Interesting Links for 08-05-2020

[andrewducker]

Some people cannot cope with uncertainty

(tags:society psychology politics )

Possible Waffles - Waffles or not?

(tags:food )

People Who Have Lost Their Religion Show "Residues" Of Religious Past In Their Thoughts And Behaviours

(tags:psychology religion )

Universal basic income improves well-being and encourages work, Finland's pilot study finds

(tags:Finland GuaranteedIncome )

Home Office's denial of benefits to migrant families found to be unlawful

(tags:law welfare immigration UK )

How World of Warcraft Has Evolved With the Internet

(tags:games mmorpg WorldOfWarcraft communication )

Sure, the Velociraptors Are Still On the Loose, But That's No Reason Not to Reopen Jurassic Park

(tags:JurassicPark dinosaurs satire pandemic funny business politics )

Nearly Half of Men Say They Do Most of the Home Schooling. 3 Percent of Women Agree.

(tags:work school gender inequality )

Firefighters burning seed fluff looks longer a weird special effect

(tags:nature fire video )

Comments

[rmc28]

This is my shocked face at your penultimate link. Shocked, I tell you.

[naath]

3 - well yes, I'm clearly a *Catholic* atheist. No matter how much I try not to be.

[andrewducker]

I'm quite lucky to be the child of two non religious parents.

But I'm still definitely an Anglican atheist. It can't help but colour my worldview when I'm not paying attention.

Waffles and Waffling

[agoodwinsmith]

If I ask for a waffle, I have a pretty specific thing in mind[1], but if you tell me we're going to waffle a potato, I'm totally willing to go there.

I do lazy french toast in a waffle iron. More crispy edges. Mmmm.

[1] - made with old style (50's) electric pair of squares waffle iron, with the small grid. Beautiful crispy waffles with lots of craters for butter and syrple. Chocolate waffle supper one of my favourite as a kid.

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

Although the first link describes a very relevant, relatable, and annoying phenomenon, I have to say that the juxtaposition of the first and second links gave me a laugh.

[andrewducker]

I didn't even notice that, and now it's made me giggle! Thank you!

Waffling

[anna_wing]

You could treat "a waffle" as a design or pattern, applicable in many contexts, whether food, textiles, other surface treatments etc. That would recontextualise the whole situation, and remove that particular kind of uncertainty.

The authoritarian personality (both bossy and likes-to-see-people-being-bossed) exists on both left and right (centre too). It's not ideologically specific. When I'm interviewing for recruitment, excessive moral insistence about anything is a red flag. Utilitarian consequentialism, that's the ticket.

Religious residue

[anna_wing]

If you read translations of Pali scriptures in English, especially the early ones by European translators, the monotheist lens through which they interpret the text is very obvious (it's better to stick to the Sri Lankan translations, for this reason).

I expect that the extent of any religious residue in patterns of thinking etc would very much depend on the extent to which the religion, as it were, soaked in originally. For people brought up in a religion more as a cultural rather than a doctrinal matter, who were never particularly ideologically engaged in the first place, there might not actually be much left. If you never believed in the first place, "no longer believing" is a formality, really. Also, in an effectively religiously monocultural society, surely it would be difficult to distinguish between ideological residues, and those of general cultural practices associated with that religion.

It's true that it rarely seems to occur to atheists from Abrahamic religious backgrounds that having the opinion that a god exists (I'm avoiding the word "believe" here because of its inherent ambiguities) and choosing to formally worship that god are two completely different things.

And also that asking someone from a polytheist or religiously mixed society whether they believe in God is a question which should expect the answer, "which one are you thinking of?"

Re: Religious residue

[calimac]

Roman accounts of other peoples' religions cast them emphatically in Roman terms. e.g. If the people have a war god, it says they worship Mars.

Re: Religious residue

[anna_wing]

Indeed! Though that sort of thing maps across cultures much more easily when both cultures in question are polytheistic, because generally (going by my experience of extant polytheistic cultures) the concept of godhood is much more fluid. It's not like Dungeons & Dragons, or whatever, with a God of This and a God of That all nicely categorised.

It's not quite the same fundamental level of misunderstanding as thinking of a Theravada monk as a priest.

Re: Religious residue

[calimac]

Yes, and when there are other sources it's clear how much is being missed even by mapping the war god onto Mars.

A rabbi isn't a priest either. It's amazing how much basic misunderstanding there is of Judaism by those who map it onto Christianity, and that for those whom it's a much more everyday-seen religion than is Buddhism.

[luzclarita]

Of course there is religious residue -- especially if you were in it as a child and adolescent. The study was interesting but didn't dig very deeply. I want to know, how long ago were the formerly religious in the religion? How old were they? For how long were they in it? I think that matters.

As a side note, when I first went to the grocery store and saw empty shelves I immediately had this fear in my bones and this dread that the rapture was coming soon and that we had entered end times. I knew I didn't believe that, but the idea was there just waiting to be triggered by years of conditioning to look for certain "signs."