This post references Jordan Peterson (Christian), the Bible (Christian), Mormanism (Christian), Judaism (Abrahamic), Catholocism (Christian) and “standard Christianity”. It claims to critique “religion” while mostly addressing a peculiar Monotheistic religion.
Most religious people are Monotheistic. But “Monotheism” describes a minority of religious diversity. To criticize “religion” and then draw all your data from Monotheism is like discussing “life” and then drawing all your data from hominids.
Monotheism (including Christianity and Judaism) is anomalous among religions because it is predicated on a singular truth. I suspect Monotheism’s requirement for a global religious truth is foundational to weird Christian behaviors like the Arian debates at the Council of Nicea. From my understanding of history, no equally abstract-and-esoteric religious debate ever rose to comparable political importance in a polytheistic civilization. It could be that “Monotheistic religion”—not “religion”—is what causes the particular religious anti-epistemologies we are familiar with in the West.
Related to Monotheistic singular truth is its emphasis on cosmology (including physics). In polytheistic religions, cosmology is often as unimportant as it is flexible. Such a theology is hardly an obstacle to science. To criticize all of polytheistic religions by their cosmology is like judging science by the fashion sense of grad students, or grading runway models according to their skills at calculus.
In my experience, the word “religion” is often used by Western intellectuals to describe Monotheism instead of reflecting the true diversity of an anthology that includes Zen mysticism, !Kung polytheism and Daoism.
However much humble respect you have for some Abrahamic religion like Judaism, you should have even more for the primitive spiritualism of hunter gatherer tribes. Such superstitions survive in harsher environments, they have less margin for error, they have tighter feedback loops, their anti-epistemologies are less developed, and all their practitioners have major skin in the game.
Yeah. Hunter-gatherer beliefs maybe not so much, but I do have more respect for Greek and Roman polytheism (which led to achievements like a 50km long aqueduct, going under hills and over valleys, that descends at exactly 25cm per km) than for the successor religion that destroyed the aqueducts, burned the libraries, and introduced religious wars to the world. Then it took over a thousand years to mold Christianity into something compatible with human achievement, and just as it became more or less ok, the kids are replacing it with something worse again. This narrative is exaggerated, but I do tentatively believe something like it, and would be interested to hear arguments against.
It claims to critique “religion” while mostly addressing a peculiar Monotheistic religion.
Fair point. Author was a bit focused when drawing their analogy. However, I think their thesis is still intact even when compared against Eastern (and Northern, and Southern) religions.
...incumbent religions deserve a lot of credit for helping people survive millennia of scarcity in untamed environments...However much humble respect you have for some Abrahamic religion like Judaism, you should have even more for the primitive spiritualism of hunter gatherer tribes. Such superstitions survive in harsher environments, they have less margin for error, they have tighter feedback loops, their anti-epistemologies are less developed, and all their practitioners have major skin in the game.
The Buddha had a tougher task because he had to explain causation, locus of control, and other critical concepts to farmers from scratch.
Newer religions (such as Scientology) get a leg up on the old ones in that they have an entire field of psychology and a more current vocabulary to pull from. For instance, look at [Scientology’s Training Routines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Training_routines_(Scientology\)), specifically TR-0: Confronting.
In the first exercise, a student and coach face each other with eyes open. The routine ends when the student can confront the coach for at least two hours without movement, excessive blinking, or loss of attention. The second exercise is the same, except that the coach tries to distract the student both verbally and physically.
Looks like an exercise in self-confidence followed by a lesson in resiliency.
If one pendulum extreme is “throw out the baby with the bathwater” and the other pendulum extreme is “all religions must be deferred to due to hidden virtue that has helped us survive for tens of thousands of years” then perhaps the equilibrium of this pendulum arc is to discover and assimilate the wisdom of religion in order to ascend religion.
EDIT: apologies for formatting. working on fixing it. fixed!
Looks like an exercise in self-confidence followed by a lesson in resiliency.
It an exercise in disassociation where a good portion of mainstream psychologists would say that is unhealthy.
I think there’s little reason to think that scientologies interventions are better then those intervention that have been refined over centuries in monastries of the older religions.
This post references Jordan Peterson (Christian), the Bible (Christian), Mormanism (Christian), Judaism (Abrahamic), Catholocism (Christian) and “standard Christianity”. It claims to critique “religion” while mostly addressing a peculiar Monotheistic religion.
Most religious people are Monotheistic. But “Monotheism” describes a minority of religious diversity. To criticize “religion” and then draw all your data from Monotheism is like discussing “life” and then drawing all your data from hominids.
Monotheism (including Christianity and Judaism) is anomalous among religions because it is predicated on a singular truth. I suspect Monotheism’s requirement for a global religious truth is foundational to weird Christian behaviors like the Arian debates at the Council of Nicea. From my understanding of history, no equally abstract-and-esoteric religious debate ever rose to comparable political importance in a polytheistic civilization. It could be that “Monotheistic religion”—not “religion”—is what causes the particular religious anti-epistemologies we are familiar with in the West.
Related to Monotheistic singular truth is its emphasis on cosmology (including physics). In polytheistic religions, cosmology is often as unimportant as it is flexible. Such a theology is hardly an obstacle to science. To criticize all of polytheistic religions by their cosmology is like judging science by the fashion sense of grad students, or grading runway models according to their skills at calculus.
In my experience, the word “religion” is often used by Western intellectuals to describe Monotheism instead of reflecting the true diversity of an anthology that includes Zen mysticism, !Kung polytheism and Daoism.
I think this is the right direction to go.
Yeah. Hunter-gatherer beliefs maybe not so much, but I do have more respect for Greek and Roman polytheism (which led to achievements like a 50km long aqueduct, going under hills and over valleys, that descends at exactly 25cm per km) than for the successor religion that destroyed the aqueducts, burned the libraries, and introduced religious wars to the world. Then it took over a thousand years to mold Christianity into something compatible with human achievement, and just as it became more or less ok, the kids are replacing it with something worse again. This narrative is exaggerated, but I do tentatively believe something like it, and would be interested to hear arguments against.
Fair point. Author was a bit focused when drawing their analogy. However, I think their thesis is still intact even when compared against Eastern (and Northern, and Southern) religions.
It reminds me of another [LessWrong post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZawRiFR8ytvpqfBPX/the-hard-work-of-translation-buddhism) I was reading a while back. The key takeaway there is
Newer religions (such as Scientology) get a leg up on the old ones in that they have an entire field of psychology and a more current vocabulary to pull from. For instance, look at [Scientology’s Training Routines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Training_routines_(Scientology\)), specifically TR-0: Confronting.
Looks like an exercise in self-confidence followed by a lesson in resiliency.
If one pendulum extreme is “throw out the baby with the bathwater” and the other pendulum extreme is “all religions must be deferred to due to hidden virtue that has helped us survive for tens of thousands of years” then perhaps the equilibrium of this pendulum arc is to discover and assimilate the wisdom of religion in order to ascend religion.
EDIT: apologies for formatting. working on fixing it. fixed!
It an exercise in disassociation where a good portion of mainstream psychologists would say that is unhealthy.
I think there’s little reason to think that scientologies interventions are better then those intervention that have been refined over centuries in monastries of the older religions.