It's Sunday -- Easter Sunday for Christians -- and time for Freethinker Sermonette, so you probably thought you'd get a day off from mathematical models. After all, we've just completed 18 posts on the subject and if you've read them all, you're exhausted. So it must be a day of rest, right? No such luck. More on mathematical models, offered in a spirit of conciliation and perhaps explanation why I don't mind the differences of opinion that erupt in the comment threads. A mathematical model tells me I shouldn't mind:
To model the evolution of opinions, physicists Renaud Lambiotte and Marcel Ausloos of the University of Liege in Belgium, and Janus Hoylst of the Warsaw University of Technology in Poland, imagined two groups, initially isolated, whose members gradually begin to talk to members of the other group.They supposed for simplicity that individuals hold one of two opinions, assigned randomly at the start. People then change their views by a "majority rule" - each person tends to adopt the opinion that is held by a majority of those with whom they are linked in the social network.
Solving their model mathematically, the authors found that when the two groups were isolated or nearly isolated, people within each group quickly came to share one opinion but the groups were as likely to agree as disagree with each other.
As the researchers began adding social links between the groups. But they found no change, at first. The two groups continued to form opinions independently.
But rather than a gradual increase in the way opinions "leak" from one group to the other as more connections are added, the researchers found a surprise when the number of links between the groups reached a precise threshold. Suddenly, the final opinions of the two groups were always identical. Even a few extra links between groups were enough to ?tip? their final opinions from a state of full polarization to full agreement. (New Scientist)
These kinds of abrupt transitions or thresholds are seen in such diverse settings as the spread of epidemic disease, fads, and marketing campaigns as well as phase transitions in solids, liquids and gases. Clearly the "majority rules" influence engine is a gross simplification, but most people in the networking field think the same kinds of "tipping point" phenomena exist with many different influence rules, perhaps explaining how polarization in communities can happen suddenly rather than gradually, and why they persist.
In the US, for example, researchers have noted an extreme and persisting polarization among bloggers expressing either Democratic or Republican political views. If most bloggers tend to read only those who agree with them, groups associated with these differing positions can easily persist.
All this could be or might be or might not be. A society with homogeneous opinions is probably not healthy, so the goal isn't to eliminate differences. But it can't be bad to talk to each other and it certainly is bad not to. People come here to read about bird flu or public health but get exposed to opinions about religion and war. When they react, I get exposed to their views. That can't be bad. At least it isn't bad for me.
It might be bad for many religious sects, however. In my youth, adherents of one sect usually knew little or nothing about another. Now we know quite a lot about religious sects, whether Jewish, Protestant, Catholic or the dreaded Islam, with all their variations. The idea there are many ways to worship may be just fine for many who consider themselves spiritual but from the standpoint of a religious doctrine, the basis of a religious sect, it is potentially dangerous. Religious sects aren't interested in talking with you, they are interested in talking at you.
I don't mind religious argument here. I welcome it. Now you know why. It is profoundly subversive.
- Log in to post comments
Depends what you mean by "sect," I suppose. Certainly, it is not true of the "sects" to which some of my relatives belong.
"Sect" is one of those words with enough shades of meaning so that its use can often fuzzify rather than clarify. Example - the first set of definitions from dictionary.com ...
Scott: I was using it in the sense of either (1) or (4). I think in either case, awareness of many other belief systems tends to be subversive. This doesn't mean determinative. It means generally subversive.
revere:
Interesting. I would think that to be more likely under definitions 2 and 3.
In the limited number of cases of which I have some direct experience, better knowledge of other religions has been anything but subversive. One friend likened it to having more experience dealing with/working with/living with people from other cultural and ethnic backgrounds. As I say, the very antithesis of subversive.
I know - you can change religions, but not the other attributes I mentioned. Nonetheless, both seem to me to be broadening experiences, not subversive.
Scott: I think when it comes to adherence to a doctrine, broadening is subversive. At least I don't consider them opposites.
I'd agree that they're not opposites, but your statement is simply too absolute for me.
We'll just have to disagree, I suspect. It looks to me as though you're taking the same approach that is fairly common on a number of science-oritend blogs by relating your comments to less than half of the religious spectrum, but that of course is only an opinion without anything but limited personal experience and observation to support it.
Reveres statement here is pretty close to a "differences" awareness training thing in the military a few years ago. Dont ask, dont tell, cant bring Penthouse into the facility because its insensitive to women, same for Playgirl and then religion... Oh man, give me the days of being able to read Penthouse back. Naked women? Geez.
The were two groups assembled and mind this was a day long class for the religious tolerance training. Protestants in one room, Catholic or Catholic like in another. They were given a subject to discuss and write down an opinion of Wicca in their religious belief. Some had never heard of it but then the sneaky noise was made that it was black magic. There were two professed Wiccans in the group but had been excluded to another room. They were asked to write their opinions of the other religions. Again, as what Revere posted up they all said they had the about the same opinions and tolerances.
Then one Wiccan went into each room and they shared their comments... With little variation they all respected the others religions in writing. Then they were asked to define their religions beliefs. Caths against Wiccans, Wiccans against Protestants. It went up the line to about the 75% of same beliefs and then it disintegrated. Almost got nasty. Then we were reassembled into the main room and a projector was up and running but nothing on it. The leaders were asked to read the results and they were written out by Padre Johanssen on the overlay. We all agreed that this was about what everyone said. Then he put up the overlay from the previous class and it was a near identical match for beliefs up to the point. Their class though had two atheists. Their moral standards were no lower than Baptists, Mormons, Episcopals etc. Nearly all including Wiccans, Atheists, and organized religions had about the same tipping point for starting to hammer each other on their religious beliefs.
Revere, I dont know when you find time to sleep. This stuff is on out there and hard to research. Its really good. What year did those guys do their study?
I agree that many religious people find encounters with other belief systems, absent vilification, very threatening. But not all do.
My favorite religious doctrine of all time: the Jains' Maybe Doctrine. It says, we believe all this earnestly... but we might be wrong.
Jainism isn't some wishy-washy hand-wavy New Age religion. I remember thinking when I first studied it that Jainism appeared to be designed for for ascetics for whom Buddhist or Hindu asceticism just wasn't hardcore enough.
Jain monks are the ones who sweep in front of them when they walk, in order not to step on and kill any living being. (As a professor of mine put it, you could either see this as an obsessive-compulsive pathology, or a profound meditation on mindfulness and compassion.) They have a very definite (and rather depressing) cosmology, too - this isn't your local Unitarian Universalist church.
And yet, for all their devout belief, a central tenet of their religion is that they might be wrong about all of it. So Jain monks study other religions, and make hand copies of other religious texts. The oldest extant copy of the Tao Te Ching was found in a Jain monastary.
Needless to say, the Jains don't tend to go around starting religious wars, either. I'd love to see the Maybe Doctrine catch on in other religions.
Acceptance, revere speaks of acceptance towards his commenter's. Well done, and I'm beginning to see what MRK means when he says you'll beat him to the gates of Heaven.
You'd make one heck of a preacher revere, although I'd never want that for anyone. You're very clever too, it's amazing how you, in your own way, dig for truth. And equally amazing that as a atheist you see truth clearer than those who embrace religion.
It's a lovely day in Utah, the clouds are floating through the blue sky, it rained for awhile last night and cleared the pollens out of the air. The allergy pills I'm taking are working and soon it's time for the shots. Relief, blessed relief from the debilitating effects of the plants that bloom and go crazy during the spring.
This Sunday Sermonette is right up my alley however, I'd not divulge to anyone here what it is that I am connected with as far as spiritual teachings go. 91% would come to the conclusion that I'm nuts, manipulated, and belong to a cult. What I will do is share my thoughts on the three religions.
Let me just say, the one common denominator in all mankind is the thirst for love. And it's difficult to define love when one is coming from the mind alone. The love mentioned here is the love that the soul within knows. Today there is love flowing through the ethers and whether we agree with the religion behind this day or not, it's a love that everyone can pick-up on and embrace in the moment.
First the word religion, of Latin derivation, means to unite. The genuine purpose of religion is to reunite soul with the Divine, but the human consciousness has become fertile ground for the mind and the ego to create separateness from the God within.
Buddhism is the most popular religion in the world today. Its founder, Siddhartha, was born sometime around 563 B.C. in the valley of Ganga in India. Everyone knows he was a prince and that his parents attempted to shield him from the miseries of the world. Siddhartha studied under several well-known philosophies of his day, but could not find the cure he sought for the suffering he saw. Buddha taught that the way to enlightenment required the absence of the passions of the mind (anger, lust, greed, attachment and vanity) and the complete absence of desire. Since he was born a Hindu and his followers were Hindu, he spoke to them in ways that related to the sacred Hindu texts. He held up the ancient ideal of the priest, created by the Vedic culture before the Brahmins, and challenged them to uphold its standards. He did not succeed in this lofty aim.
Christianity has become one of the more external and outwardly directed religions in the world today. Conflicting belief systems in Christian denominations have often usurped the great Master Jesus' message. There can be no doubt that Jesus understood love to be the true essence of soul and the center of genuine religion. All Jesus' teachings are based on the principle of sacrifice. Realizing the dual nature of humans, he also recognized the soul and spiritual consciousness within and how the human consciousness shields, perverts, and dims the light of soul.
The Christianity we know today is a moralistic teaching. The Christina religion was not given to the world by Jesus, but by Paul. Paul transformed Jesus' original message of spiritual self-sacrifice into the Christianity that depicts Jesus as the savior who sacrificed himself on the cross. Sadly, Jesus' message was not really understood by his own disciples, let alone the spiritually uneducated masses. Jesus fully realized that heaven is here and now, and he expected several of his closest disciples to make the effort to achieve the awakening of the spiritual consciousness in their lifetimes.
Muhammad, the founder of Islam, was born in Mecca in about 571 A.D. At the time of his birth, Arabia was in disarray, plagued by religious wars and fighting between rival factions and clans. In his 20's or 30's, he left his home and wife and wandered the vast desert for 15 years where, we are told, he was visited by an angel who told him, Rise, thou art the Prophet of God; go forth and cry in the name of the Lord.
Muhammad was loved and respected in his homeland as a wise, gentle, trustworthy man; he was also illiterate, untrained, and filled with self-doubt about his mission. After he returned from the desert, Khadija, his wife, helped convince him to follow his calling. Several of his close relatives became his disciples, after three years, his disciples numbered thirty.
Muhammad died in 632 A.D.. His favorite disciple, Abu Bekr, then became the head of Islam. Every religion comes into the world for a particular purpose. Islam was born at a time of chaos and degeneracy, an era of superstition, lust, and greed, when many gods were worshipped, and Might Made Right. The strict religious codes and disciplines of Islam brought order and stability, while belief in a single god brought a direct, relatively simple, clear-cut theology to a people who needed it.
Muhammad taught that knowledge was all important; the Koran states: The ink of the scholar is more valuable than the blood of the martyr. This important statement may seem unexpected. Many have fought and died for Islam-as have followers for most major religions. Muhammad believed the study of science, the arts, and mathematics was paramount because it glorified God and led the individual to finer discrimination in determining one's spiritual duty.
In surveying religions, we should remember that religions and metaphysical systems of belief suffer from misinterpretation following the death of their founders. Without the presence of a living Teacher, the tenets of any religious or spiritual movement begin to degenerate.
So, you decide, what am I. #1? #2? #3? #4? Or none of the above?
Tis an interesting phenomena, and anyone with a computer an elementary programming and math skills could write a program to examine the behavoir of simple voting networks. The original study I read talked about schools of fish. As soon as some threshold number of fish have turned a certail direction, the entire school turns. Apparently a useful trait to avoid being eaten. In physics we would consider this to be a phase change.
I was waiting for revere to spring the punch line, that after a critical number of people become agnostic, whammo it will be curtains for religion. I don't think humans are nearly that simple, and a lot of people seem to enjoy the role of being at odds with popular opinion -so a think such a phase change would more likely be a rapid
but limited in magnitude decline of belief. Perhaps western Europe is near that level today. The US is stubbornly quite far from it.
Lea's post contains some very interesting observations. Of course most (>90%) of sciblogs readers will consider the love as divine type thing to be a delusion. I hope they can still understand the rest of his post. The avatar theory of religion is an important organizer for the study of different religions. In most an avatar, is some person who has been given the true message -in some religions he is a physical manifestations, in others merely someone who was choosen to receive the message. In any case over time the message gets garbled and misunderstood, then it is time for god to choose another avatar.
If a religion has too many avatars, then lots of false avatars are likely to appear, so most successful religions only allow one per age. In any case with the concept we can view religious disputes to be disagreements about who was the last avatar, and what his message was.
In any case readers can look up avatar on wikipedia, it makes an interesting read.
"To model the evolution of opinions, physicists Renaud Lambiotte and Marcel Ausloos of the University of Liege in Belgium, and Janus Hoylst of the Warsaw University of Technology in Poland"
Janusz Holyst.