Curt Doolittle

Theme: Truth

  • Curt: Can a Sane Person Have Faith?

    October 17th, 2018 CURT: CAN A SANE PERSON HAVE FAITH?

    —“Curt, is it possible for a man to believe in Christian doctrine without being a borderline schizophrenic or a closet atheist with personal issues? Can a sane man of at least average intelligence believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God in good faith?”— Scott Cameron

    [W]ell, this confuses Sanity with Agency. Can a sane man do so? Well, evidence that sane and insane people do so. The question is can a man possessed of Agency do so? I mean, for all intents and purposes I ‘believe’ in the characters of history although they are constructed through recursive narrative improvement into myths. That does not stop me, but helps me refer to them (imitate them) in disposition, frame of mind, and method of problem solving. The question is, whether you are imitating a history, a myth, or an occult version of whatever it is, and the assumptions you have about the universe when you imitate each of those criteria. Ergo: are you Relying on Knowledge (techne/history), Seeking Wisdom (general rules), or Seeking false comfort (falsehoods)? Christians tend to make pretty good people – a dumb christian is still a lot better than just about anything else because of its optimism (exhaustive forgiveness) which is the optimum group evolutionary strategy. I’ll refer you to this post (Oath): https://propertarianinstitute.com/2017/11/12/the-oath-of-transcendent-man-a-pagan-a-christian-an-aryan-a-warrior-a-man-transcendent/ And this paragraph:

    —“I am a christian if I have adopted the teaching of christianity: 1) the eradication of hatred from the human heart. 2) the extension of kinship love to non-kin. 3) the extension of exhaustive forgiveness before punishment, enserfment, enslavement, death, or war.”—

    This is the element of ‘faith’ in christianity. And it turns out to be correct: exhausting opportunities for cooperation before retaliating is the optimum cooperative strategy – there is none better. Nearly all humans (and animals) will cooperate given enough time to learn its value. Faith, in all its forms, is merely a way to circumvent problem solving when the neural (Bayesian) accounting (calculation) is beyond our capacity to reason. So faith allows us to ignore our intuitions and frustrations and calmly continue our efforts, with some semblance of piece of mind (confidence) in the outcomes. The rest of christianity is just nonsense. The act of ‘praying to’ (role playing with) a super-parent (fictional character) that you cannot lie to (omniscience) simply works by taking advantage of our innate abilities to self program our intuitions (pre rational searching). Role playing with Gods (eternal, magical), Demigods (immortal), heroes (simple superiors), and Ancestors and parents (our own heroes as children), works for the same reason talking to priests, shrinks, and friends works: if we can train ourselves not to lie to ourselves the role playing will ‘work’. We consist of a physical body, a set of physical (cognitive) biases, a set of intuitions that are limited by those biases, and our ability to reason, and speak. Speech allows us to program our intuition and therefore compete with our genetic biases that evolved under primitive circumstances of the pack and tribe. THere is nothing terribly magical about this process. Nor need there be. The stoics learned how to do it without superstition. The buddhists did not. There is no reason we cannot ‘train ourselves’ in stoicism on the one hand, and role playing with heroes, demigods, and gods on the other, while not understanding what it is that we do. It is far better than allowing ourselves to be constantly manipulated by priests, politicians, public intellectuals, and marketers of all kinds. Fairy tales -> Myths and Legends -> Historical Biographies -> Histories -> Legal Histories + Economic Histories + Technological Histories -> The Sciences -> Mathematics.I talk to my god every day. I largely do what he informs me. I do not however mistake his existence for his function. The simpleton cannot do such a thing. But he can worship nature, ancestors, and not be taught lies.

  • Solving Religion: The Ultimate Test of Agency

    October 17th, 2018 11:42 AM SOLVING RELIGION: THE ULTIMATE TEST OF AGENCY [S]olving religion was the hardest problem. Truth was trivial by comparison. The reason being that we are less invested in truth (reason) than we are in intuitions (training). I solved religion. The question is, what can be done about it for the masses, when the purpose of faith is to circumvent reason and to relieve the individual of all sorts of calculation, particularly STATUS (self image), which is the human’s instinctual accounting system. So, people malinvest in religions (wisdom narratives) for the purpose of cognitive and signaling discounts, and as such they defend their malinvestments like they defend all forms of investment (property). Hence why religion is the ultimate test of Agency.

  • Religious Justification (excuse) vs Scientific Falsification (survival)

    October 17th, 2018 11:01 AM RELIGIOUS JUSTIFICATION (EXCUSE) VS SCIENTIFIC FALSIFICATION (SURVIVAL)

    —“Accepting scientific authority without conducting the experiments and doing the research yourself is an expression of faith.”— Clay Caldwell

    [L]ikewise, accepting supernatural authority without direct, testifiable, experience of the people and events, and miracles(magic) is an act of faith. Whereas due diligence in science is an effort to disprove a theory, not prove one. we cannot prove science. We can only find possibilities and seek to falsify them until we can’t. When we can’t falsify them (because of coherence, consistency, and correspondence, and explanatory power, and parsimony) then we have to admit to ourselves that it’s likely true. So it’s not true that one has ‘faith in science’ but one simply does the hard work of falsifying our fantasies such that only that which we cannot make false remains – that’s the entire point of scientific research: to perform due diligence against your imagination, by producing measurements that eliminate the possibility of your imaginings. The problem is that one can read either the research or other’s fictionalism or sensationalism of that research. And it takes great knowledge to understand such research, while only takes the mind of a child to understand mythology by intuition and imitation. So knowledge < wisdom < parable describe a means of graceful failure from those who possess knowledge and ability to those that possess neither. We can train people’s intuition many ways, and it turns out that abrahamic religion, like marxism, postmodernism, and feminism, is just the worst way possible.

  • Answering Misunderstandings and The Folly of Cults.

    October 17th, 2018 3:04 PM ANSWERING MISUNDERSTANDINGS AND THE FOLLY OF CULTS. With Giego Caleiro ( @Giego : I think your pm put out your objection pretty clearly, so hopefully this is a good start to working through the details. -Curt)

    —“There are fewer influx of defectors in islands, in isthmuses with mountains on the other side etc….”—

    Yes. Geography provides a discount in defense against competition by war, trade capture, immigration, conversion, defection, and malinformation.

    –“Religion is a unifying force for systems with constant influx and outflux, it is a process, and adaptive process.”—

    Religion is a form of education that in the past used storytelling (suggestion) and ritual (suggestibility) to train the intuition (pre-rational brain), to conform to general rules of conduct that advanced the group’s market (evolutionary) strategy in a period of near zero change, among people who lacked ability and experience to reason, calculate, and compute. And where our knowledge of physical forces and properties of the universe was profoundly limited, and our concept of time was an imitation of the seasons: repeating. We are no longer in those conditions.

    —“The truth is not a process, it’s just a bunch of facts. “—

    Truth is a process of due diligence that maintains continuous relations between reality, perception, cognition, memory, forecasting, description, negotiation, and advocacy: perception, frame, > display + word + deed. Truth always was, and always will be a test of one’s testimony consisting of consistency, correspondence, and coherence with reality: “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. “That which is laundered and warranted against imaginary content.” We use the word “True/False” like “yes/no” or “agree/disagree” as consent/disagreement in the context of Truth independent of all else, Good by both our standards of measure, Preference by one’s own measure, Utility and actionability as whether possible or not. The fact that we conflate all those different conditions is a matter of colloquial illiteracy and habit, not because we are conscious of the difference between terms. (The same way we use reasonable, rational, logical as appeals to authority by exaggerating our claims.)

    —“When you’re 95%Han or 95% Jap and your frontiers are negligible, you can do without God. “—

    When you are strong enough you can do without frauds. You resort to lies when you are weak. Fraud is a cheap means of governing ignorant people. Law is the cheapest means of governing skilled people. Violence is an expensive means of governing internal and external peoples as a means of replacing the order (status quo). The romans used law and violence, and oath to the emperor. The egyptians, mesopotamians, and syrians used cults because they conquered inferior people lacking ability and knowledge. The Jews used it to cause defection in women, and slaves (the underclasses) and then in a period of weakness, an emperor with a jewish (christian) mother from the lower classes, imposed it on the western empire, insuring it’s submission, by exiting its aristocracy from rule. You can rule imbeciles, the weak, and the unskilled with religion, but they are a dead weight. They were not a dead weight in antiquity since nearly all wealth was agrarian production. How do you rule the current working, middle, professional, and financial classes with superstitious nonsense?

    —“But the mythology and ritualistic training of religion are filters for those who come in with a smaller proportion of, say, white genes, but who can still be fixed, as well as a creator of a transcendental morale that invites men to go to war to defend their land (Crusades). “—

    One needs the power to enforce such a thing. How does one get that power? It’s not like the arabs,the turkics, the europeans, or even the africans are sufficientlly ignorant that the lies of the monotheistic era can persist. Islam offers the lowest of the low a pretty complete network of decidabilty. What will you offer those people instead, and why would they choose it over a god that gives them whatever they ask for in exchange for obedience?

    —“You can do your propertarianism in Australia, Japan, China, India, Denmark, and if you kick or kill sufficiently many, and bomb the tunnel, in England (start by nuking london)”—

    No one has to understand propertarianism at all except for a few elites. The entire process boils down to expansion of the law such that false speech is prosecutiable as theft from or damage to the commons just as we currently do with products and services. All this does is use the existing system to suppress abrahamism in the old and current forms, so that alternative non-false ‘mythologies’ can emerge (reach the stars, transcendence, etc).

    —“But you cannot do it in contiguous eurasian land with easy access, north africa, middle east, Brazil, south america (except Chile). “—

    That’s the thing. It’s trivial. Because the incentives I’ve proposed are purely economic and political and effectively pays people to end what they see is oppression by extraction and deception. There is nothing to ‘believe’. Only whether the proposed constitutional changes will produce a superior order for all. And the rewards are so substantial that it’s very difficult for people to argue against them other than to justify theft and fraud – which simply licenses violence against them.

    —“It just doesn’t work.”—

    You mean, your presumption that propertarianism is a philosophy or religion (Positiva) rather than a science and logic of social science and the law (negativa).

    —“Jesus saves foreigners sometimes, trains their kids. Makes european women output 2.1+ babies. “—

    So does eliminating interest, eliminating the cost of education, eliminating financialization, redistributing central government and spending authority to the states, and creating the greatest reallocation of opportunity capital in human history. This means that people will bear children earlier, pay less for their production, be more dependent upon them in retirement again, and exit their child-rearing years without debt and as homeowners with 20+ years to consume, save, or invest. People don’t need to ‘believe’. They just need to undrestand the material solution to their problems was science not cults.

    —“And it makes men go to arms for the land, for the country, for the race, for the family, and, above all, for God.”–

    Men go to arms for profit opportunity, exit of boredom, seeing the world, and the opportunity to steal, plunder, rape, pillage, obtains laves, and murder in vast numbers. The decoration is just an excuse to do so for the common good. Any illusion otherwise is a product of the success of the nation state in ritualizing the Peace of Westphalia which ended with Isis, Iran, and Putin. The european era is over, and we are back to guerrilla warfare and a war of all against all which states can no longer contain. Cheers.

  • Answering Misunderstandings and The Folly of Cults.

    October 17th, 2018 3:04 PM ANSWERING MISUNDERSTANDINGS AND THE FOLLY OF CULTS. With Giego Caleiro ( @Giego : I think your pm put out your objection pretty clearly, so hopefully this is a good start to working through the details. -Curt)

    —“There are fewer influx of defectors in islands, in isthmuses with mountains on the other side etc….”—

    Yes. Geography provides a discount in defense against competition by war, trade capture, immigration, conversion, defection, and malinformation.

    –“Religion is a unifying force for systems with constant influx and outflux, it is a process, and adaptive process.”—

    Religion is a form of education that in the past used storytelling (suggestion) and ritual (suggestibility) to train the intuition (pre-rational brain), to conform to general rules of conduct that advanced the group’s market (evolutionary) strategy in a period of near zero change, among people who lacked ability and experience to reason, calculate, and compute. And where our knowledge of physical forces and properties of the universe was profoundly limited, and our concept of time was an imitation of the seasons: repeating. We are no longer in those conditions.

    —“The truth is not a process, it’s just a bunch of facts. “—

    Truth is a process of due diligence that maintains continuous relations between reality, perception, cognition, memory, forecasting, description, negotiation, and advocacy: perception, frame, > display + word + deed. Truth always was, and always will be a test of one’s testimony consisting of consistency, correspondence, and coherence with reality: “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. “That which is laundered and warranted against imaginary content.” We use the word “True/False” like “yes/no” or “agree/disagree” as consent/disagreement in the context of Truth independent of all else, Good by both our standards of measure, Preference by one’s own measure, Utility and actionability as whether possible or not. The fact that we conflate all those different conditions is a matter of colloquial illiteracy and habit, not because we are conscious of the difference between terms. (The same way we use reasonable, rational, logical as appeals to authority by exaggerating our claims.)

    —“When you’re 95%Han or 95% Jap and your frontiers are negligible, you can do without God. “—

    When you are strong enough you can do without frauds. You resort to lies when you are weak. Fraud is a cheap means of governing ignorant people. Law is the cheapest means of governing skilled people. Violence is an expensive means of governing internal and external peoples as a means of replacing the order (status quo). The romans used law and violence, and oath to the emperor. The egyptians, mesopotamians, and syrians used cults because they conquered inferior people lacking ability and knowledge. The Jews used it to cause defection in women, and slaves (the underclasses) and then in a period of weakness, an emperor with a jewish (christian) mother from the lower classes, imposed it on the western empire, insuring it’s submission, by exiting its aristocracy from rule. You can rule imbeciles, the weak, and the unskilled with religion, but they are a dead weight. They were not a dead weight in antiquity since nearly all wealth was agrarian production. How do you rule the current working, middle, professional, and financial classes with superstitious nonsense?

    —“But the mythology and ritualistic training of religion are filters for those who come in with a smaller proportion of, say, white genes, but who can still be fixed, as well as a creator of a transcendental morale that invites men to go to war to defend their land (Crusades). “—

    One needs the power to enforce such a thing. How does one get that power? It’s not like the arabs,the turkics, the europeans, or even the africans are sufficientlly ignorant that the lies of the monotheistic era can persist. Islam offers the lowest of the low a pretty complete network of decidabilty. What will you offer those people instead, and why would they choose it over a god that gives them whatever they ask for in exchange for obedience?

    —“You can do your propertarianism in Australia, Japan, China, India, Denmark, and if you kick or kill sufficiently many, and bomb the tunnel, in England (start by nuking london)”—

    No one has to understand propertarianism at all except for a few elites. The entire process boils down to expansion of the law such that false speech is prosecutiable as theft from or damage to the commons just as we currently do with products and services. All this does is use the existing system to suppress abrahamism in the old and current forms, so that alternative non-false ‘mythologies’ can emerge (reach the stars, transcendence, etc).

    —“But you cannot do it in contiguous eurasian land with easy access, north africa, middle east, Brazil, south america (except Chile). “—

    That’s the thing. It’s trivial. Because the incentives I’ve proposed are purely economic and political and effectively pays people to end what they see is oppression by extraction and deception. There is nothing to ‘believe’. Only whether the proposed constitutional changes will produce a superior order for all. And the rewards are so substantial that it’s very difficult for people to argue against them other than to justify theft and fraud – which simply licenses violence against them.

    —“It just doesn’t work.”—

    You mean, your presumption that propertarianism is a philosophy or religion (Positiva) rather than a science and logic of social science and the law (negativa).

    —“Jesus saves foreigners sometimes, trains their kids. Makes european women output 2.1+ babies. “—

    So does eliminating interest, eliminating the cost of education, eliminating financialization, redistributing central government and spending authority to the states, and creating the greatest reallocation of opportunity capital in human history. This means that people will bear children earlier, pay less for their production, be more dependent upon them in retirement again, and exit their child-rearing years without debt and as homeowners with 20+ years to consume, save, or invest. People don’t need to ‘believe’. They just need to undrestand the material solution to their problems was science not cults.

    —“And it makes men go to arms for the land, for the country, for the race, for the family, and, above all, for God.”–

    Men go to arms for profit opportunity, exit of boredom, seeing the world, and the opportunity to steal, plunder, rape, pillage, obtains laves, and murder in vast numbers. The decoration is just an excuse to do so for the common good. Any illusion otherwise is a product of the success of the nation state in ritualizing the Peace of Westphalia which ended with Isis, Iran, and Putin. The european era is over, and we are back to guerrilla warfare and a war of all against all which states can no longer contain. Cheers.

  • ANSWERING MISUNDERSTANDINGS AND THE FOLLY OF CULTS. With Giego Caleiro ( @Giego

    ANSWERING MISUNDERSTANDINGS AND THE FOLLY OF CULTS.

    With Giego Caleiro

    ( @Giego : I think your pm put out your objection pretty clearly, so hopefully this is a good start to working through the details. -Curt)

    —“There are fewer influx of defectors in islands, in isthmuses with mountains on the other side etc….”—

    Yes. Geography provides a discount in defense against competition by war, trade capture, immigration, conversion, defection, and malinformation.

    –“Religion is a unifying force for systems with constant influx and outflux, it is a process, and adaptive process.”—

    Religion is a form of education that in the past used storytelling (suggestion) and ritual (suggestibility) to train the intuition (pre-rational brain), to conform to general rules of conduct that advanced the group’s market (evolutionary) strategy in a period of near zero change, among people who lacked ability and experience to reason, calculate, and compute. And where our knowledge of physical forces and properties of the universe was profoundly limited, and our concept of time was an imitation of the seasons: repeating.

    We are no longer in those conditions.

    —“The truth is not a process, it’s just a bunch of facts. “—

    Truth is a process of due diligence that maintains continuous relations between reality, perception, cognition, memory, forecasting, description, negotiation, and advocacy: perception, frame, > display + word + deed.

    Truth always was, and always will be a test of one’s testimony consisting of consistency, correspondence, and coherence with reality: “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. “That which is laundered and warranted against imaginary content.”

    We use the word “True/False” like “yes/no” or “agree/disagree” as consent/disagreement in the context of Truth independent of all else, Good by both our standards of measure, Preference by one’s own measure, Utility and actionability as whether possible or not. The fact that we conflate all those different conditions is a matter of colloquial illiteracy and habit, not because we are conscious of the difference between terms. (The same way we use reasonable, rational, logical as appeals to authority by exaggerating our claims.)

    —“When you’re 95%Han or 95% Jap and your frontiers are negligible, you can do without God. “—

    When you are strong enough you can do without frauds. You resort to lies when you are weak. Fraud is a cheap means of governing ignorant people. Law is the cheapest means of governing skilled people. Violence is an expensive means of governing internal and external peoples as a means of replacing the order (status quo). The romans used law and violence, and oath to the emperor. The egyptians, mesopotamians, and syrians used cults because they conquered inferior people lacking ability and knowledge. The Jews used it to cause defection in women, and slaves (the underclasses) and then in a period of weakness, an emperor with a jewish (christian) mother from the lower classes, imposed it on the western empire, insuring it’s submission, by exiting its aristocracy from rule.

    You can rule imbeciles, the weak, and the unskilled with religion, but they are a dead weight. They were not a dead weight in antiquity since nearly all wealth was agrarian production. How do you rule the current working, middle, professional, and financial classes with superstitious nonsense?

    —“But the mythology and ritualistic training of religion are filters for those who come in with a smaller proportion of, say, white genes, but who can still be fixed, as well as a creator of a transcendental morale that invites men to go to war to defend their land (Crusades). “—

    One needs the power to enforce such a thing. How does one get that power? It’s not like the arabs,the turkics, the europeans, or even the africans are sufficientlly ignorant that the lies of the monotheistic era can persist. Islam offers the lowest of the low a pretty complete network of decidabilty. What will you offer those people instead, and why would they choose it over a god that gives them whatever they ask for in exchange for obedience?

    —“You can do your propertarianism in Australia, Japan, China, India, Denmark, and if you kick or kill sufficiently many, and bomb the tunnel, in England (start by nuking london)”—

    No one has to understand propertarianism at all except for a few elites. The entire process boils down to expansion of the law such that false speech is prosecutiable as theft from or damage to the commons just as we currently do with products and services. All this does is use the existing system to suppress abrahamism in the old and current forms, so that alternative non-false ‘mythologies’ can emerge (reach the stars, transcendence, etc).

    —“But you cannot do it in contiguous eurasian land with easy access, north africa, middle east, Brazil, south america (except Chile). “—

    That’s the thing. It’s trivial. Because the incentives I’ve proposed are purely economic and political and effectively pays people to end what they see is oppression by extraction and deception. There is nothing to ‘believe’. Only whether the proposed constitutional changes will produce a superior order for all. And the rewards are so substantial that it’s very difficult for people to argue against them other than to justify theft and fraud – which simply licenses violence against them.

    —“It just doesn’t work.”—

    You mean, your presumption that propertarianism is a philosophy or religion (Positiva) rather than a science and logic of social science and the law (negativa).

    —“Jesus saves foreigners sometimes, trains their kids. Makes european women output 2.1+ babies. “—

    So does eliminating interest, eliminating the cost of education, eliminating financialization, redistributing central government and spending authority to the states, and creating the greatest reallocation of opportunity capital in human history. This means that people will bear children earlier, pay less for their production, be more dependent upon them in retirement again, and exit their child-rearing years without debt and as homeowners with 20+ years to consume, save, or invest.

    People don’t need to ‘believe’. They just need to undrestand the material solution to their problems was science not cults.

    —“And it makes men go to arms for the land, for the country, for the race, for the family, and, above all, for God.”–

    Men go to arms for profit opportunity, exit of boredom, seeing the world, and the opportunity to steal, plunder, rape, pillage, obtains laves, and murder in vast numbers. The decoration is just an excuse to do so for the common good. Any illusion otherwise is a product of the success of the nation state in ritualizing the Peace of Westphalia which ended with Isis, Iran, and Putin. The european era is over, and we are back to guerrilla warfare and a war of all against all which states can no longer contain.

    Cheers.

    Source date (UTC): 2018-10-17 15:04:00 UTC

  • WHAT ARE YOU MEASURING? FEELS (immediate experience) or REALS (consequences)? Se

    WHAT ARE YOU MEASURING?

    FEELS (immediate experience) or REALS (consequences)?

    Self Delusion feels good to the Faithful. Drugs feel good to the drug user. Stealing feels good to the thief. Murder feels good to the murderer. Just about anything we evolve a moral disposition against feels good. That’s why we limit it.

    Source date (UTC): 2018-10-17 11:47:00 UTC

  • SOLVING RELIGION: THE ULTIMATE TEST OF AGENCY Solving religion was the hardest p

    SOLVING RELIGION: THE ULTIMATE TEST OF AGENCY

    Solving religion was the hardest problem. Truth was trivial by comparison. The reason being that we are less invested in truth (reason) than we are in intuitions (training).

    I solved religion. The question is, what can be done about it for the masses, when the purpose of faith is to circumvent reason and to relieve the individual of all sorts of calculation, particularly STATUS (self image), which is the human’s instinctual accounting system.

    So, people malinvest in religions (wisdom narratives) for the purpose of cognitive and signaling discounts, and as such they defend their malinvestments like they defend all forms of investment (property).

    Hence why religion is the ultimate test of Agency.

    Source date (UTC): 2018-10-17 11:42:00 UTC

  • RELIGIOUS JUSTIFICATION (EXCUSE) VS SCIENTIFIC FALSIFICATION (SURVIVAL) —“Acce

    RELIGIOUS JUSTIFICATION (EXCUSE) VS SCIENTIFIC FALSIFICATION (SURVIVAL)

    —“Accepting scientific authority without conducting the experiments and doing the research yourself is an expression of faith.”— Clay Caldwell

    Likewise, accepting supernatural authority without direct, testifiable, experience of the people and events, and miracles(magic) is an act of faith.

    Wherease due diligence in science is an effort to disprove a theory, not prove one. we cannot prove science. We can only find possibilities and seek to falsify them until we can’t. When we can’t falsify them (because of coherence, consistency, and correspondence, and explanatory power, and parsimony) then we have to admit to ourselves that it’s likely true.

    So its not true that one has ‘faith in science’ but one simply does the hard work of falsifying our fantasies such that only that which we cannot make false remains – that’s the entire point of scientific research: to perform due diligence against your imagination, by producing measurements that eliminate the possibility of your imaginings.

    The problem is that one can read either the research or other’s fictionalism or sensationalism of that research. And it takes great knowledge to understand such research, while only takes the mind of a child to understand mythology by intuition and imitation. So knowledge < wisdom < parable describe a means of graceful failure from those who possess knowledge and ability to those that possess neither.

    We can train people’s intuition many ways, and it turns out that abrahamic religion, like marxism, postmodernism, and feminism, is just the worst way possible.

    Source date (UTC): 2018-10-17 11:01:00 UTC

  • CURT: CAN A SANE PERSON HAVE FAITH? —“Curt, is it possible for a man to believ

    CURT: CAN A SANE PERSON HAVE FAITH?

    —“Curt, is it possible for a man to believe in Christian doctrine without being a borderline schizophrenic or a closet atheist with personal issues? Can a sane man of at least average intelligence believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God in good faith?”— Scott Cameron

    Well, this confuses Sanity with Agency. Can a sane man do so? Well, evidence that sane and insane people do so. The question is can a man possessed of Agency do so?

    I mean, for all intents and purposes I ‘believe’ in the characters of history although they are constructed through recursive narrative improvement into myths. That does not stop me, but helps me refer to them (imitate them) in disposition, frame of mind, and method of problem solving.

    The question is, whether you are imitating a history, a myth, or an occult version of whatever it is, and the assumptions you have about the universe when you imitate each of those criteria. Ergo: are you Relying on Knowledge (techne/history), Seeking Wisdom (general rules), or Seeking false comfort (falsehoods)?

    Christians tend to make pretty good people – a dumb christian is still a lot better than just about anything else because of its optimism (exhaustive forgiveness) which is the optimum group evolutionary strategy.

    I’ll refer you to this post (Oath):

    https://propertarianism.com/2017/11/12/the-oath-of-transcendent-man-a-pagan-a-christian-an-aryan-a-warrior-a-man-transcendent/

    And this paragraph:

    —“I am a christian if I have adopted the teaching of christianity: 1) the eradication of hatred from the human heart. 2) the extension of kinship love to non-kin. 3) the extension of exhaustive forgiveness before punishment, enserfment, enslavement, death, or war.”—

    This is the element of ‘faith’ in christianity. And it turns out to be correct: exhausting opportunities for cooperation before retaliating is the optimum cooperative strategy – there is none better. Nearly all humans (and animals) will cooperate given enough time to learn its value.

    Faith, in all its forms, is merely a way to circumvent problem solving when the neural (Bayesian) accounting (calculation) is beyond our capacity to reason. So faith allows us to ignore our intuitions and frustrations and calmly continue our efforts, with some semblance of piece of mind (confidence) in the outcomes.

    The rest of christianity is just nonsense.

    The act of ‘praying to’ (role playing with) a super-parent (fictional character) that you cannot lie to (omniscience) simply works by taking advantage of our innate abilities to self program our intuitions (pre rational searching).

    Role playing with Gods (eternal, magical), Demigods (immortal), heroes (simple superiors), and Ancestors and parents (our own heroes as children), works for the same reason talking to priests, shrinks, and friends works: if we can train ourselves not to lie to ourselves the role playing will ‘work’.

    We consist of a physical body, a set of physical (cognitive) biases, a set of intuitions that are limited by those biases, and our ability to reason, and speak. Speech allows us to program our intuition and therefore compete with our genetic biases that evolved under primitive circumstances of the pack and tribe.

    THere is nothing terribly magical about this process. Nor need there be. The stoics learned how to do it without superstition. The buddhists did not. There is no reason we cannot ‘train ourselves’ in stoicism on the one hand, and role playing with heroes, demigods, and gods on the other, while not understanding what it is that we do.

    It is far better than allowing ourselves to be constantly manipulated by priests, politicians, public intellectuals, and marketers of all kinds.

    Fairy tales -> Myths and Legends -> Historical Biographies -> Histories -> Legal Histories + Economic Histories + Technological Histories -> The Sciences -> Mathematics.

    I talk to my god every day. I largely do what he informs me. I do not however mistake his existence for his function.

    The simpleton cannot do such a thing. But he can worship nature, ancestors, and not be taught lies.

    Source date (UTC): 2018-10-17 10:53:00 UTC