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reasonsforhope · 7 months
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Note: Reasons to Be Cheerful has had weirdly huge formatting issues for the past six or so months, so if that version is a mess, this link should work better.
"Florida Power & Light Company (FPL), the Sunshine State’s largest power utility, employs all the people you might expect: electricians, lineworkers, mechanical engineers — and a few you might not. For over 40 years, the company has kept a team of wildlife biologists on staff. Their task? Monitoring the giant carnivorous reptiles that reside in one of the state’s nuclear power plants. 
Saving the American Crocodile
What sounds like a low-budget creature feature is actually a wildly successful conservation story. It goes like this: In 1975, the shy and reclusive American crocodile was facing extinction. Over-hunting and habitat decline caused by encroaching development had pushed its numbers to a record low. By 1975, when it was listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act, there were only 200 to 300 left. 
Three years later, in 1978, workers at the Turkey Point nuclear power plant in Homestead, Florida happened upon something that must have made them gasp: a crocodile nest along one of the plant’s 5,900-acre “cooling canals.” Rather than drive the crocs away — perhaps the easiest solution — FPL hired a team of biologists and implemented a Crocodile Management Plan. Its goal was unconventional: provide a suitable habitat for the crocs within the workings of the nuclear power plant, allowing both to coexist.  
Over the course of the next 30 years, FPL’s wildlife biologists monitored nests, tagged hatchlings and generally created a hospitable environment for the reptiles. As it turned out, the plant’s cooling canals provided an ideal habitat: drained earth that never floods on which to lay eggs directly adjacent to water. Over the years, more and more crocs made the cooling canals home. By 1985, the nests at Turkey Point were responsible for 10 percent of American crocodile hatchlings in South Florida. In 2007, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service downgraded the American crocodile’s status from endangered to threatened, singling out FPL for its efforts. 
The program continues to this day. To date, biologists have tagged some 7,000 babies born at the plant. In 2021, there were a record-setting 565 crocodile hatchlings at the Turkey Point facility. 
"Reconciliation Ecology"
Turkey Point’s efforts are an example of what is known in the conservation world as “reconciliation ecology.” Rather than create separate areas where nature or animals can thrive in isolation from humans, reconciliation ecology suggests that we can blend the rich natural world with the world of human activity. Michael Rosenzweig, an emeritus professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, was a leading force in establishing this concept. The author of Win-Win Ecology: How the Earth’s Species can Survive in the Midst of Human Enterprise, Rosenzweig has pointed out that although human encroachment has typically been considered a threat to biodiversity, the notion that the world must be either “holy” or “profane,” ecologically speaking, is simply not true.  
“In addition to its primary value as a conservation tool, reconciliation ecology offers a valuable social byproduct,” writes Rosenzweig in his first chapter. “It promises to reduce the endless bickering and legal wrangling that characterize environmental issues today.”
-via Reasons to Be Cheerful, May 5, 2022. Article continues below. All headings added by me for added readability.
Dr. Madhusudan Katti, an associate professor in the Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources at North Carolina State University, was inspired by Rosenzweig when he did his postdoc at Arizona State. Katti has now been in the field of reconciliation ecology for two decades and teaches classes on the subject. “To me it’s finding solutions to reconciling human development with biodiversity conservation,” Katti says.
This common ground between development and conservation can be consciously planned, like FPL managing a crocodile habitat at a nuclear power plant or the state-sponsored vertical gardens and commercial farms on high-rise buildings in Singapore. Other examples include the restoration of the coral reef around an undersea restaurant in Eilat, Israel, or recent legislation in New York City requiring patterned glass on high-rise buildings, making windows more visible to migratory birds. Other planned examples of reconciliation ecology can be more individually scaled: a rooftop garden in an urban setting, modifying your garden to earn a “backyard bird habitat” certification from the Audubon Society, or even just mowing your lawn less often...
Reconciliation Ecology: Nature's Already Doing It Without Us
But there are countless examples of “accidental” incidents of reconciliation ecology, as well. One of Katti’s favorites is the kit fox of California’s San Joaquin Valley. “The kit fox was one of the very first species listed on the Endangered Species Act,” Katti says. Its decline was caused by habitat loss through agricultural and industrial development, as well as the extermination of the gray wolf population, which led to an increase in coyotes. So kit foxes adapted and moved to new habitats. One of these was the city of Bakersfield, California.
“Bakersfield, surrounded by oil pumps, would be the last place you’d expect to find an endangered species,” Katti says. But researchers think kit foxes have migrated to Bakersfield because they actually have more protection there from predators like coyotes and bobcats. “The kit foxes have figured out that if they can tolerate the human disturbance and live with people, then they are safer from all these other predators,” he says. 
Living in the city has led to some interesting behavioral changes. In the wild, for instance, a female kit fox gives birth to her young and raises them by herself in a den. But in the city, researchers have observed multiple females raising their litters together in the same den. “It’s like a form of cooperative breeding,” Katti says. “That wouldn’t happen in the wild.” ...
The Big Picture: How We Think about Conservation
Reconciliation Ecology isn’t just we humans welcoming animals like crocodiles and foxes into our environments, though. It’s also living with nature in a way that most Western societies haven’t done since the Enlightenment. “In recent years, there’s been a recognition that the ‘fortress conservation’ model — keeping nature separated from humans and not thinking of or valuing human-inhabited landscapes — those ideas are outdated,” says Katti.
In fact, in Katti’s classes on reconciliation ecology, he embraces the notion of reconnecting people with their land if they have been unjustly separated from it. “The term reconciliation also applies to all the colonial legacies where both nature and people have been harmed,” Katti says. “For Indigenous communities, the harm done to ecosystems, it’s happened together. So you can talk about addressing both. That’s where a lot of my thinking is at the moment.” 
A hopeful version of this sort of reconciliation is happening in California where colleagues of Katti’s who are tribal members are re-introducing “tribal burns” in some areas. Controlled burns have been a part of many Indigenous cultures for millenia, both as a way to prevent devastating forest fires, but also to encourage the growth of certain plants like hazel that are used for basket-weaving and other crafts. 
“The notion that people don’t belong there and ‘let nature take care of itself’ doesn’t really work,” Katti says. “That’s the legacy of Western European Enlightenment thinking — a divide between human and nature. That is a real faulty view of nature. People have been part of the ecosystem forever.”
-via Reasons to Be Cheerful, May 5, 2022
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decaffeinatedcrack · 1 year
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Who's your favorite philosopher of the enlightenment? Locke? Voltaire? Rousseau? WRONG.
Diderot is the greatest philosopher of the enlightenment because he was the only one who did shit.
Voltaire was all bark no bite, Locke had his head so far up his optimistic ass that he couldn't have implemented any of his ideas if he tried, and Rousseau was Rousseau.
All of the enlightened philosophers believed in and advocated for equal education yet Diderot was the only person to actually provide it.
With his Encyclopedia he managed to distribute knowledge regardless of social class. It started out only for the rich but with modified versions, thinner paper and less pictures, he was able to make it cheaper and available to all. It became a household item that could teach people anything they needed to know.
Was it free schooling? No. But, as a commoner, it was both the most he could do and the biggest step towards indiscrimant education that any philosopher had ever taken.
Diderot is THE best philosopher of the enlightenment, period.
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midsummernightsmemes · 2 months
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By: Michael Shermer
Published: Nov 13, 2023
On November 11, 2023, my friend, colleague, and hero Ayaan Hirsi Ali released a statement explaining "Why I am Now a Christian".
I have known Ayaan for many years. She has been a guest on my podcast, and I on her podcast. We have appeared together at conferences. I have read all of her books and support her heroic work defending women’s rights, civil rights, free speech, and freedom of religious expression, along with her brave stand against intolerance, bigotry, and hate, religious or otherwise. I’ll never forget when she spoke at Occidental College when I was a professor there, when during the Q&A two Muslim women dressed in the hijab accused her of Islamophobia for unfairly characterizing Islam as a religion of violence. “Then why do I have to have to travel with armed guards to protect me from death threats I receive from members of my own religion of Islam?” she rejoined understatedly and with characteristic aplomb. Ayaan has pride of place in the pantheon of greats who have had the courage of their convictions to the point of putting their own lives on the line in the name of universal principles of justice and freedom.
Nothing Ayaan has written in her essay changes my evaluation of her as a heroic figure. I simply think she is mistaken. We all are about a great many things. Maybe I am wrong here and she is right. But I think reason and history prove otherwise. Let me explain in the spirit of respect for what is on the line here, starting with the subtitle of Ayaan’s essay: “Atheism can't equip us for civilisational war.” She’s right, but not in the way she thinks.
Atheism per se can’t equip anyone for anything because it is not a belief system or worldview. Atheism just designates a lack of belief in God. Full stop. It is a purely negative statement, an indicator that someone does not believe. A lack of belief can never be the basis of a belief system. I am an atheist in the same sense that I am an a-supernaturalist or an a-paranormalist. There is no such thing as the supernatural or the paranormal. These descriptors are just linguistic place-holders for mysteries we have yet to explain. Once explained, they move into the realm of the natural and the normal. If there is a realm of the supernatural or the paranormal, there is no way for a natural and normal being like us to perceive or understand it.
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From this misunderstanding of what atheism is, Ayaan deduces that it can’t handle the stressors of current events:
Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.
Again, she’s right. Atheism can do nothing about these threats because it is not a positive assertion of principles that counter authoritarianism, expansionism, Islamism, China, Russia, and woke ideology. What can? Ayaan mentions “modern, secular tools: military, economic, diplomatic and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease or surveil.” She says these are not enough because “we find ourselves losing ground.” Are we? I don’t think so. But it’s a debatable point, so let’s set aside for a moment the matter of whether or not the world is getting better or worse this week, month, or year, and take the long view of what has driven moral progress over the centuries.
In my books The Moral Arc and Giving the Devil His Due I show that it isn’t atheism bending the arc of justice and freedom, but Enlightenment humanism—a cosmopolitan worldview that places supreme value on human and civil rights, individual autonomy and bodily integrity, free thought and free speech, the rule of law, and science and reason as the best tools for determining the truth about anything. It incorporates scientific naturalism, the principle that the methods of science operate under the presumption that the world and everything in it is the result of natural processes in a system of material causes and effects that does not allow, or need, the introduction of supernatural forces. By extension from above, if God is a supernatural being outside of space and time and therefore unknowable in any rational or empirical manner, it is not possible for natural creatures like us to understand a supernatural deity.
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Scientific naturalism and Enlightenment humanism made the modern world, and many of the founding fathers of the United States, for example Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and John Adams, were either practicing scientists or were trained in the sciences, and their construction of the Constitution and the principles on which it is based were thoroughly secular and based on the best science and philosophy of the day. It is my hypothesis that in the same way that Galileo and Newton discovered physical laws and principles about the natural world that really are out there, so too did the founders discover moral laws and principles about human nature and society that really do exist.
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Just as it was inevitable that the astronomer Johannes Kepler would discover that planets have elliptical orbits—given that he was making accurate astronomical measurements, and given that planets really do travel in elliptical orbits, he could hardly have discovered anything else—scientists studying political, economic, social, and moral subjects will discover certain things that are true in these fields of inquiry. For example, that democracies are better than autocracies, that market economies are superior to command economies, that torture and the death penalty do not curb crime, that burning women as witches is a fallacious idea, that women are not too weak and emotional to run companies or countries, that blacks do not like being enslaved, and that the Jews do not want to be exterminated. Why?
The answer is that it is in human nature to struggle to survive and flourish in the teeth of nature’s entropy, and having the freedom, autonomy, and prosperity available in free societies—built as they were on the foundation of scientific naturalism and Enlightenment humanism that seek to discover the best way for humans to live— enables individual sentient beings to live out their evolved destinies. This is moral realism, and it doesn’t require a deity to justify its validity. Steven Pinker explains the logic:
If I appeal to you to do anything that affects me—to get off my foot, or tell me the time or not run me over with your car—then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours (say, retaining my right to run you over with my car) if I want you to take me seriously. Unless I am Galactic Overlord, I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I am standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it.
This is the principle of the interchangeability of perspectives (developed in Pinker’s 2018 book Enlightenment Now), which is the core of the oldest moral principle discovered multiple times around the world throughout history: the Golden Rule. Pinker notes that it also forms the basis of “Spinoza’s Viewpoint of Eternity, the Social Contract of Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke; Kant’s Categorical Imperative; and Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance. It also underlies Peter Singer’s theory of the Expanding Circle—the optimistic proposal that our moral sense, though shaped by evolution to overvalue self, kin and clan, can propel us on a path of moral progress, as our reasoning forces us to generalize it to larger and larger circles of sentient beings.”
Thus, there are perfectly rational reasons to ground morals and values in universal humanistic principles, and these do not depend on adherents being theists or atheists. That they are universal principles mean that they apply to all people—Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, pantheists, deists, agnostics, and atheists. Whether or not there is a God—much less the Christian God—is irrelevant. That’s what universal means.
Are there good reasons to believe in God? Theists certainly think that there are, but atheists are just as certain that there are not. Who is right? I have written numerous articles, essays, reviews, and book chapters on this subject, and in my next book, Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Matters (forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press in 2025) I review the top 20 philosophical and scientific arguments for God’s existence and the counterarguments against them, so I won’t adjudicate the matter here. I will simply note that both sides have strong arguments and that, ultimately, it is not a question that can be definitively answered in the affirmative through philosophy or science, so it comes down to faith—one either makes the leap for personal reasons, or not.
As for Christianity, since Ayaan has declared her fielty to that particular faith over all others, I will concede her point that on the three threats facing the West that concern her (and me)—(1) the authoritarianism/expansionism of Islamism, (2) China and Russia, and (3) woke ideology—Christian conservatives have a clearer vision than atheist (or even theist) Leftists about the threat that Islamism, China and Russia, and woke ideology pose to the West (including and especially the LGBTQ community that would not fare well under such regimes). But this is political pragmatism pure and simple—“Say what you want about Christian conservatives, at least they know what a woman is!” I’m sympathetic to the sentiment, but is it a basis for a worldview? I think not. We should believe things because they are true, not just because they are politically pragmatic.
Consider what’s on demand in Christianity—that Jesus was the Messiah, was crucified, and was resurrected from the dead. (As the apostle Paul said in 1 Cor. 15:13-19: “if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen. … And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins!”) Is that true? My first question is this: Why don’t Jews accept the resurrection as real, either in Jesus’ time or in ours? Jews believe in the same God as Christians. They accept the same holy book as Christians do (the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament). They even believe in the Messiah. They just don’t think the carpenter from Galilee was him. Jewish rabbis, scholars, philosophers, and historians all know the arguments for the resurrection as well as Christian apologists and theologians, and still they reject them. That’s telling.
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What would it take for a rational person to accept the resurrection? Let’s put some numbers on it. Demographers estimate that throughout all of human history approximately 100 billion people have lived before the 8 billion people alive today. Not one has died and returned from the dead, unless you are a Christian, in which case you believe that one person did—Jesus of Nazareth. So the claim that one person out of those 100 billion people who died came back from the dead would be extraordinary indeed—100 billion to 1. Is the evidence extraordinary for the resurrection? No. It’s not even ordinary.
According to the University of Wisconsin-Madison philosopher Larry Shapiro in his 2016 book The Miracle Myth, “evidence for the resurrection is nowhere near as complete or convincing as the evidence on which historians rely to justify belief in other historical events such as the destruction of Pompeii.” Because miracles are far less probable than ordinary historical occurrences like volcanic eruptions, “the evidence necessary to justify beliefs about them must be many times better than that which would justify our beliefs in run-of-the-mill historical events.” But, says Shapiro, it isn’t. In fact, it’s not even as good as ordinary historical events.
What about the eyewitnesses? Maybe, Shapiro suggests, they “were superstitious or credulous” and saw what they wanted to see. “Maybe they reported only feeling Jesus ‘in spirit,’ and over the decades their testimony was altered to suggest that they saw Jesus in the flesh. Maybe accounts of the resurrection never appeared in the original gospels and were added in later centuries. Any of these explanations for the gospel descriptions of Jesus’s resurrection are far more likely than the possibility that Jesus actually returned to life after being dead for three days.”
The principle of proportionally—or extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence—also means we should prefer the more probable explanation over the less, which these alternatives surely are. Therefore, I am not a Christian because there is not enough evidence to believe that the core doctrines about Jesus’s resurrection are true. And I don’t want to believe in things that have to be believed in to be true.
What about the moral and political principles of Christianity upon which the West is claimed to be based? In The Moral Arc I make the case that Christianity went through the Enlightenment and came out the other end with the values so revered today by Westerners. This was not due to some new revelation from God (“thou shalt grant women equal rights as men”, “thou shall not enslave thy fellow humans”) or interpretation of scripture (“Galatians 3:28, ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus,’ is actually channeling the 1964 Civil Rights act that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.“) Rather, once moral progress in a particular area is underway due to secular forces, most religions eventually get on board—as in the abolition of slavery in the 19th century, civil rights and women’s rights in the 20th century, and gay rights in the 21st century—but this often happens after a shamefully protracted lag time.
The world’s religions are tribal and xenophobic by nature, serving to regulate moral rules within the community but not seeking to embrace humanity outside their circle—unless they have inculcated the secular values of the Enlightenment, which most Christians have. Religion, by definition, forms an identity of those like us, in sharp distinction from those not like us, those heathens, those unbelievers. Most religions were pulled into the modern Enlightenment with their fingernails dug into the past. Change in religious beliefs and practices, when it happens at all, is slow and cumbersome, and it is almost always in response to the church or its leaders facing outside political or cultural forces.
Even if our morality does not originate in the Bible, religious believers will often argue that Christianity gave Western civilization its most precious assets: art, architecture, literature, music, science, technology, capitalism, democracy, equal rights, and the rule of law. First, no one disputes the magnificence of countless works of art, architecture, literature, and music that were inspired by Christianity: the great cathedrals that make the spirit soar, the requiems that capture the heartache of loss, the psalms of joy that unite listeners, the paintings that dazzle with light and human emotion.
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But artists who live in a Christian world, who are surrounded by other Christians, who understand next to nothing beyond Christianity, and who are likely being supported by Christian patrons, are going to produce Christian work. Christianity was the dominant religion at a moment in history when Europe was going through a Renaissance and an explosion of discoveries of new lands and new political and economic systems; no wonder it ended up being the great patron. The fact that artists living in Christendom were inspired by the life and death of Jesus by crucifixion, and not, say, by the life and death of the Buddha by mushrooms, is not a surprise. Christianity was the only game in town.
As for Christianity forming the basis of democracy and capitalism, we can run the historical counterfactual and make a prediction: if this hypothesis is true, then societies in which Christianity is or was the dominant religion should show Western-like forms of democracy and capitalism. They don’t. The Byzantine Empire, for example, was predominantly Eastern Orthodox Christian from the early A.D. 300s, and for seven centuries produced nothing remotely like democracy and capitalism as practiced in modern America. Even early America wasn’t like it is today when, a mere two centuries ago, women couldn’t vote, slavery was legal and widely practiced, and capitalism’s wealth was vouchsafed to only a tiny minority of land holders or factory owners. Throughout the late Middle Ages and well into the Early Modern Period, all the nation states, city states, and various political conglomerates of Western and Central Europe were not only Christian but Western Christian, and yet as late as the 19th century the only quasi-democratic republics in Europe were England, Holland, and Switzerland. In Christian Europe, both England and Spain profited handsomely from their overseas colonial empires, made more profitable yet by the decimation of the native populations and the looting of their troves of precious metals, gems, and other natural resources—actions that by today’s moral standards are condemned.
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Finally, social scientist Gregory S. Paul conducted correlational study of the societal health of 17 first-world prosperous democracies—Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United States—and religiosity (to what extent the citizens in each believe in God, are biblical literalists, attend religious services at least several times a month, pray at least several times a week, believe in an afterlife, and believe in heaven and hell, ranking them on a 1-10 scale). The results were striking…and disturbing. Far and away—without having a close second—the United States is not only the most religious of the 17 nations but also the most dysfunctional, scoring the worst on a wide range of 25 different indicators of social health and well being (on a 1-9 scale from dysfunction to healthy), including homicides, suicides, life expectancy, STDs, abortions, teen births, fertility, marriage, divorce, alcohol consumption, life satisfaction, corruption indices, adjusted per capita income, income inequality, poverty, employment levels, incarceration, and others.
Correlation is not causation, of course, and each of these measures has multiple causes having nothing to do with religion (or the lack thereof), but if religion is such a powerful force for societal health as Christian commentators claim, then why is America—the most religious nation in the Western world—also the unhealthiest on all of these social measures? If religion makes people more moral, then why is America seemingly so immoral in its lack of concern for its poorest, most troubled citizens, notably its children? While it would be too much to say “religion poisons everything,” as Christopher Hitchens famously concluded in his book God is Not Great, it is problematic enough to conclude that it is not needed to create a healthy society.
Atheism isn’t the alternative to the Judeo-Christian worldview, Enlightenment Humanism is. We can ground human morals and social values not just in philosophical principles such as Aristotle’s virtue ethics, Kant’s categorical imperative, Mill’s utilitarianism, or Rawls’ fairness ethics, but in science as well. From the Scientific Revolution through the Enlightenment, reason and science slowly but systematically replaced superstition, dogmatism, and religious authority. As the German philosopher Immanuel Kant proclaimed: Sapere Aude!—dare to know! “Have the courage to use your own understanding.” As he explained: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” The Age of Reason, then, was the age when humanity was born again, not from original sin, but from original ignorance and dependence on authority and superstition. Never again need we be the intellectual slaves of those who would bind our minds with the chains of dogma and authority. In its stead we use reason and science as the arbiters of truth and knowledge. As I said in my 2012 Reason Rally speech before a crowd of over 20,000 humanists and science enthusiasts on the mall in Washington DC:
Instead of divining truth through the authority of an ancient holy book or philosophical treatise, people began to explore the book of nature for themselves. Instead of looking at illustrations in illuminated botanical books scholars went out into nature to see what was actually growing out of the ground. Instead of relying on the woodcuts of dissected cadavers in old medical texts, physicians opened bodies themselves to see with their own eyes what was there. Instead of human sacrifices to assuage the angry weather gods, naturalists made measurements of temperature, barometric pressure, and winds to create the meteorological sciences. Instead of enslaving people because they were a lesser species, we expanded our knowledge to include all humans as members of the species through evolutionary sciences. Instead of treating women as inferiors because a holy book says it is a man’s right to do so, we discovered natural rights that dictate that all people should be treated equally through the moral sciences. Instead of the supernatural belief in the divine right of kings, people employed a natural belief in the legal right of democracy, and this gave us political progress. Instead of a tiny handful of elites holding most of the political power by keeping their citizens illiterate and unenlightened, through science, literacy, and education people could see for themselves the power and corruption that held them down and began to throw off their chains of bondage and demand their natural rights.
The constitutions of nations ought to be grounded in the constitution of humanity, which science and reason are best equipped to understand. That is the heart and core of scientific naturalism and Enlightenment humanism.
==
"Beliefs are not like clothing. Comfort and utility and attractiveness cannot be our conscious criteria for adopting them." -- Sam Harris
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trollmaiden · 6 months
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I love how the Victorians were like “yeah the dark ages were so brutal look at all of these torture devices and chastity belts I recreated”
like babes we both know there was no “recreating”
your literally just projecting
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werewolfetone · 11 months
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Shout out to this annotation from the previous owner of this book
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gregorsamsairl · 4 months
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Nietzsche and Nihilism
If there's one thing that really grinds my gears it's when people treat Nietzsche as some sort of face of nihilism. I think anyone who is well-versed in Nietzsche's work would agree that the guy is definitely not a nihilist, as he is very openly against it in almost all his works.
I believe this misunderstanding of Nietzsche's philosophy mostly comes from the averages person's understanding of worth.
When Nietzsche said, "God is dead," he was referring to the objective meaninglessness of the world. A lot of people take this at face value, understanding objective meaninglessness as absolute meaninglessness. However, this is not the point Nietzsche was trying to make at all.
In our age of enlightenment values and reason, the western man values objectivity and shuns subjectivity (If you want to read more about the negative effects of enlightenment principles, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment is great). This sort of "facts over feelings" mindset is exactly what led to the nihilist interpretation of Nietzsche being so common. When people read that this guy thinks that objective meaning does not exist, they can't fathom any other meaning existing, because their whole life has been built around putting objectivity on a pedestal, they cannot begin to think about finding anything of significant value through their own subjectivity.
However, this is exactly what Nietzsche is proposing in his work. Objective meaning may be gone, but that does not mean that meaning is impossible, we should instead chose what has meaning to us, based on our own subjectivity. That is what he means when he speaks of the "will to power." My personal understanding of the will to power is simply the desire to be yourself ("simply" is perhaps the wrong word, it's much more nuanced than just "being yourself" but I think it sums it up nicely).
In fact, Nietzsche's main criticism of the modern Christian church was actually that it was "necessarily nihilistic." Modern Christianity puts all its focus on the afterlife. Even if they claim to be worried about being kind and spreading the truth of God, at the end of the day they are only doing that so they can go to heaven when they die. Taking the emphasis off of this life and placing it on the afterlife is precisely what makes modern Christianity nihilistic to its very core.
A notion Nietzsche touches on briefly after his denouncement of modern christianity is that of eternal recurrence. On this, he claims that we should live our lives in such a way that we would be happy to live it over and over again for all eternity. A lot of people dislike this claim, and point out that a lot of people aren't born in circumstances in which they can be happy over and over again (ex: because of poverty, discrimination, political situations). I don't disagree with this at all, there are an incredible amount of people who have to live in situations out of their control which make them unhappy with their life. However, you have to remember that Nietzsche is much more metaphysically inclined. When he says you should live a life you would want to life over and over again, he is more talking about the person you are. You should make choices about your virtues and your morals which would make you happy about the person you are, so much so that you would want to be you over and over again, no matter your external circumstances.
I actually used to hate Nietzsche, as I had only heard of him through this sort of depressed high school boy view that twisted him into a nihilist. However, once I read him for myself, I found his message extremely inspiring, and helped me mentally a lot. The idea of being yourself no matter your circumstances is a beautiful one, and I think it's really sad that most people just view Nietzsche as the nihilism guy.
Remember to be yourself!!!! Nietzsche said so!!!!!!
For anyone who wants to read it, here's a bonus question from an exam that I took this semester where I basically said the same thing as above, but it's worded more concisely I think:
"It is often claimed that Nietzsche is a nihilist and his philosophy is nihilistic in nature. Do you agree with this claim? Indeed what is behind Nietzsche’s denying modern society, traditional values, morality, and Christianity? How would you argue?
I strongly believe that Nietzsche is not a nihilist. In his claim that there are no objective virtues, he is not negating the meaning of human life, he is stating that there are no universal values. I think a lot of the misunderstanding of this claim making Nietzsche a nihilist comes from people's view of subjective vs objective value. Objective values are not inherently more "real" than subjective ones, and I believe this is where the most common mistake is made. Nietzsche advocating for subjective virtues does not make these virtues any less significant than objective ones. Life still has meaning, but it's up to every individual to decides on those virtues for themselves. In Nietzsche's denying of society, traditional values, morality, and Christianity come from his advocation of individuality, and subjective values. He denies society, and Christianity because it values a slave mindset, and thus hatred (ressentiment) of "the other," even denouncing modern Christianity for being "necessarily nihilistic" for focusing on the afterlife rather than our current one. He denies traditional values as well as morality because they are both discussed from a universal, objective standpoint. In all four of these, he does not deny them because they give meaning to life, or because he advocates for people doing whatever they want, he denies them because they take away the existential value of the individual. Thus, I would conclude that Nietzsche is definitely not a nihilist. Life's meaning is not removed when we don't have the guiderails of the objective to tell us how to make choices. If anything, life would have a more personal, passionate meaning when the individual gets to decide for themselves what gives their life meaning."
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empirearchives · 11 months
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“Nations slaughter each other for family quarrels, cutting each other's throats in the name of the Ruler of the Universe, knavish and greedy priests working on their imagination by means of their love of the marvellous and their fears.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte
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Just a friendly reminder that Corbin Penvellyn and John Locke are the same person. That is all. Happy scrolling.
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patterns-people · 1 year
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camc.farrar on TikTok says
It's hard to talk about media literacy when 21% of our adult population is illiterate. The stuffy articles behind paywalls were never a match for the conspiracy theorist who's Facebook posts are in simpler terms.
Ban paywalls. Say things as simply as possible. Don't ever make someone feel less than for not knowing a word.
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commander-chaoss · 1 year
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There is no vanilla extract sry mates I want your actual opinions
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jenxiez · 2 months
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Random V bio excerpt of History of Europe: « François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), who had assumed the pen-name of Voltaire during a spell of imprisonment in the Bastille, was poet, dramatist, novelist, historian, philosopher, pamphleteer, correspondent of kings, and, above all, a militant wit. Born and educated in Paris, he spent much of his long life in various sorts of exile. His books, printers, and publishers were repeatedly condemned. He hovered on the outer fringes of political and social respectability, and eventu ally settled, symbolically, on the furthest frontier of France at Ferney, near Geneva. He left Paris in disgrace at the age of 32 and, apart from three difficult years as royal historiographer at Versailles in 1744-1747, he did not return until the age of 84. He spent six founding years in England, including three at the welcoming court of Stanisław Leszczyński at Lunéville in Lorraine, and three in Prussia with an admiring Frederick the Great. He was kicked out of Switzerland for comments on Calvin. In Ferney, from 1760 to 1778, where he held court before a constant crowd of visitors, "the innkeeper of Europe" was hailed as "King Voltaire"; and "the lord of the village" puts his theories into practice: draining the marsh, operating a model farm, building a church, a theatre, a silk factory and a clock factory. “The refuge of forty savages has grown into a small, opulent town of 1,200 helpful people,” he noted proudly. Voltaire's published works, which fill over 100 volumes, are addressed to the goals of tolerance in religion, peace and freedom in politics, enterprise in economics, intellectual leadership in the arts. The English Letters (1734), which speaks with admiration of everything from Quakers, Parliament and the commercial spirit to Bacon, Locke and Shakespeare, gave new food for thought to conventional Catholic circles on the Continent. Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751) gave the French a rich but critical vision of their recent past. The philosophical novel Candide ou l'optimisme (1759) was written in response to Rousseau. It tells the story of passionate young Candide and his enlightened tutor, Pangloss, whose motto is "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds". They set out into the world from the castle of Thunder-ten-tronckh to encounter every known form of disaster: war, slaughter, disease, arrest, torture, betrayal, earthquake, shipwreck, inquisition, and slavery. They end up concluding, since the evils of the world are overwhelming, that all you can do is put your own house in order. Candide's last words are "we must cultivate our garden. »
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froglovers2 · 3 months
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(Art: Photograph by Nina Leen)
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Although the Enlightenment tradition arose from man’s optimistic and energetic aspiration to understand and control the world, it has led to the opposite in several respects: namely, the experience of loss of control. Humans have found themselves in a state of solitude, cut off from nature, and existing apart from social structures and connections, feeling powerless due to a deep sense of meaninglessness, living under clouds that are pregnant with an inconceivable, destructive potential, all while psychologically and materially depending on the happy few, whom he does not trust and with whom he cannot identify. 
~Mattias Desmet
(Book: The Psychology of Totalitarianism)
[Philo Thoughts]
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New Rule: The War on the West | Real Time with Bill Maher
New Rule: For all the progressives and academics who refer to Israel as an "outpost of Western civilization" like it's a bad thing, please note: Western civilization is what gave the world pretty much every goddamn liberal precept that Liberals are supposed to adore.
Individual liberty, scientific inquiry, rule of law, religious freedom, women's rights, human rights, democracy, trial by jury, freedom of speech. Please somebody, stop us before we Enlighten again.
And since one can find all these concepts in today's Israel and virtually nowhere else in the Middle East, if anything, the world would be a better place if it had more Israels.
Of course, this message falls on deaf ears to the current crop who reduce everything to being only victims or victimizers, so Israel is lumped in as the toxic fruit of the victimizing West. The irony being that all marginalized people live better today because of western ideals, not in spite of them.
Martin Luther King used Henry David Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience" to help shape the Civil Rights Movement. The UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights owes its core to Rousseau and Voltaire. Kleisthenes never showed up for a sexual harassment seminar, but without him there's no democracy. The cop who murdered George Floyd got 21 years for violating his Fourth Amendment rights, an idea we got directly from John Locke, who no one in college would ever study anymore because he's so old, and so white, and so dead, and so Western.
Yes, that's how simple the Woke are. It's never about ideas. If it was, would they be cheering on Hamas for their liberation? Liberation? To do what? More freely preside over a country where there are no laws against sexual harassment, spousal rape, domestic violence, homophobia, honor killings or child marriage. This is who liberals think you should stand with? Women there should be so lucky as to get colonized by anybody else.
And for the record, the Jews didn't "colonize" Israel or anywhere ever, except maybe Boca Raton. Gaza wasn't seized by Israel like India or Kenya was by the British Empire. And the partitioning of the region wasn't decided by Jews, but by a vote of the United Nations in 1947 with everyone from Russia to Haiti voting for it. But apparently, they don't teach this at Drag Queen Story Hour anymore.
Now it is true that for too long we didn't study enough Asian or African or Latin American history. But part of the reason for that is, frankly, there's not as much to study. Colleges replaced courses in Western Civ -- boo! Eyeroll! Dead white men, am I right? -- they replace that with World Civilization classes, which is fine in theory, but what it meant in practice is you read queer poetry of the African diaspora instead of Shakespeare. And I'm sure there's value in both, but as usual, America only ever overcorrects.
And so, we're at this place now where the words "western civ" became kind of a shorthand for "white people ruined everything." But they didn't ruin everything. No, they didn't live up to their own ideals for far too long and committed atrocities. But people back then were all atrocious, not just the white ones depending on who had the power.
But it was the western Enlightenment that gave rise to the notion that the law of the jungle should be curbed. Henry David Thoreau. John Stewart Mill. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Three-named dudes. It was all about three-named dudes. Three-named dudes like that were the OG social justice warriors. The ideas that came through Athens, Rome, London, Paris, and yes Philadelphia, are what make life good for most people in free societies today. That the individuals have value, and even the powers that be must submit to the rule of law. That punishment should not be cruel and unusual. That accused people get a trial. That there is such a thing as a war crime.
Why is it that every other culture gets a pass, but the West is exclusively the sum of the worst things it's ever done? You think only white people colonized? Historians estimate that the very non-western Mr Genghis Khan killed 40 million people, and that was in the 13th century. He single-handedly may have reduced the world's population by 11%. On the other hand, he kind of made up for it, because he was such a prolific colonizer of vaginas that today an estimated 16 million people are his direct descendants.
So, stop saying "western civilization" like it's a contradiction in terms. It's not. You're thinking of "moderate Republican."
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The people who snarl "western civilization" went to elite universities with air conditioning where they used their MacBook Pros and iPhones on extensive Wi-Fi networks.
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omniomnis · 11 months
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“The Enlightenment” - Text Art (2023) by M.M.
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