What Value Do Atheists Find In Celebrating Christmas?

[mfbukowski]

(Actually, methinks there's something missing in your understanding of Richard Joyce)

OK please explain his point to me.

[Shelama]

This guy believes that morality is a "useful fiction". http://mitpress.mit....d=10894&ttype=2

You explain that point to me in terms of an actual, honest, thoughtful, thorough, careful reading and understanding of Richard Joyce's book and thesis. What, specifically, about morality in his beliefs is a "useful fiction," and why is that to be dismissed?

Edited January 3, 2012 by Shelama

[mfbukowski]

You explain that point to me in terms of an actual, honest, thoughtful, thorough, careful reading and understanding of Richard Joyce's book and thesis. What, specifically, about morality in his beliefs is a "useful fiction," and why is that to be dismissed?

LOL. There is no point in doing that, you already know what he says, since you feel that you know enough to say that I misunderstand him.

(Actually, methinks there's something missing in your understanding of Richard Joyce)

You want it very briefly? The argument is quite detailed, so I will avoid summarizing it and give you the bottom line.

The bottom line is that he believes that moral judgements cannot be "true or false" precisely because morality has evolved.

He still sees maxims like "do unto others...etc" -golden rule- to be "useful" even though they are not true or false- they are maxims but they are literally "fiction"

On the other hand, following a pragmatic theory of truth I see such maxims as pragmatically justified, along the lines of William James.

But you already know all that of course......

Now that I have had to explain to you what Joyce says, please tell me how I misunderstand Joyce.

[mfbukowski]

I am re-reading the above-linked Rorty article again, recalling that this article was instrumental in my leaving academic philosophy. There is just so much here that I really love. He is such a clear writer. In the off chance that there is anyone actually following this thread, let me quote something. In speaking of a post-philosophical culture he says this:

The question of whether the pragmatist is right to be so sanguine is the question of whether a culture is imaginable, or desirable, in which no one – or at least no intellectual-believes that we have, deep down inside us, a criterion for telling whether we are in touch with reality or not, when we are in the Truth. This would be a culture in which neither the priests nor the physicists nor the poets nor the Party were thought of as more “rational,” or more “scientific” or “deeper” than one another. No particular portion of culture would be singled out as exemplifying (or signally failing to exemplify) the condition to which the rest aspired. There would be no sense that, beyond the current intra-disciplinary criteria, which, for example, good priests or good physicists obeyed, there were other, transdisciplinary, transcultural, ahistorical criteria, which they also obeyed.

Rorty is an atheist for reasons I would like to detail one day, but the bottom line is tied up in his concept of the contingency of the self in which he does not consider the possibility that we experience the self as eternal, and of course he cannot conceive of the possibility that humans are Gods in embryo or that God himself is perhaps not unlike Nietzsche's Ubermensch. But that is for another day.

The bottom line as I see it is that pragmatism is very conducive to an understanding of the justification of beliefs which is beyond the understanding possible in the correspondence theory of truth and is a potential way of seeing the world which unifies science, the arts, the "priests, the poets, the physicists or the Party" in a unified understanding of how humans organize their own worlds, and by extension, how God has organized this world in which we all live.

I am not sure if there is a good reason to let this thread run on. I will wait another day or so I guess.

Edited January 3, 2012 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

Yet another fantastic quote. Honorentheos- if you are still there, this is what it is all about

Pragmatism, by contrast, does not erect Science as an idol to fill the place once held by God. It views science as one genre of literature-or, put the other way around, literature and the arts as inquiries, on the same footing as scientific inquiries. Thus it sees ethics as neither more “relative” or “subjective” than scientific theory, nor as needing to be made “scientific.” Physics is a way of trying to cope with various bits of the universe; ethics is a matter of trying to cope with other bits. Mathematics helps physics do its job; literature and the arts help ethics do its. Some of these inquiries come up with propositions, some with narratives, some with paintings. The question of what propositions to assert, which pictures to look at, what narratives to listen to and comment on and retell, are all questions about what will help us get what we want (or about what we should want).

[Tarski]

Obviously Tarski knows him- seems like it is some kind of experiment? I never thought Mr X was for real.

Huh?

Mr X?

If you mean "Xioneye", well I have no idea who that may be.

In fact, I may have only read exactly one post by Xioneye--the short one that he/she addressed to me above.

EDIT: OK, now I see that Mr. X is apparently our friend Nightlion.

Edited January 3, 2012 by Tarski

[lachrymolotov]

The OP asks, "What value do atheists find in celebrating Christmas?"

but what we really want to know is...

..."why condemn believers for having no evidence for their beliefs?"

To which I seem to agree with the answer given (to some extent).

People (no matter what they believe) feel a certain way and look to justify how they feel. For the most part, everyone is on a level playing field when it comes to absorbing beliefs from the culture they are surrounded by. When they are offended or feel badly about their culture, then they seek explanations and evidence that corroborate how they feel.

All well and good, so far. Mostly, this is the reason people get nowhere arguing about anything on the Internet. People are just looking to be right about how they feel.

I diverge when it comes to truth claims, because I don't think truth has to be as ambiguous and useless as mfbukowski loves to make it. The reality is that certain assumptions about nature can be applied to accomplish real world tasks. Even if reality is sometimes questionable, things are happening and can be measured and observed by more than one individual. No matter what anyone believes about the nature of the key to my car, it still unlocks the door and starts it every time I get in. When someone else uses my key, they experience the same result. It is safe to assume everyone in the world can use my key to get into my car. It is as useful as truth can be. If it, someday, stops working, then there will be a reasonable explanation for why it is so... like being worn out from use.

I feel like mfbukowski regularly uses the ambiguity of truth to discredit everyone, but it is a nihilistic double-edged sword. If the truth and reality really were so ambiguous, we wouldn't be able to take abstract ideas and apply them in the real world, where it makes impacts in the lives of multiple individuals (possibly billions).

The vast majority of atheists haven't researched the ins and outs of Christianity. Most simply don't care. Most do not engage in debate on Internet boards. They often feel researching these types of things are a waste of time. Most atheists place value on traditions because that is how they were raised, the same reason everyone else does. To suggest that they shouldn't place value on Christmas, which is how most people would interpret the title question of this thread, because it is actually a Christian holiday is funny to some people, because Christians, themselves, stole the holiday from the pagans. Not only did they steal the holiday, it was originally a festival of lawlessness, making the whole OP seem a little ironic.

The whole reason why some atheists condemn Christianity, as well as other religions, is two-fold. One, is that they share the same exact opinion as mfbukowski. People shouldn't be forced to believe a lie. The second is that there are people who feel religion is harmful. Cited are references of racism, sexism, violence, and plain stupid ideas. As time has gone on, the world-at-large has become more aware of what unfairness and inequality are. Old religious traditions can be perceived as perpetuating injustice.

The secular perspective is, generally, that fairness and equality should prevail. Whether this perspective has been arrived at by feelings, culture or by reason, I don't know. Most people aren't intellectuals, and it seems that the intellectuals are better at coming up with answers to societal issues (among others) and the culture of secular people who follow them adopt their idea through the mechanisms of cultural syncretism rather than by their own logic. Should everyone research their own point of view and judge for themselves? Probably, but most people just aren't that smart and have to take other people's word for it. Original ideas are few and far between, these days, and learning the history and cultural context behind every one is a daunting task.

Should atheists' opinions count more than the opinions of religious people? Probably not, since we are all bound more by culture than most people want to admit. Logic and reason are largely illusory. Should information acquired through empiricism count for more than information acquired through so-called spiritual means? Most definitely. I don't think we should ever ignore what we reliably do know just because someone says they have spiritual knowledge to the contrary.

The way of seeing the world in the most pragmatic way would be to come up with meta-explanations of culture, which exist. Knowledge of how culture is transferred is utilized every day by the media, advertising, government, pre-school teachers and Internet boards. Some apply it in more sinister ways than others. By controlling culture, you control thought, behavior and beliefs. The scary part is that we are all susceptible to methods that are employed in this day and age by small groups of people who wish to bend large groups to their will. This is why it is important for everyone, even atheists, to question their culture and from whence it came.

[mfbukowski]

I diverge when it comes to truth claims, because I don't think truth has to be as ambiguous and useless as mfbukowski loves to make it. The reality is that certain assumptions about nature can be applied to accomplish real world tasks. Even if reality is sometimes questionable, things are happening and can be measured and observed by more than one individual. No matter what anyone believes about the nature of the key to my car, it still unlocks the door and starts it every time I get in. When someone else uses my key, they experience the same result. It is safe to assume everyone in the world can use my key to get into my car. It is as useful as truth can be. If it, someday, stops working, then there will be a reasonable explanation for why it is so... like being worn out from use.

You think I made all this stuff up myself?

This is called "Pragmatism" and the entire idea is that what is "true" works. Here read this, and the whole article. This is/was a major trend in philosophy for the last hundred years or so. Trust me, I didn't make it up, though I wish I did.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism

Peirce developed the idea that inquiry depends on real doubt, not mere verbal or hyperbolic doubt^[9] and said, in order to understand a conception in a fruitful way, "Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object"^[10] — which he later called the pragmatic maxim. It equates any conception of an object to a conception of that object's effects to a general extent of the effects' conceivable implications for informed practice. It is the heart of his pragmatism as a method of experimentational mental reflection arriving at conceptions in terms of conceivable confirmatory and disconfirmatory circumstances — a method hospitable to the generation of explanatory hypotheses, and conducive to the employment and improvement of verification. Typical of Peirce is his concern with inference to explanatory hypotheses as outside the usual foundational alternative between deductivist rationalism and inductivist empiricism, though he himself was a mathematical logician and a founder of statistics

Another Pragmatist William James wrote a book called "Varieties of Religious Experience.

More and more Mormons appear to becoming interested in Pragmatism, so you critics better get used to it.

http://www.juvenileinstructor.org/pragmatizing-mormonism-and-baptizing-william-james-or-was-william-james-a-closet-mormon-and-joseph-smith-a-proto-pragmatist-part-i-on-william-james-and-mormonism/

Your arguments are not going to work too well when everyone gets educated in this stuff

[mfbukowski]

The way of seeing the world in the most pragmatic way would be to come up with meta-explanations of culture, which exist. Knowledge of how culture is transferred is utilized every day by the media, advertising, government, pre-school teachers and Internet boards. Some apply it in more sinister ways than others. By controlling culture, you control thought, behavior and beliefs. The scary part is that we are all susceptible to methods that are employed in this day and age by small groups of people who wish to bend large groups to their will. This is why it is important for everyone, even atheists, to question their culture and from whence it came.

The entire point is that what you call "real" is nothing more than your symbolic representations of what works. In that sense, reality IS culture.

Your eyes, your perceptions- everything you know is conditioned by culture and it is inescapable. Science "works" but it is not a representation of what "is"- we can't get to what "is" because all we see is our experience of it.

All empiricism is is a carefully documented record of cultural prejudices in perception.

Why can't we say what light "is"? Is it a wave or a particle? Both can't be right- or can they? Either model works in the context of inquiry- in other words, the way you ask the question implies the answer.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bad-boy-of-physics

Leonard Susskind: The Bad Boy of Physics [Preview]

Leonard Susskind rebelled as a teen and never stopped. Today he insists that reality may forever be beyond reach of our understanding

LEONARD SUSSKIND

Vocation | Avocation

Theoretical physicist, known especially for pioneering string theory, black hole physics and the multiverse

Where

Stanford

Stanford University physicist Leonard Susskind revels in discovering ideas that transform the status quo in physics. Forty years ago he co-founded string theory, which was initially derided but eventually became the leading candidate for a unified theory of nature. For years he disputed Stephen Hawking’s conjecture that black holes do not merely swallow objects but grind them up beyond recovery, in violation of quantum mechanics. Hawking eventually conceded. And he helped to develop the modern conception of parallel universes, based on what he dubbed the “landscape” of string theory. It spoiled physicists’ dream to explain the universe as the unique outcome of basic principles.

Physicists seeking to understand the deepest levels of reality now work within a framework largely of Susskind’s making. But a funny thing has happened along the way. Susskind now wonders whether physicists can understand reality.

[Honorentheos]

Hi mfb -

I apologize that I'm late getting back to you. I've been busy at work, and as it is I have only a little bit of time right now between getting home late and bedtime stories. But since you were courteous and reopened the thread I wanted you to know that I hadn't forgotten you just have higher priorities at the moment.

I should also wait to respond until I've had a chance to read through your info in more detail. That said, I'd like to posit something based on the first comment in your post -

The point I was making has to do with anti-realism and pragmatism and the fact that acting on feelings is often perfectly "rational".

One place I think you and I get cross-ways from one another is in talking about philosophy (frankly as something I see as "other" or as outside of a person as any definition of reality we are calling "realism") and psychology. Now, if I remember right you have a background of some sort in that field as well. So I'm curious as to how you deal with obvious issues that are caused by the very nature of our interpretation abilities that we use to form so call rational decisions? Each of the three books I linked to spend significant time discussing these issues, but I think Sway is the most direct in terms of identifying problems and why we need strategies for coping with them. I'd argue that allowing an ideology such as Mormonism to hold so much "sway" over one's perception of the world and what actually is "rational" practically primes a person for making poor decisions - if they could only get outside themselves and see it. So, how do you accommodate the fallibility of the human mind without using other people/history as a means of cross-checking your choices and just how rational they really are?

And I'll get to those quotes this weekend probably.

Thanks.

[Honorentheos]

BRAVO!!! What in life is more important than community and CONNECTEDNESS? What a terrific post.

Thank you, I appreciate your comments in the thread as well!

[mfbukowski]

I'd argue that allowing an ideology such as Mormonism to hold so much "sway" over one's perception of the world and what actually is "rational" practically primes a person for making poor decisions - if they could only get outside themselves and see it. So, how do you accommodate the fallibility of the human mind without using other people/history as a means of cross-checking your choices and just how rational they really are?

I think most critics come up with the same point, and I think it is because in order to be a "critic" one must have been born Mormon, have been raised in the doctrine, then suddenly "discovered" that there are different ways of seeing reality, and then adopting that way of seeing as "true". Usually that implies some sort of scientism or naturalism as the newly found "faith", but yet they keep a basically naive view of the nature of "truth".

Their view is that Truth is what is out there- that we accurately represent somehow these truths in scientific statements and it is irrational to see anything except the way things "really are" ie: the way science represents them.

But there are other ways to see the world which are NOT based on scientism, and there are other ways to teach children to see reality which are much more compatible with an intellectual understanding of Mormonism. I think it is sad that more Mormons are not aware of these other ways of understanding reality which have nothing to do with scientism.

A large chunk of philosophy for the last hundred years has been totally opposed to that view of "naturalism" or "reductionalism" or "scientism"- and those philosophers have put forth an entirely different view, call it "postmodern" or whatever- their idea is that reality may in some sense be "out there" but there is very little we can SAY about it because we are always "stuck" in language.

The implication of that is that we can only speak about..... well,.... what we can speak about, not about what is "real" independent of the way we see it and speak about it

So all we can speak about really are human perceptions and the way we order the world. This is the essence of humanism, post-modernism etc, but for some reason the philosophically naive Mormon critic only sees what science can do in a very narrow absolutist, fundamentalist, literalist way.

If you can't measure it, it's not "real". What they should understand imo is that in fact measuring something is what makes it UNREAL. You have ripped the thing out of its context, chopped it up, sliced it, diced it, and then made a linguistic pronouncement and definition about what is "real", when all you are doing is talking about the way we talk about what is "real".

Anyway I suppose that is a digression- call it background material for the rest of the post.

The bottom line is that I came to Mormonism out of philosophy- I came out of a postmodern background. I realized that what we talk about is not "real", but it is the best we can do- language is all we have. The way we express our observations, the way we feel and taste and touch things, the ways our eyes and ears select wavelengths of light or sound and construct what "information" we have evolved to find useful to survive is all we can "know".

We are kind of stuck in our own world which evolution has given us because our thoughts dreams feelings- all of that is what keeps us alive.

What is "real" becomes irrelevant to us as organisms- we only see what we need to see to order our worlds to keep us as a species, in line with the environment around us- which has now become a cultural environment, not even a natural one anymore. A baby left alone in the desert would survive only a few hours without it's "culture"- without protection provided by other enculturated humans who know cultural artifacts like the fact that babies are supposed to be protected, and nursed and taught, and not eaten, as perhaps a bear might do with its cubs.

This was a totally ingrained principle with me- in fact when I was at UCLA when I had barely heard of Mormonism, 15 years before I started investigating the church, I was fascinated by a quote from Josiah Royce- a philosopher who was in many ways an early Pragmatist- which is written across the top of the stage in Royce Hall at UCLA which says

"Education is learning to use the tools the race has found indispensable"

In many ways- that says it all; all of culture is a tool, and a tool which we need to survive, nothing more, nothing less. It doesn't tell us what is "true", because it is not itself "real"- it is a tool to allow us to do "what works" to do those actions which are "indispensable".

So science is like any other cultural tool in the bin- it allows us to do all sorts of practical things, but there are also other cultural tools just as important. Morality is important. A feeling of community is important. A sense of your purpose in life and in relation to the universe is also important- just as important as science. As I see it now, that is where religion comes it. And I find that a religion which models God as a man is a highly useful belief. The notion that Man-God "organized" this world sounds to me very coherent to the idea that all we know- our world- is man made, and organized through our activities. And this "truth" -this tool- is just as true- it works just as well for its purpose- as knowing the boiling point of water, or how far it is in miles to the moon, work for their cultural purposes.

And can you see how we are all "unified in purpose" - as incidentally the LDS Godhead is- fits with these ideas? That we all can be unified in purpose with the Gods as they are unified in purpose?

Anyway, that was the discovery of Mormonism I made. Coming from that Pragmatist background, that whole world view just snapped into place with what I already knew about the man-made structure of what we call "reality".

So no, Mormonism does not hold "sway" over the way I see the world- the way I see the world coheres with Mormonism perfectly, and so I am a Mormon. And most importantly, I have had religious experiences which I see just as "valid" and reasonable in accepting as "real" as any other subjective experience I have ever had, including hitting the "post" icon below, which I am about to do.

Edited January 6, 2012 by mfbukowski