Very insightful! Thanks for sharing this.

I'll definitely have to check that out later! Looks interesting for sure

Extremely interesting

Excellent share. Thank you!

I can use what I sold over there as an example. Sold corporate financial analytics software...

In the U.S. you're almost always selling bottom line. "This software will make your employees get work done faster so you save money". Over there you're much better off with "this product will reduce human error, making your results better". And over there you never say that it can replace employees. You say that it gives employees a tool to make them better at their job...

I had one particular company that had people inputting thousands upon thousands of blocks of financial data by hand. A software that they already had could have automated it, so without them even needing to pay anything I was like "in 10 minutes we can have your software set up to draw data automatically and input it from place A to place B, so that you won't have to pay people hundreds of man hours in salary to do it". And their response was basically "we can't do that. Inputting that data is someone's job, and to take it from them would dishonor both us and them". Where obviously pretty much anywhere in the West the response would be "hell yeah, sign me up"...

And they are really really focused on tradition. Like every company I worked with over there (and this was just like 3-4 years ago) would fax documents to the front desk at my hotel to get them to me instead of emailing. Because fax is what they've always done...

It takes a lot of getting used to, but they are so religious with it that once you are used to it you can count on expected responses almost 100% of the time .

Interesting. I saw a different mode that proposed cultures of honor were typically more associated with pastoral nomadism, which would be more like a desert culture in your metaphor.

It sounds like environmental determinism with a fresh coat of paint tbh

I wonder if this explains why my foreign colleague had no honor.

Thanks for sharing, I didn't know that before. My family members are from different countries having different culture background, I tried to understand their behavior and things they taught me, sometimes they were totally different.

I'll have you know this is free range organic contempt with fair trade loathing. And occasionally bespoke disgust.

Hoo, haven't had someone step into the ring and just openly attack atheism in quite a while.

>I don't get militant atheism.

I'd prefer dissenting rather than militant. I'm not out to kill or conquer you, but I certainly disagree and I'm up for debating it. But it comes from dealing with theists.

>It's not as if there isn't a crazy conundrum no matter what you believe.

Except it's NOT crazy if the rules are consistent and jive with everything else. From all the other rules, to everything we see, to everything everyone else has ever experienced. ESPECIALLY if it's useful. A rational belief isn't crazy, that's a false equivalence trying to drag me down to your level. And what IS "crazy" anyway? It's when you can't understand someone's irrational reasoning, and that happens very quickly when they believe in things that can't both be true at the same time.

>E.g. it's about equally crazy to believe the universe has lasted forever,

Sure. Crazy. Especially when you look at how entropy behaves. We've observed this all over the place and it's fundamental in thermodynamics, your refrigerator, all the power plants you benefit from in your daily life.

>that it was created from nothing,

AND HERE IT IS. The tired regurgitated lie. This is absolutely NOT what the big bang theory says. But it's what the christian propaganda has spread about the globe in an effort to poison people's brains. Want to know why I dissent? It's the LIES. Lie to me and I just double down on my distrust and skepticism. Where there's a propaganda campaign organized against a particular belief I re-question everything I've ever heard about it and try to figure out where the lies end and the truth starts.

But yes. The genesis of energy would be VERY crazy considering what the big bang theory tells us, and the observable iron-clad rule of conservation of energy. People are worked very hard for millennia to violate it and failed.

>that a god existed forever, or that a god was created from nothing.

Yes, both very crazy. No observable evidence what so ever. Unless you're being poetical or playing some word games.

You know what isn't crazy? SCIENCE. There's plenty of bits which we don't know the complete truth yet. The difference between how much light we see (and how we think galaxies form) and how much gravity we feel and how fast stuff is spinning around the milky way. But rather than put on some bravado con-man bluff, we can acknowledge that we don't know, and hunt down an answer. All our ideas about how all this stuff works aren't going to be perfect, but if we repeatedly get less wrong than before, we'll approach the truth FAR better and faster than any religion ever will.

>Additionally, the majority of religious belief, seen through the lens of atheism, is the formalization of conventional wisdom by people who lived out their entire lives centuries ago.

That I'll agree with. Religion is important to study if you want to know anything about anthropology. Before we knew better it was a strong driving force in a lot of law, medicine, economics... just a whole lot. And it's important from a sociological angle to know how and why pockets of a population are going to be irrational. Where the conventional wisdom is quite foolish, like where they flagellate themselves, you'll find a lot of irrational behavior.

>[religions enforce] lifestyles in favor of one that promises stabler, more long-term happiness

Except, you know, the ones that REJECT hedonism. Which is many of them. Most religions are a pile of rules that helped and supported whoever was in power. If telling people they would be happy in the afterlife let them work harder and behave while they were alive, that was a message the rulers could get behind. What helps the nation really does have a lot of overlap with helping the people within the nation. And any nation with a religion built around self-destructive actions tend to, you know, self-destruct on a larger scale.

And this is a very important bit. Where they were once useful tools and steering people into behaviors that helped the group, the religions abide by evolutionary processes themselves just as much as species do. The self-destructive ones die out, the ones that don't spread themselves die out, the ones that conquer and infect others survive. The evolutionary process has left us only with the old-time religions that SERVE TO SELF PERPETUATE THEMSELVES. Now a days, religions are more about helping themselves rather than the people within the group.

Coincidentally, old-time religions are dying out because they're incompatible with the current modern society. The only survivors will be the ones that don't butt heads with rational thought and flee off to the god of the gaps or refine themselves strictly to moral conundrums. (Game theory and sociology are coming for you too).

>Religions are all about human nature,

Religions are all about everything. You can't just cherry pick the bits that talk about psychology. If you're okay with tossing out the garbage bits like genesis, any depiction of the super-natural like walking on water, virgin birth, coming back from the dead, reincarnation, multiplying fish, burning oil without consumption, everything the church did to Galileo and Turing, and on and on and on... oh and what the church said about tectonic plates. Even that was controversial back in the day. It's like a constant ball and chain holding us back. But if you're okay with just ditching all claims made by all the religions that aren't strictly psychological or sociological, then all the more power to you. It's a step in the right direction.

I wanted to toss in the crusades, Muhammad's pedophilia, the treatment of women, everything most of them say about homosexuality, whatever nonsense was going through those guys' heads on 9/11/2001.... but that IS what religion suggests we do as far as "human nature" goes. I dissent.

>No one will be passing on your negativity generation to generation

My children are free to believe what they want, but so far when it comes up in conversation they're not believers. What I'm really pushing onto them, and this isn't up to them, is rationality.

> know-it-alls

This really isn't the insult you think it is. I strive to know all I can. What exactly is wrong with that and why would you treat knowledge as negative? That, I think, is the most telling thing about your entire rant.

EDIT: Oh, a snarky late update while saying you're too lazy to read anything?

>I'm sorry if your day-to-day thinking is dedicated solely to simplifying everything that makes other people human. You'll likely find, once you age beyond 18-25, that you were mistaken here. It happens to all sorts of people, and it's generally social/life inexperience that promotes such swift simplifications in regards to everything and every argument and every conflict. I'd bet you ignore other tough problems like war. "It's so simple just stop killing others and be fair." Thanks, genius, we know. There happens to be more present than that.

Simplifying everything? Yes. The simplest explanation that jives with everything else is the best explanation.

Beyond 25? I'm hitting 40. Geeze, another attempted low-blow swing and a miss. You're really not good at this.

War? ...War sucks. You know what REALLY sucks? All the religious war that was fought over absolute bullshit reasons. But you want a real solution to war? Nukes and trade. The threat of nuclear retribution has kept the gits at the top from invading each other and trade has stopped them from attacking to their own detriment. Violate those rules and suffer, as Russia is showing us. (And, sadly, that Ukraine really should have kept the nukes)