How to solve a problem religion-style:

[DetlefK]

Yeah, the title is clickbait. Sue me.



I am currently reading a book about religion during the late Middle-Ages and the Renaissance and I thought it would be interesting to share how people thought back then. Back then, people were also curios how the world works. They wanted to understand it. They just used a different matter than science.

* They began with basic truths. These truths were derived from the Bible and acceptable philosophers.

* From these truths they drew conclusions. They incorporated the conclusions of acceptable philosophers and theologists and this way created a framework and hierarchy of explanations.



This works as along as everybody starts with the same truths and everybody comes to the same conclusions. If there's a conflict, it was custom to try to convince the other person by citing sources of more authority. His Platon is worth less than the Bible. But as it is impossible to denounce some kinds of sources, some contradictory viewpoints simply cannot be resolved.
In this vein, the dispute (if it was important enough) went eventually to a higher authoritarian level: the Pope or the Inquisition. And the Inquisition resolved the problem of opposing viewpoints with torture, executions and incarceration.

Please note that neither facts nor personal experience nor experiments even enter into this kind of thinking. They are non-existent. Exploring the universe begins with infallible truths and ends with conclusions from these infallible truths.



Using facts and personal experience as tools to describe the world was considered a radical new idea. It became popular during the Renaissance, when the Church had the challenge of making arguments why their orthodox Christianity is correct while the neo-platonic magical Christianity of Ficino, Mirandola, Paracelsus is false.
It was next to impossible to stamp out these ideas: While the Inquisition had no problem handling the obvious heretics, it turned out to be an impossible challenge to argue why your religion is real and the other religion is fake: Both religions were grounded on the Bible and every time you had an esoteric pinned down with an argument, he kept coming back with a new convoluted idea.



The irony is that eventually both sides started using experience as an argument.

Thomas Erastus, an evangelical fundamentalist and witch-burning enthusiast, used personal experience to denounce the effects of magical spells as illusions and trickery. Illusions and trickery caused by demons.

Francis Bacon, alchemist and adherent to a philosophy that was essentially the predecessor of materialism, used experiments to weed out useless magic and find magical spells and rituals that work in practice. He was basically an experimental chemicist, but with still a deeply esoteric view of the world. He was a big fan of astrology and despised mathematics.





I think, for understanding religion it's important to understand how religious people explore the world and why you can't convince them with facts: For them, truth is not revealed at the end. Truth is where it all begins.

[Girard442]

1. In the aftermath of the 2016 election...

...I think we have to factor into our thinking that a huge fraction of putatively religious people are basically atheists, even if they won't admit it to themselves.

An example: End-timers who pored over the book of Revelations for relevant prophecies suddenly developed selective blindness about Jared Kushner's part ownership of 666 Fifth Avenue. We secular types always knew the 666 thing was superficial superstitious bullshit. Who could have known that they felt the same way?

[DetlefK]

2. They aren't atheists. They are simply hypocrites.

Remember how a fly once circled Obama mid-speech and tried to swat it with his hand? They saw this as proof that he's the Lord of the Flies: Satan.

[trotsky]

3. So we know believers are really atheists when they behave badly?

Only atheists can be bad people?

Gee, that's pretty fucking insulting to atheists.

[Girard442]

4. Let me put it this way: suppose I've been telling everybody that...ohhh...limes are poisonous.

And then you see me quaffing down a huge glass of limeade with an actual slice of lime floating in it. Yeah, I could be a hypocrite or a complete nutcase, but more likely I never believed the toxic lime thing in the first place.

[trotsky]

5. Limes might be poisonous for others, but not you.

Or your god gave you an exception. There are many reasons that could be invented.

It is not cool for you to say that if someone behaves badly, they MUST be an atheist.

[Voltaire2]

6. The Aristotelian method.

The scientific revolution discarded this approach and in doing so ended more than 1,000 years of stagnation.

You still find the approach popping up- to a limited extent- “sure it works in practice, but in theory?”