This argument primarily comes down to arguing that because a certain category has blurry boundaries that we shouldn’t use it. This confuses having blurry boundaries with being useful. There seems to be a fair bit of implicitly arguing over definitions also which isn’t helpful.
Not at all. It tries to expose the mental dissonance of many people who would support cracking down on and wiping out Nazism the ideology, but as soon as there was a supernatural element to the belief system such as the god Thor, they wouldn’t and would talk only about dealing with Nazi “extremists”.
Why in the world should we care about metaphysical entities in people’s heads to the point of changing our ethical judgements on them? Crazy is crazy. If its transmitted like a religion, if it often springs from and back into religion, it causes as much change in political arrangements and personal behaviour as religion, people use the same rationalizations… if it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, isn’t the rational thing to just consider it a duck?
Feel free to have different words for white, purple and yellow ducks, but don’t thinks surface features will give you great predictive value beyond people considering yellow ducks lucky and purple ducks more yummy, even though there dosen’t seems to be any evidence of this.
You claim the distinction is very useful and that there is no gain to be had by thinking just about ducks in general most of the time, shouldn’t you be the one at least come up with some reasons why this is so? The only reason I can think of is that “religion” is formally protected against persecution with legislation. But I don’t let law affect my personal ethical judgement elsewhere to a great extent, why should it do so here?
But even this is word games. Among other problems, it assumes that one actually supports the current German law against Nazis. One can be against or in favour of this whether or not one treats it as a religion.
But why do you think some people wouldn’t be changing their view on the laws if Nazism was perceived as a religion?
Why in the world should we care about metaphysical entities in people’s heads to the point of changing our ethical judgements on them?
Following the insights of Max Stirner, I would go still further and claim that the difference is not between belief systems that involve metaphysical entities and those that don’t, but merely between different kinds of metaphysical entities. This means that the issue at hand is whether the antropomorphic quality of these entities is by itself such an important difference for the worse.
The really scary thing is that humans seem incapable of establishing a workable system of Schelling points that would be capable of serving as the basis for organized society, and which wouldn’t base its Schelling points on some kind of shared metaphysical fictions. An objective evaluation of different belief systems that are capable of filling this role would be a fascinating project. (Unfortunately, it would also be a project of immense difficulty, not just because of the sheer complexity of the problem, but also because all sorts of biases would interfere with it—not least since it would likely make the current reigning ideologies look quite bad in comparison on at least some important metrics.)
Not at all. It tries to expose the mental dissonance of many people who would support cracking down on and wiping out Nazism the ideology, but as soon as there was a supernatural element to the belief system such as the god Thor, they wouldn’t and would talk only about dealing with Nazi “extremists”.
Do we have any real evidence that these people exist to a large degree and are at all common?
Not at all. It tries to expose the mental dissonance of many people who would support cracking down on and wiping out Nazism the ideology, but as soon as there was a supernatural element to the belief system such as the god Thor, they wouldn’t and would talk only about dealing with Nazi “extremists”.
Why in the world should we care about metaphysical entities in people’s heads to the point of changing our ethical judgements on them? Crazy is crazy. If its transmitted like a religion, if it often springs from and back into religion, it causes as much change in political arrangements and personal behaviour as religion, people use the same rationalizations… if it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, isn’t the rational thing to just consider it a duck?
Feel free to have different words for white, purple and yellow ducks, but don’t thinks surface features will give you great predictive value beyond people considering yellow ducks lucky and purple ducks more yummy, even though there dosen’t seems to be any evidence of this.
You claim the distinction is very useful and that there is no gain to be had by thinking just about ducks in general most of the time, shouldn’t you be the one at least come up with some reasons why this is so? The only reason I can think of is that “religion” is formally protected against persecution with legislation. But I don’t let law affect my personal ethical judgement elsewhere to a great extent, why should it do so here?
But why do you think some people wouldn’t be changing their view on the laws if Nazism was perceived as a religion?
Following the insights of Max Stirner, I would go still further and claim that the difference is not between belief systems that involve metaphysical entities and those that don’t, but merely between different kinds of metaphysical entities. This means that the issue at hand is whether the antropomorphic quality of these entities is by itself such an important difference for the worse.
The really scary thing is that humans seem incapable of establishing a workable system of Schelling points that would be capable of serving as the basis for organized society, and which wouldn’t base its Schelling points on some kind of shared metaphysical fictions. An objective evaluation of different belief systems that are capable of filling this role would be a fascinating project. (Unfortunately, it would also be a project of immense difficulty, not just because of the sheer complexity of the problem, but also because all sorts of biases would interfere with it—not least since it would likely make the current reigning ideologies look quite bad in comparison on at least some important metrics.)
Do we have any real evidence that these people exist to a large degree and are at all common?