Hopper wrote:
It's not that the worldviews are different, it is that one side consistantly ignores the facts. You can debate fact-free people, it's just not that useful except to make them look stupid.
They are different, though. The world looks fundamentally different from a Creationist perspective compared to a Darwinian one. One particular worldview does not consider the facts to be such, or perhaps does not see/value them in the same way. To who do you intend to make them look stupid? They don't think they look stupid, but they will see people mocking them, which simply resolves their faith. Their explanation will cover the facts as much as yours - true, such covering may involve the dismissal of certain facts in accordance with the logic of their explanation - to their satisfaction.
If I were to suggest we debate which is best, a fieldmouse or a unicycle, I hope your response would be, 'eh?'. And not because it's clearly the fieldmouse, but because there's no obvious measure by which to judge, so we'd first have to agree what we we're actually talking about, how to measure the bestness, and how we'd resolve it, etc. The problem Darwinists and Creationists have is it really looks, to both parties, that they are talking about the same thing, that there are actual agreed grounds for debate and resolution of said debate. They're not, and there aren't.
And I think this happens a lot. It's a conceptual, metapysical issue, rather than a 'what are the facts' matter.
It seems like the more interesting divide of people is into the credulous/knuckle-headed vs. the people who are trying to grab at any new data to double-check their beliefs and make sure they have their psychological environments as trued-up against their best guess of reality as they possibly can and they're in the habit of doing this on an ongoing basis regardless of their religious or areligious upbringing.
The thing that tends to happen with more intelligent believers in any religion who are of the later group is that they try to understand as many different people around them with their different beliefs and they quite often come to a practical decision that religious dogma is one thing, their social sphere and human-to-human discussion is another. I've known Muslims as well who were very philosophically open, once or twice where we talked about Christianity and Islam as well as touching base on stuff like Greek philosophy and even Hinduism, another close acquaintence where when the first time he had a chance to have a philosophical/ontological conversation with me he brought up Terrence McKenna and DMT as he'd checked up on some of the 'spirit molecule' stuff and he was curious about where that rabbit hole lead.
My sense is that most people who are thinkers and self-actualizers in our generation are going more toward that central tendency of overriding religious dogma whenever and wherever its a divide between reasonable people and reasonable discourse. Arbitrary social ism's are annoying to us whether regardless of who the 'us' and 'them' are.
The other kind of person, ie. more impulsive and much less curious, I get the impression that a lot of this is a cascade of bullying that lead from parent or relative to child and keeps on going - ie. somewhere along the line they had it hammered into their self-preservation wiring that might makes right and when other people held onto beliefs or ideas bull-headedly and enforced those beliefs in a very blunt and macho manner, they made the executive functioning decision to put that first and they then took that as a model of their own behavioral wiring. They could be religious fundamentalists, they could be the people constantly talking about race, they could be genetically anti-anything, on the other end they could be politically 'X or Y till the day I die because that's what my pappy was', I've seen just as many religious and just as many nonreligious with just as many bullheaded ideas. Something happened that simply stops them from having any sort of nagging voice within that would impel them to keep processing anything they don't fully understand. In their minds it's like life is nothing more than roles - ie. if your a 'preppy' then you wear X, Y, and Z brand clothing in a certain manner, you only listen to A, B, and C musicians in the top 40 spectrum, no later than a month after they got popular, you have to change your clothing with just as much frequency, you're allowed to say C, D, and E only in a very specific manner, you're free to watch A, B, and C on TV albeit if you don't at least watch A consistently then you've failed your peer inspection marks, you're allowed to eat G brand cereal, drive H, I, and J brand car, eat at restaurants P, Q, and R, and when any of these variables go off air, out of business, etc. you have to touch back with headquarters to see what you're allowed to do next. These people don't need George Orwell's 1984 - they seem to love self-creating it and imposing it on themselves in the most arbitrary manners as if they're elite sub-species of humanity and my uses of 'preppies' is just an example - the role people seem to just eat this up no matter what they're into, ie. life stops being about life immediately and everything about holding up a charicature. To these people if anyone refuses the charicature shop they're either an outsider or a failed beta/omega animal. One would even be pushed to wonder, even though it's a dark question that you're not supposed to ask, is it the other way around - that they need intense and schematic mental crutches to even behave like humans? Would they run around naked or slaughter squirrels to cover themselves in the blood like it was war-paint without such crutches? If so we might need to, politely and with respect to human dignity, figure out how we might re-tune the delegation of rights and responsibilities to be understanding of such disability among such a large portion of our population without having it turn eugenic or synarch (for the later we sure don't want modern day Druids running around - just reading on how that worked in the British Isles is sobering).
A friend of mine on Facebook posted something about Plato mentioning that at any given time a person who has insight is treated like a complete alien in their culture. All of this makes me wonder about reincarnation even more - my comment back to him was that it seems like people never feel like they fit in better on their first arrival here (ie. they're as clueless as most people) whereas they feel like complete aliens on their last few tours of duty (ie. they become the objects of the chattle's scorn for lack of conformity).
If one really stops to examine the kind of arbitrary social games that we inflict on ourselves all day long and we then realize that we don't just do it to give each other black eyes and buck each other for dominance (half the time ridiculing people as week who know too much of all things....) is it a wonder that we don't simply shut that off once we've derided the local office misfit and go back to doing office work, running a school, or managing a city government in perfect conformity to what best fits the greatest good or by what makes the best sense in the absolute? We beat the sanity out of each other all day long, call it entertainment or whatever else, and I really think that's part of the driving force where so many of the idiots come from - ie. we make them by acting like this.
24 Apr 2014, 11:48 pm
There is a lot of "proof" of god outside the bible; its reoccurring in every bit of culture throughout the ages. The bible might be a complete bull, but the reason behind it, and the reason why so many people were prepared to die for it..
