Friday 29th of March 2024

religion is not like sex...

feather

Jonathan Freedland is a babe... I mean he is a youngster. A young kid in an old lollypop shop. He traipse the already trodden path of why religion is blah blah blah... This was sorted out a long time ago in the "age of enlightenment" by mighty brainiac philosophers, including David Hume... 

But this enlightened solution is still uncomfortable for many people because they have difficulty giving up the irrationality of beliefs and the comfort of easy habit... We're addicted. 

Presently in a ditch to renew beliefs, science is being highjacked by the religious mob, including Pope Francis, like the Roman mythology was absorbed into the Sistine chapel ceiling. Nothing wrong with the Pope starting to accept sciences a bit more than the Church during the inquisition, but sciences cannot become slave to or be modified by religious beliefs, as attempted by many religious nuts, especially the creationists.

The scientists need to be aware, but they can accept that the Pope is doing a better marketing job at selling their wares than they have done so far, on some quite unpopular fronts...

So Jonathan believes religion is like sex? Rubbish. I would believe he is stirring the stupid concept to get attention but if he is not he is an idiot.

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Over the years, conversations with Jews, Catholics and Muslims have taught me that when it comes to religion, belief is often optional. For many, it’s about belonging and community, a matter of ethnic or familial solidarity rather than theological creed. For increasing numbers of Anglicans, it works that way too. Singing hymns in church is a comfort, reminding them of their childhood or their parents, and leaving them with a glow of warmth towards neighbours they might otherwise never meet.

The counter-arguments are familiar, but strike me as ever weaker. Isn’t religion inherently conservative? Listen to the pope demanding radical action to save the climate or denouncing the death penalty: some conservative. Isn’t faith parochial and narrow, ensuring one tribe stays only with its own, never mixing with others? Logic says it should be, yet experience suggests people with strong roots in their own communities are better able to understand and relate to one another than people who stand outside.

And lastly, there’s the central objection: isn’t religion irrational? This is the Book of Mormon question. To which the most direct answer is yes, it is irrational. It cannot be explained or justified in the clear, stainless-steel language of pure reason. Some of it is absurd and bizarre. But you might as well ask a man why he supports this football team rather than that one. Ask a woman why she loves this man rather than that one. Reason is what separates us from the animals. But it does not account for all that makes us human.

read more http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/25/religion-sex-pope-francis-us

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Reason separates us from the animals? Not really. We're animals. Humans are animals in search of new tricks to corner the belief market to plug our natural deficiencies. A lot of what we think to be reasonable is actually wrong and could lead us to perdition in a natural environment.

Religion is nothing like sex. Sex is a natural desire that we manage with stylistic, social and individual, restrictions. Religion is a stylistic delusion that we use to impose restrictions on thoughts, including sexual desires. Humans invented god. Humans did not invent sex. Sex is not irrational. Our stylistic manipulation of sex becomes relatively mismanaged and irrational should we involve religious beliefs in it or become obsessed beyond our safe social interactions.

So, Jonathan was told that "belief is optional" in religious circles where happy slappy singing is the aim of the game. Go and tell this to the rabid evangelicals who go in raptures when visited by the spirit of Donald Trump...

NO. Supporting a football team is not like believing in god, though there is a mass market appeal being massaged in both propositions. What makes us humans is our 99 per cent reactivity to events, a habit we have learned since being a child to become somewhat reactionary. One per cent (more or less) is left to us to manage cold and this can be frightful. It's where creativity lurks and imagination comes in. It can be a dark and risky place if we don't understand it, but it is exhilarating because it is not "understood" due to uncertainty. Animals like birds, have uncertainties and make stylistic choices as well, such as birds choosing a flight path.

Humans, unlike other animals do not have firm natural certainty in our own species' evolution. This is what gives us our motivation in seeking improvements to whom we are. But improvements are difficult for most people, so some of us seek refuge in beliefs — more often than not because we are told to believe is the safest place for the group and for individuals.

Like humans, other species have sex, but they do not have religion which is a grand form of self-deceit. Other species do not have this need for self-deceit, except they often need to deceive other species into become prey. There is uncertainty in a spider catching insects with a web, but the odds are the spider will catch something.  We use self-deceit to survive in uncertainty. We catch ourselves... We transform the uncertainty into stylistic demands and eventually these modify into physical addictions (and vice versa) by not being able to manage our own deceit... 

But in the long run, we need to acquire, like all other life forms, proteins, sugars and lipids.

And like all other life-forms our individual life-span is limited. We have to accept this.

Unlike ants, our social building is spiralling with "improvements", and there are many stylistic views on to what constitute an improvement in which we all are more likely to be asked to behave like ants... Work hard, eat, sleep, shit and procreate more ants... Not a good look on the creativity aspect of our glorious uncertainty, which we can also minimise by being part of small select group of the circumcised... There, I suppose, sex and religious beliefs meet the flesh in a stupid way.

Religion is not like sex... Sex is natural. Religion is the denaturation of who we are.

Note: the picture at top is of a Lorrikeet feather. It is a construct of evolution in which a level of perfected construct has achieved protection against cold with fluff and beauty (recognition of species) via moires of colours.

 

the power of habits...

So it is we perform our ablutions in a rigid sequence - we put on our garments in the same order, we make breakfast by rote, we fold the toilet paper in an origami of our own ancient design - and naturally, we go to work, or to school, at the same time each day, employing the same means of transport. The more you reflect on the matter the more it becomes obvious.
The vast majority of people live lives of quiet systematisation, wherein an myriad of tics, gestures, routines, pastimes, methods and hobbies, are nested inside an equally myriad number of clubs, organisations, groups, societies, firms, companies, armed services, nation states and other institutions, all of which provide us with timetables listing events subject to near-eternal recurrence. Such is our addiction to our habits that on occasion one of them will become pathological - when this happens we somewhat confusingly call it "addiction".
No doubt addictions to alcohol, drugs, sex, overeating and social media can be highly detrimental to our lives and the lives of those around us, but it seems a little rich to demonise them so utterly while other equally mindless and repetitive behaviours escape censure altogether. Far from being adjured to address our habit of buying useless consumer goods which have built-in obsolescence, we're positively enjoined to keep calm and carry more shopping if we want the economy to grow.
Neither is there a government campaign aimed at persuading people whose jobs are at once utterly useless and soul-destroying to stay at home until we can come up with something better for them to do.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34335941

birdy...

birdy

Lorikeets are very social birds. They all look the same but they have different character traits depending on age, pecking order, gender and education. Humans are a disparate lot. Apart from rare occasions, our physical characteristics are different in appearance, and our behaviour is an individual mix of complex reactivity and imagination. Beliefs are stupid.