Sariaki
Kamli Dha Dhola
Bulleh Shah- Hadiqa Kiani
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Kamli Dha Dhola
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Has science made religion useless?
- Science and religion (fact versus faith) are often seen as two incongruous groups. When you consider the purpose of each and the questions that they seek to answer, the comparison becomes less black and white.
- This video features religious scholars, a primatologist, a neuroendocrinologist, a comedian, and other brilliant minds considering, among other things, the evolutionary function that religion serves, the power of symbols, and the human need to learn, explore, and know the world around us so that it becomes a less scary place.
- “I think most people are actually kind of comfortable with the idea that science is a reliable way to learn about nature, but it’s not the whole story and there’s a place also for religion, for faith, for theology, for philosophy,” says Francis Collins, American geneticist and director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). “But that harmony perspective doesn’t get as much attention. Nobody is as interested in harmony as they are in conflict.”
FRANS DE WAAL: Well, religion is an interesting topic because religion is universal. All human societies believe in the supernatural. All human societies have a religion one way or another.
REZA ASLAN: Religion has been a part of the human experience from the beginning. In fact, we can trace the origin of religious experience to before homo sapiens. We can trace it with some measure of confidence to Neanderthals. We can measure it with a little less confidence all the way to homo erectus. So we’re talking hundreds of thousands of years before our species even existed.
ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Essentially there has been no culture on Earth that has not invented some form of what could be termed meta-magical thinking, attributing things that cannot be seen, faith-based belief systems, things of that sort. It’s universal.
ASLAN: Religious thinking is embedded in our cognitive processes. It is a mode of knowing. We’re born with it. It’s part of our DNA. The question then becomes why. There must be some evolutionary reason for it. There must be a reason, some adaptive advantage to having religious experience or faith experience. Otherwise it wouldn’t exist.
SAPOLSKY: It makes perfect sense why they’ve evolved because they’re wonderful mechanisms for reducing stress. It is an awful, terrifying world out there where bad things happen and we’re all going to die eventually. And believing that there is something, someone responsible for it at least gives some stress reducing attributes built around understanding causality.
posted by f.sheikh
Is Economic Inequality Really a Problem?By Samuel Scheffler
Professor Frankfurt argued that it does not matter whether some people have less than others. What matters is that some people do not have enough. They lack adequate income, have little or no wealth and do not enjoy decent housing, health care or education. If even the worst-off people had enough resources to lead good and fulfilling lives, then the fact that others had still greater resources would not be troubling.
When some people don’t have enough and others have vastly more than they need, it is easy to conclude that the problem is one of inequality. But this, according to Professor Frankfurt, is a mistake. The problem isn’t inequality as such. It’s the poverty and deprivation suffered by those who have least.
Professor Frankfurt’s essay didn’t persuade all his fellow philosophers, many of whom remained egalitarians. But his challenge continued to resonate and, in 2015,even as concerns about economic inequality were growing in many corners of society, he published a short book in which he reaffirmed his position.
And Professor Frankfurt, it seems, has a point. Those in the top 10 percent of America’s economic distribution are in a very comfortable position. Those in the top 1 percent are in an even more comfortable position than those in the other 9 percent. But few people find this kind of inequality troubling. Inequality bothers us most, it seems, only when some are very rich and others are very poor.
Even when the worst-off people are very poor, moreover, it wouldn’t be an improvement to reduce everyone else to their level. Equality would then prevail, but equal misery is hardly an ideal worth striving for.
So perhaps we shouldn’t object to economic inequality as such. Instead, we should just try to improve the position of those who have least. We should work to eliminate poverty, hunger, bad schools, substandard housing and inadequate medical care. But we shouldn’t make the elimination of inequality our aim.
Is this the correct conclusion? I think not. Economic inequality matters a great deal whether or not it matters “as such.”
posted by f.sheikh
Preliminary theory of in-Group contrarian-by Geoff Shullenberger
We can now return to the concept of the In-Group Contrarian (hereafter IGC). Anyone who has observed social media platforms, especially Twitter, will know the type. This is the person who, precisely when mimetic snowballing is in progress, attempts to apply the brakes. What’s important is that this figure is not simply an outsider to the group, in which case they could probably be ignored, but instead claims to share the group’s goals, beliefs, etc and merely objects to some aspect of this manifestation of them. The appearance of this figure is as predictable as the mimetic snowballing itself.
Of course, the majority of IGCs are low-follower anonymous accounts, and can be simply ignored. But a few IGCs already have, or gain, a certain reputation and a following (more on that in a minute), and become harder to ignore. The reaction to these high-profile IGCs differs from the response to an ideological opponent (out-group member). The latter’s criticisms of one’s group can usually be dismissed. Often, in contrast, the IGC must not just be dismissed, but destroyed. In fact, many in-groups seem to dedicate more time and energy to attacking the IGCs attached to their group than they do to attacking their straight-up enemies. In fact, hatred of the IGC can become one of the main things that binds the in-group together.
This would be a version of the scapegoat effect, central to how Girard modifies Durkheim’s theory of collective effervescence. For Girard, groups only truly coalesce by expelling, or sacrificing, a group member. It is in the act of violent unity against this “surrogate victim” that the group’s collective identity reaches its apotheosis. That’s because whatever antagonisms exist within the group are displaced onto the designated scapegoat. The repudiation of the IGC represents an incomplete version of this operation, because usually s/he never goes away, because the in-group itself can’t fully expel him or her. That’s partly, I would argue, because on some level it doesn’t want to.
It’s easy to observe that the IGC, rather than simply being cast out, often becomes a persistent object of perverse fascination for the in-group. Here too Girard is helpful. The IGC’s objections function as an obstacle to the fulfillment of desire for collective effervescence and self-affirmation in the group. In this way, he or she functions as a skandalon or “stumbling-block,” a term Girard takes from the Bible.
But the relation to the skandalon is more complex than it seems, because it is never simply an obstacle, but an obstacle to which we return again and again, as if addicted to it. We see this when in-group members obsess over and fixate on the IGC. Why? To restate a prior point, if my desire is mimetic, it comes from observing others. I copy my desire from the large mass of similar people I observe engaging in herding behavior together. But then, the IGC transmits a counter-signal that blocks the full movement of desire. As a result, my desire, and the sense of being I obtain from group belonging, is placed in question. The IGC becomes an object of fascination because of the power he or she is capable of exerting on me by attenuating the fulfillment of my desire. But this, in turn, makes the IGC into another potential model – a prospect that throws my sense of self into crisis.
There are two possible results when this has occurred. One, the most numerically likely, is that I remain fully attached to the group, but must periodically, ritualistically cast out the IGC (in sync with the rest of the group) – an act that both conceals and reveals his/her enigmatic effect on me. But in a certain percentage of cases, the IGC will show my desire a different path, and I will follow it. In this way, the IGC can peel off certain in-group members and push them to the outer boundaries of the group. These IGC hangers-on become mimetically attached to the group’s fringe, rather than its orthodox core.
posted by f.sheikh