In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up!
NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action.
Obama is now getting attacked from the left for proposing chained CPI and other entitlement cuts. But despite this Republicans still refuse to offer anything.
Boehner argues that they should just do chained CPI and get that out of the way first because they now both agree on it. But Boehner also agreed to closed tax loopholes after Obama's reelection. So this makes him a complete hypocrite. Since they both agree on closing tax loopholes, why don't they just do that and get that out of the way?
What can Obama possibly do to make Republicans compromise?
What should Obama do?
Boehner offered closing tax loopholes/expenditures in lieu of raising rates. Obama rejected it in favor of raising rates (at a cost of more revenue), now he's circled back around to 'compromise'. That's not compromising, that's winning and then pretending to compromise because it's good PR.
Lord Turner's keynote presentation at the INET conference just a few hours ago, starts at around 2:36:15.
This is a very persuasive, comprehensive, and well presented case for stimulus financed by printing money and a permanent expansion of the monetary base.
Coincidentally, today the Bank of Japan's newly installed governor has unveiled a bold plan to hit a 2% inflation target within 2 years, by a large QE program that will double the monetary base.
(Reuters) - The Bank of Japan unleashed the world's most intense burst of monetary stimulus on Thursday, promising to inject about $1.4 trillion into the economy in less than two years, a radical gamble that sent the yen reeling and bond yields to record lows.
New Governor Haruhiko Kuroda committed the BOJ to open-ended asset buying and said the monetary base would nearly double to 270 trillion yen ($2.9 trillion) by the end of 2014 in a shock therapy to end two decades of stagnation.
The U.S. Federal Reserve may buy more debt under its quantitative easing, but with the Japanese economy about one-third of the size of the United States, the scope of Kuroda's "Quantitative and Qualitative Monetary Easing" is unmatched.
"This is an unprecedented degree of monetary easing," a smiling Kuroda told a news conference after his first policy meeting at the helm of the central bank.
"We took all available steps we can think of. I'm confident that all necessary measures to achieve 2 percent inflation in two years were taken today," he said.
One of those steps was to abandon interest rates as a target and become the only major central bank to primarily target the monetary base -- the amount of cash it pumps out to the economy. It adopted a similar policy in 2001-2006, but not on this scale.
"The result is nothing short of regime change," HSBC's Japan economist Izumi Devalier said in a report.
It seems that a video of this presentation has been put on YouTube.
The substantive stuff starts at 16:47, where he talks mainly about banking and financial regulation.
Starting at 43:00 is the case for stimulus financed by printing money.
Thanks for that. Watched it over the night.
Related: The Yen is almost trading at the same level it was 10 years ago. They're doing what needs to be done, so we'll see how well their recovery goes in the coming years.
Obama is now getting attacked from the left for proposing chained CPI and other entitlement cuts. But despite this Republicans still refuse to offer anything.
Boehner argues that they should just do chained CPI and get that out of the way first because they now both agree on it. But Boehner also agreed to closed tax loopholes after Obama's reelection. So this makes him a complete hypocrite. Since they both agree on closing tax loopholes, why don't they just do that and get that out of the way?
What can Obama possibly do to make Republicans compromise?
What should Obama do?
Boehner offered closing tax loopholes/expenditures in lieu of raising rates. Obama rejected it in favor of raising rates (at a cost of more revenue), now he's circled back around to 'compromise'. That's not compromising, that's winning and then pretending to compromise because it's good PR.
Obama is now getting attacked from the left for proposing chained CPI and other entitlement cuts. But despite this Republicans still refuse to offer anything.
Boehner argues that they should just do chained CPI and get that out of the way first because they now both agree on it. But Boehner also agreed to closed tax loopholes after Obama's reelection. So this makes him a complete hypocrite. Since they both agree on closing tax loopholes, why don't they just do that and get that out of the way?
What can Obama possibly do to make Republicans compromise?
What should Obama do?
The thing is, there's nothing Boehner can even do to make Republicans compromise, so what Obama does is pretty much moot (well except for changing the narrative, which he is of course doing a bad job on, being a Democrat who wants to cut Social Security instead of defending it). The problem with closing tax loopholes is also kind of like dealing with pork: everyone agrees it's a good idea in theory, but nobody wants to stand by any specifics in practice. In a sense we should be glad that the Tea Party is preventing Obama from cutting entitlements, since Obama's vision of some master compromise that prevents any future cuts from ever being considered is clearly deluded.
On April 06 2013 13:17 Leporello wrote: It's a government building. It's a school. You don't need a picture of Jesus. It isn't tyrannical to ask you to keep your religion to yourself. It's common sense and mutual respect.
In what way is it tyrannical to put up a picture of Jesus, or a cross, or the Ten Commandments?
And in what way is it not tyrannical to decide, upon a whim, that all people must be silent about their faith because you yourself are uncomfortable with their possessing said faith?
Yes, christians in the US are generally so timid and demure about their faith.
It's illegal, pure and simple. It has nothing to do with tyranny, or propriety. It's about the very american notion that no religion takes precedence over any other, something that should be a no-brainer for any self-respecting conservative. Either you recognize all religions equally or none of them. America chose, wisely, to go with none.
The idea that rights can only be certain and true if they come from god is abhorrent, it's reductionist and self-deprecating to the point of servility. What gave christianty the monopoly on human rights? Or any religion? Our humanism and our altriusm come from ourselves, to attribute it to some greater being without which we would be lost to barbarism is a horrible notion, it demeans and degrades us. A secular state is the only moral state, and the US being the first truly secular nation should be a point of pride.
One must be very suspicious of this given the history of human thought. Our secularism, our notion of human rights, universal rights, equality, etc. are not naturally given. They are artificial and they operate under a form of myth. The West has grown up on this for centuries now and take it as given when it is still very precarious and fragile. The Enlightenment myth, not matter how valuable and how beautiful it may be, with all its intellectualism, scientific rigor, and above all its romance and ideals, is still fundamentally, a myth. Westerners are much too complacent on this, I think; too much is taken for granted.
and the probably the most fundamentally misunderstood concept: secularism still is not truly atheistic.
This is incorrect. Animals of all kinds instinctively help each other, even animals from other species. Humans cooperated and shared with each other long before any of today's major religions came about. Altriusm and compassion are genetically hardwired into our brains
It's not a myth, it's evolutionary biology. Solidarity is desirable trait, and found over and over in numerous different species, ours included.
This is pretty much exactly what I was talking about, this idea that all good things we do can be directly attributed to either a deity or a specific philosophy. It's horrid, and patently untrue.
Edit: Secularism simply means you don't recognize religions, not that you dismiss them. It's more a MO than an opinion.
Look, it's clear you become upset in the face of being told that anything to do with humanity is linked with religion, but that does not give you license to state scientific theory as fact, particularly in the face of all the divergent research on the subject. I realize that I'll be citing wikipedia here, but I think one will find that their sourcing rigor in regards to this subject is pretty thorough.
To put it simply, evolutionary biology and sociobiology are still fledgling in their understandings of the source of altruism. You won't find a scientist who will simply tell you "morality is genetic" (that is, unless he has books to sell) because even though there is evidence to suggest that genetics and biological imperative play a role in formulation of morality and ethics, none of them would be stupid enough to claim that morality is essentially genetic; science literally cannot tell us that morality is essentially genetic, for that would require that it be able to go back in time, excise all notions of religiosity from mankind's history, and then perfectly recreate the world we live in today. Consider this notion.
Psychologist Matt J. Rossano muses that religion emerged after morality and built upon morality by expanding the social scrutiny of individual behavior to include supernatural agents. By including ever watchful ancestors, spirits and gods in the social realm, humans discovered an effective strategy for restraining selfishness and building more cooperative groups.[13] The adaptive value of religion would have enhanced group survival.
Or this.
There is general agreement among cognitive scientists that religion is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved early in human history. However, there is disagreement on the exact mechanisms that drove the evolution of the religious mind. The two main schools of thought hold that either religion evolved due to natural selection and has selective advantage, or that religion is an evolutionary byproduct of other mental adaptations.[18] Stephen Jay Gould, for example, believed that religion was an exaptation or a spandrel, in other words that religion evolved as byproduct of psychological mechanisms that evolved for other reasons.[19][20][21]
Such mechanisms may include the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm (agent detection), the ability to come up with causal narratives for natural events (etiology), and the ability to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions (theory of mind). These three adaptations (among others) allow human beings to imagine purposeful agents behind many observations that could not readily be explained otherwise, e.g. thunder, lightning, movement of planets, complexity of life, etc.[22] The emergence of collective religious belief identified the agents as deities that standardized the explanation.
Some scholars have suggested that religion is genetically "hardwired" into the human condition. One controversial hypothesis, the God gene hypothesis, states that some variants of a specific gene, the VMAT2 gene, predispose to spirituality.[23]
If you are truly interested in getting a better grasp on such things I highly recommend the wikipedia links I'll provide below. I'm not here to attribute the development of human morality to any one philosophy or belief system, only that the historical procession of morality as we know it worked in and around notions of religion and spirituality. There even exists a viable scientific theory that suggests that religion is an adaptive benefit to the evolving human!
The moral of the story is that science, morality, and our understanding of evolution in history are not finished telling each other things yet, and it is disingenuous to suggest otherwise.
On April 06 2013 13:17 Leporello wrote: It's a government building. It's a school. You don't need a picture of Jesus. It isn't tyrannical to ask you to keep your religion to yourself. It's common sense and mutual respect.
In what way is it tyrannical to put up a picture of Jesus, or a cross, or the Ten Commandments?
And in what way is it not tyrannical to decide, upon a whim, that all people must be silent about their faith because you yourself are uncomfortable with their possessing said faith?
Yes, christians in the US are generally so timid and demure about their faith.
It's illegal, pure and simple. It has nothing to do with tyranny, or propriety. It's about the very american notion that no religion takes precedence over any other, something that should be a no-brainer for any self-respecting conservative. Either you recognize all religions equally or none of them. America chose, wisely, to go with none.
The idea that rights can only be certain and true if they come from god is abhorrent, it's reductionist and self-deprecating to the point of servility. What gave christianty the monopoly on human rights? Or any religion? Our humanism and our altriusm come from ourselves, to attribute it to some greater being without which we would be lost to barbarism is a horrible notion, it demeans and degrades us. A secular state is the only moral state, and the US being the first truly secular nation should be a point of pride.
One must be very suspicious of this given the history of human thought. Our secularism, our notion of human rights, universal rights, equality, etc. are not naturally given. They are artificial and they operate under a form of myth. The West has grown up on this for centuries now and take it as given when it is still very precarious and fragile. The Enlightenment myth, not matter how valuable and how beautiful it may be, with all its intellectualism, scientific rigor, and above all its romance and ideals, is still fundamentally, a myth. Westerners are much too complacent on this, I think; too much is taken for granted.
and the probably the most fundamentally misunderstood concept: secularism still is not truly atheistic.
This is incorrect. Animals of all kinds instinctively help each other, even animals from other species. Humans cooperated and shared with each other long before any of today's major religions came about. Altriusm and compassion are genetically hardwired into our brains
It's not a myth, it's evolutionary biology. Solidarity is desirable trait, and found over and over in numerous different species, ours included.
This is pretty much exactly what I was talking about, this idea that all good things we do can be directly attributed to either a deity or a specific philosophy. It's horrid, and patently untrue.
Edit: Secularism simply means you don't recognize religions, not that you dismiss them. It's more a MO than an opinion.
Look, it's clear you become upset in the face of being told that anything to do with humanity is linked with religion, but that does not give you license to state scientific theory as fact, particularly in the face of all the divergent research on the subject. I realize that I'll be citing wikipedia here, but I think one will find that their sourcing rigor in regards to this subject is pretty thorough.
To put it simply, evolutionary biology and sociobiology are still fledgling in their understandings of the source of altruism. You won't find a scientist who will simply tell you "morality is genetic" (that is, unless he has books to sell) because even though there is evidence to suggest that genetics and biological imperative play a role in formulation of morality and ethics, none of them would be stupid enough to claim that morality is essentially genetic; science literally cannot tell us that morality is essentially genetic, for that would require that it be able to go back in time, excise all notions of religiosity from mankind's history, and then perfectly recreate the world we live in today. Consider this notion.
Psychologist Matt J. Rossano muses that religion emerged after morality and built upon morality by expanding the social scrutiny of individual behavior to include supernatural agents. By including ever watchful ancestors, spirits and gods in the social realm, humans discovered an effective strategy for restraining selfishness and building more cooperative groups.[13] The adaptive value of religion would have enhanced group survival.
There is general agreement among cognitive scientists that religion is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved early in human history. However, there is disagreement on the exact mechanisms that drove the evolution of the religious mind. The two main schools of thought hold that either religion evolved due to natural selection and has selective advantage, or that religion is an evolutionary byproduct of other mental adaptations.[18] Stephen Jay Gould, for example, believed that religion was an exaptation or a spandrel, in other words that religion evolved as byproduct of psychological mechanisms that evolved for other reasons.[19][20][21]
Such mechanisms may include the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm (agent detection), the ability to come up with causal narratives for natural events (etiology), and the ability to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions (theory of mind). These three adaptations (among others) allow human beings to imagine purposeful agents behind many observations that could not readily be explained otherwise, e.g. thunder, lightning, movement of planets, complexity of life, etc.[22] The emergence of collective religious belief identified the agents as deities that standardized the explanation.
Some scholars have suggested that religion is genetically "hardwired" into the human condition. One controversial hypothesis, the God gene hypothesis, states that some variants of a specific gene, the VMAT2 gene, predispose to spirituality.[23]
If you are truly interested in getting a better grasp on such things I highly recommend the wikipedia links I'll provide below. I'm not here to attribute the development of human morality to any one philosophy or belief system, only that the historical procession of morality as we know it worked in and around notions of religion and spirituality. There even exists a viable scientific theory that suggests that religion is an adaptive benefit to the evolving human!
The moral of the story is that science, morality, and our understanding of evolution in history are not finished telling each other things yet, and it is disingenuous to suggest otherwise.
You are conflating morality and altruism. Morality as a whole is definitely not purely genetic considering how closely some parts of it follow other cultural differences. Altruism as one of the cornerstones of core morality is biological phenomenon, that is not to say that non-biological factors cannot influence when we use altruism. Also your whole tangent about evolution of religion is quite irrelevant to the point made, which was that secularism is not about believing in god or not, but is method of approaching some policy and everyday problems.
On April 06 2013 13:17 Leporello wrote: It's a government building. It's a school. You don't need a picture of Jesus. It isn't tyrannical to ask you to keep your religion to yourself. It's common sense and mutual respect.
In what way is it tyrannical to put up a picture of Jesus, or a cross, or the Ten Commandments?
And in what way is it not tyrannical to decide, upon a whim, that all people must be silent about their faith because you yourself are uncomfortable with their possessing said faith?
Yes, christians in the US are generally so timid and demure about their faith.
It's illegal, pure and simple. It has nothing to do with tyranny, or propriety. It's about the very american notion that no religion takes precedence over any other, something that should be a no-brainer for any self-respecting conservative. Either you recognize all religions equally or none of them. America chose, wisely, to go with none.
The idea that rights can only be certain and true if they come from god is abhorrent, it's reductionist and self-deprecating to the point of servility. What gave christianty the monopoly on human rights? Or any religion? Our humanism and our altriusm come from ourselves, to attribute it to some greater being without which we would be lost to barbarism is a horrible notion, it demeans and degrades us. A secular state is the only moral state, and the US being the first truly secular nation should be a point of pride.
One must be very suspicious of this given the history of human thought. Our secularism, our notion of human rights, universal rights, equality, etc. are not naturally given. They are artificial and they operate under a form of myth. The West has grown up on this for centuries now and take it as given when it is still very precarious and fragile. The Enlightenment myth, not matter how valuable and how beautiful it may be, with all its intellectualism, scientific rigor, and above all its romance and ideals, is still fundamentally, a myth. Westerners are much too complacent on this, I think; too much is taken for granted.
and the probably the most fundamentally misunderstood concept: secularism still is not truly atheistic.
This is incorrect. Animals of all kinds instinctively help each other, even animals from other species. Humans cooperated and shared with each other long before any of today's major religions came about. Altriusm and compassion are genetically hardwired into our brains
It's not a myth, it's evolutionary biology. Solidarity is desirable trait, and found over and over in numerous different species, ours included.
This is pretty much exactly what I was talking about, this idea that all good things we do can be directly attributed to either a deity or a specific philosophy. It's horrid, and patently untrue.
Edit: Secularism simply means you don't recognize religions, not that you dismiss them. It's more a MO than an opinion.
Look, it's clear you become upset in the face of being told that anything to do with humanity is linked with religion, but that does not give you license to state scientific theory as fact, particularly in the face of all the divergent research on the subject. I realize that I'll be citing wikipedia here, but I think one will find that their sourcing rigor in regards to this subject is pretty thorough.
To put it simply, evolutionary biology and sociobiology are still fledgling in their understandings of the source of altruism. You won't find a scientist who will simply tell you "morality is genetic" (that is, unless he has books to sell) because even though there is evidence to suggest that genetics and biological imperative play a role in formulation of morality and ethics, none of them would be stupid enough to claim that morality is essentially genetic; science literally cannot tell us that morality is essentially genetic, for that would require that it be able to go back in time, excise all notions of religiosity from mankind's history, and then perfectly recreate the world we live in today. Consider this notion.
Psychologist Matt J. Rossano muses that religion emerged after morality and built upon morality by expanding the social scrutiny of individual behavior to include supernatural agents. By including ever watchful ancestors, spirits and gods in the social realm, humans discovered an effective strategy for restraining selfishness and building more cooperative groups.[13] The adaptive value of religion would have enhanced group survival.
Or this.
There is general agreement among cognitive scientists that religion is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved early in human history. However, there is disagreement on the exact mechanisms that drove the evolution of the religious mind. The two main schools of thought hold that either religion evolved due to natural selection and has selective advantage, or that religion is an evolutionary byproduct of other mental adaptations.[18] Stephen Jay Gould, for example, believed that religion was an exaptation or a spandrel, in other words that religion evolved as byproduct of psychological mechanisms that evolved for other reasons.[19][20][21]
Such mechanisms may include the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm (agent detection), the ability to come up with causal narratives for natural events (etiology), and the ability to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions (theory of mind). These three adaptations (among others) allow human beings to imagine purposeful agents behind many observations that could not readily be explained otherwise, e.g. thunder, lightning, movement of planets, complexity of life, etc.[22] The emergence of collective religious belief identified the agents as deities that standardized the explanation.
Some scholars have suggested that religion is genetically "hardwired" into the human condition. One controversial hypothesis, the God gene hypothesis, states that some variants of a specific gene, the VMAT2 gene, predispose to spirituality.[23]
If you are truly interested in getting a better grasp on such things I highly recommend the wikipedia links I'll provide below. I'm not here to attribute the development of human morality to any one philosophy or belief system, only that the historical procession of morality as we know it worked in and around notions of religion and spirituality. There even exists a viable scientific theory that suggests that religion is an adaptive benefit to the evolving human!
The moral of the story is that science, morality, and our understanding of evolution in history are not finished telling each other things yet, and it is disingenuous to suggest otherwise.
You are conflating morality and altruism. Morality as a whole is definitely not purely genetic considering how closely some parts of it follow other cultural differences. Altruism as one of the cornerstones of core morality is biological phenomenon, that is not to say that non-biological factors cannot influence when we use altruism. Also your whole tangent about evolution of religion is quite irrelevant to the point made, which was that secularism is not about believing in god or not, but is method of approaching some policy and everyday problems.
I'm not at all disagreeing with his point in regards to secularism, and my point still stands if we are to regard altruism as the subject. It may have an evolutionary underpinning, but we can in no way isolate it in a manner that befits the claim that altruism is essentially evolutionary or genetic.
Wait. We're talking about state religions now? Let the Lutheran look to the hills for fear of the Catholic and in turn let the Mennonite look to the hills for fear of the Lutheran. My ancestors fled from one country to the next due to state religions.
And if it isn't as involving (aka tyrranical) as past state religions and is only over the placement of religious iconography then I rather fail to see the point as it is such a non-essential part of Christianity. But if one opens the door to creating state religions for the religion one happens to prefer, that may seem beneficial in the short term because their religion is dominant. But if an opposing religion becomes more dominant in the state they lived in? Then it wouldn't seem so neat.
It's ok Falling, this entire thread is one big tangent
I think you are right on. If the state religion is "effective" enough to satisfy those who follow said religion, than one can be certain that it infringes on the rights of divergent believers. Conversely, if the state religion is rendered "toothless" enough to prevent this infringement, it then becomes enough unalike the religion in question so as to render the entire experiment useless. All in all, it just further goes to show that state sanctioned religion is not the way to go.
On April 06 2013 13:17 Leporello wrote: It's a government building. It's a school. You don't need a picture of Jesus. It isn't tyrannical to ask you to keep your religion to yourself. It's common sense and mutual respect.
In what way is it tyrannical to put up a picture of Jesus, or a cross, or the Ten Commandments?
And in what way is it not tyrannical to decide, upon a whim, that all people must be silent about their faith because you yourself are uncomfortable with their possessing said faith?
Yes, christians in the US are generally so timid and demure about their faith.
It's illegal, pure and simple. It has nothing to do with tyranny, or propriety. It's about the very american notion that no religion takes precedence over any other, something that should be a no-brainer for any self-respecting conservative. Either you recognize all religions equally or none of them. America chose, wisely, to go with none.
The idea that rights can only be certain and true if they come from god is abhorrent, it's reductionist and self-deprecating to the point of servility. What gave christianty the monopoly on human rights? Or any religion? Our humanism and our altriusm come from ourselves, to attribute it to some greater being without which we would be lost to barbarism is a horrible notion, it demeans and degrades us. A secular state is the only moral state, and the US being the first truly secular nation should be a point of pride.
One must be very suspicious of this given the history of human thought. Our secularism, our notion of human rights, universal rights, equality, etc. are not naturally given. They are artificial and they operate under a form of myth. The West has grown up on this for centuries now and take it as given when it is still very precarious and fragile. The Enlightenment myth, not matter how valuable and how beautiful it may be, with all its intellectualism, scientific rigor, and above all its romance and ideals, is still fundamentally, a myth. Westerners are much too complacent on this, I think; too much is taken for granted.
and the probably the most fundamentally misunderstood concept: secularism still is not truly atheistic.
This is incorrect. Animals of all kinds instinctively help each other, even animals from other species. Humans cooperated and shared with each other long before any of today's major religions came about. Altriusm and compassion are genetically hardwired into our brains
It's not a myth, it's evolutionary biology. Solidarity is desirable trait, and found over and over in numerous different species, ours included.
This is pretty much exactly what I was talking about, this idea that all good things we do can be directly attributed to either a deity or a specific philosophy. It's horrid, and patently untrue.
Edit: Secularism simply means you don't recognize religions, not that you dismiss them. It's more a MO than an opinion.
Look, it's clear you become upset in the face of being told that anything to do with humanity is linked with religion, but that does not give you license to state scientific theory as fact, particularly in the face of all the divergent research on the subject. I realize that I'll be citing wikipedia here, but I think one will find that their sourcing rigor in regards to this subject is pretty thorough.
To put it simply, evolutionary biology and sociobiology are still fledgling in their understandings of the source of altruism. You won't find a scientist who will simply tell you "morality is genetic" (that is, unless he has books to sell) because even though there is evidence to suggest that genetics and biological imperative play a role in formulation of morality and ethics, none of them would be stupid enough to claim that morality is essentially genetic; science literally cannot tell us that morality is essentially genetic, for that would require that it be able to go back in time, excise all notions of religiosity from mankind's history, and then perfectly recreate the world we live in today. Consider this notion.
Psychologist Matt J. Rossano muses that religion emerged after morality and built upon morality by expanding the social scrutiny of individual behavior to include supernatural agents. By including ever watchful ancestors, spirits and gods in the social realm, humans discovered an effective strategy for restraining selfishness and building more cooperative groups.[13] The adaptive value of religion would have enhanced group survival.
Or this.
There is general agreement among cognitive scientists that religion is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved early in human history. However, there is disagreement on the exact mechanisms that drove the evolution of the religious mind. The two main schools of thought hold that either religion evolved due to natural selection and has selective advantage, or that religion is an evolutionary byproduct of other mental adaptations.[18] Stephen Jay Gould, for example, believed that religion was an exaptation or a spandrel, in other words that religion evolved as byproduct of psychological mechanisms that evolved for other reasons.[19][20][21]
Such mechanisms may include the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm (agent detection), the ability to come up with causal narratives for natural events (etiology), and the ability to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions (theory of mind). These three adaptations (among others) allow human beings to imagine purposeful agents behind many observations that could not readily be explained otherwise, e.g. thunder, lightning, movement of planets, complexity of life, etc.[22] The emergence of collective religious belief identified the agents as deities that standardized the explanation.
Some scholars have suggested that religion is genetically "hardwired" into the human condition. One controversial hypothesis, the God gene hypothesis, states that some variants of a specific gene, the VMAT2 gene, predispose to spirituality.[23]
If you are truly interested in getting a better grasp on such things I highly recommend the wikipedia links I'll provide below. I'm not here to attribute the development of human morality to any one philosophy or belief system, only that the historical procession of morality as we know it worked in and around notions of religion and spirituality. There even exists a viable scientific theory that suggests that religion is an adaptive benefit to the evolving human!
The moral of the story is that science, morality, and our understanding of evolution in history are not finished telling each other things yet, and it is disingenuous to suggest otherwise.
You are conflating morality and altruism. Morality as a whole is definitely not purely genetic considering how closely some parts of it follow other cultural differences. Altruism as one of the cornerstones of core morality is biological phenomenon, that is not to say that non-biological factors cannot influence when we use altruism. Also your whole tangent about evolution of religion is quite irrelevant to the point made, which was that secularism is not about believing in god or not, but is method of approaching some policy and everyday problems.
I'm not at all disagreeing with his point in regards to secularism, and my point still stands if we are to regard altruism as the subject. It may have an evolutionary underpinning, but we can in no way isolate it in a manner that befits the claim that altruism is essentially evolutionary or genetic.
We definitely can, especially considering that it is not specifically human attribute. In essence it is biological with genetic underpinnings, the question is how big is the non-essential cultural component.
And when rereading your previous post I would like to point out that "but that does not give you license to state scientific theory as fact" is nonsensical statement most commonly used by creationists. Scientific theory is never a fact in the precise sense of the words, in non-precise sense scientific theory is a fact. Facts are observations, scientific theories are models, they do not overlap. Quantum theory is not a fact, evolutionary theory is not a fact, evolution though as a process is. That does not take anything away from the value of scientific theories and how true they are. Maybe you meant hypothesis ?
On April 06 2013 13:17 Leporello wrote: It's a government building. It's a school. You don't need a picture of Jesus. It isn't tyrannical to ask you to keep your religion to yourself. It's common sense and mutual respect.
In what way is it tyrannical to put up a picture of Jesus, or a cross, or the Ten Commandments?
And in what way is it not tyrannical to decide, upon a whim, that all people must be silent about their faith because you yourself are uncomfortable with their possessing said faith?
Yes, christians in the US are generally so timid and demure about their faith.
It's illegal, pure and simple. It has nothing to do with tyranny, or propriety. It's about the very american notion that no religion takes precedence over any other, something that should be a no-brainer for any self-respecting conservative. Either you recognize all religions equally or none of them. America chose, wisely, to go with none.
The idea that rights can only be certain and true if they come from god is abhorrent, it's reductionist and self-deprecating to the point of servility. What gave christianty the monopoly on human rights? Or any religion? Our humanism and our altriusm come from ourselves, to attribute it to some greater being without which we would be lost to barbarism is a horrible notion, it demeans and degrades us. A secular state is the only moral state, and the US being the first truly secular nation should be a point of pride.
One must be very suspicious of this given the history of human thought. Our secularism, our notion of human rights, universal rights, equality, etc. are not naturally given. They are artificial and they operate under a form of myth. The West has grown up on this for centuries now and take it as given when it is still very precarious and fragile. The Enlightenment myth, not matter how valuable and how beautiful it may be, with all its intellectualism, scientific rigor, and above all its romance and ideals, is still fundamentally, a myth. Westerners are much too complacent on this, I think; too much is taken for granted.
and the probably the most fundamentally misunderstood concept: secularism still is not truly atheistic.
This is incorrect. Animals of all kinds instinctively help each other, even animals from other species. Humans cooperated and shared with each other long before any of today's major religions came about. Altriusm and compassion are genetically hardwired into our brains
It's not a myth, it's evolutionary biology. Solidarity is desirable trait, and found over and over in numerous different species, ours included.
This is pretty much exactly what I was talking about, this idea that all good things we do can be directly attributed to either a deity or a specific philosophy. It's horrid, and patently untrue.
Edit: Secularism simply means you don't recognize religions, not that you dismiss them. It's more a MO than an opinion.
Look, it's clear you become upset in the face of being told that anything to do with humanity is linked with religion, but that does not give you license to state scientific theory as fact, particularly in the face of all the divergent research on the subject. I realize that I'll be citing wikipedia here, but I think one will find that their sourcing rigor in regards to this subject is pretty thorough.
To put it simply, evolutionary biology and sociobiology are still fledgling in their understandings of the source of altruism. You won't find a scientist who will simply tell you "morality is genetic" (that is, unless he has books to sell) because even though there is evidence to suggest that genetics and biological imperative play a role in formulation of morality and ethics, none of them would be stupid enough to claim that morality is essentially genetic; science literally cannot tell us that morality is essentially genetic, for that would require that it be able to go back in time, excise all notions of religiosity from mankind's history, and then perfectly recreate the world we live in today. Consider this notion.
Psychologist Matt J. Rossano muses that religion emerged after morality and built upon morality by expanding the social scrutiny of individual behavior to include supernatural agents. By including ever watchful ancestors, spirits and gods in the social realm, humans discovered an effective strategy for restraining selfishness and building more cooperative groups.[13] The adaptive value of religion would have enhanced group survival.
Or this.
There is general agreement among cognitive scientists that religion is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved early in human history. However, there is disagreement on the exact mechanisms that drove the evolution of the religious mind. The two main schools of thought hold that either religion evolved due to natural selection and has selective advantage, or that religion is an evolutionary byproduct of other mental adaptations.[18] Stephen Jay Gould, for example, believed that religion was an exaptation or a spandrel, in other words that religion evolved as byproduct of psychological mechanisms that evolved for other reasons.[19][20][21]
Such mechanisms may include the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm (agent detection), the ability to come up with causal narratives for natural events (etiology), and the ability to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions (theory of mind). These three adaptations (among others) allow human beings to imagine purposeful agents behind many observations that could not readily be explained otherwise, e.g. thunder, lightning, movement of planets, complexity of life, etc.[22] The emergence of collective religious belief identified the agents as deities that standardized the explanation.
Some scholars have suggested that religion is genetically "hardwired" into the human condition. One controversial hypothesis, the God gene hypothesis, states that some variants of a specific gene, the VMAT2 gene, predispose to spirituality.[23]
If you are truly interested in getting a better grasp on such things I highly recommend the wikipedia links I'll provide below. I'm not here to attribute the development of human morality to any one philosophy or belief system, only that the historical procession of morality as we know it worked in and around notions of religion and spirituality. There even exists a viable scientific theory that suggests that religion is an adaptive benefit to the evolving human!
The moral of the story is that science, morality, and our understanding of evolution in history are not finished telling each other things yet, and it is disingenuous to suggest otherwise.
You are conflating morality and altruism. Morality as a whole is definitely not purely genetic considering how closely some parts of it follow other cultural differences. Altruism as one of the cornerstones of core morality is biological phenomenon, that is not to say that non-biological factors cannot influence when we use altruism. Also your whole tangent about evolution of religion is quite irrelevant to the point made, which was that secularism is not about believing in god or not, but is method of approaching some policy and everyday problems.
I'm not at all disagreeing with his point in regards to secularism, and my point still stands if we are to regard altruism as the subject. It may have an evolutionary underpinning, but we can in no way isolate it in a manner that befits the claim that altruism is essentially evolutionary or genetic.
We definitely can, especially considering that it is not specifically human attribute. In essence it is biological with genetic underpinnings, the question is how big is the non-essential cultural component.
No, just because you say that we can does not mean that it is true. Literally none of the good science published on the subject is nearly as equivocal as you are in terms of saying what something like altruism "is".
On April 07 2013 04:16 mcc wrote: And when rereading your previous post I would like to point out that "but that does not give you license to state scientific theory as fact" is nonsensical statement most commonly used by creationists. Scientific theory is never a fact in the precise sense of the words, in non-precise sense scientific theory is a fact. Facts are observations, scientific theories are models, they do not overlap. Quantum theory is not a fact, evolutionary theory is not a fact, evolution though as a process is. That does not take anything away from the value of scientific theories and how true they are. Maybe you meant hypothesis ?
My entire point of contention deals with unequivocal language and the repeated misappropriation of "to be" and "is" when it comes to what science can say about the more nebulous facets of human existence and identity. When you are referencing a theory, like that of the essentially biological nature of altruism, use of "is" is incredibly problematic; "may", "can", "might", and "could" are simply far more appropriate given the state of available evidence and related extrapolation. As I've already pointed out through actual source material, good science, especially in the area of evolutionary theory, is always careful to avoid the use of "is". And yet, folks such as yourself are oh so to quick to say things like "In essence it (altruism) is biological". This is a political move on your part, whether you want to admit it or not, in very much the same way a proponent of intelligent design is likely to totally misuse scientific jargon to legitimize their position.
You betray your agenda when you are so quick to liken what I am saying to the words of a Creationist; I am in no way supporting a position that furthers pseudoscience such as Creationism or Intelligent Design as viable alternatives to theories such as evolution. Precise or non precise, I am not disputing the factual nature of scientific data, I am disputing what humans do with that data. I am simply suggesting that the rhetorical decision to use theoretical evidence in order to make "is" statements is a political move, and one that obfuscates the contentious nature of a particular subject.
everything is essentially evolutionary or genetic, includig this post and all the posts previously.
this evolution vs culture whatever dichotomy comes from an overly simplistic view of human culture (reducing liberalism to the kind of functional altruism found in evolutionary psych for instance) as well as evolution(every feature has a reason to exist at the simplistic functional level, no appreciation for hte complexity of cultural evolution). this thinking that evolution is a simple teleology involving simple models of how humans act is to blame, but the fact is, if religiosity is a distinct human function, it too is evolved, although it may no longer have a good environment to manifest.
the difference between a rationalist account (dealing with semantic content of human beliefs) and a functional account (dealing with the features' causal functional role in an organism's history) have less to do with their being different scenarios. they just have different starting points of investigation, take different methods, and it is a bit difficult to make the two commensurable. the two accounts can and should co-exist.
Sure, I don't particularly disagree with anything you've said, oot. I only hope you don't mean "everything is genetic/evolutionary" as a scientific statement with scientific proof. That ultimately is my biggest complaint with a lot of contemporary science; scientists seem unwilling to admit that even they use a bit of philosophy when extrapolating outside of a theory.
everything is evolutionary just means evolution is true, as a general account of how humans came to be. it's pretty scientific.
the same sort of thing goes on in discussing the status of brain vs mind. the brain is a recent discovery, certainly mroe recent than people first developing(evolutionarily obviously, not as a cultural creation) the capacity to represent their own thoughts and explain situations with thoughts. this capacity does not have to in itself account for any biological details(in other words, stuff like "I think" or "I feel" evolve alongside the fact that the body exists, in whatever particular shape. a runner doesn't have to know the blood vesssels in her own leg to move them), but those details are still true insofar as our empirical discoveries about our bodies are true. if they are not true, we'd have a different "Best Possible Biology," but the logical problem remains the same.
about this evolution vs ideas thing though, i am largely sympathetic to the idea that current evolutionary accounts, including terms like altrusim are loss of content reductions of what actually goes on and is ideological in themselves. believing in that story is itself an ideology, beccause evolution is always true regardless of whether you believe it, or see yourself in those terms. thinking that "I am evolved and therefore i need to maximise my welfare disregarding others" is itself a distinct move of self representation, but this is particuarly bad because this kind of person thinks that it is a logical (Objective in the word of a retard) conclusion, rather than a normative commitment as it really is.
it is unfortunate to become a cynic if one for example believes that human altruism is limited based on commitment to a particular evolutionary theory (though the theory may be true). it is tragically wrong to treat this becoming a cynic move as a logical deduction rather than a simple response to bad reality.
so yea, don't get too caught up in deducing how you should think and feel, just think and feel. but this is not because evolution is false, its explanation just operates on a different level from the semantic ones.
Edit: oot gave me even less to take issue with, what a bore
You've put it better than I, I'm currently knee deep in Horkheimer's Critique of Instrumental Reason, so my ability to be succinct may be hampered atm.
Although the North Carolina House of Representatives killed a bill Thursday that would have paved the way for establishing an official state religion, a new national HuffPost/YouGov poll finds widespread support for doing so.
The new survey finds that 34 percent of adults would favor establishing Christianity as the official state religion in their own state, while 47 percent would oppose doing so. Thirty-two percent said that they would favor a constitutional amendment making Christianity the official religion of the United States, with 52 percent saying they were opposed.
Although a large percentage of Americans said they would favor establishing a state religion, only 11 percent said they thought the U.S. Constitution allowed states to do so. Fifty-eight percent said they didn't think it was constitutional, and 31 percent said they were not sure.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment, which (among other things) prohibits the government from establishing an official religion, also applies to the states.
Republicans were more likely than Democrats or independents to say that they would favor establishing Christianity as an official state religion, with 55 percent favoring it in their own state and 46 percent favoring a national constitutional amendment.
Although the North Carolina House of Representatives killed a bill Thursday that would have paved the way for establishing an official state religion, a new national HuffPost/YouGov poll finds widespread support for doing so.
The new survey finds that 34 percent of adults would favor establishing Christianity as the official state religion in their own state, while 47 percent would oppose doing so. Thirty-two percent said that they would favor a constitutional amendment making Christianity the official religion of the United States, with 52 percent saying they were opposed.
Although a large percentage of Americans said they would favor establishing a state religion, only 11 percent said they thought the U.S. Constitution allowed states to do so. Fifty-eight percent said they didn't think it was constitutional, and 31 percent said they were not sure.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment, which (among other things) prohibits the government from establishing an official religion, also applies to the states.
Republicans were more likely than Democrats or independents to say that they would favor establishing Christianity as an official state religion, with 55 percent favoring it in their own state and 46 percent favoring a national constitutional amendment.
On April 07 2013 07:01 {CC}StealthBlue wrote: Be afraid, be very afraid...
Although the North Carolina House of Representatives killed a bill Thursday that would have paved the way for establishing an official state religion, a new national HuffPost/YouGov poll finds widespread support for doing so.
The new survey finds that 34 percent of adults would favor establishing Christianity as the official state religion in their own state, while 47 percent would oppose doing so. Thirty-two percent said that they would favor a constitutional amendment making Christianity the official religion of the United States, with 52 percent saying they were opposed.
Although a large percentage of Americans said they would favor establishing a state religion, only 11 percent said they thought the U.S. Constitution allowed states to do so. Fifty-eight percent said they didn't think it was constitutional, and 31 percent said they were not sure.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment, which (among other things) prohibits the government from establishing an official religion, also applies to the states.
Republicans were more likely than Democrats or independents to say that they would favor establishing Christianity as an official state religion, with 55 percent favoring it in their own state and 46 percent favoring a national constitutional amendment.
Of what? Republicans suffering another gigantic blow in moderate support if they follow their own party's majority?
It's bad enough we can't get rid of the religious symbolism off our currency let alone our National Pledge, now this. Never underestimate this country's paranoia/religious zealotry.
EPT
