Mattel about to launch first Barbie that wears a hijab

boing
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You’ve made at least five provably, demonstrably false statements in the post I’m replying to. You apparently believe these falsehoods; what would it take to change your mind?

I was thinking of Viruses of the Mind, and the mathematical models he did comparing spread of religion with propagation of disease vectors. Nightingale showed that tight proximity of humans increases the probability of illnesses spreading from one person to another, Dawkins showed that memes spread the same way, including religious memes. Families are generally in tight proximity to their children, who aren’t very hygienic (mentally or physically) by nature.

However, only one religion would exist if parenthood was the only vector, and that religion would presumably be valid. Think about it. :slight_smile: New religions can’t be born if they only spread through indoctrination of children.

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Evidence. Please list the falsehoods and evidence refuting them. I’m prepared to change my mind.

It’s not the only vector. Religions also market themselves pretty well. The ceremony and solemnity of it all, combined with an offer of answers can be might appealing. I’m not quite following how you get from the existence a single religion to presuming that the religion is valid (in the sense that the truth of the beliefs is backed by evidence). Historically, religions branch to form new religions. That model works pretty well with parent-children faith correlation as a main idea. A branching might be triggered by a king’s desire to get divorced, for example.

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Based on your previous tactics I’d be surprised if that were true.

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Here ya go, off the top of my head.

  1. To the best of our knowledge, religion pre-dates law, and historically the vast majority of human societies have leveraged existing religious beliefs to create their legal codes. Western legal systems all owe debts to Lycurgus, who claimed to have received law from a divine Oracle, and the US legal system has always explicitly invoked religion (for example, by swearing on Bibles). The legal codes of the earliest civilizations we know were justified by religion, and there are no legal codes today that do not derive from past codes that were driven by religious beliefs.

  2. You will not necessarily be tried in court if you commit murder. Laws are like spiders’ webs; the mighty ignore them, the least slip between the strands, only the middle-sized are trapped (shout out to Anacharis of Tyre’s smackdown of Solon the Lawgiver).

  3. Many religions do not feature the things you’ve implicitly or explicitly claimed are features of religion. Supreme beings, afterlifes, miracles and Hells are not features of Religion. They are restricted to particular religions. Of all those, my own faith only recognizes the existence of God - and Jains, for one example, don’t recognize a supreme being.

  4. As you know if you’re seen The Matrix, soldier of fortune Rene Descartes proved that all epistemologies are faith-based; you cannot know anything other than the raw fact that you yourself exist, as all your senses can easily be deceived. Believing your senses is a leap of pure faith. You have zero real evidence, yet you believe in the fantastical world of quarks and atoms, because you have been indoctrinated with a faith in these things.

  5. In my capacity as a minister and by virtue of much study, I am a little bit of a religious scholar. I prefer not to argue from premises that are, “by definition, one of faith and without challenge”. As you can see here, I hope! I prefer reason and logic, which I can easily use to prove the existence of my God and the validity of my beliefs.

I think Dawkins has specifically exempted people with my religious belief system from his ire on several occasions, by the way. He’s said my beliefs are unnecessary but not evil and not provably false.

You can look all these things up; google is your friend!

Part of my religion is a belief that the physical world is real and can be known (this is a belief you appear to share). If physical reality disproves any of my beliefs, then I will change my beliefs. This is necessitated by my religion, which I believe is far less faith-based than atheism or scientism (to give two examples).

Well, then no problem. I thought you were saying it was, I apologize for the misunderstanding.

Anyway, if religions only spread through parental indoctrination, then who indoctrinated the first parent? It would have to be some kind of creator father-god or mother-god, wouldn’t it? And therefore that religion would be true.

Really religions mostly spread through social and economic channels, just like disease. But (again like disease) they get a lot of help from the four horsemen of War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death. Unenlightened people fear Death in particular.

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My first Barbie, received the Christmas before I turned 4, was the “Solo in the Spotlight” Barbie. She was decidedly not a baby doll, she was a Fashion Doll and existed to be dressed up in fabulous outfits that your mother and aunts made for you, and you learned to make later.

It does not surprise me at all that she was modeled on an exaggerated model of an ideal female form. Call girl or a fashion model, both are looks that women are culturally conditioned to believe that we should look like, whether that is attainable or not. Many of us realize we have bodies that are shaped differently, and will never look like that, and hope that the fashion for thinner/thicker/bustier/flat-chested/hourglasses/name-your-era-&-shape-preference that we fit into will come back in style while we’re young enough to appreciate it. And fashion is what it’s all about.

One more comment: it’s great that nowadays it’s easier for kids interested in fashion dolls to walk down an aisle in the toy store and see dolls that look like themselves, even if it’s a dream idealized version of themselves, whatever skin tone, whatever eye set, whatever style of dress.

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I missed it - which one is that?

Though really, Dawkins is a dick.

Good example is Indonesia adopting Islam through trade.

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This must have been years before meeting Chewbacca and winning the Millennium Falcon.

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I’m a pantheist, essential monist variety, although I don’t deny agency like Twain or Spinoza. Dawkins, I seem to recall, refers to people like me as believing in “a vague nature deity” or something similarly dismissive, and his condemnation of religions doesn’t extend to us. He just thinks we’re harmless nutters, basically, wasting our time.

I kind of enjoy his takedowns of the more aggressive fundies from the desert monotheisms, but it might be necessary to be a bit of a dick for that.

I also like the way he tries to be true to the skepticism that good science requires, even when it’s to his disadvantage. Dawkins is the kind of atheist who says “there’s probably no god, and we shouldn’t act like there is one” - which means he’s not making a faith based argument, he’s going for the tougher sell.

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The origins of our laws and societal norms is not what I was referring to. The history is what it is. What I’m saying is that they currently do not depend on our following a religion (at least where I live). They have become deonstrably separate from faith.

You’re right of course, there are plenty of exceptions, but you are deliberately missing my point. We are (more or less) bound by laws that do not, today depend on faith or religion. They are very real and act keep our societies civilised.

The religions followed by the vast majority of the religious of the world feature some, or even all these things. Jainism is an outlier.

It is a false equivalence to place science and religion in the same context as you have done. The science of quarks and atoms is highly successful, but like all science, subject to challenge and if a better explanation comes along, the existing theories will fall away. By contrast, I can conceive of no physical evidence that would be guaranteed to convince a religious person that their god did not exist.

So off you go the. Let’s see it.

I have no “ire” in general with respect to religious people. It is the beliefs themselves that I find ridiculous. It is not ridiculous that many people cling to them. They are beliefs inculcated by people of authority such as parents and clergy. Those beliefs are planted in impressionable and vulnerable minds. Without these mechanisms there would be (virtually) no religion.

Proving many of the beliefs to be false can be tricky. I’m not sure that something like belief in heaven or in life after death in the way that religious hold it, can be falsified. It is the tenacity of those beliefs that is a foundation of the persistence of religion. It doesn’t make them true.

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And based on yours I’d likewise be surprised. An actual verified, statistically significant and repeatable “miracle” would change my mind about the existence of a god. Just one. What would change yours?

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There is historical precedence here… Soviet Union banning public displays of faith, eliminating it entirely from the public square. They were officially an atheist state, not a secular one.

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Does it matter? How do you know that @Israel_B hasn’t seen that proof in his own life, in a way that you haven’t? Do you believe you should be able to tell him, me, @Medievalist, or a lady in a hijab what WE should think and feel, when you haven’t lived our lives?

For myself, I’m agnostic, but I don’t find the existence of religion to be necessarily “the problem” in the world, as it were. Maybe that’s because I’m a historian and I tend to think in terms of contingency and historical context. Can religion be used as a tool of oppression? Sure. Can it be a tool of resistance and strength, even a driver for greater freedom? That’s true too.

I guess do you really think that if you could snap your fingers and all religions just stopped existing, that all of a sudden, we’d all be living in a global utopia, where we can all hold hands and get along? Or would something else crop up that functioned as a tool of social oppression?

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Yup.

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“Don’t do unto others that which is hateful to yourself” - Hillel

Maybe Dawkins likes to be belittled?

It’s the “we” part that comes off as horribly arrogant to me

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Jainism is believed to be the oldest continuously active religion in the world. Calling it “an outlier” is a No True Scotsman argument. And it’s not the only religion that doesn’t posit a supreme being, anyway.

What’s happening between us is that you’ve been indoctrinated, probably by your family, to believe that Christianity (or something similar) is exemplary of religion; that its arcane trappings and peculiarities are archetypical of religion. To make a possibly improper simile, you’re like a person who’s been raised to believe that all things that are wet are also sweet and carbonated, so when I offer you a drink of seawater it feels like an assault rather than a gift of painful knowledge.

Christianity is a “revealed truth” religion. The way those work is that a person you want to trust provides an explanation for things that seem inexplicable by revealing to you the “real truth” behind the troubling events you’ve observed, or provides a reason to put aside fears and burdens and live a richer, happier life by teaching you that surface appearances are illusory. These faiths typically posit a super-natural or meta-physical reality that transcends mere Nature and physicality.

This is not typical of religion. It happens to be a feature of some very large and powerful religions today. There have always been religions of this type, I think, but there have been religions that don’t follow the pattern all throughout history.

There is nothing mystical, supernatural, metaphysical or inexplicable in my own religious beliefs, which aren’t innovative or unusual. I thought, when I was younger, that I’d discovered the secret of the universe, and was humbled to find that others had already found the same path millions of times.

As mentioned, I am a pantheist. I believe, like many millions of other people, that God is all there is. (Why we believe this is also quite simple and straightforward, and based on science and reason). So - are you reading this? Are my words perceived by your mind? Then you exist. Therefore something exists, therefore my God (and Spinoza’s and Einstein’s and Kneeland’s and Sagan’s &etc.) exists.

You and I are not supplicants before a desert war god who delights in the smell of burning flesh. We are participants in the divine, we are the eyes of the world, our observation of reality literally shapes it. I am you and you are me and we are all together. My God undeniably exists. There is nothing that is super-natural, nothing that is meta-physical, there’s almost certainly no “afterlife” and if something actually happened, it wasn’t “miraculous”, that’s all just superstition.

Edit: Re-reading this I think I’ve expressed myself poorly, but I’m tired so it’s off to bed. Be well and prosper!

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Speaking to aspects of religions that represent the vast majority of religious people is a valid thing to do. That their are a large number of smaller different religions does not affect the validity of discussing the few that are most successful. To call Jainism an outlier is absolutely true if you plotted a histogram of religions and number of participants. The length of its history is not what I’m talking about here.

I also think it is valid to talk of the circumstances today.

I can’t follow your simile. Sorry.

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You’re extrapolating and twisting my arguments. I guess I made them poorly. I’m done here, sorry. Please do not respond.

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Ever seen Pulp Fiction? The ongoing dialogue between Jules & Vincent is a great example of why miracles aren’t so interesting to me in relation to this. How does one know for sure that what one saw was a miracle al all? There is after all so much we don’t understand and life is full of amazing coincidence and misunderstanding. If the event was repeatable it would not seem very miraculous to me anyway.

I frequently jest that it is “miraculous” or proof of the Devine that the pedestrian traffic fatality rate in Tokyo is so low since the Japanese seriously lack awareness of their surroundings but that is really just a jest.

When God parted the Sea of Reeds during the Exodus it wasn’t like in the movies. The water didn’t part until one person acted upon faith that it would do so as He had said through Moses. Others saw this but there is no text or commentary saying “and then they believed”.

I didn’t grow up religious at all. There was no talk of God in our house when I was a child. No attendance of any religious service at all ever. I grew up with a dislike for lots of what I saw as public displays of organized religion but kept my responses to “no thanks”. In my late 30s I began research on a question I’d had for years about different ideas of the nature of the relationship between mankind and the Divine. The result of a few years of studies changed my mind.

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Real people who exist, true.

How to culturally address them is a hard question, though.
There are real people who exist and who engage in various levels of toxic behaviour in the name of religion.
I would say that I consider the hijab mildly toxic (see below).

For the time being, I prefer to side with the moderate muslims against the xenophobes, but I do not subscribe to the idea that all religious conduct should be culturally “protected”.

I think freedom of religion should be compared to freedom of speech, and not to racial equality.

I’ve never been a Muslim girl, but I’ve been a Catholic boy in a mostly Catholic country who, some time between the ages of 13 and 15, became an atheist. Thankfully, there is no Catholic male equivalent to the hijab. I did not have to constantly display a symbol that said “I believe”, whose removal would have declared “I no longer believe”. I could pick my fights, choose who I reveal my religiosity, my lack of religiosity, or my in-between state of doubt to.
There were still plenty of situations that made me feel deeply uncomfortable because I was forced to declare myself one way or the other, but considering that Catholicism in Austria is relatively progressive and I was raised by a very moderate Catholic and an atheist, I had it easy.

But this is why I think traditions like the hijab are inherently toxic. And why I think a law that keeps it out of schools might be beneficial to the students. Interestingly, Iran’s mandatory hijabs also help to reduce the toxicity of the custom, as it, too, makes the hijab less meaningful as a statement of personal religious belief.

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