You can’t trust anyone who claims to be “non-religious”.
I tried to explain this to a bunch of people claiming to be non-religious.
Secularism is a teeny-weensy bit better than Atheism.
Secularism is “…a system of political or social philosophy that rejects all forms of religious faith and worship.”
In other words, it’s a religion that rejects religion.
This is why you can’t trust secularists.
They’ll tell you they don’t believe in God while dogmatically worshiping themselves.
This article from The Atlantic lays out the horrors of Secularism pretty clearly:
ATL: Imagine you’re the president of a European country. You’re slated to take in 50,000 refugees from the Middle East this year. Most of them are very religious, while most of your population is very secular. You want to integrate the newcomers seamlessly, minimizing the risk of economic malaise or violence, but you have limited resources.
First paragraph, Secularism is assumed to be different from “religion”.
How do you integrate two entirely different cultures without economic malaise or violence? …you can’t. But we’ve got column space to fill-up so let’s keep writing!
ATL: You can, however, experiment…with virtual people. And that’s exactly what the Modeling Religion Project does. An international team of computer scientists, philosophers, religion scholars, and others are collaborating to build computer models that they populate with thousands of virtual people, or “agents.” As the agents interact with each other and with shifting conditions in their artificial environment, their attributes and beliefs—levels of economic security, of education, of religiosity, and so on—can change.
Basically, it’s The Sims with crappier graphics.
How much confidence should I have in a religious simulation built by people who consider themselves outside of religion?
World History offers a lot of data on what happens to secular societies when they try to eliminate religion.
ATL: The goal of the project is to give politicians an empirical tool that will help them assess competing policy options so they can choose the most effective one. It’s a noble idea: If leaders can use artificial intelligence to predict which policy will produce the best outcome, maybe we’ll end up with a healthier and happier world. But it’s also a dangerous idea: What’s “best” is in the eye of the beholder, after all.
Gobbledy-Gook.
“Politicians can assess which policies to enact to produce the best outcome, though there’s no way to determine what’s best. But who knows? Maybe the world will get better!”
ATL: The one that focuses most on refugees, Modeling Religion in Norway (MODRN), is still in its early phases. Led by Shults, it’s funded primarily by the Research Council of Norway, which is counting on the model to offer useful advice on how the Norwegian government can best integrate refugees. …By using them to calibrate his model, Shults can get more accurate and fine-grained predictions, simulating what will happen in a specific city and even a specific neighborhood.
I can tell Shults what’s going to happen without a million dollar computer model.
The Syrian refugees are going to screw-up the Norwegian culture because they don’t share the same religious values. The Syrians aren’t interested in becoming Norwegians. The Norwegians don’t want to be Syrians. The politicians are powerless to fix this.
ATL: Another project, Forecasting Religiosity and Existential Security with an Agent-Based Model, examines questions about nonbelief: Why aren’t there more atheists? Why is America secularizing at a slower rate than Western Europe?
I can tell them why there aren’t more atheists without a million dollar computer model.
Atheism is stupid. Thinking people realize that claiming “no religious beliefs” is hypocritical.
ATL: … the team found that people tend to secularize when four factors are present: existential security (you have enough money and food), personal freedom (you’re free to choose whether to believe or not), pluralism (you have a welcoming attitude to diversity), and education (you’ve got some training in the sciences and humanities). If even one of these factors is absent, the whole secularization process slows down. This, they believe, is why the U.S. is secularizing at a slower rate than Western and Northern Europe.
Security, freedom, pluralism and education lead to secularization…so…how in the world is the United States secularizing SLOWER than Western and Northern Europe??!!!
Pray tell, oh wise maker of Sim People!
ATL: “The U.S. has found ways to limit the effects of education by keeping it local, and in private schools, anything can happen,” said Shults’s collaborator, Wesley Wildman, a professor of philosophy and ethics at Boston University. “Lately, there’s been encouragement from the highest levels of government to take a less than welcoming cultural attitude to pluralism. These are forms of resistance to secularization.”
ATL:When you build a model, you can accidentally produce recommendations that you weren’t intending. Years ago, Wildman built a model to figure out what makes some extremist groups survive and thrive while others disintegrate. It turned out one of the most important factors is a highly charismatic leader who personally practices what he preaches. “This immediately implied an assassination criterion,” he said. “It’s basically, leave the groups alone when the leaders are less consistent, [but] kill the leaders of groups that have those specific qualities. It was a shock to discover this dropping out of the model. I feel deeply uncomfortable that one of my models accidentally produced a criterion for killing religious leaders.”
Here you go!
The model suggested that religious leaders should be killed to achieve a particular social outcome. This made the guy ‘deeply uncomfortable’. WHY??!!
If it achieves the goal to have a few religious people whacked, that’s just the cost of doing business. It’s for the greater good, isn’t it?
If you’re going to chicken out and follow your conscience, what’s the use in building this computer model?
ATL: Nevertheless, just like Wildman, Shults told me, “I lose sleep at night on this. … It is social engineering. It just is—there’s no pretending like it’s not.” But he added that other groups, like Cambridge Analytica, are doing this kind of computational work, too. And various bad actors will do it without transparency or public accountability. “It’s going to be done. So not doing it is not the answer.” Instead, he and Wildman believe the answer is to do the work with transparency and simultaneously speak out about the ethical danger inherent in it.
Let’s follow the logic:
- Social engineering is bad.
- This is social engineering.
- Somebody else will do it anyway.
- I’m doing it cause’ I’m a good guy.
- But it’s still not a good idea.
4 Responses
Oh my…
You should leave a more interesting comment than that before you blog about this…
That’s the most interesting thought he has.
I assume he disagrees… which is why he often writes long treatises to inform his readers about the important things he says to Theists…
Maybe he’s not planning to write a response to this post, though.
Maybe he’s still too busy leading the discussion about the appropriate/ethical time to end a human life.