Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "Enlightenment and the Righteous Mind | Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt | EP 198" video.

"“The Moral Law isn't any one instinct or any set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts. (...) The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There's not one of them which won't make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it isn't. If you leave out justice you'll find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials 'for the sake of humanity,' and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.”" - CS Lewis
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"Thinking of evil as focused within, is much better than thinking of evil as focused without." From Christian liturgy: "I have sinned against God in thought, word, and deed" -- atheists complain about God holding your thoughts against you, but there are good reasons for focusing on within rather than without. (Also, it's the place where you want to win the struggle, before it spills out into the world.)
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"People who aren't raised in the Christian tradition reject the parable of the snake in the garden" I dunno about that -- Professor Peterson, when you were on that lecture tour, how open were your audiences to that story? Pinker, you might want to revisit some of your assumptions here.
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"The greatest bloodbaths of history were moralistic crusades." Haven't read much about the Mongols, I suppose. They were bloodier than Christians ever were. Rational Atheists, on the other hand, were at least 10x more deadly than the Mongols...
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"Christianity pushes utopia into the ever-receding future. Does this help forestall the tendency of utopian thinking to commit atrocities in the name of the imminent eschaton?" Excellent point.
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@julesjacobs1 As far as I can tell, the Mongols conquered because they could. Sometimes, motivations really are that simple.
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@julesjacobs1 I'm afraid I don't have proof of that particular negative, just a sense (after paying bit of attention to the subject) that they didn't have a fixed moralistic objective. The ever-ironic moral of Peace, maybe? Bringing good things back to Mongolia? Genghis may have believed that everything under the sky was his, although he was somewhat famous for not pushing his religion (aside from the precept, "Don't ever hurt a Mongol. Seriously, just don't") on the people he conquered. And I'm not sure they were all that unique. The conquests of Tamarlane, the Imperial Japanese, the Imperial Chinese, the conquests of Julius Caesar and other Romans, the Greeks, the Persians, the Zulus... the farther back you go in time, and the farther from Europe you go, the less justification they seem to have had (or thought they needed). Almost makes you wonder whether a moral justification for everything, even conquest, is something attributable to Christianity, too.
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"Much of the world does not believe in a deity" The number of Christians in China is 30 million and climbing, despite massive government tyranny against it. =)
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@Castle3179 Especially the destructive part. The archetypical righteous man, Abraham, is one who actually argues with God for the preservation of what might be good, in the cities of the evildoers. Jonah, on the other hand, is rebuked for being enthusiastic about their destruction.
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Pinker doesn't understand Christianity in the slightest. He would do well to spend some time reading half a dozen of CS Lewis' works. Until he understands it, he probably shouldn't talk about it.
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@julesjacobs1 So, "Don't ever hurt a Mongol. Seriously, just don't" stands up, then?
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@BUSeixas11 Marxist was a rationalist Enlightenment thinker, and also an atheist. Saying he was not, is a semantic game unworthy of someone calling themselves rational.
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"Availability machine" Kind of like how the wars of religion clustered around the decades of living memory, for Enlightenment thinkers. I see. Also, kind of like how what we can measure has gotten better, at the expense of things we can't measure.
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"Progress has happened in the past, why should it stop now?" I don't know. What does the evidence say, on any given subject?
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"People are paying attention to crummy moral systems, which leaves open the possibility of a not-so-crummy moral system." Careful, you're wandering a bit closer to St. Anselm's proof of God's existence, than I expect you'd like to.
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@lynncarter4964 Considering the opposition, they're doing pretty well. And as I said, the number is growing fairly rapidly.
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"Everything got weird, right after 2012." So many people saying this. What in the world kicked off, at that time?
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"When John F. Kennedy got people to join the Peace Corps" Huh. Did he read Kipling's "Take up the White Man's Burden" to them? It's pretty much the same pitch. (The Chinese Burden, on the other hand, rejects "the ports ye shall not enter, the roads ye shall not tread" and puts in debt traps so they'll own them in the end.)
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