The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is indeed the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man, state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.posted by Abiezer at 10:16 AM on September 19, 2010 [15 favorites]
I don't think anyone has ever claimed that atheism alone makes one a good person.Well, they usually claim that religion makes you a bad person, or a worse person, or whatever. Bill Maher in particular has said that religion is what makes people actually go out and be violent, which implies that Atheists wouldn't do these things.
I'm sorry if this wasn't clear from my phrasing, but the new evidence is all in *favor* of religion as a useful adaption that *continues* to be useful even today. This is not the "atheists rule, believers drool" post you seem to have been expecting, nor does the evidence give us any reason to believe that religion is "vestigial."I don't think religion is any kind of evolutionary 'adaptation'. People tend to anthropomorphize things, and early religions were just anthropomorphisation* of their environments.
delmoi, I agree with your big point but with regard to that comic you can get called a militant atheist for just definitely not believing in god. In order to get called a militant christian or militant islamist you actually need to be sort of actually militant.Is that really true? I mean, I guess people use the term "militant atheist" to mean message board warriors. But that's just a different sense of the word. Kind of like how software pirates don't actually nock over boats on the open sea.
These are pretty weak articles. They just say that religious people are "happier" and do charitable things "more." We're never told how much happier they are or how much more they give. This must have been quantified in the experiment, so why don't we get to find out how significant the difference is?Yeah. It's important to remember that lies and happiness go together. Depressed people rate themselves more accurately then non-depressed people, who overrate themselves. Families where kids lie to parents are happier and have less conflict.
Taken as a whole, from an outsider's perspective, Communism is itself a religion, doing all the things a religion might do to expand its sphere of influence.See this is what I'm talking about w.r.t lies. Calling communism a religion is like calling Atheism itself a religion (which religious people love to do). There was nothing supernatural in communist ideology. It was not a religion.
Had you given two seconds of thought to what you just wrote, you would have seen why the bit is a completely irrelevant unit here. But in case you haven't yet, which has greater fitness, 0s or 1s? How does memetic selection on 0s and 1s work?hey guess what! You have no idea what you're talking about. Man. Philosopher Dirtbike is just making some amazingly dumbass comments about information theory. Kind of amazing. But beside the point of the thread so I'm not going to get into it.
If I were to ask about units in, say, classical music theory, if you reply with something about the encoding of your Mozart MP3s you've missed the point.
I try not to play armchair psychology, but when I hear people foam at the mouth about religion in general, I can't help thinking they're really just mad that their dad, who forced them to go to church or at a particular religious community that ostracized them for being gay -- grumblebeeJesus Christ that's just astoundingly stupid.
What I have learned from this thread is that, while many atheists will not tolerate a no true Scotsman argument when applied to religion, many in this thread will not tolerate any other argument when applied to atheism. -- Astro ZombieThat's a very succinct way of expressing what I was trying to say :P
So it's okay with you that simply being passionate about atheism gets you tagged with the same word that for religious people means you're a murderer and a terrorist?Like I said, same thing is true about violating copyright law. Who cares?
You really are okay with non-religious people being called terrorists not because of what they do but because they are passionate in their belief? I just want to hear you say it, so to speak.I thought this was about them being called militants. Militant isn't a synonym for terrorist.
All right, instead of using the loaded word religion suppose we assert that Communism is a dogma, and what is generally bad about religion (when religion is bad) is that religions are dogmas too, and it's the dogmatism that inspires people to wipe out the competition and kill people.Sure, you could say that. But if dogmatism is orthogonal to religion, then the supposed benefits of atheism, or the problems of religion don't actually exist. There are plenty of religious people who are not dogmatic.
*Of course, if you know know something about Shannon information, you know that Shannon information is strictly a function of the probabilities of the characters in the transmission, and has nothing to do with meaning.Do you believe that you can have meaning without information. At the simplest level meaning and information are the same thing.
Scientific theories often contain components that have not been identified (like, say, the top quark or Higgs Boson in the Standard model); but if it turns out that critical components don't actually exist, the theory is in trouble.Lots of scientific theories rely on things that haven't been identified or even theorized. Natural selection before DNA is the obvious example -- and it's already been discussed in this thread.
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.This is one of the most mis-represented quotes by Marx because he is not referring to religion only as an institution; ie: Catholicsm, Judaism, etc. In this text Marx is referring to religion as both way of thinking and as a way of being. If you read the whole page, you will notice that Marx equates religion with not only the official history of Germany but with Germany as a philosophy; that is, a way of thinking:
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.
It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.
German philosophy is the ideal prolongation of German history. If therefore, instead of the oeuvres incompletes of our real history, we criticize the oeuvres posthumes of our ideal history, philosophy, our criticism is in the midst of the questions of which the present says: that is the question. What, in progressive nations, is a practical break with modern state conditions, is, in Germany, where even those conditions do not yet exist, at first a critical break with the philosophical reflexion of those conditions.The abolition of religion does not come from political prosecution of religions institutions and orders. This tract is basically Marx's attempt to find the "superheroes" of a much needed socialist revolution in a Germany that is still entrenched in the spiritual revolution it pioneered in the Middle Ages (the Reformation) yet is lagging behind the modern social revolutions of a place like France. If Marx really were that rabidly against religious institutions, he would have said out right "off with their heads" but he doesn't because the struggle of Germany as he saw it in his time was not one against religion (Martin Luther was, after all, a badass by Marx's own account). The real struggle Marx identifies is that of the people's need for religion inside (and in spite) of themselves:
The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, the root is man himself. The evident proof of the radicalism of German theory, and hence of its practical energy, is that is proceeds from a resolute positive abolition of religion. The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest essence for man – hence, with the categoric imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence, relations which cannot be better described than by the cry of a Frenchman when it was planned to introduce a tax on dogs: Poor dogs! They want to treat you as human beings!
Even historically, theoretical emancipation has specific practical significance for Germany. For Germany’s revolutionary past is theoretical, it is the Reformation. As the revolution then began in the brain of the monk, so now it begins in the brain of the philosopher.
Luther, we grant, overcame bondage out of devotion by replacing it by bondage out of conviction. He shattered faith in authority because he restored the authority of faith. He turned priests into laymen because he turned laymen into priests. He freed man from outer religiosity because he made religiosity the inner man. He freed the body from chains because he enchained the heart.
But, if Protestantism was not the true solution of the problem, it was at least the true setting of it. It was no longer a case of the layman’s struggle against the priest outside himself but of his struggle against his own priest inside himself, his priestly nature. And if the Protestant transformation of the German layman into priests emancipated the lay popes, the princes, with the whole of their priestly clique, the privileged and philistines, the philosophical transformation of priestly Germans into men will emancipate the people. But, secularization will not stop at the confiscation of church estates set in motion mainly by hypocritical Prussia any more than emancipation stops at princes. The Peasant War, the most radical fact of German history, came to grief because of theology.
As philosophy finds its material weapon in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapon in philosophy. And once the lightning of thought has squarely struck this ingenuous soil of the people, the emancipation of the Germans into men will be accomplished.Marx's use of religious imagery to talk about revolution is not happenstance, by the way. I encourage you to read this bit from Engles' On the History of Early Christianity, an article that is the cornerstone for the marxist inspired Catholic insurgency we know as Theology Of Liberation. Liberation theologists look at themselves as abolitionists, not of religion but of Empire because without Empire, catholicism could be true force for liberation from suffering and oppression on our earthly road to Heaven. And to Marx, early Christian organizations were as needed as Martin Luther's protests because their revolutions were needed within their context in History.
Let us sum up the result:
The only liberation of Germany which is practically possible is liberation from the point of view of that theory which declares man to be the supreme being for man. Germany can emancipate itself from the Middle Ages only if it emancipates itself at the same time from the partial victories over the Middle Ages. In Germany, no form of bondage can be broken without breaking all forms of bondage. Germany, which is renowned for its thoroughness, cannot make a revolution unless it is a thorough one. The emancipation of the German is the emancipation of man. The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat. Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendence [Aufhebung] of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization [Verwirklichung] of philosophy.
When all the inner conditions are met, the day of the German resurrection will be heralded by the crowing of the cock of Gaul.
Do not let us go back to a fictitious primordial condition as the political economist does, when he tries to explain. Such a primordial condition explains nothing; it merely pushes the question away into a grey nebulous distance. The economist assumes in the form of a fact, of an event, what he is supposed to deduce – namely, the necessary relationship between two things – between, for example, division of labor and exchange. Thus the theologian explains the origin of evil by the fall of Man – that is, he assumes as a fact, in historical form, what has to be explained.As you can see the Economist and the Theologian are equals actors in the subjugation of the masses for the sake of Capital.
We proceed from an actual economic fact.
The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general.
This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.
I explicitly disclaimed the second part of that sentence in a post above. I never claimed that memes don't exist or that memetics is meaningless without an identified meme. Perhaps you have confused me with fourcheesemac?how can you possibly read that think that I "know there is no such thing"? Let me say this again (for the fourth or fifth time). I am not claiming that memes do not exist. Tybeet made the assertion that a basic unit is "beside the point" of memetic theory, and I even provided a link to his/her assertion. Tybeet's assertion is not true. The basic unit is THE POINT of memetic theory, not "beside the point".
In what other context is it okay to refer to someone as a terrorist when they are not?Well, like I said. They're not calling them terrorists; they're calling them militants. Those are different words.
This is not true: you can have information without meaning. Information is not enough to imply meaning, and that is precisely what the problem with localroger's claim that Shannon's information theory provides a framework for the transmission of and selection for cultural information. Meaning implies information, but not the other way around.Well, you never even bothered to try defining "meaning" so it's really impossible to have a discussion about it. Is it really possible to have information without meaning? All information "means" something - at the very least the result of some random process. The output of a PRNG "means" the result of a mathematical process. If you have a nuclear random number generator, then the bits "mean" whether or not some subatomic event happened. It all "means" something in some sense. It's just that you may not care.
Or in short, we can talk about biological evolution as a theory because, except for a few fringe cases, we know exactly how genetic information is transmitted, expressed, and modified.But we didn't know that 60 years ago. Does that mean biology wasn't a science at that point? Obviously not. People talked about genes before anyone knew what DNA was.
It took less than 30 years to get from Mendel to Darwin.Neither Mendel nor Darwin knew what genes were actually made of. Which according to the "logic" in this thread means they weren't doing real science. Obviously, that's idiotic.
What do you mean "believe in" evo-psych? Natural selection obviously affects behavior. Other than that, it's a field of study, not a belief system.It's a field of study that's produced bupkis.
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posted by bwg at 5:44 AM on September 19, 2010 [21 favorites]