Relatively Irrational Ideas vs. Universally Irrational Ideas
I'm trying to play with #Thoughts and don't know if my reach is big enough to attract people willing to chat about my content.
It started before hearing the latest podcast from The Thinking Atheist
but it felt urgent while hearing it.
I have to hear #Irrational thoughts uttered from people in my social circles very often. I'm rarely in a position to influence people towards truth (well at least to my truth if nothing else ;) because my #Atheism is something that causes all of them to be skeptical of my and my thoughts on anything. I took my trip to Atheism quietly in my own head and after Farcebook outed me by flipping a switch one day on private groups, everything changed.
Since I used to be just like them, I have some insight into how we used to think and react to #Divergent ideas. I would like to blame it on #Religion, but I think it's more pervasive than that based on personal experiences. It seems like something in human culture from somewhere way back in our collective past it became a #Game #Theory winning strategy to reject the "others" when they deviated from our thoughts and ways. That's a segway to my bigger point; we are more a product of our culture by far than we are of our genetics and that makes us malleable in remarkable ways. It can be the case that a tumor on a brain can cause a person to be criminally anti-social, so please lets only consider the cases where we are in good working order.
Sam Harris the public figure, has a strong case that #FreeWill is an illusion, and I reject that notion, but don't reject his supporting evidence. However, I do often notice how a person's choices were preloaded by their cultural influences. And most people are rational, so most people make a preselected single choice based on the values they adopted from their cultural influences. That can appear to show life is predestined, but it's also showing the lack of exercising free-will. It might help if we would occasionally make sub-optimal decisions in a Puckish way or take choices of action that aren't offered to us, then I think it makes us activists in the protection of free-will. Although this freedom can lead to bad things; that's part of free will, the danger of bad outcomes which cultural experience could have prevented.
I escaped my "cave" of #Christian #Theology and think it's was the best thing that ever happened to me, but between then and now were a lot of very uncomfortable times and bad memories. It was worth it for me.
If you have left a cave, or can bring yourself to accept the idea that your current #Reality might be a wrong one, then you are open-minded enough to break free of the cultural influences that programmed your decisionmaking apparatus.
From such a vantage point you can begin to see how others weren't inherently #Good or #Bad people, but instead were people stuck in a personal reality path where they saw no other choices despite there being infinite possibilities at their disposal at every moment in time. This is where my post title comes back into the foreground. People who are acting in ways you accept are most likely in one of your chosen or inherited cultural circles and those actions may be relatively rational to your circle(s), or they might be universally rational to all circles for all time (or somewhere inbetween). As a quick aside, I didn't know how remarkably bad WWI was till recently, and with my current understanding of how #PTSD works and affects people, it changed how I thought about Hitler since he suffered through, but survived, that wretched war. It seems to my recollection that every time I take a closer look into the life of somebody who's actions are Relatively Irrational to me, I can see how they could be so far askew of good social order and yet still think they are the good person doing the right thing. It doesn't mean I forgive or forget the actions, but like the amazing Chris Rock once said about O.J. Simpson, "I can understand."
I believe the motivation for people asking this question is relying on the fallacy of incomplete evidence or at the worst a red-herring type Straw-Man.
The following is a brief trip to my past. As a young child, my parents told many lies which they thought at the time were good to tell in order to protect an innocent child; Santa is real, pulled teeth are worth money to a fairy, drugs are of the devil, etc. At some point in life, I discovered that some people were assholes based on how they treated me and others were not. For reasons I didn't think about at the time people I considered good also did drugs and drank alcohol outside the law. This type of cognitive dissonance caused by personal experience allowed me to distrust all the advice of my parents and their related circles of culture, even the good ones. You might say I got kicked out of the cave I was born into?
At some high level of summary, my parents were ideal in society and were above reproach as good parents. Depending on where one point's the telescope or microscope of hindsight, very different conclusions can be justified about how "good" my home-life was. Even from my own knowledge of history, I would have agreed that their parenting was above reproach and only I was culpable in my decisions to try drugs and drink to excess, that is, until I learned how to leave a cave.
I neither condemn or exonerate their actions, but I don't mindlessly repeat any of them. I'd like to believe I'm a truly good person in the world, especially since I rejected faith in any supernatural entities. I can also see how despite doing things in the past that I find despicable now, at the time I was doing them I was the hero in my own mind's eye, and I was doing the right things for the right reasons. So, if we took a closer look at how the "bad places" and "bad parents" world treated a person who left that all behind to become a "good person", we will probably find that similar to why I thought drugs would be good, that red-herring person who chose good was kicked out of their cave too.
It started before hearing the latest podcast from The Thinking Atheist
but it felt urgent while hearing it.
Click to open/close
His words and callers had me vasillating between NNNOOOOOO!!!!! & YYYEEEEEESSSSSSSS!!!!!We are all #Rational from within our own social circles.
I have to hear #Irrational thoughts uttered from people in my social circles very often. I'm rarely in a position to influence people towards truth (well at least to my truth if nothing else ;) because my #Atheism is something that causes all of them to be skeptical of my and my thoughts on anything. I took my trip to Atheism quietly in my own head and after Farcebook outed me by flipping a switch one day on private groups, everything changed.
Since I used to be just like them, I have some insight into how we used to think and react to #Divergent ideas. I would like to blame it on #Religion, but I think it's more pervasive than that based on personal experiences. It seems like something in human culture from somewhere way back in our collective past it became a #Game #Theory winning strategy to reject the "others" when they deviated from our thoughts and ways. That's a segway to my bigger point; we are more a product of our culture by far than we are of our genetics and that makes us malleable in remarkable ways. It can be the case that a tumor on a brain can cause a person to be criminally anti-social, so please lets only consider the cases where we are in good working order.
Sam Harris the public figure, has a strong case that #FreeWill is an illusion, and I reject that notion, but don't reject his supporting evidence. However, I do often notice how a person's choices were preloaded by their cultural influences. And most people are rational, so most people make a preselected single choice based on the values they adopted from their cultural influences. That can appear to show life is predestined, but it's also showing the lack of exercising free-will. It might help if we would occasionally make sub-optimal decisions in a Puckish way or take choices of action that aren't offered to us, then I think it makes us activists in the protection of free-will. Although this freedom can lead to bad things; that's part of free will, the danger of bad outcomes which cultural experience could have prevented.
Exit the #Matrix, escape to Sanctuary, leave the cave
I escaped my "cave" of #Christian #Theology and think it's was the best thing that ever happened to me, but between then and now were a lot of very uncomfortable times and bad memories. It was worth it for me.
Click to open/close
I've left a lot of psychological caves since then too and can't believe the things I accepted as reality without ever testing things rigorously.If you have left a cave, or can bring yourself to accept the idea that your current #Reality might be a wrong one, then you are open-minded enough to break free of the cultural influences that programmed your decisionmaking apparatus.
From such a vantage point you can begin to see how others weren't inherently #Good or #Bad people, but instead were people stuck in a personal reality path where they saw no other choices despite there being infinite possibilities at their disposal at every moment in time. This is where my post title comes back into the foreground. People who are acting in ways you accept are most likely in one of your chosen or inherited cultural circles and those actions may be relatively rational to your circle(s), or they might be universally rational to all circles for all time (or somewhere inbetween). As a quick aside, I didn't know how remarkably bad WWI was till recently, and with my current understanding of how #PTSD works and affects people, it changed how I thought about Hitler since he suffered through, but survived, that wretched war. It seems to my recollection that every time I take a closer look into the life of somebody who's actions are Relatively Irrational to me, I can see how they could be so far askew of good social order and yet still think they are the good person doing the right thing. It doesn't mean I forgive or forget the actions, but like the amazing Chris Rock once said about O.J. Simpson, "I can understand."
What about people in bad places with bad parents who turn out good?
I believe the motivation for people asking this question is relying on the fallacy of incomplete evidence or at the worst a red-herring type Straw-Man.
The following is a brief trip to my past. As a young child, my parents told many lies which they thought at the time were good to tell in order to protect an innocent child; Santa is real, pulled teeth are worth money to a fairy, drugs are of the devil, etc. At some point in life, I discovered that some people were assholes based on how they treated me and others were not. For reasons I didn't think about at the time people I considered good also did drugs and drank alcohol outside the law. This type of cognitive dissonance caused by personal experience allowed me to distrust all the advice of my parents and their related circles of culture, even the good ones. You might say I got kicked out of the cave I was born into?
At some high level of summary, my parents were ideal in society and were above reproach as good parents. Depending on where one point's the telescope or microscope of hindsight, very different conclusions can be justified about how "good" my home-life was. Even from my own knowledge of history, I would have agreed that their parenting was above reproach and only I was culpable in my decisions to try drugs and drink to excess, that is, until I learned how to leave a cave.
I neither condemn or exonerate their actions, but I don't mindlessly repeat any of them. I'd like to believe I'm a truly good person in the world, especially since I rejected faith in any supernatural entities. I can also see how despite doing things in the past that I find despicable now, at the time I was doing them I was the hero in my own mind's eye, and I was doing the right things for the right reasons. So, if we took a closer look at how the "bad places" and "bad parents" world treated a person who left that all behind to become a "good person", we will probably find that similar to why I thought drugs would be good, that red-herring person who chose good was kicked out of their cave too.
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The subject matter shows how we construct reality instead of experiencing reality. Part Two is the more powerful of the two podcasts.