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Piwin -> RE: Do you believe in karma and reincarnation? (Apr. 28 2024 10:26:43)
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Don't most religions preach some form of service and/or submission? It was certainly the case of the brand of Christianity I grew up with. In some ways it resembled honor cultures, or at least the little I know of them. I don't know if there's a big difference between "East" and "West" on the whole individual vs collective thing. Could be. I'll just say this: until I finally said fúck it and just went my own way, my entire life in the "West" had been a story of institutions trying to enforce mindless obedience on me. School, university, work. None of them fostered individuality and creativity. I feel like I've managed to retain those traits despite the culture I live in, not because of it.
Maybe that's the ideal we have or the story we tell ourselves, but in practice we're pretty damn far from that ideal. FWIW I also thought the same thing when Ricardo said scientists don't have any hard feelings and they enjoy changing their mind. That's the ideal maybe, but in practice - at least in my own experience - we're very far from that ideal.
Many scientists invest decades, and sometimes their entire lives, on a hypothesis or a broader theory. So of course there are hard feelings and of course they don't want to change their minds. William James blurred the lines a bit in his The will to believe by arguing that the scientific method does require some degree of "faith", in that you often have to spend years and years pursuing an idea with no clue whether it'll turn out to be true or not. That's hard to do if you don't believe the hypothesis is true from the outset. I suppose his point was that scientific inquiry isn't as rational as some would like to believe, and conversely religious beliefs aren't as irrational as some would like to believe. At least I think that's what he was saying. People better versed in those topics than I am will have to correct me if I'm wrong.
But back to the point, personally I don't see why I'd criticize someone who holds a belief just for their own personal consolation. If karma helps you make sense of your circumstances, then by all means. I don't think Ricardo's argument that it would make you "waste time" not improving your situation has any evidentiary basis. In fact many people use religious belief to fuel their action. I have fortunately never fought in a war, so I don't know whether there are atheists in fox holes (though I assume that there are), but I have done social activism, and I do know that there are theists of all stripes and colors on the picket lines. I might somewhat agree with Bill's point, but to some extent it seems orthogonal to your own. Separation of Church and State is one thing. Individual beliefs is quite another.
In the English-speaking world, Martin Gardner is considered by some to be the father of the modern "skeptic" movement. That was before it was drowned out by white fascists. Gardner was a theist. He believed in life after death and in a personal God. But he recognized that he had no empirical justification for it and that it was just a belief that helped him cope with death and loss. I see no problem with that, and no contradiction with his being a "skeptic". Just as I see no problem with you believing in karma. We'll only have a problem if you start trying to impose those beliefs on others, e.g. like if you start arguing that low-income workers should remain low-income because that's their karma or whatever, then yeah, then I'd take issue with that.
A few years ago I did a deep dive in the literature on "pretend play", i.e. "make believe". Not all people engage in it, but it does seem to be the norm. As a child you make up stories with your toys, or you pretend to be the protagonist of some grandiose story with your friends out in the park. As adults we seem to lose that spark. Or perhaps it's less that we lose it and more that it's beaten out of us by the demands of adult life. It is allowed, but only within carefully delineated settings. You can role-play in the bedroom, but not outside. You can role-play as long as the board game is out, but once it's back in the shelf, you are expected to stop.
What sparked my digging into that topic is that I found myself talking to my grandmother's grave. Do I actually believe she could hear me? No, probably not. But at least in that moment, I felt the need to act as if she could. I told her about what had happened in my life since she had passed, the good, the bad, etc. I honestly don't know what's going on there. People like Yuval Hariri think that stories are part and parcel of what makes us human. I tend to agree. If people saw that and interpreted it as "there's a crazy person talking to himself in front of a tombstone and he really shouldn't be doing that", I think they fundamentally misunderstand what it means to be human.
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