Curt Doolittle

Theme: Religion

  • ON RELIGION I don’t attack religions for being religions, or being predicated on

    ON RELIGION

    I don’t attack religions for being religions, or being predicated on whatever causal relations, for whatever reason. This is because I understand that ARATIONAL thinking is useful as a defense against reason that we disagree with. It allows us to exit the rational conversation and continue to pursue our preferences, albiet with arational, rather than rational thought.

    What I care about are the consequences of any line of thought. And in particular, that any line of thought produces negative economic consequences, because negative economic consequences reduce ALL choices for ALL people and positive economic consequences improve ALL choices for ALL people.

    If I argue in favor of the morality of PROPERTY, this allows people to adopt whatever religion that they want to, and to form in to whatever groups they want to. I have no greater concern if people gather into groups based upon religion, historical reference, or preference for a particular artist’s music, or any other reason that they want to group together.

    That is the whole point of market and property. Market and property allow us to compete on means in the market, even if we have completely opposite ends.

    The reason that we can’t all live peacefully together is that governments are monopolies, which define a monopoly of property rights, and as such we compete to gain power over government so that we can implement our version of property rights, rather than, government is a set of institutions administers the market, using PRIVATE property rights, so that groups may create whatever COMMON Property Rights among themselves that they prefer to.

    Capitalism is the only form of tolerance. The market doesn’t care about your color, or creed. Everyone is the color ‘gold’.

    Postmodernism is a religion that promote socialism, and socialism is harmful, and removes choices, and destroys the market. As such, I object to the argument that postmodernism, and its political wing ‘liberalism’, do not claim to be a religion that seeks power. I object to the argument that Islam is a religion of peace rather than a religion of tyranny and poverty. And I object to the fact that both Postmodernism and Islam will of necessity destroy economic productivity, and freedom.

    And In both cases, most likely, my race.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-07 02:47:00 UTC

  • The Religion of Postmodernism as a Reformation of Christianity

    [T]HE PURPOSE OF RELIGION IS TO CONCENTRATE POLITICAL POWER Either as a resistance, or as a military force. That is the purpose of a religion. EIther to take power, or to resist power. Religions concentrate human efforts. POSTMODERNISM IS A REFORMATION OF CHRISTIANITY Postmodernism is just the most recent religion in a long history of religions. 7) Postmodernism is a reformation of Protestantism. – Resisting Capitalism in response to the failure of socialism in both theory and practice (1960ad). 6) Socialism is a reformation of catholicism – French, then german, then worldwide resistance to anglo industrial capitalism. (1850ad) 5) Protestantism is a reformation of Catholicism. – Germanic countries exiting Mediterranean taxation and occupation. (1520ad) 4) Islam is a reformation of Judaism and Christianity – Enabling arab conquest of the Byzantines and Sassanids who were exhausted by war with each other. (600ad) 3) Christianity (Catholicism) is a reformation of Judaism. – adaptation to the roman conquest. (80ad), and eventual success by mobilizing the underclasses and women. Made possible by exhaustion of seafaring Rome by conquering landed Europe. 2) Judaism is a reformation of Zoroastrianism. – Exiting persian conquest, as a means of unifying various tribes. (650bc) 1) Zoroastrianism was authored by Zarathustra (Zoroaster) ( 1500-1000bc) Exiting the stone age, and adapting to the agrarian revolution, in order to concentrate political and military power, possibly to separate western tribes from eastern tribes. Religion is the means by which we make people believe untrue things in order to get them to cooperate according to one scheme or another.

  • WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHRISTIANITY AND POSTMODERNISM? CHRISTIANS (conse

    WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHRISTIANITY AND POSTMODERNISM?

    CHRISTIANS (conservatives) keep their hands out of your pockets, and demand you behave ethically and morally in public – AND POSTMODERNISTS (liberals) put their hands into your pockets and that is their only demand.

    That appears to be the only difference.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-06 09:36:00 UTC

  • CONSERVATISM AND THE ANIMAL “RIGHTS” MOVEMENT (chapter excerpt) Conservative vie

    CONSERVATISM AND THE ANIMAL “RIGHTS” MOVEMENT

    (chapter excerpt)

    Conservative view of man’s relation to nature is heroic:

    That nature is ours to modify for our benefit.

    That nature is capricious and something we must pacify for our safety.

    That the purpose of man’s life is to leave the world better for having lived in it.

    This is an heroic view of man that is as ancient as the indo-european peoples.

    Meaning:

    (a) animals do not have ‘rights’ – this is an absurdity – they are not human. In conservatism (which means “european aristocratic egalitarianism”). Even humans must ‘earn’ rights – which is why we take them away if they misbehave. Animals can’t earn rights. (perhaps dogs to some minor degree.)

    (b) that we should care for animals because we desire to, because our world is better to live in if we have them. True. This is the logical reasoning, not ‘rights’.

    (c) that disregard for animals that we have normatively chosen to care for, and which are under our control,

    (d) that laziness in caring for animals is likely laziness in caring for people. True.

    (e) that cruelty to animals is likely cruelty to humans – and therefore you are unfit to live among humans. True.

    Unfortunately, this is an argument to NORMS: demonstrating the human character necessary to possess ‘rights’. Conservatives place extremely high value on norms. Progressives do not. The progressive movement is largely an attack on conservative (aristocratic egalitarian) norms. And the progressive movement has managed to, at least in education and other major areas of life, discredit norms. And therefore the progressive movement has lost the ability to market policy that requires adherence to norms. And therefore has, out of necessity, used the specious argument of ‘rights’, because it is the only means of justifying legal action that they have available to them.

    Of course, what may not be obvious is that:

    (a) it is not possible for animals to possess rights – a right is something that can be reciprocally granted and animals cannot conceive of this (except perhaps for domesticated dogs..)

    (b) that the word “right” is an attempt to load, or frame, animals anthropomorphically. in order to misrepresent the normative utility of protecting animals as a resource, as one open to legal rather than normative control. In other words, it’s common marketing fraud.

    (c) that caretaking, even anthropomorpized caretaking, provides women with oxcytocin reactions, and that many females are addicted to this reaction. It is not rational. It is drug addiction. It’s just relatively harmless drug addiction. So our political policy is being driven by logically confused drug addicts using a deceptive marketing campaign, not reason. In which case we would simply sell off the management of wild animals to private firms who would specialize in it and figure out how to make it profitable (the way we have with deer hunting in america).

    (d) that the female psyche evolved, and cooperation evolved, as a means of controlling alphas by gossip, complaint and excitement, to motivate the non-alpha males to organize against, and punish or kill the alphas, so that the females could control their own breeding rather than be the mere victims of alphas. And that there is a significant correlation between the female members of the animal rights movement and their reproductive status.

    (e) That the anti-fur movement is absurd, and counter to the benefit of animals and man. It is a renewable resource. It encourages the protection of the species. It is inexpensive. It is excellent protection against the cold, and it’s beautiful. This same argument applies to hunting. And to wild animals. Because if wild animals were ‘owned’ rather than a ‘commons’ owners would protect them far better than governments do – just like we do with domesticated animals.

    This is a fairly damning critique of REASONING USED by the animal rights movement. It is not however a critique of the conservative normative proscription.

    The conservative (aristocratic egalitarian) proscription is that if you do not care for animals as if they are the commons that they are, and a commons that we have assumed responsibilty for from nature, that you have not EARNED the right from other humans to administer that commons on their behalf, and therefore they will withdraw your rights, which they reciprocally grant you, because you are unfit to live with rights, among others, who have them.

    Conservatives are rational but their moral code is ancient and they speak of it in metaphorical terms not suitable for an era where scientific language has all but replaced metaphor. And this is why I write philosophy – to repair conservatism (aristocratic egalitarianism) by articulating it rationally.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-03-29 02:57:00 UTC

  • The Signaling Properties Of Secular Democratic Humanism Versus Christian Aristocratic Egalitarianism

    [D]EMOCRATIC SECULAR HUMANISM IS A RELIGION It is based upon false premises, and counter to observable fact. It is no less mystical or absurd than an omniscient omnipotent, artificial deity. It’s purpose is to accumulate power. IT IS A WAR ON AN OLD RELIGION BY A NEW RELIGION. The equality of man, the relativity of values, the irrelevance of norms, the equality of cultures, the permanence that technical innovation will ‘save us’, and a dozen other mythos, attribute untrue properties to man and society, in an effort to cast the extended order of human cooperation and competition as an extended family. Humans do not act in this way. Even practitioners of the religion do not act this way. If they did, they would tolerate the old religion. But they don’t. And, in fact, they only tolerate any religion with lower status signals than their religion. TRADING THE HIGH TRUST SOCIETY FOR FALSE, FREE STATUS SIGNALS And those free status signals are the ‘psychological device’ that provides the incentive for adopting the new democratic religion, rather than the old religion’s promise of life after death. This is the technological innovation of democratic secular humanism: it has replaced false promise of afterlife, true status signals, true suppositions about human nature, and true economic principles, with false status signals, false suppositions about human nature, and false economic principles. The net of this new religion has been the destruction of the nuclear family and a the slow regression away from the high trust society that the west built by local outbreeding over more than a thousand years. Because trust in *kindness*, which is an emotionally loaded term for the human need for acceptance and positive status signals, is counterproductive to the economic requirement for trust in trade and contract. [IDEA: positive signals for mere existence versus positive signals for economic action.] The innovation of the west that allowed it to create greater relative wealth at lower rates of corruption, and to tolerate higher risk and innovation, finally consumer credit, was the high trust society. And we can demonstrate empirically that increases in diversity of norms and culture, even race, cause accelerating decreases in trust. Our governmental conflict is just an expression of this difference. It is NOT POSSIBLE to create a civic religion without status signals. Humans value status more than money. No civic religion will ever exist that does not. However, the question is, what actions do those signals produce in the real world? Let’s see: SIGNALS OF TRUSTWORTHINESS IN CONTRACT [A]bsolute respect for the commons and private property, Competition, Individualism, the nuclear family, truth telling, adherence to contract, and conformity to commercial norms, were innovations adopted by the western cultures under manorialism (feudalism), as people sought to demonstrate that they were fit to rent land. Males embraced chivalry because it allowed them to achieve status signals without fighting, and in turn, it allowed them to achieve status through service. Further it did not require extraordinary wealth to do services, as did fighting. [T]hat it takes a long time to change signaling strategies once the capture of fossile fuels permits industrialization, therefore freeing the woman from the drudgery of the home and the man from teh drudgery of the field, and gives us enough free wealth and time to afford to educate our young is certainly good reason to extend property rights to women, and to extend political enfranchise to all consumers and laborers. This is true. But the practical reality is our goods and services may be cheaper and the least of us we may live better than nobility of the past, but that does not change the reality that we are vastly unequal in temperament and ability, and most of us require extraordinary training and reinforcement by others to maintain the high trust society that we buit by accident was counter to intuition and behaviorally expensive to maintain. People universally demonstrate a preference for the benefits of material productivity. Always. Yet they long for the behavior of the tribe and family, despite universal and inescapable tribal poverty, and despite universal and inescapable low trust in family-dominated, in-breeding-in-extended family societies. Be careful what you wish for. You’re getting it. [P]rogressive ideology is a longing for a return to the tribe. It is cheap false status signals that produce negative economic consequences. Cultures are empirically demonstrable to be unequal, and democracy only works in the west because the west started out as aristocratic. Without western culture the west will be like every other barbaric low trust civilization on the planet. Progressive ideology is to the west what christianity was to rome. There is no difference. It is mysticism in different robes. -Curt

  • (From Another Thread: Very Meaningful Ideas in this post) DEMOCRATIC SECULAR HUM

    (From Another Thread:

    Very Meaningful Ideas in this post)

    DEMOCRATIC SECULAR HUMANISM IS A RELIGION

    It is based upon false premises, and counter to observable fact.

    It is no less mystical or absurd than an omniscient omnipotent, artificial deity.

    It’s purpose is to accumulate power.

    IT IS A WAR ON AN OLD RELIGION BY A NEW RELIGION.

    The equality of man, the relativity of values, the irrelevance of norms, the equality of cultures, the permanence that technical innovation will ‘save us’, and a dozen other mythos, attribute untrue properties to man and society, in an effort to cast the extended order of human cooperation and competition as an extended family.

    Humans do not act in this way. Even practitioners of the religion do not act this way. If they did, they would tolerate the old religion. But they don’t. And, in fact, they only tolerate any religion with lower status signals than their religion.

    TRADING THE HIGH TRUST SOCIETY FOR FALSE, FREE STATUS SIGNALS

    And those free status signals are the ‘psychological device’ that provides the incentive for adopting the new democratic religion, rather than the old religion’s promise of life after death.

    This is the technological innovation of democratic secular humanism: it has replaced false promise of afterlife, true status signals, true suppositions about human nature, and true economic principles, with false status signals, false suppositions about human nature, and false economic principles.

    The net of this new religion has been the destruction of the nuclear family and a the slow regression away from the high trust society that the west built by local outbreeding over more than a thousand years.

    Because trust in *kindness*, which is an emotionally loaded term for the human need for acceptance and positive status signals, is counterproductive to the economic requirement for trust in trade and contract. [IDEA: positive signals for mere existence versus positive signals for economic action.]

    The innovation of the west that allowed it to create greater relative wealth at lower rates of corruption, and to tolerate higher risk and innovation, finally consumer credit, was the high trust society. And we can demonstrate empirically that increases in diversity of norms and culture, even race, cause accelerating decreases in trust. Our governmental conflict is just an expression of this difference.

    It is NOT POSSIBLE to create a civic religion without status signals. Humans value status more than money. No civic religion will ever exist that does not. However, the question is, what actions do those signals produce in the real world?

    SIGNALS OF TRUST

    Absolute respect for the commons and private property, Competition, Individualism, the nuclear family, truth telling, adherence to contract, and conformity to commercial norms, were innovations adopted by the western cultures under manorialism (feudalism), as people sought to demonstrate that they were fit to rent land. Males embraced chivalry because it allowed them to achieve status signals without fighting, and in turn, it allowed them to achieve status through service. Further it did not require extraordinary wealth to do services, as did fighting.

    That it takes a long time to change signaling strategies once the capture of fossile fuels permits industrialization, therefore freeing the woman from the drudgery of the home and the man from teh drudgery of the field, and gives us enough free wealth and time to afford to educate our young is certainly good reason to extend property rights to women, and to extend political enfranchise to all consumers and laborers. This is true.

    But the practical reality is our goods and services may be cheaper and the least of us we may live better than nobility of the past, but that does not change the reality that we are vastly unequal in temperament and ability, and most of us require extraordinary training and reinforcement by others to maintain the high trust society that we buit by accident was counter to intuition and behaviorally expensive to maintain. People universally demonstrate a preference for the benefits of material productivity. Always. Yet they long for the behavior of the tribe and family, despite universal and inescapable tribal poverty, and despite universal and inescapable low trust in family-dominated, in-breeding-in-extended family societies.

    Be careful what you wish for. You’re getting it.

    Progressive ideology is a longing for a return to the tribe. It is cheap false status signals that produce negative economic consequences. Cultures are empirically demonstrable to be unequal, and democracy only works in the west because the west started out as aristocratic. Without western culture the west will be like every other barbaric low trust civilization on the planet.

    Progressive ideology is to the west what christianity was to rome. There is no difference.

    It is mysticism in different robes.

    -Curt

    Source date (UTC): 2013-03-25 02:07:00 UTC

  • THE DEMOCRATIC HUMANITARIAN RELIGION MASQUERADING AS A POLITICAL MODEL VS ISLAMI

    THE DEMOCRATIC HUMANITARIAN RELIGION MASQUERADING AS A POLITICAL MODEL VS ISLAMIC TOTALITARIANISM MASQUERADING AS A RELIGION.

    (And aristocracy, liberty and reason a casualty of their mysticisms.)

    “The many varieties of Socialism, Syndicalism, Radicalism,Tolstoyism, pacifism, humanitarianism, Solidarism, and so on, form a sum that may be said to belong to the democratic religion, much as there was a sum of numberless sects in the early days of the Christian religion. We are now witnessing the rise and dominance of the democratic religion just as the men of the first centuries of our era witnessed the rise of the Christian religion and the beginnings of its dominion. The two phenomena present many significant analogies.

    …. The social value of both those two religions lies not in the least in their respective theologies, but in the sentiments that they express. As regards determining the social value of Marxism, to know whether Marx’s theory of “surplus value” is false or true is about as important as knowing whether and how baptism eradicates sin in trying to determine the social value of Christianity–and that is of no importance at all.”

    Source date (UTC): 2013-03-24 09:51:00 UTC

  • PARETO ON THE “DEMOCRATIC HUMANITARIAN RELIGION” “The weakness of the humanitari

    PARETO ON THE “DEMOCRATIC HUMANITARIAN RELIGION”

    “The weakness of the humanitarian religion does not lie in the logico-experimental deficiencies of its derivations. From that standpoint they are no better and no worse than the derivations of other religions. But some of these contain residues beneficial to individuals and society, whereas the humanitarian religion is sadly lacking in such residues. But how can a religion that has the good of humanity solely at heart . . . be so destitute in residues correlated with social welfare? . . .[Because] the principles from which the humanitarian doctrine is logically derived in no way correspond with the facts. They merely express in objective form a subjective sentiment of asceticism. The intent of sincere humanitarians is to do good to society, just as the intent of the child who kills a bird by too much fondling is to do good to the bird. We are not . . . forgetting that humanitarianism has had some socially desirable effects. . . . But . . . humanitarianism is worthless from the logico-experimental point of view. . . . And so for the democratic religion in general.”

    It’s not a surprise that I concur with his argument.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-03-24 09:45:00 UTC

  • Western (protestant christian) values are aristocratic values. (Aristocratic ega

    Western (protestant christian) values are aristocratic values. (Aristocratic egalitarian values).

    The western male did not adopt aristocratic values because he desired them. He adopted them because they were to his advantage.

    They were to his advantage because they were the values of the land holding aristocracy. He had to have them if he wanted to join the economy.

    These values are minority values. THey will always be minority values.

    And we are a minority in the country were we were once the majority.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-03-02 18:51:00 UTC

  • ON BEAUTY: A CRITIQUE OF ISLAM (From a post elsewhere, where someone very gracio

    ON BEAUTY: A CRITIQUE OF ISLAM

    (From a post elsewhere, where someone very gracious was criticized as being racist. When she is anything but.)

    ~Aphrodite,

    You are one of the most tolerant people out there. Don’t sweat it.

    Arguing against a religion is not arguing against a race. You cannot change your genes. You have the volition to change your ideas. If arguing against a religion is racism then arguing against Christianity is anti-white racism. This whole line of reasoning makes no sense.

    Islam is not a religion. It is a political system structured as a religion. It is the highest evolution of monotheism, which successfully institutionalized mysticism as law. That we grant this political system the same status as religion out of tolerance is a convenient trick of marketing that we could call deceptive if it were applied to any other product or service. It is perfectly logical, and perfectly consistent with western secular tolerance to criticize a political system – even if it is structured as a religion. That is because the western concept of tolerance is predicated on the requirement that the purpose of any government is the production of prosperity for its people.

    Islam reduces people to poverty. It always has. It always will. It must. It is intellectually closed. And the market economy which is what produces wealth, requires constant disruptive innovation through that process of competition. One cannot have prosperity and certainty. Islam promises certainty and delivers what certainty must: poverty.

    Therefore we are perfectly legitimate in criticizing Islam as a political system whether or not people treat that political system as a religion. In the west, democratic secular socialist egalitarian humanism has risen to the status of unquestionable religion – an act of faith that is contrary to the evidence. Yet we allow ourselves to criticize it. We encourage ourselves to criticize it.

    You are the author of an artistic sentimental publication stream. Whether consciously or not, the dominant properties of the beauty you admire and promote are a) ‘the presence of resources’, and b) ‘there is always plenty’, and c) ‘humans are capable of creating beauty and as such we should wonder at the marvel of it’. These are the conceptual concepts that you work with whether you articulate them rationally as I have just done, or whether you intuit these properties without being able to articulate them.

    However, the underlying problem with beauty is that it may contain a false promise, just as do religions: the promise of the absence of scarcity. The absence of scarcity means we do not need to compete. It means we do not need to constantly calculate for the purpose of producing something which others will trade for us.

    Islam makes a similar promise: that we can be seduced by certainty. That we can avoid the problem solving that science provides us with the tools to constantly bear. That innovation in thought thought he competition of ideas is not only unnecessary but undesirable.

    It may be possible to tolerate the myth of the absence of scarcity, because that myth provides us with the desire to create beauty by creating plenty – prosperity. But it is not possible to tolerate the myth of certainty – because it produces poverty. It can only produce poverty.

    It is certainly within our moral code to criticize Islam on political and material grounds. And whomever argues that Islam is a religion rather than a political system hiding under the cover of a religion, is either engaging in deception or error.

    And whomever argues that stasis, certainty and poverty are preferable to innovation, uncertainty and prosperity.

    Islam is institutionalized ignorance and poverty. It is a failed economic system. And there is nothing beautiful or plentiful about it.

    That may be too deep a bit of philosophy for Facebook, but it is pretty solid logic all the way ’round. Maybe, it will help you assuage your conscience. You’re a wonderful person and I”m glad that you make the world a better place by reminding us how beauty makes it so.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-02-11 05:39:00 UTC