'Divinity Consultants' are Now Designing Sacred Rituals for Some Corporations (nytimes.com) 315
"They go by different names: ritual consultants, sacred designers, soul-centered advertisers," reports the New York Times, describing "a new corporate clergy" working as "divinity consultants" and "designing sacred rituals for corporations."
They have degrees from divinity schools. Their business is borrowing from religious tradition to bring spiritual richness to corporate America. In simpler times, divinity schools sent their graduates out to lead congregations or conduct academic research. Now there is a more office-bound calling: the spiritual consultant. Those who have chosen this path have founded agencies — some for-profit, some not — with similar-sounding names: Sacred Design Lab, Ritual Design Lab, Ritualist.
They blend the obscure language of the sacred with the also obscure language of management consulting to provide clients with a range of spiritually inflected services, from architecture to employee training to ritual design. Their larger goal is to soften cruel capitalism, making space for the soul, and to encourage employees to ask if what they are doing is good in a higher sense. Having watched social justice get readily absorbed into corporate culture, they want to see if more American businesses are ready for faith. "We've seen brands enter the political space," said Casper ter Kuile, a co-founder of Sacred Design Lab. Citing a Vice report, he added: "The next white space in advertising and brands is spirituality...."
Ezra Bookman founded Ritualist, which describes itself as "a boutique consultancy transforming companies and communities through the art of ritual," last year in Brooklyn. He has come up with rituals for small firms for events like the successful completion of a project — or, if one fails, a funeral. "How do we help people process the grief when a project fails and help them to move on from it?" Mr. Bookman said. Messages on the start-up's Instagram feed read like a kind of menu for companies who want to buy operational rites a la carte: "A ritual for purchasing your domain name (aka your little plot of virtual land up in the clouds)." "A ritual for when you get the email from LegalZoom that you've been officially registered as an LLC."
The articles notes there are problems when combining the corporate with the religious.
For one thing, "It's hard to exhort workers to give their professional activities transcendental meaning when, at the same time, those workers can be terminated."
They have degrees from divinity schools. Their business is borrowing from religious tradition to bring spiritual richness to corporate America. In simpler times, divinity schools sent their graduates out to lead congregations or conduct academic research. Now there is a more office-bound calling: the spiritual consultant. Those who have chosen this path have founded agencies — some for-profit, some not — with similar-sounding names: Sacred Design Lab, Ritual Design Lab, Ritualist.
They blend the obscure language of the sacred with the also obscure language of management consulting to provide clients with a range of spiritually inflected services, from architecture to employee training to ritual design. Their larger goal is to soften cruel capitalism, making space for the soul, and to encourage employees to ask if what they are doing is good in a higher sense. Having watched social justice get readily absorbed into corporate culture, they want to see if more American businesses are ready for faith. "We've seen brands enter the political space," said Casper ter Kuile, a co-founder of Sacred Design Lab. Citing a Vice report, he added: "The next white space in advertising and brands is spirituality...."
Ezra Bookman founded Ritualist, which describes itself as "a boutique consultancy transforming companies and communities through the art of ritual," last year in Brooklyn. He has come up with rituals for small firms for events like the successful completion of a project — or, if one fails, a funeral. "How do we help people process the grief when a project fails and help them to move on from it?" Mr. Bookman said. Messages on the start-up's Instagram feed read like a kind of menu for companies who want to buy operational rites a la carte: "A ritual for purchasing your domain name (aka your little plot of virtual land up in the clouds)." "A ritual for when you get the email from LegalZoom that you've been officially registered as an LLC."
The articles notes there are problems when combining the corporate with the religious.
For one thing, "It's hard to exhort workers to give their professional activities transcendental meaning when, at the same time, those workers can be terminated."
And Now We Repeat The Chant (Score:5, Funny)
Congretation "All hail Steve Jobs, the one true creator. May his legacy bring us stock rises."
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Re:And Now We Repeat The Chant (Score:5, Insightful)
Gotta hand it to the divinity grads for hustle. With fewer opportunities in mainline religion, nothing wrong with being creative and trying to broaden the market for your skills.
I'm not buying into "corporate ritualism", but then, I'm an engineer. The only deity we believe in is Murphy.
And the pantheon of UNIX/Linux deities, of course. However, I'm sure there will be enthusiasm amongst the HR "people people" for something new and different.
Re:And Now We Repeat The Chant (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not buying into "corporate ritualism", but then, I'm an engineer. The only deity we believe in is Murphy.
Unfortunately the only deity your management board believes in is Mammon...
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I'm not buying into "corporate ritualism", but then, I'm an engineer. The only deity we believe in is Murphy.
Unfortunately the only deity your management board believes in is Mammon...
...if we're lucky.
If we're not, Baal.
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or any kind of business.
will need to exist.
when systems are fully automated
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The Heretic and Blasphemer can offer no excuse for their crimes. Those who are pardoned merely live to further shroud Humanity from the Light of the CEO with the Darkness of their souls
Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep (Score:5, Insightful)
A fool and investor's money are soon parted.
My sincere hope (Score:3)
I sincerely hope these people get burned at the stake by a band of outraged fundamentalists.
Don't we have enough creepy cults in this country? Somebody PLEASE tell me this was accidentally copied from The Onion.
I will make up my own mind what to believe or not, and reserve the right not to be bombarded with a fake corporate religion in the workplace.
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Ya, nothing like a band of outraged fundamentalists showing their enemies the Love of Jesus Christ by burning them at the stake. It would bring back the nostalgia of the good ol' days.
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OTOH, it would at least be expedient. We don't have time for the courts to do their somersaults trying to avoid ruling on the issue at hand. This kind of crap needs to be nipped in the bud before we have a bunch of would be god-emperors running around demanding worship because they have a pile of cash.
Laveyan Satanists should get in on this (Score:2)
The proper response. (Score:2, Flamebait)
The proper response to any "divinity consultant", "fung-chung sooie consultant", and other psudeoscience bullshit is to waste as much of their time as possible, give them the runaround, and refuse to pay them after several hours on work on the grounds of "You didn't render a service" and then throw him out the building and tell everyone that he made multiple sectarian comments towards your Jewish, Islamic, and Hindu workers and denigrated their faith.
Lies that, unlike his, will have a measurable impact on t
Nothing wrong with corporate sacred rituals (Score:3)
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They famously sacrificed a goat in the hope that the company would recover.
Within weeks, they went bankrupt.
Moral: Always apply QA to your spiritual guides.
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We already have those (Score:5, Funny)
bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
For one thing, "It's hard to exhort workers to give their professional activities transcendental meaning when, at the same time, those workers can be terminated."
This. Work used to have a meaning, when it was either for yourself or something that you could sink your soul into because it was common to retire within the same company that you started and had your entire career in.
Hire and fire ended that. Anyone who sinks his soul into a job today is a fool. You can find meaning in WHAT you do - but not who you do it for, because they don't feel much loyalty to you anymore. Whenever the management consults come in, some jobs will be cut, because somehow, they always manage to find improvements possible by eliminating people. (because that's the easy way out. Doing actual business process re-engineering is tough work and requires deep understanding of the processes, which an external consultant with a small time budget won't have nor get)
I'm loyal to my company while they pay me and otherwise make my job interesting and attractive. But "spiritual meaning"? You'll create a bunch of rituals that a bunch of people will pay lip service to, but that's all.
But hey, it's probably well paid and easy work. Maybe I should do that when I'm old and conservative and my brain is starting to degrade?
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For one thing, "It's hard to exhort workers to give their professional activities transcendental meaning when, at the same time, those workers can be terminated."
This. Work used to have a meaning, when it was either for yourself or something that you could sink your soul into because it was common to retire within the same company that you started and had your entire career in.
Hire and fire ended that. Anyone who sinks his soul into a job today is a fool. You can find meaning in WHAT you do - but not who you do it for, because they don't feel much loyalty to you anymore. Whenever the management consults come in, some jobs will be cut, because somehow, they always manage to find improvements possible by eliminating people. (because that's the easy way out. Doing actual business process re-engineering is tough work and requires deep understanding of the processes, which an external consultant with a small time budget won't have nor get)
I'm loyal to my company while they pay me and otherwise make my job interesting and attractive. But "spiritual meaning"? You'll create a bunch of rituals that a bunch of people will pay lip service to, but that's all.
But hey, it's probably well paid and easy work. Maybe I should do that when I'm old and conservative and my brain is starting to degrade?
This is like a second-order bullshit job. One reason a lot of people are dissatisfied with their jobs is because they're bullshit jobs.
https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/ [strike.coop]
This month, I had to renew my IRS I9 form with my employer. This is a form that says that I have the legal right to work in the US. I am a native-born US citizen. I have always had, and always will have, the right to work in the US, unless the unlikely situation arises that I renounce my US citizenship for another country's. I haven't
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"Work used to have a meaning", like slavery? Or working for the monopolies of early 20th century? Or being not very white, not very middle class during the 50's-60's? The past always look better if you train yourself to ignore the painful parts.
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In The Beginning Was The Plan: https://www.smart-jokes.org/pl... [smart-jokes.org]
Is this news that matters? (Score:2)
How exactly is this "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? I guess I am missing the point.
I remember fondly (Score:5, Funny)
I one wrote software for such a company, they had paid a couple of hundred bucks apiece for 'anti-virus-stickers' with the Virgin Mary glued to the exterior of every desktop computer to protect them against malware.
I obviously billed them double and they paid without any remarks whatsoever.
Even more obviously, a year after that, they went bankrupt.
more corporate fakery (Score:3)
Ripoff for losers (Score:2)
Re:Ripoff for losers (Score:4, Interesting)
It makes sense, in a horrible way. If you are a high-ranked manager at a business, you want to promote employee loyalty - because while they may be replaceable and expendable drones, they work harder if they don't see themselves that way. You can try to send them on team-building exercises, or arrange company events - but then, who are the real masters of instilling community and loyalty? Churches. That industry has a great track record of instilling an absolute loyalty. Church members are so loyal, they'll not only work for free, they'll give up part of their income to the church. So whatever they are doing, it must be worth investigating to see if it can be used in the corporate world.
Fascism Evolved? (Score:2)
Fascism == Corporatism. Never imagined they'd go this far... Oh, and if you believe the "invisible hand of the market" is going to super naturally bring about a better world then you've got yourself another religious belief; by definition.
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Consult a professional: (Score:2)
(gonna try this again, because the first one might not have gone through)
Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to ensure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be,
Please publish a list of companies (Score:3)
LOLWUT (Score:2)
Well it's official, we've crossed into the loony and comedic part of the cyberpunk spectrum now (where you might find such works as Judge Dredd, Transmetropolitan, perhaps Demolition Man...)
We're getting dumber. (Score:2)
Idiocracy is going to turn out to be the best/worst prediction ever made.
Horrific (Score:2)
That's all we need, the rise of corporate cults. If you thought your management was tyrannical before, wait until they become your clergy and business rules and culture become promoted as "faith" - the violation of which doesn't just result in your excommunication (firing) but also a separation of your spirituality and the loss of your faith. This may seem to be an extreme view, but mark my words, people will start blending company ritual into personal religion. The trauma suffered by those who leave cults
The bigger problem (Score:2)
The bigger problem comes when workers feel that any sort of advantage (including simple trust and credibility) might be given by management to others who share their own religious ideals.
In a private company, particularly a smaller one, this is less of an issue but in a publicly traded company or one large enough to have a significant employment monopoly or economic momentum this becomes a serious problem that can't be allowed.
Everyone Should Hate This (Score:3)
Actual religious people should be offended at the idea of having their sincere beliefs molded into corporate propaganda and perverted in the pursuit of profit.
Atheists and non-religious people would be upset by the inclusion of irrelevant nonsense in their lives... and yet another corporate attempt to provoke cultish motivation from their employees.
The only people who benefit from this are upper management and the major shareholders. This is dirty no matter how you look at it. This is one of the most morally and philosophically degenerate things I've ever heard of.
And I was already convinced 2020 is a trainwreck.
faux justice and faux virtue, meet faux religion (Score:3)
We've gone from big institutions pushing "social justice", "environmental justice", etc instead of actual JUSTICE (the sort that requires no modifying word because it's the real thing), to phony corporate and celebrity virtue signalling (where if they did not advertise how virtuous they were, we'd surely not be able to figure it out by simply observing their actions), to phony religiosity...
...and some people keep telling me "things cannot possibly get any worse...
This reeks of people with pointless MBA degrees who have run out of buzzwords and exhausted the supply of consultant firms with bright ideas for increasing productivity that can be put into a PowerPoint and shown to a new batch of sucker investors.
That these businesses are publicly admitting they want religiosity but are not interested in bringing in actual religion to get it should be a big neon sign to everybody within miles that the management is foolish. Whether religion in the workplace is a good idea or not is a different conversation, and takes you down the rabbit hole of whether they are all the same (they CANNOT be, since they disagree on so much) and whether any should be preferred or disfavored (nobody in HR wants to be the one to die for the crime of pointing out the features/bugs in one that might favor murder), how many hours of productive work time and square feet of facility space will be used, etc. No, the point of this particular stupid exercise is that it's planned from the outset to be empty meaningless nothingness - sorta like those "team building" fads of years gone by where companies took groups of employees out into the woods or zip-lining or fire-walking, etc. In other words: stupid managers with no real plans trying to impress their superiors.
Re:Religious impulse (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Religious impulse (Score:5, Informative)
I'm afraid he is right. Belief in the supernatural seems to be the default setting for the human mind and even a lot of educated people still believe in it. If you were to do a world survey I suspect you'd find that rational atheism based on science comes out as a rather minority view of the universe.
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The problem is that "rational atheism based on science" is not a complete instruction set on how to live life for the average human being.
Adhering to "rational atheism based on science" would mean that every human tested and re-tested every decision, every direction their life would go, over and over again, which is not possible within one human lifespan and most negative consequences appearing only years and decades too late.
Moreover, even if the above could somehow be solved and not drowned in the endless
Re:Religious impulse (Score:5, Insightful)
"would mean that every human tested and re-tested every decision"
Thats not what I meant and you know it. And since when does religion come into everyday decision making anyway?
"cannot provide meaning"
You're assuming everyone is looking for some higher meaning in the world beyond the mundane. I can assure you we're not.
"Science can tell you how to get to your goal, but it cannot set the goal."
If you need a religion to set your goals for you then IMO you're personality is lacking something fundamental.
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Religion is the basis of ethics and morality. You can abstract and rationalize all ethics as far away from its religious origins, but like all logical systems, morality and ethics require axioms. Ethics cannot provide axioms, ethics can deduct from given axioms and produce more results. Without religion, ethics has nothing to build upon. And like all logical systems, ethics has the Goedel's incompleteness, it is either incomplete or contradictory (or both, as it's less rigid than pure mathematics).
If Goedel
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If there is an axiom, the axiom that doesn't require religion is called EMPATHY.
In nature it works out well enough with perhaps the exception of people with anti social personality disorders.
Empathy has been observed in many social animals.
For example there were experiments with rats https://www.nih.gov/news-event... [nih.gov]
https://www.sciencemag.org/new... [sciencemag.org]
https://www.frontiersin.org/ar [frontiersin.org]
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Empathy works great for families and villages. Religion seems to have been a key innovation that allowed human collectives to grow much larger than they otherwise were able to, though.
No, that was agriculture.
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Permanent villages are enabled by agriculture, and may not necessitate religion. But historical evidence shows that all large, socially complex civilizations that developed and depended on specialized labor had religious institutions that developed alongside of them. Yes, yes, correlation is not causation, but this isn't exactly a tough thing to figure out. Concepts like karma and omnipotent deities handing out rewards and punishment in the afterlife are a much easier way to keep people from screwing over t
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Empathy is not a religion, but the golden rule [wikipedia.org] derives from on it. Religion is not the basis for all morals and ethics.
Boy, howdy!
If we all practiced the golden rule a little more diligently, the world would be a much more enjoyable place.
I can dream, can't I?
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The Golden Rule is a sufficient foundation for a moral code. Religion has three legs to its foundation: Ignorance; fear; and the realization by some that it can be used to control others.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Religious impulse (Score:5, Insightful)
Religion is the basis of ethics and morality.
No, it is not. Empathy is the basis of ethics. The Ethic of Reciprocity (aka Golden Rule) is older than any religion and has been independently expressed by many different cultures. Empathy is a natural product of evolution within social species with sufficient cognitive and communicative capabilities. There are numerous examples that show that individuals of many species are distressed by the distress of a conspecific and will act to terminate the object’s distress, even incurring risk to themselves. Religion and taken the natural inclination and inefficiently attempted to codify ethics while including a lot of garbage along with it - ie women should be silent in church or wear a bag over their heads.
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I think you are missing an important distinction: descriptivism vs. prescriptivism.
From a descriptivist point of view, you are absolutely correct. "Religion" is just the word we use for the set of institutions/social norms that reinforces a behavioral framework that enables the existence of exceedingly large human groups.
We as humans have done well at propagating across the earth in no small part because we can create tremendously large groups that behave more-or-less cooperatively. To be able to create gro
Re:Religious impulse (Score:4, Informative)
Except when it comes to Evangelicals in the U.S. who readily abandoned their ethics and morality by wholeheartedly supporting an covetous, lying, thieving adulterer.
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Except when it comes to Evangelicals in the U.S. who readily abandoned their ethics and morality by wholeheartedly supporting an covetous, lying, thieving adulterer.
Well, I would argue that Evangelicalism has wandered a far, far way from the text and religious tradition it is ostensibly based on. Evangelicalism has stopped focusing on the central tenets of Christianity (helping the poor, promoting non-violence, living modestly) and has instead basically become the religious arm of the GOP (promoting consumerism, lower taxes, strong military/police state).
Atheism requires faith in the unprovable (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem is that "rational atheism based on science" is not a complete instruction set on how to live life for the average human being
Nor is it a belief system devoid of faith. It requires a belief in the unprovable, that god does not exist. Religion and atheism both require faith in the unprovable, the differ merely in that one has faith in god's existence and the other faith in god's nonexistence. Same coin, different sides, hence their willingness to fight to defend their beliefs.
Agnosticism is the belief system actually compliant with science. When presented with the question of god's existence it is the agnostic that answers "how
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An agnostic acknowledges that there is now "knowledge" about the existence. But as far as believing goes they are still either an atheist or someone who believes that God exists. Because if there is no evidence the only thing that's left is belief.
It makes little sense to say that you don't know whether you believe or not. This is one of the rare occasions where it is indeed a binary option to a question that only you yourself can answer.
And as far as athe
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God(s) are an irrelevant waste of time; the whole debate is as pointless as how many angels fit on the head of a pin. Think about it... reality does not change no matter what the flee believes about the nature of the dog on which it exists.
That is another position on the agnostic spectrum... from certainty there are no gods to "whatever floats your boat" unitarianism... it adds another dimension to a spectrum most often seen as binary.
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If you removed the possibility of group think and instead asked people individually what God is to them using dynamic questions and not some kind of fixed questionnaire people could prepare for, you'd have a hard time finding two people with exactly the same definition.
In the case of members of a tight group
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"Nor is it a belief system devoid of faith. It requires a belief in the unprovable, that god does not exist"
You're deliberately conflating not believing with a negative belief. The burden of proof is upon the person making the claim - ie that god exists. Atheists are making no such claim.
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Science and the Supernatural really are two very different things I have issues when Religions are saying science is wrong because it goes against the established texts. It is measurable, observable, or cleanly fits in a mathematical model, that is Science, and it is closer to the truth than what the religion states.
However Supernatural, by definition are factors which are not measurable, observable or fit well in a model. As it is outside of nature.
Science hasn't disproved a God or some other supernatural
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Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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bullshit. If people weren't brainwashed from the crib in this dogma you would see a significant amount of non believers. In fact, believers would be the weird ones. Wha? You believe in some sky fairy or child rapist to tell you how to compose yourself? Sounds pretty fucked to me.
Religion was invented by clever assholes that wanted to control the masses and extract money out of them. Same as it's ever been.
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Leibniz, Newton, Einstein, Pasteur, Galilei, Bohr, Noether.
All foolish, eh?
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The same spurious argument is often made when it comes to the infamous Pascal's Wager.
Blaise Pascal grew up in a society where the existence of God was seen as axiomatically correct and in particular we're speaking about the Christian God. So Pascal forms his philosophical argument based mostly on the existence of a Christian God and a Christian Afterlife, ignoring all the other thousands of rel
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ignoring all the other thousands of religions that exist around the planet, of which many say that if you don't believe and live your life exactly according to what they believe you're damned.
What is the largest coherent group of religious people? Is it still the Catholics? Or does Islam in general count as such? In any case, it shows you that fervently believing in something makes you at least 70% likely to get everything wrong (since contradicting claims can't be simultaneously true, at least 70% of people in the world are wrong about actual deities, and despite that, all of them are passionate about it, even those who got everything wrong). That doesn't seem like a good place to be in when it
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Find me a person that isn't foolish in some way.
I am not sure of the point you wish to make, but being "foolish in some way" is not at all the same as being a fool.
By analogy, we can also say "find me a person that isn't good in some way" without being bound to the conclusion that everybody is a good person.
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And in many cases safer.
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"Humans are religious by nature." No, not correct. Foolish and gullible humans only.
So in other words, yes, correct.
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For instance: Will you spend a decade to get an advance degree in immunology before you get vaccinated or are you going to trust your physician's recommendation?
Religion takes many forms: guns, diet, politics (Score:3)
"Humans are religious by nature." No, not correct. Foolish and gullible humans only.
You have your religion substitute. I don't know you personally, but you have something you do in the hopes of a better future in which you have no evidence it has any tangible effect. I live in a deep blue bubble...not a lot of organized religion, but knowing many deeply religious people and many proud atheists, I don't see much difference between the person with half a dozen made up dietary restrictions and Catholicism. Sure...my nutty coworkers aren't going to mass on Sundays, but they irrationally al
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The opposite of a religious view point is being agnostic -- waiting for evidence of a god, ie belief in things that can be shown to be true.
Atheism is NOT a belief system (Score:5, Insightful)
Saying atheism is a belief system is like saying NOT playing football is a sport. But I guess it makes religious types feel better to pretend its a level playing field.
Atheism and Religion, same coin, different sides (Score:3, Insightful)
Saying atheism is a belief system is like saying NOT playing football is a sport. But I guess it makes religious types feel better to pretend its a level playing field.
But the atheist is playing the belief game, they just came to the opposite conclusion. It is only the agnostic that does not play the belief game, who points out there is no evidence one way or the other.
Re: Atheism and Religion, same coin, different sid (Score:5, Informative)
There's a further layer beyond agnosticism, called apatheism, the indifference towards the existence of gods.
Agnostics still care for the subject. They do affirm there's no evidence, or that the evidence is ambiguous, or that it tends weakly towards theism or atheism, but if they do keep a focus on it, and if the evidence changed in any decisive way, they'd promptly move towards either theism or atheism. Therefore, the three, theism, atheism and agnosticism, fall under the shared umbrella of patheism (no "n" in the word), the care for the existence or not of gods, which is evidenced by the fact they keep discussing it.
An apatheism, on the contrary, absolutely doesn't care. They may think gods exist (apatheistic theism), or don't exist (apatheistic atheism), or that there's no way to know (apatheistic agnosticism), but any of those options is utterly indifferent, so whatever.
The difference can be better illustrated by possible reactions during, let's say, an Abrahamic apocaliptic scenario:
* Theist: Either happy, for he drew the right number in the loterry of religions, or terrified, because he got the short end of the stick;
* Atheist: Crestfallen, for it was so obvious deities didn't exist, and/or outraged, as that arbitrary megalomaniacal superpowered SOB is real and is now going to begin torturing humanity, including themselves;
* Agnostic: "Ohh! Now I know for certain!"
* Apatheist (the three kinds): Looks up at the commotion, rises eyebrow Spock-style, shrugs, balances head, and goes back to whatever they were doing before.
Re: Atheism and Religion, same coin, different si (Score:2)
Yes kid, keep applying the Argumentum ad Dictionarium and any day now it'll stop being a fallacy.
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Yes old-man, keep applying words incorrectly and you will never say anything intelligible.
Here, little padawan, for your growth in the way [lesswrong.com] of the Beisutsukai [lesswrong.com]:
You're welcome.
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Are you an agnostic about Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy or whether the alienss from the planet Beeblebrox are coming to enlighten us next Tuesday? There is no evidence one way or the other!
The burden of providing evidence is on the person making a positive claim. Atheists observe that there is no evidence for deities, that what we observe in the world is entirely consistent with the absence of deities, and conclude that there is no point in waiting for evidence either for or against deities. The people
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You are invoking what is commonly referred to as a "god of the gaps" argument: We do not understand (or we do not have specific evidence on) some topic, therefore one may argue that a supernatural agent explains that gap.
This is a seriously flawed argument, as any new understanding or evidence on the topic tends to undermine the imputed agent or the claimed causation. Religion told us there were celestial spheres, until careful observations showed otherwise. Religion told us that all kinds of animals were
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What is this, Schrodinger's asshole's argument? Either use the argument to criticize my position, or don't, but don't raise the argument and then run from it when I address it.
What religion claims right now is exactly the point. You very specifically pointed to a god-of-the-gaps argument. But those have never been good arguments, and they have been thoroughly and repeatedly refuted. Using such arguments assumes, contrary to long historical evidence, that we have discovered everything on some topic that
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But the atheist is playing the belief game, they just came to the opposite conclusion. It is only the agnostic that does not play the belief game, who points out there is no evidence one way or the other.
No, here is how this debate looks to me: Religionists believe that there is an invisible being in the sky who is all powerful but that only their priests can communicate with, usually through a holy 'vision' or the interpretation of some sacred text. This all powerful invisible being tells the priests how the rank and file religionist is supposed to live his or her life. These instructions are then passed on to the rank and file by the priests. Atheists are people who took one look at this system and then a
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I have been saying "Not playing football is a sport" my whole life, you insensitive clod!
Re: Atheism is NOT a belief system (Score:2, Informative)
Of course it is a belief system.
Atheism is a belief there is nothing, which is precisely as unprovable as religious faith.
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Re: Atheism is NOT a belief system (Score:3)
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Each and every time when someone who's not speaking out of a deep knowledge in the fields of neurology, psychology and sociology claims something was "human nature", one can be sure it's wrong – and it is uttered in the voluntary or subconscious service of either a religion or an ideology itself.
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Oh, and no – religion believes, atheism does not. Atheism is the absence of belief. It is not the belief there wasn't any god, it is the absence of any belief into any god.
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Humans are religious by nature.
That is true only in the very broadest sense of the word. There's been enough studies to show that mysticism and magic as well as ancestor worship came well before anything resembling religion ever developed. So if you use the word "religious" as meaning "anything spiritual in any way" then yes. If you use it in a useful meaning, say "service and worship of god(s)" as common definitions usually start, then no, humans are not religious by nature, gods were invented at a point in time same as anything else.
The opposite of organized religion is not atheism - that is a belief system too. The opposite of organized religion is disorganized religion.
No
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There's been enough studies to show that mysticism and magic as well as ancestor worship came well before anything resembling religion ever developed.
I don't think this is true (although 'resembling religion' is not clearly defined here). At least, looking at the archeological records, it seems priests or career shamans began to exist before ancestor worship.
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That would go contrary to almost everything I've read on the subject, so that's interesting. Where can I find more on those records?
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Each individual atheist might have some beliefs, even systematical ones, but as a collective, atheists don't have a common belief system, even if some people like to rabulistically conjure one up.
Every set... (Score:2)
You are overlooking the fact that every set includes the empty set. So, some religions may simply be the absence of religion. Also, the opposite of "organized religion" could just as easily be "organized atheism".
For all you know there is a "silent majority" of atheists around. Since they don't make a fuss and carry on like other religious fanbois they could easily be overlooked.
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