I got drawn into a Twitter conversation, because I am apparently the living manifestation of sacrilege. I actually wouldn’t object to my apotheosis as the god of god-hating, but even in that job, there are rules.
It started off with Madhusudan Katti objecting to an act of sacrilege by Jenniffer Lawrence.
Jennifer Lawrence, please keep your butt off our ancestors https://t.co/UxDei3mpZA
— Madhusudan Katti (@leafwarbler) December 10, 2016
The story of the Lawrence Heresy:
How do you define “sacred?” One simple answer: it’s something you keep your butt off. Jennifer Lawrence got that memo, but decided to disregard it. In a recent interview she recalls her “butt-scratchin’” on sacred rocks while shooting Hunger Games in Hawai’i. They were, to her mind, a useful tool to relieve her of itchiness.
In the comments, which she made on a recent episode of the BBC’s Graham Norton Show this week, she says: “There were … sacred … rocks — I dunno, they were ancestors, who knows — they were sacred.” She goes on to say: “You’re not supposed to sit on them, because you’re not supposed to expose your genitalia to them”. But she did. “I, however, was in a wetsuit for this whole shoot – oh my god, they were so good for butt itching!”
She knew this was a gross cultural breach – that much is clear – but Lawrence decided to go ahead and desecrate the rocks anyway.
Razib Khan seems to think this is an example of a double standard — people defended my act of sacrilege, so how can they find Jennifer Lawrence’s act offensive?
@leafwarbler look, i don't get any of this religious stuff. do you remember how ppl flipped out when @pzmyers did something with a wafer?
— Razib Khan (@razibkhan) December 10, 2016
Katti notes some differences: Are you punching up or punching down? Are you disrespecting a whole culture or criticizing an intrusion of one culture into another?
@razibkhan I can't ignore the power dynamics; @pzmyers desecrating wafer to troll Catholics was punching up to power; this is punching down
— Madhusudan Katti (@leafwarbler) December 10, 2016
@razibkhan @pzmyers and I don't get the religious stuff either! But I wouldn't knowingly disrespect indigenous culture, tell tale for laughs
— Madhusudan Katti (@leafwarbler) December 10, 2016
Long story short, Katti’s right. I wouldn’t do that. I said over and over again during the whole Catholic wafer episode that what I was protesting was 1) the assumption that the Catholic church gets to control what I or anyone does in our private, secular spaces, and 2) the historically toxic influence of religion as a whole and Catholicism in particular on people around the world. Trashing a communion wafer turned out to be a surprisingly effective way of highlighting those problems without violating anyone’s rights or committing violence, and most of the effectiveness came not from my trivial act, but the exaggerated outrage from Catholics. It became quite clear that many people did want to control my beliefs in my home, and were willing to threaten violence to do it.
Catholics are free to practice and believe whatever they want in their spaces. Aside from finding their beliefs silly, I’m not going to outlaw communion or blow up churches (although I would like to tax them) or show up at church to disrupt their ceremonies. I will point out the sacred Catholic practice of sheltering pedophiles, of denying birth control to people, of buying up hospitals and then imposing arbitrary Catholic rules on medical practice, of just generally trying to tell non-Catholics how to live, are all examples of using their wealth and power to oppress others.
I find the idea of sacred stones rather silly, too. But I don’t find the native people of Hawaii to be silly, and do find them lacking in harmful intent. There’s nothing I (or Jennifer Lawrence) have to protest, even symbolically, about native Hawaiian culture; if anything, we have amends to make for our great big Western European butts rolling over and largely crushing their people, and wiping our butts further on little things they ask us to let them have is simply condescending, cruel, and wrong. If you go to someone’s house and they ask you to not sit in Grandpa’s favorite chair, do you then make it a point to reject their request and insist on taking that chair and only that chair for your entire visit?
Sure, if it’s a great and comfy chair buy one just like it for your house, and then you can complain if they try to reserve your sacred chair for their grandfather. But otherwise, show a little courtesy. It doesn’t do you any harm. Especially if you’re a hugely overpaid fabulous actor getting millions of dollars to play-act on a Hawaiian beach, and who can afford to buy their own non-sacred custom-designed butt-scratcher and hire a poor Hawaiian to haul it up and down the beach at your convenience. It’s just petty and rude to go out of your way to ‘defile’ a shared public resource simply because you can.
Atheists, skeptics, agnostics, they all suffer from the same colonial, dominionist mindset, same as religious people. Nothing can ever be sacred, because they always equate sacred with religious, so along with all the religious people, display the same disconnect from the planet which gives them life, and treat it like a possession to rip, shred apart, and destroy. Can’t have respect, no. Can’t feel a connection to ancestral life, no. Can’t sit still for five minutes and feel the wonder and sacredness of life, no.
I loathe the sense of superiority so many atheists and skeptics are walking around with, so damn busy congratulating themselves for not being religious, they don’t have the slightest idea or awareness of just how assholish they are.
Standing on Sacred Ground.
Words.
@Caine – Well, the important thing is that you’ve found a way to feel superior to both.
This sure is a difficult issue. I see where everyone’s coming from, (including Caine in the comments).
What about astronomers wanting to build a telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea? Native Hawaiians are protesting because the site is “sacred”. Or carrying out DNA analyses of ancient skeletal remains of early humans in North America? Some First Nations people regard this as desecration of their ancestors.
Should rationality give way to superstition, to save someone’s feelings? I’m generally against that if there’s a chance of enlightening them.
I think the only way to resolve these conflict issues is to conduct an enquiry where all the stakeholders have a say, & try to reach some form of accommodation. (That may not be possible, of course. Some people get fanatical & won’t accept concessions at all.)
I think that is what usually happens in the “West”, nowadays, as opposed to what happens where the Taliban or ISIS are in control. But we must try to let reason prevail, surely?
Sometimes, when dealing with individuals, we should make concessions to the superstitious, when in a situation like the one with Jennifer Lawrence, where holding an enquiry isn’t possible. (At least, that’s my excuse for removing my hat, if asked to, in a cathedral.)
@Sarah A. Hey, this is fun — you’ve found a way to feel superior to all three! And I’ve found a way to feel superior to all four! Please don’t reply, let’s give someone else the chance to feel superior to all five of us!
‘But you’re using that same tactic to try to feel superior to me, too!’ ‘Sorry, that accusation expires after one use per conversation.’
re 2:
speaking of sacred ground.
Coincidentally, I was just recently looking over my eventual “bucket list” cross country road trip (US20 coast to cost) which would bring me quite close to Rushmore. Rushmore would just be a little spur. It is worth noting how we (not inclusive) decided to blast sculptures of our founders into the mountain that had been held as a sacred place by the Natives.
I want to visit to look at the travesty, to mock it, not revere it; hoping the entrance fee will go to maintain the land of ALL the NP’s, not just keep Rushmore pristine. I am not being sarcastic.
I also just included a continuation of that eventual side-trip to view the Crazy Horse Monument, to see a bigger sacred carving on a sacred mountain, by a Native artist in reverence of their heritage and to say a big “take THIS, Rushmore”.
*applause* Crazy Horse.
[rereading the above… sorry to get so preachy]
Nullifidian:
It doesn’t have one damn thing to do with superstition. For fuck’s sake, you’re an embarrassment.
I never concede to superstition.
I’m instead willing to recognize the rights of others to hold their own beliefs, as long as they don’t harm others.
Well said. It’s apples and oranges to compare this to the cracker crap. And she went there. It’s like going to India as a tourist and rubbing your butt on a figure in a temple and then whining about your feelings being hurt by the backlash.
This is a basic characteristic of white supremacy: thinking the world somehow belongs, to some tiny extent, to you. Like the world cultures are supposed to understand your behavior because you’re from a “superior” civilization.
Sarah A:
No, cupcake. An ongoing frustration and disgust with people refusing to see anything outside of a colonial mindset. That mindset is embraced and used to fuck over everything and everyone, and rationalize doing so. As you seem to be the sort of person who can’t be bothered to click links, I’ll provide this little bit for you:
Indigenous people are 4% of the world’s population, live on 22% of the earth’s surface – and on that land is 80% of the planet’s remaining biodiversity.
Go ahead an ignore the deep connection Indigenous people have with the earth and all that it is sustained by it; ignore that yes, this is a spiritual matter for us; ignore the fact idiots like you are incapable of such – we are caretakers, and we have so little of this planet to take care of anymore, can’t you fatuous fucking assholes leave us and our land alone?
If you think your atheism and rationality gives you license to go to someone’s house and offend them for no reason than OMG RATIONALITY!!!11, you’re an asshole.
Caine, #11
That term captures everything I was trying to say. Thank you.
By the way, the Words post is all pretty pictures, for all the assholes who are afraid if they click it, they might have to actually read words or something.
Caine @ #11
Well said – 1000 likes!
re Saad@10:
I agree, yet still see a distinction that I think is being overlooked. ( I know, it’s just me. let me share my viewpoint.) I’m not trying to correct anyone.
There is a difference between being corrected for making a faux-pas vs being insulted and told to GTFO. The latter is what happened and she is complaining about (not whining). No I’m not trying to excuse her “abuse of privilege”, just saying the reaction was a little to extreme to make an actual point.
[this foot tastes really bad in my mouth, who put it there?]
Decolonize Your Mind.
The Halluci Nation.
Magistramarla, thank you. :)
slithey tove, #16
Are you assuming she didn’t know about the rocks being important before rubbing her ass on them?
Only in that case can it be called a faux pas.
It sounds to me like she knew what the rocks were.
Going back from the general to the specific, I’m glad to see that she apologized.
http://www.ew.com/article/2016/12/09/jennifer-lawrence-responds-hawaii-sacred-site
re 18:
I knew I was putting my foot in my mouth. … nevermind…
slithey trove @7:
There is no entrance fee to Mount Rushmore National Memorial. There is, however, a humongous parking garage operated by Xanterra Parks and Resorts, Inc. And Xanterra charges $10.00 per vehicle ($5.00 for seniors, free for active duty military) and $50.00 per bus. Just to park. For a free National Memorial. To a private concessionaire. Just another gift to big business. Very appropriate. Just another way for the colonizers to make money.
She apologized with “if I offended anyone”, the classic notpology. :spits:
As for a “faux-pas”:
Emphasis mine. She didn’t just rub her ass all over, either – she dislodged one of the rocks, and it rolled down the mountain.
Colonial minded, entitlement poisoned white asshole. But she’s just so darn sorry if she offended anyone. Fucking white people.
Caine & PZ, I’ve been asked, in a medieval cathedral, to remove my hat. That has been because of the superstitious beliefs of the docent in charge.
I don’t think that I’d have got very far with him arguing about the nature of his beliefs. So I conceded to superstition &, reluctantly, took my hat off, rather than walk out. If I’d not conceded to superstition, I’d have had to forgo the pleasure of enjoying the sight of a marvellous structure fashioned out of stone by a pre-scientific people. Sometimes it is best to make concessions to superstition. (PZ, I hope that I’ve addressed your criticism.)
As to the wider issue of a dominant culture not respecting an indigenous one, e.g. by planning to build an observatory on their ‘sacred’ ground, I thought I’d made it clear that I don’t approve of that, & that adequate measures should be taken to accommodate all stakeholders. That assumes that such accommodation is possible. I believe that is, almost ubiquitously, the case. I certainly don’t approve of dominant cultures riding roughshod over indigenous peoples, just because they can. (Caine, I hope that I’ve addressed your criticism.)
I guess this is like the difference between burning an American flag in protest or burning the American flag that was raised at Iwo Jima. The first is merely a symbol, the latter has strong historical value to an entire culture; it’s more than just a flag. Or, perhaps, like when Bart cut the head off the statue of Jedediah Springfield. The statue was a symbol of what made Springfield a community; it became more than just a statue to the people of the town. I think that Lawrence really didn’t mean to disrespect the people as much as she probably thought that the superstition was silly. However, if I were those rocks, I could think of a lot of worse butts than Lawrence’s to have rubbed against me.
congaboy #24
Bless your heart.
Nullifidian:
Was it superstition or a request that you show respect? I ask because I’ve found white people to consign requests for respect to any category other than showing respect.
congaboy:
Nice example of why I tend to dismiss many white people out of hand anymore. Shallow, stupid, and incapable of thought or understanding.
Nullifidian, #23
You were being asked when entering property belonging to someone else. The reason for them asking isn’t important.
If they came to your house and told you to remove your hat for a religious reason and you removed it, then you’d be conceding to superstition. In the cathedral you respected their simple request to show respect to their place. You didn’t concede anything. It doesn’t have to be a damn fight.
Caine, please feel free to fuck off. White person here who ALWAYS gives respect when I’m in your house and am neither shallow nor incapable of understanding.
I’m doubtful if it happened at all, she probably just thought it would be a funny story to tell on Graham Norton and it backfired horribly, cue the textbook apology.
Robert Webster:
That’s nice, Robert. You could have demonstrated that in two ways:
1. Noted the many: Nice example of why I tend to dismiss many white people. I did not say all.
2. Taken ‘Congaboy’ to task for making all you intelligent, understanding white people look like shallow assholes.
Instead, Robert, all I have from you is “fuck off.” You aren’t exactly giving me much to go on when it comes to your deep intelligence and capacity for thought and understanding.
dusk #30
I thought so, too.
But there is an article in on-line People that quotes an eye-witness.
#26 Caine, #28 Saad,
I guess it was both. But I have no respect for religion, so I don’t take kindly to being asked to respect the nonsense.
It is also a building open to the public, who they encourage to visit. There was a voluntary admission charge, which I paid. I believe that such buildings also receive public funds. But, nevertheless, I acquiesced to the docent’s request. That incident did spoil my visit.
Nullifidian:
:shakes head: This is why the colonial mindset and greed are winning, and the assholes are so busy destroying the very earth which gives them life. You have no respect. You know nothing other that disdain, greed, and destruction. And yes, you are very much all that, and part of it.
It was a simple request for respect, but you hated that, and consigned it to superstition, because that makes you feel better. There were times at the Oceti Sakowin camp, the walk in particular, where people were asked to put their cameras down or take off their headgear. A matter of respect, but that would have spoiled things for you, because respect isn’t something anyone needs, yeah?
You should probably stop explaining yourself, you aren’t making yourself look better, just petulant and spoiled.
dusk:
Right, because us Indigenous savages get upset over made up stories.
@33 Nullifidian
This is the part I don’t understand. I don’t respect religion either but I’ve agreed to many such requests because I respect people. It means something to them, it means nothing to me and causes harm to no one so why not agree to it?
http://emilypost.com/advice/hats-off-hat-etiquette-for-everyone/
I don’t understand how wearing a hat would have enhanced
“enjoying the sight of a marvellous structure fashioned out of stone by a pre-scientific people”.
Chigau:
It wouldn’t have. It was the request for respect that was disenchanting.
I have been reluctant to use sacred in reference to anything on this sight . I did not want to have to get into a long and difficult conservation on what bullshit that is and all. I do have feelings for many things that I would have to class as understanding them to be sacred in some way and the sight any of them being pointlessly destroyed or disregarded, some are not actually things, can bring me to tears. I could go on but I will try and make it clear and short. Many people do that and do differ with others even among those who in practice have things that they take as sacred and they have inevitable conflicts like this on the personal level. This however seems to have other connotations that are troubling.
One of which is this was an on location movie shoot. Hollywood movie shoots have a much earned reputation of wanton destruction of their locations and the surroundings
it must have something to do with them playing make believe and extreme focus on what “THEY” are trying to do and an almost total disregard of everything else, the “laws of nature” (science), health and safety of the cast and crew or the conditions of the surroundings were they are shooting.. the end result is often irreparable damage.
Here we have a talented clever actor who thoughtlessly damaged the surroundings and seemed to then make light if it. I contend that the producers and the director have some responsibility in this they did not impress upon all of there employees the need to not make a mess and respect where they were and to take care to be extra careful.
It is my opinion that it would have been better for the Movie business as a whole and this production company if they would have come down on her like a ton of bricks and repaired and restored any damage they or any of their company had caused
uncle frogy
@Caine not sure how you got that from what I said. Where did I imply anything about savages?! Baffled.
@Chigau ah ok fair enough. Seems like a pretty rude thing to do, and a stupid thing to almost boast about in an interview.
The “pre-scientific” people knew enough science to construct a marvellous structure that you want to enjoy, so the least you can do is show some modicum of respect. If it’s interesting enough for you to visit, it’s surely not too much to ask to adhere to the rules connected to the very structure you find interesting enough to visit.
If you want to walk into “marvellous structures” built by “pre-scientific people” without having your enjoyment spoiled by the slightest interaction with people who don’t share your rational worldview, go to the British Museum or the ones in Berlin or Paris. They have already conveniently stolen all that stuff for you in a very scientific way.
And btw, the admission charge usually goes into upkeep. Same is true of public funds: they are the reason you can enjoy what you still seem to dismiss as the product of superstition.
Also, I think it would still have been shitty if Lawrence had made the story up, and basically used Hawaiian culture as the butt (no pun intended) of her joke. It would surely be better not to actually destroy a sacred stone, but it’s still a lame-ass move.
Nullifidian @33:
I am a park ranger. I work in National Parks. Open to the public. Many of which charge a fee. And all of them have rules — some for safety, some for preservation, and some for respect.
The rules for safety are obvious (or should be): stay on the trails, don’t do anything to the wildlife, stay away from the cliff edge, don’t swim in certain areas.
Rules for preservation may not be as obvious: no flash photography, don’t touch the cave formations, limits on tour sizes.
Rules for respect are a little odd. Some of them (places like national memorials, or Truro Synagogue, national cemetaries) are to allow each person to gain their own insight into why that place is special. Other rules are to respect places that certain cultures revere, or honour, or hold sacred. Kivas in Anasazi towns, certain mountains, certain spots, are held sacred for whatever reason. To unilaterally decide, oh, that is superstition, I don’t need to respect this, that or the other thing, speaks to arrogance and privilege.
National parks, like almost all public places, are used and enjoyed by a wide cross section of people. Asking visitors to respect the traditions of a place makes sure that all can enjoy the heritage preserved in national parks. Even if it is telling people to stay off of those rocks. It does no harm to respect tradition; not respecting the tradition hurts people.
I am an atheist. I see religion as a tool to dominate and subjigate. I have no respect for religion. I do, however, have respect for most traditions. Specifically, traditions that do not hurt people or places. So if I am asked to remove my hat in a place that others find sacred, no problem. If I am asked to remove my shoes at someone’s house, no problem. If I am asked not to smoke inside, no problem. If I am asked to stay away from a certain spot, no problem.
Unfortunately, we see shitloads of people in my line of work who want to leave their mark, desecrate something held sacred by other, flout the rules, flout the traditions. And they make it less likely that whatever it is will still be around for future generations or that future generations will even be able to visit it.
Bernando Soarses, #43
I agree. It would be reasonable to object if Pacific Islanders had gone to Norway (or somewhere) to declare local stones sacred, but they hadn’t. The stones were significant to their culture, and their society should hold dominion over their artifacts.
Further, religious artifacts can obviously hold cultural value even to atheists. If someone had defaced an old Norse standing stone with religious writing on it, people would rightly be upset because it’s a significant aspect of their history.
You know, if I made such a faux-pas, and if I understood that it was wrong and why and if I felt any remorse about what I’d done, then I wouldn’t joke about it.
She could easily have recounted it and told about how she learned from this since and how people should be better than her and inform themselves well and respect those things and she could have been everybody’s darling.
+++
congaboy
However, if I were those rocks, I could think of a lot of worse butts than Lawrence’s to have rubbed against me.
Oh, cool, colonialism AND sexism for the price of one sentence!
Bernardo Soares
Well said indeed.
Argh, why do some people have such a hard time with basic manners? Men remove their hats in a church. this is not an unusual or superstitious request. Don’t touch our ancient sacred sites is not a difficult thing to understand, unless you are a horribly rude and entitled white girl. I managed to visit every sacred site on Oahu without damaging them. I did leave an appropriate offering of fruit at one location, even though I am an atheist. The natives who were also visiting observed this, thanked me, and played some music for my enjoyment. I have never felt more ashamed of my white skin than I was being thanked for showing basic respect.
I did not climb on the rocks at another location, or even consider doing something as disrespectful as scratching my butt with them. I toured the shark gods cave, and felt very blessed when the ocean gifted me a fossil coral in that location. (really, it washed it right to my feet as I walked along the lava flow by the barking rocks)
I am not a superstitious person, but I don’t consider respect for the land or it’s people superstition.. The land and water is sacred, because without them there is no life.
Tethys:
They are also living history to many peoples, and even if someone does not, or refuses to understand that, it costs nothing to pay respect.
dusk:
Why would you assume Lawrence lied, when there have been Indigenous people on public record being upset by her actions?
Tethys, #47
Personally, I’m appalled by this. Given that she had access to her hand, it would seem that the only reason to choose a culturally significant object was to offend people, and later mock their culture.
The timing of this post is curious – I had just been thinking that I needed to go back and re/read the original CrackerGate posts (I only read some of them at the time). Now I have one more reason to do so.
I’ll be back to read the comments here in a bit, for now, I’m going to be reading Affinity & Against the Grain & then on to CrackerGate.
In the meantime, I’ve only read one thing in the comments to which I have a coherent bit of feedback (from Nullifidian, #23)
My biggest problem with this is the how “stakeholders” is defined and how “stakes” are acquired. In Canadian constitutional law I can’t think of a time when this phrase has been used to support a precedent that prioritized the “stakes” of First Nations or BC Bands or even Aleut people over the “stakes” of white governments in Ottawa or the provinces. Rather, I’ve seen numerous uses where this has been nothing but a whitewash of one-sided actions by Ottawa or the provinces.
Now, I’m no expert in CCL and may easily have missed a use of two of this wording intended to calm white anger over a loss in court or ease some similar “problem”, but I really can’t think of anything that would even begin to rehabilitate the phrase. As of now, I’ve got nothing but contempt for it.
Caine
The stone incident occurred in 2012 or 2013. No one outside those involved in the production of the movie heard about it until Lawrence told her story.
The people reacting to it are taking her word for what happened.
PZ, you’ve made your point as clear as possible.
I’m afraid it’s a waste of effort. People who don’t understand, simply don’t want to understand.
Thanks for trying though.
Caine: thank you for taking me to task. Expressing any sense of humor about this situation is simply disgusting. Thank goodness we have painfully self righteous people like you to point out the obviousness of an intentionally shallow, superficial statement intended to lighten the situation. But, some people seem to enjoy wallowing in indignant anger. I am sometimes shallow and perhaps it comes across as incensitive, opinions vary. I do, however, feel that Lawrence possess qualities that make her an empirically attractive human being.
congaboy #54
Have a nice day.
congaboy, #54
Yes, empirically attractive. Just ask any heterosexual woman; she’ll surely agree.
And remember: colonialism is always an excellent subject for a joke.
@congaboy:
Leaving aside the “I feel…empirically” idiocy for a moment (which does explain a lot):
Saying someone is attractive and shouting “Oi, she sure can rub ‘er privates on me” are two different things. Both are not ok in a discussion about her disrespectful actions, to which her looks are irrelevant anyway.
Why you thought your shallow “sense of humour” (i.e., the oldest, slimiest sexist comment in the book) would be appreciated in a discussion that is about why it’s not ok for a person to disrespect and then make an “intentionally shallow, superficial” joke out of a culture’s beliefs is beyond me.
Caine:
How is one supposed to not associate ‘sacred’ with ‘religious’?
That’s what it means!
(In passing, I note you’ve covered atheists, skeptics, agnostics, and religious people in your accusation — who’s left?)
Wow, I thought congaboy at 54 was actually sincere for the first several words… Silly me!
I do want to thank Caine for keeping up the criticism of people who are being being assholes. I’m a middle-aged white guy who needs reminding of his privilege, because, try as I might, I’m often utterly unaware of it (I know, duh). What I don’t understand is why people, even here, double down. I think one of the differences between them and me is that I don’t want to be an asshole.
And: “empirically attractive”? Really?
When people say spiritual I hear “social connection to a place or things”. Religion as a manifestation of human social instinct makes me respectful of it unless it directly impacts on my life (abortion level stuff). So when it comes to where a people live I think the same thing applies. Respect the rocks, respect the land, respect the social agreements.
Hint for congaboy: stop digging.
@Sarah A. #3 – That was uncalled for.
@congaboy #54 – Empirically attractive? What’s that even supposed to mean… the opposite of theoretically attractive?
@John Morales – Human rights are pretty damn sacred to me.
They’re not religious.
Caine
Respect not only costs nothing, some of the best moments of that trip came about because I made an effort to learn the history before visiting the sites and engaged with the native people and their culture as much as possible. This site in particular was absolutely stunning, and felt very powerful in a sense that can only be described as spiritual.
Puu o Mahuka
It was entirely random that I had an appropriate offering. I had stopped at a roadside stand on the way, and ended up having a lovely lunchtime with a native couple, discussing the raising of tropical fruit, and being given tastes of everything they had brought that day. I never knew there were so many kinds of bananas, or that there are green grapefruit that get as big as my head.
It was also entirely random that I was visiting the site when the traditional musicians and singers arrived. I’ve no idea how they knew I had placed a fruit offering before walking around for a couple hours, but I was nearly moved to tears to be thanked for it and serenaded by a group of complete strangers. A stunning location, an ancient ruin, ukuleles, songs, and chants at sunset? All of it was a incredibly generous gift.
Her apology:
Meant no disrespect
The way it was perceived
If I offended anyone
I think I get the sentiment — to quote H. L. Mencken:
Take away the imperative, and I’m fine with that.
(And I’m reminded of PZ’s earlier post about being entitled to one’s opinion)
Saad, #65
I was most surprised at “if I offended anyone”. She did offend a lot of people, and it’s quite obvious. They declared that they’re offended.
Great @67:
Offense is taken, not given. Forgetting this is what has lead to what is now commonly called “snowflake syndrome” amongst the young, where many of them TAKE offense for the sake of attention, power, self-righteousness, who knows what.
Also you can make quotes look better using the tags below at the beginning and end of the text. You just need to add these brackets around both:
blockquote
/blockquote
miles links #68
Did you know that there is ‘Preview’ button?
<>
Caine, I’m sorry but so far as I understand the story, this woman did no physical damage to the rocks. And rocks is all they are. You do realize this is an atheist/skeptic website don’t you? Why the fuck should we care about the poor wittle feewings of some people who have a superstition about these rocks? It is like those dickhead “druids” who trash Stonehenge every year at Solstice. It is of historical significance, nothing else, and they and their stupid beards should not be given special access.
miles links:
Wrong. Effects have causes.
Specifically, this is the case at hand: If one know that action X will offend entity Y and one, knowing that, performs X such that Y becomes aware of it, one has perforce given offence.
So slymy!
John Morales:
I have been through this so many damned times already. English is a remarkably lousy language when it comes to interpreting Indigenous concepts. As for the definition, sacred also means these things:
4. reverently dedicated to some person, purpose, or object:
a morning hour sacred to study.
5. regarded with reverence:
the sacred memory of a dead hero.
6. secured against violation, infringement, etc., as by reverence or sense of right:
sacred oaths; sacred rights.
7. properly immune from violence, interference, etc., as a person or office.
Indigenous people have a relationship with the earth and all that is on her. The earth is considered to be a relation; we are all related. That concept is a common one among Indigenous peoples, and has to do with the view of sacredness. Claiming you couldn’t possibly understand a concept of sacred sans religion simply means you don’t care enough to try to understand. I understand the Indigenous concept of sacred, it doesn’t connect to religion at all. That you choose to accept only the colonial, dominionist view says more than enough about you and others who insist that sacred must be connected to a religion.
John Trudell.
miles links:
You clearly don’t understand the story; the issue is not about the rocks, it’s about the knowing disregard for a culture’s sensibility for no good reason. There is nothing within scepticism or atheism which excuses that.
For one thing, pragmatic considerations. Pointlessly pissing people off is not a good strategy.
miles links:
I don’t buy one thing you say. You obviously didn’t read one thing, as there was disrespect and damage done. Not that you care about it – you reek with the stench of the ‘pit. Crawl on back there, cupcake.
Well, I sure set the sparks flying, what with all the grinding of axes. I’ve been accused of things that I have not said, presumably to satisfy people’s prejudices, or let them jump on the bandwagon.
I’ve been a fan of PZ’s blog for many years, but I’ve had enough, so I’ll wish you all a goodbye.
There was a controversey here in NY back in 1999 which should provide an interesting perspective on this issue. African artist Chris Ofili had created a painting of the Virgin Mary out of lacquered elephant dung and floating asses, which was just then admitted to a showcase at the Brooklyn Museum. The artist himself chose these materials because quote “It’s a way of raising the paintings up from the ground and giving them a feeling that they’ve come from the earth rather than simply being hung on a wall” in the context of his African heritage.
But other Christians couldn’t get past the fact their appropriated pagan goddess was literally covered in elephant shit.
There was a lot of popular support, even from the mayor’s office (Catholic at the time) to remove and censor the painting, and eventually it was. It has since sold for over two million dollars to a private collection.
I supported the right of the artist to display that work, not out of artistic integrity, which I have no doubt was his only goal, but because the Christian opposition made themselves look like a bunch of lunatics over it.
I can’t get over the fact that, carried to an all-too-likely extreme, going out of my way to protect any little thing spiritualists/theists consider sacred will someday endanger my freedom to disagree with that. The elephant-dung-madonna scenario was just a case of differing Christian interpretations. How much more lopsided would the controversey have been, had the artist been an atheist? I’m sure the mayor would have found a way not only of removing it, but fining them for public indecency or inciting religious intolerance.
I find it logical to remain intolerant of all religion in such circumstances, be it out of a different interpretation, or a sense of artistic merit, or purely for poking fun at an existentially immature angst.
Now, if someone walked up to a monument at a Holocaust museum and shat all over it, an event within recorded history whose question of respect is mounted not in religious belief, but in humanitarianism, I would recognize a moral (and probably legal) consequence.
The case of the Hawaiian ancestor mound issue may fall to one side or the other. The question to be asked here is is the mound a commemorative grave/monument to the dead, or is it purely a facet of a religious system no reader of this particularly blog should have any sense subscribing to? And it may be both.
If this is used as a functional grave to once-real people, especially recently, then Lawrence’s actions are in poor taste. If it is a generalized animistic marker and the idea is this mound is full of souls who are somehow harmed by the act of sitting on it, then it is a ridiculous, silly thing, and we should call it a ridiculous, silly thing.
taraskan:
PZ already did that in the OP: “I find the idea of sacred stones rather silly, too.”
Your justification?
Perhaps. Point being that not sitting on some set of rocks (or rubbing your bum on them!) is hardly an extreme concession. More like good manners. So I find that an inapplicable concern in this case.
(Also, I personally accept that–terminology aside–it’s not a religious issue in the sense that “spiritualists/theists” consider something sacred. FWTW)
Nullifidian #75
You fucked up and now you’re flouncing.
*sob*
how shall we carry on???
No, the idea that it is just rocks and not worthy of respect is white supremacy. You would never walk into a Catholic church and drink from the holy water, or use the statue of Mary as a chair or convenient surface to scratch your ass.
The Hawaiian sites are all protected cultural locations, and generally are also National or State parks. The same rules apply, take nothing but photos, leave nothing but footprints.
PS taraskan,
Nope, I don’t see the difference. Best as I can tell, that’s “sacred” in the very same sense as Caine mentioned above.
(You’re not the first to attribute sacrosanctness to human rights, though!)
It’s not difficult.
As long as no one is *forcing* me to be in the church, I have no reason to be disruptive or disrespectful of the (to me) silly rituals.
If I don’t like it I can just walk away, and suffer no consequences.
Nothing is being imposed on me.
This is why the difference between punching up vs punching down is so important.
Jennifer Lawrence could have chosen to be in a million other places without a sweat.
She didn’t stick it up to a dominant, powerful culture.
She stuck it up to conquered people.
@miles links
Do you believe that our minds process social information?
Brony @82:
Yes.
Caine @74:
1) I read PZM’s link, and did not see mention of “damage done”. The woman scratched her ass on a rock, what the fuck damage could that have caused?
2) The baseless accusations of association with the slimepit are tiresome, and also indicative of a paucity of world experience. There is not this group and that group, rather there are all these groups and all those groups. Take a moment to reflect.
To restate my position: Islanders’ veneration of a rock is no fucking different from a Priest offering blood for his followers to drink every Sunday. “Native” people get no special pass allowing them to be exempt from ridicule.
@miles links
Do you believe that our minds can create symbolic links between people, places and things that evoke feelings?
miles links
Have you ever taken an Anthropology class?
Bzzzzt, that is incorrect. Islanders value their history. THEIR history, that comes complete with ancient archaeological sites and stories and mythology.
A priest is a modern employee of those who cut down all of my tribes sacred groves and woods, and forced us to adopt their god of death religion on pain of death. After they murdered all the people who refused, Charlemagne’s son burned all the ancient texts to prevent them from reverting to their ‘superstitious’ beliefs. Now they don’t even remember the time when the land was sacred, or that church was a circle of trees, and worshiping in a building was considered sacrilegious. They even spend time spreading the notion that it is superstitious nonsense to treat your environment and history as if it has no intrinsic value beyond your own needs.
Brony @85:
Symbolic: “Significant purely in terms of what is being represented or implied”.
A flabby question, but I would lean towards “yes”, just to get you moving towards the gotcha moment. This one question at a time thing is very Ray Comfort.
Tehtys @87:
Aww, poor you and the bad things that happened to some people hundreds of years ago who might have been your distant ancestors.
Grow up. We could all discover an ancestral horror story to cry over if we tried. The reason I mentioned the Stonehenge druids originally was because the same thing happened there: a bunch of people worshiping trees were killed/converted by a bunch of people worshiping a man in a book. It’s completely fucking irrelevant apart from being historically fascinating, and the druids deserve to be laughed at as much as these Islander idiots and their version of Stonehenge.
It is also nothing to do with a movie star scratching her ass on a rock. This is simply an excuse for certain special interest groups to whinny about nothing, just to keep the cash flowing.
@miles links
The “purely” part needs to go. The symbol can often take on a life of it’s own. The many forms and uses of “fuck” for example.
I’m talking about the brains basic ability to create different groups of ourselves with different purpose. And to create useful non-literal comparisons for teaching (analogies and metaphors). The thing that can tie fetishes and phobias to specific things. The thing that makes fission-fusion societies possible. The thing that makes money more than paper and digits on a computer. I suppose it’s OK if I have all of your paper and digits?
So why did you say what you did about “flabby”? I don’t see any adipose tissue. Just because something does not represent something real does not mean that it is not meaningful to someone. If you have any consistency you will explain flabby. Since I am not Ray comfort you will explain that too.
And humor is right out. Feeling strongly about connections that are not real is just immature apparently. I guess I can shit all over the symbolism in your preferred entertainment for no good reason. And take your kids toys away since the doll is not a real person (if you have any kids). I suppose I can go tell all of those Marvel fans that the stones connected to things like mind and time are not worth watching because it’s just a bunch of connections between colors, rocks and themes that are not real. And the places that you might feel good about from your childhood just because that is where you grew up? I guess I can crap all over that too. Any representation of the people that came before us.
Grow up? This is pretty basic parts of our nature that you are dismissing as if it is so simple.
Another basis part of our nature, if you can assert that they should not care about those rocks and those rocks do not affect you, I can assert that you should not care about them either. I can support criticism of your lack of concern for the how a culture’s emotions are arranged. I can be quite offensive but I assure you it’s not out of neglect for the feelings of others. It’s out of calculated choices in a social conflict with symbolic elements.
You can fuck off and by your own standards that should not bother you.
Brony @90:
I am not a mental health professional, so I will disengage from this conversation. I seriously hope that you have or find the best care available for your illness. I am sure we all here could help you if needed.
@miles links
Non-literal references to mental illness as indirect criticism of my points instead of a reasoned analysis? Mere impressions of my writing instead of analyzed sections of them? I thought you said connections to things that are not real was a problem?
If on the other hand you mean it literally what diagnostic patterns of thought are you seeing in my writing? Surly these impressions of me are not important. You should not feel strongly about them.
You are so full of shit miles. That one should not bother you too.
silly me, trying to have a rational discussion with a testosterone addled, reality challenged slime ball. My bad, but do feel free to fuck off now.
@Tethys, 94:
You didn’t indicate to whom you were responding. I feel the odds would be on me, but could you confirm?
@miles links
Also your picture of offense if totally reversed from reality. The feeling of offense rises in the mind in an uncontrolled process. The percept triggers feelings of offense. One does not “take offense” literally like they reach out and consciously grab it.
You really suck at this. A better comprehension of human symbolism and meaning would probably help you not only navigate the symbolism in your environment better, it will help you avoid looking like a hypocritical jackass.
The word “sacred” is a distraction in this context.
Would you scratch your ass on someone’s grave? Probably not. Why? Because it would be rude as fuck, even if you didn’t cause physical damage to the headstone.
That someone calls the grave “sacred” doesn’t change the fundamental principles— you don’t scratch your ass on a grave because it is rude as fuck.
So, does it never occur to people that just because one believes one is right and others are wrong is no reason to behave as such?
Miles links, you are a juvenile in every sense of the word.
This weird idea that I’m smart and religious people are stupid and therefore *deserve* to be insulted and degraded and have things they love (how stupid! they love rocks!) ridiculed– And so *what* if priests like to feed their community blood– is so-called skepticism at its most arrogant and self-centered.
This “isn’t it silly, the rocks were ancesters, or spirits or who knows, it doesn’t matter, cause it’s silly any way, but I scratched my butt on them, isn’t that funny”, is one of the most disgusting clueless arrogant and ethno-centric things I’ve ever read.
Colonial mindset is right.
Does it never occur to anyone that when someone says “this place is special to me and has meaning” it might behoove us to consider that maybe, just maybe, there’s merit in the statement. And, no, not just in the “well, it’s really about something else that’s compatible with *my* correct world view” way. It’s still a significant and meaningful belief *to them* even if it is “superstitious” to us.
Sheesh. It’s not a difficult concept. It’s nothing more than being aware of others. It shouldn’t be hard.
congaboy
1. There is indeed a difference between “emirically” and “pleasing to congaboy’s boner”. Learn it some day
2. Her supposed attractiveness is completely irrelevant to what she did. “Attractive” people are not allowed to do things “unattractive” people aren’t.
JOhn Morales
And in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and all the words in the English language in the 2016 most superficial dictionary definition.
I swear, nobody is as creationist as an atheist dudebro who’s desperately making an argument about semantics (something they also don’t understand) in order to score points.
“You can come over to my house any time and I’ll help you with maths except on Tuesday afternoons because then I play tennis and my tennis is sacred” clearly means this person has a religion that is about tennis.
+++
Let’s talk about “sacred” and “desecration”
5 minutes from my garden in the woods there’s an old Roman quarry, which has been dubbed “Celtic Sacrifice Stone” in the popular voice. It’s testimony to more than 2000 years of history, of settlement, of our ancestors. It is obviously not a “religious” place. Not many things more mundane than a quarry (maybe the latrine). But I think for it’s history, for its meaning, it’s sacred. It is a place for all of us to go to, to enjoy, to enjoy the woods around us.
And every once in a while some idiot will carve their initials into the stones, displaying the same mindset as Lawrence: Every single thing and place in this world is there for their convenience. Everything is there for them to use. There’s nothing that commands respect or awe.
Yes, in my view what they’re doing is desecrating a sacred place, making one that is for all to one that is for them.
And paint and canvas is all it is
+++
Just for the sake of the argument I’ll grant the premise (the difference has already been addressed by others): Do you think it’s OK to go to a catholic* church on Sunday, take the wine, spit in it and throw it on the floor?
*Most christian dominions don’t believe the literal blood stuff
I don’t believe in gods life after death or that headstones are needed to keep the dead from escaping from the grave, but if you sit and scratch your butt on the stone with my dad’s, grandma’s, grandpa’s, greatgrandpa’s and greatgrandma’s names in it and it falls over and breaks, I’ll be mad and you’ll pay for the damages, voluntarily or through the justice system.
What Ms. Lawrence did wasn’t substantially different from what I described.
John Morales @ 80:
The aspect of sacred in this case is living history. Non-indigenous people seem to have the worst time trying to wrap their head around this particular concept. For most non-indigenous people, everything is consigned to progress, to it’s rip, shred, dig, pave over, destroy, all that’s considered some sort of good. That’s absolutely antithetic to the beliefs of indigenous peoples.
People who have a colonial mindset, and that’s most people, don’t care how much the destroy, there’s no relationship with the earth there, no understanding that we live in the past, present, and future. This is a scene I described from the Oceti Sakowin Camp in early September:
The colonial mindset is extremely short term; it’s never long term, and it does not take into account other generations, past or future. It’s a rapacious, greedy, grasping, thoughless mindset, and too many people suffer from it.
You know, everyone has things in their lives that are important to them, but not to other people. Maybe they really love their “useless” dog. Maybe they have a “silly” hobby. When they say, “please don’t harm my model horses, they are really important to me” do you really go scratch your initials on them, because you think model horses are stupid?
There are other people on the planet. We are an animal that lives in groups, and we have to get along with each other. We do this by respecting each other. If someone says, “these rocks are important to me and my culture, please don’t sit on them” it is not hard to avoid sitting on those rocks and only showing respect for others to do so. By showing respect for others, there is a higher chance they will show respect for YOU and YOUR silly thing that you care about.
Despite his many faults, this was something Hitchens got right – we should respect spaces that people hold sacred or beautiful. Demands for respect only become intolerable when they seek to impose religious proscriptions on others elsewhere.
I was expecting to read about the catholic cracker, but also to what happened in Australia, not Hawai’i: “Everyone Is Taking The Piss Out Of These Idiots Sending Bacon-Laced Christmas Cards”
To anyone (e.g. Sarah A) who says “What’s the big deal?”, would you defend someone doing something similar to the Blarney Stone in Blarney Castle (Ireland)? Because it’s “only a stone” with legends attached to it?
Even if someone says “sacred has no value”, are they saying history has no value? The
FraudShroud of Turin is an eight hundred year old piece of art. Thousand year old mosques in Spain have amazing architecture. And a 500 year old Gutenberg bible is one of the earliest mass printed books. Things can have value and are worth protecting, even if you don’t like the reason they were made.… the sacred Catholic practice of sheltering pedophiles, of denying birth control to people, of buying up hospitals and then imposing arbitrary Catholic rules on medical practice, of just generally trying to tell non-Catholics how to live…
Not to mention, say, still opposing the distribution or use of, and education about, condoms – over 36 years into the Age of AIDS.
I admit to being pissed off when asked in a freezing cold church (St. Vitus Cathedral) to remove my thin woolen hat by a guide who had his ears kept warm by a head band that was essentially the same woolen hat just with top not sewn together. Apart from that I also got pissed because the church building belongs to the state and for long time had ben admision free, but after the church has been given it back to use the first thing they did was to impose admission fees. And lastly I was only in the admission free area (no way I am going to give money to catholic church) and therefore in front of any signs telling me to remove hat.
So in the context of the freezing weather, the way the rules were arbitrarily set and the overall behaviour of the catholic church in CZ over last years, my inner asshole burst out and I said something rude. I also left the church immediately and I never intend to put my foot in any of those buildings ever, because I hate everything the organisation that runs them stands for. I admit in retrospect that I handled that situation poorly.
Some years previously, when I went to a church on a wedding, I kept voluntarily quiet, I followed the service respectfully, I stood up when told so and sat down when requested. I did not go for the wafer at the end of the mass, but I did not do or say anything disrespectfull about it – not untill well outside. Not out of respect to the church or the silly ritualy – I have none – but out of respect to the people.
At the same time I am on record saying, when Pussy Riot got into a church in the middle of a service and made a ruckuss, that If hey made a ruckus in front of a church I would accept it as a protest, but disrupting a religious service in a church is assholery on par with christians bursting into university lecture and preaching forcefully at students (but of course neither is an assholery warranting imprisonment).
What Jennifer Lawrence did was pure assholery with no purpose at all. There was no historical or contemporary powerfull organisation whom she could even perceive to oppose to or give a middle finger. There was no possibility of oversight on her part, because she had been clearly informed. There was no pragmatical reason to do what she did, because there are countless other ways she could scratch your butt. And she did damage to the site on par scratching graffiti on a church wall. It also has nothing to do with disrespecting superstitions for the sake of enlightenment and teaching people to shed them (especially the harmfull ones).
This was just the behaviour of a white privileged brat who thinks the whole world is their sandbox to do as they please with, especially the parts inhabited by not white people.
Charly
I disagree here. I’m not much a fan of Pussy Riot or better said their spin-offs which too often rely on the display of conventionally attractive young women and quite some tone-deafness, but the “original stunt” was women protesting their oppression against their oppressors. I’d agree with you if they’d disturbed some private ceremony as a wedding, but not an ordinary service.
I have been ruminating over the sheer ignorance of this statement by the trolling miles.
I’ve no idea why Miles decided I am descended from the Celtic peoples, or why he thinks a ring of sacred trees is the same thing as a ring of standing stones. In any case the seasonal traditions of my pagan ancestors are currently plastered all over the entire USA. Your tree, your lights, your magical elves, carols, decking the halls…all of it comes from my tribe. None of it was religious as defined by Rome. It is a calendrical story cycle, used to tell time, just like every other human culture in the world.
Most of the history of Europe is actually the history of Rome and it’s culture of normalizing toxic masculinity. Everybody else’s books, cosmology, and history was burned and the people subjugated to foreign rule. The bits and pieces that managed to survive show that my ‘pagan barbarian’ ancestors had a rich and fascinating egalitarian civilization that predates Rome by thousands of years. Rome never managed to conquer them in their scary black forest, high in the mountains. Quite the opposite actually, since Alaric sacked Rome in revenge in 410.
I will never understand why some people seem to have so much trouble distinguishing between skepticism of religious and/or otherwise supernaturalist beliefs on the one hand, and acts of cultural surpremacism or expressions of a neo-colonial mindset on the other. The fact that, to me and others like me, the rocks in question are merely rocks and in no way sacred does not entitle me to trample all over the cultural expression of other people.
In this instance, Lawrence was present in another cultural setting and seemingly willfully disregarded the mores of that culture after being warned of the cultural significance of the objects in question. That is clearly unreasonable behaviour. Note that no one is demanding that Lawrence accept the rocks as sacred in her own worldview or accord any particular special status to the rocks themselves, but instead simply expect her to show proper recognizance of the beliefs of the people of Hawaii while she is actually in Hawaii. Refusing to do that, and then parading her insensitivity and entitled attitude as a ‘joke’ after the fact, is the problem. This isn’t about whether the rocks should be universally considered sacred by every human being on the planet, or by Lawrence as an individual – that would clearly be unreasonable. This is about her attitude toward other people’s culture and beliefs while dealing directly with items of cultural significance to those people.
As PZ points out in the OP;
Lawrence did the equivalent of the former, she was not subjected to the equivalent of the latter. Now, if the native people of Hawaii turned up one day in Lawrence’s own garden somewhere (I assume) in the US mainland, and declared every rock there to be sacred out of left field and just because they say so, and so she isn’t allowed to interact with her own property, then there is an argument that their behaviour would be unreasonable. But as usual, this isn’t even close to what is actually happening.
Virtually everyone can perfectly understand protecting an important non-religious art installation, historical monument or anything similar. If someone invited me into their home, pointed out some art or structure that was very important to them (regardless of how many other people considered it important) and asked that I not disturb it, and I turned around and scratched my ass on it, they’d have every right to be pissed off at me, even if there were no spiritual significance attached to it.
So, the “I have no reason to obey your religion” excuse is a paper-thin justification for being an asshole.
After all, The Arnolfini Wedding is also just a piece of canvas, pigments and linseed oil.
Gilell at 100: Yes.
Gregory at 110:
False premise, bad argument. She did not enter private land against the owner’s/owners’ wishes. So your “what if” theoretical situation is an incorrect comparison.
So…. let’s say my mother dies and I believe she is in an afterlife and that if I go to her grave she can hear me in the afterlife.
So say I believe that. I’m wrong. I’m even kind of … irrational and dumb and completely illogical. But, for what it’s worth, let’s say that just happens to be what I believe.
Maybe I believe she can hear me anywhere but somehow I feel it strongest if I am near the grave. So I go to the grave site one day and there is Miles Links rubbing his ass against her gravestone.
“What?” he asks increduously, “It’s a fucking stone and my butt was itchy”. I explain this is where my mother is buried and it’s sacred to me. And he answer “well, she’s not here. And I need to tell you that. And it’s your fault for believing in something stupid that I’m entitled to scratch my ass anywhere I want and fuck you if you get offended because it’s your fault in choosing to believe something stupid that can be hurt by my rubbing my ass on it.”
So, because I believe in something that is not true, this makes miles’ actions acceptable?
And people wonder why atheists have a reputation for arrogance.
Grow up miles. You are a child. And a very self-righteous and self-centered and immature child at that.
Not scratching your ass on a rock that has importance to some people is conceding to superstition!
The default state of atheists is to go out of their way* to take actions that cause offense to people.
* i.e. not use hands or other object to scratch but to use item sacred to people
qwints, #104
I’m disappointed tbh. Who would have thought Hitchens would be one to concede to superstition and have his quality of life reduced by not showing disrespect to to objects that don’t belong to him and have importance to others?
Well, after that tedious spectacle, I think it’s good that miles links will no longer be posting here.
It’s just a blog. Nothing special about his comments.
Miles: you of course always have the option of being oppositional in any space you find yourself. Exercising that right, however, is not in every case the lesser transgression, even taking into account the lack of credence you possess. This is not a difficult concept, and your absolutist application of defiance as more excusable than someone’s asking for respect says more about your maturity, compassion, and position of power in the world. Exerting your control at the expense of respect or deference to another individual – who is that really helping? It’s so little of you.
I don’t think anyone is surprised that Miles finally met the red letters of death. I do not understand the utility of trolling. What is gained by saying the most awful things you can imagine just to get outraged reactions?
Claiming he would spit in the communion cup and throw it on the floor is such bullshit. In the real world he would never do that, because the people in the church would take immediate offense and at the very least he would be arrested.
——–
I don’t know the exact location she filmed, but none of the ancient sites on Oahu are graves. White people aren’t allowed on that island. That is not what they mean when they call the rocks their ancestors. It may help to understand that as the top of a volcano, the Hawaiin islands do not have rocks like you find on a continent. It has sand, and weathering volcanic flows. There is no other type of rock, and there are many shrines hidden in the jungle that are large upright blocks of lava that represent Pele or some of the others in their pantheon. . The rocks are sometimes a landmark, others are small islets, sometimes the remains of structures, and others are figures in their stories and cosmology , much like Ayers rock is a sacred rock to the aboriginal people of Australia.
@Intransitive #105 – You seem to have gotten me confused with someone else. I agree with PZ that what Ms. Lawrence did was inappropriate. My comment was addressed to Caine, who for some reason decided to go on a rant about how all atheists, skeptics, and agnostics “suffer from the same colonial, dominionist mindset, same as religious people” in response to a blog post in which a noted atheist condemns Ms. Lawrence’s actions.
idiot
What a surprise. They don’t respect PZ’s right to moderate his own blog.
Silentbob, #124
That would be conceding to moderation.
wanker
So predictable. So gone.
I bet miles links miles is One of Those.
they’ll be back
trolling as explained by a neurobiologist
Tethys
Uluru.
I’m kind of sorry for miles link. What a sad world to live in where there’s no difference between the Mona Lisa and the interior of a craft store, an office building and the Houses of Parliament, Park Güell and the time you dropped a teacup.
I’m on the phone now, but remember how the sun would not have risen in the morning had Death and Susan not saved the Hogfather.
It’s not surprising, because a good number of atheist men do struggle with boundaries and have serious entitlement issues.
I think it’s clear that if a country like the US becomes majority atheist and Christians become a small minority, they’ll be treated pretty badly. I can see weekly headlines about churches being vandalized by atheist men and Christian people’s houses having their Christmas decorations damaged and probably receiving the occasional death threat too.
I’d like to start a project to reclaim the word “spiritual” for atheists and materialists. I would define the word as “A powerful emotional response to the sense of being a part of something larger than oneself, whether that something is a culture, a species, the biosphere, or the universe.”
The word spiritual has been poisoned for us because religionists have made it so central. But a materialist with no belief in anything supernatural can also have a spiritual response in all sorts of ways: reading poetry, listening to music, looking at a cathedral, watching a sunset, even just participating in a group activity. So if there’s a group somewhere that says a group of rocks give them a sense of spiritual connection to their ancestors, that doesn’t necessarily imply that they believe there’s anything supernatural about those rocks. (Though they might, of course.) They might also just be saying, “I know that these rocks were important to my ancestors, and they would come here and perform certain actions; when I come here and perform the same actions, it makes me feel closer to them.” Which is completely legit, imo.
brucegee1962:
But why would you? It’s not like we don’t have words for this: awe, wonder, admiration, fascination, amazement, astonishment…. None of those even hint at the claim that there is any sort of “spirit,” much less blatantly contain it as a root word.
In fact religionists did not poison the word “spiritual” or turn it into something else which it doesn’t literally mean: relating to or consisting of spirits is a typical, brief definition. I mean, that usage derives from the ancient theory that souls are made of some type of supernatural/immaterial breath or air, that this is what grounds life or consciousness or goodness or beauty or truth or all of the above.
Could you describe some profound experience or another as “breathtaking” for example? Sure you could, and you wouldn’t be suggesting an association with spirits or spirituality, because it’s not a soul you’re referencing but that with your lungs you breathe the material sort of air, the sort which actually exists and doesn’t have any special status in the world like souls or élan vital or whatever.
Of course I’m not opposed to referencing religious practices/literature/music/art/etc. or other sorts of folk wisdom or cultural practices that can’t be understood as referring to real-world things events. We do that all of the time already and can understand them meaningfully as fictional or metaphorical or what have you. But the idea seems to be that it’s supposed to be obvious that we should take “spiritual” more seriously or realistically than that — not as a useful fiction or metaphor, not as a term we ought to use because we lack the conceptual/linguistic resources to express it in real terms (since in fact we don’t lack that), but as something which is real which brings something really new to the table.
Same deal with “sacred”: if you just mean respect or high regard for people or principles or whatever, then of course you can use that word to signify that whenever you like, but you should understand that many people won’t interpret it just in that sense, because it has a very long history of being used in a very different way for very different purposes. And if you were doing it deliberately, in order to cause that sort of confusion or in order to conflate those things and mislead people, maybe you should ask yourself whether you ought to be communicating to others in this confusing/misleading way…. Perhaps you should sometimes, that’s a topic worth thinking about, but you shouldn’t be too surprised or offended if some don’t immediately appreciate whatever it is you’re intending to do.
But what force is it supposed to have that it doesn’t necessarily imply that? It is logically possible that they could be using that word only in the sense you outlined. We don’t yet know just from that, but instead of letting it hang there and stewing in the mystery of it all, we could simply ask them what they mean. If in this conversation you’re allowed to follow up a statement like that with a question about whether some other non-supernatural language would be adequate or what exactly they do mean by it; and if they refuse to consider those equivalent or indicate clearly they had a supernatural concept in mind after all, then that is the implication we ought to be taking away from it.
The fact that it can be used so ambiguously doesn’t imply we’re justified in using it as liberally and as confusingly as we like, since many others routinely do so. It does mean we (as atheists) ought to be a little careful about how/why we’re using it, since the obvious and literal reading entails exactly the sorts of things we believe don’t exist, and of course using cryptic or contradictory language is not something that recommends itself. In contrast, the religious are not contradicting themselves about things like that: they may equivocate about it at times and could be criticized purely for that reason; but either way, it’s not fundamentally at odds with a religious outlook, so they haven’t put themselves into the position of defending statements that they couldn’t mean and don’t want to defend.
John Morales @58:
You should go read some more Affinity. There are several discussions about the differences of the western concepts of sacred and many other cultures concept of how that term is applied. The fact that you think the single, rather narrow western definition is (ironically) the definition of the term, says much about your limited view. It’s akin to the old dictionary atheist definition (that we are sooooo fond of here, amiright?).
I can dig up specific links, but you’d probably learn more on your own simpy reading.
CR @ 137:
Y’know, when you decide to be an asshole, you do a really good job of it.
Because spirituality is very important to many people on this planet, even though it is not connected to gods in any way. Read my fucking post, supra, with the quote from John Trudell. Then you can go on a lecture tour, and get the message across, especially to asshole white people who use those words in an every day sense, that those words actually mean something.
Those words are also rarely used to describe a concept which is deeply rooted in the indigenous view of living history because they don’t mean jack shit to most people, they are just another way of saying “wow”.
You aren’t normally a stupid asshole, but you are one right now.
Caine:
Of course that’s true. Awe, wonder, admiration, fascination, amazement, astonishment (to name just a few examples) are also very important to many people on this planet. So…?
Simply false. Some people in some contexts may use the words “spiritual” or “spirituality” in a way which is not meant to refer to literal spirits, but others obviously do use it in a way which is so connected and is supported by a very common and very literal historical usage. So it is connected in a way, and it’s false that it’s not connected in any way.
Well, that’s not helpful. I was criticizing the idea that we ought to “start a project to reclaim the word “spiritual” for atheists and materialists.” I don’t think that makes sense, as I tried to explain. If people who don’t fit that description want to use it in whatever ways they like, then what I said above doesn’t apply (as I also remarked), and there is in any case nothing for such people to “reclaim” about it because in fact that’s been an essential feature of the meaning (for many if not most) since its pre-Christian origins in Latin.
Geist
Well I’m not sure what is supposed to be significant about that, but it’s worth pointing out that Hegel was not a naturalist philosopher. Or even an intelligible philosopher of any other variety. But if you want reams of incongruous senselessness written in 19th century German, then he’s definitely your guy.
#136
No need, there are many words that can be used as a secular equivalent. In particular, revered / reverential comes to mind.
cr
I realize that you are not quite grasping the significance of the German word geist. It communicates exactly the same human experience as the Hawaii word haole, or the ancient Greek word pneuma. The quote from Hegel was merely an example of the word geist as used in a sentence. Geist has multiple meanings that are not present in the equivalent Latin word, such as mind, or the state of dreaming. It is lost in translation.
The Greek pneuma was also used to describe a lot of invisible things that science has since explained. That does not negate the other definitions or word usages. There is nothing inherently supernatural about these words which all carry the meaning of breath/ life/wind/ and invisible force that moves within the body and without which the body cannot live.
Life is sacred. All life is absolutely dependent on this planet and it’s rocks and trees and plants and things. To respect that truth is to understand that the entire planet and its life are functionally one interdependent organism. The very real spread of latinized patriarchal hierarchical society is the source of treating the planet as a dead resource to be exploited, and is actually going to kill us all quite soon. That is the crucial and very real detail that you keep missing. Men are clearly disadvantaged in drawing these parallels because they lack experience in being oppressed by patriarchal cultures. It is just as invisible to them as the wind.
I try not to hold it against them, because it isn’t their fault our society is patriarchal, but it gets really annoying when those atheist men repeatedly ignore the non-magical concept that is being communicated in favor of demonstrating their intellectual superiority by proclaiming it superstitious nonsense, or nitpicking about philosophers. (also my #1 reason for hating discussing philosophy even though I am very fond of it as a concept)
I’m trying really hard. However, I have some questions about that post:
Is this metaphorical? I cannot tell if this is metaphorical. Is this talking about attempting to communicate with disembodied spirits of dead people through vocal communication or internal telepathy?
The word “they” above refers to “spirits”, and the verb “understood” has the object “they” which refers to “spirits”. Thus, this is stating that “spirits” are taking the action “to understand”, which implies that they have minds and are capable of reason. Again, am I taking this too literally? Is this meant to be metaphorical?
If this is meant to be metaphorical, what do you actually mean?
This seems much more clearly to be metaphorical. Just to be clear, do you accept standard big bang cosmology, (unguided) abiogenesis, and (unguided) new-Darwinian evolution?
My best guess is that it’s trying to communicate some moral values via metaphor and analogy (see below for full explanation).
What does the person mean by “Creator”? I noticed further that “Creator” is capitalized. Is this metaphorical? Metaphorical for what? You’ve lost me.
My best guess is that this is all obscure and obfuscated metaphorical language for what should be simple concepts, such as moral responsibility to preserve the environment for ourselves and our children, and the related empirical concepts that the environment is a fragile and global thing, where the actions of one affect the environment that we all share. Is that right? If that’s right, why must you use obscure metaphors instead of simply stating what you mean? It’s poor communication.
I’m going to go out on a limb (not really), and you’re going to accuse me of being colonialist, racist, dominionist, sexist, etc., you’re going to deny my heritage and ancestry with a “No True Scotsman” and label me with racial slurs, rather than explain yourself like you have before. Oh well. I kind of expect that. Just this once though, could you explain yourself. Please?
@Enlightenment Liberal:
While I cannot speak for Caine, I am able to google.
This is a description of the foundations of Indian beliefs and how they differ from those of European religions from the perspective of Osage scholar George E. Tinker.
Here is where I got that link from. It contains many other links to things written by Indian people who have already volunteered to explain themselves to people.
Here is a search I ran for you on NativeWeb. You may be able to find explanations of different indigenous people’s beliefs regarding ancestors in the articles there.
Here are two links to Indian publications on line: Native Times and Indian Country Today. Both sites have search functions.
Here is a bibliography of Lakota specific resources. It does not contain links, but it may be helpful during your trip to the library.
In any event, next time you wish for someone to explain the intricacies of their oft disrespected and denigrated culture to you, you’re probably (although it’s not a guarantee) going to get a more patient response if you don’t demonstrate your unwillingness to consider their perspective by doing this
.
Do keep in mind, it is not Caine’s job to be your teacher.
Wrong. There is obviously breath and life and wind, but what I mean is that there is no such thing as an “invisible force that moves within the body and without which the body cannot live” in the natural world.
Only the dead have no breath.
Isn’t it funny how most of us atheists, skeptics, and agnostics on this blog, took no offense at all by Caine’s comment?
Look, I got nothing against Caine. I don’t want to start a fight or anything. But this idea that indigenous people are the caretakers of the land, unlike those evil white exploiters is revisionist bullshit. When humans first arrived in America they exploited the fucking shit out of the place even though they weren’t white.
We’re all the same species. How much we exploit has a lot more to do with how much opportunity we have, than the colour of our skin.
[meta]
Crimson Clupeidae,
No. I like being able to interact, and I’m been told not to be there.
I respect that, but it’s a two-way street. Here, I can still interact.
That said, I understand figurative use and I tend towards descriptivism, not prescriptivism. And I perfectly understand the etymological fallacy no less than the nature of polysemy.
And, finally, I would have thought I’d made it clear that I have accepted that usage — just not conceded the base meaning and historical usage.
(Terminology, etymology and semantics are not weak areas of mine; they’ve been a hobby of mine for a long time and I have a facility for them. Semiotics, not-so-much, but I do try.)
—
FWIW, I have to try to understand the “colonial, dominionist mindset” intellectually rather than viscerally no less than “indigenous mindset” — it’s just easier because I am immersed within it; or, I am a stranger in the culture within which I find myself no less than I am to indigenous culture.
(Birthdays, celebrations, anniversaries, Christmas etc etc are all things with which I cope, not things in which I partake, any more than are fashion, style or decorations. Those are for other people, but I do like to at least try to grasp what they are about)
—
[Yeah, I know this will be seen as assholish, elitist and humble-bragging. Most people find my attitudes and nature hard to believe]
To Onamission5
Yes and no.
It’s no one’s responsibility to engage in public conversation. However, it’s ethically indefensible to pop into a conversation, say “you’re wrong”, and not explain oneself. That’s trolling. If one is going to partake in a conversation, then to the extent that one is going to partake in a conversation, one has a ethical responsibility to engage honestly and constructively. Again, the alternative is trolling.
Regarding your links. I think it’s grossly wrong-headed to lump the beliefs of all native and indigenous people around the world into a single bucket, and paint with broad strokes, just like it would be ignorant and wrong-headed to do the same for Christianity, Islam, or the European traditions as well, which include a vast, vast variety of such things, let alone trying to group together all European traditions into a single umbrella and paint with broad strokes like “colonialism”.
I asked Caine what Caine meant concerning words like “sacred” and “spiritual”, and there’s no way I’m going to reliably discover that by asking other random people, many of whom undoubtably have wildly different perspectives, when I know that there is a huge variety of meaning of the words “sacred” and “spiritual”. For example, if I ask every Catholic of a particular city and church about the meaning of the words “sacred” and “spiritual”, I am going to get a different answer for every one of them. I see no reason to believe that it would be different for native and indigeous people, and especially so when I see some apparent similarity of usage with some of the new-agers and Caine’s usage.
I am not going to saddle Caine with the results of some random website that I found by search engine in this case – that would be strawmanning, something intellectually dishoneet, which I will not do. I think it’s an intellectual disservice to pretend that all native and indigeous people in North America have the same beliefs, let alone all native and indigeous people across the planet. What kind of classification scheme is that? I also hope Caine does not do that, because only No True Scotsman and mysticism lies that way.
Rather, I took the only honest approach in this situation: To ask for clarification. To ask “what the hell do you actually mean?”.
…
To Tethys
Wanna bet?
As an analogy, which you seem so found of. Suppose someone said “only the dead have no pulse”.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/04/health/permanent-artificial-heart/
With modern advances in medical technology, here is someone that had no (natural) heart, no pulse, and survived for many days.
In your earlier post, you said:
For the purposes of our conversation, it’s thusly obvious that of course someone can live without lungs. Someone could also live without breathing air. Someone alive is going to need a sink of CO2 and a source of O2, but that need not come in air form.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_breathing
If someone has no lungs, and the liquid exchange is a constant steady flow instead of an “in, out” flow indicative of breathing, do you still say that’s breathing? Regardless, it’s definitely not “breath/life/wind”, where “wind” is understood as a phenomenon of air.
EnlightenmentLiberal:
You should have read the thread before writing that.
Caine was very explicit as to what was meant; cf. #72, #102.
(You’re asking what has been already answered)
—
Regarding your addressing Tethys, the principle at hand is vitalism: the essence of life.
It’s figurative
(Inspiration, spirit you can look up the etymology if you want)
I’d prefer if Tethys said that. It’s less than clear to me.
I responded to one of those very posts just before, and asked detailed questions. I disagree politely about your assessment that Caine was “very explicit”. IMHO, Caine was extremely obscure.
Oy, Pleistocene? I won’t even blockquote the person who is seriously claiming that the living indigenous people of Hawaii and North America are hypocrites about preserving their environment because the glaciers melted 13,000 years ago. Stonehenge is less than half that age, just for a perspective on the timescale involved.
——–
It is hard to discuss the phenomenon of life without having a word to refer to the force that animates a living being. Science has confirmed what the indigenous tribes have been saying for hundreds of years, that all life is related. I do not understand why there is so much push back to thinking of our entire ecosystem as a live being who needs to be nurtured and protected to insure our future well-being.
It is odd that one has to use so many words in English in an attempt to convey the meaning of a single German word. Tracing the etymology of ghost leads back to geist which has multiple additional related meanings dependent on context. Your breath is invisible, but it sustains you. Wind cannot be seen, but it clearly exists and moves the weather around the planet. It relates to consciousness, a dreamer is geist. Zeitgeist is the cultural spirit of the times. An invisible force is the common thread that unites all the meanings.
Because then we might have to care about something other than our own immediate gratification.
Silentbob #150
Human overhunting as the only cause of the Pleistocene extinctions is not a widely accepted theory.
Tethys:
Air isn’t invisible, it’s not a force, and forces don’t move. Spirits and souls and ghosts are not real. At best, you’re using that big hot mess of ideas metaphorically.
Okay, Enlightenment Liberal. Let me put it a different way then.
If you wish for someone to explain the personally meaningful details of their historically and contemporarily undervalued, oppressed, and marginalized culture to you, and you are approaching them from the position of a member of the oppressor’s culture, rather than come equipped with some whine about how you expect that person to be so mean when you’re just a poor innocent white dude asking questions, maybe you could demonstrate a base level of comprehension which shows you’ve made a good faith effort to educate your own self up front.
You won’t get everything you’re looking for. You might get things you weren’t looking for. You might find yourself confused and staying that way a good long while. But it would still be a show of good faith, rather than what bullshit you’re presently doing.
To Onamission5
Again, you’re not engaging with my own stated positions. You just brushed off what I wrote without engaging with it at all. Because of that, my position is unchanged.
Do you have a particular reason to believe that you know what Caine means? Are you a mind-reader? Do you have a lot of first-hand experience with Caine on this topic? If yes, then I’m willing to buy that this is a legit strategy. However, if you are just waltzing in with no first-hand experience of Caine in particular, and you’re just assuming that all indigenous people of all indigenous cultures are the same worldwide, then I have some severe problems with that kind of thinking. I do not mean these are rhetorical questions – I politely request answers.
Again, I have good reason to believe that there is a wide range of meanings for these words and concepts even within a single narrow culture, and therefore barring particularly good reasons to believe that this is what Caine means, I’m not going to simply take the word of some other person that they know what Caine means. That would be dishonest.
tl;dr If you want, I can engage with your links in order to understand what you believe, but I have no good reason to believe that this is what Caine believes.
But we do have words for that. Physics, chemistry, biology, homeostasis, molecular pumps, digestation, etc. There are many technical words in the sciences that describe precisely that, all the way down to fundamental particle physics, and also at many terms at many different layers of abstraction. Now, if someone says that it’s magic, then I’ll object, because there is no magic here. No magic. No souls. No spirits. No non-material stuff. It’s materialism all the way down.
I don’t object to that. I agree to that, for the clearly stated reasons. It’s a little too colorful, metahporical, for me to use that terminology myself, but I don’t object to this. However again, there are no souls, no spirits. There is no consciousness of the whole. There are no forces except that of materialism that are in play.
PS:
Caine could obviously fix this situation by just giving a one-liner like “those links are a good primer of my beliefs”.
cr
You can’t see air, and the meaning was wind. Air in movement. Why are you refusing to understand that all the meanings refer to things that cannot be seen? Your insistence that those things don’t exist is ridiculous. It does not matter if ghosts are real things. It in no way affects the definitions of the word. The concept of geist does not necessarily imply the spirit of a dead person, though it can be used that way. There is another word that means to shine which refers to souls. Geist has multiple meanings dependent on context, just like Hebrew is written without vowels and the meaning must come from the context. Old High German is linguistically related to Yiddish , unrelated to Latin, and much older. Grammar rules include alliteration, kennings and rhyming syntax. It simply does not correlate to the romance languages.
The zeitgeist of the 60’s is very different from the zeitgeist of today is not meant as a metaphor A cultural trend is a real thing, but I don’t think it can be scientifically quantified.
To Tethys
We’re just asking you to use clear language, and to avoid ambiguous terms where possible in favor of precise and clear terms. It’s really hard to understand what you’re talking about when you speak in imprecise and opaque metaphor, and especially when you choose words to mean as metaphor when other people use those same words in the same context to mean something literally, ex: talking about praying to ghosts for advice, or talking about the breath of life, or talking about the animating force of life.
And I’m still not entirely sure if you are speaking in metaphor. I’m still not entirely sure if you accept materialism and philosophical naturalism, and you should, because the evidence is really, really strong in its favor.
Yes it can. Do you doubt the existence or the work of anthropologists, sociologists, etc.?
My guess is that you’re using an extremely narrow and artificially limited definition of “science”, and I also guess that you’re using an extremely narrow and fallacious understanding of “reason” and “logic” ala the Straw Vulcan tvtrope.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrawVulcan
IIRC, this Skepticon video was pretty good too:
> The Straw Vulcan, Julia Galef Skepticon 4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLgNZ9aTEwc
Emotions can be analyzed coldly and rationally with science.
Further, emotions and reason are not in conflict. They compliment each other. Being emotional does not mean being irrational. Oftentimes, someone who is extremely upset is more prone to abandoning proper reason, but this does not need to be true for everyone in every case.
Being rational simply means looking at your possible options, properly evaluating the likely outcome of those options, evaluating the relatives benefits of each likely outcome, and choosing to take action based on this analysis.
Emotions are a very crucial part of this process. Mere reason and logic cannot tell you what your goals are. They cannot tell you what what outcomes are to be preferred. Emotions are what inform our goals, and when combined with reason, that should inform our actions.
Broadly speaking, “science” is just a set of procedures on top of that basic description of rationality that humans have discovered and created, and they stuck around because they work really well. In conversations like this, I think it’s not fair to use a restricted definition of “science” as “only the things done by professional scientists in university labs”. Rather, science is something that we all do every day.
EL
You are a rude, obnoxious fuck-wit. it is not my problem that you do not understand how different languages work, even when I explain it in excruciating detail. Try getting better at reading and stop demanding that Caine and I rectify your ignorance. I can describe feelings, but the only way to truly understand an emotion is to experience it. That doesn’t mean that emotions are logically less real than rocks.
sexist assholes, who refuse to get it because they are blind and dead to all but their need to be right, because science. Such logic!
Well then. It looks like we’re at an impasse.
If you want to understand the different human cultures, first you need to learn to speak the language. Endless quibbling about the exact definition of a word is not going to create understanding. It’s like explaining snow to people who have lived their lives in tropical climates.
Source Language is metaphor.
So you can’t see your warm breath in cold weather, a mirage in hot weather, smoke, fog or numerous other atmospheric phenomena? Or can you not see the blueness of the sky, even when none of those other things are happening? What do you think you are seeing when such things occur?
Wind is also not a physical force, just a thing which is moving. Do you have other terms specially crafted for rocks in movement, water in movement, hydrogen peroxide in movement, blood in movement, clowns in movement, stars in movement, etc.? Why or why not?
Because real physical matter can be seen, either by the unaided human eye or with various other detection methods.
You might want to tell me about dark matter, as if I didn’t already know about it, which doesn’t appear to have electromagnetic interactions at all. But even in an arcane situation like that, we can detect it (whatever it is) indirectly because it has mass and map out where it is in space, how much of it there is, and so forth. Were any ancient mystics talking about it? No.
What’s ridiculous about saying spirits, souls and ghosts don’t exist? That’s got to be one of the least ridiculous things I’ve ever said.
Why does that not matter?
You can have whatever definition you want, but people who think ghosts exist either don’t share your definition (so your definition in no affects what they’re thinking and how they’re using the word) or they do share it because you think they exist too but simply don’t want to defend it. It matters to them that they are supposedly real things, doesn’t it?
So the definition isn’t just whatever you say it is, because it can be used that way. You’re not telling me anything I don’t know or anything I didn’t already say above.
What does this have to do with my claim that atheists (and naturalists, materialists, physicalists) have no use for words like “spiritual,”? Or that I am not missing out on anything whatsoever by not using the word for anything that I actually believe is real (and only use it to describe what others believe)?
CR:
Psyche.
(Same root meaning)
I don’t think this is quibbling. Again, are you a materialist? Do you believe in life after death? Do you believe that the human body and mind is something other than just a collection of chemical elements arranged in a particular pattern, obeying the same rules of physics as rocks, dirt, and stars? In other words, do you believe that this “animating force” of life is something other than biology, chemistry, and physics – something other than materialism? These are important questions, and the answers would be very useful for me to understand your position. Both you and Caine have said many things which make me unsure as to your positions on these questions, and taken at face value, many of the things that you both have said make me believe that you are not materialists.
CR
So you have never experienced a gust/geist of wind? A wave of liquid? I didn’t invent German, and I have no formal training in linguistics. You keep banging on that it can only refer to the narrow concept of ghost in English, which is entirely irrelevant to what I have said. I’ve never claimed that supernatural forces exist. Human culture is real. Nature is real. Kreiskringel is not real as a living person, but is quite popular as a cultural belief. Go translate his/her name. It might help you to grok something that I can’t seem to explain to your liking.
Avalanche, slosh, bubbling, circulating, tumbling, orbiting. Yes, we have many verbs that convey specific movements.
Meh. I never use that specifically. Psychology and psychiatry … well … what can you do? As scientific fields, they’re not commonly understood to have anything to do with the supernatural. I’m not concerned about the root words themselves, although that has of course shaped how people think (or used to think) of them, just what it means to many people now. Because they’re the ones I should try to have coherent conversations with.
Did I imply that? You didn’t answer the “why or why not” question — just cut that from the quote — but it wasn’t rhetorical.
I have not once claimed it can only refer to that, and I’ve explicitly said several times now that it has multiple meanings. So you’re the one being entirely irrelevant here.
Yes we do. So what? Were you going to share some kind of folk wisdom about those too, and tell us not to fuss when such things are considered supernatural? Have you felt any need to personify them, misrepresent what they literally are or how they work, attribute some kind of great significance to them, or whatever it is that I’m supposedly missing out on by not considering “spirits” and “ghosts” and such as real things that we actually need to worry about? If there isn’t any need to do that, then what exactly is the problem with anything I’ve actually said?
Well-and-truly OOT now, but…
EL:
Then your ontology is weak.
One can be a physicalist and still accept the existence of non-physical things such as relationships, processes and emergent properties of systems; or: substance monism doesn’t entail the rejection of abstracta.
As with the Gaia hypothesis, one can perceive the world-view you claim to disdain as either mystical or as a higher-order process.
John, I don’t understand what is meant by a type of physicalism according to which emergent properties are not physical. If the claim is that emergent stuff doesn’t reduce ontologically (not epistemically or methodologically or anything else) to whatever is the non-emergent physical stuff, then that just sounds like a rejection of physicalism. Because those would be, as you said, non-physical things, which physicalism rejects.
That is, it’s not a question about whether it’s better (methodologically) for us to use special sciences instead of fundamental physics (or that we simply don’t know enough about the latter) for the particular emergent phenomena which reduce to the entities physics deals with. We should use those other sciences to understand the kinds of systems studied by biology, sociology, ecology, etc., because it’s vastly more helpful to do so. That sort of emergentism is consistent with physicalism, because it doesn’t have a different ontology (and we’re not making the ontology weaker or strong or in the business of doing anything like that). However, I don’t see how someone could maintain both the claim that only physical things exist and the claim that there are non-physical things; somebody might have a view like that of course, but they’d be contradicting themselves.
I suppose the idea that abstractions exist (or numbers, etc.) could be a somewhat different story, because it seems like “exist” is being used very differently in discussions like that, so the issue may just depend on ambiguous language. Or if you really want to insist, it’s not about being a “substance” or failing to be one (“substance”-talk seems antiquated but whatever); instead it’s about some other sort of concept that may not have anything to do with fundamental physical stuff and emergent physical stuff.
I did answer the question. I did not invent German, so why would I answer a question that accused me of making up the various meanings of the word geist? John Morales seems to be understanding the distinction without accusing me of lack of intellectual rigor.
Just because the word can mean ghosts, it is irrational to then claim I am arguing for the existence of ghosts, or souls or spirits. The words exist because the concept is very common in human cultures, regardless of what science has to say about ghosts, souls, or spirits.
I think you might have missed part of the conversation or have lost track of what my issue has been since #137. Suppose some real-world, honest-to-dog atheist out there says “I’m an atheist and I’m spiritual.”
Do you seriously think they’re talking about wind, their breathing, the fact there are zeitgeists/trends or their trendiness, or that you can view a law as agreeing with the “spirit of the Constitution” instead of its “letter”? It’s just fucking silly to think that in that context such a person probably meant anything like that. So what are they probably talking about? Maybe they don’t believe in gods but think that humans have souls: they are spiritual in the sense that they have a spirit. Doesn’t seem like a stretch to me. And that’s a possible worldview that some atheist out there could have — not a good one, but they could have it. A naturalist just plain couldn’t have that view, because naturalism rejects all of that supernatural garbage and isn’t picking out a specific type of it.
If that person really is talking about something else (like for example the wind and who the fuck knows why they’d be doing that), then there is no problem, except that the quoted statement above is at best going to be difficult for many people to understand. And I don’t see any reason why we ought to bother pushing for that, as something that needs to be “reclaimed” somehow by us as atheists/naturalists, because we’re desperate for it or missing out on something important or actually need it to do something useful in our discussions of anything that’s real. How am I (or how is anyone) supposed to make sense of a statement like that?
consciousness razor,
Emergent properties are phenomena caused by particular arrangements of physical things which are not caused by those same physical things themselves outside that set of arrangements…and they need not be physical per se.
I could use boring old examples such as controllable linear displacement being caused by a collection of metal, plastic, rubber and volatile substances being arranged in a particular order — or I could use an example such the Sorites paradox.
(Or, for Nerd, compounds vs. elements)
More to the point, the case at hand refers to emotions and to culture: both are emergent properties of mind, itself an emergent property of particular neural arrangewments.
Regarding sacredness: when used in this sense, to say something is sacred is to express an attitude (personal or cultural) towards that something — and that attitude is a real thing, though itself abstract.
And that sense something meriting reverence and deserving inviolability need not be because of any ascribed supernatural attributes of that something.
Um. Let’s say I’m standing two meters away from you.
Is our separation a real thing? Does it have any substance?
(I hope you agree that the concept of separation is not limited to abstractions such as points on an infinite plane; I live 45Km from where I work, and both my home and workplace are very physical things)
In the sense of communing with nature, being at one with nature. It is a well-documented state of mind. I don’t believe in gods or supernatural forces, but I do enjoy spending time in pristine nature. Going for a walk in the woods and meeting a wolf on the trail was a very “spiritual” experience. I feel blessed when the catbirds and cardinals choose to nest in my tiny little garden.
I understand that it is non-magical , but it still makes me happy and connected to life in a way that is hard to describe.
John Morales:
So would you (or somebody with this view) say that they don’t supervene on neural arrangements or aren’t identifiable with them somehow? (Let’s just suppose a neural arrangement is in fact the correct non-emergent thing to pick out for these purposes, although it’s questionable since neurons are not like an electron or the EM field or whatever.) I mean, you said that it had to do with ontology… I don’t get in what sense there is there supposed to be something in addition to the fundamental things.
I have tables and chairs. Those exist. They are composed of many many microscopic things, which is not to say that I have both a chair and something in addition to those microscopic things which make up the chair. I use words like “chair” to describe a whole collection of those things, which are functioning like a chair or are in a chair-like sort of arrangement or meet some sort of criteria like that.
I mean, it’s not as if what I’ve got is a chair and now I’ve put it inside some actual box, so now I have to admit that the box also exists in addition to the chair. Instead, I just decided to carve up the world in a way which delineates between the part of the world consisting of the chair (the matter in that region of space) and the rest of the world which doesn’t have it. That’s just a useful thing to do in all sorts of cases, not an entity. For things like chairs, there don’t need to be very sharp boundaries (because, e.g., particles in the chair come and go) because I’m not counting the whole chair as a fundamental thing, so I can be fairly lax about how I’m defining the collection of stuff that I’m calling a “chair,” which is just a useful shorthand description of many things that have some very complicated set of physical properties or relations with each other. I don’t care about all of those things most of the time, so I can just refer rather casually to the big macroscopic object which is made of them.
No, of course not. I’m not picky about how you’d characterize abstractions (so maybe this won’t work for you), but they’re not material and unlike matter they don’t have a spatial extent or move around in space or have spatial relationships with anything else. They’re also not composed of material things which do all sorts of stuff like that. So I wouldn’t associate that with what I’d call emergent phenomena, like the temperature of a gas or the wetness of water or economic activity or anything along those lines.
Sorry: both a chair and the microscopic things which make it up. The chair would be the additional thing according to a different view, but hopefully it’s clear that I wouldn’t say that.
consciousness razor,
“Categories of being”.
So? The issue at hand is whether their existence is veridical, not what kind of existence they have.
They are real things, even if not fundamental, and one therefore ignores them at no less peril than one ignores any other real thing.
PS
Um. I take it you’re still referring to this (new emphasis): “One can be a physicalist and still accept the existence of non-physical things such as relationships, processes and emergent properties of systems”
Is it not clear to you I was expressing that emergent properties are but one case of many representing non-physical things?
In short, Caine cited someone to describe their beliefs, and that citation included talk about praying to spirits of dead people for advice. Tethys was more ambiguous, but several times used language that seemed like the belief that there is an actual animating force of magic, a soul, that distinguishes life from non-life. It seems that Tethys doesn’t actually believe such things based on more recent posts, but that was far from clear from the start.
Obviously I agree with what you just wrote.
I don’t know what “Gaia hypothesis” means offhand, and so I cannot comment. If I commented before in some other thread, perhaps I was out of line and in error.
For someone who advances an idea by that name, I would have to ask them “what do you mean?”, especially in light of this thread, where people are arguing that they can use language like “spiritual”, “breath of life”, etc., in a way that is entire materialistic. It’s quite confusing, and IMHO needlessly so.
I wouldn’t dispute that point. But would you give an example of a real abstract thing to work with? That is, one which isn’t an emergent physical thing as I described it, like the temperature of a gas, which is real and physical and is not fundamental, which thus doesn’t count as an abstraction (as I would put it) or non-physical because it reduces to physical stuff and how that stuff behaves. So, of course like you said, we shouldn’t ignore temperature or say it’s not real or whatever; it just isn’t fundamental… But recognizing the existence of something non-fundamental doesn’t mean we’ve added anything to the ontology, since it’s just another way of talking or thinking about that same ontology.
I’ll offer a few things that I take to be genuine abstractions (and clearly not emergent phenomena): the number seven, the Platonic form of a chair, the essence of chairness, the category of all chairs, a potential but non-actual chair, what an existing chair would be like in a counterfactual situation. Or whatever you like.
About the only thing constructive I have to say about that is that the activity of inventing categories, for example, is one sort of physical activity that people do (and find useful for various reasons), so it’s at least real in that sense. But in the sense that it is something over above all of the chairs there are, as well as all of the categorizing activities people do? I’m not really sure what it even means to say that something else like that is supposed to exist, but with a clearer idea maybe I’d understand what you’re getting at.
EL:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis
—
CR,
I refer you to Giliell @100.
(Its value* is very real, in a monetary sense)
—
* Value too is a real thing, no?
To John Morales
Thanks, and, my initial reaction is that there’s not enough to the Gaia hypothesis as defined for it to be a proper scientific hypothesis. It seems immune to falsification, and I struggle to see what sort of meaningful predictions it could make. I just don’t understand what it is, except as some sort of romanticized pseudo-scientific “spiritual” notion perhaps. Maybe Wikipedia just does a really bad job explaining it. I don’t know.
PS:
Depends on the semantics. For some meanings of “real”, yes. For some meanings of “real”, no. For my part, I want to clarify that I just wanted to know if people accepted the truth of simple materialism and philosophical naturalism. It was never my intention to dive down this rabbit-hole of semantics and ontology, and to argue about the fine distinctions that you bring up here.
I’m an atheist, materialist, naturalist. I have use for these words , therefore you’re wrong. Or is there some kind of purity test where you get to decide?
To Giliell
I might also hold that position. However, I really don’t like how you changed that to a “purity test”. I don’t know how better to describe my position than as follows.
I don’t know why someone would use such a confusing and ambiguous word, when there exist better words, such as “emotional”, “moving”, “awe-striking”, etc. I don’t know why someone would use “spiritual” except as some sort of olive branch towards religious and supernatural nonsense, and as a implicit attack on materialism and atheism.
For example, on many of the dating websites I use, I see “spiritual but not religious”. To be clear, I never bring this up on the site to these people – that would be exceptionally rude and not productive – but I wonder “what do you even mean?”. In this context, where “atheist” and “agnostic” are usually alternatives in the drop-down selection, or where “atheist” and “agnostic” are usually culturally conventional alternatives, many people still choose to express themself as “spiritual but not religious”. I think that these people are at best confused, and at worst they’re being a little dishonest with themselves and others. They are trying to have their cake and eat it too. I believe that they mean to communicate, and they are successful at communicating the following: “I’m not one of those dirty, evil, and uncaring materialist atheists / agnostics. However, I’m also not one of those silly creationists, and I don’t go to church that often.” It’s a coward’s position.
That was just an example, but I do believe that it captures a large bit of the usage of the word “spiritual”.
In other contexts, like this one, I see “spiritual” used as a means to attack materialism, proper scientific analysis, and a reasonable and proper usage of clear and meaningful terms, and I see “spiritual” as part of this extremely confusing tendency to speak in really silly and confusing metaphors as opposed to just using clear and simple language. Again, I see a strong undertone of “western academic materialistic atheist scientists are bad, and we need to do something else, we need to be spiritual (whatever the fuck that means)”, and I object to that. For my own part, I see some of this in what Caine writes – whether that is intentional or not, I do not know.
John Morales @ 151:
I was an asshole, and I was wrong. You are welcome at Affinity any time, John.
…
Thank you, Caine.
I find it extremely confusing when I make comments about the etymology of the concept of spirit in languages that are not Latin, and compare with its equivalent term in different languages, that I got responses like this.
Please quote anyone saying this.
Absurd, arrogant, and completely ignores anything I actually said.
I am a bit flabbergasted you claimed air is visible, is somehow not crucial to life, or that wind cannot be accurately and scientifically described as a force. Declaring the definitions of a word a big hot mess metaphorically was actually so wrong it was funny. All language is metaphorical. So I incorporated my disdain with some language and made my own little joke at the expense of those who keep claiming that science and rationality is all that exists despite the glaringly obvious preexisting condition of being a human being who is in fact primarily motivated by emotions.
Only the dead have no breath.
Perhaps the reason there are so many German philosophers is because the language has philosophical concepts embedded within the words. German is very amenable to nuance and layers, you can get very creative with it. English and Latin are good for writing science papers and classification. French and Spanish are excellent for poetry, and writing about love.
Western culture has it’s good points, but all of those superstitious fairy tales that form the Lord of the Rings are the stories of my tribal culture. The fact that the stories are still told and are beloved by so many attest to how powerful mythos is to culture, whether those things actually exist or not. The one ring that binds them all. I can’t help but gloat just a little bit that Latin is a dead language, but modern versions of my tribes language and stories are still here.
(gloat, another very useful German descriptor)
[OT]
Tethys, I do like me many German (and Yiddish!) terms.
One that comes to mind in the context of this discussion: Weltanschauung.
To Tethys
I cannot. I also clearly did not accuse anyone of saying this. I clearly stated that I personally perceive undertones of this, and I took great pains to also communicate that this undertone in this thread might be entirely in my own mind, and it might not be the intention of the speakers (Caine and you).
Having said that, most of the posts by Caine gave me that impression. Whether that impression is there to “an objective reader”, and whether that impression was intentional – I do not know. I’m simply communicating my experiences, my feelings, my thoughts, and what the words mean to me – you really shouldn’t be able to object to that, short of you saying that I’m dishonest, and IMAO I have not said anything here (or elsewhere) to give people good reason to believe that. I might be asshole, and oftentimes I am asshole, but I’m almost never dishonest. I take being honest to an extreme, to the point of it almost being a fault.
I’m getting more confused. I’ve taken great pains to not be confrontational in this thread, and I also don’t mean to be confrontational in this thread, because I don’t understand what is going on, and I’d like to understand what is going on. Again, let me take pains to be clear: I stated that this is my impression. This is how I feel. This is what Caine’s words have meant to me as I interpet those words. However, I recognize that this might not be Caine’s intent, and I’ve been patiently and politely asking for further information, so that I might understand what’s going on.
To quote you from before:
Like, I’m really trying here, but I am entirely confused. I don’t understand. It seems that you think that there is something very important that I don’t understand, and it seems that you’ve been trying to communicate it, but I still don’t understand.
If we could, could we focus on the following?
What do you mean by “It is hard to discuss the phenomenon of life without having a word to refer to the force that animates a living being.”? The forces that animate a human being are just normal materialistic physics. At higher levels of abstraction, we can talk about chemistry, biology, nutrition, etc. We can also talk about the motivations of a human being, and we can use words like “the things that motivate a human being to choose to live, and take the actions necessary to continue living”. I’m totally ok with all of those things, and it seems that English have plenty of good words to describe those things. Is there something else that you mean to describe, and what? Or do you think that we don’t have good enough English words to describe these things? Politely, I think we do.
Pedantic nit: No one gets credit for being right by accident. I’m not going to give credit to “the indigenous tribes” for knowing that all life is related when their reasons were bad or nonexistent. You shouldn’t respect someone who had a right belief for wrong reasons. Did “the indigenous tribes” develop anything like Darwinian evolution, common ancestry, descent with modification? Or was it all religious hocus-pocus? Religious hocus-pocus doesn’t count. Philosophizing on an armchair doesn’t count. Doing the hard scientific work and making the proper scientific models is what counts.
Worse, did you mean that metaphorically? It really looks like you were trying to give credit to “the indigenous tribes” for discovering evolution before Darwin. Was that really your intent? It seems like this was your intent. I honestly cannot think of any sort of reasonable alternative meaning that you might have wanted to communicate, but maybe my imagination is bad.
Also, why are you using such a ridiculous phrase “the indigenous tribes”? Surely there is a wide spread of views over all indigenous people around the world. As I’ve been saying many times, it’s flagrantly ridiculous to attribute the same views to all such peoples and cultures across the planet. It’s quite disgusting and offensive.
Let’s focus on the last sentence:
I completely agree that the ecosystem needs to be nurtured and protected to secure our own well-being in the future, and the well-being of future generations. I’m entirely sold on that.
However, again, this is just a personal statement of my own beliefs, and I’m not trying to impugn anything to you, but when I see things like “as a live being who needs to be nurtured and protected”, my internal bullshit detector goes off. That sort of language is immediately interpreted by me as literal and non-metaphorical, and my mind immediately and unsconsciously and unwillingly makes associations to beliefs about chakras, and magic life forces, and the ancient superstitious belief that there was a magic life force in a human’s breath – for example, consult some of the old beliefs about such things here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneuma
It immediately makes me think that the speaker believes that there are non-material magical life forces, like spirits, “energies”, chakras, etc., and that humans have one, and that makes them different than rocks, and specifically claimed here is that the Earth as a gestalt whole has one of these magical life forces too.
In particular, Generally we use the word “who” to refer to individual creatures, and especially creatures with a mind. I wouldn’t use the pronoun “who” when it refers to a patch of moss. I would use the impersonal pronoun “which”. As soon as I see the pronoun “who”, I start thinking “person”.
Again, I must emphasize, I am not accusing you of having the intention to communicate those things. However, intent is not magic. Further, I am not even saying that this is what a reasonable person would understand by the words you have chosen. Perhaps I am an unreasonable audience. Still, these are the immediate and unconscious associations that my mind has made, and that is part of an answer to your implicit question here.
Again, I hope I’m helping and being constructive. I’m trying really hard to not be an asshole.
Gestalt is another useful concept. I think we as a culture need to build a new Weltanshauung that incorporates modern science with a culture that centers the health of earth within the health of all its living creatures, rather than just the human creatures. Nothing mystical about it
Not mystical perhaps, but perhaps misguided. (I spent a lot of time to think if a different word would be better, but I really think “misguided” accurately portrays my beliefs and position.)
I’m a humanist. These values extend to intelligent and aware non-human animals too. I want to make everyone’s life better. I value the well-being of conscious creatures. I do not value the well-being of a living creature that is not conscious, that has no mind. If I can sacrifice a living creature without a mind in order to improve the life of a living creature with a mind (and with no external harm to other creatures with minds), then I’ll make that trade every time.
I think we should care deeply about the global environment and ecosystem. However, I think we should be clear about our priorities. Our priorities should be to the well-being of those creatures with a mind, in the present and the future. The Earth as a gestalt does not have a mind, and therefore it has no place among my primary / foundational concerns. Of course, it’s also true that the global environment is an indispensable tool to ensure the continued well-being of creatures with minds, present and future, and for that reason it has extremely high importance – even paramount importance. However, protecting the environment is not a moral end unto itself; it is merely and only a means to an end.
So, again, I’m not saying that you’re being obviously mystical. I would say that “health of the Earth” does set off internal bullshit detectors for being potentially mystical, but if you say you mean it in a non-mystical way, then I’ll accept that.
However, I really don’t like that phrasing, because it seems to suggest that we elevate the importance of the global environment to a place that it does not belong. Again, it seems to me. Maybe you don’t mean to communicate that. I don’t know. Do you mean to communicate that? Or are we in full agreement about our actual values, and we’re just using different language to express the same values? I hope we’re in full agreement. However again, lots of what Caine wrote in here (and perhaps you too, I don’t remember) strongly suggest to me that you mean to write that in stark contrast to what I’ve written in this post. Again, I’m not sure, because this entire conversation has been horribly confusing to me.
EL
Perhaps you should consider the alternative? It does not really matter what you like. Your personal preferences are not pertinent, and they aren’t a valid criticism. Your grasp of logic is tenuous at best, and regardless of whether you are trying to be an asshole or not, I am tired of this habit of grabbing the wrong end of the stick, posting asinine rude comments exclusively to the women, and then demanding we be respectful and nice and do all the work of explaining it to you. You can’t even apologize for being an asshole, you don’t get to demand anything.
This is an atheist board. Where the fuck do you get off demanding that Caine, or I, are required to explain anything to you, much less deciding we are just masquerading as atheists who need to have materialism explained to them? Now you are expounding at length that it is somehow our fault that you entered this conversation with your premature false conclusions, really?
I don’t wish to be mean, but until you understand how “Only the dead have no breath.” is simultaneously true, repartee, and a sly joke, you will continue to be confused.
Tethys
I assume that you believe I have posted rude and asinine comments to you. I assume that you are a woman – I didn’t know that before. I have used gender-neutral pronouns throughout this thread to refer to you, and before this post, I didn’t even think about your gender. Finally, the clear implication is that I am rude and asinine to women. Why do you think that I knew that you were a woman?! You are assuming a bit too much here. If you are going to assume that much, and assume such bad faith on my part, then it is no surprise to me that you are so hostile and so unconstructive in conversation.
If you don’t want to explain yourself, fine. I can’t make you.
I am not a mind-reader. Plenty of other people use almost identical language to convey a belief in spirits, souls, ghosts, goblins, and other supernatural woo. Asking you to explain yourself when you use such ambiguous language is a completely reasonable thing to request.
So, when Caine does it, it is a valid criticism? Nice double standards there.
Basic human decency and empathy. A shared desire to teach others to improve the world for everyone. A simple desire to understand and be understood. I’m sorry for projecting myself onto you. I will try to not do it again.
Tethys
Finally, I have been just as confused as several other regulars here, and I doubt that you would accuse them of being especially hostile to women in particular. IMO, I have been quite reasonable, and no worse than several others, such as consciousness razor. I really and politely request that you review your internal assumptions about my behavior and honesty, because they are in error.
PS:
I’m not asking you to be polite. I generally don’t care if people are polite to me or not. I’m often an asshole. I don’t deny that. However, you are accusing me of being a sexist, and possibly accusing me of being dishonest, neither of which are true in any particularly meaningful sense. I am no more sexist than any other common feminist. You’re totally wrong here.
And now I expect to be accused of gaslighting. ~sigh~
EL
Poor,poor you.
Please go learn logic, discourse, rational debate. I didn’t assume you were rude, I quoted the most obnoxious sentence. That entire comment has no relevance to the various definitions of the word geist, or the OP. CR was also making the same cognitive error of claiming what I said was incorrect, because they could see air.
Why do you expect me to “explain myself” to people whose response to the definitions of a word was to make preposterous claims in order to prove I was wrong? It is not the first time CR and I have had a disagreement about philosophy, but they usually don’t make such claims as being able to see invisible gases and calling it scientific.
English retains some meaning of the German geist when it refers to distilled alcohol as spirits. German actually has different terms to differentiate between real imaginary things, and unreal imaginary things.
Ooh, this’ll be fun*… How do you know which creatures have minds, and which don’t?
(* For certain values of “fun”, including “stupid and pointless”…)
@201, Dunc
You seem to be implying it’s some kind of impossible task. It isn’t.
There’s a whole ton of science on the subject of animal consciousness, for starters. And then there’s a whole bunch of philosophy on the subject of mind, too.
I could go into detail, but my time is short and the topic is off topic, so maybe I won’t.
You never answered what you do see, when I described all sorts of visible, empirical, and utterly ordinary phenomena that do amount to seeing the air. I don’t think you have an answer even now, because it’s for whatever fucked up reason a part of your orthodoxy that air is “invisible” and a “force” and is accurately described by various other howlers. So you just won’t budge, but that clearly doesn’t mean you have a fucking clue what you’re talking about. Anyway, we’re not at all in the same epistemic situation with air or any other sort of matter as we are with, say, the ghost of a dead person, which nobody has any evidence for whatsoever because those don’t exist — so if that’s the kind of equivalence we were reaching for well … nope.
That said, how your bullshit “invisible force that moves” has anything to do with air, or is supposed to be relevant to anything else here, is totally beyond me. Just a case of SIWOTI on my part, so you can have your bullshit if you want it, since it seems not to matter at all how bullshitty it is.
The Earth doesn’t, if for whatever reason it’s being counted among the living things, as in the Gaia hypothesis. It doesn’t have anything resembling a nervous system, and all of the evidence I’m aware of suggests that’s a requirement for having a mind. Is there any genuine, reasonable dispute about that? I don’t think so.
I want to underscore a certain point EL made in #189:
You very often hear the claim that a person can’t be “good without god” and so forth. I think that some people associate religion and morality/meaning/etc. with each other so strongly, that they don’t realize it or don’t intend an implication like “atheists can’t be good” (or people of other religions can’t be good), when they assume “Christian behavior” for example is the same thing as “good behavior.” Intent of course still isn’t magic. But it seems they are just oblivious to that and don’t any have real atheists or anything like that in mind. They’re just so firmly accustomed, from birth and every day since, to talking about “spiritual” experiences and so forth (which are all understandable naturalistically) that they just don’t get how they’re using confusing/confused language and don’t have a coherent reason why they’re thinking/talking in the way that they are. Some people even take offense at the idea that they ought to think clearly at all about such beliefs, but in any case they never find a way out of that vicious cycle.
Sometimes, when certain religious people are feeling particularly defensive or trying to justify their patently absurd religious beliefs, then the claim is explicitly trotted out that atheist/naturalist/reductionist boogeymen are out there, can’t be good, have no meaning in their lives, are coming to eat your babies, etc. This seems somehow more preposterous than the people above, who were only tacitly assuming it or failing to have any definite thoughts on the subject. Anyway, we should not be conceding this point. It is not a reasonable position. To say that people with a naturalistic worldview have some real logical need to engage in spirit-talk or religious-talk is (intentionally or not) conceding it and legitimizing that sort of position. I don’t care at all which culture or cultures a supernatural belief comes from, except in the sense that I’m interested in cultures…. But sensitivity to marginalized people and their cultures is extremely important, and that does not mean we need to be any less clear about what the problems actually are with all religions or pretend that certain ones are special and have evaded those problems.
Science defines air as a mixture of gases, and none of them are visible to human vision. If you exhale onto glass, you still can’t see the air, you see condensed water vapor . Even if I was somehow wrong about this basic fact of air being invisible, it would not alter the definitions of the word geist one bit.
As far as the ‘cowards position’, no. You and EL don’t get to arbitrate others peoples atheism or judge them because you can’t grasp the concept. It has nothing to do with church. It has everything to do with feeling and connection. Science is not sacred.
To Tethys
Every person who meets a basic definition of sanity is either an atheist or a theist. For the purposes of conversation, I conflated “theist” and “religious”. For the purposes of conversation, I define “theist” as “someone who accepts as true that there is a god”, and “atheist” as “anyone who is not a theist”. (I also say that these definitions are IMHO the best match for historical usage, and they are the best match for the usage of most self-identified atheists.)
If someone presents themselves as “spiritual but not religious”, and if they mean to posit this as some alternative to “religious” and “atheist”, then they’re wrong. Further, I suspect that many of them know it on some conscious level, but they’re afraid to admit to themselves or others that they are an atheist. That totally fits the definition of “(intellectual) cowardice”.
Finally, I assert that many people do mean to use “spiritual but not religious” as an alternative to “religious” and “atheist”.
This is totally within my purview to decide and judge, to arbitrate, to decide and declare.
This is a colonialist mindset. No, you don’t get to arbitrate peoples beliefs, especially since you can’t even comprehend their beliefs.
If someone tells me that they believe that “2” is neither “even” nor “odd”, I can say that they’re wrong. That’s a totally reasonable thing to do. I am not casting into doubt the sincerity of their belief. I am saying that their belief is wrong, or nonsensical, or not even wrong.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
Similarly, if someone tells me that they are “spiritual but not religious”, and if they tell me that they’re not an atheist, then they’re wrong. I’m not doubting their sincerity. I’m doubting their command of the English language, and specifically the words “atheist” and “religious” and their meanings.
Further, I would strongly suspect that they know that they’re an atheist, but they don’t want to admit that to themself or others, because of the negative cultural connotations on the word “atheist”.
PS: Pedantic correction. There is the class of theists who don’t follow an (organized) religion. So, if someone tells me that they’re neither a theist nor atheist, then they’re wrong. Also, if they say “spiritual but not religious” with the intention of communicating “not atheist and not theist”, then they are wrong.
PPS: I can put it like this. Understanding of someone’s beliefs is not requisite to conclude that someone who says “I am neither an atheist nor a theist” is wrong. I can make that conclusion with zero understanding of their beliefs.
Tethys:
So what are you seeing, in the picture from the EPA page that I linked above? (Here it is again.) I mean, go ahead and pick the photo on either side showing the same location at different times, since it makes no difference. Do you see those hills off in the distance that seem to disappear or become blurrier or less colorful or however you might describe them? Yes, good, you do see those hills, so they’re not invisible.
Do you think the distant hills are inherently fuzzier-looking compared to the ones nearer to the camera? Do you think it’s a problem with your eyesight or with the camera? What do you think makes the difference in what you are seeing in those photographs? Could it possibly be something you’re seeing which filled the space between the camera’s location and the hills’ locations, which got in the way of the camera’s line of sight with the hills? Perhaps that something is a mixture of gases which are therefore visible?
And forget about the hills for a moment…. Do you see the color of the sky in either picture, instead of … well, nothing at all … or whatever visible non-air thing you think it is which has that color under certain specific conditions (like when sunlight scatters off of it for instance)?
Could you somehow be wrong? Yes, you definitely could be. And if you don’t care, or if that doesn’t matter, or if you’re going to tell me that what I’m talking about was totally obvious to you all along, then I don’t get what the fuck you were trying to claim or why it was important to you to claim it.
You can observe it indirectly, you still cannot see the air itself. That is the concept behind all of the various usages of the word geist, and some uses of the English spirit. French has esprit.
I have no idea why you decided to argue that point, but sure, yeah, I am stupid and pointless because you took issue with the definitions of a word and I have been teasing you for it.
Just admit that air is invisible, and enjoy this oddity I came across while looking at a list of German words that don’t exist in any other language. IIRC, music is an area of interest for you? Augenmusik”
Sorry, accidentally chopped off the header, that last comment was directed to CR.
Whether or not something is invisible is an empirical claim about physical facts. I have no idea what it would be to “see the air itself,” if that’s not exactly what we can already do. When you see what seems to be a rock, if there is some such rock in your line of sight which you’re apparently looking at, then do you also not “see the rock itself,” and if so what do you see?
Funny thing is, in this situation at least, I don’t give a shit about your concept.
— If the concept behind it is just false, because it doesn’t agree with those facts (since not agreeing with them is certainly possible), then it’s just false and shouldn’t be relied upon to tell us what’s true about the real-world, empirically-ascertainable facts.
— If the concept is not supposed to be about such facts but about something else, then you shouldn’t construe it as being about them and you shouldn’t be disputing what the facts are simply on the basis that it has a particular meaning. What is supposed to make you so convinced of this concept, or why take it on faith that it must be correct? Anyway, flipping through a dictionary or thesaurus or whatever, while interesting and useful in various ways, is not reliable method of learning about things like that. And it’s very puzzling that you would make your case by appealing to an idea that some people happened to invent, instead of whatever is manifestly going on all of the time in the real world.
direct vs indirect Again German is a language, not MY concept. Latin only has the fucking churches concept of spirit, which is that of a supernatural force outside of the world, or the nebulous holy ghost. That is exactly what is meant by having a colonialist attitude. World-views are only limited by your ability to imagine, and the words you have to communicate them. It is hard to consider a concept that doesn’t exist in your native language.
I’m not totally fluent in anything other than English, but I do know substantial bits of several languages, to greater or lesser degrees (including a smattering of German for what it’s worth, colonialist assholes thought they may be). But any language will do, because it makes no difference to me who came up with some words in that language, or when they did so, or anything like that. Just give me a reasonable understanding of the idea, if it’s even coherent enough to have some clear understanding of it, in case I’m not already familiar with it. So I’m utterly open to learning about some new word in some new language, in the most non-imperialistic fashion that I can, if that’s what you think this will take. But I have no clue how learning about a word will help.
Whatever any such words mean, it is not the case that they must therefore be true claims about the world by virtue of the fact that they have that meaning. This is not how we decide things like that. If you thought that the word geist is useful in all sorts of other senses or for all sorts of other purposes, I don’t know if I should agree or not, but you haven’t made that even remotely clear to me.
In any event, the fact (and I’ll take your word for this) that some notion or another amounts to a claim that air is invisible should not be in any sense compelling to you, because you ought to be learning whether or not that is the case empirically, not by having some super-duper-deep understanding of what the concept behind it is and letting it wash over you and having faith about whatever the concept says no matter what it says. Right?
That would just be circular, because all you have is the concept, then go back to the concept and then back to it, etc., without ever doing any independent check about whether or not it happens to be right about the world or even makes any logical sense whatsoever. If that’s how you roll, then you ought to be just as convinced by an ontological argument for the existence of a god (or some other god-like thing as featured in some other language … Brahman, for example), which is to say that you shouldn’t be convinced at all.
Convinced of what? That words can have multiple overlapping definitions and imprecise meanings? I don’t think that the concept of world view is invalidated by the existence of religious beliefs. Nobody has argued for gods or religion. Nobody is proposing abandoning science or materialism and in favor of the supernatural.
The air we all breath is produced by living organisms. Soil is nothing without the decomposing humus and various communities of microorganisms that facilitate nutrient uptake in plants. Rain can turn to acid it we pump too many pollutants into the atmosphere. Humans are not separate from nature. The web of life is something many different cultures noticed and valued long before science proved that all life is related.
Latin is the language of the people who did not value these things. They are the original oppressors who went all over Europe colonizing foreign lands by violent force. The idea that their concept of spirit is the only possible use of the term is simply sad and steals all the joy from life.
We clearly have very different approaches to synthesis. I am comfortable with ambiguity, that doesn’t mean I am less rational in my thinking. More than one thing can be true. Science tells us there is no sharp line that divides life from the non-living raw components. It’s fuzzy and imprecise. Breath is as viable a measure as any other. Respiration is a feature of all living matter.
I am curious if you looked at the eye music link? I’m sure this seems like I am making a leap of logic, but maybe if we apply the concepts to something less nebulous than world view it would be easier to have an exchange of ideas rather than an argument.
There is no logical reason that music is emotive. How does an arrangement of sounds produce an emotional response? Why do we respond to it so strongly? Why do we feel compelled to create it or listen to it in the first place?
There were lots of oppressive cultures, well before the ancient Romans came along and did their (unoriginal) oppressive shit. Anyway, I have no idea how that might have anything to do with the word “spiritus.” If it’s supposed to be tainted just by originating from a certain culture, then I do not accept any racist/nationalist bullshit like that. Maybe you could produce some kind of argument for the particular Romanesque taint which that particular word has, or connect it in some coherent way to the awful things Romans did. But you haven’t done that, and until that happens, your claim goes with the rest into my trash bin.
First, once again, I don’t think that. The fact that there are various uses, and numerous other similar terms in various languages, doesn’t mean we (atheists) have some special need to fill in some kind of gap, with some such thing which we were somehow lacking. I don’t have a god-shaped hole in my heart, and I don’t have a spiritual or a geist-ey one either. When you tell me it means other stuff, which you also tell me is already consistent with everything in the natural world that is thus already clearly unproblematic for us, then there goes the entire motivation we were supposed to have for adding something new to plug in the alleged hole so as to fix the alleged problem.
Also, I have no idea how this could steal all the joy from life. Get a grip. It’s a word, and we have tons of them, like for example “joy,” which I don’t believe has been stolen by anyone or anything. This is, just to be clear, the sort of statement which makes me believe you really don’t have in the back of your head something mundane or reasonable, like the fucking air or what properties it has.
What does that mean? It’s a claim that there is no explanation for why people have emotional experiences when listening to music? That’s just inexplicable? Inexplicable in the context of the natural world, which is why you’re trying to justify some notion which adds to that, or inexplicable period?
And how do you know this? Is this another article of faith or what? To put the point differently: What sorts of things do you think I learn when I study it, none of which amount to how/why people tend to respond (emotionally or otherwise) in various ways to various sorts of music? I mean, maybe you’re not aware, but I learned about it historically, sociologically, physically, mathematically, philosophically, music theoretically, how to read it and write it and improvise it and perform it, how to interpret what others made and what they think about it, how to teach it, and all sorts of shit about it to be perfectly honest. And to this day I still learn new things quite often, because I think it’s a vast and interesting subject. Are you telling me that despite all of that, there’s some huge chunk of it that I totally missed?
Admittedly, I certainly don’t know everything about the psychology of music, nor does anyone for that matter, and as far as I can tell the sciences may never come to an end like that. Anyway, many of those issues above factor into that project too, if you’ll just accept that claim, at least for the sake of argument right now. But it’s as if you’re even claiming (or just don’t know) that it is not a genuine subfield of psychology which (seemingly, at least) produces lots of informative and logical and scientific content that’s all about telling you reasons like that (if you’re paying any attention), even if it were the case that a comprehensive and formal music education like mine turns out to be utterly useless for answering any part of your question. Maybe the rest of psychology isn’t such a black box and isn’t so useless, but that one special part is. Maybe not.
Or it’s as if you’re saying that, in some other sense, some special style of reason doesn’t exist or some such reasoning doesn’t or can’t happen. No idea why you would say it, but there’s got to be some other sort of “reason” or “logic” to it, above and beyond all of the things that we actually do know and all of the ways we do reason about it…. Like maybe God wanted it that way, or Life made it so, or the Form of Music-Emotiveness just is so, or who knows what. If that’s the idea, then of course, no, there isn’t anything like that. But why would should it matter that there isn’t anything like that?
If it’s none of those, then what else could you mean? I’m actually curious. Is it supposed to be a claim, as it seems to be, which you know is true? Is it just something you happened to hear somewhere and are repeating for no particularly good reason?
Those are very complicated questions, but they do have very complicated answers. If you actually want to learn about them, you can.
To give you a simple one, since this is all becoming very tiring, sounds are sometimes arranged very well, and for a variety of reasons people tend to like such experiences. Their brains produce responses, by doing the normal brainy sorts of things brains do. Of course, sometimes we don’t respond very strongly (or emotionally) to certain music, depending on what we and the music in question happen to be like. Nor do some people create it or listen to it, despite the fact that many do one or both. Is that really the sort of answer you’re looking for?
apologies for this minor interruption of the conversation that is way over my head.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/
The recent film Heart of a Dog, mentions the philosophy of Wittgenstein in passing, as ‘things only exist if one can talk about them’, etc. Some reason, it sounds like a lot of the conversation here. so I’ll just plop it here for your perusal. seriously not trying to derail, just trying to augment. possibly. maybe. ?
I don’t think the philosophy was a derail at all, it’s exactly the concept I am trying to convey. The language itself is one of the limiting factors in any form of communication. I found this comment highly amusing.
I am third generation American, but my known ancestry is not a mix of Anglo-Saxons. My Grandparents all spoke German as their first language, but three different variations including Old High German. I don’t speak German, or read it well, but I can follow a conversation in German because my brain has been ‘wired’ by hearing all these variants of a language. I frequently asked for English versions of words only to be told that it can’t be said in English. They did try, but especially with humor, they literally could not explain the joke in English.
Rome never managed to conquer the German tribes. The Holy roman church never managed to completely suppress the aspects of the culture they considered pagan barbarians, because they never quite understood some very basic aspects of the culture they considered inferior. The Germans elected their ‘King’, and had equality between the sexes. Both concepts were completely foreign to Rome. We are still fighting over these two cultural concepts, but I think history has shown which worldview was better for people.
To Tethys
I believe that you do not mean to communicate merely “I am comfortable with ambiguity”. No. I believe that you actually mean to communicate “I can be just as rational while using and thinking with ambiguous words and concepts as compared to using and thinking with precise and clear words and concepts”. To avoid strawmanning, I explicitly ask: I am correct in interpreting what you mean to communicate?
If I am right about what you wish to communicate – which is hard when you seemingly choose to communicate in a way that is ambiguous and difficult to understand, as opposed to clear communication – then you are simply wrong. To borrow a quote from Thomas Jefferson: “Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them;”. Choosing to communicate with and think with more ambiguous words does exactly mean that you will be less rational in your thinking.
Yes, more than one thing can be true, and sometimes there are no bright lines. This is not an excuse to abandon proper thinking. Further, this is not an excuse to communicate with words and concepts that you know will lead to confusion and that will fail to correctly communicate, when you know of much better words that are less likely to lead to confusion and which are much more likely to accurate communicate. The use of purposefully vague or ambiguous terms in communication just means that you are a shitty communicator, and seemingly you choose to do this purposefully. Further, doing this just means that you are a shitty person, IMAO.
Again, more confused thinking. In the context of the life and death of a human person, “breath” is a really shitty measure. “Cellular respiration of the constituent cells” is also a really shitty measure for the life and death of a human person. By far the best boundary for life and death of a human person is brain death. Of course, even human brain death is a fuzzy line, but that’s the line that we should and do care about for human persons, and it’s way better than “breath” and “respiration”.
For example, we have plenty of cases where lung-breathing stopped for an hour, but they were still resuscitated afterwards, and lived a normal life for many years afterwards. Often when someone falls into extremely cold water, like walking on a frozen lake, and falling through a hole in the ice.
For example, after brain death, many cells continue with cellular respiration. Brain cells are among the first cells to die in a human. However, after the brain cells die, the human person is dead, in spite of continued cellular respiration among the other cells of the body.
If you meant to talk about the boundaries of life and death of all organisms in terms of a detached biologist, and not in the context of the boundaries of life and death of (human) persons, then “respiration” is a pretty good measure; I’ll grant that. However, “breath” is not synonymous with “respiration”. PS: There is also the nasty and open problem “are viruses alive?”. PPS: And speaking in vague and imprecise language does nothing to help us understand these things and does nothing to help us successfully communicate about these things.
@221, Tethys
Eh, that could easily be more because of their skill and ability and time and effort than any literal impossibility. At least, most of the time I find that people aren’t very good at this sort of skill, even within a single language like English, yet I personally do just fine at this task (even when my co-workers for whom English is their second language ask me about stuff). Plus, English people successfully learn German all the time!
Admittedly, I don’t have a slam dunk case that they’re wrong. Just seems easy to doubt.
It could, but in this instance it is because of the differences in the languages themselves. They could translate the words, but they couldn’t explain why it was funny. In order to get the joke, you need a good grasp of German. In English it is not funny or it literally could not be translated because English doesn’t have equivalent words.
EL
Again, fuck off. The context is how do we define alive? I am surprised that you decided to argue about the life and death of a person, but that is not the topic under discussion.
CR
I think you know far more about music than I do, so I was hoping that you would tell me what your take on eye-music might be. I have no working explanation for why music is emotive. It appears you easily accept that it can be, so I am asking you to apply your critical thought to that aspect of culture because I think you would have some very interesting ideas on the subject. Spirited discussion is my goal, I thought it would be easier if I completely removed any religious overtones by applying the concept of spirit to the emotive aspect of music. Music can move you, but you can’t see it, or touch it.
Why can’t we have an enjoyable discussion about the subject? It’s not like I know many people in my daily life who even consider such things.
It’s hard to know what the topic under discussion is, because I am not a mind-reader, and because you refuse to practice effective communication. You refuse to speak in clear terms, and worse you celebrate ineffective and unclear communication. It seems that only you know what the topic is, and you seem to be making damn sure that you’re that no one else will find out. I am not alone. consciousness razor is also struggling over the exact same issues. Get off your faux intellectual high horse, drop this ridiculous position that “I’m superior because I can think and speak in unclear terms”, and behave according to my own projection which I mentioned earlier, namely: Care about understanding the other person, and care about being understood. Put effort into doing effective communication: communication is not a one-person activity. Effective communication is when one person expresses ideas in language chosen specifically with the other person in mind, so that the other person understands, and to avoid unnecessary ambiguity.
For example, poetry and art often thrives on ambiguity and unclear metaphor. Poetry and metaphor have their place, and they are quite valuable. I enjoy good poetry and metaphor and ambiguity. I am not attacking poetry and metaphor. I am attacking your “use” of poetry and metaphor in this context where you should be striving to use effective communication. Ambiguity in poetry and art might be sacred and have great value, but it has little to no proper place during attempts to communicate the definition and meaning of “sacred” to others, such as myself and several others in this thread.
Your seeming adamant refusal to practice effective communication is, IMO, a kind of faux intellectual superiority. I think Sarah A called it perfectly in post 3 in the link to that xkcd article, where this is not about truth nor effective communication, and instead it’s just a means to feed your own ego.
And yes, I’ve stopped caring about being polite and understanding. I stopped caring about being polite and understanding the moment that I realized that you had absolutely no intention to explain yourself, and that you were going to troll me. Your entire post content here is just one giant troll in order to feed your own ego.
Let’s be clear here.
Could the joke be translated? I’ll accept “no” as a short answer.
Could the joke be rendered in English in a way that would be funny to a English speaker listener? I’ll definitely accept “no” here.
Could the joke and why it’s funny be explained to an English speaker listener? Definitely yes.
Those three things are different questions. I must emphasize that explaining a joke and why it’s funny does not mean that the English spekaer will find it to be funny. To find something to be funny is to have an emotional reaction. Actually personally having and experiencing the emotional reaction of “funny” is not a requisite to understanding the joke and why it’s funny to a German speaker.
It should be noted that many jokes depend on more than a mere understanding of the language, its words, and its grammar. Many jokes often depend on hidden cultural assumptions too. However, just like the meanings and connotations of words can be explained, and rhymes can be explained, these cultural assumptions can be explained too.
I would argue: Of course they can be explained! This relates to my answer to Quine’s problem of radical translation. What everyone always overlooks in the problem is that everyone must overcome the problem of radical translation. No one is born with a language. Everyone must learn the language of their parents without first having a shared language. So, if you are able to learn the language and all of the cultural assumptions that are required to make it funny, then of course all of those things can be explained to someone else.
It should be stated that it may be difficult for someone to be able to consciously recall all of the pertinent facts of what makes a joke funny. We all might have consciousness, but that doesn’t make us experts in consciousness. When we think, not everything that we think is readily available to immediate conscious introspection. The skill to introspect is a skill like any other, that can be practiced and improved.
And it should also be emphasized again that explaining the details of why a joke is funny is often not sufficient to actually make the joke funny. Someone can understand all of the reasons of why a joke is funny without having the emotional response of finding the joke to be funny themself. Often, those “reasons of why a joke is funny” must be an unconscious and long-accepted cultural knowledge in order for a joke to be funny. For example, one reason (of many) of why a particular joke might be funny is a piece of cultural background where a certain job is deemed undesirable. That fact can be explained to someone from another culture, who doesn’t already come with that bit of cultural background. However, merely understanding that reason is different than having that reason be a part of the persons’s cultural background knowledge. In order to have the emotional response of finding the joke funny, it’s often not sufficient to merely know that the job is undesirable in the cultural, but instead it’s often required to have that belief “the job is undesirable” as part of one’s background cultural beliefs. Believing that the job is undesirable, or even having the working background cultural knowledge that the job is undesirable, is different than simply knowing that the job is undesirable. Lived experience is different than learning about it in an academic and detached way from a book. There are different kinds of understanding of a fact. The human mind is a complex and nuanced thing.
Here’s an example of a joke. I think I have the advantage that very few people here will find it funny, in part because I am a huge math nerd, and very few people are.
The joke:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_choice
In this case, the problem is partly language, and partly what I might call “cultural background knowledge”.
I could easily render this joke in German, or any other language, and it would be just as funny – which means that it would not be funny to most people no matter what language that they speak. That’s because they understand the technical terms, which can be thought of as being a language separate from English, German, etc. One first needs to understand what “axiom of choice”, “well-ordering”, and “Zorn’s lemma” means.
I could explain those terms to you, but you still probably won’t find it funny. The joke relies on someone being able to immediately and unconsciously make connections, which require a deep knowledge and understanding of the topic in order to have those connections form. The funniness of this joke comes from dramatic irony:
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/dramatic-irony
Here, the speaker is feigning partial ignorance of what the words mean, with the expectation / requirement that the audience will have better understanding of the words than the speaker. The expectation is that the audience will immediately make the connection that these three things are logically equivalent statements, IMO which then leads to the conclusion that the speaker doesn’t know what they’re talking about, which might be funny, but IMO the deeper funniness comes also comes the understanding that these three things superficially look drastically different but they happen to be logically equivalent, and the deeper funniness comes from being able to relate in some way to the speaker in their confusion about how these three things which look wildly different can actually be logically equivalent. In particular, it also rests on a shared visceral belief with the speaker that one of them does look obviously right, and one does look obviously wrong, and the third is seemingly opaque to even mathematicians. One might say that it’s as much laughing at the speaker as it is laughing at ourselves, and laughing at the apparent absurdity that is this fact of math. It requires this sort of lived experience or deep knowledge in order for all of these associations to come to the front of consciousness at the same time, to mix, and to produce the emotional response “funny”.
Hmm, look at all these people engaging in sharing the spirit
Of course I borked the link. * rolls eyes at self* link
Coming from the person who keeps claiming I am wrong because he can’t even follow the gist of the conversation, this is weapons grade irony.
You obtuse dipshit! Neither can several others in here, including consciousness razor and John Morales! And this is coming from the person, you, who openly celebrated being vague and ambiguous in conversation too! The irony is all yourself, with a severe case of projection, and a severe lack of introspection.
Again, talking in ambiguity and expecting the other person to follow along is not intellectualism. It’s not philosophy. It’s sophistry. Wisdom is not found in purposeful ambiguity. It’s a way to feed your own ego at the expense of others. It’s dishonest. It’s trolling.
[meta]
EnlightenmentLiberal, please do not attribute to me positions which I have not claimed that I hold.
I am very aware that I don’t grasp all the nuances and connotations of particular terms/concepts in other languages/cultures, and that I can only intellectually apprehend their adumbration. To fully grok them, I’d have to change the way I think.
In particular, I am persuaded by a weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (language shapes thinking).
(As to purposeful ambiguity, you may care to your own definition of a joke. Not that Tethys is doing that; she’s alluding to an ineffable quality to certain terms because they rely on a particular way of perception no less than a particular background)
to Caine @ 102 I apologize if further comments have made this one redundant but I have to go now, and I wanted to quickly add to try to get across to all the other white people like me who seem to be having trouble with the ideas of ‘respect’ and ‘sacred’ and conflating them with things they personally dislike. Read Caine’s post at 102 again. Practicing respect, even as simply as taking your hat off, or dressing appropriately, or not sitting on a particular patch of rocks, takes time. It slows you down. In that bit of time, you can start to feel a connection with the people and things for which you are showing respect.
Practicing respect allows you to learn to listen and to see and to feel. These lead to deeper understanding and knowledge. You like bananas? Commercial bananas are going to disappear because colonial businesses clear cut tropical rainforests on a vast scale and established huge plantations growing just one crop. That crop was nearly killed off once by a fungus and is being killed off again by another because growing bananas that way is unsustainable. But we didn’t listen and we didn’t learn. We rushed to dominate, control, suppress. You can see our lack of respect in the destruction of the land, the cultures, the history, the people of all the so-called “banana republics”.
It doesn’t hurt anyone to remove your hat or avoid looking in someone’s eyes or consider why this pile of rocks is important to people. But that bit of time it takes can begin and sustain the process of making the entire planet a whole lot more important.
As a postscript, I’d like to add that I live in a city that floods all the damned time. If the invading settlers had respected the First Nations peoples’ advice, they never would have built here.
To John Morales
Just as I and others did, you expressed a lack of understanding about the claimed separation between “sacred” and “religious”. I’m still sitting here, no closer to understanding their positions on these issues. The only thing that I’ve learned is that the beliefs of Tethys include “good communication is a sin” and “there are reasonable alternatives to proper clear thinking”.
I do not appreciate you throwing me under the bus here. But then again, you’ve always been an insufferable and dishonest asshole to me, and so this is something that I should expect.
Agreed.
No.
This:
Is defending purposefully vague and ambiguous thinking in the context of analysis and rationality. It’s completely absurd. Further, the way that Tethys has behaved themself is to be incredibly evasive and ambiguous, and to refuse to explain themselves, and to take pride that they can understand “complex things” and deign to say that I’m hopeless if I don’t immediately understand, see:
Tethys could have just said in response to my questions and consciousness razor’s questions. Instead, Tethys dragged it out for many posts, continuing to be evasive, and after several posts just gave me the above. The above, without the arrogant and condescending nature, would have served quite adequately as an explanation, and an honest and reasonable person would have just given that immediately as a response. Instead, Tethys dragged it out for several posts without explaining, and purposefully so, and then ended with the above passage which is completely patronizing and egotistical response. This is not intellectualism. Again, this is trolling.
I asked a question and got sufficiently-informative answers to resolve that aspect.
Thing is, I don’t need for people to justify their beliefs for me to accept they hold them, I only need for people to explain what they are so that I can sufficiently understand them.
—
Well then, you have your adequate explanation.
EL doesn’t get it despite multiple attempts at explaining the concept of spirit as material and non-religious part of culture. I find the ad hominems and faulty reasoning rather tedious. Who whinges on for days because the person they insulted decided to not take their whining and faulty logic seriously? Yes, I mocked your limited understanding. I am not a bit ashamed of having a really good grasp of how language works.
Tethys:
I think that from a musical point of view, what matters in a score is everything which affects what is actually heard. Making a score with visual features that don’t contribute to what is heard is useless musically. I do go to a whole lot of trouble to make scores visually appealing. But that is for the sake of encouraging a performer to take the score seriously and making it easier for them to interpret what the various indications mean in terms of their affect on the sound.
Using all sorts of unnecessary visual features which aren’t doing that, which I guess are more or less analogous to writing in calligraphy, can just obscure that musical meaning. Some people after all have trouble reading that sort of thing and would do better at it if it were not so obscure. It’s absolutely essential to aim for clarity and functionality — that is, making it a useful set of instructions that any old normal performer* can interpret to accurately reproduce the desired sequence of sounds. Producing anything else for whatever other reasons is at best unessential and at worst counterproductive.
*By that, I mean it should not be an utter mystery how the score should be interpreted, for people who don’t have access to privileged information from or about the person who made it. So if any non-standard notation is going to be used (or if standard notation should be interpreted in a non-standard way), then you’ll need some set of meta-instructions to understand the instructions which were supposed to come in the form of a score that a musically literate person can read. If it’s visually detrimental that you’ve added some ugly-looking cheat sheet to your visual masterpiece, for any random person who wants to actually play it, then so be it. There is no good reason why it ought to be a mystical or authoritarian or anti-egalitarian relationship between you and the performer. Your job is to do your best to ensure they’ll understand your score properly and without incident, not to put up hurdles for them to jump over.
That’s just wrong too. It doesn’t take much imagination to see why: look at a vibrating speaker or feel it. Touch an instrument while it’s playing (or your vocal chords while you’re speaking or singing), and you will feel stuff vibrating. If you want an extreme example, consider an earthquake. It will certainly and literally move you, and you can easily see or feel the vibrations all around you. That should’ve been obvious because sounds are physical, and what you said would only be true if they were not. So you haven’t removed the religious or supernatural overtones, have you? Sounds are also not metaphors or whatever conceptual relationship it is you think they’re supposed to have with “spirits.” They’re sounds.
^ What I meant. I guess typos and other errors would be good examples too, if you don’t like the calligraphy example. Or splashing random colors around on the page, making it harder to see the text. Or writing it all backward, upside down, etc. … lots of (bad) possibilities there.
I thought the concept of eye music was strange. Why would you make it more difficult to play? What possible function would it serve? Placing a hidden communication between composer and musician within the score seems very odd to me.
True, an upright bass and live music will indeed get me moving. I love nothing better than feeling it through the floor, and engaging in a little word less dialogue between musicians and dancers. Yes, there are soundwaves but that was not the sense of move I was using. I mean the emotions that it invokes. Music has spirit, and soul, with no need for supernatural or religious explanations for those terms. It may move you to dance, or sing, or weep. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. (sorry this is a bit disjointed, it is late here and I haven’t had my dinner yet)