(May 12, 2025 at 8:34 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:

(May 12, 2025 at 8:05 pm)arewethereyet Wrote: If I had my 'drothers' it would be against the rules to put staff on ignore.

I didn't realize I could put people on ignore lol.

Religions have being silencing dissenters for millennia. It's clear you're not really interested in any objectively critical examination of your beliefs and arguments John, so why wouldn't you do this. The urge to preach religion at atheists is too much for you to resist obviously, but there's no reason why your belief in unevidenced archaic superstition should be questioned in any objective or rational way. To quote the late Christopher Hitchens...

“Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.”

It seems you'd like your offer to be one the people here can't refuse, not out loud anyway.

(May 12, 2025 at 1:13 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:

(May 12, 2025 at 12:13 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: ...based upon talking to two -- count 'em, two! -- of them.

Okay, then how many would we need? (Hint: The average study uses around 20-30 participants.)

MORE THAN TWO, and an unevidenced anecdote about a chat, is not a study, John.

Quote:"For a demographic of billions, a representative sample would ideally be in the tens of thousands, potentially even hundreds of thousands, depending on the research goals and the level of detail required. While the exact number would vary, a simple random sample of a few thousand might be sufficient for understanding general trends, but larger samples are needed for more specific or nuanced analyses."

I am sure a chat with two people, without any recorded data will be fine though... 

(May 12, 2025 at 9:29 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:

(May 12, 2025 at 10:34 am)Angrboda Wrote: ...far beyond any attribution to personal choice unfettered by coercive factors.

This last part is problematic for your theory, because autonomy is one of the strongest predictors in motivational psychology. People value control so much they’ll pay more just to keep it. The difference between influence and coercion is exactly how much autonomy is preserved. I wouldn’t be surprised if individuals raised in coercive religious environments were more likely to reject religion altogether.

Social environments do have an influence, but your autonomy, free of coercion, is a far better predictor of what beliefs and behaviors you'll adopt.

What about misinformation and disinformation, or even the lack of information?  If you spread propaganda and suppress more accurate information, people may not even be aware that you are coercing them. They may not even realize what their choices are if you have loaded the language with which they think.

People have to know what their real choices are to make good choices.  But once you pull them into an information bubble, you can motivate them very well indeed.  This situation hasn't really improved with the internet, though it had the promise to.

Religious people start with children exactly because they can preclude certain possibilities if they get them early enough.  That's why it takes some of us, at least, so long to get over religious assumptions.  They believe they are justified in doing this by the fact that the futures of the souls of their children are at stake. The fact that some escape this treatment is not exactly a recommendation for them to stop when it's a numbers game.

(April 28, 2025 at 2:30 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:

(January 16, 2025 at 5:29 pm)Ravenshire Wrote: Some willful ignorance, a bit of wishful thinking, and a metric shit ton of fear of death.

The average person doesn't go around thinking of death, much less fearing it, until its right at their doorsteps. 

Not true, not in the UK anyway.

"The YouGov Death Study reveals that Britons are split when it comes to fear of their own death: 41% are afraid and 43% are not. Women (47%) are more likely than men (35%) to say the prospect of their own death frightens them."

"Women aged 25-39 (56%) are the most likely to say they fear death, while this falls to a quarter (26%) among men aged 60+."

"There is a notable generational split on this question: for Britons under 40, 38-40% say their fear of dying has affected their life, compared to 33% of those in their forties and fifties, and 21% of those over 60."

CITATION

I don't dear death at all, and I am approaching 60. I was dead for billions of years after all. Though I might have some reservations about the nature of it, avoiding unnecessary pain would be high on my agenda.

(May 13, 2025 at 5:52 am)Alan V Wrote: What about misinformation and disinformation, or even the lack of information?  If you spread propaganda and suppress more accurate information, people may not even be aware that you are coercing them. They may not even realize what their choices are if you have loaded the language with which they think.

I don't know if you can do that successfully and the person not be aware of the coercion. You would need to isolate a person from the world to such a degree that you become their only source of information, and that's just not likely unless we're talking about obvious abuse. People normally exist within several social spheres of influence, from parents to peers to institutions, and it is very difficult to have them all be in complete agreement.

Most information bubbles are of our own making. We seek out echo chambers and like-minded individuals. And we do a better job of that than any propaganda machine could.

(May 13, 2025 at 11:42 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:

(May 13, 2025 at 5:52 am)Alan V Wrote: What about misinformation and disinformation, or even the lack of information?  If you spread propaganda and suppress more accurate information, people may not even be aware that you are coercing them.  They may not even realize what their choices are if you have loaded the language with which they think.

I don't know if you can do that successfully and the person not be aware of the coercion. You would need to isolate a person from the world to such a degree that you become their only source of information, and that's just not likely unless we're talking about obvious abuse. People normally exist within several social spheres of influence, from parents to peers to institutions, and it is very difficult to have them all be in complete agreement.

Most information bubbles are of our own making. We seek out echo chambers and like-minded individuals. And we do a better job of that than any propaganda machine could.

The advertising industry would like a word.

Boru

(May 13, 2025 at 11:42 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:

(May 13, 2025 at 5:52 am)Alan V Wrote: What about misinformation and disinformation, or even the lack of information?  If you spread propaganda and suppress more accurate information, people may not even be aware that you are coercing them.  They may not even realize what their choices are if you have loaded the language with which they think.

I don't know if you can do that successfully and the person not be aware of the coercion. You would need to isolate a person from the world to such a degree that you become their only source of information, and that's just not likely unless we're talking about obvious abuse. People normally exist within several social spheres of influence, from parents to peers to institutions, and it is very difficult to have them all be in complete agreement.

Most information bubbles are of our own making. We seek out echo chambers and like-minded individuals. And we do a better job of that than any propaganda machine could.

A combination of propaganda and echo chambers seems to work quite well for spreading disinformation.

For instance, last I heard, about two-thirds of Republicans really do believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen.  Unbelievable, right?

I can only think that they filter information based on their identifications rather than the facts.

(May 13, 2025 at 12:12 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: The advertising industry would like a word.

Advertising is 60% pseudoscience, 40% copying what the next guy is doing.

(May 13, 2025 at 11:42 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: I don't know if you can do that successfully and the person not be aware of the coercion.

So you think a three-year-old child is going to catch on to the fact that they're swimming in Christian propaganda, and reject the lessons for that reason? I submit that it's going to take a few more years than that, and that by the time the child does catch on, they will have a lot of inculcated notions to unlearn.

(May 13, 2025 at 1:10 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:

(May 13, 2025 at 12:12 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: The advertising industry would like a word.

Advertising is 60% pseudoscience, 40% copying what the next guy is doing.

Yet from a coercion standpoint, it’s phenomenally effective. The effectiveness of advertising demonstrates, once again, that you don’t know what the ever-loving fuck you’re talking about.

Boru