Steven Pinker tweets something stunningly stupid
I like some of Steven Pinker’s work. His book The Better Angels of Our Nature, for example (which I wrote about here) presents a fascinating thesis that is quite persuasive, although it sounds absurd when you first hear it: that society has become less violent over time.
But the following tweet by Pinker – which contains a link to this WaPo column by Gary Abernathy – is deeply stupid in so many ways it’s almost a parody. Alas, Pinker seems to mean it quite seriously [hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit]. The following is not a quote from the WaPo piece to which Pinker links; it appears to be Pinker’s own words:
Belief in an afterlife is a malignant delusion, since it devalues actual lives and discourages action that would make them longer, safer, and happier. Exhibit A: What’s really behind Republicans wanting a swift reopening? Evangelicals. https://t.co/ppo2bwiVGn
— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) May 21, 2020
Pinker is an atheist, and says he’s been one since he was thirteen years old. Actually, he put it this way: “I was never religious in the theological sense. I never outgrew my conversion to atheist at 13.” That’s interesting. What does “religious in the theological sense” mean? Is there any other way to be religious? I suppose he means “theological” as opposed to “spiritual,” the word a lot of people use these days as a shortcut for saying they’re not into organized religion. But “theology” is the study of the Divine and of religious belief in all its guises.
More to the point, Pinker himself is an atheist, and his contention that he never outgrew becoming an atheist at thirteen is probably meant to be slightly humorous. But it is also telling. Did his atheism stagnant at that stage of his development, adolescence? That would explain a lot about the tweet.
As a supposed scientist, Pinker should know that calling belief in an afterlife a “delusion” (much less a “malignant” one) is an opinion of his, not a scientific fact. The afterlife is by definition after life, not of it. The ultimate answer, and the ultimate test, comes outside of this world and this temporal life. We do not know the answer one way or the other in the sense of scientific proof, we can only live humbly and respectfully in a state of faith or lack of faith.
Why “malignant”? Is Pinker unaware of the good that is done by religious people who believe in an afterlife: the selflessness, the sacrifice, the help to others? I think Pinker is correct that belief in an afterlife can sometimes contribute to a sense of invulnerability that can in certain limited circumstances help make a person impervious to malignant consequences: witness the suicide bomber terrorist. But they constitute such a tiny portion of believers as to be nearly meaningless – except in certain parts of the world and among certain groups. The vast vast majority of believers either live ordinary lives or altruistic ones. Meanwhile, unbelievers are hardly immune from malignant risk-taking: crimes, and even crimes against humanity.
Nor are atheists happier than believers. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be much scientific evidence that people who don’t believe in the afterlife live lives that are “longer, safer, happier.” It’s certainly not true as compared to religious people.
As Pinker well knows, or should know. But his anger and his politics seem to be blinding him here.
Of course, another point is that most Republicans are not Evangelicals, and many Democrats are. In fact, for those wishing to look at the actual numbers (not Pinker, apparently), they can be found here (from 2016). Thirty-six percent of registered voters describe themselves as evangelical, and they constitute 45% percent of Republican (or lean-Republican) voters. They also constitute 29% of Democrat (or lean-Democrat) voters, nearly a third. And both Republicans and Democrats who are Christian constitute around another third of the registered voters in each party (40% for Republicans and 35% for Democrats). So the differences exist, but are not all that large between the two parties regarding religious beliefs, and probably concerning the afterlife as well. Christian believers constitute a substantial majority of registered voters in both parties.
I’ve not seen evidence that evangelicals drive the beliefs of other Republicans in any respect. And of course, there are people who are not Christians at all who believe in an afterlife, and even – whether Pinker knows it or not – people who would be considered atheists who believe in an afterlife of spirit beings or energy fields or the like.
Lastly, there are scientists who question the value of shutdowns for COVID based purely on the science of what we’ve learned about how COVID seems to be operating: patterns of transmission, and data from countries and states that locked down harshly vs. those who did not. For example, there’s this, and there are plenty of others. The science is, as they say, unsettled. But it’s not trending in Pinker’s direction.
[NOTE: And from that Abernathy WaPo piece to which Pinker links:
The coronavirus? Christian fundamentalism is often fatalistic. As far as many evangelicals are concerned, life passes quickly, suffering is temporary and worrying solves nothing. That’s not a view that comports well with long stretches of earthly time spent waiting out business closures or stay-at-home orders. It should be no surprise that a person’s deepest beliefs about the world influence how they measure the risks they’re willing to take.
But what Abernathy is describing here, accurate or not, also indicates a stance that would be likely to accept a lockdown with equanimity rather than to protest it.
This sentence appears later in the piece [emphasis mine]:
McEwen [an evangelical leader and ex-politician] told me this week that evangelicals aren’t rattled by covid-19, either the disease or the government’s response to the pandemic, because the Bible instructs them not to let earthly fears overwhelm them.
So again, that indicates an attitude as likely to accept a lockdown as to reject one.
The difference that Abernathy – and Pinker – miss, and the one that makes the difference IMHO, is not belief in an afterlife. It is a focus on liberty rather than fear.]
[ADDENDUM: And then there’s this church bombing, which may or may not have been a false flag operation.]
Some years ago, in the aftermath of the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Florida by an ISIS-sympathizing gunman of Afghan parentage, the NYT wrote a stunningly idiotic editorial blaming the massacre on Republican Christian conservatives. The need of leftists (and Pinker, who is very bright and often very insightful, is not even on the hard-left) to divert attention from the real culprits to their ideological enemies is truly pathological.
Pinker is an evil man and has been so for quite some time. This just outs his Satanic streak for all to see. It’s always instructive when the skin splits and you can see the lizard inside the mask.
IMO believing that anyone alive knows anything about what comes or doesn’t come after death is absurd. Mr. Pinker can settle that question for himself when he dies. Meanwhile he should stay away from lecturing others about their beliefs.
Such militant atheists always looked to me as never matured adolescents. The most important question here is “why?” Why an intellectually developed person chose to stay in a state of arrested development in such important thing? The answer is: to avoid responsibility. Accepting even a possibility of inavoidable objective judgment of their moral behavior is for them intolerable, so they turn to denial of any objective moral truth. Cowards!
parker,
That no one can prove they know is not proof that they don’t know.
Near Death Experience…
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=reportage+on+near-death+experiences&view=detail&mid=D95030AF96A25F74DD64D95030AF96A25F74DD64&FORM=VIRE&PC=U316
If Abernathy and Pinker want to examine fatalism, they should take a look at Islam in particular, and also Hindu ideology. Evangelical Christians like the Samaritan’s Purse people who went to that field hospital in New York acknowledge the commandment to help other people in this life.
“Such militant atheists always looked to me as never matured adolescents”
I can go along with that. I myself was a “devout” atheist by 14 or 15. By my mid 20s, cracks began to appear. I’m not sure how to describe myself now. Not a Christian, but I now acknowledge there is something more to this life and universe than just a big cosmic accident. Call it God, or the Force, or whatever, there’s definitely a spirit pervading this existence.
Thank you for this post, neo. I was shocked by that tweet.
Man, I was tempted to sign up for Twitter just to bash that Pinker tweet. Saner minds (between my ears) prevailed.
Pinker is hardly an evil man, pace Gerard, but he did betray the profound bubble in which he exists without noticing and self-righteously presumes to judge others.
huxley:
Glad to hear from you again, you’ve been absent for months it seems.
I saw Pinker’s post yesterday on my Facebook feed. The comments then were overwhelmingly critical. I added my own, which was likewise.
I respect and appreciate Pinker as a sincere liberal, who disdains leftist ideology, particularly in its anti-intellectual, anti-free speech inclinatinions on university campuses and elsewhere. I’m willing to forgive a boneheaded post or tweet, here and there because I think Pinker is largely doing important and useful work: reaching out to liberal (but not leftist) educated lay readers on the dangers of leftist dogma.
There are scores of people who are not leftist, but liberal leaning, who are, nevertheless quite malleable, and accept, uncritically, all cliches about conservatives and Republicans. They will never, ever consider anything anyone on the right has to say, no matter how well reasoned or politely presented. They also largely accept the MSM narrative of current events, without much reflection. As the MSM has lurched left, it is drawing a lot of these people with it.
Pinker is a public intellectual who provides a counterbalance. That is critically important.
A straw-clown apology. Admission to the afterlife is judged by conformance and performance to a religious (i.e. moral) philosophy in the present. #PrinciplesMatter #HateLovesAbortion
That said, a Pro-Choice, selective, opportunistic, politically congruent, religion does devalue human life in the present. Diversity (i.e. color judgment) breeds adversity, and devalues human life in the present. Masculinism, femininsm are first-order forcings of personal conflict and strife, and devalue human life in the present. Also, conservation, not environmentalism. Reconcile.
I think that the ultimate response to aetheists is the response I read in regards to Jean Paul Sartre’s death:
Either he was right and doesn’t know it, or he was wrong and he knows it.
GB,
I have read about death experiences. My only comment is our brains can create mysterious experiences.
I’ve never understood atheism, but I am an agnostic when it comes to personally knowing about what happens after death. However, I agree with physicsguy. The universe and the fact that there is life on earth (perhaps elsewhere) is not random.
why do apostate Jews become such reprehensible people?
and why do they invariably personify Jews to anti-semites?
maybe the rabbit should put vermin like him in cherim
The most rabid religious fanatics I’ve ever known were atheists.
parker,
What rationale, other than facile dismissal… can be offered as support for the assertion by others that the thousands of reports of a personal experience of conscious awareness after death are merely the brain’s dying echoes?
It’s called arrested development.
Pinker’s Better Angels… wasn’t so hot either. See this https://politicsandprosperity.com/2013/07/29/the-fallacy-of-human-progress/, and this https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-steven-pinker-wrong-violence-war-declining.
As both an evangelical Christian, and Republican, I would fit in this ignorant idiot’s stereotype. He is an idiot if he is not willing to have his ignorance corrected.
I am married to a Catholic wife, and also a member of an evangelical church trapped in the PCUSA, (that apostate liberal presbyterian denomination). I am best described as a charismatic Calvinist. So I know more of Christianity than the idiot.
It is almost certain that I also know more of science that the idiot. My hobbies being quantum mechanics, geology, geography, history, in addition to theology and poetry. Quantum mechanics is very helpful in understanding the paradoxes of theology.
The universe is designed for free will. This is a very elegant design. Both free will and predestination are 100% true. As a Calvinist, I am deeply aware of how God is fully in charge. Yet at the same time, every action, thought, and intention of mine is of cosmic significance. God’s design is so amazing, because we are somehow free to come to Him. God offers Himself to us as a gift. He asks us, will you accept My gift, and offer yourself as a gift. This is not a transaction, but mutual gifting. So in everything, God invites me to join His plan, the problem: It requires learning to listen, and live a life of intimacy and AWE.
So this person spectacularly illustrates how little he knows of God. Since for him, there is no god, (except himself), he does not know either intimacy or awe, so he cannot understand how a prophet can hear from God. He does not understand how God speaks in His word.
He does not understand how God is with us in our suffering. When my son was diagnosed with the cancer that killed him within 6 months, I offered my grief to God as a gift. As I walked the last miles with my son, I did not operate in my own strength, but God’s.
I am not angry at this man, but I pity the fool. He does not know. As Jesus said as he hung on the cross. “Father forgive them. They know not what they do”.
GB,
I think the brain recognizes death. Remember, I am agnostic, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have beliefs about spiritual questions. Just not the same as yours.
Glad to hear from you again, you’ve been absent for months it seems.
0m: Thanks! The end of the semester got complicated with schoolwork and Covid so I stepped back for a while.
avi:
That’s quite the generalization.
Most Jewish people who are not religious, most Christians who are not religious, and most people who are not religious, are not the least bit reprehensible.
neo writes, “Lastly, there are scientists who question the value of shutdowns for COVID based purely on the science of what we’ve learned about how COVID seems to be operating: patterns of transmission, and data from countries and states that locked down harshly vs. those who did not.”
I wish it were not so, that so many people are shocked! shocked! to discover that in many fields, very much including many scientific fields, there are experts who very sincerely and sometimes pointedly disagree with one another.
On another hand, many of those many are not necessarily so shocked! shocked!, but they choose which experts to believe based on what they already believe or want to believe (it’s called confirmation bias).
I’m subject to confirmation bias, and honestly, I’m not sure who isn’t. It’s something I think most of us would like to minimize.
Most modern atheists aren’t really atheists. They’re just people who have one or another particular problem with organized religion and are way to in love with themselves. You can tell because they have completely conventional Judeo-Christian moral beliefs on everything except sex.
A genuinely atheistic morality would be markedly different in ways beyond what you do with your hoo-ha.
Mike
An interesting take on the Pinker tweet from Mollie Hemingway, herself a believing conservative Lutheran. “This tweet is getting dunked on but there may be a kernel of truth hidden underneath the atheistic bellicosity. I could see how something many Christians don’t have — a crippling fear of death — plays a role in supporting perpetual shutdown.”
https://twitter.com/MZHemingway/status/1263660390006784002?s=20
parker,
I wasn’t nor am I questioning your agnosticism. Which BTW, I perceive to be far more intellectually defensible than atheism.
And, of course you have different beliefs than I, which given the human condition is a certainty.
I simply find speculation that essentially dismisses what is reported as imaginary, by those who have had no experience with a near death experience to be nonsensical. As how can a blind from birth man offer a knowledgeable opinion about colors?
Plus, the “brain chemistry” speculation requires positing that the brain and mind are inseparable, being one and the same. I am reasonably certain that is not the case both by reason and personal experience with related states of consciousness that challenge the assertion that we are simply an organic ‘computer’ interacting with outward reality through our five senses.
But of course I cannot prove that of which only personal experience can persuade.
Oh god, what a maroon. What else can you say?
GB,
I enjoy reading your comments. I think you are sincere and very intelligent. I also think we could have “a beautiful friendship”. BTW are you an east coast or west coast Floridaian? I ask because I have a childhood friend who lives on the northern west coast that I visit every February. We go deep sea fishing and remember our younger years on neighboring farms. Old or new friends are a treasure.
BTW, I don’t question anyone’s perception when it comes to the issue at hand.
Yes, huxley I’m happy to see you around here I’ve wondered what had become of you and with this format a person can just disappear and us fellow ‘strangers’ will never have a clue. The internet is weird like that.
Hi huxley – glad to see you back.
I wonder why physically weak or otherwise irritating people, would imagine that, say, my being an atheist would likely increase my respect for their existence and to treat their annoyingness with greater forbearance ?
I’m sure that there are plenty of ways of dealing with problematic persons aside from leveling violence against them. But it seems to me that confidence in the fact that the cosmos is intrinsically meaningless, including the meaningless lives of those cosmic side effects we call living beings, and that there are no long term consequences to whatever we do to anyone or anything, would tend to make it more or less just one more useful option to be decided upon at the acting agent`s discretion and calculation of advantage. Perhaps when say, speed and efficiency are thought to be critically important.
Remember too, that countenancing or even initiating the slaughter of millions, doesn’t mean that one becomes incapable of appreciating a well formed woman, or expressing acts of kindness to children and dogs. Or at least those breeds that strike one as congenial.
Maybe Pinker has an argument that amounts to more than some kind of emergent evolution crap. If so, I’d like to see it.
parker,
My parents passed away last year, he first @ 97 and she 7 weeks later @ 93. Storybook romance, lifelong friends and lovers.
6 weeks ago I moved to Bend Oregon to be close to my daughter and future grandchildren. That and the fly fishing:-). Yes, tragically I’m now living in a deep blue state but sacrifices had to be made if my grandchildren were to know me. Had I my druthers, I’d be in Tennessee but “life is what happens while we’re busy making other plans”.
Yes, our outlook is simpatico and, should we ever be able to meet I’d enjoy getting to know you better.
MBunge @ 8:12 You said it.
I tell my ‘non believing’ friends that they have no idea how deeply internalized and ‘Judeo-Christian’ their thinking and values are – and they are not going to like the post Christian world one bit.
As for near death/out of body experiences, I have my doubts about the ‘random neurons firing’ explanation. Is ANYTHING in human biology random? Seems to me it’s all coordinated down to the nth degree…
I haven’t had one – a NDE – thank goodness, but I have had two dying men talk to me. From 2500 miles away. In neither case did I have any fore knowledge of their deaths. One of them I hadn’t thought of let alone talked to in decades. I don’t even try to explain it, it happened and I just accept it.
‘There are more thing in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’
I’m looking at you, Mr Pinker.
T, MBunge, and DNW – thanks for sparing me the need to compose something on this.
I also largely agree with Ackler’s assessment of Pinker. There are *far* worse liberals than him out there, and he is no SJW loon. But like many in his quadrant of the left (highly educated, In Love With Science Sexually, etc.), he is incapable of thinking straight when it comes to religion. Sam Harris is that way too.
It doesn’t particularly bother me. I wish we could go back to the ancient times of 2010 when we were still arguing about important things like God and free will, as opposed to modern times where we’re forced to argue about women with male gear and transitioning little children and barbarous pronouns.
Of course, it all comes back to metaphysics, however indirectly – but I like it when it’s more direct. It’s more honest, and gives less of an incentive to fake like lesser things are the ultimate.
It’s not only a matter of religion. ‘Progressives’ have a very strong need to stereotype their political opponents: anyone who votes for Trump, or opposed excessive lockdowns, has to be: Christian(Evangelical), uneducated, low income, rural, probably Southern, etc etc.
Couple of points:
I’ve had, among others, Jehovah’s Witnesses, talk to me about believing–I already do, Christian–their way. They are pleasant, polite, and seem hopeful I will believe…for my sake.
Atheists are…frantic…it seems which affects their delivery. Which seems to be getting me to believe their way, or stop believing my way, for their sake. As if there’s some doubt and it bothers them and the more who believe their way, the less (incrementally) they fear.
When my father was passing–heart failure due to aspirational pneumonia–the hospice staff said to keep talking to him. The brain is aware and operating for three minutes after the heart stops.
From what I’ve heard, EEG can tell which areas of the brain are active and apparently knows which areas are aware and concerned with which aspects of cognition and emotion.
If this is the case, who knows what is taking place. Hate to think of it. Perhaps an individual whose life has been infused, will they or nill they, with conventional Christian views of the after life will see some version of Heaven or something else we might call the NDE wrt the afterlife. It might even happen to atheists. Especially atheists who wish they were wrong, at the last moment.
And then some are revived, to tell the tale.
This three minute interval doesn’t, apparently, apply to other situations where the time interval is longer by far.
I believe, but I am skeptical of a lot of things, including skepticism.
Re: Hemingway quote above “I could see how something many Christians don’t have — a crippling fear of death — plays a role in supporting perpetual shutdown.”
I can definitely see that too, but the word “crippling” is the key here. Any belief system that ends up crippling your ability to fully live your life is bad by definition, to be tossed aside, a limiting world view, a challenge to be overcome. A form of mental illness, a “phobia” for lack of a better word.
The mentally healthy thing to do is, rather than continue to feed it, deny it’s power over you by learning ways to overcome it.
One more point, this is a big here-and-now benefit of belief in an afterlife that non-religious people just don’t seem to comprehend. Merely believing in it gives you power over this life that is difficult or impossible to achieve otherwise.
In other words, whether it’s true or not, a positive belief about the “future” (including into after death) is always a good thing for you today, for your attitude and mental health, for your relationships, for your ability to handle stress, for everything. Focus on what you can control, and your attitude is always something you can control.
Kind of an “out of left field” argument, I know, but it’s self-evident and very powerful.
You have choices over things you can control that could help your chances of living longer, and of leaving a legacy if you pass before “your” time, of course.
So do those things to the extent you can, accept that you’ve done all you can, and head out the door to face the day. When has life ever been any different than that? Some folks live to 94, some die young, most of us are in the middle somewhere. What else are you going to do about it? Do people think they are immortal?
More to the point, if you could fast forward to the day you died, and look back on time spent worrying about death instead of actually living your life and spending more time enjoying people and experiences, would you regret that? Of course you would. Everyone intuitively knows that, if they stop and think about it.
But shutting yourself in your house because you choose to believe in a non-existent and false risk management calculation that actually applies to you as a member of specific risk groups — that you have never even seen — is a terrible idea that wastes precious days of your life you will never get back. It’s a bogeyman. A ghost.
Such people have allowed fear peddlers in the media and government to skip right over the good arguments — they never had one, as it turns out — to pushing fear. And as news consumer and good citizen, you should reject that transparent appeal to emotion on its face every time. Demand more. It’s extremely likely you’re being played.
On the plus side this pandemic is causing people to confront their mortality and that leads them to think more about what really matters to them, which is an unqualified good thing.
The search for meaning is always there but a lot of people never understand that’s what they’re doing when they chase status, big houses and consumer goods.
People and experiences that build memories, these are the only real things in our lives, because they are the only things we will regret not having more of when we confront death.
My thoughts on all this, anyway.
Steven seems to have followed the path of so many Jews of my generation, rejecting the religion of their families for the fashions of the ’60s.
Old joke (relevent here): A priest, minister and rabbi were discussing how to rid their buildings of mice. Only the rabbi had success. Asked his technique he said, “I Bar Mitzvah’ed them and they never showed up again!”
neo,
You pretty much nail the flaws in Pinker’s logic, or lack thereof, from all angles and directions, as do the commenters.
However, there is one hilarious thing Pinker failed to see. Who has benefited more from the lockdown than Jeff Bezos? And he will continue to benefit greatly the longer it continues. Yet Pinker links to an opinion piece from the newspaper Bezos owns as an argument to continue lockdowns!
Hilarious!
Geoffrey Britain,
Do you know the story of Eben Alexander? He was a well regarded neurosurgeon and non-believer who had a NDE. Prior to the NDE he believed NDE’s were some physiological response to death, a trick the brain played on dying folks to make death more comfortable. After experiencing one himself, and it being the most real thing he has ever experienced in his life, he has still be unable to convince his peers that he, and they were wrong. His peers now believe the man they once knew and respected has lost his medical and scientific reasoning capability rather than accept the fact that he experienced something firsthand and their biases may be wrong.
Molly Brown,
I had something astounding happen to me that would take too long to write about here, but I certainly believe what you wrote can happen and did happen with you.
Although I do not understand what happened to me, ever since there are times when existence, this existence, seems like it’s sort-of happening behind a scrim. Like in a play when a scrim hangs in front of action to give it a gauzy effect. I have only told my closest friends about it (pretty much just family, really), and when they ask how I know it was real all I can tell them is it was the most real thing I have ever experienced, and after having seen it this, the ground and sky and metal and wood and flesh and plastic… all seem non-real, like a movie filmed with a lens covered in vaseline shown through a projector covered with a filter projected on a scrim.
And I have had hallucinations before from lack of sleep and very real seeming dreams. None were anything like this one experience. It is the most real thing I have yet known. But if I say that to a scientist how can he or she measure that?
Kate, Thanks for a good comment about a possible kernel of truth – Christians, and most believing religious folk (Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists) don’t believe that a short, materialistic life here on Earth is all there is. Pinker believes this discourages actions to make life longer, safer, and happier.
But I’m sure that anti-Christian atheists have shorter, less safe, and less happy lives. (Artfl’s notes on feminists that are atheists are relevant – few seem happier than avg.) Most folk seem less happy than those who go to Church weekly, or more.
I used to call myself an agnostic, not knowing God or if he (He?) was there. Like most nerdy Sci-Fi readers of the 60s & 70s, along with belief or sympathy for the libertarianish Objectivists of Ayn Rand, and the hedonists of Heinlein’s individualism & tech fascination, if not quite worship.
But I did believe in Evil, and was against it. So I started as a third kind of friend of God (God’s enemy’s enemy). A good book for me was A Rumor of Angels by P Berger (read in ’79?).
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1714718.A_Rumor_of_Angels
There’s another important point I see alluded to often, but seldom explicitly expressed. Whenever I think about an “optimal” society, with a balance of freedom and responsibility; of individualism and sociability; of unfairness & injustice and systems of justice; I conclude that people acting with “Christian morality” would make that society optimal.
The sub-optimality, in practice, of atheism is a good reason to oppose it. For myself, the (Heinlein & Libertarian) idea of “responsible promiscuity” for sexual relations is among the clearest cases of sub-optimality.
More Christianity in society would always, as far as I see, make any society closer to optimal, better.
But not perfect, and, very importantly, not fair.
God, or Reality (for atheists), did NOT create children fairly – they do NOT start off from birth (or conception) in a “fair race” with others.
The biggest mistake of most Dems is the desire to correct some unfairness — but there is no “just” way to correct something that was unfair. Like beauty; IQ; physical health; parents; birth location (& citizenship).
Were I to write a book, it would be: Unfair, not Unjust
Too often unjust actions are used in an attempt to correct some unfair situation
It seems that a lot of anger against God is based on the unfairness of creation, rather than on gratitude for gifts received.
People who give thanks for what they have are happier than people who are angry about what they don’t have, or what doesn’t, and possibly can’t, exist.
[Link typo? My link fails
It’s certainly not true as compared to religious people.
but I have long believed church goers are happier. ]
Geofrey Britain, parker, Molly Brown and all else discussing an afterlife,
One of my two favorite NDE stories is Dr. Mary Neal, https://ndestories.org/dr-mary-neal/ I have heard her speak on a podcast and she comes across as extraordinarily logical and believable. She is a very skilled physician and approached the whole experience very clinically. Her “death” had several very credible witnesses and her reaction makes her story seem even more credible. Even after experiencing what she did, she had little interest in it until a few additional, supernatural things happened to her*.
The second was a man I heard on the old Tom Snyder show, “The Late, Late Show.” Maybe 1974, or so? I was babysitting and had fallen asleep with the television on (my charges were safe in bed) and woke up to Tom Snyder interviewing three NDE experiencers. The first two were the classic, tunnel, bright light stories, and my then atheist mind dismissed them as cowards or attention seekers (or, maybe the brain releases some chemicals to make suffering easier at death). But the third guy did not go to heaven, he went someplace else. And the experience he described was horrendous. It was not fire and brimstone and pitchforks. I was a voracious reader of all things Astronomy and Physics at the time, and this guy’s (he was not knowledgeable of physics or astronomy) description was perfectly believable from an Astronomical, Physical explanation and scary as, well, scary as hell. To top it off, he told Tom he had been an atheist and lived a rather immoral life. Afterwards he had gone to seminary and become a minister, and was wearing a cleric’s collar in the interview.
Needless to say I was wide awake after watching it and every minute that ticked by until the Mom came home seemed like an hour. I’ve searched for his name and story before on the Internet and have come up empty handed, so I can’t share his name.
*I heard her speak on Eric Metaxas’ radio show. https://www.metaxastalk.com/?s=mary+neal&doing_wp_cron=1590244455.8661789894104003906250
I imagine the November 27th and 28th, 2017 shows are still available in his podcast archive.
Jeff Brokaw,
We used to live in a nation where all educated people knew about Achilles and Hector and the many, lovely lines of poetry where they debate the exact thing you write about. Oh, I think some guy named Hemlet, or Hamlet had something to say about it also. But who needs to read those old things?
I have yet to read anything from the geniuses at the Washington Post that frames the debate over a continuation of lockdowns better than the below:
“I like some of Steven Pinker’s work. His book The Better Angels of Our Nature, for example (which I wrote about here) presents a fascinating thesis that is quite persuasive”
_______
I really, really, don’t want to offend. But this shows something like the Gell-Mann effect at work. I too have a certain respect for Pinker. But in that book (and Enlightenment Now) he displayed a typically sketchy and unreliable knowledge of history – both of events and ideas. I recommend searching for reviews by those who actually study pre-moderns. Even lefties are scathing. He was also one who howled in outrage when Thomas Nagel let down the atheist side in Mind and Cosmos.
His work on how the brain works is very interesting, though. He has advanced beyond the atheists of my youth, who had a crude “brain events = mental events” model. (Some still do; e.g., eliminativists.)
Tom Grey,
Great philosophy there and I share a similar path. Not initially a believer, but always willing to fight for those who were persecuted. Like you, I came to similar conclusions. Even if I didn’t believe there was a bearded, gray haired guy above me keeping score, life would be better for all involved if we followed the ten commandments. It’s a pretty clever way to organize society.
A lot of our Congresspeople are fond of coveting.
MBunge says “they have completely conventional Judeo-Christian moral beliefs on everything except sex.”
Correct, but it also applies in other areas, not so beneficially. E.g., almost everyone has internalized assumptions about the “arc of history” or other historicist notions. Can’t help it, it’s in the air we breathe. And a lot of it comes from Marx, whose assumptions are almost ubiquitous, even in those of us who consciously reject him. (Of course, there are other sources. Hegel before Marx, Whig historians, and pop-Darwinism all play into it.)
It is very hard to question all the sources of our beliefs, and recognize this. I get attacked regularly when I point this out. And when we do recognize them, we should try hard to extirpate them, unless we can see clearly that they are justified. When I find one such from Marx, I’ll let you know. (Not something he got from someone else. The closest I can get is that there is something to the distinction between a “class in itself” and a “class for itself”. But of course, to accept it entirely, you have to accept his concept of class. Most, even on the right do. I don’t.)
avi:
That’s quite the generalization.
Most Jewish people who are not religious, most Christians who are not religious, and most people who are not religious, are not the least bit reprehensible.
non religious does not mean apostate.
the first is passive and can mean twice a year and simchas, the latter is active
I’m surprised that Steven Pinker (whom I agree with on defending modernity and the Enlightenment) would make such a bold claim without any backup. People invent explanations for other people’s political stances with little, if any, evidence all the time – I just thought Pinker was the type of person who’d be above that.
Actually, I think this is a much more plausible take: https://reason.com/2020/05/14/more-thoughts-on-church-closings/
I don’t think Pinker’s explanation makes much sense, because it’s not like most Evangelicals take absurd risks in every aspect of life just because they think (quite reasonably, imo) that there’s an afterlife. Evangelicals accept medical care, follow driving rules, etc. And I’m sure there are quite a few Evangelicals who would retort that atheists shouldn’t care about earthly problems, either, because we’re all going to die and the sun’s going to burn out and the universe is going to fall apart anyway.
FYI: Pinker has deleted his tweet.
“Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!”
https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/1263463995870269440
“I’ll take “Smart People Saying Stupid Things” for $100, Alex.”
“Who is Steven Pinker?”
Neo: Why “malignant”? Is Pinker unaware of the good that is done by religious people who believe in an afterlife: the selflessness, the sacrifice, the help to others?
the answer is easy and special, i have bumped into his kind who believe that the logic of certain things govern behavior and that such behavior is less complicated..
for him, the idea of an after life means you dont have to be the best in this one, and so your not, and so you do less… its logical… but wrong… i have met so many of his kind in which the cold heart of mathematical logic seems to replace more complicated math and ability to work incomplete sets of information
this is akin to the snarky concept of being evil and getting a pass into heaven by repenting as you die… or asking forgiveness is easier than getting permission
the first comes from their LACK of understanding, which is also a requirement for them to take the position they take, as their ‘understanding’ is a pale shadow of wrongness that replaces the richer and deeper thinking of some of humankinds greatest thinkers..
for them, they know everything, and so are not working from a set of incomplete information… they also believe stuff that they think is settled or they believe is right, as if it is, without recognizing that there still is no proof or way to tell any more than the more symbolic and more joining power of religion.
they believe in things like the multiverse… which there is no proof of, and no way to know by definition (to imply there is, is to imply that energy/information can leak from one to the other and let us know)… they like the idea of higher dimensions, ignoring that if creatures existed in such, they would be much like the critters of flatland… but they ALSO believe, and this is the worst, that math is reality not reality is separate from math or a subset… from when i was a kid and through Bronx science i had a lot of experience with these who cleansed themselves of metaphysical notions as a way to adorn themselves with a sense of superiority they and their intelligence imbued with deep insecurity.
And even more interesting their deep thinking isnt very deep as their problems wiht religion and god tend to be why didnt he make a marxist man so we could live in utopia… and why is there suffering… and so on..
take the last one… thats one of the most common… however, they fail to see the power of an after life and immortal one at that for relieving suffering one has. why? because they cant see that it makes suffering here unreal and transitory and not relevant!!! if life is but an illusion and there is an after life, than no matter what happens here, its just not real… but there are even better much more well thought out takes to this, and they do not read that. for fear they may slide… the same way a leftist wont pay attention to the reality of the not left, for fear it will poison them and change them into a not left zombie…
its about belief and guarding them…
your seeing someone with a very complicated avoidance and guard system
so much so the system is hidden and clothed to be invisible and place them above
Pinker is no scientist. Real scientists work in STEM fields. Social scientists claim they are scientists in order to assert themselves and their tenuous work and conclusions thereof. Pinker is a Harvard prof in “cognitive psychology” ( a land of babble) and, like Chomsky, is a putative “linguist”. I would not pay a thin dime to read either.
Pinker has a massive and anti-reasoning ego, becoming an atheist at age 13. We are to understand that his understanding of wisdom, faith and other mundane matters was fully developed at that age. After all, he’s a Harvard!
Pinker is not an atheist. He is an anti-theist.
He will die and spend an eternity in the absence of God. So goeth free will.
“their ‘understanding’ is a pale shadow of wrongness” – Artfldgr
What a lovely phrase.
Eeyore …. excellent couple of comments. Or at least they are excellent insofar as they address what amounts to my own obsession with trying to trace the lineage of the current crop of progressives’ ideas . LOL And, as several others have pointed out, those implicit assumptions of the progressive hierophants, which cannot be justified on the basis of , or at least squared with, their own metaphysical beliefs. [ i.e., which cannot be sucessfully deduced from what they state to be the most fundamental reality that can be either described or inferred]
Kolnai … great to see you still dropping in. Always nice to see a professional grade philosophical mind at work. And the remarks of Bunge, Avi, Rufus, and Molly Brown were all interesting. Kolnai, how about I shut up and you take over for a couple months? You will say everything I would say, but with greater moderation and academic currency, anyway.
Man, may I say again in general, and for probably the umpteenth time, that it’s really gratifying to see the level of critical thinking ability and historically informed perspective that exists among Neo’s readership.
Alan Finger on May 23, 2020 at 10:04 am said:
…
Old joke (relevent here): A priest, minister and rabbi …
* * *
New joke: A priest, a minister, and a rabbit walk into a bar.
The rabbit looks around and says, “Darn autocorrect.”
Rufus T. Firefly on May 23, 2020 at 10:25 am said:
…when they ask how I know it was real all I can tell them is it was the most real thing I have ever experienced, and after having seen it this, the ground and sky and metal and wood and flesh and plastic… all seem non-real, like a movie filmed with a lens covered in vaseline shown through a projector covered with a filter projected on a scrim.
* * *
C. S. Lewis touches on this disparity of Reality in the Narnia Chronicles, but he makes it clear in “The Great Divorce” that Heaven (whatever that really means) is solid and brightly real, whereas Hell is a nebulous and foggy realm of dreariness, which I personally believe to be more accurate than Dante’s Inferno.
I suppose Mortality is somewhere in-between, and probably closer to the Grey Town of the novel.
At the risk of spoiling the pleasure of discovery for new readers of Lewis, this excerpt from a summary really hits hard about the situation on so many fronts today, and for Pinker’s apparent brand of atheist especially.
https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-great-divorce/summary
Lewis wrote that in 1945; people don’t seem to have changed much.
The Internet is good for this kind of research – here’s a site with a short about the book and what Lewis was attempting to do with it, followed by questions about the details inviting personal responses.
I am going to pull out a couple of the study guide’s questions because they demonstrate just how relevant Lewis is to what we are seeing in ever-increasing abundance these days.
http://www.cslewis.org/resources/studyguides/Study%20Guide%20-%20The%20Great%20Divorce.pdf
If you aren’t familiar with his Christian writings, starting with “The Screwtape Letters” is a good introduction. He was sort of the Babylon Bee of his day, skewering most of the deficiencies of self-professed believers who didn’t really have a clue about what Christianity entails.
Michael Towns on May 22, 2020 at 10:09 pm said:
I know that these are the end times because I cannot distinguish between reality and parody.
* * *
That’s why The Babylon Bee is now the paper of record.
Oops – Michael’s comment was over on the Wray post, but all of the stories are running together anyway.
I once met a woman who had attempted suicide with a drug overdose.
It was classic. She saw the light, the tunnel and her dead relatives. She was happily reconnecting when a Being told her she had to meet Someone, i.e. God. She was afraid at first but then overwhelmed with Love. God asked her if she was really finished. She could stay in Heaven, but she had to answer the question.
She looked down at Earth and saw its beauty and told God she wasn’t finished. Whoosh! She was back.
I tell the tale I heard told…
There are atheists and there are atheists.
Most of the militant anti-Judaeo-Christian (it’s never anti-Buddhism somehow, is it?) atheists I’ve met have been mad at God for some reason. Maybe a priest or pastor sexually abused them, or maybe their hyper-religious parents did, or maybe they were just slapped down way too hard for asking questions. But now they have a grudge, and insults and derision are their tools, and their enemies are everywhere, and they can’t forgive or forget.
I wonder if that’s what happened to Pinker.
Then there are atheists like me. I think I was just born missing the spirituality gene, if you will. My dad was areligious (an experience in his teens convinced him that churches are a con game for money), and my mother called herself a “lapsed Unitarian”, so I didn’t get any religion at all growing up, and I’ve never had any particular yearning that way at all. By college I decided that calling myself “agnostic” was just being wishy-washy.
So even though I consider all religions more or less delusional, I don’t think those delusions are necessarily malignant, and perhaps give society as a whole a variety of herd immunity (there’s that term) against some of the more awful things we see when there’s too much atheism (cultural breakdown, mass infertility, Communism, cats and dogs living together, etc.).
And I would much rather live in a majority-but-unofficially-Christian society than most other types.
AesopFan:
“C. S. Lewis touches on this disparity of Reality in the Narnia Chronicles, but he makes it clear in “The Great Divorce” that Heaven (whatever that really means) is solid and brightly real, whereas Hell is a nebulous and foggy realm of dreariness, which I personally believe to be more accurate than Dante’s Inferno.”
______
Be careful here. Lewis explicitly (through MacDonald in the book) warns against taking the vision too literally. No Swedenborgs, he says.
Also, remember that the Inferno is only part I, albeit the part our age prefers. (Dante’s own age probably did too. People supposedly pointed him out as “a man who had been in Hell.”)
I think that that is a pretty common attitude and an understandable one. As a kid I hated religion, felt it to be suffocating, tyrannical meddling, boring and stultifying. And unless you are into ritual for ritual’s same, or like being bossed around by neurotics and hypocrites, or listening to under-educated half-wits shouting to an audience as a means of convincing themselves that what they say has meaning, you probably feel somewhat the same.
And as far as populations go, I too would prefer to live among people who believe it is wrong and involves eternal consequences to cheat, lie, steal, murder, and commit adultry. Nothing better to my mind than being an amiable free rider in a society filled with good looking but temptable Christian women.
So I have no interest whatsoever in religion, per se.
But, there is the inescapable question of Being. And unlike some others, I cannot shrug it off as an artifact of Indo-European language, and as an illusory question. Who’s to say that some languages may accidentally reveal, or some people perceive, what others cannot. To stipulatively rule this out of court, is to implicitly advance a universalism that could only be sustained by the old metaphysics which the sons of the nominalists explicitly, and proudly reject. (Another instance of that smuggled-in concept/assumption, which so many here have remarked upon as a technique common to militant naturalists.
And in addition, there is the question of whether moral judgments can be founded in reason itself; which relates not so much to pragmatics but eventually, in my view, to the question of the intelligibility of reality itself. That is to say, that what we refer to as moral judgments, involve not just questions of practical or harmonious relations, but reveal a more fundamental stance towatd existence, both as subject/ the one who looks out, and the object/that which is looked out upon.
It may be that we are blind riders, inhabiting a slice of an unintelligible brute fact reality which is not only mostly beyond our comprehension, but which would be inexplicable in itself if it could be better known. That could be. But I’m not going to bet, that is to say organize, my life on it.
Those physicists, who proclaim that the universe as science (Or they as supposed mouthpieces of it) reveals it is all of reality, and as such revealed to be a pointless process, and that only their process constitutes knowledge, yet, who then go on to rhapsodize about the awe, and the glory of the process, seem like men missing part of their brains. Like skilled idiot connoisseurs of dirt tasting. Even if they manage to become gods in their little snow globe, they will still be nothing ultimately. And their schemes and triumphs will be nothing more than the working out of a meaningless determinate effect in a pointless closed loop. I was about to add the word “system” after loop, but that in itself would add a luster to what I am describing, that it would not deserve.
And unless you are into ritual for ritual’s same, or like being bossed around by neurotics and hypocrites, or listening to under-educated half-wits shouting to an audience as a means of convincing themselves that what they say has meaning, you probably feel somewhat the same.
You know nothing of parish life. You know only your caricatures.
I did not mention parishes or dioceses, and was addressing the man I quoted, making no identifiable reference to Catholicism. Nonetheless, it is worth pointing out that you know nothing concering what I know of parish life.
Perhaps you have the parishes of some other denomination or even religion in mind; though if such existed, then the same point would obtain in those cases.
I’m watching Jordan Peterson interview Steven Pinker in the ancient pre-Covid world of last August about Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now” book:
“Steven Pinker: Progress, Despite Everything:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBylbB7s5Nw
In the book Pinker documents the progress from the values of the Western Enligtenment — reason, science and humanism — which Peterson can get solidly behind, so the interview is quite collegial.
Pinker said something stupid and bigoted the other day, but I still see him as basically an ally with some caveats.
I haven’t followed the Pinker criticism over his “Better Angels” arguments, but overall I remain in that camp. We may not live in the best of all possible worlds but we live in one where we have seen astonishing progress over the past few centuries.