589. The Difference Between Philosophy And Religion

589.  The Difference Between Philosophy And Religion

I am calling myself atheistic as a part of being apistic.  But there are many people, who call themselves atheists in spite of being religious.  They do not consider this as a contradiction, as long as their preferred religion does not include personalized deities. Buddhism is an example, which is wrongly defined as a philosophy by those alleged atheists.    

There is a fallacy, when the decisive distinctions between philosophies and religions are underestimated or ignored.  

1.  Philosophies are thoughts.   These thoughts can exist only in one person's head, they can be taught, shared and talked about, they can be preserved on media and read or listened to.   

The philosophies are immaterial, they have no impact upon the material world.     Whenever people's actions are influenced by a philosophy, this is an independent consequence, not a part of it.    The behavior following a philosophy can be determined by it, but the philosophy can exist without causing any behavior.   
As an example, Epicureanism is a philosophy.   Living in the garden of Epicurus was some people's individual choice.  But one can be an Epicurean without living in the garden.

Discussing, teaching or learning about a specific philosophy is independent of agreeing with it.   


2.  Religions are more than just irrational and delusional beliefs and claims in people's heads.  Material and physical expressions are an intrinsic constituent of all religions. Participation is the expression of conscious genuine or faked agreement with the beliefs.

I mentioned before, how the behavior of christians in Lourdes is a weird spectacle. when seen from my mental distance.   But Lourdes is only an example, which can be generalized, based upon what I have either observed in real live or watched as documentaries of what is offered as spectacles by christianity, islam, judaism, hinduism, sikhism, buddhism and a few other creeds.   

Each of these religions is defined by the display of certain behaviors, both ritualistic as scripts learned by rote and more flexible reactions to situations, which all appear more or less weird, hilarious, ludicrous and senseless to any person not sharing the belief.   

Each of these religions is materialized by buildings and objects, which are useless without the belief, not serving any non-religious purpose, except those of amusing and entertaining tourists.

• Buildings for public religious behaviors like temples, churches, sanctuaries
• Furniture like altars, shrines, confessionals
• Objects like wands, statues, vessels
• Alleged special immaterial values of redefined simple objects like bones, pieces of textile, splinters of wood 
• Conformity like prescribed attires and body modifications
• Noises not qualifying as enjoyable music, like chanting, screaming, bells, drums, gongs
• Non-communicative body movements like prostrating, bowing, gestures and gesticulations 
• Chemical hazing of the brain like by incense, scents or drugs
• Abandoning and wasting goods like food on altars, candles or material sacrifices for the embellishment of the religion's material environment

All of these observable expressions of religion are driven by the motivation to obtain benefits.  They have also a perpetuating effect upon the mind.

When a christian prays for the fulfillment of a wish, this is implicitly the expectation of starting a sequence of two steps of causation.   The deity is a black box containing a kind of a relay, which, when activated, has the alleged power to fulfill the need.   The praying person believes, that the prayer presses a button on the black box, which in turn then activates the relay and causes the wish to be granted, even though the fulfillment of the wish is not considered to be in the realm of own direct action.

This pattern is not restricted to black boxes imagined as deities.    All religious behaviors are the attempt to activate some fuzzy black box, which as a consequence would then cause something beneficial for the believers.   This is a general part of all religious beliefs, that irrational behavior, which makes no sense to apistics, is expected to be sufficiently effective to obtain benefits.

An example:  When a buddhist chants, which means him to be positioned in front of a shrine, swaying some parts of his body and producing weird, funny and to the bystanders annoying noises, this is essentially the same pattern as the christian praying.   The buddhist's black box is not a personalized deity, but he too does something, which has no direct benefits whatsoever, but is based upon the mere belief of causing indirect benefits.  

Religious behaviors, especially rituals following a routine learned by rote, have a strong effect upon the brain, which is enhanced by the presence of olfactory, auditive and visual stimuli.    Thus the cognition gets temporarily blurred, blunted, dulled and hazed.   The sense for the own individuality is diminished, rationality reduced and the reason disabled.   
This enhances gullibility freeing it from rational control.   The hierarchy instinct to submit and be humble and the gregarious instinct to feel as a particle of some vague entity are also relieved from cognitive control.   This temporary heightened gullibility reinforces the religious beliefs and gets the person even more entangled.  


Along with mistaking religions like buddhism for a philosophy, people also confound it as a method of self-improvement.   This is a fallacy.  Self-improvement requires insights and introspection, which are best gained in a state of the most undisturbed and undistorted faculty for reasoning.    Self-improvement cannot be any better than the ability to be rational and the knowledge of scientific psychology and neuroscience.   
Dimmed cognition as a result of religious behavior is certainly counterproductive to self-improvement.  

450. Self-Labeling And Self-Deception

Self-Labeling And Self-Deception

Correct self-labeling is important for people, who are selective in the choice of with whom to interact.   Self-labeling helps to make a fast preselection for the decision, with whom to spend time, what to share, whom to trust, what to expect, whom to avoid.   

Therefore self-labeling has to be specific enough to draw a line between like minded people and mental aliens, but it has not to be too specific.   A label, that is too specific to be generally known does not serve the purpose.  A suitable label is a kind of an umbrella to include people with a fuzzy understanding of the label.  

Also the meaning of the label has to be roughly agreed upon by those using it for self-labeling, it is much less important, how much it is sometimes used incorrectly by others.   Someone using a certain self-label upon himself needs to be able to recognize with a low probability of error any other person as like minded due to using the same self-label.   But It is rarely possible to recognize someone as like minded, if the label is merely attached by others.     

Atheism is such a label.   Mistaken christians interpret is as the belief in the non-existence of their god.   Those using it upon themselves are usually better informed even though it is also a fuzzy label.   Not believing in the existence of a god does not automatically imply the absence of other weird beliefs.    

The absence of all beliefs is called apistia.   But would I call myself only apistic, some people would not understand this not widely used word.    But it is at least probably that a self-defined atheist really is one.  When the adherents of one religious creed use this label for anybody, who is not, they only define the absence of their specific belief, but not of any.

The correct use of a label is based upon the full understanding of the core of its definition.  Many ex-christians have partially adopted other religions as a substitute.  A good example are those, who call themselves both atheists and buddhists, based upon the claim, that buddhism were not a religion.   

The core of buddhism is the belief in reincarnation. That implies the unscientific religious belief in an immortal soul.   The buddhistic religious practice aims at influencing the sequence of the reincarnations.   This practice has some side effects, that are also beneficial before death and therefore without the belief in an immortal soul.   Meditation is an example of a method with such side effects.  

Buddhism stripped of the non-scientific beliefs is a conglomeration of exercises, some physically beneficial, some psychologically beneficial, some merely ludicrous.   But without the belief in the rebirthing of a soul it is not buddhism by its core definition. 

Somebody calling himself a buddhist without believing in the reincarnation of his soul, is using a label, of which he has not really understood the meaning or is in denial of it.   In this case, using the self-label buddhism is misleading.   The majority of buddhists in the Asian countries with traditional buddhism do believe in reincarnation without one moment of hesitation.   This justifies to assume that anybody using buddhism as a self-label is a religious person with an irrational belief, who does not really fit under the umbrella of atheism.  

People simultaneously defining themselves as atheists and as buddhists show a similar psychological mechanism as I already described in entry 441 about the unitarian universalists.   

They succeed in feeling good about themselves as having overcome the stupidity of the belief in a god.   But they also succeed to continue to feel good due to the security and protection of a religion promising them benefits when following in submission to rituals and exercises prescribed by others.    If they would make the mental step to mentally separate beneficial exercises from the label buddhism, they would lose the subjective feeling of security.    

345. Gullibility and the Choice of a Belief

Gullibility and the Choice of a Belief

As already mentioned in entry 344, belief serves to convert something worthless into a pseudo-remedy for troubles, and it often replaces or impedes any real improvement, sometimes the trouble even gets worse.

A gullible's belief is another person's claim taken as true without doubt.    In this context, it makes no difference, if the belief is in the existence of an entity or in a contingency.   It also makes not difference, if it contradicts science, has never been scientifically evaluated or just cannot be proven or disproved.  

Gullible people choose their preferred belief depending on the kind of trouble and their personality.   The following are a few combinations of a belief chosen to fit a need.  

1.  Begging or buying help from imaginary beings

The gullibles in this group feel helpless to solve their problem.  They choose a powerful deity, whom they believe to be able to be the life stuntman or proxy to solve their problems for them.  They believe, that while the deity is able to supply the fulfillment of all needs, he only does this after being explicitly motivated to do so.  

• Those who believe, that an appeal is sufficient to bring the trouble to the attention of a deity,  just waste their time in prayers.  

• Others believe, that it is not enough to simply bring the trouble to the attention of a powerful deity.   They hope to get better results by bribing the deity.   This can be as simple as buying candles or paying money to some full time intermediate pastor to pray on their behalf.     

• Another approach to more fierce and unfriendly deities is earning favors by undergoing hardships of any kind.   Fasting or even sacrificing a close relative are examples.    Gullibles of this kind jump deliberately from the frying pan into the fire.   To get relief from one pain, they deliberately inflict another pain upon themselves, in the end they have added more pain to the previous.

The same methods as above for existing trouble can also be used for prevention and sometimes the effects are paradoxical.  Someone feeling protected by a deity is prone to recklessness and risky behavior.    Soldiers sometimes are encouraged by the religious benediction of weapons.

2.  Buying help from crooks and delusionals

The more pragmatic gullibles buy quackeries from real people.   They want an easy way out.  They hand over the money and then it is the quack's job to remove their emotional or physical ailments or prevent them.  
The skeptic's dictionary ( http://www.skepdic.com ) and quackwatch ( http://www.quackwatch.com ) have long lists of such quackeries.    Homeopathy, aromatherapy, Bach's flowers, magnet therapy, therapeutic touch, faith healing, feng shui are just a few examples.   There is a quackery for every imaginable discomfort.

There are three kinds of quacks.  

• The crooks, who know, that what they sell is fake and a fraud.
• The over altruistic gullibles, who believe to help others by selling the quackery, in which they believe themselves.    
• The delusionals, who are not only gullible to claims from others but create the claims by believing in their own ability to heal or help.        

3.  Buying information from crooks and gurus

The curious gullibles and those, for whom uncertainty and ignorance are difficult to bear buy bogus informations from crooks and gurus.  Bogus information can relief anxieties.  Here again, there are the crooks aware of frauding, the over altruistic gurus, who believe so much in their methods, that they want to share the source of their bogus information, and the delusional gurus, who believe to have gained special competency in a specific method.  
Again, there is a long list.  Graphology, astrology, numerology, biorhythm are examples of bogus psycho diagnostics for the wish to gain better knowledge about oneself and others, while clairvoyance, dowsing, ESP are a bogus access to unobtainable information.  

4.  Justification instead of changing

Some gullible people choose a belief system, when they feel bad, insufficient, a failure, in cognitive dissonance.   Something in themselves is in discord with their previous belief or that of their social environment.   Instead of changing themselves, they choose a new belief, which justifies their weakness, selfishness, irresponsibility and other behavior, that they experience as unwanted.  If it does not really justify their behavior and attitudes, it does at least so in their interpretation and perception.  The newly chosen belief makes them feel better about themselves. 

• A male cheater can convert to islam, where cheating does not exist, because the coran allows him not only 4 wives, but an unspecified number of concubines.   
• In entry 56 I already outlined, how zen-buddhism focuses on the present and can serve as an excuse to refuse responsibility for past transgressions.  
• Someone having damaged another chooses a religion, in which it is the deity's job to forgive sins by application.   When believing to have acquired the forgiveness of the deity, then he never makes amends to the victim of his transgression.

4.  Buying power by direct or indirect methods

The gullibles, whose main trouble is their lack of social success, buy methods from crooks and gurus to enable them to gain power over people.   

• Voodoo and witchcraft are paid for as the delegation of the use of their power on one's behalf. 
• Others want to gain power themselves.   NLP is an example.  In entry 177, I described, how jerks are attracted to NLP, because they believe to gain seductive power over women by applying NLP.

5.  Acquiring power by climbing up in a hierarchy

Cults are an especially interesting phenomenon, because of the hierarchy principle.    Gullibles enter at a low position of the hierarchy having two believes:  

• One or several masters or gurus at the top have some attractive special powers, knowledge or skills.
• By investing enough money and effort, they can become like the masters and acquire the same powers.  

Another example is the Chinese cult around the chi belief.  It includes martial art, which is some weird mixture of gymnastics and fighting techniques, not based on physical strength but on mental overpowering.   This has some interesting effects. 

• Those at the bottom of the hierarchy overestimate the power and ability of those above, because the more attractive the goal of becoming like them, the more they feel justified in their attempts to climb the hierarchy even at a high cost.  
• They react to the overestimated and alleged powers as if they were real.
• The masters get the wrong feedback and overestimate their own power.  

There is an interesting video on 

http://www.skepdic.com/chi.html

It shows, how the combined belief of a disciple and a master result in a weird double delusion, called the "no punch knockout".   It looks impressive, how one guy falls backwards, stiff like a board, doomed to hurting himself if not caught by others standing behind him.   He falls, just because another puts his hand close to his face.  
Then the video shows, how the master fails completely, as soon as he tries the same procedure with a skeptic, who stays unmovably rooted to the spot in spite of the master's efforts.  

The first presentation was enabled by a disciple believing in it to fall, and a master believing in it, else he would not have dared to do this in front of a camera.     
I wonder, how many of those martial arts masters have been beaten up by criminals, while they felt invincible.

56. Zen-Buddhism, Instinctivity and Rationality

Zen-Buddhism, Instinctivity and Rationality 

I just watched a documentation on Zen-Buddhism and meditation.   

In a simplified manner, I discovered three basic claims:
- Thinking is no good.
- It it better to go with the flow than to resist.  
- The past and the future are not important, only the present moment.  

Drastically translated, this means to give up important specific human faculties and to reduce oneself to the existence of an animal.    It means to submit to instinctivity and avoid rationality.  

I am not insinuating, that adapting Zen-Buddhism would automatically cause mature people to become a hazard to others.    But it is the perfect justification for immature and selfish persons like narcissists, psychopaths and sociopaths for their monstrous behavior towards others.
   
Implicitly it is the conscious expression of the attitude determined by the animal identity of the bearer of the genes without the more human identity as an individual.    The eternal chain of the survival of the genes is translated into the conscious admiration of the flow of nature.  

Any person, whose rationality and instinctivity are about equal, needs to rationally control urges, that at one moment can cause impulsive actions with long term detrimental effect, either on the self or on others.   
Such a person needs to reflect, needs to learn from their past behavior for the future, needs to learn and practice a lot of self-control, and needs to take responsibility for his actions in the past.   

The principles of Zen-Buddhism encourages him instead to allow the instincts to guide his behavior without feeling a conscience.

Some examples: 
Without Zen-Buddhism, such a person would control the eating instinct to avoid unhealthy obesity.   Zen-Buddhism would allow him to eat and get fat.
Without Zen-Buddhism, such a person would know from observation and thinking, that having children would be detrimental to their long term happiness, and he would not breed.   Zen-Buddhism would allow him breed without thinking.  
Without Zen-Buddhism, such a person, who has hurt another in the past, would make amends and earn forgiveness by learning not to do the same again in the future.   With Zen-Buddhism, the transgressor would demand the hurt person to feel, as if the transgression has never happened.   
Without Zen-Buddhism, such a person would honor obligations, once he has accepted them in the past as valid in the future.    Zen-Buddhism allows him to act on the impulse of the moment as if obligations from the past do not exist.  

Interestingly enough, the statues of Buddha show him usually as quite fat.   Also it is known that he deserted his wife and children.   

Teaching Zen-Buddhism to a narcissist, psychopath or sociopath is like giving a knife to someone, who wishes to kill.