RE: When is a Religious Belief Delusional?
September 7, 2018 at 6:50 am
(This post was last modified: September 7, 2018 at 7:44 am by The Grand Nudger.)
It's formalization is relatively recent, but the trend of thought extends well back to the birth of christianity (and beyond).
Every statement that begins with
"Were it not for the gods, then" is, potentially, an invocation of proto-presuppositionalism.
When one reasons from and not to a divine x. You'll find that these arguments litter the ad hoc rationalizations of pre-christian cultures, and..in point of fact, survived and persisted within christian apologetics. The names of the gods being the only thing that changed. In the context of a cascading series of action by an abstraction system - these would be base inputs, and no amount of internal error checking could disabuse the system of the status "true" for their correlates, because..to the system, they are true by default of being inputs, just as k -is- x, and "input x" -is- true...to my intentionally programmed or malfunctioning pc.
This might (or at least could) explain why childhood indoctrination is the most compelling factor in ones eventual religious beliefs. It's innocent and blisteringly simple..label setting, no matter how much attendant strangeness might be employed or observed after the fact; like the man with half inch inches or an email I send you full of x's where k's should be (or semi-colons in place of apostrophes, lol). Functionally, a gated system is physically incapable of contending otherwise in the absence of reprogramming or repair. The misapprehension becomes the normal and accurate operation of the system and it's attendant truth tables. This is why we sometimes joke that computers, toasters, and thermostats, for example, are dumb by definition. The only way to correct these misapprehensions are multiple lines of independent parallel processing (and isolated process hardware) combined with some system of output or input weighting, like AST.
This is one of the benefits of independent construction and distributed processing, as opposed to central processing and straight line computational architecture. The fact that we don't seem to have any central system might be what allows us to (sometimes) overcome those sorts of ticks in any given single line..but what happens if all or most lines are mislabeled by continuous programming and maintenance, such as participation in religious activities or existence in a society of communal belief? Rather than performing an error checking function, each line could reenforce the k is x and x is true statement.....the counterfactual becoming a minority report that is discarded.
In sum, a dumb system literally and physically stuck on stupid.
(as mentioned before, ofc, we have no way of knowing, at present, whether our system of discernment is sufficiently analogous to other known and understood systems, and it may be that much more is going on - but this in itself would be a sufficient functional explanation for religious delusion and the level of certainty in belief noted....and if there were other things going on as well..it would be one hell of a multiplying effect)
Every statement that begins with
"Were it not for the gods, then" is, potentially, an invocation of proto-presuppositionalism.
When one reasons from and not to a divine x. You'll find that these arguments litter the ad hoc rationalizations of pre-christian cultures, and..in point of fact, survived and persisted within christian apologetics. The names of the gods being the only thing that changed. In the context of a cascading series of action by an abstraction system - these would be base inputs, and no amount of internal error checking could disabuse the system of the status "true" for their correlates, because..to the system, they are true by default of being inputs, just as k -is- x, and "input x" -is- true...to my intentionally programmed or malfunctioning pc.
This might (or at least could) explain why childhood indoctrination is the most compelling factor in ones eventual religious beliefs. It's innocent and blisteringly simple..label setting, no matter how much attendant strangeness might be employed or observed after the fact; like the man with half inch inches or an email I send you full of x's where k's should be (or semi-colons in place of apostrophes, lol). Functionally, a gated system is physically incapable of contending otherwise in the absence of reprogramming or repair. The misapprehension becomes the normal and accurate operation of the system and it's attendant truth tables. This is why we sometimes joke that computers, toasters, and thermostats, for example, are dumb by definition. The only way to correct these misapprehensions are multiple lines of independent parallel processing (and isolated process hardware) combined with some system of output or input weighting, like AST.
This is one of the benefits of independent construction and distributed processing, as opposed to central processing and straight line computational architecture. The fact that we don't seem to have any central system might be what allows us to (sometimes) overcome those sorts of ticks in any given single line..but what happens if all or most lines are mislabeled by continuous programming and maintenance, such as participation in religious activities or existence in a society of communal belief? Rather than performing an error checking function, each line could reenforce the k is x and x is true statement.....the counterfactual becoming a minority report that is discarded.
In sum, a dumb system literally and physically stuck on stupid.
(as mentioned before, ofc, we have no way of knowing, at present, whether our system of discernment is sufficiently analogous to other known and understood systems, and it may be that much more is going on - but this in itself would be a sufficient functional explanation for religious delusion and the level of certainty in belief noted....and if there were other things going on as well..it would be one hell of a multiplying effect)
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