Irreni Introduction: Religion's Modern Role
Irreni Introduction: Religion's Modern Role
Irreni World Scale
Got religion's modern role? Just as a reminder this blog is about solutions and not punditry.
One blog solution in and of itself is just to educate, to be current with where the religious debate is at in 2018, especially with regards to apologetics.
For an entire decade after 9/11 hundreds of debates between atheists and the religious rehashed the same old tired saw: does god exist? Due to the religious nature of 9/11 a group of atheists, now called "new atheists", took to writing books and engaging public debates admonishing all religion as evil, and in particular Islam.
I'm happy to say we've moved on. I say happy because I always found the debates trivial. Every debate hinges on the same underlying fact: either one accepts the Bible or Qaran as historical and divine or you don't. Everything else is just spilled milk. If you are interested in what happened last decade then you can just search YouTube for "Christopher Hitchens debate" and binge watch god debates until your heart's content.
But, we've moved on.
Below I'm linking to two, hour-long videos between Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris. If you are not aware of these two then these videos are good introductions to their work and thinking.
So what is the debate about if not "does god exist"? The debate now is about "is religion intrinsic."
Jordan Peterson picks up the gauntlet of modern anthropology. We have known for a long time that religion has been a part of every culture ever discovered. This is an argument against the notion of living an atheist life. The argument smacks of religion as a buffet. This is because with this argument it doesn't matter what religion you have, just that you have one, when in fact no religion argues this.
Still though leading Christian apologists (apologists are people who advocate for religion) use this argument. William Lane Craig (link to reasonable faith) is one of the best Christian apologists in the public eye as promoted by Christians themselves. William sites this scientific fact of human cultures having religion as part of Intelligent Design. This argument of Intelligent Design has the benefit of answering the question, "why are atheists moral?" Intelligent Design apologists argue that all humans have religious morality biologically hard-wired in. Interestingly enough this is not what Jordan Peterson argues. He argues that much hackneyed trope that all atheists are murderous, raping, amoral monsters. If someone is not a murderous, raping, amoral monster then they are not atheists but religious. As you can imagine we atheists don't take too kindly to being told we don't know our own minds.
Peterson believes that all moral people are religious people. This is a good introduction to the kind of thinking surrounding Peterson: he redefines words. The common definition of religion requires someone identify with Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. The most important aspect is God or the supernatural. Peterson's idea of the supernatural is that the supernatural is inescapable just like gravity or our biology. Peterson argues evolutionary biology has exposed the supernatural. This is why, from his perspective, there are no atheists.
To whit, Peterson is trying to connect faith and science via something he calls the connective tissue of narrative structures. First thing to note about narrative structures is they are not scientifically justifiable. In other words they are only observable through discussion and reason. The argument goes that humans do not have enough moral capacity in their lifetimes to justify the moral behavior acted out. The moral behavior can only be explained by supernatural narrative structures made manifest by religion. Peterson is performing a reductive analysis on the supernatural, namely belief in god overtly is not needed just adherence to the supernatural narratives. Peterson calls this "walking with god" where god's only role is originator of narrative stories that even atheists adhere too, albeit unconsciously.
Sam Harris wrote a book, "The Moral Landscape", where he promotes a hypothesis to explain why all cultures are religious. The main point is to imagine our well being as the worst possible bad, or hell, that could exist on Earth. Our common morality quest is to constantly have a conversation about improving our well being on a continuum from bad-to-good.
So who's right? Is Peterson right? Do supernatural narrative stories provide a moral substrate that defy any single person's lifetime of being moral? Is Sam Harris right? Do all religions have the same underlying human substrate searching for better well-being? Are these two models mutually exclusive, compatible or somewhat compatible?
Anyway, now you are caught up with modern religious argument. We have moved on from "does god exist" to "is religion intrinsic."
Why? Why is this happening? The answer is straight forward. People are leaving organized religion and churches in droves. The non-affiliated religious are now the largest growing religious demographic in the United States. Gallup and Pew polls have unfortunately chosen to label these unaffiliated as "nones". This is unfortunate because many of these people still believe in God but are disillusioned by archaic religions. Peterson then is tapping into these so called "nones". Peterson is promoting acting on Christian morality, including requiring Biblical marriage, as good enough for government work.
Peterson is selling millions of books and has millions of followers. The same is true for Sam Harris.
I made some comments on these YouTube videos that provide insight into Irreni World Scale solutions.
Given a large population of all humanity much higher than 90% runs an unexamined life and live cradle-to-grave with "I don't know" and "I don't care" then dogma prevails today. As a computer scientist it is common practice to substitute a heuristic for an algorithm for expediency, especially where the domain of inputs are standard. Just run the algorithm that takes enormous time, cache the results, and then used the cached results. One can even detach the algorithm and then simply fail or exception-out when unrecognized inputs don't map to cached results. Until some non-standard input is input the system works as if the algorithm is extant. The problem is when non-standard inputs start to overwhelm standard inputs. This is the problem of religion in a technological era. Historically people following religion who live cradle-to-grave with unexamined interest could rely on tradition and dogma to suffice and more-or-less succeed with standard input. One-man, one-woman marriage was standard input, but homosexuality had no solution and those inputs failed. Homosexuals lived in forced misery for millennium. Marriage for homosexuals could not be addressed. What's needed in a technical era of fast-paced life changes is for people to utilize an ethics algorithm and not a dogmatic tradition. The challenge then is not one of argument about ultimate morality as Peterson and Harris are doing, but one of motivating ethics thinking. We need to motivate the 90% who run a moral system on auto-pilot, dogmatic tradition to be motivated to engage algorithmic ethics. This makes the deeper arguments moot in that most people are still surface ethics thinkers and need to move the next level and not the deepest level. Religion is particularly hostile to algorithmic ethics by the common person and still relies on offloading the algorithm onto a perceived expert: the preacher or priest. We have reached full Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland absurdity in 2018 relying on preachers and priests. The common lay person doesn't molest children and has much better algorithmic ethics than the preacher and priests the religious turn too. Further, the preacher model cannot begin to cope with onslaught of new ethics people are experiencing every day. The pace of technological advancement today is such that in order for a preacher to keep up and function as a source of algorithmic ethics then we'd need many preachers for one person. Many preachers to one person is the exact opposite model of mega-churches of one preacher to thousands of lay people. Religion in its structure then is outdated and that structure further denies quick updates from even taking place. Ergo, religion is dead and humanity needs to find a replacement and fast.
Sam's silver-lining argument of negative, harmful experience provides growth is the fundamental argument of the cycle of empires. The theory is that empires are not so much conquered as they rot from within. This rot has to do with missing silver-lining sacrifice. Parents that sacrificed and worked hard to build an empire invariably coddle their children, spoil their children. These children then are missing the silver-lining growth acquired from hard-work and sacrifice. This rot does not happen in one generation and external threats can reset the cycle. The hard question is this: how does a country like the US prevent internal rot without arbitrarily and capriciously declaring war so as to create sacrificial and hard-work circumstances. When looked through this lens one could look at the rise of Trump era Republicans as some cultural, collective intuition that is inducing sacrifice and hard-work for no reason other than to prevent internal rot. We are self-destructing by going to war internally with each other and externally with rest of the world to offset our internal collapse. Unfortunately the Trump era Republicans have no guidance system, they are essentially lashing out randomly at anyone and everyone, including Canada, without any real strategy or examination except to induce sacrifice and hard-work known as MAGA. This random destruction, I would argue, has almost no chance of succeeding and will likely bring about internal failure faster than the previous pace of internal rot.
The empathy problem applies to Trump and his capability to launch nuclear war. As Stalin said, kill one person it is murder, kill one million it is a statistic. Those of us with functioning modern ethics are horrified by Trump's potential. Those people with classical empathy value of family and tribe only are indifferent to Trump's capability to create not only genocide but planetcide. The risk of planetcide with Trump is unacceptable by not just a little, but orders of magnitude in deaths of people due to Trump's delusional mind. Trump's supporters who are indifferent to Trump's risk are manifest archaic in their empathy.
The three comments are tied together by one underlying thesis:
The challenge then is not one of argument as Peterson and Harris are doing, but one of motivation. We need to motivate the 90% who run a moral system on auto-pilot dogma tradition to be motivated to engage algorithmic ethics.
The strongest argument against Peterson's narrative structure argument is archaic empathy. All religion's share a common trait of empathy being taught for family and tribe sizes. We now live in a world where a single person, Donald Trump, could push the nuclear launch codes and literally destroy millions directly and then subsequently billions based on nuclear war. No religion has moral teachings for this size. Not a single one of them.
Why is answering the question, "Is religion intrinsic?", important? Presumably so that we can all move onto common ground. If we all agree that Peterson is right then we all walk with the Christian god. If Sam Harris is correct then we dump religion and have moral conversations that are constantly updating.
The Irreni World Scale solution does not engage a religious question head on. The Irreni solution is to provide a community for people to act within. Much of what religions provide today is community. Irreni World Scale requires one-hundred percent of all humans to belong to a community, an MGO, which is a group of people of size thirty. People will no longer to be allowed to be isolated. If this sounds oppressive to you then that just means you are a frog boiling in the pots of local, State and Federal government oppression because one-hundred percent of all Americans belong to those governments. You belong to communities of no interaction. The fact that you can ignore what the local, State and Federal governments are doing and that they in turn ignore you is a bug, not a feature. You have no control. That is not necessarily what you want but it is what they want. That's why it is a bug.
Voting is the least they can do outside of doing nothing at all. Irreni World Scale demands everyone being socially engaged in their government. Citizenry requires more than just maybe a few minutes of voting twice per year that we do today. And voting for candidates you don't know and you don't like.
Is religion intrinsic? This is a question of deepest ethics arguing what is moral. We just need practical ethics for our day-to-day lives, more than dogma morals of Biblical scripture that are no longer meaningful. This is why millions of Americans are no longer affiliated with organized religion. One modern solution to updating religion is that Peterson is advocating retaining Christianity as narrative structures of ancient precedence. Sam Harris is advocating we dump religion and have conversations to update morality quickly now. Irreni World Scale is advocating we change the structure of ethic moral making from large sizes of no compromises to immediate sizes of thirty where we can practice what we believe as agreed upon by thirty people. Thirty may still seem a lot of convincing but the size is far more reasonable than Democracy today. Inevitably with Irreni then both Peterson's and Harris' principles will play out.
We need to rebuild our communities first before we update our ethics and morals. That is the Irreni strategy.
Freethinkers unite!
Freedom!
Party On!
Let's get cracking!
Voluntarily Reject Demagoguery!
Politics as Science!
Demand Irreni World Scale!
Anti-theism is feminism!
Think disruption!
Empathy for all!
Moral relativity: think it, breath it!
Prove it or lose it!
Conversations equal consensus!
Welcome to the 21st century!
Scale your empathy, scale the world!
Find your tribe!
Be sexy people!
The future is coming!
Innovate at a rapid pace!
Slow speed ahead!
Well come! and well met!
Irreni World Scale
Got religion's modern role? Just as a reminder this blog is about solutions and not punditry.
One blog solution in and of itself is just to educate, to be current with where the religious debate is at in 2018, especially with regards to apologetics.
For an entire decade after 9/11 hundreds of debates between atheists and the religious rehashed the same old tired saw: does god exist? Due to the religious nature of 9/11 a group of atheists, now called "new atheists", took to writing books and engaging public debates admonishing all religion as evil, and in particular Islam.
I'm happy to say we've moved on. I say happy because I always found the debates trivial. Every debate hinges on the same underlying fact: either one accepts the Bible or Qaran as historical and divine or you don't. Everything else is just spilled milk. If you are interested in what happened last decade then you can just search YouTube for "Christopher Hitchens debate" and binge watch god debates until your heart's content.
But, we've moved on.
Below I'm linking to two, hour-long videos between Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris. If you are not aware of these two then these videos are good introductions to their work and thinking.
So what is the debate about if not "does god exist"? The debate now is about "is religion intrinsic."
Jordan Peterson picks up the gauntlet of modern anthropology. We have known for a long time that religion has been a part of every culture ever discovered. This is an argument against the notion of living an atheist life. The argument smacks of religion as a buffet. This is because with this argument it doesn't matter what religion you have, just that you have one, when in fact no religion argues this.
Still though leading Christian apologists (apologists are people who advocate for religion) use this argument. William Lane Craig (link to reasonable faith) is one of the best Christian apologists in the public eye as promoted by Christians themselves. William sites this scientific fact of human cultures having religion as part of Intelligent Design. This argument of Intelligent Design has the benefit of answering the question, "why are atheists moral?" Intelligent Design apologists argue that all humans have religious morality biologically hard-wired in. Interestingly enough this is not what Jordan Peterson argues. He argues that much hackneyed trope that all atheists are murderous, raping, amoral monsters. If someone is not a murderous, raping, amoral monster then they are not atheists but religious. As you can imagine we atheists don't take too kindly to being told we don't know our own minds.
Peterson believes that all moral people are religious people. This is a good introduction to the kind of thinking surrounding Peterson: he redefines words. The common definition of religion requires someone identify with Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. The most important aspect is God or the supernatural. Peterson's idea of the supernatural is that the supernatural is inescapable just like gravity or our biology. Peterson argues evolutionary biology has exposed the supernatural. This is why, from his perspective, there are no atheists.
To whit, Peterson is trying to connect faith and science via something he calls the connective tissue of narrative structures. First thing to note about narrative structures is they are not scientifically justifiable. In other words they are only observable through discussion and reason. The argument goes that humans do not have enough moral capacity in their lifetimes to justify the moral behavior acted out. The moral behavior can only be explained by supernatural narrative structures made manifest by religion. Peterson is performing a reductive analysis on the supernatural, namely belief in god overtly is not needed just adherence to the supernatural narratives. Peterson calls this "walking with god" where god's only role is originator of narrative stories that even atheists adhere too, albeit unconsciously.
Sam Harris wrote a book, "The Moral Landscape", where he promotes a hypothesis to explain why all cultures are religious. The main point is to imagine our well being as the worst possible bad, or hell, that could exist on Earth. Our common morality quest is to constantly have a conversation about improving our well being on a continuum from bad-to-good.
So who's right? Is Peterson right? Do supernatural narrative stories provide a moral substrate that defy any single person's lifetime of being moral? Is Sam Harris right? Do all religions have the same underlying human substrate searching for better well-being? Are these two models mutually exclusive, compatible or somewhat compatible?
Anyway, now you are caught up with modern religious argument. We have moved on from "does god exist" to "is religion intrinsic."
Why? Why is this happening? The answer is straight forward. People are leaving organized religion and churches in droves. The non-affiliated religious are now the largest growing religious demographic in the United States. Gallup and Pew polls have unfortunately chosen to label these unaffiliated as "nones". This is unfortunate because many of these people still believe in God but are disillusioned by archaic religions. Peterson then is tapping into these so called "nones". Peterson is promoting acting on Christian morality, including requiring Biblical marriage, as good enough for government work.
Peterson is selling millions of books and has millions of followers. The same is true for Sam Harris.
Video 1
Video 2
I made some comments on these YouTube videos that provide insight into Irreni World Scale solutions.
Comment One
Given a large population of all humanity much higher than 90% runs an unexamined life and live cradle-to-grave with "I don't know" and "I don't care" then dogma prevails today. As a computer scientist it is common practice to substitute a heuristic for an algorithm for expediency, especially where the domain of inputs are standard. Just run the algorithm that takes enormous time, cache the results, and then used the cached results. One can even detach the algorithm and then simply fail or exception-out when unrecognized inputs don't map to cached results. Until some non-standard input is input the system works as if the algorithm is extant. The problem is when non-standard inputs start to overwhelm standard inputs. This is the problem of religion in a technological era. Historically people following religion who live cradle-to-grave with unexamined interest could rely on tradition and dogma to suffice and more-or-less succeed with standard input. One-man, one-woman marriage was standard input, but homosexuality had no solution and those inputs failed. Homosexuals lived in forced misery for millennium. Marriage for homosexuals could not be addressed. What's needed in a technical era of fast-paced life changes is for people to utilize an ethics algorithm and not a dogmatic tradition. The challenge then is not one of argument about ultimate morality as Peterson and Harris are doing, but one of motivating ethics thinking. We need to motivate the 90% who run a moral system on auto-pilot, dogmatic tradition to be motivated to engage algorithmic ethics. This makes the deeper arguments moot in that most people are still surface ethics thinkers and need to move the next level and not the deepest level. Religion is particularly hostile to algorithmic ethics by the common person and still relies on offloading the algorithm onto a perceived expert: the preacher or priest. We have reached full Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland absurdity in 2018 relying on preachers and priests. The common lay person doesn't molest children and has much better algorithmic ethics than the preacher and priests the religious turn too. Further, the preacher model cannot begin to cope with onslaught of new ethics people are experiencing every day. The pace of technological advancement today is such that in order for a preacher to keep up and function as a source of algorithmic ethics then we'd need many preachers for one person. Many preachers to one person is the exact opposite model of mega-churches of one preacher to thousands of lay people. Religion in its structure then is outdated and that structure further denies quick updates from even taking place. Ergo, religion is dead and humanity needs to find a replacement and fast.
Comment Two
Sam's silver-lining argument of negative, harmful experience provides growth is the fundamental argument of the cycle of empires. The theory is that empires are not so much conquered as they rot from within. This rot has to do with missing silver-lining sacrifice. Parents that sacrificed and worked hard to build an empire invariably coddle their children, spoil their children. These children then are missing the silver-lining growth acquired from hard-work and sacrifice. This rot does not happen in one generation and external threats can reset the cycle. The hard question is this: how does a country like the US prevent internal rot without arbitrarily and capriciously declaring war so as to create sacrificial and hard-work circumstances. When looked through this lens one could look at the rise of Trump era Republicans as some cultural, collective intuition that is inducing sacrifice and hard-work for no reason other than to prevent internal rot. We are self-destructing by going to war internally with each other and externally with rest of the world to offset our internal collapse. Unfortunately the Trump era Republicans have no guidance system, they are essentially lashing out randomly at anyone and everyone, including Canada, without any real strategy or examination except to induce sacrifice and hard-work known as MAGA. This random destruction, I would argue, has almost no chance of succeeding and will likely bring about internal failure faster than the previous pace of internal rot.
Comment Three
The empathy problem applies to Trump and his capability to launch nuclear war. As Stalin said, kill one person it is murder, kill one million it is a statistic. Those of us with functioning modern ethics are horrified by Trump's potential. Those people with classical empathy value of family and tribe only are indifferent to Trump's capability to create not only genocide but planetcide. The risk of planetcide with Trump is unacceptable by not just a little, but orders of magnitude in deaths of people due to Trump's delusional mind. Trump's supporters who are indifferent to Trump's risk are manifest archaic in their empathy.
Comment Unpacking
The three comments are tied together by one underlying thesis:
The challenge then is not one of argument as Peterson and Harris are doing, but one of motivation. We need to motivate the 90% who run a moral system on auto-pilot dogma tradition to be motivated to engage algorithmic ethics.
The strongest argument against Peterson's narrative structure argument is archaic empathy. All religion's share a common trait of empathy being taught for family and tribe sizes. We now live in a world where a single person, Donald Trump, could push the nuclear launch codes and literally destroy millions directly and then subsequently billions based on nuclear war. No religion has moral teachings for this size. Not a single one of them.
Irreni World Scale Solution
Why is answering the question, "Is religion intrinsic?", important? Presumably so that we can all move onto common ground. If we all agree that Peterson is right then we all walk with the Christian god. If Sam Harris is correct then we dump religion and have moral conversations that are constantly updating.
The Irreni World Scale solution does not engage a religious question head on. The Irreni solution is to provide a community for people to act within. Much of what religions provide today is community. Irreni World Scale requires one-hundred percent of all humans to belong to a community, an MGO, which is a group of people of size thirty. People will no longer to be allowed to be isolated. If this sounds oppressive to you then that just means you are a frog boiling in the pots of local, State and Federal government oppression because one-hundred percent of all Americans belong to those governments. You belong to communities of no interaction. The fact that you can ignore what the local, State and Federal governments are doing and that they in turn ignore you is a bug, not a feature. You have no control. That is not necessarily what you want but it is what they want. That's why it is a bug.
Voting is the least they can do outside of doing nothing at all. Irreni World Scale demands everyone being socially engaged in their government. Citizenry requires more than just maybe a few minutes of voting twice per year that we do today. And voting for candidates you don't know and you don't like.
Is religion intrinsic? This is a question of deepest ethics arguing what is moral. We just need practical ethics for our day-to-day lives, more than dogma morals of Biblical scripture that are no longer meaningful. This is why millions of Americans are no longer affiliated with organized religion. One modern solution to updating religion is that Peterson is advocating retaining Christianity as narrative structures of ancient precedence. Sam Harris is advocating we dump religion and have conversations to update morality quickly now. Irreni World Scale is advocating we change the structure of ethic moral making from large sizes of no compromises to immediate sizes of thirty where we can practice what we believe as agreed upon by thirty people. Thirty may still seem a lot of convincing but the size is far more reasonable than Democracy today. Inevitably with Irreni then both Peterson's and Harris' principles will play out.
We need to rebuild our communities first before we update our ethics and morals. That is the Irreni strategy.
Freethinkers unite!
Freedom!
Party On!
Let's get cracking!
Voluntarily Reject Demagoguery!
Politics as Science!
Demand Irreni World Scale!
Anti-theism is feminism!
Think disruption!
Empathy for all!
Moral relativity: think it, breath it!
Prove it or lose it!
Conversations equal consensus!
Welcome to the 21st century!
Scale your empathy, scale the world!
Find your tribe!
Be sexy people!
The future is coming!
Innovate at a rapid pace!
Slow speed ahead!
Well come! and well met!
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