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"So assuming you actually have a viable choice, the situations where it makes sense to reject religion in favor of far truth are extreme – either there are big personally-useful far contrarian claims to learn, or you have a good shot at being a rare far expert, respected by a community with truth-correlated standards. So if such extremes seem unlikely to you, far truth probably isn’t worth its costs to you."
Given 1. religious people tend to have better lives and 2. far beliefs, e.g. religion, have small effects on your life. Then why not believe in religion?
"Liberals often say that the Right’s hatred of Obama is about his race. Conservatives say it’s about his socialist agenda. But there’s something more going on, and it’s captured in the way that the Right has often mocked Obama as “the chosen one,” the Messiah. Dig a little under the surface of that derision and you’ll discover a world of confusion and ambivalence.
Obama is a deeply familiar figure among tea partiers and conservative Christians. He has the energy and charisma of a pastor, and he’s the sort of authority figure many on the far-Right are conditioned to respect. But the context is all wrong. The messenger is a black man. The hope he offers is grounded in the possibility that human institutions can be expressions of the common good."
"four tribal markers that characterize the boundaries of American evangelicalism: abortion, homosexuality, evolution and environmentalism. Opposition to all four of those constitutes evangelical tribal identity."
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So back when Billy Graham was just starting out, the boundaries of the tribe weren’t policed and enforced as fiercely as they are today. There were other tribal markers — no drinking, no dancing, etc. — but only one of today’s Big Four was then in place: opposition to evolution. That’s the oldest of the Big Four — the only one that traces back to the last time when the culture wars were as prominent and heated as they’ve become in recent decades.**
But if evolution is the oldest of the Big Four, it is also probably the weakest. Categorical opposition to evolution is not as mandatory as categorical opposition to abortion and homosexuality. A firm stance against evolution verifies one’s status within the tribe, but the lack of such a firm stance doesn’t necessarily require one’s expulsion.
"Here's some background those befuddled Democrats need to know: One of the most robust and effective conspiracy theories on the right, the notion that "secularism" – or, just as often, "Secular Humanism" – is a religion is meant to be taken entirely literally: right wingers genuinely believe it refers to an actually existing religious practice. How do conservatives know? Because, they say, the Supreme Court said so. "
Scientific interest in the cognitive underpinnings of religious belief has grown in recent years. However, to date, little experimental research has focused on the cognitive processes that may promote religious disbelief. The present studies apply a dual-process model of cognitive processing to this problem, testing the hypothesis that analytic processing promotes religious disbelief. Individual differences in the tendency to analytically override initially flawed intuitions in reasoning were associated with increased religious disbelief. Four additional experiments provided evidence of causation, as subtle manipulations known to trigger analytic processing also encouraged religious disbelief. Combined, these studies indicate that analytic processing is one factor (presumably among several) that promotes religious disbelief. Although these findings do not speak directly to conversations about the inherent rationality, value, or truth of religious beliefs, they illuminate one cognitive factor that may influence such discussions.
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And what that means is that the single-minded devotion to work that Weber described no longer offers any reassurance that can help Protestants cope with the anxiety of uncertainty about their salvation. What Paul Krugman calls the Great Divergence — escalating economic inequality coupled with the divergence of productivity and wages — means that a Protestant ethic will only compound that salvation anxiety. Working harder and having nothing to show for it can appear to be evidence that you are not favored by God, thus heightening the fear that you are not among the elect.
So how, then, are Protestants to cope with salvation anxiety? For some, I think, the solution has been tribalism.
Tribalism allows you to know that you belong. It allows you to claim, with confidence, that you are among the righteous. It promises the assurance of salvation that Reformed Protestantism otherwise withholds.
"The bottom line is that I was much less willing to engage my relative’s cuckoo beliefs than I normally am with strangers, even though I think I did manage to make her/him doubt or even reconsider part of the nonsense s/he apparently so readily accepts. The question is: should I not have done more? After all, I subscribe to virtue ethics, an approach to morality according to which your friends and relatives are actually more important (to you) than strangers because you have a relationship with and duties toward them. Do these duties not include steering them away from falsehoods, some of which (e.g., the ones concerning alternative medicine) can actually be directly deleterious to them?"
"If de Botton wants to build a temple to atheism, good luck to him. I just hope it’s a place where a diversity of people feel able to work together to discuss options for a shared future, not simply sit in awe of a world they’ve been given. At their best, religious sites provide this. I’d hope any atheist one would too."
"Recent polls indicate that atheists are among the least liked people in areas with religious majorities (i.e., in most of the world). The sociofunctional approach to prejudice, combined with a cultural evolutionary theory of religion's effects on cooperation, suggest that anti-atheist prejudice is particularly motivated by distrust. Consistent with this theoretical framework, a broad sample of American adults revealed that distrust characterized anti-atheist prejudice but not anti-gay prejudice (Study 1). In subsequent studies, distrust of atheists generalized even to participants from more liberal, secular populations. A description of a criminally untrustworthy individual was seen as comparably representative of atheists and rapists but not representative of Christians, Muslims, Jewish people, feminists, or homosexuals (Studies 2–4). In addition, results were consistent with the hypothesis that the relationship between belief in God and atheist distrust was fully mediated by the belief that people behave better if they feel that God is watching them (Study 4). In implicit measures, participants strongly associated atheists with distrust, and belief in God was more strongly associated with implicit distrust of atheists than with implicit dislike of atheists (Study 5). Finally, atheists were systematically socially excluded only in high-trust domains; belief in God, but not authoritarianism, predicted this discriminatory decision-making against atheists in high trust domains (Study 6). These 6 studies are the first to systematically explore the social psychological underpinnings of anti-atheist prejudice, and converge to indicate the centrality of distrust in this phenomenon."
"The take home point has to do with shifting social alliances. Now that most Americans have abandoned a strong dislike for members of other religions, it’s possible for The Religious to emerge as a socially-meaningful identity group. In other words, once members of different religions begin to see each other as the same instead of different, they can begin to align together. Suddenly atheists become an obvious foe. Instead of one of many types of people who had lost their way (along with people of different faiths), atheists could emerge as uniquely problematic. It is the building of cross-religious alliances, then, that undergirds the strong dislike for atheists specifically."
Philip K. Dick
The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
Eds. Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, November 2011. 944 pp.
_____. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
1964. Mariner, October 2011. 240 pp.
_____. Ubik
1969. Mariner, April 2012. 240 pp.
_____. VALIS
1981. Mariner, October 2011. 288 pp.
_____. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
1982. Mariner, October 2011. 256 pp.
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Dick’s convoluted sci-fi plots are best read allegorically in any case, and I think Three Stigmata and Ubik deserve to be seen as two of the starkest parables of the Marxian concept of reification ever written. The entropic settings of both novels are indistinguishable from our mundane world of consumer capitalism, where meaningful distinctions between people and objects have collapsed: Humans have become mere things to be drugged and manipulated, while artifacts have become efficacious, quasi-spiritual agents. The characters in both books routinely emit a debased jargon full of advertising slogans and empty journalese, all the while moving through an object-world that seems vitalized by the very powers they have lost. Yet there remains the possibility, however absurd, of a kind of salvation, of some transcendent message that can break through the reified crust and put the characters in touch with their essential selves. This invasive signal, emanating from a higher dimension, is usually cryptic and distorted by noise, and can often be confused with the welter of garbage surrounding it. As Dick would put it in VALIS, “the symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum” — and this is how the first inklings of Dick’s later oracles vouchsafe themselves in his early work.
"My wondering was rewarded by this excerpt from Spiritual Instruction and Discourses, Vol I: The Authentic Seal by Archimandrite Aimilianos: “Orthodox Spirituality and the Technological Revolution”
He argues that there isn’t anything essentially different about today’s technology, in its effect on our spiritual life, than there ever has been. Technology per se is not the problem. Rather it is the “absence of accountability in the way in which technology is administered and exploited.” "
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