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52 - Postgame ft. Trevor Beaulieu (Patreon)

Published:
2018-08-15 01:29:52
Imported:
2026-06
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52 - Postgame ft. Trevor Beaulieu

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Comments

Jeff Berg

Amazed that y'all don't ask if Morsi is still in jail. He was the legally elected president of the country. I get caring about Mandela, but just for context he was a guerilla fighter. Being jailed is not a huge stretch. Morsi meanwhile is being literally killed in jail and y'all have nothing to say.

Jeff Berg

Morsi is being killed in jail.....seems worth a mention.

Jeff Berg

White people raped the pockets of hockey players for years here in Canada and it was a white person that was taken down to end the exploitation because the times changed. So it ain't always one way.

Kathy Ross

atheist vs. religious-based thinking is about faith vs. fact based thinking. People process evidence differently when they think with a factual mind-set rather than with a religious mind-set. If you care about truth how can you think faith based is good.

Kathy Ross

David Hume " that one cannot directly derive values (what ought to be) from facts (what is)" The religious cake baker that refuses to bake a cake for gay couples is doing so because his faith tells him that's what he ought to do. It seems to me that both philosophy as a method for interpreting science and science has more to offer in our struggle to make our world a more moral place.

Kathy Ross

Btw I still plan on buying your book about the IDW ;-)

Bijou Smith

I think +KathyRoss can do better than those weak comments. Very few religionists are purely "faith based" that phrase is used either as a smear or emboldens those who are genuinely extremely idiotic and anti-science. And the sociology of science shows plenty of scientists or self-proclaimed rational humanists are horrible in their application of logic and science and come across on any objective analysis to be just as opinionated and hence "faith based" as any religious believers. What makes science special are the methods it uses, which are basically a social consensus based on disputable results of theory and experiment taken in tandem, which has built-in error correction. But it is not perfect error correction, and in particular misleads when it comes to metaphysical issues and social issues that transcend narrow theory. So I hope TMBS fans do not get too sucked in by the false science supremacy peddled by Harris and his crowd of militant atheists. Part of the problem in people failing t take the good from religion is that people equate religion with corrupted faith. If you look at the original sources of the great world religions they are chock full of teachings on good things like virtues and advocating of fostering peaceful relations, and all the crap that gets done in our world under the name of religious fanaticism is by my definition actually anti-religious. If you can begin to see that dynamic (a co-opting and corruption of inherently good ideas to use for evil purposes) then the dynamic is one of power, not merely the simplistic dichotomy of "faith vs fact" which is almost always a false and misleading one. On particular topics a few minutes into a conversation with a scientific atheist will show you they are just as absurd and unreasonable as a typical religious nerd on other topics. Lastly, take a listen to the neo-marxists and democratic socialists and listen carefully to the deepest reasons why they champion their politics (not the praxis but in principle) and you will always find they are resting on moral and ethical foundations -- kindness, compassion, love, honesty, and these are shared in foundations of all valid religions. If you can remove those blinkers that have you thinking in harsh binary opposites like fact/faith or left/right then I think you will see we all share more in common at the deeper spiritual level whether you lean more towards practising ethical science or more towards practising religious compassion. This removing of binary filtering in people's thinking is extremely important I think, especially for the wider socialist project, it is not dopey centrism either, it does not mean you abandon beliefs and principles that are core to your values, rather it means finding deeper well-springs of motive and justification which are potentially common across superficially more diverse world views. Why is this important? Because it can change people for the better, and if they do not change in their superficial practise they can at least be more sympathetic and tolerant of your causes. Socialism needs this to thrive in a highly diverse community like the USA.

Jeff Prillaman
>>14752377

I don't begrudge anyone who believes their lucky rabbit's foot will protect them from misfortune. It is when the Lucky rabbit's foot is used as their warrant to impose their belief's (and prejudices) on others. What is true, what is real is a tad important.

Kathy Ross

Bijor Smith I think it's important to treat people respect even if you do not agree with their views. First let's get some clarity and define what we're talking about, how I define faith is it's a belief in something despite insufficient knowledge and evidence, so there is no such thing as faith based science. facts are something that can be backed up with evidence and can be proven, opinions are based on people views and beliefs. Facts are indisputable truths, and opinions are someone's perspective or judgments. I'm not sure if this makes me a "militant atheist" This is how Hebrews 11:1 define's faith as "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, The evidence of things not seen" How exactly do you define faith and spirituality?

Bijou Smith
>>14785196

Hi Kathy. Treating people with respect is not the same as treating their ideas with respect. There are many scientists and believers whose ideas I do not respect, but I can respect their motives and character. I accept your definition of faith. But you should really take a harder examination of how science is conducted and how in unfolds. It is all based on underlying theory, and all experiments are subject to uncertainty, so it is faith-based, but in degree, by comparison, in relative terms, science relies far less on faith than other belief systems. Although I do not find all of his idea compelling, reading Paul Feyerabend could open your mind at least a little into realizing how flimsy a lot of science is, but we do not have to go all postmodernist and say science is purely rests on faith in abstract principles, so for sure, I agree that there are pretty solid objective facts, within prescribed uncertainties, which science can rely upon. But I did not mean to critique science, I am a scientist myself. However, talk about "indisputable truth" is bordering on religiosity (in the hacker jargon file sense ;-) don't you think? It is of course only quibbling to make a pedantic point, but we all know that laws of physics (the most indisputable in science historically) are not absolute or indisputable. Newtons' Law for gravity, being only an approximation, but once thought to be absolute. So yeah, I can accept that we have discovered fairly immutable laws using scientific inference, if you use a coarse enough grained filter on phenomena that is, since if you go in finer then there are still many unknowns where the foundations get shakey. But this is getting me too far from the point about the importance of faith and spirituality more generally. A militant atheist would be someone who is not only absolute in their belief, but firmly convinced that anti-atheism is dangerous. That would be my characterisation. They also tend to lump all belief systems that are not based on a materialist conception into one basket for ridiculing and regard "beleivers" to be ignorant or anti-intellectual. I just do not find that sort of view helpful. For one, because even though I am a scientist, I can accept that maybe there are things beyond science and beyond physical reality, although I think this is a subtle issue. It is definitely no the simplistic "tooth fairly" or "lucky rabbits foot" sort of beleif I am talking about. I really do not respect such ideas in any way other than as emotional comforts (which do have a valid use according to psychologists, much like placebo effects). What I am talking about in terms of spirituality is a lot more subtle, and I think more in accord with the origins of the great religions. I like Chomsky on this: he once said that dualism is not a well-defined notion, and physical versus spiritual is a false dichotomy because once a phenomenon can be understood mathematically or empirically then it automatically becomes physics by definition, it expands the sphere of physical phenomena (the propagation of the gravitational force has undergone such a transition from mystical to physical), but he also recognised that there could be real phenomena that will never be mathematically describable or amenable to empirical observation, and these would then be like nonphysical realities. My point is twofold: (1) what is called "physical" is only relative to the power of one's science. (2) it is possible that most of reality is going to be perpetually nonphysical to human science, and what we regard as physical appears to be "all there is" is thus possibly a prejudice based on the fact we cannot discern or measure anything currently defined as nonphysical by my previous characterisation. For example, some respectable physicists have recently been writing about some very speculative (and perhaps unrespectable! ;-) ideas about how our universe could be a simulation running in some meta-super-computer, and so in this sense there is a "god" (lowercase, since that is also only relative to whatever originated It) which is jokingly discussed as a computer programmer in some higher dimensional world. AS fanciful as such ideas are, they do have some theory papers being disseminated on the arXiv, so it is not all tooth fairies and santa claus. My point is that such a fictional all-powerful programmer (relative to our universe) would appear to us like a god, and would be for all practical purposes forever unknowable to us, and hence, by the Chomsky definition, forever non-physical. We would not ever have scientific access to the ontology of this creature's own world in which her computer existed. All this would be pure idle intellectual circle jerking if it was not incredibly important for politics, and in particular for a resurgent democratic socialism with a morally based marxist undercurrent. That's because of the final thing I wanted to respond to you about, which is spirituality. Perhaps the definition I use is not standard, so I will need to spell it out. In most of my readings, spirituality is not a vitalist quasi-sensible concept, it is rather very simple, something which everyone understands through conscious life: spirituality is the realm of thought & deliberative action where concepts like love, kindness, honesty, justice, mercy, compassion, and so on, are entertained. Although they are abstractions, from a maxist perspective they have great power because they are abstractions which describe and help codify forms of human relations and interactions between conscious people which help to diffuse abusive power structures and help us to find the concrete forms of such principles to organize a humane social life. The force of spirituality is thus realised when spiritual thinking and motives inform the acts and deeds we perform materially --- right down to the grit involved in setting up say a worker cooperative, a free learning school project, or a fair tax system or whatever. This, in my view, is the greatest motive force for democratic socialism, because socialism is profoundly and deeply a movement which is designed to bring dignity and justice to all humanity. It is not a mere new experiment to replace capitalism, it is deeper than that, socialism is what were ARE as humans. It is in our biology. But if we fail to appreciate the deep spiritual rots of socialism we lose this vital moral force and get reduced to material historicism, which becomes too easily corrupted and blind to morality and ethics as a result, and risks becoming purely about bind belief in some other abstractions about how economic and working life should be organized (which is how Soviet communism devolved -- devoid of spirit, failing to respect the spirituality and spiritual needs of it's citizens). For me, there is a higher convergence where spirituality meets material marxisms, and that is how I think democratic socialism will win out in the end, when it captures peoples hearts and minds and souls, and admits a diversity of beleif and action, all based around common core spiritual beleifs in justice, egalitarianism and compassion. This is compatible with a scientific humanism of course, but we do not need to exclude religion from discourse either --- by which I mean as a valid equal partner in dialectic and not to be dismissed as all "angels and tooth fairy" talk, which is blatantly unfair to many people's beleifs. There is for sure a standard of self-consistency and freedom from hypocrisy we should expect as we do for valid science, which renders a lot of religious praxis thoroughly perverse and corrupt, and I see such forms as being actually anti-religious. You can call a cat a dog but hat doesn't make it one. One final note: if you really "beleive" in science, have trust in science (dare I say put your faith in science?) then it is not hard to also use the same sort of logic used in science (the suitably generalise idea of cause & effect --- post-quantum mechanics --- for example) to validly infer there must be a unique single cause of all phenomena. The proof of this is fairly easy, I can send it to you if you like, and it has no religious notions at all, it is simply science (based on a couple of very elementary principles about causality --- which in a more limited technical way is a necessary feature of special relativity). I know this does not fully bridge a gap to spirituality, but I hope at least I have given you some food for thought. I just worry we are never going to get a healthy democratic socialism project going at the highest levels using only materialism and raw science. We need to connect to all people at an emotional level as well, in tandem, and that means not only understanding their faith but taking their faith seriously, intellectually accepting they might arrive at valid truth through their faith, and preserving the best parts of their beleif systems which are compatible with science. For example: science might be able to justify certain tax policies based on efficiency principles, but someone else can reach the same conclusion even quicker using the principle of compassion and spiritual oneness of humanity. Who is to say which method of deducing the same policy is superior? What I do know is that in economics there are no solid results that are logically defensible because the dynamical systems mathematics is essentially unsolvable. So heuristics are needed at some stage, and they become no more valid than spiritual reasoning (reasoning based on morals and spiritual values like love and truth and beauty). Heck, one of my biggest reasons for denouncing conservatism is that it is ugly. Even if I accepted free market monetary principles on merit (which I do not) I would say the results and end-run dynamics conclusions for such economics are too ugly for a decent society to want -- there's a spiritual argument from beauty against conservative style capitalism. I think it is as valid as other formal econometrics arguments, maybe even moreso.