Religion
Related: About this forumFamous atheists more ‘certain’ than religious extremists: Study
New atheist author Sam Harris emerges from this study as much more "certain" and rigid in his beliefs than religious fundamentalists Glenn Beck and Anne Coulter. UBC social psychologist Ara Norenzayan proves to be much more open-minded.
February 26, 2014. 6:52 pm
Douglas Todd
Who is more rigid in their thinking atheists or religious fundamentalists?
Its often said that Christian, Muslim and other religious fundamentalists are very certain in their beliefs. Another term for this is dogmatic.
Given the ongoing debate between religious people and the new atheists, like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and others, a wise American psychologist has decided to test the levels of certainty of prominent leaders of both camps.
Jonathan Haidt is a moral psychologist and author of the new book, The Righteous Mind. Hes also highly familiar with the excellent research of UBC social psychologist Ara Norenzayan, author of Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict, whose work I have written about over the years. (Ill be exploring his new book soon.)
http://blogs.vancouversun.com/2014/02/26/new-atheists-more-certain-than-fundamentalists-study/
phantom power
(25,966 posts)thereismore
(13,326 posts)And what does it even mean?
rug
(82,333 posts)I'd like to run that program through this room.
Fumesucker
(45,851 posts)When people are telling you things as fundamentally incorrect as the Sun revolves around the Earth it's hard not so say something like "I'm sure you're mistaken".
rug
(82,333 posts)Fumesucker
(45,851 posts)Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You cant explain that. You cant explain why the tide goes in.
After graduating from high school in 1967, O'Reilly attended Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York, his father's choice.[21] While at Marist, O'Reilly played punter in the National Club Football Association[22] and was also a writer for the school's newspaper, The Circle. An honors student, he majored in history.
http://physics.fau.edu/observatory/lightpol-astro.html
Ed Krupp, the director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, had reported that many callers did not want to believe that what they saw when the power was out really was the normal, unpolluted, appearance of the night sky. He has said that "Since so many of us never see a non-light-polluted night sky from one year to the next, a mythology about what the people think a true star-filled sky looks like has emerged."
An example of this from around here in South Florida is that during the night time, clouds are bright white, when in fact they should appear black against a black sky. I am amazed of how many of our visitors seem surprised by that fact, when I tell them it. Try to see a faint nebula, a comet or recognize a constellation against such competition and you'll realize why the first science, astronomy, is slipping away from people's consciousness.
cbayer
(146,218 posts)be.
TygrBright
(20,763 posts)Or even a very big deal.
It's easy to be rigid about facts, I am myself. The sun is bloody hot, and Pluto is bloody cold, and no one will convince me otherwise.
I believe in God, but someone might convince me not to believe in God someday.
Applying words like "dogma" and "rigid" and "certainty" to a discussion of atheism versus belief is just another way of stirring shit and keeping us apart.
Well played.
wearily,
Bright
rug
(82,333 posts)Jim__
(14,082 posts)Let's take a quick look at the type of facts he's dealing with. This is an excerpt from a review in The Nation of his book, The Moral Landscape:
Harris is as narrow in his views as the believers he condemns. Consider his assault on the demon of relativism, which, he declares, leaves us unprepared to face our ignorant tribal adversaries and robs us of the moral resources needed to prevail in the Armageddon against unreason. This conviction stems from a profound ignorance of philosophy. Harris finds it interesting that Sayyid Qutb, Osama bin Ladens favorite thinker, felt that philosophical pragmatism would spell the death of American civilization. Pragmatism causes its devotees to lose the conviction that you can actually be rightabout anything, Harris announces. One can only imagine the astonishment of pragmatists such as William James, who opposed Americas imperial adventures in Cuba and the Philippines, or John Dewey, a staunch defender of progressive education, if told that their inclination to evaluate ideas with respect to their consequences somehow prevented them from holding convictions. For Harris, pragmatism and relativism undermine the capacity to admit that not all cultures are at the same stage of moral development, and to acknowledge our moral superiority to most of the rest of the world. By preventing us from passing judgment on others beliefs, no matter how irrational, religious tolerance has become one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss. Harris treats the recognition of legitimate moral differences as a sign of moral incompetence, and it is this sort of posturing that has cemented the New Atheists reputation for bold iconoclasm.
Harriss argument against relativism is muddled and inconsistent on its own terms, but it is perfectly consistent with the aims of the national security state. It depends on the assumption that Americans (and the West) exist on a higher moral plane than just about anyone else. As a culture, we have clearly outgrown our tolerance for the deliberate torture and murder of innocents, Harris writes in The End of Faith. We would do well to realize that much of the world has not. He dismisses equations of state-sponsored violence (which creates collateral damage) and terrorist violence (which deliberately targets civilians): Any honest witness to current events will realize that there is no moral equivalence between the kind of force civilized democracies project in the world, warts and all, and the internecine violence that is perpetrated by Muslim militants, or indeed by Muslim governments. He asks critics of civilian casualties in the Iraq War to imagine if the situation were reversed, and the Iraqi Republican Guard had invaded Washington. Do they think Iraqis would have taken as great care to spare civilians as the Americans did? We cannot ignore human intentions. Where ethics are concerned, intentions are everything.
One would think that Harriss intentionalism would have him distinguish between the regrettable accidents of collateral damage and the deliberate cruelty of torture. But after invoking a series of fantastic scenarios ranging from the familiar ticking time bomb to demonic killers preparing to asphyxiate 7-year-old American girls, Harris concludes that the larger intentions animating torture can be as noble as those that cause collateral damage: there is no ethical difference between them, he says. Torture, from this bizarrely intentionalist view, is somehow now a form of collateral damage. Both are necessary tactics in a fight to the death against Islamic unreason. When your enemy has no scruples, your own scruples become another weapon in his hand, Harris writes. We cannot let our qualms over collateral damage paralyze us because our enemies know no such qualms. Most treacherous are the qualms of pacifists, whose refusal to fight is really nothing more than a willingness to die, and to let others die, at the pleasure of the worlds thugs. (Reading this passage, one cant help wondering why in 2005 PEN bestowed its Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction upon The End of Faith.) Given the implacable opposition between Islam and Western modernity, it seems certain that collateral damage, of various sorts, will be a part of our future for many years to come. It is the endless war against evil, the wet dream of every armchair combatant from Dick Cheney to Norman Podhoretz.
The only difference is that, unlike those pious gents, Harris dismisses not only Islam but also all the Western monotheisms as dangerously retrograde obstacles to the global civilization we must create if we are to survive. His critique of religion is a stew of sophomoric simplifications: he reduces all belief to a fundamentalist interpretation of sacred texts, projecting his literalism and simple-mindedness onto believers whose faith may foster an epistemology far more subtle than his positivist convictions. Belief in scriptural inerrancy is Harriss only criterion for true religious faith. This eliminates a wide range of religious experience, from pain and guilt to the exaltation of communal worship, the ecstasy of mystical union with the cosmos and the ambivalent coexistence of faith and doubt.
...
There is a lot more at the link.
cbayer
(146,218 posts)then what facts do you think they are dealing in?
Since no one really knows whether there is a god or not, being certain about this either way would appear to be the problem.
It is those on the extremes, those that claim to "know" and are certain, that stir shit and keep us apart.
Those with less certainty are much more likely to be tolerant and accepting of others with less certainty.
Nice to see you again, TB.
TygrBright
(20,763 posts)People in this forum have identified themselves as atheists, and from what they describe of themselves and their beliefs, they are not narrow.
In a larger sense, being certain of a negative is also irrational, but if we start arguing degrees of irrationality, we'll be doing just what those who wish to divide us intend.
peaceably,
Bright
edhopper
(33,597 posts)No.
Did he compare books from Fundamentalist Religious writers?
No.
Useless comparison in a questionable study using words out of context.
I'm certain it's a waste of time.
cbayer
(146,218 posts)I would guess that he chose these particular writers because they are all in the business of selling their brand, but they are interesting choices.
cbayer
(146,218 posts)It looks like he used a valid tool, but I don't see any statistical analysis that would indicate whether the differences are valid or not.
Too much "certainty" is not a good thing, imo. It marginalizes people and makes them look extreme.
The real changes will come from the more moderate, tolerant and less certain.
cbayer
(146,218 posts)It looks like the tool he used may be valid, but how he chose his authors and the specific books is questionable.
And I still don't see anything that would show this to be statistically significant.
And then there is the issue of confirmation bias, which seems to run pretty deep here.
Brettongarcia
(2,262 posts)But that's the genre. You have to overstate things to sell books to a big audience.
Subtlety has a very small audience.
Brettongarcia
(2,262 posts)"Turnabout is fair play"; you "have to fight fire, with fire";"What's good for the goose is good for the gander"; "let's see what it looks like when the shoe is on the other foot."
There is lots of folk wisdom to suggest that when confronting religious extremists - who are so absolutely sure about their own beliefs - it might be best to give them "a taste of their own medicine."
Believers have been coddled for centuries by at worst, veiled criticisms. But those were not effective.
A popular/cliched calumny often addressed to atheists today, is that they themselves are just a new kind of inflexible "fundamentalist." But? Confronted by centuries of adamant, inflexible criticisms and persecution, it seems it is today a good time for atheists to be far more directly confrontational. As counterbalance.
It seems to be a good rhetorical strategy for our own time.
el_bryanto
(11,804 posts)While I do love the Declaration of Independence the concept of self evident truths has always bugged me. A self evident truth is something that is so clearly true in the mind of a person that it can't be denied.
If a truth is so certain in your mind that every honest person must acknowledge it than you have a hard time justifying why people don't accept that self-evident truth. People who don't accept the truth must either have a lack of information that demonstrates the truth (they are ignorant), brains that don't work right (they are stupid/crazy), or they are refusing to accept the truth for personal gain (immorality). You see this crop up in political arguments all the time - someone who doesn't hold the "correct" view is either ignorant, crazy/stupid, or immoral. You see it in people of faith regularly, particularly the more right wing faiths.
You see it at DU regularly as well, of course on all sorts of subjects - it's often enough to acknowledge disagreement, you have to explain how your rhetorical adversary came to be so wrong-headed. Usually by suggesting they are bought off in some way (immoral) or they are "purist" (which I would categorize as claiming your opponents as crazy).
Being certain or "rigid in thinking" is one thing - but being sure that anybody who disagrees with you is ignorant, crazy/stupid, or immoral is another.
Bryant
Brettongarcia
(2,262 posts)As perhaps hinted above, Harris is perhaps not really talking about atheism, or "facts," above.Harris seems a bit dogmatic above ... about subjects like Pragmatism and so forth. But how about atheism as such?
In any case though, there may be some good reasons for Atheists to be rather firm. First 1) to present a rhetorical counterbalance to those dogmatic traditionalists, who think that God himself supports them and underwrites their ideas.
But then too, as hinted by many here: 2) some of atheism is based on Science. Which does in fact seem rather more certain about many things.
To be sure also though, 3) atheism as I personally have come to know it, when it addresses religion, does so more from the background of Social Science: Anthropology, Culture Studies especially. And these fields ... are more properly modest. Rather more like the Humanities. Social Science is not yet entirely exact - and it knows it. It quantifies things as much as it can; but always with the understanding that new findings and approaches must always be considered.
So most people, even atheists, in THIS field at least, are always open to consider new ideas. In fact, all Science demands it; every old idea has to be open to experimental verification. And if negative data shows up? Science is open to dis-confirmation, or partial modification.
So the common clichéd criticism of atheists, is just that; it is just a cliché. One not entirely based on fact. One based only on a few exaggerated or polemical examples.
No doubt 4) it is fun for conservatives to call Atheists "fundamentalists." But... that is mostly just name-calling, and biased "findings."
By the way: 5) Liberals especially like to suggest that Atheists are just like fundamentalists - and that they often were fundamentalists, when they were believers. It is frequently suggested that their mindset is still say, Calvinist or whatever. Finally it is claimed that their criticisms of Christianity apply only to such fundamentalist denominations; not to liberal, "spiritual" Christianity.
But here and elsewhere, many of us are noting problems even with allegedly more "advanced," liberal, spiritual Christianity. Like for example, problems with the Liberal Christian assumption that God is wholly "Good." An assumption effectively challenged by The Problem of Evil.
It's time to systematically put this common insult to rest.