To “point out” means to induce others to see what you see. Do you think that Harris’s approach reliably induces people who don’t already agree with him to see the ridiculousness that he sees?
Since the people he has to convince are religious believers, I think his approach is about as reliable as the ‘nice’ approach, which is to say it’s almost completely worthless. However, it has other benefits that the nice approach doesn’t have.
Unless I’m reading you wrong, those “other benefits” amount to no more than signaling tribal loyalties, at least in practical terms.
ETA: . . . and if that kind of behavior helps a tribe to grow, it does so for non-truth-tracking reasons, producing a tribe full of people who are there just because they like the company.
The benefit is to help other non-believers (and perhaps a few believers) realize that Armstrong’s article (and defense of religion in general) doesn’t fit into the category of “Respectable beliefs I disagree with”, it fits into the category of “Intellectually dishonest nonsense that should be scorned and ridiculed”.
The benefit is to help other non-believers (and perhaps a few believers) realize that Armstrong’s article (and defense of religion in general) doesn’t fit into the category of “Respectable beliefs I disagree with”, it fits into the category of “Intellectually dishonest nonsense that should be scorned and ridiculed”.
If the benefit of scorn and ridicule is just to inform others about what to scorn and ridicule, then I don’t see the point. Scorn and ridicule aren’t terminal values.
It’s a benefit closely related to breaking the taboo that protects religious beliefs and raising the sanity waterline.
That would be true if the ability to deride were a reliable signal of sanity. But derision is cheap; it’s a tool that is equally available to the insane.
One of the things that keep religion alive in western society in the 21st century is the dogma, widespread even among atheists, that even if religious beliefs are false they’re sane enough to deserve respect. In other words, most non-believers treat mainstream religious beliefs as if they were like the belief that the Washington Redskins are going to win the 2010 Superbowl rather than like the belief that Tom Cruise is the son of Xenu, Lord of the Galactic Confederacy.
The first step towards a society in which ridiculous beliefs are acknowledged to be ridiculous, is to stop acting as if these beliefs aren’t ridiculous. The point of ridicule is first to make those who hold ridiculous beliefs feel ashamed or at least uncomfortable, and second to help make rationalists feel the appropriate emotion when dealing with such extremes of irrationality. The end goal is a society in which people have the same attitude towards religious beliefs than they do towards belief in alien abductions.
Humans are social animals. Inducing shame and discomfort might be useful if the believer is isolated away from other believers and cannot rely on them for emotional support. If not, he or she will likely relieve their shame by seeking the company of fellow believers, reinforcing the affiliation with the believing group.
Or they’ll give up their belief to avoid looking like a nut. I know several Christian fundamentalists who’ve done just that. Unfortunately, since ‘moderate’ or ‘liberal’ religion is still respected, they just became Christians of a different type instead of atheists.
How exactly do you expect to make humanity acknowledge the ridiculousness of religion if you yourself continue to act as if it was a respectable position?
Does your experience accord with my (implied) retrodiction that the fundamentalists who gave up their extreme beliefs could not easily retreat to a more comfortable social milieu?
Well, I was thinking of some of my fellow students, back in college. IIRC their families were mostly fundies (and lived in the same city) so, not really.
Anyway, could you answer my question? It wasn’t rhetorical.
I’m dubious of militant atheism, as it seems counter-productive. Promoting atheism is closely related to promoting science. Aggressively promoting science and proclaiming it to be in direct conflict with religion will polarize society as religious groups will in turn attack science. On the other hand, if you just quietly taught science to everyone and not mention anything about a conflict, religious people would just compartmentalize their beliefs so that they didn’t interfere with the things science teaches. You’d basically get people who were technically religious, but close to none of the negative sides.
This has pretty much already happened in my country (Finland). The majority still belongs to a religious domination, but religion is considered a private thing and actually arguing in favor of something “because of the Bible” will get you strange looks and likely branded as a fanatic. Yes, there is still a Christian political party in parliament, but they’re a minor player, fielding 7 representatives out of 200. There has traditionally been practically no public debate about any sort of conflict between science and religion, though that’s possibly changing as parts of the populace have began to express a fear of Islam. Judging from past evidence, that is probably just going to make any clash of cultures worse. That article is also a good example of the results you’ll get when the debate gets polarized, as it shows people who might otherwise have been moderates become extremists.
And yes, we should regardless still continue to provide some critique of religion and the fallacies involved, to shift the social consensus even further into the “religion is just a private way you look at the world, not something you can base real-world decisions on” camp. But one can do that without being overly aggressive.
religion is considered a private thing and actually arguing in favor of something “because of the Bible” will get you strange looks and likely branded as a fanatic.
Pardon my drooling—I live in the United States. The inmates run much of the asylum here.
Do you know the history of how Finland acheived this compartmentalization of religion? Are there lessons in the path you followed that we can learn from? We can’t directly follow your current-day practices because our would-be theocrats are still quite rabid, and hold significant power. I agree that head-on confrontation doesn’t work. What did work?
Sociology isn’t my strongest field (though not my weakest either) and I haven’t studied this issue in detail, so I can’t provide any very conclusive answers. Still, there’s one thing that many people suspect to be at least partially responsible. Curiously enough, this is the existence of a state church. Two to be exact, one Lutheran and one Orthodox.
Most people are members of the Lutheran one (79,7% of the population in 2009, down from 85% in 2000 and from 90% in about 1980). They’ll attend a week-long Confirmation camp around age 14, get a church marriage and have their children baptized, have a church funeral when they die. But the church is a very mild, non-radical one. Most of the kids I knew had their Confirmation because tradition says you get gifts afterwards and hey, a week spent camping! The lessons on theology you have to endure are an acceptable price to pay for that.
A prevailing theory is that this acts as a sort of an inoculation against more radical strands of religion. Religion is that traditional thing you grew up with, with neat rituals that bring some comfort and you’ll likely believe in at least some of what they say, but that’s about it. It’s been mostly relegated to the position of “those nice people who provide nice traditional rituals for a few special occasions in everyone’s life”. And once you’re used to the thought of that being the church’s function, any church or religion that gets more involved in the daily lives of its followers will seem radical and fanatic in comparison.
ETA: The fact that the church is funded by taxes probably also helps, as it makes the church more independent from the common populace. They don’t need to actively collect money from people. If they needed to, the fundraising events would probably reach out to more people and make them feel more committed to the church.
ETA2: Of course, this doesn’t explain how the Lutheran church became so secularized. I don’t know the answer to that myself either. A plausible hypothesis might be that as a state church, it’s had a need to do what the rulers told it to, which has forced it to be more secular than churches that don’t need to answer to anyone. That doesn’t help much for the situation in the United States, of course.
A prevailing theory is that this acts as a sort of an inoculation against more radical strands of religion.
Yes, I’ve read analysis along those lines before as well.
The fact that the church is funded by taxes probably also helps, as it makes the church more independent from the common populace. They don’t need to actively collect money from people.
Good point. And they don’t need to carefully tune themselves to actually attract the population either. They are insulated from “market discipline”.
That doesn’t help much for the situation in the United States, of course.
Agnostics and atheists united to weaken church/state separation by funding lukewarm, preferably bureacratic state religion(s). Hmm, do I have the energy to set up a web site...
One comment and one odd suggestion:
It’s been mostly relegated to the position of “those nice people who provide nice traditional rituals for a few special occasions in everyone’s life”.
But, but...aren’t they also supposed to maintain special cuisines for religious festival days too? Once the fangs are gone, I thought that that was one of the central purposes of a nominal religion… :-)
Two to be exact, one Lutheran and one Orthodox.
Perhaps the best solution to Islam is to add a third...
But, but...aren’t they also supposed to maintain special cuisines for religious festival days too? Once the fangs are gone, I thought that that was one of the central purposes of a nominal religion… :-)
I found an interesting article which contains a summary of what people in the Nordic countries think are the most important functions of the church:
This makes the Nordic position even more of a paradox. Most uncommitted or marginal Norwegian Lutherans knowingly pay to maintain an organization they do not attend terribly often and to support spokesmen for beliefs they do not hold. The explanation can be discerned from the fascinating material in the Religious and Moral Pluralism (RAMP) study. Respondents were asked to rank the importance of various church activities. There was a surprising degree of agreement between the four countries. The activities rated highest in all four countries were funerals, baptisms and weddings. Next, and surprisingly close, came the preservation of old church buildings and the celebration of Advent and Christmas. Those all came above the mid-way level. Below and in declining order of importance came ‘church music and singing of the choir’, the celebration of Easter, ‘well-known hymns’, and ‘ringing in of the Sabbath’. The two least important occurrences were ‘regular Sunday services’ and ‘holy communion’! The most important things the church could do were to give a religious gloss to significant personal and community events and to maintain the national heritage by preserving historic church buildings. Marking the Sabbath, regular worship services and what (even for Protestants) should be the most important part of church life, holy communion, were ranked lowest.
Another question asked people to rank ten activities on which the church could spend its resources. The most popular was social work with the old and sick. Second came upkeep of cemeteries. Third was ‘keeping churches open for private prayers’. Fourth was international aid and emergency relief. Fifth was the preservation of church buildings. Arranging activities for children and young people was sixth, then came ‘arranging services in the national language abroad’. Eighth was aid to Christians abroad, ninth was holding services every Sunday in all parishes, and last in the list was international missionary work. With the exception of keeping churches open for private prayers, there is a very clear ordering here: what have traditionally been regarded as the principle activities of the church — trying to spread the Christian message and regularly worshipping the Lord — were the last two items in order of preference and secular community activities came at the top.
Interestingly, the article also concludes that simply having a state church isn’t enough, if the population is too heterogeneous:
The difficulty of interpretation is to know what things would have been like otherwise. Viewed from the USA, it may seem obvious that state support kills religion; from Britain a different interpretation suggests itself. In the Nordic countries and Britain ‘demand’ for the ideological core of religion is weak. However, the established status of the Lutheran Churches and their tax base allows them to provide social and liturgical services to the population at large. The homogeneity of the societies allows the national churches to be truly national while the multi-national character of the UK prevents its churches playing such a role.
The activities rated highest in all four countries were funerals, baptisms and weddings.
Sounds like the state churches should look for a way to inject themselves into graduation ceremonies… Tricky balancing act, keeping them banal and toothless, but not fading into oblivion...
Interestingly, the article also concludes that simply having a state church isn’t enough, if the population is too heterogeneous
Ouch! So innoculation via state religion has the same heterogeneity problem that personalized medicine has...
The first step towards a society in which ridiculous beliefs are acknowledged to be ridiculous, is to stop acting as if these beliefs aren’t ridiculous. The point of ridicule is first to make those who hold ridiculous beliefs feel ashamed or at least uncomfortable, and second to help make rationalists feel the appropriate emotion when dealing with such extremes of irrationality.
Perhaps it seems tautologous that ridicule is the best way to deal with the ridiculous. So I’m tabooing the word “ridiculous”. What do you mean by it?
Does it just mean “crazy” in the sense in which Eliezer uses it? Then, for what reason do you believe that ridicule (e.g., sarcasm and contemptuous scorn) is the best way to achieve your end goal?
If I read “crazy” where you wrote “ridiculous”, then your claim is that the first step towards a society in which crazy beliefs are acknowledged to be crazy is to heap scorn and contempt on them. But this is far from obvious. How do you make this argument without relying on the verbal similarity between the words “ridiculous” and “ridicule”?
Does it just mean “crazy” in the sense in which Eliezer uses it?
Pretty much.
If I read “crazy” where you wrote “ridiculous”, then your claim is that the first step towards a society in which crazy beliefs are acknowledged to be crazy is to heap scorn and contempt on them.
Well, not in all situations, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be scorn and contempt, it could also be incredulity (“You believe WHAT?!”), for example. The point is to shock people out of their usual way of thinking, and that sometimes requires a bit of finesse. But a lot of the time scorn and contempt is necessary, yes.
But this is far from obvious. How do you make this argument without relying on the verbal similarity between the words “ridiculous” and “ridicule”?
The idea is that faith and self-deception are bad, while truth and rationality are good. So we reward good behavior and punish bad behavior.
How did the gay movement make so much progress in so little time? Was it by engaging in gentle, respectful debate with their opponents? Of course not. They just pointed out the obvious repeatedly: Those people are intolerant bigots. It was obvious, and yet somehow it hadn’t really entered public consciousness, even among those who had the kind of morality that should have lead them to support gay rights. Now that it has, most of those whom we now call homophobes haven’t suddenly become enlightened, but they’ve been forced to dilute their language if not their beliefs if they want to be part of the public sphere.
There’s more than that to the gay movement’s accomplishments, but heaping scorn and contempt on their opponents is definitely a big part of it. If it worked that movement, why not for this one?
The idea is that faith and self-deception are bad, while truth and rationality are good. So we reward good behavior and punish bad behavior.
There’s an implicit premise here that the punishment works to discourage the bad behavior. Your argument for this premise is to make an analogy with the gay-rights movement:
How did the gay movement make so much progress in so little time? Was it by engaging in gentle, respectful debate with their opponents? Of course not. They just pointed out the obvious repeatedly: Those people are intolerant bigots.
That is not my sense of how the gay-rights movement succeeded at all. As I see it, they did it by gaining the sympathy of enough of the right people. This, in turn, they did by making their humanity evident. And this they did by having high-status, sympathetic representatives.
Now, once your group is already high-status, you can use scorn to squelch opposition. If you’re high-status, people will want to affiliate with you, and they’ll read your scorn as a signal that they can affiliate with you by helping to squelch your opposition.
Personally, I’d say that that trick is a dishonest manipulation, because it’s not truth-tracking. It depends only on having high status, not on being right. But, more pragmatically, it only works if you already have the high status. Otherwise, it backfires. People read your scorn as a signal to affiliate with your opponents.
Before homosexuals had sufficiently high status, any scorn they showed hampered their progress. But I grant that they eventually gained enough status so that the scorn trick could work. Sam Harris does not appear to me to have reached that level.
That is not my sense of how the gay-rights movement succeeded at all. As I see it, they did it by gaining the sympathy of enough of the right people. This, in turn, they did by making their humanity evident. And this they did by having high-status, sympathetic representatives.
Now, once your group is already high-status, you can use scorn to squelch opposition. If you’re high-status, people will want to affiliate with you, and they’ll read your scorn as a signal that they can affiliate with you by helping to squelch your opposition.
This may be true, but I don’t think the gay movement waited to start expressing their scorn for homophobia until after they were high status. Are you saying that before the gay movement was high status, most of its representatives acted like homophobia was simply an opinion with which they disagreed, but which they respected nonetheless?
My impression is that portraying homophobia as something contemptible played an important part in obtaining this high status. Hell, just coming up with the word ‘homophobia’ (which was brilliant) helped a lot, and that was done a few decades ago.
Anyway, there’s another reason why treating religious beliefs like they’re crazy is a good thing: Religious beliefs are, indeed, crazy. I don’t see how this fact can ever be acknowledged by the rest of humanity if no one actually acts like it’s true, even those who accept it!
Are you saying that before the gay movement was high status, most of its representatives acted like homophobia was simply an opinion with which they disagreed, but which they respected nonetheless?
No, I am saying that whatever displays of scorn they made didn’t help them gain the sympathy of non-homosexuals, and probably hurt them.
Religious beliefs are, indeed, crazy. I don’t see how this fact can ever be acknowledged by the rest of humanity if no one actually acts like it’s true, even those who accept it!
I agree that we should act as though religious beliefs are crazy (in Eliezer’s sense of the word). The question is, what does it mean to act that way? That is, what is the most productive response to crazy beliefs? I expect that it’s not generally contempt.
No, I am saying that whatever displays of scorn they made didn’t help them gain the sympathy of non-homosexuals, and probably hurt them.
It may not have gotten them sympathy, but I think labeling the opposing view as bigotry and a phobia could easily have gotten them a higher status, even in the early days of the movement.
Honestly though, I have no idea where to find the information we need to settle this disagreement.
I agree that we should act as though religious beliefs are crazy (in Eliezer’s sense of the word). The question is, what does it mean to act that way?
What I mean is that our reaction to someone who says, “I believe that Jesus is the son of God” should be similar to our reaction to someone who says, “I believe aliens are trying to kidnap me”.
The reaction can be incredulity, or amusement, or contempt, or something else, anything that doesn’t communicate the impression that you think it’s perfectly (or mostly) OK to be deluded in such a fashion.
Honestly though, I have no idea where to find the information we need to settle this disagreement.
That’s an important question, but one for which I have no answer.
I agree that we should act as though religious beliefs are crazy (in Eliezer’s sense of the word). The question is, what does it mean to act that way?
What I mean is that our reaction to someone who says, “I believe that Jesus is the son of God” should be similar to our reaction to someone who says, “I believe aliens are trying to kidnap me”.
Okay, just so long as we agree that “what it means to act as though a belief is crazy” isn’t something that you ought to define however you like. (As though you were to argue “It’s ridiculous. Therefore, by definition, I should ridicule it.”) The proper way to act is not something you can determine just by analyzing what “crazy” means, or just by establishing that it’s not okay to have crazy beliefs. The proper way to act is determined by what will in fact change the world into a state more like it ought to be.
If you’re right about the history of the acceptance of homosexuality, then that is some evidence in favor of your position.
the verbal similarity between the words “ridiculous” and “ridicule”?
It’s not just verbal similarity—one is derived from the other. It indeed seems merely definitional that the ridiculous ought to be ridiculed, though not necessarily that it is ‘the best’ way of dealing with it.
There’s some equivocation here. “Ridiculous” can mean, as the etymology would suggest, “that which should be ridiculed”, or it can mean “not sensible”. In the latter case, the ridiculous should not necessarily be ridiculed.
Since the people he has to convince are religious believers, I think his approach is about as reliable as the ‘nice’ approach, which is to say it’s almost completely worthless. However, it has other benefits that the nice approach doesn’t have.
Unless I’m reading you wrong, those “other benefits” amount to no more than signaling tribal loyalties, at least in practical terms.
ETA: . . . and if that kind of behavior helps a tribe to grow, it does so for non-truth-tracking reasons, producing a tribe full of people who are there just because they like the company.
The benefit is to help other non-believers (and perhaps a few believers) realize that Armstrong’s article (and defense of religion in general) doesn’t fit into the category of “Respectable beliefs I disagree with”, it fits into the category of “Intellectually dishonest nonsense that should be scorned and ridiculed”.
It’s a benefit closely related to breaking the taboo that protects religious beliefs and raising the sanity waterline.
If the benefit of scorn and ridicule is just to inform others about what to scorn and ridicule, then I don’t see the point. Scorn and ridicule aren’t terminal values.
That would be true if the ability to deride were a reliable signal of sanity. But derision is cheap; it’s a tool that is equally available to the insane.
One of the things that keep religion alive in western society in the 21st century is the dogma, widespread even among atheists, that even if religious beliefs are false they’re sane enough to deserve respect. In other words, most non-believers treat mainstream religious beliefs as if they were like the belief that the Washington Redskins are going to win the 2010 Superbowl rather than like the belief that Tom Cruise is the son of Xenu, Lord of the Galactic Confederacy.
The first step towards a society in which ridiculous beliefs are acknowledged to be ridiculous, is to stop acting as if these beliefs aren’t ridiculous. The point of ridicule is first to make those who hold ridiculous beliefs feel ashamed or at least uncomfortable, and second to help make rationalists feel the appropriate emotion when dealing with such extremes of irrationality. The end goal is a society in which people have the same attitude towards religious beliefs than they do towards belief in alien abductions.
Humans are social animals. Inducing shame and discomfort might be useful if the believer is isolated away from other believers and cannot rely on them for emotional support. If not, he or she will likely relieve their shame by seeking the company of fellow believers, reinforcing the affiliation with the believing group.
Or they’ll give up their belief to avoid looking like a nut. I know several Christian fundamentalists who’ve done just that. Unfortunately, since ‘moderate’ or ‘liberal’ religion is still respected, they just became Christians of a different type instead of atheists.
How exactly do you expect to make humanity acknowledge the ridiculousness of religion if you yourself continue to act as if it was a respectable position?
Does your experience accord with my (implied) retrodiction that the fundamentalists who gave up their extreme beliefs could not easily retreat to a more comfortable social milieu?
Well, I was thinking of some of my fellow students, back in college. IIRC their families were mostly fundies (and lived in the same city) so, not really.
Anyway, could you answer my question? It wasn’t rhetorical.
Families are a special case—one doesn’t get to choose them, and one might not particularly like them.
I neither act as if religious belief were a respectable position nor expect to make humanity acknowledge the ridiculousness of religion.
I’m dubious of militant atheism, as it seems counter-productive. Promoting atheism is closely related to promoting science. Aggressively promoting science and proclaiming it to be in direct conflict with religion will polarize society as religious groups will in turn attack science. On the other hand, if you just quietly taught science to everyone and not mention anything about a conflict, religious people would just compartmentalize their beliefs so that they didn’t interfere with the things science teaches. You’d basically get people who were technically religious, but close to none of the negative sides.
This has pretty much already happened in my country (Finland). The majority still belongs to a religious domination, but religion is considered a private thing and actually arguing in favor of something “because of the Bible” will get you strange looks and likely branded as a fanatic. Yes, there is still a Christian political party in parliament, but they’re a minor player, fielding 7 representatives out of 200. There has traditionally been practically no public debate about any sort of conflict between science and religion, though that’s possibly changing as parts of the populace have began to express a fear of Islam. Judging from past evidence, that is probably just going to make any clash of cultures worse. That article is also a good example of the results you’ll get when the debate gets polarized, as it shows people who might otherwise have been moderates become extremists.
And yes, we should regardless still continue to provide some critique of religion and the fallacies involved, to shift the social consensus even further into the “religion is just a private way you look at the world, not something you can base real-world decisions on” camp. But one can do that without being overly aggressive.
Pardon my drooling—I live in the United States. The inmates run much of the asylum here.
Do you know the history of how Finland acheived this compartmentalization of religion? Are there lessons in the path you followed that we can learn from? We can’t directly follow your current-day practices because our would-be theocrats are still quite rabid, and hold significant power. I agree that head-on confrontation doesn’t work. What did work?
Sociology isn’t my strongest field (though not my weakest either) and I haven’t studied this issue in detail, so I can’t provide any very conclusive answers. Still, there’s one thing that many people suspect to be at least partially responsible. Curiously enough, this is the existence of a state church. Two to be exact, one Lutheran and one Orthodox.
Most people are members of the Lutheran one (79,7% of the population in 2009, down from 85% in 2000 and from 90% in about 1980). They’ll attend a week-long Confirmation camp around age 14, get a church marriage and have their children baptized, have a church funeral when they die. But the church is a very mild, non-radical one. Most of the kids I knew had their Confirmation because tradition says you get gifts afterwards and hey, a week spent camping! The lessons on theology you have to endure are an acceptable price to pay for that.
A prevailing theory is that this acts as a sort of an inoculation against more radical strands of religion. Religion is that traditional thing you grew up with, with neat rituals that bring some comfort and you’ll likely believe in at least some of what they say, but that’s about it. It’s been mostly relegated to the position of “those nice people who provide nice traditional rituals for a few special occasions in everyone’s life”. And once you’re used to the thought of that being the church’s function, any church or religion that gets more involved in the daily lives of its followers will seem radical and fanatic in comparison.
ETA: The fact that the church is funded by taxes probably also helps, as it makes the church more independent from the common populace. They don’t need to actively collect money from people. If they needed to, the fundraising events would probably reach out to more people and make them feel more committed to the church.
ETA2: Of course, this doesn’t explain how the Lutheran church became so secularized. I don’t know the answer to that myself either. A plausible hypothesis might be that as a state church, it’s had a need to do what the rulers told it to, which has forced it to be more secular than churches that don’t need to answer to anyone. That doesn’t help much for the situation in the United States, of course.
Many thanks!
Yes, I’ve read analysis along those lines before as well.
Good point. And they don’t need to carefully tune themselves to actually attract the population either. They are insulated from “market discipline”.
Agnostics and atheists united to weaken church/state separation by funding lukewarm, preferably bureacratic state religion(s). Hmm, do I have the energy to set up a web site...
One comment and one odd suggestion:
But, but...aren’t they also supposed to maintain special cuisines for religious festival days too? Once the fangs are gone, I thought that that was one of the central purposes of a nominal religion… :-)
Perhaps the best solution to Islam is to add a third...
I found an interesting article which contains a summary of what people in the Nordic countries think are the most important functions of the church:
Interestingly, the article also concludes that simply having a state church isn’t enough, if the population is too heterogeneous:
Many thanks!
Sounds like the state churches should look for a way to inject themselves into graduation ceremonies… Tricky balancing act, keeping them banal and toothless, but not fading into oblivion...
Ouch! So innoculation via state religion has the same heterogeneity problem that personalized medicine has...
Perhaps it seems tautologous that ridicule is the best way to deal with the ridiculous. So I’m tabooing the word “ridiculous”. What do you mean by it?
Does it just mean “crazy” in the sense in which Eliezer uses it? Then, for what reason do you believe that ridicule (e.g., sarcasm and contemptuous scorn) is the best way to achieve your end goal?
If I read “crazy” where you wrote “ridiculous”, then your claim is that the first step towards a society in which crazy beliefs are acknowledged to be crazy is to heap scorn and contempt on them. But this is far from obvious. How do you make this argument without relying on the verbal similarity between the words “ridiculous” and “ridicule”?
Pretty much.
Well, not in all situations, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be scorn and contempt, it could also be incredulity (“You believe WHAT?!”), for example. The point is to shock people out of their usual way of thinking, and that sometimes requires a bit of finesse. But a lot of the time scorn and contempt is necessary, yes.
The idea is that faith and self-deception are bad, while truth and rationality are good. So we reward good behavior and punish bad behavior.
How did the gay movement make so much progress in so little time? Was it by engaging in gentle, respectful debate with their opponents? Of course not. They just pointed out the obvious repeatedly: Those people are intolerant bigots. It was obvious, and yet somehow it hadn’t really entered public consciousness, even among those who had the kind of morality that should have lead them to support gay rights. Now that it has, most of those whom we now call homophobes haven’t suddenly become enlightened, but they’ve been forced to dilute their language if not their beliefs if they want to be part of the public sphere.
There’s more than that to the gay movement’s accomplishments, but heaping scorn and contempt on their opponents is definitely a big part of it. If it worked that movement, why not for this one?
There’s an implicit premise here that the punishment works to discourage the bad behavior. Your argument for this premise is to make an analogy with the gay-rights movement:
That is not my sense of how the gay-rights movement succeeded at all. As I see it, they did it by gaining the sympathy of enough of the right people. This, in turn, they did by making their humanity evident. And this they did by having high-status, sympathetic representatives.
Now, once your group is already high-status, you can use scorn to squelch opposition. If you’re high-status, people will want to affiliate with you, and they’ll read your scorn as a signal that they can affiliate with you by helping to squelch your opposition.
Personally, I’d say that that trick is a dishonest manipulation, because it’s not truth-tracking. It depends only on having high status, not on being right. But, more pragmatically, it only works if you already have the high status. Otherwise, it backfires. People read your scorn as a signal to affiliate with your opponents.
Before homosexuals had sufficiently high status, any scorn they showed hampered their progress. But I grant that they eventually gained enough status so that the scorn trick could work. Sam Harris does not appear to me to have reached that level.
This may be true, but I don’t think the gay movement waited to start expressing their scorn for homophobia until after they were high status. Are you saying that before the gay movement was high status, most of its representatives acted like homophobia was simply an opinion with which they disagreed, but which they respected nonetheless?
My impression is that portraying homophobia as something contemptible played an important part in obtaining this high status. Hell, just coming up with the word ‘homophobia’ (which was brilliant) helped a lot, and that was done a few decades ago.
Anyway, there’s another reason why treating religious beliefs like they’re crazy is a good thing: Religious beliefs are, indeed, crazy. I don’t see how this fact can ever be acknowledged by the rest of humanity if no one actually acts like it’s true, even those who accept it!
No, I am saying that whatever displays of scorn they made didn’t help them gain the sympathy of non-homosexuals, and probably hurt them.
I agree that we should act as though religious beliefs are crazy (in Eliezer’s sense of the word). The question is, what does it mean to act that way? That is, what is the most productive response to crazy beliefs? I expect that it’s not generally contempt.
It may not have gotten them sympathy, but I think labeling the opposing view as bigotry and a phobia could easily have gotten them a higher status, even in the early days of the movement.
Honestly though, I have no idea where to find the information we need to settle this disagreement.
What I mean is that our reaction to someone who says, “I believe that Jesus is the son of God” should be similar to our reaction to someone who says, “I believe aliens are trying to kidnap me”.
The reaction can be incredulity, or amusement, or contempt, or something else, anything that doesn’t communicate the impression that you think it’s perfectly (or mostly) OK to be deluded in such a fashion.
That’s an important question, but one for which I have no answer.
Okay, just so long as we agree that “what it means to act as though a belief is crazy” isn’t something that you ought to define however you like. (As though you were to argue “It’s ridiculous. Therefore, by definition, I should ridicule it.”) The proper way to act is not something you can determine just by analyzing what “crazy” means, or just by establishing that it’s not okay to have crazy beliefs. The proper way to act is determined by what will in fact change the world into a state more like it ought to be.
If you’re right about the history of the acceptance of homosexuality, then that is some evidence in favor of your position.
It’s not just verbal similarity—one is derived from the other. It indeed seems merely definitional that the ridiculous ought to be ridiculed, though not necessarily that it is ‘the best’ way of dealing with it.
Arguments from etymology are not normative.
There’s some equivocation here. “Ridiculous” can mean, as the etymology would suggest, “that which should be ridiculed”, or it can mean “not sensible”. In the latter case, the ridiculous should not necessarily be ridiculed.