The mysteries of the human mind: cell phone videos and religiously-driven 'honor killings' in the same sentence. OR How the rationality of the science that surrounds people fails to penetrate irrational beliefs.
POSTED BY: 1KIKI
UPDATED: Sunday, November 24, 2024 23:11
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Quote:Hmm. I must not be a republican, because my objection to the historic arbitrariness of religion is similar to Pinker's, except mine is based on fairness while his is based on progress.
Predictably you'd write that. It is something about How Republican Minds Work.
... according to Pinker ... "But yes, I believe that appealing to supernatural forces, appealing to doctrines that only people [who] are born into a particular religion share or that they can't(?) be persuaded of, does go against progress."
Quote:
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=63626&p=2
But when it comes to religion, they ALL promise to be The ONE & ONLY REAL DEAL© (accept no substitutions!), with eternal damnation for everyone else. And I rankled at the idea that salvation could be so arbitrary as to condemn virtually the entire human race for the sin of being born in the wrong time, at the wrong place. As proposed by religions, salvation is a roulette wheel, except the chances of winning are infinitesimally small.
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Quote:Unlike SECOND, who only knows this guy from a TED talk
KIKI: I've wasted my time reading whole books by Pinker.
Quote:Liar
KIKI: With his grandiose failure to find hard facts and his use of amorphous words, when all is said and done, Pinker might possibly be remembered in history as a small-time derailment of progress on any topic.
SECOND: Predictably you'd write that. It is something about How Republican Minds Work.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
#WEARAMASK
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Quote:Harvard professor Steven Pinker explains the disturbing truth behind Trump's 2 favorite phrases
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:Unlike SECOND, who only knows this guy from a TED talk
KIKI: I've wasted my time reading whole books by Pinker.Quote:Liar
KIKI: With his grandiose failure to find hard facts and his use of amorphous words, when all is said and done, Pinker might possibly be remembered in history as a small-time derailment of progress on any topic.
SECOND: Predictably you'd write that. It is something about How Republican Minds Work.
www.businessinsider.com/meaning-of-fake-news-and-make-america-great-ag
ain-steven-pinker-2018-3
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Quoting Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
In writing this book I have adopted a voice that is analytic, and at times irreverent, because I believe the topic has inspired too much piety and not enough understanding. But at no point have I been unaware of the reality behind the numbers. To review the history of violence is to be repeatedly astounded by the cruelty and waste of it all, and at times to be overcome with anger, disgust, and immeasurable sadness. I know that behind the graphs there is a young man who feels a stab of pain and watches the life drain slowly out of him, knowing he has been robbed of decades of existence. There is a victim of torture whose contents of consciousness have been replaced by unbearable agony, leaving room only for the desire that consciousness itself should cease. There is a woman who has learned that her husband, her father, and her brothers lie dead in a ditch, and who will soon “fall into the hand of hot and forcing violation.”21 It would be terrible enough if these ordeals befell one person, or ten, or a hundred. But the numbers are not in the hundreds, or the thousands, or even the millions, but in the hundreds of millions—an order of magnitude that the mind staggers to comprehend, with deepening horror as it comes to realize just how much suffering has been inflicted by the naked ape upon its own kind.22
Yet while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, that species has also found ways to bring the numbers down, and allow a greater and greater proportion of humanity to live in peace and die of natural causes.23 For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savor, and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible.
https://libgen.unblockit.me/search.php?req=steven+pinker+angels
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Quote:Pinker used your favorite President/political party as a punching bag in his most recent book:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:Quote:Hmm. I must not be a republican, because my objection to the historic arbitrariness of religion is similar to Pinker's, except mine is based on fairness while his is based on progress.
Predictably you'd write that. It is something about How Republican Minds Work.
... according to Pinker ... "But yes, I believe that appealing to supernatural forces, appealing to doctrines that only people [who] are born into a particular religion share or that they can't(?) be persuaded of, does go against progress."Quote:
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=63626&p=2
But when it comes to religion, they ALL promise to be The ONE & ONLY REAL DEAL© (accept no substitutions!), with eternal damnation for everyone else. And I rankled at the idea that salvation could be so arbitrary as to condemn virtually the entire human race for the sin of being born in the wrong time, at the wrong place. As proposed by religions, salvation is a roulette wheel, except the chances of winning are infinitesimally small.
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
Preface
The second half of the second decade of the third millennium would not seem to be an auspicious time to publish a book on the historical sweep of progress and its causes. At the time of this writing, my country is led by people with a dark vision of the current moment: “mothers and children trapped in poverty . . . an education system which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge . . . and the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives.” We are in an “outright war” that is “expanding and metastasizing.” The blame for this nightmare may be placed on a “global power structure” that has eroded “the underlying spiritual and moral foundations of Christianity.” from Donald Trump’s inaugural speech, Jan. 20, 2017
In the pages that follow, I will show that this bleak assessment of the state of the world is wrong. And not just a little wrong—wrong wrong, flat-earth wrong, couldn’t-be-more-wrong. But this book is not about the forty-fifth president of the United States and his advisors. It was conceived some years before Donald Trump announced his candidacy, and I hope it will outlast his administration by many more. The ideas that prepared the ground for his election are in fact widely shared among intellectuals and laypeople, on both the left and the right. They include pessimism about the way the world is heading, cynicism about the institutions of modernity, and an inability to conceive of a higher purpose in anything other than religion. I will present a different understanding of the world, grounded in fact and inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment: reason, science, humanism, and progress. Enlightenment ideals, I hope to show, are timeless, but they have never been more relevant than they are right now.
https://libgen.unblockit.me/search.php?req=steven+pinker+enlightenment
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Thanks for making stuff up about me just because you can't understand the words I post. So, with me being both a democrat and agnostic, your post count as 2 strikes.
And do I have a 'higher purpose' outside of myself and religion? Why, yes I do!
The question is, do you?
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No, SECOND does not have a higher purpose. He has a lower purpose, which is driven by hate.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
#WEARAMASK
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The mysteries of the human mind: cell phone videos and religiously-driven 'honor killings' in the same sentence. OR How the rationality of the science that surrounds people fails to penetrate irrational beliefs.
The answer that Signy pointed to seems to be 'context'. And if you want to convince people of something, you can do that by putting it in a 'context' that makes it palatable.
One 'context' that can be invoked in the mind is that of the in group v 'other' groups, where the 'in' group is righteous and 'they' are scum. And you can draw that line between 'in' and 'they' using any characteristic to define a group: skin color, religion, political party, sex, age, health, and so on.
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Pakistan and Bangladesh establish direct sea route. Should this worry India?
https://www.firstpost.com/explainers/pakistan-bangladesh-direct-sea-ro
ute-india-worry-13836413.html
FBI nabs Houston man accused of planning ISIS terror attack, creating radical islamist propaganda on US soil
https://nypost.com/2024/11/14/us-news/fbi-arrests-houston-man-for-alle
ged-isis-ties-terror-plot-on-us-soil/
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