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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31725 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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Religiosity is a personality trait like agreeableness or conscientiousness, and adopting atheism doesn't actually change your personality in that dimension, it just channels it through other causes, like atheism itself or communism or nationalism. Although I now reject Yahweh-ism, I don't feel I have become less religious in character. That inclination for religiosity is channeled through other causes. I also don't think "religiosity" is a personality defect that can or should be entirely crowded out by rationalism, it inspires people to do great things often manifests as self-sacrifice for a group cause.

I also don't think Nietzsche's intention was for all men to ascend to godhood, but for an extremely small number of worthy to do so and for the rest to be good followers. The former interpretation leads to the chaotic incompetence of everyone wanting to be a leader but nobody a follower, which is what you see today with Online Influencers fostering their own small communities but otherwise not cohering men together in a broader Religion. This also manifests in "Beta-male" being universally interpreted as an insult, whereas great men are nothing without worthy Beta-males. What would Napoleon have achieved if all of his followers fancied themselves as Alpha and thought it was some humiliation to be a loyal follower?

I think the solution is to consciously develop a new non-theistic Religion that doesn't rely on superstition or demand belief in miracles. Adherence to this religion should sacralize civilizational achievement, the Faustian spirit, and social conventions that steer society in a eugenic direction. It should oppose those who compromise these objectives with false gods and a false morality.

When you're on your deathbed, where will you look for comfort? What force or being or god will let you face your own death without flinching? What water will purify you?

Although I no longer believe in spiritual afterlife, I believe in more than ever a physical afterlife. I will look towards my children, who are my life after my death, a physical projection of my blood and spirit. Any successor-religion to Yahweh-ism should likewise elevate eternal life not as a matter of personal salvation, but group survival and thriving.

I also don't think Nietzsche's intention was for all men to ascend to godhood

You're on solid ground here because he actually explicitly says as much multiple times and in multiple places.

EVERY elevation of the type "man," has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society and so it will always be--a society believing in a long scale of gradations of rank and differences of worth among human beings, and requiring slavery in some form or other. Without the PATHOS OF DISTANCE, such as grows out of the incarnated difference of classes, out of the constant out-looking and down-looking of the ruling caste on subordinates and instruments, and out of their equally constant practice of obeying and commanding, of keeping down and keeping at a distance--that other more mysterious pathos could never have arisen, the longing for an ever new widening of distance within the soul itself, the formation of ever higher, rarer, further, more extended, more comprehensive states, in short, just the elevation of the type "man," the continued "self-surmounting of man," to use a moral formula in a supermoral sense. To be sure, one must not resign oneself to any humanitarian illusions about the history of the origin of an aristocratic society (that is to say, of the preliminary condition for the elevation of the type "man"): the truth is hard. Let us acknowledge unprejudicedly how every higher civilization hitherto has ORIGINATED! Men with a still natural nature, barbarians in every terrible sense of the word, men of prey, still in possession of unbroken strength of will and desire for power, threw themselves upon weaker, more moral, more peaceful races (perhaps trading or cattle-rearing communities), or upon old mellow civilizations in which the final vital force was flickering out in brilliant fireworks of wit and depravity. At the commencement, the noble caste was always the barbarian caste: their superiority did not consist first of all in their physical, but in their psychical power--they were more COMPLETE men (which at every point also implies the same as "more complete beasts").

consciously develop a new non-theistic Religion that doesn't rely on superstition or demand belief in miracles. Adherence to this religion should sacralize civilizational achievement, the Faustian spirit, and social conventions that steer society in a eugenic direction. It should oppose those who compromise these objectives with false gods and a false morality.

A modern Confucianism? That sounds interesting; hopefully we might get something like this in a century or two.

It's hilarious to me that this is what autopopulated when I hit "reply".

Quokka

"A modern confucianism" doesn't seem like a good description of what we're looking at. Instead the middle classes of most developed countries are experiencing strong selection pressures towards dogmatism, xenophobia and belief in the supernatural. The future secular population of developed countries doesn't look like Jordan Peterson. It looks like the whackos who think they're witches.

It looks like the whackos who think they're witches.

The stereotype about them is they're childless and eaten by their cats when they die, so that seems kinda unlikely.

That may be the stereotype, but there’s no good evidence they have a fertility rate much lower than the general blue tribe. On the other hand we know that religious fertility rates remain much higher than secular ones and that apostates are both a major reason the secular population is close to demographically stable and also mostly made up of the kind of ‘spiritual but not religious’ people who believe in all kinds of superstitions and are very likely to get into weird magic.

I think the solution is to consciously develop a new non-theistic Religion that doesn't rely on superstition or demand belief in miracles.

This is certainly a solution, but the massive failures, predicted by Nietszche actually, tend to end in massive waves of blood drenching the world. It's happened twice already, and I think most modern leaders are understandable highly cautious when it comes to any sort of 'non-theistic Religion.'

Adherence to this religion should sacralize civilizational achievement, the Faustian spirit, and social conventions that steer society in a eugenic direction.

I think you're misunderstanding one of the main draws of religion for those you deem have high religiosity. Religion and true Gods are supposed to give us something to map onto concepts that are difficult for humans to wrap their minds around. A worthy God (or pantheon) must embody concepts like bargaining with the future, cleansing the people of sin, helping people work together, and as you say steer people towards good values. (or a eugenic direction in your desacralized wording.)

These processes tend to develop over the aeons as a process of cultural evolution, and I'm highly doubtful that we can just manufacture that type of religion by brute forcing it with a scientific mindset. Similar to how brute forcing government has tended to go quite poorly.

Recently I'm leaning more towards the idea of broadening our understanding of truth and fact. Right now your main contention is that religion 'demands belief in miracles.' What if we could separate our understanding of religion from science, and see it through an experiential lense.

For instance, even if miracles don't exist in an objective, empirical sense, they do absolutely exist in an experiential sense. People can touch the divine, and with psychedelics and/or religious ritual we can produce that feeling of a miracle reliably. Just because the phenomenon is taking place inside someone's conscious experience doesn't make it less real than something happening in the material world.

In a way consciousness comes before the material world, because without consciousness how would any of our concepts of time, space, size, or structure even exist? There would be no reason to have any of these concepts, the universe would just be billiard balls of different sizes bouncing around endlessly with no rhyme or reason.

This is certainly a solution, but the massive failures, predicted by Nietszche actually, tend to end in massive waves of blood drenching the world. It's happened twice already, and I think most modern leaders are understandable highly cautious when it comes to any sort of 'non-theistic Religion.'

It has happened many, many times, not just twice- the dividing lines between Ideology and Religion are more of an illusion than a reality.

I think most modern leaders are understandable highly cautious when it comes to any sort of 'non-theistic Religion.'

No they are not, they are highly cautious about defending their own non-theistic Religion, which we call "wokeness". Their core narrative is that their own non-theistic Religion is the One and True Just morality, and heretics have only ever covered the world in blood while their own ideology has liberated the masses. It's a highly convenient narrative, but it isn't true and their bloodlust against heretics is not driven by caution against non-theistic Religion, it's driven by fanaticism towards their own non-theistic Religion.

Religion and true Gods are supposed to give us something to map onto concepts that are difficult for humans to wrap their minds around. A worthy God (or pantheon) must embody concepts like bargaining with the future, cleansing the people of sin, helping people work together, and as you say steer people towards good values. (or a eugenic direction in your desacralized wording.)

I agree, but isn't this exactly what Marvel Comics does? Heroes in that canon achieve this same influence without demanding the audience believes the literal truth of the myths they portray. This was also similar to the Roman system, where there was certainly superstition among the laity but the essence of the Religion itself was civic ritual rather than a personal salvation cult based on belief in the literal truth of the myth of a dying-and-rising god. Abrahamic religion is is fairly unique in this regard in terms of demanding belief in the literal truth of the claimed miracles, and it did not appear to be a feature of European religious practice pre-Christianity.

The European gods were like tribal mascots, held dearly, but more like Comic-con on steroids than mass belief in the actual, literal resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Right now your main contention is that religion 'demands belief in miracles.' What if we could separate our understanding of religion from science, and see it through an experiential lense.

Yahwehism demands belief in the literal truth of the miracles it claims, but that is not a necessary feature of a religion per se. That is my point. If I were to "design a religion" and somehow use AI or something to meme it into existence, I wouldn't choose to make that a feature of my religion because it has proven to be vulnerable/killed by rationalism and enlightenment thinking.

There of course is the prospect, the likelihood, that all religion has always been consciously designed by a cultural elite in order to invoke a psychological effect in intended flocks. This is how Plato saw the Greek religion, and how Nietzsche saw Christian religion as well.

Nietzsche viewed the Death of God as an existential crisis, certainly, but he still welcomed it because he viewed it as a sink or swim moment for humanity. It's a moral crisis but it's also an opportunity for transcendence.

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