Beliefs Conform To Cultural Identities 629
DallasMay writes "This article describes an experiment that demonstrates that people don't put as much weight on facts as they do their own belief about how the world is supposed to work. From the article: 'In one experiment, Braman queried subjects about something unfamiliar to them: nanotechnology — new research into tiny, molecule-sized objects that could lead to novel products. "These two groups start to polarize as soon as you start to describe some of the potential benefits and harms," Braman says. The individualists tended to like nanotechnology. The communitarians generally viewed it as dangerous. Both groups made their decisions based on the same information. "It doesn't matter whether you show them negative or positive information, they reject the information that is contrary to what they would like to believe, and they glom onto the positive information," Braman says.'"
Re:Oh well (Score:5, Interesting)
Depends on who's picking the facts ...
Example (poll results below): More people feel that gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve in the military than homosexuals. Same survey. The only difference between the two questions was the word "homosexual" vs the term "gays and lesbians."
Why do you think that opponents keep saying "homosexual rights" and "homosexual agenda"? It's because "homosexual" is a dirty word because of centuries of religious meddling.
And let's not forget stupidity. These poll results also show that more than 10% of the population (the ones who think it's okay to deny homosexuals rights but not gays and lesbians) depend on someone else to tell them how to think. (FauxNews, the Church, etc).
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/02/dadt_poll.html/print.html [americanprogress.org]
Re:One needs to look no further than religion (Score:5, Interesting)
That passage is of dubious authenticity and may be mistransliterated. It also includes other historical mistakes.
Personally, I think the arguments over transliterations (Chrestianos vs Christianos) are misguided since some of the PGM use "Chrestos" in clear place of "Christos" ("Christos" is Hebrew "Messiah" translated into Greek while "Chrestos" is Greek for "The Useful One" though Hans Dieter Betz translates as "The Most Excellent" in context).
However, the historical errors by Tacitus suggest he was not working from actual records, but perhaps simply entering a sidebar as to what the Christians said about the founding of their sect. Consequently I am not prepared to use it as evidence of Jesus's existance.
My own view is that Christianity began as a synthetic religion between somewhat Hellenized Jewish sects and Hellenistic mystery cults. I think the Gospels bear the same relationship to Christianity as the Asinus Aureus (as Augustine called it) bore to the Cult of Isis. That doesn't devalue the work as a mythological basis for religion and in fact may strengthen its pedigree. Such an interpretation however flies in the face of literalism.
Re:Hurr. (Score:5, Interesting)
Nobody reads Heisenberg anymore, I see....
One of the best books I have ever read on scientific epistemology was by him ("Physics and Philosophy" Great book.)
Over and over in that book he writes about how people tend to think that data implies theory, as if there is only one true interpretation of the information before a scientist, but how that is a false assumption. As he puts it (several times), "Data does not imply theory." Instead he suggests that theories can only emerge when scientists put the pieces together based on pre-existing philosophical assumptions.
"Physics and Philosophy" is really one of those books that anyone interested in the sciences really should read. It would help avoid the reactions to studies like this.
Re:One needs to look no further than religion (Score:4, Interesting)
I am aware that the majority of scholars think Jesus existed. However, this strikes me as evidence of what this thread is about rather than a matter of solid evidence. I think this is for a couple of reasons:
1) Christians of course want to think that Jesus existed.
2) Atheistic approaches tend to assume that it is simpler to assume that Jesus was a great teacher than that everything written about him was pseudopigraphic or mythological in origins.
My reason for saying there is no real reliable evidence however comes from concluding (by studying Hellenistic religions) that basic outline of the story of Christ is probably mythological instead of factual, and that it combines pre-existing threads from a number of other Hellenistic religions. Secondly, there seems to have been a very lively tradition of writing what were essentially novels about religious subjects as a means of religious teaching (Apuleius's Metamorphosis/Asinus Aureus is a good example of that). This sort of thing has been called "pseudopigrapha" when the authorship is falsely attributed.
Furthermore, when you actually look at Paul's epistles, they are all over the place in which Hellenistic religions they incorporate pieces of. His general approach seems to be to incorporate the basic religious terminology and cosmology of whoever he is writing to.
So when we strip all of these things which seem to come from other sources away (the Trinity from Plato, the Archons of the Ages from various Hellenistic Gnostic cults, the Last Supper as possibly having Dionysian origins, the death and resurrection on Easter as the pagan sacrifice of world renewal), we are really left with nothing new under the sun.
I am not dismissing the possibility of Jesus's existence entirely. However, I am saying that it is more fruitful to look at Christianity as an outgrowth of the Hellenistic world in general than the outgrowth of one man's teachings, and that I have no immediate understanding of the exact circumstance of the formation of Christianity in the first place (our records until really near the end of the Hellenistic era are remarkably sparse).
BTW, I would also go further. I think that some of this Roman literature about other Hellenistic religions was formative on Christianity as well. The development of the Blood Libel really seems to have its origins in Roman literature such as that of Lucan, Apuleis, Horace, etc. If Christianity is seen as having its origins in a syncretic, Hellenistic branch of Judaism, then I think more problems are solved than created. The only problem created is a doubt as to whether Christ actually existed.
Mechanical Thinking. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
When was the last time you changed your mind about a significant, foundational piece of data in your life?
I'm not talking about an uncertainty being made resolute on one side of the fence or the other.
I'm talking about a belief you once held to be true and around which you based your daily decision-making processes and then after review, realized that you were wrong and then took steps to alter your behavior accordingly.
Now, if you have experienced that, ask yourself the following. . .
Did you change your mind because of your own curiosity, reasoning and data collection OR because your tribe and its associated authority figures changed their minds and you felt compelled to follow suit?
Are you the sort of person who switches back and forth between beliefs easily?
Are you the sort of person who refuses to change belief systems out of fear of appearing or feeling weak-minded?
Do you lie to yourself in order to take the edge off uncomfortable truths?
Are you lying to yourself right now about any of the answers to these questions?
Just asking.
-FL
Re:No shit, Sherlock. (Score:3, Interesting)
Watch a Christian complete phase out and stop processing info when you point out the the many similarities between Jesus and many other similar shepherd gods in other cultures of that same region of the Eastern Med.
I'm not religious, but I "phase out" at that, too. The problem is that these "similarities" are an invention of a whacked-out conspiracy nut who basically just pulled them out of his ass. Non-religious people who buy into it are simply swallowing another form of dogma.
Watch a so-called science-focus skeptic phase out the same way when you point out that a recording of Dallas police broadcast has scientifically proven there were more than 3 shots fired in Dealey Plaza.
If you think that a recording of police broadcasts can "scientifically prove" anything, then you don't really understand what that phrase means.
As far as I can tell, the only thing that your two examples have in common is that they're based on ignorance. Anyone capable of doing basic research and applying simple logic should reject both claims.
Succinct summary of the study (Score:4, Interesting)
"Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus [culturalcognition.net]"
ABSTRACT:
People tend not to listen to your message if they view it as threatening to their livelihood, their community, or their ego.
--
Toro
Re:A partial solution: (Score:2, Interesting)
Poppycock.
There is no recorded instance of anyone "disappearing" when they became an atheist. Most of Europe is effectively atheist and has been for a couple of decades. When I look out my window, I see people - quite what they are doing in my backgarden I don't know :-P
Some unbalanced individuals may commit suicide if they believe their life has no meaning, but the change in paradigm between theism and atheism is such that people realise the meaning given by religion is illusory and that a good life has plenty of meaning even if there is no sky man wizard thing.
'Cause it makes a lot of sense to look elsewhere. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Irony (Score:3, Interesting)
This is vividly illustrated by modern data analysis methods, which tend to be black boxes defying full understanding. A good example that's been on slashdot a few times was the Netflix contest, where the most successful methods defy comprehension in all but the most simplistic way.
On the other hand, the bias in the overall direction of the field depends on individual goals. If one physicist's goal is a grand unified theory of all the forces, then individual experiments can be viewed as biased toward nonessential or irrelevant questions. Such bias does not exist in any objective sense, though, it merely reflects one physicist's priorities.
In this sense, saying that science is generally biased is rather trivial: each scientist is biased towards his interests and priorities. Moreover, this is no bias from his point of view, but it is a bias from another's, if his priorities and interests differ. It still does not follow from this that experiments reported by thusly biased scientists are flawed. Facts are facts. If they are relevant, they must be used, and if they are not relevant, they should be ignored.
This point is already well understood in the theory of statistics. A personality is represented as a formal collection of prior beliefs, for which there is only one (reasonable) logical way to combine them with the results of a statistical experiment: namely Bayes' theorem. When statistical data is made available, the prior combines with the likelihood to generate the posterior conclusions. It is routine (nowadays with computers) to evaluate the sensitivity of the posterior on both types of inputs, to gauge the significance of an experimental result, etc.
Re:Slashdot needs a like button. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A partial solution: (Score:5, Interesting)
Citation needed!
And even if you dig up some I still won't buy it because I was there, my parents and grandparents were there too. I know, you just talk....
Sure, there was a killing of intellectuals and some of them were priests, but most were not. Teachers, scholars, generals, aristocracy - they all suffered. BTW, in 10 years the allegedly killed people by Stalin rose from a few million to (don't laugh) 100 million! I have seen such ridiculous numbers from "respectable" sources and most people in the west are conditioned to believe any bullshit about the communist you care to concoct.
Killing and burning churches never works in the long run. If it did, Christianity would have never survived (remember, 2000 years ago the Christians were minority!). You might want to dig up my post about the Ottoman empire and see to what lenghts they went to extinguish christianity in our land. They had 482 years to do so and failed! Because action cause reaction. People started to identify their nationality via their faith. The church was poor and harassed and guess what - they produced great people and did a lot of good in those dark ages. After they got their power back all went to HELL.You can never keep people slaves forever - you always fail.
The trick that the communist applied was more clever than just killing - they simply discouraged people to go to church. You could go to church (yes, you really could - I have been to a church every Easter and every Christmas, mostly because my grandma was a bit religious. No one ever stopped us, no one came knocking on the door. In school people wore crosses below their shirts and no one said anything). 3 generations aftfer communism was established in my country almost everyone was an atheist. Which is exactly what this article is all about. Repeat after me - if I am not reminded DAILY even hourly that I am a believer I will cease to be one - this counts for the vast majority of people. Religion is a meme and you can diminish its influence in the same way you would do it with genes - you prevent the spreading.
I am forever grateful to the communist for one thing only (in general I despise them) - they showed empirically that a particular religion is NOT something natural, something that is inheritable human. Spirituality - yes! It comes from the realization of one's own mortality - nothing new, just read a bit of philosophy. Particular religion however - NO! Nobody is born christian , muslim or jew - you are MADE one and you have no choice. Which is abuse of human nature and damages your free will to an extent that is unrepairable. The communist tried to replace religion with faith in the Party and the system but that ideology had such a vast gap between intentions and reality that it was self defeating. It never did catch up with people. Everyone who tells you that the common people believed in the system is fucking liar!
So at the end, a generation emerged which had limited if none exposure to the most popular belief systems and the "substitute" did not work so we got the perfect secular, scientific, civil generation. I am one of those people - everyone (+/- 5 years my age) around me during all my life is being one - at school, at university, at work. The very new generations are already lost - 2 fucking days after the wall collapsed I saw Mormons on the streets! TWO fucking days, people! Then followed all the sects - there was an explosion of kids running from home, drug abuse, suicide...parents went crazy! One of our prime ministers (democrat and very strong anti-communist) refused permission to enter the country to a sect leader who was legally recognized and pampered in the whole western world and he wanted to sue us in den Hague! Man, if I could just have 5 minutes with this arrogant asshole alone!!!
So, I am sorry my friend but you are not in possessions of the facts, neither (I suspect) you want to be. Millions of nuns my ass - check how much the population of the country was at the time, if you claim to be intelligent (posting on \. is a statement after all), estimate how many priest there were and then talk crap! You just might end up with minus 1 000 000 figure there.....
Re:A partial solution: (Score:1, Interesting)
Some might argue that the cult of the totalitarian state is a religion in all but name. It has a lot of the trappings - veneration of the leader, symbology & vocabulary, demanding unquestioning obedience.
Re:Oh well (Score:2, Interesting)
"Depends on who's picking the facts ... "
Atheist: "I'll believe it when I see it, unless it involves the supernatural."
Deist: "I believe it because I see it, although it involves the supernatural."
Trying to explain to the hyena that there is gold buried in the sand is a waste of time as it is pretty damn hard to understand something you are trying to tread on.
---
Agnostic: "meh."
Re:The Irony (Score:3, Interesting)
I dunno - the danger of scientific consensus could be summed up in a few plays on a statement you made:
We say there is a theological consensus about the existence of God because all the theology papers that reach a conclusion about it reach the same conclusion: God must exist. It's not because theologians "just believe" that God exists due to their personal biases instead of what clear logic dictates. If anyone wants to claim that God doesn't exist, all they need to do is write up their reasoning in a paper (and lose their job at their Christian university or church).
We say there is an economic consensus about the risk of credit default swaps because all the economic papers that reach a conclusion about it reach the same conclusion: CDSs are safe investments. It's not because economists "just believe" that CDSs are safe due to their personal biases instead of what the facts say. If anyone wants to claim that a CDS isn't safe, all they need to do is write up their observations and reasoning in a paper (and lose their job on Wall Street).
The concern I have is the herd mentality. There is safety in numbers. How many stock analysts that pushed CDSs lost their jobs? Probably very few, because "who could have seen that coming!" Did anything bad happen to scientists who maintained the majority view that EM radiation must propagate through the ether? Generally you have more security and success if you're wrong but in the majority than if you're right but in a fringe minority. Sure, you could win a Nobel Prize, but if you don't come up with a REALLY clever experiment chances are you'll just end up getting shunned.
Don't get me wrong - scientific consensus isn't a bad thing. However, the part where we dismiss anybody who disagrees with it as a "quack" or whatever isn't always good. Most major advances in science have come from theories that deviated from scientific consensus at the time they were developed. At the same time, the majority of these kinds of theories turn out to be wrong. I think there needs to be a healthy tension in research between conformity and innovation. Most of the funding probably should be aligned with the consensus, but simply voicing a dissenting view should not ruin one's career.
Re:Oh well (Score:1, Interesting)
You screwed it up. It's more like this:
Atheist: Prove to me that God exists.
Non-Atheist: Prove to me that God doesn't exist.
Agnostic: You guys are still arguing about it? This is a question that is, for the moment, unanswerable given the data. Now would you two quit arguing and move on to more important questions?
Re:A partial solution: (Score:5, Interesting)
No system of beliefs is just a convenient way of disguising one's biases, but all of them can be. It's entirely possible to use, say, science to excuse being an asshole; eugenics is a perfect example of that.
The problem is that people who don't share a particular system of beliefs tend to not understand how anyone could believe it, and jump to the conclusion that they don't really do, but are merely pretending to in order to excuse their inexcusable behavior. This isn't helped at all that all such systems have people who believe them but don't understand them, yet feel the need to defend them; rationalism and science are perhaps the worst off here, due to their complexity.
The end result is people dismissing all arguments against their beliefs because they are usually made by people who 1) think the people they talk to are evil demagogues to be defeat or gullible sheep to be rescued and nobody wants to be treated that way and 2) don't understand why anyone would believe the system and thus usually end up arguing against strawmen of their own making, which is amuzing to watch but won't convince anyone.
All this means that it's very difficult to discuss any given belief system rationally; either your audience agrees with you, in which case it becomes an intellectual circlejerk, or they don't, in which case it ends up with you talking down to them or outright attacking them for being idiots, or there are both amongst them, in which case it becomes a free-for-all strawmen vs. insults brawl. Just look at the post that began this thread: it calmly suggests "abolishing" religion, in other words, forcing everyone to conform to the poster's beliefs. Is it any wonder that his would-be victims look at him and all that share his views with suspicion, just like he looks at them?
Re:A partial solution: (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway, the point is, given how deeply intertwined religion is with those things which weigh most heavily on the human mind (or "soul", if you believe there is one), I don't think the cocaine analogy, nor the implied addiction model of religious belief, even come close to explaining why people adhere so steadfastly to religion.
You're going to have to do a better job of explaining why. I get your "unanswerable questions" argument, but - no offence - it's shit. Theism doesn't answer any of those questions. It barely even tries. It simply asserts commandments based on an Ultimate Authority - an immortal Mafia Don who promises to break our legs if we don't don't pay homage and follow his orders.
The actual meaning of life, the question of morality ... those questions remain unanswered on any broad level. That's because we as individual human beings get to define what those things are, and no external orders can ever solve those dilemmas for us. Nobody can tell you what the purpose of your life is, and nobody can dictate a moral code to you. I find religion particularly offensive because it pretends to do both. I get one life to live to the best of my ability - a mere 80-ish years on this Earth, if I'm lucky - and some jackass in a funny hat thinks he has the right to dictate how I live it based on orders from his magical sky daddy. Well fuck that. Even if there were a "god" to tell me how to live my life, I'd tell him to get fucked too - I don't give a damn how he intended me to live it because it's purpose is mine to determine. He could have some input on it (if he'd speak the fuck up) but the final decisions would still be mine to make. As long as you allow for free will, no religion can ever give you an answer to what the purpose of life is.
Religion answers the question "What is the meaning of life" to the same extent that cocaine does - it's all about the next fix. We can come up with much better answers than that. Even Douglas Adams' tongue-in-cheek answer was more meaningful and less harmful than the ones provided by most religions.
Re:A partial solution: (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually as an interesting side note, looking at an argument as having two sides is a self-imposed mental restriction of cultural origin (I bet you're from the US :))
In fact, in most arguments neither side is fully right: if you notice, discussions where two people are discussing something with the intent of reaching a destination instead of winning points will often end with a conclusion which does not exact match the inital argument of any of them.
Not a criticism, just pointing out that even the most enlightened people will unknowingly be biased by the environment they live in (and other factors, many other factors).
Re:A partial solution: (Score:3, Interesting)
Oddly enough, the standards for "communitarian" and "individualistic" that they used to sort the people would put the majority of the "right-wing nutjobs" into the "individualistic" group, and the majority of the rest of /. into the "communitarian" group.
Note, specifically, that religion, or lack of same, wasn't even a factor in deciding which group you're in.
Re:A partial solution: (Score:3, Interesting)
60% is 'a mandate' 30% is 'a political party'
Re:A partial solution: (Score:2, Interesting)
There is nothing "magical" about scientists that makes them better than normal people. Indeed, there is no transcendental property to the scientific method that makes it some kind of unique window to "truth". It's just a tool that we use to try to get consistent and objective answers to questions about the universe.
A note on the Trinity (Score:3, Interesting)
First, Philo is an interesting source and I consider to be one important to the study of this topic. I would argue however that the trinity does derive (as was believed in the Renaissance) from Plato's works, in particular "Republic" and "Letters." However, the roots of the concept go even further back. In Republic you have Plato essentially arguing that a tripartite structure unites the human condition and society, and in Letters, this is applied to the structure of Godhead (though Plato only mentions two of the three components himself: Jupiter (The Shining Father) and the active principle, the son of Jupiter (Note that Jupiter, though the Latin name I have usually seen in translations was a word borrowed into Latin from Greek and seems etymologically related to Zeus but with -piter on the end signifying "father"). This Father/Son structure is particularly interesting here and worth coming back to.
Of course, the third element was filled in by Plato's followers by adopting the World Soul discussed in Timaeus. So we have The Shining Father (or The Father Zeus, or some other interpretation), The Active Principle/Logos/Son, and The World Soul. That is not far at all from Father/Son/Holy Spirit.
However, as Georges Dumezil has shown, this structure was not entirely invented by Plato. Instead Dumezil places the structure into a larger context comparable to the Vedic formula of Mitra/Indra/Ashvins (and in some rituals these are further divided as Mitra/Varuna, Indra/Vayu, and the Ashvins or Horse-Twins). This would also make the structure comparable with the Three Great Gods of Uppsala mentioned by Adam of Bremen (Odin, Thorr, and Freyr), of the three gods mentioned for their treasures in the Battle of Magh Tuiredh (Lugh, Nuada, and In Dagda). Other comparable structures include the Old Capitoline Triad (Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus), and the three offspring of Rig in Norse myth (Jarl/Earl, Karl/Freeman, and Thrall/Slave).
To these I would add the Three Gunas of the Bagavad Gita (Sattvas/Truth, Rajas/Kingship, and Tamas/Inertia), the three top varnas in Hindu society (Brahman/Priest, Kshatrya/warrior, Vasaya/Farmer-merchant), and the three top classes in post-Solon Athens (Elites, Horsemen, and men-of-yoke).
This suggests a very old pattern, the ancestor to which (I think which was a spacial/cosmic model roughly comparable to heaven/earth/hell) was dispersed as the Indo-European peoples expanded out from the Pontic-Caspian steppes. However to get into that is at least a 30-page paper!
Re:'Cause it makes a lot of sense to look elsewher (Score:3, Interesting)
Other gospels, as far as I am aware, do not focus on giving an account of the life of Jesus, but rater give accounts of "secret" wisdom given to some of his disciples, myths and parables used to describe christian teaching, and parables and phrases given by Jesus. I just purchased a book containing all the other early works recovered to date, so I'll know better what they say after I've read them.
As far as the gospels go, most believe that Matthew and Luke were written from Mark (and some believe from the "Q-document", a hypothetical collection if phrases and parables spoken by Jesus). If you read John, you'll notice that it is completely different from the other three, both in form, and in terms of which events are described (though it does not contradict them). John reads like a personal account from a close friend, while the other three read like biography.
I was researching the Gnostic gospels because of your comment, and I came across a claim that John was included because it was widely accepted among Gnostics, and extremely important to them, but not considered heretical by the orthodox church. I think it is fitting that the gospel that speaks the most about love would be used in such a way, though it is just a hypothesis.