Religion = team sport, Doctrine = team colors

[_beastie]

I will say that this book has had a tremendous impact on my judgment of religion. I have varied a lot in that over the years since becoming an atheist. Part of me has always recognized that religion must have served some beneficial purpose for human beings, otherwise it wouldn't be so nearly universal. But I wasn't sure that purpose was still valid. Haidt makes a strong argument that it is, and that society, in general, does need religion. I'll come back to that argument of his when I have time later. I found it very persuasive.

Good points, beastie. I hope you find time to share some more of the thoughts and quotes you mentioned collecting above.

I'll try to come back to it tomorrow. I actually already copied some of my favorite quotes, and have the book on my shelf waiting for a reread.

[_zeezrom]

Aristotle,

I thought it was the communities who make the doctrines not the other way around.

Yours,

Zee.

[_Aristotle Smith]

Aristotle,

I thought it was the communities who make the doctrines not the other way around.

Yours,

Zee.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeneutic_circle

[_beastie]

Here's one of my favorite quotes:

Because we’re all so crippled by the confirmation bias, which is that we use our reason just to confirm what we already believe – if that’s true of all of us, then I think we all have to get a little more humble as individuals, and recognize that, as individuals, we’re not very good at finding the truth, that we can only can find the truth when we’re put into relationships in which other people can question our confirmation bias – and this is what has changed. Science works because each of us individually flawed scientists challenge each other, and so, over time, the scientific community does update, where, say, the religious right may not.

Follow the sacredness, and around it you’ll find a ring of motivated ignorance.

That is, in my opinion, why science has already "won" in terms of impact. When religionists want to give their claims more weight, they dress up those claims in scientific garb. When religionists want to belittle science, they call it a religion. That tells you something - it tells you that even they know science has "won".

(using won loosely, of course, many argue it's not a direct competition between the two)

Some of my favorite quotes have to do with the elephant and the rider. I've been interested in laybooks explaining the workings and evolution of the human mind for years, and it's become clear that much of our "reasoning" happens below the surface, and that our conscious mind only later, helpfully, provides rationalizations and justifications for beliefs and opinions that actually developed without our conscious awareness, and that have nothing to do with logic and reason.

And the fact that the rider follows the lead of the elephant, who is not persuaded by facts but by relationships, explains why discussion boards like this usually just turn into competing soapboxes.

Later tonight I'll try to find some of those quotes.

[_sock puppet]

And the fact that the rider follows the lead of the elephant, who is not persuaded by facts but by relationships,

if we are all just confirming bias...

explains why discussion boards like this usually just turn into competing soapboxes.

we can avoid competing soapboxes by stopping discussion at some point?

[_beastie]

And the fact that the rider follows the lead of the elephant, who is not persuaded by facts but by relationships,

if we are all just confirming bias...

explains why discussion boards like this usually just turn into competing soapboxes.

we can avoid competing soapboxes by stopping discussion at some point?

"Discussion" is a term best used loosely.

Real discussion, real opportunity for changing one another's minds or at least seeing something from the perspective of the other can only take place once a personal connection has been established. Only then will the "elephant" allow the "rider" to at least listen.

I don't have the time or energy to go out of my way to establish those sort of personal relationships with the "other" on this board, so I really do just view it as entertainment, with occasional real discussions interspersed here and there.

[_beastie]

I love this book so much I'll share more quotes.

Xiv
Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning. If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you. But if you think about moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas – to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong go – then things will make a lot more sense. Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value. They’re mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.

This explains so much. Look at the arguments justifying Joseph Smith's "marriages". I don't believe for one little minute that if the neighbor down the street or the leader of a different religion engaged in the same behavior as Joseph Smith that LDS would justify HIS behavior with these same excuses. And the rationalizations are sometimes so strained it's hard to believe they're being proffered with a straight face. Accepting that these arguments shouldn't be taken at face value, adn are post hoc constructions made up to advance one's own beliefs and team, then it all makes sense.

[_beastie]

Now this quote:

Xv
Morality binds and blinds. The central metaphor of these four chapters is that human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. Human nature was produced by natural selection working at two levels simultaneously. Individuals compete with individuals within every group, and we are the descendants of primates who excelled at that competition. This gives us the ugly side of our nature, the one that is usually featured in books about our evolutionary origins. We are indeed selfish hypocrites so skilled at putting on a show of virtue that we fool even ourselves.

But human nature was also shaped as groups competed with other groups. As Darwin said long ago, the most cohesive and cooperative groups generally beat the groups of selfish individualists. Darwin’s ideas about group selection fell out of favor in the 1960s, but recent discoveries are putting his ideas back into play, and the implications are profound. We’re not always selfish hypocrites. We also have the ability, under special circumstances, to shut down our petty selves and become like cells in a larger body, or like bees in a hive, working for the good of the group. These experiences are often among the most cherished of our lives, although our hivishness can blind us to other moral concerns. Our bee-like nature facilitates altruism, heroism, war and genocide.

This explains why Mormonism has been fairly successful for a new religion. Mormonism embraced the bee 100%, literally and figuratively. And it works wonderfully at times. I will never forget the feeling of gratitude I had when the fellow Mormons (at work and in the ward) of my Utah based nephew who had been called to Iraq just rallied around his wife and four children, and assured him that they would help and look after her in his absence. That means a lot. The hive is important, and brings a lot of meaning and beauty to this life. I don't discount that at all.

The downside is I'm not sure they would rally around nonmembers or exmembers to the same extent, but then, it is a hive. There are boundaries to the hive. And boundaries alone don't mean that hives should be eliminated.

[_honorentheos]

Here's one of my favorite quotes:

Because we’re all so crippled by the confirmation bias, which is that we use our reason just to confirm what we already believe – if that’s true of all of us, then I think we all have to get a little more humble as individuals, and recognize that, as individuals, we’re not very good at finding the truth, that we can only can find the truth when we’re put into relationships in which other people can question our confirmation bias – and this is what has changed. Science works because each of us individually flawed scientists challenge each other, and so, over time, the scientific community does update, where, say, the religious right may not.

Follow the sacredness, and around it you’ll find a ring of motivated ignorance.

That is, in my opinion, why science has already "won" in terms of impact. When religionists want to give their claims more weight, they dress up those claims in scientific garb. When religionists want to belittle science, they call it a religion. That tells you something - it tells you that even they know science has "won".

(using won loosely, of course, many argue it's not a direct competition between the two)

Some of my favorite quotes have to do with the elephant and the rider. I've been interested in laybooks explaining the workings and evolution of the human mind for years, and it's become clear that much of our "reasoning" happens below the surface, and that our conscious mind only later, helpfully, provides rationalizations and justifications for beliefs and opinions that actually developed without our conscious awareness, and that have nothing to do with logic and reason.

And the fact that the rider follows the lead of the elephant, who is not persuaded by facts but by relationships, explains why discussion boards like this usually just turn into competing soapboxes.

Later tonight I'll try to find some of those quotes.

Great quote, beastie.

My daughter recently decided she was an atheist. We've had a lot of discussions about this, mostly off topic. Most of the time I play devil's advocate, asking why she is so certain she is right while so many people continue to believe in things she finds unbelievable?

One time, when pressed, she told me she believed in science because "it was right, while people who believe the Bible are wrong!" Along the lines of Haidt's quotes, I suggested to her that wasn't true. Science isn't "right", not by any emperical measure anyway. What I suggested made science such a good tool for learning truth was that, unlike dogma, it knows it's not right and has a process in place for working out the biases and flaws in our understanding. It acknowledges human nature and uses it to tease out better truth. Knowing you're not right and being ever learning is the strength of science, in my opinion. Funny that there is a scripture calling that a flaw. (2 Timothy 3:7) It's a scripture that too many on the atheist/agnostic side worship in their own way as well.

To me, that's one of the valuable points in Haidt's book.

I totally agree with you about this book. I consider it one of the best books to come out this year.

[_Fence Sitter]

Thanks for the book recommendation Beastie. I am really enjoying it.

I believe the LDS Church teaches that obedience is far more important than knowledge, that our eternal rewards are based on our actions, not our faith or knowledge. This leads to behavior where the member is more concerned with appearances than doctrine. Phrases that comes to mind are "it's not important to my salvation", or " the Sunday School answers really are the best", "you don't need to know that" or "some truths are not useful". The faithful believer is one who pay, prays and obeys.

Here is what Haidt says about this behavior in his section on accountability.

Tetlock found two different kinds of careful reasoning. Exploratory thought is an "evenhanded consideration of alternative points of view. Confirmatory thought is a "one-sided attempt to rationalize a particular point of view". Accountability increases exploratory thought only when three conditions apply: (1) decision makers learn before forming any opinions that they will be held accountable to an audience,
(2) the audience's views are unknown, and (3) they believe the audience is well informed and interested in accuracy.
When all three conditions apply, people do their darnedest to figure out the truth, because that's what the audience wants to hear. But the rest of the time--which is almost all of the time--accountability pressures simply increase confirmatory thought. People are trying harder to look right the to be right.

Then this.

A central function of thought is making sure that one acts in ways that can be persuasively justified or excused to others. Indeed, the process of considering the justifiability of one's choices may be so prevalent that decision makers not only search for convincing reasons to make a choice when they must explain that choices to others, they search for reasons to convince themselves that they have made the "right" choice.