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Utopia Talk / Politics / The death of reason
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Wed Oct 20 16:44:15
"The sciences were financially supported, honoured everywhere, universally pursued; they were like tall edifices supported by strong foundations. Then the Christian religion appeared in Byzantium and the centres of learning were eliminated, their vestiges effaced and the edifice of Greek learning was obliterated. Everything the ancient Greeks had brought to light vanished, and the discoveries of the ancients were altered beyond recognition."

The tragedy is that these are the words of the 9th century (golden age of Islam) arab historian, Al-Masudi. Reflecting over what we now refer to as the dark ages of Europe.

Such ideas and concepts about the destructive nature of revelation over reason, was known even back then. It is truly sad.
murder
Member
Wed Oct 20 20:02:41

Religion makes people stupid because stupid unquestioning people are easier to control. Humanity has progressed as far as it has despite dragging around the anchor of religion.



Habebe
Member
Wed Oct 20 21:02:03
"stupid unquestioning people are easier to control."

Which is why we should ask that "experts" and alphabet boys show their work when they turn in homework.

There has been a large push to not question authorities of all sorts over the past 2 years and just follow orders.
Rugian
Member
Wed Oct 20 21:07:48
murder
Member Wed Oct 20 20:02:41
"Religion makes people stupid because stupid unquestioning people are easier to control."

"Dorian Abbot is a scientist who has opposed aspects of affirmative action. He is now at the center of an argument over free speech and acceptable discourse.

----

Phoebe A. Cohen is a geosciences professor and department chair at Williams College and one of many who expressed anger on Twitter at M.I.T.’s decision to invite Dr. Abbot to speak, given that he has spoken against affirmative action in the past.

Ideally, she said, a university should not invite speakers who do not share its values on diversity and affirmative action.

What, she was asked, of the effect on academic debate? Should the academy serve as a bastion of unfettered speech?

“This idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated,” she replied."

http://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/us/dorian-abbot-mit.html
Rugian
Member
Wed Oct 20 21:11:58
We as a people are just as prone to religious extremism as we ever were.

It just so happens that the new religion is secular. Its high priests are the teachers and scientists who staff our educational institutions.
LazyCommunist
Member
Wed Oct 20 23:15:38
The new religion is called Bitcoin.
Sam Adams
Member
Wed Oct 20 23:32:04
"The tragedy is that these are the words of the 9th century"

Yet the byzantine empire lasted another half millenium or so, so it couldnt have been too bad yet.

But ya, secular reason > thoughtless followers
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Thu Oct 21 05:00:53
As far as intellectual production went, it was.

They actually even made a movie about Hypatia, it didn't get much attention, but I thought it was a Beautiful movie that portrays the insanity of the early christian followers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agora_(film)

I don't think the tragirony of Al-Masudis words are lost on anyone.
murder
Member
Thu Oct 21 15:54:04

"Which is why we should ask that "experts" and alphabet boys show their work when they turn in homework."

No. Those "experts" already had their homework checked. That's why they are "experts".

The homework you need to check is the crap posted on a blog by some guy calling himself superMAGApatriot#1 and reposted to facebook by your idiot cousin that you wouldn't let reset your fucking dislocated shoulder ... but whose word you'll take about stuff that you know for a fact he's far too stupid to understand.

That's the homework you need to check.

Habebe
Member
Thu Oct 21 16:05:02
So you trust experts with no evidence of claims?

How did those WMDs go?
Rugian
Member
Thu Oct 21 16:05:29
"No. Those "experts" already had their homework checked. That's why they are "experts"."

Who checks the checkers? What if the entire profession has abandoned reason for dogma?

If every teacher starts saying 2+2=5, is that because 2+2 no longer equals 4, or is it because faith and groupthink can be an extremely powerful combination?
Pillz
Member
Thu Oct 21 18:18:11
A 9th century Islamic scholar knows nothing about pre-chrisrian Greece or what the transition did to the Roman Empire.

Like come the fuck on. The ERE didn't stop funding science and arts because of the Church, they did it because they were busy shoveling money to barbarians to avoid being raided into oblivion for centuries.
murder
Member
Thu Oct 21 19:58:47

"How did those WMDs go?"

And who were those "experts"?

murder
Member
Thu Oct 21 20:11:22

"Who checks the checkers?"

superMAGApatriot#1


"If every teacher starts saying 2+2=5, is that because 2+2 no longer equals 4, or is it because faith and groupthink can be an extremely powerful combination?"

If every teacher starts saying that 2+2=5, then we know that they're Republicans who refuse to believe the "elitists" when they tell them that it actually equals 4. After all, Billy Bobs friend's cousin knew a guy once who decided to test it out for himself and added 2 and 2 and came up with 5, thereby proving that 2+2=4 is just a deep state conspiracy.

Rugian
Member
Tue Oct 26 18:56:17
pillz

It's worth pointing out that al-Mas'udi was hardly a neutral observer on this subject. Rather, he was pushing a particular line of Islamic propaganda which intentionally degraded the Christian Roman Empire as an ignorant society that had willfully turned its back on the classical authors. By this same vein of thought, the Muslim world had by contrast willingly embraced the wisdom of the ancients and, in doing so, proved its own inherent superiority as a result.

To be sure, the Roman Empire of the Middle Ages was turned fundamentally towards Christianity, embracing it and making it a part of its identity in a way that us modern secular people can barely even comprehend. But al-Mas'udi's narrative is not one that embraces a rejection of religion in favor of secularism and the sciences; it instead merely seeks to portray that Christianity is an inferior religion to Islam, the true faith of the world.

Moreover, there was a political element to al-Mas'udi's writings. In his time, the Roman Empire was the primary antagonist of the Islamic world, the implacable enemy that had been the subject of annual military raids almost every year for the past three centuries, but which had able to survive and stem the tide of further Muslim advances into Anatolia and Europe. Not only that, but it had even managed to recover and go on the offensive, recently recapturing (in al-Mas'udi's own lifetime) lands that had been held by the Muslims since the time of the Rightly Guided caliphs themselves. In such times, it's unsurprising that Muslim writers would have sought to cast the Roman Empire in as negative a light as possible.

If you want a (relatively) positive Muslim assessment of the medieval Romans, one can look to al-Jahiz, writing a century before al-Mas'udi:

"The [Byzantine] Romans possess an architecture different from that of others. They can produce carving and carpentry as nobody else can. Besides, they have a holy book and a religious community. It is unmistakable and undeniable that they possess beauty, are familiar with arithmetic, astrology and calligraphy, and have courage, insight, and a variety of great skills...

...[We Muslims therefore can't] believe that [such] a people of religious philosophers, physicians, astronomers, diplomats, arithmeticians, secretaries, and masters of every discipline [could believe in the concept of the Christian Trinity]."

In short, one should not try to draw too many modern lessons from al-Mas'udi's works. The man was an excellent historian and writer, but he lived in a time that is quite simply very different to our own, and his writings must be understood in the context of the world that he lived in, not the world that we inhabit today.
jergul
large member
Tue Oct 26 19:12:58
2+2 = 4 axiomatically. Specifically the additive axiom.

Different axioms would give a different result.
Habebe
Member
Tue Oct 26 19:39:26
Bah, Arabic numerals.

II + II =IV

#FUCK ZERO!
Rugian
Member
Tue Oct 26 21:08:12
Habebe

Would you say that using Arabic numerals could constitute a form of...cultural appropriation?
Dukhat
Member
Tue Oct 26 21:16:31
Most people are dum dums. And reason takes a lot of time to read books and cultivate relationships with smart people. In capitalism you need masses of stupid people to work unquestioningly for the capitalist class.

As Karl Marx said, religion is the opium of the masses. He was wrong about economic theory but he was right about that.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Wed Oct 27 01:21:36
Rugian
A lot of words being strangely defensive and missing the point.

Al-Masudi was alive around the same time that the Muʿtazila were a school of thought, weather there is enough evidence to say he was one of them is not as relevant, but those words there are congruent with the spirit of the Mu'tazila.
jergul
large member
Wed Oct 27 02:01:21
Habebe
Its important to recognize that mathematics is literally a construct. The greeks were very clear on that. Lets pretend for fun that the following rules are true, then lets do math with the rules we have made.

It is the cornerstone of everything. We cannot really know anything for sure, so use placehold knowledge until something better comes along.

We are literally still trying the define the area of Pi. That problem has been around longer than the pyramids (two dimenstional circles are the easiest shape to make, and the hardest to know exactly what it contains).
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Wed Oct 27 02:19:20
Jergul
Last time I checked there was no consensus on the nature of math.
jergul
large member
Wed Oct 27 05:28:40
Nimi
Nor can there be. Everyone has in principle the right to choose their own axioms and design a system on that basis, then call it math. Prolly with a prefix of some sort. Jergulmath for example (close is good enough).
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Wed Oct 27 05:41:35
Fair enough, it was not obvious from how you asserted that it should be recognized as a "literal construct".

I definitely think there are better and worse ways of approximating reality and that we actually can improve it. The precision of how close is "good enough" should stand in relation to the consequences of being wrong. We can choose our initial values, but those values have varying degrees of congruence with reality and wildly different emergent inconsistencies of the system we build on them.
Habebe
Member
Wed Oct 27 06:10:33
Rugian, "Would you say that using Arabic numerals could constitute a form of...cultural appropriation?"

Yes, we should return them immediately.For Ethnic justice?
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Wed Oct 27 07:18:53
These numerals they were appropriate my Persian mathematicians first from Indians, then made their way through the arabic language to Europe. The chain is already messed up. I give you permission to keep using them as the descendant of those that first appropriated it. Also I have deep linguistic and cultural ties to the Indian people.
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