nah we’re cool now, and I told him you are too so.... hopefully
Why do we believe lies?
- Thread starter weltweit
- Start date
nah we’re cool now, and I told him you are too so.... hopefully
fucthest8
Cool people die horrible, preventable deaths.
Perhaps it's more that all lies are stories, or at least have to have a story behind them.
"The moon landings were fake" is a lie, but it's just a statement. Behind that is a story, that might persuade you to believe the lie.
weltweit
Well-Known Member
There are multitudes of religions around the world, with multiple gods, are any of them truthful? Is one right and the others lies? And Scientology, legally a religion in the USA, truth?
Orang Utan
Psychick Worrier Ov Geyoor
Never engage Humberto after midnight. Here endeth the lesson
weltweit
Well-Known Member
Money, cash or electronic is a concept given life by belief. Banknotes used to say I promise to pay the bearer a sum in gold. That became outdated and now we just believe our cash or contactless will give us a general level of purchasing power. With current low levels of inflation this holds true, because everyone plays by the rules of the game, the story of money.
A period of hyper-inflation could partially burst this bubble.
A period of hyper-inflation could partially burst this bubble.
Kevbad the Bad
Amiable Bowel Syndrome
All successful religions are a mixture of truth and lies. Historical inaccuracies abound in any scripture, which the faithful can choose to ignore or explain away. Some historical statements will be basically true, or have elements of truth about them. But human knowledge generally increases over time, so certain religious statements or beliefs will be exposed as untrue eventually. More noticeable is how religions fail what I call the kangaroo test. The eternal verities enshrined in the Bible or Koran somehow fail to reference kangaroos. Is that because the almighty didn't create them, or because the humans who invented the religion were necessarily just ignorant?
Truisms about life, love etc abound as well in most religions, which may seem more or less appropriate in certain cultures at certain times, as well as loads of prejudice and political crap.
But there is no point in asking if any of them are true? We can explain the origins of the myth of Santa Claus and we can explain in a similar way the origins of any and all human belief systems. Where those beliefs rely on invented suppositions they can be safely discounted.
Here endeth the lesson.
fucthest8
Cool people die horrible, preventable deaths.
No.
weltweit
Well-Known Member
Not sure I follow your Kangaroo test, do you literally mean a Kangaroo? because I am sure Australian Aboriginals include Roos in their dreamtime histories.
Other than that wrt truisms in religion, I get that .. My feeling is that successful religions have always made plenty of money which over the generations has encouraged chancers to start them, all tend to the impossible and some like Scientology really test credulity.
Saul Goodman
It's all good, man
Yes. I'm an ordained minister of the church of the latter day dude. Not an ounce of bullshit involved.
Kevbad the Bad
Amiable Bowel Syndrome
I call it the kangaroo test because that applies to Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism etc. Down under you could call it the Moo Cow test, or something similar. The point being that those religions which pretend to cosmic knowledge don't know what's around the corner, astronomically speaking.
weltweit
Well-Known Member
Aha, I see now.
weltweit
Well-Known Member
There are many reasons to distrust something like Catholicism, many of which Dawkins expounds in his book The God Delusion. Why would an all powerful god permit such individual suffering as there is in the world, why would they permit African children to get parasites in their eyes rendering them blind? etc etc .. He goes on, if this is your god I don't want any part of it.
NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
I'm uncomfortable with this expansive definition of what a lie is. I think it's confusing at best. What I understand to be "lies" are false statements or arguments, knowingly made with intent to deceive. Denmark isn't a lie. Microsoft isn't a lie. They might be abstract entities with no truly physical substance, but they nevertheless have a social dimension to their existence which is just as real as gravity is.
fucthest8
Cool people die horrible, preventable deaths.
I'm not entirely sure Denmark and Microsoft were meant as examples of lies.
I could be wrong though.
Or lying.
Orang Utan
Psychick Worrier Ov Geyoor
It’s Finland that is a lie
NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
I've seen folks on this forum talk about countries before, as if the fact that you can't go out and find a molecule of "Denmark" means that the country is entirely fictional. Which is bollocks. Things don't have to be concrete to be real.
weltweit
Well-Known Member
I understand your discomfort with the expansive understanding of "lies". I also was concerned with the title of the podcast when what they mainly spoke about were stories, mental concepts and constructs, sometimes falsehoods etc.
Microsoft, Denmark, money, etc are all human mental constructs that require us to believe a story which is usually quite strongly embedded in our societies, but are exclusive to human societies and mean nothing to other animals.
But there are big lies, Trumpian fake media, Nazi superior race, religion, things that even when using human mental constructs many are likely to understand to be false, yet thousands of people believed the lies.
NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
The religion example is where I think the word "lie" fails to adequately convey the nuances of the situation. I know that there are cynical types to who push religion because it lines their own pockets or because it gives them a sense of power. I think those types can safely be considered liars of one kind or another. But sincere believers do exist. I don't think their intent is to deceive. Especially if their life circumstances have never given them cause to properly examine the things that they take on faith.
weltweit
Well-Known Member
to be real? what is real? physical things, soldiers killed in war, a building, physically exists, constructs like Denmark we believe to be real, perhaps if we went and found a border crossing point they would also physically be real? We have to learn that money is real, and it is increasingly becoming removed from the physical. I think there is a distinction between things that are physically real facts, and things that we believe are real but have limited hard evidence that they are facts, things which require mental belief.
NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
I prefer to think of it as physical vs social reality. Since humans are social creatures, our perception of reality is at least partly mediated socially. Denmark and other countries emerge out of the interactions between humans. I don't see how learning has any bearing on that; we have to learn how do unambiguously physical things like walking, after all.
weltweit
Well-Known Member
Yes, there are sincere believers, for all the religions, even for Scientology. Their sincere belief may mean that when they refer to their religion they are perhaps not intentionally lying or trying to deceive, but have they been taken in by stories about their faith that are not true?
Their belief is founded on stories that generally can't be proven and have to be accepted on faith. Believers might take these stories as fact while non believers would say that they are lies.
weltweit
Well-Known Member
Yes, I see that. We do need to learn to walk, but when we have mastered it we patently can walk, it is a physical fact that we can do it, we intake a lot of social knowledge as we grow before we are expected to understand that Denmark or Microsoft or money is also real, even while we may not understand that they are wholly collective mental constructs.
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JimW
支那暗杀团
I think a bit of a problem with facts is they often get talked about as static things whereas I suspect there's underlying patterns but the events and phenomena are always in motion and seen from multiple perspectives so shouldn't be pinned down too hard. So it's a fact there was a world war in the late 1930s - early 1940s, but maybe it begins in China if you're from here or with the invasion of Poland and so on. Probably got this round my neck but think I read even what we assumed to be observable laws of physics are changing a bit as the universe does too. Not trying to stay that there isn't stuff that is just so or things that did happen, just that even seemingly pretty banal stuff can actually be quite hard to boil down to this or that fact.
weltweit
Well-Known Member
What you say about perspective and time is definitely true, there was a time the world was believed to be flat and when it was believed the sun and planets circled around the earth. And things like WWII there can be no doubt it occurred - there is physical evidence - but peoples will have their own perspectives.
Interesting in these times that to combat politician's statements there are wide spread "fact checkers" in the media to bring sanity to proceedings.
Boris Sprinkler
Dont be scared
Denmark may not exist.
There was a tame elk (klod Hans), owned by the Swedish / Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. Klod Hans died on a trip to Sweden to entertain a nobleman, when he got drunk and fell down the stairs. I am sure he knew about Denmark. He was a clever elk, this is why he had to drink. Because he may not have necessarily agreed with the concept of Denmark.
There was a tame elk (klod Hans), owned by the Swedish / Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. Klod Hans died on a trip to Sweden to entertain a nobleman, when he got drunk and fell down the stairs. I am sure he knew about Denmark. He was a clever elk, this is why he had to drink. Because he may not have necessarily agreed with the concept of Denmark.
Shippou-Sensei
4:1:2.5
I didn't think that was how that was spelt either. mind you on reflection I have no idea how you romanise that phrase.
weltweit
Well-Known Member
We tell lies to our children, Santa Claus for one, also perhaps that Granny has gone to live in heaven / the clouds, etc .. lies that after a passage of years they will know were lies and that they will often go on in time to repeat to their own children. Probably not too much harm done in these cases.
weltweit
Well-Known Member
In the podcast Gates says that he expects in the next 50 years there will be AI type devices that will know us better than we know ourselves and that at some point there will be machines that can do everything we do, better than we can do them. He said he hadn't thought much about the moral aspects, preferring to go one step at a time.
Spandex
A crazy bulbous punchbag of sound
With stories there's an understanding between the author and the audience that it isn't true.
With a lie the author is trying to convince the audience that it is true.
In Europe after the fall of the Roman empire there were very few books, mostly bibles, and very few people who could read, mostly monks. There was an idea that the written word was true. It was only in the 12th century that the widespread understanding developed that books could contain writing that wasn't true. At first people started filling in gaps in the bible story (what did Jesus say after the resurrection? What is hell like?) or accounts of the lives of saints or knights or famous historical figures like Alexander the Great. But the understanding that if it was written down it might not be true wasn't widely there. Many people would've thought these semi-historical/religious stories were lies if they found out someone had made it up. The first generally accepted European fiction book was about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, written by Chrétien de Troyes in the 1170s. It wasn't until the 19th century that a clear division between fiction and non-fiction books was clearly established in Europe.
But spoken stories - folk tales - are a different matter. While traditional historical records can only date them back to the 15th or 16th century, the Brothers Grimm believed, and they are supported by modern phylogenetic analysis, that folk tales dated back to before written language. A version of a tale called The Smith and the Devil may date back to early indo-europeans in the bronze age. So it seems that stories have been around almost as long as people.
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