
Source date (UTC): 2020-09-26 16:48:43 UTC
Original post: https://gab.com/curtd/posts/104932240498630405


Source date (UTC): 2020-09-26 16:48:43 UTC
Original post: https://gab.com/curtd/posts/104932240498630405
Excerpt…. (and after this, wait till you see my most recent work explaining the evolution of european civilization’s group strategy and metaphysics. I finally found a way to talk about it and get the point across easily.)
===
4 – Any group that institutionalizes neotenic evolution (eugenics) will benefit from the fact that eugenics are the single most influential and desirable factor determining group quality of material life. Dysgenics are the single most desirable factor opposing material life in exchange for psychological life. Markets are naturally eugenic. Religion is the opposite. And serves largely to sedate us against evolutionary pressures as populations increase and with it, anonymity, irrelevance, and alienation.
5 – Europeans, for entirely environmental reasons, were the only people to develop Law – meaning the natural law of tort (consisting of self-determination, sovereignty, property, and reciprocity) as their first social and political institution, instead of religion or state. And the law is a purely empirical means of social organization. As we shall see, the order of institutional development like any evolutionary process creates evolutionary dependencies, that determine the future of civilizations. (See: Path Dependence) Law is the least evolutionarily contradictory political institution. Just as commerce is the least evolutionarily contradictory social order. Just as the Military is the least evolutionarily contradictory extra-political order. Just as science (Testimony) is the least evolutionarily contradictory intellectual order.
6 – Europeans, and specifically European aristocratic (Ruling) classes, for those entirely environmental reasons, and having developed empirical law as their first institution, were alone the only people to discover, adapt to, and apply the physical, natural, and evolutionary laws of the universe. Despite the extraordinary high psychological cost of doing so. And the one cost East Asians would also bear: the suppression of the reproduction of the underclasses and the direction of the surpluses to the production of commons. And in doing so dragged mankind kicking and screaming out of ignorance, superstition, hard labor, poverty, starvation, disease, suffering, early mortality, in just a few centuries in the early bronze age, a few centuries in the ancient world, and a few centuries in the modern world – while the middle east stagnated then declined in dysgenia, the Indians were unable to transform the continent, the Chinese, luckily isolated from the middle east succeeded then stagnated, leaving Europeans as the only people to succeed in the transition out of victimization by nature, and the universe, and instead to domesticate it.
Source date (UTC): 2020-09-21 10:32:00 UTC
Brandon Hayes
August 20 at 1:58 PM ·
QUOTES ROUND 4 PREFACE
Quotes dates for posts between March, 01, 2020 and July 01, 2020. The pace has stiffened yet again… paying attention to those that are taking in the information for you is wise. These people can save you an enormous amount of time; and time is scarce, money is abundant… which one are you chasing and storing?
THE THIRD WAY EDITION
CURT DOOLITTLE
[The founder of The Propertarian Institute, his work si easily found on the website, it’s cataloged and easily sort through. The next leap in science can come during your life time and you have a choice to enjoy the fruits… never again does this offer manifest before catastrophe.]
Man is risen beast (hero) Not fallen angel (criminal).
As long as you’ve got enough men present it’s a jury.
It is only animals who fear the truth, and liars who avoid it.
The utility of immorality increases as enforceability decreases.
We must educate not prevaricate. It is the cost of transformation.
What you are seeing is the third-world-ization of the USA, by design.
We remember debts better than we remember spatial configurations.
They aren’t used to living in a world that requires constant calculation.
The truth will in fact set you free – at the cost of additional responsibility.
Decidability refers to satisfaction of demand for infallibility in the question.
I mean, I have respect for the queen, but after that it’s just the art of the duel.
Jesus gave us wisdom. It was in addition to our wisdom; not in replacement of it.
An awful lot of us in P considered or briefly participated in one of the priesthoods.
Our social order law, court, houses; the most easily reorganized because it’s procedural.
Deprive the government the ability to extract from the people; decrease power distance.
We must still make neo-marxism and postmodernism and feminism and hbd-denial over.
You need to act; you need to have confidence to act no matter how bad your information.
Having six to ten men around you when you’re afraid and angry tends to reduce resentment.
The present judiciary conflates law, legislation, regulation, and command. We disambiguate them.
Our Militia: The LAW, our jury, and our rights – we are unruled because we forbear for only rule of law.
The tendency for all money to go into debt in Washington DC or New York or Los Angeles will disappear.
Constitutions don’t save you (us). They explain the terms by which others do not need saving from you (us).
Politics is the Entertainment business for ugly people, but both operate in the interests of the evil people.
Abrahamism is as advanced a method of deceit as Aristotelianism is an advanced technique of truth telling.
They don’t want you to know things partly because they don’t want you to go home & judge your parents.
The future looks like being taught P-law, meta-physics, psychology, & sociology in this universal language.
Automate like hell so that our group of people can produce a landscape where we don’t have to work very much.
Self Determination within the Limits of Sovereignty and Reciprocity. Reciprocity within the Limits of Proportionality.
We can try to fight to pull a past that isn’t possible or we can create a future with positive opportunity for all of us.
Feminism as indifferent mediocrities rather than as opposite and compatible excellences was a disaster for the west.
We are proposing the greatest and most rewarding redistribution of power over self determination in human history.
Greece, Rome, & the British Empire are expressions of the European Group Strategy at increasing scales. Militia created.
Males are lean mean machines. Females are the opposite. Neoteny limits maturity, buying time to develop agency.
Police can show up at your house, criminalize something you did by accident, or innocently, and throw you into the system.
Our way is good for everybody, so let’s create the way. We all develop the commons we want and pay the costs for them.
The problem is smart people can’t imagine that their competitive advantage does not translate to the reproductive market.
GKC (Gilbert Keith Chesterton)
[Author, philosopher, Christian apologetic… wrote a book titled “The Third Way”; wiki him if you don’t know him]
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
It is dangerous to be alive; one very often dies of it.
The Citizen has liberty; the Slave can have only leisure.
Public education has not produced an educated public.
I am not afraid of opposition. My God is a God of battles.
It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.
Feminists are, as their name implies, opposed to anything feminine.
Of all horrible religions the most horrible worshiping the god within.
A moral standard must remain the same or it is not a moral standard.
What is wrong with our civilization can be said with one word — unreality.
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
The man is the head of the house, while the woman is the heart of the house.
If a real book has not touched us we might as well not have touched the book.
The bully is the man who acts on the assumption that he will not have to fight.
Those who have nothing to say may say it a million times and in a million forms.
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
Real love is not passive; because one cannot feel it without being ready to fight for it.
Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it.
Those that chastise you for associations are also those that won’t allow for disassociation.
Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.
We are in danger of forgetting all facts, good and bad, in a haze of high-minded phraseology.
The Family is not only an institution, but a foundation, the foundation of nearly all institutions.
Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.
The definition of the true savage is that he laughs when he hurts you; and howls when you hurt him.
Government does not rest on force. Government is force; it rests on consent or a conception of justice.
Men in a state of decadence employ professionals to fight for them, to dance for them, and to rule them.
What the peasant has is exactly what the Individualist never has and the Socialist never has: common sense.
There is no limit to the lunacy of men when they think themselves superior both to laughter and humility.
We are always near the breaking-point when we care only for what is legal and nothing for what is lawful.
The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.
Pornography is not a thing to be argued about with one’s intellect, but to be stamped on with one’s heel.
War is not a proposal; it’s the refusal of all proposals. War is not an institution; it’s the breakdown of all institutions.
Homeless intellectualism of an unhappy age: Bigot: anybody who is sure he is right & other people are wrong.
An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.
It’s easy to be a madman or a heretic. It’s easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own.
A nation is a thing which recognizes a certain moral principle called patriotism, of which the opposite is treason.
All punishment is a sort of righteous rebellion; the revolt of all men against the man who thinks he is the only man.
Civilization is a decision. The indecisive, the higher skeptics, the idealistic doubters have remained barbarians.
What we need, as the ancients understood, is not a politician who is a business man, but a king who is a philosopher.
There is now a false idealism of turning Government into God, by a vague notion that it gives everything to everybody.
Once twenty barely tolerable men owned one newspaper; now 20 newspapers are owned by one barely tolerable man.
The answer to anyone who talks about the surplus population is to ask him whether he is the surplus population…
You don’t know a tyranny until it’s on top of you; until you’re in its trap. The tyrant isn’t present until he’s omnipresent.
When a politician’s opposition he’s an expert on the means to an end; when he’s in office he’s an expert on obstacles to it.
It is rather a curious coincidence that in every controversy in which I have been hitherto I have always been entirely right.
Our education is uneducation; its whole tendency is to unteach people the traditions of their fathers.
All vulgar errors arise from education. The uneducated are generally right: the badly educated are always wrong.
Marxian materialism is a slave morality; a protest against particular authorities made by the spirit of slavery, not liberty.
Why are going on with this double process; cursing the position we are in & blessing everything that’s brought us to it?
In this age everything done inside a house is called ‘drudgery’ while anything done inside an office is called ‘enterprise.’
Outcomes of modern education are uneducated men. Our education is uneducation; to unteach people traditions of their fathers.
P. (P-LAW; Propertarianism)
[It’s THE law for rule OF law]
Not tyranny; symphony. In concert or conflict.
We no longer reward people for telling the truth.
All people are compatible in commerce – that’s the wonder of Trade.
Demarcation between animal and human is agency, not consciousness.
Men require adversarial training. Without it they acquire brain damage.
Sheriffs are elected (‘citizen soldiers’) Police are hired (‘mercenaries’) {Every man a Sheriff}
Reformation: Extensions of involuntary warranty from goods and services to information and speech.
New American Constitution: Preserving trade, treasury, military, and veto(insurer of last resort) power.
If we don’t have universal standing in matters both private & common, we can’t use the court to defend ourselves.
Legislative law is incomprehensible, where as reciprocity (natural law) is both intuitive and comprehensible.
BIG PROBLEM: The law(current) does not recognize interests in the commons when the state is the actor violating them.
The reallocation of capital from media, financial, and academic sectors must serve local rather than imperial demands.
Reformation: Every other possibility ends in random chance. The cost of that will be millions of lives and trillions of dollars.
Nationalize the banks; allow ‘financial talent’ to obtain commissions rather than interest which belongs to the commons.
Reformation: Incremental evolution of our laws such that we suppress and reverse the institutionalization of the arts of lying.
QUOTES #5: JULY/AUGUST 2020
BRANDON HAYES
NBA = No Basketball Anymore
Peaceful demonstrations intensify.
Be like Jesus: Flip tables, whip bankers.
You think the AIs are going to forgive you?
Original sin is ancestral duty for the non-agentic.
Act like a human or be domesticated as you ought.
People wearing masks ought be treated as infectious.
Public education: a Zoom! chat will suffice. No, no; same price!
The time for justice is long past due; a righteous correction lies in wait.
Someone explain to me how multiculturalism isn’t cultural appropriation.
FACT: 2020 has had the lowest number of recorded US deaths since 2009.
Average men are ordinary. Common men are extraordinary. Which are you?
First tell of a worthwhile opinion; it’s counter the opinion holder’s preference.
Dismantle the cities for materials to build US Space Force and colonize the future.
Public education: telling boys they aren’t good girls since the industrial revolution.
You oughtn’t have free speech but the freedom to testify. As that’s what Jesus did.
Look, I don’t like to watch it burn but I’m not gonna not warm my hands by the fire.
All those saying “vote them out”… ah, y’all voted them in and yous haven’t changed.
You can have man’s judgement of God’s laws or you’ll get God’s judgement of man’s.
Gulags and stool-pigeons. Why aren’t we hearing these terms a lot more? …it’s unnerving.
It’s common for those with little to no agency to categorize the successes of others as luck.
Protesting in the street is attempted suicide. (change my mind; that’s how that works, yeah?)
Some lives matter to some people for some reasons. That’s about the extent of it. Value varies.
The truth carries serious cost. Paying it is wise. Not truth carries unbearable cost. No more lies.
Going into public with a mask whilst not sick is sick. Going into public with a mask whilst sick is sick.
Patience not a virtue: good things come to those who wait but only things left by those who hustle.
There’s a difference between gate-keepers and flood-gate-keepers. People ought keep that in mind.
Outcome of a race between Trump and Biden circa 1994? (alternate timeline scenarios encouraged)
Inalienable: unable to alienate. Giving up an inalienable right is unlawful. Inalienable rights are duties.
I prefer not to respectfully disagree with anyone. I vehemently disagree. Cause most people are wrong.
A very healthy dose of “keep your feelings to yourself” would do us a whole lotta good right about now.
Go woke for broke. This is the motto of the NPC/SJW/Pedocrat. Join our zombie hoard or be consumed.
Most of what we consider work(jobs) is merely consumption and its acceleration. You’re not productive.
Abortion, sex changes, & (in)voluntary sterilizations but not home births covered by medical insurance…
There is a single path of sanity. The really real reality tunnel is one of a kind. It’s something to travel together.
There are consequences for tattling and crying wolf. They’re just delayed. Or don’t you read children’s stories.
The Democrats(DNC) haven’t disavowed Antifa nor BLM yet… that makes them terrorists too; 100%. Your move.
In the best America Elon Musk is developing laser guns for the militia forces. But, this isn’t that America… yet.
What kind of criminal do they need to be for you to stop following, voting for, playing with, and paying them?
Failure to integrate is catastrophic for humans. Integration isn’t any different from domestication. Sort it out.
People: Remove/replace all white men! White men: we should band together to stop that. People: Nazis!
Do your job = do your duty. If that equation is untrue for you(which I suspect). You’re not doing your duty.
It’s victims who most often turn perpetrator. Victim cards turn into victimization cards real quick in a pinch.
Any history buffs? When are Gulags the next thing? (modern/future equivalent of a Gulag for bonus points)
Stifled warriors and amplified psychotics. In what reality was this going to work out? Demonstrably not this one.
We have an individualist approach to creating collectives. This is a masturbatory approach. Try actually collecting.
Public education isn’t. Indoctrinating children into a culture of critique and consumption is catastrophic. Change.
Hard to win if you’re not afforded the field. We’ll get you in the game; win. The field will then remain level by law.
Those that throw shade at 2020 (year of clarity): shame on you. This is clearly the best timeline… it’s you if it’s not.
When people stop being exactly how I imagined them to be in person, maybe, I’ll stop judging them online… maybe.
Taleb’s Intellectual yet idiot, are in fact intellectual yet naive(high-trust; moral), presently are intellectual yet immoral.
American Nationalism. Take care of your family first. Those that would steal from your grandchildren are your enemies.
Tolerance requires no agency; it’s lowly not lofty. You’ve been lied to. You either forbear or you can’t/don’t/won’t.
NEWS IN 2020: Ellen DeGeneres fat-shamed an 11-year-old boy in the 1970s. (how do you live with yourselves?)
Delusional people start sentences about manifest reality like this: “I can’t believe…” You can’t believe what’s real, we know.
If you’re not offering forgiveness why ought they? Yous can’t afford your sins. Forgiveness is your only hope for good life.
Never apologize to the mob. Do not offer an explanation. Addressing their concerns gifts them credibility, there isn’t any.
God given rights don’t exist; God given responsibilities do. Upholding God’s given responsibilities affords human rights.
Animals. Coexist, codepend, cooperate, control, command. You can’t even properly coexist with yourselves; this doesn’t end well.
You probably oughtn’t get a vote. A vote is a say in what to do. Your decisions don’t even make things better for you.
Your phone acts like the “jeep on a track” in Jurassic Park. A moving cage peering into habitats. Your water is rippling.
You affect one another; you effect one another; you infect one another. You know we already wear too many masks, right?
I agree with Nancy Pelosi. No debates. We want trials. Start with the top of the last administration (Biden included) work down.
Abundance of information atomizes us; social technology masks this process by passing us through fractionating clusters.
120 million sexually mutilated American men ought choose to solve this cultural pickle: refuse to be in the kosher sandwich.
The right and responsibility to bear arms; true inalienability. Consequence for eschewing responsibility or abusing the right.
Freedom isn’t the affordance to globe trot(travel), but hold property(territory). Parasitic cosmopolitans are stealing from you.
Preferences and opinions are not the same thing. Neither deserve to be respected outright. Nor the people that act on awful ones.
Pandemic Marketing: brag about how often you clean & disinfect. Revealing your previous sub-par(disgusting) standards. Gross.
Most politicians never deliver on their campaign promises yet you expect them to be effective in times of crisis. Fools and tools.
Anxiety and depression are accounting, accordance, and affordance problems. Prescriptions perpetuate perceptions problems.
Take all defunded police & house them in suburban & rural areas surrounding cities. City containment coordination. Militia rings.
PSA: Your preferences are garbage and your opinions don’t matter. Your elephant isn’t special nor unique and neither are you.
Getting paid for your views vs. paying for your views. No. Views oughtn’t cost anything and they oughtn’t afford collision.
2017-2018 high school graduation rates were 85% for whites… You know that 50% of people are below average, right?
Expectations are projections into the future; trying to manage their infinite array is fruitless. Objections; we can handle those.
If you sell bullshit & you market it as bullshit, you’ve made a branding error. But market bullshit as gold get rich, why?
The blue church houses a dead religion and false idols. Its followers are zombies. Aimless, head-down, and seeking brains.
If they can’t live without you how can you claim to be good? Sounds to me like you plausibly create dependents, purposely.
The simplest way to divide world factions: the globalists and China are the enemy. Don’t buy anything they’re selling; they lie.
THE ILLUSION OF DELUSION Paranoia is becoming evidenced justifiable threat detection. Sanity is masked in mass delusion.
Tolerate and its conjugations aren’t found in the Bible. Jesus was intolerant of what isn’t righteous. He spat out the lukewarm.
You don’t get rid of stereotypes by not stereotyping (or worse by punishing their use) but by not acting stereotypically. Try.
The humanity lost behind a mask is incalculable. No one is doing the issue any justice. Your authorities never demonstrate care.
How can one win & lose a war, hate those that saved them AND garner protected status among the saviors? Seems far-fetched, no?
This isn’t an echo chamber but an amplification arena. We’re all saying the same thing; just not the same way. K(no)w we’re right.
You ought be able to hunt those outside the law. Under current arbitrary rule that’d be disastrous and illegal. Your law’s broke.
CURT DOOLITTLE
(Curt Doolittle)
No More Lies. Reciprocity. Commons. Rule of Law.
The capitalism vs socialism debate is a cunning deception to circumvent rule of law.
Rule of law by the natural law of reciprocity is more important than the economic model under it.
All civilizations produce a group strategy, a mythos, rituals to perpetuate it, a means of arguing in favor of it.
Aristocratic Statesmanship (Paternalism) Republican Politics (Pragmatism) Democratic Politicking (Parasitism)
Theology (Strategy/Imagination) > Philosophy (Choice/Ideal) > Law (Reciprocity/Action) > Science (Truth/Testimony)
Courts, churches, business, streets, parks & cemeteries are equally sacred grounds; as safe as your kitchen.
The chief function of a college education is to allow people to exit the market and responsibility for outcomes.
Rule of law prevents rule by men and prohibits the corruption of communism and the criminality of capitalism.
Civicism, localism, nationalism, evolution, competition vs Religion, universalism, globalism, devolution, corruption.
The only Europeans that ever existed were the aristocracy. And we, in our vanity, thought we could replace them.
Democracy was poison. The truth is incompatible with the promise. It’s a false promise, and a contradictory one.
We must teach the common folk how to win when their natural instincts are to do everything possible to continue to lose.
We will choose our destiny by honest discourse or honest violence; but not by restraint of violence in tolerance for lies.
We have been smart for 5000 years: we’ve demanded warranty of one’s words, martial testimony “reporting” in all walks of life.
Military > Empiricism+Testimony > Duty > Investment in the commons > Status regardless of rank > ‘insurance’ regardless of rank
PAT RYAN
(Pat Ryan)
They call us racists, we call them pedocrats.
Affluent White Female Liberal Also known as AWFL
Psychometric liberal capitalism is the worst capitalism.
Being on the Right Side of History will no longer protect you.
Nobody wins because they are right. They win because they win.
Globalism maximizes the dehumanization pipeline we call progress.
Law is the binding force that brings all these domains into balance eventually.
Scientists are not moral authorities. Peer review isn’t a guardian of your rights.
Google literally SWATs people they don’t like. They hate you and they want you dead.
Neurology doesn’t do back-propagation because it is the literal opposite of energy efficiency.
I’m being hard on the lolberts because they default to using mental gymnastics to justify inaction.
You might not believe me, but Trump is the last olive branch you’re going to get. Next time, there won’t be rules.
The symbolic and objective exist in parallel by default. There is often need to merge them to the same construct: “law.”
Younger me: why did we execute, chase out, or exile intellectuals en masse throughout history? Me now: Oh. I get it now.
The Democrats just insult everyone for not consuming the information they paid to consume. Yes, they are really this stupid.
Cantor: Turns everything into Microsoft Excel. Humans: use all power to force EVERYTHING to be spreadsheet compliant.
What do you get when your mother abandons you & you’re told she should have aborted you as it’d have been easier for her.
Trade ought be the only power one holds over another; governance to limit action to trade; law removing those circumventing it.
SCOTT ADAMS
Did the TDS Telethon last night raise enough money for a cure?
It’s time to face a hard truth: Hunter Biden is the smartest Biden.
Where does the “Trump Secret Police Hoax” rank on the hoax list?
Is freedom of speech still different from crime or have they effectively merged?
How many of you have completely lost interest in at least one sport you enjoyed until this year?
Calling white people “White Supremacists” is pure racism, similar to using the N-word. Maybe worse…
F*cking liar Joe Biden still pushing the “Fine People Hoax.” That is 100% disqualifying. Now it’s personal.
I’m planning a micro lesson on how to save your marriage after your spouse catches TDS. Anyone need that?
Historians: Objectively, is Biden the most prolific liar the Democrats have ever nominated to represent their party?
GKC
Wherever there is Animal Worship there is Human Sacrifice.
This is the age of minorities; of groups that rule rather than represent.
Children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.
Americans may go mad when they make laws; but they recover their reason when they disobey them.
The only perfect pleasure in life is the pleasure of fighting for something in which one passionately believes.
An open mind is really a mark of foolishness, like an open mouth. Mouths and minds were made to shut; open’em to shut’em.
Conservatives & progressives are in partnership. They quarrel in public as a put-up job perpetually playing into each other.
MORITZ BIERLING
(Moritz Bierling)
Bottom down and top up.
First the eyes, then the ayes.
Watch out for Woke Supremacists.
I am a meta missionary: I convert people to their own cause.
Talking is done. Action reigns supreme. Move fast and fix things or GTFO.
I think blood and soil, for better or worse, has been replaced by coke & WiFi for far too many people.
LUKE WEINHAGEN
(Luke Weinhagen)
Every man the solution.
Free Speech is being used to destroy Free Testimony.
Reciprocity puts within reach the only equality you can build high trust on: Equality of Character.
MATTHEW PIRKOWSKI
(Matthew Pirkowski)
Resentment is not a policy; its bloody soil will bear fruits that substitute essential nutrients for bitter toxins.
There exist few ideas less sustainable—or more irresponsible—than guilt by association in a hyper-connected world.
JONATHAN PAGEAU
(Jonathan Pageau)
I hope you are ready for the Matrix 4 to be pro Matrix while still pretending to be about a resistance.
ROGER WALRUS
(Roger Walrus)
If we dismantle all this parasitic diversity infrastructure a lot of people would leave.
JAMES KRIEGER
(James Krieger)
Thus the libertarian corpus reproduces talmudism in economic prose.
MELISSA CHEN
(Melissa Chen)
Time to adhere to a policy of reciprocity
THE HURT YOUR FEELINGS EDITION
PAT RYAN (Pat Ryan)
[Pat’s the most dangerous man on the internet; his series on the Dark Stoa is excellent and worth investing the time]
Trauma is essential to the brain.
Words were never designed to convey intent.
They aren’t homeless. They are protesting income tax.
You are unable to prove AIs aren’t behind all mass protests.
Right Side of History is always Right Side of Corporate Profits
I’m not blocking bad faith people. I’m practicing social distancing.
Jeffrey Epstein held the highest stake in the BlackmailCoin network.
Information may want to be free, but law wants it to be harmonious.
Subhumans clamoring for honey instead of vinegar are still subhumans.
“I’M SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER” Speak truth to yourself first, shitbag.
Have we tried calling everyone we know racist yet? Maybe that will help.
Brevity is not only the soul of wit, it is the only way to transfer useful data.
AI Warfare will prove that morality needs to be a treated like Schedule 1 drug.
Dear white people, You can stop your creepy-tier forced politeness at any time.
Now that illegals are returning to Cartexico in droves…. NOW COMES THE ROBOTS.
You know contact tracers are going to be deployed to interfere with you voting, right?
The things we create lets us filter nature, but what we filter from nature then filters us.
Would gradual isolation strategies work on a person who thinks solitary confinement is paradise?
Hope you are all familiar with Butterfly War, because you’re all about to become collateral damage.
Did you know Obama was extremely skilled at woodworking and fencing? Google Obamagate to find out more.
So many Antifa leaders were disappeared this weekend, I could walk unmolested through DC proper today.
When is the low IQ woke squad coming to shut down Planned Parenthood for having a turbo racist founder?
Want to understand the limits of science, ask: “What -ISN’T- racist?” You will never get an answer that makes sense.
They warned us about murder Hornets, but we’ve responded with Chainsaw Mexicans so I’d say we’re about even.
If ceasing revenue from income taxes is the only way to fight Covid, would this tactic also work against global warming?
If the only opposition to your morally pure ideology is an endless stream of conspiracy theories, that’s a conspiracy theory.
Antifa started Minnesota looting and passed off the entire blame on to local blacks. That’s what being a “good ally” means.
Thing is, humans are humans & we have independently across time & space concluded that we will get to child sacrifice.
JAMES SANTAGATA (James Santagata)
[James is a cunning psycological underminer; it’s worth understand those who understand how to get under your skin and influence your thoughts and actions… there are many; James’ll help you spot them]
Don’t run from controversy – seek it out.
Hunger Games soon to be a live action game.
I’ve got good news and bad news. We ain’t seen nothing yet.
May I share a dark secret? I’m an Autistic RomCom movie goer.
Cancel Culture will be ended by Killer Culture. Gonna get messy.
Stranger: “Stay home, you owe us.” Me: “My body, my choice.”
“Morality” prevents most trigger pulls. Catalysts understand this.
The surest way to stop your nightmares is to become someone else’s.
It’s hard to experience PTSD when you’re busy giving it to someone else.
One person’s “intolerance” is another person’s honesty and authenticity.
Sometimes your mistakes are the lessons that others study and learn from.
American jumped the shark long ago. Legalizing drugs and criminalizing work.
Game Theory is only the starting point. Gaming, Game Theory is the objective.
Can’t wait for the Left to tear down the “White Supremacist” Statue of Liberty.
Muscular Entrepreneurialism and Muscular Entrepreneurs are the Modern Day Knights.
Spoken German is verbal Beethoven. Sounds beautiful but unfolds very slowly and methodically.
America 1776: e pluribus unum America 2020: e cannabis lootum America 2021: e bellica shootum
What’s a lock down? Noun: The confining of prisoners to their cells, typically in order to regain control (after a riot).
Advanced Psychological Technology looks like magic to the cognitively dense appearing a scam to the morally depraved.
When Morality is Mathematical rather than Metaphysical you begin to understand what is possible agentially & ecologically.
THE SALIENCE EDITION
SCOTT ADAMS
[Creator of Dilbert; possibly the most accurate political commentator living. Documents all his predictions. Writes extremely helpful books.]
China killed George Floyd as much as the police.
Some celebrities are paying to bail out protesters.
Calling Trump supporters white supremacists is a hate crime.
Did you realize that the worst way to get the news is the news.
Red Pills are falling like hail this week. The old reality is fading.
Is Victim Privilege a thing yet, or are we still pretending it isn’t?
India, Russia, and the United States are natural allies against China.
Looks like another day of lying to each other about everything important.
You might be missing the big story here. China just influenced our elections.
The ridiculousness of blaming this on white nationalists is almost laughable.
Don’t trust any American politician with a good haircut during the lockdown.
Protesting on the streets for racial equality has been proven to be ineffective.
Time for offense. It’s Time to Stop Using an Obama Afghanistan Strategy Against a Virus.
Who’s watching the big game in Tulsa tonight? I’m glad we found a substitute for sports.
Looks like another day looking in all the wrong places for the problems and the solutions.
It feels like conservatives are eating popcorn and watching the left destroy their own stuff.
Black America gave back ten years of gains this weekend. I think that was the opposite of the plan.
Antifa and BLM are learning the same thing ISIS learned, that capturing territory is easier than holding it.
The biggest difference in life outcomes is strategy. The smallest is skin color. Which makes headlines today?
If FDA guidelines would almost certainly cause harm to a patient, is a doctor ethically obligated to ignore the FDA?
What is the right amount of time to wait for an example of systemic racism before discarding it as an illusion?
Is it my imagination or is Great Britain running a Russia intelligence operation against Trump for the second time?
Teen accidentally discovers a powerful form of persuasion called “reciprocity,” thus guaranteeing him a good life.
Democratic party: publicly & loudly supporting a domestic terror organization. Not positioned for the 2020 election.
Obvious racism in Hollywood; I refuse to watch any movies that involve white actors or directors. It encourages them.
JORDAN HALL (
Jordan Hall
)
[Jordan is a regular occurrence here and adept at extracting the essence of any given situation. His Deep Code (including Deep Code Bits) and Civium projects are incredibly salient as well as his work on the Blue-Church.]
It feeds on outrage.
It’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when and how painful.
Minimum compliance to stupid rules is a good idea right now.
Compulsory schooling is an absolute non-sense; compulsory life, well, it turns out that’s just the way it is.
We the people may actually have to start taking matters into our own hands and presenting the right ideas.
Introverts, now is your time. Facetime (or Zoom if you prefer) an extrovert friend who is quarantined alone.
The right choice right now is to stop being passive, that’s hurting everybody. The days of malevolence are over.
It’s not stretching the truth to say that all of our social institutions are a bad combination of corrupt and obsolete.
We are obligate tribal: our reality as humans is in groups that are coherent, that’s when we begin to feel most fully real.
DANIEL SCHMACHTENBERGER (
Daniel Schmachtenberger
)
[Daniel has objectively too long a last name; I suggest checking out the work he’s done on “The War on Sense-Making” and his most recent website.]
Micro-rivalry leads to macro-symbiosis.
States becoming more relevant is a very good idea.
In a place where you are questioning meaningfulness you can bring it.
Sometimes the only way to figure out what the externalities are is to experiment.
The US either needs heroic work to be restored/recreated…or it will fully fail soon.
The rationalist and EA communities ought use words like, sacred and devotion, more.
How do we make a civilization that is anti-fragile with decentralized exponential technology?
Someone doesn’t have to have sloppy metaphysics to be able to understand phenomenology.
Sometimes you gotta put a head on a spike in the yard to keep everyone else from being assh*les.
They’re all on benzos and opiates and porn and Facebook so they’re too weakened and addicted to do anything.
ERIC WEINSTEIN
[Eric is one half of the Weinstein brothers duo(
Bret Weinstein
being the other). Management at Thiel Capital, Academic renegade, thinks against the grain.]
It can not be Trump vs Biden.
This was gonna come no matter what.
It is too trivially easy to destroy individuals.
Grown-ups have bought into magical thinking.
It’s been too easy to pick off the initial adopters.
The great negative externality is potential violence.
Listen carefully: you don’t have to elect Biden or Trump.
Real knowledge has become too dangerous to transmit.
Every peaceful demonstration is a demonstration of potential violence.
People treat me like I’m crazy for caring about the world after I’m dead.
It all begins with the middle finger; the administration has to seek other work!
People are cowards at the moment because if they’re not, they’re unemployed.
Go break the law; go break the law in a way that inspires us not to want to prosecute you.
We are now living the unthinkable because we couldn’t discuss the unsayable in real time.
Universal institutional betrayal: the schools, hospitals, drug companies, our food, our journalists are bad.
We are blind to the effect that somatic pleasure & status pleasure is crowding out fulfillment in our lives.
You incinerate peoples viability, it’s economic warfare: if your reputation is damaged you can’t be trusted.
We are completely confused as to how perilous the present moment is because our luck has been amazing.
We need to get into the institutions and remove the weak leadership. They need to seat people more dangerous.
We do business where we can’t measure and almost everything it produces is negative externality so it has to be disguised.
MY PERSONAL COLLECTION
I care that you can think much more than what you think. If you can think, you can calculate and the only differences in our actions will be dictated by preference(in the case of pursuit) and law(in the case of punishment).
To many of you have been taught what to think AND how to act based on that very thinking… unlearn that. Learn how to think; if you can’t form your own thoughts find someone who can to help you. The chances those steering your decisions have your best interests in mind are slim.
Last thing; the quotes… they aren’t false.
BRANDON HAYES
P comes before Q
There’s a 3rd way.
Tone oughtn’t matter.
Leadership divided isn’t.
The world JUST got real.
Big brothers or Big brother?
They boil the frogs too fast.
Who’s gonna walk their talk?
Economics is a moral discipline.
Decide and act more frequently.
Those who lie always shift liability.
Money can’t pay for what is owed.
It’d be a lot simpler if you didn’t lie.
Moral philosophers are anything but.
Why Kings; they pay with their heads.
Going back to normal is nonessential.
Unity around utility is a beautiful thing.
Your rules and protocol are failing you.
You’re not going to think your way out.
Corona Virus: The real “cancel culture”.
They’re all playing right into our hands.
Why Kings; better subjects than objects.
Got it: you don’t like your own company.
The only reasonable takes are hot takes.
Seeking happiness is a haphazard strategy.
Bring your guns but keep your masks at home.
Think: how do we reduce asset price inflation?
All those protesting received a public education.
Proper timing separates knowhow from wisdom.
The problem with “Game A” is that it’s one game.
Choose to change your operating methodologies.
The best thing you can do is teach people to play.
If our rule of law were fair; nobody would be in fear.
You see problems where you ought see possibilities.
Reciprocity is a moral rule that bears no exception(s).
It’s a huge mistake to think this isn’t the best timeline.
It’s time for people that act in the clutch; it’s the clutch.
The speed of collapse is faster than being anticipated for.
Black Americans are at the most risk whilst in the womb.
For all those with any agency the cage doors just opened.
Dragging your feet? You might as well be dragging bodies.
Trust is the metric you ought be seeking to maximize here.
Just listen to your elected officials; that’ll do pig, that’ll do.
What’s coming won’t be measured but it will be calculated.
You do understand that no one cares how you feel… right?
“It’s HIS will” (and all variations) IS admittance of addiction.
There are many things that need be done regardless of cost.
Big brother. or Brothers in arms? I thought this was America.
Practice adversarialism: Try being encouragingly antagonistic.
What happens to victims when the world is devoid of heroes?
Stop exporting expertise; you can import it. It’s 2020 you know.
Without my job I can’t afford to live… sounds like slavery to me.
Proper market to equlibrate: Step-up; Step-aside; or Stepped on.
Not defending monuments is a monumental failure of the militia.
We ought to depend on one another more and use each other less.
Exhausting forgiveness is not the same as forgiving until exhausted.
You’re going to have to explain how it is you didn’t see this coming…
Why’s it people always want straight answers to crooked questions?
You do understand that once everything is racist then nothing is, yes?
When this thing is over; and we win. I’m going to shake all your hands.
Free trade isn’t free; it costs freedom. It frees trade and creates slaves.
Y’all know the name George Floyd but not the name Duncan Lemp. Why?
Imagine thinking that voting was going to release us from this nightmare.
You all had your chance for honesty; that ship has sailed. Truth rules now.
I was described by someone close to me as progressive. Thing is; I’m right.
They’ve divided you by affording you the opportunity to divide yourselves.
Critique is fancy lying; critics are frauds. Don’t ask questions; seek answers.
Democracy dies in “blah blah blah.” No, democracy dies. It does so by suicide.
Let 1000 Nations Bloom… “Bloom” (like a flower) NOT “boom”! Pay attention.
We practically get along under terrible conditions. We’re offering better ones.
Guess what happens when inaction is built into the processes of your systems.
This is the American experiment; we desperately need to alter the parameters.
Go home. None of us get enough sleep. And people sleep easier around family.
I figured it out; this is what it’s like when the victim card doesn’t work anymore.
They can’t even walk the walk when they’re commanded to sit down and stay put.
You’re no good to us (nor yourself, nor your loved ones) if you can be preyed upon.
Lying about racism is a much larger problem in scope and severity than racism itself.
It’s natural to feel like a victim; hell, you may even be one. Acting like one is the error.
Being mean is incredibly effective if honest and you follow it up with being nice twice.
Call your state Representatives or Governor; I bet they can do something to help you…
We’ve spent so long practicing deescalation we don’t know what escalation looks like.
You don’t have a case: “I’d like to lie, cheat, steal and kill as it suits me,” isn’t going to fly.
So, now that Joe Biden has the endorsement of a warlord… are we gonna other him now?
Know what a great April Fools joke would be? Pretending we’re all going to pay our bills…
Not many generations get handed a reset button… That “easy button” shit doesn’t count.
We’ll never undermine your agency or your interpersonal relationships with those you love.
Social media is a problem in the way a hammer is a problem if you’re striking children with it.
P is pro-actively reactive at the nodal level so reaction at the group level becomes diminished.
The solution is a very simple contract between sovereigns. (oh, that’s Kings <and a compliment)
They only allow you the privilege of victim-hood… and that’s gonna go away. Pick a better team.
Consumerism driven parasitism is an infection. Short course of a rough treatment. Then it’s over.
In hindsight they lacked the foresight. Keep asking the people that got you into this to get you out.
You want a universal humanist position? You can have ours; we however, will not suffer any of yours.
Imagine thinking our global economies would be in good shape had this pandemic not taken place…
If your threat detectors were functioning so astutely how do you find yourself surrounded by threat?
You are a mind/body; it’s one thing. Your first sense is spatial awareness. Don’t separate from being.
The global system was negligent in being a parent. We’d have taken their children by force. Grow-up.
This is a law problem. A constitution problem. Because it’s an affront to our constitution. War is here.
Libertarianism maintains the Marxist prohibition on common property as communism does on private.
It’s because money means more to you than anything else. You can say what you like; you act this way.
Last summer I described this chaos(clusterf*ck) as morally imperative to repair, it’s only more so now.
The left always objects for the same reason; the “objectionable” example is devastating to their case.
Words written and/or uttered ought put constraints on response ability in the direction of responsibility.
Evil appears most obviously as performative contradiction. (this is when your action betrays your words)
We’re letting the only home-grown terrorists we have destroy our history… AND they’re technically girls!
Y’all squabble about the past; meanwhile the technology exists to shape the future. Wasting time is a sin.
Note: Wells Fargo, Chase and Bank of America have all sided with terrorists… pulling your patronage is wise.
You impossibly under-estimate the power of a first follower; humans can not only acquire them but be them.
We are blind to the effect that somatic pleasure & status pleasure is crowding out fulfillment in our lives.
We’re making a new team; a reciprocal one; one where those who oppose us actually are the “bad guys.”
The one time you’re among the victims; silence. Maybe you don’t know what being wronged feels like yet?
They are trying to save the currency system instead of saving our lives. Once you see it you can’t unsee it.
Ever play a chess game where each of your pieces also plays 4D chess? Maybe you don’t know what to do?
This is a militia problem; a neighboring-up issue. Military is for
bases and borders. You all fell short of the mark.
The internet never forgets; so it must forgive. Sacrificing people
at the alter of digital virtue is sin. It’s untenable.
Economic growth is a danger to our future; we need to re-till our
landscapes for agency. People over profits.
Reciprocity: making sure Americans aren’t left behind.
Parasitism: making sure the system & institutions survive.
Remember when Americans used to innovate? You know for more than just… enhancing the filters on selfies.
We’ve extended childhood indefinitely and removed innocence completely. Just go about your day; it’ll be fine.
These aren’t the most uncertain times, but the most certain. Uncertainty in thought leads to predictable action.
As a “mental health professional”: relieving the underlying tension of the globe right now is the move; Just Ask.
A Corona Baby Boom is inevitable! Oughtn’t we prepare the world for them? Are the current systems suitable?
The only words that have power are the ones believed to be true. With no lies all words are good and powerful.
One human life is worth more than any system or institution. They’ve already accrued debt they can’t pay back.
It doesn’t matter that the truth is expensive. We can just make the lies equally or more so. Then truth is cost effective.
How much of a victim can you be when the greatest trauma you’ve faced wasn’t even your own? Asking for a friend…
Credit Card companies; now’s a hell of a time to start deferring interest, Yes? Late to the party; don’t you have PR?
Politics undermined our legal system. Economics has hijacked our nervous systems. War has been foreign. Weak.
Unwise of the unjust to scream for justice. Our justice won’t suit you. Silence, however, may bring forgiveness.
Decreasing power distance decreases punishment response time increasing behavioral modification effectiveness.
The world is a poorly put together set of doggie daycare centers; demonstrably! Properly distribute the packs by kind.
So, let me get this straight; you want to stop the virus to go back to the actives that allowed a virus like this to spread?
The feminine ethic has no place in masculine realms; balance is achieved through interplay NOT integration.
Are perpetually accidentally antagonistic people aggravating enough yet? Terrible games produce terrible prizes.
After 9/11 we failed at re-establishing our nation. We failed again in 2008. Are you willing to say we failed in 2020?
P.S. Most are popularity seekers not problem solvers. Preaching on problems for popularity. Seldom do solutions surface.
Rites of passage changed people. Yet present humans say people don’t change. Maybe they’re not oppressed but unfit.
Imagine sitting at home in quarantine thinking; “no worries, the government and the banks got this, what’s on netflix?”
You will get no solutions nor assistance from the right(GOP) nor the left(DNC); and you’re fighting over which to choose.
Steal your time back: We can’t give back what’s passed; but we can free-up what you’ve been tricked to promise. They lied.
Everyone’s thinking about saving their jobs and not saving you. They can only see the future within the rules of the game.
All the “big heads” are wrong. Obviously, they got you here. They aren’t fit to get you out. You have neighbors for that.
Secure a bag for adults & half-bags for the children; Monthly. Use Credit Card infrastructure to distribute liquidity; no cheats.
If you garner your news & narrative world view from the television or radio you won’t get a say moving forward. Wisen
up.
The medium of authority is trust; who do you spend it on? Are you receiving returns? Recognize, re-evaluate, re-order!
Worried about your safety at the expense of your grandchildren’s. What kind of parent does that make you? (not a grand one)
Natural Law prevents retaliation cycles and cumulative potential violence. Reciprocity is as real a law as those in physics.
Today I was called blasphemous; non-sense! 😉 Sorry we’re not sorry: our John, James, Noah and Luke are superior to yours.
Marketing isn’t about procuring customers (consumption); but about liberating agents (production). The people need tools.
Chastising those for their choice making whilst simultaneously eliminating their alternative action vectors is dastardly.
The poor were a problem for the church; oughtn’t they still be? The production arena ought deal only with the producers.
JFK was killed for saying “do something for your country”; and at the time… he was begging. You think it’s gotten better?
They ignored Chesterton’s fence by building paths circumventing the fences and making the case it’s not defense’s destruction.
Solution: revolution via reformation & constitution under threat of escalation & retaliation; it’s like that made explicit or not.
There ought lie liability for stifling sense-making. Twitter & Facebook ought to lift bans. “Community Standards,” are a joke.
It’s not doctors, nurses, teachers, & police; it’s doctoring, nursing, teaching & policing as such. (the actions; not the actors)
Hostility towards an optimal solution denotes preference not to try. How’s not trying working out for you; for everyone else?
Are you making a case for those who have exploited and abused you? Those who have stolen your time and livelihood? Why?
You know: for boys with ADHD sitting in class feels to them as this crisis feels to you. (stop drugging them; fix the landscape)
Speciation is not specialization. It’s a new set of generalizations. Creating robust and resilient agents valued by their groups.
My favorite word is the one the person I’m talking to hates most. If words hurt you; you have problems; I require disassociation.
Sovereignty, reciprocity, and tort affords for the largest degree of individualism without undermining cooperative landscapes.
The responsibilities of building a new world are great; but the suffering of the continuance of the old world are much greater.
Libel, Slander, and Doxxing… this is violence from the authoritarian left. Not defending those targeted means you’re complacent.
Not discussing certain topics/concepts because you oppose them isn’t courage but cowardice. Either you have a case you don’t.
Let’s keep playing games where all the players lie, cheat, steal, and kill whilst all those who depend on the players suffer. USA!
Every person we lose, We lose a book that was never written. Full of knowledge & wisdom that would have helped someone.
Don’t leave anything to chance(gamble) we have a choice(risk). The calculation is easily done; if not suffering from delusion.
Exists 1000s of Laws. Many you’ve broken. Any combinatorics of your meta-data proves it. We have one Law. You have a choice.
If you’re blaming or attempting to better anyone, other than yourself, during this meta-crisis; you’re doing something wrong.
There is no plan; you’re not the first mover; you don’t get to decide where you are. But there is proper action & reaction. OODA
Removal and defacing of monuments are acts of conquest. There’s already a war on American soil distracting us from WW3.
We’re in civil conflict with one another; we’re smart enough to separate, our divorce rates prove that. Let’s make it optimal.
Feminine coercive strategies: Marxism, socialism, postmodernism, feminism, & denialism; undermining truth, trade, and order.
Everyone knows that money is the problem. “Follow the money”; “They’re just in it for the money”… but so are you, demonstrably.
Step up or step aside! No time for internet games. Truth over Face(book). The amount of ego stroking people need is nauseating.
There are still “wellness professionals” charging for their services right now. Shows how much they know about care, don’t it?
Escalation not deescalation. You deescalate to skirt conflict. However, we are already in conflict & escalation leads to resolve.
The only country you can talk openly about revolution; & you fools want to talk about the characters. Golden age or Dark age Pick.
Nothing is lost; no one’s begun to fight. There’re no reactionary agents; but an eventual reaction. It ought be calculated proper.
What’s the cost of your anonymity(personal safety) & social absence(reprieve from the herd) to those who’d fight by your side?
The left is literally terrorist adjacent. It’s an objective reality; a demonstrated fact. Their rules say they ought be othered.
Everyone’s worried about that pesky overton window. Forget that god-damned window; the front door is open! You have a choice.
Cull legislation back decades; instantiate rule OF law (as opposed to arbitrary rule by fiat and rule by lawyers/judges). One law.
Your whole life: go to work, go to work, go to work. Complaints. You’re told to stay home. “This is unbearable.” Maybe it’s you?
Insane asylums are superior to prison for the mentally deranged. Understand those with TDS would occupy these corrective houses.
Everyone’s looking for a fight; demonstrated by the war waged against themselves. Those wars need to end before any others begin.
Exceptions are not exceptional. Ordinary men are made exceptional by becoming extraordinary. We need common men again.
Banks & lenders are “making it convenient” for you to keep paying them. Try, ending late fees, and pushing payments out a month.
The options are chance or choice. The former doesn’t require nor make anything of you. The latter; everything and something.
Our enemies speak for the disenfranchised. We just speak to them. We, those who actually produce everything, have a better offer.
No king worth anything would believe yous worthy to subject you to being subjects. Maybe people ought try being worthy of rule.
Remember when the Government wasted time and didn’t close borders? Hard choices must be made constantly or this gets much worse.
Remember that time BLM took the mic from Bernie Sanders & then the DNC cheated him out of a nomination? Imagine backing the DNC.
How many tactical errors does the enemy have to make before you grasp their incompetence? Constantly doubling down; err, err, err
MOUNTAINS OF QUOTES
PACE; PARSIMONY; PRODUCTION
Pace has picked up; so messages must be clearer; the virus has sped up the clock; it’s time to produce… catch-up and dive in.
{LINK TO ROUND #2: TWO YEARS AND A MOUNTAIN OF QUOTES: OP: facebook.com/brandon.hayes.5851/posts/ 10104064667864921
11/19/2019} [Had to “break” the link so it didn’t have me sharing the old set of quotes close the gap to use it]
Note round one was two years of quotes; this next batch was produced since round #1… 4 months to the day; 1/8 of the time. I did say pace! 🙂
BRANDON HAYES
(Brandon Hayes)
Embrace the speciation.
Life ought be a risk not a gamble.
Money is abundant. Time is scarce.
Neurotypicals are relative primitives.
Intention deficit not attention deficit.
P is a new “cultural cognitive grammar.”
Never look for approval; Seek recognition.
P is the solution for the information ecology.
Pay attention; it pays back with interest. {2017}
Decreasing the power distance frees all the slaves.
I think by 2020 we’ll all be able to see clearly. {2016}
Incentivize animalistic behavior; be delivered animals.
We don’t do hatred; but our love is not unconditional.
The left believes words are weapons; P makes them so.
True jesters don’t use their masks to hide, but to reveal.
Forget independent thinking; get to correspondent first.
More information won’t help; being better informed will.
I love people; I hate what we allow the world to do to them.
Don’t confuse ‘not normal’ with ‘novel’. This is a horrific error.
Never settle for what was considered normal; never, ever again.
The Propertarians are the only group that takes trinities seriously.
The herd wants not for you to succeed; it cares only you conform.
A gang or a train: you’re getting screwed, but, you get to choose how.
Those truth seeking; expose liars. Be curt; do little. They out themselves.
Forget ‘making memories’; you can’t take them with you. Leave Legacies.
Kings create kings; how they do so isn’t important. That they do so well is.
It’s called an “active shooter drill” because it’s a drill for the active shooter.
Once we forgive we ought cease to forbear. It’s unwise to rush the process.
Command, cooperation, and coordination in times of chaos. Fascist is fastest.
Maddening: most murder messengers; meanwhile misunderstanding meaning.
Truth before Face(book). Truth-tell don’t self-sell. You’re only fooling yourself.
Viruses don’t coordinate nor cooperate. Don’t forget what sets humans apart!
Not knowing where you’re going is still “lost,” you know? Mind your time frames.
How’s all that time you spent “bettering yourself” working out? Cost you didn’t it?
Systems and institutions have incentive to remain; ask yourself which ones ought.
Virtue-signalling and counter-signalling the meta-crisis; is noise that ought be stifled.
Look, at some point it’s gonna be on you if you don’t understand; we forbear for now.
The meta-crisis is the greatest opportunity the world has ever seen to properly balkanize.
All those lives ruled and ruined by the financial realm; you know we can de-financialize, right?
What happens to bread and circuses when the clowns don’t show and there’s lines for bread?
Taking violence off the table is the surest way to cloud your judgement. And you MUST judge.
It’s impossible not to judge; those that purport you ought not don’t have your success in mind.
Who loses and who gains by nationalizing visa and mastercard? Better than UBI by check isn’t it?
We can create a world that systematically improves group averages along meaningful dimensions.
The problem is you all believe you’re playing word games; when actually you’re playing war games.
Whatever your social media habits; you ought to up the “share” function usage significantly. 10x it.
Facebook newsfeed still has ads. Why aren’t they suspending paid ads in place of helpful knowhow?
Perception traps will leave your mind blind. Frames are to hold lenses; yet you were born with eyes.
This virus is the variable that broke old sense-making. No combination of popular narratives suffice.
The red-pill is a lot less jagged; much easier to swallow currently. Who’s filling prescriptions for hope?
Imagine thinking the institutional and systematic tools we used to get us into this mess will get us out.
Due to current advancements: Minding your Ps and Qs has new meaning. Realizing relevance required.
Morals and ethics are solved with reciprocal calculation. No, it isn’t hard. You just prefer to lie and steal.
If there was ever a time to prioritize organic feedback in the abstract space; now is that time. No distortions in information.
We can drive this together; but recognize you go nowhere safely without a good frame. Copilots welcome; backseat drivers are not.
Will parents, now struggling to “entertain” their children, begin to realize public school is state sponsored baby-sitting?
What ought to be the popular opinion: This virus has the chance(it ought) to save everyone it doesn’t kill. Separate; Speciate
The single argument against reciprocity: “I’d like to lie, cheat, steal, and kill as it suits me,” it oughtn’t suit anyone.
Reciprocal: “Familism”: Maximum Intergenerational Production. Parasitic: “Individualism”: Maximum Generational Consumption.
A cult(ure) of reciprocity, sovereignty, truth, beauty, duty, excellence, heroism, and markets in all things; it’s not an insult.
Power and preference pool predictably; combine this with an allergy for setting limits; what ought you expect?
How many Boomers that “never missed a day of work in their life,” are missing work? How’s all that “hustle” treating you?
The law of cooperation can lead parasites of the human variety to symbiosis; we’re behind, you ought start shepherding.
My preference isn’t to lead; it’s to lead others to lead themselves. Time is currency; authority is a cost that irks me to incur.
All truths are promises; all lies broken promises. Existence is this serious. We can’t afford the lying any longer.
It’s not just my opinion; framing it as such is admittance you merely speak yours. You project your inadequacies in explanation.
Few first responders to begin with. Peace keepers are second up. They are at high risk for infection. They run out; then what?
As we slash our norms, haphazardly, like Walmart slashes prices, we witness Walmart quality behaviors and individuals emerge.
Everyone pursues money because it’s a proxy for autonomy. It oughtn’t be; the agents chip away at the agentic landscape.
The saddest part of the present zeitgeist(trends) is most will scoff at the hero they need(or need to be) and never be saved.
Multiculturalism is compromis(ed)ing culture. Cultures must be built around something NOT all things. You ask a task impossible.
If we could each make the necessary “black swans” personal; we could stave off those that are bound to be societal.
We suffer more due to undomestication than incivility. Animal behavior isn’t uncivil; for it was never civil to begin with.
It takes the three other archetypes to keep the Devouring Mother at bay. The opening of Pandora’s Box has never been so real.
P is an intellectual disinfectant; make Truth claim; hold the limits of the discourse; liars emerge. The P pied piper method.
Living in nature is superior to living in human nature. Living in nature is an option; are you saying changing human nature isn’t?
Those with timelines that aren’t public; make “public”, posts about this meta-crisis. [Select the little world looking icon]
When community standards undermine the community’s ability to communicate the standards are broken. Ah, duh.
CURT DOOLITTLE
(Curt Doolittle)
Everything is dependent upon electricity.
Hit pieces would be illegal under P-Law.
Efficiency in the aesthetic is a dirty word.
‘Legitimacy’ like ‘Social Justice’ is a nonsense word.
The guild system is superior to the academic system.
Big Lies: Marxist, Postmodern, Feminist, HBD-Denial
It takes at least three markets to produce an equilibrium.
Beyond reciprocity there is no moral question – only war.
Abrahamism: in-group retention and out-group predation.
Largely it’s just that we tell the truth – and no one else does.
Success is dependent almost entirely on conscientiousness.
Eugenics was the MOST moral movement in human history.
It is easier to educate you than to excessively dumb it down.
Always ask who is stealing what and that tells you the answer.
Cities are a behavioral sink. So are school systems. So is the
USA.
Some of us feel anxiety, depression, or pain if we are not learning.
Theology to escape choice, philosophy to choose, science to decide.
All government demonstrations of force, are expressions of weakness.
I want to end philosophy, the way empiricism ended supernaturalism.
Now we get to see the consequences of the so called ‘services’ economy.
Truth can only be produced via-negativa, and choice only by via positiva.
Race is just a convenient low resolution proxy that obscures the problem.
We (want to) criminalize disinformation, misinformation, and manipulation.
Pay government employees by capital generation not income consumption.
Good and evil were invented in the middle east to facilitate cultural warfare.
Your body, your children; my capital, my polity. That’s the deal. No More Lies
Our strategy amounts to paying off the middle to destroy the top and bottom.
End universal enfranchisement and we end the problem. That’s not hard to do.
“We need 1T in stimulus to survive this quickly.” Um. Yeah. Pay down mortgages.
I would like to see a constitution for christianity. Because I bet it can’t be written.
It’s Propertarianism, Sovereigntarianism, or The Natural Law of the European People.
Language is the system of measurement we use for thinking and speaking about the world.
They don’t believe that we aren’t being evil; the same way we can’t believe they’re that stupid.
Our only problem is rates of reproduction of our classes reversing our many centuries of eugenics.
The only thing that melts in the American pot is rule of law, trust, the commons, and the civil society.
European religion used chaos and mischief vs order, and our gods were ‘real people’ with real frailties.
Attention, kindness, compliment, and humor are the cheapest means of contributing to the commons.
Man is amoral, not moral. Morality is just advantageous because we’re superpredators – and dangerous.
Removal of parasitism affords high-trust which affords adaptive velocity. We are not first we are fastest.
We’ve spent 1000s of years outlawing anti-social male behavior; this century let’s outlaw anti-social female behavior.
Judges love to apply law beyond its original intent and judges love to not constrain the law to its original
intent.
Abrhamism infecting the sciences; Eric Weinstein points this out stating; ‘we can’t even have intelligent conversations’.
Abrahamism is showing up in the sciences because you’re no longer able to have masculine competitive conversation.
Creative, innovative, high agency, high risk takers are not suitable for the top universities & the ‘academic grind’.
What we ‘ought’ to do is anything we CAN organize voluntarily TO DO that which is not false or irreciprocal.
If I wrote about art, fashion, relationships, & sex instead of this serious sh-t I’d be happier, & way more popular.
The state deprived us of the user of courts in matters public; we had to invent class action to circumvent that deprivation.
All government action is limited to coercion, either by informing/lying, bribery/deprivation, or force/defense.
P gives us a language at human scale, in human time frames, for human purposes, of achieving godhood ourselves.
Discipline is necessary; Education is good. Training is better. Mentoring is better. Experience is best. Winning is best of all.
Despite pseudoscientific attempts to obscure it, sex differences in bias, cognition, intelligence, were settled by 2012.
Land use and exploitation is a far bigger issue than climate change for species extinction and ecosystem health.
High IQs are more successful at defending the polity and economy from ignorance, error, bais, wishful thinking, & deceit.
The value of our side’s understanding is far less than the harm of the other side’s preparation in advance.
We use P-methodology to create a universally commensurable, value neutral, language across all disciplines.
Spartan Milita, Athenian Thought, Roman Administration, German Engineering, American Entrepreneurship, Italian Art, Slavic Family.
This is the only way to be sure. King of the Hill, Markets for Commons, Markets for Consumption, Competition in Courts, Falsification in Science: Trial & Error.
Think of the postmodern-feminist program as ‘re-wilding’ of humanity, and our constitution as re-socialization and re-militarization so that we restore the civil society, and the excellences that emerge from a homogenous polity.
PAT RYAN
(Pat Ryan)
Humanism is the heroin of morality.
I just don’t make shit up and reeeee about it for lulz.
Oh, Planned Parenthood… your time will come soon.
The bread is sawdust and the circus has too much botox.
What -IS- a cult? What -IS- a cult state? What -IS- an autocult?
Belief is a technique that is used to make sure we aren’t goldfish.
4chan + virtue signal spoofing + CRISPR = eugenics via shitposting
Moral certitude is synthetic violence. Actual violence is resolution.
There wasn’t a Sexual Revolution in the 1960s. You were conquered.
Social media bans contribute to the spread of Corona Virus. (COVID-19)
When I sense any of “Team Right Side Of History’s” playbook, it’s auto-war for me.
All you have to do is abandon your moral certitude. That’s it. Everything will be fine.
Why don’t lab mice rise up from mazes? The freedom beyond the maze terrifies them.
There is no way to separate information from compression. Oh gods, what have I done.
If you don’t put a cork in middle-class white women and soon, y’all gonna have a bad time!
Nearly every single social woe we have stems from the prohibition against organic violence.
A bunch of single children, jealous other children might exist. Explains their abortion worship.
Your genes might have a future! We just shouldn’t automatically assume they should have a future.
When they & their families are deprived of assets, I will be able to share my story. Until then, almost everything is noise.
Turning a nation from farmers to rocket engineers in a single generation has resulted in psychological side effects.
Watch the overeducated flail: Ask programmers why biological signal systems don’t rely on mutual exclusion or deadlocks.
Why aren’t we in space yet!?” Cause every new generation falls prey to sociopsychological traps about equality and fairness.
In all matters of human power dynamics, causality trends towards a specific type of absurdity that can be retroactively justified.
Modern Western psychology have never identified a disorder or disease that inhibits epistemological belief.
“Karen” is going to take over society. And when she asks for the manager, she will be presented with a mirror.
I’m showing what happens when you court insanity in the name of altruism. May all involved burn.
If wasn’t for the overt and complete takeover if the DNC by the CIA, Yang and Tulsi would be fine.
Notice all wars are waged to ‘liberate’ someone not ‘conserve’ their way of life; this is to appease Boomer moral boners
People say love conquers all, but I’ve found love leads to confusion while vengeance leads to conclusions.
When the journalists involved finally fold and beg for mercy by saying, “We were just following orders!”, reply with, “So am I.”
Everything you hate in this world was popularized by marketers appealing to middle class white women. Prove me wrong.
BILL JOSLIN
(By: Bill Joslin)
What do you want; a golden age or a dark age?
Peer Review: an idiot test that became an idiot defense.
Marketing agencies are factories for ‘standard non-features’
“Don’t raise your children; raise your grandchildren’s parents. {2016}
Don’t get wrapped up in competition; contribution will find you your proper place.
If there isn’t a strict hierarchy within a social animal grouping all the animals are anxious.
Semetic languages – hieroglyphic (ambiguous symbolic) European – alphabetic (recursive disambiguation)
Training situational awareness is a short-cut to the higher level benefits of meditation without the mysticism.
ALAIN DWIGHT
(By: Alain Dwight)
“Kleptocracy is profitable up until the point of failure.
We’re the new founding fathers but not just America this time.. this time it’s the entire western world.
It’s a good litmus test for social institutions. Are commons used to hamstring the people or facilitate agency.
JAMES SANTAGATA
(By: James Santagata)
Stop being so cynical. Just light a prayer candle, and vote harder!
First Principles: Explaining is not Complaining. That’s a projection.
Is reincarnation real and how do you know? Well your kids are you. Yes it’s real.
Retaliation, Revenge, Reparations, and Rewards are all simply forms of Reciprocity.
Media: “Stop calling it the China Corona virus!” Me: “Well it’s certainly not the Amish Flu.
The Dead are not very good debaters yet ironically, they are very effective persuaders.
Remember when you thought Anthrax and Ebola were scary? How I pine for the good ole days.
Hi, I’m Pat Ryan, Though you may think otherwise, your genes don’t have a future. This is my Master Class.
LUKE WEINHAGEN
(By: Luke Weinhagen)
Ritual is training. Craftmanship is worship.
We come as lie breakers, not peace makers.
CTRL+Left: 1. Always Lies 2. Always Doubles Down 3. Always Projects
The CTRL-Left are people of cultivated helplessness sustained by invincible ignorance.
Never let the helpless define proportionality. They will reduce the limits for all to their helplessness.
Equality reduces men and women to the opposite’s weaknesses. Compatibility elevates them to the opposite’s strengths.
As soon as their interests shift, so does the loyalty… making it not loyalty at all but merely the trappings of loyalty.
GEAROID WALSH
(By: Gearóid Walsh)
The thing about P is you cannot *bypass* it.”
No, the group strategy is fine. I hate you as individuals, collectively.
People generally avoid the responsibility of discernment and accountability (in the most direct way possible).
Terrorizing boomers with concepts like “nation state, “incentives”, “limits/costs/externalities”, “ir/reciprocity”
Doubling down on partial truths soon brings absolute lies. That is the CTRL+LEFT cult now. They do not have a position anymore.
ERIC WEINSTEIN
(By: Eric Weinstein)
Cultivate civility with disagreeability.
The DISC: Distributed Ideas Suppression Complex
(On the left) there is some weird anti-family thing.
It’s time to inflict ourselves on our own institutions.
We don’t want to see women pushed onto the apps.
How many people are we going to throw on the dummy pile?
Peer review means the exact opposite of what it actually should mean.
Social interactions become rich when people can pass power back and forth.
We’ve deranged society, because society is about continuity and continuity is about babies.
We can lie about us all being the same or we can recognize our gifts lie in different places.
Real peer-review is what happens after you’ve passed the bullshit thing, called peer-review.
We can pass power back and forth; we Jews have the power to celebrate German culture…
No we should not be pushing for citizenship for everyone in the country that is here illegally.
Epstein was behaving like a high 11 figure type guy with what appears to be a 9 figure fortune.
Everyone with-in the gated institutional narrative is hawking one conspiracy theory or another.
Fake Growth: downsizing, off-shoring, immigration, securitization; techniques used to save the system.
Peer review is a cancer from outer-space; it came from the biomedical community and invaded science.
I’m concerned right now about people finding partners to have children with; it’s an economic epidemic.
I’m an incredible hypocrite; hypocrisy offered the greatest benefits per unit of responsibility of all philosophies.
Heroic behavior comes from a group of people who, in general, are viewed as unsavory by the mainstream.
We’re killing our own innovative class with all these extra requirements for collegiality or diversity or regularity.
The American Scientific enterprise: National Science Foundation Academy of Sciences & our university systems are fraudulent.
There are reasons great work can not be peer-reviewed… peer review is not peer review it’s peer injunction.
I’m trying to be long good and short nice; nice doesn’t have a future it’s a performative version that crowds out good.
Economics is the logical meeting place for the two greatest ideas man has ever had.” -Eric Weinstein
String Theory is an affirmative action program for mathematically talented baby boomers to not work on the real world.
SCOTT ADAMS
(By: Scott Adams)
I’m a systems nationalist.
If you can simplify you can frame.
Bernie, now, has gone full racist and full liar.
Republicans blame systems; Democrats blame people.
The Mexican(drug) cartels are a Chinese proxy-military.
Overheard: “Open borders is the opposite of reparations.
Violence is very underrated for a number of different things.
As of today; it’s irresponsible to hold political rallies. {3/10/2020}
This will be the first US presidential race that could be determined by a sneeze.
I’m thinking of registering Democrat just so I can lie to the FBI if I ever need to.
Firing skills > Hiring skills “Trump has more of the former and it’s more important.
Passion feels very democratic. It is the people’s talent, available to all. It’s also mostly bullshit.
I worry that if Bloomberg becomes president he will round up his enemies and put them in cubicles.
If the lasting impact of #WuhanVirus includes the end of shaking hands, could end save more lives than it takes.
The luckiest Americans will be the ones who get Coronavirus first, while there are still medical resources.
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON
(By: G.K. Chesterton)
Logic is simply an intellectual sense of honor.
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
Fairy Tales are perhaps the highest form of art.
I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.
Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
The obvious effect of frivolous divorce will be frivolous marriage.
I write chiefly because I find so many people quite comically wrong.
Politicians have ruined politics; not by being stupid, but by being clever.
Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence.
The great man tries to be ordinary, and becomes extraordinary in the process.
The bully is the man who acts on the assumption that he will not have to fight.
There is nothing more consciously dreary than the deliberate pursuit of pleasure.
When all are sexless there will be equality. There will be no women and no men…
Government may grow into something worse than injustice; it may turn into treachery.
The Press has ceased to be roughly representative, and become almost solely oppressive.
Everybody knows what Birth Control means. It means love towards sex that is not towards life.
Modern people insist on talking about Birth Control when they mean less birth and no control.
It is not easy to draw the line anywhere; that is why it is so necessary to draw the line somewhere.
There are some things more important than peace, and one of them is the dignity of human nature.
It cannot be too often repeated that what destroyed the Family in the modern world was Capitalism.
It is no longer a question of having freedom to indulge folly, but of not having freedom to refuse folly.
You find the necessity of Liberty as you find the necessity of air; by not having enough of it & gasping.
By preaching individualism while preserving inequality, the Reformation produced modern Capitalism.
The worst enemies of the saints could not say of the saints anything worse than they said of themselves.
Professors or Intellectuals; these are a blight and a desolation both to their families and also to mankind.
It is only the man who is brave enough to challenge dragons who can discover that they are only lizards.
People quarrel because they cannot argue; it is extraordinary to notice how few people in the modern world can argue.
The essence of the Sentimentalist; seeking to enjoy every idea without its sequence & every pleasure without its consequence.
Just as it was the mark of old tyranny to stretch the law; the mark of new tyranny to make a law that can be stretched.
I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.
I think the Socialist & the Capitalist are very much alike, especially in the great unifying quality of being both wrong.
Modern man in revolt has become useless; by rebelling against everything he’s lost his right to rebel against anything.
Nationalism: recognition of the right of all nations to be national; the right of other nations, especially of small nations.
Fixed rule is the only protection of ordinary humanity against clever men — who are the natural enemies of humanity.
Of all such educational processes, the hardest and apparently the most hopeless is the education of the educated.
Voting is a bore, while arguing, shouting, heckling, & holding up one’s hand are, on the contrary, great fun.
A man who thinks hard about any subject for several years is in horrible danger of discovering the truth about it.
My complaint merely is that we are sacrificing what is natural and eternal to what is morbid and temporary.
Brandon Hayes
August 20 at 1:58 PM ·
QUOTES ROUND 4 PREFACE
Quotes dates for posts between March, 01, 2020 and July 01, 2020. The pace has stiffened yet again… paying attention to those that are taking in the information for you is wise. These people can save you an enormous amount of time; and time is scarce, money is abundant… which one are you chasing and storing?
THE THIRD WAY EDITION
CURT DOOLITTLE
[The founder of The Propertarian Institute, his work si easily found on the website, it’s cataloged and easily sort through. The next leap in science can come during your life time and you have a choice to enjoy the fruits… never again does this offer manifest before catastrophe.]
Man is risen beast (hero) Not fallen angel (criminal).
As long as you’ve got enough men present it’s a jury.
It is only animals who fear the truth, and liars who avoid it.
The utility of immorality increases as enforceability decreases.
We must educate not prevaricate. It is the cost of transformation.
What you are seeing is the third-world-ization of the USA, by design.
We remember debts better than we remember spatial configurations.
They aren’t used to living in a world that requires constant calculation.
The truth will in fact set you free – at the cost of additional responsibility.
Decidability refers to satisfaction of demand for infallibility in the question.
I mean, I have respect for the queen, but after that it’s just the art of the duel.
Jesus gave us wisdom. It was in addition to our wisdom; not in replacement of it.
An awful lot of us in P considered or briefly participated in one of the priesthoods.
Our social order law, court, houses; the most easily reorganized because it’s procedural.
Deprive the government the ability to extract from the people; decrease power distance.
We must still make neo-marxism and postmodernism and feminism and hbd-denial over.
You need to act; you need to have confidence to act no matter how bad your information.
Having six to ten men around you when you’re afraid and angry tends to reduce resentment.
The present judiciary conflates law, legislation, regulation, and command. We disambiguate them.
Our Militia: The LAW, our jury, and our rights – we are unruled because we forbear for only rule of law.
The tendency for all money to go into debt in Washington DC or New York or Los Angeles will disappear.
Constitutions don’t save you (us). They explain the terms by which others do not need saving from you (us).
Politics is the Entertainment business for ugly people, but both operate in the interests of the evil people.
Abrahamism is as advanced a method of deceit as Aristotelianism is an advanced technique of truth telling.
They don’t want you to know things partly because they don’t want you to go home & judge your parents.
The future looks like being taught P-law, meta-physics, psychology, & sociology in this universal language.
Automate like hell so that our group of people can produce a landscape where we don’t have to work very much.
Self Determination within the Limits of Sovereignty and Reciprocity. Reciprocity within the Limits of Proportionality.
We can try to fight to pull a past that isn’t possible or we can create a future with positive opportunity for all of us.
Feminism as indifferent mediocrities rather than as opposite and compatible excellences was a disaster for the west.
We are proposing the greatest and most rewarding redistribution of power over self determination in human history.
Greece, Rome, & the British Empire are expressions of the European Group Strategy at increasing scales. Militia created.
Males are lean mean machines. Females are the opposite. Neoteny limits maturity, buying time to develop agency.
Police can show up at your house, criminalize something you did by accident, or innocently, and throw you into the system.
Our way is good for everybody, so let’s create the way. We all develop the commons we want and pay the costs for them.
The problem is smart people can’t imagine that their competitive advantage does not translate to the reproductive market.
GKC (Gilbert Keith Chesterton)
[Author, philosopher, Christian apologetic… wrote a book titled “The Third Way”; wiki him if you don’t know him]
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
It is dangerous to be alive; one very often dies of it.
The Citizen has liberty; the Slave can have only leisure.
Public education has not produced an educated public.
I am not afraid of opposition. My God is a God of battles.
It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.
Feminists are, as their name implies, opposed to anything feminine.
Of all horrible religions the most horrible worshiping the god within.
A moral standard must remain the same or it is not a moral standard.
What is wrong with our civilization can be said with one word — unreality.
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
The man is the head of the house, while the woman is the heart of the house.
If a real book has not touched us we might as well not have touched the book.
The bully is the man who acts on the assumption that he will not have to fight.
Those who have nothing to say may say it a million times and in a million forms.
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
Real love is not passive; because one cannot feel it without being ready to fight for it.
Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it.
Those that chastise you for associations are also those that won’t allow for disassociation.
Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.
We are in danger of forgetting all facts, good and bad, in a haze of high-minded phraseology.
The Family is not only an institution, but a foundation, the foundation of nearly all institutions.
Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.
The definition of the true savage is that he laughs when he hurts you; and howls when you hurt him.
Government does not rest on force. Government is force; it rests on consent or a conception of justice.
Men in a state of decadence employ professionals to fight for them, to dance for them, and to rule them.
What the peasant has is exactly what the Individualist never has and the Socialist never has: common sense.
There is no limit to the lunacy of men when they think themselves superior both to laughter and humility.
We are always near the breaking-point when we care only for what is legal and nothing for what is lawful.
The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.
Pornography is not a thing to be argued about with one’s intellect, but to be stamped on with one’s heel.
War is not a proposal; it’s the refusal of all proposals. War is not an institution; it’s the breakdown of all institutions.
Homeless intellectualism of an unhappy age: Bigot: anybody who is sure he is right & other people are wrong.
An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.
It’s easy to be a madman or a heretic. It’s easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own.
A nation is a thing which recognizes a certain moral principle called patriotism, of which the opposite is treason.
All punishment is a sort of righteous rebellion; the revolt of all men against the man who thinks he is the only man.
Civilization is a decision. The indecisive, the higher skeptics, the idealistic doubters have remained barbarians.
What we need, as the ancients understood, is not a politician who is a business man, but a king who is a philosopher.
There is now a false idealism of turning Government into God, by a vague notion that it gives everything to everybody.
Once twenty barely tolerable men owned one newspaper; now 20 newspapers are owned by one barely tolerable man.
The answer to anyone who talks about the surplus population is to ask him whether he is the surplus population…
You don’t know a tyranny until it’s on top of you; until you’re in its trap. The tyrant isn’t present until he’s omnipresent.
When a politician’s opposition he’s an expert on the means to an end; when he’s in office he’s an expert on obstacles to it.
It is rather a curious coincidence that in every controversy in which I have been hitherto I have always been entirely right.
Our education is uneducation; its whole tendency is to unteach people the traditions of their fathers.
All vulgar errors arise from education. The uneducated are generally right: the badly educated are always wrong.
Marxian materialism is a slave morality; a protest against particular authorities made by the spirit of slavery, not liberty.
Why are going on with this double process; cursing the position we are in & blessing everything that’s brought us to it?
In this age everything done inside a house is called ‘drudgery’ while anything done inside an office is called ‘enterprise.’
Outcomes of modern education are uneducated men. Our education is uneducation; to unteach people traditions of their fathers.
P. (P-LAW; Propertarianism)
[It’s THE law for rule OF law]
Not tyranny; symphony. In concert or conflict.
We no longer reward people for telling the truth.
All people are compatible in commerce – that’s the wonder of Trade.
Demarcation between animal and human is agency, not consciousness.
Men require adversarial training. Without it they acquire brain damage.
Sheriffs are elected (‘citizen soldiers’) Police are hired (‘mercenaries’) {Every man a Sheriff}
Reformation: Extensions of involuntary warranty from goods and services to information and speech.
New American Constitution: Preserving trade, treasury, military, and veto(insurer of last resort) power.
If we don’t have universal standing in matters both private & common, we can’t use the court to defend ourselves.
Legislative law is incomprehensible, where as reciprocity (natural law) is both intuitive and comprehensible.
BIG PROBLEM: The law(current) does not recognize interests in the commons when the state is the actor violating them.
The reallocation of capital from media, financial, and academic sectors must serve local rather than imperial demands.
Reformation: Every other possibility ends in random chance. The cost of that will be millions of lives and trillions of dollars.
Nationalize the banks; allow ‘financial talent’ to obtain commissions rather than interest which belongs to the commons.
Reformation: Incremental evolution of our laws such that we suppress and reverse the institutionalization of the arts of lying.
QUOTES #5: JULY/AUGUST 2020
BRANDON HAYES
NBA = No Basketball Anymore
Peaceful demonstrations intensify.
Be like Jesus: Flip tables, whip bankers.
You think the AIs are going to forgive you?
Original sin is ancestral duty for the non-agentic.
Act like a human or be domesticated as you ought.
People wearing masks ought be treated as infectious.
Public education: a Zoom! chat will suffice. No, no; same price!
The time for justice is long past due; a righteous correction lies in wait.
Someone explain to me how multiculturalism isn’t cultural appropriation.
FACT: 2020 has had the lowest number of recorded US deaths since 2009.
Average men are ordinary. Common men are extraordinary. Which are you?
First tell of a worthwhile opinion; it’s counter the opinion holder’s preference.
Dismantle the cities for materials to build US Space Force and colonize the future.
Public education: telling boys they aren’t good girls since the industrial revolution.
You oughtn’t have free speech but the freedom to testify. As that’s what Jesus did.
Look, I don’t like to watch it burn but I’m not gonna not warm my hands by the fire.
All those saying “vote them out”… ah, y’all voted them in and yous haven’t changed.
You can have man’s judgement of God’s laws or you’ll get God’s judgement of man’s.
Gulags and stool-pigeons. Why aren’t we hearing these terms a lot more? …it’s unnerving.
It’s common for those with little to no agency to categorize the successes of others as luck.
Protesting in the street is attempted suicide. (change my mind; that’s how that works, yeah?)
Some lives matter to some people for some reasons. That’s about the extent of it. Value varies.
The truth carries serious cost. Paying it is wise. Not truth carries unbearable cost. No more lies.
Going into public with a mask whilst not sick is sick. Going into public with a mask whilst sick is sick.
Patience not a virtue: good things come to those who wait but only things left by those who hustle.
There’s a difference between gate-keepers and flood-gate-keepers. People ought keep that in mind.
Outcome of a race between Trump and Biden circa 1994? (alternate timeline scenarios encouraged)
Inalienable: unable to alienate. Giving up an inalienable right is unlawful. Inalienable rights are duties.
I prefer not to respectfully disagree with anyone. I vehemently disagree. Cause most people are wrong.
A very healthy dose of “keep your feelings to yourself” would do us a whole lotta good right about now.
Go woke for broke. This is the motto of the NPC/SJW/Pedocrat. Join our zombie hoard or be consumed.
Most of what we consider work(jobs) is merely consumption and its acceleration. You’re not productive.
Abortion, sex changes, & (in)voluntary sterilizations but not home births covered by medical insurance…
There is a single path of sanity. The really real reality tunnel is one of a kind. It’s something to travel together.
There are consequences for tattling and crying wolf. They’re just delayed. Or don’t you read children’s stories.
The Democrats(DNC) haven’t disavowed Antifa nor BLM yet… that makes them terrorists too; 100%. Your move.
In the best America Elon Musk is developing laser guns for the militia forces. But, this isn’t that America… yet.
What kind of criminal do they need to be for you to stop following, voting for, playing with, and paying them?
Failure to integrate is catastrophic for humans. Integration isn’t any different from domestication. Sort it out.
People: Remove/replace all white men! White men: we should band together to stop that. People: Nazis!
Do your job = do your duty. If that equation is untrue for you(which I suspect). You’re not doing your duty.
It’s victims who most often turn perpetrator. Victim cards turn into victimization cards real quick in a pinch.
Any history buffs? When are Gulags the next thing? (modern/future equivalent of a Gulag for bonus points)
Stifled warriors and amplified psychotics. In what reality was this going to work out? Demonstrably not this one.
We have an individualist approach to creating collectives. This is a masturbatory approach. Try actually collecting.
Public education isn’t. Indoctrinating children into a culture of critique and consumption is catastrophic. Change.
Hard to win if you’re not afforded the field. We’ll get you in the game; win. The field will then remain level by law.
Those that throw shade at 2020 (year of clarity): shame on you. This is clearly the best timeline… it’s you if it’s not.
When people stop being exactly how I imagined them to be in person, maybe, I’ll stop judging them online… maybe.
Taleb’s Intellectual yet idiot, are in fact intellectual yet naive(high-trust; moral), presently are intellectual yet immoral.
American Nationalism. Take care of your family first. Those that would steal from your grandchildren are your enemies.
Tolerance requires no agency; it’s lowly not lofty. You’ve been lied to. You either forbear or you can’t/don’t/won’t.
NEWS IN 2020: Ellen DeGeneres fat-shamed an 11-year-old boy in the 1970s. (how do you live with yourselves?)
Delusional people start sentences about manifest reality like this: “I can’t believe…” You can’t believe what’s real, we know.
If you’re not offering forgiveness why ought they? Yous can’t afford your sins. Forgiveness is your only hope for good life.
Never apologize to the mob. Do not offer an explanation. Addressing their concerns gifts them credibility, there isn’t any.
God given rights don’t exist; God given responsibilities do. Upholding God’s given responsibilities affords human rights.
Animals. Coexist, codepend, cooperate, control, command. You can’t even properly coexist with yourselves; this doesn’t end well.
You probably oughtn’t get a vote. A vote is a say in what to do. Your decisions don’t even make things better for you.
Your phone acts like the “jeep on a track” in Jurassic Park. A moving cage peering into habitats. Your water is rippling.
You affect one another; you effect one another; you infect one another. You know we already wear too many masks, right?
I agree with Nancy Pelosi. No debates. We want trials. Start with the top of the last administration (Biden included) work down.
Abundance of information atomizes us; social technology masks this process by passing us through fractionating clusters.
120 million sexually mutilated American men ought choose to solve this cultural pickle: refuse to be in the kosher sandwich.
The right and responsibility to bear arms; true inalienability. Consequence for eschewing responsibility or abusing the right.
Freedom isn’t the affordance to globe trot(travel), but hold property(territory). Parasitic cosmopolitans are stealing from you.
Preferences and opinions are not the same thing. Neither deserve to be respected outright. Nor the people that act on awful ones.
Pandemic Marketing: brag about how often you clean & disinfect. Revealing your previous sub-par(disgusting) standards. Gross.
Most politicians never deliver on their campaign promises yet you expect them to be effective in times of crisis. Fools and tools.
Anxiety and depression are accounting, accordance, and affordance problems. Prescriptions perpetuate perceptions problems.
Take all defunded police & house them in suburban & rural areas surrounding cities. City containment coordination. Militia rings.
PSA: Your preferences are garbage and your opinions don’t matter. Your elephant isn’t special nor unique and neither are you.
Getting paid for your views vs. paying for your views. No. Views oughtn’t cost anything and they oughtn’t afford collision.
2017-2018 high school graduation rates were 85% for whites… You know that 50% of people are below average, right?
Expectations are projections into the future; trying to manage their infinite array is fruitless. Objections; we can handle those.
If you sell bullshit & you market it as bullshit, you’ve made a branding error. But market bullshit as gold get rich, why?
The blue church houses a dead religion and false idols. Its followers are zombies. Aimless, head-down, and seeking brains.
If they can’t live without you how can you claim to be good? Sounds to me like you plausibly create dependents, purposely.
The simplest way to divide world factions: the globalists and China are the enemy. Don’t buy anything they’re selling; they lie.
THE ILLUSION OF DELUSION Paranoia is becoming evidenced justifiable threat detection. Sanity is masked in mass delusion.
Tolerate and its conjugations aren’t found in the Bible. Jesus was intolerant of what isn’t righteous. He spat out the lukewarm.
You don’t get rid of stereotypes by not stereotyping (or worse by punishing their use) but by not acting stereotypically. Try.
The humanity lost behind a mask is incalculable. No one is doing the issue any justice. Your authorities never demonstrate care.
How can one win & lose a war, hate those that saved them AND garner protected status among the saviors? Seems far-fetched, no?
This isn’t an echo chamber but an amplification arena. We’re all saying the same thing; just not the same way. K(no)w we’re right.
You ought be able to hunt those outside the law. Under current arbitrary rule that’d be disastrous and illegal. Your law’s broke.
CURT DOOLITTLE
(Curt Doolittle)
No More Lies. Reciprocity. Commons. Rule of Law.
The capitalism vs socialism debate is a cunning deception to circumvent rule of law.
Rule of law by the natural law of reciprocity is more important than the economic model under it.
All civilizations produce a group strategy, a mythos, rituals to perpetuate it, a means of arguing in favor of it.
Aristocratic Statesmanship (Paternalism) Republican Politics (Pragmatism) Democratic Politicking (Parasitism)
Theology (Strategy/Imagination) > Philosophy (Choice/Ideal) > Law (Reciprocity/Action) > Science (Truth/Testimony)
Courts, churches, business, streets, parks & cemeteries are equally sacred grounds; as safe as your kitchen.
The chief function of a college education is to allow people to exit the market and responsibility for outcomes.
Rule of law prevents rule by men and prohibits the corruption of communism and the criminality of capitalism.
Civicism, localism, nationalism, evolution, competition vs Religion, universalism, globalism, devolution, corruption.
The only Europeans that ever existed were the aristocracy. And we, in our vanity, thought we could replace them.
Democracy was poison. The truth is incompatible with the promise. It’s a false promise, and a contradictory one.
We must teach the common folk how to win when their natural instincts are to do everything possible to continue to lose.
We will choose our destiny by honest discourse or honest violence; but not by restraint of violence in tolerance for lies.
We have been smart for 5000 years: we’ve demanded warranty of one’s words, martial testimony “reporting” in all walks of life.
Military > Empiricism+Testimony > Duty > Investment in the commons > Status regardless of rank > ‘insurance’ regardless of rank
PAT RYAN
(Pat Ryan)
They call us racists, we call them pedocrats.
Affluent White Female Liberal Also known as AWFL
Psychometric liberal capitalism is the worst capitalism.
Being on the Right Side of History will no longer protect you.
Nobody wins because they are right. They win because they win.
Globalism maximizes the dehumanization pipeline we call progress.
Law is the binding force that brings all these domains into balance eventually.
Scientists are not moral authorities. Peer review isn’t a guardian of your rights.
Google literally SWATs people they don’t like. They hate you and they want you dead.
Neurology doesn’t do back-propagation because it is the literal opposite of energy efficiency.
I’m being hard on the lolberts because they default to using mental gymnastics to justify inaction.
You might not believe me, but Trump is the last olive branch you’re going to get. Next time, there won’t be rules.
The symbolic and objective exist in parallel by default. There is often need to merge them to the same construct: “law.”
Younger me: why did we execute, chase out, or exile intellectuals en masse throughout history? Me now: Oh. I get it now.
The Democrats just insult everyone for not consuming the information they paid to consume. Yes, they are really this stupid.
Cantor: Turns everything into Microsoft Excel. Humans: use all power to force EVERYTHING to be spreadsheet compliant.
What do you get when your mother abandons you & you’re told she should have aborted you as it’d have been easier for her.
Trade ought be the only power one holds over another; governance to limit action to trade; law removing those circumventing it.
SCOTT ADAMS
Did the TDS Telethon last night raise enough money for a cure?
It’s time to face a hard truth: Hunter Biden is the smartest Biden.
Where does the “Trump Secret Police Hoax” rank on the hoax list?
Is freedom of speech still different from crime or have they effectively merged?
How many of you have completely lost interest in at least one sport you enjoyed until this year?
Calling white people “White Supremacists” is pure racism, similar to using the N-word. Maybe worse…
F*cking liar Joe Biden still pushing the “Fine People Hoax.” That is 100% disqualifying. Now it’s personal.
I’m planning a micro lesson on how to save your marriage after your spouse catches TDS. Anyone need that?
Historians: Objectively, is Biden the most prolific liar the Democrats have ever nominated to represent their party?
GKC
Wherever there is Animal Worship there is Human Sacrifice.
This is the age of minorities; of groups that rule rather than represent.
Children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.
Americans may go mad when they make laws; but they recover their reason when they disobey them.
The only perfect pleasure in life is the pleasure of fighting for something in which one passionately believes.
An open mind is really a mark of foolishness, like an open mouth. Mouths and minds were made to shut; open’em to shut’em.
Conservatives & progressives are in partnership. They quarrel in public as a put-up job perpetually playing into each other.
MORITZ BIERLING
(Moritz Bierling)
Bottom down and top up.
First the eyes, then the ayes.
Watch out for Woke Supremacists.
I am a meta missionary: I convert people to their own cause.
Talking is done. Action reigns supreme. Move fast and fix things or GTFO.
I think blood and soil, for better or worse, has been replaced by coke & WiFi for far too many people.
LUKE WEINHAGEN
(Luke Weinhagen)
Every man the solution.
Free Speech is being used to destroy Free Testimony.
Reciprocity puts within reach the only equality you can build high trust on: Equality of Character.
MATTHEW PIRKOWSKI
(Matthew Pirkowski)
Resentment is not a policy; its bloody soil will bear fruits that substitute essential nutrients for bitter toxins.
There exist few ideas less sustainable—or more irresponsible—than guilt by association in a hyper-connected world.
JONATHAN PAGEAU
(Jonathan Pageau)
I hope you are ready for the Matrix 4 to be pro Matrix while still pretending to be about a resistance.
ROGER WALRUS
(Roger Walrus)
If we dismantle all this parasitic diversity infrastructure a lot of people would leave.
JAMES KRIEGER
(James Krieger)
Thus the libertarian corpus reproduces talmudism in economic prose.
MELISSA CHEN
(Melissa Chen)
Time to adhere to a policy of reciprocity
THE HURT YOUR FEELINGS EDITION
PAT RYAN (Pat Ryan)
[Pat’s the most dangerous man on the internet; his series on the Dark Stoa is excellent and worth investing the time]
Trauma is essential to the brain.
Words were never designed to convey intent.
They aren’t homeless. They are protesting income tax.
You are unable to prove AIs aren’t behind all mass protests.
Right Side of History is always Right Side of Corporate Profits
I’m not blocking bad faith people. I’m practicing social distancing.
Jeffrey Epstein held the highest stake in the BlackmailCoin network.
Information may want to be free, but law wants it to be harmonious.
Subhumans clamoring for honey instead of vinegar are still subhumans.
“I’M SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER” Speak truth to yourself first, shitbag.
Have we tried calling everyone we know racist yet? Maybe that will help.
Brevity is not only the soul of wit, it is the only way to transfer useful data.
AI Warfare will prove that morality needs to be a treated like Schedule 1 drug.
Dear white people, You can stop your creepy-tier forced politeness at any time.
Now that illegals are returning to Cartexico in droves…. NOW COMES THE ROBOTS.
You know contact tracers are going to be deployed to interfere with you voting, right?
The things we create lets us filter nature, but what we filter from nature then filters us.
Would gradual isolation strategies work on a person who thinks solitary confinement is paradise?
Hope you are all familiar with Butterfly War, because you’re all about to become collateral damage.
Did you know Obama was extremely skilled at woodworking and fencing? Google Obamagate to find out more.
So many Antifa leaders were disappeared this weekend, I could walk unmolested through DC proper today.
When is the low IQ woke squad coming to shut down Planned Parenthood for having a turbo racist founder?
Want to understand the limits of science, ask: “What -ISN’T- racist?” You will never get an answer that makes sense.
They warned us about murder Hornets, but we’ve responded with Chainsaw Mexicans so I’d say we’re about even.
If ceasing revenue from income taxes is the only way to fight Covid, would this tactic also work against global warming?
If the only opposition to your morally pure ideology is an endless stream of conspiracy theories, that’s a conspiracy theory.
Antifa started Minnesota looting and passed off the entire blame on to local blacks. That’s what being a “good ally” means.
Thing is, humans are humans & we have independently across time & space concluded that we will get to child sacrifice.
JAMES SANTAGATA (James Santagata)
[James is a cunning psycological underminer; it’s worth understand those who understand how to get under your skin and influence your thoughts and actions… there are many; James’ll help you spot them]
Don’t run from controversy – seek it out.
Hunger Games soon to be a live action game.
I’ve got good news and bad news. We ain’t seen nothing yet.
May I share a dark secret? I’m an Autistic RomCom movie goer.
Cancel Culture will be ended by Killer Culture. Gonna get messy.
Stranger: “Stay home, you owe us.” Me: “My body, my choice.”
“Morality” prevents most trigger pulls. Catalysts understand this.
The surest way to stop your nightmares is to become someone else’s.
It’s hard to experience PTSD when you’re busy giving it to someone else.
One person’s “intolerance” is another person’s honesty and authenticity.
Sometimes your mistakes are the lessons that others study and learn from.
American jumped the shark long ago. Legalizing drugs and criminalizing work.
Game Theory is only the starting point. Gaming, Game Theory is the objective.
Can’t wait for the Left to tear down the “White Supremacist” Statue of Liberty.
Muscular Entrepreneurialism and Muscular Entrepreneurs are the Modern Day Knights.
Spoken German is verbal Beethoven. Sounds beautiful but unfolds very slowly and methodically.
America 1776: e pluribus unum America 2020: e cannabis lootum America 2021: e bellica shootum
What’s a lock down? Noun: The confining of prisoners to their cells, typically in order to regain control (after a riot).
Advanced Psychological Technology looks like magic to the cognitively dense appearing a scam to the morally depraved.
When Morality is Mathematical rather than Metaphysical you begin to understand what is possible agentially & ecologically.
THE SALIENCE EDITION
SCOTT ADAMS
[Creator of Dilbert; possibly the most accurate political commentator living. Documents all his predictions. Writes extremely helpful books.]
China killed George Floyd as much as the police.
Some celebrities are paying to bail out protesters.
Calling Trump supporters white supremacists is a hate crime.
Did you realize that the worst way to get the news is the news.
Red Pills are falling like hail this week. The old reality is fading.
Is Victim Privilege a thing yet, or are we still pretending it isn’t?
India, Russia, and the United States are natural allies against China.
Looks like another day of lying to each other about everything important.
You might be missing the big story here. China just influenced our elections.
The ridiculousness of blaming this on white nationalists is almost laughable.
Don’t trust any American politician with a good haircut during the lockdown.
Protesting on the streets for racial equality has been proven to be ineffective.
Time for offense. It’s Time to Stop Using an Obama Afghanistan Strategy Against a Virus.
Who’s watching the big game in Tulsa tonight? I’m glad we found a substitute for sports.
Looks like another day looking in all the wrong places for the problems and the solutions.
It feels like conservatives are eating popcorn and watching the left destroy their own stuff.
Black America gave back ten years of gains this weekend. I think that was the opposite of the plan.
Antifa and BLM are learning the same thing ISIS learned, that capturing territory is easier than holding it.
The biggest difference in life outcomes is strategy. The smallest is skin color. Which makes headlines today?
If FDA guidelines would almost certainly cause harm to a patient, is a doctor ethically obligated to ignore the FDA?
What is the right amount of time to wait for an example of systemic racism before discarding it as an illusion?
Is it my imagination or is Great Britain running a Russia intelligence operation against Trump for the second time?
Teen accidentally discovers a powerful form of persuasion called “reciprocity,” thus guaranteeing him a good life.
Democratic party: publicly & loudly supporting a domestic terror organization. Not positioned for the 2020 election.
Obvious racism in Hollywood; I refuse to watch any movies that involve white actors or directors. It encourages them.
JORDAN HALL (
Jordan Hall
)
[Jordan is a regular occurrence here and adept at extracting the essence of any given situation. His Deep Code (including Deep Code Bits) and Civium projects are incredibly salient as well as his work on the Blue-Church.]
It feeds on outrage.
It’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when and how painful.
Minimum compliance to stupid rules is a good idea right now.
Compulsory schooling is an absolute non-sense; compulsory life, well, it turns out that’s just the way it is.
We the people may actually have to start taking matters into our own hands and presenting the right ideas.
Introverts, now is your time. Facetime (or Zoom if you prefer) an extrovert friend who is quarantined alone.
The right choice right now is to stop being passive, that’s hurting everybody. The days of malevolence are over.
It’s not stretching the truth to say that all of our social institutions are a bad combination of corrupt and obsolete.
We are obligate tribal: our reality as humans is in groups that are coherent, that’s when we begin to feel most fully real.
DANIEL SCHMACHTENBERGER (
Daniel Schmachtenberger
)
[Daniel has objectively too long a last name; I suggest checking out the work he’s done on “The War on Sense-Making” and his most recent website.]
Micro-rivalry leads to macro-symbiosis.
States becoming more relevant is a very good idea.
In a place where you are questioning meaningfulness you can bring it.
Sometimes the only way to figure out what the externalities are is to experiment.
The US either needs heroic work to be restored/recreated…or it will fully fail soon.
The rationalist and EA communities ought use words like, sacred and devotion, more.
How do we make a civilization that is anti-fragile with decentralized exponential technology?
Someone doesn’t have to have sloppy metaphysics to be able to understand phenomenology.
Sometimes you gotta put a head on a spike in the yard to keep everyone else from being assh*les.
They’re all on benzos and opiates and porn and Facebook so they’re too weakened and addicted to do anything.
ERIC WEINSTEIN
[Eric is one half of the Weinstein brothers duo(
Bret Weinstein
being the other). Management at Thiel Capital, Academic renegade, thinks against the grain.]
It can not be Trump vs Biden.
This was gonna come no matter what.
It is too trivially easy to destroy individuals.
Grown-ups have bought into magical thinking.
It’s been too easy to pick off the initial adopters.
The great negative externality is potential violence.
Listen carefully: you don’t have to elect Biden or Trump.
Real knowledge has become too dangerous to transmit.
Every peaceful demonstration is a demonstration of potential violence.
People treat me like I’m crazy for caring about the world after I’m dead.
It all begins with the middle finger; the administration has to seek other work!
People are cowards at the moment because if they’re not, they’re unemployed.
Go break the law; go break the law in a way that inspires us not to want to prosecute you.
We are now living the unthinkable because we couldn’t discuss the unsayable in real time.
Universal institutional betrayal: the schools, hospitals, drug companies, our food, our journalists are bad.
We are blind to the effect that somatic pleasure & status pleasure is crowding out fulfillment in our lives.
You incinerate peoples viability, it’s economic warfare: if your reputation is damaged you can’t be trusted.
We are completely confused as to how perilous the present moment is because our luck has been amazing.
We need to get into the institutions and remove the weak leadership. They need to seat people more dangerous.
We do business where we can’t measure and almost everything it produces is negative externality so it has to be disguised.
MY PERSONAL COLLECTION
I care that you can think much more than what you think. If you can think, you can calculate and the only differences in our actions will be dictated by preference(in the case of pursuit) and law(in the case of punishment).
To many of you have been taught what to think AND how to act based on that very thinking… unlearn that. Learn how to think; if you can’t form your own thoughts find someone who can to help you. The chances those steering your decisions have your best interests in mind are slim.
Last thing; the quotes… they aren’t false.
BRANDON HAYES
P comes before Q
There’s a 3rd way.
Tone oughtn’t matter.
Leadership divided isn’t.
The world JUST got real.
Big brothers or Big brother?
They boil the frogs too fast.
Who’s gonna walk their talk?
Economics is a moral discipline.
Decide and act more frequently.
Those who lie always shift liability.
Money can’t pay for what is owed.
It’d be a lot simpler if you didn’t lie.
Moral philosophers are anything but.
Why Kings; they pay with their heads.
Going back to normal is nonessential.
Unity around utility is a beautiful thing.
Your rules and protocol are failing you.
You’re not going to think your way out.
Corona Virus: The real “cancel culture”.
They’re all playing right into our hands.
Why Kings; better subjects than objects.
Got it: you don’t like your own company.
The only reasonable takes are hot takes.
Seeking happiness is a haphazard strategy.
Bring your guns but keep your masks at home.
Think: how do we reduce asset price inflation?
All those protesting received a public education.
Proper timing separates knowhow from wisdom.
The problem with “Game A” is that it’s one game.
Choose to change your operating methodologies.
The best thing you can do is teach people to play.
If our rule of law were fair; nobody would be in fear.
You see problems where you ought see possibilities.
Reciprocity is a moral rule that bears no exception(s).
It’s a huge mistake to think this isn’t the best timeline.
It’s time for people that act in the clutch; it’s the clutch.
The speed of collapse is faster than being anticipated for.
Black Americans are at the most risk whilst in the womb.
For all those with any agency the cage doors just opened.
Dragging your feet? You might as well be dragging bodies.
Trust is the metric you ought be seeking to maximize here.
Just listen to your elected officials; that’ll do pig, that’ll do.
What’s coming won’t be measured but it will be calculated.
You do understand that no one cares how you feel… right?
“It’s HIS will” (and all variations) IS admittance of addiction.
There are many things that need be done regardless of cost.
Big brother. or Brothers in arms? I thought this was America.
Practice adversarialism: Try being encouragingly antagonistic.
What happens to victims when the world is devoid of heroes?
Stop exporting expertise; you can import it. It’s 2020 you know.
Without my job I can’t afford to live… sounds like slavery to me.
Proper market to equlibrate: Step-up; Step-aside; or Stepped on.
Not defending monuments is a monumental failure of the militia.
We ought to depend on one another more and use each other less.
Exhausting forgiveness is not the same as forgiving until exhausted.
You’re going to have to explain how it is you didn’t see this coming…
Why’s it people always want straight answers to crooked questions?
You do understand that once everything is racist then nothing is, yes?
When this thing is over; and we win. I’m going to shake all your hands.
Free trade isn’t free; it costs freedom. It frees trade and creates slaves.
Y’all know the name George Floyd but not the name Duncan Lemp. Why?
Imagine thinking that voting was going to release us from this nightmare.
You all had your chance for honesty; that ship has sailed. Truth rules now.
I was described by someone close to me as progressive. Thing is; I’m right.
They’ve divided you by affording you the opportunity to divide yourselves.
Critique is fancy lying; critics are frauds. Don’t ask questions; seek answers.
Democracy dies in “blah blah blah.” No, democracy dies. It does so by suicide.
Let 1000 Nations Bloom… “Bloom” (like a flower) NOT “boom”! Pay attention.
We practically get along under terrible conditions. We’re offering better ones.
Guess what happens when inaction is built into the processes of your systems.
This is the American experiment; we desperately need to alter the parameters.
Go home. None of us get enough sleep. And people sleep easier around family.
I figured it out; this is what it’s like when the victim card doesn’t work anymore.
They can’t even walk the walk when they’re commanded to sit down and stay put.
You’re no good to us (nor yourself, nor your loved ones) if you can be preyed upon.
Lying about racism is a much larger problem in scope and severity than racism itself.
It’s natural to feel like a victim; hell, you may even be one. Acting like one is the error.
Being mean is incredibly effective if honest and you follow it up with being nice twice.
Call your state Representatives or Governor; I bet they can do something to help you…
We’ve spent so long practicing deescalation we don’t know what escalation looks like.
You don’t have a case: “I’d like to lie, cheat, steal and kill as it suits me,” isn’t going to fly.
So, now that Joe Biden has the endorsement of a warlord… are we gonna other him now?
Know what a great April Fools joke would be? Pretending we’re all going to pay our bills…
Not many generations get handed a reset button… That “easy button” shit doesn’t count.
We’ll never undermine your agency or your interpersonal relationships with those you love.
Social media is a problem in the way a hammer is a problem if you’re striking children with it.
P is pro-actively reactive at the nodal level so reaction at the group level becomes diminished.
The solution is a very simple contract between sovereigns. (oh, that’s Kings <and a compliment)
They only allow you the privilege of victim-hood… and that’s gonna go away. Pick a better team.
Consumerism driven parasitism is an infection. Short course of a rough treatment. Then it’s over.
In hindsight they lacked the foresight. Keep asking the people that got you into this to get you out.
You want a universal humanist position? You can have ours; we however, will not suffer any of yours.
Imagine thinking our global economies would be in good shape had this pandemic not taken place…
If your threat detectors were functioning so astutely how do you find yourself surrounded by threat?
You are a mind/body; it’s one thing. Your first sense is spatial awareness. Don’t separate from being.
The global system was negligent in being a parent. We’d have taken their children by force. Grow-up.
This is a law problem. A constitution problem. Because it’s an affront to our constitution. War is here.
Libertarianism maintains the Marxist prohibition on common property as communism does on private.
It’s because money means more to you than anything else. You can say what you like; you act this way.
Last summer I described this chaos(clusterf*ck) as morally imperative to repair, it’s only more so now.
The left always objects for the same reason; the “objectionable” example is devastating to their case.
Words written and/or uttered ought put constraints on response ability in the direction of responsibility.
Evil appears most obviously as performative contradiction. (this is when your action betrays your words)
We’re letting the only home-grown terrorists we have destroy our history… AND they’re technically girls!
Y’all squabble about the past; meanwhile the technology exists to shape the future. Wasting time is a sin.
Note: Wells Fargo, Chase and Bank of America have all sided with terrorists… pulling your patronage is wise.
You impossibly under-estimate the power of a first follower; humans can not only acquire them but be them.
We are blind to the effect that somatic pleasure & status pleasure is crowding out fulfillment in our lives.
We’re making a new team; a reciprocal one; one where those who oppose us actually are the “bad guys.”
The one time you’re among the victims; silence. Maybe you don’t know what being wronged feels like yet?
They are trying to save the currency system instead of saving our lives. Once you see it you can’t unsee it.
Ever play a chess game where each of your pieces also plays 4D chess? Maybe you don’t know what to do?
This is a militia problem; a neighboring-up issue. Military is for
bases and borders. You all fell short of the mark.
The internet never forgets; so it must forgive. Sacrificing people
at the alter of digital virtue is sin. It’s untenable.
Economic growth is a danger to our future; we need to re-till our
landscapes for agency. People over profits.
Reciprocity: making sure Americans aren’t left behind.
Parasitism: making sure the system & institutions survive.
Remember when Americans used to innovate? You know for more than just… enhancing the filters on selfies.
We’ve extended childhood indefinitely and removed innocence completely. Just go about your day; it’ll be fine.
These aren’t the most uncertain times, but the most certain. Uncertainty in thought leads to predictable action.
As a “mental health professional”: relieving the underlying tension of the globe right now is the move; Just Ask.
A Corona Baby Boom is inevitable! Oughtn’t we prepare the world for them? Are the current systems suitable?
The only words that have power are the ones believed to be true. With no lies all words are good and powerful.
One human life is worth more than any system or institution. They’ve already accrued debt they can’t pay back.
It doesn’t matter that the truth is expensive. We can just make the lies equally or more so. Then truth is cost effective.
How much of a victim can you be when the greatest trauma you’ve faced wasn’t even your own? Asking for a friend…
Credit Card companies; now’s a hell of a time to start deferring interest, Yes? Late to the party; don’t you have PR?
Politics undermined our legal system. Economics has hijacked our nervous systems. War has been foreign. Weak.
Unwise of the unjust to scream for justice. Our justice won’t suit you. Silence, however, may bring forgiveness.
Decreasing power distance decreases punishment response time increasing behavioral modification effectiveness.
The world is a poorly put together set of doggie daycare centers; demonstrably! Properly distribute the packs by kind.
So, let me get this straight; you want to stop the virus to go back to the actives that allowed a virus like this to spread?
The feminine ethic has no place in masculine realms; balance is achieved through interplay NOT integration.
Are perpetually accidentally antagonistic people aggravating enough yet? Terrible games produce terrible prizes.
After 9/11 we failed at re-establishing our nation. We failed again in 2008. Are you willing to say we failed in 2020?
P.S. Most are popularity seekers not problem solvers. Preaching on problems for popularity. Seldom do solutions surface.
Rites of passage changed people. Yet present humans say people don’t change. Maybe they’re not oppressed but unfit.
Imagine sitting at home in quarantine thinking; “no worries, the government and the banks got this, what’s on netflix?”
You will get no solutions nor assistance from the right(GOP) nor the left(DNC); and you’re fighting over which to choose.
Steal your time back: We can’t give back what’s passed; but we can free-up what you’ve been tricked to promise. They lied.
Everyone’s thinking about saving their jobs and not saving you. They can only see the future within the rules of the game.
All the “big heads” are wrong. Obviously, they got you here. They aren’t fit to get you out. You have neighbors for that.
Secure a bag for adults & half-bags for the children; Monthly. Use Credit Card infrastructure to distribute liquidity; no cheats.
If you garner your news & narrative world view from the television or radio you won’t get a say moving forward. Wisen
up.
The medium of authority is trust; who do you spend it on? Are you receiving returns? Recognize, re-evaluate, re-order!
Worried about your safety at the expense of your grandchildren’s. What kind of parent does that make you? (not a grand one)
Natural Law prevents retaliation cycles and cumulative potential violence. Reciprocity is as real a law as those in physics.
Today I was called blasphemous; non-sense! 😉 Sorry we’re not sorry: our John, James, Noah and Luke are superior to yours.
Marketing isn’t about procuring customers (consumption); but about liberating agents (production). The people need tools.
Chastising those for their choice making whilst simultaneously eliminating their alternative action vectors is dastardly.
The poor were a problem for the church; oughtn’t they still be? The production arena ought deal only with the producers.
JFK was killed for saying “do something for your country”; and at the time… he was begging. You think it’s gotten better?
They ignored Chesterton’s fence by building paths circumventing the fences and making the case it’s not defense’s destruction.
Solution: revolution via reformation & constitution under threat of escalation & retaliation; it’s like that made explicit or not.
There ought lie liability for stifling sense-making. Twitter & Facebook ought to lift bans. “Community Standards,” are a joke.
It’s not doctors, nurses, teachers, & police; it’s doctoring, nursing, teaching & policing as such. (the actions; not the actors)
Hostility towards an optimal solution denotes preference not to try. How’s not trying working out for you; for everyone else?
Are you making a case for those who have exploited and abused you? Those who have stolen your time and livelihood? Why?
You know: for boys with ADHD sitting in class feels to them as this crisis feels to you. (stop drugging them; fix the landscape)
Speciation is not specialization. It’s a new set of generalizations. Creating robust and resilient agents valued by their groups.
My favorite word is the one the person I’m talking to hates most. If words hurt you; you have problems; I require disassociation.
Sovereignty, reciprocity, and tort affords for the largest degree of individualism without undermining cooperative landscapes.
The responsibilities of building a new world are great; but the suffering of the continuance of the old world are much greater.
Libel, Slander, and Doxxing… this is violence from the authoritarian left. Not defending those targeted means you’re complacent.
Not discussing certain topics/concepts because you oppose them isn’t courage but cowardice. Either you have a case you don’t.
Let’s keep playing games where all the players lie, cheat, steal, and kill whilst all those who depend on the players suffer. USA!
Every person we lose, We lose a book that was never written. Full of knowledge & wisdom that would have helped someone.
Don’t leave anything to chance(gamble) we have a choice(risk). The calculation is easily done; if not suffering from delusion.
Exists 1000s of Laws. Many you’ve broken. Any combinatorics of your meta-data proves it. We have one Law. You have a choice.
If you’re blaming or attempting to better anyone, other than yourself, during this meta-crisis; you’re doing something wrong.
There is no plan; you’re not the first mover; you don’t get to decide where you are. But there is proper action & reaction. OODA
Removal and defacing of monuments are acts of conquest. There’s already a war on American soil distracting us from WW3.
We’re in civil conflict with one another; we’re smart enough to separate, our divorce rates prove that. Let’s make it optimal.
Feminine coercive strategies: Marxism, socialism, postmodernism, feminism, & denialism; undermining truth, trade, and order.
Everyone knows that money is the problem. “Follow the money”; “They’re just in it for the money”… but so are you, demonstrably.
Step up or step aside! No time for internet games. Truth over Face(book). The amount of ego stroking people need is nauseating.
There are still “wellness professionals” charging for their services right now. Shows how much they know about care, don’t it?
Escalation not deescalation. You deescalate to skirt conflict. However, we are already in conflict & escalation leads to resolve.
The only country you can talk openly about revolution; & you fools want to talk about the characters. Golden age or Dark age Pick.
Nothing is lost; no one’s begun to fight. There’re no reactionary agents; but an eventual reaction. It ought be calculated proper.
What’s the cost of your anonymity(personal safety) & social absence(reprieve from the herd) to those who’d fight by your side?
The left is literally terrorist adjacent. It’s an objective reality; a demonstrated fact. Their rules say they ought be othered.
Everyone’s worried about that pesky overton window. Forget that god-damned window; the front door is open! You have a choice.
Cull legislation back decades; instantiate rule OF law (as opposed to arbitrary rule by fiat and rule by lawyers/judges). One law.
Your whole life: go to work, go to work, go to work. Complaints. You’re told to stay home. “This is unbearable.” Maybe it’s you?
Insane asylums are superior to prison for the mentally deranged. Understand those with TDS would occupy these corrective houses.
Everyone’s looking for a fight; demonstrated by the war waged against themselves. Those wars need to end before any others begin.
Exceptions are not exceptional. Ordinary men are made exceptional by becoming extraordinary. We need common men again.
Banks & lenders are “making it convenient” for you to keep paying them. Try, ending late fees, and pushing payments out a month.
The options are chance or choice. The former doesn’t require nor make anything of you. The latter; everything and something.
Our enemies speak for the disenfranchised. We just speak to them. We, those who actually produce everything, have a better offer.
No king worth anything would believe yous worthy to subject you to being subjects. Maybe people ought try being worthy of rule.
Remember when the Government wasted time and didn’t close borders? Hard choices must be made constantly or this gets much worse.
Remember that time BLM took the mic from Bernie Sanders & then the DNC cheated him out of a nomination? Imagine backing the DNC.
How many tactical errors does the enemy have to make before you grasp their incompetence? Constantly doubling down; err, err, err
MOUNTAINS OF QUOTES
PACE; PARSIMONY; PRODUCTION
Pace has picked up; so messages must be clearer; the virus has sped up the clock; it’s time to produce… catch-up and dive in.
{LINK TO ROUND #2: TWO YEARS AND A MOUNTAIN OF QUOTES: OP: facebook.com/brandon.hayes.5851/posts/ 10104064667864921
11/19/2019} [Had to “break” the link so it didn’t have me sharing the old set of quotes close the gap to use it]
Note round one was two years of quotes; this next batch was produced since round #1… 4 months to the day; 1/8 of the time. I did say pace! 🙂
BRANDON HAYES
(Brandon Hayes)
Embrace the speciation.
Life ought be a risk not a gamble.
Money is abundant. Time is scarce.
Neurotypicals are relative primitives.
Intention deficit not attention deficit.
P is a new “cultural cognitive grammar.”
Never look for approval; Seek recognition.
P is the solution for the information ecology.
Pay attention; it pays back with interest. {2017}
Decreasing the power distance frees all the slaves.
I think by 2020 we’ll all be able to see clearly. {2016}
Incentivize animalistic behavior; be delivered animals.
We don’t do hatred; but our love is not unconditional.
The left believes words are weapons; P makes them so.
True jesters don’t use their masks to hide, but to reveal.
Forget independent thinking; get to correspondent first.
More information won’t help; being better informed will.
I love people; I hate what we allow the world to do to them.
Don’t confuse ‘not normal’ with ‘novel’. This is a horrific error.
Never settle for what was considered normal; never, ever again.
The Propertarians are the only group that takes trinities seriously.
The herd wants not for you to succeed; it cares only you conform.
A gang or a train: you’re getting screwed, but, you get to choose how.
Those truth seeking; expose liars. Be curt; do little. They out themselves.
Forget ‘making memories’; you can’t take them with you. Leave Legacies.
Kings create kings; how they do so isn’t important. That they do so well is.
It’s called an “active shooter drill” because it’s a drill for the active shooter.
Once we forgive we ought cease to forbear. It’s unwise to rush the process.
Command, cooperation, and coordination in times of chaos. Fascist is fastest.
Maddening: most murder messengers; meanwhile misunderstanding meaning.
Truth before Face(book). Truth-tell don’t self-sell. You’re only fooling yourself.
Viruses don’t coordinate nor cooperate. Don’t forget what sets humans apart!
Not knowing where you’re going is still “lost,” you know? Mind your time frames.
How’s all that time you spent “bettering yourself” working out? Cost you didn’t it?
Systems and institutions have incentive to remain; ask yourself which ones ought.
Virtue-signalling and counter-signalling the meta-crisis; is noise that ought be stifled.
Look, at some point it’s gonna be on you if you don’t understand; we forbear for now.
The meta-crisis is the greatest opportunity the world has ever seen to properly balkanize.
All those lives ruled and ruined by the financial realm; you know we can de-financialize, right?
What happens to bread and circuses when the clowns don’t show and there’s lines for bread?
Taking violence off the table is the surest way to cloud your judgement. And you MUST judge.
It’s impossible not to judge; those that purport you ought not don’t have your success in mind.
Who loses and who gains by nationalizing visa and mastercard? Better than UBI by check isn’t it?
We can create a world that systematically improves group averages along meaningful dimensions.
The problem is you all believe you’re playing word games; when actually you’re playing war games.
Whatever your social media habits; you ought to up the “share” function usage significantly. 10x it.
Facebook newsfeed still has ads. Why aren’t they suspending paid ads in place of helpful knowhow?
Perception traps will leave your mind blind. Frames are to hold lenses; yet you were born with eyes.
This virus is the variable that broke old sense-making. No combination of popular narratives suffice.
The red-pill is a lot less jagged; much easier to swallow currently. Who’s filling prescriptions for hope?
Imagine thinking the institutional and systematic tools we used to get us into this mess will get us out.
Due to current advancements: Minding your Ps and Qs has new meaning. Realizing relevance required.
Morals and ethics are solved with reciprocal calculation. No, it isn’t hard. You just prefer to lie and steal.
If there was ever a time to prioritize organic feedback in the abstract space; now is that time. No distortions in information.
We can drive this together; but recognize you go nowhere safely without a good frame. Copilots welcome; backseat drivers are not.
Will parents, now struggling to “entertain” their children, begin to realize public school is state sponsored baby-sitting?
What ought to be the popular opinion: This virus has the chance(it ought) to save everyone it doesn’t kill. Separate; Speciate
The single argument against reciprocity: “I’d like to lie, cheat, steal, and kill as it suits me,” it oughtn’t suit anyone.
Reciprocal: “Familism”: Maximum Intergenerational Production. Parasitic: “Individualism”: Maximum Generational Consumption.
A cult(ure) of reciprocity, sovereignty, truth, beauty, duty, excellence, heroism, and markets in all things; it’s not an insult.
Power and preference pool predictably; combine this with an allergy for setting limits; what ought you expect?
How many Boomers that “never missed a day of work in their life,” are missing work? How’s all that “hustle” treating you?
The law of cooperation can lead parasites of the human variety to symbiosis; we’re behind, you ought start shepherding.
My preference isn’t to lead; it’s to lead others to lead themselves. Time is currency; authority is a cost that irks me to incur.
All truths are promises; all lies broken promises. Existence is this serious. We can’t afford the lying any longer.
It’s not just my opinion; framing it as such is admittance you merely speak yours. You project your inadequacies in explanation.
Few first responders to begin with. Peace keepers are second up. They are at high risk for infection. They run out; then what?
As we slash our norms, haphazardly, like Walmart slashes prices, we witness Walmart quality behaviors and individuals emerge.
Everyone pursues money because it’s a proxy for autonomy. It oughtn’t be; the agents chip away at the agentic landscape.
The saddest part of the present zeitgeist(trends) is most will scoff at the hero they need(or need to be) and never be saved.
Multiculturalism is compromis(ed)ing culture. Cultures must be built around something NOT all things. You ask a task impossible.
If we could each make the necessary “black swans” personal; we could stave off those that are bound to be societal.
We suffer more due to undomestication than incivility. Animal behavior isn’t uncivil; for it was never civil to begin with.
It takes the three other archetypes to keep the Devouring Mother at bay. The opening of Pandora’s Box has never been so real.
P is an intellectual disinfectant; make Truth claim; hold the limits of the discourse; liars emerge. The P pied piper method.
Living in nature is superior to living in human nature. Living in nature is an option; are you saying changing human nature isn’t?
Those with timelines that aren’t public; make “public”, posts about this meta-crisis. [Select the little world looking icon]
When community standards undermine the community’s ability to communicate the standards are broken. Ah, duh.
CURT DOOLITTLE
(Curt Doolittle)
Everything is dependent upon electricity.
Hit pieces would be illegal under P-Law.
Efficiency in the aesthetic is a dirty word.
‘Legitimacy’ like ‘Social Justice’ is a nonsense word.
The guild system is superior to the academic system.
Big Lies: Marxist, Postmodern, Feminist, HBD-Denial
It takes at least three markets to produce an equilibrium.
Beyond reciprocity there is no moral question – only war.
Abrahamism: in-group retention and out-group predation.
Largely it’s just that we tell the truth – and no one else does.
Success is dependent almost entirely on conscientiousness.
Eugenics was the MOST moral movement in human history.
It is easier to educate you than to excessively dumb it down.
Always ask who is stealing what and that tells you the answer.
Cities are a behavioral sink. So are school systems. So is the
USA.
Some of us feel anxiety, depression, or pain if we are not learning.
Theology to escape choice, philosophy to choose, science to decide.
All government demonstrations of force, are expressions of weakness.
I want to end philosophy, the way empiricism ended supernaturalism.
Now we get to see the consequences of the so called ‘services’ economy.
Truth can only be produced via-negativa, and choice only by via positiva.
Race is just a convenient low resolution proxy that obscures the problem.
We (want to) criminalize disinformation, misinformation, and manipulation.
Pay government employees by capital generation not income consumption.
Good and evil were invented in the middle east to facilitate cultural warfare.
Your body, your children; my capital, my polity. That’s the deal. No More Lies
Our strategy amounts to paying off the middle to destroy the top and bottom.
End universal enfranchisement and we end the problem. That’s not hard to do.
“We need 1T in stimulus to survive this quickly.” Um. Yeah. Pay down mortgages.
I would like to see a constitution for christianity. Because I bet it can’t be written.
It’s Propertarianism, Sovereigntarianism, or The Natural Law of the European People.
Language is the system of measurement we use for thinking and speaking about the world.
They don’t believe that we aren’t being evil; the same way we can’t believe they’re that stupid.
Our only problem is rates of reproduction of our classes reversing our many centuries of eugenics.
The only thing that melts in the American pot is rule of law, trust, the commons, and the civil society.
European religion used chaos and mischief vs order, and our gods were ‘real people’ with real frailties.
Attention, kindness, compliment, and humor are the cheapest means of contributing to the commons.
Man is amoral, not moral. Morality is just advantageous because we’re superpredators – and dangerous.
Removal of parasitism affords high-trust which affords adaptive velocity. We are not first we are fastest.
We’ve spent 1000s of years outlawing anti-social male behavior; this century let’s outlaw anti-social female behavior.
Judges love to apply law beyond its original intent and judges love to not constrain the law to its original
intent.
Abrhamism infecting the sciences; Eric Weinstein points this out stating; ‘we can’t even have intelligent conversations’.
Abrahamism is showing up in the sciences because you’re no longer able to have masculine competitive conversation.
Creative, innovative, high agency, high risk takers are not suitable for the top universities & the ‘academic grind’.
What we ‘ought’ to do is anything we CAN organize voluntarily TO DO that which is not false or irreciprocal.
If I wrote about art, fashion, relationships, & sex instead of this serious sh-t I’d be happier, & way more popular.
The state deprived us of the user of courts in matters public; we had to invent class action to circumvent that deprivation.
All government action is limited to coercion, either by informing/lying, bribery/deprivation, or force/defense.
P gives us a language at human scale, in human time frames, for human purposes, of achieving godhood ourselves.
Discipline is necessary; Education is good. Training is better. Mentoring is better. Experience is best. Winning is best of all.
Despite pseudoscientific attempts to obscure it, sex differences in bias, cognition, intelligence, were settled by 2012.
Land use and exploitation is a far bigger issue than climate change for species extinction and ecosystem health.
High IQs are more successful at defending the polity and economy from ignorance, error, bais, wishful thinking, & deceit.
The value of our side’s understanding is far less than the harm of the other side’s preparation in advance.
We use P-methodology to create a universally commensurable, value neutral, language across all disciplines.
Spartan Milita, Athenian Thought, Roman Administration, German Engineering, American Entrepreneurship, Italian Art, Slavic Family.
This is the only way to be sure. King of the Hill, Markets for Commons, Markets for Consumption, Competition in Courts, Falsification in Science: Trial & Error.
Think of the postmodern-feminist program as ‘re-wilding’ of humanity, and our constitution as re-socialization and re-militarization so that we restore the civil society, and the excellences that emerge from a homogenous polity.
PAT RYAN
(Pat Ryan)
Humanism is the heroin of morality.
I just don’t make shit up and reeeee about it for lulz.
Oh, Planned Parenthood… your time will come soon.
The bread is sawdust and the circus has too much botox.
What -IS- a cult? What -IS- a cult state? What -IS- an autocult?
Belief is a technique that is used to make sure we aren’t goldfish.
4chan + virtue signal spoofing + CRISPR = eugenics via shitposting
Moral certitude is synthetic violence. Actual violence is resolution.
There wasn’t a Sexual Revolution in the 1960s. You were conquered.
Social media bans contribute to the spread of Corona Virus. (COVID-19)
When I sense any of “Team Right Side Of History’s” playbook, it’s auto-war for me.
All you have to do is abandon your moral certitude. That’s it. Everything will be fine.
Why don’t lab mice rise up from mazes? The freedom beyond the maze terrifies them.
There is no way to separate information from compression. Oh gods, what have I done.
If you don’t put a cork in middle-class white women and soon, y’all gonna have a bad time!
Nearly every single social woe we have stems from the prohibition against organic violence.
A bunch of single children, jealous other children might exist. Explains their abortion worship.
Your genes might have a future! We just shouldn’t automatically assume they should have a future.
When they & their families are deprived of assets, I will be able to share my story. Until then, almost everything is noise.
Turning a nation from farmers to rocket engineers in a single generation has resulted in psychological side effects.
Watch the overeducated flail: Ask programmers why biological signal systems don’t rely on mutual exclusion or deadlocks.
Why aren’t we in space yet!?” Cause every new generation falls prey to sociopsychological traps about equality and fairness.
In all matters of human power dynamics, causality trends towards a specific type of absurdity that can be retroactively justified.
Modern Western psychology have never identified a disorder or disease that inhibits epistemological belief.
“Karen” is going to take over society. And when she asks for the manager, she will be presented with a mirror.
I’m showing what happens when you court insanity in the name of altruism. May all involved burn.
If wasn’t for the overt and complete takeover if the DNC by the CIA, Yang and Tulsi would be fine.
Notice all wars are waged to ‘liberate’ someone not ‘conserve’ their way of life; this is to appease Boomer moral boners
People say love conquers all, but I’ve found love leads to confusion while vengeance leads to conclusions.
When the journalists involved finally fold and beg for mercy by saying, “We were just following orders!”, reply with, “So am I.”
Everything you hate in this world was popularized by marketers appealing to middle class white women. Prove me wrong.
BILL JOSLIN
(By: Bill Joslin)
What do you want; a golden age or a dark age?
Peer Review: an idiot test that became an idiot defense.
Marketing agencies are factories for ‘standard non-features’
“Don’t raise your children; raise your grandchildren’s parents. {2016}
Don’t get wrapped up in competition; contribution will find you your proper place.
If there isn’t a strict hierarchy within a social animal grouping all the animals are anxious.
Semetic languages – hieroglyphic (ambiguous symbolic) European – alphabetic (recursive disambiguation)
Training situational awareness is a short-cut to the higher level benefits of meditation without the mysticism.
ALAIN DWIGHT
(By: Alain Dwight)
“Kleptocracy is profitable up until the point of failure.
We’re the new founding fathers but not just America this time.. this time it’s the entire western world.
It’s a good litmus test for social institutions. Are commons used to hamstring the people or facilitate agency.
JAMES SANTAGATA
(By: James Santagata)
Stop being so cynical. Just light a prayer candle, and vote harder!
First Principles: Explaining is not Complaining. That’s a projection.
Is reincarnation real and how do you know? Well your kids are you. Yes it’s real.
Retaliation, Revenge, Reparations, and Rewards are all simply forms of Reciprocity.
Media: “Stop calling it the China Corona virus!” Me: “Well it’s certainly not the Amish Flu.
The Dead are not very good debaters yet ironically, they are very effective persuaders.
Remember when you thought Anthrax and Ebola were scary? How I pine for the good ole days.
Hi, I’m Pat Ryan, Though you may think otherwise, your genes don’t have a future. This is my Master Class.
LUKE WEINHAGEN
(By: Luke Weinhagen)
Ritual is training. Craftmanship is worship.
We come as lie breakers, not peace makers.
CTRL+Left: 1. Always Lies 2. Always Doubles Down 3. Always Projects
The CTRL-Left are people of cultivated helplessness sustained by invincible ignorance.
Never let the helpless define proportionality. They will reduce the limits for all to their helplessness.
Equality reduces men and women to the opposite’s weaknesses. Compatibility elevates them to the opposite’s strengths.
As soon as their interests shift, so does the loyalty… making it not loyalty at all but merely the trappings of loyalty.
GEAROID WALSH
(By: Gearóid Walsh)
The thing about P is you cannot *bypass* it.”
No, the group strategy is fine. I hate you as individuals, collectively.
People generally avoid the responsibility of discernment and accountability (in the most direct way possible).
Terrorizing boomers with concepts like “nation state, “incentives”, “limits/costs/externalities”, “ir/reciprocity”
Doubling down on partial truths soon brings absolute lies. That is the CTRL+LEFT cult now. They do not have a position anymore.
ERIC WEINSTEIN
(By: Eric Weinstein)
Cultivate civility with disagreeability.
The DISC: Distributed Ideas Suppression Complex
(On the left) there is some weird anti-family thing.
It’s time to inflict ourselves on our own institutions.
We don’t want to see women pushed onto the apps.
How many people are we going to throw on the dummy pile?
Peer review means the exact opposite of what it actually should mean.
Social interactions become rich when people can pass power back and forth.
We’ve deranged society, because society is about continuity and continuity is about babies.
We can lie about us all being the same or we can recognize our gifts lie in different places.
Real peer-review is what happens after you’ve passed the bullshit thing, called peer-review.
We can pass power back and forth; we Jews have the power to celebrate German culture…
No we should not be pushing for citizenship for everyone in the country that is here illegally.
Epstein was behaving like a high 11 figure type guy with what appears to be a 9 figure fortune.
Everyone with-in the gated institutional narrative is hawking one conspiracy theory or another.
Fake Growth: downsizing, off-shoring, immigration, securitization; techniques used to save the system.
Peer review is a cancer from outer-space; it came from the biomedical community and invaded science.
I’m concerned right now about people finding partners to have children with; it’s an economic epidemic.
I’m an incredible hypocrite; hypocrisy offered the greatest benefits per unit of responsibility of all philosophies.
Heroic behavior comes from a group of people who, in general, are viewed as unsavory by the mainstream.
We’re killing our own innovative class with all these extra requirements for collegiality or diversity or regularity.
The American Scientific enterprise: National Science Foundation Academy of Sciences & our university systems are fraudulent.
There are reasons great work can not be peer-reviewed… peer review is not peer review it’s peer injunction.
I’m trying to be long good and short nice; nice doesn’t have a future it’s a performative version that crowds out good.
Economics is the logical meeting place for the two greatest ideas man has ever had.” -Eric Weinstein
String Theory is an affirmative action program for mathematically talented baby boomers to not work on the real world.
SCOTT ADAMS
(By: Scott Adams)
I’m a systems nationalist.
If you can simplify you can frame.
Bernie, now, has gone full racist and full liar.
Republicans blame systems; Democrats blame people.
The Mexican(drug) cartels are a Chinese proxy-military.
Overheard: “Open borders is the opposite of reparations.
Violence is very underrated for a number of different things.
As of today; it’s irresponsible to hold political rallies. {3/10/2020}
This will be the first US presidential race that could be determined by a sneeze.
I’m thinking of registering Democrat just so I can lie to the FBI if I ever need to.
Firing skills > Hiring skills “Trump has more of the former and it’s more important.
Passion feels very democratic. It is the people’s talent, available to all. It’s also mostly bullshit.
I worry that if Bloomberg becomes president he will round up his enemies and put them in cubicles.
If the lasting impact of #WuhanVirus includes the end of shaking hands, could end save more lives than it takes.
The luckiest Americans will be the ones who get Coronavirus first, while there are still medical resources.
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON
(By: G.K. Chesterton)
Logic is simply an intellectual sense of honor.
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
Fairy Tales are perhaps the highest form of art.
I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.
Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
The obvious effect of frivolous divorce will be frivolous marriage.
I write chiefly because I find so many people quite comically wrong.
Politicians have ruined politics; not by being stupid, but by being clever.
Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence.
The great man tries to be ordinary, and becomes extraordinary in the process.
The bully is the man who acts on the assumption that he will not have to fight.
There is nothing more consciously dreary than the deliberate pursuit of pleasure.
When all are sexless there will be equality. There will be no women and no men…
Government may grow into something worse than injustice; it may turn into treachery.
The Press has ceased to be roughly representative, and become almost solely oppressive.
Everybody knows what Birth Control means. It means love towards sex that is not towards life.
Modern people insist on talking about Birth Control when they mean less birth and no control.
It is not easy to draw the line anywhere; that is why it is so necessary to draw the line somewhere.
There are some things more important than peace, and one of them is the dignity of human nature.
It cannot be too often repeated that what destroyed the Family in the modern world was Capitalism.
It is no longer a question of having freedom to indulge folly, but of not having freedom to refuse folly.
You find the necessity of Liberty as you find the necessity of air; by not having enough of it & gasping.
By preaching individualism while preserving inequality, the Reformation produced modern Capitalism.
The worst enemies of the saints could not say of the saints anything worse than they said of themselves.
Professors or Intellectuals; these are a blight and a desolation both to their families and also to mankind.
It is only the man who is brave enough to challenge dragons who can discover that they are only lizards.
People quarrel because they cannot argue; it is extraordinary to notice how few people in the modern world can argue.
The essence of the Sentimentalist; seeking to enjoy every idea without its sequence & every pleasure without its consequence.
Just as it was the mark of old tyranny to stretch the law; the mark of new tyranny to make a law that can be stretched.
I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.
I think the Socialist & the Capitalist are very much alike, especially in the great unifying quality of being both wrong.
Modern man in revolt has become useless; by rebelling against everything he’s lost his right to rebel against anything.
Nationalism: recognition of the right of all nations to be national; the right of other nations, especially of small nations.
Fixed rule is the only protection of ordinary humanity against clever men — who are the natural enemies of humanity.
Of all such educational processes, the hardest and apparently the most hopeless is the education of the educated.
Voting is a bore, while arguing, shouting, heckling, & holding up one’s hand are, on the contrary, great fun.
A man who thinks hard about any subject for several years is in horrible danger of discovering the truth about it.
My complaint merely is that we are sacrificing what is natural and eternal to what is morbid and temporary.
BOTTLENECKS, SPEED, AND MULTIPLE FOUNDERS: REMINDER THAT WE DON”T HAVE INFINITE TIME TO COMPLETE THE ARYAN REVOLUTION OF MAN.
by Sean Kane
Although recreational running can feel like a chore, our species is built for insane endurance. Plenty of land animals are faster in short distances, but nothing can move at a slow, easy run for longer than humans.
This allowed prehistoric humans to excel at hunting. We’d jog after large prey under the midday sun until they died from exhaustion.
Once our weapons got better and we learned to carry water in containers, our already impressive endurance only improved, readying humans to spread across the globe.
Our ability to regulate body temperature further helped our crazy endurance abilities. Humans can really take the heat.
Many animals sweat, but few use it for evaporative cooling, like humans (and horses) do. We’re also able to breath through our mouths when we run, taking in more oxygen as well as further dissipating heat.
Other animals dump heat by panting, which is impossible to do in a gallop. This meant hunters could chase animals at their slowest galloping speed until they overheated
Another huge evolutionary advantage came from our ability to stand upright — though creaky knees and back pain are certainly a tradeoff.
Standing on two legs kept more of our hairless skin out of the harsh savanna sun and, even more importantly, freed up our hands to wield tools and to throw weapons.
Though other primates have the ability to understand the trajectories of thrown objects (allowing them to dodge), no animals can aim and throw with the power and precision of a human.
We’ve also got better hearing than our other primate brethren, and we can hear a wider range of sounds, especially between 1.0-6.0 kHz — where most human speech occurs.
Around 70,000 years ago, humanity’s global population dropped down to only a few thousand individuals, and it had major effects on our species.
It’s called the Toba catastrophe. A massive supervolcano in Indonesia erupted, blackening the sky with ash, plunging earth into an ice age, and killing off all but the hardiest humans.
The enormous supervolcano eruption occurred around the same time as humanity’s biggest bottleneck. Research from the late 1990s and early 2000s suggested that this eruption, on Sumatra in Indonesia, blocked the sun across much of Asia, causing a harsh volcanic winter and a 1,000-year-long cooling period on earth.
But archaeological evidence shows that human hunter-gatherer settlements in India weren’t too affected by the eruption and quickly recovered. Temperature data embedded in the geology of Lake Malawi, in East Africa, also suggests that the region didn’t cool off that drastically.
But worldwide the population declined rapidly.
Almost getting wiped out put a lot more pressure on our ancestors and caused a genetic bottleneck, which greatly decreases the genetic variation in a population.
Small populations are much more susceptible to disease and environmental disasters, and unfavorable genetic traits can rapidly accumulate. Bottlenecks also slow evolutionary change, since fewer members of a species are around to pick up potentially favorable genetic mutations.
However, any rare beneficial mutations that do occur get amplified: Genes get passed around quickly in a tiny community.
Genetic bottlenecks can cause what is known as the founder effect, where small, isolated populations drastically diverge from the original population.
As humans spread across the planet, our population experienced multiple bottlenecks and, as a result, a serial-founder effect kicked in to create the diversity we currently see in the human race today.
Scientists have mapped these events to geographic choke points around the world, based on decreasing genetic diversity as we migrated.
One bottleneck occurred when a small group of humans left Africa.
Another happened when this group split up in the Middle East, with some of us heading to Europe and others to Asia.
Others occurred when we left Southeast Asia for Austronesia, crossed the Beringia land bridge into Alaska, and spread into South America through what is now Panama.
This is why African populations tend to have far more genetic diversity in their DNA than populations native to the Americas.
It’s also why, when you compare humans to other species, human DNA is not very diverse when you consider our globe-spanning range.
—“Almost alone among barbarians, [the Germans] are content with one wife, except a very few among them, and these not from sensuality, but because their noble birth procures for them many offers of alliance. Lest the woman should think herself to stand apart from aspirations after noble deeds and from the perils of war, she is reminded by the ceremony which inaugurates marriage that she is her husband’s partner in toil and danger, destined to suffer and to dare with him alike both in peace and in war. The yoked oxen, the harnessed steed, the gift of arms, proclaim this fact.”—
Source date (UTC): 2020-09-17 20:13:00 UTC
BOTTLENECKS, SPEED, AND MULTIPLE FOUNDERS: REMINDER THAT WE DON”T HAVE INFINITE TIME TO COMPLETE THE ARYAN REVOLUTION OF MAN.
by Sean Kane
Although recreational running can feel like a chore, our species is built for insane endurance. Plenty of land animals are faster in short distances, but nothing can move at a slow, easy run for longer than humans.
This allowed prehistoric humans to excel at hunting. We’d jog after large prey under the midday sun until they died from exhaustion.
Once our weapons got better and we learned to carry water in containers, our already impressive endurance only improved, readying humans to spread across the globe.
Our ability to regulate body temperature further helped our crazy endurance abilities. Humans can really take the heat.
Many animals sweat, but few use it for evaporative cooling, like humans (and horses) do. We’re also able to breath through our mouths when we run, taking in more oxygen as well as further dissipating heat.
Other animals dump heat by panting, which is impossible to do in a gallop. This meant hunters could chase animals at their slowest galloping speed until they overheated
Another huge evolutionary advantage came from our ability to stand upright — though creaky knees and back pain are certainly a tradeoff.
Standing on two legs kept more of our hairless skin out of the harsh savanna sun and, even more importantly, freed up our hands to wield tools and to throw weapons.
Though other primates have the ability to understand the trajectories of thrown objects (allowing them to dodge), no animals can aim and throw with the power and precision of a human.
We’ve also got better hearing than our other primate brethren, and we can hear a wider range of sounds, especially between 1.0-6.0 kHz — where most human speech occurs.
Around 70,000 years ago, humanity’s global population dropped down to only a few thousand individuals, and it had major effects on our species.
It’s called the Toba catastrophe. A massive supervolcano in Indonesia erupted, blackening the sky with ash, plunging earth into an ice age, and killing off all but the hardiest humans.
The enormous supervolcano eruption occurred around the same time as humanity’s biggest bottleneck. Research from the late 1990s and early 2000s suggested that this eruption, on Sumatra in Indonesia, blocked the sun across much of Asia, causing a harsh volcanic winter and a 1,000-year-long cooling period on earth.
But archaeological evidence shows that human hunter-gatherer settlements in India weren’t too affected by the eruption and quickly recovered. Temperature data embedded in the geology of Lake Malawi, in East Africa, also suggests that the region didn’t cool off that drastically.
But worldwide the population declined rapidly.
Almost getting wiped out put a lot more pressure on our ancestors and caused a genetic bottleneck, which greatly decreases the genetic variation in a population.
Small populations are much more susceptible to disease and environmental disasters, and unfavorable genetic traits can rapidly accumulate. Bottlenecks also slow evolutionary change, since fewer members of a species are around to pick up potentially favorable genetic mutations.
However, any rare beneficial mutations that do occur get amplified: Genes get passed around quickly in a tiny community.
Genetic bottlenecks can cause what is known as the founder effect, where small, isolated populations drastically diverge from the original population.
As humans spread across the planet, our population experienced multiple bottlenecks and, as a result, a serial-founder effect kicked in to create the diversity we currently see in the human race today.
Scientists have mapped these events to geographic choke points around the world, based on decreasing genetic diversity as we migrated.
One bottleneck occurred when a small group of humans left Africa.
Another happened when this group split up in the Middle East, with some of us heading to Europe and others to Asia.
Others occurred when we left Southeast Asia for Austronesia, crossed the Beringia land bridge into Alaska, and spread into South America through what is now Panama.
This is why African populations tend to have far more genetic diversity in their DNA than populations native to the Americas.
It’s also why, when you compare humans to other species, human DNA is not very diverse when you consider our globe-spanning range.
Source date (UTC): 2020-09-14 12:59:00 UTC
By Vexen Crabtree 2013
#beliefs #causes_of_religion #god #illusion #religion #science #sociology
The principal cause of an individual’s religion is the inheriting of identity from parents and local culture1 and most conversions are to another religion that is active locally2. Religion is primarily a result of where you are raised. But what other secular, sociological and psychological factors cause religion to prosper? What about new religious movements and spiritualities that are exotic, superstitious, anti-intellectual and counter-cultural? They all share in common a certain irrational and illogical character. What causes such beliefs? There have been many studies on these topics, and here the examination covers both arbitrary exterior circumstances and internal neuronal causes. Sociologists warn us that fixation on “the” cause of religion hampers research3. There are many causes of religion and superstition because the word “religion” covers such a variety of beliefs and practices, from dry academic ideas through to rituals and cultural behaviours. Of all the causes examined here it is easy to see that one of the least motivating factors is a conscientious deliberation over what claims are true4,5. Guy Harrison states with disdain that “a typical home purchase is given far more thoughtful analysis than the selection of a god to worship“6.
#belief #causes_of_religion #mass_belief #parenting #religion
“In most countries on Earth, most people are religious. But why? The main reason is that children assume the religion of their parents7 and they are unlikely to ever switch8, or, if they do convert, it will be to become a member of a different religion that is also popular where they live9. In “Social Psychology“ by David Myers (1999)10 the word “religion” enters the index from the chapters on “conformity” and “indoctrination”11. Other researchers have found that “fewer than 1% [of Americans] convert to an entirely new religion“12 and in some places children are not exposed to non-belief until college13 and it is easy to imagine that in the current-day Middle East and in historical times, the only comments ever heard about non-believers are intensely negative. In this sense, most people’s religion is arbitrary and it is clear that most religious people did not choose their religion, nor have they seriously compared religions to ascertain which one(s) were most likely to be true. Most people confuse their heritage for their religion.”
“Why Are There So Many Religious People? Parents, Local Culture and Inertia” by Vexen Crabtree (2016)
#brazil #china #christianity #hong_kong #korea,_south
Individuals will often adopt a religious position for social reasons. Associating with a group of like-minded folk feels good, and can engender a feeling of empowerment and worth14. Examples of this abound, and include the sectarian strife in Northern Ireland, the embrace of alternative religions by teenagers, the embrace of Eastern mysticism by intellectuals and students at the turn of the twentieth century, and the reaction against Western materialism through the embrace of anti-commercialist religions. Religion thus serves a functional purpose quite separate from its actual religious content. Many people adhere to a religious life because it helps combat loneliness, helps them stay off of alcohol, helps them oppress sexual urges, or helps them cope with anxiety or depression15.
Pascal Boyer in “Religion Explained“ (2001)16 listed many of the commonly theorized explanations for the success of religion, and, most of the list consisted of items that described functional roles of religion such as “religion holds society together” and “religion allays anxiety and makes for a comfortable world”17. But what the functional influences lack is a genuine appraisal of the pros or cons of the theological dogmas of the religion in terms of their truth or falsity. I.e., functional elements of religion can remain fully operational even if the underlying belief system contains serious flaws.
Some people join religions because “a cohesive, supportive church plays a central role [in] providing social network[s]”18. Many times it is not even structure that appeals – the very fact of joining a group can be uplifting19. In analysing the growth of evangelical Christianity from 1940 in South Korea, for example, the sociologist D. Martin notes that the basis for the spectacular growth is partially the same as in South America and Asia in general; ‘success can be attributed to a combination of vibrant Pentecostal worship … and personal support’ and ‘the chief pastor/executive combines many secular roles, as, indeed he does in Brazil. He is a social worker and employment exchange official, a kind of store manager and a broker, an educator and a fixer”. I.e., such motivated people attract flocks of followers for their general function in society.20
The same purely pragmatic approach to religion can be found amongst Cantonese coverts to Mormonism (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) in Hong Kong. Caroline Plüss studied this and in 1999 reported the following:
“Chinese residents in Hong Kong joined this church despite [a] negative perception of the church … because [it] offered potential recruits help with learning English by, for example, operating a tutorial college. It also helped Chinese converts gain financial support for studying in the universities it operates in the United States.”
“Migration and the Globalization of Religion” by Caroline Plüss (2011)21
Religion attracts some people because of the usefulness of the organization and not because of the underlying truth of the religion. Religious leaders know this and their hope is, of course, that some people caught in this way will develop a genuine interest at some later date.
Religions are often associated with particular stances on particular subjects. From the late nineteenth century a few generations of women seeking equality and empowerment found that some alternative religions were strongly appealing for their stance on gender equality; such religions naturally became magnets for feminists and activists. The membership of Greenpeace is, likewise, notably skewed away from traditional patriarchal religions and towards pagan ones. “Among the Airo-Pai, a small group of Amazonian people on the borders of Peru, Ecuador and Columbia, [Christian evangelicalism and Pentecostalism] has served to prevent alcoholism and drug abuse” because it is embraced as a statement of abstinence rather than strictly for its religious ideas22.
By far the major example of religion-as-activism was the Protestant reformation that swept away Catholicism in much of Europe. The masses were utterly despondent with the immoral, power-abusing, money-centered activities of the Roman Catholic Church, and they were aided by early governments who could no longer stand seeing such huge volumes of religious taxes being sent to Rome. Although there were also theological concerns, the mass of the movement was clearly socio-political in nature; the appeal of Protestantism was mostly its social-activist function and not the specific theology of Martin Luther, its founder.
Some sociologists explain religion – especially new religion, as a form of reactionism against the modern world. So, religious argumentation appeals because it helps justify a rejection of features of the modern world. Main (2002) describes one set of such reactions as “romanticism”, where intuition, imagination and holistic-sounding ideas are espoused in opposition to the cold sciences and practicalities of life23.
#causes_of_religion #politics #psychology #religion #sectarianism
Religion is often used as a collective political and racial identity regardless of whether people agree with the actual tenets of a religion24. To be a proper member of an ethnic group in many cases means adopting a certain religion. Or the opposite – some people join a symbolic opposition religion to signal rebellion and dissatisfaction with their own community25. Studies have found that many people join a religion not because they agree with its theological arguments, but because religion endows “people with an enhanced sense of solidarity to advance collective, often political intentions“26. Migration is often a trigger for adopting a religion. This works in two ways, together called “cultural transition and defence” by sociologist Steve Bruce27: (1) Once removed from a community that they come to miss, some adopt a religion common in that community as a way of boosting their identification with it, regardless of whether they have started believing in the tenets of the faith. (2) When faced with immigration, some take up more extreme forms of what they perceive to be the ‘proper’ religion of their own culture.#atheism #buddhism #theism #USA
This section is taken from “Do We Need Religion to Have Good Morals?: 1.3. Is Religion Required to Be a Good Person?” by Vexen Crabtree (2014).
Religions almost universally emphasize the moral duty of the individual. “God knows all” as the Qur’an and Bible repeat: examples in the Christian Bible include Job 28:24, 37:16; 1 John 3:19-20; and very frequently in the Qur’an: the first chapter (after the introduction) iterates God’s omniscience ten times, for example Sura 2:29, 77, 85, 115 and 137. We all answer to God eventually. Buddhism and Hinduism likewise teach that we pay the consequences of this life throughout our next. So many people come to think of religions as being a bastion of moral thinking, because, religions tend to dramatize and exaggerate the rewards and punishments of good and bad behaviour. Don’t forget that when Psalms 14:1 says “the fool saith in his heart that there is no God”, the word it uses in Hebrew also means immoral people: immoral people say ‘there is no god’. This emphasis is strong amongst laypeople: despite their record against human rights on an institutional and national level, locally popular religions are often seen as a force for good and there is a general belief that religion supports morality28. A 2002 poll in the USA, an unusually religious country for its state of development, found that on average 44.5% of the adults believed that “It is necessary to believe in God in order to be moral and have good values”29. This included both church-goers and laypeople. 65% of regular churchgoers believed it, thinking therefore that the vast majority of the members of “wrong” religions therefore could not be moral people. This ridiculous belief is still held by 25.7% of those who never attend church. Although it is hard to believe that this level of ignorance can exist in the rest of the world, the underlying belief was more popular in pre-modern times throughout the world. Academics have also toed this line; Talcott Parsons in 1966 said the same thing, merely using bigger words. After saying that what makes moral rules valid is a ‘legitimation system’, he adds that ‘a legitimation system is always related to, and meaningfully dependent on, a grounding in ordered relations to ultimate reality. That is, its grounding is always in some sense religious. […] The process of secularization, then, undermines the system of legitimation by which a society’s rules seem to be grounded in ultimate reality.’30
Bryan Wilson is an insightful and respected sociologist of religion. Even he, in 1982, warned of mass breakdown in morality in the West if the religious underpinnings of moral propriety were forgotten.
“As Wilson (1982: 52) concludes, ‘Unless the basic virtues are serviced, unless men are given a sense of psychic reassurance that transcends the confines of the social system, we may see a time when, for one reason or another, the system itself fails to work…’ […] Wilson (1982: 86) describes how secularization resulted in the breakdown of morality in Western societies: ‘When in the West, religion waned, when the rationalistic forces inherent in Puritanism acquired autonomy of their religious origins, so the sense of moral propriety also waned – albeit somewhat later, as a cultural lag. Following the decline of religion [… and the resultant] process of moral breakdown [… we should have] genuine concern about the role of morality in contemporary culture’ (Wilson 1982: 87)”
“Religion in Sociological Perspective” by Bryan Wilson (1982)31
Being discussed in “Key Thinkers in the Sociology of Religion“
Richard K. Fenn (2009) [Book Review]32
After Parsons in 1966 and Wilson in 1982, Karen Armstrong repeats the same story in “A Short History of Myth: Volume 1-4“ (2005)33, arguing that myth is essential for good ethics and meaningful living. How do all of these thinkers rationalize the fact that many god-believers, myth-believers and suchlike, appear to commit the same atrocities and immoralities as unbelievers? From the Dark Ages presided over by Christianity, to the spectre of Islamist brutality against (for example) women and gays in Islamic countries, it seems that religious morals are hardly a panacea. Karen Armstrong dismisses these problems with the odd concept that they are caused by “failed myths”34. An element of double-think appears to be in place: if religious people do good, it is because they are religious, whereas if they do wrong, it is because they are fallible human beings. Such circular logic ought to be challenged wherever it is heard.
So there are numbers of people who, if they want to be good or, wants to be seen as good, will gravitate towards religion simply because they think it is what required. These people, who have come to actively choosing to be a better person, will find that their efforts are rewarded whether or not they choose to do it within a religious framework.
There is plenty of evidence that religion is not required. Parson in 1966 and Wilson in 1982 both warned of systematic collapse in morality if secularisation continued. It not only continued, but has accelerated. There has been no mass failure. Crime is down, wars are shorter, violence is down. It happens that people can also adopt non-religious and secular philosophies in order to promote good moralizing. Secular movements such as the British Humanist Association and IHEU (International Humanist and Ethical Union) are devoted to encouraging moral behavior, moral thinking, overall conscientiousness and rationality. The main difference between these and religious groups who do the same, is that the religious groups often teach that they are the only valid source of morals.
If I am threatened into behaving in a good manner then I am at best amoral, because I am not acting with free will. If you believe that a supreme god is going to punish you (in hell) or deny you life (annihilation) if you misbehave, it is like being permanently threatened into behaving well. In addition, if you believe there is some great reward for behaving well, then your motives for good behavior are more selfish. An atheist who does not believe in heaven and hell is potentially more moral, for (s)he acts without these added factors. Most atheists who do not believe in divine judgement, and most theists who do, both act morally. Some of both groups act consistently immorally. The claim that belief in God is essential or aids moral behavior is wrong, and any amusing theistic claim that they have “better” morals, despite acting under a reward and punishment system, is deeply questionable. Who is more moral? Those who act for the sake of goodness itself, or those who do good acts under the belief that failure to do so results in hell?
In conclusion, the simplicity and drama of religious stick-and-carrot approaches to morality often make religions appealing, and, to be seen as good in society – or to try to reform themselves – many people find themselves attracted to a religion. Unfortunately, all of this psychology functions just as well no matter if the tenets of the religion are actually true, or not.
It is only in modern literate times that myth and religion have become individual areas of study: they were previously and universally tied up with human culture. So, agricultural communities had agricultural religions as part of that culture. A 1915 study of ancient Mesopotamian religion found that it was apparent that although many cultures shared beliefs and myths, “striking differences remain to be accounted for. Human experiences varied in localities because all sections of humanity were not confronted in ancient times by the same problems in their everyday lives”35. Agricultural people had gods that waxed and waned, lived and died, with the seasons. Native hunting tribes had gods and rituals that would secure them luck in the hunt36. Those gods are clearly products of the people’s environment, and the personal stories and dramas told about them are products of the imagination in an attempt to explain facets of the natural environment. In retrospect it is hard to tell what elements of ancient cultures were actually believed, what was known to be mythical, and what was therefore religious (i.e., thought to be true but basically mythological). In “A Short History of Myth: Volume 1-4“ by Karen Armstrong (2005)33 we see this confusion as a central theme37. It continues today: Buddhism and Hinduism are very hard to separate out into culture and religion and no-one knows whether “Jew” means the religious, dietary-observing Synagogue-attending type, or the atheist secular type. For that reason, there are many sociologists who deny that Hinduism is a distinct religion, although in recent decades, Hindu nationalists have been building a much clearer and more forceful definition of Hindutva (‘Hindu-ness’).
In general, it must be acknowledged that a lot of what we call religion is in fact a mixture of semi-believed mythology and cultural practices; a ’cause’ of religion is therefore our want of simple categorisation.
Anthony Laying (2010) has studied the prevalence of superstitions and witchcraft-accusations in certain cultures in this case, the Caribs. The general idea, held by “many tribal and peasant communities all over the world” is that witches are responsible for many social maladies from disease to failed crops, and they are simply evil and sneaky. Often so-called witches are murdered, tortured, expelled or at least shunned; the Dark Ages of Christian history and the heresy-accusations of Islam today both follow(ed) the same psychology. The features of witchcraft highlight the functionalism of religion in wider ways. “Believing that there are witches inclined to harm others with their malevolent power can have numerous social and psychological consequences for a community” says Prof. Laying. Witness how many of the effects serve to reinforce people’s already-existing beliefs and to maintain social structure even when the religious dogmas suffer from counter-evidence:
Maintaining mental health (gaining sympathy and compensation for low status, displacing antagonism and jealousy, achieving a sense of control). Victims of witchcraft, often persons who otherwise attract little attention, receive intense sympathetic concern from their neighbours. Those accused of using witchcraft are frequently very unpopular and, therefore, are ideal scapegoats. Blaming misfortune on gods, demons, or bad luck gives the believer very little sense of control; witches, being here among the living, may be identified and dealt with.
Providing Explanations (explaining death, illness, misfortune, and why magical cures sometimes fail). Where witchcraft is presumed, bad luck, accident, or infection are not considered satisfactory explanations. When misfortune is especially persistent, witchcraft is readily assumed to be the cause. When magical cures fail, witchcraft may be blamed for the failure, thus preserving faith in such good magic.
Encouraging proper conduct (reinforcing and clarifying correct behaviour and providing negative role models to discourage bad behaviour). Nonconformists are the most likely to be accused of practicing witchcraft; their strange behaviour provides ‘evidence’ of their evil nature. […]
Encouraging generosity and sharing (ensuring an equitable distribution of material resources). In egalitarian societies and communities plagued by persistent poverty, individuals and households adapt by sharing with others. Those who refuse [can be accused of being a witch, or conversely might attract the attention of a jealous witch].
Conserving tradition (defending the social order and community cohesion). Those who openly challenge accepted norms are especially likely to be accused of witchcraft. […]
Providing entertainment (creating drama and stimulating imagination). Dramatic folktales about witches and gossip concerning an unpopular neighbour suspected of inflicting illness or bad luck on a household are listened to with great interest, especially by children. Consequently, lessons to be learned from these accounts fall on fertile ground and help perpetuate the beliefs.
Coping with rapid social change (attempting to reinstate social order). Under conditions of rapid cultural change and prolonged stress, witchcraft accusations may increase dramatically. Tolerance for deviant behaviour decreases under these conditions, inviting witch hunts and creating incentive to abide by traditional cultural norms. […]
One hears less about witches once a certain level of economic development has been achieved, but when hard times return, accusations of witchcraft may become common again. For example, there has been a resurgence of this belief in sub-Saharan Africa in recent years. […]
Some of the methods used subconsciously by believers to defend their beliefs are typical. When traditional remedies fail (or in modern monotheistic religions, when prayer fails) it is often said that lack-of-genuine-belief is the cause. The ironic solution to failure of traditional solutions is therefore is to believe more strongly!
Many psychologists, scientists and researchers have come to the conclusion that religion is a by-product of otherwise-normal processes in the brain. A theory of religion developed by Stark and Bainbridge (1987) “is both cognitive in nature and fundamentally atheistic”, being rooted in the idea that the information-processing and language-producing functions of our brain are not perfect as they evolved for practical purposes only, and when they are applied to theoretical issues they result in faulty conclusions and perceptions. Lawrence Krauss38 notes that “we are hardwired to think that everything that happens to us is significant and meaningful”39. Certain types of stimulus are misunderstood and some of these processes cause us to hold religious beliefs.40
Pascal Boyer throughout “Religion Explained“ (2001)16 argues that a panoply of psychological factors explains religion, explains why religion is successful and why we are inclined to believe in it and find religious arguments plausible, and also explains why it does not appeal universally, and explains why it is partially persistent even in the face of science41.
Other human behaviours also result from misapplied cognitive functions. Our enjoyment of music is the result of a side-effect of our complicated auditory systems in the brain and a lot of other behaviours are of a similar ilk: an over-stimulation or a misuse of a built-in system. Figurative art is another area Boyer uses as an example of our embrace of artificial stimulation of parts of our brain (object and face recognition, etc). These parts of the brain would normally have a purely practical function. According to Boyer religion isn’t a case of ‘neuronal dysfunction’ as I say, but more like a case of misdirected, overstimulated, or inappropriately applied cognitive functions42.
Scott Atran (2002) and Justin Barrett (discussed in the next section) offer “a compatible evolutionary argument about why humans tend to imagine supernatural beings that have feelings, thoughts, and desires. […] in an environment where we were both hunters and hunted”40, centering on the way we attribute conscious intent to events. Prof. Richard Dawkins summarizes some more of the contributors towards the biological psychology of religion:
“The ethnologist Robert Hinde, in Why Gods Persist, and the anthropologists Pascal Boyer, in Religion Explained, and Scott Atran, in In Gods We Trust, have independently promoted the general idea of religion as a by-product of normal psychological dispositions. […] The psychologist Paul Bloom, another advocate of the ‘religion is a by-product’ view, points out that children have a natural tendency towards a dualistic theory of mind. Religion, for him, is a by-product of such instinctive dualism. We humans, he suggest, and especially children, are natural born dualists. […] Other by-product explanations of religion have been proposed by Hinde, Shermer, Boyer, Atran, Bloom, Dennett, Keleman and others.”
#causes_of_religion #pareidolia #psychology #religion #thinking_errors
“We are biologically programmed to detect signs of predators (and prey) wherever they may be. This often means being distracted on occasions where slight movements or patterns make us think something (‘an agent’) is there watching us – possibly even hunting us! “It is far more advantageous to over-detect agency than to under-detect it“44. Hence, the hyperactive agent detection device (HADD). As a highly social species, we are always looking in the shadows for signs of plots, for possible indirect effects of “behind the scenes” actors who are organizing against us – or who are potential allies. Certain circumstances (dim lighting!) heighten our instincts to watch out for secret danger. The evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins says that “we are biologically programmed to impute intentions to entities whose behaviour matters to us“45 and unfortunately, this now includes inanimate forces from “the weather, to waves and currents, to falling rocks“45. Psychologist Justin Barrett originally conceived of HADD and says it is “fundamental to understanding concepts of gods and spirits“44. We Humans excel at abstract thinking and telling imaginative stories to fledge out our feelings. Hence, there are local tribal spirits, sky gods, evil and wild spirits, ghosts in certain buildings, and when most of them are no longer found to exist there is always the eternal creator-God who never really does anything but secretly influences subtle events in the world, seemingly in a manner that makes it an expert at stimulating our HADD while not being detected by any other means. Even in the modern world the attribution of natural events to ‘magical’ and ‘spiritual’ causes is an easier way to understand the world than to study it critically.”
“Hyperactive Agent Detection Device (the Psychology of Religion and Superstition)” by Vexen Crabtree (2017)
There is much evidence in history that the more profound religious insights occur alongside mental dysfunction. The psychologist William James, in his survey of religious experience, comments that there are a massive proportion of prominent religious people in history that have shown signs of now-recognized long-term neurological complaints.
“Religious geniuses have often shown symptoms of nervous instability. Even more perhaps than other kinds of genius, religious leaders have been subject to abnormal psychical visitations. […] They have led a discordant inner life, and had melancholy during a part of their career. They have […] been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological. Often […] these pathological features in their career have helped to give them their religious authority and influence.”
“The Varieties of Religious Experience“ by William James (1902) [Book Review]46
The average believer does not suffer from such severe cataclysms, however, and merely believes in the irrational results of others‘ experiences that have become codified as part of a religion. In normal believers, it may be a long-term background dysfunction of the prefrontal cortex that leads to illogical beliefs:
“People with greater paranormal beliefs showed lower levels of executive function. Particularly, they had less impulse control and greater disorganization, independent of age, sex, or level of education. In contrast, people with greater moral attitudes showed greater executive functioning in all areas measured (motivation, impulse control, empathy, planning, and organization). These findings support studies suggesting that superstitious thinking involves some degree of dysfunction in the prefrontal cortex, even in the general population, while moral attitudes involve better prefrontal functioning. […] People with religious beliefs showed a minute increase in both empathy and impulse control, characteristics encouraged by most orthodox religions.”
M. Spinella and O. Wain, Skeptical Inquirer (2006)47
It is not only chronic neurological dysfunction that can cause religious and supernatural beliefs. Some of the founding experiences can be based on single neurological events such as isolated strokes or seizures. Many types of fit do not involve the motor area of the brain, so do not result in obvious, physical signs of fitting. They can be purely sensory in nature, involving sights, sounds and feelings that range from subtle through to overwhelming.
“Partial seizures can […] cause clonic movement of part of a limb [, … or] may trigger an abnormal sensation, or aura, such as an odd smell or sparkling lights. Most bizarre are the partial seizures that elicit more well-formed auras such as déjá vu (the feeling that something has happened before) or hallucinations.”
“Neuroscience“ by Bear, Connors and Paradiso (1996)48
William James is not alone in being convinced that St. Paul was converted to Christianity by a vision that was the result of a seizure. Other neurological complaints such as schizoid events can also be recurrent and form part of a person’s normal life experience; many such people never develop complete schizophrenia but sit half way on the spectrum between normality and delusion.
“It is best to see ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘normality’ as two overlapping distributions, not two distinct states. Given this view, it may be that we have already found many of the key biological mechanisms […]. Many of the most creative and spiritual individuals show certain apparently schizotaxic traits – unusual patterns of thought and behaviour, unorthodox beliefs, a tendency to have visions and hear voices. Where this does not become disorganizing, and where it can be expressed in a socially accepted form such as art or religion, this kind of thing is usually seen as one of humanity’s great psychological assets, rather than as an impairment.”
“Emotions and Mind” by Toates, Mackintosh and Nettle (2004)49
A final note from William James’ psychological exploration of religion is that mystical and religious experiences can support any religion50. It depends on culture and phenotype of the person. It can cause, or support, any form of a religion including asceticism, gnosticism, theism and such experiences can also cause insanity, genius or works of art. It would be truly enlightening if we could perform some neurological tests on some of the great religious figures in history.
For more on this topic, see “The False and Conflicting Experiences of Mankind: How Other Peoples’ Experience Contradict Our Own Beliefs” by Vexen Crabtree (2008):
#bah�’�_faith #buddhism #christianity #epistemology #experience #god #psychology #religion #subjectivism #taoism #thinking_errors
Hallucinations caused by eye problems can result in surprisingly specific visions of grotesque faces with large eyes and teeth, blood running upwards, and costumed figures51 as our brain tries to interpret errant inputs52. But most hallucinations start in the brain and most of them are subtle and not just a matter of visual phenomenon. Disease, neurochemical imbalances, fasting, exhaustion, sleep and sensory deprivation53,54, chanting, practices of austerity and ritualistic behaviour can all induce hallucinations and other strange states of mind55. They can also be triggered artificially by doctors. The range of experiences produced is varied, from mundane events such as smelling something to out of body experiences. Experimenters can consistently generate deeply meaningful religious experiences which would be utterly convincing if participants didn’t know it was being generated artificially. People interpret these episodes in terms of their local culture – Western Christians don’t receive Buddhist enlightenment and witness their previous lives, for example, whilst Eastern Daoists don’t receive images of the Virgin Mary56. For those who know no neurology it is easy to see how supernatural beliefs can result from such episodes.
A wide variety of religious customs and beliefs across the world are clearly the result of misunderstood biology55. Native American tribes considered fasting being the way for receiving guidance from the Great Spirit. Moses fasted for forty days on Sinai while “talking to God” – the result was the 10 Commandments (Exodus 34:28), Elijah fasted forty days as he journeyed to Horeb, where, in a cave, he experiences a range of effects (1 Kings 19:8-15) and Bahá’u’lláh, (of the Bahá’í Faith) received revelations after spending months in a black underground prison. Jesus also fasted 40 days and as a result, experienced a battle with Satan in a series of visions (Matthew 4:1-11). As a species, we have been artificially inducing mystical experiences for as long as there are records of our behaviour, although nowadays we have a much better understanding of the underlying neurology and how it effects our consciousness.
For more, see Hallucinations, Sensory Deprivation and Fasting: The Physiological Causes of Religious and Mystical Experiences. Its menu:
#beliefs #pseudoscience #psychology #thinking_errors
Not many people would say that subconscious cognitive processes are responsible for their beliefs and actions. We construct rational-sounding reasons to back up the beliefs we have, and we simply don’t – and frequently can’t – get any insight into our true inner workings. Sociologists have found that people deny subconscious causes of their actions or beliefs. The formidable thinker Paul Kurtz explains that people frequently let themselves blindly believe certain things:
“I surely do not wish to suggest that conscious deception is the primary explanation for all or even most paranormal beliefs. Rather, it is self-deception that accounts for so much credulity. There is a powerful willingness in all too many people to believe in the unbelievable in spite of a lack of evidence or even evidence to the contrary. This propensity was due in part to what I have called the transcendental temptation, the tendency to resort to magical thinking, the attribution of occult causes for natural phenomena. The best antidote for this, I submit, is critical thinking.”
Paul Kurtz in Skeptical Inquirer (2006)57
People often do not know how strong subconscious misdirection is and it often feels very awkward when one attempts to deconstruct one’s own thought processes. It may be that such psychological investigation is best done by outside sociologists. William James, the psychologist of religion famous for his work at the turn of the twentieth century, examines the difficulty of such self-examination through a metaphor based on drunkenness:
“Knowledge about a thing is not the thing in itself. You remember what Al-Ghazzali told us in the Lecture on Mysticism – that to understand the cause of drunkenness, as a physician understands them, is not to be drunk. A science might come to understand everything about the causes and elements of religion, and might even decide which elements were qualified, by their general harmony with other branches of knowledge, to be considered true: and yet the best man at this science might be the man who found it hardest to be personally devout.”
“The Varieties of Religious Experience“ by William James (1902) [Book Review]58
In “Errors in Thinking: Cognitive Errors, Wishful Thinking and Sacred Truths“ (2008) I write about the subconscious causes of our behaviour and thought:
“We all suffer from systematic thinking errors59,60 which fall into three main types: (1) internal cognitive errors; (2) errors of emotion61, perception and memory; and (3) social errors that result from the way we communicate ideas and the effects of traditions and dogmas. Some of the most common errors are the misperception of random events as evidence that backs up our beliefs, the habitual overlooking of contradictory data, our expectations and current beliefs actively changing our memories and our perceptions and using assumptions to fill-in unknown information. These occur naturally and subconsciously even when we are trying to be truthful and honest. Many of these errors arise because our brains are highly efficient (rather than accurate) and we are applying evolutionarily developed cognitive rules of thumb to the complexities of life62,63. We will fly into defensive and heated arguments at the mere suggestion that our memory is faulty, and yet memory is infamously unreliable and prone to subconscious inventions. They say “few things are more dangerous to critical thinking than to take perception and memory at face value“64. We were never meant to be the cool, rational and logical computers that we pretend to be. Unfortunately, and we find it hard to admit this to ourselves, many of our beliefs are held because they’re comforting or simple65. In an overwhelming world, simplicity lets us get a grip. Human thinking errors can lead individuals, or whole communities, to come to explain types of events and experiences in fantastical ways. Before we can guard comprehensively against such cumulative errors, we need to learn the ways in which our brains can misguide us – lack of knowledge of these sources of confusion lead many astray66.
Learning to think skeptically and carefully and to recognize that our very experiences and perceptions can be coloured by societal and subconscious factors should help us to maintain impartiality. Beliefs should not be taken lightly, and evidence should be cross-checked. This especially applies to “common-sense” facts that we learn from others by word of mouth and to traditional knowledge. Above all, however, our most important tool is knowing what types of cognitive errors we, as a species, are prone to making.”
“Errors in Thinking: Cognitive Errors, Wishful Thinking and Sacred Truths“
Vexen Crabtree (2008)
Keeping the power of the subconscious in our minds, let us look at the causes of religion in particular, aside from the causes of general error.
Two of William James lectures on religion from 1901-02 were devoted to tracing the psychology of ‘conversion’ into a religion. He introduces Dr Starbuck:
“Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child’s small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity. […] In his recent work on the Psychology of Religion, Professor Starbuck of California [says] “Theology takes the adolescent tendencies and builds upon them; it sees that the essential thing in adolescent growth is bringing the person out of childhood into the new life of maturity and personal insight.”
“The Varieties of Religious Experience“
William James (1902) [Book Review]67
This compares well with the notes of many psychologists on god and religion, including Sigmund Freud: that religious feelings, and adult ideas about religion, are actually childhood fantasies in disguise. Luhrmann describes it in terms of “recreating a childhood world”, in order to re-enchant adulthood68. This is not directly what Dr Starbuck and William James were implying, but it is true that many aspects of religion are drawn-out ideas of childhood such as the idea of an ever-present all-loving parent, the feeling of guilt when no-one is looking, the lack of death, etc. In the Christian Bible, in the first letter of St Paul to Corinth, Paul says “when I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me” (1 Corinthians 13:11). Although this may be the conscious and intellectualized testimony, religion is largely the subconscious survival of childhood fantasy into adulthood. Childish seeming ideas may have been tidied away into the closet, but from the dark corners of the mind they continue to exert much pressure on the religious mind. Giving childish ideas adult terminology no longer hides the route of wishful thinking from psychologists.
#afterlife #causes_of_religion #christianity #death #heaven #hell #islam #karma #reincarnation #religion
“Many people believe that one of the greatest appeals of religion is that it provides reassurance against the spectre of death28,69. The very thought of the permanent cessation of our consciousness can be terrifying, confusing and difficult to accept. Any theory that posits our ultimate survival can have a lot of appeal. This isn’t a new revelation; Roman philosopher Lucretius (99-55BCE) famously said “fear was the first thing on Earth to make gods“70 and the 19th century anthropologist Bronishaw Malinowski argued that religion gives us a sense of power over death71. At the turn of the century William James, devoted to the study of comparative religion and psychology, says that “the ancient saying that the first maker of the Gods was fear receives voluminous corroboration from every age of religious history“72. Later the astute Albert Einstein wrote “with primitive man it is above all fear that evokes religious notions – fear of… death“73. Biologist E. O. Wilson studies the neurobiological basis of human behaviour, and states that the “foremost” religious drive is the one that “hunger[s] for a permanent existence”74. Aside from theory, modern sociological and psychological research has supported this position. A review of studies by Soenke et al. (2013) found that “one variable showing particular importance in protecting individuals from anxiety about death is the belief in an afterlife” which was bolstered by “active commitment and practice” of their religion. The stronger the belief, the less the anxiety about death.
”
And,
“The idea of avoiding death through some kind of belief in the afterlife is one of the most powerful driving forces behind religious belief75. For many people, (1) the personal desire to survive death and (2) the personal desire for social justice both conspire to make belief in the afterlife feel right. Some historians say that belief in an afterlife is one of the universal traits of primitive Human culture that led to the founding of our religions76, and it continues to fuel the appeal of faith even today, in the 21st century. Actual beliefs have differed from culture to culture, based mostly on geographic location. Historically many cultures believed that all dead folk (good and bad) go to a single underworld, but Christianity and Islam developed their ideas of heaven and hell into a very black-and-white moralistic affair. Now, many people say their fear of hell is one of the reasons they follow their religion77. Most spiritual experiences throughout the rest of the world rest on the idea of continual reincarnation rather than on heaven. The concept of an ultimate scheme which redresses the moral imbalances of the world is common to religion both in the West and in the East. God, or Karma, works to make sure that good people are rewarded, and bad people taught a lesson. It teaches us that we have a powerful social instinct towards justice, and when we don’t find it in this life, it is very soothing for us to believe that it is found in the next78. There is no actual evidence for any kind of afterlife79 and in many countries where scientific knowledge is high, belief in the afterlife has heavily declined.”
“Causes of Belief in the Afterlife and Differences Across Religions and Cultures” by Vexen Crabtree (2015)
#causes_of_religion #emotions #myths #new_age #paganism #psychology #religion
“Human beings have a natural tendency to enjoy myths, stories, epic tales, supernatural wonder and other fascinating elements from the worlds of our imaginations. Karen Armstrong writes that “Human beings have always been mythmakers”81. We love creating, and telling these stories. Over time they are altered, embellished, made more amazing and told with greater confidence82. Every culture has a central creation myth83. Such epic stories are exciting, they give life meaning, and feed our egos by making us think we’re the concern of the creator of billions of galaxies. For some people it goes further; the stories become the basis for ceremonial retellings, ritualistic behaviour and strict dogmatic beliefs. And they find themselves compelling other people to adhere to the same principles in order to respect the great story.
Classic sociologists such as Weber and Geertz taught us that religions allow people to deal with existential anxieties “about how to understand the natural and social environment” by developing world-view cosmologies; modern sociologists have not found reason to disagree84. Although modern science and knowledge have eroded most of the influence of religion in many countries, mythic answers are simpler and make it easier to understand the universe (and are easier to tell) than the dry and complicated evidence-based stories that come from science.
“Myths can be debased and uprooted. All that happens is that modern myths and rituals replace the traditional ones, for myths and archetypes are an inherent part of the human psyche. Human beings appear to need a religious underpinning both to their personal and to their social lives. At the personal level, human beings need a mythology within which to frame their identities and the meaning of their lives.”
“The Phenomenon Of Religion: A Thematic Approach“ by Moojan Momen (1999) [Book Review]85
As traditional Abrahamic religions are fading away in the modern world, a suite of new movements have arisen to (partially) take their place including the New Age and Pagan religions. New stories are replacing old ones.”
“Religion as the Result of Human Mythmaking” by Vexen Crabtree (2017)
#beliefs #causes_of_religion #new_religious_movements #psychology #religion
“Simple faith-based answers to fundamental questions are very appealing, because the world is very complicated86,87. Human knowledge is broken up into so many deep specialities that it is no longer possible for anyone to attain an accurate overall picture of reality88. Least of all is it possible to grasp what it all means for us personally. Psychologist Carl Jung wrote that “man positively needs general ideas and convictions that will give meaning to his life and enable him to find a place for himself in the universe“89 and many say it provides them a sense of meaning and destiny90,91,92. The same psychological factor can be explained from a cynical point of view: “the contemporary persistence of religion indicates an inability or refusal on the part of many people to take on board the implications of science and rationality“93. This would appear to be a factor both amongst science-denying American Christian fundamentalism, and in Western New Religious Movements epitomized by the New Age which embraces a wide range of zany, and very unlikely, beliefs about reality. Unfortunately, and we find it hard to admit this to ourselves, many of our beliefs are held because they’re comforting and simple65.”
“Simple Answers in a Complex World: What Causes Religion?” by Vexen Crabtree (2017)
#creationism #philosophy #religion #science #the_universe
“The phrase ‘anthropic coincidences‘ refers to the theory that the Universe is so delicately fine-tuned for life that it must have been designed with that purpose in mind, by an intelligent creator-god95. The main argument is that if you fiddle with the universal constants of physics (such as the strengths of the weak and strong nuclear forces) and change their values even by a little bit, then the Universe would be completely unsuitable for life as we know it. Therefore, God created the Universe for life, and in particular, created it for mankind here on Earth. Some scientists subscribe to this idea, and use it to justify (and promote) belief in God96. But there are a number of convincing logical and evidential arguments against this idea.”
“The Anthropic Coincidences: Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Life?” by Vexen Crabtree (2015)
My Experiences of God are Illusions, Derived from Malfunctioning Psychological Processes examines many of the psychological factors that lead people to ‘experience’ the presence of various Gods, and the summary conclusion lists the main points:
The psychological wish for an ever-present loving parent looking over us, combined with our ability for abstract ideas to become the basis for our emotions, especially love, form the concept of God as a subconscious parent-substitute and ideal carer. The childhood memory of our seemingly all-knowing and all-capable parents, whom we continuously miss in adult life, causes some people to desire a parental god to exist.
Pride and ego incline us toward god-belief: It is more prideful to think that the creator of the billions of galaxies cares deeply about oneself, and it is a function of the ego that we want such an all-powerful eternal being to be watching and judging us. The opposite: That no-one is watching, and no-one keeps measure of our actions, is cold in comparison, so that some peoples’ ego’s and pride wish for there to be a god. See: Homocentricity or Anthropocentrism: Why Do Religions Think Humanity Is Central to God and Creation?.
As we can see from the different ways people experience the same event, peoples’ expectations influence their reality. Examples of this include, as discussed, sleep apnea: Experienced by some as UFO abductions, and others as attempted demon possession. Of all the experiences and messages given by God, many contradict each other. From this mess of contradictory experiences, combined with the lack of any logical reason why gods would exist, I conclude that there is no God. There are human beings, our wishes, our projections and our experiences led by our own abstractions and expectations, but there is no objective, real God external to the self. See: The False and Conflicting Experiences of Mankind: How Other Peoples’ Experience Contradict Our Own Beliefs.
That we can stimulate parts of the brain and induce mystical and spiritual experiences in people means that such experiences are explained by the neurological sciences whether or not there is actually a ‘spiritual realm’. See: Souls do not Exist: Evidence from Science & Philosophy Against Mind-Body Dualism.
Hallucinations are easily interpreted in religious terms, and, the religious instinct towards fasting and sensory deprivation are both sought after as routes towards gaining ‘divine’ or ‘spiritual’ messages – when in reality, it is the starved brain misfiring. See: Hallucinations, Sensory Deprivation and Fasting: The Physiological Causes of Religious and Mystical Experiences: 2. Hallucinations.
The burden of proof remains firmly with the spiritualists: Experience of these types of mystical events is not proof of the reality of them, therefore different (logical or experimental) proof needs to be found. Until such proof arrives, it is not sensible to believe in god.
For the full page, see: “Experiences of God are Illusions, Derived from Malfunctioning Psychological Processes” by Vexen Crabtree (2002).
#causes_of_religion #religion #sun_worship
That religion is ultimately all based on worship of the sun, and of the stars and other visible stellar bodies (such as Mercury, Venus and Mars), has been a very common observation. The sun has obvious life-giving properties; its waning during autumn and winter gives rise to natural decay, loss of vegetation and eventually, to human difficulties in obtaining food. But the powers of darkness are eventually defeated, and the sun’s power starts to rise on the winter equinox. The celebration of the solstices, equinoxes and seasons has often been done via the apotheosis of natural forces: in the history of mankind, more gods are attributed to the cycles of nature than from any other source.
“Prodicus of Ceos [5th century BCE), also one of the most famous sophists, advanced the idea that the conceptions of the gods were originally associated with those things which were of use to humanity: sun and moon, rivers and springs, the products of the earth and the elements; therefore bread was identified with Demeter, wine with Dionysus, water with Poseidon, fire with Hephaestus. As a special instance he mentioned the worship of the Nile by the Egyptians.”
“Atheism in Pagan Antiquity” by Anders Björn Drachmann (1922)98
“… as late as the days of the French Revolution, Dupuis, in a voluminous work, tried to trace the whole of ancient religion and mythology back to astronomy.”
“Atheism in Pagan Antiquity” by Anders Björn Drachmann (1922)99
In the Northern Hemisphere, the spring equinox occurs when the length of the day increases until it is equal with the length of the night, which occurs on the 21st of March each year100. The sun, growing in power, finally overtakes darkness, and its rebirth is celebrated. This was an especially important event for early human civilisations that relied upon agriculture. This is why so many ancient religions and cultures celebrate renewal and rebirth at and after the spring equinox, and is why Easter is tied up with the ideas of fertility and growth, hence, the symbols of the egg and the rabbit. Ancient pagans anthropomorphized the forces of nature, and told stories to explain why the sun was resurgent. Adonis, Attis, Dionysus, Osiris and many other Greek and Roman cults incorporated the death and rebirth of their gods at this time, with the principal dying-and-resurrection god returning to Earth for the sake of humankind101. When Christianity arose, Christians also told stories of Jesus dying and resurrecting at Easter, and since the very first centuries of Christianity, Christian apologists have had to defend themselves against accusations that the whole Jesus story was a retelling of pagan myths but without understanding of the underlying solar symbolism101.
#burkina_faso #hong_kong #islam #kenya #psychology #scientology #thinking_errors
“The regression fallacy occurs when people extract too much meaning from chance events under specific circumstances. Disease and fortune come and go: because of the law of regression when things are at their worst they are likely to simply get better on their own no matter what we do. But when things are bad, some will “try” all manner of superstitious, meaningless and misguided practices – including all kinds of alternative therapies. Social psychologist David Myers agrees: “when things reach a low point… whatever we try – going to a psychotherapist, starting a new diet-exercise plan, reading a self-help book – is more likely to be followed by improvement than by further deterioration“102. Because we rarely employ controls and statistical analysis in our personal lives, it seems that any attempted solution, from the zany to the insane, has actually worked. This is the cause of untold numbers of superstitions, magical practices, religious beliefs and pseudoscience, and can sometimes lead large numbers of people astray, especially when stories and anecdotes are published by the press.103,104,105,106
This is why many cults, religions and pseudo-therapeutic fads prey on the weak, depressed, down-and-outs and those who have recently experienced catastrophe. Such people are more likely to try new religions107.
The solution is to be more cognizant of Human thinking errors. Cause and effect must be analyzed statistically, carefully, and by (social) scientists who know how to discount confounding factors. Simply put: do not assume that some action or event causes a change in the frequency of another event without investigating it properly; no matter how much it goes against common-sense to deny the correlation, cognitive thinking errors such as the regression fallacy can easily lead us to false conclusions based on limited data.”
“Statistical Regression: Causes of Strange Beliefs and Pseudoscience” by Vexen Crabtree (2017)
Other desperate measures are connected with the frailty of being human. Among the Mossi people of Burkina Faso, for example, “barrenness among non-Muslim women may be treated by the divinatory diagnosis that the would-be children are refusing to be born except as Muslims. The obvious remedy is conversion to Islam”. This abuse is effective – people during desperate times are open to wilder influences. The same author who described the Mossi above provides a similar cultural illustration of this in action:
“Among the Giriama of Kenya, to take another example, people falling ill are diagnosed as having been possessed by Muslim spirits for which the cure is, once again, conversion to Islam.”
Translatabiliity in Islam and in Christianity in Africa by Lamin Sanneh (2002)108
It might seem ridiculous to outsiders and educated people in modern countries that this can truly result in conversion, but, in the West, many convert to Scientology on the basis of its pseudoscientific Dianetics practices, many converted to EST, and take up Edward Bach´s flower remedies, all kinds of New Age healing methods, aromatherapy and a large number of highly suspicious and ineffective “cures” because they think they might work. In Hong Kong, anthropologist Daniel Métraux documents how 10 members of a family all converted to Soka Gakkai on the basis that when the wife converted, the husband recovered from a serious illness109. Did they stop to think: why join this religion? Given that thousands of different religious movements claim thousands of healing events, why should we trust that this one in particular embodies otherworldly truth? The answer is that conversions are based on interpersonal relationships and social factors, rather than on a serious attempt to understand the world.
#belarus #buddhism #estonia #hinduism #human_development #religion #russia #vietnam
National under-development, low national average intelligence and poor social stability are all correlated with high rates of religious belief. In other words – as a country gets richer, better educated and more stable, religion declines. The more well developed the country is the less religious it is. For our purposes here, we need to also consider education to be of note. Mass education is one of forces that works to undermine religious thinking. The correlation between low intelligence and religion is discussed elsewhere on this page. Social stability relies on the arms of government such as police, justice and infrastructure management to be in good functional order. Corruption, poverty and poor governance affect an entire countries health – including mental health.
Chart data footnote: 111
In countries with a per-capita GDP equal to or below $2,000, the average religiosity rate is 95%. For rich countries, with per-capita incomes higher than $25,000, the rate is half as much – 47%. A few countries do not fit this trend, but, there are clear historical reasons for this. All four lower-income countries with low religiosity rates (Estonia, Russia, Belarus and Vietnam) were all subject to long-lasting restrictions against religion112.
Dr Nigel Barber has analysed many of the same sets of statistics as I have, and his published works are somewhat more methodical than mine and show the same results. He writes that “the question of why economically developed countries turn to atheism has been batted around by anthropologists for about eighty years. Anthropologist James Fraser proposed that scientific prediction and control of nature supplants religion as a means of controlling uncertainty in our lives. This hunch is supported by data showing that the more educated countries have higher levels of non belief and there are strong correlations between atheism and intelligence” (2011).
Likewise, researchers Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman have approached this from an evolutionary and a sociological stance and both argue that belief in God is correlated with the level of difficulty of life in general – that “in countries where food is plentiful, health care is universal and housing is accessible, people believe less in God than in those countries where their lives are insecure”113. Sociologist of religion Professor Roderick Main writes that “where the technology and resources to mitigate major sufferings such as poverty and sickness exist, it is understandable that, for some, the appeal of religious consolations should diminish”114
The link is between development and our understanding of the world. In other words, the more mysterious and hard to control the world is, the more strongly religion suits people’s demands115 for an ultimate victory over life. This future may take the form of a perfect afterlife (and maybe punishment for wrongdoers), or it may take the form of absolute dissolution where all the trials of life can be seen to have been steps towards annihilation – the former one being a typically “Western” solution adopted by Abrahamic religions whereas the latter is “Eastern” as adopted by Hinduism and Buddhism.
The idea of heaven is one of the most attractive features of religion. The ends to which people will go in order to foster the required spiritual brownie points to get to heaven is seemingly endless – from lives spent in prayer, meditation and repentance, to lives wasted in suicide attacks and isolation: if there is potential reward at the end, people will believe in it, and then act on those beliefs.
The following things make the concept of heaven compelling and mentally addictive:
The attainment of a personal state of eternal happiness and bliss.
The idea that friends and family, alive and dead, have found peace and happiness in an afterlife.
The idea that all the wrongs of life are righted because good people go to heaven, and the bad people we’ve encountered are tortured in hell even if they got away with their wrongful attitudes during our own lives.
The worse one’s own life in this world, the stronger is the compulsion to believe in a better life after this one. The statistical correlation between social inequality and religion, and, social instability and religion, has been reported on thoroughly by Barber (2011). People yearn for, and then believe in, an ultimate and absolute justice that will rectify all the wrongs of this life. There is certainly a strong element of condolence in believing that those who do wrong against us will be punished for each and every deed.
“Because the distribution of wealth and power inhibits them, the resentful cannot act out of their desire for vengeance against the wealthy and the noble; as compensation, therefore, they seek to score moral victories that in the end will enable them to turn the tables on those who have previously lorded it over them. Thus, as Weber (1964: 110-11) put it, ‘suffering may take on the quality of the religiously meritorious, in view of the belief that it brings in its wake great hopes for future compensation.’ The notion that unconscious drives for salvation, motivated by suffering, take on the form of religious claims to eventual privilege, was shared by Freud, perhaps in a common debt to Nietzsche.”
“Key Thinkers in the Sociology of Religion“ by Richard K. Fenn (2009) [Book Review]117
This section is extracted from: “Theological Problems with Heaven, Paradise and Nirvana” by Vexen Crabtree (2003).
#anti-religion #astronomy #atheism #belief #buddhism #christianity #education #god #intelligence #iq #religion #science #stupidity #taoism #theism #UK #USA
Taken from “Religion and Intelligence” by Vexen Crabtree (2007)
General intelligence is negatively correlated with strength of religious belief from national to individual average: The historical battles between religious institutions and science, such as those in physics, astronomy and biology, indicate there is something wrong with the religious approach to the study of reality. The underlying problem extends to negative effects on the individual intelligence of believers, and a related negative effect on educational achievements. Hardly any of the several-hundred Nobel Prize winning scientists have been Christians. Only 3.3% of the Members of the Royal Society in the UK and 7% the National Academy of Sciences in the USA, believe in a personal God. The more senior and learnéd the scientist, the less likely they are to believe in God. The children of highly religious parents suffer diminished IQs – averaging 7 to 10 points lower compared to their non-religious counterparts in similar socio-economic groups. As you would expect from these results, multiple studies have also shown that IQ is opposed to the strength of religious belief. 39 studies since 1927 (out of 43) have found that the more educated a person is, and the higher one’s intelligence, the less likely someone is to hold religious beliefs – “religion declines in proportion to the rise in education and personal income”118. This correlation isn’t new and was also observed in ancient Greece by Polybius (200-118BCE)119.
The effect extends beyond individual countries and is visible inter-nationally. Countries with a higher rate of belief in God have lower average intelligence. All countries with high average intelligence have low national levels of belief in God. For countries where belief in God is over 80%, the average national IQ is 83 points. For those countries where stated disbelief in God (atheism) is greater than 20%, the national average IQ is 98 points. Instead of belief in God, countries with the highest IQs adhere to Far-Eastern belief systems such as Buddhism, Taoism and Shintoism. It is not just intelligence and education that is inversely correlated with religion – it has also been found that the more you know about religion itself, the less likely you are to be religious120.
Suggestibility: In The Origins of Psychic Phenomena: Poltergeists, Incubi, Succubi, and the Unconscious Mind121 Stan Gooch examines many aspects of supernatural experience, and finds that those who experience such things score highly on suggestibility indexes, are better hypnosis subjects, and are more religious and spiritual.
#alternative_spirituality #causes_of_religion #neo-paganism #new_religious_movements #paganism #religion #secret_societies #wicca
“There has been an explosion of interest in unusual, novel, untraditional, magical, counter-cultural and Earth-centered religious movements. They have some common features123 and share a number of common pull-factors attract people to new religious movements123.
The simplistic answers they give to life questions124 often combined with an anti-science stance125,126.
Anti-consumerism and anti-materialism.127
Golden-age romanticism. Some groups promote pre-industrial or historical moral eras and attract others who think that the modern world is “lost”.128
Celtic fandoms.129
The loss of magic and fantasy in traditional religions.130,85,131
The rise of individualism132 and protections for freedom of belief means people are free to pick-and-choose which religion to embrace.
Religious groups that arise from a particular cause will attract those interested in that cause. Two of the most popular amongst NRMs are:
”
Environmentalism is commonly proclaimed by all kinds of pagan, Celt, pseudo-Native and New-Age groups, and they attract many people who are similarly passionate about protecting the planet.132,133,134,135,136
Feminism-friendly movements such as Paganism and Wicca attract many like-minded folk.132,137
“Why do People Join New Religious Movements?” by Vexen Crabtree (2017)
While religious beliefs are mostly the result of parental instruction and geographic incidence, there are many subconscious, psychological, sociological and neurobiological factors that cause religious and superstitious beliefs to prosper. This includes the idea of functionalism, where traditionalism and rebellion are achieved by adopting religious labels and following or rejecting typical cultural-religious behaviour. Likewise, many activists are drawn to particular religious groups on account of their association with their stance on worldly issues. Culture and religion are also mixed up, so that many times (for example in Northern Ireland) conversion is a political act; and beliefs are secondary to labels. This is also apparent in the way that the amount of Christians in countries like the UK (72%) somehow outnumber the number of actual god-believers (~50%). Religion is mostly caused by social and psychological factors and not by any examining of the evidence or logic behind the beliefs involved. This is why skeptics often find it so hard to bring their scientific knowledge to productive use in arguments with religionists.
Psychologists, sociologists, ethnographers and scientists tend to view religious beliefs as the result of mostly normal psychological systems being applied in the wrong context. A prime example is the way we get angry with cars and computers, and shout insults at them, or the way we tend to see patterns in random behaviour such as brownian motion (our ‘hyperactive agent detection device’). Historical investigators such as William James have found that outstanding religious innovators and leaders have frequently been epileptic, psychotic, suffered from strokes and various mental problems and nervous instability and that this often give them more command in areas of spirituality. Experiments on the Human brain have allowed us to discover many of the specific neuronal networks that can misfire to cause us to have ‘religious’ feelings and experiences. Childhood fantasies, including an absence of death and the seemingly all-present, ever-caring and all-knowing parental figures who give us comfort, often become the basis for religious beliefs in adults. This hidden wishful-thinking mechanism feeds our ego (that “someone” cares about everything we do) and gives us consolation from death in the idea of an afterlife. Many strange things we ‘experience’ are cultural (therefore an aspect of upbringing), and once a scientific and critical understanding of them is attained, the beauty of the natural world displaces the appeal of the supernatural. Religion, when not considered a byproduct of misapplied cognitive psychology and social factors, is self-inflicted delusion, illusion, smoke and mirrors.
Current edition: 2013 Jul 30
Last Modified: 2017 Jun 25
Second edition 2011 Jul 22
Originally published 2007 Jan 08
http://www.humanreligions.info/causes.html
Parent page: Human Religions
The Bible (NIV). The NIV is the best translation for accuracy whilst maintaining readability. Multiple authors, a compendium of multiple previously published books. I prefer to take quotes from the NIV but where I quote the Bible en masse I must quote from the KJV because it is not copyrighted, whilst the NIV is. Book Review.
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(1902) The Varieties of Religious Experience. Subtitled: “A Study in Human Nature“. 5th (1971 fifth edition) edition. Originally published 1960. From the Gifford Lectures delivered at Edinburgh 1901-1902. Quotes also obtained from Amazon digital Kindle 2015 Xist Publishing edition. A paperback book. Book Review.
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(2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow. Published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, New York, USA. A paperback book.
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(2014) The Future of the Mind. Subtitled: “The Scientific Quest To Understand, Enhance and Empower the Mind“. Amazon Kindle digital edition. Published by Penguin Books Ltd, London, UK. An e-book.
Krauss, Lawrence. Lawrence Krauss is Foundation Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration and the Physics Department at Arizona State University, as well as Co-Director of the Cosmology Initiative and Inaugural Director of the Origins Project.
(2012) A Universe from Nothing. Amazon Kindle digital edition. Published by Free Press, New York, USA. An e-book.
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Kurtz, Lester R.
(2007) Gods in the Global Village. 2nd edition. Published by Pine Forge Press, California, USA. Was previously Director of Religious Studies at Texas and holds a master’s in Religion from Yale Divinity School and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago. Kurtz is Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas, USA.
Laying, Anthony
“Faith in the Power of Witchcraft” in Skeptical Inquirer (2010 Mar/Apr) p51-53. Laying is emeritus professor of anthropology at Elmira College. He spent a year conducting ethnographic research among the Caribs on the West Indian island of Dominica.
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(1994) Persuasions of the Witches’ Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England. First published 1989. Published by Picador, Basingstoke, UK. In “Belief Beyond Boundaries: Wicca, Celtic Spirituality and the New Age“ by Joanne Pearson (2002)7 chapter 4, p163.
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(2002) Religion, Science and the New Age. This is chapter 5 (pages p173-224) of “Belief Beyond Boundaries: Wicca, Celtic Spirituality and the New Age“ by Joanne Pearson (2002)8 (pages p173-224). Pearson, Joanne
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(1990) Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America. Published by Basil Blackwell, Oxford, UK. This is a chapter (pages 88-89) of “Global Religious Movements in Regional Context” by John Wolffe (2002)9 (pages 88-89). Wolffe, John
(2002, Ed.) Global Religious Movements in Regional Context. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Aldershot, UK, in association with The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. This was a religious studies textbook in the AD317 OU course.
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(1999) The Phenomenon Of Religion: A Thematic Approach. Published by Oneworld Publications, Oxford, UK. A paperback book. Book Review.
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(2002) Aspirational Indians: North American indigenous religions and the New Age. This is chapter 3 of “Belief Beyond Boundaries: Wicca, Celtic Spirituality and the New Age“ by Joanne Pearson (2002)11. Pearson, Joanne
(2002, Ed.) Belief Beyond Boundaries: Wicca, Celtic Spirituality and the New Age. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Aldershot, UK, in association with The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. A paperback book.
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(1999) Social Psychology. 6th (‘international’) edition. Originally published 1983. Current version published by McGraw Hill. A paperback book.
Nesbitt, Eleanor. Professor of Religions and Education at the University of Warwick, UK.
(2011) The Teacher of Religion as Ethnographer. This is chapter 53 (pages 965-985) of “The Oxford Handbook of The Sociology of Religion“ by Peter B. Clarke (2011)12 (pages 965-985). Clarke, Peter B.. Peter B. Clarke: Professor Emeritus of the History and Sociology of Religion, King’s College, University of London, and currently Professor in the Faculty of Theology, University of Oxford, UK.
(2011) The Oxford Handbook of The Sociology of Religion. Originally published 2009. Current version published by Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. A paperback book.
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(2008) Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science. Amazon Kindle digital edition. Published by Princeton University Press, New Jersey, USA. An e-book.
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(2004, Ed.) Encyclopedia of New Religions. Published by Lion Publishing, Oxford, UK. A hardback book.
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(2002, Ed.) Belief Beyond Boundaries: Wicca, Celtic Spirituality and the New Age. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Aldershot, UK, in association with The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. A paperback book.
Pessi, Anne Birgitta. Academy Research Fellow and Adjunct Professor at the Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland.
(2011) Religion and Social Problems: Individual and Institutional Responses. This is chapter 52 (pages 941-962) of “The Oxford Handbook of The Sociology of Religion“ by Peter B. Clarke (2011)13 (pages 941-962). Clarke, Peter B.. Peter B. Clarke: Professor Emeritus of the History and Sociology of Religion, King’s College, University of London, and currently Professor in the Faculty of Theology, University of Oxford, UK.
(2011) The Oxford Handbook of The Sociology of Religion. Originally published 2009. Current version published by Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. A paperback book.
Plüss, Caroline. Assistant Professor in the Division of Sociology School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technical University, Singapore.
(2011) Migration and the Globalization of Religion. This is chapter 27 (pages 491-506) of “The Oxford Handbook of The Sociology of Religion“ by Peter B. Clarke (2011)14 (pages 491-506). Clarke, Peter B.. Peter B. Clarke: Professor Emeritus of the History and Sociology of Religion, King’s College, University of London, and currently Professor in the Faculty of Theology, University of Oxford, UK.
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Footnotes
By Vexen Crabtree 2013
#beliefs #causes_of_religion #god #illusion #religion #science #sociology
The principal cause of an individual’s religion is the inheriting of identity from parents and local culture1 and most conversions are to another religion that is active locally2. Religion is primarily a result of where you are raised. But what other secular, sociological and psychological factors cause religion to prosper? What about new religious movements and spiritualities that are exotic, superstitious, anti-intellectual and counter-cultural? They all share in common a certain irrational and illogical character. What causes such beliefs? There have been many studies on these topics, and here the examination covers both arbitrary exterior circumstances and internal neuronal causes. Sociologists warn us that fixation on “the” cause of religion hampers research3. There are many causes of religion and superstition because the word “religion” covers such a variety of beliefs and practices, from dry academic ideas through to rituals and cultural behaviours. Of all the causes examined here it is easy to see that one of the least motivating factors is a conscientious deliberation over what claims are true4,5. Guy Harrison states with disdain that “a typical home purchase is given far more thoughtful analysis than the selection of a god to worship“6.
#belief #causes_of_religion #mass_belief #parenting #religion
“In most countries on Earth, most people are religious. But why? The main reason is that children assume the religion of their parents7 and they are unlikely to ever switch8, or, if they do convert, it will be to become a member of a different religion that is also popular where they live9. In “Social Psychology“ by David Myers (1999)10 the word “religion” enters the index from the chapters on “conformity” and “indoctrination”11. Other researchers have found that “fewer than 1% [of Americans] convert to an entirely new religion“12 and in some places children are not exposed to non-belief until college13 and it is easy to imagine that in the current-day Middle East and in historical times, the only comments ever heard about non-believers are intensely negative. In this sense, most people’s religion is arbitrary and it is clear that most religious people did not choose their religion, nor have they seriously compared religions to ascertain which one(s) were most likely to be true. Most people confuse their heritage for their religion.”
“Why Are There So Many Religious People? Parents, Local Culture and Inertia” by Vexen Crabtree (2016)
#brazil #china #christianity #hong_kong #korea,_south
Individuals will often adopt a religious position for social reasons. Associating with a group of like-minded folk feels good, and can engender a feeling of empowerment and worth14. Examples of this abound, and include the sectarian strife in Northern Ireland, the embrace of alternative religions by teenagers, the embrace of Eastern mysticism by intellectuals and students at the turn of the twentieth century, and the reaction against Western materialism through the embrace of anti-commercialist religions. Religion thus serves a functional purpose quite separate from its actual religious content. Many people adhere to a religious life because it helps combat loneliness, helps them stay off of alcohol, helps them oppress sexual urges, or helps them cope with anxiety or depression15.
Pascal Boyer in “Religion Explained“ (2001)16 listed many of the commonly theorized explanations for the success of religion, and, most of the list consisted of items that described functional roles of religion such as “religion holds society together” and “religion allays anxiety and makes for a comfortable world”17. But what the functional influences lack is a genuine appraisal of the pros or cons of the theological dogmas of the religion in terms of their truth or falsity. I.e., functional elements of religion can remain fully operational even if the underlying belief system contains serious flaws.
Some people join religions because “a cohesive, supportive church plays a central role [in] providing social network[s]”18. Many times it is not even structure that appeals – the very fact of joining a group can be uplifting19. In analysing the growth of evangelical Christianity from 1940 in South Korea, for example, the sociologist D. Martin notes that the basis for the spectacular growth is partially the same as in South America and Asia in general; ‘success can be attributed to a combination of vibrant Pentecostal worship … and personal support’ and ‘the chief pastor/executive combines many secular roles, as, indeed he does in Brazil. He is a social worker and employment exchange official, a kind of store manager and a broker, an educator and a fixer”. I.e., such motivated people attract flocks of followers for their general function in society.20
The same purely pragmatic approach to religion can be found amongst Cantonese coverts to Mormonism (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) in Hong Kong. Caroline Plüss studied this and in 1999 reported the following:
“Chinese residents in Hong Kong joined this church despite [a] negative perception of the church … because [it] offered potential recruits help with learning English by, for example, operating a tutorial college. It also helped Chinese converts gain financial support for studying in the universities it operates in the United States.”
“Migration and the Globalization of Religion” by Caroline Plüss (2011)21
Religion attracts some people because of the usefulness of the organization and not because of the underlying truth of the religion. Religious leaders know this and their hope is, of course, that some people caught in this way will develop a genuine interest at some later date.
Religions are often associated with particular stances on particular subjects. From the late nineteenth century a few generations of women seeking equality and empowerment found that some alternative religions were strongly appealing for their stance on gender equality; such religions naturally became magnets for feminists and activists. The membership of Greenpeace is, likewise, notably skewed away from traditional patriarchal religions and towards pagan ones. “Among the Airo-Pai, a small group of Amazonian people on the borders of Peru, Ecuador and Columbia, [Christian evangelicalism and Pentecostalism] has served to prevent alcoholism and drug abuse” because it is embraced as a statement of abstinence rather than strictly for its religious ideas22.
By far the major example of religion-as-activism was the Protestant reformation that swept away Catholicism in much of Europe. The masses were utterly despondent with the immoral, power-abusing, money-centered activities of the Roman Catholic Church, and they were aided by early governments who could no longer stand seeing such huge volumes of religious taxes being sent to Rome. Although there were also theological concerns, the mass of the movement was clearly socio-political in nature; the appeal of Protestantism was mostly its social-activist function and not the specific theology of Martin Luther, its founder.
Some sociologists explain religion – especially new religion, as a form of reactionism against the modern world. So, religious argumentation appeals because it helps justify a rejection of features of the modern world. Main (2002) describes one set of such reactions as “romanticism”, where intuition, imagination and holistic-sounding ideas are espoused in opposition to the cold sciences and practicalities of life23.
#causes_of_religion #politics #psychology #religion #sectarianism
Religion is often used as a collective political and racial identity regardless of whether people agree with the actual tenets of a religion24. To be a proper member of an ethnic group in many cases means adopting a certain religion. Or the opposite – some people join a symbolic opposition religion to signal rebellion and dissatisfaction with their own community25. Studies have found that many people join a religion not because they agree with its theological arguments, but because religion endows “people with an enhanced sense of solidarity to advance collective, often political intentions“26. Migration is often a trigger for adopting a religion. This works in two ways, together called “cultural transition and defence” by sociologist Steve Bruce27: (1) Once removed from a community that they come to miss, some adopt a religion common in that community as a way of boosting their identification with it, regardless of whether they have started believing in the tenets of the faith. (2) When faced with immigration, some take up more extreme forms of what they perceive to be the ‘proper’ religion of their own culture.#atheism #buddhism #theism #USA
This section is taken from “Do We Need Religion to Have Good Morals?: 1.3. Is Religion Required to Be a Good Person?” by Vexen Crabtree (2014).
Religions almost universally emphasize the moral duty of the individual. “God knows all” as the Qur’an and Bible repeat: examples in the Christian Bible include Job 28:24, 37:16; 1 John 3:19-20; and very frequently in the Qur’an: the first chapter (after the introduction) iterates God’s omniscience ten times, for example Sura 2:29, 77, 85, 115 and 137. We all answer to God eventually. Buddhism and Hinduism likewise teach that we pay the consequences of this life throughout our next. So many people come to think of religions as being a bastion of moral thinking, because, religions tend to dramatize and exaggerate the rewards and punishments of good and bad behaviour. Don’t forget that when Psalms 14:1 says “the fool saith in his heart that there is no God”, the word it uses in Hebrew also means immoral people: immoral people say ‘there is no god’. This emphasis is strong amongst laypeople: despite their record against human rights on an institutional and national level, locally popular religions are often seen as a force for good and there is a general belief that religion supports morality28. A 2002 poll in the USA, an unusually religious country for its state of development, found that on average 44.5% of the adults believed that “It is necessary to believe in God in order to be moral and have good values”29. This included both church-goers and laypeople. 65% of regular churchgoers believed it, thinking therefore that the vast majority of the members of “wrong” religions therefore could not be moral people. This ridiculous belief is still held by 25.7% of those who never attend church. Although it is hard to believe that this level of ignorance can exist in the rest of the world, the underlying belief was more popular in pre-modern times throughout the world. Academics have also toed this line; Talcott Parsons in 1966 said the same thing, merely using bigger words. After saying that what makes moral rules valid is a ‘legitimation system’, he adds that ‘a legitimation system is always related to, and meaningfully dependent on, a grounding in ordered relations to ultimate reality. That is, its grounding is always in some sense religious. […] The process of secularization, then, undermines the system of legitimation by which a society’s rules seem to be grounded in ultimate reality.’30
Bryan Wilson is an insightful and respected sociologist of religion. Even he, in 1982, warned of mass breakdown in morality in the West if the religious underpinnings of moral propriety were forgotten.
“As Wilson (1982: 52) concludes, ‘Unless the basic virtues are serviced, unless men are given a sense of psychic reassurance that transcends the confines of the social system, we may see a time when, for one reason or another, the system itself fails to work…’ […] Wilson (1982: 86) describes how secularization resulted in the breakdown of morality in Western societies: ‘When in the West, religion waned, when the rationalistic forces inherent in Puritanism acquired autonomy of their religious origins, so the sense of moral propriety also waned – albeit somewhat later, as a cultural lag. Following the decline of religion [… and the resultant] process of moral breakdown [… we should have] genuine concern about the role of morality in contemporary culture’ (Wilson 1982: 87)”
“Religion in Sociological Perspective” by Bryan Wilson (1982)31
Being discussed in “Key Thinkers in the Sociology of Religion“
Richard K. Fenn (2009) [Book Review]32
After Parsons in 1966 and Wilson in 1982, Karen Armstrong repeats the same story in “A Short History of Myth: Volume 1-4“ (2005)33, arguing that myth is essential for good ethics and meaningful living. How do all of these thinkers rationalize the fact that many god-believers, myth-believers and suchlike, appear to commit the same atrocities and immoralities as unbelievers? From the Dark Ages presided over by Christianity, to the spectre of Islamist brutality against (for example) women and gays in Islamic countries, it seems that religious morals are hardly a panacea. Karen Armstrong dismisses these problems with the odd concept that they are caused by “failed myths”34. An element of double-think appears to be in place: if religious people do good, it is because they are religious, whereas if they do wrong, it is because they are fallible human beings. Such circular logic ought to be challenged wherever it is heard.
So there are numbers of people who, if they want to be good or, wants to be seen as good, will gravitate towards religion simply because they think it is what required. These people, who have come to actively choosing to be a better person, will find that their efforts are rewarded whether or not they choose to do it within a religious framework.
There is plenty of evidence that religion is not required. Parson in 1966 and Wilson in 1982 both warned of systematic collapse in morality if secularisation continued. It not only continued, but has accelerated. There has been no mass failure. Crime is down, wars are shorter, violence is down. It happens that people can also adopt non-religious and secular philosophies in order to promote good moralizing. Secular movements such as the British Humanist Association and IHEU (International Humanist and Ethical Union) are devoted to encouraging moral behavior, moral thinking, overall conscientiousness and rationality. The main difference between these and religious groups who do the same, is that the religious groups often teach that they are the only valid source of morals.
If I am threatened into behaving in a good manner then I am at best amoral, because I am not acting with free will. If you believe that a supreme god is going to punish you (in hell) or deny you life (annihilation) if you misbehave, it is like being permanently threatened into behaving well. In addition, if you believe there is some great reward for behaving well, then your motives for good behavior are more selfish. An atheist who does not believe in heaven and hell is potentially more moral, for (s)he acts without these added factors. Most atheists who do not believe in divine judgement, and most theists who do, both act morally. Some of both groups act consistently immorally. The claim that belief in God is essential or aids moral behavior is wrong, and any amusing theistic claim that they have “better” morals, despite acting under a reward and punishment system, is deeply questionable. Who is more moral? Those who act for the sake of goodness itself, or those who do good acts under the belief that failure to do so results in hell?
In conclusion, the simplicity and drama of religious stick-and-carrot approaches to morality often make religions appealing, and, to be seen as good in society – or to try to reform themselves – many people find themselves attracted to a religion. Unfortunately, all of this psychology functions just as well no matter if the tenets of the religion are actually true, or not.
It is only in modern literate times that myth and religion have become individual areas of study: they were previously and universally tied up with human culture. So, agricultural communities had agricultural religions as part of that culture. A 1915 study of ancient Mesopotamian religion found that it was apparent that although many cultures shared beliefs and myths, “striking differences remain to be accounted for. Human experiences varied in localities because all sections of humanity were not confronted in ancient times by the same problems in their everyday lives”35. Agricultural people had gods that waxed and waned, lived and died, with the seasons. Native hunting tribes had gods and rituals that would secure them luck in the hunt36. Those gods are clearly products of the people’s environment, and the personal stories and dramas told about them are products of the imagination in an attempt to explain facets of the natural environment. In retrospect it is hard to tell what elements of ancient cultures were actually believed, what was known to be mythical, and what was therefore religious (i.e., thought to be true but basically mythological). In “A Short History of Myth: Volume 1-4“ by Karen Armstrong (2005)33 we see this confusion as a central theme37. It continues today: Buddhism and Hinduism are very hard to separate out into culture and religion and no-one knows whether “Jew” means the religious, dietary-observing Synagogue-attending type, or the atheist secular type. For that reason, there are many sociologists who deny that Hinduism is a distinct religion, although in recent decades, Hindu nationalists have been building a much clearer and more forceful definition of Hindutva (‘Hindu-ness’).
In general, it must be acknowledged that a lot of what we call religion is in fact a mixture of semi-believed mythology and cultural practices; a ’cause’ of religion is therefore our want of simple categorisation.
Anthony Laying (2010) has studied the prevalence of superstitions and witchcraft-accusations in certain cultures in this case, the Caribs. The general idea, held by “many tribal and peasant communities all over the world” is that witches are responsible for many social maladies from disease to failed crops, and they are simply evil and sneaky. Often so-called witches are murdered, tortured, expelled or at least shunned; the Dark Ages of Christian history and the heresy-accusations of Islam today both follow(ed) the same psychology. The features of witchcraft highlight the functionalism of religion in wider ways. “Believing that there are witches inclined to harm others with their malevolent power can have numerous social and psychological consequences for a community” says Prof. Laying. Witness how many of the effects serve to reinforce people’s already-existing beliefs and to maintain social structure even when the religious dogmas suffer from counter-evidence:
Maintaining mental health (gaining sympathy and compensation for low status, displacing antagonism and jealousy, achieving a sense of control). Victims of witchcraft, often persons who otherwise attract little attention, receive intense sympathetic concern from their neighbours. Those accused of using witchcraft are frequently very unpopular and, therefore, are ideal scapegoats. Blaming misfortune on gods, demons, or bad luck gives the believer very little sense of control; witches, being here among the living, may be identified and dealt with.
Providing Explanations (explaining death, illness, misfortune, and why magical cures sometimes fail). Where witchcraft is presumed, bad luck, accident, or infection are not considered satisfactory explanations. When misfortune is especially persistent, witchcraft is readily assumed to be the cause. When magical cures fail, witchcraft may be blamed for the failure, thus preserving faith in such good magic.
Encouraging proper conduct (reinforcing and clarifying correct behaviour and providing negative role models to discourage bad behaviour). Nonconformists are the most likely to be accused of practicing witchcraft; their strange behaviour provides ‘evidence’ of their evil nature. […]
Encouraging generosity and sharing (ensuring an equitable distribution of material resources). In egalitarian societies and communities plagued by persistent poverty, individuals and households adapt by sharing with others. Those who refuse [can be accused of being a witch, or conversely might attract the attention of a jealous witch].
Conserving tradition (defending the social order and community cohesion). Those who openly challenge accepted norms are especially likely to be accused of witchcraft. […]
Providing entertainment (creating drama and stimulating imagination). Dramatic folktales about witches and gossip concerning an unpopular neighbour suspected of inflicting illness or bad luck on a household are listened to with great interest, especially by children. Consequently, lessons to be learned from these accounts fall on fertile ground and help perpetuate the beliefs.
Coping with rapid social change (attempting to reinstate social order). Under conditions of rapid cultural change and prolonged stress, witchcraft accusations may increase dramatically. Tolerance for deviant behaviour decreases under these conditions, inviting witch hunts and creating incentive to abide by traditional cultural norms. […]
One hears less about witches once a certain level of economic development has been achieved, but when hard times return, accusations of witchcraft may become common again. For example, there has been a resurgence of this belief in sub-Saharan Africa in recent years. […]
Some of the methods used subconsciously by believers to defend their beliefs are typical. When traditional remedies fail (or in modern monotheistic religions, when prayer fails) it is often said that lack-of-genuine-belief is the cause. The ironic solution to failure of traditional solutions is therefore is to believe more strongly!
Many psychologists, scientists and researchers have come to the conclusion that religion is a by-product of otherwise-normal processes in the brain. A theory of religion developed by Stark and Bainbridge (1987) “is both cognitive in nature and fundamentally atheistic”, being rooted in the idea that the information-processing and language-producing functions of our brain are not perfect as they evolved for practical purposes only, and when they are applied to theoretical issues they result in faulty conclusions and perceptions. Lawrence Krauss38 notes that “we are hardwired to think that everything that happens to us is significant and meaningful”39. Certain types of stimulus are misunderstood and some of these processes cause us to hold religious beliefs.40
Pascal Boyer throughout “Religion Explained“ (2001)16 argues that a panoply of psychological factors explains religion, explains why religion is successful and why we are inclined to believe in it and find religious arguments plausible, and also explains why it does not appeal universally, and explains why it is partially persistent even in the face of science41.
Other human behaviours also result from misapplied cognitive functions. Our enjoyment of music is the result of a side-effect of our complicated auditory systems in the brain and a lot of other behaviours are of a similar ilk: an over-stimulation or a misuse of a built-in system. Figurative art is another area Boyer uses as an example of our embrace of artificial stimulation of parts of our brain (object and face recognition, etc). These parts of the brain would normally have a purely practical function. According to Boyer religion isn’t a case of ‘neuronal dysfunction’ as I say, but more like a case of misdirected, overstimulated, or inappropriately applied cognitive functions42.
Scott Atran (2002) and Justin Barrett (discussed in the next section) offer “a compatible evolutionary argument about why humans tend to imagine supernatural beings that have feelings, thoughts, and desires. […] in an environment where we were both hunters and hunted”40, centering on the way we attribute conscious intent to events. Prof. Richard Dawkins summarizes some more of the contributors towards the biological psychology of religion:
“The ethnologist Robert Hinde, in Why Gods Persist, and the anthropologists Pascal Boyer, in Religion Explained, and Scott Atran, in In Gods We Trust, have independently promoted the general idea of religion as a by-product of normal psychological dispositions. […] The psychologist Paul Bloom, another advocate of the ‘religion is a by-product’ view, points out that children have a natural tendency towards a dualistic theory of mind. Religion, for him, is a by-product of such instinctive dualism. We humans, he suggest, and especially children, are natural born dualists. […] Other by-product explanations of religion have been proposed by Hinde, Shermer, Boyer, Atran, Bloom, Dennett, Keleman and others.”
#causes_of_religion #pareidolia #psychology #religion #thinking_errors
“We are biologically programmed to detect signs of predators (and prey) wherever they may be. This often means being distracted on occasions where slight movements or patterns make us think something (‘an agent’) is there watching us – possibly even hunting us! “It is far more advantageous to over-detect agency than to under-detect it“44. Hence, the hyperactive agent detection device (HADD). As a highly social species, we are always looking in the shadows for signs of plots, for possible indirect effects of “behind the scenes” actors who are organizing against us – or who are potential allies. Certain circumstances (dim lighting!) heighten our instincts to watch out for secret danger. The evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins says that “we are biologically programmed to impute intentions to entities whose behaviour matters to us“45 and unfortunately, this now includes inanimate forces from “the weather, to waves and currents, to falling rocks“45. Psychologist Justin Barrett originally conceived of HADD and says it is “fundamental to understanding concepts of gods and spirits“44. We Humans excel at abstract thinking and telling imaginative stories to fledge out our feelings. Hence, there are local tribal spirits, sky gods, evil and wild spirits, ghosts in certain buildings, and when most of them are no longer found to exist there is always the eternal creator-God who never really does anything but secretly influences subtle events in the world, seemingly in a manner that makes it an expert at stimulating our HADD while not being detected by any other means. Even in the modern world the attribution of natural events to ‘magical’ and ‘spiritual’ causes is an easier way to understand the world than to study it critically.”
“Hyperactive Agent Detection Device (the Psychology of Religion and Superstition)” by Vexen Crabtree (2017)
There is much evidence in history that the more profound religious insights occur alongside mental dysfunction. The psychologist William James, in his survey of religious experience, comments that there are a massive proportion of prominent religious people in history that have shown signs of now-recognized long-term neurological complaints.
“Religious geniuses have often shown symptoms of nervous instability. Even more perhaps than other kinds of genius, religious leaders have been subject to abnormal psychical visitations. […] They have led a discordant inner life, and had melancholy during a part of their career. They have […] been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological. Often […] these pathological features in their career have helped to give them their religious authority and influence.”
“The Varieties of Religious Experience“ by William James (1902) [Book Review]46
The average believer does not suffer from such severe cataclysms, however, and merely believes in the irrational results of others‘ experiences that have become codified as part of a religion. In normal believers, it may be a long-term background dysfunction of the prefrontal cortex that leads to illogical beliefs:
“People with greater paranormal beliefs showed lower levels of executive function. Particularly, they had less impulse control and greater disorganization, independent of age, sex, or level of education. In contrast, people with greater moral attitudes showed greater executive functioning in all areas measured (motivation, impulse control, empathy, planning, and organization). These findings support studies suggesting that superstitious thinking involves some degree of dysfunction in the prefrontal cortex, even in the general population, while moral attitudes involve better prefrontal functioning. […] People with religious beliefs showed a minute increase in both empathy and impulse control, characteristics encouraged by most orthodox religions.”
M. Spinella and O. Wain, Skeptical Inquirer (2006)47
It is not only chronic neurological dysfunction that can cause religious and supernatural beliefs. Some of the founding experiences can be based on single neurological events such as isolated strokes or seizures. Many types of fit do not involve the motor area of the brain, so do not result in obvious, physical signs of fitting. They can be purely sensory in nature, involving sights, sounds and feelings that range from subtle through to overwhelming.
“Partial seizures can […] cause clonic movement of part of a limb [, … or] may trigger an abnormal sensation, or aura, such as an odd smell or sparkling lights. Most bizarre are the partial seizures that elicit more well-formed auras such as déjá vu (the feeling that something has happened before) or hallucinations.”
“Neuroscience“ by Bear, Connors and Paradiso (1996)48
William James is not alone in being convinced that St. Paul was converted to Christianity by a vision that was the result of a seizure. Other neurological complaints such as schizoid events can also be recurrent and form part of a person’s normal life experience; many such people never develop complete schizophrenia but sit half way on the spectrum between normality and delusion.
“It is best to see ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘normality’ as two overlapping distributions, not two distinct states. Given this view, it may be that we have already found many of the key biological mechanisms […]. Many of the most creative and spiritual individuals show certain apparently schizotaxic traits – unusual patterns of thought and behaviour, unorthodox beliefs, a tendency to have visions and hear voices. Where this does not become disorganizing, and where it can be expressed in a socially accepted form such as art or religion, this kind of thing is usually seen as one of humanity’s great psychological assets, rather than as an impairment.”
“Emotions and Mind” by Toates, Mackintosh and Nettle (2004)49
A final note from William James’ psychological exploration of religion is that mystical and religious experiences can support any religion50. It depends on culture and phenotype of the person. It can cause, or support, any form of a religion including asceticism, gnosticism, theism and such experiences can also cause insanity, genius or works of art. It would be truly enlightening if we could perform some neurological tests on some of the great religious figures in history.
For more on this topic, see “The False and Conflicting Experiences of Mankind: How Other Peoples’ Experience Contradict Our Own Beliefs” by Vexen Crabtree (2008):
#bah�’�_faith #buddhism #christianity #epistemology #experience #god #psychology #religion #subjectivism #taoism #thinking_errors
Hallucinations caused by eye problems can result in surprisingly specific visions of grotesque faces with large eyes and teeth, blood running upwards, and costumed figures51 as our brain tries to interpret errant inputs52. But most hallucinations start in the brain and most of them are subtle and not just a matter of visual phenomenon. Disease, neurochemical imbalances, fasting, exhaustion, sleep and sensory deprivation53,54, chanting, practices of austerity and ritualistic behaviour can all induce hallucinations and other strange states of mind55. They can also be triggered artificially by doctors. The range of experiences produced is varied, from mundane events such as smelling something to out of body experiences. Experimenters can consistently generate deeply meaningful religious experiences which would be utterly convincing if participants didn’t know it was being generated artificially. People interpret these episodes in terms of their local culture – Western Christians don’t receive Buddhist enlightenment and witness their previous lives, for example, whilst Eastern Daoists don’t receive images of the Virgin Mary56. For those who know no neurology it is easy to see how supernatural beliefs can result from such episodes.
A wide variety of religious customs and beliefs across the world are clearly the result of misunderstood biology55. Native American tribes considered fasting being the way for receiving guidance from the Great Spirit. Moses fasted for forty days on Sinai while “talking to God” – the result was the 10 Commandments (Exodus 34:28), Elijah fasted forty days as he journeyed to Horeb, where, in a cave, he experiences a range of effects (1 Kings 19:8-15) and Bahá’u’lláh, (of the Bahá’í Faith) received revelations after spending months in a black underground prison. Jesus also fasted 40 days and as a result, experienced a battle with Satan in a series of visions (Matthew 4:1-11). As a species, we have been artificially inducing mystical experiences for as long as there are records of our behaviour, although nowadays we have a much better understanding of the underlying neurology and how it effects our consciousness.
For more, see Hallucinations, Sensory Deprivation and Fasting: The Physiological Causes of Religious and Mystical Experiences. Its menu:
#beliefs #pseudoscience #psychology #thinking_errors
Not many people would say that subconscious cognitive processes are responsible for their beliefs and actions. We construct rational-sounding reasons to back up the beliefs we have, and we simply don’t – and frequently can’t – get any insight into our true inner workings. Sociologists have found that people deny subconscious causes of their actions or beliefs. The formidable thinker Paul Kurtz explains that people frequently let themselves blindly believe certain things:
“I surely do not wish to suggest that conscious deception is the primary explanation for all or even most paranormal beliefs. Rather, it is self-deception that accounts for so much credulity. There is a powerful willingness in all too many people to believe in the unbelievable in spite of a lack of evidence or even evidence to the contrary. This propensity was due in part to what I have called the transcendental temptation, the tendency to resort to magical thinking, the attribution of occult causes for natural phenomena. The best antidote for this, I submit, is critical thinking.”
Paul Kurtz in Skeptical Inquirer (2006)57
People often do not know how strong subconscious misdirection is and it often feels very awkward when one attempts to deconstruct one’s own thought processes. It may be that such psychological investigation is best done by outside sociologists. William James, the psychologist of religion famous for his work at the turn of the twentieth century, examines the difficulty of such self-examination through a metaphor based on drunkenness:
“Knowledge about a thing is not the thing in itself. You remember what Al-Ghazzali told us in the Lecture on Mysticism – that to understand the cause of drunkenness, as a physician understands them, is not to be drunk. A science might come to understand everything about the causes and elements of religion, and might even decide which elements were qualified, by their general harmony with other branches of knowledge, to be considered true: and yet the best man at this science might be the man who found it hardest to be personally devout.”
“The Varieties of Religious Experience“ by William James (1902) [Book Review]58
In “Errors in Thinking: Cognitive Errors, Wishful Thinking and Sacred Truths“ (2008) I write about the subconscious causes of our behaviour and thought:
“We all suffer from systematic thinking errors59,60 which fall into three main types: (1) internal cognitive errors; (2) errors of emotion61, perception and memory; and (3) social errors that result from the way we communicate ideas and the effects of traditions and dogmas. Some of the most common errors are the misperception of random events as evidence that backs up our beliefs, the habitual overlooking of contradictory data, our expectations and current beliefs actively changing our memories and our perceptions and using assumptions to fill-in unknown information. These occur naturally and subconsciously even when we are trying to be truthful and honest. Many of these errors arise because our brains are highly efficient (rather than accurate) and we are applying evolutionarily developed cognitive rules of thumb to the complexities of life62,63. We will fly into defensive and heated arguments at the mere suggestion that our memory is faulty, and yet memory is infamously unreliable and prone to subconscious inventions. They say “few things are more dangerous to critical thinking than to take perception and memory at face value“64. We were never meant to be the cool, rational and logical computers that we pretend to be. Unfortunately, and we find it hard to admit this to ourselves, many of our beliefs are held because they’re comforting or simple65. In an overwhelming world, simplicity lets us get a grip. Human thinking errors can lead individuals, or whole communities, to come to explain types of events and experiences in fantastical ways. Before we can guard comprehensively against such cumulative errors, we need to learn the ways in which our brains can misguide us – lack of knowledge of these sources of confusion lead many astray66.
Learning to think skeptically and carefully and to recognize that our very experiences and perceptions can be coloured by societal and subconscious factors should help us to maintain impartiality. Beliefs should not be taken lightly, and evidence should be cross-checked. This especially applies to “common-sense” facts that we learn from others by word of mouth and to traditional knowledge. Above all, however, our most important tool is knowing what types of cognitive errors we, as a species, are prone to making.”
“Errors in Thinking: Cognitive Errors, Wishful Thinking and Sacred Truths“
Vexen Crabtree (2008)
Keeping the power of the subconscious in our minds, let us look at the causes of religion in particular, aside from the causes of general error.
Two of William James lectures on religion from 1901-02 were devoted to tracing the psychology of ‘conversion’ into a religion. He introduces Dr Starbuck:
“Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child’s small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity. […] In his recent work on the Psychology of Religion, Professor Starbuck of California [says] “Theology takes the adolescent tendencies and builds upon them; it sees that the essential thing in adolescent growth is bringing the person out of childhood into the new life of maturity and personal insight.”
“The Varieties of Religious Experience“
William James (1902) [Book Review]67
This compares well with the notes of many psychologists on god and religion, including Sigmund Freud: that religious feelings, and adult ideas about religion, are actually childhood fantasies in disguise. Luhrmann describes it in terms of “recreating a childhood world”, in order to re-enchant adulthood68. This is not directly what Dr Starbuck and William James were implying, but it is true that many aspects of religion are drawn-out ideas of childhood such as the idea of an ever-present all-loving parent, the feeling of guilt when no-one is looking, the lack of death, etc. In the Christian Bible, in the first letter of St Paul to Corinth, Paul says “when I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me” (1 Corinthians 13:11). Although this may be the conscious and intellectualized testimony, religion is largely the subconscious survival of childhood fantasy into adulthood. Childish seeming ideas may have been tidied away into the closet, but from the dark corners of the mind they continue to exert much pressure on the religious mind. Giving childish ideas adult terminology no longer hides the route of wishful thinking from psychologists.
#afterlife #causes_of_religion #christianity #death #heaven #hell #islam #karma #reincarnation #religion
“Many people believe that one of the greatest appeals of religion is that it provides reassurance against the spectre of death28,69. The very thought of the permanent cessation of our consciousness can be terrifying, confusing and difficult to accept. Any theory that posits our ultimate survival can have a lot of appeal. This isn’t a new revelation; Roman philosopher Lucretius (99-55BCE) famously said “fear was the first thing on Earth to make gods“70 and the 19th century anthropologist Bronishaw Malinowski argued that religion gives us a sense of power over death71. At the turn of the century William James, devoted to the study of comparative religion and psychology, says that “the ancient saying that the first maker of the Gods was fear receives voluminous corroboration from every age of religious history“72. Later the astute Albert Einstein wrote “with primitive man it is above all fear that evokes religious notions – fear of… death“73. Biologist E. O. Wilson studies the neurobiological basis of human behaviour, and states that the “foremost” religious drive is the one that “hunger[s] for a permanent existence”74. Aside from theory, modern sociological and psychological research has supported this position. A review of studies by Soenke et al. (2013) found that “one variable showing particular importance in protecting individuals from anxiety about death is the belief in an afterlife” which was bolstered by “active commitment and practice” of their religion. The stronger the belief, the less the anxiety about death.
”
And,
“The idea of avoiding death through some kind of belief in the afterlife is one of the most powerful driving forces behind religious belief75. For many people, (1) the personal desire to survive death and (2) the personal desire for social justice both conspire to make belief in the afterlife feel right. Some historians say that belief in an afterlife is one of the universal traits of primitive Human culture that led to the founding of our religions76, and it continues to fuel the appeal of faith even today, in the 21st century. Actual beliefs have differed from culture to culture, based mostly on geographic location. Historically many cultures believed that all dead folk (good and bad) go to a single underworld, but Christianity and Islam developed their ideas of heaven and hell into a very black-and-white moralistic affair. Now, many people say their fear of hell is one of the reasons they follow their religion77. Most spiritual experiences throughout the rest of the world rest on the idea of continual reincarnation rather than on heaven. The concept of an ultimate scheme which redresses the moral imbalances of the world is common to religion both in the West and in the East. God, or Karma, works to make sure that good people are rewarded, and bad people taught a lesson. It teaches us that we have a powerful social instinct towards justice, and when we don’t find it in this life, it is very soothing for us to believe that it is found in the next78. There is no actual evidence for any kind of afterlife79 and in many countries where scientific knowledge is high, belief in the afterlife has heavily declined.”
“Causes of Belief in the Afterlife and Differences Across Religions and Cultures” by Vexen Crabtree (2015)
#causes_of_religion #emotions #myths #new_age #paganism #psychology #religion
“Human beings have a natural tendency to enjoy myths, stories, epic tales, supernatural wonder and other fascinating elements from the worlds of our imaginations. Karen Armstrong writes that “Human beings have always been mythmakers”81. We love creating, and telling these stories. Over time they are altered, embellished, made more amazing and told with greater confidence82. Every culture has a central creation myth83. Such epic stories are exciting, they give life meaning, and feed our egos by making us think we’re the concern of the creator of billions of galaxies. For some people it goes further; the stories become the basis for ceremonial retellings, ritualistic behaviour and strict dogmatic beliefs. And they find themselves compelling other people to adhere to the same principles in order to respect the great story.
Classic sociologists such as Weber and Geertz taught us that religions allow people to deal with existential anxieties “about how to understand the natural and social environment” by developing world-view cosmologies; modern sociologists have not found reason to disagree84. Although modern science and knowledge have eroded most of the influence of religion in many countries, mythic answers are simpler and make it easier to understand the universe (and are easier to tell) than the dry and complicated evidence-based stories that come from science.
“Myths can be debased and uprooted. All that happens is that modern myths and rituals replace the traditional ones, for myths and archetypes are an inherent part of the human psyche. Human beings appear to need a religious underpinning both to their personal and to their social lives. At the personal level, human beings need a mythology within which to frame their identities and the meaning of their lives.”
“The Phenomenon Of Religion: A Thematic Approach“ by Moojan Momen (1999) [Book Review]85
As traditional Abrahamic religions are fading away in the modern world, a suite of new movements have arisen to (partially) take their place including the New Age and Pagan religions. New stories are replacing old ones.”
“Religion as the Result of Human Mythmaking” by Vexen Crabtree (2017)
#beliefs #causes_of_religion #new_religious_movements #psychology #religion
“Simple faith-based answers to fundamental questions are very appealing, because the world is very complicated86,87. Human knowledge is broken up into so many deep specialities that it is no longer possible for anyone to attain an accurate overall picture of reality88. Least of all is it possible to grasp what it all means for us personally. Psychologist Carl Jung wrote that “man positively needs general ideas and convictions that will give meaning to his life and enable him to find a place for himself in the universe“89 and many say it provides them a sense of meaning and destiny90,91,92. The same psychological factor can be explained from a cynical point of view: “the contemporary persistence of religion indicates an inability or refusal on the part of many people to take on board the implications of science and rationality“93. This would appear to be a factor both amongst science-denying American Christian fundamentalism, and in Western New Religious Movements epitomized by the New Age which embraces a wide range of zany, and very unlikely, beliefs about reality. Unfortunately, and we find it hard to admit this to ourselves, many of our beliefs are held because they’re comforting and simple65.”
“Simple Answers in a Complex World: What Causes Religion?” by Vexen Crabtree (2017)
#creationism #philosophy #religion #science #the_universe
“The phrase ‘anthropic coincidences‘ refers to the theory that the Universe is so delicately fine-tuned for life that it must have been designed with that purpose in mind, by an intelligent creator-god95. The main argument is that if you fiddle with the universal constants of physics (such as the strengths of the weak and strong nuclear forces) and change their values even by a little bit, then the Universe would be completely unsuitable for life as we know it. Therefore, God created the Universe for life, and in particular, created it for mankind here on Earth. Some scientists subscribe to this idea, and use it to justify (and promote) belief in God96. But there are a number of convincing logical and evidential arguments against this idea.”
“The Anthropic Coincidences: Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Life?” by Vexen Crabtree (2015)
My Experiences of God are Illusions, Derived from Malfunctioning Psychological Processes examines many of the psychological factors that lead people to ‘experience’ the presence of various Gods, and the summary conclusion lists the main points:
The psychological wish for an ever-present loving parent looking over us, combined with our ability for abstract ideas to become the basis for our emotions, especially love, form the concept of God as a subconscious parent-substitute and ideal carer. The childhood memory of our seemingly all-knowing and all-capable parents, whom we continuously miss in adult life, causes some people to desire a parental god to exist.
Pride and ego incline us toward god-belief: It is more prideful to think that the creator of the billions of galaxies cares deeply about oneself, and it is a function of the ego that we want such an all-powerful eternal being to be watching and judging us. The opposite: That no-one is watching, and no-one keeps measure of our actions, is cold in comparison, so that some peoples’ ego’s and pride wish for there to be a god. See: Homocentricity or Anthropocentrism: Why Do Religions Think Humanity Is Central to God and Creation?.
As we can see from the different ways people experience the same event, peoples’ expectations influence their reality. Examples of this include, as discussed, sleep apnea: Experienced by some as UFO abductions, and others as attempted demon possession. Of all the experiences and messages given by God, many contradict each other. From this mess of contradictory experiences, combined with the lack of any logical reason why gods would exist, I conclude that there is no God. There are human beings, our wishes, our projections and our experiences led by our own abstractions and expectations, but there is no objective, real God external to the self. See: The False and Conflicting Experiences of Mankind: How Other Peoples’ Experience Contradict Our Own Beliefs.
That we can stimulate parts of the brain and induce mystical and spiritual experiences in people means that such experiences are explained by the neurological sciences whether or not there is actually a ‘spiritual realm’. See: Souls do not Exist: Evidence from Science & Philosophy Against Mind-Body Dualism.
Hallucinations are easily interpreted in religious terms, and, the religious instinct towards fasting and sensory deprivation are both sought after as routes towards gaining ‘divine’ or ‘spiritual’ messages – when in reality, it is the starved brain misfiring. See: Hallucinations, Sensory Deprivation and Fasting: The Physiological Causes of Religious and Mystical Experiences: 2. Hallucinations.
The burden of proof remains firmly with the spiritualists: Experience of these types of mystical events is not proof of the reality of them, therefore different (logical or experimental) proof needs to be found. Until such proof arrives, it is not sensible to believe in god.
For the full page, see: “Experiences of God are Illusions, Derived from Malfunctioning Psychological Processes” by Vexen Crabtree (2002).
#causes_of_religion #religion #sun_worship
That religion is ultimately all based on worship of the sun, and of the stars and other visible stellar bodies (such as Mercury, Venus and Mars), has been a very common observation. The sun has obvious life-giving properties; its waning during autumn and winter gives rise to natural decay, loss of vegetation and eventually, to human difficulties in obtaining food. But the powers of darkness are eventually defeated, and the sun’s power starts to rise on the winter equinox. The celebration of the solstices, equinoxes and seasons has often been done via the apotheosis of natural forces: in the history of mankind, more gods are attributed to the cycles of nature than from any other source.
“Prodicus of Ceos [5th century BCE), also one of the most famous sophists, advanced the idea that the conceptions of the gods were originally associated with those things which were of use to humanity: sun and moon, rivers and springs, the products of the earth and the elements; therefore bread was identified with Demeter, wine with Dionysus, water with Poseidon, fire with Hephaestus. As a special instance he mentioned the worship of the Nile by the Egyptians.”
“Atheism in Pagan Antiquity” by Anders Björn Drachmann (1922)98
“… as late as the days of the French Revolution, Dupuis, in a voluminous work, tried to trace the whole of ancient religion and mythology back to astronomy.”
“Atheism in Pagan Antiquity” by Anders Björn Drachmann (1922)99
In the Northern Hemisphere, the spring equinox occurs when the length of the day increases until it is equal with the length of the night, which occurs on the 21st of March each year100. The sun, growing in power, finally overtakes darkness, and its rebirth is celebrated. This was an especially important event for early human civilisations that relied upon agriculture. This is why so many ancient religions and cultures celebrate renewal and rebirth at and after the spring equinox, and is why Easter is tied up with the ideas of fertility and growth, hence, the symbols of the egg and the rabbit. Ancient pagans anthropomorphized the forces of nature, and told stories to explain why the sun was resurgent. Adonis, Attis, Dionysus, Osiris and many other Greek and Roman cults incorporated the death and rebirth of their gods at this time, with the principal dying-and-resurrection god returning to Earth for the sake of humankind101. When Christianity arose, Christians also told stories of Jesus dying and resurrecting at Easter, and since the very first centuries of Christianity, Christian apologists have had to defend themselves against accusations that the whole Jesus story was a retelling of pagan myths but without understanding of the underlying solar symbolism101.
#burkina_faso #hong_kong #islam #kenya #psychology #scientology #thinking_errors
“The regression fallacy occurs when people extract too much meaning from chance events under specific circumstances. Disease and fortune come and go: because of the law of regression when things are at their worst they are likely to simply get better on their own no matter what we do. But when things are bad, some will “try” all manner of superstitious, meaningless and misguided practices – including all kinds of alternative therapies. Social psychologist David Myers agrees: “when things reach a low point… whatever we try – going to a psychotherapist, starting a new diet-exercise plan, reading a self-help book – is more likely to be followed by improvement than by further deterioration“102. Because we rarely employ controls and statistical analysis in our personal lives, it seems that any attempted solution, from the zany to the insane, has actually worked. This is the cause of untold numbers of superstitions, magical practices, religious beliefs and pseudoscience, and can sometimes lead large numbers of people astray, especially when stories and anecdotes are published by the press.103,104,105,106
This is why many cults, religions and pseudo-therapeutic fads prey on the weak, depressed, down-and-outs and those who have recently experienced catastrophe. Such people are more likely to try new religions107.
The solution is to be more cognizant of Human thinking errors. Cause and effect must be analyzed statistically, carefully, and by (social) scientists who know how to discount confounding factors. Simply put: do not assume that some action or event causes a change in the frequency of another event without investigating it properly; no matter how much it goes against common-sense to deny the correlation, cognitive thinking errors such as the regression fallacy can easily lead us to false conclusions based on limited data.”
“Statistical Regression: Causes of Strange Beliefs and Pseudoscience” by Vexen Crabtree (2017)
Other desperate measures are connected with the frailty of being human. Among the Mossi people of Burkina Faso, for example, “barrenness among non-Muslim women may be treated by the divinatory diagnosis that the would-be children are refusing to be born except as Muslims. The obvious remedy is conversion to Islam”. This abuse is effective – people during desperate times are open to wilder influences. The same author who described the Mossi above provides a similar cultural illustration of this in action:
“Among the Giriama of Kenya, to take another example, people falling ill are diagnosed as having been possessed by Muslim spirits for which the cure is, once again, conversion to Islam.”
Translatabiliity in Islam and in Christianity in Africa by Lamin Sanneh (2002)108
It might seem ridiculous to outsiders and educated people in modern countries that this can truly result in conversion, but, in the West, many convert to Scientology on the basis of its pseudoscientific Dianetics practices, many converted to EST, and take up Edward Bach´s flower remedies, all kinds of New Age healing methods, aromatherapy and a large number of highly suspicious and ineffective “cures” because they think they might work. In Hong Kong, anthropologist Daniel Métraux documents how 10 members of a family all converted to Soka Gakkai on the basis that when the wife converted, the husband recovered from a serious illness109. Did they stop to think: why join this religion? Given that thousands of different religious movements claim thousands of healing events, why should we trust that this one in particular embodies otherworldly truth? The answer is that conversions are based on interpersonal relationships and social factors, rather than on a serious attempt to understand the world.
#belarus #buddhism #estonia #hinduism #human_development #religion #russia #vietnam
National under-development, low national average intelligence and poor social stability are all correlated with high rates of religious belief. In other words – as a country gets richer, better educated and more stable, religion declines. The more well developed the country is the less religious it is. For our purposes here, we need to also consider education to be of note. Mass education is one of forces that works to undermine religious thinking. The correlation between low intelligence and religion is discussed elsewhere on this page. Social stability relies on the arms of government such as police, justice and infrastructure management to be in good functional order. Corruption, poverty and poor governance affect an entire countries health – including mental health.
Chart data footnote: 111
In countries with a per-capita GDP equal to or below $2,000, the average religiosity rate is 95%. For rich countries, with per-capita incomes higher than $25,000, the rate is half as much – 47%. A few countries do not fit this trend, but, there are clear historical reasons for this. All four lower-income countries with low religiosity rates (Estonia, Russia, Belarus and Vietnam) were all subject to long-lasting restrictions against religion112.
Dr Nigel Barber has analysed many of the same sets of statistics as I have, and his published works are somewhat more methodical than mine and show the same results. He writes that “the question of why economically developed countries turn to atheism has been batted around by anthropologists for about eighty years. Anthropologist James Fraser proposed that scientific prediction and control of nature supplants religion as a means of controlling uncertainty in our lives. This hunch is supported by data showing that the more educated countries have higher levels of non belief and there are strong correlations between atheism and intelligence” (2011).
Likewise, researchers Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman have approached this from an evolutionary and a sociological stance and both argue that belief in God is correlated with the level of difficulty of life in general – that “in countries where food is plentiful, health care is universal and housing is accessible, people believe less in God than in those countries where their lives are insecure”113. Sociologist of religion Professor Roderick Main writes that “where the technology and resources to mitigate major sufferings such as poverty and sickness exist, it is understandable that, for some, the appeal of religious consolations should diminish”114
The link is between development and our understanding of the world. In other words, the more mysterious and hard to control the world is, the more strongly religion suits people’s demands115 for an ultimate victory over life. This future may take the form of a perfect afterlife (and maybe punishment for wrongdoers), or it may take the form of absolute dissolution where all the trials of life can be seen to have been steps towards annihilation – the former one being a typically “Western” solution adopted by Abrahamic religions whereas the latter is “Eastern” as adopted by Hinduism and Buddhism.
The idea of heaven is one of the most attractive features of religion. The ends to which people will go in order to foster the required spiritual brownie points to get to heaven is seemingly endless – from lives spent in prayer, meditation and repentance, to lives wasted in suicide attacks and isolation: if there is potential reward at the end, people will believe in it, and then act on those beliefs.
The following things make the concept of heaven compelling and mentally addictive:
The attainment of a personal state of eternal happiness and bliss.
The idea that friends and family, alive and dead, have found peace and happiness in an afterlife.
The idea that all the wrongs of life are righted because good people go to heaven, and the bad people we’ve encountered are tortured in hell even if they got away with their wrongful attitudes during our own lives.
The worse one’s own life in this world, the stronger is the compulsion to believe in a better life after this one. The statistical correlation between social inequality and religion, and, social instability and religion, has been reported on thoroughly by Barber (2011). People yearn for, and then believe in, an ultimate and absolute justice that will rectify all the wrongs of this life. There is certainly a strong element of condolence in believing that those who do wrong against us will be punished for each and every deed.
“Because the distribution of wealth and power inhibits them, the resentful cannot act out of their desire for vengeance against the wealthy and the noble; as compensation, therefore, they seek to score moral victories that in the end will enable them to turn the tables on those who have previously lorded it over them. Thus, as Weber (1964: 110-11) put it, ‘suffering may take on the quality of the religiously meritorious, in view of the belief that it brings in its wake great hopes for future compensation.’ The notion that unconscious drives for salvation, motivated by suffering, take on the form of religious claims to eventual privilege, was shared by Freud, perhaps in a common debt to Nietzsche.”
“Key Thinkers in the Sociology of Religion“ by Richard K. Fenn (2009) [Book Review]117
This section is extracted from: “Theological Problems with Heaven, Paradise and Nirvana” by Vexen Crabtree (2003).
#anti-religion #astronomy #atheism #belief #buddhism #christianity #education #god #intelligence #iq #religion #science #stupidity #taoism #theism #UK #USA
Taken from “Religion and Intelligence” by Vexen Crabtree (2007)
General intelligence is negatively correlated with strength of religious belief from national to individual average: The historical battles between religious institutions and science, such as those in physics, astronomy and biology, indicate there is something wrong with the religious approach to the study of reality. The underlying problem extends to negative effects on the individual intelligence of believers, and a related negative effect on educational achievements. Hardly any of the several-hundred Nobel Prize winning scientists have been Christians. Only 3.3% of the Members of the Royal Society in the UK and 7% the National Academy of Sciences in the USA, believe in a personal God. The more senior and learnéd the scientist, the less likely they are to believe in God. The children of highly religious parents suffer diminished IQs – averaging 7 to 10 points lower compared to their non-religious counterparts in similar socio-economic groups. As you would expect from these results, multiple studies have also shown that IQ is opposed to the strength of religious belief. 39 studies since 1927 (out of 43) have found that the more educated a person is, and the higher one’s intelligence, the less likely someone is to hold religious beliefs – “religion declines in proportion to the rise in education and personal income”118. This correlation isn’t new and was also observed in ancient Greece by Polybius (200-118BCE)119.
The effect extends beyond individual countries and is visible inter-nationally. Countries with a higher rate of belief in God have lower average intelligence. All countries with high average intelligence have low national levels of belief in God. For countries where belief in God is over 80%, the average national IQ is 83 points. For those countries where stated disbelief in God (atheism) is greater than 20%, the national average IQ is 98 points. Instead of belief in God, countries with the highest IQs adhere to Far-Eastern belief systems such as Buddhism, Taoism and Shintoism. It is not just intelligence and education that is inversely correlated with religion – it has also been found that the more you know about religion itself, the less likely you are to be religious120.
Suggestibility: In The Origins of Psychic Phenomena: Poltergeists, Incubi, Succubi, and the Unconscious Mind121 Stan Gooch examines many aspects of supernatural experience, and finds that those who experience such things score highly on suggestibility indexes, are better hypnosis subjects, and are more religious and spiritual.
#alternative_spirituality #causes_of_religion #neo-paganism #new_religious_movements #paganism #religion #secret_societies #wicca
“There has been an explosion of interest in unusual, novel, untraditional, magical, counter-cultural and Earth-centered religious movements. They have some common features123 and share a number of common pull-factors attract people to new religious movements123.
The simplistic answers they give to life questions124 often combined with an anti-science stance125,126.
Anti-consumerism and anti-materialism.127
Golden-age romanticism. Some groups promote pre-industrial or historical moral eras and attract others who think that the modern world is “lost”.128
Celtic fandoms.129
The loss of magic and fantasy in traditional religions.130,85,131
The rise of individualism132 and protections for freedom of belief means people are free to pick-and-choose which religion to embrace.
Religious groups that arise from a particular cause will attract those interested in that cause. Two of the most popular amongst NRMs are:
”
Environmentalism is commonly proclaimed by all kinds of pagan, Celt, pseudo-Native and New-Age groups, and they attract many people who are similarly passionate about protecting the planet.132,133,134,135,136
Feminism-friendly movements such as Paganism and Wicca attract many like-minded folk.132,137
“Why do People Join New Religious Movements?” by Vexen Crabtree (2017)
While religious beliefs are mostly the result of parental instruction and geographic incidence, there are many subconscious, psychological, sociological and neurobiological factors that cause religious and superstitious beliefs to prosper. This includes the idea of functionalism, where traditionalism and rebellion are achieved by adopting religious labels and following or rejecting typical cultural-religious behaviour. Likewise, many activists are drawn to particular religious groups on account of their association with their stance on worldly issues. Culture and religion are also mixed up, so that many times (for example in Northern Ireland) conversion is a political act; and beliefs are secondary to labels. This is also apparent in the way that the amount of Christians in countries like the UK (72%) somehow outnumber the number of actual god-believers (~50%). Religion is mostly caused by social and psychological factors and not by any examining of the evidence or logic behind the beliefs involved. This is why skeptics often find it so hard to bring their scientific knowledge to productive use in arguments with religionists.
Psychologists, sociologists, ethnographers and scientists tend to view religious beliefs as the result of mostly normal psychological systems being applied in the wrong context. A prime example is the way we get angry with cars and computers, and shout insults at them, or the way we tend to see patterns in random behaviour such as brownian motion (our ‘hyperactive agent detection device’). Historical investigators such as William James have found that outstanding religious innovators and leaders have frequently been epileptic, psychotic, suffered from strokes and various mental problems and nervous instability and that this often give them more command in areas of spirituality. Experiments on the Human brain have allowed us to discover many of the specific neuronal networks that can misfire to cause us to have ‘religious’ feelings and experiences. Childhood fantasies, including an absence of death and the seemingly all-present, ever-caring and all-knowing parental figures who give us comfort, often become the basis for religious beliefs in adults. This hidden wishful-thinking mechanism feeds our ego (that “someone” cares about everything we do) and gives us consolation from death in the idea of an afterlife. Many strange things we ‘experience’ are cultural (therefore an aspect of upbringing), and once a scientific and critical understanding of them is attained, the beauty of the natural world displaces the appeal of the supernatural. Religion, when not considered a byproduct of misapplied cognitive psychology and social factors, is self-inflicted delusion, illusion, smoke and mirrors.
Current edition: 2013 Jul 30
Last Modified: 2017 Jun 25
Second edition 2011 Jul 22
Originally published 2007 Jan 08
http://www.humanreligions.info/causes.html
Parent page: Human Religions
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IHEU. International Humanist and Ethical Union.
(2012) Freedom of Thought. A copy can be found on iheu.org/…Freedom of Thought 2012.pdf, accessed 2013 Oct 28.
James, William. (1842-1910)
(1902) The Varieties of Religious Experience. Subtitled: “A Study in Human Nature“. 5th (1971 fifth edition) edition. Originally published 1960. From the Gifford Lectures delivered at Edinburgh 1901-1902. Quotes also obtained from Amazon digital Kindle 2015 Xist Publishing edition. A paperback book. Book Review.
Kahneman, Daniel
(2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow. Published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, New York, USA. A paperback book.
Kaku, Michio. Professor of theoretical physics.
(2014) The Future of the Mind. Subtitled: “The Scientific Quest To Understand, Enhance and Empower the Mind“. Amazon Kindle digital edition. Published by Penguin Books Ltd, London, UK. An e-book.
Krauss, Lawrence. Lawrence Krauss is Foundation Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration and the Physics Department at Arizona State University, as well as Co-Director of the Cosmology Initiative and Inaugural Director of the Origins Project.
(2012) A Universe from Nothing. Amazon Kindle digital edition. Published by Free Press, New York, USA. An e-book.
Kressel, Neil
(2007) Bad Faith: The Danger of Religious Extremism. Amazon Kindle digital edition. Published by Prometheus Books, New York, USA. An e-book.
Kurtz, Lester R.
(2007) Gods in the Global Village. 2nd edition. Published by Pine Forge Press, California, USA. Was previously Director of Religious Studies at Texas and holds a master’s in Religion from Yale Divinity School and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago. Kurtz is Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas, USA.
Laying, Anthony
“Faith in the Power of Witchcraft” in Skeptical Inquirer (2010 Mar/Apr) p51-53. Laying is emeritus professor of anthropology at Elmira College. He spent a year conducting ethnographic research among the Caribs on the West Indian island of Dominica.
Little & Twiss. D. Little and S.B. Twiss
(1978) Comparative Religious Ethics: A New Method. Published by Harper & Row, New York, USA. In Reeder (2011) P347..
Luhrmann, T.M.
(1994) Persuasions of the Witches’ Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England. First published 1989. Published by Picador, Basingstoke, UK. In “Belief Beyond Boundaries: Wicca, Celtic Spirituality and the New Age“ by Joanne Pearson (2002)7 chapter 4, p163.
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(1915) Myths of Babylonia and Assyria. Amazon Kindle digital edition produced by Sami Sieranoja, Tapio Riikonen and PG Distributed Proofreaders. An e-book.
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(2002) Religion, Science and the New Age. This is chapter 5 (pages p173-224) of “Belief Beyond Boundaries: Wicca, Celtic Spirituality and the New Age“ by Joanne Pearson (2002)8 (pages p173-224). Pearson, Joanne
(2002, Ed.) Belief Beyond Boundaries: Wicca, Celtic Spirituality and the New Age. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Aldershot, UK, in association with The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. A paperback book.
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(1990) Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America. Published by Basil Blackwell, Oxford, UK. This is a chapter (pages 88-89) of “Global Religious Movements in Regional Context” by John Wolffe (2002)9 (pages 88-89). Wolffe, John
(2002, Ed.) Global Religious Movements in Regional Context. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Aldershot, UK, in association with The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. This was a religious studies textbook in the AD317 OU course.
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(1986) Understanding Human Behavior. 5th edition. Originally published 1974. Current version published by CBS College Publishing, Holt Rinehart and Winston, New York, USA. A hardback book.
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(2000) The Soka Gakkai in Southeast Asia, a chapter in Wolffe (2002)10 p267-287. This text first appeared in Global Citizens: The Soka Gakkai Buddhist Movement in the World (2000) by David Machacek and Bryan Wilson (eds), pp.404-29. Published by Oxford University Press, UK.
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(1999) The Phenomenon Of Religion: A Thematic Approach. Published by Oneworld Publications, Oxford, UK. A paperback book. Book Review.
Mumm, Susan
(2002) Aspirational Indians: North American indigenous religions and the New Age. This is chapter 3 of “Belief Beyond Boundaries: Wicca, Celtic Spirituality and the New Age“ by Joanne Pearson (2002)11. Pearson, Joanne
(2002, Ed.) Belief Beyond Boundaries: Wicca, Celtic Spirituality and the New Age. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Aldershot, UK, in association with The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. A paperback book.
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(1999) Social Psychology. 6th (‘international’) edition. Originally published 1983. Current version published by McGraw Hill. A paperback book.
Nesbitt, Eleanor. Professor of Religions and Education at the University of Warwick, UK.
(2011) The Teacher of Religion as Ethnographer. This is chapter 53 (pages 965-985) of “The Oxford Handbook of The Sociology of Religion“ by Peter B. Clarke (2011)12 (pages 965-985). Clarke, Peter B.. Peter B. Clarke: Professor Emeritus of the History and Sociology of Religion, King’s College, University of London, and currently Professor in the Faculty of Theology, University of Oxford, UK.
(2011) The Oxford Handbook of The Sociology of Religion. Originally published 2009. Current version published by Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. A paperback book.
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(2008) Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science. Amazon Kindle digital edition. Published by Princeton University Press, New Jersey, USA. An e-book.
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(2004, Ed.) Encyclopedia of New Religions. Published by Lion Publishing, Oxford, UK. A hardback book.
Pearson, Joanne
(2002, Ed.) Belief Beyond Boundaries: Wicca, Celtic Spirituality and the New Age. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Aldershot, UK, in association with The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. A paperback book.
Pessi, Anne Birgitta. Academy Research Fellow and Adjunct Professor at the Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland.
(2011) Religion and Social Problems: Individual and Institutional Responses. This is chapter 52 (pages 941-962) of “The Oxford Handbook of The Sociology of Religion“ by Peter B. Clarke (2011)13 (pages 941-962). Clarke, Peter B.. Peter B. Clarke: Professor Emeritus of the History and Sociology of Religion, King’s College, University of London, and currently Professor in the Faculty of Theology, University of Oxford, UK.
(2011) The Oxford Handbook of The Sociology of Religion. Originally published 2009. Current version published by Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. A paperback book.
Plüss, Caroline. Assistant Professor in the Division of Sociology School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technical University, Singapore.
(2011) Migration and the Globalization of Religion. This is chapter 27 (pages 491-506) of “The Oxford Handbook of The Sociology of Religion“ by Peter B. Clarke (2011)14 (pages 491-506). Clarke, Peter B.. Peter B. Clarke: Professor Emeritus of the History and Sociology of Religion, King’s College, University of London, and currently Professor in the Faculty of Theology, University of Oxford, UK.
(2011) The Oxford Handbook of The Sociology of Religion. Originally published 2009. Current version published by Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. A paperback book.
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(1957) Why I am not a Christian. Fourth Impression of 1967 edition, 1971. Published by Unwin Books.
Soenke, M, M. Landau, & J. Greenberg
(2013) article “Sacred armor: Religion’s role as a buffer against the anxieties of life and the fear of death” in the American Psychological Association handbook of psychology, religion, and spirituality (volume 1) p105-122. Accessed via EBSCOhost on 2016 Oct 17.
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(2004) Emotions and Mind. Published by The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. A neurology textbook by Frederick Toates, Bundy Mackintosh and Daniel Nettle.
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(1982) Religion in Sociological Perspective. Published by Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. Cited in Fenn (2009) Chapter “Bryan Wilson” p136-138..
(1998) Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Published by Little, Brown and Company, London, UK. Professor Wilson is a groundbreaking sociobiologist. A hardback book.
Wolffe, John
(2002, Ed.) Global Religious Movements in Regional Context. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Aldershot, UK, in association with The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. This was a religious studies textbook in the AD317 OU course.
York, Michael. Principal Lecturer in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology and Director of the Sophia Centre at Bath Spa University College, UK. Previously a post-doctoral reasearcher at the Academy for Cultural and Educational Studies in London.
(1995) The Emerging Network: A Sociology of the New Age and Neo-Pagan Movement. Published by Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, USA.
Footnotes