Modern Day Religions

I agree with Zuby. As I see it, traditional religions were serving a purpose that was not fully appreciated. I'm not claiming that the religious claims touted by most traditional religions were true. The truth of such claims is not where the source of the power of a religion. It is more accurate to state the the falsity of the dogmatic claims underlie the power of a religion. I explain this in a five-part series of articles I titled "Mending Fences."

What happens when you take eliminate a popular institution?  We're finding out as it is occurring, as described by Chesterson's Fence:

The principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.

The most powerful social dynamic is our tendency to form tribes. Whenever people do this, they point to principles and beliefs, but there is no need for these principles or beliefs to be factually true to serve as the "reason" for the tribal affiliation. We often see this: the wackier the belief, the stronger the tribal ties, because proclaiming nonsensical things serves as a badge of tribal belonging.

John McWhorter has repeatedly made this point with regard to Wokeness. It is not like a religion. Rather, he says, it is a religion. “The reality is that what the Elect call problematic is what a Christian means by blasphemous.” The following excerpt is from the introduction of McWhorter's book, Woke Racism (2021):

My main aims will be:

1. To argue that this new ideology is actually a religion in all but name, and that this explains why something so destructive and incoherent is so attractive to so many good people.

2. To explain why so many black people are attracted to a religion that treats us as simpletons.

3. To show that this religion is actively harmful to black people despite being intended as unprecedentedly “antiracist.”

4. To show that a pragmatic, effective, liberal, and even Democratic-friendly agenda for rescuing black America need not be founded on the tenets of this new religion.

5. To suggest ways to lessen the grip of this new religion on our public culture.

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Citing Accurate Statistics Can be Harmful to Your Career: The Cases of Zac Kriegman and Roland Fryer

Zac Kriegman lost his job at Thomson Reuters for the sin of doing his job well.  Citing accurate statistics collided with the prevailing Black Lives Matter narrative regarding the extent of police violence against unarmed blacks.  Unfortunate for his career, Kriegman also concluded that the Ferguson Effect stemming from the BLM protests and riots has resulted in the deaths of thousands of black men.

[Please assume that wherever I use the terms "black" or "white" that I am using these terms in scare quotes.  I am asking readers to make this assumption because I am convinced that concept of "race" is illusory and pernicious and should be eliminated from all discourse. I am quite aware that people come in various shapes and shades of skin color, but none of this is evidence supporting a belief in "race."  I have been convinced that this is the proper course based on writings of Sheena Mason, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Zuby (and see here), Kmele Foster, Coleman Hughes, Angel Eduardo and Inaya Folarin Iman.  In an earlier post, I characterized the belief in "race" to be as absurd as the belief in astrology.]

What follows is an excerpt from Kriegman's article at Common Sense, "I Criticized BLM. Then I Was Fired: The data about police shootings just didn't add up, but no one at Thomson Reuters wanted to hear it.":

I had been following the academic research on BLM for years (for example, here, here, here and here), and I had come to the conclusion that the claim upon which the whole movement rested—that police more readily shoot black people—was false.

The data was unequivocal. It showed that, if anything, police were slightly less likely to use lethal force against black suspects than white ones.

Statistics from the most complete database of police shootings (compiled by The Washington Post) indicate that, over the last five years, police have fatally shot 39 percent more unarmed whites than blacks. Because there are roughly six times as many white Americans as black Americans, that figure should be closer to 600 percent, BLM activists (and their allies in legacy media) insist. The fact that it’s not—that there’s more than a 500-percentage point gap between reality and expectation—is, they say, evidence of the bias of police departments across the United States.

Continue ReadingCiting Accurate Statistics Can be Harmful to Your Career: The Cases of Zac Kriegman and Roland Fryer

Children Expelled from Elite Private School Because Parents Believe in the Existence of Boys and Girls

Leighton Woodhouse Reports at Common Sense. Here's an excerpt:

“Today was the last day of school for your children, Charlotte and Carter,” Dinh informed the couple. The Sinclairs—she’s 37; he’s 51—had been driving home from a vacation to celebrate their anniversary. Dinh appeared to be reading a script. Two MCDS board members joined her on the call but stayed quiet. “Please do not contact any other school employees, particularly Charlotte and Carter’s teachers, as your reaching out to them will cause them further stress,” Dinh continued. “The two of you are not to be on campus again.”

It was the closing act of a year-long drama between the Sinclairs and MCDS, which charges $40,000 per student per year and had been teaching first and second graders about “deconstructing the gender binary”—the idea that there’s no such thing as girls or boys, just a spectrum of relative girlness and boyness.

One more excerpt:

(Several parents I reached out to indicated that they wanted to talk but were scared. One father said he’d call me from a pay phone, if only there were pay phones.)

Parents started to hear about weird classroom exercises designed to force the seven- and eight-year-olds to decide how they identified: They were asked which gender they “felt like.” Or to pick the pronoun that seemed right to them. Or to say which toys seemed more like boy toys or girl toys.

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Glenn Loury and Jonathan Haidt Discuss the Structural Stupidities of the Left and Right

In this video, Glenn Loury and Jonathan Haidt Discuss the Structural Stupidities of the Left and Right. It is a fantastic conversation by two good-hearted nuanced thinkers who are concerned about the damage being done to many American institutions.

Continue ReadingGlenn Loury and Jonathan Haidt Discuss the Structural Stupidities of the Left and Right