I have not read the book he read, but I did grow up in a similar environment (and lived in the same Meah Shaarim neighbourhood for a few years), I think part of the issue is semantics.
He conflates modernity and progressiveness, while the book sees both progressives and reactionaries as modern. Hassidim are both modern and reactionary.
Thanks so much for putting this on here. I have read Auslander's "Foreskin's Lament" and could deeply identify with his critique and eventual rejection of so-called "modern Judaism" (indeed - an oxymoron).
I come from a non-religious Jewish family, but I too was circumcised without being asked at 8 days old (which today makes me resent my parents), I too recited the Torah in a synagogue on my Bar-Mitsva, though I was not really forced to, it was just something everybody did.
Today I live far away from this God-forsaken place called Israel with its ridiculous religious laws, its racism, its recursively fractured society (the more devout you are, the smaller your "community"), its cancerous infiltration of institutional religion into government, its sick obsession with death and martyrdom, its stupid veneration of men-with-yarmulkas, and its infantile particularism.
Today I reject Judaism as an ethnic identity and as a philosophy. For me being Jewish is a biographical detail. It does not define me as a person, it is not who am. I enjoy Jewish humour as much as anyone and embrace my father's painful experiences during WWII, but it cannot mean that I'm better or more important than someone who's not a jew.
I am grateful for having escaped this Jewish reality distortion field. I'm grateful for being able to live and raise my kids in an egalitarian society that transcends ethnic and or religious origins and instead embraces solidarity and rationality, indeed modernity.
Not so sure about it. Religions tell a compelling story for multiple other reasons.
Maybe it could happen if some of these roles were expanded by the media as it seems to be an ongoing process, e.g. superheroes movies. I am not sure if that would be desirable though.
I only have my (and my brothers) anecdotal experience: We weren't baptised, nobody ever pushed or even talked religion with us, we went to church with grandma a couple times a year, and lived in a regular Catholic country (Italy).
I recall the first time I thought about God and afterlife and my spirituality I was around 14, old enough to entertain these kind of thoughts, and old enough not to care. God wasn't just a concept I felt I needed in my life.
We're 3 brothers (and a sister), and only she wanted to be baptised when we was younger, around 8, because her grandmother (which wasn't MY grandmother) was somewhat religious, and often talked about it with her. Now she's 12, and she's not interested anymore, probably after the influence of the three older brothers who go through life without any consideration about spirituality.
Again, this is just a N=4 experience, but living in Europe, where most modern families are not religious anymore, it's most apparent. Only one person in my 50 closest acquaintances believes in God, and goes to church. Yet everybody is baptised, all families have a crucifix in the house, and everybody goes through a couple months reading the Bible with their priest (catechism) when they're 10 or 11 years old. I doubt many of their sons and grandsons will find any interest in religion.
Of course some percentage will seek religion on their own.
But the main point of that fathomless hypothesis is that, on the scale of humanity, today's religion would fall back to old traditions initiated in a previous era and now only followed by factions of lunatics.
Interestingly the same is true of secular indoctrination. Christianity has resurfaced and flourished in Russia and Eastern Europe in the wake of the Soviet Union.
Well, let me rephrase more accurately then: 'then religions would gradually be forgotten as more and more endoctrined people die without passing their religious doctrine to their children'.
Is this supposed be an argument for infantile religions indoctrination? "If we didn't cram this down the throats of captive audiences with undeveloped critical thinking skills, no one would believe it!". There's a popular meme going around describing the correct reaction to such a claim: "Then perish".
I fully agree on what you said.
But the question is, as always, about proportions and statistics: how many people adhere to a religion today because their parent told them they would go to hell otherwise, versus how many choosed actively by seeking a spiritual answers in questions not answered by science?
I'm not convinced that folks would defer to new religions to address those questions.
I don't have data to support it, but I think the modern mind is better equipped to accept uncertainty and ignorance these days so some might just allow those questions to remain presently unanswered.
Even if the scientific method doesn't directly answer a question, it models the approach of using a placeholder for things not yet known rather than demanding someone make shit up to eliminate the unknown.
"Today I reject Judaism as an ethnic identity and as a philosophy. For me being Jewish is a biographical detail."
That attitude really should be held by all people of all ethnicities.
But the fact that you "resent your parents" because they chose to follow an ancient cultural practice that is colloquially thought to be harmless seems melodramatic. You shouldn't resent them. Resent the practice itself perhaps.
I think some people still need this attitude. For instance if their ethnic culture or heritage is undergoing a process of repression and erasure. Like say the Kurds in Turkey or the Rohingya in Myanmar. And there are still groups who experience this in the west, like black or indigenous people.
Rejecting your roots creates a void that must be filled with other ideas or addictions. Alas, in the US there are many Jews who believe in socialism. Hostility to what was rejected is natural, so it's not surprising that you hate Israel so much.
For most of the Jews outside of the US this outlook would seem strange. I think you may become a happier person if you escape your new "reality distortion field" and stop hating this inherent part of you and your family.
This is reactionary nonsense. In no sense is any culturally transmitted system of metaphysics "inherently part of you", any more than driving on the right- or left-hand side of the road is "inherently part of you".
>For me being Jewish is a biographical detail. It does not define me as a person, it is not who am. I enjoy Jewish humour as much as anyone and embrace my father's painful experiences during WWII, but it cannot mean that I'm better or more important than someone who's not a jew.
Well, that's what being Jewish -- in a modern sense -- sounds like to me. The parts that you embrace are what define being Jewish as an ethnic identity.
At least that's how I think of myself, being jewish-like-Feynman, not jewish-like-whoever-goes-to-synagogues. But again, I don't know what you are revolting against; nobody in my family has been religious since 1917 (my great-grandmother used to tell me she was brought up a "Pioneer"[1] in a figurative sense) - and I only had to part with my adenoids as a kid.
I like this discussion from a "modern" perspective. I think there are three not-modern things and in my opinion it's quite clear how to handle them.
1) There's the thing that survived modern trends and still exists. That is a useful thing, a kind of truth that has been found and embodied in this thing. People should learn about it, no matter if it's 10 months old or 1000 years. Language is such a thing, forks are such a thing, Vim is such a thing. If you don't use this thing you are bound to rediscover it under a different name. E.g. Unix attempted to be the platform neutral programming environment, then some people forgot about it. So they developed Java as platform independent programming environment. Now if you look at both, you find a lot of great things, but they are similar. And you also find that both have not fully succeeded in their goal of being platform independent.
2) There are emotional attached things. They are objectively viewed not really valuable anymore, but people get sentimental about them. This is an individual experience and therefore must also be an individual decision to use or not use. E.g. old tv shows with mediocre ratings. You might like it or not like, but another person can feel different because they have/haven't seen it in their childhood. The correct approach is to let each do their own thing in this area.
3) There are old things that haven't survived the connection to modern things. Strict hierarchical organisations for instance. A more flexible, democratic organisation usually ends up beating a strict competitor. That's why we now have republics, federations etc instead of kingdoms. You should stay away from them and not support anybody who attempts that. People try to sell this as sentimental with words like "in the past everything was better". Screw it. We don't live in the past, we live now. And if it would really be that good this thing would still be there.
Sadly we have a lot of discussions in society if obvious category 3 things might actually be category 1 for some abstract reasons. It's unnecessary to discuss. Communism is dead. Faschism is dead. Islamic Traditionalism is dead. Get off these horses.
Instead we should discuss category 1 things that are interesting from a modern perspective. For instance in school we learn that slavery is dead, but if you learn and learn and learn about the global economy you find there is still an awful lot of slavery out there. Women get cought and sold, or forcefully married. Children are used for 16h/day jobs without any pay. Prostitution itself only has a very small minority of really free participants. How the fuck can something like slavery survive? What is actually good about it? This kind of thing would be an interesting discussion in my eyes, because there is some value there to be learned about our morals and reality. Talking about if dead horses are really dead is a waste of time tho.
I think "modern" perspectives are also being attacked from a progressive perspective. Freedom of speech, for instance, is losing its appeal as different groups see speech itself as despicable and on par with physical misbehavior. I guess you could group that into your #2, but in a future-looking perspective, towards some sort of utopia where everyone has pleasant thoughts and words.
Not going to defend Hasidism, but this article was pure contempt.
As CS Lewis would call it, chronological snobbery:
> Barfield never made me an Anthroposophist, but his counterattacks destroyed forever two elements in my own thought. In the first place he made short work of what I have called my “chronological snobbery,” the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also “a period,” and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.
Contempt is sometimes warranted. If the descriptions in the article are accurate (from the spitting to the running over with a car), contempt is absolutely the appropriate response and the kind of temporal relativism that denies that is wrong.
It may be warranted, but it is not productive. If you really want change, you need to understand the reasons behind people's culture and actions, and have an open dialogue about those reasons.
Agreed. If we think conversation and reason do not solve problems, we have, to some degree given up on democracy based on universal suffrage.
If we think we can't reason with people, we start thinking elections are illegitimate. After all, if people are that unreasonable and easily to manipulate, elections are only about who is lucky and has better psychological tricks on their side.
If you think the CS Lewis quote is relevant at all, show how
> the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age
and/or
> the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited
apply here. Not accepting a straw man isn't refusing dialogue, to the contrary.
> If you really want change, you need to understand the reasons behind people's culture and actions
How was that applied to, say, the end of segregation in the US? Why is the perspective of the people who get mistreated suddenly not sufficient? Instead of comforting abusers primarily with victims just a statistic, I'd say comfort and protect the victims, and let abusers find their own way, or no way. If they can change, fine, if they can't, that's also fine.
You can, and often must, understand the reasons behind people's actions while still condemning them - but you should condemn the actions, not the people.
Which is preferable to you. That those people be punished appropriately for their actions but continue to believe that they were justified; or that those people are genuinely persuaded they were wrong, repudiate their former beliefs and actions and work to undo the damage.
Personally I believe in both, where criminality is concerned. Appropriate sanctions and rehabilitation are the ideal. For non-criminal prejudice and discrimination, I think the latter is perfectly acceptable.
As with any other bad thing people do, our response should include compassion and understanding - but it should also include clear condemnation. Sometimes telling people bluntly that their culture and actions are wrong and unacceptable in this day and age is the productive line, e.g. the Pitcairn sexual assault trial was seen as cultural imperialism at the time, but from interviews now one gets the impression it ultimately resulted in a substantial positive change.
Scorn for spitting at strangers is warranted. Outrage at unpunished murder is appropriate.
Extrapolating those feelings to an entire people group is wrong. It's still possible to value people for the content of their character while tolerating their loafers and the style of hat they wear.
Yes and no. Individuals are of course responsible for their own actions. But individuals who choose to form a community that very deliberately lives in a particular way and sets itself apart from the rest of society, that choice is a reflection of their character - indeed it's a decision I expect they would say they wanted to be judged by. And at that point it's fair to judge them on the overall societal consequences of their chosen way of living, positive and negative.
all the Hasidim are to be blamed for this as a group? (Some other guy will tell you that all the Jews are to be blamed as well) I think blaming a group as a whole had a name - bigotry.
> “An end to all apologetics!” cried the Lubavitcher Rebbe, and for once, I agree with him. There was no reason, in his opinion, to harmonize faith and science.
On the contrary, I think we must rediscover the relationship between metaphysical philosophy and observation-based reasoning. For whatever reason the current culture pulls communities apart and forces hate and conflict where, in my opinion, fighting over the tension between "science" and "religion" is unneeded and unhealthy.
The fact of the matter is that each religion is based on a certain set of metaphysical axioms. Scientific reasoning is based on a particular subset of those axioms. To hate, confuse, and fight over the implications of that is such a waste.
> The fact of the matter is that each religion is based on a certain set of metaphysical axioms. Scientific reasoning is based on a particular subset of those axioms.
I'm genuinely struggling with this. In what way are the axioms of science (by which I think you mean rationality) a subset of the axioms of (all?) religion?
"We can learn truths about the universe through observation of matter and reason."
I'm sure some collaboration and editing are due on that particular phrasing, but that's the general premise behind science. And, perhaps with fringe exceptions, religious people are fine with that axiom. Exhibit A is all the religious scientists throughout history and up to right now.
Semantics. Religions largely don't reject all that much, people in them do and the fact is an awful lot of religious people reject evolution and the principle of natural selection on the grounds of their religion.
Well, yeah, the conflict is poor understanding of semantics.
I think most of the contention is people talking past each other, and I think we're at risk of that happening here, too. I'll try to be careful.
How old the universe is and whether there is a creator are theological and metaphysical questions. Whether species change over time in response to changes in their environments is an empirical question. You can't disprove a theological axiom with empirical observation. The universe could have been created in the middle of my typing this post up. There's no scientific way to prove that an omnipotent being didn't set it up that way.
So the fundamentalists need to accept that a creator could have created a universe with evolution in it. And anti-fundamentalists need to acknowledge that they can only prove that the universe looks really old when we extrapolate backwards from existing evidence.
One metaphysical question is "Could an omnipotent creator create a universe with evolution?" I think the answer is clearly "yes". The people who object at this point usually object to the "Why would a creator do that?" That's an entirely different theological question, one that doesn't affect science a single bit.
Doesn't this line of thinking break down from the fact that you can replace the religious concepts with litteraly anything else you can dream up, as you don't really demand any evidence or even a cogent argument from the answers to these metaphysical questions?
This is a similar issue to that posed by Descartes’ Demon, which continuously creates the illusion of a universe around you. How do you know whether you live in a real world or an illusion?
The best solution I know is that you must proceed on he basis that what you perceive is accurate, otherwise you might as well give up as the alternative is that nothing is knowable or has any value. There is a congruent theological principle that a good god would not so deceive it’s creation.
I’m not sure what you mean by “sole source of truth”. But from my point of view (a believer), if God placed us in a material universe and he gave us senses, it’s not only our right but our obligation to use these senses and learn about our enviroment. Yes I believe he is the source of truth, he poses all the knowledge, but that doesn’t mean I’ll learn to program a computer by reading the Bible or by praying. And about God being unfathomable, well a finite entity is incapable of containing the infinite, that doesn’t mean we are not able to tend to infinite.
But see, that's the point of my last sentence. You're going for axioms - there's just no room for wordsmithing. When you leave the essential terms of your statement without a clear definition, the axiom is meaningless.
EDIT: In this particular case, the choice of using "truth" or "fact" completely changes the premise. (And even then, I've already made a boatload of assumptions here on the exact definition of each word.)
I have the impression that almost every philosophical discussion is actually a discussion about definitions. Tomes have been written about "truth" and "fact" and their differences and similarities. I don't think we can reasonably hold a discussion in an Internet forum where each comment is only a couple of sentences long to the precision standards expected from philosophical discourse in an academic context.
Of course there's a limit to precision in a forum discussion, but yes, definitions are damn important in this context and it's perfectly possible to at least trying to aim at a basic level of precision.
To stay at this example: (natural) sciences are generally accepted to actually not be about learning (absolute, verified) truths - and that is a cornerstone of nat. science and one of the main properties distinguishing it from religion.
We can learn about singular facts and use reason to make generalizations and predictions from those facts that we can try to validate through experiment, thus leading to theories. But scientific theories are never true, they are valid. They are a model, an approximation of what we think of reality, only validated through repeated, but ultimately finite testing, and we can never be 100% sure that they aren't...hm, wrong. (I freely admit though, that it's at this point here where it starts to get hairy in the sense of your post, especially for a non-native speaker. :) )
Religions are remnants of the dark, primitive ages of mankind, when lightning was a divine force of wrath, and illiterate masses were easily convinced/forced to lies that would make common people these days laugh. The times where broken/weird albeit convincing people fed the masses things they wanted to hear, although today most of them would end up in insane asylum. We're not out of those ages yet, just look at the daily news.
Mankind will be much better off without them, albeit I realize this is unrealistic dream for next few hundreds of years. All of them are based on emotions, the stronger the emotions the more devout the follower, and reason and logic needs to be left in the drawer.
I see so much little damage done on personalities of the people who were brought up in strict religious environments regardless of which religion, and the brutal crash with modern way of life, freedom and priorities.
People who are damaged for life and torn between feeling guilt for not adhering to something they have been indoctrinated with since childhood by their parents/grandparents, and just simple plain common sense that is really hard to ignore long term.
New religions will come as old will die, it has happened already numerous times and current ones are definitely not first nor second wave. It's a built-in feature of weak human mind, and requires serious mental strength to avoid consistently, especially with indoctrination from childhood.
That said, I respect all people's right for religion, in whatever externally non-harmful shape. Just that any time I look at any of those, I see them as net loss for mankind and every day brings new proofs for this statement (I don't count mainstream Buddhism as religion, more like a life philosophy. If I would be forced to pick one with a gun next to my head, this would be it).
Modernity != progress. This is not to say that the Hasidic mode of life is right (or wrong), just that the term modern is being misunderstood here. When people use the word modern in a context like this, they usually mean to say that a movement could not have existed in a previous era in time, that it is as much an artifact of the 18th-21st centuries as the Enlightenment.
I do think that arguing that Hasidic Judaism is modern and thus good is a dubious argument, I just think the author of this piece is conflating several terms.
> What happens, I wonder, if this boy discovers at the age of fifteen that the deepest love he feels is for another man? Or less dramatically, if he wants to eat a cheeseburger? I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that his father’s response will be anything but modern.
I wonder very much how modern Shalom Auslander's response would be if his son at the age of fifteen decided to become a Hasid …
Shalom Auslander wouldn't disown his son. He wouldn't refuse to go to his wedding (unlike children of Hassidim who marry people who aren't Jewish). There's a world of difference between what he would do and what Hassidim do to their children when they become irreligious.
You also need to take into consideration that Auslander had a very negative upbringing as a Hassid, and therefore his supposed lack of tolerance could be put down to PTSD - Hassidim don't have the same excuse.
I don't quite agree with the author about modernity. I argue that the modern Ultra-Orthodox are modern, specifically in the way they justify their beliefs. Most of what I'm going to say is just a summary of this lovely paper by Haym Soloveitchik then at Yeshiva University: https://www.lookstein.org/professional-dev/rupture-reconstru...
The basic point is that modernity has destroyed tradition as a justification for a way of life. Look, before people were often happy to say "We do this because our ancestors did it." and that alone was enough. And when the sacred texts was a little off with tradition, people were happy to try and make sure that they could be read to agree with tradition. But now, you have to try and fall back and argue from higher authority. In the end this often looks the same, but it lends much greater power to those who interpret sacred texts, and pushes people to more and more extreme interpretations.
There's a book I just read, Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms by Gerard Russell. It's a travelogue though the Middle East meeting the small religious movements that survived Christianity and Islam over the last ~2000 years: Mandaeans, Yezidis, Coptic Christians, Samaritans, and the Kalasha. The Kalasha are a tiny group of pagans who live on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and one of the interesting things that comes up when Russell visits them is that they don't really have explanations for a lot of their rituals. They do things because their parents did them, and so on. and it's troublesome because when faced with Islam, or outsiders, it's hard for them to justify what they're doing, there's no intellectual basis.
And I think that, on a much smaller scale (Judaism has had a more formal intellectual basis for a long long time) is what modernity, chiefly through literacy and improved communication, brings. I also think that blanket rejection of groups like the Ultra-Orthodox or fundamentalist Christians as "dated" or just wrong isn't very helpful, certainly they're not going away any time soon.
There's also the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy, in Christian faith, dating to the 1920s & 1930s, largely a response to WWI and what was seen as dislocations imposed by the rapid advance of modernity (in the ... modern sense) as technology and industry developed especially ~1860 - 1920.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadHe conflates modernity and progressiveness, while the book sees both progressives and reactionaries as modern. Hassidim are both modern and reactionary.
I come from a non-religious Jewish family, but I too was circumcised without being asked at 8 days old (which today makes me resent my parents), I too recited the Torah in a synagogue on my Bar-Mitsva, though I was not really forced to, it was just something everybody did.
Today I live far away from this God-forsaken place called Israel with its ridiculous religious laws, its racism, its recursively fractured society (the more devout you are, the smaller your "community"), its cancerous infiltration of institutional religion into government, its sick obsession with death and martyrdom, its stupid veneration of men-with-yarmulkas, and its infantile particularism.
Today I reject Judaism as an ethnic identity and as a philosophy. For me being Jewish is a biographical detail. It does not define me as a person, it is not who am. I enjoy Jewish humour as much as anyone and embrace my father's painful experiences during WWII, but it cannot mean that I'm better or more important than someone who's not a jew.
I am grateful for having escaped this Jewish reality distortion field. I'm grateful for being able to live and raise my kids in an egalitarian society that transcends ethnic and or religious origins and instead embraces solidarity and rationality, indeed modernity.
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité
Maybe it could happen if some of these roles were expanded by the media as it seems to be an ongoing process, e.g. superheroes movies. I am not sure if that would be desirable though.
I only have my (and my brothers) anecdotal experience: We weren't baptised, nobody ever pushed or even talked religion with us, we went to church with grandma a couple times a year, and lived in a regular Catholic country (Italy).
I recall the first time I thought about God and afterlife and my spirituality I was around 14, old enough to entertain these kind of thoughts, and old enough not to care. God wasn't just a concept I felt I needed in my life.
We're 3 brothers (and a sister), and only she wanted to be baptised when we was younger, around 8, because her grandmother (which wasn't MY grandmother) was somewhat religious, and often talked about it with her. Now she's 12, and she's not interested anymore, probably after the influence of the three older brothers who go through life without any consideration about spirituality.
Again, this is just a N=4 experience, but living in Europe, where most modern families are not religious anymore, it's most apparent. Only one person in my 50 closest acquaintances believes in God, and goes to church. Yet everybody is baptised, all families have a crucifix in the house, and everybody goes through a couple months reading the Bible with their priest (catechism) when they're 10 or 11 years old. I doubt many of their sons and grandsons will find any interest in religion.
[1] http://faculty.washington.edu/tgill/Gill%20Lundsgaarde%20Wel...
Why?
Well, explain where the universe came from. Explain consciousness. Explain what happens after we die. Can you?
I didn't think you could. There are no human accessible answers to these questions. Humanity will forever be confused when we ponder them.
I love the scientific method but it in principle cannot answer these questions.
I don't have data to support it, but I think the modern mind is better equipped to accept uncertainty and ignorance these days so some might just allow those questions to remain presently unanswered.
Even if the scientific method doesn't directly answer a question, it models the approach of using a placeholder for things not yet known rather than demanding someone make shit up to eliminate the unknown.
I am not sure if you have experienced Judaism in America, but it is much more humble (and certainly more modern) than what you experienced in Israel.
That attitude really should be held by all people of all ethnicities.
But the fact that you "resent your parents" because they chose to follow an ancient cultural practice that is colloquially thought to be harmless seems melodramatic. You shouldn't resent them. Resent the practice itself perhaps.
For most of the Jews outside of the US this outlook would seem strange. I think you may become a happier person if you escape your new "reality distortion field" and stop hating this inherent part of you and your family.
Well, that's what being Jewish -- in a modern sense -- sounds like to me. The parts that you embrace are what define being Jewish as an ethnic identity.
At least that's how I think of myself, being jewish-like-Feynman, not jewish-like-whoever-goes-to-synagogues. But again, I don't know what you are revolting against; nobody in my family has been religious since 1917 (my great-grandmother used to tell me she was brought up a "Pioneer"[1] in a figurative sense) - and I only had to part with my adenoids as a kid.
[1]In the sense of Lenin's Pioneers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin_All-Union_Pione...
https://archive.is/1g9QG
1) There's the thing that survived modern trends and still exists. That is a useful thing, a kind of truth that has been found and embodied in this thing. People should learn about it, no matter if it's 10 months old or 1000 years. Language is such a thing, forks are such a thing, Vim is such a thing. If you don't use this thing you are bound to rediscover it under a different name. E.g. Unix attempted to be the platform neutral programming environment, then some people forgot about it. So they developed Java as platform independent programming environment. Now if you look at both, you find a lot of great things, but they are similar. And you also find that both have not fully succeeded in their goal of being platform independent.
2) There are emotional attached things. They are objectively viewed not really valuable anymore, but people get sentimental about them. This is an individual experience and therefore must also be an individual decision to use or not use. E.g. old tv shows with mediocre ratings. You might like it or not like, but another person can feel different because they have/haven't seen it in their childhood. The correct approach is to let each do their own thing in this area.
3) There are old things that haven't survived the connection to modern things. Strict hierarchical organisations for instance. A more flexible, democratic organisation usually ends up beating a strict competitor. That's why we now have republics, federations etc instead of kingdoms. You should stay away from them and not support anybody who attempts that. People try to sell this as sentimental with words like "in the past everything was better". Screw it. We don't live in the past, we live now. And if it would really be that good this thing would still be there.
Sadly we have a lot of discussions in society if obvious category 3 things might actually be category 1 for some abstract reasons. It's unnecessary to discuss. Communism is dead. Faschism is dead. Islamic Traditionalism is dead. Get off these horses.
Instead we should discuss category 1 things that are interesting from a modern perspective. For instance in school we learn that slavery is dead, but if you learn and learn and learn about the global economy you find there is still an awful lot of slavery out there. Women get cought and sold, or forcefully married. Children are used for 16h/day jobs without any pay. Prostitution itself only has a very small minority of really free participants. How the fuck can something like slavery survive? What is actually good about it? This kind of thing would be an interesting discussion in my eyes, because there is some value there to be learned about our morals and reality. Talking about if dead horses are really dead is a waste of time tho.
As CS Lewis would call it, chronological snobbery:
> Barfield never made me an Anthroposophist, but his counterattacks destroyed forever two elements in my own thought. In the first place he made short work of what I have called my “chronological snobbery,” the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also “a period,” and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.
If we think we can't reason with people, we start thinking elections are illegitimate. After all, if people are that unreasonable and easily to manipulate, elections are only about who is lucky and has better psychological tricks on their side.
> the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age
and/or
> the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited
apply here. Not accepting a straw man isn't refusing dialogue, to the contrary.
> If you really want change, you need to understand the reasons behind people's culture and actions
How was that applied to, say, the end of segregation in the US? Why is the perspective of the people who get mistreated suddenly not sufficient? Instead of comforting abusers primarily with victims just a statistic, I'd say comfort and protect the victims, and let abusers find their own way, or no way. If they can change, fine, if they can't, that's also fine.
Personally I believe in both, where criminality is concerned. Appropriate sanctions and rehabilitation are the ideal. For non-criminal prejudice and discrimination, I think the latter is perfectly acceptable.
Extrapolating those feelings to an entire people group is wrong. It's still possible to value people for the content of their character while tolerating their loafers and the style of hat they wear.
On the contrary, I think we must rediscover the relationship between metaphysical philosophy and observation-based reasoning. For whatever reason the current culture pulls communities apart and forces hate and conflict where, in my opinion, fighting over the tension between "science" and "religion" is unneeded and unhealthy.
The fact of the matter is that each religion is based on a certain set of metaphysical axioms. Scientific reasoning is based on a particular subset of those axioms. To hate, confuse, and fight over the implications of that is such a waste.
I'm genuinely struggling with this. In what way are the axioms of science (by which I think you mean rationality) a subset of the axioms of (all?) religion?
I'm sure some collaboration and editing are due on that particular phrasing, but that's the general premise behind science. And, perhaps with fringe exceptions, religious people are fine with that axiom. Exhibit A is all the religious scientists throughout history and up to right now.
http://news.gallup.com/poll/21814/evolution-creationism-inte...
I think most of the contention is people talking past each other, and I think we're at risk of that happening here, too. I'll try to be careful.
How old the universe is and whether there is a creator are theological and metaphysical questions. Whether species change over time in response to changes in their environments is an empirical question. You can't disprove a theological axiom with empirical observation. The universe could have been created in the middle of my typing this post up. There's no scientific way to prove that an omnipotent being didn't set it up that way.
So the fundamentalists need to accept that a creator could have created a universe with evolution in it. And anti-fundamentalists need to acknowledge that they can only prove that the universe looks really old when we extrapolate backwards from existing evidence.
One metaphysical question is "Could an omnipotent creator create a universe with evolution?" I think the answer is clearly "yes". The people who object at this point usually object to the "Why would a creator do that?" That's an entirely different theological question, one that doesn't affect science a single bit.
The best solution I know is that you must proceed on he basis that what you perceive is accurate, otherwise you might as well give up as the alternative is that nothing is knowable or has any value. There is a congruent theological principle that a good god would not so deceive it’s creation.
I'd strongly disagree that this is the general premise - many scientists would already cut you off at "We can learn truths".
And yes, in this case the particular phrasing is essential.
EDIT: In this particular case, the choice of using "truth" or "fact" completely changes the premise. (And even then, I've already made a boatload of assumptions here on the exact definition of each word.)
Of course there's a limit to precision in a forum discussion, but yes, definitions are damn important in this context and it's perfectly possible to at least trying to aim at a basic level of precision.
To stay at this example: (natural) sciences are generally accepted to actually not be about learning (absolute, verified) truths - and that is a cornerstone of nat. science and one of the main properties distinguishing it from religion.
We can learn about singular facts and use reason to make generalizations and predictions from those facts that we can try to validate through experiment, thus leading to theories. But scientific theories are never true, they are valid. They are a model, an approximation of what we think of reality, only validated through repeated, but ultimately finite testing, and we can never be 100% sure that they aren't...hm, wrong. (I freely admit though, that it's at this point here where it starts to get hairy in the sense of your post, especially for a non-native speaker. :) )
Religions are remnants of the dark, primitive ages of mankind, when lightning was a divine force of wrath, and illiterate masses were easily convinced/forced to lies that would make common people these days laugh. The times where broken/weird albeit convincing people fed the masses things they wanted to hear, although today most of them would end up in insane asylum. We're not out of those ages yet, just look at the daily news.
Mankind will be much better off without them, albeit I realize this is unrealistic dream for next few hundreds of years. All of them are based on emotions, the stronger the emotions the more devout the follower, and reason and logic needs to be left in the drawer.
I see so much little damage done on personalities of the people who were brought up in strict religious environments regardless of which religion, and the brutal crash with modern way of life, freedom and priorities.
People who are damaged for life and torn between feeling guilt for not adhering to something they have been indoctrinated with since childhood by their parents/grandparents, and just simple plain common sense that is really hard to ignore long term.
New religions will come as old will die, it has happened already numerous times and current ones are definitely not first nor second wave. It's a built-in feature of weak human mind, and requires serious mental strength to avoid consistently, especially with indoctrination from childhood.
That said, I respect all people's right for religion, in whatever externally non-harmful shape. Just that any time I look at any of those, I see them as net loss for mankind and every day brings new proofs for this statement (I don't count mainstream Buddhism as religion, more like a life philosophy. If I would be forced to pick one with a gun next to my head, this would be it).
Then again, "A personal response to the history of Hasidism" (actual title) would not have received as much attention.
I do think that arguing that Hasidic Judaism is modern and thus good is a dubious argument, I just think the author of this piece is conflating several terms.
I wonder very much how modern Shalom Auslander's response would be if his son at the age of fifteen decided to become a Hasid …
You also need to take into consideration that Auslander had a very negative upbringing as a Hassid, and therefore his supposed lack of tolerance could be put down to PTSD - Hassidim don't have the same excuse.
The basic point is that modernity has destroyed tradition as a justification for a way of life. Look, before people were often happy to say "We do this because our ancestors did it." and that alone was enough. And when the sacred texts was a little off with tradition, people were happy to try and make sure that they could be read to agree with tradition. But now, you have to try and fall back and argue from higher authority. In the end this often looks the same, but it lends much greater power to those who interpret sacred texts, and pushes people to more and more extreme interpretations.
There's a book I just read, Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms by Gerard Russell. It's a travelogue though the Middle East meeting the small religious movements that survived Christianity and Islam over the last ~2000 years: Mandaeans, Yezidis, Coptic Christians, Samaritans, and the Kalasha. The Kalasha are a tiny group of pagans who live on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and one of the interesting things that comes up when Russell visits them is that they don't really have explanations for a lot of their rituals. They do things because their parents did them, and so on. and it's troublesome because when faced with Islam, or outsiders, it's hard for them to justify what they're doing, there's no intellectual basis.
And I think that, on a much smaller scale (Judaism has had a more formal intellectual basis for a long long time) is what modernity, chiefly through literacy and improved communication, brings. I also think that blanket rejection of groups like the Ultra-Orthodox or fundamentalist Christians as "dated" or just wrong isn't very helpful, certainly they're not going away any time soon.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/modern
There's also the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy, in Christian faith, dating to the 1920s & 1930s, largely a response to WWI and what was seen as dislocations imposed by the rapid advance of modernity (in the ... modern sense) as technology and industry developed especially ~1860 - 1920.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist%E2%80%93Moderni...