This wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that you have tacit beliefs installed by the path dependent process that is hugely religion influenced. It’s useful to know about this. E.g. Nietzsche has useful insights for people who consider themselves non-christian but are still running the same OS. Etc.
I don’t much care about the “function” of religion; I care whether it is factually correct.
So, is Confucianism factually correct? Or shamanic animism, for that matter? Not all religions involve a cosmology (i.e. claims about what the real world is factually like)!
Shamanic animism is false; that’s a pretty easy one.
As I understand it, Confucianism is a collection of advice on how to live a good life and have a good society. That makes it harder to evaluate empirically; I imagine that some of it is true of people generally, some of it is true of ancient China, some of it is false, and some of it is not truth-apt.
Shamanic animism is false; that’s a pretty easy one.
So, you think that shamanic practices are not doing anything interesting? e.g. that altered states of consciousness, such as are claimed to be inherent in these practices, don’t really exist? (If so, that would seem to be falsified by the available evidence.) Or perhaps that practices and cognitive stances linked to shamanic animism are not in fact beneficial to those who pursue them (Such as the stance of striving to relate to the enduring ‘spirit’ of one’s ancestors, in order to heal a perceived psychological weakness or illness)?
is Confucianism factually correct? Or shamanic animism, for that matter? Not all religions involve a cosmology (i.e. claims about what the real world is factually like)!
There are multiple levels of claim to evaluate. For the religions I’ve paid any attention to, the surface factual claims which differ from standard atheist science are false, and the typically unstated underlying claims that their metaphors are “best” for some set of “proper” life goals is false or meaningless.
Can you give an example of a claim of Confucianism or shamanic animism that’s true and useful?
Note that I do care about the functions of religion, in the same way I care about the functions of political systems or the function of music. A lot of people claim to believe nonsensical things, and deconstructing claims and associations helps me understand them and myself better.
In similar situations I usually think about Dr. Semmelweis, whose theories were dismissed as incorrect (and yes, they were incorrect in some minor technical details), and not enough attention was paid to the fact that they saved lives anyway.
Analogically, religion may be doing some right things for the wrong reasons. We shouldn’t copy its reasoning blindly, but we also shouldn’t dismiss the whole area without exploring it.
Even if all the insights would turn out to be something unimpressive-in-hindsight like “singing together increases group cohesion”, it is still a body of knowledge that is good to have. (Specifically for a community that is known by its “inability to cooperate”.)
Analogically, religion may be doing some right things for the wrong reasons. We shouldn’t copy its reasoning blindly, but we also shouldn’t dismiss the whole area without exploring it.
Following newspaper horoscopes may also produce the right results for the wrong reasons. Listening to advice from a 5 year old may produce the right results for the wrong reasons. Opening an encyclopedia to a random page and reading whatever paragraph you point to as a solution to your problem may produce the right results for the wrong reasons.
Producing the right results for the wrong reasons is uninteresting unless it produces them often—at least more often than a nonreligious person using basic educated guesses.
Just to gently point out that you both, seems to me, haven’t actually checked the work I created this post about in the first place. It is not a matter of right results for the wrong reasons. It is about the right results, for the right reasons, in a different approach than the scientific one, but one that is part of human culture even today. It explains the function of ritual, myth and religion in the development of human thought tracing it through thousands of years of cultural development in humans and linking it even further down to biological structures through evolutionary time. With scientific evidence.
You are still having the old religion debate where rationality and science won. This is the new one.
This is a subtle argument and if Peterson is correct with his assessment you do care. And his argument is really strong if you give it due attention. This is a time to use humility as even our view of religion should be open to updating.
Then we can debate the actual arguments and learn.
I am going through it at the moment and have to warn you that this is not a general public book. It is a really dense academic work. If I was you I would get the main concepts by watching the university lectures. Then, if you want to explore further, you can go through the evidence he is putting forward in detail.
I don’t much care about the “function” of religion; I care whether it is factually correct. (Which it isn’t.)
This wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that you have tacit beliefs installed by the path dependent process that is hugely religion influenced. It’s useful to know about this. E.g. Nietzsche has useful insights for people who consider themselves non-christian but are still running the same OS. Etc.
So, is Confucianism factually correct? Or shamanic animism, for that matter? Not all religions involve a cosmology (i.e. claims about what the real world is factually like)!
Shamanic animism is false; that’s a pretty easy one.
As I understand it, Confucianism is a collection of advice on how to live a good life and have a good society. That makes it harder to evaluate empirically; I imagine that some of it is true of people generally, some of it is true of ancient China, some of it is false, and some of it is not truth-apt.
So, you think that shamanic practices are not doing anything interesting? e.g. that altered states of consciousness, such as are claimed to be inherent in these practices, don’t really exist? (If so, that would seem to be falsified by the available evidence.) Or perhaps that practices and cognitive stances linked to shamanic animism are not in fact beneficial to those who pursue them (Such as the stance of striving to relate to the enduring ‘spirit’ of one’s ancestors, in order to heal a perceived psychological weakness or illness)?
Some of the practices may have effects, but generally not for the reasons claimed.
There are multiple levels of claim to evaluate. For the religions I’ve paid any attention to, the surface factual claims which differ from standard atheist science are false, and the typically unstated underlying claims that their metaphors are “best” for some set of “proper” life goals is false or meaningless.
Can you give an example of a claim of Confucianism or shamanic animism that’s true and useful?
Note that I do care about the functions of religion, in the same way I care about the functions of political systems or the function of music. A lot of people claim to believe nonsensical things, and deconstructing claims and associations helps me understand them and myself better.
In similar situations I usually think about Dr. Semmelweis, whose theories were dismissed as incorrect (and yes, they were incorrect in some minor technical details), and not enough attention was paid to the fact that they saved lives anyway.
Analogically, religion may be doing some right things for the wrong reasons. We shouldn’t copy its reasoning blindly, but we also shouldn’t dismiss the whole area without exploring it.
Even if all the insights would turn out to be something unimpressive-in-hindsight like “singing together increases group cohesion”, it is still a body of knowledge that is good to have. (Specifically for a community that is known by its “inability to cooperate”.)
Following newspaper horoscopes may also produce the right results for the wrong reasons. Listening to advice from a 5 year old may produce the right results for the wrong reasons. Opening an encyclopedia to a random page and reading whatever paragraph you point to as a solution to your problem may produce the right results for the wrong reasons.
Producing the right results for the wrong reasons is uninteresting unless it produces them often—at least more often than a nonreligious person using basic educated guesses.
Just to gently point out that you both, seems to me, haven’t actually checked the work I created this post about in the first place. It is not a matter of right results for the wrong reasons. It is about the right results, for the right reasons, in a different approach than the scientific one, but one that is part of human culture even today. It explains the function of ritual, myth and religion in the development of human thought tracing it through thousands of years of cultural development in humans and linking it even further down to biological structures through evolutionary time. With scientific evidence.
You are still having the old religion debate where rationality and science won. This is the new one.
This is a subtle argument and if Peterson is correct with his assessment you do care. And his argument is really strong if you give it due attention. This is a time to use humility as even our view of religion should be open to updating.
Then we can debate the actual arguments and learn.
I really, really hate videos and podcasts and am not going to deal with them. Is there a text link I can read?
You can get the Maps of Meaning book as a hard copy or pdf.
I am going through it at the moment and have to warn you that this is not a general public book. It is a really dense academic work. If I was you I would get the main concepts by watching the university lectures. Then, if you want to explore further, you can go through the evidence he is putting forward in detail.