Meaning of Life

	Five Books ⁦‪@five_books‬⁩ Finding meaning in life is not the same as finding happiness, argues Canadian philosopher Paul Thagard. He picks the best books on the meaning of life. fivebooks.com/best-books/pau…   5/27/22, 11:06 AM

Bertrand Russell

It’s the birthday of philosopher Bertrand Russell, born in Trellech, Wales (1872), into one of Britain’s most prominent families. His parents were radical thinkers, and his father was an atheist, but both his parents died by the time he was four. They left their son under the care of radical friends, hoping he would be brought up as an agnostic, but his grandparents stepped in, discarded the will, and raised Bertrand and his brother in a strict Christian household.

As a teenager, Bertrand kept a diary in which he described his doubts about God and his ideas about free will. He kept his diary in Greek letters so that his conservative family couldn’t read it. Then he went to Cambridge and was amazed that there were other people who thought the way he did and who wanted to discuss philosophical ideas. He emerged as an important philosopher with The Principles of Mathematics (1903) which argued that the foundations of mathematics could be deduced from a few logical ideas. He went on to become one of the most widely read philosophers of the 20th century. His History of Western Philosophy (1946) was a big bestseller and he was able to live off its royalties for the rest of his life.

He said, “The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”

WA

==

Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)*
By Bertrand Russell

The Lecture that is here reproduced was delivered at the Battersea Town Hall on Sunday March 6, 1927, under the auspices of the South London Branch of the National Secular Society. It is issued in booklet form at the request of many friends. It should be added that the author alone is responsible for the political and other opinions expressed.

As your Chairman has told you, the subject about which I am going to speak to you tonight is ‘Why I am not a Christian’. Perhaps it would be as well, first of all, to try to make out what one means by the word ‘Christian’. It is used these days in a very loose sense by a great many people. Some people mean no more by it than a person who attempts to live a good life. In that sense I suppose there would be Christians in all sects and creeds; but I do not think that that is the proper sense of the word, if only because it would imply that all the people who are not Christians—all the Buddhists, Confucians, Mohammedans, and so on—are not trying to live a good life. I do not mean by a Christian any person who tries to live decently according to his lights. I think that you must have a certain amount of definite belief before you have a right to call yourself a Christian. The word does not have quite such a full-blooded meaning now as it had in the times of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas. In those days, if a man said that he was a Christian it was known what he meant. You accepted a whole collection of creeds which were set out with great precision, and every single syllable of those creeds you believed with the whole strength of your convictions.

WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN?

Nowadays it is not quite that... (continues)

g'r

Bertie Russell, patron saint of summer https://t.co/eYwA03sOk8

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) May 18, 2022

POSTSCRIPT. For the record, Russell did NOT say that...  

 

The Brains of Believers and Non-Believers Work Differently

Not believing in God is due to a distinct set of brain networks.

Posted May 11, 2022 |  Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-brain-food/202205/the-brains-believers-and-non-believers-work-differently

KEY POINTS

• Atheism and agnosticism are becoming increasingly popular as church attendance declines.
• A recent study investigated whether not believing in a God is due to the activation of distinct higher-order brain networks.
• Non-believers are more likely to process sensory information in a more deliberate manner that involves higher cortical areas.
• Religious believers are more likely to interpret information in an emotional or intuitive manner, involving more ancient brain areas.

Church attendance has sharply declined and the number of people who express interest in religion is decreasing. Why are atheism and agnosticism becoming increasingly popular? Is the human brain evolving away from religiosity?

Possibly, but it is impossible to ignore the fact that religious beliefs have been a durable feature of the world’s cultures. Anthropologists estimate that at least 18,000 different gods, goddesses, and various animals or objects have been worshipped by humans since our species first appeared. Evolution has clearly selected for a brain that has the ability to accept a logically absurd world of supernatural causes and beings. Spirituality must have once offered something tangible that enhanced survival. Something has clearly changed in the past few decades that underlies the increase in religious non-believers.

A recent study investigated which resting-state brain circuits are utilized by religious non-believers, as compared to religious believers. Previous studies have demonstrated that a resting state analysis is objective, stable, and capable of revealing individual differences in how the brain functions. Essentially, the analysis provides a kind of "neural fingerprint" of which brain regions are involved in the processing of emotions, memories, and thoughts.

The believers (n=43) self-identified as Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu. The non-believers (n=26) self-identified as atheist or agnostic. The believers and non-believers did not significantly differ with regard to gender (only slightly more were female), standard markers of intelligence, social status, a predisposition towards anxiousness, or emotional instability.

Not believing in a God is due to the activation of distinct higher-order brain networks. The results demonstrated that religious believers are more likely to use more intuitive and heuristic reasoning and that religious non-believers are more likely to use more deliberative and analytic reasoning. For example, non-believers are more likely to process sensory information, such as something they see, in a more deliberative manner that involves higher cortical areas, called top-down processing, involved in reasoning. In contrast, religious believers are more likely to interpret visual information in a more emotional or intuitive manner, called bottom-up processing, that involves more ancient brain systems. Religious believers share this bottom-up processing bias with people who believe in the supernatural or paranormal activity, such as telekinesis or clairvoyance.

The authors noted that although the neural traits they identified are considered highly stable, it is possible to convert a believer into a non-believer, or vice versa, via the use of neurofeedback, meditation, and repeated training.

The relatively recent increase in the number of religious non-believers may also be due to the brain's response to dramatic shifts in our culture as well as scientific explanations for natural phenomena that once depended on the intervention of mythical beings.

 

Humanists, atheists, lobbyists...

 American Humanist Association (AHA) is partnering with American Atheists to co-host our 2022 Virtual Lobby Day on Wednesday, June 22nd.

Lobby Day is an opportunity for members of our community to speak directly with their elected officials and staff in Washington to advocate for the issues we care about in a friendly and empowering environment.

The John Lewis Every Child Deserves a Family Act (S.1848/H.R. 3488) will be the centerpiece of our event.

CO-HOSTED BY AMERICAN ATHEISTS

There are more than 400,000 youth in foster care. And yet, too often, foster care and adoption agencies turn away qualified, loving parents because of who they are, who they love, or what they believe—based on the agency’s religious beliefs rather than the best interests of these children. Too often agencies turn away nonreligious people and those from minority religions.

The John Lewis Every Child Deserves a Family Act would bar discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion (including nontheism), and marital status against families or children in taxpayer-funded child welfare services. And, it provides extensive resources to states, tribes, and agencies to improve care and outcomes for LGBTQI+ foster children.

So please join us as we advocate for American families and youth in foster care. All participants will have the opportunity to receive training on Saturday, June 18th to learn about the bill and how to lobby effectively.

This year, we are asking participants to contribute $15 to help offset the costs of scaling the event. (Free and discounted registrations are available by contacting ncarr@americanhumanist.org.)

Register now to join us!

Start your 2022 Virtual Lobby Day registration here.

https://americanhumanist.org/lobbyday2022/

 New research uncovers stereotype differences between agnostics and atheists

by Patricia Y. Sanchez

 May 9, 2022

in Psychology of Religion

https://www.psypost.org/2022/05/new-research-uncovers-stereotype-differences-between-agnostics-and-atheists-63107

Agnosticism and atheism are often categorized into one “nonreligious” group in research despite these being distinct belief systems. New research published in Psychology of Religion and Spirituality finds that people do have distinct stereotypes that differentiate agnosticism and atheism from each other and from Christianity.

“I was interested in this topic because I noticed that most research on nonreligious groups either focus solely on atheists or group atheists and agnostics together. Because self-identified agnostics are as prevalent in society as atheists, I wondered whether differences would emerge if we studies these groups separately,” explained study author Veronica Bergstrom, a PhD candidate in social psychology at the University of Toronto.

Prejudice against the nonreligious can exist for many reasons. One explanation is the “moral deficiency” hypothesis, where religious people stereotypically assume nonreligious people are more likely to act immorally. Another explanation is symbolic threat, where religious people view atheism and agnosticism as a threat to the societal, American norm of religiosity.

Although research has consistently categorized atheists and agnostics into one nonreligious category, there are some deviations between these groups that could be relevant for stereotyping. For example, atheists and Christians might both be perceived as highly dogmatic as these categorizations take a stand on the existence of a God whereas agnostics do not (referred to as dogmatic recalcitrance).

In Study 1, researchers were interested in how Americans differentially stereotype agnostics, atheists, and Christians (as they are the religious majority in the U.S.). Researchers recruited a final sample of 118 U.S. adult residents from Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), an online platform. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In one condition, they were provided with definitions of agnostic, atheist, and Christian and asked to list up to 5 stereotypes that most people hold about each religious group. In the other condition, participants did the same but were prompted to give their own definitions of each religious group. The researchers focused on atheist vs. agnostic comparisons.

Only 56% of participants in the definition-generated condition correctly defined agnosticism. “Participants indicated that atheists are generally viewed as more evil, immoral, intolerant, pushy, rude, and satanic than agnostics. In contrast, agnostics were thought to be viewed as more confused, indecisive, questioning, cowardly, kind, curious, neutral, and scientific than atheists,” wrote the researchers. Atheists, but not agnostics, were reported to be morally worse, meaner, and colder than Christians. These patterns were demonstrated regardless of whether the participants were provided a definition of the religious groups or if they gave their own.

Study 2 sought to provide stronger support for the findings of Study 1. The researchers also included a measure of belief in God to examine whether this impacts how people stereotype the different religious groups. They recruited a final sample of 244 adult U.S. residents from MTurk. Participants were presented with and given definitions of three religious groups (agnostics, atheists, and Protestants). They were asked to rate the groups on 10 trait pairs selected from the traits given in Study 1 (i.e., immoral-moral, cowardly-brave, indecisive-decisive) for how representative they were of each religious group. Participants also completed a measure of their level of belief in God.

Results show that atheists were rated less moral, trustworthy, and safe compared to agnostics, who were rated lower on these traits compared to Protestants, supporting the moral deficiency hypothesis. Results also show that agnostics were rated more trustworthy than atheists, but less trustworthy than Protestants, providing support for the symbolic threat hypothesis. Further, Protestants were rated as older, more loyal, more patriotic, and more predictable than both atheists and agnostics. Results also show that agnostics were seen as less decisive than atheists and Protestants, but more tolerant than atheists.  Agnostics were rated as equally brave, predictable, and loyal as atheists, which contradicts the dogmatic recalcitrance hypothesis.

“Although atheists and agnostics have stereotypes in common, important differences do exist. For example, agnostics are perceived as less immoral but more indecisive than atheists. These differences in stereotypes might lead to different experiences of discrimination,” Bergstrom told PsyPost.

Belief in God was relevant in some of these ratings. For example, participants with low belief in God rated Protestants and agnostics as equally moral and brave; and participants with high belief in God rated Protestants as more moral and braver than agnostics. Similar patterns to this emerged for several trait ratings including decisiveness, loyalty, safeness, tolerance, and trustworthiness.

Altogether, findings give support for both the moral deficiency and symbolic threat hypotheses of prejudice against the nonreligious. Support for the dogmatic recalcitrance hypothesis was mixed across these two studies. “Future work should explore the degree to which context influences when agnostics are viewed as more indecisive than atheists. For example, are agnostics perceived to be indecisive about both inconsequential choices (e.g., which detergent to buy) and major life decisions (e.g., bearing children)?”

The researchers do cite some limitations to this work. “Agnostics are an extremely difficult group to study because being agnostic is not mutually exclusive with atheism or theism. In other words, it is possible to be an agnostic atheist or agnostic theist,” Bergstrom said. “Additionally, many people do not know what it means to be agnostic.”

“In our study, stereotype content did not seem to differ depending on whether the perceiver could accurately define agnosticism. However, future work will need to replicate this finding with a larger sample. Additionally, future studies will need to assess whether differences in stereotype content result in different experiences of discrimination.”

The study, “To believe or not to believe Stereotypes about agnostics“, was authored by Veronica N. Z. Bergstrom, Jason E. Plaks, and Alison L. Chasteen.

 

Rorty’s antiauthoritarian hope

Just published today…

"While Rorty consistently insisted that there is no necessary link from his or anyone's philosophical critiques of truth, rationality, and objectivity to liberal democracy, he did believe that "there is a plausible inference from democratic convictions" to such philosophical views. 11 The affinity stems from a moral commitment to "antiauthoritarianism," his name for the pragmatist objection to any form of fundamentalism, whether philosophical or religious, that attempts "to circumvent the process of achieving democratic consensus" by appealing to "the authority of something 'not ourselves.' "12 In Rorty's antiauthoritarian vision, "Both monotheism and the kind of metaphysics or science that purports to tell you what the world really is like are replaced with democratic politics." 13 These commitments illuminate two registers of politics that exist in Rorty's writings. The first, which he once dubbed "real politics," involves organized efforts to reduce economic inequality, provide basic needs, and improve people's lives in banal ways through things like labor unions, coalitions, policy reforms, and changing laws. The second register is alluded to in the last volume of essays completed in his lifetime, Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007), which makes the case that intervening in "cultural politics" should be philosophers' "principal assignment." 14 This apparent embrace of "cultural politics" was surprising to readers of Achieving Our Country familiar with Rorty's scathing indictment of the "academic, cultural Left" for its dismissal of "real" politics and "mock[ ing] the very idea that democratic institutions might once again be made to serve social justice." 15 However, his later return to "cultural politics" invokes instead the register of politics oriented to the broad, generational cultural change highlighted in Rorty's work of the 1980s of "liberating the culture from obsolete vocabularies" and "reweaving of the community's fabric of belief" so that we get to "the point where we treat everything—our language, our conscience, our community—as a product of time and chance." 16 For philosophers to intervene in cultural politics, in this sense, is to join poets and novelists and other social critics in offering new vocabularies and imagining new ways of looking at the world: "social hopes, programs of action, and prophecies of a better future." 17"

— What Can We Hope For?: Essays on Politics by Richard Rorty
https://a.co/fLSwXoP

May the 4th be with us

 The 4th has come and gone, and things don't feel a lot more reasonable. But it's a nice gesture.

	Humanists Celebrate National Day of Reason Resolution
	One week ago, Reps. Jamie Raskin and Jared Huffman introduced a resolution to recognize May 4th, 2022 as a “National Day of Reason,” cosponsored by six other members of the Congressional Freethought Caucus.

Acknowledging humanity

 Posted for Trevor:

At the beginning of the semester, as with many courses I have taken, I did not know quite what to expect. I certainly did not know what to expect from my fellow class members who would be joining me for this amazing semester. Would they be hostile to religion? Would there be any highly religious members of the class? Would new perspectives could they offer on the issues of life and religion? These questions and many others were (and I hope this does not come off as though I feel I have gained some type of certainty) answered during the time shared with my fellow class member this semester.

Before taking this class, as I believe was stated in my last presentation, my view of religion was more hostile than it is currently. This was a view largely adopted from the personal experiences with religion I had until that point, and personal experience is indeed the chief crafter of one's personal views. A central aspect of this course has been to show that it is life denying to simply dismiss religion outright in the face of one's atheism, especially when one's religion brings virtually no harm to others, is a product of their lived experience, and which serves to increase their general level of happiness. The ideas of James and Rorty, as well as the perspective gained from my fellow classmates has shown me that the general hostility between atheists the religious is both unwarranted and unnecessary. My view has changed based on new experience, experience that has shown me the importance of understanding what James referred to as "refined religion." It is important to understand in order to move past a monolithic notion of what constitutes religion and to understand the importance religion plays in increasing human happiness. Religion does not cause a drain on society or hold it back; it is possible to be both pragmatic and religious. Indeed, my fellow classmates showed me this in the best possible way with their consideration, respect, and insightful discourse on religion, even with religious matters on which we disagree. That brings me to my next point.

Before this semester, I generally considered myself somewhat of a pragmatist, in that I felt some degree of pragmatism is necessary to combat the problems of dogmatism. Again to bring notice to Rorty's insight, a pragmatic outlook that does not rely on nonhuman sources of authority is indeed one of the best defenses against authoritarianism. There was a time when I myself was, to some degree, a holder of the authoritarian mindset (that time passed very shortly after my first semester). This course has strengthened my dedication to antiauthoritarianism and to the idea of freedom of conscience as one of the most important parts of any humanistic outlook. The attempt to force others to adopt a particular view based on some type of external authority and not through persuasion or the acknowledgement of personal experience has brought about some of the darkest chapters of human history.

To sum up and bid my farewell for this semester, I will close with a synopsis of how this course has changed my view of the world and my place within it. Personally, this course has helped me to struggle with some of the issues I have long struggled with in finding meaning and purpose in my life, which is to some degree why I spoke in the class about the dangers of nihilism. This course has truly been like a breath of fresh air, and I now truly look forward to understanding the experiences of others and how those experiences have shaped their outlook. This acknowledgement of humanity, in all its messiness and uncertainty, is, in my view, necessary for the advancement of human society. My only hope is that I may be able to play a role in that; that for me is what has given me purpose in life.