Forgetting

There were recent debates in parts of the United States over school textbooks spending time on detailing the atrocities dealt to the Native Americans, the history of slavery and other negative parts of history.  Some people claim that it degrades students' perception of the grandness of the U.S. history.  But not dealing with the details allows for the forgetting and even doctoring of important historical events.  We have rather vocal holocaust deniers, people who want to place more blame on the Native Americans than deserved and those who want to lessen the negative perception of slavery.  In addition to people not realizing how bad some things were, lack of attention to teaching the details of humanity's past bad behavior along with the good aids people who want to convince others that certain things did not happen or were not as bad as was previously indicated.  I was amazed to hear a politician claim that slavery was not as bad as it has been portrayed and that the majority of slaves had comfortable lives.  This politician was from one of the same areas where the debates about teaching the negative aspects of US history are occurring.

That being said, I would like to comment that it would be good to see more developmental history alongside the tendency to emphasize war in some world histories.

decisions based on primitive supernatural belief systems

Most people have or like fantasies.  The popularity of fictional movies, books and TV series seems to attest to that.  In the case of TV series, there can be quite the devoted audiences.  On some levels, some people's supernatural believes are no more dangerous than the aforementioned types of fictions.  That's when people do not base too much of their real lives on what characters in the fictions tell them or suggest to do.  I do not find that level of supernaturalism as objectionable.  But religions, being primitive supernatural belief systems, get more dangerous as people devote too much of their reality to them and makes decisions and judgements based on the fictitious characters.

By the way, I consider newer religions such as Scientology to also be primitive supernatural belief systems because they are basically branches off the same primitive mentalities and persuasions.

Belief-dependent Realism

"We form our beliefs for a variety of subjective, personal, and psychological reasons in the context of environments created by family, friends, colleagues, culture, and society at large; after forming our beliefs, we then defend, justify, and rationalize them with a host of intellectual reasons, cogent arguments, and rational explanations.  Beliefs come first, explanations for beliefs follow.  I call this process belief-dependent realism, where our perceptions about reality are dependent on the beliefs that we hold about it.  Reality exists independent of human minds, but our understanding of it depends upon the beliefs we hold at any given time."


Michael Shermer, The Believing Brain (2011)

Our brains do not simply record and play back experiences as they occurred.  Put in general terms, our conscious recall and even direct experiences are filtered through our beliefs and assumptions.  We even unconsciously attach false information to events.  I believe near death experiences involve these elements of brain activity.  The brain reacts to physical conditions and ome of these reactions result in what we interpret later as visual input.  Then our perception of what we think was visual input results in ideas and thoughts which later merge with the event.  The end result is sometimes a recall of an event which has only a small connection to what really happened.

Moral Relativism

Moral relativism has been used as a reason for religion and belief in a god.  It has been said that lack of religion or belief in a deity leads to moral relativism.  It is argued that religions and deistic beliefs support a standard set of beliefs.

This argument is false.  It's actually backward.  Religions and belief in deities already have moral relativism.  In addition to religions having different sets of morals, so do different denominations and sects.  An example is how birth control is allowed by some christian denominations but not by others.  My mother switched from a pentecostal church to a baptist church because the pentecostal church believed that she was sinning when she remarried after having divorced my father.  Violent and deadly conflicts between muslim sects are additional evidence for existing moral relativism within religions.

I believe that morality / ethics become more standardized and evolved with the absence of religions in the process.  Religious immoralities such as witch hunts and homosexual killings are held in check by secular laws.

Morality

I recently saw another religionist speak negatively about moral relativism.  Most of the people who I've seen harp against moral relativism or proponents of biblical moral absolutism, like that actually exists.  I actually know people who believe that the bible, at least the 10 commandments, should be used as the basis for our laws.  I used to be one of those people.

The bible is more of an example of moral relativism than religionists realize.  The morals and dictates in the bible are those created by people in a more primitive state of being.  Rules against certain foods were based on people only knowing that some people became ill from those foods.  Once people knew more, those rules were modified by most people.  Rules against women were removed by most people as people became more aware of things.  Laws against different people changed or were removed as understanding occurred.  There are many examples.

I think that there is currently and has always been only moral relativism.  History illustrates how morality seems to have always been relative to feelings, perceptions and what seemed to work at that time.  As humanity changes, so do the rules.  Some remain as standards because they work.  Others are dropped as better knowledge or higher ethics prevail.  More are added as new information or other changes occur which may necessitate new rules.

In Steven Pinker's article called "The Moral Instinct", he makes a distinction between moral reasoning and moral rationalization.  Let's say that we have an existing moral which has been passed down over many generations.  A traditional tendency is to rationalize the justification of maintaining the moral regardless of the evidence for updating it.  But moral reasoning is an approach where we look more at the details and update morals accordingly.  With moral reasoning, we remove some morals, update others and add new ones as evidence and reality indicates.

Why Are States So Red and Blue?

I recently read an opinion piece b y Steven Pinker called "Why Are States So Red and Blue?"  In it, Mr. Pinker gives an interesting historical analysis of the current political divide in the US.  Among the interesting things in the piece is the following: "American homicide rates are far higher than those in Europe, and those of the South higher than those in the North."

Happy Solstice

Happy Solstice to all.  As you've gathered if you have read my previous posts, I hold very little appreciation for the Abrahamic religions.  However, I do have appriciation for the Winter Solstice time of year.  As stressed as people can get during the winter holidays, I see a lot more positiveness from people. This positiveness can be infectious.  It affects a lot of people regardless of their beliefs.  To me, this is a secular side of the holidays.  Yes, this time of year has been dominated by specific religionist systems.  But there is a level of neutrality which occurs and which is contrary to at least one of the belief systems which dominate this season.

FDA changes rules regarding blood donations from men who had sex with other men

I just saw a news article on PBS about FDA's recent decision to change rules regarding who can donate blood.  For many years, a man could not donate blood if he admitted to ever having sex with another man.  An interviewee cited Italy as an example of a country who went the direction of individual risk assessments rather than a blanket ban.  There has been no appreciable increase in tainted blood from donations.  The FDA did not go that far.  The new rule is that men who admits to having sex with another man within the last 12 months prior to donation cannot donate.  This is significant.  I used to donate blood.  But, as a bisexual, I could not legally donate blood.  So I stopped donating blood after my first sexual relationship with another man.  I now have the option to do so during periods when my relationships are heterosexual.  I have never had a sexually transmitted infection of any kind.  Since this is the case, I was very frustrated that I was permanently excluded from donating blood.  I still do not think that the FDA went far enough.  All donated blood is tested for contamination anyway.  But at least the FDA has finally updated their rules to a more reasonable position.

Why

Why is violence more acceptable than sex in entertainment?
Why is violence more acceptable than nudity in entertainment?
Why is it more acceptable to say shit than fuck?

Truth

I became irritated while listening to an introduction to a discussion about belief and doubt.  It began by referencing how several US presidents had conversations with Billy Graham.  The commentator said that the thing about these conversations was that they were about a truth.  The commentator then posed the question as to why they believed as they did.  This was not a religious program but rather an introduction to some TED talks.  I do not know why the commentator used "truth" in that context.  But I think that it is a misuse of the work.  Truth relates to facts and evidence.  Of course, people misunderstand what evidence is but that is worthy of a separate discussion which I think that this will may lead to.  For now, let's look at "truth" for a little while.

I tell you that I ride a recumbent cycle.  You can say that this is a truth for someone who has directly seen me riding.  Beyond that, my statement about cycling cannot really be determined as true for most other people.  It's more like spectrums of belief.  Even accepting my YouTube videos as evidence without close examination is a level of belief.  I propose that the claim of truth should be held to a very high standard.  People have gotten to the point where "truth" and "belief" are used as if they mean the same thing.  But this is inaccurate.  Truth should be limited to things which are fact.  There are degrees of believe, some which come close to truth.  But truth is not relative.  You can say that certain things, like my long hair, were once true but are no longer so.  You can also say that certain things are true in some areas but not others, like I am currently on vacation but others are not.  So there is some relativity to truth.  But I think that it is a disservice to truth to mistakenly call something true when what is actually meant is belief.

I spent my childhood and early teens in the "show me" state.  There was a certain amount of pride about that, until I moved to an environment where many things which I took as fact because people told me they were true turned out to be false.  But childhood habits are sometimes hard to break.  Well into adulthood, I continued to discover how things which I assumed to be true were not.  The quality of communication is corrupted by the misuse and misunderstanding of what truth and facts are.

This reminds me of the Fargo film.  It opens with "THIS IS A TRUE STORY.  The events depicted in the film took place in Minnesota in 1987.  At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed.  Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred."  This is almost completely false.  It was eventually revealed that an entirely different case was an inspiration for the movie.  A woman was killed by her husband in 1886 in Connecticut and chopped up through a wood chipper.  That's way different from what the opening statement says.  Why did the Coen brothers make the statement in the movie?  They said that this was a device for manipulating the audience.  I think that this is horrible.  It's as bad or worse than taking an actual event and changing the details for entertainment or political purposes.  These manipulations happen so much that a lot of people think that things happened which didn't, at least not as was portrayed, like Noah's flood and the Exodus.

The last speaker in the TED talk compilation which I started this was completely confusing belief and truth.  In the end, he was basically saying that every ones individual beliefs are as valid as everyone else's.Now, I am not saying that all truth is absolute.  A lot of things are relative to regions and people.  But that does not mean that all belief's are equal.

Let's look at a non-supernatural spectrum of beliefs.  There are, from time to time, unidentified flying objects.  As a radar operator in the Navy, I had direct experience with this.  I have a bit more validation than people who simply believe that there are UFO's.  But simply a belief in UFO's is not necessarily that far from what is real, since it is, at it's base, an acknowledgement that there are some things in the air which have not been identified.  Now, on the other end of this spectrum are people who assume that UFO's are extraterrestrial. Most of these people don't need any evidence.  They simply believe that extraterrestrials visit our planet.  A believe that there are some things which have not been identified is quite different than connecting the unidentified objects to beings with no confirmation as to their existence.  How can it be said that these are equally valid beliefs?  By the way, I actually do believe that there is a possibility that intelligent life beyond Earth.  But I cannot be abolutist about that nor can I attribute Earthly phenomena to them.  Just as this spectrum illustrates unequal validity in a spectrum of beliefs, I see the same thing in supernatural beliefs.  Accepting the possibility of a super powerful being who may have sparked life is a far cry from believing that this being requires you to perform rituals and obey strict rules with no explanation.