A challenge to Statler Waldorf

[reverendjeremiah]

Hello,

as for my manners, you people are right and I'm sorry. I have jumped to some conclusions about how people are based on this thread only and been condencending based on those conclusions. I should not have done either of these things and just focussed on participating in the discussion itself. I think I'm not used to discussions where the gloves come off like that.

Just relax. As far as I am concerned you dont have to apologize. As long as someone isnt validating rape, torture and murder then I am usually easy going about morals. Here lately Waldork has been claiming I am not moral because I pick and choose my religion. Then he turns around and says it is "perfectly moral" for his god to pick and choose what morals are and dictate to everyone else through judgements like "do as I say or suffer eternal torture". He has been riding on my last nerve. To him it is a god. To me it is a bunch of long dead religious freaks who dictated their own morals and put them in the mouth of a god...not to mention that Waldorf also picks and chooses what he thinks is moral out of the bible as well.

I guess that it was like I came in someone elses party and saw someone screaming at, or even slapping another guest. My first instrinct would be to step in too maybe, even though the screaming might have had a good reason.

I will make an introduction post later this day.

Yeah, the members really like n00bs coming in and introducing themselves first before they hop in. I cant blame them too much and it does make sense, so I have pretty much hopped on the band wagon with them. A introduction post would be a step in the good direction in this society.

And as far as screaming..No..LOL...thats just me and a few other members backing Waldork into a corner and taking turns slapping him around and poking him in the ribs. Once you get some time on this board you will realize that Waldork will come and go without a notice. When Waldorf does show up, he yanks the lamp shade off of my head, scrapes the needle on the record player to turn the music off, stands up on the coffee table, kicks down the empty beer can pyramid that me, min, summerqueen, and a few other members have worked so hard at stacking up so that he can have his soap box. He then starts pointing at individual members with one hand, bible in the other hand hugged tight to his chest, judging and condemning us. We half ass listen to him until we have had enough, then a few of us grab him by his 70's polyester long collared plaid dress suit, walk him into the corner, and proceed to taunt and torment him. The other members either go back to partying or they stand back and laugh at the taunts and laugh even harder at Waldorfs replies.

You will understand after a while


Waldork preparing to crash the party and spread the word of Christ Jesus upon the unsaved!

[downbeatplumb]

Waldork preparing to crash the party and spread the word of Christ Jesus upon the unsaved!

Where did you get the photo of my dad?

[Maria]

We're all born atheists, so according to Statler Waldorf's logic we're all born religious. I was born on 22/2/88 and I was instantly religious. I just didn't know it at the time.
At a stretch, one might argue that atheist activism is a religion, but it's a very long stretch. I would call it political more than anything else.
And atheism was an official policy of the USSR, not religion.

[Angrboda]

Well, seeing as I've taken the time to read all this, I suppose I HAVE to respond.

I will concur in respect with Waldorf that Girlysprite's description of the religiousity of Buddhists is off the mark. I am not a Buddhist, but from my limited survey of the religion, it would be a gross distortion to say that most or even many believe in a "higher power". As a Taoist, one might describe the "Tao", conceived as an ordering principle of the universe (perhaps even as an ontogenetic power) as a higher power, but to suggest that the Tao is a "higher power" in the same sense that a theist uses the term is to do gross violence to the metaphysics and beliefs of the Taoist.

Now, on to Waldorf's "proof".

First, what the law decides is irrelevant. The goal of law is justice, not truth. That is, when it's not stooping to crass politicizing. The blacks in the northern United States didn't "spring into existence" as persons with the emancipation proclamation, nor did those in the south suddenly appear when the Confederacy surrendered. And if the thrteenth amendment were repealed and an amendment passed decreeing that blacks were not persons, they would continue to be persons, regardless. Equating truth with the legal is not a tree you want to be barking up, lest you find yourself on a limb about to fall. By the same logic, abortion is "right" and "moral" and those who oppose it are evil. Is this a logical precedent you want to set?

Now as to your use of Professor Smart's framework, some basic questions need to be asked. A) Is it valid, and B) is it being applied correctly. I confess that before today I had not even heard of Professor Smart and his framework, so feel free to correct any misunderstanding of his framework that I have with reference to the primary literature, or at least a respected secondary source (such as a review article).

I'm going to address the second question first. Is it being applied correctly. From what little reading I've done, it appears that Smart intended his framework to serve as a guide -- as noted several places I looked, it's referred to as a framework for "study". It's not at all clear from any of the readings that he intended the 7 criteria as exclusionary criteria (properties or behaviors exclusive to religion) as opposed to inclusive criteria (things which are common to religions but not exclusively to religion). I'll wait for you to provide a citation from the literature that he (and other anthropologists) use the 7 traits as exclusionary criterion (a full-text quote would be super). Failing that, use of Professor Smart's framework to justify treating atheism as a religion is illegitimate, as, if his framework doesn't unfailingly partition the world and its people into religious and non-religious people, your argument is not sufficient. As rainydays alluded to, many things on your list are things that religious and non-religious alike have in common (e.g. curiosity about origins), and given your rather contorted gerrymandering of the evidence, it's clear you could paint anything as a religion (or at least, the apologist whose talking points you likely stole could). To put it in reverendjeremiah's terms, unless you can deterministically apply these criteria and always come up with the right answer, you've got crap.

The first question, is it valid, takes us considerably further afield. It's necessary to point out that anthropology (well, one of two main movements within anthropology) is not one of the hard sciences; it is a so-called "soft science", and it's conclusions have to be qualified accordingly. Where anthropology is scientific, it tends to be purely descriptive; even the more interpretive aspects of anthropology (and sociology) eschew claiming brute objectivity. Where anthropology is neither descriptive nor analytic, it tends to avoid being proscriptive. Is Professor Smart's criteria intended as a means of separating religious from non-religious behavior; I doubt it. Does his framework identify a specific trait or set of traits that should be termed religious? Certainly religious people exhibit these behaviors, that doesn't mean that these behaviors are "the essence" of religiosity. To do is to be? Maybe. But I think it fails on two counts. First, there is something distinctly religious which isn't captured by these criteria; a certain "je ne sais quois" which every religious person understands, and understands differentiates them from the non-religious. Second, again, these traits are far too broadly and ambiguously defined to capture religious behaviors and religious behaviors alone. To borrow a popular meme, regarding Professor Smart's criteria, "Where's the beef?" -- where's the religious in these religious criteria? I'm only briefly going to return to the problem of anthropology being a soft science; while it may "seem" to describe something real and objective, that's a long ways away from demonstrating it; psychology, another soft science, may still apply the tenets of Freudian theory as useful, but I don't think anyone expects Freud's ideas to pan out in terms of neurological structures. I'm not entirely discounting the utility of the soft sciences, but it is generally a fallacy of reification to assume that the concepts obtained in them have simple, concrete correlates. If Professor Smart's framework is only statistically valid, that these behaviors correlate with religion probabilistically, again, you've got crap for a definitive (pun intended) argument that atheism is a religion.

As long as I've babbled on this far, I will point out that I am both a Taoist and an atheist. According to your application of the criteria, I have two religions! The idea that a person can belong to two seperate religions at the same time is generally abhorrent to most westerners, though it is not unheard of in the east. In China, it's common for people to participate in Taoist, Confucian or Buddhist rituals as they apply -- different situations will call for a Taoist answer than that which requires Confucianism. Since none of these three religions contains the concept of a creator god to which the person is beholden, they are also atheists. Not one, not two, but four religions! Well, at the very least, it's clear that your framework can't pick out individual religions (how do we decide when a Chinese person is being an atheist, but not a Taoist; a Buddhist but not a Taoist?). These are the types of questions that a theory, if it is actually a theory of some thing, should be able to answer; if the theory can't differentiate between "is" and "is not", I strongly suspect the object of the theory is imaginary; at best it is incomplete. In addition, there are people who declare themselves not as atheist, but as non-religious; I'm not going to go through your criteria, but they hit many of the same points (some of them are even, horror, "secular humanists" -- Auntie Em, it's a twister!). Essentially, using your criteria as an exclusionary principle, religions will be proliferating at an exponential rate (do we have a separate religion for non-religious Taoists, Atheistic Taoists, and one for Taoists who never gave it much thought?). I'm sorry, but even if Smart's criteria uniquely identify something it's not clear that that something is either useful or a good definition for religion.

I'll throw you a couple bones. I would argue that for many people, atheism does function as a social identity just as for some people, religious or not, white supremacy functions as a social identity. The sociological, anthropological and what-ological purpose that serves, I won't speculate. I will ask however how Professor Smart's criteria separate those behaviors one adopts as a part of a social identity from those behaviors one adopts as part of a religious identity?

I'm not going to go into the Soviet question in any depth other than to say I think atheists dismiss what happened in Russia and Cambodia as irrelevant to them all too readily. That still doesn't make atheism a religion.

And finally, regarding origin stories and Darwinism, it's natural to wonder after explanations for the world, just as it's human to wonder how a magician performs his trick. It's human to want to understand the world, if you're arguing that "to be human" is "to be religious", I'd say you've broadened your net way too far. Yes, there are those who are overly dogmatic about science, those who embrace scientism and even those who deconverted on account of evolution or cosmology; none of these are strictly speaking evidence of religiosity. If I didn't believe in evolution, if I didn't worship the current cosmological model (which itself is a mess) -- if I never read a single scientific statement whatsoever, I would still lack a belief in a god (and it isn't atheism which keeps me in my particularly religious orbit so much as a firm foundation in Taoism reinforced by the lack of any good reason to believe in a god does [and theists like you trying to "explain" to me what the nature of my beliefs are doesn't help]. When theism starts making sense, then I'll allot it more consideration.

[reverendjeremiah]

Look at that wall of text..and not a single mention about me in it

[Angrboda]

Look at that wall of text..and not a single mention about me in it

You need to read more closely. I quote:

To put it in reverendjeremiah's terms, unless you can deterministically apply these criteria and always come up with the right answer, you've got crap.

Not that I wish to be a stickler, but another problem with Waldorf's demonstration occurs to me. He is asserting that Professor Smart's criteria are a valid way of identifying a religion. However, if atheism is not a religion, it follows that Smart's criteria are not a valid way of identifying what is and is not a religion, and therefore demonstrating it using those criteria is not possible. In order to determine if Professor Smart's criteria are valid, one has to have independent proof that atheism is a religion -- you can't use Smart's criteria to demonstrate its own validity, that would be question begging. And since there is no independent evidence that atheism is a religion (at least that has been offered), it is impossible to conclude whether the criterion are invalid, or whether atheism is a religion, without further proof.

Furthermore, even if I grant the framework more legs than it has, it's entirely possible that atheism is like a religion (for some atheists). That's an entirely different thing than saying that atheism is a religion. If you were to assert that a unicycle is like a bicycle, I might incline to agree; however if you assert that a unicycle is a bicycle, I couldn't more strongly disagree. Regardless of how many criteria they share (having spokes, employing wheels, peddles, useful for transportation), their likeness does not imply their equivalence. Now I would agree that atheists and theists share a lot in common, since they are both human, there's bound to be a lot of overlap. But let's not restrict ourselves to a one way street here -- if the behavior of atheists is purely a product of godless human invention, and theism shares these behaviors, it seems only sensible to conclude that theism is also the product of godless human invention.

Anyway, since you seem to feel that Smart's criteria are scientific, that atheism is a religion and that the word of law is truth, why not go for the trifecta and convince a judge that it's a scientific fact that atheism is a religion, and that its demon spawn Darwinism/evolution is likewise religious and should be excluded from the public schools. I'm gonna take a long shot and bet that you do no such thing. But I'll be delighted to hear how you rationalize your not doing so.

I'm all ears.

[Girlysprite]

apophenia, about your comment on Buddhism in the start - they do not believe in a higher power like a god, I know that. But from what I know there is some higher force that governs that world (Karma). And the cycle of rebirth certainly is no naturalistic thing.

[Angrboda]

apophenia, about your comment on Buddhism in the start - they do not believe in a higher power like a god, I know that. But from what I know there is some higher force that governs that world (Karma). And the cycle of rebirth certainly is no naturalistic thing.

The law of Karma is neither a power -- a capability to influence or cause to be -- nor is it "higher", except perhaps in the Thomistic sense in which man and existence is causally dependent on God, and therefore man is subservient to the law of Karma in a hierarchical ranking of causal dependencies. But that still would be stretching it, particularly given the difficulty in even making sense of Aquinas' metaphysics. Do you consider gravity to be a "higher power" ? That is a closer analogy to Karma, as Karma is neither superior to, nor metaphysically prior to man's existence, and isn't properly a power.

[ETA: This is incorrect; see below] Regarding your note that reincarnation isn't a part of western naturalistic metaphysics, I don't know what your point is. Your original post was to claim that Buddhists and Taoists share the concept of a higher power with Theists, which you've failed to demonstrate. It's an additional fact that Buddhist do not share the naturalist's metaphysics, nor do the Shinto, nor do those who believe in past lives, nor those who believe in parapsychology or the laying on of hands; none of these groups share the traditional western, scientific, naturalist's metaphysics (although some would be willing to extend the metaphysics given sufficient evidence). What exactly is your point? That Buddhism is a religion? I don't think that was ever in dispute. I can only conclude that you are adding this property -- which I don't believe you claimed originally -- to bolster a failing argument that, "all religious folk are the same under the skin." To which I can only say, rubbish.


ETA: I was mistaken, your original post (quoted below) did make reference to non-naturalistic forces. However you did try to equate such with belief in a "higher power", which I still feel is incorrect, and misleading. Those who believe in energy bracelets believe in powers that transcend the natural (I mean beyond, "there's a sucker born every minute"), yet to describe that as a belief in a higher power is just plain wrong.

From your previous post:

What I find lacking in atheism that I find in all other religions is the belief in 'the higher power'. By that I mean something that can not be described, observed, and completely understood by mortals. The power is explicitly something above and beyond the naturalistic world, and defies laws of nature. I avoided saying god here, because some religions believe in some higher power, but not a god (Buddhism)....

Anyway, I apologize for the false accusation.

ETA: (In lieu of another post) I just noticed that you referred to atheism as a religion; do you hold that atheism is a religion? I must say I find that a peculiar idea for an atheist to hold, though not impossible.

[Girlysprite]

Apophenia, I think I worded some of my posts wrong, which led to a misunderstanding. For me, 'higher power' meant any force that was not naturlistic. That did not mean that I regarded any belief in a non-naturalistic power as a deity-belief. I think I'll stick with 'non-naturalistic power' instead.

What I tried to come up with was a component which set atheism apart from actual religions. If I would have said 'we don't believe in any gods', the reply would have been 'Well Buddhists don't believe in gods either, Buddhism is a religion, so atheism can be a religion too'. I wanted to prevent that, so instead of mentioning a god, I tried to describe the belief in the exsistence of non-naturalistic forces.

By the way, I do not think of atheism as a religion. However, in my opinon groups of new atheists display behavior which resembles religious behavior.

I hope I managed to clarify myself in this post.

[reverendjeremiah]

Look at that wall of text..and not a single mention about me in it

You need to read more closely. I quote:

To put it in reverendjeremiah's terms, unless you can deterministically apply these criteria and always come up with the right answer, you've got crap.

Oh..then I forgive you