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Are you optimistic? About the future of the usa or of your country? The world?

Help a brother out. I am a student of humankind and history and I have seen long dark swings followed by brief respite of enlightenment.

I don't see much positive now to be hopeful about. Load me up with what's gives you hope. And no faith, please.

Bigwavedave 8 Jan 14
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1

I am by nature a pessimist, but with an underlying long view that is optimistic.

I am about as alarmed and concerned as I can be about how we are circling the drain here in the US as well as the UK and to a lesser extent many other places in the West. I can see increasingly plausible scenarios that are at least short to mid-term dystopian, in fact.

But on the mere basis that what's known can't be unknown, and that knowledge and understanding are the mortal enemy of authoritarianism and religious dogma, I regard humanity as having already broken the stranglehold of the failed epistemology of religious faith. I see religion today as a sort of zombie phenomenon that is not sustainable.

Because the human brain is such a great environment for religion to take hold, I see it taking another millennium or so for religion generally to be relegated to the lunatic fringe where it ultimately belongs. I see this happening organically, and already underway. Fundamentalism, depending on what world region you're talking about or what survey you're listening to, represents somewhere between a third and a sixth of Christianity, for example. And they are hemorrhaging young people in droves and going through waves of mini-reformations that are slowly diluting their extremism until eventually they will be more like liberal Christianity, which is itself, the after-echo of 19th century fundamentalism.

Indeed, Trumpism, Brexit, etc., are largely a fundamentalist abreaction to the realization that they are a dying breed. It's a last-ditch attempt to circle the wagons.

That doesn't mean there can't be a huge detour that will cost us a generation or two of progress temporarily, and cause untold human suffering. But I don't think it can derail the big picture.

So I don't really agree that the narrative of human history, in its broad sweeps, represent long dark swings interspersed with brief respites of enlightenment. I see it as increasing waves of enlightenment, each building upon the last. I see aspects of it increasing exponentially in the past 4 or 5 generations rather than in a linear fashion, too. Yes, in those same generations we had two world wars and a lot of lesser conflagrations and there's always the looming threat of a civilization-as-we-know-it-ending "hard evolutionary stop" that could send us back to the bronze age and have to completely reboot. But there's also great promise and a lot of hope. I think individuals will be able to find personal hope and meaning in the midst of that, and continue to build on the shoulders of giants.

It helps to remember that the whole of human society, and the whole of the biosphere, are complex systems, and complex systems tend to be remarkably self-healing and self-correcting and resilient over time. Life finds a way.

Over time we all die ...

@Bigwavedave Yeah ... but not sure how the fact we're mortal is relevant to the topic. It's a separate issue to me. When I say "life finds a way" I'm really just channeling Jeff Goldblum's character in Jurassic Park, and talking at the scale of societal evolution. It's true that you or I are unlikely to be able to enjoy a beer together 1,000 years from now and laugh about how right or wrong I ultimately was about religion descending into irrelevance and marginality. But still ... I'm "optimistic", relatively, about the long-term prospects of the human experiment. Whether I'll get to see much more of it, or even whether I much want to, is beside the point.

4

Regardless of what's going on, we as humans, have the innate ability to overcome, adapt, flee or fight. Keep your view of this messy world as minute as possible; looking at the big picture is enough to scare and depress anyone.
Always take one day at a time, one task at a time, one step at a time...when you do that, this world has no space to intervene very harshly. Get up each day knowing that what you do for others (e.g., family, employer, etc...) doesn't dictate what the day will be for you. What you do for yourself, is what will always matter...doing a little something, just for you, helps you to see that you still might be a cog in this machine we call life, but you're important to how you function, as a whole, not only for others, but for yourself.

Thank you. I like that thought.

Best answer ever!

@Bigwavedave you're welcome. I'm a high functioning depressed person; anxiety sets in when I'm looking at a 'possible' finished result of a huge task, or issue... without knowing for sure how the results will turn out. Speculation, is the main trigger of anxiety. When anxiety sets in, you lose the motivation you had, when this big issue or task came about. Taking one day at a time, one thing at a time, one step at a time, you sometimes surprise yourself at how unstressed you become. Suddenly, the world around you isn't so foreboding and you can only be certain of one thing....that the world might be fucked up beyond repair, but you're definitely gonna be okay.

1

The answer is within.... There is so much to explore and discover, one lifetime is not enough. Find something that will get you going, fire your engine, crank it up and don't look back

2

I am optimistic about the huge asteroid that is headed toward Earth even as we speak! When will it hit? Who knows... But it will send the Earth back to primordial times. Human kind may not survive it! The Earth will get to cleanse itself again!

1

Contrary to popular belief, faith isn't believing something that isn't true. Faith is knowing how to access heartfelt joy, independent of material circumstances. If that option isn't allowed on the menu, then whatever the world is currently serving is what you'll be having. Don't let fundamentalists write your menu.

skado Level 9 Jan 14, 2019

Religious faith isn't believing things that aren't true, but a strong tendency to believe things, many of which are highly unlikely to be true, by accepting asserted truth without a requirement of evidence to substantiate it.

Faith in the colloquial, generic sense is reasonable belief based on past experience and evidence -- almost the opposite of religious faith. In that context I prefer to use the word trust, to avoid confusion with the religious meaning.

"Knowing how to access heartfelt joy independent of material circumstances" is not faith, it is finding hope and meaning and purpose in the midst of whatever you have to work with. That involves not having a rigid, sequential requirement of how things must or should play out, it involves patience, tolerance and often an impractically long view of things, but one learns how to do it or one swings from the rafters. Call it faith if you want, of course, but faith is such an overloaded and hijacked word that I prefer to avoid it outside the religious context because everyone's brain gravitates to the religious context with that word.

@mordant
Other people’s brains are free to do whatever they wish, but they don’t get to dictate what my brain does. I realize I’m fighting a losing battle, but I can’t just sit idly by and watch the language being degraded without expressing my displeasure. (And I think history vindicates me.) If we are squeamish about resisting thieves they will take everything. Fundamentalists have no legitimate claim of ownership of the words they have muddied. Our cultural heritage is much broader and richer than a narrow and brittle literalist perspective of faith and matters of human spirit (attitude, intention, etc. ).

There is a deeper sense of the word “faith” that I think is more historically accurate in this context, and should not be allowed to drift into obscurity. That is a steadfast loyalty to truth, no matter what is popular or expedient. The irony of people who believe in literal sky gods making it unfashionable for me to speak of being faithful to truth is just more painful than I can bear without squawking a bit.
Keep the faith!

@skado I understand your distress, actually, at least intellectually. Coming as I do from fundamentalism I may at times overestimate the fundamentalist influence on popular usage -- but probably not, because given fundamentalism's outsize influence on politics and culture relative to their numeric share as a subset of, e.g., Christianity, I would be unsurprised to discover that they also have an outsize influence on the evolution of language.

To me it is a simple question of evolution of meanings. In Elizabethan English, for example, the world "convenient" used to mean something closer to the modern usage of the words "fitting" or "appropriate", hence, when you have a KJV passage decrying "doers of that which is not convenient", it is talking about doing unseemly things. But that has changed since the 17th century to mean "involving little trouble or effort".

Does this suggest that we should insist on reclaiming the historic usage of "convenient" in order to take it back from ... well, from whoever changed the meaning? Nope. Word meaning and usage evolve, organically and inorganically, for better or worse, and in my judgment, "faith" is one of those weasel-words that has come to mean whatever someone wants it to mean and ends up mucking up any efforts at real engagement and discourse. My personal preference then is to confine it to what most people understand it to mean in a religious context, "a blind leap of faith", and to use other words in other contexts. It's not the One Right Way to do it, but it helps me make sense of it and I think it acknowledges the fait accompli of popular usage and doesn't engage in quixotic battles to try to claw already-ceded ground back.

But ... if you feel differently that is definitely your choice and not mine. At least you're clear on what you mean by faith and try to qualify it.

@mordant
Good points, all! Reasonable minds may differ on this issue. Language does evolve. I’m not pretending that should be stopped. And I’m not claiming it should always be only one way; context rules.

This is just one place where I have a pet interest, and use the situation to try to make a point about attitudes toward religion and related concepts.

I think the Dawkinses and Hitchenses have illegitimately and disproportionately skewed our associations with a small class of words that I feel like yanking back from their clutches, however quixotic that may admittedly be.

The historic use of these words is not so far in the past that retrieval would be unrealistic (modern dictionaries still list the meanings I suggest as being in current usage - not archaic). And there is more at stake here, in the culture, than tilting at linguistic windmills. “Ownership” of the language is a critical tool in the battle for sanity between modern literalism and classical metaphorical expression.

For reasons I don’t understand, Dawkins seems to want to throw the baby out and save the bath water. If I didn’t know better I’d think he hates the complexity of art and sees humanity as conforming neatly to a set of orthographic diagrams.

I love that he, Harris, et al. have taken one step in the right direction, but find it stultifying that they insist on slamming the door so closely on their heels.

@skado Lol ... you are probably right about Dawkins, what you are describing there is the heart's cry of every science nerd or techy that has ever lived. Give me objectivity or at least intersubjective agreement, I can't stand abstractions and metaphors and intuition and often not even love. I fight it myself. Not entirely successfully. But I can cop to it at least.

@mordant
I have that same impulse in me, to some degree, but a friend pointed out the value of metaphoric language to me a few years back, and the idea found fertile ground in my artistic side. Since then it has grown to a conviction that there is room in most of us for both, and it need not constitute a conflict. That seed has engendered so much peace of mind for me... I try to pass it along.

1

Very pessimistic about the farther than I will live future: climate; pollution; over population; and the effects thereof.

1

Don't see how one could be when you've already stated "I am a student of humankind and history and I have seen long dark swings followed by brief respite of enlightenment". That right there shows you there is no hope. Idk, hope for a coming period of enlightenment?

Good luck with that lol. We are not close to that from my viewpoint. The only hope one can have is to be oblivious or strong enough to push on. I know life is hopeless at its core and society and humans are overall shitty but I still enjoy my days.

Lol great answer . Thank you.

1

Where was the science? Why use children to tug on heart strings? Why not provide data to back up your positions?

Just sounded like a child making threats backed by government force.

Pretty sad.

A large majority of scientists warned us about it for years, But our leaders corrupt by fossil fuel money didn't bulge.
[ipcc.ch]

3

Something that made me smile what is the fact that they've closed more coal-fired power plants in the first two years agent Oranges administration then they did in the first four years of Obama's I still put my trust in reason.

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