This discussion is fascinating, anthropologically speaking. Some observations:
* Many commenters seem to be holding to this weird idea that if you don't believe God will smite you, you will not be able to behave responsibly, give your word in a trustworthy manner, etc. If there's not a supernatural enforcer then there are no consequences to lying/breaking your oath. Interestingly, it looks to me that even atheists are endorsing this false idea here!
* An understanding of symbolism and its nuances is also lacking. Perhaps this isn't a surprise, as Enlightenment thinking and literalist Protestant thought have largely erased cultural understanding of symbolism. Thus we have confusion in two ways: many folks swear on the Bible out of convention or lack of critical thought, rather than belief, but will rationalize if pressed, and then folks who are very thoughtful may choose the Bible (looking "normal") or something else (looking "different"). The document chosen, if there is a conscious choice made, symbolizes something about their approach to the ceremony and the position. It is not necessarily a magical choice. (A magical approach takes symbolism a step further and imbues the symbolic object with supernatural power. Contrary to popular belief, this is not a universal approach vis a vis the Bible. Remember that the Christian church and Christian faith and practice existed before the Bible was written, easy to forget in a "sola scriptura" cultural milieu!)
* Amusingly, some really Bible-believing folks will not swear, on a Bible or on anything else, due to Matthew 5:34-37. This intellectual consistency is lost of course when we reduce swearing on the Bible to either convention or magic.
Human rituals cannot be usefully be interpreted as legal acts or as declarations of intellectual belief in a set of propositions. They are symbols. The intellectual incoherency of commonly swearing on a book that says not to swear alone ought to tip you off. I sympathize, folks! I grew up quite literal-minded and so have had quite a struggle coming to terms with the Protestantism I grew up with. Learning the intellectual history of thought and religion and understanding the ways different cultures engage with the divine/supernatural/morality has been very helpful -- and some of that learning must be experiential. Taking part in physical rituals taps into a very different part of the human experience than reading philosophy.
The Princess Alice experiments imply superstition would have a practical role in a society where (lacking CCTV and other modern technology to supervise) it's important that people do what they're supposed to without actual oversight:
Children in that study are markedly less likely to "cheat" in a task if they believe they are being supervised. This can happen because an actual adult supervises them, or because they believe (as they were told) that an invisible person "Princess Alice" is supervising them.
Sceptical children confirmed Princess Alice wasn't real behaviourally, that is, they'd verify that she just doesn't exist by passing their hand through the space supposedly occupied by Alice, having done so they would cheat at the same rate as unsupervised children. If you remove those children from the results, Alice and an actual supervising adult are equally effective in deterring cheating.
The fact that we can't get people to do what they are supposed to do without threat of retaliation is really sad.
Anecdata, I found that religious or otherwise superstitious people have a more flexible morality that allows them to justify objectively bad behaviour, such as cheating.
Frankly, if all it takes is to ask for forgiveness from an eternal being is enough to guarantee eternal reward, justifying bad behaviour in the present is trivial.
> If there's not a supernatural enforcer then there are no consequences to lying/breaking your oath. Interestingly, it looks to me that even atheists are endorsing this false idea here!
Most Christian theology holds that God is the present age is not going smite people for breaking such oaths. I think you are right to frame this ritually not theologically.
I would argue that purpose of swearing on an object is that it demonstrates that the oath is being made seriously, as an oath. Lying and breaking minor promises is socially acceptable in almost all human societies, and in some circumstances it is more socially acceptable to lie than be truthful. An oath is a different sort of object. An oath is something which is not socially acceptable to break, and thus swearing on an object which is deeply important to the oath taker ritually emphasizes this fact both to the oath taker themselves and to society at large.
A modernist view of rituals is that they create Schelling fences[0]. You agree to X, everyone knows you agreed to X, you know that you agreed to X, and you know that everyone knows that you agreed to X. Thus, if you do !X, you know that you have broken an important oath and everyone knows that you have broken an important oath. There is a clear line and there are mutually reenforcing internal and external pressures not to cross that line. Furthermore, if someone tells you to d !X, you have an ironclad reason to tell them no and it is much harder for them to take the rejection personally since it is personal. You can point to a public pre-commited attestation to never do !X.
> Most Christian theology holds that God is the present age is not going smite people for breaking such oaths.
Or to put it another way. Since it is very obvious that people routinely break oaths, Modern Christians have come up with the rationalization that God chooses not to smite them, rather than accept the more likely explanation that God can't smite them for the same reason Superman couldn't prevent the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack.
While I am not religious myself, it is useful to actually learn about something before mocking it. Beyond the self evident reason for this, a fun is you might be surprised where else it shows up. In Christianity, mankind is taken as inherently sinful (even from the point of birth - hence baby baptismals) and is unable to avoid sinning. The path to 'salvation' is to accept ones own nature as a sinner and inability to not sin, repent for those sins committed, and essentially dedicate oneself to trying to live a life of 'antisinning', in spite of the impossibility of ever truly achieving such.
If the phrasing of 'antisinning' wasn't enough of a tell, you might notice this fits Progressive antiracist rhetoric literally perfectly. And it's not a coincidence. The man who wrote "How to Be an Antiracist" (which is undoubtedly the most influential modern text on such topics) not only spent most of his early education in Christian schools, but is also the son of two Christian ministers. Antiracist rhetoric is literally Christian original sin repackaged with racism replacing sinning. Design patterns show up across all "industries."
People attempting to improve themselves and the world must face the fact that
improvement necessarily requires accepting that one is imperfect, since if one was perfect one could not improve.
> Design patterns show up across all "industries."
Strong agree, and I would argue that even if antiracism philosophy did not come from christianity it would likely arrive at a similar point due to the nature of the problem. Any sort of hill climbing algorithm that does not assume original sin is very unlikely to be effective.
I do think it is worth focusing on what one is doing right as well as what one is doing wrong. Turning a bad behavior (-1) into a good behavior (+1) is a 2 point improvement, whereas just improving a good behavior (+1) is only an increase of 1. However it is often easier psychologically to improve what you do well then to face your weaknesses and biases.
> Modern Christians have come up with the rationalization that God chooses not to smite them, rather than accept the more likely explanation that God can't smite them for the same reason Superman couldn't prevent the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack.
That is too cynical for my taste. People observe the world around them. They see that sometimes people prosper when they do evil. A lot of theology is an attempt to understand why this is the case. Perhaps the Gods fickle? Perhaps there are no Gods? Perhaps the Gods want to preserve human agency?
Any religion that makes it a core tenant of the faith that God will prevent or punish X, and a human being is capable of doing X, will have dilemma when a human being do X and not be punished. So we have a survivorship bias in favor of religions that can bend without breaking. That religion, and human culture in general, is not falsifiable does not mean it is necessarily wrong anymore than ethics not being a science.
> God can't smite them for the same reason Superman couldn't prevent the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack
Because he had traveled to deep space and was busy facing off with Imperiex-Prime, an entity capable of destroying not just the Earth (though that was part of his plan) but large portions of the universe itself?
I'd forgotten just how mediocre the Man of Steel is. This is why my favourite character is Winter Moran. Less caring about humans ("They're only people") and more teleportation :)
> Many commenters seem to be holding to this weird idea that if you don't believe God will smite you, you will not be able to behave responsibly
If anyone actually believed that a god would smite them, or in hell or any of that stuff, they would behave very differently. It's stupidly easy to find "Christians" who completely disregard any teachings of Jesus. It's stupidly easy to find Muslims who drink alcohol, including (or perhaps mainly) those from Muslim countries. It's stupidly easy to find Jews who flagrantly break the rules the second someone discovers the smallest loophole.
I see only two possibilities: either they live every day in conflict knowing what they are doing is wrong but they don't have the will to make the necessary changes, or they simply don't believe. I am sure there are many in the former category (I was a carnivore for many years but knew I needed to stop so I know it's possible), but I believe most are in the latter.
Humans are just the total sum of their actions. Actions beget being and so rituals beget a practiced being. Humans practice rituals every day without even thinking about it. Ever sat in your chair and immediately wanted a cold one?
What you describe sounds more like a habit to me. But even if it were a ritual —something (re-)enacted to imbue meaning to a moment— it's of a different quality than swearing in the head job of an organization that aims to bring humanity to the stars.
There is a difference between what we consider to be the sacred and the profane. Rituals fall into either of these categories as well.
There are rituals with all sorts of meaning, individually and collectively. But if it can work individually then it can certainly work negatively too, such as with addictions. Many habits are rituals with no meaning, which is one of the reasons why people get depressed.
We’re going to have to disagree. Habits are merely unformalized rituals. If you examine your day-to-day you may find many rituals you do to prepare your self for the coming moment. Adjusting your volume on your music before a coding session. I obviously don’t know you, but a lot of people like to prepare snacks before watching Youtube. There are a lot of things we think of as habit, but we prepared them literally like a ritual.
Unformalized ritual is an oxymoron. None of those examples are rituals. I mean if you want to call them rituals, go right ahead, but you're using a different definition of the word than everybody else, and the definition you are using is the one everyone else uses for habit.
Ritual does not mean "thing you prepare to do." No one is arguing that rituals are not done regularly, but those specific sorts of things you are describing are not rituals.
A crucial aspect of ritual is preparation. I prepare to drive by adjusting all of my mirrors. A ritual is more than just a habit, it is a preparation for a specific habit. Again, I guarantee you do some kind of ritual in your day-to-day that, once understood, can be formalized for you.
I cannot know what that ritual looks like for you. But do you wanna know how I know you have one? Because I read a lot of old books that told me I had one too. How did someone 1500 years ago who couldn’t have even imagined me know these things about me and be right about them?
> If there's not a supernatural enforcer then there are no consequences to lying/breaking your oath. Interestingly, it looks to me that even atheists are endorsing this false idea here!
> many folks swear on the Bible out of convention or lack of critical thought, rather than belief, but will rationalize if pressed
You have contradicted yourself here. When someone asks why you swore on the Bible, you tell them the surrounding context, which is a story. You don't need to believe a story to appreciate it, or to continue its tradition. That's what symbolism is all about.
> Amusingly, some really Bible-believing folks will not swear, on a Bible or on anything else, due to Matthew 5:34-37. This intellectual consistency is lost of course when we reduce swearing on the Bible to either convention or magic.
The Bible is infamous for being logically inconsistent. It contradicts itself at every turn.
The result is not that humans are unable to use it to back their opinions! Quite the opposite: nearly any arbitrary opinion can be found to have biblical support.
Of course, religious belief is based on the circular conclusion that arbitrary morals come from The Bible itself, and not from the people reading it. That belief doesn't break the system. Instead, humans simply live with the conflicted ambiguity: it's called "cognitive dissonance".
This is the power of natural language at work: ambiguity. It allows us to hear, express, and manipulate ideas that are not logically sound. Symbols can be explicit and literal, or implicit and symbolic.
Just like GPT is claimed to have "features" and "limitations", the ambiguity of language is a double edged sword. The good news <insert bible joke here> is that we know about it. We are able to objectively recognize the difference between explicit definition and inference. We are able to recognize logical fallacies and their implications. We are able to use science and reason to literally reach new horizons.
And that is why I can see someone "swear on" this book, and feel that I would do the same. It's a beautiful symbol, and a thought-provoking response to a tradition that I, like you, am generally quick to criticize.
>> Amusingly, some really Bible-believing folks will not swear, on a Bible or on anything else, due to Matthew 5:34-37. This intellectual consistency is lost of course when we reduce swearing on the Bible to either convention or magic.
> The Bible is infamous for being logically inconsistent. It contradicts itself at every turn.
If Jesus says 'do not swear an oath at all' (Matthew 5:34), and some president or official has been swearing on the Bible since 1789 – as in the case of The United States – what does that have to do with Jesus being inconsistent? The contradictions come when people read His word and decide not to follow it!
(And I have done this many times myself in many other ways, sadly, and therefore grateful to Jesus for saving 'a wretch like me').
> what does that have to do with Jesus being inconsistent?
The reality that The Bible is logically inconsistent provides opportunity for biblical followers to be themselves logically inconsistent.
If The Bible were logically consistent, then that opportunity would not be present; and biblical followers would share a homogenous set of moral ideology.
Christianity is well known for having many different denominations, each with their own take on biblical morality and dogma.
I come from a country where the majority of people count themselves as non religious. As atheism became a mainstream opinion in the 1980s a "solemn pledge" was introduced into the Constitution as an alternative to swearing on the Bible.
Keeping Christianity around as some hollow ritual handed down by our ancestors seems to me much more insulting to true believers.
* Many commenters seem to be holding to this weird idea that if you don't believe God will smite you, you will not be able to behave responsibly, give your word in a trustworthy manner, etc. If there's not a supernatural enforcer then there are no consequences to lying/breaking your oath. Interestingly, it looks to me that even atheists are endorsing this false idea here!
* An understanding of symbolism and its nuances is also lacking. Perhaps this isn't a surprise, as Enlightenment thinking and literalist Protestant thought have largely erased cultural understanding of symbolism. Thus we have confusion in two ways: many folks swear on the Bible out of convention or lack of critical thought, rather than belief, but will rationalize if pressed, and then folks who are very thoughtful may choose the Bible (looking "normal") or something else (looking "different"). The document chosen, if there is a conscious choice made, symbolizes something about their approach to the ceremony and the position. It is not necessarily a magical choice. (A magical approach takes symbolism a step further and imbues the symbolic object with supernatural power. Contrary to popular belief, this is not a universal approach vis a vis the Bible. Remember that the Christian church and Christian faith and practice existed before the Bible was written, easy to forget in a "sola scriptura" cultural milieu!)
* Amusingly, some really Bible-believing folks will not swear, on a Bible or on anything else, due to Matthew 5:34-37. This intellectual consistency is lost of course when we reduce swearing on the Bible to either convention or magic.
Human rituals cannot be usefully be interpreted as legal acts or as declarations of intellectual belief in a set of propositions. They are symbols. The intellectual incoherency of commonly swearing on a book that says not to swear alone ought to tip you off. I sympathize, folks! I grew up quite literal-minded and so have had quite a struggle coming to terms with the Protestantism I grew up with. Learning the intellectual history of thought and religion and understanding the ways different cultures engage with the divine/supernatural/morality has been very helpful -- and some of that learning must be experiential. Taking part in physical rituals taps into a very different part of the human experience than reading philosophy.