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Brian Hawthorne

@lednabm I can’t see @TruthSandwich’s replies anymore, so perhaps they blocked me. In any case, I think it is pretty clear both in common usage and in dictionary definitions that worship goes far beyond just the supernatural. In fact, part of what makes the cartoon so funny is exactly that: the Christian guy is using the word in the first meaning in Merriam-Webster (“to honor or show reverence for as a divine being or supernatural power”) while the native folks are likely closer to the second (“to regard with great or extravagant respect, honor, or devotion”).

As an atheist animist, I nearly always use it in the latter meaning.

15 May 2023 at 16:06 | Wall-to-wall | Open on infosec.exchange
12 comments
DELETED

@bhawthorne @lednabm

Uhm, I haven’t blocked you. I can see your response.

15 May 2023 at 16:07 | Open on qoto.org
DELETED

@bhawthorne @lednabm

Ok, we’re mutual followers. Can you see my toots now?

15 May 2023 at 16:30 | Open on qoto.org
Brian Hawthorne

@TruthSandwich @lednabm Yep. I can see them now. You seem to be pretty insistent that everyone look at the world the way you do.

Does worship require personification? You claim it does. I don’t see it that way.

But even if it does, is personifying nature dumb? You say it is. I don’t see it that way.

From a solipsistic viewpoint, all I can know is what I think and perceive. From that perspective, I need to choose which experiences that seem to be caused by external stimuli are produced by persons and which are not.

Having never met you, I choose to believe that the words I see attached to your name on my phone are utterances from a person, and not a large-language model. I choose to personify “Truth Sandwich”. Are you human? It would be difficult for me to know for sure, but I give you the benefit of the doubt.

I have spent the last dozen years in a close daily friendship relationship with an organic being who looks nothing like me, is incapable of speech, but who responds in many of the same ways as people do. I personify my dog because it pleases me to believe that he has an emotional reality similar to my own, albeit likely simpler.

So how about “nature”? Is that a person? I don’t experience it that way, but nature is such a huge and nebulous concept. On the other hand, there are certainly trees that I have had decades-long relationships with that are as meaningful to me as those with some human friends. I personify those trees because in their company I have learned much about myself and the world, in the same way that my relationship with family and friends has taught me much about being human.

In all of these cases, I choose to relate to non-human beings in ways that some people restrict to entities of their own species or gender or skin color or nationality.

You don’t need to do the same of course. My point was merely that you may find it unproductive from a human and social point of view to walk around telling people that their way of looking at the world is “dumb”. It isn’t going to make you friends of the human sort, and is unlikely to advance anyone’s knowledge or understanding.

@TruthSandwich @lednabm Yep. I can see them now. You seem to be pretty insistent that everyone look at the world the way you do.

Does worship require personification? You claim it does. I don’t see it that way.

But even if it does, is personifying nature dumb? You say it is. I don’t see it that way.

15 May 2023 at 16:57 | Open on infosec.exchange
🍸Pooka🥕Boo🍸

@bhawthorne @TruthSandwich You raise interesting points, but I think on it all depends on how strict you want to define the word worship, as I've said.

15 May 2023 at 17:07 | Open on c.im
Brian Hawthorne replied to 🍸Pooka🥕Boo🍸

@lednabm @TruthSandwich Can we mutually agree on a definition? I proposed Merriam-Webster’s (merriam-webster.com/dictionary), which seems to adequately reflect the two main senses that I have seen the word used over the past 60 years, both in written and verbal communication.

15 May 2023 at 17:14 | Open on infosec.exchange
DELETED replied to Brian

@bhawthorne @lednabm

Well, it offers two definitions. The first is specifically supernatural.

The second is not, but it’s still excessive for stuff like trees and the sun.

15 May 2023 at 17:15 | Open on qoto.org
Brian Hawthorne replied to DELETED

@TruthSandwich @lednabm “Excessive” is such a lovely value-laden term.

15 May 2023 at 17:21 | Open on infosec.exchange
Brian Hawthorne replied to Brian

@TruthSandwich @lednabm I would argue that the sun is a far better thing to worship than the example given by Merriam-Webster (“a celebrity worshipped by her fans”) but that is because I utterly reject the cult of celebrity in our society. I’m not saying it is “dumb” but it sure seems more worthy of that moniker than worshipping the major source of all energy on earth.

15 May 2023 at 17:27 | Open on infosec.exchange
DELETED replied to Brian

@bhawthorne @lednabm

A celebrity could appreciate your worship and even return it (in a vague, parasocial way; “I give my thanks to all the little people”).

The sun is a ball of hot gas. It has no clue that you exist, and if it somehow did learn of this, it would not care because it is as incapable of caring as it is of learning. It’s mindless.

Your own chosen definition lists:

- respect
- honor
- devotion

I don’t see how any of these make sense when the target is an inanimate object.

@bhawthorne @lednabm

A celebrity could appreciate your worship and even return it (in a vague, parasocial way; “I give my thanks to all the little people”).

The sun is a ball of hot gas. It has no clue that you exist, and if it somehow did learn of this, it would not care because it is as incapable of caring as it is of learning. It’s mindless.

15 May 2023 at 17:45 | Open on qoto.org
Brian Hawthorne replied to DELETED

@TruthSandwich @lednabm That’s an interesting way of looking at it. As an atheist, it never occurred to me to consider that someone might consider appreciation and response by the worshippee as a sine qua non for worship, since that is completely lacking in theistic worship where people worship a non-existent idea.

I have always considered worship to be a one-sided thing, that meets some psychological or spiritual needs of the worshipper, independent of whether what they are worshipping exists, is sentient, or is aware of their worship. In the case of a celebrity, for example, fans often worship them even more after their deaths (Presley, Kobain, Lennon, etc.).

So for me, respect, honor, and devotion make perfect sense with what you call “inanimate objects.” But that is probably because I am an animist, and I see all objects as endowed with anima, from humans to animals to trees, from the fusing gravitationally-attracted ball of plasma to clumps of rock orbiting it, to each tree and each rock on the surface of the 3rd rock from the sun.

How, you might ask, can a lump of quartzite be endowed with anima? The same way that a complex conglomeration of eukaryotic cells derived themselves through symbiogenesis from multiple prokaryotes can be endowed with anima. And that comes down to personal introspection of myself, observation of meat-sacks that appear similar to myself, and ultimately a decision that I would rather live in a reality where I am not a solipsistic mind living in a biological or virtual simulation, and the humans around me are people like me. What distinguishes a programmed meat-sack from a person? I don’t know, but the term anima is as good an identifier as any to represent that difference.

From that observationally-influenced but essentially arbitrary decision to endow anima to other humans, one must then decide what other objects possess anima. The nihilist will say, there is no such thing as reality. Anattā in Buddhism says there is no anima, and there are some materialists who reject the idea that there is anything other than chemical and electrical reactions. The solipsist will say that he or she alone possesses anima. A racist may believe that only humans with their skin color or culture has anima. A humanist may ascribe anima to all Homo sapiens. Many Hindu adherents endow all animals with anima. And an animist sees anima in everything.

An animist sees no difference between rocks and humans because both are made of matter and endowed with anima. A materialist sees no difference between rocks and humans because both are made of matter and that’s it.

I like my choice of reality better, and for me, that’s what life is all about.

[ edited to get rid of repetitive uses of “ultimately” ]

@TruthSandwich @lednabm That’s an interesting way of looking at it. As an atheist, it never occurred to me to consider that someone might consider appreciation and response by the worshippee as a sine qua non for worship, since that is completely lacking in theistic worship where people worship a non-existent idea.

16 May 2023 at 12:30 | Open on infosec.exchange
RD replied to Brian

@bhawthorne

This sounds, at least superficially, very much like panpsychism (the idea that consciousness is a fundamental property of all physical matter). Would you make any distinction between these ideas?

@TruthSandwich @lednabm

16 May 2023 at 14:32 | Open on kolektiva.social
DELETED replied to Brian

@bhawthorne @lednabm

The core of religion the mistaken attempt to impose a social view onto the natural world, often generating a supernatural world as an ontological artifact.

Consider blessings.

I could ask for your blessing in an endeavor, which means I’m requesting your approval and support. This is a real thing with real consequences.

“Yes, I took his car, but I had his blessings for the trip.”

Awkward sentence, but it gets the point across, which is that blessings are a social construct that is entirely meaningful in describing how people interact.

“He asked his fiance’s father for his blessing” means he asked for permission to marry the man’s daughter. Again, completely meaningful. If he didn’t get the man’s blessing, she might call off the wedding plans. Or, at a minimum, they might have to elope.

Now consider holy water, which is distinct from regular water only in that a priest blessed it. Same word, but it’s lost all meaning. Water is unaffected by our feelings; it is incapable of participating in social contexts because it lacks agency.

If someone secretly replaced all the holy water with unblessed tap water, literally nothing would have changed. There are no consequences. There is no conceivable test to detect this swap because the status of being blessed exists solely in the mind of the priest and those who go along with the cosplay.

Bluntly, animism is more of the same error. It is ascribing human characteristics to the natural world. Rocks don’t have feelings. They don’t care if you kick them or even crush them. They’re rocks. Worrying about rocks’ feelings is a fine example of trying to extend social reasoning past its limits.

@bhawthorne @lednabm

The core of religion the mistaken attempt to impose a social view onto the natural world, often generating a supernatural world as an ontological artifact.

Consider blessings.

I could ask for your blessing in an endeavor, which means I’m requesting your approval and support. This is a real thing with real consequences.

16 May 2023 at 15:14 | Open on qoto.org
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