While not a celebrity, I recently met a woman whom spent $XX,000 on psychics to try and understand where life comes from. She was raised Christian, started "branching out" to find the answer and spent over a year of time in doing so. I asked if she ever found the answer.. her response was "no" and that she returned to Christianity. I was flabbergasted with how casual she was about explaining psychics as her choice to better understand the Universe.
There are scores of mormons that tithe hundreds of thousands of dollars over their lifetimes in order to become gods of other planets after they die. In my view they're just as silly as the person who uses psychics. And it's not just mormons -- plenty of catholics, jews, and others do as well.
It's easy to pick on people that use psychics -- but really it's not any more or less silly than a bunch of mainstream spiritual beliefs.
I'm not going to defend Mormon beliefs, but I will play devil's advocate. Many Mormons view tithe as giving back to the community of which they're a part. And that community, they believe, will provide value to them, in turn. And generally, it does... as far as I can tell from the outside.
I'll also play devil's advocate and suggest that perhaps some people also get value from their psychics. As far as I can tell from the outside, some psychics essentially serve as life coaches for their clients.
And just as some people find religion comforting with regards to their passed relatives ("I know Grandma is in heaven!") others may find similar comfort talking to Grandma via a psychic -- even if both are total fabrications.
One additional difference is that the psychic is being personally enriched by the money, whereas the Mormon leaders are not being personally enriched. (At the highest levels they get a stipend, of around 120k/year last I checked). Now this is not true of other churches necessarily, but it is true of the Mormons.
Education is a cult in and of itself — most follow its scriptures in just as similar a fashion as they would a priest. People just don’t think that hard about things outside of their specialization (and often enough, not even then), and end up trapped in all sorts of belief systems, including “education” and “science” (have you ever taken a look at “I fucking love science” fb pages? Its called science, and its followers believe in science, but that group has nothing to do with it. Its just a bunch of rituals that eventualy produce an effect, with any arbitrary reason given)
Its not a fix on its own, just accidentally more (likely to be) correct than psychics, from the perspective of the believer.
Claims that education, or atheism, are cult-like or religion-like are common enough, but they require ignoring what an education actually means and instead assuming it's just deferring to a (different) bunch of books.
An education gives you critical thinking, the ability to rationally consider, deduce, conclude, the willingness to discover, to be wrong, etc.
I guess gp was describing someone who was eager to discover, but certainly lacked an understanding or developed abilities around critical thinking.
It only gives you critical thinking if you... critically think about it. Not by its very nature.
>they require ignoring what an education actually means and instead assuming it's just deferring to a (different) bunch of books.
But thats the key. People do that. All the time. In practice, education doesn’t follow your idealized version of it. Education, by which I mean western education, struggles to even resemble the ideal, and if anyone tells you to go get educated (thinking of the ideal), they will lead you to a very different path, because it’s done as an accident of the education system (that is, a mistake, a rarity).
My point is that people don’t think that hard about what they learn; regardless of the source. All the fantasicism and cargo culting of programming communities are a direct result of this: fully educated people falling prey to the same mistakes you can accuse any religious follower of.
Both (educated) liberals and conservatives accuse each other of these mistakes on a daily basis.
Education isn’t magic; you should be applying the same skepticism to it as anything else, and it becomes fairly obvious that people can and do make the same mistakes they do with the bible as they do with the textbook
I meant that its a cult insofar as any form of mass teaching lends itself to cult behavior; it elevated and unquestioned status exasperates the issue, especially when used as a blind solution to any problem at hand (e.g., only an idiot would go to a psychic; go to a teacher instead... approach both similarly, and your outcome is only accidentally more correct); but in reality, its no magic bullet, and lends itself to the same issues (more problematically, the educated tend to believe they are less susceptible by virtue of their education, despite being offered few such protections)
The bible too isn’t bad on its own... a good wholesome christian turns out to follow a pretty good set of morals.
My railing is against the belief the education is inherently better in these things than any other form of teaching (religions, myths, tradition, etc), but its not — critical thinking is outside of it, and most won’t partake in it regardless of which teaching methodology. The only saving grace is that education supposedly embraces it as an operation, where perhaps the christians might have once damned you for it, but in practice, education systems try quite hard to minimize the act (it would slow down standardized teaching, and memorization far simpler, scalable and cheaper to teach)
I just don't see a significant difference between the modern education... and any other. It happens to be more practical, useful and even more correct, but the majority of its believers mistreat, and misunderstand it, just as they would anything else.
It's definitely better, but not fundamentally superior. (this perhaps is the troll, the blasphemy, the should-be-made illegal belief)
>I feel that you're conflating your experiences with, or observations of, bad teaching -- with education in the general / abstract.
I'm arguing that, in practice, education is not education, and thus telling people to get educated as a solution to some mistake like following psychics blindly, is based on the exact same mistake that the target person made. If you critically think about education as it occurs in practice, it rarely offers critical thinking; it theoretically does, just as the bible theoretically offers you inner peace, but in practice, it does not. And its difficult to argue that the (now like ggggp) gp meant your idealized form of it, because you wouldn't get the solution from the default form of education. But the mistake was made, because of a blind faith in how the system describes itself (your idealized version), rather than an understanding of how it actually functions.
Also what do you have against a good wholesome christian/hindu/muslim/etc? Ignoring the god-ly aspect, religion passes down a culture, and they tend to be pretty damn good ones at that, if they don't run off to some extreme (the good, wholesome description protects us from that scenario). Of course they have their history... but again, so does any other. A religious or geographic one, they all have something to be ashamed of. It's not like the heathens and worshippers of science are without fault as well.
Blind faith in education is as dumb as blind faith in a psychic. ...and it turns out education doesn't stop you from executing blind faith.
All a cult is in this view is an unwavering, unthinking group following over some belief system; in that sense, any form of education (of which the bible, and schooling, are just one of) can turn into a cult. Its not surprising that students are just as susceptible as some midwestern hick. Its also not that surprising that people take those teachings differently, and some treat that knowledge in cultish fashion, and others don’t.
And its not that surprising that people don’t realize this occurs, and spreads the word blindly, with unwavering faith in its problem-solving ability
I'd agree with the first part of your statement. Though what it means is that anyone's worldview is a flawed model from the start better described as a cult than as the truth.
It's hard. And science gives really unsatisfying answers to many big questions.
What happens after we die?
What does it all mean?
Does my pain have meaning?
Am I special?
What is consciousness?
Will I ever be able to talk to my dead grandmother again?
That's why there have always been predators around willing to take your money in exchange for easy answers to these (and other) questions...
Really? Cause I think most of this we have some pretty definitive answers.
What happens after we die? You stop being. The conscious experience of it is the same as before you were born, i.e. nothing.
Does my pain have meaning? Not to the universe, yes to the people that care about you?
Am I special? Live is special, it's the most amazing phenomenon we appear to have in the universe. But at the same time, the "universe" doesn't care about you.
What is consciousness? A physical process happening in your brain.
Will I ever be able to talk to my dead grandmother again? No.
You might not like these answers, but that doesn't have any bearing on them being true or not.
You don't know that of course, and have no way of knowing that. Although I'll agree that from a modern, rationalist point of view that's the default reasonable assumption.
> What is consciousness? A physical process happening in your brain.
And same goes for that one; the brain clearly relates to consciousness, but you can't be sure it produces it. Maybe it receives it somehow; maybe it's even more complex than that. I'd even go as far to say that if we were to create a black box AGI tomorrow, the question would still not be solved: the only thing you'd have proven is that a specific arrangement of matter appears to result in consciousness, nothing more.
Moreover, reality itself happens - in a very concrete way - in your head, not outside of it. Plato's cave and all that (or for a more technically oriented one, the brain-in-a-jar idea). Your point of view is rational in the extreme, but also extremely reductive. I don't think one should be so quick to reject deeper - and, dare I say, spiritual - ways of considering our universe.
> You don't know that of course, and have no way of knowing that.
I'm a little surprised how many threads here "OMG YOU CAN'T KNOW FOR SURE SO HERE'S THIS OTHER STUFF YOU SHOULD CONSIDER LIKE SPIRITUALITY!!!".
When you turn off your computer, does its essence float away to computer heaven? When your car breaks down, does its soul get sent to automotive hell? I accidentally stepped on and broke my HP Calculator a few years ago, it won't turn on anymore, so is it in computation limbo? These questions are (purposefully) absurd, but where do you draw the line in "attributing spiritual crap to machinations?"
Define 'you'. If 'you' is your memories and personality, then those things are physical. You can take a knife to a brain and cut out memories, you can cut out love. These are tied to your physical meat. If the meat is destroyed, or the currents stop running, then your memories and personality are destroyed. If 'you' is something other than your memories and personality, then sure, that might go on.
> Science does not give any answer, satisfying or not, to those questions
Of course it does, as its very basis is that there are no supernatural forces influencing anything that the science observes. Or to formulate even simpler: there are no "miracles": if something happened, it was possible to happen. You can't postulate "and then the deity came and intervened" if you are doing scientific inquiry about some event. If you could everything could be simply explained by deities playing around.
Therefore, the scientific approach to human history is also very simple: it's the people who invented the gods, and not vice versa.
So you can personally believe in deities somehow, but if you try to explain your scientific work with their involvement, your work would immediately not be scientific anymore.
To give again a simple example, Newton didn't try to explain the movement of the planets with angels pushing them around, but with the plain physical laws. And it worked. Newton believed in god(s) somehow, but he hasn't let that interfere with the laws. Then he did some other works which involved gods, but these aren't science.
Newton fit models to data that reliably predict outcomes. What makes his work scientific is its method and reliability, not the nature of the explanation.
Most of these questions can be replied with a "No" or "Nothing", without contradicting the scientific view of the world.
Agreeing to such answers at the emotional level is an entirely different enterprise, quite hard for many people. Many people would rather feel content than learn a bit of uncomfortable truth, and I'm not going to judge them.
