fides' Jack's Mega Anti-Vax Thread

[Peace]

1 hour ago, hakutaku said:

That wasn't ever my point though?  My point was never that religion makes people susceptible to conspiracy theories.  For someone leveling the charge of "not actually reading," this is an awfully hypocritical mistake to make.

I think you are attempting to backtrack now. I thought that is what you were insinuating when you wrote "So when conspiracy theories involving global malevolent actors comes along, where is the fertile ground for these seeds?  The fertile ground is basically all inside of religious communities."

I made it clear that is what I thought you were insinuating in my first response to you. I wrote "You will also find that the vast majority of modern science from say the 15th century was conducted by religious people. Is religion also the cause of modern science and rational thinking because the vast majority of scientific development in the history of the world was conducted by religious? To prove your theory . . ."

Then when I challenged you to prove that theory, you basically responded by saying "Oh there is plenty of data to show that . . ." You didn't respond at that time by clarifying "Oh that is not what I was trying to assert."

Now, only after I criticized your use of the articles, you want to go back and say "Oh that isn't really what I was trying to say at all."

I don't buy it pal.

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I stated my point quite clearly:

Lord, to whom shall they go?  They shall go disproportionately to religion.

Now this does not mean that religion is exclusively made up of these people, just that most of these people will end up religious, and there will be very few of these people outside of religious communities.

Now I don't think you have demonstrated either of these. But even if you can, who cares? Quacks are also more likely to drink milk, watch Star Wars Episode 3, and do a million other things. Essentially this is kind of an attempt to make an Ad Hominem sort of attack on religion, is it not? Many people who hold religious beliefs are quacks, therefore there must be something intrinsically wrong with religion. Now, I'm sure you won't admit that this is what you are attempting to insinuate, but you aren't fooling anybody.

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Now I have submitted some data which directly supports my thesis: most strongly the first article which directly relates teleological thinking (as I put it "a natural tendency to find organization, plans, in the world, and to ascribe bad outcomes to malevolent actors") to conspiracy theories and certain religious beliefs. 

Friend, you did not submit any data at all. What you submitted were the conclusions that the authors of that article drew from the data that they collected. Neither you nor they have produced any hard data whatsoever. And if you look at the methodology from the first study mentioned in the article, I am surprised how you can even take it seriously. The authors conducted a survey of 157 college freshmen on a single college campus. That is not serious data science. That is fluff science. Certainly not anything approaching what you need to prove up your claims.

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You seem to have missed some critical pieces of the final paper (slightly condensed):

Now you are correct: It may be the case that there exist religions which do not attract these people, but I will not write more defensively and explicitly say that religious beliefs which do not involve teleological reasoning may not attract these people.  The papers I posted are in fact evidence for my thesis even if you judge it to fall short of proof.

Yeah I saw those portions, but they are meaningless conclusions. They are nothing more than conclusory statements based on the author's review of studies that other people made. The author cites one study for one sentence, a completely different study for the next sentence, a third study for the next sentence, and so forth. This is his opinion and the conclusions that he drew from the works of others. We don't have the data or even the methodology or definitions used from any of those underlying studies, so we have nothing to go on other than the author's opinion. And if you look at the abstracts of the underlying articles (the only thing that we have) - the articles themselves do not appear to have anything to do with religion, or even to attempt to address the question raised by your assertion. Like I said, show me the hard data that proves your assertions. Citing the conclusions of someone who may have similar opinions as you is really nothing more than a sort of an veiled attempt to make an appeal to authority. In my original post I said you had no hard data. You have still not produced any.

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I deny, however, that you have made a substantive complaint against the literature on fundamentalists.  Fundamentalist Catholics are still Catholics; indeed my theory would say that these people are the most likely to be attracted to fundamentalism insofar as fundamentalism is basically the assertion "we have forgotten the fundamental truths of our religion."

If any so-called fundamentalists (however you want to define them)  want to jump in an take issue with whatever you think about them that is up to them. It's really no concern of mine because I am not a fundamentalist.

Edited February 1, 2021 by Peace

[fides' Jack]

As a fundamentalist, just based on the definition above (that we believe "we have forgotten the fundamental truths of our religion"), I would say, no, I'm not going to jump up and take issue with how you think about us.  Despite my hard and straight language that I've used in several threads here, of late, I'm a very agreeable person by nature.  

I do object to being called a conspiracy theorist, but I also think anyone who holds fast to truth these days will be called much worse than that.  If they're not being called names, they're probably not as faithful as they think...

[hakutaku]

Really good deep-dive into the flat earth society, including their eventual subsumption into the "big tent" of Qanon theories.  Goes in-depth into people's motivations and why such groups are so uniquely immune to reality.

Edited February 8, 2021 by hakutaku

[ReasonableFaith]

23 hours ago, hakutaku said:

Really good deep-dive into the flat earth society, including their eventual subsumption into the "big tent" of Qanon theories. 

Thank you for sharing the movie. I found it entertaining, informative, and helpful. 

[Ice_nine]

Yes conspiracies never happen. Take this section of an article written by alt-right, facio-supreme propaganda outlet Time Magazine:

"That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it."

Ahh, no worries. No elections were rigged, per se, they were fortified. Now I feel MUCH better.

https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/

I find the discussion of religion and conspiracy theories and religion a fun time. For years the hyper-rational new atheists cry and cry about how religion destroys everything. And now the far-left progressives are eating these people alive, because they are just as religious as any troglodyte from the Bible-belt you can conjure up. Sam Harris is not having a good time with them.

See, people are inherently religious. That's the rub. Even the hyper-rationalist intellectuals who do a good job pretending they are above all of that "superstitious nonsense."

[Anomaly]

Is being committed to your beliefs despite rational thought and evidence mean being religious?

[Ice_nine]

3 hours ago, Anomaly said:

Is being committed to your beliefs despite rational thought and evidence mean being religious?

I can only imagine that this is the wrong question, or that it doesn't make much sense.

Any set or beliefs or tenets that are embodied in custom or ritual and contain a meta-narrative seems to be a good workable definition of religion. So someone who holds to belief and practices the requisite rituals could be said to be "religious."

So yes you can be religious despite rational thought and evidence. You can also be religious because of rational thought and evidence. If I were a more well-trained logician there's probably a better way to describe your question. For now, I can only say I don't see the point of the question.

[Peace]

1 hour ago, Ice_nine said:

I can only imagine that this is the wrong question, or that it doesn't make much sense.

Any set or beliefs or tenets that are embodied in custom or ritual and contain a meta-narrative seems to be a good workable definition of religion. So someone who holds to belief and practices the requisite rituals could be said to be "religious."

So yes you can be religious despite rational thought and evidence. You can also be religious because of rational thought and evidence. If I were a more well-trained logician there's probably a better way to describe your question. For now, I can only say I don't see the point of the question.

I thought that it was a back-handed way to insinuate that religion is contrary to rational thought and evidence. That is, the essence of religion is to believe something that defies thought and evidence.

If that is what was intended it is quite ironic, given that atheism is one of the most irrational and evidence-free assertions in history of mankind.

[ReasonableFaith]

7 hours ago, Ice_nine said:

I find the discussion of religion and conspiracy theories and religion a fun time.

Perhaps some of the fun time discussion should be spent on the deaths, bodily injury, emotional trauma, property damage, ruined careers and potential threats to public health cause by today’s most popular conspiracy theories. 

[hakutaku]

45 minutes ago, ReasonableFaith said:

Perhaps some of the fun time discussion should be spent on the deaths, bodily injury, emotional trauma, property damage, ruined careers and potential threats to public health cause by today’s most popular conspiracy theories. 

Conspiracy theories have had disastrous consequences for entire democracies.

7 hours ago, Ice_nine said:

Ahh, no worries. No elections were rigged, per se, they were fortified. Now I feel MUCH better.

I wonder about the course of German politics, for example, if there had been a deliberate effort to combat the "Jewish Bolshevism" and stab in the back conspiracy theories, similar to the efforts described in the Time article.

Edited February 19, 2021 by hakutaku

[Ice_nine]

1 hour ago, Peace said:

I thought that it was a back-handed way to insinuate that religion is contrary to rational thought and evidence. That is, the essence of religion is to believe something that defies thought and evidence.

If that is what was intended it is quite ironic, given that atheism is one of the most irrational and evidence-free assertions in history of mankind.

maybe, but I don't find Anomaly to be the back-handed type. And I think he respects religion even though he can't bring himself to believe.

It would be disappointing if that's what he was saying. Maybe I give him too much credit.

1 hour ago, ReasonableFaith said:

Perhaps some of the fun time discussion should be spent on the deaths, bodily injury, emotional trauma, property damage, ruined careers and potential threats to public health cause by today’s most popular conspiracy theories. 

Where you right "popular conspiracy theories" I can replace with almost any noun in the English language and find an example to illustrate my point. I think you are likely estimating the scope and scale here.

I'd be willing to say that actual conspiracy have probably caused more of the above than mere theories.

But there's no real way of empirically knowing or quantifying the harm done when we're talking about one versus the other. It's really more about what you believe.

[Ice_nine]

45 minutes ago, hakutaku said:

Conspiracy theories have had disastrous consequences for entire democracies.

I wonder about the course of German politics, for example, if there had been a deliberate effort to combat the "Jewish Bolshevism" and stab in the back conspiracy theories, similar to the efforts described in the Time article.

So you are indeed religious after all. Trump and his supporters are just like Hitler and the Nazis, evil, and therefore elites controlling the flow of information is a good thing. The ends justify the means. Amen.

Also censoring an idea is not combating it. That is a joke. You are fooling yourself if you think censorship actually eliminates the targeted ideas.

[Anomaly]

@Ice_nine   Thanks.    You’re right in the money.   I respect religion and most religious people immensely.   It mostly is a rational expression of fundamental beliefs. 
My post was ironically sarcastic to state that anyone can choose to ignore rationality and attempt to justify it by demeaning the other side as superstitious or blind ideology. 
 @Peace You’re better than that 95% of the time and I can accept that I respect you more than you respect me.   Sorry that you think I rip on religion.  I respect enough to try to not be a hypocrite.  

[hakutaku]

54 minutes ago, Ice_nine said:

So you are indeed religious after all. Trump and his supporters are just like Hitler and the Nazis, evil, and therefore elites controlling the flow of information is a good thing. The ends justify the means. Amen.

They're not evil, they are (as I said) dangerous to democracy.  Are you perhaps ignorant of the tight control that the Nazis' wielded over the press?  The problem I identified was not that the press was too free.  The problem was that there was no concerted effort to push back when motivated individuals began using conspiracy theories to justify anti-democratic political ends.

1 hour ago, Ice_nine said:

Also censoring an idea is not combating it. That is a joke. You are fooling yourself if you think censorship actually eliminates the targeted ideas.

This fundamentally misunderstands the concept of censorship.  Censorship is when a government (e.g. the Papal states) use their authority to enforce bans on certain ideas (e.g. the Index Librorum Prohibitorum).  What was described in your Time article was not a government ban on ideas.  What it described was a consortium whose goal was to take idea-amplification tools out of the hands of people seeking to use them for anti-democratic political ends.

[Peace]

1 hour ago, Anomaly said:

  @Peace You’re better than that 95% of the time and I can accept that I respect you more than you respect me.   Sorry that you think I rip on religion.  I respect enough to try to not be a hypocrite.  

Friend, when are you gonna stop with this "You are better than that" jazz? You are not my judge, and you know plenty well that I do not care one iota about where the quality of my posts ranks on your scale.

That being said, I respect you as a person. I disagree with your views on God, religion, and many other things. I call things how I see them, and that is what I thought was being insinuated by your post. If not, you can clarify otherwise.

It's just business baby. Nothing personal.