Interesting Links for 15-02-2012
Feb. 15th, 2012 11:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- When will experiences replace movie theaters?
I think people enjoy passive entertainment a lot, so I don't expect movies to go anywhere. It would be nice to see more "experiences", but I suspect that their cost is going to remain a chunk higher than a movie ticket.
- Some detail on what people who identify as "Christian" in the census actually believe
- Dutch government calls for loosening of copyright law. Could the tide be turning?
- Online RPGs WILL DESTROY YOUR RELATIONSHIP. Unless you play together, of course.
- Some common sense on prayer and councils.
What occurred to me, when reading someone else's journal, was that atheists are merely going to be irked by compulsory Christian prayers - but think about the effect it has on a Muslim, Sikh, etc. that in order to represent their constituents they have to sit through the prayers of a different religion.
- Game of Thrones Valentine's Day cards
- The UK devolved rights to Antarctica to Scotland - by mistake. Now they want them back.
- The BBC replaces the word "Palestine" with the sound of breaking glass. No, really.
- Firefox Roadmap for 2012
- This video is genius. Horrific, hilarious, genius. I can't say more than that without spoiling it.
- What If All the Cats in the World Suddenly Died?
- Chocolate + Apple = best valentine's present evar.
- Shitstorm 'best English gift to German language'
- Being left/right-handed affects your preferences
- Game Developer Gives 7-Year-Old Best Birthday Present Ever
- 9 Essential Skills Kids Should Learn
Tags:
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- census,
- children,
- chocolate,
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- development,
- english,
- experience,
- firefox,
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- gameofthrones,
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- government,
- handedness,
- horror,
- ipad,
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no subject
Date: 2012-02-15 05:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-15 05:29 pm (UTC)I don't want to misunderstand you here - it sounds to me like you're saying that you believe things based on whether they feel good to you or not, but if that's not what you mean then I don't want to assume. (Particularly after our previous misunderstandings!)
no subject
Date: 2012-02-15 05:31 pm (UTC)How do you determine what is true?
no subject
Date: 2012-02-15 05:35 pm (UTC)When it comes to historical fact (as opposed to things you can experiment on or run statistical models against) - wodges of documentation.
I'm not sure how either of these can be applied to deciding which bits of The Bible to believe are true.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-15 05:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-15 06:04 pm (UTC)I do believe that morals are just opinions though - They're statements of like and dislike.
I like it when people have free speech, I dislike it when millions of people are killed because of their genetic grouping. But I wouldn't try and say those are somehow facets of the universe, they're facets of me (and many other people, of course).
no subject
Date: 2012-02-15 06:06 pm (UTC)(Incidentally, do you really believe your moral framework was constructed by choosing axioms and then logically working them through to their conclusions?)
If morals are just opinions how do you pick your opinions?
no subject
Date: 2012-02-15 06:09 pm (UTC)I don't pick my opinions - they just are. Much the same way as I like chocolate and dislike being kicked in the crotch, I like free speech and dislike torture.
Some of them change over time, of course. I didn't used to like salt and vinegar crisps, and now I do. And, of course, sometimes my opinions clash, and things I thought seemed like a good idea turned out to not produce results that I liked.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-15 06:26 pm (UTC)When people say "you just choose the parts of the bible/koran/atlas shrugged/D&D second edition rules/bhagvad gita that make you feel good" (which is where this started) it strikes me as unjust but a question worth considering. But really this is part of a larger question about how we construct our beliefs about the world.
For clear-cut science/history things this is easy (um... well not easy, but easy to state the approach one would like to have). For moral/societal choices it strikes me as much more difficult and that most of us aquire a bunch of disparate moral beliefs from what we have read and what we found compellingly argued and try to make this into a consistent whole.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-15 07:50 pm (UTC)If you look at where most people get their morals from, it's usually themselves. People might espouse particular codes, but if you look at what they actually do it's what they believe to be right. See that Russell piece for perfect examples of that - people who espoused Christianity, while utterly ignoring what Jesus (is supposed to have) said. When you get down to it, they didn't actually believe in that model of Christian Values, they just claimed to (and quite possibly believed they did - people are exceptionally self-deceiving), while actually doing what they wanted.
And I'm not trying to claim this is just Christians - this is pretty much everyone. Ayn Rand was a rubbish Objectivist, L Ron Hubbard probably sucked at Scientology :->
When I actually went back and asked myself "What do I mean when I say 'Eating babies is wrong.'?" I was left with the conclusion that I meant "I do not like it when people eat babies." And as my likes and dislikes are something that are sourced internally (although, clearly, affected by the world around me), trying to take the various things that make up my moral tastes and make them all fit into a single code seems remarkably silly and counterproductive.
It would be like trying to fit my liking of "Aliens" and "The art of Dave McKean" into a single system - we could spend countless hours trying to define different systems of taste, fitting things into it, or I could use a simple label like "Geeky stuff" and understand that that's a very vague descriptor, with oodles of places where it doesn't fit.
And that's fine, because my feelings on rape squads and Monet don't tell you anything about external truths of the universe, they just tell you about things in my head.
Now, getting back to the tricky stuff of belief, if your Christianity is a purely moral "I think that most of the stuff that Jesus (is said to have) talked about is pretty good, and the world would be a better place if more people took care of the sick and poor and stopped throwing stones at each other." then that makes perfect sense to me. That's not making any statements about whether there even was a person called Jesus, it's just making statements about the way you'd like people to act.
If you think that Genesis definitely didn't happen, but Jesus was definitely resurrected then I'm left wondering why you think that two things that both seem impossible from my understanding of the universe are differently possible in your understanding - but I'm happy to hear explanations of your logic :->
Speaking of which - looking at the definition of Christian in the Russell piece, it seems to be belief that (1)There is a God (2)There is immortality and (3)Christ was at the least a great man.
I haven't seen any evidence for (1) or (2), and (3) seems debatable as I'm not convinced that the Christ described in the Bible existed, or that I would agree with all of his beliefs, although a lot of them do seem like a good start, particularly for someone born in a pretty unpleasant part of human history.
*phew* I don't half ramble on.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-15 08:11 pm (UTC)This is pretty much where I am as well... If you've ever read anything Feyerabend wrote about the nature of science, what you describe here seems to be the same thing for morality and ethics... that while people want to believe in a coherent logically constructed moral system (which I suspect is why so many people are drawn to utilitarianism), in fact what most people do is gain beliefs over their lifetime and cobble them together and try to make them consistent.
the system becomes the answer, rather than a useful set of guidelines to save people from decision overload.
Indeed... a reaction to the complexities by believing a simple system will somehow work.
That's not making any statements about whether there even was a person called Jesus, it's just making statements about the way you'd like people to act.
Which is pretty much were I come from.
If you think that Genesis definitely didn't happen, but Jesus was definitely resurrected
I don't think the second either... you'd perhaps be surprised how common a position it is. http://preacherwoman.wordpress.com/2009/04/12/the-resurrection/ (only the first few pars worth reading)
So apparently the second belief is not necessary to get to the rank of Bishop in the Church of England.
However, I take your more general point that there are things which seem unevidenced.
as I'm not convinced that the Christ described in the Bible existed,
The evidence is better than most people would make out given that he was just one guy with a relatively small number of followers some time in the past. A comparison I like to make is, imagine trying to find evidence that the poll tax riots had happened if the entire resources you had to work with were a handful of small public libraries where 9/10ths of the books had been destroyed. But yes, it's certainly not 100% convincing. I find the evidence that he existed more convincing... the opposite involves believing in later forgers (presumably Christian) inserting into at least one text.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-16 10:57 am (UTC)It's the adding of the supernatural elements, and the idea that Jesus wasn't just great, but that he was connected to the creator of the universe, who has ideas about right and wrong that we should listen to that converts it from a fan club into a religion. And that's the unevidenced bit - unless you believe that The Bible is an accurate account, in which case we're back to "Which bits and why?".
no subject
Date: 2012-02-16 11:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-16 12:08 pm (UTC)And brings me back to my original point, I think* which is that given a book in which large chunks are obviously unreasonable, why take any of it as fact?
To use an analogy that's simplified to the point of silliness, imagine if people took Narnia as a religion, with The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe as their religious text. There would be your strict Narians, who believed that the whole thing was literal fact, passed down by Aslan. And there would be those who said that _obviously_ it was unreasonable to think that the children literally passed through the wardrobe into Narnia - that bit was metaphor, but the Pevensie children still existed and visited that house during the blitz, and that bit was fine, because it's not obviously unreasonable.
And I'd be wondering why we'd take a book where 3/4 of it was agreed to be metaphor/myth and take 1/4 of it seriously, just because there was an actual Blitz, and houses like that really did exist in the 1940s.
*Or at least, I'm going to segue there anyway.