Comment on Chris Martenson on VivaBarnes predicted fertilizer shortage 2 weeks ago. WSJ confirmed it today
sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net 2 years agoI can sort of see where that would come from, with the pushing of rationalism which inherently removes the power from religion, people would suddenly be trying to find a universal meaning through rationalism, and because people are lazy and not very good at rationalism they would assume that these destinations actually work.
The honest truth is that we've known for hundreds of years that you can't get an ought from an is, and instead of accepting that, people have ignored it because someone was able to make a decent enough emotional argument. No wonder it ends up as religion dressed up in rationalism as a skin suit.
I expect to be very difficult to get to the next phase, which would be recognizing the amazing power of rationalism as a tool while also recognizing that it is a very poor tool for answering moral or ethical questions. You need to start with something different, and that could be emotional, and where it could be something completely different, but the one thing that you can't do is treat it as if it is scientific fact and universal.
If they stopped making that one mistake, I think the power of the religious elements of activism would drive pretty quickly. The answer for determining right and wrong shouldn't be outsourced, it requires long meditation about someone's personal convictions and further meditation to ensure that those personal convictions are internally consistent and not monstrous. Maybe part of the reason that even at higher levels activism turns into religion is that people just don't realize or don't want to realize the truth.
iamtanmay@wolfballs.com 2 years ago
I somewhat disagree. I think rationalism was just one outlet of many. There are many modern things that people don't realize are substitutes for religious outlets.
Harry Potter and superhero movies are filled with religious metaphors, trance behavior at concerts is similar to religious ceremonies, travel/holidays to other countries to marvel at architecture and art is no different from making pilgrimage.
I do not think people will ever realize this, outside of a very small number. The level of self understanding needed to realize this is too high, and our educational systems don't touch this subject. It is and will remain an unconscious need.
sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net 2 years ago
I don't think necessarily that there is a difference between what we're saying here, because I'm not saying that rationalism is what people are living in now, but I do think that it's arguable that rationalism is what killed God as Nietzsche argued.
Once that outlet was dead, people can fill it with fiction or nonfiction or whatever, it doesn't even necessarily matter because once you've killed the king, the king is dead. Whether you afterwards get a republic, or an emperor, or a democracy, for the country is completely broken up and taken over by a number of different countries, or even if you get another king, the king himself is still dead.
iamtanmay@wolfballs.com 2 years ago
Oh, I see. Yes, I understand what you mean. I agree.
People are very unaware of who they really are, and how they behave vs their imagination of themselves. They also don't understand their own motivations and needs.
I don't think religious people are any smarter, but they have a huge advantage with the religious superstructure that keeps their psychology grounded much better.
We really owe a huge debt to our ancestors for making and passing on such systems for us.
sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net 2 years ago
I wrote a book for my son before he was born, which I called The Graysonian Ethic: Lessons for my unborn son. One thing I keep coming back to in the different chapters is that a lot of our humanity was passed down from our ancestors. Not just culture, but even things we don't think about. We have so much survival, thousands of generations of survivors, written in our blood.
One example that's invisible is sickle cell anemia. This is common in black people but nobody else. It's a trait that evolved because sickle cell traits are more resistant to malaria. It's considered a disorder because that world doesn't matter, but back then it helped entire bloodlines survive. Same with our propensity to be overweight. It's a vice in an age of plenty, but most of human history was filled with famine, so having some extra meat on your bones might be the difference between survival and death.
These lessons built into our DNA are a good example of what you're talking about.
Looking at religion through a different lens, instead of thinking of it as the divine word of God passed down, and instead thinking of it as the combined wisdom of millennia of human beings helps to contextualize it and explain things that don't make sense in terms of it being divine word: The values of 2000 years ago are not the values of 1000 years ago, and the religion practiced today doesn't even look the same as the religion practiced 250 years ago in the least, but that's because it's a body of knowledge that's passed down, and parts are emphasized, and other parts are de-emphasized, and it evolves over time.
In that sense, it makes sense that Christianity while being imperfect has a huge lead over contemporary replacements. There have been 2000 years of sanding down the rough parts. The bible has instructions on how to keep your slaves, but the living ideology of Christianity is the thing that helped end the global slave trade. By contrast, the postmodern woke religion is still very rough, and contains a lot of rough edges that haven't been sanded down yet, and may never for all we know.