Check out the comments section for some FASCINATING discussions on the origins of morality
Added 2019-07-12 02:19:58 +0000 UTC
Comments
The title of this video almost worked like a clickbait - I expected to hear some ground-breaking news on why Christian girls are untrustworthy. But the conclusion was that they are untrustworthy because they are women - which is corrrect!
AWALT - All Women Are Like That.
So I like the don't trust women part (even though you made it inadvertently).
But I find the Christian part too shallow.
I'm a lapsed Catholic, who for the past decade felt proud for being progressive and quite liberal. Luckily I found the Red Pill.
I started to look back on my conservative upbringing and I see Practical value in it.
People say that religion is brain-washing - and they are correct.
However, it seems that our ancestors knew better, across all cultures and thousands of years.
Because how do you civilize the uncivilized?
Everyone talk about the cave-man - but what about the cave-woman?
How do you organize society so that it doesn't fall apart from within?
That's where religions come in - a complex set of values, belief systems, explanations for everything etc.
And I totally get it that religions stifle free thinking - since men should be thinking independently, rationally, objectively.
But can women think in such a way?
Apparently not.
So when in your interview those girls were spewing religious explanations like automatons it didn't bother me even a little bit.
Because obviously, some strong father figure showed them the way, which they otherwise wouldn't find themselves.
Would a girl find out just by Thinking that for instance, monkey-branching is destructive to her and her offspring long-term?
But it's in her nature, her inner cave-woman.
So she needs a man (a father) to show her the way and another man (a husband) to keep leading her throughout her life.
That she arrives at great conclusions through faulty logic doesn't matter. What really counts is that a good and constructive set of values was imprinted in her psyche.
To finish it off, I actually started to pay closer attention to Muslim women and how they behave, as they seem way more conservative.
I remember that AWALT - but still I wonder how resistant to Western liberalism they are and if they will continue to do so.
2019-07-15 20:18:46 +0000 UTC
I don't agree here.
You are taking a free will approach / the ghost in the machine. For you, behaviour is a perfectly rational path and our conduct is the product of our deliberate choices which we base in our values. And if you change your values, your conduct changes accordingly.
But I think your values are a post hoc rationalitation, a narrative you use to make sense of your behaviour and a filter to understand others. Being exposed to religious ideas has an impact in your reward system, so it matters, but there are hundreds of underlying factors which cause a given behaviour and you may use atheism or Christianism to make sense of your conduct but half of the time you are not even aware of what's going on.
Robert Sapolsky wrote a great book (Behave) explaining what causes a certain reaction from miliseconds before (spikes in cortisol, the role of the amigdala and the frontal cortex) to months before (brain damage, diet) to the time you were not born (your mum's levels of pre natal testosterone) to your parents (personality traits are hereditary, see some fascinating studies on twins adopted by different families) to your ancestors from thousands of years ago.
Considering conduct is solely based on deliberate choices linked to your values is blank slate 101.
Christianism was used to justify completely antagonistic ideas in different moments of history. Same with any belief or ideology. In the 30's in Spain, the left opposed female vote. In the 40's in US the antifascist movement justified cultural homogeneity (public campaigns against the use of German, Italian and Japanese). And it made perfect sense to them back then.
Free will is an illusion and it works as one of those optical illusions where even after understanding how your visual system is tricking you, you can't help being fooled everytime. The cognitive system is very similar. Even researchers who get paid to study cognitive disonance can't help to avoid it in their daily life.
2019-07-12 08:55:27 +0000 UTC
I think this reply in an exchange to the thread is a particularly interesting counter-point: https://twitter.com/recordofabeing/status/1149387704821399552?s=20
2019-07-12 02:43:40 +0000 UTC
Alex, I'd love for you to cover the topic of the original thread linked here, from a critical perspective: https://twitter.com/Pat_Stedman/status/1149476147584913415
