I was raised evangelical fundamentalist Baptist, and I am sure that nearly everyone in those circles believes that the things they say they believe are literally true. Some beliefs have plausible wriggle room; they may say that the 6 days of creation are not Earthly days, and that Earth is very old. Some have inexplicable wriggle room: the Bible has a complete genealogy from Adam to Jesus which isn't long enough for the Neolithic. Many say they believe the Bible literally, yet don't deny that humanity is more than 6000 years old. But many do stick on that point, and come up with AND BELIEVE explanations such as that humans before Adam didn't have souls. I have far too much experience with these people to think that all of them are faking it.
The way these Christians plan their lives does not make sense if you take their beliefs as aspirational. They believe literally that Heaven is a place, and that they will be there after they die. MANY of them are willing to risk death to spread these beliefs, and many have died rather than perform some symbolic act of disrespect towards their God. If the people who "believe" the sexes are the same were like Christian fundamentalists, you wouldn't find people covering up the fact that they are different; you'd find HUNDREDS or THOUSANDS of professionally-published books with long, detailed, scientific-looking arguments against all of the evidence that men and women are different, as you do books attempting to scientifically rebut evolution. These people really believe they have the truth, and sufficient scientific study will prove it.
"Belief as aspiration" is a thing, but I think it's a distinctly elite thing. In ancient Athens or Rome you could have found many elites who didn't believe the gods existed, but thought it was good for other people to believe in gods. There's also "belief as pragmatics", and this is common outside the literalist churches. You find pragmatics in "religious" people who don't deep down believe in anything, but believe everyone would turn to raping and murdering each other if society stopped saying it believed in a god. (This is not quite "belief as aspiration"; the aspiration people are revolutionaries; the pragmatics people are conservatives.) And there's "belief as aesthetics": "I don't really believe this absurd thing, but how beautiful it is! If it's untrue, I don't want to know it." That was C.S. Lewis' ultimate argument for "believing in" Christianity in /The Silver Chair/.
"Belief as literal belief" is probably the oldest, and still co-exists alongside these others. What is new about the modern beliefs is actual altruism. Altruism is not a part of any conventional religion. Every time you find a religion that preaches self-renunciation, love of your neighbor, and so on, you'll find that it teaches that the person who does that will be rewarded. They are all carrot-and-stick. Ones that aren't, don't last.
Humans do naturally have actual altruism, but it is not useful for religions in an evolutionary sense. (You should apply evolutionary psychology to religion. Religions and philosophies are just self-replicating meme sets.)
My mother literally believes that I will burn in Hell for eternity unless she prays hard enough for me. The pain this causes her is not faked. She knows that she is risking her relationship with me every time she recites the same reasons why she is a Christian. She isn't doing this because she believes religion will have some good effect on me or on the world. She knows I would be the same person and do the same things in the same way if I "accepted Jesus as my savior", except for going to church, praying for missions, praying before meals, and doing other things that would have no impact on anything if her beliefs are not literally true.
She, and all my religious relatives, literally cannot understand any of the simple and obvious reasons why their beliefs are false. She never, ever comprehends what I say in reply, nor remembers it the next time around. I know her well enough to say this is a sincere lack of comprehension, or even a lack of ability to translate my statements into her internal representation. Plato's ontology, which is basically what Christians have, was constructed so that the claims which disprove Plato's theology can't be expressed in it, and thus can't be comprehended or remembered.
Take the fact that you can't explain the complexity of life by saying "God created it." This just leads to infinite regression: Who created God? And who created the one who created God? I've argued this point many times with many people, and they really, really, cannot understand it. Some roadblock in their brains shatters it before it reaches their consciousness.
Religious systems--the kind that last--are self-consistent. So is post-modernism, Nazism, and the Social Justice movement. They come with their own epistemologies, which provide ways of dismissing all evidence that the system is false. They are logical and self-consistent, so that once a person literally believes all the major points of this system, rationality keeps them IN the system rather than breaking them out of it. Rationality is the problem, not the solution. Empiricism is the solution.
I'm the same kind of person, the one who literally believes stuff. I have a lot more respect for the people who actually literally believe in god than those who do it for social reasons. I think they're wrong, but at least they aren't polite liars.
Yeah, similar here. With actual believers, we can "agree to disagree" and then move on to different topics where perhaps we will find more agreement.
With social believers, I never know what game we are playing, and I don't know whether it's still the same game as we change topics from religion to politics or economics or humans or weather...
What exactly did you do under the assumption that there's no material differences between the races that they got mad at you for because they don't actually believe that and were just politely pretending to?
That any skill one race can master, any other race can also master. I didn't believe there was some special thing intrinsic to any race that makes them the only ones able to perform a certain task/skill, and when I expressed that (via a stated belief that non-asians could also learn and do Fung Shui) I became Problematic.
In this case I'm pretty sure your issue was that you disagreed on cultural appropriation discourse. I'm not sure anyone believes Asians are genetically better at Feng Shui; if anything, this strikes me as a similar "fake belief" someone might endorse because they don't think non-Asians *should* learn Feng Shui.
That's messed up. You were Not The Asshole. Feng Shui is basically bullshit anyway, but, seriously, WTF are they thinking when they say people can't learn it?
In conclusion, although they were presumably perfectly nice people in other contexts, when it comes to this, f--k them and the horse they rode in on.
It's worth minding that we live in a time where all sorts of people deny reality for all sorts of reasons. They will not tell you theybare doing this, of course, and they will not feel like they are lying because "everybody knows". But everybody does not know. You can never be too careful to believe your own two eyes--or to heed the voice in the back of your head that doubts, even if it just seems like vague, unjustified, dissatisfaction with a "proven" answer.
I only skimmed the "believe in" piece but I'm glad someone else is speaking to rationalists along these lines. I've always thought of "belief in" as a kind of trust. If I believe in you, that means I trust you to come through for me. I'm sorry the people you've believed in haven't always come through for you.
I think this blog post makes a good point. However, there are two related points where I am not sure whether I understand it correctly.
I sometimes get the impression that if some author makes a point that resaonates well with the rationalist community's vibes, then the community accepts that the author
1.) writes things that s/he doesn't mean literally, used as rhetorical figures to support the author's message,
2.) uses words in ways that may have a certain meaning within the community but people outside of the community would understand it differently.
Therefore, I am unsure about
1.) your quote of what the "left-wing commentator" said (‘—is what one would say if one is a right-wing deplorable that just wants to laugh while humiliating those that are already oppressed. Naturally none of us would ever propose such a thing, we aren’t horrible people. Here’s what they get wrong…”). Is that exactly and verbatim what the commentator said, or is it an approximate, distorted representation?
2.) your usage of the word "lying". Do you really believe that Jehova's Witnesses in fact do not believe what they say and deliberately mislead others?
I'm genuinely unsure at this point and would like to make sure I'm not also "not getting a joke".
omg stop with the passive-aggressive bullshit and just say what you mean.
1. Gee, I wonder if I recalled the exact words spoken while my world was being shattered in the car 3 years ago. You sound like exactly the sort of person no one can trust, by pretending to saying something other than what you mean. Just come out and say "This obviously isn't a direct quote, I think you're misrepresenting what was said." See how much better it feels to be direct?
2. God is a lie. Yeah, of course many believers actually believe the lie. You are trying to imply I'm being deceitful for referring to it as a lie *because* many people are fooled by it. Congrats, you are correct in the way that doesn't matter to the conversation. Would you like to engage with the substance of the post, or do you want to go around throwing veiled accusations of bad faith on my part via pathetic hints of contamination?
Eneasz, I certainly didn't mean to offend you, upset you, or be passive-aggressive. You know what you mean with your own writing. But I was unsure about it. I then prefer to ask rather than throw accusations around. I was trying to be polite and actually thought it would help me understand what you're saying. It might also be a question of cultural and language translation.
With respect to the NPR radio commentator, maybe I would have felt more confident at another time, but when I wrote my comment I wanted to ask if that part of your post was meant to be a quote/paraphrasing. It is not always easy to distinguish between caricatures and accurate representations of reality in blog posts. I actually do not know whether radio commentators in the United States use words like "right-wing deplorable" in such a context, because my knowledge of American politics is filtered and indirect. I get it from reading blogs and newspapers/websites. I don't think I've ever listened to political comments on a US radio station. When someone uses quotation marks, I consider what is in between them to be a quote. I think I missed the word "roughly" and was confused. Therefore, I am sorry for the words "exactly and verbatim"; I think I added them after some back and forth trying to formulate my question. I understand that an exact memory of an emotionally distressful situation is nearly impossible. However, the paraphrasing seemed like a caricature. I was unsure, therefore I asked, and maybe my impression I was wrong. Sorry.
The second point was about the word "lying". No, I did not try to imply that you are being deceitful for referring to the behavior of JW as a lie, but I wanted to know what you meant by using the word "lying". But maybe my caution was unjustified and that's why it came across wrong. Considering your answer now, yes, your usage of words is misleading because you claim that religious people lie when they are only saying what they believe. The problem is not that "many people are fooled" by religion but because I see no real lying (“to intentionally give false information” according to wiktionary), and it seems you just use the word because you want to let these kinds of behavior to appear identical. Yet at the same time, you say that JW very literally say what they believe to be true. Your accusation against them seems to be that their beliefs are wrong, but you blur the concepts by calling that "lying". I don't really know what Jehovah's Witnesses exactly believe or do, I'm just drawing conclusions based on what you write. Based on that, your writing (that is, how you use the word "lying") seems closer to the wiktionary definition of "lying" than their behavior. I'm still confused by this, sorry.
Now I tried to be more direct, as requested. And while we're at it, I would like to add that I was surprised by your ad hominem and the patronizing advice, found both unnecessary and I think if you want more direct criticism based on fewer questions and clarifications, you can just say that.
With respect to the substance of the post, I am not sure there is ONE "substance of the post".
I already recommended it to people a while ago because I found the "Reality Keeps Shattering" part (Section 3) to be a very good illustration of a concept I'd like to have a better gears-level understanding of. Something like "political milieus having a groupthink belief-in-belief". However, it is not easy to identify such beliefs. The interesting question would be how they arise and who knows what about the nature of these beliefs. Could the radio commentator really know how his listeners would understand the concepts?
I think the other sections don't really fit together very well.
Section 1) Your accusation against Jehova's Witnesses doesn't make sense against the background of the rest of the post. I understand your post's message that you demand that everybody behaves honestly and tells the truth, but JW seem to do that (from their own perspective).
Section 2) I think the concept of "aspirational beliefs" in the section "'Believing In' is Aspirational, Unless You’re A Child" section is useful, even if it seems more like the beginning of a concept.
Section 4) About the last section "Believing In Anti-Santa", even though my own behavior is less consistent than the behavior you advocate, I still find the call to action to be positive. In a sense, reading that you call for "fighting to be as honest as possible" etc you can imagine me "mentally pumping my fist in the air and cheereing". Then I was confused by, well, see above. Piecemeal disillusionment is not as shocking as your world being shattered, of course, but it is still disappointing. I may not be consistent in all my actions, but I understood the message of your post to be that you are calling for exactly this kind of consistency.
I appreciate you trying to make sense of this. I do think you do better for yourself if you were more direct and honest about your feelings. Couching them in so many niceties to avoid offense comes across as deceitful, and honestly I think it damages one's mental health to be in such a constant state of self-policing. Trust that your peers have some measure of reliance and don't need to be protected from your every non-complimentary emotion -- you don't want peers that are that fragile anyway.
To be fair - I lived this way too, and it was pretty awful, which is one reason I encourage people not to live this way when I can. Sometimes with a bit of... vigor? ^^;
The NPR commenter absolutely began with the proposition that the men's and women's teams play each other, sparking that joy and relief in me, and immediately proceeded into explaining that that position is one the bad people on the Right hold.
When you say "Could the radio commentator really know how his listeners would understand the concepts?" I'm not sure what you're referring to. Probably the commentator didn't think that her rejection of the two teams playing each other would come as a shock to me.
(Though nowadays I'm not even sure about that, it very well could have been a "We've always been at war with East Asia" moment where the NewThink was both blatantly contradictory and expected to be adopted immediately and without question. I have a hard time modeling a human as being THAT morally depraved, though. (even one on NPR ;) ))
re my accusation against Jehovah's Witnesses - this reduces to a blanket accusation against all normie theists. They say they believe something which would have massive ramifications if they ACTUALLY lived like they believe it. But they don't. They live like they don't take their own beliefs to be true at all. I don't care if they have managed to mangle their epistemology so badly that they can literally *think they believe* what they say while living as if someone with completely different beliefs controls their bodies. A human with a care for truth would not end up like this. Malicious negligence doesn't absolve one of guilt, and the things such people say are lies.
PS: A minute after hitting reply, I better understood the relationship between sections 2, 3, and 4, but it's still hard to see how section 1 is supposed to be an introduction for them without changing the meaning of the word "lies." (There is a biographical connection, but not a logical one.) Maybe I'm still missing something.
I think that the leftist reliance on continental philosophy has led them to turn politics into a Stage 3 simulacra, like Kayfabe in pro wrestling, or (more likely) a Stage 4 simulacra, in which those In the Know treat the entire dialogue as the kind of language game described by Derrida and Barthes, in which "true" means "repeated by many people".
I recently had several "arguments" with mobs of leftists in which they said nothing at all of substance against me, but merely flung insults and illogic at me, then went away convinced they'd proved I'm a Nazi. The only way I can interpret their performance is that they believe that establishing consensus /is/ establishing truth.
I was raised evangelical fundamentalist Baptist, and I am sure that nearly everyone in those circles believes that the things they say they believe are literally true. Some beliefs have plausible wriggle room; they may say that the 6 days of creation are not Earthly days, and that Earth is very old. Some have inexplicable wriggle room: the Bible has a complete genealogy from Adam to Jesus which isn't long enough for the Neolithic. Many say they believe the Bible literally, yet don't deny that humanity is more than 6000 years old. But many do stick on that point, and come up with AND BELIEVE explanations such as that humans before Adam didn't have souls. I have far too much experience with these people to think that all of them are faking it.
The way these Christians plan their lives does not make sense if you take their beliefs as aspirational. They believe literally that Heaven is a place, and that they will be there after they die. MANY of them are willing to risk death to spread these beliefs, and many have died rather than perform some symbolic act of disrespect towards their God. If the people who "believe" the sexes are the same were like Christian fundamentalists, you wouldn't find people covering up the fact that they are different; you'd find HUNDREDS or THOUSANDS of professionally-published books with long, detailed, scientific-looking arguments against all of the evidence that men and women are different, as you do books attempting to scientifically rebut evolution. These people really believe they have the truth, and sufficient scientific study will prove it.
"Belief as aspiration" is a thing, but I think it's a distinctly elite thing. In ancient Athens or Rome you could have found many elites who didn't believe the gods existed, but thought it was good for other people to believe in gods. There's also "belief as pragmatics", and this is common outside the literalist churches. You find pragmatics in "religious" people who don't deep down believe in anything, but believe everyone would turn to raping and murdering each other if society stopped saying it believed in a god. (This is not quite "belief as aspiration"; the aspiration people are revolutionaries; the pragmatics people are conservatives.) And there's "belief as aesthetics": "I don't really believe this absurd thing, but how beautiful it is! If it's untrue, I don't want to know it." That was C.S. Lewis' ultimate argument for "believing in" Christianity in /The Silver Chair/.
"Belief as literal belief" is probably the oldest, and still co-exists alongside these others. What is new about the modern beliefs is actual altruism. Altruism is not a part of any conventional religion. Every time you find a religion that preaches self-renunciation, love of your neighbor, and so on, you'll find that it teaches that the person who does that will be rewarded. They are all carrot-and-stick. Ones that aren't, don't last.
Humans do naturally have actual altruism, but it is not useful for religions in an evolutionary sense. (You should apply evolutionary psychology to religion. Religions and philosophies are just self-replicating meme sets.)
My mother literally believes that I will burn in Hell for eternity unless she prays hard enough for me. The pain this causes her is not faked. She knows that she is risking her relationship with me every time she recites the same reasons why she is a Christian. She isn't doing this because she believes religion will have some good effect on me or on the world. She knows I would be the same person and do the same things in the same way if I "accepted Jesus as my savior", except for going to church, praying for missions, praying before meals, and doing other things that would have no impact on anything if her beliefs are not literally true.
She, and all my religious relatives, literally cannot understand any of the simple and obvious reasons why their beliefs are false. She never, ever comprehends what I say in reply, nor remembers it the next time around. I know her well enough to say this is a sincere lack of comprehension, or even a lack of ability to translate my statements into her internal representation. Plato's ontology, which is basically what Christians have, was constructed so that the claims which disprove Plato's theology can't be expressed in it, and thus can't be comprehended or remembered.
Take the fact that you can't explain the complexity of life by saying "God created it." This just leads to infinite regression: Who created God? And who created the one who created God? I've argued this point many times with many people, and they really, really, cannot understand it. Some roadblock in their brains shatters it before it reaches their consciousness.
Religious systems--the kind that last--are self-consistent. So is post-modernism, Nazism, and the Social Justice movement. They come with their own epistemologies, which provide ways of dismissing all evidence that the system is false. They are logical and self-consistent, so that once a person literally believes all the major points of this system, rationality keeps them IN the system rather than breaking them out of it. Rationality is the problem, not the solution. Empiricism is the solution.
I'm the same kind of person, the one who literally believes stuff. I have a lot more respect for the people who actually literally believe in god than those who do it for social reasons. I think they're wrong, but at least they aren't polite liars.
Yeah, similar here. With actual believers, we can "agree to disagree" and then move on to different topics where perhaps we will find more agreement.
With social believers, I never know what game we are playing, and I don't know whether it's still the same game as we change topics from religion to politics or economics or humans or weather...
What exactly did you do under the assumption that there's no material differences between the races that they got mad at you for because they don't actually believe that and were just politely pretending to?
That any skill one race can master, any other race can also master. I didn't believe there was some special thing intrinsic to any race that makes them the only ones able to perform a certain task/skill, and when I expressed that (via a stated belief that non-asians could also learn and do Fung Shui) I became Problematic.
In this case I'm pretty sure your issue was that you disagreed on cultural appropriation discourse. I'm not sure anyone believes Asians are genetically better at Feng Shui; if anything, this strikes me as a similar "fake belief" someone might endorse because they don't think non-Asians *should* learn Feng Shui.
O_o
That's messed up. You were Not The Asshole. Feng Shui is basically bullshit anyway, but, seriously, WTF are they thinking when they say people can't learn it?
In conclusion, although they were presumably perfectly nice people in other contexts, when it comes to this, f--k them and the horse they rode in on.
Related: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/everybody-knows
It's worth minding that we live in a time where all sorts of people deny reality for all sorts of reasons. They will not tell you theybare doing this, of course, and they will not feel like they are lying because "everybody knows". But everybody does not know. You can never be too careful to believe your own two eyes--or to heed the voice in the back of your head that doubts, even if it just seems like vague, unjustified, dissatisfaction with a "proven" answer.
I only skimmed the "believe in" piece but I'm glad someone else is speaking to rationalists along these lines. I've always thought of "belief in" as a kind of trust. If I believe in you, that means I trust you to come through for me. I'm sorry the people you've believed in haven't always come through for you.
"Honestly, any sort of theism should have massive repercussions on how lives." - typo?
Also the YouTube link doesn't work for me (based in the UK)
I think this blog post makes a good point. However, there are two related points where I am not sure whether I understand it correctly.
I sometimes get the impression that if some author makes a point that resaonates well with the rationalist community's vibes, then the community accepts that the author
1.) writes things that s/he doesn't mean literally, used as rhetorical figures to support the author's message,
2.) uses words in ways that may have a certain meaning within the community but people outside of the community would understand it differently.
Therefore, I am unsure about
1.) your quote of what the "left-wing commentator" said (‘—is what one would say if one is a right-wing deplorable that just wants to laugh while humiliating those that are already oppressed. Naturally none of us would ever propose such a thing, we aren’t horrible people. Here’s what they get wrong…”). Is that exactly and verbatim what the commentator said, or is it an approximate, distorted representation?
2.) your usage of the word "lying". Do you really believe that Jehova's Witnesses in fact do not believe what they say and deliberately mislead others?
I'm genuinely unsure at this point and would like to make sure I'm not also "not getting a joke".
omg stop with the passive-aggressive bullshit and just say what you mean.
1. Gee, I wonder if I recalled the exact words spoken while my world was being shattered in the car 3 years ago. You sound like exactly the sort of person no one can trust, by pretending to saying something other than what you mean. Just come out and say "This obviously isn't a direct quote, I think you're misrepresenting what was said." See how much better it feels to be direct?
2. God is a lie. Yeah, of course many believers actually believe the lie. You are trying to imply I'm being deceitful for referring to it as a lie *because* many people are fooled by it. Congrats, you are correct in the way that doesn't matter to the conversation. Would you like to engage with the substance of the post, or do you want to go around throwing veiled accusations of bad faith on my part via pathetic hints of contamination?
Eneasz, I certainly didn't mean to offend you, upset you, or be passive-aggressive. You know what you mean with your own writing. But I was unsure about it. I then prefer to ask rather than throw accusations around. I was trying to be polite and actually thought it would help me understand what you're saying. It might also be a question of cultural and language translation.
With respect to the NPR radio commentator, maybe I would have felt more confident at another time, but when I wrote my comment I wanted to ask if that part of your post was meant to be a quote/paraphrasing. It is not always easy to distinguish between caricatures and accurate representations of reality in blog posts. I actually do not know whether radio commentators in the United States use words like "right-wing deplorable" in such a context, because my knowledge of American politics is filtered and indirect. I get it from reading blogs and newspapers/websites. I don't think I've ever listened to political comments on a US radio station. When someone uses quotation marks, I consider what is in between them to be a quote. I think I missed the word "roughly" and was confused. Therefore, I am sorry for the words "exactly and verbatim"; I think I added them after some back and forth trying to formulate my question. I understand that an exact memory of an emotionally distressful situation is nearly impossible. However, the paraphrasing seemed like a caricature. I was unsure, therefore I asked, and maybe my impression I was wrong. Sorry.
The second point was about the word "lying". No, I did not try to imply that you are being deceitful for referring to the behavior of JW as a lie, but I wanted to know what you meant by using the word "lying". But maybe my caution was unjustified and that's why it came across wrong. Considering your answer now, yes, your usage of words is misleading because you claim that religious people lie when they are only saying what they believe. The problem is not that "many people are fooled" by religion but because I see no real lying (“to intentionally give false information” according to wiktionary), and it seems you just use the word because you want to let these kinds of behavior to appear identical. Yet at the same time, you say that JW very literally say what they believe to be true. Your accusation against them seems to be that their beliefs are wrong, but you blur the concepts by calling that "lying". I don't really know what Jehovah's Witnesses exactly believe or do, I'm just drawing conclusions based on what you write. Based on that, your writing (that is, how you use the word "lying") seems closer to the wiktionary definition of "lying" than their behavior. I'm still confused by this, sorry.
Now I tried to be more direct, as requested. And while we're at it, I would like to add that I was surprised by your ad hominem and the patronizing advice, found both unnecessary and I think if you want more direct criticism based on fewer questions and clarifications, you can just say that.
With respect to the substance of the post, I am not sure there is ONE "substance of the post".
I already recommended it to people a while ago because I found the "Reality Keeps Shattering" part (Section 3) to be a very good illustration of a concept I'd like to have a better gears-level understanding of. Something like "political milieus having a groupthink belief-in-belief". However, it is not easy to identify such beliefs. The interesting question would be how they arise and who knows what about the nature of these beliefs. Could the radio commentator really know how his listeners would understand the concepts?
I think the other sections don't really fit together very well.
Section 1) Your accusation against Jehova's Witnesses doesn't make sense against the background of the rest of the post. I understand your post's message that you demand that everybody behaves honestly and tells the truth, but JW seem to do that (from their own perspective).
Section 2) I think the concept of "aspirational beliefs" in the section "'Believing In' is Aspirational, Unless You’re A Child" section is useful, even if it seems more like the beginning of a concept.
Section 4) About the last section "Believing In Anti-Santa", even though my own behavior is less consistent than the behavior you advocate, I still find the call to action to be positive. In a sense, reading that you call for "fighting to be as honest as possible" etc you can imagine me "mentally pumping my fist in the air and cheereing". Then I was confused by, well, see above. Piecemeal disillusionment is not as shocking as your world being shattered, of course, but it is still disappointing. I may not be consistent in all my actions, but I understood the message of your post to be that you are calling for exactly this kind of consistency.
Happy New Year and no offense.
I appreciate you trying to make sense of this. I do think you do better for yourself if you were more direct and honest about your feelings. Couching them in so many niceties to avoid offense comes across as deceitful, and honestly I think it damages one's mental health to be in such a constant state of self-policing. Trust that your peers have some measure of reliance and don't need to be protected from your every non-complimentary emotion -- you don't want peers that are that fragile anyway.
To be fair - I lived this way too, and it was pretty awful, which is one reason I encourage people not to live this way when I can. Sometimes with a bit of... vigor? ^^;
The NPR commenter absolutely began with the proposition that the men's and women's teams play each other, sparking that joy and relief in me, and immediately proceeded into explaining that that position is one the bad people on the Right hold.
When you say "Could the radio commentator really know how his listeners would understand the concepts?" I'm not sure what you're referring to. Probably the commentator didn't think that her rejection of the two teams playing each other would come as a shock to me.
(Though nowadays I'm not even sure about that, it very well could have been a "We've always been at war with East Asia" moment where the NewThink was both blatantly contradictory and expected to be adopted immediately and without question. I have a hard time modeling a human as being THAT morally depraved, though. (even one on NPR ;) ))
re my accusation against Jehovah's Witnesses - this reduces to a blanket accusation against all normie theists. They say they believe something which would have massive ramifications if they ACTUALLY lived like they believe it. But they don't. They live like they don't take their own beliefs to be true at all. I don't care if they have managed to mangle their epistemology so badly that they can literally *think they believe* what they say while living as if someone with completely different beliefs controls their bodies. A human with a care for truth would not end up like this. Malicious negligence doesn't absolve one of guilt, and the things such people say are lies.
Happy New Year to you too :)
PS: A minute after hitting reply, I better understood the relationship between sections 2, 3, and 4, but it's still hard to see how section 1 is supposed to be an introduction for them without changing the meaning of the word "lies." (There is a biographical connection, but not a logical one.) Maybe I'm still missing something.
I think that the leftist reliance on continental philosophy has led them to turn politics into a Stage 3 simulacra, like Kayfabe in pro wrestling, or (more likely) a Stage 4 simulacra, in which those In the Know treat the entire dialogue as the kind of language game described by Derrida and Barthes, in which "true" means "repeated by many people".
I recently had several "arguments" with mobs of leftists in which they said nothing at all of substance against me, but merely flung insults and illogic at me, then went away convinced they'd proved I'm a Nazi. The only way I can interpret their performance is that they believe that establishing consensus /is/ establishing truth.
Yeah, it was very disturbing when I stumbled into it. :( Expanded my view of the possible variations in human mind-space (to put it charitably).