Buddhism in comparison with Judaism and Christianity

I was just talking with a friend about the differences and similarities between Judaism and Buddhism.  It makes for an interesting starting point in explaining what Buddhism is.  It's too broad, but narrowing back to the points one might cover in such a discussion works.  We spent about half an hour talking about that theme, related to him leaving town (Bangkok) soon after; that's about right for how long such a thing would take.

No matter what writing or other channel one uses setting up an audience perspective, who you are talking to, is very important.  Before you do much writing it seems like talking to everyone, adopting a general listener perspective, would be completely workable.  In actual practice that doesn't work very well.  We are accustomed to communicating things to people in different ways, and "talking out into the world" only works for some subjects.  You have to assume what people already know, for example, or match use of language to what people can relate to.  Doing that "in general" is problematic, especially related to narrowing down a very broad set of ideas to what one might be able to say in 10 minutes or so.  We had a great discussion, and already had a feel for what each other might already understand, so all that worked out.

I'll start with a bit he told me about Judaism, but cut that part short, because it's interesting and somewhat related but not the main part of what I'm trying to share here.  Then I'll cover passing on a short take on what the Christian perspective is.  Odd, right; everyone knows that, don't they?  Maybe not.  I live in a Buddhist country, for example, in Thailand, and for people here it's a foreign religion.

Judaism

It's far from intended as a summary of what Judaism is all about but that friend made some interesting points, which I'll share an abbreviated version of.  The obvious qualifications apply:  I won't get what he meant completely right in my own summary, and he was only breaking off a part of the broad set of ideas that comprise Judaism to share them, based within a fairly limited scope conversation.  I'm not saying this is inaccurate, but a lot more is being left out than included.  Framing these ideas properly within the rest of what hasn't been expressed wouldn't be possible using only assumptions and extrapolation.  It's still interesting though.  I cut the material detail back even further to avoid making mistakes in interpretation, since I'm sure I didn't completely "get" what he was saying, only hearing part of a broad set of related ideas.

A main theme was that it's within basic human nature to desire things, and it's seen as ok within Judaism.  This was framed as a response to his take that Buddhism is really about cutting off all desires, simply eliminating wanting anything to achieve a very unusual form of inner peace.  That's not right, really, but I'll get to that part.  It's partly right.

Of course Judaism sets up plenty of limitations about what you shouldn't want, or shouldn't do, or experience (eating pork, murder, and so on).  We didn't get into all that.  The idea was that an interesting and novel form is set up for framing desires, and for satisfying them.  It's fine to want things, if they aren't prohibited, and fine to experience the things you want to experience, but you have to be thankful and receptive in very specific ways.  It's a form of communion with God and the rest of reality to be given things (with "given" here used in the broad sense, including earning them, in a conventional sense, or granted potential to experiences by chance).  Acceptance of positive things is responded to with a form of prayer, a step that occurs before you have the experience.  Like saying the blessing, right?  Just extended a lot further, across a lot of the scope of human experience.  It almost sounded more like a mindfulness related take on life, to keep track of all positive things as they happen to you, to emphasize self awareness and conscious experience of momentary reality.

To me this is interesting because it frames human experience in a different way.  Prohibitions and ethical guidelines, what you should do, are different kinds of things, and this enters into a different kind of experiential space.  It makes a lot of life experience a holy sort of undertaking.  Not just eating, as I took it many kinds of experiences, or as I took it all positive kinds.  Adjusting the form and perspective of routine activities, or special events and circumstances, frames much more of life experience within the scope of religious practice than occurs within Christianity.  Everything one experiences throughout their lives relates to God's setting things up, in Christianity, but the moment to moment experience isn't framed within religious practices, as it's commonly taken.  Christian teachings are much more active related to telling you what not to do and what general perspective to take up, then moment to moment you take it from there yourself, the form is a bit open.

This has been barely a shell of what I understood him to be saying, but I'll move onto the difference between that and Christianity, as I interpret it, and try to clarify this a little further through contrast.

Christianity

He asked me about the  Christian worldview, how it works out, moral guidelines and restrictions, adjustment of ordinary perspective.  People in the US just assume that everyone knows that, right?  There they kind of do.  Even someone raised to reject it would have some idea what they are rejecting, even if everyone isn't really on the same page about how it all maps out.

I just saw a fragment of an interview with Richard Dawkins, this one, which I may or may not get around to finishing, and it's strange to me how modern atheists seem to take on and reject relatively unsophisticated takes on Christianity.  The most literal forms are a bit absurd:  God looks like Zeus, he lives in the sky, Jesus is his son, you are following rules in order to gain admission to heaven, angels are related in some way, the Devil is out to get you, you can sin all you want, you just have to ask for the slate to be wiped clean and it's all good again.  Dropping out the most absurd half still leaves lots of relatively absurd parts.

To back up, I studied religion in a university program, or in two of them, really.  The second focused only on interpreting limited religious scope as philosophy but the first included actual religion classes, not philosophy-context versions.  To put details to that I studied religion and philosophy, focusing on Buddhism, in an undergrad program at the University of Colorado, and comparative philosophy for an MA at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.  And I'm an industrial engineer, which I studied at Penn State, but that doesn't relate.  I've considered different forms of religion a good bit.  Study of Islam came up more than Judaism, but I covered quite a bit on Christianity and focused most on Buddhism.

This gets odd because what I accept as the most sophisticated form of Christianity and that answer to how it defines a standard American's worldview are two completely different things.  Funny how that goes.  The same comes up in Buddhism; the core message and practices I don't see as overlapping much at all with a conventional take or worldview here in Thailand.  Even among monks, to some extent, but I probably won't fill that part in much here.  I was ordained as a monk here once, for two months, with an earlier post here on how that went.  Let's break all that apart then.  I'll start with how I see Christianity as two different things, how people tend to take it, what I see as a more mature and developed form. 

I can't do justice here to the range of how religions are interpreted; that's too long a subject for a 1500 word blog post only about that.  We reviewed a relatively old work on that theme, from 1979, that mapped out some interesting ideas on that, James Fowler's Stages of Faith, described in summary form in this related reference.

In a basic form Christianity is interpreted as a set of rules, an afterlife scheme, and an explanation for things people couldn't otherwise know (who started the world, what the earlier form of it was, what happens after death, is there a soul or spiritual form of people).  Those parts should be familiar to most.  You can pick and choose which parts to take up or leave aside, of course. 

In answering my friend's question this was more or less what I focused on, about how Christianity tends to define an American worldview.  Rules stand out; you should or shouldn't do a lot of things.  Stay within those bounds and in general the more prescriptive parts, about what you should do, or general approach, can be a bit flexible.  It doesn't necessarily relate to momentary perspective all that much.  Ideally of course I think it should; I'll get into more of that related to what a more sophisticated take might be.

Jesus taught about being more compassionate, about seeing yourself as connected to others, as here to help others as much as to help yourself (or more, one might reasonably interpret).  All this works well from a practical standpoint, and not just as a set of rules to follow, when you consider that your connection with your family, friends, co-workers, employment context, country, social groups, and so on really do define you. 

The more you consider all of those ties and demands as important the better a person you turn out to be.  Your own longer term good follows.

Beyond just being external rules to follow, or break, all the different ethical short-cuts also limit your support of and connection to those around you (lying, stealing, treating people unfairly, failing to be empathetic and supportive to others, etc.).  Benefiting others benefits you.  To the extent you are reliable, consistent, supportive, and so on you are a good friend, family member, employee, and social group member and all those connections will be stronger.  Only following a list of 10 or more restrictions doesn't help to highlight that.  Of course that's not exactly where the Old Testament left off, but that is a main difference in the two sets of ideas.

The most mature perspectives on religion develop this, and set aside the mythology.  Jesus was a person but it's not necessary to believe that he performed miracles, or was a divine being in some way, or that he talked to the Devil like my friend and I conversed. 

The mythology is what people like Richard Dawkins tend to attack.  They want to accept that you can just assume the ethics and social connections are important, and take them up and leave aside all the rest.  What they don't realize is that this also works as a mature interpretation of Christianity, that it is really the point, or also the point of any other religion. 

I've taken ethics classes, about the study of morality, and another part they miss is that it's not so easy to derive what Jesus taught as what we should do, as a positive approach to ethics and reality in general.  I'm not getting into all that here, just suffice it to say that it really doesn't work to use a standard approach to get to the same general context (eg. accept Kantian ethics derivation, or Utilitarian / Consequentialist versions instead).  Those approaches take the short-cut of heading for an end point they already accept, basic Christian and Buddhist morality, more or less.  They gloss over that what seems to be a complete and independent derivation really isn't that at all.  You already know what "doing the right thing" is because it's in the air; all that has been an underlying theme in every organized society since prior to known history.  If it wasn't people couldn't collect into an organized society; there would be chaos instead.  That does come up in places from time to time but there's a function in order; it tends to spread.

In the end I told that friend that Christianity asks us to put others above ourselves, to focus on the interests and needs of other people.  To me that is completely consistent with everything else I've said here, even though if what I mean by that isn't clear then it wouldn't seem so.  In the end that's really a pursuit of our own highest good, our own self-interest, because we really are linked in with other people in countless ways.

Jordan Peterson gets all this; the people who reject what he says about religion don't get him.  An example:  he admits that there is an appeal for successful men to have many physical or relationship partners, since they can.  An example like Tiger Woods might come up.  It's obvious enough why that doesn't work out in his own case; that typically prevents a successful monogamous relationship from succeeding.  Someone like Donald Trump might seem to be able to cheat the system, to have a wife and experiences outside that relationship.  But then he has two ex-wives now, and others end up identifying people for who they really are related to their values, as in his case.  It's atypical for an incriminating voice tape to turn up but that would come up in different ways.  It's not an isolated example; practicing generosity or empathy pays similar returns, and so on.

Buddhism

One mistaken take on Buddhism is that it suggests that people should cut off all desire, get rid of attachments of all forms, which will result in achieving an unconventional neutral perspective, and "inner peace."  Taken the right way all that sort of works but it's just as wrong as it is right, and it's much more incomplete than it is descriptive.  I'll pass on how I explained it.

Buddhism is about limiting attachments, about examining parts of a worldview and personal perspective and discarding what doesn't work.  What makes the cut-off or fails to is problematic to describe in broad terms.  The introspection / review process is a methodology, not a form of external mapping of that sort.  There is a good bit of ethical guidance in the core teachings, but that's only one part of a set of 8 main types of teachings.  I have a graphic about that handy:

Ok, maybe it touches on a couple branches.  That's only one broad, general model of what Buddhism is, so relying on that as a complete description only goes so far.  And it only breaks teachings and subject scope into 8 parts, which is of limited helpfulness, since detailed review follows or else it's meaningless. 

A more detailed idea mapping makes things worse than they might really be, since there are a lot of different starting points and relatively equivalent explanations for different parts:

In the end for me Buddhism is really a system of introspection and adjustment of self-definition and worldview, a set of ideas I'll get back to developing just a little more.

Thais don't necessarily take it that way, even though 90% of them are Buddhist.  They take it as explanations for supernatural reality, as ethical guidance, and so on, all a close parallel to how Christianity is most commonly interpreted in the US.  Go figure.  People get it that meditation is a part of it but even their take on meditation and mindfulness practices (two related but different things) tend to not be mature, in my experience. 

They think meditation helps you accumulate spiritual good credit, karma or merit.  Sort of, maybe, but there is also an introspective aspect, which is probably more of the main point.  It's not an ordinary form of introspection, and I can't really do justice to describing how it's different in a short space.  Mindfulness is about staying calm and consistent, being able to apply rules in different circumstances, but it's also a practical tool for clearly observing a layer of reality that usually goes completely unnoticed.  It helps you unpack what is typically only included as subconscious experience.  That should ring a bell, for students of psychology.  Being present in the moment isn't nearly as simple as it seems, and the inputs in how we interpret reality and what we react to aren't simple at all.

One might wonder what parts of self, normal experience, or reaction should be "cut out of" normal perspective and life practices, or at least what I'm claiming.  If Buddhism doesn't reject desire and does reject some view of self what is being retained, and what is left aside?  It's not so simple, but engaging such ideas is critical.  You drop what doesn't work, and keep what does.  There's not really as much clear, external, well-defined guidance for that as one might think.  In a developed conventional religion it might seem that there definitely would be, but to me that's not really what Buddhism is.  The starting point is your own perspective, life experience, and momentary experience of reality--only that.  As you delve into what you think you are, and what you really are, you untangle the knots of all sorts of assumptions.

An example:  it would be easy to define yourself based on what you own, in a consumer oriented society.  It's relatively low-hanging fruit, but examining the role of that within your own worldview could turn up that you've accepted the assumed importance of this as an external assumption, and you could later also drop it. 

An example:  that friend I started out mentioning talking to was moving without owning much; this is a very practical approach to experienced reality.  For some it would be natural to own a lot of clothing, furniture, electronics, collections of goods, and so on, but keeping all that limited simplifies your life.  The desire to always own more only complicates it.  This kind of realization would only work so well in the form of external guidance: "don't own a lot of things."  If someone could unpack what they think about a lot instead, what causes them stress, what goals they serve that can be cut back or simply eliminated, then giving themselves this advice works much, much better.

I'm into tea, and write more about that subject than Buddhism (here), and it comes up a lot related to people collecting teaware (or even tea itself).  Part of that is functional, but it also seems to become just a normal way of relating to things, that you mark out how much you enjoy a subject by how much you own related to it.  It can be a habit to collect things.  It's not exactly a vice but examining why it happens could be informative, and dropping it could free up space for working on something else.  You can only make tea in one device at a time; owning dozens of devices isn't necessarily functional, it's closer to collecting artworks.

Of course that's just an example.  In different individual cases different coarse findings would turn up earlier on, then more and more subtle levels of understanding and adjustment could occur.  The past and future are particularly fruitful areas to consider.  Regrets, worry, and even anticipation can cause people a lot of stress.  It's easier to say "just live in the moment" than it is to let the past and future go, and only deal with what is actually occurring in the present.  The tools of meditation and mindfulness help with this; they turn up what is simmering beneath the surface in your mind, and what is weighing down present moment perspective, in two different but related sets of ways.


I could keep going in lots of directions from there but that covers the main point, fleshing out what a friend and I talked about over the course of a half an hour or so.  Buddhism isn't about rejecting any normal view of reality, just uncovering what goes into one and improving it, little by little.  It's a negative process in the sense that things are removed or dropped, instead of added.  The end point is kind of a funny thing; eventually one gets to a purer form of more direct experience.  I'm not so sure about "enlightenment" or that process ever being completely finished; I guess that has to be a real thing.  It's generally as well to not worry too much about that.

So a Buddhist could definitely have a family, or own things, take up hobbies, exercise, and so on.  They would generally try to be positive and helpful to others, and take a leaner approach to material things, to not focus on them.  Really it's more about perspective than it is material ownership or following rules though.  It would be better to have more stuff and keep the perspective lighter, or really to do both, to focus more on positive forms of experience and less on piling up things and accumulating status.

Moral, cultural, and economic decay in the US

A video blog post reminded me of this subject; I'll get to the details of that starting point.  An example related to Trump also raises the same broad themes.  To be up front about that I don't see the Trump Presidency as a positive thing, and it's worrisome to me that 40% of the people in the US do.

I don't think the US necessarily is experiencing cultural and moral decay.  It's interesting to consider to what extent that might be the case, and the specific example offered in that video as evidence.  I'm much more concerned about the economic health of the US, even in the very short term.  I expect a severe economic down-turn related to the next recession cycle.  But that's not the point here, really, even though I do get back to saying more about that.  I'll cover what I mean towards the end, since it's relevant, if perhaps a bit less connected.

It works to use the two examples as a starting point and intro.

Two examples of cultural decay

The first relates to Roosh V, a minor cultural figure best known for starting an online forum related to hook-up culture, and for writing books on the subject.  That's exactly what you would expect, advice and discussion about how to have sex with women you don't know.  We have Tinder for that now, but he was exploring methodologies before that became what it currently is.  Of course that activity isn't regarded positively by many, and there are misogyny oriented aspects to what he said and what gets discussed.  He has since "found religion," and is touring the US giving talks about whatever it is he thinks is appropriate to share, spiritual guidance, or cultural commentary.

What I mean by "hook-up culture," and why that portrayal seems negative may not be clear.  Roosh himself devised a system, described as a game (or "the Game," really), as a developed set of approaches and practices designed to lead to success in having sex with random women.

This video covers the point I'll discuss further.  That point:  the US is experiencing cultural decay, with ultra-left liberal perspectives the main sign of that shift, which takes the form of economic decay as well (eg. the homeless issue).  It seems best to unpack all that further after introducing the other starting point.


Trump just removed troops from one part of Syria, enabling Turkey and Russia to invade that area and drive away or kill off a lot of the former Kurdish US allies that helped defeat ISIS there (a radical terrorist Islamic movement).  In this most recent comment on the move, which was criticized by both liberals and conservatives (which is rare for any position Trump takes up), he likened what is probably better categorized as genocide as a playground fight:

"Like two kids in a lot, you have got to let them fight and then you pull them apart," he told a rally in Texas...

...The Turkish leader's aim is to push Kurdish fighters - regarded by Turkey as terrorists - away from northernmost Syria and create a "safe zone" for resettling up to two million Syrian refugees currently in Turkey.

Between 160,000 and 300,000 people were reported to have fled their homes since the fighting started, and there were fears that the Turkish operation may lead to the ethnic cleansing of the local Kurdish population...


In this related story and quote Trump says that the Kurds have a lot of sand to play with.

It's beside the point why Trump did what he did, or any of that background.  My take on this, and how it relates here, is that at this point the US government is behaving erratically, "turning on" recent allies, and randomly applying trade sanctions, and shifting internal policies.  A lot of it can be fairly assessed as highly unethical behavior:  rejecting climate change, rolling back environmental protections, adjusting taxation to favor the wealthy, restricting prior health care support for the poor (which wasn't completely successful), confining potential immigrants in internment camps that are not really different than concentration camps, and so on.

The ideas will connect, but the linkage could be tighter.  Let's start with exploring the first point in more detail.

Roosh V's observations

The context matters:  Roosh V is touring the US on a very small-scale speaking event tour.  He's admittedly burned out by that endeavor, which is probably coloring his observations to be more negative.  He best introduces himself on his website:


...Six years into my career, and a little over two years after I started DC Bachelor, I quit my job and finished my first book called Bang, a textbook for picking up girls and getting laid. Afterwards I spent six rough months in South America, which I detailed in my second book called A Dead Bat In Paraguay...

credit Youtube channel image

And it continued from there.  The rest of that bio starts in on how that practice evolved to include a personal philosophy:


6. Elimination of traditional sex roles and the promotion of unlimited mating choice in women unleashes their promiscuity and other negative behaviors that block family formation.

7. Socialism, feminism, cultural Marxism, and social justice warriorism aim to destroy the family unit, decrease the fertility rate, and impoverish the state through large welfare entitlements.


I'm not really sympathetic to any of those concerns or that perspective, to be clear.  It's interesting to see what I can make of points that I don't agree with, in this case, to break down observations and see which seem accurate, and to work back to a better understanding of root causes than he seems to have arrived at. 

Roosh himself abandoned a core part of his own lifestyle in "finding religion," but has retained some of the aspects of his earlier perspective.  It's an odd starting point.  This is his statement of what he is now trying to share with others:


I’m conducting private events in 23 American cities during the second half of 2019 where I will share stories that have revealed the truth to me up to turning 40 years of age.

I hope that my stories, which concern masculinity, relationships, work, human nature, grief, and spirituality, will allow you to find wisdom, contentment, and peacefulness during these difficult days of clown world.


The most obvious initial take is:  how did it come to this, that people are looking for life advice from a guy who wrote books on how to have sex with strangers?  Wouldn't that be like someone drawing on experience as a career criminal or long term drug addict to give out guidance for living?  People with such background might explain why one particular approach turned out to not be positive, but those experiences alone wouldn't be good grounds for teaching others to do better.

That whole "incel" movement is interesting to me, that people can gather together around something as strange as shared lack of success in relationships with the opposite sex.  There must be quite a bit of overlap with that theme and this context.  Is society broken because a subset of its members are failing in certain ways though?  There have always been poor people and disenfranchised in the US, in any society.  It's beyond the scope of writing out some thoughts here to try and figure out if that sort of problem is getting worse.  It seems to be, but impressions don't always match reality, even commonly held ones.

His most specific point in the last video, mentioned earlier, was that in places where liberal values take hold (like California, or Austin, Texas), where technology industries thrive, homelessness, poverty, and decay of values also occurs.  He didn't explain the connection.  As he crossed the Southwest (I just ran across a video based on an online mention--I don't follow this guy online) he also pointed out how other places had darker aspects, so that's the main shared theme, that different places have bad sides.  I think most of the smaller areas would've been quite conservative, and that seemed to resonate better with him; he sees himself as a modern anti-liberal.

That brings up another odd broad trend in modern US culture:  people defining themselves as what they're not, what they're the opposite of, instead of what they are, or in terms of views and perspective of their own.  I don't think he sees himself as any sort of conservative either.  What is he telling people then, what core message does he convey?  That society is breaking, in the ways he describes, or so it seems.  Since he has now taken up religion (an orthodox Christian form of one) it's implied that he now sees some resolution as possible through personal reform.

How could he even have an audience, recommending unrestrained sex tourism, and then traditional religion, after an abrupt shift?  That's an interesting part.  Apparently the two things are a lot more continuous than they might first seem.  He didn't lose his earlier audience, although some of them must have been turned off by the shift.

I don't think it's really possible to completely untangle the moral, cultural, and economic threads, which he skips past even trying to do.  His evidence that society is breaking down is most evident through homelessness, for example, which can't easily be connected to liberal perspective.  Conventional morality is an odd ground for him to take any stand on, but then the framing here seems to be that he has returned as a saint-like figure reborn out of the experience of vice.  Embracing immoral behavior is set up as his own personal path to finding a truer calling.  Who knows; maybe that works.  Maybe a career criminals or long-term drug addicts are good people to offer opinions on morality.

On the whole it seems not to work, really.  He sounds wistful and deep for speaking slowly and making interestingly framed points that don't necessarily connect.  He is at least partly broken, for sure, which he himself openly admits, but interpreting society as broken could as easily stem from that as from any unusual insight. 

I think considering the ideas he is proposing is of considerable value, and his observations aren't flawed enough to not serve well as a very promising starting point.  It just seems best to try to isolate aspects in observations from his interpretations, to take a broad view of all of it, and initially set aside defining what it all means.

This seems a good place to switch over to the other example.

Trump abandons Syrian Kurds to Turkish and Russian conquest

Why did Trump do this?  This article explore why, but can't really conclude any one reason.  This quote covers the general theme, it was in his nature to do so:


The Kurds were a mere afterthought to Donald Trump. Turkey’s Erdoğan is the type of authoritarian leader who can easily manipulate the president. Erdoğan wanted something done, and Trump was willing to do it.

A year ago, President Trump was praising the Kurds as “great” allies, vowing to protect them. “They fought with us. They died with us,” Trump said. “We have not forgotten.” But just a few days ago, he dismissed the Kurds this way: “They didn’t help us in the Second World War. They didn’t help us with Normandy, as an example.”

President Trump doesn’t interpret his abandonment of America’s faithful and intrepid Kurdish ally as betrayal because he can’t even understand why betrayal is a vice. It’s like trying to explain color to a person born with no eyesight... 


It turns out after closer review that the Kurds did take part in World War 2 supporting the allies, and Turkey didn't, the exact opposite of what Trump said, but that's not the point.  That article does summarize the point:

“We should expect our current president to betray anyone or any principle or any norm or any ally whenever he has the impulse to do so,” a friend of mine who is a psychologist told me via email. 


Trump is impulsive, and what he does next isn't well thought-out.  If a decision relates to promoting his own business interests or the long-term national interest of the US he would probably fail to even notice the latter.  Fast-takes and knee-jerk reactions are like that; biases carry weight but analysis doesn't.

It doesn't seem like these ideas connect beyond the broad strokes, does it, a reformed hook-up advocate saying the US is morally bankrupt, and a US President exemplifying that?  The finer details don't match, the specific contexts.  Roosh sees problems within the normal experience of gender relations, and patterns of self-definition, along the lines of rejecting extreme forms of feminism.  Trump serves himself more than the US.  They are not similar things.  But the ideas do connect.

Somehow the very fabric of reality in the US seems to not be a shared experience now.  Maybe it never was, and there being a white, relatively conservative, middle class largest group maintained the illusion of that.  Now that's somewhat lost, to the extent it ever did even occur.  It seems like integrating the full range of other perspectives and experience may be an underlying problem.

That doesn't explain Trump's continued support from his base; nothing does.  It seems like he has tapped into the insecurity over this underlying issue, and regardless of what he does he still represents an ability to hold onto how things had been in the past to his supporters.  Nothing he does related to foreigners (like Kurdish allies), or foreign trade partners, or to immigrants can change that.  Slighting or limiting the rights of relatively large groups like homosexuals also doesn't matter, except maybe to members of that group.

This is where things get unusual.  Trump can even target women's issues, in whatever fashion he wants to, and in spite of that negatively affecting half the citizens of the US it wouldn't necessarily conflict with those "traditional value" themes, no matter what he did, or what position he supported.  He would have to find a way to advocate rights of minorities (immigrants, minority "races," sexual preference groups, etc.) over those of white, straight, middle class Americans to oppose his base.  Even supporting Russian and Turkish interests over those of the US could simply be reframed.

An odd twist:  giving the wealthiest Americans a tax cut wasn't regarded as a problem by his lower and middle class supporters.  No matter what actions Trump takes, since the assumed conclusion is that he is working for the greater good of his base, "average Americans," there doesn't really even need to be a plausible connection to why any one step isn't doing that.   The opposite needs to happen instead, for a clear opposition of these goals to be a problem.  Since so few things are clear in modern political and cultural society Trump is always in the clear.  Maybe until the next recession happens, but then there is no common understanding of the business cycle, and repeating patterns of those, so with a bit of shifting around of blame maybe even that wouldn't be a problem.

In the end nothing Trump could do can change his supporters' impression of him.  Being removed from office for multiple clear violations of US law might not even serve as an exception.  It's funny how all that works out.  This has nothing to do with current societal trends and everything to do with how biases are carried forward, as I see it.  It's an "us and them" issue, related only to people supporting their own team.  Those people should probably be a bit more broad-viewed and open-minded, but I'm not certain that's any different than how people have always been.

How I see cultural transition

This is complicated, but it seems helpful to go there.  I can't completely make sense of the current ultra-liberal and ultra-conservative themes, but anyone can guess about those.

It's a time of extreme perspectives; it seems normal for that to happen.  Maybe on a broad cycle, or maybe not, perhaps only related to causes and conditions repeating in complex ways.  That obviously happened in the late 60's through the 70's, and then dissipated through the 90's and beyond.  At a guess the perspective shift is occurring because a real change in how people define themselves is underway in the US.

It seems to help to look at what changed in the US in that earlier 60's-70's time period.  I've ran across a good set of video references for that, talks on the subject by subject experts and others, in this Youtube documentary channel, that of David Hoffman, a documentary producer.  Parts of the values and self-image of people did shift in that time, but the extreme forms of perspective and lifestyle changes went way beyond what "stuck" in the end.  Something similar will probably happen, or rather is probably happening now.  Parts of what is now considered ultra-liberal perspective will be retained as ordinary, shared perspective, and most of the rest will be all but completely discarded.  As to which parts are which who knows.

It could be that only the exact same themes experienced in that earlier time period will be extended slightly further.  That would seem a little anti-climactic, but not unlikely.  Women and minority rights, integration of these "groups" as more fully equal members of society, could be extended.  Electing a black (half-black) President and then a racist one, more or less as a response, would fit with all that, as natural later steps.

One read is that most of the cultural extremes we experience now are mostly noise, as commune living was in the 60s and 70s.  Maybe "overshoot" describes that better; trends and perspective extends further than is practical, only later to be retracted to where that will eventually reset.

Of course there is no narrow, well-defined, prior set of cultural values to get back to, the dream on the conservative side.  And the extremes on the liberal side are also illusions, the idea that people in the US might be given free health care by society at large, or even a universal basic income, that needing to work to support yourself might drop out as a requirement.   Complete self-definition is also impractical, the idea that someone could pick their own new, previously unheard of version of a gender, and then change that as frequently as they change clothing styles, or even outfits.  In the end maybe only greater equality of everyone will emerge as a practical, normal outcome.

What would be decaying, if anything really is?  My guess:  the economic base.

Gloom and doom for the US economy

For context, I'm from "the Rust Belt," from the Industrial Northeast and Mid-West that experienced a relatively complete economic collapse over the last 40 years or so.  It's easy for me to accept that the sky is falling, on the broader economic scale.  But maybe it is, and maybe it's not.  I'm an industrial engineer; I can say for sure that not much manufacturing is going on in the US, or will ever be again.

My concerns about the US economy doesn't even relate to all that.  I think factors like ignoring the US National Debt sets up conditions that could lead to the eventual collapse of the US economy.  It's my opinion that the US government essentially supporting the broadening unequal distribution of wealth in the US is also potentially problematic.  It's hard to say why that's a problem, unless you are living out being at the bottom of the economic scale, the lowest 1/4th versus the highest 1 %.  Then it's easy to say why it is:  because your life sucks, and it's no small feat to change that.

Maybe I worry too much.  England experienced a relatively complete economic contraction when they lost their Empire back around the WW 2 time-frame, and they didn't completely fail as a country.

By Firebrace - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php

Officially the UK economy didn't even really contract; that's a pattern of continued expansion, with downturns in four places since the huge shift as a result of that major war.  Then again I'm not sure to what extent that accurately accounts for inflation.

A negative pattern of growth rate, like this, would probably feel a bit like decline, but in a real sense it's not.  Let's take a quick scan of how something like that might be playing out in the US:

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4193310-june-2018-median-household-income

This probably shows as clearly as any graph image why a lot of Americans feel that things aren't necessarily improving, or staying as positive as they had been.  Graph after graph would seem to all tell different stories, but the mid-point family income just took a number of years to climb to around where it had been at the turn of the century 20 years ago, which was no improvement over that 20 years prior, and the next periodic recession down-turn will surely erase any gains.  Staying even isn't so bad, but surely not everyone is doing that well.

These seem like different subjects, don't they, economic issues and then moral and cultural concerns?  Am I not just repeating what I said didn't work in Roosh's observations here?  Maybe.

It seems like economic potential and improvement bring health to a society, and decline brings malaise, so they can't be completely uncoupled, even though they are essentially different subjects.

My home area is a good example of the results of long-term down-turn.  I'm from near enough to Oil City, PA, one of the next small villages over, which works better as a place description given the images it brings up.  It was the original center for processing (refining) oil in both the US and in the world.  Oil was first intentionally extracted by well in nearby Titusville, PA.  All of the other local industry and that one are gone, leaving behind a shell of a small town in a state of perpetual decline.  Steel production left the general area, and manufacturing; it's not as if that one commodity was an isolated case.

People don't lose morality quickly; it's not as if everyone immediately turned to drugs and crime.  Those have become much more of an issue since I graduated high school in 1986 there, which was really a decade into the main form of the decline, a decade prior to it being complete.  My sister raised children back there since then, and they're fine, normal, happy, positive individuals.  Maybe their worldview is slightly stagnant, never refreshed by any forms of positive changes, no outside input from economic renewal or social group transitions.  But they're fine.

Roosh wouldn't see it that way, if he visited there.  Crumbling infrastructure, vacant lots, and shabby looking buildings would be a sure sign of economic catastrophe, a decline into non-existence.  That wouldn't be completely wrong.

Looked at the other way though, other communities are thriving now (just not so much in that region), so it's more a pattern of change.  Things must have always been like that.  There are ghost-towns in different places where entire communities had existed and now don't, completely vanished.  It's a sad thing to be there for the decline, to ride it out, but from the perspective of society as a whole it's just normal. 

It reminds me of Reagan visiting Detroit (I think it was), and people asking him about how to renew the economy in that area, since job opportunities were increasing in the South but in sharp decline there.  He recommended moving to the South.  He wasn't joking, and it's not an impractical suggestion.  It's heartless, on one level, but only practical on another.  Government pushing against economic forces is typically a bad idea.

Conclusion

It's not tidy enough, is it, all these picked-up and abandoned threads?   There are plenty of threads I could've picked up but didn't.  I live in Bangkok now; it would be easy to sweep in why that is, and what it means to me individually and related to societal changes.  The short version:  any one individual life example doesn't mean anything, necessarily; the broad patterns are something else.

I think the US is just changing, and it may make sense to describe some of that as decay, as negative transition, but if one looks deeper it works better to just see changes instead, to keep that less broad and more value-neutral.  No one can clearly pin down what the individual cultural shifts mean, I don't think.  In retrospect that goes a lot better; things are much clearer looking back.  "Hindsight is 20-20," my Dad used to say.

Guessing about all that doesn't hurt.  Turning to people who you all but completely disagree with for input, as I have done here, can be interesting.  I think this is being lost now, open-minded review of these patterns and perspectives.  So it probably always went.  Back in the late 60s through early 70s there were probably few enough people in between the hippies and conservatives seeing things for what they were.  Probably almost no one knows exactly what Brexit really means now, in terms of societal shifts and economic factors, or where that's headed over the next 20 years or so.

It has been interesting talking to friends in China, Japan, Russia, India, and other places about how they see shifts in their societies.  More of that will help people place these trends as their own countries experience them.  Of course I'm much more familiar with how things go in Thailand now, having been here for 12 years, but living abroad naturally brings up international themes and foreign perspectives.

I'm an optimist; I think it will all be fine.  Except maybe for the US economy, but even then I think catastrophic decline might be fine.  I think people grow through challenges and set-backs, both as individuals and societies, and the US might emerge stronger for experiencing next-level set-backs.  The country might stop repeating the same mistakes, and gain a collective broader view of things, or fix some things that really are broken. 

It's nice being an optimist, seeing light even within darkness.  No other perspective is quite as practical.

About Trump instigating public violence

This post is to capture a snapshot of something going on in the news now.  Of course the gradual implosion of the US under Donald Trump's disastrous leadership isn't news, it's a day to day train wreck that will take 4 to 8 years to fully unfold, with the severe impact to US global influence and economic potential occurring for decades to follow.  This is about a shooting in a Pittsburgh synagogue. 

It might as well be about a bomb mailing campaign from one of his followers to a number of prominent Democratic party members; that happened in the last week too.  The running theme is the same:  Trump holds rallies and says what's on his mind, and recommending that "someone should do something" as a vague reference to people taking criminal actions to settle the conservative score gets implied in some of that.  He's a scumbag.

I really wanted to capture what a friend wrote of that related to reaction.  The back and forth in Facebook discussion takes a familiar form, related to this divide.  Liberals (or moderates, anyone but extreme conservatives, given what's going on) express outrage over any number of things:  a tax cut for the wealthy, saying crazy things, defending violence by white supremacists, endorsing a likely rapist to the Supreme Court, starting a trade war, rejecting climate change, claiming to have an intuition for science that allows him to know better than climatologists how climate change is going to work out, etc., etc.

Then conservatives--at least the ones that support Trump--respond that things were no better under Obama, or that Hillary did something, or that we don't really know (whatever it is).

No need to flesh all that out too much further.  Here is the response to this incident by Jewish leaders in Pittsburgh, who blame Trump (some of them cited in this article, at least):

https://politicaldig.com/jewish-leaders-to-trump-you-incited-this-massacre-youre-not-welcome-in-pittsburgh-liar/

A Facebook friend just wrote his own response about it related to his family having personally been impacted by the Holocaust, which is obviously enough related to this event:


Literally my entire family on my mother’s side was murdered in the Holocaust. My great grandmother, my great grandfather, and his older brother were the only survivors of my direct line. 

I’m letting myself feel anger here. Not vengeance, not hate, but anger. Anger that the climate of intolerance, jingoism and complete lack of accountability fostered by Donald Trump and his administration has engendered a literal epidemic of high profile right wing terrorist acts. Anger that people are probably going to try to justify this shooting as something other than an act of terrorism, of anti-semitism, of racism. That people are going to try to pin this on something other than the hateful example set by our president. Anger that there are people laughing and making jokes about this right now, because the president was making jokes about his hair at the press conference. Anger that the right is going to trivialize this as “no big deal” or just an isolated incident while catastrophizing anything that goes against their agenda. That our president doesn’t care if he appointed a sexual predator to the Supreme Court, because “we won”. That winning is more important than justice in this country and that there are people who will see this shooting as a victory - that murdering Jews, Americans, human beings, is bringing joy to people right now, and that even those who may not condone these acts will look away and refuse to condemn them and the hateful rhetoric which has allowed them to happen for fear of looking “wrong”. 

Read the writing on the fucking wall. Everyone makes mistakes but this is your chance to turn it around. Trump opened his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists, he failed to condemn the murder of an innocent woman in Charlottesville and practically defended her murderers. There is a long list of ways in which Trump has emboldened hateful people to blatantly propagate their bigotry and engage in public acts of discrimination that would have never been accepted before. 

I am feeling anger. Not that the people who were murdered are my people, but that they are people who were murdered, and they were murdered because they are my people, and that millions of Americans are going to look the other way and pin the blame on anything besides its true source, because they don’t want to feel wrong. This is your chance to see what is really going on. If the separation of migrant families wasn’t enough, if the condemnation of first amendment rights when wielded by minorities wasn’t enough, if the misogyny and casual racism and smug contempt for justice, truth, humanity, decency weren’t enough, let this absolute analogy to one of the greatest atrocities of the 20th century, the holocaust, be your wakeup call. 

I feel sick. I feel angry. I feel heartbroken. 

And if you want to fucking argue with me on this post, don’t. This is not a discussion it’s a statement of fact. 

In my eyes, from this point forward, if you support Donald Trump, these peoples’ blood is on your hands and I don’t have anything to say to you. You can go ahead and remove yourself from my friends’ list, I’m done trying to understand you or convince you to have any modicum of compassion.


So that's where things stand.  For some people this is about compassion and decency; the outrage is over Trump saying as little to condemn these actions as public outrage will let him get away with.  It white supremacists kill someone he might even say "there is blame on both sides," or actually did say that in such a case, then switch over to a reasonable condemnation after weighing out the level of outrage.

For some people it's more about economic impact.  The trade war will cripple the US economy in the longer run.  Rejecting climate change is a nightmare on the long term level, related to the survival of the species and humanity's future, but in the short term embracing coal as a power supply and eliminating government support for renewable energy development turns away from one of the clearest growth industries occurring now.  The impact won't be immediate but as the world turns to resolution countries that developed renewable energy technology and production will benefit, and those that didn't will have missed an obvious opportunity.

For others it's more about those long term issues.  Climate change probably will be the most serious threat and impact to human civilization over the course of the rest of this century and beyond.  The pollution currently occurring as a result of all but shutting down the EPA will cost lives, with impact to be felt for decades.

Political issues are more serious for others.  Trump has turned away from current economic partnerships, with Asia (cancelling a trade agreement set to go into effect, starting a trade war with China), and with Canada, Mexico, and the EU (more of the same), embracing stronger relations with North Korea (?), the Philippines (at least in terms of supporting the radical actions of another nationalist dictator), and Russia.

All of this is beside the initial point, isn't it?  It is the related context.

This isn't intended as a complaint, or venting, or to change anyone's mind (not that that ever happens), just documenting where things stand.  My own take is that people can believe whatever they want to believe much more than I ever thought possible.  It doesn't matter what Trump does to his followers; they've already concluded how they'll feel about it. 

To some extent the blindness must extend to the liberal side too but what we're seeing is unprecedented in the US.  This is a capture of fact-checking on Trump's count of public statements, cases of stating a position or idea that can be clearly verified or rejected as untrue:

17% of what Trump says is True or Mostly True, 69% is Mostly False, False, or "Pants on Fire" blatantly a complete lie.  In many cases you don't need to fact-check his statements against reality because he's contradicting himself; it's clear that one or all of a set of statements aren't true when he makes several that all can't be true together.

I'd like to see this as a low point in US modern history but all signs indicate the trend is still downward; that the next two years could be even worse.  At least the fall-out almost certainly will be; there's an economic crash coming as a direct result of two years of worst-case decision making.

As a natural optimist I often like to pair an "at least" positive factor with any set of ideas, no matter how horrific.  There isn't one this time.  With 40% of the US completely behind Trump regardless of what comes next, essentially oblivious to it, the die is cast.  Even with better leadership and the other majority pushing a more reasonable agenda it just seems like too much of a limitation to overcome.

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Disproving God, levels of atheism

Atheism is a funny thing, isn't it, trying to reason out and prove that God doesn't exist?  There's something strange about that project.  It's came up twice recently so I'll mention it here, really just to keep track of some interesting discussion. 

The first time was a Quora question answer, and the second related to a Facebook post about levels of atheism (or I guess agnosticism really is mid-level atheism, put on that sort of scale).

Quora answer

I answered the question on Quora, What's your proof that God doesn’t exist?:


With a background in philosophy and a good bit of formal study of religion I should put an answer to some form of this question here somewhere. I don’t think that’s the best way to frame such a question, but since I wasn’t looking for any version of the question I’ll just go with this one.

Of course it can’t be proven that God doesn’t exist. How can you prove that Santa Claus doesn’t actually exist? You can explain the origins of the story, and build a strong case for that tradition only relating to earlier forms of culture-based stories shifting to become that particular story, but checking satellite images to confirm that no one really lives at the North Pole is almost as good a counter-proof as that. Proving a negative is tough. Even in this case, when parents have a conspiracy going that involves none of the presents actually coming from some mythical entity, we buy them instead, all of them.

It’s more productive to look at what religions in general are really doing, and then map how Judaism and Christianity work onto that. It’s no small project. It works well enough as a counter-argument that if a minority of people are really Christian, and the literal take on Christianity is that all non-Christians go to hell, then that particular God is ok with most people going to hell. I guess as with really sorting through who might live at the North Pole that gets problematic. Maybe Santa really lives in Antarctica, and the stories got that wrong, and maybe that Jewish / Christian God isn’t splitting people into the heaven and hell-bound groups in that way (or maybe a majority really do go to hell, and then there’s purgatory, etc.). An argument from evil comes up too; why would such a God create this particular world, one in which someone could spend all day pointing out horrible aspects that people and other creatures experience, all sorts of death and suffering.

Again it works better to take a different approach, to dig deeper into what religion really is. To me—only my take—it doesn’t work well to use religions as explanations for first causes or afterlife destinations, even though those are two very common purposes for the story-lines. The conflict between the different versions is one obvious problem, but it’s sort of not about that. More mature takes accept that important patterns in societies are encoded in religions, in the teachings, rituals, social roles, and practices. One good example: if there was no form of morality at all in a society then it wouldn’t be orderly enough to be functional. Reasonably consistent social roles and practices wouldn’t stick; there wouldn’t be enough consistency in behavior and perspective to base laws on, or consistent economic practices, and so on.

It’s a good question if there could be a completely irreligious society, if the same types of principles could conceivably evolve without religion as an input. In one sense I don’t see why not, in another sense absolutely not. Let’s start with the latter, the negative version: people evolved into organized civilizations based on religious practices and religion-based worldviews over the past few thousand years, or at most 10 or 20 (most likely; maybe it’s a lot more complicated than that). There is really no way to initiate a reset that starts a civilization or society completely from scratch, to not build on some of that prior foundation. Here I’m claiming that at the least organized societies and religious principles evolved together, interwoven, although the claim in the sentence before this one was framed as stronger than that, with one underlying the other. Either way conjoining the two still seems to work.

Communist regimes have attempted this, to try and systematically eliminate religion, but even if those had been more successful in some sense they would still be drawing on the assumed structure and general perspective that came before, whether they wanted to acknowledge that or not. In the other more shallow sense why not; a society could retain some of the functional structure of common-ground understanding that evolved along with prior religions while at the same time shedding the literal forms of those beliefs. It wouldn’t be necessary to try to re-form a system of ethics—the underlying assumptions, the detailed principles, etc.—but people could do that, to describe the function, and then to say that’s still a necessary cultural element. Various forms of consequentialism are this type of thing, structures of ideas that say we “do the right thing” because it’s functional to follow those sorts of patterns, that people as a whole benefit from that.

Why would someone want to prove that God doesn’t exist? I guess one answer could be to get to the facts of the matter. Or if someone was concerned about that hell-afterlife possibility maybe a set of arguments could put their mind at ease. But it would be quite difficult to move past the types of general lines of thought that I’ve just described to eliminate the possibility of an entity that served as a first-cause as a possibility.

Some type of creator God could definitely exist. This is where atheists use a bit of slight of hand, it seems to me; they reject the forms of creator Gods that we’ve been proposing, waving away the most absurd aspects, and in the end rely on probability related to their take on a first take. It’s very unlikely that Santa Clause does actually exist, even though we can’t disprove that he does, and if we can flesh out a clear story for what religion is doing as we did with “Saint Nick” stories then we can sweep away the conclusion for existence of a literal God in a similar fashion. It just doesn’t work nearly as well in the case of religion. If there is a creator God we wouldn’t be able to relate to what that entity is like (unless “it” is as chatty as the Old Testament version, or happens to be some living person’s literal parent, then maybe so). So the idea is to reject something beyond our own comprehension instead, some broad category of possible things we couldn’t have much understanding of, which is going to be problematic for argument forms to dispel.

Levels of disbelief in God

A Facebook friend posted this scale of levels of atheism recently:

My initial response was this:

This whole scale seems to imply that one uniform interpretation of God somehow makes sense. If God has to be the chatty, opinionated, divisive Old Testament version or the slightly mellowed out New Testament Christian version he / she / it probably doesn't exist. If God is either some vague type of cause or origin for the universe involving intention or a possible underlying linkage between different forms of life then it's harder to judge.

Of course that didn't really work for the person who posted that; they wanted a number, and they interpreted the question framework as making sense.  To me this is why atheists seem to be talking past anyone interested in religion who is not really so concerned if the typical, literal, personal type of god exists.  Per my experience people who study religion move past that type of superficial take at the outset, and atheists tend to stick with it, and work around it.  Then they say "it doesn't matter," as if it really doesn't, all the while building up arguments and analysis that really use that form or something quite close to it as a crucial starting point.

I'm not sure that point ever became clear, and it's a bit of stretch to map out what religion is really doing in Facebook post comment, but I did answer further about how the question isn't well formed.

That online friend (or contact; however you use those concepts) explained that he thought the question made sense in this way:

While there are a multitude of different ways people follow faith and drastic differences in what those systems or beliefs may lead to in the actions and ethics of different people, this scale's utility lies in lumping all together based solely on what level of adherence one might have to their beliefs. Do you wobble or hesitate with what you believe in, or are you unflinching in your trust? It doesn't matter, in this specific instance, whether it is something innocuous like merely thinking there is some kind of connecting energy inside or between beings, or if it is thinking doing actions in life like feeding the homeless or blowing up nonbelievers will augment some sort of afterlife/reincarnation. In this instance they are all explicitly equivalent with thinking there are supernatural sentient beings that created everything or thinking drinking kale juice will make you lose weight or cure cancer. 

This scale doesn't distinguish between what you believe, what that entails, or what it might lead to in your actions throughout life - it just deals with what level you trust in those beliefs. If you think it more likely that what you "know" will stay the same, you are a lower number. If you are perfectly ambivalent, you are pure agnostic. If you think it is more likely that what you "know" will/can be overturned via empirical evidence, you are a higher number. 

Interesting; not bad as analysis goes, but this still doesn't seem to work.  I explain why I think that as follows:

To me this is asking for an answer to the wrong question. I get what you're saying; as framed it doesn't matter what the type of answer, it's really a question of degree. If someone says "I believe all things are connected in some way; I don't know the form," the question can apply to how strongly they believe that. It sort of doesn't work though, the # 2 relating to "I cannot know for certain but I think that "all things are connected in some way" is probable." This person isn't believing in any God, so per a different and more direct read they're really a #5 or 6. If you assume God or not God, or maybe God, you've already made all the interesting decisions prior to answering the question within the framing, and have already begged the question. 

To me this is like the problem in asking the question "what is the meaning of life" according to philosophy. It's kind of the wrong question, in the sense that there are much better questions to start on. One could ask what types of assumptions and context frameworks tend to support an implicit meaning of life. Generally that's too broad a question for either Analytic or Continental philosophy, but it works much better for the latter. In either broad-school context at least you are more directly asking what you are really asking, not skipping over it with assumptions.

Conclusions / analysis; what atheists are doing

I think we're narrowing in on the key problem with atheism and arguments related to atheism here; in one form or another they set up a straw man to reject, that very literal form of God.  It's not them that postulate that God initially, it's organized religion, in some forms of interpretation, but they do adopt it in the process of rejecting it.

They say they're doing the opposite, that their arguments work to reject any God, not just the relatively angry one in the Old Testament, or the ass-kicking version that some Muslims take up, or the more compassionate and vague version Jesus talks about (who of course is a bit paternal, in that form).  But really God has to be a super-person in those systems, in the form atheists tend to reject "him."  A bit of sleight of hand, as mentioned in that Quora answer, is involved in mixing between personal God and first-cause minimum level type of agency.  But this only makes the problems worse, rejecting a selected continuum, without really digging deeper into the function of religion.

If you don't think it through religion is all about solving the first-cause problem and the after-life problem, and deriving morality based on an appeal to authority.  I think the main function is much closer to the latter, but the draw, the personal appeal, is perhaps coming from that first set of two purposes.  This really would run long if I tried to explain what I think religion is doing, and it would be a personal take, there is no way that one person can explain a narrow range that's really it in a nutshell.  

But in a one paragraph version, I think religion codifies guidelines for how people should live in ways that support the development of an organized society.  It defines a system of morality that makes people working together in social roles possible, and helps define those social roles, to some extent.  Monogamy makes for a good example of both; identifying an institution of marriage, the concept of marital fidelity, and a stable family structure works as a basis for society.  That can even extend into non-traditional interpretation, eg. gay marriage, but problems can occur if a society doesn't gravitate towards defining family as some sort of valuable construct.  I'm not saying that a single parent can't possibly raise a child, and of course they can, instead that it's functional for there to be a norm that two people set up some form of contract towards the shared goal of raising children.  The project takes a lot of work even with two people on it, and the nearly two decade commitment time-frame is a bit extreme.  Other examples of the function of religious teaching relating to respect for personal property ownership or honesty also work.  It just gets complicated to flesh out how any one norm plays a clear role in grounding a society, and how real-life interpretation, codes of conduct, and exceptions tend to play out.

It might well seem that now I'm proposing some sort of interpretive slight of hand, that instead of discussing if there was an agent that caused the universe I've shifted to the function of teachings of a religion as the main point.  I would agree, that I just did that, except for not agreeing with the part that it's in error to do so.

Oddly a lot of the ideas I'm proposing are coming directly from a derivation of Christianity, from progressive religion interpretation from the second half of the 20th century.  Essentially within that tradition they were discussing how God as a super-person really didn't make sense, that this was a superficial form the ideas can take that has little relation to the actual function of a religion.  I suppose the earlier post here on Stages of Faith a bit earlier fills in more details on that.

As far as me answering that question goes, where I fall on the atheism scale, I suspect that all things are connected in an unusual way, at a deeper level than we can tend to experience.  Since that's not much of a personal God it doesn't work well to use that scale to reject or embrace one.  I suppose if you force that online contact's interpretation I hold that belief at the level of #3 (I cannon know for certain but I am inclined to believe that in some deeper sense things are connected), it just doesn't work as well to map that back onto a more literal theism / atheism.  

Humor, and my kids' personalities before birth

Normally in any work related to Buddhism pre-birth personality aspects would relate to re-birth (reincarnation, for some), but I'm on the subject of how my kids seemed inside the womb instead.  It relates to two starting points:  telling someone about that in a message recently, and also a point raised by Jordan Peterson, that You-tuber psychology professor (really in this video about personality related to Piaget, but the next one related to Freud was probably slightly more interesting overall).

Jordan Peterson, my favorite psychologist (credit his website)

Let's start with those online discussion comments, the story about interacting with my kids before they were actually born:


I had believed that culture and learning through experiences must play a much larger role in personal development and attributes than genetics before I had kids, but that experience has changed that. My son and daughter were different people when they were still inside the womb; they could express it in the way they interacted while I would sing to them. Keoni was hyper in there; he would be excited to hear from me, and would really kick the side, and seemed to be agitated by being crowded towards the end when he was outgrowing the size of the space. Kalani interacted enough that I knew she understood we were communicating, in a sense, but she was calm about it. 

Even the way they both took being born matches up with the way their personalities turned out later. Keoni screamed like something horrible was going on, and stayed a bit hysterical for some time, and Kalani cried a little but then was curious to see what was going on. I can’t really fill in how that connects with how they are right now but it does. She first saw him when she was about an hour old, maybe just a little later, as we were coming down from the operating room level after she’d been cleaned up and checked out. She was in a plastic box to control temperature and access to air and pathogens, I guess it was, and as he looked at her and talked to her she smiled. I really didn’t think that’s an innate expression, and maybe it was just coincidence, but it really looked as if she recognized him. For sure she’d been hearing him for 9 months.

If I was more into psychology I'd probably be expressing that more related to big five personality characteristics, and could go on to say more about how it maps to how they are now, but I'm not that read up the subject.  Eventually I might do more with those concepts and models but the ordinary framing of related ideas probably covers a lot of the same ground in this case anyway.  I might add that to the extent that psychology and philosophy overlap (not so much, but a little) I'm a lot more familiar with it, since I did study that subject somewhat extensively.


I won't really say more about that part, about how they were as fetuses, or about how they seemed to already partly be who I would later know them as.  As an 8 year old my son is still easily agitated, and very emotional, and as a three year old my daughter is still a lot more calm and curious about new experiences, versus anxious about them.  He had trouble adjusting his first week of school, for example, or the first few weeks really, and she didn't, at all.  The ideas extend from there but most of the point is already made.

meeting for the first time, in a sense

Babies and sense of humor

Onto the second starting point already then:  Jordan Peterson raised the idea in that video about how babies seem to have a sense of humor almost immediately, or at least as soon as they are able to interact and demonstrate such an attribute.  He didn't explain it, and actually went the other way with that, mentioning it's not completely clear why they would possess that so early (or is it how?; maybe both questions make sense, and one comes before the other).  I guess it partly ties in with the idea I've proposed that a lot of someone's character is already pinned down before they are born, but here I'm going to take that mostly in a different direction.

I'll pass on some thoughts about why it would be practical to have a sense of humor so early.  Oddly I dreamt an answer to why.  It's kind of strange for my subconscious to be getting in on mulling the subject over, but why not.  It seems related to play.  He mentioned the importance and function of play before, which is all obvious enough, not exactly requiring psychological study to follow.  It prepares children to face real life situations similar to those they act out, and provides an opportunity to work on physical skills, and social roles, mapping related ideas together, exploring cause and effect, etc.

Related to parts of that, for young kids he mentioned "rough and tumble" play is critical, part of figuring out physical limits.  I'm reminded of my Dad throwing us into the air; the kind of thing kids love, and mothers don't like so much.  Of course I do the same with mine, with a favorite form as them doing a "super-baby" pose, holding them up overhead so they can experience that height and practice something like planking, sort of like a yoga move.  Apparently a baby can do that a bit before they are one year old, and my eight year old would still like to give it a go but kids get a bit heavy and unwieldy around 5 or 6  or so (he's 8 now).

Another type of play is to practice variations of simple games like peek-a-boo, which in Thai goes by "ja-ay" instead.  We most often play that with them older than one, in a form of hiding behind a curtain, but he refers to that as a game related to hiding simply by holding a hand in front of their eyes, so the kind of thing a baby a few months old could take up.  According to Jordan Peterson the game variations help them practice both reasoning and social interaction, related to recognizing more complex forms of patterns of the game (more or less; I summarize).

Why express humor within the first few months though, as early as they can possibly interact?  It makes one wonder what it connects to, and of course I have no idea, but I'll speculate.  It seems possible play and exploration are two related things, and so is humor.  If my kids see me bang my head it's funny to them, and although actually getting injured wouldn't be funny it seems to play a role in helping them avoid a more serious pattern of cause and effect.

Why would it need to be funny, though?  Games tend to be funny or at least fun, enjoyable, and this helps kids enjoy repeating the same type of practice over an over.  In an interesting observation Dr. Peterson mentioned that they are copying themselves in a lot of early learning, for example hitting a "mobile" with their hand, then trying to do it again on purpose, with it taking nearly countless attempts to master hand and eye dexterity.  There would have to be some reward mechanism to trying that sort of thing over and over; it couldn't really just be an academic curiosity to a baby in the same sense I might watch Youtube videos on psychology just to learn.  If it's funny to see something that doesn't match expectations in different ways, like a two month old banging a mobile around, or watching me bump my head, it might help with repeating the cycles of learning.  Actually hitting me on the head would work better as an example of physical limitations play, and they do get around to such things.

Linking the two ideas, about my son talking to me in the womb (communicating by kicking the side), and a baby playing with a mobile, there is no reason why the process would need to start at birth.  A baby would know where it's own hands were from idle months spent in the womb, with only itself and the edges as stimulus (and sound, and motion; they would hear and feel a lot from the outside world).

she could definitely smile within a couple of days

A baby enjoying the skill of banging into a mobile intentionally, or later sucking on toes, finding a new body part, and a fetus sucking it's thumb wouldn't seem to reflect the same emotional reward pattern as humor.  Even if they're related they still seem quite different.  It makes one consider what humor is really doing, and again we've reached a point where more background in psychology and awareness of common understanding would be useful.


Humor really spans a range, doesn't it?  Slapstick was based on enjoying people falling down, and fart jokes are kind of a lower end baseline,  seeing body functions that are regarded negatively as funny.  More intellectual humor is related to observation of unusual linked references, of getting a connection that is unexpected.  Related to function humor can diffuse a type of tension, or resolve a type of conflict.  Physical space and body control would pose a large conceptual problem for a baby for quite some time, so to them in a sense these could be lower forms of problems to work on, with situational tension and conflict requiring more concepts to build up to.

Considering a parallel with animals

It's a bit of a stretch but all of this makes me consider to what extent an animal can do some of the same things.  They tend to not really have much sense of humor, typically, don't they?  Or more intelligent dogs can seem to.  We had a cat that was painfully stupid (he would get stuck on the same roof for two weeks in a row, always forgetting how he got up there, or not realizing that he couldn't un-do those steps) and he seemed to really enjoy interactions and play on a level cats typically don't.  Of course "play" cats can do, and dogs, and it seems to fill a similar role.  A cat bats around a ball of string to mimic catching a mouse, although it's perhaps not clear that the same cause for doing both isn't common, that it could be acting out the same thing for them, not practicing one by way of the other.  Some dogs love to chase a stick as a game, and that does seem social, that it's as much about interaction as practice.  My brother had a cat he named "fetch" because it would do the same.  But what would a dog find funny?

If the same pattern holds they might expect something, and experience some degree of tension, or lack of expectation resolution, then something unexpected would happen.  Of course with my kids the unexpected thing can be the same hundreds of times; it's more just a resolution.  I would participate in rough and tumble play with the smartest dog that we ever owned; she would jump around, and pretend to bite me, barking a bit, and I would grab at her.  But it didn't seem to extend to humor, which would require more concepts.  Maybe a relationship to time and abstract concepts bridges play and humor, in ways that might not be obvious.

It's a given that dogs experience emotions, isn't it?  It seems so to me.  They experience equivalences to anger, and fear, happiness, anxiety, and boredom.  Cats less so; ours seem complex to me but not common with us in character, for the most part.  I raised pigs as a child (four; I wasn't exactly a farmer, but that was some experience) and they really do seem roughly as intelligent as dogs, but different in character.  Maybe they're less emotional.  Then again dogs learn to interact with us in the same ways we do based on different factors, which include how intelligent the dog is, other in-born character aspects, and the extent to which they interact with people, and related to the nature of that interaction.  This tangent really doesn't get far with the main theme since to me they definitely can play but humor is something else.  As far as I've noticed animals don't find things to be funny.

I Googled dogs and humor just to see if anyone thought differently, and it turns out Charles Darwin did (cited in this modern reference article on dogs and humor):


In the 1872 edition of The Descent of Man, he writes:  Dogs show what may be fairly called a sense of humor, as distinct from mere play; if a bit of stick or other such object be thrown to one, he will often carry it away for a short distance; and then squatting down with it on the ground close before him, will wait until his master comes quite close to take it away. The dog will then seize it and rush away in triumph, repeating the same maneuver, and evidently enjoying the practical joke.”


Play versus humor seem interrelated but different, as I've mentioned, but the article does go on to give dogs credit for extending into the latter.

Conclusion

I don't have much for conclusions.  My kids seemed to experience play to different degrees before they were born, or at least interaction, and I tried to extend that considering a relation to humor.  I'm not sure how early interactions with my kids seemed to clearly be expressions of humor, of finding things funny.  They seem quite aware long before they are able to make their own impressions of things clear, which builds up slowly.  If my daughter really did smile within an hour or so of being born then that form of expression is available nearly right away, or could be, but I'm not sure to what extent they practice and master such things versus learning them from scratch.

what she looks like now

Both my kids really did seem to know me within hours of being born, to recognize me by voice--but again that's a little off the main subject.  She might not have smiled within an hour but she did seem to use that expression in a typical way within the first week. 

I took a video of my daughter laughing for the first time--the kind of thing you would absolutely never catch on "tape" since you wouldn't expect it--and she was just over three months old then.  I guess in a limited sense she had already passed a milestone related to humor just then.  She wasn't laughing at something funny, really, unless her mother laughing with her seemed funny to her (and maybe it did).  Somehow I suspect me bumping my head would have been funny to her even before that, or her brother acting silly.  I guess the part about how or why she had that ability then I don't know, and can only ramble on about it in speculation, as I already did.

Conspiracy theories: a lie that you're tired of hearing

I recently answered a question on Quora titled "what is a lie that you are tired of hearing?"

I've been discussing conspiracy theories lately, and they're not exactly a lie (to some extent that's what they are though), so I wrote about that.  That topic and answers are listed here:

https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-lie-that-youre-tired-of-hearing


I just wrote a post about fluoride in tea in the main blog I write, Tea in the Ancient World (the one some people actually read).  I wasn't researching that related to any sort of conspiracy, instead about a question in a group about if the fluoride in tea poses any health risk.  I didn't know, so I researched it.
The short answer:  there is probably no risk.  Or maybe, depending on other factors, but this post isn't about that.  It's also not about the theory that adding fluoride to water could be part of a government mind control conspiracy.  I guess the idea is that it lowers IQ, making people easier to control, although in lots of discussion the general point is never really clear.

Since I've mentioned it I'll add a link to that fluoride post, and go on to the content of that answer:

http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.com/2017/07/fluoride-in-tea-good-or-bad-how-much-is.html

Answer post:

It’s not exactly the same thing but conspiracy theories are getting under my skin a little lately. If it’s a conspiracy theory about something so clearly known that it’s absurd (eg. the earth is flat) then at some point that does clearly trace back to someone making something up, posting Youtube videos that propagate nonsense, so lying. If a climate scientist receives funding from oil or other fossil fuel interests and as a result concludes that climate change isn’t certain then that’s another case of lying. A poll just confirmed that most Americans don’t realize that 90% of all climate research scientists accept that it’s all proven (the basic understanding, that climate change is certainly occurring; the models will keep evolving), and that’s part of the background.

Beyond not keeping up with what is currently known people tend to want to believe in nonsense, it seems. They want nameless, faceless, powerful forces to be shaping reality in harmful ways based on lies, for whatever their reasons. At a guess it somehow seems nicer than believing the world just is as it is, a bit unfair, flawed in various ways, and that they aren’t personally more successful because of a stacked deck. Related to the theories everyday circumstances wouldn’t necessarily be tilted against the people that believe in those ideas, at least in ways that they can pin down—most of it isn’t about suppressing economic opportunities—but at least some other supposed examples of altered reality turn up that they can cite.


Examples:


-Fluoride added to water:  The current research evidence shows that fluoride is not harmful, in ordinary amounts, within a relatively clearly defined exposure range, and that it does protect teeth. But people want to believe that something else is going on, either a government mind control program or something else less clearly determined.


-The 9/11 terrorist attack:  this was clearly a case of terrorists using planes to destroy those buildings but people want to believe that somehow a separate conspiracy-related demolition activity occurred, or the US government was in on it. There is no clear reason why this has better explanatory value, and the supposed evidence put forward is usually easy to explain away as misunderstanding. One example cited is that the buildings fell downward, that they didn’t tip over, but falling straight downward is what is expected to happen if fires caused by plane impacts and burning jet fuel caused them to fall. People cite that steel doesn’t melt at the temperature at which jet fuel burns, and it doesn’t, but a guy in a youtube video shows how soft and flexible heated steel becomes at that temperature, so that it couldn’t continue to function as a building frame. The problem isn’t about one piece of evidence not holding up in any case, it’s about working backwards from a false conclusion, even fabricating evidence if necessary, but more usually twisting interpretations in strange ways.


-The moon landings: either that was by far the most comprehensive hoax ever pulled off (continuing to this day? so the Chinese really don’t have rovers on the moon now?) or else NASA really did send people to the moon, but it’s more interesting to some to believe that they didn’t. NASA just released a lot of photographs taken there to put an end to all of it but as with flat-earthers rejecting lots of real-time satellite feed images of the spherical earth it’s really not about analyzing evidence anyway.


At least in the case of climate change there is a good reason for people to hope that the world as we know it isn’t coming to an end, even if rejecting the current conventional understanding of reality is not a reasonable step to take. For the rest it’s more a preference for there to be a conspiracy, probably in lots of cases initiated by people that are either intentionally “trolling” (saying things just to get a reaction), or making money off Youtube video views and such.