Michael Shermer - The Moral Arc

[@bi0lizard1]

Shermer is amazing. His books are more than just entertaining reads;for me they change my life.

[@Rico-Suave_]

Watched 47 of it, watched this before probably in another upload

[@jeffbrownlee6006]

Very good lecture and I have just bought the book as well as Pinker's "Better Angels.." I like the idea that the world is improving in spite of media, government, and religious assertions otherwise. However, one of my beefs is the way Shermer seems to breeze over the ineffectiveness of free trade and other neo-liberal economic policies. He refuses to acknowledge the violence that disciples of Milton Friedman use to put in place economic structures that promote poverty and that can only be imposed by force I.e. Chile, Russia, China and Iraq. In a related criticism-it was in fact a criticism of Pinker's book- some have claimed that Pinker and Shermer, by using per capita numbers, are off base in claiming that violence is decreasing. These critics claim that they have merely diluted a skyrocketing death toll due to worldwide violence by subsuming it per capita into even greater demographic growth. This is the same scam behind globalization and free trade. Neo-liberals take the fabulous fortunes acquired by various corrupt investors-Russian and Mexican oligarchs are an example- and then distribute these fortunes per capita over an entire populating inflating the average income.

[@d_e_a_n]

This is a huge thing for me. It depends what question you ask. If you ask what chance you have of being killed, or tortured to death, or lynched, or beaten today, verses the past...if this is important to you, then times are less violent. If you have 2 islands and one island has 100 people and 5 of them are murdered, and another island that has 1000 people and 8 of them are murdered, which island is more violent? Which island would you like to be dropped onto. I would pick the second. But if you just think in absolute numbers then you will say that the second island is more violent, despite your chances of personally dying being much less. If the world population had not exploded with the decrease of infectious disease and the increase in prosperity, then we could rely on absolute numbers. More people mean more births and more deaths. The more people there are born, the more that have to die, one way or another. Given that, if we use absolute numbers, we could conclude that deaths are on the rise. That death is becoming more and more a problem. We could also say that the sneezing or coughing or hiccups are becoming more and more a problem as in absolute terms these things are happening more and more. To me, using absolute numbers is the wrong way to look at this. In my opinion, If violence is becoming more of a problem then so is sneezing.

[@austinm419]

Woah, cool to hear Faisal Saeed Al Mutar outta nowhere at 1:04:35

[@noeldown1952]

7:50 hehe. Let's see how that pans out now that the Supreme Court is stacked with Catholics and Evangelicals.

[@bo0tsy1]

I like Shermer but his example of people in bars with guns argument is bullshit, in most states it is illegal to have a firearm or weapon in an establishment that makes over 50% of it's profit from alcohol sales.

[@MrGOTAMA420]

+bo0tsy1 some folksdont give a damn about the law

[@frxnlab]

Worst arguments ever. I thought Michael Shermer was a careful thinker. This is just messy reasoning. Awful.

[@MrBeamProductions]

Would you care to explain? I'm genuinely curious why you'd dispute his claims so absolutely. Was none of his talk valuable in your eyes?

[@frxnlab]

I wouldn't say I dismiss them absolutely. A lot of things he states are facts, but the context gets bent to subtly imply that it's thanks to a move away from religion that allowed for a lot of social change and evolution. In that he is just wrong. As usual I can only say correlation is not causation. The church has evolved from it's primitive pagan roots all the way through till today and beyond into the image of Jesus. It is willfully ignorant to claim that Jesus represented any of the terrible views in the past that was held by religious and non-religious alike. The biggest problem with Christianity is that it has never been Christian enough. Woody Allen said it best when he said "'If Jesus came back and saw what was being done in his name, he'd never stop throwing up." Cherry picking one or two great thinkers who were atheists can be done on the religious side as well. He mentions Kant for example who played a critical role in the evolution of morality and he was a deeply religious person. But I can dig into each of his claims exposing where he gets it right and where he simplifies it to suit his argument. His audience is credulous enough to take each shallow reading as being sufficient. I always recommend reading Larry Siedontop's Inventing the Individual to anyone for a thorough account of the roots of Western society and law. He lays out pretty clearly through proper historical research how fundamental religion has been to the creation of a modern humane civilization and is still directly manifested in secular terms (minus the G word, rituals, crosses etc.) even in non religious philosophies like Humanism. There is a reason why most of these advances where made in Christian countries and it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out why, just a deep and thorough knowledge of history. I have to be honest that I'm not particularly religious but I often think it's to my loss. The way religion gets judged as a legal system, or as a science is just ridiculous and absurd in times when none of this was known. At it's core it's about acknowledging a need for a deeper connection and the search for trying to find the meaning of this indescribable urge to walk into the unknown and battle the infinite. Only religion has the potential to create the safe and open environment in which the uncertainty and illogical nature of these feelings can be explored, however incorrect, and has through this blessed the world with some some of it's greatest art and beauty. Because art and beauty isn't scientific or logical. We might get it wrong regularly but that is a failure of humanity and it would be ignorant to think that our inherent faults will magically disappear if religion was abolished. There is so much more I would want to analyse in what he says but sadly it needs a drink and lots of time. I hope that this very brief and possibly slightly rambling reply will help to explain why I think he is being either disingenuous or maybe just less informed than he would like you to believe. He does seem to only be parroting the fundamental talking points laid out by the New Atheists throughout his talk, he does this in debates too. PS. I'm all for engaging and challenging religious ideas or any set of beliefs. I just think his "religious people are stupid, I'm smart, tee hee hee" approach is annoying and unhelpful and only serves to generate popularity and fame on the internet. At it's core New Atheism is just a form of intellectual elitism grounded in the crazy utopianism of the Positivists.

[@daleg.9673]

Shermer didn't cherry pick one or two great thinkers who were atheists. He pointed to a new paradigm of secular rationality and humanism that arose during the Enlightenment and drove astounding technological and moral progress. The least religious countries in the world are the most advanced and least violent, and vice-versa. I have a hard time believing this is merely a correlation. And if you think that a legacy of Christianity explains it, how do you account for Japan and South Korea?