i think i'd like to do a religion thread on here some time. a way to whet my writing, which i've put off for too long. i'd want it to be opening up some of the repetitions i see in the discourses of ostensibly left critics (like anarchists)
i wonder how the Brent Nongbri book "Before Religion" would be received
@exiliaex I haven't read it but the thesis seems pretty in line with other stuff I've read
@exiliaex
I can chip in as an atheist and an anarquist if you want.
I don't think I can say that any religions propose a false reality as proving any religion wrong usually requires a evidence of absence.
But I value the idea of believing in as many true things as possible and as few wrong things as possible, which I find is best achieved by following evidences and for that purpose I think all the religions I have been exposed to have provided insufficient proof of their truth. So I don't say that i believe gods don't exist, but that I don't believe that gods exist, which is not the same thing.
Then I am also aware that many people are attracted to faith for other reasons, more often than not their cultural heritage, and I have no objection to that as long as people don't impose the mandates of their faith onto others.
Then I am also anticlerical because of my history with the catholic institution, but that is a matter of personal opinion.
English is not my first language so I might write a bit weird.
@exiliaex what the fuck is a reality that's some christian shit
@ZiaNitori yeah that's exactly the kind of question i want to delve into! what is reality? how is it made? why do "we" think there's only one reality? what is knowledge? what is belief? how do they construct each other?
@exiliaex @ZiaNitori isn’t reality just the medium through which we can affect each other and be affected?
@ZiaNitori @exiliaex is mean i guess i don’t really know a strong argument against solipsism
@destroy @exiliaex people use solipsism to describe anything they find absurd and i've yet to see what's absurd about being critical of someone trying to make a general claim about something "we" both experience especially when we presumably can experience radically different realities. the way you frame it too as the medium through which beings can affect each other also just sounds way to similar to reality being defined via relations to other beings which just screams christian to me cause those mfers think you can come to know gods world through correspondence with others
@ZiaNitori @exiliaex okay but like… how is it wrong?
@destroy @exiliaex my experience does not require correspondence to validate. correspondence still requires interpretation, and a singular argument with an ego blinded or hive minded person on twitter will show you the issues with how people insulate their realities, it's impossible to really know that you're not just finding a way to look into a mirror when you look at another. correspondence is how you make a show of force by invoking imagined others that believe in your reality. it's a show of procedure, it's a formality of certification, it's when the rental place has you to look over a piece of equipment you're seeing for the first time and asks you if you see anything wrong with it before you sign. it's a thing to show to other people to convince them of something because people find other people convincing because people are reflexively conformist.
@exiliaex @ZiaNitori I mean have you never hallucinated or seen a magic trick? I know I’m wrong all the time and that the knowledge of others is useful to me.
@exiliaex @ZiaNitori I have no reason to believe that my interpretation of sense data is different than other people’s on this level. My everyday interactions with people and objects affirm to me this. Sure I guess I could be interpreting everything in a specific way that creates a reality that truly is separate but this is just Cartesian skepticism but the daemon is simply your own mind.
Ultimately your view falls apart under its own weight because there’s exactly as much evidence to believe in an unshared reality as a shared one. There’s no more reason to believe your view because this lack of knowledge about others also prevents me from knowing if they are experiencing the same reality as me.
@destroy @exiliaex i have many reasons to believe my interpretation of sense data is different than other peoples given that interpreting sense data is not as simple as the neurons associated with your eye producing a color. the totality of your experience is riddled with association and reference to a world that is entirely your own. it is with abstractions that you make about the world based on facts produced in academia that you reduce all of this to the same experience, when if i am to interpret the behavior of other creatures we're all living radically different realities. normative pressures in society push people to act like they all experience the world in the same way when it just covers up difference and then we assume all nonhuman animal life to be something radically different that we ignore. also you bring up "evidence" like that's a coherent concept in this kind of discussion, i think you should think more about epistemology
@ZiaNitori @destroy i would be heavily interested in reading some deleuze with you two and discussing its implications for world-making
@exiliaex
I have only just read Before religion's blurb and I don't see why I would object to the few lines that I read.
On a related note there is a book by Paul Veyne called "did the greeks believe their myths - essay on constituting imagination" that might interest you. The thesis is that our concept of belief, this idea of believing something to be true does not apply to how ancient religions were practised. It was about adhering to shared narratives which in turn felt powerful enough to influence reality. Like people would invoke Athena to be imbued by her knowledge as if we tried to think of superman to feel stronger. There's a lot more than that of course but that was the main idea I remember from 25 years ago when I read it.
If you look for the book the title might be translated differently in English, I just translated literally from french.
@ja_herre i'll check out that Veyne book, thanks for the recommendation!
@exiliaex
There is a translation on the internet archive.
i'm just saying the refrain of "i'm against religion because i'm against all false realities" really falls flat when you examine "religion" as a category at all