"Design for living"?

[Donn]

No, I mean the opposite. The more secular, the less theistic, the more ethical things become.

 

[Fast Eddie B]

Very true -- by constantly pioneering another theistic* model instead. Why?

Stone

* vital distinction here between theistic, which is personal, vs. religious, which is institutional.

It's been too long since I took Philosophy 101, but where would Hobbs and Hume and Kant fit into this theory?

 

[Stone]

No, I mean the opposite. The more secular, the less theistic, the more ethical things become.

O.K., can you please name specific figures, then, who both introduced nonbelief to their cultures from scratch and also introduced brand new ethical constructs to those cultures at the same time? Can you describe in detail, please, just what they did that demonstrates that they introduced nonbelief to their cultures for the first time and just how they introduced new ethical constructs/ideas at the same time?

Sincere thanks,

Stone

 

[tsig]

O.K., can you please name specific figures, then, who both introduced nonbelief to their cultures from scratch and also introduced brand new ethical constructs to those cultures at the same time? Can you describe in detail, please, just what they did that demonstrates that they introduced nonbelief to their cultures for the first time and just how they introduced new ethical constructs/ideas at the same time?

Sincere thanks,

Stone

Hey, I see wheels on them goalposts.

 

[Bad vibe]

O.K., can you please name specific figures, then, who both introduced nonbelief to their cultures from scratch and also introduced brand new ethical constructs to those cultures at the same time? Can you describe in detail, please, just what they did that demonstrates that they introduced nonbelief to their cultures for the first time and just how they introduced new ethical constructs/ideas at the same time?

Sincere thanks,

Stone

This isn't a logical comparison, you haven't shown any figure taking a culture from non-belief TO belief + new ethics, you simply have ideas credited to a famous individual.

Just because some figure is credited with something doesn't mean they actually did it, there are other reasons for this i.e to legitimise an idea by associating it with a revered figure.

Records simply aren't good enough to define the pattern you claim.

 

[Donn]

O.K., can you please name specific figures, then, who both introduced nonbelief to their cultures from scratch and also introduced brand new ethical constructs to those cultures at the same time? Can you describe in detail, please, just what they did that demonstrates that they introduced nonbelief to their cultures for the first time and just how they introduced new ethical constructs/ideas at the same time?

Yeah, no. You've read my posts. I have been saying, all along, that there is a distributed, multi-person, effort that is dragging the world into an ethical age.

There is no one great name that nicely fits your perceived pattern. But if you loosen your overly-tight focus, you can begin looking at every scientist on the Nobel role, every secular philosopher, modern writers, thinkers, bloggers, youtubers, forumites, there are thousands of non-theists who are lifting the world to better places.

I am saying, and I've said it quite clearly, that we all have ethics built-in and the religious pioneers are no different. It's all the same, non-theistic, ethics.

You need to show why these ethics (say Gautama's) are from god and not from biology.

 

[Stone]

you haven't shown any figure taking a culture from non-belief TO belief + new ethics

Gotama's earliest extant remarks read as a direct pushback against Brhaspati and the Lokayata doctrine, introduced roughly a century before Gotama and already taking on like wildfire before Gotama came along. In fact, implicit turns to explicit when the Lokayata thinker Ajita K. is specifically cited as a counterpart to Gotama in one sermon in the Digha-Nikaya.

Stone

 

[Soapy Sam]

Are you serious? Practically all of it. Did you read it? But here's a representative sample:


"In my 20s, I obtained a Ph.D. in social psychology and began to study morality. I ignored religion in my studies. We don't need religion to be ethical, I thought. And yet, in almost every human society, religion has been intimately tied to ethics. Was that just a coincidence?

It's more probably biology.

In my 30s, I began to study the emotion of "moral elevation." That's the warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you see acts of moral beauty. When you see someone do something kind, loyal, or heroic, you feel uplifted. You can feel yourself becoming a better person -- at least for a few minutes.

Really?

Everyone who has watched an episode of Oprah knows the feeling,

Is this irony?

but there was absolutely no scientific research on this emotion. Studying moral elevation led me to study feelings of awe more generally, and before I knew it, I was trying to understand a whole class of positive emotions in which people feel as though they have somehow escaped from or "transcended" their normal, everyday, often petty self.

I was beginning to see connections between experiences as varied as falling in love, watching a sunset from a hilltop, singing in a church choir, and reading about a virtuous person. In all cases there's a change to the self -- a kind of opening to our higher, nobler possibilities.

The connection is the obvious common hardware- the brain.

As I tried to make sense of the psychology of these "self-transcendent emotions," I began to realize that religions are often quite skilled at producing such feelings. Some use meditation, some use repetitive bowing or circling, some have people sing uplifting songs in unison.

Some religions build awe-inspiring buildings; most tell morally elevating stories. Some traditional shamanic rites even use natural drugs. But every known religion has some sort of rite or procedure for taking people out of their ordinary lives and opening them up to something larger than themselves.

It was almost as if there was an "off" switch for the self, buried deep in our minds, and the world's religions were a thousand different ways of pressing the switch."

That's one way to look at it. The commonality of experience- even experience of hallucination under drugs- is due to the very recent common ancestry of humans. There's nothing mysterious or numinous here. It's genetics, plain and complex.
We might equally view it the other way around- that religion is the tool we use to achieve particular mindstates. It can be achieved more easily with drugs or biofeedback mechanisms. I recall a friend who practised transcendental meditation for a while, but gave it up. When , after some years, she tried a "mindlab"- a late 1980s gadget that pulsed light and sound through a headset, she immediately entered a level of meditation that would previously have taken half an hour of mantra chanting. Brains are all pretty alike. I don't doubt we will develop far more precise ways to generate particular states.

But if brain state and "god creation" are correlated, it's probable that brain state is the critical factor, with the new religious idea being just how that state tends to be expressed in a religious culture.
We don't dream about Cabali-Yau manifolds, because we don't know what the hell they are. We dream about people and angels and gods, which are just imaginary people with knobs on.

 

[Stone]

It's more probably biology.
Really? Is this irony?The connection is the obvious common hardware- the brain.
That's one way to look at it. The commonality of experience- even experience of hallucination under drugs- is due to the very recent common ancestry of humans. There's nothing mysterious or numinous here. It's genetics, plain and complex.
We might equally view it the other way around- that religion is the tool we use to achieve particular mindstates. It can be achieved more easily with drugs or biofeedback mechanisms. I recall a friend who practised transcendental meditation for a while, but gave it up. When , after some years, she tried a "mindlab"- a late 1980s gadget that pulsed light and sound through a headset, she immediately entered a level of meditation that would previously have taken half an hour of mantra chanting. Brains are all pretty alike. I don't doubt we will develop far more precise ways to generate particular states.

But if brain state and "god creation" are correlated, it's probable that brain state is the critical factor, with the new religious idea being just how that state tends to be expressed in a religious culture.
We don't dream about Cabali-Yau manifolds, because we don't know what the hell they are. We dream about people and angels and gods, which are just imaginary people with knobs on.

-- and dream of them while also dreaming up brand-new socio-ethical paradigms that just happen to prove of long-term practical value.......... Hmmm....

I don't fault that much of your reasoning here. I think you are generally on to something -- thank you. I just question whether this explanation sufficiently explains the apparent social benefits as well.

Now I don't view any single one of these socio-ethical paradigms as _the_ ultimate solution to the human condition. Instead, each one is merely an approximation toward some degree of amelioration of a human existence that would otherwise be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short".

I'm just not sure if what you unwrap here takes sufficient account of the apparent social-benefits aspect to this phenomenon of what another poster here has termed the combination of "renovative theism and ground-breaking altruism".

Stone