Coach T wrote:So, antishock, what other great truths to you hold in that great treasure trove. Have you solved the Grand Unification Theory yet? You are so bent on being right that the truth right in front of your nose wouldn't convince you of it *ping*. I encounter people like you all the time *ping*. You look for opportunities to rail without even the semblance of wanting discussion and have the audacity to act offended when someone calls b***s***. *ping* Go eat an ice cream cone, would you?
I'm sorry, did you just involve the Grand Unification Theory with a discussion about Mormonism? That's about the stretchiest piece of stretching I've ever witnessed, Coach.
I'm seriously wondering what the deal is with Mormons and mendacity at this point. There is some deeply ingrained pathos going on... And it's disconcerting. :(
antishock8 wrote:Well, I'm not the one lying, LoaP. How can anyone be happy with someone who deceives other people? That's silly. You're overtly dishonest, admit to it, and shill for a dishonest church. When presented with an obvious fraud, like the Joseph Smith facsimile translations you're so dishonest that you can't even admit that is a decpetion. What part of your behavior are people supposed to be enamored with? Shame on you.
I've never discussed Joseph Smith facsimile translations with you, or anyone on this board that I can recall, so I'm uncertain how I was possibly dishonest about it, and if I had been, how you would have known. Are you clairvoyant? I shall take comfort in the fact that no one on this board is coming to your aid. You are looking the fool. The sad thing is, none of the folks here are kind enough to point it out to you. It's like your fly is down and your friends are saying nothing.
I am struggling to take you seriously. It seems at this point you are pulling my leg.
One moment in annihilation's waste, one moment, of the well of life to taste- The stars are setting and the caravan starts for the dawn of nothing; Oh, make haste! -Omar Khayaam
antishock8 wrote:I'm seriously wondering what the deal is with Mormons and mendacity at this point. There is some deeply ingrained pathos going on... And it's disconcerting. :(
Well, I know how you feel there, I assure you.
One moment in annihilation's waste, one moment, of the well of life to taste- The stars are setting and the caravan starts for the dawn of nothing; Oh, make haste! -Omar Khayaam
Sorry amigos, I got super busy and couldn't come back until now. Here goes nothin'. (I can't wait to see all the poor members talking about how dumb my remarks are, when they should be thanking me for helping them against all those evil secular anti-Mormons :P).
Warning to Moniker: you may get hot reading this.
******
"Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye". - Dr. Julius Erving (I think).
Is secular humanism a fraud? In some ways, it looks like it. In this ramble, I'll address two areas of vulnerability. In subsequent posts, I hope to address more.
We say that certain (or all) religions are fraudulent not because we think that everything they teach is false, but because certain of their most fundamental claims do not withstand scrutiny. These claims fall into one of two categories: the inherently untestable/unfalsifiable (call these IU claims for short), or the already-falsified (call these AF claims).
So, for example, Scientology stakes its claim to be "the one true way" on a story about an extraterrestrial dictator named Xenu who lived 75 million years ago. This is an IU claim; and because it is, there is no reason to believe it. Perhaps we cannot regard this formally as a fraudulent claim (since it is inherently unfalsifiable), but for all intents and purposes, it's in the same category, since we do not - and should not - believe it. Scientology appears very much to not be what it claims, on this point alone (I'll leave aside L. Ron Hubbard's ludicrous claim that barley cures infant colic for the moment).
Mormonism claimed (though increasingly weakly as the evidence piled up) for the first 170 years of its existence that the Native American peoples were the blood descendants of Israelite Book of Mormon peoples. And no wonder, since the supposed blood tie to Israel was a central part of the Book of Mormon's own justification for its existence: e.g., "And then shall the remnant of our seed know concerning us, how that we came out from Jerusalem, and that they are descendants of the Jews" [from II Nephi 30]).
In fact the pre-Columbian peoples of America did not emigrate from Israel and do not descend from Jews. A claim to the contrary, then, is an example of an AF - already-falsified - claim. That alone is good evidence that Mormonism cannot be what it claims to be, "we just need more research!" pleas notwithstanding.
Most of us all will have no trouble recognizing that for whatever good things may have emerged from them, religions like Christianity (and all its variants), Judaism, Moonie-ism, Shintoism, etc., are chock full of IU and AF claims - mere myths, in a word - and so, do not merit belief in their literal truthfulness. And because at some point they all claim to be literally true, it is safe to label them as frauds.
But if we applied the same standards to secular humanism, we would be forced to come to the same conclusion of fraud.
Consider two of secular humanism's most basic claims, articulated always in universal terms, derived straight from the Enlightenment's greatest thinkers and their Greek forebears:
1.) That knowledge leads to happiness.
2.) That knowledge leads to (or "is", in Plato's words) virtue, or moral progress.
First premise first. The now forgotten, but once highly influential Enlightenment thinker Baron D'Holbach, expressed the idea in this way: "the source of man's misery is his ignorance of nature". This is what Dawkins says, faulting religion for perpetuating that ignorance, in "The God Delusion". It's what Harris implies in "The End of Faith". It is a main tenet of secular humanism.
But how can this dogma have persisted? We know more now as a species than we have ever known, yet there is no empirical evidence that we are any happier than our ancestors were. (I doubt there is even any good evidence that, right now, non-religious scientists are overall happier than backwoods creationists). And disconcertingly (to me anyway), there is actually good reason to believe that we may be unhappier than our ancestors
Numerous books in the past few years have summarized a now vast literature attesting to the lack of correlation between knowledge/scientific progress and happiness. One particularly good one is "The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse", by Gregg Easterbrook. Another supposedly good one (I haven't read this one yet) is "Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies" by Yale political scientist by Robert Lane. (Parenthetically, the starting point of Betty Friedan's galvanizing "The Feminine Mystique" was the deep discontent ["the problem that has no name"] felt by modern women). Richard Layard, Jonathan Haidt and Daniel Gilbert have also put out books recently trying to get a handle on happiness (Haidt's is pointedly entitled, "The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom"). Psychologist Barry Schwartz has presented a large amount of evidence in his "The Paradox of Choice" that having fewer choices leads to an increase in feelings of peace and happiness.
To differing extents, all these books chronicle the same pattern: while scientific advances continue to provide us with more and more opportunities for alleviating the physical discomforts and miseries of life - hunger, pain, disability, cold, heat, disease, etc. - there is no detectable corresponding or inevitable increase in human happiness. And what is detectable suggests an inverse relationship between the two. (Bummer.)
Anecdotally, I spent a month last fall at University College London, the UK hotspot for research into psychology and cognitive neuroscience. While I was there, a professor from London's Open University (if I remember right) came to share the results of his research to a few of the UCL profs and their grad students. He was, he admitted, very perplexed by his research results. He and his assistants had examined a large number of people who had suffered debilitating accidents, and yet they could establish no diminution in overall happiness. One man, said the professor, had lost the use of his legs and was consigned to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Yet he said that he was happier than he ever was in his life, and had come to feel grateful that he'd had the accident.
I was junior man there, so I didn't say anything; fortunately, Nigel Harvey, one of the UCL psychologists, piped up and voiced what I was wondering about as an explanation. It seems almost too obvious to mention.
Harvey speculated (to paraphrase) that we see no lasting decrease in happiness after misfortune, and no lasting increase in happiness after good fortune, simply because there is a deeply embedded, automatic emotional scale-adjustment mechanism wired into human brains - that we had something like an emotional homeostatic process. Unexpected, extreme vicissitudes of fortune, like winning a lottery or losing a loved one, will cause short-term disruptions in our emotional equilibrium; but almost immediately, our "frame of emotional reference" or scale will begin to shift, so that in a while, we will feel about the same as we used to. At least in many cases.
Certainly this makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Were our emotional scales not very adjustable, we might be distraught to the point of long-term total debilitation, or to the point of suicide, over the hardships and tragedies of life. But as it happens, human beings can even come to feel a great sense of peace after tragedies like losing a loved one. We go on, sometimes even deeper and richer than before. Conversely, simply knowing more things, or having access to more technological advancements, does not hoist one up yet another notch on the happiness meter.
It might be argued that alcohol and anti-depressant medications constitute evidence in support of the claim that knowledge leads to happiness. Maybe; but it is worth noting that if the Enlightenment/secular humanist claim that increasing knowledge leads to increasing happiness were true, that the explosion of knowledge in the two centuries following Holbach's claim should have left no reason even for the existence of anti-depressants. All six billion of us should have been ecstatically, unspeakably, orgasmically happy - and not worriedly calling Dr. Laura, divorcing spouses because we're so miserable with them, obsessively reading self-help books, visiting psychiatrists and therapists in record numbers, and popping anti-depressants like they were jelly beans.
Against modern claims for the unmitigated good of knowledge, ancient religious and secular folk wisdom recognized that the fruits of knowledge weren't necessarily all sweet. Some were quite bitter. This the point of the Biblical myth of the fall of Adam. It is the point of the myths of Prometheus and Pandora. It is the point of proverbs like "ignorance is bliss", and "there's none truly happy but the village idiot". We ourselves give voice to that same intuition when we remember fondly our own experiences of past innocence.
Secular humanism, the new kid on the block, disputes this view. It asserts in universal terms that progress in knowledge leads to progress in human happiness. The point is that it does so without any support from, and even in contradiction to, a large body of empirical evidence. It is therefore dogma. And from all we can gather, it is false.
This thread is far to wordy for what has been said. Is this just another way of saying that atheism is dogmatic?
I found this definition for secular humanism on answers.com:
An outlook or philosophy that advocates human rather than religious values.
How can advocating human values be a fraud?
I need a better explanation of what is meant by secular humanism in order to understand what is being said here and before I can even began to speak to its fraudulant nature.
One moment in annihilation's waste, one moment, of the well of life to taste- The stars are setting and the caravan starts for the dawn of nothing; Oh, make haste! -Omar Khayaam
Tal Bachman wrote: Consider two of secular humanism's most basic claims, articulated always in universal terms, derived straight from the Enlightenment's greatest thinkers and their Greek forebears:
1.) That knowledge leads to happiness.
2.) That knowledge leads to (or "is", in Plato's words) virtue, or moral progress.
For what it's worth, I have strong secular humanist leanings. I have never once adhered to either of the above claims. My common sense and limited experience tells me that neither is true, as a general law.
I was not aware that being a secular humanist obligated one to adhere to all the arguments/theories of its forbears.
A tenant of my belief is that the human species has within it the capacity to forge its own way, solve its own problems, create its own moral destiny, etc. without the intervention (or presumed intervention) of any divine or otherwise external being. More, that humanity's reluctance to let go of the myth of "God," is impeding its progress toward these ends (though never to be reached in entirety).
I believe this to be generally true, if not true in each specific case.
God . . . "who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, . . . and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him ..."
If would help if you defined secular humanism. There are three general senses of the term I an familiar with. The first, and the one I prefer, is the notion that things are good or bad insofar as they affect humans or things with human-like qualities and this is idea is not based in religion. The second is a reference to the body of people who who refer to themselves as secular humanists and have signed onto to the ideas expressed in the humanist manifesto. Third I realize it is used as a nebulous term by conservative religious groups to refer to a secularist enemy, though they are more likley now to use other terms like "neo-pagan" as secular humanist seems to fallen out of favor to an extent.
None of these three contain the core propositions you are criticizing.