713. When One Irrationality Serves To Reinforce Another

713.  When One Irrationality Serves To Reinforce Another

Wars are a manifestation of the ingroup-outgroup instinct.  

The more someone perceives, defines and identifies himself as a bearer of genes and his purpose of existence as to enable his genes to survive and to spread, the more any behavior favoring his own progeny is subjectively logical to him.  Even exploiting and killing outgroup members thus appears permissible and even mandatory to him.   
Rationality ascribing equal rights to any person on this globe makes the ingroup-outgroup obsolete.  But while this instinct it is often consciously, publicly and legally discarded and rejected, it prevails subconsciously.  

When people are torn in cognitive dissonance, when they are oscillating between rational behavior and irrational instinctive urges and tendencies, a variety of irrational beliefs are invented to ease the inner conflict.  
These beliefs allow people to succumb to and to follow their instincts without feeling bad.   For many people, this comes easier than to rationally conquer instincts.  

While denial prevents to recognize and acknowledge the irrationality of the belief itself, being guided by this belief makes the instinctive behavior subjectively appear rational.    Thus the pseudo-rationality of the belief enhances instinctive behavior, even though it is obsolete and harmful.

The following article is an interesting indication of how war is reinforced by religious beliefs. 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/05/140515153811.htm

"World War I -- the “war to end all wars” -- in fact sowed seeds for future international conflicts in a way that has been largely overlooked: through religion, says a historian and author. Widespread belief in the supernatural was a driving force during the war and helped mold all three of the major religions -- Christianity, Judaism and Islam -- paving the way for modern views of religion and violence, he said."

656. The Placebo Church

656.   The Placebo Church

In entry 441 I was expressing how a weird institution called Unitarian Universalist Church (UU) puzzled me, because it makes no rational sense.    They claim not to be a religion but they behave like one.  

In entry 589 I defined religion by also showing behaviors based upon irrational beliefs other than only the one in the existence of a deity.    These behaviors can be seen as rational methods of coping with irrational beliefs, while without such beliefs, the behaviors themselves are irrational.


In this sense the UU is a placebo religion.   

A person, who has by own experience or by reliable observation learned, that taking a painkiller brings relief from pain, can often experience the relief from pain by unknowingly taking a placebo, which is a pill without any chemical content.    It is a placebo by still looking like a pill, only the active ingredient is omitted.    

The christian religion has some psychological benefits for some people.  Their imaginary god's attributes help them to cope with human suffering.   The christian religion is especially attractive to victims finding an alleged sense in their sufferings and to perpetrators and evil doers finding alleged justification for harming others.   

• The belief in being rewarded by the alleged god in the alleged afterlife misrepresents senseless suffering as if it were a valid method to earn such a reward.
• The belief in an alleged god's alleged wisdom being beyond human comprehension attributes hidden reasons to suffering.
• The belief in an alleged god's alleged wisdom and rewarding in the alleged afterlife allows the perpetrators to harm others without a bad conscience.   They perceive the alleged god as the proxy, who is considered the one responsible for the harm. 
• The belief in an alleged god's alleged reward for forgiving is misused as the unjustified demand for being forgiven for unforgivable harm.  

The only active ingredient of any christian church is the god's impact upon the endurance of suffering and the inflicting of harm.   By being interwoven with the entire culture the christian religion has over its long history incorporated the additional supplying of many secular benefits.  As a result, many people completely lost all awareness for the differences between those benefits, which were due to the core of the religious beliefs, and those collateral and independent benefits, which were only added but not religious. 

This vague and indiscriminate notion of a church as being beneficial in a generalized and very special manner is the reason, why so many people experience it is possible to delete the god and create a placebo church, which still appears to be a church.    Just like the placebo pill looks like a pill.  

The placebo effect of a sugar pill is impossible for any person ignorant of the existence of painkillers, like some ingenious people in a remote area.   (Any similar effect would need other explanations like a general gullibility to suggestions and claims.) 

It is the same with the church.   Those, who have never experienced the christian religion as beneficial, are not prone to experience a placebo church as offering any benefits, which cannot be obtained elsewhere.   

But there is one decisive difference between taking a placebo pill and joining a placebo church:  

The placebo pill works, when the person does not know, that the pharmaceutical ingredient is lacking.   The placebo church is chosen for being the placebo, for having the god as the active ingredient eliminated.   

A person without pain needs neither a pharmaceutical nor a placebo painkiller.   The sugar in the pill can be obtained anywhere and in any form, the person without pain eats sugar when he wants to.   He does not make it look like a painkiller first.
I have never heard of anybody eating placebos, knowing that there is no medicine in them, only because of the sweet taste.   They rather eat real sweets. 

A person without religious needs does not need a church, neither one with a god nor a placebo church.  Such a person finds and enjoys the collateral benefits found in christian churches directly in secular alternative institutions.   He does not combine them to appear like a church.    

Self-labeled atheists in the UU are like people, who knowingly eat placebos for the taste instead of getting the real thing elsewhere.   

When a church already exists for those, who benefit from the delusion of the existence of a deity, then the additional use of such an institution for other benefits and also by non-religious persons can be rational.    

All the benefits offered by the UU are benefits available elsewhere, where each by itself can be experienced and enjoyed as secular.   Combining them as a placebo church is a deliberate bias.    Creating a placebo church for only non-religious benefits is irrational.   

I can think of only one explanation for this is a fallacy: 

It seems that there are two distinct types of self-labeled atheists.  

• Those who are independent thinkers, to whom the insight of the irrationality of religious beliefs has come as an unavoidable conclusion and consequence of thinking.   Atheism and feeling free from needing any religion is emotionally beneficisal for them, because it makes them feel good about themselves.  
• Those who have a strong need for the benefits of the delusion of the existence of a god, but who were so much disappointed by some event in their life, that they were unable to continue to believe.   They suffer from their persistent craving for their lost paradise of the delusion. A placebo church gives them the best relief for that craving.   
  As members of the UU they remain fence sitters, who look in the direction of atheism, but their behind is still entangled in christian religious needs.   
  The choice of an institution with the style of buildings and terminology as a placebo church accommodates the fence sitters' needs to remain in surroundings resembling their lost paradise.   
  

An example:  Somebody with sufficient knowledge in philosophy can either be the speaker giving a lecture in an auditorium or he can be the minister giving a sermon in a church with or without a god.   

They may even talk about the same topic, but there is a huge difference:
 

Independently thinking atheists attend the lecture.   They listen to information, which they afterwards reflect upon and which maybe influences their attitudes and their behavior.   But they actively process the information and choose what to make of it.

People, who prefer to attend services and to listen to sermons, do this in a more passive and submissive way.   Naming an event a service indicates, that there is a target, who is served by humble servants, who expect guidance and who are emotionally ready to be told what to do.   They do not choose or process, they attempt to follow, and rarely doubt the wisdom of someone with the halo of being called a minister.  

Becoming an atheist is only the first, but not sufficient step for rational people.   The logical next step is a rational reevaluation of all attitudes, values, opinions.   Whatever makes no sense without the christian belief, of which it had been derived, has to be reconsidered.

  
But the choice of a placebo church indicates the clinging to the values and world view of christianity and the wish to change nothing except having lost or deleted the god.

    

The following is a list of benefits as experienced and perceived by a member of the UU.   With his permission, I am quoting him literally. 

 
All these benefits do not need a church but can be obtained as good or better elsewhere.    My comments point to alternatives.  

1. fabulous live music of all kinds

No church is needed for life music.   There are many secular places offering concerts.    Anybody who wants to play in public, has a wide choice of places.  

2. liberal religious education, fellowship and musical training for children, making them aware of the great variety of religions and non-religious views

The place for education is the school.  Community colleges offer music lessons beyond the level of schools.  Pupils need to be taught scientific and skeptical thinking.   The place for information concerning religion are in history and social science lessons with sufficient mental distance.   They need to be taught, that religion is obsolete and enhances harming behavior.

Pupils also need to be taught interactive skills like communication, theory of mind, and a value system based upon rationality.   

3. fellowship and fun with people of liberal, non-religious and liberal religious views

People need fellowship with likeminded people.     Non-religious and liberal religious are contradictions.   Someone can either belief in a god or not.  This impedes fellowship.   There is a mental abyss between those, who belief in any god and those, who do not.   Something is weird when they join a placebo church instead of associating with their own kind.  

Liberal is a political term and has its place in a political party.  

4. promotion of enlightened values, including earth-friendly values among others, and tolerance for people of differing views.  

Tolerance for differing views (not different needs or tastes, unfortunate life situations or disabilities) is an indication of ignorance, stupidity and/or irrationality.   The careful evaluation of all views leads to the conclusion, which of them is rationally superior or is the only rational one.  From then on, differing views do not deserve tolerance.    Tolerance is the admittance of insufficient thinking.  
Rational non-religious people need secular non-religious and atheist groups, where religious people are excluded as a nuisance and annoyance.    Only fence-sitting atheists have tolerance for delusional believers.  
Enlightenment is the contrary of tolerated stupidity.   

5. social justice activities

This is the realm and task of political parties and task oriented pressure groups..

6. places where people can evolve their views as they are exposed to new or different ideas, not to mention help and healing in recovering from past indoctrination from dogmatic theology

This is the realm of secular psychological self-help, self-improvement and self-awareness groups and courses at community colleges.     The worst indoctrination is the delusion, that there are deities, afterlife, an immortal soul and such.   Any alleged help, which includes tolerating such insane beliefs would not be a real help, only a slight reduction of the damage. 

7. promotion of an open-minded approach to life in general

This is the realm and task of secular psychological self-help, self-improvement and self-awareness groups and of schools and all educational institutions.

8. non-religious weddings, child dedications, coming of age celebrations, and funeral services

All these celebrations are rituals based upon some interaction with a god.   A wedding means vows to a god, they are obsolete without a god.   People can best organize their celebrations according to their own individual needs.  

9. counseling and support for people going through difficult times

This is the task of qualified secular and rational psychologists.   A minister's kitchen psychology can do more damage than good.

10. community outreach supporting other organizations serving the most needy people in our communities and beyond

This is the realm and task of political parties and task oriented pressure groups.  They have to influence any country's government to fulfill its obligation to care and provide for the needy by getting sufficient tax from the rich.

11. a forum for the free expression of views which sometimes may run counter to those of the populous in general, e.g. opposition to war, oppression, etc.

This is the realm and task of political parties and of task oriented pressure groups.. 

12. an insitution where people can come together on a regular basis to meditate quietly and calmly on their lives and so on

This is the realm of secular psychological self-help, self-improvement and self-awareness groups and courses at community colleges and other educational institutions.    

13. a welcoming congregations accepting of people of different genders, sexual orientations, races, ethnicities, etc.

This is the common ground and every day situation of every functional group of people, who have joined it to pursue a hobby, sport, interest of any kind.  

14. all of these things and more available from one organization existing often like an island of liberality in the midst of a land of conservative religious people and their churches

It is pathetic to imitate, what one rejects.   Independent thinking atheists need a real alternative, not a placebo church.    

15. a denomination demonstrating a democratic way of functioning in the midst of many non-democratic, paternalistic institutions

A democratic way of functioning is the common ground of every functional group of people, who have joined it to pursue a hobby, sport, interest of any kind.  

There is no objective need for a placebo church to provide anything from this list.   A placebo church caters only for the need of people with a specific precondition.  

637. The Mentally Hazardous Gray Zone Between Woo-woo And Science

637.   The Mentally Hazardous Gray Zone Between Woo-woo And Science

One important task of science is to draw a clear line between irrational beliefs and rational knowledge derived from evidence.   Responsible scientists accentuate this line.  

People being disappointed with modern scientific medicine often turn to so called alternative medicine.   While some of it is outright quackery, some parts of traditional non-western medicine are an unfortunate mixture of absurd beliefs with methods, which sometimes and under specific circumstances seem to be beneficial.    These benefits deserve scientific research.  

Researching the claims of alternative medicine is important.  But it can only lead to curative progress, when beneficial effects are thoroughly cleansed of the contamination by woo-woo beliefs.   

The line between science and quackery needs to be sharpened and emphasized.    Accidentally appearing to validate woo-woo beliefs, while in fact only validating their collateral benefits blurs this line instead,  It is a fallacy, which contributes to the persistence of all quackery.    


The following study presenting beneficial effects of QiGong on cancer patients is an example of scientists having irresponsibly blurred the line by attributing unwarranted value to an irrational belief:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130125142244.htm 

Presenting the lump method and entire package of what is called QiGong as beneficial is a dangerous and irresponsible fallacy.   

"qigong is traditionally viewed as a practice to cultivate and balance qi (chi) or what has been translated as "intrinsic life energy"."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qigong

The existence of such a qi is a typical woo-woo belief in the alleged existence of something too vague and elusive to allow finding evidence of its existence by experiments or observations.   QiGong is centered around this woo-woo belief.    Without the belief in this qi, QiGong would not be QiGong.   Therefore there cannot ever be a scientific QiGong.    QiGong is woo-woo or it is not QiGong.  

The fallacy of the study is the misrepresentation of appearing to validate a woo-woo belief, while it in reality only validates the outcome of specific behaviors.    Nothing in the study validates QiGong as a belief based method.   

Responsible science needs to refrain from ascribing benefits to woo-woo beliefs.    Studying methods like QiGong scientifically requires a very careful separation between rationally describable physiological effects of behaviors and obsolete irrational woo-woo beliefs. 

Once there is evidence for real benefits of any method, as was found in the study, a responsible scientific approach cannot end there.  Its task includes to also attribute the curative effects to evident causes and replace wrong ascriptions to woo-woo beliefs. 

Step 1 requires the evaluation of all claims like the existence of a qi.    Unless evidence for the existence of qi can be found, the concept of QiGong as a package has to be discarded.    Whatever has an effect, it is not QiGong.   It makes no sense to believe, that specific exercises influence an imaginary qi, which then does the cure, as long as there is no evidence for the existence of that qi.

Step 2 requires to distinguish between the specific woo-woo belief and general placebo effects.  

Step 3 requires to find those behaviors, gymnastics, practices and/or exercises, which are the real and direct cause of the observed benefits.   Whenever behaviors lead to beneficial results, research is important, but with the focus on the behaviors themselves.

The result of such research can lead to the definition of an independent curing method, which only coincides with the woo-woo method by the application of some same behaviors.   Such a method therefore needs a clear distinction by being given a different, non-woo-woo name.    It could be 'xyz'-exercises, where xyz can be any name.  

627. Ludicrous And Irresponsible Propagation Of Woo-woo

627.   Ludicrous And Irresponsible Propagation Of Woo-woo

I just got an email from one of the dating sites, where I have a profile.    Some quotes:  

"do you want to die alone?‏" 

"We’re screwed. You should be too!"

"As we all know, the world is ending 12/21. Why not find someone to spend your last moments with? As things heat up and the earth’s crust begins to melt, here’s a high match that would welcome your embrace — before your hearts burst into ash. Hey, better safe than sorry."

People, who merely believe such nonsense, are pathetic fools.   But when they create, enhance or reinforce other people's irrational anxieties, this is irresponsible.

    
Based upon the false belief of having no future, people could do lots of things, which they hitherto wisely avoided to prevent dire consequences.  

Examples:

• Gambling and loosing all the savings.
• Risking unwanted pregnancies and STDs
• Telling the boss the true opinion about him and getting fired.
• Killing someone hated and finally indulging in a long repressed revenge.
• Indulging in the consumption of any food or substance, which damages their health or causes a relapse to an addiction

The easier it gets technically to spread the publicity of any claim and opinion, the more those people are dangerous, who carelessly multiply dangerous, weird and delusional beliefs.    Unfortunately skepticism lacks behind the technical progress favoring the propagation and spreading of woo-woo.  

617. The Irrationality Of Antisemitism

617.   The Irrationality Of Antisemitism

Being German, writing about antisemitism is a delicate topic.   But recently I was very appalled by someone mentioning his personal experience of antisemitism in the USA, which has obviously hurt him a lot. 

The tragic strength of antisemitism comes from confounding a religion to be at the same time also a defining trait of an alleged ethnic group.    Thus antisemitism gets fueled by two mutually reinforcing influences, which both are equally irrational.  

• Religious fundamentalists fighting and discriminating against any other religion.  
• The ingroup-outgroup instinct sometimes causing societies to redefine the well to do and intellectual elite into being considered as underdogs.  Thus the disadvantaged classes are manipulated to feel less bad about suffering social injustice and thus they are kept from rebelling.  
  This in my understanding is the main reason for the sad success of Hitler's antisemitism, which would not have been possible without the cooperation of the populace.    

Therefore I see today's antisemitism in the USA connected to the influence of christian fundamentalists, similar to how declaring oneself to be an atheist can sometimes cause strong hostility in some areas of the USA, while here in Germany my calling myself an atheist has no consequences.

Calling someone a Jew in absence of his being religious is a myth.  

Judaism is a religion, and a Jew is someone belonging to this religion.  I have come across the label 'secular Jew' several times.  It is a contradiction.    A Jew is religious, secular means to be not religious.

The following is not about Judaism as a religion.   From my apistic point of view, Judaism does not deserve any more respect than any other religion, as all religious beliefs are an insane deficit of rationality.


Antisemitism is literally not about a religion and not even about Jews.   

Literally it is the rejection of people who are ethnically called Semitic.   Several ethnicities in the Middle East are called Semitic, even including the Maltese.   

But those, who are discriminated against by antisemitism as alleged ethnic Jews, are not even ethnically Semitic, because the historical Semitic Jews have seized to exist long ago. 

Persons of the Jewish religion are today ethnically members of the country, where they and their immediately preceding generations have been socialized into, just as are the people of any other or no religion.

A defined ethnicity exists as long as there is continuity. 

Ethnic groups have a name and are defined by http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ethnic

"1. Of or relating to a group of people having common racial, national, religious or cultural origins.

2. Belonging to a foreign culture."

And while this definition does not mention it, the culture also includes a shared language.

Some ethnic groups develop and evolve over a long time and have enough continuity to keep their name.
Example: Greece

There is also continuity when large groups form colonies on different territories. When nations are including large groups of not integrated subcultures of immigrants, then the nation embraces colonies.
Examples: Many Mexicans in the USA have formed colonies. The Turkish immigrants into Germany keep themselves segregated in colonies, in contrast to all other work immigrants from several Mediterranean countries, who have been integrated in the second and third generation.

Many or even most ethnic groups change so much over the centuries, that they develop into distinct ethnicities with different names.
Example: Today's Italians are the descendants of the Romans of ancient times, but they are very different.

But there is rarely any long-term continuity in the case of the migration of individuals and small groups, instead there is assimilation and integration.   Migrants become members of the host ethnicity and country after a few generations.
Example: About a hundred years ago, many people from Poland came as workers to the coal mines and other industry in an area called Ruhrgebiet and stayed.  Names ending on -ski are usually Polish.  But today, people with such names are considered as regular Germans, nobody would call them or even think of them as Polish anymore.

Except the religion, there is no continuity from the historic ethnic Jews. .

Several thousand years ago, an ethnic group called Jews lived in a territory east of the Mediterranean sea.   They spoke Hebrew and were ethnically Semitic.   They have seized to exist.   There is no continuity.  

• Today, there are no more ethnic Jews just as there are no more ethnic Romans.  
• In Israel today, Hebrew was reinstalled after having been extinct as a spoken language. 
  The Hebrew speaking inhabitants of Israel are Israelis.  
• If Israelis are also Jews, it is by their religion.   A shared religion alone, which is the only attribute, which has not changed for thousands of years, does not suffice to define an ethnic group.  
• After centuries and milllennia of migration and mixing, the descendants of the historical Jews are both culturally and genetically as related to the ethnic group of the country, of which they are citizens by passport, education and shared language as anybody with different ancestors and a different religion.  
  I do not know, if this has been done.   But if someone would compare the genetic code of alleged ethnic Jews, including the immigrants to Israel, I would expect them to be less related to the Semitic ethnicities in the Middle East and much more related to their present or previous ethnic homes.
• Even the Yiddish language spoken by some subcultures sharing the Jewish religion is no continuity from the Hebrew of the historical Jews.   Yiddish is not even related to Hebrew at all but a different language, while Italian at least has evolved from the Romans' Latin.

Religion is not hereditary. 

To achieve the cure from the insanity of religious beliefs and to succeed in becoming an atheist and an apistic is something, which for some people is a struggle and a difficult process.   They need encouragement, appreciation and respect.   While ex-christians do not always get this, at least they are usually recognized to have left behind christianity, as soon as the label themselves as atheists.   

But when someone leaves Judaism behind and is still called a Jew, it is as if his religion is confounded with a genetic defect, which cannot be rationally overcome.     Irrationality can be considered a genetic defect making someone gullible to any religion, but it certainly does not lead to choose Judaism over any other.   
It is foolish to call someone a Jew, even though he has become an atheist or converted to a different religion, only because some ancestors had belonged to the Jewish religion.  This is not less foolish than to call atheistic descendants christians only because of their christians parents or even grandparents.  

Antisemitism is a two-step mental fallacy.

Conclusions from visible traits like the color of the skin to alleged correlated invisible traits are the simple fallacy of simple racism.   But the conclusion, that an only alleged but not visibly recognizable race or genetic ethnicity is correlated to invisible traits is the double fallacy of generalized racism without even a race.     

_____

 Janurary 21, addition:

This source indicates the genetically mixed background of people with a Jewish cultural and/or religious background.    

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130116195333.htm

Further analyses yielded a complex multi-ethnical ancestry with a slightly dominant Caucasus -Near Eastern, large South European and Middle Eastern ancestries, and a minor Eastern European contribution.

603. Simple Recipes Attract Simpleminded People

603.   Simple Recipes Attract Simpleminded People

Texts presenting apparently easy recipes for about any problem or task are plenty in books, newspapers, the web and other media.    

Practical tasks sometimes do follow simple algorithms, which are not obvious without a step-by-step guide to follow through.   Recipes for cooking are an examples, manuals how to maintain and handle household appliances and machines are another.  

But most of the recipes concerning non-material topics are false promises offering pseudo solutions to very complex, difficult and strenuous tasks.  

1.  The attraction of recipes:  

Recipes are tempting to be believed and applied, whenever people struggle with the experience of failure, because they wish or crave for something, which

• can generally not be achieved
• is beyond someone's ability to achieve it
• could only be achieved by much more efforts than the person is ready and willing to invest

Recipes are expressed as assertive claims.   The apparent false authority of them misleads people to confound their mere wishful thinking as if it were something to come true as a secure success needing only limited efforts.   Recipes are most suggestive, when they are expressed in a way, which precludes doubts of failure and pretends programmed success.   

Recipes are usually either promising the certain way to reach one specific goal, or they offer a precise number of steps or items to work through towards a goal.   

2.  Some examples:

The following examples are chosen only because of the big claim made by the title.  

Examples of titles of books

Get the life you want

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

The 48 Laws of Power

Think and Grow Rich

The Feeling Good Handbook

How Successful People Think: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

Examples of 'how to' articles found by a google search:  

How to trick people into thinking you're good looking

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

How to Win Friends and Influence People

How to be an expert

How to Get a Life

How to Get Out of Debt

How to Lose 20 lbs. of bodyfat in 30 days

How to Read 300% Faster in 20 Minutes

How To Become Wealthy

Examples from a dating advice site:

10 things men should never say

Seven steps to the perfect first email

5 Habits that Hurt Your Relationship

Five dating tips for spotting ‘Mr Right’

3 Key Things to Discuss Before Moving In Together

3. Classification of recipes:

Falling for simple recipes can be caused by several different fallacies. 

• Absurdity.   Recipes advising religious rituals like prayer or a pilgrimage and woo-woo remedies like homeopathy are just absurd and irrational.  
• Pseudo-science.   Pseudo-science is suggestive, because uninformed people confound it with serious science.   NLP is an example.
• Exaggerated and biased truth.   A few good, valid tips can be convincing, even when they are banalities.   These tips can supply a tiny contribution to the problem, that makes them suggestive.   But they are nevertheless very insufficient, when exaggerated into an entire recipe, not applicable for the complex problem and for the wide variety of different people and situations.  

4.  Purpose for using recipes:

The recipes are used as a crutch to reduce insecurity and anxiety in areas of life, where the access to reliable information and better methods is difficult:  

• Self-improvement towards a better ability of understanding, predicting, influencing and controlling other people
• Health improvement

5.  Gullibility to the belief in simple recipes:

Not all recipes are fully worthless, when perceived with the critical mental distance to not succumb to unrealistic expectations.    If read skeptically, knowing that there cannot be simple recipes, there is sometimes some food for thought to be integrated in a larger frame of investigating the best way to cope with an issue. 

• Gullible, uneducated and simple minded people, who are prone to believe any irrational nonsense, are most prone to also fall uncritically for simple recipes.   Pressing problems like strong instinctive urges, which deactivate or blur the reason, often enhance the attraction of simple recipes.
  
• Intelligent and skeptical people with the ability for abstract and complex thinking are not prone to fall for simple recipes.   They understand the complexity and real magnitude of a task and react appropriately.  They prefer sources, which put the emphasis on the complexity of any issue and avoid any claims of easy solutions.     

6.  The authors of the recipes:

Those who produce simple recipes are

• frauds, who know, that they take advantage of other people's gullibility and simplicity to make money.  
• gullible and mislead themselves.    The feel a mission to propagate their delusional insights and wisdom.  
  
  • They want to earn a reward in the afterlife
  • They expect narcissistic supply as gurus.
  • They want to feel good about themselves by being altruistically helping others.

7.  The dangers of simple recipes for the applicants:

By relying exclusively on a simple recipe, people often enhance and prolong the problem, which they attempt to solve.  The focus on vain attempts to reach a goal with an oversimplified recipe impedes them to find a real solution.

When the wrong expectations for an easy achievement fail, a wrong attribution of this failure can damage a person's self-esteem and confidence.   This can lead to wrong decisions with long term fatal consequences in the realm of important life choices.

8.  The dangers of the impact of imposed simple recipes:

When people rely more on recipes than on direct information from the target of the applied recipe, then they can be a serious hazard to others,    The lack of any modification of the applied recipe by the target's direct influence can be caused by any combination of lacking trust, of lacking information and of failing recognition for the target being a source of information.

• Misjudgment by categorization:  
  Using astrology as a recipe of sorting people into 12 arbitrary categories and ascribing traits to them can cause harm.   A person is not treated according to how s/he really is but by ascribed traits.   A person chosen by wrongly ascribed traits as a mate or employee cannot fulfill erroneous expectations and may suffer from pressure.
  
• Misjudgment by unsuitable methods: 
  NLP includes pseudo-scientific recipes.  One such recipe claims, that specific eye movements were indicators for the difference between honesty and lying.    When trust is denied by this fallacy, this can prevent or destroy relationships and friendships.
  
• Unjustified blame: 
  When recipes promising benefits in the interaction with others fail, no matter if the goal is to be accepted or to gain control, this is a logical consequence of not perceiving the other as a partner, but as reduced to a mere target.   But due to believing in the power and correctness of the recipe, the failure is attributed to faults, flaws of defects of the target. 
  
• Enhancement of the detriments of power:  
  The more the person applying a recipe also has power, the worse the situation gets for the target.   People applying for a job or training can be rejected by invalid recipes like graphology.   Bosses, teachers, parents, wardens and caretakers in institutions can do a lot of harm by applying recipes derived from a religion, ideology or simply from an unqualified application or misinterpretation of recipes from any source.

I am personally scared of people, who believe so much in simple recipes of any kind, no matter if it is religion, woo-woo or pseudoscience, that this impedes and prevents me from influencing by proactive rationality, how I am judged and treated.    

My mindmate to be found is not simple minded, he does not use recipes upon me.  He is someone, who not only is able to think abstractly, but who also feels comfortable with cognitive complexity.  

596. Commodification And Learning By Feedback - The Spell Checker Metaphor

596.   Commodification And Learning By Feedback - The Spell Checker Metaphor


While people can often improve their relationships by feedback and constructive criticism, those men, who commodify women are unfortunately out of the reach of improvement by feedback. 

The spell checker metaphor:

Using a spell checker when writing a text in a foreign language helps to find mistakes and to learn better spelling.   Without the spell checker, the same mistakes are repeated and become a habit.   

A spell checker offers to its user the choice to change his spelling, whenever and if he agrees to do so.  Ignoring the errors indicated by the spell checker can have the unfavorable consequences of reactions to bad spelling.   

The benefits of using a spell checker as a learning aid are limited by preconditions.   It is only a valuable tool to improve the spelling competence, if it is reliable by only indicating real mistakes and by finding (nearly) all of them.  

1.  Learning from a spell checker does not work, when there are too many false positives.   When the spell checker uses a wrong language on a text, this leads to so many false positives, that the real mistakes are lost between the many apparent mistakes.  

2.  Learning from a spell checker does not work, when there are too many mistakes.  
When someone's knowledge of a language is only minimal and below the threshold for writing correct text, too many mistakes are discouraging and beyond the capacity to memorize all the corrections. 

3.  Relying on a spell checker, which overlooks mistakes, is worse than not using one.  Whatever is not indicated as an error is wrongly assumed and reinforced as correct.   This leads to learning mistakes.  


Feedback as a behavior checker:

Being influenced (entry 594) by the feedback of the partner concerning the preferred behaviors and especially concerning what hurting, annoying and disturbing behaviors need to be avoided is an important method and part of the learning process for improving a relationship. 
The partner's feedback indicates inappropriate behaviors.  Accepting feedback can be seen as using a behavior checker.   Feedback offers the choice to change the behavior in the case of agreement with the necessity to do so.    Ignoring and rejecting proffered feedback can have the unfavorable consequences of strong reactions to the persistent criticized behaviors.

The benefits of feedback as a tool to improve a relationship are limited by preconditions.   Feedback is reliable, when it is welcome by the recipient as justified and when both partners agree, that and how the criticized behaviors need to be changed.   

1.  Learning from feedback does not work, when there are too many false positives of unjustified and irrational criticisms.   When a commodifying man's entitlement delusion causes him to have absurd expectations and make inappropriate demands on a woman, which she refuses to comply and submit to, then his criticizing her for not serving his delusion is not justified.   Under an overwhelming pressure of his absurd and unwarranted blames and reproaches she has no chance to ever discover and consider those few instances of justified feedback.   

2.  Learning from feedback does not work, when there are too many justified reasons for criticism.   When a man has very many hurting, annoying and disturbing habits and attitudes, then getting too much justified feedback is more than what he can cope with.  This can happen, when someone is immature and ignorant, or when he is suddenly exposed to new expectations after having been considered as unfit for learning by feedback as in 3.

By the reaction of blocking and denial to overwhelming criticism he avoids any change.  But giving too much justified feedback is in such a situation not the woman's fault.    Her feeling hurt and annoyed is real and shifting the suffering upon her to spare him is not an improvement for them both as a couple, only a redistribution of the burden.   Her refraining from giving justified feedback is not a solution.  

Whenever there is a persistent conflict, because there is only the choice between him suffering from her feedback or her suffering from his behavior, they are a mismatch and not suitable for each other.    

3.  Not giving feedback reinforces habits, even though they are hurting or disturbing to others.   This happens, when someone gets the fool's or insane's license, not being taken for serious but instead considered as a weirdo and too deranged to change.  While he himself remains ignorant of his unfavorable reputation as a hopeless and incorrigible case, he believes to be respected and accepted.  He misinterprets the absence of feedback as if his behavior were experienced by others as correct and appropriate.  

4.  Learning by feedback does not work without agreement concerning the justification of the feedback.  
Making a relationship work requires a process of adapting to each other.   But not all people are suitable to reciprocally adapt.   When people's basic attitudes and values are too disparate, they cannot agree concerning which behaviors are acceptable and which are not and thus they also cannot agree, which feedback is justified.  They cannot adapt to each other, they are a mismatch and doomed to accumulate more and more unresolvable conflicts.  

5.  Feedback does not work, unless it is understood by the recipient as it was meant by the sender.   When feedback is incomprehensible or distorted by dysfunctional communication (entry 595), it does not help to learn and does not lead to improvements..  

The commodifying men's fallacy:

Spell checkers compare written text with an internal dictionary of correct words.  This dictionary represents the generally agreed upon correct spelling of a language.  Some spell checkers allow people to enter additional own words as correct into this dictionary.     Any fault entered as correct into the dictionary would no longer be found by the spell checker.  But entering faults is of course a completely irrational method of avoiding to notice the own errors by distorting the spell checker.

Yet the method applied by commodifying men, when handling women's feedback is as if someone would adjust the spell checker by feeding mistakes into the dictionary, until all the mistakes are hidden.   Text thus only appearing as if correct is then believed it to really be correct. 

But the dictionary of correct behaviors is in the woman's head, outside the commodifying man's control.  Feedback concerning his outrageous behavior and his absurd attitude towards women does not elicit the appropriate reaction of his correcting his behavior. Instead he believes the dictionary of correct behaviors in the woman's mind to be faulty.  He reacts with attempts to fix the woman, which for him means to make her modify her allegedly wrong feedback and the faulty concept of correct behaviors causing this feedback.   

Whenever by any method, threat, coercion, exhaustion or domination he succeeds to make her discontinue her feedback, he interprets this as having successfully fixed the woman.  

By this mechanism, men commodifying women are out to the reach of being influenced.    

574. The Baseline Of Insignificance

574.   The Baseline Of Insignificance

There are billions of people of this globe.   I know that they exist as an abstract mass of people, but not as individuals, as long as I have never even heard their individual names.  They are insignificant for me personally.    This has nothing to do with the ingroup-outgroup instinct.   The German stranger living down the street is as insignificant to me as any stranger on another continent.  

I perceive all human beings as a kind of prototype, as long as they are not known to me personally as individuals.  People visibly and unequivocally engaging in specific behaviors, no matter if for example performing religious rituals or as spectators at a sports event, are a subgroup of the general prototype distinguished by one of more special additional attributes.  

The existence of these prototypical humans has only one impact upon myself:  They are beings not to be harmed.  
Not harming as the baseline of behavior with strangers requires nothing more than distant politeness in the case of superficial haphazard interactions.  As long as I keep away from them and it causes no harm, I am free to choose, what to think or say about them.   
Their insignificance for me is the baseline.   I owe them no proactive beneficial behavior.    I do not owe them any respect, because I cannot know, if they as individuals deserve it or not.   


Based upon this, it is justified to discreetly ridiculing the weird irrational behaviors of people in Lourdes as explained in entry 573.  

• It is not harming by propagating prejudice.   Laughing at irrational expressions is laughing at something really and publicly displayed.   Propagating prejudice would mean to make unfounded detrimental claims by alleged contingencies. 
  
• It is neither interpersonal cowardice not talking behind people's back, because both these behaviors are clearly defined as reproachable under the limiting conditions of concerning people personally known.
  Encouraging a person into his face to pray for health and then talk with others behind his back about his foolishness to pray is cowardice. 
  Being told in confidence about someone's illness and then breaking the trust of telling this to others is talking behind his back.
  Sharing the opinion about how expecting to be cured in Lourdes is preposterous and laughing about it is neither of this, because it concerns the public behavior of strangers. 
  Nobody has any rational reason and even less moral obligation to approach a complete stranger to inform him of the own unfavorable cognitive reaction to his public behavior (unless the interference serves to protect a third party).      
  The rational reason to approach a stranger would be the intention of mutually beneficial interactions, not to offend him.
  
• The absence of personalization is not the same as depersonalization.   As stranger is insignificant but is considered as the prototype of a person entitled to not be harmed, he has just not been known as having an individuality.   
  Depersonalization is an ingredient in the justification of harming by commodification.   Depersonalization is the wilful undoing of a previous personalized contact for the purpose of asymmetrical advantages.  

573. The Justification For Ridiculing Irrational Beliefs

573.     The Justification For Ridiculing Irrational Beliefs

In entry 436 (Religion As Entertainment), I described, how the weirdness of behaviors based upon irrational beliefs can be very entertaining and that some religious events are spectacles worth visiting.   I mentioned Lourdes as an example.   

In a forum discussion I mentioned, how shared laughter at irrational behaviors is a way of feeling close with someone because of sharing the same attitudes, while the necessity to censor myself and refrain from laughing in the company of persons afflicted themselves with those weird beliefs is an indication of the separating mental ditch.  
Mentioning Lourdes as an example I was accused of laughing at cripples.   There is a fallacy in this accusation.   

The evaluation of a person's situation and the evaluation of a person's method of coping with a situation are independent.   Compassion with a person's unfortunate situation does not require automatic respect for weird coping,

• Every religious and other irrational belief and every behavior based upon such beliefs are so preposterous and ludicrous, that this justifies ridicule and making fun of it.   This is independent of who is afflicted with the irrationality and of the reasons to behave irrationally.   This ridicule is principally justified by the irrationality.  
• Justified ridicule is no justification for hurting the feelings of the misguided believers.  Ridiculing has to be restricted to be shared only by those in agreement.   It is important to be guided by the consideration to ascertain, that the unfortunate believers are kept ignorant and are not exposed to the ridicule.     
• The moral justification of ridicule depends directly upon how much choice there is.   It is not justified to ridicule someone for being sick, because this is not a choice.   But it is justified to ridicule someone (without his knowledge) for praying or taking homeopathy, because this is irrational and it is a choice.  
• When looking at the absurdity, there is not difference between someone praying to win the lottery and someone praying to be healed from an incurable condition.    The urgency of the suffering of the sick, which is not there for someone merely dreaming of being rich, explains the susceptibility and gullibility to behave irrationally, it does not diminish the absurdity.   
• Justifying hidden ridicule is the combined expression of two distinctive consequences of the same underlying strong rationality.  
  Irrationality is defined as the absence of full rationality, no matter the circumstances.      The rational moral principle of not harming people, of behaving according to the golden rule and a tit-for-tat strategy requires not to show the ridicule.  It requires instead to independently perceive and acknowledge the need for compassion and support.     

Having visited Lourdes, standing there hidden in a corner and sharing a discreet good laughter about the weird spectacle was restricted to ridiculing the irrational religious behaviors of making fools of themselves by going to Lourdes.  Ridiculing this choice does not imply any devaluation of the unfortunate and tragic situation of being crippled and sick.   They have my compassion and my sympathy.   


There is the Darwin award, ridiculing especially absurd and stupid ways of people causing their own accidental death.  I would never jump to the fallacious conclusion to mistake people as cold and immoral monsters for nothing more than having invented the Darwin award.   Laughing about weird ways of getting killed does not preclude their having compassion with dying and suffering persons and those grieving for them.  

564. Foolish Lies

564.  Foolish Lies

Trust in a close, bonded and committed relationship requires sincerity and honesty without exceptions.   But with strangers and unrelated people, there can be situations, in which lies are a necessity of self-protection.
 

Independent of any moral consideration of the possible harm done by lies, there are rational and irrational lies.   Rational are those with a high probability of getting away with.  Irrational and foolish lies are those, which are determined to be discovered.    In the latter case, being caught with the lies often does more damage than the truth would have done.

Lies in profiles on matchmaking sites are extremely foolish by any person using such a site for its real purpose.   During real life encounters, many of these lies will be discovered immediately.  

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/fashion/online-dating-as-scientific-research.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

"about 81 percent of people misrepresent their height, weight or age in their profiles,"

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/exagger_dating_7N5Irwi6wBf636XjbJjV3O

"Men are on average 2 inches shorter than they say in their profiles, while women are an inch shorter. About 50 percent of daters fib about their weight. Almost everyone exaggerates their income by 20 percent,

"*24.3% of men and 13.1% of women lie about their age
* Men are on average 2 inches shorter than they say in their online profiles, women are 1 inch shorter
* 59% of women lie about their weight, 55% of men lie about their weight
* People tend to inflate their salaries by 20%
* It rises with age: 20-year-old men and women inflate by 5%; jumps to around 35% for men and women at 50 years old."

The choice to either lie or to be correct about facts and to apply the cautious preference of understatements in the case of attributes with only fuzzy self-evaluation allows some conclusions about the person's motivation and goals.   

It is the choice between disappointing and surprising.  

The preference to risk disappointing is the attempt to manipulate someone to meet once.  
If the disappointing person is a man, he probably is convinced to be such an irresistible guy, that he can seduce the woman for a night, even though his lies have forfeited any trust in him.  
If the disappointing person is a woman, she probably just wants to take advantage of a man paying for an expensive dinner.   

The preference for hoping to be a pleasant surprise is the method to find someone for a long term relationship.    When correct information and understatements are already sufficient to be acceptable for a meeting, then a pleasant surprised adds to attraction and eligibility.      

556. An Anti-Woo-Woo Song

556.   An Anti-Woo-Woo Song

Woo-woo is cognitive poison ivy and I am allergic to people believing in it (entry 555).  That does not prevent me from appreciating any form of debunking, rejecting and ridiculing it. 

I really enjoyed this song:    

The Tower of Woo by Bob Carroll

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iokk35v0KRk&feature=player_embedded

The words can be read here:  
http://www.skepdic.com/woowoo.html

555. Cognitive Poison Ivy

555.  Cognitive Poison Ivy

Too many repetitions of stimulation can lead to desensitization, but there is also the possible opposite reaction of sensitization and allergization.   
Physiologically, impaired hearing due to too much noise too often is an example of desensitization.   Touching poison ivy is known as initiating an allergic reaction, which gets worse with every repeated contact.   

Exposure to immaterial stimuli can also cause both kinds of a reaction.   Just as people get desensitized be their repeated inflicting harm, people can also get allergic due to being exposed too often to annoying, disgusting, discouraging, disturbing, hurting or in any other way unpleasant cognitive input.    I will call such allergenic input cognitive poison ivy.    

There is an expression about pushing someone's button.   Cognitive poison ivy is something different.   A button in the expression is an individual's peculiarity.  What is a button to one person has not effect upon another.   Poison ivy is toxic, becoming allergic is not a peculiar weakness.    Commodification harms every woman, if it is forced upon her too often and too drastically.   

The availability of cheap mass media has lead to the possibility of exposing oneself to extensive and intensive cognitive stimulation, which can have the side effects of either desensitization or allergization.
   

I have internet access at home since 1998.  This was a turning point in my access to authentic informations about very varied people.  Without the internet, information was either second hand through the filter of those writing, producing and publishing books, newspapers, magazines, radio, movies, tv.  Else it was limited to the experiences of the preselected kind of people, whom I chose to mix and socialize with.     

On the internet I started to avidly read forums of all kinds, where I found people's authentic and unfiltered expression of their opinions, attitudes and accounts of their subjective perception of their own life experiences.   
My wish to end my loneliness and to find a mindmate requires to be active by reading men's profile and taking the initiative to contact those appearing suitable.   
Doing this is for me like searching for one nice flower on a meadow overgrown with poison ivy, which I cannot avoid to expose myself to.    To find happiness, I have to invest a lot of annoyance of walking through the gutter, of developing a growing allergic reaction to too much filth.  

As a result of my exposure to the internet I got aware of the real seriousness and magnitude of two nuisances and annoyances, which I had previously thought to be able to keep away from.    The commodification of women and gullibility to irrational beliefs are so ubiquitous on the web, that they became cognitive poison ivy for me.

Before the internet, I mistook both nuisances as merely vague and drastic dysfunctions of a limited and clearly recognizable number of people.  

• I thought that those predators, who insulted me with their wish to abuse my body were a bad minority from the gutter, while there were also enough decent, monogamous and committing men.  
• I thought that all people, who called themselves atheists, really were rational.
• I overestimated the prevalence of decency and the prevalence of rationality.  

Since then, by reading information, by a lot of thinking and drawing my own independent conclusions, I have learned a lot more about commodification and irrationality:

• They are quite ubiquitous and exceptions are rare.  
  
• Both have as a general basis the disposition towards distorted thinking, which can lead to become manifest in many different variations.   Not only the manifestations are the nuisance, but also the disposition.
  
  • The disposition for commodification is the asymmetrical attitude towards women, which causes many different harming behaviors.
  • Gullibility is the predisposition, which is manifest in very different irrational beliefs leading to different harming behaviors.   

•  While the harming behaviors are drastic, the dispositions can be recognized by subtle, indirect indicators, which are superficially not easily noticeably and tend to be overlooked and underestimated.  
  I got more aware and attentive to recognize the real significance of such indicators as red flags.   
  
• Some of the damage done directly and indirectly to victims is beyond what I had imagined as possible.

• People's self-labeling and self-attributions are often not correct.  When these persons appear sincere, this can be misleading.    It sometimes takes a while to find out, that they are not aware of the real meaning of what they appear to say.
  
  • Self-labeled atheists believing in reincarnation, astrology or chi are not less irrational than christians.  
  • A man's declared intention to commit does not imply symmetry, even marriage can be mistaken by some men for a variety of commodification.
    
• Those causing the nuisance are unable to comprehend, what they are doing, even when they are told or notice any disruption, they blame it on the victims of commodification and of irrational behaviors. 
   
• The worst nuisance are those men, who combine commodification and irrationality. While a rational men has theoretically the potential to reconsider and change his asymmetrical attitude towards women, irrationality protects the commodification.   
  
  

With growing awareness for the indicators of both nuisances, I started to consciously encounter them more often and I became more alert as to their significance.   While ignorance had spared me previously thereof, I experienced annoyance more frequently.  I was waking up to the real extent of two major dysfunctions of the cognition.
   
I am using the words annoyance and nuisance.  It is difficult to describe emotions.  Every instance of reading about women being degraded or about some irrational belief triggered in me this feeling of sighing a 'not again' and of cringing from this unpleasant aspect of life.    The more often this happened, the stronger I experienced the unpleasantness.   By now it has become an allergic reaction of disgust, tedium and nausea.    Commodification and irrationality have become cognitive poison ivy for me. 


I want to find a mindmate for a relationship, which is a safe haven, from where commodification and irrationality are both banned.  Filth and stupidity are kept outside the surrounding walls.   I wish to be never again exposed to cognitive poison ivy.  

But where is my mindmate?

552. Harm And The Evolution Of The Gullibility For Religion

552.   Harm And The Evolution Of The Gullibility For Religion


In entry 547 I compared two videos revealing the atrocities suffered by the children in Kinsey's research.    While one was as seemingly unbiased documentary, the other was biased by the christian religion.  

This brought me back to the old question, why a level of intelligence in the human brain inventing advanced technology did co-evolve with a level of irrationality causing delusions like the one of the existence of deities and all subsequent nonsense.   

Gullibility to delusional beliefs did evolve for a reason.   Falling for such beliefs was in some way beneficial in the adaptation to coping with the challenges of the survival of the species, no matter how unfortunate it is for the oblivious individuals.

To declare not harming and not be harmed as the essence of a good life is a part of the wisdom of Epicurus.    Harm is the key explanation of the evolved susceptibility to religious beliefs, because the success of the survival of any species is enhanced and enabled by harm to individuals.  

Generally speaking, instincts lead often to behaviors, which as a side effect cause harm to the self and to other individuals of the same species. 

Procreation:   In mammals, pregnancy is a hazard, burden and source of pain for the female.

Ingroup-outgroup:   Herds and groups of animals hunt and eat members of their own species not belonging to the own group.   They kill outgroup members in defense of their territory.   They rob and steal outgroup members' prey from hunting and cause their starvation.  All this is done by instinct to enhance the resources for the own offspring.

Hierarchy and competition:   Male animals fight to become alpha males and to gain control over as many females as there are.  These fights sometimes lead to serious wounds, mutilations and deaths.   Sometimes new alpha male not only usurp control over all the females, but also over their fertility by infanticide.  

Spider cannibalism is an example.  

"...a female spider kills and eats a male of the same species before, during, or after copulation."
"his indirectly contributing nutrition to the eggs. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_cannibalism.

Male spiders have observed other males being eaten are nevertheless unaware, that by following their instinctive urges to get near the female spider, they will also be eaten.   Had the male spiders a conscious choice to run away and keep at a safe distance from all female spiders, they would prevent being harmed as individuals, but their species of spiders would get extinct.  
The female spider also has no cognitive option to refrain from eating the male as a choice to spare him harm.   Would she do this, this may lead to less surviving offspring due to malnutrition.  

Animals are determined to follow their instinctive urges, because they have no cognition sufficiently evolved to allow them to anticipate future events, nor to attribute effects correctly to their own behavior, even in the case of empathy.  They lack the consciousness of having a choice.   Animals suffer harm at the moment, when it happens, there is no cognitive anticipation.    Following their instincts but lacking cognition, animals cannot be held responsible for harming.   


In humans, the instinctive behaviors leading to the successful survival of the species are the same as in animals, but the human cognition adds unique aspects to the subjective experience of the collateral suffering of the harm.  There is an unfortunate correlation between reproductive success and its price of harm suffered by individuals.  

1.  Mirror neurons, empathy, remembering own experiences and understanding causality enable humans to anticipate the harm inflicted by their intended behavior before acting.  Humans have a conscious choice between harming and not harming.
2.  Human cognition includes abstract emotions and intellectual needs, which can be invisibly and non-physically harmed.    Humans do not suffer only momentarily, but for a long time and sometimes in advance. 

3.  The victim and the perpetrator both know, that harm is a decision and a choice of someone being responsible. 

Examples of the harm to humans due to the major instincts

Procreation:  Jerks harm women emotionally by commodifying and objectifying them due to their need for sexual homeostation.
Men harm women physically by inflicting pregnancy upon them.

Ingroup-outgroup:   Victims are seriously harmed by varieties of exploitation like war, slavery, colonization used as methods to acquire resources for successful procreation:

Hierarchy and competition:   In every competition, where there is a winner, the loser at least suffers emotionally.   But in more drastic fights for higher places in hierarchies, the harm can be much worse, serious material damage, physical mutilations or even death.  

The evolution of the cognition and the evolution of being determined as animals to pursue instinctively the advantages for the survival of the fittest seem to be mutually exclusive.

To live without or with reduced harming is possible, when people remain childfree and cooperate in peace and harmony.   But with such people, the human species would get extinct.

    
Being determined by instincts became a cognitive problem as a by product of the evolution of the human cognition.  As the result of the developing understanding of causality and the awareness of the self as an actor, at some point of their evolution humans started to comprehend the responsibility of how specific behaviors cause harm to others and of having the option to either inflict the harm or to refrain from doing so.    The brain's mirror neurons and ability to experience some empathy added the knowledge of the other's experiencing harm.
 

From that time on, harming seized to be an animal's automatic behavior, instead it required moral justification, that rationally does not exist.    

The evolution of the gullibility to irrational beliefs including the imagination of one or more deities with ascribed responsibility solved the problem.    The delusion of the deities justifying harming and the existence of harm has solved the evolutionary contradiction.

  

Religions are very outspoken to point out the benefits for the recipients of harm.   The side effect of the delusion of being rewarded after death does indeed
- make some people more resilient to suffering.
- motivate people to choose to suffer by making specific sacrifices to earn the reward.

But religions seldom admit the other side of the coin.   Religions also create, enable and enhance the suffering, which requires the resilience to cope with.      

The Milgram experiment has shown, that people are prone to harm others and accept it as justified to do so, whenever someone of authority takes the responsibility.   Generalizing this supplies an explanation of the attraction of religion.  
 
The authority of the real life researcher in Milgram's experiment can be replaced by the authority, power or superiority of a delusional and imaginary figure of a deity.  
The specific proactive act of harming by the application of electrical shocks when being told can be replaced by the permission to do every act of harm, unless it is explicitly forbidden as a sin.   In this case the authority's ascribed responsibility is not limited to one act, but to all behaviors unless they are explicitly excluded.    Everything appears as allowed, which the deity has not explicitly forbidden and everything allowed is done under the deity's responsibility.   
Taking own responsibility is based upon the subjective conscious and sufficient justification for the choice of a behavior.   Acting under someone else responsibility implies to be void of an own justification but considering someone else having a hidden and elusive justification.    When the justification is ascribed to a deity, who does not even exist, then anything can be believed, ascribed or defined as justified.  

All religions, that I know of, allow harm caused by instincts to a certain degree.   The specific definitions of sins have indirectly also favored the evolution of the fittest religions.   These are those religions, in which the definition of sin is an optimized balance between enhancing reproduction by disregarding the individual suffering and limiting all harm bad enough to damage the reproductive success.

But the deity as an imaginary figure of authority is not only considered as the one justifying all harming, which is not defined as a sin.   This figure is also a bargaining partner for prospective and retrospective deals to earn permission to sin.   In such deals, the harmed person is insignificant.   

Sin is bought in advance or compensated for afterwards by sacrifices.   The definition of sacrifices is also ascribed to the deity.   This is most successful in those religions, where sinning and paying is more attractive than not sinning.  

In this sense, here is my definition of religion:

  

Religion is the purposeful invention of an imaginary authority, who is believed to be able to justify harming other people, whenever the own hidden reasons for harming are instinctive and therefore cannot be rationally justified.    

The deity's permission serves as a sufficient justification to harm, either due to the deity having alleged unknown rational reason or by having earned it as part of a deal.    Religion frees the harming person from any consideration for the victim.        

550. The Irrationality Of Diatribes In Personal Interactions

550.   The Irrationality Of Diatribes In Personal Interactions

Whenever I am the recipient of a diatribe or angry rant, I am puzzled about why people bother to approach me in this way, even though this is not a method to gain anything.   The last good example is a comment to entry 549.   

http://dictionary.reference.com

Diatribe
noun:  a bitter, sharply abusive denunciation, attack, or criticism:
Rant
noun:  ranting, extravagant, or violent declamation.
noun:  a ranting utterance.

The following is not about the benefits of people sharing the same grievances against any third party while being in harmony with each other, nor is it about someone finding relief by telling grievances to a sympathetic friend.   Many important social and political movements have been initiated by a few justified diatribes. 

It is about the irrationality of sending me diatribes by email or blog comments.    Such diatribes are as irrational as is the man's behavior in Watzlawick's story:

A man wants to hang a painting. He has the nail, but not the hammer. Therefore it occurs to him to go over to the neighbor and ask him to lend him his hammer. But at this point, doubt sets in. What if he doesn’t want to lend me the hammer? Yesterday he barely spoke to me. Maybe he was in a hurry. Or, perhaps, he holds something against me. But why? I didn’t do anything to him. If he would ask me to lend him something, I would, at once. How can he refuse to lend me his hammer? People like him make other people’s life miserable. Worst, he thinks that I need him because he has a hammer. This is got to stop ! And suddenly the guy runs to the neighbor’s door, rings, and before letting him say anything, he screams: “You can keep your hammer, you bastard.” (Paul Watzlawick, “The Situation Is Hopeless But Not Serious: The Pursuit of Unhappiness”)

There are many reasons, why any man and I are not suitable to have any beneficial contact.   The rational reaction of such a man is to zap without wasting any further thoughts on me, when while reading this blog or my profile on a matchmaking site he notices such reasons.
In the case of doubt, a friendly question invites a friendly clarification.    Any provocation on my part is not intended and it is no invitation to hostile arguments.    There is no rational reason to express anger by attacking me with diatribes.  

The irrationality of sending diatribes indicates, that the sender has some problems, concerning both the cause of his anger and his hostility when coping with it:

1.  Entitlement and grandiosity delusion. 
A man feels entitled to get anything and this is justified for him by nothing more than his wish to have it and/or he believes himself to be god's gift to women, who cannot have a valid reason to reject him.    Therefore he considers the choice of a partner only justified by his own selection or rejection. Being rejected is not acceptable to him.   Even anticipated rejection due to my clearly expressed criteria is for such a man a reason to be angry.   A woman's disagreement with his grandiosity is also a reason to be angry. 
2.  Displaced anger.   Something in my text triggers anger, which is caused by his own experiences and has nothing to do with my person.   This something can be either a provocation by any real attribute of mine or it can be something misunderstood and misinterpreted.   

3.  Paradoxical coping with the anger.   The devaluation of what is not available as in the fable of the fox and the sour grapes are a valid coping strategy as part of realistic resignation.    Attacking someone with the declarations of devaluation by email is absurd.    

When people write emails, they enhance the probability of getting a reply by showing as much appreciation for the recipient as they can do sincerely.   In the case of intended manipulation, appreciation is insincerely exaggerated.   

An email of devaluations is supplying the recipient with reasons not to reply and not to communicate.   Therefore there is no reason to ever bother to write devaluing emails, while not writing has the same effect without wasting time.  


The diatribe comment on entry 549 gives examples.   His (assuming the commenter to be a man) attacks me for being German.   This indicates displaced anger about Germany or German culture or maybe some German individual.   Now he attacks me for being German in spite of my explicit declaration of not identifying with being German.

I cannot know his level of formal education.   But his attack on my valuing a university degree makes it obvious, that he has none but does not accept this as a reason to be not suitable for me.  

He calls me 'dogmatic, unscientific, irrational, dictating, intolerant, sexist, emotional, arrogant'.   These being obviously all unacceptable attributes in his opinion, I can fully agree with him that any woman, whom he subjectively perceives as having such attributes, is not suitable for him, no matter who and how she really is.   I have no problem with being perceived as not suitable by an unknown commenter.   But his bothering to write a comment, which forfeits any communication, is weird.  


Expressing and sending a diatribe is a distorted method of counterproductive communication.    Constructive communication motivates the recipient to reciprocate an interaction perceived as beneficial.   Diatribes create antipathy for the hostile sender, who presents himself as someone to be avoided, not as someone to interact with.    Everybody writing and sending diatribes just wastes his own time and gains nothing.  

1.  One possible interpretation of diatribes is to see them as related to real life bullying.    

Based upon his physical strength, a man can sometimes succeed to get his will by intimidation.  A woman cringing under outbursts of anger does not dare to resist.   The woman suffers and is driven away by this bullying.    

Men with long term thinking and wisdom learn, that bullying gets them nowhere and nothing.   But when they are only learning short term direct effects, they are mislead to learn, that expressing anger is a successful method to get their will.    Bullies misinterpret the success of their outburst of anger as if this were a method of influencing the victim's thinking.   They mistake enforced apparent acquiescence with agreement and they believe in their power to obtain agreement by expressing anger.         

As a result of this distorted learning these men are oblivious of the limited reach of the weapon of anger.   Anger and aggression only work in direct contact, when the intimidation triggers spontaneous fear, elicited not in accordance with the probability of a physical attack but by the mere possibility.    

Therefore expressing anger at the target by email is the futile attempt of distance bullying.    Due to not eliciting fear, this does not work.   Diatribes are the consequence of a man's overestimation of the power of his anger without physical intimidation.   

2.  Diatribes are an indication of an asymmetrical attitude to women and of the intention and purpose of a relationship for getting advantages by commodification.   A man pursuing a symmetrical relationship appreciates the information of any woman's needs and preferences for his own evaluation of possible symmetry.   Finding out that he cannot give her, what she needs, is not a reason to get angry and even less to send a diatribe.   For him it is a reason to accept incompatibility.