Thursday 28th of March 2024

why why why...

crosss

To introduce this article, I used the scientology cross as a general symbol of arrested beliefs with some major psychological implications. Natasha Moore is not a scientologist but is a learned fellow with a PhD and is a Research Fellow with the Centre for Public Christianity. Natasha picks on minnows, possibly because they are popular with the unwashed pseudo-intellectuals while they promote some amusing fantasies about life which do not fit her religious framework. They are not seriously scientific. They just muck about with observed distractions. But Natasha has a beef about their take on evolutionary psychology:

Whichever way you slice it, evolutionary psychology - and even less our free-and-easy adulterations of it - doesn't come close to an exhaustive explanation of who and what we are as humans. That mystery, grappled with over thousands of years by philosophers and theologians, artists and scientists, remains up for discussion - a richer, and saner, and more wonder-filled conversation than the reign of pop evolutionary psychology has lately permitted us.

Natasha Moore is a Research Fellow with the Centre for Public Christianity. She has a PhD in English from the University of Cambridge, and is the author of Victorian Poetry and Modern Life: The Unpoetical Age.

Read more:  http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2015/11/25/4359190.htm

 

Gus Ponders:

Whichever way you slice it, religious belief - and even less our free-and-easy acceptance of it - doesn't come close to an exhaustive explanation of who we are as humans. It just comes to a silly belief that a god plonked us on this planet, in an immeasurable universe to annoy the shit out of us because Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit whatever that was. Theologians have tried to corner the market of morality and are loosing out on reality and proper scientific analysis.

Philosophers like Nietzsche, analysts like Freud, Scientists like Bohr and Herbert Spencer rejected the notion of religion and god for one major reason: it is the biggest lie we sell to each other. 

The Wait But Why website is not a scientific outfit. The drivers of that website are basically two blokes trying to stir the possum with stick figure and a few cartoons and some bubble gummy-thoughts. Not much different from being a research fellow in the Centre for Christianity. It's pop culture, NOT SCIENTIFIC culture.

But I agree with Natasha when she writes:

And yet, it offers a classic example of pop evolutionary psychology - and everything that's wrong with it. To start with, it makes the rookie but near-universal error of talking about evolution in terms of intention. Explicitly, in fact: "Evolution does everything for a reason." I can only imagine how much this fallacy must irritate actual biologists. Evolution doesn't do anything for a reason; it doesn't, strictly speaking, "do" anything. Mutations happen. They may or may not be beneficial to the organism in which they happen, from the point of view of survival. The organism survives and passes on its genes, or doesn't. The flourishing or extinction of the species is a matter of supreme indifference to the process we personify as "Evolution".

Yes Natasha is correct... Here, I never "personify "evolution" and make sure it is not an entity with a purpose. far from it. But then as a fellow of the CPX, she is in the same boat of delusional activity as the two blokes of Wait But Why:

The Centre for Public Christianity (CPX) is a not-for-profit media company that offers a Christian perspective on contemporary life. We seek to promote the public understanding of the Christian faith by engaging mainstream media and the general public with high quality and well-researched print, video and audio material about the relevance of Christianity in the 21st century.

At least the Wait But Why two blokes are taking the piss out of us while the CPX is trying to be as serious as a box of tacks placed on our office chair to wake us up from the matrix.

This is why "evolutionary psychology" is very complex, has improved the human condition and at some stage following some benefits to the group and individuals, some rules of interactions were incrementally devised (not by "evolution" but still as part of evolution) by humans themselves to actually improve and understand with intent the human condition. We call it progress, style, invention, usage of imagination, including lying about it. We do this every day: how can I improve this thingemiggygger? 

This is a form of evolution which is detached from natural evolution, extinction and degradation of species. When did this secondary evolution became "intentional" is a hard question to answer. I answer this question partially that due to evolution we developed a memory that is too big for survival exclusively. We had to fill the void with fanciful imagination and entertainment. We know that there has been a gradual switch in humans towards cultivating intentional evolution. Religious beliefs are part of this process but they soon fail to evolve beyond the dogmatic intent. Religions are dead ideas. Well, not quite. They should be dead ideas but some humans are hanging to the concept because these humans are subconsciously afraid of the uncertainty of evolution — natural and the decidedly psychologically stylistic evolution.

Why do people get stuck in religious beliefs is the real question. The answer to this is stated above: fear of uncertainty in change and fear of opening new possibilities, some of which may not be savoury and could lead to the degradation of humanity, but not necessarily so. 

 

Gus Leonisky

Your local kitchen staff in charge of the cake mix.

 

 

question...

The question asked by the religious person is:

How a non-intentional universe gave us the concept of intent? Simplistic answer: The universe is intentional and is called god.

 

The question asked by evolutionary psychology is:

How did we develop intent in a non-intentional universe? Answer: it's a non-deterministic accidental event in which our intent is as important as a gnat lost in space. But we can improve it.

marilynne...

It is likely that I have already mentioned Marilynne Robinson on this site. But here I come again. Forgive me for walking on sacred toes once more.



I believe Robinson is very engaging and cultured, famous, cult-like even, for writing "framed" Christian literature fiction. The word fiction is not fascinating to those who seek solid information. Some of us see science-fiction in the same way as Christian SHOULD see Christian literature. It's entertainment but not a place to learn reality, though it can be close to the bone of our evolved emotional reactivity if the writing is good. 

The main difference between science and science-fiction is the ease in which science-fiction bypasses scientific complexities. To the contrary, religion itself bypasses the scientific complexities and melts the whole lot into a dogma, with morality in tow. Thus the Christian literature fiction tends to redress this simplistic bypass — a simplistic view that should annoy us — by adding the complexity of human interactions with dilemmas and contradictions. It's artificially complexing delusion in reverse while coming from a simplistic delusional position in the first place. It does not mean that the observations of human behaviour are wrong but they are perspectived with one religious focus in mind.

It's a bit Aristotelian in its "scientific" endeavour, in which experiment is not considered scientific since "only reason (or belief) can decide what should be". It ain't like this. 

Interestingly enough, most of the religious Christian dictum were written in the fourth century AD while Aristotle lived in the fourth century BC. The two precepts — unfortunately combined till the 16th century — kept most scientific investigation in the dark. Galileo eventually explained why Aristotle was wrong with reason about gravity, for example, by demonstration and deductions which the "scientists" of his time did not want to witness since "experimentation was not a factor of reality in the world of what they called reason". 

The simplistic Star Trek Series is pompous and stage-managed to give a fantasist humourless glimpse of the slanted/prejudiced interactions with each other, through the cover of meeting and mixing with aliens, while cultivating the concept of hierarchy (a sociopathic concept which is very popular in America of all places. Hoist the stars and stripes).

On the other spectrum of science-fiction, a series like Red Dwarf gives us a laugh at our crazy ill-adaptation to circumstances. 

In comparison, with its monsters and events, Doctor Who is far more simplistic than Red Dwarf. The Christian Literature Fiction is closer to Doctor Who in the sense that the human interactions can be loaded with dealing in inadequacies that can take the form of our "inner demons" while we try to cope with despair, pain and hope — lose or win.

Natasha Moore introduces Marilynne Robinson:

Enter Marilynne Robinson, stage left, several decades later. To be fair, this tentative post-Eliot resurrection of the religious element in Western literature is no one-woman show. From the mid-twentieth-century novels of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis or Flannery O'Connor to contemporary work by Donna Tartt, Tim Winton, or the poet Christian Wiman, Christian faith has for some time been stealing quietly back into the quasi-mainstream literary limelight.


Says Marilynne herself:

"I have heard it said a thousand times that people seek out religion in order to escape complexity and uncertainty. I was moved and instructed precisely by the vast theater Edwards's vision proposes for complexity and uncertainty, for a universe that is orderly without being mechanical, that is open to and participates in possibility, indeterminacy, and even providence. It taught me to think in terms that finally did some justice to the complexity of things."

Says Gus: This is total contradictory twap (bullshit). Religion from its inception has always been designed to remove uncertainty in a very simplistic way. The only complications that one can do justice to the complexity of things, in a religious sense, is to study the loopy human behaviour and tag a simplistic godly concept onto it to make it work in the decided framework. It's terminating a long convoluted dissertation about relativity with an imaginary absolute. It's thus bunkum twap (bullshit) — by definition. 

The religious antecedents are simplistically wrong. Most modern intelligent philosophers today are totally perplexed as to why simpletonian religion is resurgent in some quarters. Well, they know: we are lazy thinkers. There are also many attractive factors at play, the main one being of pecuniary value. Religions can be the source and motivation to collect cash or points such as a place in paradise. The absence of religious belief is definitely not a cash collection plate nor a paradise real estate sales office. 

Yes, the religious people will argue that the cash is only a small necessary portion of the faith industry, yet the cash is designed to proselytise, wage wars and preach "good" as part of a system of morality — all based on fear.

Okay, I know, in the last 50 years or so, the Christian Churches have refocused their activities of doom away from the fear of god and the temptation of demons, into the "love" of god with kissing booths. The message of fear was getting stale and was loosing traction amongst people who developed a sense of the secular comfort. So the next step to maintain bums on seat has been to say god "loves" you, blah blah blah... Pass the collection plate one more time. The activities of the Pentecostal Churches is to make you feel good through mostly hormonal activities like singing and dancing tagged along to faith. It's still an illusionary moment of feeling good in your Sunday pants, but not of real knowledge. 

It's perfect for the simpletons who do not seek the hard yaka. 

Robinson's book "Absence of Mind" sales pitch is full of praise:

In Robinson’s view, scientific reasoning does not denote a sense of logical infallibility, as thinkers like Richard Dawkins might suggest. Instead, in its purest form, science represents a search for answers. It engages the problem of knowledge, an aspect of the mystery of consciousness, rather than providing a simple and final model of reality.

The words here are well chosen to make you reject Dawkins ideas, wrongly. "Absence of Mind" restores human consciousness to its central place in the religion-science debate." It does not do so. It dithers.

Robinson's book roams around the pot like a dog on a long chain attached to a solid bolt anchored in the wall of religiousness. It does not run wild. It's a set up, as cuddly and comforting as it is.

So Robinson elaborates:
"A bird is not a latter-day dinosaur. We can assume the ancestors ate and slept and mated, carrying on the universal business of animal life. Still, whatever the shared genetic history of beast and bird, a transformative change occurred over the millennia, and to find the modern sparrow implicit in the thunder lizard is quite certainly an error, if one wishes to make an ornithological study of sparrow behaviour. On the same grounds, there is no reason to assume our species resembles in any essential way the ancient primates whose genes we carry. It is a strategy of parascientific argument to strip away culture-making, as if it were a ruse and a concealment within which lurked the imagined primitive who is for them our true nature."

Sorry Marilynne, no scientists would suggest that a bird is a dinosaur. No one is suggesting that a sparrow is a giant lizard reduction — except in Red Dwarf, for fun (I think it's in series 7). The behaviour of these animals have been different and we know that a brontosaurus Rex did not fly, nor ate beef vindaloo.

Science is not trying to strip away culture-making, but culture-making is mimetism in evolution. For humans this extends to stylistic interpretations in which we cultivate habits in order to protect ourselves from accidents. We often lie in the process.

Monkeys are not humans but developed like humans from a common ancestors in evolution, and we can learn far more cultural subtleties than a chimp. But this does not make us god's creatures nor fallen angels. All it does is tell us nothing. But WE CAN note the life on the planet changes and has changed. We SHOULD NOTE the planet is limited and that we need to care for it should we expect a future that is not trash, and not destroy other creatures in the process, accidentally or decidedly. Now this is evident simplicity, but because we are complexing our ideas with godly simpletoniumism, we tend to find this too hard to accept and we trash the place religiously, because we dream of paradise somewhere else.

Too many of us are still idiotic believers.

Gus Leonisky
You local terrestrial sapienus bipedus.

 

see also: 

Gus' Mission Statement

not an ounce of critical thinking in this empty diatribe...

Ralph C Wood is a puzzle wuzzle... well he is not. He's just stuck up in hot religious thin aerospace. He writes a lot about it with the zeal of his convicted erroneousness. His approach is methodical and academic, looking at what others have written on the subject of life, dragging us back into the sacramental cattle pen, with a spiritual dog whistle and a mirror. According to Ralph, we cannot live in the wild I think he means because that's where the wild things are, including devil and evil that we should not fight because we end up evil and devil ourselves should we fight. Bugger orf...



That the ABC still promotes this pseudo-analysis crap is beyond me. Not an ounce of critical thinking in this empty diatribe...:





Walker Percy gives fictional life to our contemporary hell ruled by the Prince of this world in both its bestial and angelic expressions. He reveals that we are already inhabiting a city of the dead populated by the corpses of souls. Percy warns against slothfully resigning ourselves to existence in this earthly hell, even though we know that it will eventually work its own self-destruction.

Yet he also cautions against our rising up in wrath against these demonic forces, lest we remake ourselves in their image by returning evil for evil. This more excellent way lies in the formation of true selves in the Body of Christ, not in the redemption of solitary souls through an invisible spiritual inwardness. The more abundant life is found, instead, in the sacramental and communal life of the Church.

Ralph C. Wood is University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University. He is the author of many books, including Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God and Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South. He is the editor of Tolkien among the Moderns.


http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2016/02/10/4403855.htm



What a lot of rot —and in many books as well!... What is our contemporary hell?

Is it our ordinary life compared to the one we imagine in heaven?  The one we endure grudgingly day-in day-out because we don't like being alive? Because we've been told there is a better life around the corner once we cark it?

We don't like being yoked like a pair of beefy oxen pulling the cart of King Canute?

Is our contemporary hell, the life that god made us accept as a punishment for some badly crafted idiots sin about an apple? Or the same senseless life that some philosophers tried to make sense of, 5000 years ago?

Always flying back to the delusive skirt of your heavenly mummy, Mr Wood. Come on. You can do better than that. The illusion is wearing thin.

Life is far more robust without the prop of religion, than Ralph C Wood makes out. The Malaise of the Modern Self is as old as the Neanderthals who found ways to survive despite hardship, without knowing why. Some researchers now tell us that our "depressive" moods are due to our unfortunate five per cent ancestral mix of Neanderthal genes. African people don't get depressed because they never mixed with the Neanderthals. They just get clobbered.

The modern malaise of the Self actually resides in our not-understanding reality and cooking up fairy stories about it, including religious sacramental mumbos which to say the least do not add up in the scientific world...

Walker Percy's life unfortunately was a bit morbid from age 16 when his father shot himself with the same gun Percy's grand father had also killed himself with. His mother possibly killed herself in a car drowning from sorrows...

Not a good start for luminous festivities. So, armed with a bit of skills and a pen, Percy is going to write about the Hell of life. No joy. Useless joy. We have to be penitent for sins we have not committed yet. And so painful forth. Okay been there. Done that. Next. Why is Ralph bringing back to life this sour dour negative writer that Percy is... Is it a cattle prod to guide us into this ghetto that is the religious thought with the promise of liberation...

Yes, we are the corpses of the future. Nothing new. Meanwhile let's make the best of it, surviving like happy cockroaches. No need for god to tell us we'll end up like the dinosaurs, who must have fucked-up since he wiped them out.

Trust me, we will outsmart this almighty guy.

"I am not proposing anything

 

"I am not proposing anything new here," writes Marilynne Robinson in her new book of essays, as she casually bulldozes one or two assumptions central to modern life and thought.

"This seems obvious enough," she states modestly, having just deftly exposed the bankruptcy of one term or another as we've gotten into the habit of using it.

Well, sure. Now it does.

The experience of reading The Givenness of Things is deceptively soothing. Robinson's prose distils dauntingly complex thought into beautiful rolling sentences, and then cracks like a whip:

"Recently I heard a neuroscientist in Europe explain that what we call fear is in fact a pattern of heightened activity, synapses firing in a certain region of the brain. This seems to some to dispel the mystery, to refute the illusion of selfhood - aha! there it is! a bright spot on the screen. No doubt if I and a higher ape encountered a lion, there would be an interesting similarity in the pattern of excitation in our nervous systems. And much would be made of this. But if I and the ape were confronted with a subpoena or a pink slip, all similarity would vanish."
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2016/02/10/4403886.htm

No sooner, one thinks one has dealt with Marilynne Robinson (see blog marilynne...) that here she comes again, as annoying as before, via another annoying writer.
If us humans were confronted with an alien situation such as parking-fine on Saturn to a Borgutian voyager from planet Borgut we would not understand either. We'd be stumped like stupid monkeys. So Marilynne argument does hold water.  Fear is the memory of pain. And it can linger beyond pain. we can learn fear like we learn mathematics.
Natasha Moore pushes a barrow of shit on the ABC once more....