There’s the atheist joke that “Christians are announcing that without belief in Hell, they would be horrible people” or something to that effect.

Sad thing is that there indeed is truth to it, and it has consequences. As much as I dislike organized religion and on practical level, would align with scientific, materialist worldview, I do think that without straight forward “be good or be punished” paradigm, a lot of people will be exactly the kind of self-centered assholes we currently see in positions of power in the world.

Back in the day, rich people would fund hospitals and schools in hopes of getting to heaven. These days why bother, religion is mostly a cultural artifact to occasionally pay some lipservice to, while one fully believes that their material possessions are all they got, and even their lowest possible pleasures should be attended to with whatever resource they can spare. Scientific materialism helped get rid of a lot of assbackwards reasoning but with cold hard logic, came the ease of reducing everything to a number. Money, usually. Worth. Nothing else matters. You can’t put a number on love, care, kindness, or something as ephemeral as “goodness” - an ever moving target which is only ever defined by the person using the word, with luck at least slightly informed by (pro-)social contracts. Indeed most people would specifically reject any attempt to put a number on those qualities as it would run counter to their virtuous nature. Which just makes it easier for those with power to devalue those qualities entirely, and with power, build structures that lets them indefinitely get away with it.

  • Naz@sh.itjust.works
    10·
    3 days ago

    Weird; I came pre-installed with this weird thing that tells me if what I’m doing is right or wrong, absent of cultural norms.

    The joke here is that it doesn’t exist in everyone, we just presume it does.

    The assumption of pre-existing universal empathy turns out to be a fatal flaw for a collective, even when the absent rate of empathy is small (<3% of the population).

    My grandmother, bless her soul, grew up on a farm and her solution to psychopathic tendencies in society is to “tie a bag of potatoes or stones to them and drop them in a river”.

    I said: “Grandma, what about rehabilitation?” She didn’t exactly understand the word completely but she said: “After killing six people and two children, the river does it.”

    And you know what? Even then, capital punishment still feels wrong.

      • Naz@sh.itjust.works
        8·
        3 days ago

        https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8374040/

        Abstract:

        The meta-analytical results obtained allow us to estimate the prevalence rate of psychopathy in the general adult population at 4.5%. That being said, this rate varies depending on the participants’ sex (higher in males), the type of sample from the general population (higher in samples from organizations than in community samples or university students), and the type of instrument used to define psychopathy. In fact, using the PCL-R, which is currently considered the “gold standard” for the assessment and definition of psychopathy, the prevalence is only 1.2%.

        So the scientific estimate is between 1.2% (strictest criteria) and 4.5% (loosest criteria).

        4.5+1.2÷2 = 2.85%, which is close enough of an estimate to use in casual conversation (roughly 3%).