Why Planet of the Humans Makes Sense of Modern Religion

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I'm like this guy more the more I listen to him.

This is a good example of where I think we need a lot more Durkheim in our understanding of everything from religion to modern politics if we want to survive into the future. Past that we'll have no clue what's happening, we'll keep falling back on instinctual preferences, and falling back in that manner is almost assured to take us into anything ranging from dictatorship, neo-feudalism, or a new dark age out to species extinction.

The species evolved with no knowledge of what it was to be. It may be that no amount of enlightenment can get us out of the fire. Who knows what will emerge from the ashes?

I've got to admit, and am sorry to say, that video was not what I was expecting; very interesting! I'll have to check-out that book, (At our wits end is what it's called right?) sometime in the future.

Of course, when it comes to Arminianism vs Calvinism, I'm pretty sure most people know where I stand, both, and:

The way I look at it I don't think the core take away would be to take jabs at religion, the same guy (Dr. Edward Dutton) actually has pointed out in his cultural narcissism video that he thinks 'spiritual but not religious' are a great example of useless and purely self-centered people in that if they were better people and cared about others much they'd be practicing the religion of their parents because it's the social glue of society.

What I fully agree with him on is that magical thinking about big global problems is an evolutionary adaptive strategy and that most evolutionary adaptive strategies about who can manage the best social status grift to run miles past and technically defeat those who'd try to get by on merit in terms of the genetic procreation game.

More Durkheim certainly won't hurt,but this guy took it all the way to idiocracy. And I don't buy the idiocracy argument, or rather, I don't buy that society used to be smarter, mainly because protein-deficiency in childhood won't kill you, but it will undermine brain development. So, on the contrary, I'd argue that in the western mations, we have never had more well developed brains than we are having nowadays. And in Europe, even if one is born into difficult economic circumstances, one can get through school and into university based on intellectual ability. It's not perfect, but certainly better than at any point in history.
Yet, the best and brightest go to the US- and why? Because there you can, regardless of social background, become filthy rich, working as a physicist in finance. Not that physics and finance have anything in commeon besides the math.
I'd argue that we have our incentives wrong.

That, and we have an outdated education system that is the perfect breeding ground for contempt against any form of authority - even the legitimate authority of virologists and statistical modelling. Add the media's propensity to publicise conspiracy theories until no one believes any form of authority anymore but only ever follows his gut feelings, and you end up with a society that is on average better educated, with healthier brains than ever before, but always stuck with only an individual's intelligence, expertise and desires.

The argument that we couldn't go to the moon if we wanted too is of course silly. We'd take some time to build the structures necessary, elaborate on the existing knowledge etc. - it's quite the undertaking and we had no reason to spend time and money on it for a while now.
We're still trying to get those fusion ractors going, remember? That appears like a more worthwhile effort than shooting people onto a space rock to get some amazing pictures for instagram.
But for crying out loud! We have a space station that's in space, permanently, with people coming and going. We can reconstruct what's around a corner from laser pulses scattered back from walls. We can recreate words spoken in a room from a video of the plants on the windowsill (by measuring the vibrations of the leaves). We can verify gravity waves.

Something I just saw on this guy via Wikipedia, it doesn't necessarily follow that everything he talks about on his channel is wrong but it does throw up some question marks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Du ... ropologist)

His political orientation is a bit worrying. I might be a pessimist on a lot of issues but there's very little silver lining in the far right or alt-right, some silver-lining with pepole like Alain de Benoist in the French 'new right' or the embrace of the Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey or the embrace of esoteric traditionalism and some of the more austere forms of Hinduism on the alt-right some silver-lining but that's a bit of icing in a massive slab of crap when it comes to everything else that resides in the basket. Steven Pinker was, at least for once, on his 'A' game when he told an interviewer that if you avoid genetic questions you cede that territory to wing-nuts. I'm definitely not about that, I want to stare at the real problems in their full fidelity but I sure as heck don't want to follow a trail of bread-crumbs to 'Bring back Sanger!'.