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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   3779 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 25, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Obligations.

It's impossible to achieve the same degree of community provided by religion without a sense of obligation to the community. Religion is an obligation because of the outside forces believed to require adherence to the principles. Secular alternatives have been speculated many times, they have all floundered on the rocks of the lack of obligation. They fall apart over time, people drift away.

It's very easy to build something that's church without the God bit, it's been tried over and over, it dies. The only examples of enduring community institutions that are cited as being non-religious generally drift so far towards religious and supernatural beliefs that they're closer to religions than not. They substitute the race or the nation or the Proletariat and its eventual triumph for God.

Religion is a universalizing force to provide a community for humans to exist.

You can just not do that. I have friend groups that have nothing to do with religion. We meet based on prior meetings, or tradition if you will.

Cool. Do we have a remindme bot for talking about this again 100 years from now?

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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