Sunday School

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Belief without Religion: Study finds Spirituality among the religiously unaffiliated.

US ‘unchurching’ marks the ‘fastest religious shift in modern history’.

Muslim co-workers accused a factory worker of blasphemy and then murdered him.

Univ. of Oklahoma punishes instructor for failing Christian student who didn’t do the assignment.

Trump’s MAGA coalition is showing cracks over religion.

J.D. Vance has a dream.

It’s time for South Carolina to repeal its blasphemy law.

Nearly 40% of Gen Z women identify as atheist, agnostic or have no faith.

World of Woo: Failed predictions are a key feature of pseudoscience.

Environment: How is winter possible if the climate is warming?

Researchers now have a real face for the Denisovans thanks to molecular analysis of the “Dragon Man” skull.

New species are now being discovered faster than ever before.

A new theory of biological computation might explain consciousness.

New Tech for 2026.

Long Reads:

Why the Denmark Vaccine Schedule won’t work in the U.S.

The Militia and the Mole.

Reg, why did you get the name Viktoriia Roshchyna tattooed on your arm?

More on LLM’s and how it’s pattern-matching words can make advice feel solid even when it’s shallow or misleading.

3 philosophical debates from the 20th century that neuroscience is reshaping.

Top science stories of 2025.

Sunday Book Club: The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Some photographs taken last week. The best space photos of 2025.

While you are waiting for the kettle to boil……

Podcast: Yascha Mounk and Ivan Krastev discuss the state of the world.

Coffee Break Videos:  What I want for Christmas. How sex with Neanderthals changed us forever. The future of brain implants. Sam Harris and Ross Douthat debate Belief. The hidden problem at the heart of nihilism. What do Genes have to do with the religious belief? – Robert Sapolsky.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Have a great week everyone and Happy New Year!!

[StregaModerator]

Thanks, Reg!  Happy New Year to you and  I hope all your Machiavellian plans for 2026 achieve outstanding success!

[jakelafortParticipant]

I was wondering if anyone would bring up the lynching of the Hindu.

Heart warming stuff.

Now i could pontificate and berate and conflate one state with another but meh it is just in the wind.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

Univ. of Oklahoma punishes instructor for failing Christian student who didn’t do the assignment.

She wrote a right-wing rant instead.  I think that the student, Samantha Fulnecky, will never be able to get a normal job now.  But there’s plenty of work spouting off on YouTube, playing the victim and pretending to be oppressed.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Understanding is voluntary.
Belief is optional.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

Understanding – apprehending the truth – is an aspiration or goal.  We can’t guarantee to reach an adequate understanding of something.

Understanding is true belief.  False beliefs are either redundant or harmful because delusion is always unsatisfactory.

[jakelafortParticipant]

See those college kids protesting in support of the brave Iranians who are risking their lives?

No of course not. They are morons. Or should i say they are human and acted upon just like monkeys? Degrees are no assurance or indication of intelligence. Achievement tests same. Until we recognize that the masses are led and incapable of critical thinking we will continue to do good guy/bad guy ideology.

Finally i’ve seen someone make points i have been making that ought to be trite. Ricky Gervais has a special on netflix and he explains how he would have been a slave holder 300 yrs ago and if the government tried to fuck with his property he’d think em fascist. And now 300 years later the lowest of lows is the racist or pedophile. (Not to Muslims of course and racism is jim dandy if you are hating zionists)

If we accept the aforementioned it follows that we ought not be critical of Germans because they are vicious killers. Of White Colonial settler apartheid genociders as fiction or fact. Of Belgians in the congo. Of Muslim suicide bombers. Of participants in autos de fe. Of Aztec sacrifices. Of fill in the blank ad nauseum.

So what should inform classical liberalism?

First acknowledge that we aint ever gonna achieve utopia. But we don’t have to live in perpetual futility and make same errors. Encourage good influences that help draw out innate human empathy and compassion. Simple fucking precepts that encourage equality and oppose racism, sexism, slavery, warfare etc. Therefore when we see hyperfocus on one state and one population we won’t pig pile on em. It will engender immediate suspicion regarding the motives. Wherever people are fucked over without justification by their government or terrorists or outsiders we support the oppressed. Inexcusable having lefties ignore the myriad human rights causes when they don’t fit their constructs or contradict their narratives.

We also need to recognize that ideology causes the adherents to degrade whatever intelligence they have. Nothing worse than presupposing the truth of the matter asserted by the ideology. You end up like King Schmuck or whatever his name is. Or the guy who wants to validate his prophecies. Jordan Peterson pulled that dumb assed move. It is another human failing. And by the same token if we ever come to the understanding of how we are swept up by contemporary rivers of belief/norms it is ultra fucking important that we don’t metamorphose a basic movement to improve civilization into a religion like the Maga fuckers and the lefty pieces of human dung. And then we can get to questions like changing protocol for war. Like defeating all of the totalitarian and theocratic regimes. It is axiomatic that such regimes are inimical to human flourishing. North Korea? Poor mofos are just sitting their dangling in the wind. No help. No sympathy. A few controlling the many. it is unacceptable. Oh and i have not hit the other point that is to me obvious how we posit free will into these morasses and it is an error and a costly one but not at this juncture.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-881949

[jakelafortParticipant]

Very interesting/informative article i link.

Please read this. You won’t hate for having done so.

https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-881994

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Once moral judgment is externalized, violence becomes procedural. Killing is no longer an act of violence. It becomes a duty to the cause. The killer experiences righteousness, not guilt. I remember the phone call by the Hamas terrorist to his father and both were rejoicing in the murders. Religion claims absolute moral authority by an ‘unappealable’ divine command. Religious justification is more powerful than anger or hatred and that is how ordinary people become instruments of atrocity.

Yeah, of course this is not unique to religion, but religion excels at it. Any ideological system that claims absolute moral authority and sanctifies obedience does it too. But religion outsources morality and therefore dissolves personal responsibility. The believer no longer asks “Is this right”. Instead they only care that they are able to justify the act.

[jakelafortParticipant]

Reg,

You said a mouthful. Several mouthsful.

Moral Judment is externalized. Yep. Innate impulses concerning right and wrong are superseded. But remember you can’t be a good person without the moral guidance! Crusaders slaughtering infidels. Muslim suicide bombers. Goddamnit little Aisha no tears for your brother who is in Jannah.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

Religious justification is more powerful than anger or hatred and that is how ordinary people become instruments of atrocity.

I actually think that extremist religion and politics can justify “righteous” anger and hatred, blotting out all compassion or respect for human rights.  That’s because morality has an enforcing, punishing function as well as promoting mutual benefit.

I’m not putting “Isis” and “wokeness” in the same bracket, but it’s true that woke people tend to have a remarkable, “righteous” callousness towards people who disagree with them.  It’s even entering the common culture, the idea that we can legitimately destroy people who have the wrong views.

The problem is ideologically-driven purity, whereby one cause or principle is put above all else including human life.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

@simon – Understanding is true belief. False beliefs are either redundant or harmful because delusion is always unsatisfactory.

That’s incorrect in modern epistemology. The old school of thought was that “Knowledge is justified true belief”. It is difficult to shake that idea because it is ‘folk epistemology’ and it has been around for centuries and now feels “intuitive”.

JTB has all the properties of a successful meme (in the Dawkins sense). JTB didn’t survive because it’s right. It survived because as a simple utility it is cognitively useful and now feels like common sense. We evolved to make fast decisions and to rely on testimony in order to avoid endless doubt. JTB matches that environment perfectly. Having to check for epistemic luck or alternative causes is slow and even evolutionarily irrelevant in small tribes. It has a social utility that beats epistemic accuracy whereas Science is open-ended and even uncomfortable.

Once JTB is embedded, it’s easily hijacked. Religion replace evidence with authority, and this is why belief systems feel epistemically legitimate to those inside its box. JTB is the epistemology of tribes, not of truth-seeking systems. I explicitly  reject JTB. I treat scientific models as tools, not truths.It started with Plato. Aquinas codified it. Descartes assumed it. Even Hume did not reject it and even Bertrand Russel endorsed it. It took Gettier to rupture the meme. He upturned centuries of acceptance in a few short pages. He shows that everyone had been wrong to assume that JTB was sufficient for knowledge.

Science has survived his ideas, but religions have not. JTB isn’t just a philosophical relic. It is baked into how societies reward certainty, punish doubt, and confuse confidence with competence. Science has now rejected the concept of JTB. It does not ask “Is this belief justified and true?”. Instead, it asks “Does this survive hostile testing better than alternatives?”

I would rewrite your wording as follows  (or something like it):

Understanding involves seeing how a claim depends on underlying structures and would change if those structures were different. Beliefs can be true yet empty, or false yet instrumentally useful. Delusion arises not from error, but from a resistance to revision. Being right by accident is not understanding.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

@regthefronkeyfarmer – but I never said the truth had to be justified – just “true”.  Anyway I like your definition of understanding better – understanding the factors that make something happen, and everything has a causative structure.

I understand that the concept of truth is not simple and is hard to define precisely.  If something is logical and consistent with other knowledge, it stands a good chance of being part of reality.

To say that the truth of something is justified demands an answer to the question, justified according to who?  In the case of morality, justification is according to the moral agent (individual or group).  In the case of truth, justification must be similarly subjective, in that everyone has their own reasons for thinking something is true.

[jakelafortParticipant]

First Venezuela.

Next Mexico and Cuba. Hell just take over South and Central America. Bunch of shithole countries. Murica is expanding. Canada is too cold unless and until we need it.

And why not legalize slavery again? Why should the Arab/Muslims have all of the fun?

Trumpistan and Trump is the man who can. All hail Trump.

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