Zelandakh, on 2015-June-15, 08:13, said:
The problem is that such data is not always easy to interpret. One of the earliest experiments in this area was to take a group of "natives", as they would have been known at the time, and present to them pairs of everyday items. They then had to remember where they were located - the memory game in effect. It was shown that a control group of Europeans scored more highly and this was generally taken as strong evidence of the superiority of "the white man". Some time later, another group repeated the same experiment but using everyday items for the other culture involved. Now the European group performed worse by about the same amount.
So if you are going to work in this area, you better be very sure of your results before publishing. And such rigour is unusual in the social sciences.
We are in agreement. We need to separate out the question of whether a topic is so abhorrent or repugnant to our societal values as to be an unacceptable research project, on the one hand, or whether it is conceptually acceptable to look into it, but very, very difficult to do so appropriately. Factoring out cultural influences seems to me to be extremely difficult. Richard, in this thread, referenced a longitudinal study on political leanings that, to a layperson such as myself, seems to have been able to at least minimize such influences, by starting with young infants, and focussing on twins who were separated at birth. However, even there, it seems to me that there might be some cultural effects. After all, identical twins put out for adoption are likely to attract adoptive parents who, as between the two sets of parents, share many values and beliefs. One could argue that that can't explain why fraternal twins differ far more than identical twins, and that might be a complete answer, but on the other hand, it seemed to me that the study suffered from a pretty small sample size when it came to some of the categories that showed the most extreme effects. And so on.
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That may be your definition, Mike, but it is by no means the only one. As an example, I learned in Religious Education at school that Shintoism is an atheist religion. That is, a follower of Shintoism believes in no god but is nonetheless a religious believer. The point being that Shintoism is a religion based on spirits and not gods. And the classical example of an atheist religion is Buddhism. I understand that it is in modern day America (and presumably also Canada) unusual to use the word atheism in this way but it is nonetheless perfectly correct.
I have never discussed Shintoism with any follower of that religion. I have discussed Buddhism with some Buddhists.
It may be that a Shinto believer would self-describe as atheist, but it strikes me as unlikely. My limited exposure to Buddhists persuades me that they would take exception to being called 'atheist', while also pointing out, as did you, that they don't believe in any gods as such. It is all semantics anyway, since the post to which you responded was itself a response to a post from nige1 in which he stated his opinion that atheism is an irrational belief, implying that it represented an idea similar to his belief in his god.
This is a common trope amongst religious people in discussion with or attacking atheists. I suspect that for many the subconscious reasoning is that they know that their belief in their god is silly when viewed objectively. They cannot refute the arguments against their belief, so they distort the beliefs of their critics.
As virtually all atheists acknowledge, it is not possible, with the state of human knowledge today, to prove that no god exists. Anyone who cleaves to such a belief is doing so in spite of this rationally unassailable position. Therefore, if one can assert that atheists believe that god doesn't exist, one has demonstrated (!) that atheists hold to an irrational belief, just as do godbots.
Once one can say to one's critic that he or she is exactly the same.....equally irrational....one can safely dismiss the arguments of the critic as hypocritical.
If one had, instead, to confront the reality, which is that the atheist doesn't claim to 'know' the answers, but instead rejects the irrational adaptation of a particular fantasy as the answer, one has to examine why one holds to the fantasy as true, and that can be very uncomfortable for someone who claims that he or she views the world based on evidence.
Many studies show that most people will got to incredible lengths of self-deception to avoid admitting that their core values were silly.
'one of the great markers of the advance of human kindness is the howls you will hear from the Men of God' Johann Hari
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