There seems to be little doubt that religion, faith, spirituality or rite can have benefits. The question is how to get the good side of all these (community, meaning, satisfaction and fulfilment) without the nasty side (exclusion and intolerance, resistance to or denial of reality, imposition of impossible standards, the denial of one's own preferences and wants).
Religion has been a major source of soothing and a major source of suffering for all of humanity's past. I think we need to overcome religion and move to a world where each can have their own spirituality - but as long as people follow religions that preach their own unique truthfulness (believe the pope, the Bible, the Quran, the priests, the sutras, ...) we will never get there.
The issues you describe apply to any grouping of people. Tribes have their own truths. Look at how popular those "we believe science is real" signs are.
You could remove religion and we'd still have the same issues. I don't think it's possible to solve them. The best solution is going to be a world where a long, happy life is guaranteed by forces outside man's control. This will likely alleviate a lot of the tribal issues we face as well.
The difference between religion and other groups is that it provides an impenetrable shield to those who wield it, and virtually anything can be deflected a-la
> God's ways are mysterious
fashion. Any differing positions appear as attacks against the person's religion, which - when it carries sufficient argumentative power - can shake the foundations of the person's world model. This, in turn, prevents them from accepting the differing position because such events induce fear and shut down mental faculties, effectively putting a person in a fight or flight mode.
Furthermore, it prevents people from maturing and accepting integral parts of the human condition, such as the permanence of death, it provides a false sense of security that renders people incapacitated from taking meaningful action (God will find a way if God wills it), and finally gives a false sense importance and grandiose to puny humans who live in utter ignorance of their own insignificance in the medium (NB humanity scale) and grand scheme of things.
To reach the solution that you point to, society needs to accept that free-will is an illusion, and that is inherently incompatible with Abrahamic religions.
> The difference between religion and other groups is that it provides an impenetrable shield to those who wield it, and virtually anything can be deflected
Yeah, other groups have this as well. I once had the temerity to observe that Bush did a lot to quell anti-Islamic sentiment by appealing to other people of faith in post-9/11 speeches. I recounted my own experience as a brown guy with a Muslim name living in the south in 2002-2003.
An acquaintance, a young white atheist lady, told me that I needed to “educate myself” about the “damage” that “Islamaphobia does to brown people in America.”
I didn’t even engage further because it was clear I was dealing with someone’s quasi-religious belief.
Everyone has belief systems and everyone’s belief systems necessarily include things taken as axiomatic.
Nah they're just racist. The thing is a white liberal can become a homosexual should they choose to have sex with someone of the same sex. They can even theoretically become trans.
No matter what a white man or woman does or how they feel about attraction or their gender.... He or she will never be brown. Sorry I'm not putting up with this intersectionality shit.
Sure. But if I, a straight man, slept with a man, then I would become a homosexual by definition. Or if I pursued becoming trans. Now it's unlikely I'd do this but theoretically it is part of the set of possible actions..
There is no action a white man or woman can take, not surgery they can pursue, that will make them brown.
If free will doesn't exist, what's the point in arguing with someone predetermined to believe in free will? They have no free will to change their mind!
That assumption lies in ignorance of how our brains work.
The gist is that we have some world model that arises out of the structure of the brain and the chemical state of it.
Your mind doesn’t change because you have free will. Your mind changes because you have collected a sufficient amount of experiences that alter the state and structure of the brain.
You don’t learn stuff because you “decided” I will learn this and that and I will store it in my brain somewhere. All your learning is actually involuntary because as you accumulate experiences, your synapses get positively or negatively reinforced and that causes the learning. You may choose to study something but you don’t choose which exact information gets stored and where. Instead, when trying to recall something your brain probes its world model and tries to find the circuit that triggers the correct response.
So why would anyone argue that free will doesn’t exist? Because it gives people the opportunity to prove their world model, see the inconsistencies, experience new trains of thought and rewrite their brain.
But no person who is not open to the idea will ever get to accept despite mountains of evidence because for most people, the idea of free will is so integral to their world model, that any challenge feels like a threat to their very foundation, which causes cognitive dissonance, and the shut down of executive functions that process information logically.
Our brains have two competing circuits, one that tries to break the mould and challenges everything, and one that tries to be grounded and conservative. Cognitive dissonance occurs when the former is pushing the latter around but the latter has trouble coming to terms with reality and falls in denial.
Let's try another question. How does not believing in free will give you an advantage in life? Studies seem to show that a "growth mindset" is superior to a "fixed mindset", and I would guess a belief in free will tends to correlate more with a "growth mindset".
A strong belief in free-will correlates with an internal locus of control, which enables a "growth mindset", an external locus of control does not enable a growth mindset because the human believes they react to things.
I do have to admit that for a good while, accepting absence was not good for both my mental well-being, or my actions, simply because I could not find meaning or reason to do anything when no choice is ever my own.
Absence of free will however, implies that there is no locus of control at all. Things happen as they will, regardless of what any human believes, and accepting that things just happen and going with the flow is something that many eastern religions advocate for.
The consequence of accepting the absence of free will is that the person can stop dwelling about the past, because they were never in control and could have never done otherwise. The person understands that any action they "take" is conditioned on their brain's current state (ie structural and chemical).
This means that nothing is fixed, the person itself is not fixed in place because the person is a manifestation of the brain's state, which is constantly modified and revised.
This assumption then, even if wrong, enables a much stronger growth mindset, one that doesn't dwell on the past, and doesn't get stuck on misfortunes, or on a false sense of optimism.
By accepting that we lack free will, we "can" then probe our world model to see what makes us happy, ie what utility functions our brain has, which then gives us a compulsion to do things that make us happy or reach goals. This is because we understand that what needs to be done is change our brain's structure such that when the time comes, it will be in the correct state to achieve whatever it wants to achieve, and understands that achieving goals and pushing forward makes the brain happy - even if only momentarily - due to dopamine.
On a larger scale, suddenly inmates are not the evils society makes them to be, but people who have a screwed up brain and that need help, rehabilitation and normalization of their brain and structures so that they too can experience a decent life, and the events that got them imprisoned can not unfold again. Obviously this does not mean that the inmates get thrown back in with the general population (pun not intended), and that is because they are still in a space of states that cause them to be dangerous to other humans.
Agreed, and to add on, incarceration then, is about protecting society from harmful people, not retribution. It makes no sense to say, were going to keep this person in jail for another 10 years because s/he really deserves it. Rather, we can't let them out because it seems likely they will harm other people.
Obviously if you are person who was harmed in some way by this person, it's hard to hear and follow this plan. But as a society, we have to think in a more calm and deliberate manner, and try to make dispassionate decisions.
Further, if in the future, we find a drug for psychopathy, such that we can just give it dangerous people in prisons, and they become rational, healthy people, at that point it makes no sense to keep incarcerating them. Holding the treatment as a further punishment also makes no sense.
There is a point to be made that incarceration does potentially effect other people's drive to do bad things. Certainly their brain can be dissuaded by them seeing huge prison penalties paid for similar crimes they might do. But i'm not sure the correlation is all that high, and i'm not sure it's ethical to use one person to dissuade another. But that is a point that a society would have to decide on.
A treatment for psychopathy could be possible through magic mushrooms as they seem to promote neuroneogenesis, and restructuring of the brain in depressed patients, so that is a very promising angle, and a lot of further research needs to be done on hallucinogenics because they seem to have profound effects on our perception of reality.
With psychopathy, one of the major problems is with the mirror neurons of the brain, their absence prevents the person from being empathetic, so very targeted treatment would be needed, but in the end, it is better than suffering and rotting in prison.
because your mental state is a culmination of some mix of your genes and external influences, both in history and through the world now. If you are around people who consistently present ideas to you, there is a more likelyhood that your brain will accept those beliefs as facts. This is why indoctrination works so well. So just because you don't have free will doesn't mean your position won't change, in fact, it's evidence that it will change.
I don’t see how running real-time experiments invalidates absence of free will and I’d like to discuss this further.
However, I would like to point out that a non deterministic system does not imply a system where the agents have free will. The scales at which QM apply are many orders of magnitude smaller than those of individual neurons and I don’t believe Penrose has reached a meaningful conclusion with his work. And any deterministic system can be simulated as far as we would like and at any point we want, even if it is chaotic, if the initial parameter are the same the outcome is always the same.
I would also like to argue that consciousness, being aware of one’s own actions or probing some world model does not imply free will. This occurs simply because your brain was in such a state to perform such actions. The act of self referencing can be achieved with things even more dumb, like natural numbers, and I can recommend Hofstadter’s work here, like Gödel Escher Bach.
> a long, happy life is guaranteed by forces outside man's control. This will likely alleviate a lot of the tribal issues we face as well.
I suspect it would make it worse. People without a purpose tend to invent tribes and social status to fight for. School kids and prisoners are great examples. Their purpose is basically to passively exist while their physical needs are provided for by the system. Another example is neighborhoods with high unemployment and lots of people living on social welfare.
I think it’s time to recognize that many of the things you list as bad have a purpose as well and benefits. Remember, organized religion developed in harsh societies were people were always struggling to survive. If you think about a village in Bangladesh, where there is no government with unlimited resources to come save you, imposition of strict rules, suppression of individual preferences, etc., makes sense.
> According to the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, 60 years ago just 20 percent of children born to parents with a high-school education or less lived in a single-parent household; now that figure is nearly 70 percent. Among college-educated households, by contrast, the single-parent rate remains less than 10 percent. Since the 1970s, the divorce rate has declined significantly among college-educated couples, while it has risen dramatically among couples with only a high-school education—even as marriage itself has become less common.
If you think about the marshmallow test of impulse control, a lot of us are those kids at the far right of the bell curve who could wait forever for future rewards. But what about everyone else? What if a lot of people need the threat of exclusion or intolerance to, for example, to not walk away from their parental obligations.
My in laws live in rural Oregon, and what’s striking to me is how dysfunctional their communities are. People might putatively religious, but liberalism has won insofar as organized religion has no power to police public morals. And what’s been the result? Not a social libertarian utopia, but dysfunction. My mother in law has teenagers just flocking to her house because it’s an island of stability in a world of mom’s boyfriends coming and going, divorces over trifles, etc.
My dad in the other hand comes from a village in Bangladesh, and they don’t have a fraction of the material comfort of folks in rural America. But what they have is Islam, and tight regulation of social behaviors, intact families, etc. They have social structures that help them make the most of what little they have, which is why I think they thrive when they immigrate to America.
But what do we do if the core factual claims turn out to be false? Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, nothing happens after you die, there is no anthropomorphic super-entity like the biblical god or Allah from Islam, and so on.
If it this turns out to be the case, we can’t just pretend otherwise.
Can we make a better religion that doesn’t depend on false myths?
I don't believe that religion works if it is sold as a series of fables containing practical advice encouraging pro-social behavior (even if that's how it functions). Religion works as myths that are true and make your hair stand up when you read them.
Most Christians have already shed a lot of now-disproven beliefs. Angels aren't literally flying in the sky over our heads. Literal stories get re-interpreted as metaphors or the definitions of words changed. Contradictions get solved by picking whichever one agrees with the culture at the time. And there are a lot of contradictions, so if logic was enough to un-believe a Christian, they would all have become atheists already.
What exactly about secular humanism has caused this social problem? Do you have some research that indicates that walking away from "parental obligations" is in any way influenced by religious belief?
I could make the equal assertion that religion turns men into sexual abusers of children (reference: the Catholic church). Are you comfortable with that?
> What exactly about secular humanism has caused this social problem? Do you have some research that indicates that walking away from "parental obligations" is in any way influenced by religious belief?
Religion (speaking about Christianity here, but Islam is similar) prioritizes marriage and family within the traditional two parent structure. Organized religion provides a framework for pressuring people to confirm to that structure. Secular humanism, by contrast, emphasizes development of the self, and discourages social enforcement of moral norms.
There’s many studies on correlation between religious belief and say fertility rate. There’s also studies showing the correlation between vibrant religious institutions and various positive family formation characteristics. In particular, if you compare geographically and economically similar places, those with healthy religious institutions where people regularly attend church (say certain Dutch parts of Iowa) are socially better off than similar places where the religious institutions aren’t healthy. (Tim Carney has done a lot of research on this.)
To be clear: I’m not saying that religion is the only way to achieve these goals. My thesis is narrower: religion is a social phenomenon that have average people practice healthy behaviors. Educational elites who similarly practice these healthy behaviors (say non-religious but highly educated Asians in California) may not need the support mechanism offered by organized religion. But those same people underestimate or overlook the support networks they may have, or cognitive advantages they may enjoy, which average Americans may lack. (My great grandfather was an imam. My dad didn’t raise us religious, but we had the same moral framework, and our Bangladeshi community enforced the same behavioral standards.)
The reason this is important is the research being done now, for example by Raj Chetty, which shows that single parenthood rates is the single factor most highly correlated with low economic mobility.
> I could make the equal assertion that religion turns men into sexual abusers of children (reference: the Catholic church). Are you comfortable with that?
I think it would be more accurate to say that hierarchical religious organizations make it easier for sexual abusers to hide. And that’s absolutely true.
But that’s not the end of the analysis. Our society has a tendency to focus on injustice to individuals created by social structures, which is admirable. But we are often myopic about the benefits of social structures to the majority.
For example, we focus a lot on abuses within the Mormon community, which undoubtedly exists. But if you go to Utah you can’t help but notice these people have created a thriving civilization in the middle of an inhospitable desert, next to a lake that has no drinkable water. And heavily Mormon areas continue to thrive even as other non-coastal areas, which aren’t full of educational elites, are collapsing.
I think it would be more accurate to say that hierarchical organizations make it easier for sexual abusers to hide, with the Olympics, sports, Hollywood, government, industry, academia stories we hear every week.
This is an interesting and well thought out response but I have a few issues with it:
> Secular humanism, by contrast, emphasizes development of the self, and discourages social enforcement of moral norms
I don't think this statement is true. For example, secular society provides the legal framework that reinforces the social practice of marriage.
> single parenthood rates is the single factor most highly correlated with low economic mobility
Poverty is a much bigger driver behind low economic mobility. Poor people in the west tend to have less stable family structures, it has nothing to do with social norms and everything to do with money.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/44127459
> But we are often myopic about the benefits of social structures to the majority
If this means what I think you are saying (please correct me if I'm wrong) that we should turn a blind eye to the injustices fomented by a big religious institution like the Catholic church, because overall they appear to do more good than harm, I would 100% disagree.
The Mormon example is a bit of a weird one. Utah has a higher GDP per capita but I'm not sure you can ascribe that to religious practices. It might be just because Utah is better farmland than (say) Nevada.
https://countryeconomy.com/countries/usa-states/compare/neva...
> For example, secular society provides the legal framework that reinforces the social practice of marriage.
Huh? The legal framework around marriage as it currently exists in the secular society of USA does exactly opposite. After no-fault divorce became an option, and as legally sanctioned child support system was set in place, incentive to get and stay married became much diminished.
> Poverty is a much bigger driver behind low economic mobility. Poor people in the west tend to have less stable family structures, it has nothing to do with social norms and everything to do with money.
If it was about wealth, the family structures in rural Bangladesh would be complete disaster, as the people there are much, much poorer than what passes as “poverty” in the States. Americans with income at federal poverty threshold enjoy material wealth that most Bangladeshi can only dream of, and that’s before you consider government transfers, which boost real consumption of poor Americans by 25-50% beyond what their wage income would allow them. Nevertheless, families in Bangladesh are strong, and families of poor Americans are highly dysfunctional. Why is it so?
Moreover, most poor Americans are poor precisely because their families are dysfunctional. In America, poverty among people who are married, have not had children before marriage, and who have a full time job (even minimum wage one) is very rare. It’s not poverty that causes dysfunctional families, it’s dysfunctional families that cause poverty.
> Utah has a higher GDP per capita but I'm not sure you can ascribe that to religious practices. It might be just because Utah is better farmland than (say) Nevada.
Given that agriculture contributes less than 1% to Utah GDP, I consider it highly unlikely to be relevant.
No-fault divorce and legally sanctioned child support were put in place to give women more choices. I don't think we need to return to a time where women and children are effectively chattel. The overall effect of these policies has been positive.
There is an untested assertion here that Bangladesh has better outcomes for marriages because the practise of religion is higher. Yet you should also see lower levels of violence against women in Bangladesh from all these happy families but it seems that isn't so. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2740706/
I'm not sure how far we are going to get trying to work out whether the chicken/egg situation regarding dysfunctional families and poverty in the US is causal. All we really know for sure is that poverty is a reliable cause of family breakdown.
We shouldn't force people to stay together because some religious folk think that piling further misery on unhappy people is OK.
> I don't think we need to return to a time where women and children are effectively chattel.
This is very much factually wrong description of the position of women in America before no-fault divorce. In fact, I consider the suggestion that women in America completely lacked agency before 70s to be rather reprehensible.
> Yet you should also see lower levels of violence against women in Bangladesh from all these happy families but it seems that isn't so.
I don’t think anyone argues here that family life in Bangladesh is better than in America in all aspects. Violence against women is obviously bad thing, just as all violence is. It is a good societal goal to reduce violence against any of its members.
At the same time, this is only one of the goals the societies might want to pursue. Often, you might encounter hard trade offs to make. For example, is it better to have a bit more violence, but much fewer children raised by a singe parent? Or, is it better to give the members of the society more choices, at cost of the society failing to choose to procreate, leading to ultimate decay and dissolution of the society in a few generations? One of the problems in the secular society in the US is failure to acknowledge these trade offs, and deciding that more choice of, less violence towards, and more workplace empowerment of women as always preferable at all circumstances.
If anyone thinks it is a straw man, just look at how responses to this comment will claim that I want to enslave women and promote violence towards them, which I of course do not, but the mere suggestion of the trade off existing, and potentiality of choosing something other than liberal women empowerment is an idea completely outside the overton window of secular, liberal discussion within educated, professional community.
I don't quite understand this argument. Are you saying this is all women's fault for wanting to participate in the workforce and leave bad relationships?
Suppose you were a stay at home dad married to a high earning wife. You then meet a new woman you find more attractive. Under most Western countries' laws you can divorce your wife for no reason other than you no longer find her attractive, and she has to pay you alimony and child support to maintain your lifestyle while you're dating your new, hotter partner.
What's the downside to you? Seems there isn't any.
It seems obvious that a system setup like that will increase divorces initiated by stay at home parents, and hence increase single parent households.
So, the no fault divorce system has to be absolutely perfect to be acceptable?
To be honest, I don't see anything wrong in your scenario. People fall out of love for lots of reasons, making them miserable by making it harder to split up doesn't seem like a particularly good solution to me. The scenario you've raised would have to involve a very emotionally shallow individual whom the other partner would be better off without anyway.
This is exactly the kind of refusal of admitting the existence of trade-off I was speaking of. To pursue a noble goal of reducing abuse and violence to zero, other noble goals are sacrificed. This sacrifice, while very real, is not acknowledged, because the narrative claims we can satisfy all of our goals perfectly at the same time. This might even be possible, but, quite apparently, not using the currently proposed approaches. Nevertheless, the narrative rejects the idea of admitting that the current approaches are anything less then perfect, because it would mean admitting the existence of the trade off.
> Of all the factors most predictive of economic mobility in America, one factor clearly stands out in their study: family structure. By their reckoning, when it comes to mobility, “the strongest and most robust predictor is the fraction of children with single parents.” They find that children raised in communities with high percentages of single mothers are significantly less likely to experience absolute and relative mobility.
This likely one of the reasons why Asian kids raised in the bottom 1/5 have a 25% chance of ending up in the top 1/5 as adults, versus 11% for white kids. Asians have by far the lowest rates of single parent families, across the income spectrum.
> Poor people in the west tend to have less stable family structures, it has nothing to do with social norms and everything to do with money. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44127459
Saying it has “everything to do with money” is a pretty remarkable assertion given that the single parenthood gap between classes is growing even as everyone gets richer in absolute terms, and is extremely low in countries that are very poor in absolute terms.
I’m not saying we should turn a blind eye to anything. But we should be cautious about undermining institutions and hierarchies that may be doing more good than harm because we’re only fixated on the harm. And education and cognitive elites should be especially careful not to project their own experiences rest of society.
Chetty also notes that his study can't be used to determine whether single parent families are a cause or an effect. Racial segregation and quality of schooling are also noted as being correlated with lower social mobility in that study.
I object to the notion that there is some acceptable level of violence and abuse we need to tolerate for the dubious good that any institution might claim. There is only one acceptable level of violence and abuse and that is zero.
That's quite a logical leap. Would you care to lay out the exact steps from somebody saying they find violence unacceptable, to asserting that they definitely support state sanctioned violence?
For the state to not tolerate any violence, it must prevent violence among its citizens and from foreign attackers. The only way we have that works is using violence to restrain criminals, or fight against enemy armies. We don't have any perfect safety shield that can protect everyone without harming the attackers, or to prevent people from doing violent acts without physically restraining them (violence).
It's not just this but it's also the lying and attempting to pass off various myths, mysticism, dogma, theology and fairy tales as being true with no evidence, and the promotion of "faith" and "belief" as justifications for doing so. And before someone says it, yes, there are other groups besides religious groups that fall into these same self-reinforcing traps. For example a significant number of people still believe in witches and ghosts: https://news.gallup.com/poll/2380/One-Third-Americans-Believ...
This is one of the pluses, not the minuses. There's nobody out there saying you can achieve the standards. But there are lots of people out there saying you should push yourself in the direction of the standards.
"Impossible standards," for some religions, include things like being happy and fulfilled in a mixed orientation marriage with a large number of children.
Not all directions are worth pushing in, and religion is actually really bad at identifying the good directions.
This is the classical liberal take: ultra-individualism. Everyone can have their own god(s) (even metaphorically) and things will just work out if everyone got along.
Historical trends seem to be going in the exact opposite direction. Individualism is sustainable to a certain point, but not when it becomes the default position of a society. All of the countries, belief systems, and ideologies that are succeeding today are running away from individualism. Whether that’s good or bad, is up to you.
> (exclusion and intolerance, resistance to or denial of reality, imposition of impossible standards, the denial of one's own preferences and wants).
This is true of group affiliation in general, and may be innate to human beings:
> “The human mind,” Klein observes, “is exquisitely tuned to group affiliation and group difference”—so much so that, as soon as an affiliation has formed, the people who have affiliated with one another proceed to define themselves against an out-group. To make matters worse, Klein goes on, human groups compete less for resources than they do for social esteem, and esteem is zero-sum: more for you means less for me. We would rather “win” against the out-group and be worse off than be better off and lose.
> but as long as people follow religions that preach their own unique truthfulness (believe the pope, the Bible, the Quran, the priests, the sutras, ...) we will never get there.
Except that some world views do hew closer to reality than others:
> Occasionalism is a philosophical doctrine about causation which says that created substances cannot be efficient causes of events. Instead, all events are taken to be caused directly by God.
[…]
> The doctrine first reached prominence in the Islamic theological schools of Iraq, especially in Basra. The ninth century theologian Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari argued that there is no Secondary Causation in the created order. The world is sustained and governed through direct intervention of a divine primary causation. As such the world is in a constant state of recreation by God.
> Secondary causation[1][2][3] is the philosophical proposition that all material and corporeal objects, having been created by God with their own intrinsic potentialities, are subsequently empowered to evolve independently in accordance with natural law.[citation needed] […] That the physical universe is consequentially well-ordered, consistent, and knowable subject to human observation and reason, was a primary theme of Scholasticism and further molded into the philosophy of the western tradition by Augustine of Hippo and later by Thomas Aquinas.
> Secondary causation has been suggested as a necessary precursor for scientific inquiry into an established order of natural laws which are not entirely predicated on the changeable whims of a supernatural being.[4] Nor does this create a conflict between science and religion for, given a creator deity, it is not inconsistent with the paradigm of a clockwork universe.
> Religion has been a major source of soothing and a major source of suffering for all of humanity's past
The idea that religion is such a big source of suffering throughout all of our history is one I stopped believing once I took a closer look at the actual nature of war, particulary how a country's elite is moving closer to war and how "religious" said elite actually is.
IMO the amounts of blood shed over millenia would have been the same under atheists.
And because today most of us are Atheists/Agnostics, and because most of these millenias' rulers weren't, it is our "agnostic hindsight" which follies us into believing that this suffering was all just caused by religion.
To be fair, the good things that happened in the past might also have been the same under atheists.
The thing that's puzzling to me is that religion is supposed to have such a profound effect on society, but is utterly innocent of involvement in anything bad that happens. Granted it's very hard to pin historical events on specific root causes.
Yep, war has always been about resources and the fights of the elites. Religion is only ever an excuse, just like WMDs or whatever; a convenient lie to mislead the populous into believing there's a legitimate casus belli.
You've posted a ton of flamewar comments to this thread—not just religious flamewar but nationalistic flamewar too. This is badly breaking the site guidelines and we ban such accounts.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. And please, no more flamewar comments of any kind and certainly not these kinds!
> Look at the intolerance and hypocrisy in France, one of the most secular states. A girl is not allowed to go to school with the Muslim head scarf. This is worse than the Taliban.
Tolerance of intolerance is a difficult topic, of course. Should France tolerate intolerance?
> France allows insulting the Prophet (pbuh), but you'll get to jail for insulting the president.
The Prophet is dead but the French president is alive. Even if you have laws promoting a mutually polite society, they don't apply to the dead (any more than for example property rights do -- the dead can't own things either).
> Should France tolerate intolerance?
How is voluntarily wearing the head scarf "intolerance".
>the French president is alive.
So what? It's still within my "Freedom of Speech" to say whatever I want, as long as it does not directly incite violence. Regardless of whatever Frances' convenient version is. I believe even the US allows insulting the president.
> How is voluntarily wearing the head scarf "intolerance".
"Voluntarily", sure.
> So what? It's still within my "Freedom of Speech" to say whatever I want, as long as it does not directly incite violence.
Whatever the court says to be within your rights is the thing that is within your rights. It's the courts that interpret law. Are you a court? Specifically, if you're in France, are you a French court?
There are many who want to voluntarily wear hijab to school in France, but are denied this right. So, my point stands that this "secular" law is intolerant.
>Whatever the court says to be within your rights
Weak argument. Let's say an extremist court says women have no right to education. Or, that blacks are less human, say the have less rights.
I still don't see the hypocrisy you speak of, though. France is a reasonably religious country overall but extremely secular when it comes to school and politics. The edicts you describe simply enforce these principles (e.g. "No religious symbols allowed in school, be it a cross, a star of David, a hijab, etc...").
I guess you could say they are intolerant of all religions, but that's a stretch.
The bottom line is that all displays of religion are banned in French schools, which puts everyone on an equal footing. Even religious people should see the value of that, especially if you're part of a minority religion.
Schools are places where you learn, not practice religion. That's what places of worship are for.
> I guess you could say they are intolerant of all religions
Yes, intolerant. But also hypocritical (see the Macron's hypocrisy of free speech).
> which puts everyone on an equal footing
It does not. Some religions mandate certain attire. And certain religions / atheism does not. So, it is not fair for a student to be denied practicing his/her religion, if his/her religion mandates the head scarf. While an atheist has no worry, since he/she has not religous command to wear a certain attire.
> Schools are places where you learn, not practice religion
Who is any person or government to dictate this to me? If I want to voluntarily do something peaceful, I should be able to. What's next, "homes are for living, not religion".
> Who is any person or government to dictate this to me?
Nobody is forcing anyone to attend public school. Send your kids to a private school if you want.
But if you want to benefit from what public schools have to offer, you have to abide by their rules. And one of them is that expression of religion is banned there.
In much the same way that a guest to your house would have to abide by your rules.
> But if you want to benefit from what public schools have to offer, you have to abide by their rules. And one of them is that expression of religion is banned there.
Not in the USA. In this country it's constitutionally protected.
Religion has been a major source of soothing and a major source of suffering for all of humanity's past. I think we need to overcome religion and move to a world where each can have their own spirituality - but as long as people follow religions that preach their own unique truthfulness (believe the pope, the Bible, the Quran, the priests, the sutras, ...) we will never get there.