Wednesday, May 7, 2014

151

Let it go, if it come back it was meant to be!

I NEVER BELIEVED IN THIS NONSENSE. NOTHING IS 'MEANT TO BE' BECAUSE NOTHING IS PREDESTINED. THERE IS NO FATE OR DESTINY OR GOD ABOVE MAKING THINGS HAPPEN IN YOUR LIFE. THE ONLY WAY YOU MAKE SOMETHING HAPPEN ('TO BE') IS IF YOU WILL IT INTO EXISTENCE THROUGH YOUR OWN EFFORT AND/OR HAVE A LITTLE LUCK (RANDOM CHANCE) TO HELP YOU MAKE IT COME TRUE ('TO BE'). (TO BE OR NOT TO BE THAT IS THE ?)


38m
Don't stress over what could've been, chances are if it should've been, it would've been.
SUCH FUCKIN' NONSENSE. SEE HOW THE MIND IS INNATELY WIRED TO MAKE SENSE OF THINGS IN A FLAWED MANNER? THIS IS ALONG THE LINES OF BELIEVING THAT FATE OR DESTINY DETERMINES YOUR LIFE OR THAT ALL THINGS HAPPEN FOR A REASON. LISTEN DUMMIES, THERE ARE MANY THINGS IN ONE'S LIFE THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN, BUT DIDN'T OCCUR FOR A NUMBER OF REASONS (SOME IN YOUR CONTROL AND SOME OUT OF YOUR CONTROL). BUT BECAUSE IT DIDN'T HAPPEN DOESN'T MEAN IT SHOULDN'T HAVE HAPPENED. AS A MATTER OF FACT, IN MOST CASES, IT SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED BUT YOU FUCKED IT UP AND DIDN'T MAKE IT HAPPEN. NOW YOU'RE TRYING TO DOWNPLAY YOUR FUCK UP OR RATIONALIZE YOUR FUCK UP BY FOOLING YOURSELF INTO BELIEVING THAT IT WASN'T MEANT TO BE. IN OTHER WORDS, YOUR DELUDING AND DECEIVING YOURSELF AND MAINTAINING YOUR OPTIMISM BY CONTINUALLY SAYING IT WASN'T MEANT TO BE. IN ACTUALITY, IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE (HAVE HAPPENED) BUT YOU FUCKED IT UP AND NOW YOUR TRYING NOT TO REGRET YOUR FUCK UP AND WHAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN. SO YOU KEEP SAYING TO YOURSELF 'IT WASN'T MEANT TO BE BECAUSE IF IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN IT WOULD HAVE BEEN.' WHAT FUCKIN' DISTORTED, NONSENSE.


  • HEY, READ ABOUT OPTIMISM. WHAT A DELUSION IT IS.
    There are many biological-based realities that are difficult to accept, including aging, mortality, the sexual boredom that can occur in a monogamous relationship, and the fact that children are born with innate differences in abilities. Many of the most successful products ever devised, and ideologies ever espoused, seek to convince us that these realities do not exist. Religion promises us immortality. Cosmetics sell us the the fleeting allure of eternal youth and beauty. Social constructivism convinces us that we are all born with equal potentiality and it is only the environment that subsequently hinders our progress (and pollutes our otherwise "clean" tabula rasa minds). Self-help books guarantee us hot monogamy forever, eternal virility, unlimited female orgasms, seamless parenting, thin bodies, popularity, and the ability to generate endless money streams. It is not unusual that many of the books on any bestseller list are self-help books. In a sense, humans have an evolved capacity to engage in self-deception in order to navigate through life in a delusional state of blissful ignorance. Interestingly, clinically depressed individuals are the sole people who do not suffer from such a delusional glow. The bottom line is that peddlers of promise (e.g., cosmetic companies, preachers, self-help authors) seek to assuage our most basic Darwinian fears linked to survival, mating, family relationships, and friendships.

    Hope is an elixir of life. It is the engine that propels us forward in our pursuit of countless goals, all of which might otherwise be impossible to undertake if we were bereft of hope. Individuals who lose hope (or who have less optimistic outlooks), be it in penitentiaries, hospitals, or in everyday life, are more likely to suffer adverse health consequences. Generally speaking, optimistic and hopeful people are better able to deal with life's trials and tribulations. Therefore, hope is a valuable commodity that is "sold" to the populace by a wide range of peddlers. The great majority of individuals are susceptible to hopeful messages, be it those originating from religious narratives, advertisements, or self-help books. At the same time, a smaller percentage of the populace is well aware of the inherent duplicity of such messages. Accordingly, they set up mechanisms to counteract the claims of the hope peddlers. The four horsemen of atheism - Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens - bring to light the lunacy of religious narratives. Culture-jamming organizations attempt to highlight the lies behind corporate advertising along with the firms' unabated greed. Evolutionary scientists repeatedly demonstrate the fallacy of the otherwise hopeful view that we are all born with blank-slate minds, and that only the environment shapes our individual outcomes in life. Despite such laudable attempts to infuse rationality into the various arenas ripe for hope peddling, most people remain easy prey to the messages of hope.

    The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, And Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature. Saad, p.203-204


    One such payoff was glimpsed by Historian Walter Burkert, who argues that religion helps induce people to make a last-gasp effort when otherwise they might stop trying. "Although religious obsession could be called a form of paranoia," wrote Burkert,
    it does offer a chance of survival in extreme and hopeless situations, when others, possibly the nonreligious individuals, would break down and give up. Mankind, in its long past, will have gone through many a desperate situation, with an ensuing breakthrough of homines religiosi.

    On the surface, this seems plausible, but it begs a crucial question: If religion has proven adaptive because it evokes greater confidence, increased effort, or enhanced probability of a last-gasp attempt that occasionally yields success and thus increased fitness, why aren't people primed to make such efforts in any event, without religion no less than with it? The issue raised is similar to the mystery of the placebo effect, encountered earlier. Thus, if believing something (the efficacy of a medicinal cure, the prospect of divine intervention on the battlefield or in response to a final, last-gasp effort) contributes to success, then why the necessity of belief? Wouldn't selection favor bodies curing themselves via those immunological mechanisms that are evidently already available, or people making other efforts on their own behalf - even without much prospect of success - regardless of whether they were motivated to do so by religious faith?

    There is also a converse of making extra efforts because of religious conviction: remaining calm in the face of disaster. Here is Zora Neale  Hurston's description of the Okeechobee Hurricane and its resulting flood of 1928:
    Ten feet higher and far as they could see the muttering wall advanced before the braced-up waters like a road crusher on a cosmic scale. The monstropolous beast had left its bed. Two hundred miles an hour wind had loosed its chains...[T]he wind came with triple fury and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with others in other shanties...[T]hey seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.
    Most likely, the extra effort and don't panic hypotheses don't hold water with regard to individuals, since selection should indeed favor making that extra effort and/or avoiding panic any time the ultimate benefit - to the individual - exceeds its cost. However, let's imagine that making the "ultimate sacrifice" is indeed counter-evolutionary... for the individual. It could nonetheless be beneficial for the group. So, selection could possibly operate to favor religious conviction, if it worked at the group level, in which Burkert's extra effort hypothesis might provide some biological momentum. Similarly, if it is beneficial to avoid panic, then people should have been selected to do so, without any necessary prod from religion. But maybe "watching God" under times of severe stress helped provide the kind of preservative pause that was adaptive after all.

     Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature. Barash,


The next function of religion that I'll discuss is another one that was probably strongest in early societies: religion's role in defusing our anxiety over problems and dangers beyond our control. When people have done everything realistically within their power, that's when they are most likely to resort to prayers, rituals, ceremonies, donations to the gods, consulting oracles, and shamans, reading omens, observing taboos, and performing magic. All of those measures are scientifically ineffective at producing the desired result. However, by preserving the fiction and convincing ourselves that we are still doing something, aren't helpless, and haven't given up, we at least feel in charge, less anxious, and able to go on to make our best effort.

Our craving for relief from feeling helpless is illustrated by a study of religious Israeli women, carried out by anthropologists Richard Sosis and W. Penn Handwerker. During the 2006 Lebannon War the Hizbollah launched Katyusha rockets against the Galilee region of northern Israel, and the town of Tzfat and its environs in particular were hit by dozens of rockets daily. Although siren warnings while rockets were en route alerted Tzfat residents to protect their own lives by taking refuge in bomb shelters, they could do nothing to protect their houses. Realistically, that threat from the rockets was unpredictable and uncontrollable. Nevertheless, about two-thirds of the women interviewed by Sosis and Handwerker recited psalms every day to cope with the stress of the rocket attacks. When they were asked why they did so, a common reply was that they felt compelled "to do something" as opposed to doing nothing at all. Although reciting psalms does not actually deflect rockets, it did provide the chanters with a sense of control as they went through the semblance of taking action. (Of course, they themselves did not give that explanation; they did believe that reciting psalms can protect one's house from destruction by a rocket.) Compared to women in the same community who did not recite psalms, the psalm reciters had less difficulty falling asleep, had less difficulty concentrating, were less inclined to bursts of anger, and felt less anxious, nervous, tense, and depressed. Thus, they really did benefit, by reducing the risk that natural anxiety over uncontrollable danger would cause them to endanger themselves in a different way by doing something foolish. As all of us who have been in situations of unpredictable and uncontrollable danger know, we do become prone to multiply our problems by thoughtlessness if we can't muster our anxiety.

This function of religion, at its peak already in early religious societies, would have decreased as societies increased their control over life's course, through state government growing stronger and decreasing the frequency of violence and other dangers, states become increasingly able to avert famines by distributing food, and (in the last two centuries) the development of science and technology...

... for traditional peoples, even more than for us moderns, there are limits to their effectiveness, and large areas beyond their control. Crop yields are affected by unpredictable droughts, rainfall, hail, wind storms, cold temperatures, and insect pests. There is a large role of chance in the movements of individual animals. Most illnesses lie beyond traditional control because of the limits of traditional medical knowledge. Like the Israeli women who recited psalms but couldn't control the paths of the rockets, much also remains beyond the control of traditional peoples after they have done their best. They, and we, rebel against remaining inactive and doing nothing. That makes them and us anxious, feeling helpless, prone to make mistakes, and unable to put out our best efforts. That's where traditional peoples, and still often we today, resort to prayer, rituals, omens, magic, taboos, superstitions, and shamans. Believing that those measures are effective, they and we become less anxious, calmer, and more focused.

One example, studied by the ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski, comes from the Trobriand Islands near New Guinea, where villagers catch fish in two types of locations requiring different fishing methods: in the sheltered, calm inner lagoon, where one dumps poison into a patch of water and then just picks up the stunned or dead fish; and in the open sea, spearing or netting fish while paddling a canoe through waves and surf. Lagoon fishing is safe, easy, and offers predictable yields; open-sea fishing is dangerous and unpredictable, with large bonanzas if a shoal of fish happens to be running at that particular time and place, but with little profit and much personal risk if one doesn't happen to encounter a shoal that day. The islanders perform elaborate magical rituals before embarking on open-sea fishing in order to secure safety and success, because much doubt remains even after they have laid the best plans based on experience. But no magic is associated with lagoon fishing: one merely sets out and does it, without uncertainty or anxiety about the predictable result.

...

For us today, prayer and ritual and magic are less widespread, because science and knowledge play a larger role in the success of our endeavors. But there remains much that we still can't control, and many endeavors and dangers where science and technology don't guarantee success. That's where we, too, resort to prayers, offerings, and rituals. Prime examples in the recent past have been prayers for safe completion of sea voyages, bountiful harvests, success in war, and especially healing from disease. When doctors can't predict a patient's outcome with high probability, and especially when doctors admit that they are helpless, that's when people are especially likely to pray.

Two specific examples illustrate for us the association between rituals or prayers on the one hand, and uncertain outcome on the other hand. Gamblers in a game of chance often follow their own personal rituals before throwing the dice, but chess-players don't have such rituals before moving a piece. That's because dice games are known to be games of chance, but there is no role of chance in chess: if your move costs you the game, you have no excuses, it was entirely your own fault for not foreseeing your opponent's response. Similarly, farmers wanting to drill a well to find underground water often consult dowsers in western New Mexico, where the area's local geological complexity results in big unpredictable variation in the depth and quantity of underground water, such that not even professional geologists can predict accurately from surface features the location and depth of underground water. In the Texas Panhandle, though, where the water table lies at a uniform depth of 125 feet, farmers merely drill a well to that depth at a site nearest to where the water is needed; no one uses dowsers, although people are familiar with the method. That is, New Mexico farmers and dice players deal with unpredictability by resorting to rituals just as do Trobriand ocean fishermen...while Texas Panhandle farmers and chess-players dispense with rituals just as do Trobriand lagoon fishermen.

In short, religious (and also non-religious) rituals are still with us to help us deal with anxiety in the face of uncertainty and danger. However, this function of religion was much more important in traditional societies facing greater uncertainty and danger than modern Westernized societies.

Let's now turn to a function of religion that must have expanded over the last 10,000 years: to provide comfort, hope, and meaning when life is hard. A specific example is to comfort us at the prospect of our own death and at the death of a loved one. Some mammals - elephants are a striking example - appear to recognize and mourn the death of a close companion. But we have no reason to suspect that any animal except is humans understands that, one day, it to will die. We would inevitable have realized that that fate lay in store for us as we acquired self-consciousness and better reasoning power, and began to generalize from watching our fellow band members die. Almost all observed and archaeologically attested humans groups demonstrate their understanding of death's significance by not just discarding their dead but somehow providing for them by burial, cremation, wrapping, mummification, cooking, or other means.

It's frightening to see someone who was recently warm, moving, talking, and capable of self-defense now cold, motionless, silent, and helpless. It's frightening to imagine that happening to us, too. Most religions provide comfort by in effect denying death's reality, and by postulating some sort of afterlife for a soul postulated as associated with the body. One's soul together with a replica of one's body may go to a supernatural place called heaven or some other name; or one's soul may become transformed into a bird or another person here on Earth. Religions that proclaim an afterlife often go further and use it  not just to deny death but also to hold out hope for something even better awaiting us after death, such as eternal life, reunion with one's loved ones, freedom from care, nectar, and beautiful virgins.

In addition to our pain at the prospect of death, there are many other pains of life for which religion offers comfort in various ways. One way is to "explain" a suffering by declaring it not to be a meaningless random event but to possess some deeper meaning: e.g., it was to test you for your worthiness for the afterlife, or it was to punish you for your sins, or it was an evil done to you by some bad person who you should hire a sorcerer to identify and kill. Another way is to promise that amends will be made to you in the afterlife for your suffering: yes, you suffered here, but never fear, you will be rewarded after your death. Still a third way is to promise not only that will your suffering be offset in a happy afterlife, but also that those who did you evil will have a miserable afterlife. While punishing your enemies on Earth gives you only finite revenge and satisfaction, the eternal exquisite tortures that they will suffer after death in Dante's Inferno will guarantee you all the revenge and satisfaction that you could ever long for. Hell has a double function: to comfort you by smiting your enemies whom you were unable to smite yourself here on Earth; and to motivate you to obey you religion's moral commands, by threatening to send you too there if you misbehave. Thus, the postulated afterlife resolves the paradox of theodicy (the co-existence of evil and a good God) by assuring you not to worry; all scores will be settled later.

This comforting function of religion must have emerged early in our evolutionary history, as soon as were we smart enough to realize that we'd die, and to wonder why life was often painful. Hunter-gatherers do often believe in survival after death as spirits. But this function expanded greatly later with the rise of so-called world-rejecting religions, which assert not only that there is an afterlife, but that it's even more important and long-lasting than this earthly life, and that the overriding goal of earthly life is to obtain salvation and prepare you for the afterlife. While world rejection is strong in Christianity, Islam, and some forms of Buddhism, it also characterizes some secular (i.e., non-religious) philosophies such as Plato's. Such beliefs can be so compelling that some religious people actually reject the worldly life. Monks and nuns in residential orders do so insofar as they live, sleep, and eat separately from the secular world, although they may go out into it daily in order to minister, teach, and preach. But there are other orders that isolate themselves as completely as possible from the secular world. Among them were the Cistercian order, whose great monasteries at Rievaulx, Fountains Abbey, and Jerveaulx in England remain England's best-preserved monastic ruins because they were erected far from towns and hence were less subject to plunder and re-use after they were abandoned. Even more extreme was the world rejection practiced by a few Irish monks who settled as hermits in otherwise uninhabited Iceland. 

Small-scale societies place much less emphasis on world rejection, salvation, and the afterlife than do large-scale, more complex and recent societies. There are at least three reasons for this trend. First, social stratification and inequality have increased, from egalitarian small-scale societies to large  complex societies with their kings, nobles, elite, rich, and members of highly ranked clans contrasting with their mass of poor peasants and laborers.  If everybody else around you is suffering as much as you are, then there is no unfairness to be explained, and no visible example of the good life to which to aspire. But the observation that some people have much more comfortable lives and can dominate you takes a lot of explaining and comforting, which religion offers.

A second reason why large, complex societies emphasize comforting and the afterlife more than do small scale-societies is that archaeological and ethnographic evidence shows that life really did become harder as hunter-gatherers became farmers and assembled in larger societies. With the transition to agriculture, the average daily number of work hours increased, nutrition deteriorated, infectious disease and body wear increased, and lifespan shortened. Conditions deteriorated even further for urban proletariats during the Industrial Revolution, as work days lengthened, and as hygiene, health, and pleasures diminished. Finally, as we shall discuss below, complex populous societies have more formalized moral codes, more black-and-white emphasis on good and evil, and bigger resulting problems of theodicy: why, if you yourself are behaving virtuously and obeying the laws, do law-breakers and the rest of the world get away with being cruel to you?

All three of these reasons suggest why the comforting function of religion has increased in more populous and recent societies: it's simply that those societies inflict on us more bad things for which we crave comfort. This comforting role of religion helps explain the frequent observation that misfortune tends to make people more religious, and that poorer social strata, regions, and countries tend to be more religious than richer ones: they need more comforting. Among the world's nations today, the percentage of citizens who say that religion is an important part of their daily lives is 80%-99% for most nations with per-capita gross domestic products (GDP) under $10,000, but only 17%-43% for most nations with per-capita GDP over 30,000. (That doesn't account for the high religious commitment in the rich U.S., which I'll mention in the next paragraph.) Even within just the U.S., there appear to be more churches and more church attendance in poorer areas than in richer areas, despite the greater resources and leisure time available to build and attend churches in richer areas. Within American society, the highest religious commitment and the most radical Christian branches are found among the most marginalized, underprivileged social groups.  

Ethan Mollick
@emollick
A second paper finds even more evidence that earthquakes increase religiosity by examining the names of 4.1 million authors throughout history. After a major earthquake, children born in the area are far more likely to be given religious names, such as being named after saints.
Ol' San Pedro!

It may initially seem surprising that religion has been maintaining itself or even growing in the modern world, despite the rise in two factors already mentioned as undermining religion: science's recent usurpation of religion's original explanatory role; and our increased technology and societal effectiveness reducing dangers that lie beyond our control and thus inviting prayer. That religion nevertheless shows no signs of dying out may be due to out persistent quest for "meaning." We humans have always sought meaning in our lives that can otherwise seem meaningless, purposeless, and evanescent, and in a world full of unpredictable unfortunate events. Now along comes science, seeming to say that "meaning" isn't meaningful, and that our individual lives really are meaningless, purposeless, and evanescent except as packages of genes for which the measure of success is just self-propagation. Some atheists would maintain that the problem of theodicy doesn't exist; good and evil are just human definitions; if cancer or a car crash kills X and Y but not A and B, that's just a random catastrophe; there isn't any afterlife; and if you've ever suffered or been abused here on Earth, it won't be fixed for you in the afterlife. If you respond to those atheists, "I don't like to hear that, tell me it's not true, show me some way in which science has its own way of providing meaning" those atheists' response would be "Your request is in vain, get over it, stop looking for meaning, there isn't any meaning - it's just that, as Donald Rumsfeld said of looting during the war in Iraq, 'Stuff happens!'" But we still have our same old brains that crave meaning. We have several million years of evolutionary history telling us, "Even if that's true, I don't like it and I'm not going to believe it: if science won't give me meaning, I'll look to religion for it." That's probably a significant factor in the persistence and even growth of religion in this century of growth in science and technology. It may contribute part - surely not all, but perhaps part - of the explanation for why the United States, the country with the most highly developed scientific and technological establishment, is also the most religious among wealthy First World countries. The greater gulf between rich and poor people in the U.S. than in Europe may be another part of the explanation.
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? Diamond, p. 346-355.

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