I believe in science not because I want to, but because it has enabled us to build weapons of war. It is provable via death. What's there to argue with?

Nothing in this article suggests to me that any sort of subjective belief can come close to that. And yeah, as another commenter suggested, scientific facts come much closer to tying the knot with their subjective counterparts than vice versa. The explanation that, if you don't act like you believe in a moral god, then you'll develop a personality which leads to despair and unhappiness, seems to me much more compelling than something from the other end. (Maybe like 'the firmament of fields vibrates to the music of eternal existence and consciousness springs from a sufficiently beautiful harmony of vibrating being-ness)

The article doesn't address this to my satisfaction so I fail to see what it can do. It's just another call to action to deny the nihilism (which it mischaracterizes as cynicism) which will destroy our society.

His views seem to be a product of at least two things. First, the inability of neoliberal capitalism to see what's going on around it. Second is more particularly historic, namely post Cold War ascendancy. This lead to the hubris of nrocons believing they could easily remake the world however they wanted. It also shows in the easy, and absurd, conflation of capitalism with democracy, which are obviously not the same. His book says more about the US in that area than anything to be taken seriously.

Like I said. . .

I do marketing. 😉

Do ellipses count as separate sentences? I fell like I was tricked into reading more than 1 sentence

Cogito ergo sum doesn't mean the certainty of what one is. It just means that whatever is happening, is happening now. Having the thought I think, therefore I am, is a way of repeatedly reaffirming the occurence of real time events, by using a real time event. Not what, who, where or why you are with any certainty.

The sun will rise tomorrow has been a figure of speech for decades.

>You might like "Crucial Conversations - tools for talking when stakes are high". They discuss "shared pool of meaning" - ensuring you and the person you're trying to communicate with are actually understanding each other well. > >Oh, and "The Power of Myth" by Joseph Campbell

Thanks!

It goes this way: I can never know for certain what I am not. What I do know for certain is that I am. In whatever medium it may be, I am. You can make the case that it’s a simulation if you’d like; nonetheless, within that simulation IF it is that, I am.

I can tell you with utter certainty that the sun will not rise tomorrow. I’ve made the celestial observations and calculations myself. Our system is not geocentric, it is heliocentric. So the sun will not rise at all. Rather, our planet will continue to rotate for the remainder of my life unless some massive external force acts upon it. Likewise our star. It is not at all belief, therefore, to state that absent some as yet unknown massive external force our planet will continue to rotate as it continues to orbit our star.

I've read Sun Tzu.... I do marketing...... You are spot on! 😎

I think it is more than just distorted perception. Violence just is not a part of the average man's life anymore. Maybe Israelis, and even then, it is only the threat of violence. Ukraine is an aberration. I think the modern instruments of war preclude humans from engaging in violence in a culturally meaningful way. You could think of a handgun as a nuclear weapon at a personal scale. It's incompatible with the style of warfare that humans engaged in for the majority of their history. To say nothing of nuclear weapons! And it's very, very hard to imagine going back to less fatal forms of warfare. Your opponent would just bring a gun to the knife fight.
Then we have the monopoly on the use of force by the state. Non military citizens have to content themselves with violent ideation, of which we have many forms.

Depends. Are you taking care of your kids in such a way that it is actually damaging them? And/or in such a way as adversely affects scores of other people? Are you so stuck in your belief that you are taking good care of your kids to notice if you are not?

I’m not arguing for or against any particular belief. I am merely stating that an insistence on a need to embrace belief itself is bound to lead to issues. Here’s one for you: virtually every “evil dictator” has been utterly convinced that he’s doing the right/good thing for his nation. Go read Mein Kampf. Hitler believed fervently that his course of action was the right and necessary course of action for Germany. Believed it so fervently and spake it so strongly, so very strongly, that he convinced millions of people to join him.

The ideas you're hashing out sound to me like the ones that have already been analyzed - perhaps poorly - in the debate between Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, and Bret Weinstein.

In short, is a linguistic error to claim that we should "believe" myth and metaphor.

We shouldn't really asking if myth and metaphor are "true" or if they should be "believed." The right question is, what do we call truths that are conveyed by myths, metaphors, and artistic fictions? The answer is clear: we call them moral lessons. A teenager might watch a film such as Star Wars and learn a lesson about redemption or bravery. That lesson manifests because it resonates in their psyche with an objective truth about human nature and life.

This isn't confusing for most art and mythology because people usually understand which categories those genres of human creativity belong to. That, however, is obviously not true with religion. Seeing authoritative texts as myth and metaphor is simply not the way the majority of religious people read those texts. The can of worms that kind of thinking opens is postmodern: those metaphors are fundamentally subjective because it's not clear at all what objectivity it's conveying without a textual interpretation to view the bible's claims through.

What lessons one extracts from the bible depends crucially on what interpretation one uses to understand it. If someone attaches literal belief to it, that is going to produce very different results than someone who reads the bible in the same way one would watch Star Wars. There is no reason to believe practically anything in the bible actually happened. Now that of course doesn't prevent someone from viewing the bible as a mythology with metaphorical truths similar to a film or piece of artwork that one can extract lessons from. But that does not mean one believes it even in that sense, just as one would never say that one believes in Star Wars.

And even if one does try to see moral reality within images in the bible, that is extremely hard to do if one engages with what is actually in that barbaric text as honestly as is possible (unless one conveniently ignores those nasty sections about god engaging in actions such as genocide and genital mutilation, which is incidentally what many Christians resort to).

This seems like a semantic distinction of what you believe truth means

Many people who consider themselves atheist are actually nontheist. There is only one type of atheist, those who claim there are no gods, as this cannot be proven it constitutes a belief. Everyone else is nontheist and rejects the question of the existence of deities entirely. An absence of belief is nothing, it isn't non-belief, hence nontheism, not atheism because you can't non-believe something, only believe that it isn't true, which is still belief.

I'm not sure how you can repeatedly state that its possible to not believe anything, when you don't even know for certain if you are really alive at this moment and not some brain in a jar. Or a simulation of yourself in a virtual environment. I might be a philosophical zombie for all you know. You have no idea if the sun will rise tomorrow, or the true speed of light because it depends on the sensitivity of the instrument doing the measuring. Everything is belief, or prediction or estimation. All of it.

I believe taking good care of my kids is good.

Does that belief need to be dispelled?

Your argument mirrors that of religious believers who claim that atheism is a belief system - and that therefore, their beliefs in deities are as valid as the atheist belief that there are no deities. Once you iterate that it is impossible to transcend belief, then indeed you support their claim.

But atheism is not necessarily a belief that there are no gods. It is simply a lack of belief in gods! There’s a huge difference. The former stipulates that gods are a given, and from there which ones you believe in - while the latter says there’s no evidence of it. Furthermore, what is true remains true regardless of how fervent your belief otherwise… while that which is not true cannot ever be made true by mere belief.

So I will opt to disgree with the conclusion posited by the OP in his title. We do not need to believe anything - least of all fairy tales (myths).

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You're welcome, I agree.

Not sure how many ways to say this, you cannot operate without belief, not now and not ever. The absolute best we can do is improve our beliefs so that they match reality as closely as possible.

The fact that belief contains the word lie, has no significance. Its etymology is related to a mental acceptance of something as true, along with religious connotations of faith.

lol

If you structure your arguments based on logic, and the logic is based on something clear, and fact based, and having such makes it easier to understand; then the other party will most likely agree. Unless only if the other party has a conviction so strange , and such conviction is so strong and biased, and such will causes one to shut out all things; then the other will most likely never change his mind.

If the other person does not follow the truth, and you can't do much about it, and you shouldn't care to much about things beyond your control; then it's not wrong to let it be after you tried.

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Belief. BeLIEf. BeLIEf. Be^(LIE)f.

It’s right there in the word. A belief belies the reality.

Just because beliefs are inevitable does not mean we ought embrace them. Rats and cockroaches are inevitable - do you embrace them? Let them roam freely in your kitchen? The more we can dispel belief, the better we can function in the modern world.

Reads like art of war marketing edition. Sun tzu if he worked remote and drank mocca lattes

One small : keep it concise.

Would love a TDLR on these articles tbh, no disrespect to the author. The beauty of philosophy is the near infinite discussional depth to almost any statement and I haven't got time to read 6k words, consider it intellectually and then form a comment. Give us the short version.