True, but not all tribal cultures are equal.

@Fernapple
No tribal cultures are equal. But there’s a difference between a propositional claim and an identity. Not all propositional claims are equally true, but no tribal identity is true or false - it’s just an identity image that social animals become emotionally attached to.

@skado Quite. Which is why using the tribal identity issue, to distract from the issues of propositional claims, is misdirection.

@Fernapple
These are both fictional characters. There are no real propositional claims being represented here.- only identity caricatures.

@skado There certainly are identity caractures, but identity caractures can contain propositional claims, and if you do not think that the big questions or the value of positivety are propositional claims, then you have a very strange idea of claims.

@Fernapple

This is why I don’t call myself an atheist or a theist. Those are not claims about the nature of reality. They are claims of identity.

But these are not even real people - they are fictional representations of types. They are cartoons expressing exaggerations of stereotypes - twice removed from claims about the nature of reality.

And even the cartoons are not making reality claims. They are depicting two warring tribal identities. They are arguing over whether the one man is a douche.

If two real people were engaged in that same argument I wouldn’t think one was making a reality claim that the other was a literal jet of water. I would quickly recognize that he was attempting an adolescent character assassination on not just the other individual, but on that individual’s tribal identity. And more importantly, a defense of his own tribal identity.

The reality claim that I’m making is that the stereotypical real humans that are being caricatured in this cartoon may think they are making claims about the nature of reality, but they are really just defending their respective identities. When a person is making a slur against another person’s character they are not building a rational argument about reality - they are responding emotionally to perceived threats to their identity.

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@OldMetalHead
No, I'm not "hung up" on anything being fictional. I'm just pointing out that when anybody, real or fictional, is calling someone else insulting names, or defending themselves from such name-calling, they are engaging in identity defense - not in objective, propositional claim-making.

I'm not even saying it is wrong to do so. I'm just pointing out that that's what's going on. What they're doing has little to do with "facts" and everything to do with instinctual, emotional, tribal defense. We all do it. And we all think we're just reporting facts when we do it.

@OldMetalHead
Yes, there's no question that the human tendency to believe we already know everything we need to know, and our natural resistance to new information that challenges our existing worldview are impediments to progress. But those tendencies are not isolated to any sector of human society, like "religious people" or "clergy", etc. Those are straw men against which we focus our identity defenses. The actual "enemy" is inside us all. It is, to a great extent, in our (totally natural) instinct to form tribal identities and then defend those identities, to the death if need be. The death of the "other" or even our own death. Because, in our ancestral environment, being without a tribe was in fact a death sentence.

There's no harm in rooting for our tribe. It's our nature to do so. But it doesn't hurt to be aware of the fact that it is the same instinctual impulse that drives us to war and mass murder. And the irony is that it was religion's original mission to train ourselves away from such instincts, and to teach the unnatural skill of tolerance for people who may be different from our tribe.

@OldMetalHead Actually Skado is a major supporter of the useful fiction idea anyway.

@OldMetalHead
I’m kinda stuck… on this claim that “religious people” and “clergy” actively champion… “that point of view” (I assume you mean “acting as if humanity already possesses all of the answers to life's difficult questions”?).

Somehow that’s not ringing a bell. I’ve known lots of religious people and some clergy, and while there is always the occasional religious fanatic here or there, just like there are political fanatics and sports fanatics and business fanatics and so on, I’ve never had the impression that the rank and file religious folk championed the notion that humanity already possesses all of the answers to life’s difficult questions. Maybe I’m not understanding your comment correctly?

But to address your comment about equivalence… I wasn’t suggesting any equivalence between bishops and scientists at any level more specific than their species. They are both Homo sapiens. And Homo sapiens, of any and all professions, are tribal animals. Regardless of differences in worldview, all humans - not to a person, but a clear majority - live and die according to whatever tribal identity they were either born into or adopted along the way.

And we tend to think members of our ingroup are good, no matter how they actually behave, and members of all outgroups are bad, no matter how they actually behave. And we get caught up in these identity battles at the basic human level, regardless of whether we are a scientist, priest, dentist or ditchdigger.

And of course we all like to stereotype and generalize, but reality is just more complex than that. There are good and bad bishops, and good and bad scientists. Their jobs are different but their humanity is identical.

The great error that I see all fundamentalists, both theist and atheist, making, speaking of non-equivalence, is that science and religion are competing for the same job title.

There are levels of analysis at which it appears that way on the surface. The casual religionist will argue with the casual atheist about the age of the earth or some such. But evolution doesn’t “care” about such surface phenomena. If jumping in a bed of cactus in your birthday suit will somehow help your species survive, evolution will find a way to convince you to do it. It doesn’t have to be pleasant or sensible to the rational mind, or factually accurate or politically correct or safe for the individual or any of those things we normally think of as good. If it works, evolution will do it.

The job of science is to methodically observe and document the nature of Nature. No human institution does that better than science. There is no contest.

The main job of modern, organized religion, from the biological perspective, is to counterbalance the evolutionary mismatch generated when a Pleistocene ape tries to live in a metropolis. Its instincts were not evolved to fit that environment. Adjustments must be made. That's religion's job description. Factual truth is not the primary unit of exchange here. Social cohesion and emotional equilibrium are - no matter what kind of silly contortions we have to perform to make it happen.

I see I'm just rambling now, so I'm gonna take a break. I hope you had a pleasant holiday.