Popular delusions and our duty to dispel them

there's a student in one of the classes i work in who seems to be deeply into the whole Illuminati thing. i'm vaguely aware that this is some Web 2.0 retooling of the time-honoured conspiracy party that now seems to, hilariously, revolve around major pop stars, but i don't care to know much about this cobblers.

this student tho, is really really into it and seems to swallow every bit of "WOW LOOK AT THIS SINISTER EVIDENCE" crap they come across. now i don't teach them and don't have any direct role in their education, but the last few weeks i've been wondering if i ought to gently suggest that maybe they shdn't believe everything they read on the internet. i haven't done that yet because maybe it's none of my business to be the smug adult who tries to spoil your exciting inner world of evil Jay-Z or whatever.

but i dunno? in this kind of situation where one is at least tangentially a mentoring-type figure is there any kind of duty to gently and respectfully try to guide the student away from Idiotville? or shd one just roll ones eyes because it's Chinatown and tbh all the web-boggled teens out there now will be lolling underwater in 50 years time anyway.

I'd leave well enough alone tbh. Then again I've never even tangentially been a mentoring-type figure.

There's a load of Illuminati themed graffiti at my workplace for some reason, alongside "Bolon Yokte is coming" and "TTT Asianbird is 100% fit."

my instinct is to leave it but then i think if everybody leaves it where do we end up?

chinatown, chonatown always.

also YOU DONT GET TO TELL HIM WHAT TO THINK iirc

sure i wdn't go in with "THIS IS HORSESHIT YOU BUFFOON" but maybe some gentle questioning

i feel like a bystander at the murder of human intelligence tbh

i mean obvs i wd never get into one of the fights online but person to person in an educational setting i dunno

Since when, exactly? Not starting with yerman, surely? xp

When I was at an impressionable age, my Mum left lying around an interesting book called "Love's Executioner" (which I picked up and read, thinking it would be excitingly kinky; it wasn't at all. It was a collection of tales of psychotherapy which turned out to be interesting in a different way.)

But, one of the (repeated) dilemmas posed in this book was the idea that, should you disillusion people of delusions which are comforting them if you don't have anything better to replace said delusions with.

Which is one thing when it is the delusion that one has been deeply loved, another when the delusion that one is secretly Napoleon, yet something else that the Illuminati control Beyonce's career?

I think if you are someone's teacher, part of the job is actually to challenge them and say "why do you believe that?" because this is how you teach people to think, and "maybe you could question the idea of believing everything you read on the internet" is part of that. But on the other hand, believing in conspiracy theories can be fun and entertaining and a way of believing that there is *some* control over a world that is very scary to an adolescent, even if it's a big, scary evil controlling thing.

Maybe mentoring isn't the thing, but if you are in a role where you can push them more towards questioning/thinking, that's better than going "conspiracy theories are bunk!" to say "why do you believe this, what about it appeals to you?" rather than engaging it directly.

(well aware that conspiracy theories also appeal to mental adolescents who may be much older than physical adolescence, but still cling to that adolescent belief that *something* is in control of life, even if it is a Big, Bad Parent, rather than accepting the unpredictability of adult life.)

Since when, exactly? Not starting with yerman, surely?

i meant fights with people in the grip of obvious and severe delusions. you can make of that what you will.

tbh i think in this case the tutor shd raise the questions if anything, as an illuminatu stooge i'm happy for the clouds of ignorance to thicken

I meant re bystander feeling tbh

amirite in observing a slightly skeezy queasy racial element to this shit now, pics of Obama with his eyes scrubbed out and apparently rappers and r'n'b singers secretly running the world?

I first heard of it in connection with 2Pac.

Branwell Bell otm.

darragh oic your point yeah it's fair enough it's not a new thing i think it's just jarring at work in an institute theoretically dedicated to "education"

Thing is if you engage this student he's gonna know a hell of a lot more about it than you so could be difficult.

tbh i think 5 minutes on the Web and i "know" more about it than "him"

i think on the whole i agree that this is none of my business.

i still also think that this has kinda disturbing implications about ideas or worldviews or our relationship to others tho.

i see somebody starving, i shd feed them. i see somebody freezing, i shd shelter them. i see somebody rolling around in a bog of stupid, i shd keep me head down and walk quicker.

When someone has dedicated themselves to a delusion and researched argument and counterargument and read experts in the delusion and quotes verbatim on the delusion and accepts only argument on the level of that with the associated jargon as pantomime script before they even deign to engage with you then its tough to motivate yourself to give enough of a fuck about where it leads them as long as you can ignore them.

I mean, if ilx has taught me anything, like

The thing is, 1) we as humans have pattern-spotting brains and 2) there *are* actually large, over-arching systems that do exercise undo control over the world which are called things like Class and Race and Gender and there are probably ways in which you can shape people to use 1 to notice and/or address 2 rather than go off on these adolescent fantasies of The Big Evil Controller.

But somehow those explanations and patterns are neither as simple nor as easy (and also entertaining) as the ~OMG the Illuminati/Rosicrucians/Trilateral Commission/Bilderberg/Invisible College control everything, maaaaan." And also involve looking at and examining one's own role in the world, rather than just presenting oneself as the passive pawn of parent-controllers.

I think in this case, it might be worth, if you are on good terms with the actual tutor, to get the tutor to teach independent thinking/challenging but who knows if they think that's above their paygrade or whatever.

xp

i don't think we're at that level of dedication to research tbh, it's only stuff to look at on the internet inbetween listening to tattooed white dudes rapping over acoustic guitars.

i guess your depressing point is right, tho.

and another xp

well BB i think the tutor probably isn't seeing it as an issue like i do - and tbf i see it as a niggle at the back of my head rather than a consuming issue, based on the oddity of sort of professionally turning a blind-eye to rongness

I still think it's worth raising it with the tutor if it's bothering you enough to start a thread about it - and if they say it's NBD, well, then it's their call. At least you tried.

TBH, a lot of Anti-Capitalism reads superficially like the same conspiracy theory stuff I used to read in college, except more grounded in reality and a slightly more sophisticated understanding of the world and one's place in it.

(Just like the rabid proselytising fringe of Capital-A Skeptical Atheism reads a lot like the UFO "the truth is out there!" cults that proceeded it, and incidentally contains a lot of the very same people.)

It's almost like conspiracy theory thinking is an early way of *grasping* at the idea that the world is bigger and more complicated than you've been told, but really isn't quite there yet as to what to *do* with the knowledge.

Reminds me of a guy I used to work with, a young black guy who voted Tory and said that the UK was the only country in Europe that had a welfare state and that's why we had so many immigrants... but that's by the by... I came in once in the middle of a conversation he was having with a fellow worker where he was saying that there was a giant pyramid floating a hundred metres above the Kremlin, I (in time-honoured NOTW fashion) made my excuses and left.

(in time-honoured NWO fashion)

Yes, indeed, I have no patience with conspiracy nuts I must admit

Probably best not to delve too deeply into the utter shite that apparently sensible people are prepared to believe in

yeah i might bring this up with the tutor. this "research" is happening in the context of other students working on actual fictional material so there's a degree of irony here and a lack of it being meaningful to the educational context.

i think the broader issue is "when do we 'step in' and try to guide people away from intellectual paths that might be harmful to them in some vague way"? i don't think obsessing over internet conspiracy memes is especially harmful except that if your thought comes to revolve around this stuff, if you view the world around you thru this distorting lens, who knows where it might lead? there's something maybe dehumanizing about aspects of the big conspiracy theories - illuminati become lizard people/coded Jews become "not one of us"

obv there are "rationalist" world views that can go into this territory but then i'd shy clear of the conspiracy end of Marxism or Atheism too. they do attract a similar crowd - smartarses and peeps who wanna know more than you - but they aren't the only people. the kid that set me thinking about this seems like a sweet kid with enough issues of their own to be getting on with

Given that it is easier to leak actual conspiracies and secret service shit than it has been at any point in history and none of what we've been presented with so far is anywhere near as elaborate as any of this shit. It's like how none of the conspiracies on Wikileaks are as elaborate as the one allegedly perpetrated on Julian Assange.

I mean "the US government are monitoring everything you do online" is elaborate as well but in a different way and I'd always basically assumed it was happening anyway.

atheism, illuminati, marxism, privcru, its all a bit dark round the edges imo

when ppl i have known have come out w/ semi-crazed shit i have v gently had fun w/ them, nothing direct, but e.g. advocating a more extreme/ridiculous position, generally trying to deflate their own seriousness. if i get on well enough w/ someone that i can share lols then i would try something like that.

Maybe the answer is just to lend them a copy of Karl Marx / No Logo / bell hooks or whatevs with a wink and a wary nod and say "here's the shit that They are *really* trying to keep away from you..."

Haha no.

I mean Assange is kind of case in point of a former conspiracy nut who made his own fantasies come true but um, no, not going to go down that avenue today.

yeah i think this was the wrong thread to start today but thanks for all your thoughts which i am broadly in agreement with

The thing that always gets me about 9/11 conspiracy theorists is that their explanations (or *implied* explanations since they're usually "just asking questions") are always far more illogical and full of holes than they claim the "official" explanation is. Once you realize that, you realize that they possess an indomitable will to believe, and a knee-jerk mistrust of anything "official," that you can never overcome with facts.

how does the 77 Board fit into all of this? THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE

77 = SS

= SECRET SANTA

= CRETE'S SATAN

the obvious question "how do you trust the people telling you 'the truth'?" is too painful to contemplate

so 77 caused the greek crisis and is going to replace their government with a nazi one, you see?

makes sense, thx. (sorry NV for facetious derailing)

I did actually once have someone, who knew I was Jewish, perfectly innocently ask me about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and I explained it to her, and I think she actually believed me. But she wasn't really a "conspiracy theorist" type, it was just something she heard about somewhere and wanted to know what the deal was.

Coincidence or not, but every conspiracy theorist nut I've ever known smokes copious amounts of weed, which I guess makes them a bit paranoid.

yeah a friend who had serious drug problems and problems with depression started coming up with this kind of nonsense. I don't want to generalise about a link between conspiracy theories and mental health problems, but in his case one seemed to go with the other. Who knows what causal relationship (if any) there was though.

A teenage friend started telling me about some illuminati/Jay-Z stuff I dunno, a few months ago? First I'd heard of it. I think I left it at a sort of distant-sounding, "Oh, really? Hm. Let's move on." She's smart. She'll figure it out.

Did all this stuff start before or after Magna Carta Holy Grail came out?

As we all know it's the Magic Flute of rap.

Do you get a sense this person might be on their way to hurting themselves or others due to this conspiracy talk?

xp, the Jay-Z illuminati thing has been around for a way long time

my students talk about illuminati shit all the time, no qualms tellin em 'yall know this is p much BS, right?'

than i tell em the real truth *opens bag of l ron hubbard texts*

there *are* actually large, over-arching systems that do exercise undo control over the world which are called things like Class and Race and Gender

While I would never disclaim the influence of class, race and gender upon our lives, I think it is stretching the point to describe these as "systems", unless you regard them in a similar light to, for example, our digestive or nervous "systems", which evolved organically as a response to extant forces, were shaped out of available materials, and which self-perpetuate for much the same reason other organisms do.

this will be the most popular world religion in 2513

sys·tem (sstm)
n.
1. A group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole.

You don't think that class, race, gender etc fit this definition?

Gender, you must be a system because you're a group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole.

xp Or people's feelings, beliefs, and deeply held prejudices about same, interlaced with government, employment, education, and all non-race blind selection processes.

Or non-gender/race/whatever blind, I should correct to.

lol crut

Yes, class race and gender do fit that defition of systems. The confusion which can arise in applying the word to them is to think that they were designed with a guiding intention and an overall plan, as if they were the product of some illuminati-like group of powerful people, rather than ad hoc systems which evolved in parallel with the evolution of society.

Y'know, we can use phrases like "systems of oppression based around race, class and gender" if that makes it easier for you to process, but if you are going to call things like slavery and Jim Crow and Apartheid ~just kinda ad hoc things that evolved naturally~ or whatever then really, there's no need to continue this conversation.

First, race is not the same as slavery, Apartheid or Jim Crow and if you were willing to continue the conversation, this could be clarified. Second, there is nothing about "ad hoc" that implies these things are not hugely oppressive and hurtful systems. Lastly, I would certainly put slavery into the category of something that just kinda evolved naturally. Slavery has a history spanning thousands of years, and it was practised in Europe, Africa, Asia, in both Americas, and in Polynesia. But, hey, we're not talking about that, because we are not talking at all - or are we?

see i said privcru didnt i

Is the illuminati stuff usually just about, like, shadowy cabals of secret leaders, or is there also a, umm...mystical aspect? Because I was informed that the reason Jay-Z is so powerful is that, like, stole people's souls. It was kind of entertaining tbh and I don't think my friend really believes it because that's just too far out for anyone except an adolescent with no religious background to focus on.

Anyway, privcru midshipman, reporting for duty.

Is that grog? I could use some grog.

i see somebody starving, i shd feed them.

idk, chalking illuminati talk up to stupidity that can be alleviated with factual sources is like thinking you're going to fix someone's eating disorder by handing them a sandwich

i dunno i've never tried to 'deprogram' a conspiracy theorist beyond just dead-end arguments with 9/11 truthers but i wonder if exposing them to the stories of actual historical conspiracies with real evidence and documentation (iran-contra, CIA-engineered coups, business plot against FDR) might be a good strategy insofar as it might demonstrate the comparative lack of evidence for their pet conspiracy (9/11, illuminati, et al) as well as the fact that real conspiracies are almost always led by total incompetents who invariably fail to keep anything secret.

oh, you mean like the Kennedy assassination, that was a conspiracy like those others, right?

(I do not believe this is the case)

lol i lk fwd to a privcru/privdenier grog sesh in september but no hitting ok

the illuminati stuff is interesting as a sort of metaphor for how the elite comes across to the rest of society. WRT Jay-Z I think a lot of that is really about what it feels like to watch this kid from the Marcy Projects suddenly having business dealings with mysterious russian billionaires.

I make no promises.

The Illuminati thing seems to be a symbol that many disparate groups can flock to and use for their own purposes. In the case of pop music, it restores the mystery lost through reality TV, encouraging Glass Onion-style obsessive celebrity gazing. In the case of the political sphere, it can be used to explain anything that needs explaining. In the case of teenagers, it can be used in place of (formerly) rebellious music in rebelling against their parents.

Kinda feel bad for pre-911 conspiracy buffs.

I actually think the Kennedy assassination probably was the CIA. Is that crazy? I think that's reasonable, they do all kinds of fucked up shit.

print this out and distribute it http://overthrowingilluminati.wordpress.com/2013/08/07/how-to-overthrow-the-illuminati/

otm

I am pretty sure the Kennedy assassination was Jay Z

Reasonable Doubt peaked at 23 on the Billboard 200.
Blue Ivy Carter is 23 months old. Her first name starts with the 2nd letter of the alphabet. Her last name starts with the 3rd...
Beyonce is 32 years old.
Jay has done 2 sets of albums which have 3 volumes.

oh shit guys.

I actually think the Kennedy assassination probably was the CIA. Is that crazy? I think that's reasonable, they do all kinds of fucked up shit.

it's not really crazy -- the CIA's assassinated a lot of leaders, and there's no doubt they were aware of oswald pre-dallas and that they rushed to cover that up after the assassination. on the other hand it's hard to see what threat JFK posed to the CIA.

i also think, contrary to conspiracy theorists' beliefs, that dealey plaza would be a horrible place to carry out a planned assassination. oswald got p lucky.

he was up all night

The whole music industry/conspiracy nexus goes back at least as early to the whole "Paul Is Dead" theory of The Beatles and all the allegedly encoded album covers and back-masking. Also the 27 Club and other peripheral weird pop/rock/celebrity related things get rolled into it.

The Satanic Illuminati Runs the Entertainment has been promoted by fundamentalist Christians as far back as I can remember, and I think it originally had connections to antisemitism but it seems to have developed into something separate than typical white supremacist "the jews control the media" talk... A lot of the rhetoric and supposition about the Illuminati is lifted directly from 80's satanic panic stuff.

Not to mention you have rappers like Immortal Technique currently promoting conspiracy theory culture ideas (like 9/11 truth and the Illuminati) who are building on lyrics and themes used by 2Pac and others and are probably far more trusted sources to today's youth than some random guy who sits in on their classes.

Like J.D. said though, and I have always agreed with -- real conspiracies are messy and actual cover-ups don't quite cover it all up. That might be a point of entry into dialogue but honestly the kid will probably grow out of it.

As for JFK... it doesn't help that an entire who's-who of criminal underground and shady intelligence people were in Dallas the day in question and that Oswald was killed before he could testify. These sorts of lingering issues have kept an entire industry of assasination mythos alive and well.

Illuminati and further out-there theories (like Nibiru, the duplicate Earth on the other side of the solar system, who sent inter-dimensional aliens to mine our planet for gold which their atmosphere needs and btw these aliens are literally Biblical "Demons") are getting lots of play on evangelical talk radio. Bible Belt all-Christian stations will just throw something in about this holograms or aliens or the Illuminati. Look to your local Wal Mart to start stocking David Icke books.

i think the broader issue is "when do we 'step in' and try to guide people away from intellectual paths that might be harmful to them in some vague way"? i don't think obsessing over internet conspiracy memes is especially harmful except that if your thought comes to revolve around this stuff, if you view the world around you thru this distorting lens, who knows where it might lead? there's something maybe dehumanizing about aspects of the big conspiracy theories - illuminati become lizard people/coded Jews become "not one of us"

this is the main question for me. my approach is - if at a party or dinner etc do not allow this sort of stuff to go unexamined at the very least (usually this involves a 'Really?! Why?!' *Forcing* someone out of intellectual or emotional paths that they've forged seems to me impossible, well or at least that's my experience. The dehumanizing point is on the money, and really important I think - in fact that's the reason why i want to engage and defuse - the misinformation i don't really give a fuck about given that their ideas have no meaningful power behind them. idk, pissed right now, but this is a subject i find fascinating. (how much is anyone's pov a single-minded conspiracy theory that more or less matches the consensus?)

nv, i presume u don't teach a critical thinking class yeah

The solution is to be the conspiracy you want to see in the world

Séb i don't teach as such and no, this is not a critical thinking class and not at a particularly high academic level

I dunno; I spent a long part of my life ~being obsessed with~ conspiracy theories - NOT believing them, but wanting to understand them, wanting to understand *why* people believed in them. And it got to the point where it was kinda silly, because people would start to accuse me "Do *you* believe in the Illuminati (or whatever?" and I would be "Of course I don't, but I really want to understand why other people do!" but you get to the point where it stops mattering, because if you're wandering around with a conspiracy-related nickname, people just make assumptions about you and what you believe.

And it turns out that the reasons people do believe these things are really quite sad, mostly: over-arching or personal events that lead people to believe that they have lost control over their own lives.

So I don't know if disillusioning them is the answer, or giving them a greater sense of control over more aspects of their own lives is the answer.

thanks. i have a habit of framing broad questions in terms of immediate examples and i think this thread is more about the broad questions - the "bliss" of ignorance, how important it is for a world view to approach a consensus reality, whether we ought to try to influence each other's beliefs "for the better".

also, i think, about whether every way of thinking that comforts us is ultimately "good for us"?

whether we ought to try to influence each other's beliefs

'Do you have anything better', 'Do you have any authority over what they should think', might be the questions to ask yrself. (I think you do have something better – you have the method of looking for evidence before believing stuff you see on youtube. And you're not trying to impose your authority on them, but trying to free them from the authority of youtube users with a batshit agenda.)

I also think there's a sliding scale between 'Whatever, everyone just have your own opinions' and 'No, this is something we can be pretty sure about and you're wrong'.

Things like 'the ultimate purpose of one's life' or 'do we have a soul' I would personally put at the 'Whatever' end of the scale, but things like conspiracy theories or anti-vaccination I would on the 'No, this is something we can be pretty sure about' end.

*put on the

The solution is to be the conspiracy you want to see in the world

― it's going to be a https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1D5PtyrewSs (latebloomer),

I love you for this

lol ok what the fuck happened there

u got duritzed

damn

you love being duritzed, apparently

Gov't hasn't really done itself any favors dispelling conspiracies by constantly being shady bastards about more or less every single thing they do.

Well i mean fair enough but dont u bleev in god like, sketchy mfer imo

The God Conspiracy

I was half heartedly fossil hunting/dog walking one day and found this lump of grey limestone with a mottled ultramarine streak going through it and if you look at it from one particular angle, the refracting light effects make it spell JESUS, from every other angle it looks like TEUST. This is direct word from mfer.

more pressing at elections time

frequent reminders that everyone is entitled to their opinion but not their own set of facts

"entitled to your opinion" is tautological since short of scooping yr brain out i can't prevent you from holding your opinion. "entitled to express your opinion" is different because many societies are not comfortable with all opinions being expressed e.g. libel, death threats, calls for pogroms etc

what the "i'm entitled to my opinion stop trying to deny me free speech" mob fail to understand is that free speech also extends to people dragging them mercilessly for their stupid, ill-informed opinions

I usually respond to that kind of bluff garbage with 'Well, entitled is one way of putting it...'

'you're entitled to your opinion' is pretty much universally used as a pass-agg way of saying 'you are talking shit but I can't be bothered to argue with you', surely?

i think we need an all-purpose "not all opinions have equal value" thread tbh

since we're living in the Age of Opinion

Argh I've accidentally got into an argument on FB with someone I don't even know about whether blackboards were banned for being racist. Why did I do this.

Well, since this link has been doing the rounds on social media, I might as well post it here:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/mariakonnikova/2014/05/why-do-people-persist-in-believing-things-that-just-arent-true.html

On the difficulty of trying to convince people not to believe fallacies that concur with their internal belief system.

Ive (mostly) given up giving my opinion unless its asked for, I dont think this is necessarily a good thing but I end up stressed out otherwise and cant deal with it. Problem is, even then it seems people ask my opinion but only as an excuse to give me their opinion which is thrust at me like a weapon

I can kind of relate to that, actually, I relate to that a lot.

But some people get genuinely ~outraged~ at the idea that a person might choose not to engage with them, or their opinions. People get seriously butthurt over the idea that a person can just say "you know what, I don't want to get into this with you" and establish boundaries about what they are willing to discuss, with whom, and how.

Learning how to exit a situation or conversation is still something I'm working on. But establishing that I have the right to do so - and doing so, whether gracefully or not - has been pretty damn crucial for self preservation, and in trying to re-establish some kind of sanity in my life.

(I actually kinda cringe to post this, knowing that doing so will probably open me up to the usual suspects either mocking me for it, or trying to insist yet again that I don't have this right. But I guess, so what. Yapping people always gonna find something to yap about.)

One can get to a point where one becomes literally afraid to express one's opinion, any opinion, for fear of the inevitable backlash. That's not a good place to be.

One can also get to a point where one has been embroiled in so many *bad faith* arguments, that one loses the ability to tell a *bad faith* argument from a good faith argument, and therefore refuse to participate in *any* arguments. That's not a good place to be, either.

Im finding myself having fewer opinions, but beginning to think of this as a good thing, fewer answers and more questions.

But establishing that I have the right to do so - and doing so, whether gracefully or not - has been pretty damn crucial for self preservation, and in trying to re-establish some kind of sanity in my life

When i do this i end up embroiled in a different conversation, that i also dont want to be in!

Also to answer the original question. Our 'duty' to dispel delusions rests on being very sure of our own position - and im not! I probably need my own delusion dispelled more than anything else...and if someone ASKS me about them im sure some of them would change. But if they just hit me over the head with their own opinion, i just shut down, cant engage

I was in a taxi yesterday and the driver started talking at me about the local elections and inevitably about UKIP and i looked at myself and i realized how tense my body was. It wasnt the UKIP stuff, it wasnt the fact that i knew exactly what he was going to say and the feeling he says this every day, it was the feeling of his opinion and words forcefully put into my brain and i realized how invasive it actually felt, ive been feeling this more and more recently partly due to family issues, realizing how draining these conversations are, with anybody

I have a weak personality in the way that i take on other peoples words, i try to engage as little as possible but these conversations feel like duels and im able to cope with it less and less, and feeling increasingly agitated and stressed. I dont actually have strong opinions i think, and when i have held an opinion strongly its often been proved wrong - i think partly because when i hold an opinion, its an answer and not a question and if its an answer it requires no more thought, right?

not sure where im going with this, ive just really had enough of people who are right and who know best, and are going to tell me all about it

Yeah. That feeling of tension, and the way your whole body just kind of cringes up into defensive stations and "I know what's coming" and oh boy here we go again, can we just skip it this time. It's this kind of physical sensation of... tense. Akin to fight or flight. And it is draining to do it again and again, but is also exhausting in a different way to actively avoid.

What are the options? Withdraw? Leave the conversation? Leave the room? Say "I'm going to put the phone down now"? It's hard to leave the room when you're in a taxi. Or an office.

When there are no more rooms for you to go and absent yourself to? When you end up feeling silenced. When your silence is taken as tacit agreement. When engaging in those duel-conversations takes a price, but also, refusing to engage takes a different price.

It is hard to leave the room, and i did engage with the taxi driver, and i felt agitated from it for some time after. And silence wouldnt have helped either, it would have been the same. I just try and avoid where it happens, but obviously you cant always

When you end up feeling silenced. When your silence is taken as tacit agreement

Ive thought about both of these for some time and come to the conclusion that that you are silenced anyway, if a person doesnt listen the net result is the same, I might as well have been talking to a tree.

I care less and less about being heard, if someone doesnt listen im not sure i want them to hear me anyway

Invariably, when i HAVE been heard, I end up thinking ugh well I'd rather have kept quiet - i preferred it when they didnt know what i thought

yeah i'm not sure any more of the possibility or benefit of winning the hearts and minds of people whose beliefs i believe to be hateful/evil

if there's some autonomous part of us that can choose what we believe then if you choose to believe in bigotry fuck you, own yourself and own any consequences

have to admit that i feel approximately no obligation to dispel anyone's delusions, popular or otherwise. i'm constitutionally disposed against certainty, but my objection has less to do with fallacy than fundamentalism.

i am pondering, of late, an ethics that can exist happily without fundamentalism/realism

realism's the sticky wicket, imo. you want to take compassionate heed of others and consequence, which requires a fairly hardnosed attention to the objective, but at the same time, i'd hate to be bound by the merely reasonable...

I'm getting pessimistic enough to the point where I don't see how delusions can be corrected, seeing as how reason won't work and only tends to re-cement in a belief that's being directly addressed/attacked

Don't get why people get so chatty with cab drivers anyhow- is Magic FM that intolerable to you?

That' affects me badly too

I don't want to engage with them but somehow feel unable to say please don't talk at me:(

The joy when I found a barber that doesn't bother with trying to engage in conversation was quite something.

A good tactic with taxi drivers: go silent for a bit, then suddenly change the subject to something related to the current traffic.

taxi drivers either of black cabs or suburban minicabs almost never attempt to talk to me and if they do its probably about the traffic, if a phatic pseudo-'subject' then football, virtually never politics perhaps because i am too young to look like i might care about forcible repatriation and the reintroduction of hanging, the day i am perceived to have an interest in such tropes is yet to arrive but i anticipate it fondly

how old are you nakhhh?

In the 2nd century, Nakhchivan was known to Ptolemy under the name Ναξουὰνα (Naxouana), and some scholars have sought to identify Strabo's otherwise unidentified Arxata, mentioned in his description of the cities of Armenia, with Nakhchivan.

Ptolemy a little more about yrself

i try to engage as little as possible but these conversations feel like duels and im able to cope with it less and less, and feeling increasingly agitated and stressed. ...

... not sure where im going with this, ive just really had enough of people who are right and who know best, and are going to tell me all about it

I think I need to print this, and some of your other posts ITT out, and stick it on the top of my laptop. Nothing good comes of these kinds of conversations. Sometimes people are just looking for a fight, and I need to stop accidentally or deliberately volunteering myself as their punching bag.

I think the thing for me to remember also is, if it doesnt feel like a conversation, then it isnt a conversation! Its a broadcast.

Recently had a conversation with a family member where i asked their advice about something, and they said "you shouldnt pay money to do xyz" But they didnt ask me more about xyz, or how much it cost (it could have been £1!), so different types of xyz were never even looked at, a blanket "you shouldnt pay to do that". This had nothing to do with xyz, and nothing to do with me, it was all about them...but why wouldnt they look? why had they already decided in 2 seconds flat?

so the conversation felt like a duel...but the conversation shouldnt have been about yes/no, it should have been about looking at 10 different cases of xyz and saying the pros/cons of each, but this cant happen without a person asking and listening, and they didnt do that. the central point of the conversation was their unshakeable belief that "paying for xyz" was bad, objectively. period.

and it was kind of the final straw, a conversation where a person tells and doesnt ask? not a conversation. cant do

whats this to do with the thread....not sure, but something to do with telling and asking. how do you dispel a delusion? maybe not be so sure you dont have your own delusion! and if its that important to you to change their belief, ask them to explain it some more? have a conversation with them, dont just tell them!

actually the final straw might not have been that but this lol

The state of Dance music in 2014...

all i can do to dispel my own delusions tbh

which is a great example of the red flag when you realize a 'conversation' isnt about the topic, its about that person, the topic is merely todays vehicle for them. you can never be heard because you are under the misapprehension you are in a conversation, and the further misapprehension that the conversation is about the topic:/

all i can do to dispel my own delusions tbh

― difficult listening hour, Sunday, May 25,

yes! ive certainly had a few of those along the way! and a lot of them actually feel sort of inherited, from the types of conversations i mention above. other peoples forceful opinions somehow made their way in. and only through examining self or belated realizations do i think wait how did that get in there?

For me, it's about trying to tell the difference between "good faith" arguments and "bad faith" arguments.

Good faith arguments are, like, "I have actual experience of, or knowledge of this issue, and I'm going to share my experiences and opinions, with the hope that both sides can grow" while bad faith arguments are, I dunno, a person just looking for someone to shout at. I think good faith arguments are the ones where both sides hold in their mind the possibility that their minds could be changed by new perspectives or new information. Bad faith arguments are the ones where one or both parties are so convinced of their own rightness that all they are doing is either sharpening their own confidence, or trying to convince the other person.

I guess the UK politics thread is where this is happening for me at the moment. There's a point where arguing is not productive. There's a point where saying "I have experience in that; this is my experience" is not going to change anyone's mind, but might be useful or relevant or whatever. I don't know for whom, for me or anyone else.

But there's also the idea of not entering arguments where you are not prepared to change your mind, as a means of self preservation. There are a couple of discussions going on - both on ILX and on the wider web - right now, in which I do have relevant experience. But I'm not prepared to change my mind, both because of my experiences, and because I had all of the discussions about them that I needed to have ten years ago. So would my entering that argument be a bad faith argument? Or would it just be needlessly upsetting (it is not a topic I can just ~argue around~ dispassionately) and for nothing.

tl;dr don't argue unless you are willing to have your own delusions dispelled.

But there's also the line between "delusions as genuine fallacies" and "delusions as opinions I do not agree with" and where do you draw the line?

(I'm also aware that even talking about this stuff on this thread is veering very dangerously close to both meta and to sub-posting, which is always a bad idea.)

this maybe belongs here:

http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/05/gluten_sensitivity_may_not_exist.html

hey man don't tell me how my stomach FEELS

bransplaining

I was in a taxi yesterday and the driver started talking at me about the local elections and inevitably about UKIP and i looked at myself and i realized how tense my body was. It wasnt the UKIP stuff, it wasnt the fact that i knew exactly what he was going to say and the feeling he says this every day, it was the feeling of his opinion and words forcefully put into my brain

I had this the other day, it started off as fairly innocuous "I had that Kathleen Turner in the back of my cab the other day" chatter and descended into casual racism fairly suddenly. We were on the way back from a funeral and therefore obviously fairly formally dressed and the guy made a series of assumptions from that and just started ranting. In the end I just underpaid him by a tenner and made it clear that he'd talked himself out of the full fare somewhere around Camberwell.

It felt like a futile gesture but I thought maybe he might take on board the economic argument for just shutting the fuck up. Then again, judging by the two previous stories he'd told us about a member of a visible minority jumping out of the cab without paying, maybe not.

ha Kathleen turner segue needs further elaboration imo

Coming round here, romancing our stones

war of the roses surely

"I'm not racist, I'm just drawn that way by the liberal media"

getting sick irony vertigo atm, but the again it's sunday morning, maybe that's to be expected

There's levels of delusional thinking, and also an axis of harmfulness/harmlessness. There's not a clear-cut line between "harmless bullshit" and "pernicious bullshit" and "downright toxic bullshit."

On the question of "how much harm does this cause?" I really don't think that "gluten intolerance" or "homeopathy" are even twitching the needle. People believe dumb, false things, but then again, if those false, dumb things are not hurting anyone but themselves, people kinda have the right to believe dumb, false things? This is probably more indicative of my particular social bubble, but the amount of energy and prominence given to "OMG! MUST DEBUNK HOMEOPATHY!!!" compared to the (not very wide) prevalence of homeopathy and the minimal amount of harm it does (at which point, I know someone will bring out the "what about the children" argument) seems disproportionate.

People also have the right to pick whatever battles they feel capable of fighting. And no one has a *duty* to dispel bullshit; arguments may be counterproductive. But when people feel they have a "duty to dispel" fish in a barrel harmless level bullshit, but feel perfectly happy to just ignore toxic-level-bullshit, my response is often a sense of "That's your priority? Really?"

I care more about homeopathy when people with responsibility for people's health promote it at the expense of promoting how to actually determine if something works/is good for you/critical thinking and particuarly at the expense of actual medicine when that is required. I don't really think you can measure the 'energy or prominence' on both sides to compare them because no-one sees the full picture - as you say, depends on your particular social bubble.

I also care about it in the same way I care about people profiting from bullshitting other people generally, and kids being taught media literacy.

I've made a couple of posts about it in the past day, that was because it was one particular oddity with the party in question and not because I spend my life dedicated to debunking it. However, I *do* often see it discussed by others as part of 'natural' or 'herbal' medicine (as I used to think it was) and I think misinformation about what it even *is* is particularly unhelpful.

I guess what I meant by that last sentence is, if it comes up in conversation I'm not going to ignore it because it's only no. 99 on my priority list - I don't think people operate in that way.

No, fair enough, and I agree with your points on e.g. media literacy etc. That if it comes up in conversation with someone trying to promote it, it's a fair point to say "errrrr, no". But that conversation in particular just struck me as strange; in going through a political party's 800 point manifesto, to zero in on that one point seemed disproportionate.

I could see that going another way: that if you have that one "decision point" issue. That if someone supports or advocates something you know to be bullshit, that can be a sign that the rest of their thinking is wooly or wrong-headed. (I certainly have "decision point" issues of mine own!) Maybe that particular conversation was more like that.

But this was not attempting to pick at that one particular conversation, more a case of, use that one particular conversation to talk about something I see in my particular social bubble a *lot*.

I mean, maybe all of these things become decision point issues that are seen as being indicative of wider... "mindsets" (for lack of a better word).

If there's a venn diagram overlap of "people who believe in homeopathy" (harmless nonsense) with e.g. "people who are anti-vaccination" (whoa there, dangerous bullshit!) then this is a problem.

But I also see a large venn diagram overlap of "people who devote whole blog to posts debunking homeopathy as dangerous bullshit" with "people who protest 'but Muslim is not a race!!!' as justification for their racist bigotry" (whoooaaaaa there, REALLY dangerous bullshit)

I am not accusing *anyone* on ILX of performing this particular manoeuvre. It's just a mindset that appears with not-insignificant frequency in my particular off-ILX social bubble.

I am just thinking aloud, before anyone decides to jump on me and protest "but no one here DOOOOOEEESSS that" or the like.

Reading that back, in retrospect, if I feel like I have to apologise for my posts before, during and again after making them, this is probably not a good argument to be having, nor a good place to be having it.

Been thinking a bit about the logic of "I respect your opinion, but..." and it occurred to me that if your opinion is that eg it's basically fine for the government to send millions of people over the breadline then, actually, I don't respect your opinion, and realising that I don't have to even pretend to was actually this incredibly liberating feeling.

The idea that "I respect the basic right of human beings to *have* opinions" is really not the same as "I respect this, abhorrent, individual opinion." It's an important distinction, I think.

friend of a friend has a progressive form (I think) of multiple sclerosis & has been persuaded/[whatever verb you feel is most appropriate] into only taking homeopathic treatment by their mother, who does it professionally. I'm not generally v tolerant of pious rationalist types either but it seems like as clear a case as you could get

OK, I guess I'm wrong. ("Friend of a friend" is pretty vague hearsay, but I'll take you at your word.) It always surprises me when I've put too much faith in human beings, rather than too little.

If someone's delusion is strong enough to endanger the health / life of their child, how does one go about dispelling it? Like, if all the evidence already existent isn't going to shift it? I tend to think options like "ban it outright" only retrench beliefs that deep, because now they've got the weight of persecution?

Lots of businesses become non-viable if consumer protection laws get invoked, so I think removing economic incentive is still worth doing in the absence of any "de-programming" strategy.

Also, I think a lot of weird decision making isn't actually driven by belief; I remember hearing an interview with someone who had gone down a checklist of reasons why he shouldn't vote for bush based on what he believed, but ultimately admitting he was probably going to vote for bush and at a loss to explain why, since he'd just explained a bunch of reasons why he wouldn't.

red rag to me is (usually from a sibling) "it's just my *opinion*, I don't have to justify it to you" to end a debate/argument.
You do have to justify it if you have a reason for thinking it that isn't just plain old racist and you don't want me to think you're a racist, yes.
Opinions inform actions and votes so gtfo with that line of thinking!

BB, I agree re the likely reaction to banning it. Some of the cases are homeopath doctors treating their own very young kids. How do you ever convince them? Do they change their mind once their own kids die? (I'm guessing not).

Another one I've heard is 'whatever, you obviously just don't get it'

xp There is a website listing cases of wacky and upsetting treatments, documented in the press, but having spent 5 mins looking at it, don't. You would imagine that a bunch of the parents would cause harm whatever label they stuck on it, I guess.

OK one of them is 'moon landing denial' and 'harm' is as follows:
Bart Sibrel

Age: 37
Beverly Hills, California

Punched in the face
September 9, 2002
Bart is a major proponent of moon hoax misinformation. When he decided to harrass astronaut Buzz Aldrin about it, Buzz fought back. Bart became the recipient of a punch to the face.

Ugh, yes, I remembered that website and just looked it up myself. Many of their connections are far more spurious than the things they're trying to debunk.

yeah, one of the categories is 'home births' which I can see what they're getting at but it's not exactly accurate.

I'm not sure if humour is the best way to debunking tool, but I think this goes here anyway. Australian humorous consumer affairs show that spends a lot of time explaining the myths surrounding things like superfoods and supplements. It may well be effective for these but can't see them doing a segment for antivaxxers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTa_ccZBvEg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPGnBkH3fBg

dulce et decorum est pro patria mori

I kinda get the feeling that many people who are into 'alternative medicine' and the like often get there because of a retreat from ~Science~ and a retreat from ~Experts~ because of suspicion with those things. So the problem is, wheeling out Science! and Experts! to debunk their favoured choice is actually very counter-productive, and will drive them in the opposite direction even harder. What is effective? Humour, as Ed suggests? Peer pressure? Do fashions in pseudo-medicine just change the way all fashions change?

(Because of research I've been doing into local history, I've been reading a lot about the Georgian / early Victorian fashion for "taking the waters" as a medicinal thing, and the huge spas that were built across lots of South London. And that was a pseudo-medical fad that went out of fashion so decisively that all of those spas are just gone, except for the occasional gatehouse or capped well in the back of a weird local park.)

But then the other rabbithole that this line of thinking has taken me down is the idea of "how to change the minds of people who will not listen to the experts." Which is reminding me a lot of the current discussion on how to counter the particularly toxic strain of MRA/PUA misogyny. The problem being, how does one, as a woman, counter misogyny and sexism when part of the very core of the belief system is that misogynists do not listen to women. That is part of the misogyny toolkit. So if the retreat into psuedo-medicine is driven by fear of science, fear of progress, suspicion of experts, part of the toolkit of that belief system is... do not listen to scientists/experts. It seems to be a common thread in delusions, that they are driven by this rejection, therefore applying the expertise of whatever/whoever it is they are rejecting will not work.

Therefore by definition self-perpetuating and invulnerable... Good point!

Yeah that's pretty much the theme of the thread innit: when someone's whole deal is based around an antipathy to stuff like "facts" and "thinking", at what point do you just get the fuck outta Chinatown

Maybe the most popular delusion that needs dispelling is that it's our 'duty' to dispel them.

But... we do have such a duty? And I think it does largely work even if not on an immediate personal level. Like if climate change denial was demoted to flat earth science in popular culture, over time such views move to the fringe, away from determining policy.

Like maybe you can't change your kooky anti-vaccine pro-misogyny coal-burning uncle, but you can keep him from becoming mayor

I feel like, in light of the Isla Vista rampage, we *absolutely* have a duty to try to dispel false and unhealthy ideas.

It's like, yeah, you can keep said kooky uncle from becoming mayor, but you can't, in a free society, keep him from joining a community of likeminded kooks who will feed off one another's hatred and eventually possibly hurt/kill someone. Even as someone who supports gun control (it really is obviously way too easy in this country for someone like Elliot Rodger to get their hands on firearms), I can't help but feel like the core of this issue, as it always is in these situations, is the influence of toxic ideas on susceptible minds, and the two best things we can possibly do are 1) improve support for those with mental health issues and 2) promote non-harmful ways of thinking and living in the world. We need to do these things *in addition to* keeping guns out of the hands of the violent, but they can't take a backseat.

I'm not naive enough to think that you can accomplish no. 2 just by arguing with people. Branwell and others in this thread have pointed out that this is a matter of trust and if the people you're trying to sway have already decided not to trust you, you will at best have zero effect on them and at worst just make them more stubborn and entrenched.

tl;dr changing minds is a really hard problem but not one to be abandoned, imo.

I don't think the key is to argue people out of their insane bullshit, whether it's anti-vaccine or belief in religion. I think the key is to keep the infection from spreading. So when you see/hear someone talking insane bullshit, don't argue with them in an attempt to get them to change their minds—debunk what they're saying in a calm and rational manner so that the casual observer, who could go either way, winds up on your side instead of the lunatic's.

I think not enough credit is given to all the people with the old, bad, unshakeable ideas just dying out and a younger group less hidebound in that area ascends control.

There's this disturbing unshakable aspect in Western thought left over from the Enlightenment and other Greek traditions that you can just change someone from a tightly held belief just by debunking it. I remember reading in _The Ghost Map_ about how the scientific and medical establishment up thru the early Victorian era believed that disease traveled thru bad smell and bad air, and there was nothing that these few guys who were investigating a certain water pump in London could sway their views, so they just had to wait them out.

I think that might be right with outdated scientific paradigms, like if you're talking about "diseases are borne by bad smells" or "Newtonian physics doesn't need Einsteinian physics" then sure, it requires the old guard retiring or dying off for the new theorems to take root and grow.

But there are other old, bad, unshakeable ideas (like racism, like misogyny) that just spring up like little seedlings and grow afresh in every generation. So a different kind of approach is required, rather than e.g. "wait for all the old racists to die" because racism finds new and more insidious forms to express itself anew.

And on that one, yeah, you are not going to dislodge those ideas from the minds of old people. But the idea that you can practice weed control, and model better forms of behaviour not for the people who are hopeless, but for the undecided onlookers (especially of another generation) to stop it taking root anew, I think that's a better practice.

Sorry, though, I don't think "religion" is anything that one really can or even should stamp out of humans as if it were just like anti-vac. What one can do, if one is religiously inclined, is push for a more loving, tolerant, progressive kind of religion. That's a duty I leave to the religiously minded, and I've a lot of respect for those that do.

The ways in which science changes is a fascinating topic, I would recommend "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn for anyone interested in this. His basic idea is that scientific theories are sociologically constructed paradigms which require a critical mass of expert dissent before they can be shifted. The classic example is the evidence gathered by Copernicus that the earth revolves around the sun, which was to begin with resisted by "conventional" astronomers of the Ptolemaic persuasion. There are numerous other examples. However Kuhn's theories aren't uncontroversial, c.f. Paul Feyerabend.

Religion isn't something that can be stamped out, or should it. Religion is interwoven with culture, and culture changes.

Sorry, though, I don't think "religion" is anything that one really can or even should stamp out of humans as if it were just like anti-vac.

Religion isn't something that can be stamped out, or should it.

I'm fascinated by this POV, because to me it's the most abject surrender. Religious belief—belief in imaginary things, let us remember—is every bit as poisonous as any other kind of belief in bullshit, and in fact is far worse, because it's frequently the umbrella under which people's other bullshit beliefs hide, whether it's racism or sexism or anti-scientism or whatever else. Tear it away and destroy it, and who knows how many other fucked-up aspects of human culture may disappear too? Sunlight as disinfectant, etc. But if you're unwilling to tackle religion, you're allowing the structure that shelters all the oppressions you're against to remain and even thrive. You're effectively saying, "Well, you've been wrong for so long, it's impossible to correct you now, so we'll just let it go." Good luck changing anything else you think needs changing with that approach. Personally, I think anyone who brings religious belief into a discussion of real life should be punched in the face until they learn to debate like a grown-up. (N.B.: The last sentence—but only that sentence—is intended as humorous hyperbole.)

I thought the pump mystery was solved by graphing people who were ill and you saw that there was this huge cluster centered round the pump?

No, sorry, horse, this is not something I'm prepared to discuss on the internet. Religion is part of human culture, spirituality is part of the set of human emotions. If evils (misogyny, racism, etc) infect religion, it is because they are part the problems of *humans* which infect every other aspect of human culture, not just religion. It's really next level bullshit to blame "religion" for these ills, rather than "humans" for these ills. And the moment someone starts coming out with that kind of magical "get rid of religion and we instantly get rid of all the human problems" reasoning, it's a big warning to me that they don't really understand how culture, or religion, or indeed humans work. So sorry, but... nope. I'm out.

i've been around this on many other threads, so it probably isn't worth getting into here, but i disagree strongly with the horse. the blithe reduction of religious faith to "belief in imaginary things" is rank arrogance, imo, and simplistic to boot. the temptation to dismiss beliefs & experiences that don't square with our own is just as pernicious as anything else discussed in this thread.

moreover, i don't believe that the rational/scientific has any special claim to the good. from a purely scientific standpoint, any obligation to morality, decency, justice, equality and/or compassion must also be seen as "imaginary". such matters instead become the intersection of pragmatism, social theory & taste. i hardly think that scrubbing the world of all thinking that isn't wholly objective/logical/scientific would reliably lead to a reduction in human fucked-uppedness.

More listening and less talking would lead to a reduction in human fucked-uppedness!

also: cake

"Get rid of religion, and we will somehow get rid of all the human problems which infest every other aspect of human existence" is just another kind of ~magical thinking~.

(I am talking way too much for someone who doesn't want to talk about this stuff.)

I can still never discuss this properly because I don't know how to identify a 'religious belief' as opposed to any other kind of belief.

Branwell's probably right that it's a chicken-egg thing: people give their god(s) all the same fucked-up prejudices they've got already, and then argue that their fucked-up prejudices come from their god(s). Still not sure how that's an argument for holding onto the god(s), though. I mean, if you're gonna try to get rid of fucked-up beliefs and the behaviors they inspire (which is the Progressive Project, supported by All Right-Thinking People and everyone we follow on Twitter, after all), where do you start if not with the 100% imaginary ones? You can always work on the ones that have a toehold in reality afterwards, right?

Leaving to run errands, back later.

Believe in something ineffable that's bigger than yourself as reminder of both insignificance and specialness of life: fine, go right ahead, might even be helpful in a crisis.

Believe in higher power that's gonna smite your enemy because they're dirty/don't believe/you're having a bad day: magical thinking.

There is a tribe that due to some weird linguistic properties, have never developed beliefs in the supernatural, but they've also never developed counting.
This missionary who went to convert them basically lost his faith, and they also are really problematic for Noam Chomsky in terms of linguistic theory.
Also despite being in abject conditions, they don't experience depression.
Who would switch places with them, though?

if you want to oppose what you consider poisonous beliefs & behaviors, then do that. trying to stamp out "imaginary" beliefs (irony alert) is a completely different enterprise, and there's no clear relation between the two that i can see.

that kind of aggressive arrogance is far too narrow- and closed-minded to have any place in what i consider "the progressive project".

What would you need to draw that relation? The godless tribe seems to be free of many ills we assume are baked in more deeply than religion.

"the godless tribe" is an anecdotal point. would want to see some kind of verifiable large-scale correlation. otherwise, it's just wishful thinking, belief in an imaginary reality preferable to what we can actually observe.

Well I'm gonna assume the piraha are actual observable people and not imaginary.
There are only 400 left though

was speaking of the correlation being imaginary, not the tribe

idea that eradicating other people's belief in supposedly imaginary things would result in a reduction in man's humanity to man seems like a fantasy on the level of "when i die i get to go to heaven"

Piraha believe in spirits but only ones they can see.

coming from a white southern american family dominated by baptist grandparents, I personally find it very hard to separate certain old-fashioned reactionary delusions from certain protestant religious beliefs. I know most people don't share my experiences though.

i feel like this gets brought up all the time, but religion has been a force for violence + bigotry in the world, and also a force for liberalism, justice and progress. the issue isn't that someone believes something you think is silly but what they use that belief to justify.

Yes, the problem isn't belief as such, its drawing moral imperatives from metaphysical assumptions. Jesus rose from the dead therefore don't use birth control. This goes for secular belief systems too.

But the force itself is coercive -- the real trade off to me is that civilized comforts might not be possible without coercion
The piraha apparently live in a society without such coercion but is that sustainable when they are only 400?

I'll put it this way - I wouldn't be anywhere near as reactionary as P-Free, but some of the prejudices that are inherent in religion didn't merely come from man taking something pure and sullying it up. These things are ingrained in many religions, especially Judeo-Christianity, because religion is manmade and was a product of its time.

There are definitely latent anti-Semetic sentiments buried throughout the Gospel According to John, for one. When comparitively reading it alongside the other synoptic Gospels, one sees that more blame is attributed to the Jewish people for the death of Jesus, whereas Pilate, who was much more complicit in the other depictions, was seen as more reluctant. Bart Ehrman and other New Testament scholars largely believe the author of the Gospel According to John was one of the earliest new Christians to break from the old school Judaism faith, and he and others of his followers were ostracized and forced out of the faith for their 'heretic' beliefs. In retaliation, he and the Johannine community began assessing blame to the Jews for Christ's death. So right there, we have prejudice ingrained in canonical New Testament text, and being that Christianity did not exist until after Jesus was dead, one can hardly say "well it was a pure religion until men came and tainted it", cuz men invented it to begin with!

With all that being said, I am still tolerant towards religious folks, but not like I once was. That doesn't mean I go looking for fights with believers or refuse to associate with them by any means. But it does mean I'm less likely to be laissez-faire with them if I happen to get in an argument or won't criticize their beliefs. Context also matters: cliffs notes is I grew up in a church that explicitly told me that the word "dogs" in Revelation referred to homosexuals, who would sit outside the Kingdom of Heaven, and other completely bigoted horseshit. And many of the folks in that church grew up in it from childhood, indoctrinated into it, meaning by the time they were an adult, they didn't know anything else. the only reason I escaped it and actually sought other 'truths' was because someone had the gumption to challenge my beliefs in a series of discussions when I was 16...and I found, upon closer examination, that I hadn't really thought through it much and that it didn't make sense to me after all.

Some folk will remain steadfast after being challenged and that's fine. But sometimes I feel like 'respecting' people's beliefs is conflated with 'ehh don't bother engaging with them on the topic', which is BS IMO

No, sorry, horse, this is not something I'm prepared to discuss on the internet.

followed by 3 more sentences on the topic and a follow-up post

Well, religion is coercive!

i do not believe for any reason though that our ills would be gone by eradicating religion. there are plenty of evil sons of bitches out there that have little to no influence of spirituality or religion making them tha tway.

Actually do you guys think of coercion as having a neutral property or is it intrinsically bad?

coercion is the wrong way to put it. nothing is ever "completely free". context is constraint. and there's nothing wrong with context.

my own bit of magical thinking is that a reduction in certainty (fundamentalism, absolutism, etc) would "naturally" lead to a reduction in human poison. this applies to religious certainties as well as those of whatever other sort: libertarian, antireligious, progressive, whatever.

Isn't it a classic defense of religion argument to claim that without it, certain classes would have nothing to restrain them from going completely id?

Well if you're trying to dispel a delusion, I think some coercion is implied in the sense that there is an unwilling party to win over and likewise they have stakes in winning you over

my own bit of magical thinking is that a reduction in certainty... I tend to agree provided that we're generally talking about unsubstantiated or unverifiable certainties.

and sorry for nonsensically dodging the "coercion" question. straight answer: coercion is not intrinsically bad. social coercion (laws, standards, taboos, regulations, etc & their enforcement) is okay w/ me.

I tend to agree provided that we're generally talking about unsubstantiated or unverifiable certainties.

i just go with opposing all of 'em. cleaner that way. allows for the erosion of supposed verities, which seems inevitable.

Then why isn't religion counted among the "good" coercion toolbelt? Because of deceit?

Coercion is the monopoly of the State, blah, blah, blah. It tends to be less effective on interpersonal levels and especially if you're trying to get someone to empathise enough to think like you do. My biggest problem with conspiracists is they're missing the forest for the imaginary trees. Most of the shit that impacts us is out in the open and it's rarely that well camouflaged. Pppl are relatively predictable and rarely smart enough to carry out secret schemes like the Illuminati and why would they? Most of the ways that the system is rigged are pretty obvious and straightforward.

i just go with opposing all of 'em. I hate to tell you this, contenderizer, but we're all going to die.

seems likely

Well the conspiracists impulse to see patterns that aren't there and convince others of it is essentially a religious impulse but isn't this also the mechanism for invention and technological/capitalist progress?

Like what's the difference between a conspiracy theorist and someone making an IM app?

I hate to tell you this, Michael White, but all of our consciousness is going to be uploaded to the cloud.

not me.. i keep all of my thoughts to myself and never post them on the internet