellectual history of thought and religion and understanding the ways different cultures engage with the divine/supernatural/morality has been very helpful -- and some of that learning must be experiential. Taking part in physical rituals taps into a very different part of the human experience than reading philosophy.

leroy-is-here 4y ago
Humans are just the total sum of their actions. Actions beget being and so rituals beget a practiced being. Humans practice rituals every day without even thinking about it. Ever sat in your chair and immediately wanted a cold one?
- arvidkahl 4y ago
  What you describe sounds more like a habit to me. But even if it were a ritual —something (re-)enacted to imbue meaning to a moment— it's of a different quality than swearing in the head job of an organization that aims to bring humanity to the stars. There is a difference between what we consider to be the sacred and the profane. Rituals fall into either of these categories as well.
  - leroy-is-here 4y ago
    There are rituals with all sorts of meaning, individually and collectively. But if it can work individually then it can certainly work negatively too, such as with addictions. Many habits are rituals with no meaning, which is one of the reasons why people get depressed.
- stronglikedan 4y ago
  > Ever sat in your chair and immediately wanted a cold one? lol, categorically, no
- jjk166 4y ago
  You're describing habits. Plenty of things are habits but not rituals.
  - leroy-is-here 4y ago
    We’re going to have to disagree. Habits are merely unformalized rituals. If you examine your day-to-day you may find many rituals you do to prepare your self for the coming moment. Adjusting your volume on your music before a coding session. I obviously don’t know you, but a lot of people like to prepare snacks before watching Youtube. There are a lot of things we think of as habit, but we prepared them literally like a ritual.
    - jjk166 4y ago
      Unformalized ritual is an oxymoron. None of those examples are rituals. I mean if you want to call them rituals, go right ahead, but you're using a different definition of the word than everybody else, and the definition you are using is the one everyone else uses for habit.
EthanHeilman 4y ago
> If there's not a supernatural enforcer then there are no consequences to lying/breaking your oath. Interestingly, it looks to me that even atheists are endorsing this false idea here! Most Christian theology holds that God is the present age is not going smite people for breaking such oaths. I think you are right to frame this ritually not theologically. I would argue that purpose of swearing on an object is that it demonstrates that the oath is being made seriously, as an oath. Lying and breaking minor promises is socially acceptable in almost all human societies, and in some circumstances it is more socially acceptable to lie than be truthful. An oath is a different sort of object. An oath is something which is not socially acceptable to break, and thus swearing on an object which is deeply important to the oath taker ritually emphasizes this fact both to the oath taker themselves and to society at large. A modernist view of rituals is that they create Schelling fences[0]. You agree to X, everyone knows you agreed to X, you know that you agreed to X, and you know that everyone knows that you agreed to X. Thus, if you do !X, you know that you have broken an important oath and everyone knows that you have broken an important oath. There is a clear line and there are mutually reenforcing internal and external pressures not to cross that line. Furthermore, if someone tells you to d !X, you have an ironclad reason to tell them no and it is much harder for them to take the rejection personally since it is personal. You can point to a public pre-commited attestation to never do !X. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)
- tialaramex 4y ago
  > Most Christian theology holds that God is the present age is not going smite people for breaking such oaths. Or to put it another way. Since it is very obvious that people routinely break oaths, Modern Christians have come up with the rationalization that God chooses not to smite them, rather than accept the more likely explanation that God can't smite them for the same reason Superman couldn't prevent the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack.
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    While I am not religious myself, it is useful to actually learn about something before mocking it. Beyond the self evident reason for this, a fun is you might be surprised where else it shows up. In Christianity, mankind is taken as inherently sinful (even from the point of birth - hence baby baptismals) and is unable to avoid sinning. The path to 'salvation' is to accept ones own nature as a sinner and inability to not sin, repent for those sins committed, and essentially dedicate oneself to trying to live a life of 'antisinning', in spite of the impossibility of ever truly achieving such. If the phrasing of 'antisinning' wasn't enough of a tell, you might notice this fits Progressive antiracist rhetoric literally perfectly. And it's not a coincidence. The man who wrote "How to Be an Antiracist" (which is undoubtedly the most influential modern text on such topics) not only spent most of his early education in Christian schools, but is also the son of two Christian ministers. Antiracist rhetoric is literally Christian original sin repackaged with racism replacing sinning. Design patterns show up across all "industries."
tialaramex 4y ago
The Princess Alice experiments imply superstition would have a practical role in a society where (lacking CCTV and other modern technology to supervise) it's important that people do what they're supposed to without actual oversight: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21377689/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21377689/ Children in that study are markedly less likely to "cheat" in a task if they believe they are being supervised. This can happen because an actual adult supervises them, or because they believe (as they were told) that an invisible person "Princess Alice" is supervising them. Sceptical children confirmed Princess Alice wasn't real behaviourally, that is, they'd verify that she just doesn't exist by passing their hand through the space supposedly occupied by Alice, having done so they would cheat at the same rate as unsupervised children. If you remove those children from the results, Alice and an actual supervising adult are equally effective in deterring cheating.
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  The fact that we can't get people to do what they are supposed to do without threat of retaliation is really sad. Anecdata, I found that religious or otherwise superstitious people have a more flexible morality that allows them to justify objectively bad behaviour, such as cheating. Frankly, if all it takes is to ask for forgiveness from an eternal being is enough to guarantee eternal reward, justifying bad behaviour in the present is trivial.
WeylandYutani 4y ago
I come from a country where the majority of people count themselves as non religious. As atheism became a mainstream opinion in the 1980s a "solemn pledge" was introduced into the Constitution as an alternative to swearing on the Bible. Keeping Christianity around as some hollow ritual handed down by our ancestors seems to me much more insulting to true believers.
globular-toast 4y ago
> Many commenters seem to be holding to this weird idea that if you don't believe God will smite you, you will not be able to behave responsibly If anyone actually believed that a god would smite them, or in hell or any of that stuff, they would behave very differently. It's stupidly easy to find "Christians" who completely disregard any teachings of Jesus. It's stupidly easy to find Muslims who drink alcohol, including (or perhaps mainly) those from Muslim countries. It's stupidly easy to find Jews who flagrantly break the rules the second someone discovers the smallest loophole. I see only two possibilities: either they live every day in conflict knowing what they are doing is wrong but they don't have the will to make the necessary changes, or they simply don't believe. I am sure there are many in the former category (I was a carnivore for many years but knew I needed to stop so I know it's possible), but I believe most are in the latter.
thomastjeffery 4y ago
> If there's not a supernatural enforcer then there are no consequences to lying/breaking your oath. Interestingly, it looks to me that even atheists are endorsing this false idea here! > many folks swear on the Bible out of convention or lack of critical thought, rather than belief, but will rationalize if pressed You have contradicted yourself here. When someone asks why you swore on the Bible, you tell them the surrounding context, which is a story. You don't need to believe a story to appreciate it, or to continue its tradition. That's what symbolism is all about. > Amusingly, some really Bible-believing folks will not swear, on a Bible or on anything else, due to Matthew 5:34-37. This intellectual consistency is lost of course when we reduce swearing on the Bible to either convention or magic. The Bible is infamous for being logically inconsistent. It contradicts itself at every turn. The result is not that humans are unable to use it to back their opinions! Quite the opposite: nearly any arbitrary opinion can be found to have biblical support. Of course, religious belief is based on the circular conclusion that arbitrary morals come from The Bible itself, and not from the people reading it. That belief doesn't break the system. Instead, humans simply live with the conflicted ambiguity: it's called "cognitive dissonance". This is the power of natural language at work: ambiguity. It allows us to hear, express, and manipulate ideas that are not logically sound. Symbols can be explicit and literal, or implicit and symbolic. Just like GPT is claimed to have "features" and "limitations", the ambiguity of language is a double edged sword. The good news <insert bible joke here> is that we know about it. We are able to objectively recognize the difference between explicit definition and inference. We are able to recognize logical fallacies and their implications. We are able to use science and reason to literally reach new horizons. And that is why I can see someone "swear on" this book, and feel that I would do the same. It's a beautiful symbol, and a thought-provoking response to a tradition that I, like you, am generally quick to criticize.
- wolfhumble 4y ago
  >> Amusingly, some really Bible-believing folks will not swear, on a Bible or on anything else, due to Matthew 5:34-37. This intellectual consistency is lost of course when we reduce swearing on the Bible to either convention or magic. > The Bible is infamous for being logically inconsistent. It contradicts itself at every turn. If Jesus says 'do not swear an oath at all' (Matthew 5:34), and some president or official has been swearing on the Bible since 1789 – as in the case of The United States – what does that have to do with Jesus being inconsistent? The contradictions come when people read His word and decide not to follow it! (And I have done this many times myself in many other ways, sadly, and therefore grateful to Jesus for saving 'a wretch like me').

by kaitai 4y ago

leroy-is-here 4y ago

Humans are just the total sum of their actions. Actions beget being and so rituals beget a practiced being. Humans practice rituals every day without even thinking about it. Ever sat in your chair and immediately wanted a cold one?

arvidkahl 4y ago
What you describe sounds more like a habit to me. But even if it were a ritual —something (re-)enacted to imbue meaning to a moment— it's of a different quality than swearing in the head job of an organization that aims to bring humanity to the stars. There is a difference between what we consider to be the sacred and the profane. Rituals fall into either of these categories as well.
- leroy-is-here 4y ago
  There are rituals with all sorts of meaning, individually and collectively. But if it can work individually then it can certainly work negatively too, such as with addictions. Many habits are rituals with no meaning, which is one of the reasons why people get depressed.
stronglikedan 4y ago
> Ever sat in your chair and immediately wanted a cold one? lol, categorically, no
jjk166 4y ago
You're describing habits. Plenty of things are habits but not rituals.
- leroy-is-here 4y ago
  We’re going to have to disagree. Habits are merely unformalized rituals. If you examine your day-to-day you may find many rituals you do to prepare your self for the coming moment. Adjusting your volume on your music before a coding session. I obviously don’t know you, but a lot of people like to prepare snacks before watching Youtube. There are a lot of things we think of as habit, but we prepared them literally like a ritual.
  - jjk166 4y ago
    Unformalized ritual is an oxymoron. None of those examples are rituals. I mean if you want to call them rituals, go right ahead, but you're using a different definition of the word than everybody else, and the definition you are using is the one everyone else uses for habit.

EthanHeilman 4y ago

> If there's not a supernatural enforcer then there are no consequences to lying/breaking your oath. Interestingly, it looks to me that even atheists are endorsing this false idea here! Most Christian theology holds that God is the present age is not going smite people for breaking such oaths. I think you are right to frame this ritually not theologically. I would argue that purpose of swearing on an object is that it demonstrates that the oath is being made seriously, as an oath. Lying and breaking minor promises is socially acceptable in almost all human societies, and in some circumstances it is more socially acceptable to lie than be truthful. An oath is a different sort of object. An oath is something which is not socially acceptable to break, and thus swearing on an object which is deeply important to the oath taker ritually emphasizes this fact both to the oath taker themselves and to society at large. A modernist view of rituals is that they create Schelling fences[0]. You agree to X, everyone knows you agreed to X, you know that you agreed to X, and you know that everyone knows that you agreed to X. Thus, if you do !X, you know that you have broken an important oath and everyone knows that you have broken an important oath. There is a clear line and there are mutually reenforcing internal and external pressures not to cross that line. Furthermore, if someone tells you to d !X, you have an ironclad reason to tell them no and it is much harder for them to take the rejection personally since it is personal. You can point to a public pre-commited attestation to never do !X. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)

tialaramex 4y ago
> Most Christian theology holds that God is the present age is not going smite people for breaking such oaths. Or to put it another way. Since it is very obvious that people routinely break oaths, Modern Christians have come up with the rationalization that God chooses not to smite them, rather than accept the more likely explanation that God can't smite them for the same reason Superman couldn't prevent the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  While I am not religious myself, it is useful to actually learn about something before mocking it. Beyond the self evident reason for this, a fun is you might be surprised where else it shows up. In Christianity, mankind is taken as inherently sinful (even from the point of birth - hence baby baptismals) and is unable to avoid sinning. The path to 'salvation' is to accept ones own nature as a sinner and inability to not sin, repent for those sins committed, and essentially dedicate oneself to trying to live a life of 'antisinning', in spite of the impossibility of ever truly achieving such. If the phrasing of 'antisinning' wasn't enough of a tell, you might notice this fits Progressive antiracist rhetoric literally perfectly. And it's not a coincidence. The man who wrote "How to Be an Antiracist" (which is undoubtedly the most influential modern text on such topics) not only spent most of his early education in Christian schools, but is also the son of two Christian ministers. Antiracist rhetoric is literally Christian original sin repackaged with racism replacing sinning. Design patterns show up across all "industries."

tialaramex 4y ago

The Princess Alice experiments imply superstition would have a practical role in a society where (lacking CCTV and other modern technology to supervise) it's important that people do what they're supposed to without actual oversight: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21377689/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21377689/ Children in that study are markedly less likely to "cheat" in a task if they believe they are being supervised. This can happen because an actual adult supervises them, or because they believe (as they were told) that an invisible person "Princess Alice" is supervising them. Sceptical children confirmed Princess Alice wasn't real behaviourally, that is, they'd verify that she just doesn't exist by passing their hand through the space supposedly occupied by Alice, having done so they would cheat at the same rate as unsupervised children. If you remove those children from the results, Alice and an actual supervising adult are equally effective in deterring cheating.

PartiallyTyped 4y ago
The fact that we can't get people to do what they are supposed to do without threat of retaliation is really sad. Anecdata, I found that religious or otherwise superstitious people have a more flexible morality that allows them to justify objectively bad behaviour, such as cheating. Frankly, if all it takes is to ask for forgiveness from an eternal being is enough to guarantee eternal reward, justifying bad behaviour in the present is trivial.

WeylandYutani 4y ago

I come from a country where the majority of people count themselves as non religious. As atheism became a mainstream opinion in the 1980s a "solemn pledge" was introduced into the Constitution as an alternative to swearing on the Bible. Keeping Christianity around as some hollow ritual handed down by our ancestors seems to me much more insulting to true believers.

globular-toast 4y ago

> Many commenters seem to be holding to this weird idea that if you don't believe God will smite you, you will not be able to behave responsibly If anyone actually believed that a god would smite them, or in hell or any of that stuff, they would behave very differently. It's stupidly easy to find "Christians" who completely disregard any teachings of Jesus. It's stupidly easy to find Muslims who drink alcohol, including (or perhaps mainly) those from Muslim countries. It's stupidly easy to find Jews who flagrantly break the rules the second someone discovers the smallest loophole. I see only two possibilities: either they live every day in conflict knowing what they are doing is wrong but they don't have the will to make the necessary changes, or they simply don't believe. I am sure there are many in the former category (I was a carnivore for many years but knew I needed to stop so I know it's possible), but I believe most are in the latter.

thomastjeffery 4y ago

> If there's not a supernatural enforcer then there are no consequences to lying/breaking your oath. Interestingly, it looks to me that even atheists are endorsing this false idea here! > many folks swear on the Bible out of convention or lack of critical thought, rather than belief, but will rationalize if pressed You have contradicted yourself here. When someone asks why you swore on the Bible, you tell them the surrounding context, which is a story. You don't need to believe a story to appreciate it, or to continue its tradition. That's what symbolism is all about. > Amusingly, some really Bible-believing folks will not swear, on a Bible or on anything else, due to Matthew 5:34-37. This intellectual consistency is lost of course when we reduce swearing on the Bible to either convention or magic. The Bible is infamous for being logically inconsistent. It contradicts itself at every turn. The result is not that humans are unable to use it to back their opinions! Quite the opposite: nearly any arbitrary opinion can be found to have biblical support. Of course, religious belief is based on the circular conclusion that arbitrary morals come from The Bible itself, and not from the people reading it. That belief doesn't break the system. Instead, humans simply live with the conflicted ambiguity: it's called "cognitive dissonance". This is the power of natural language at work: ambiguity. It allows us to hear, express, and manipulate ideas that are not logically sound. Symbols can be explicit and literal, or implicit and symbolic. Just like GPT is claimed to have "features" and "limitations", the ambiguity of language is a double edged sword. The good news <insert bible joke here> is that we know about it. We are able to objectively recognize the difference between explicit definition and inference. We are able to recognize logical fallacies and their implications. We are able to use science and reason to literally reach new horizons. And that is why I can see someone "swear on" this book, and feel that I would do the same. It's a beautiful symbol, and a thought-provoking response to a tradition that I, like you, am generally quick to criticize.

wolfhumble 4y ago
>> Amusingly, some really Bible-believing folks will not swear, on a Bible or on anything else, due to Matthew 5:34-37. This intellectual consistency is lost of course when we reduce swearing on the Bible to either convention or magic. > The Bible is infamous for being logically inconsistent. It contradicts itself at every turn. If Jesus says 'do not swear an oath at all' (Matthew 5:34), and some president or official has been swearing on the Bible since 1789 – as in the case of The United States – what does that have to do with Jesus being inconsistent? The contradictions come when people read His word and decide not to follow it! (And I have done this many times myself in many other ways, sadly, and therefore grateful to Jesus for saving 'a wretch like me').