Skepticism and alternative medicine Translated with ChatGPT

Resume
Summary
Recently, I was confronted in my circle with proponents of alternative medicine who tried to convince me. At the time, I wasn't able to clearly express my position, let alone justify it convincingly (I was tired and quite surprised that this topic came up).
So I wrote this blog post to get back at my readers by inflicting on them an endless explanation on the subject.
Introduction
Recently, I was confronted by people around me who support alternative medicine and tried to convince me. At the time, I was not able to clearly express my position, let alone justify it convincingly (I was tired and quite surprised that this topic came up).
So I wrote this blog post to get back at my readers by inflicting an endless explanation on the subject.
Presentation of Skepticism
General Theory of Skepticism
I will first make a more general digression on online skepticism. This barbaric expression refers to a movement born online in the early 2010s following the rise of scientific popularization on YouTube.
And for good reason, this movement aims to try to reflect on criteria/methods to determine what is true or false, what is scientific or what is not. And then, to advocate for popular science channels or media to apply these criteria or be denounced as non-scientific/liars/spreading misinformation.
You may not be familiar with this movement, as the YouTube videos discussing it have rarely exceeded 500,000 views (which is already quite a lot). However, it quickly spread beyond YouTube and had a significant impact on politics in France.
To give a few examples, it is to this movement that we owe the delisting of homeopathy or the reflections/directives of the Minister of National Education on the teaching of critical thinking in schools, the harassment of researchers specialized in issues of critical thinking and scientific method who had the audacity to point out that the leading figures of thisMovement was talking nonsense. He is also the originator of concepts like fact-checking and maxims that are starting to annoy me because they are used carelessly by right-wing propagandists like: 'Facts must be separated from opinions'.
In short, the outcome of this movement is rather mixed, and yet I unashamedly claim that I support it and that we should all be more interested in it, as it seems promising to me. And to convince you, I will present the version that I believe is the most accomplished of the ideology/philosophy carried by this movement.
To make my explanation more digestible, I will illustrate my explanation with a simple (even simplistic) example.
Let's imagine that my neighbor claims to have psychic powers and that he can control which side a coin lands on when playing heads or tails. He flips a coin 20 times, and it always lands on heads. Should I conclude that he indeed has powers? Of course not. But why? Isn't it dogmatic, close-minded, and unscientific not to believe him in this case? The answer lies in three points:
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There is another possible explanation (starting with the fact that the coin is rigged)
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Whether he cheats or has a real gift, the result of this experiment will be the same. So this experiment, even if it were repeated 1,000,000 times, does not allow me to know which hypothesis is true.
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This observation/experience is just one among thousands of others that I have had throughout my life. And they all tend to prove to me that there is more chance that my neighbor wants to play a joke on me.
As a result, in all rationality, I cannot exclude that he has a gift, but given all the data at my disposal, to be kind, it is not the most credible hypothesis. However, that is an unsatisfying conclusion.
In this situation, I want to know for sure whether or not my friend has a gift. I want to have a scientific approach, and science is the establishment of indisputable facts through experience? Well, no, actually. For a skeptic, science is quite the opposite. For a skeptic, the scientific approach requires accepting that one can never exclude or prove anything 100%. And therefore, one can never be sure of anything. And this, no matter what we do. All we can do is:
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Hope to have made the list of all possible explanations (without ever being sure)
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Increase or decrease the probability that their explanations are true by conducting experiments whose possible results have a different probability of appearing if one or the other of their explanations is true.
This hardly understandable sentence means that contrary to what is generally said at school, in reality, it is never possible to create experimental protocols that will test a single hypothesis and therefore to definitively exclude an explanation with an experiment.
For example, in our case, if I ask him to bend a fork in half and he can't do it, I couldn't exclude 100% that he just had a moment of weakness, but that he has real powers. However, the most likely,If he doesn't succeed, it means he has no talent, so this result increases the probability that he has no talent (but it doesn't prove it 100%).
In this very simplified example, I could be accused of nitpicking. If this happens to me in real life, even if it means being seen as closed-minded, if my friend fails to bend the fork, I won't bother keeping open the possibility that he really has psychic powers. And if he manages to lift one of the pieces of furniture I have at home from a distance, I will believe him when he tells me he has powers.
But in life, in general, we face slightly more complex problems, and there this approach makes perfect sense. To demonstrate this, I will develop two examples, one historical (and very famous) and one very political. But this applies to all sorts of everyday life problems, starting with the problems encountered in professional life (at least for me, the teachings of skepticism videographers have helped me a lot in my work, and I don't understand why it isn't taught in school).
Example 1: Newton and Einstein
When in the 19th century it was observed that the orbit of Uranus did not conform to Newton's predictions, the instinctive reaction, in line with the traditional view of science, would have been to conclude that Newton's theory was false and to seek a new theory.
But given the very good performance of Newton's theory over a century in predicting all sorts of phenomena, astronomers of the time instead sought other explanations. And one of them was to wonder if there might be an unknown planet disturbing Uranus's orbit. They then calculated what mass and orbit this unknown planet should have to reconcile the predictions of Newtonian mechanics with the observations. And that's how Neptune was discovered at the exact location where the theory had predicted its presence.
Following this impressive success (and others), Newtonian mechanics became an absolute truth in the minds of most contemporaries. It is therefore quite naturally that a few decades later, when it was discovered that Mercury's orbit did not conform to Newton's predictions, all sorts of ad-hoc hypotheses were imagined to save the theory.
Unfortunately, this time it was indeed the theory that was incorrect, and it would take Einstein and his theory of relativity to understand the reason for the peculiarities of Mercury's orbit.
This historical example shows that adopting a skeptical approach is very fruitful in terms of scientific discovery and allows us to get closer to the truth than if we had adopted the rather intuitive reasoning presented in college (and which was that of many intellectuals in the past).
Indeed, these approaches lead either to rejecting true explanations too quickly or to a dogmatic attitude by rejecting observations that could challenge the theory.
To quickly take another example, it is this type of reasoning that led the leaders of the USSR to refuse to admit that there could be serial killers in the USSR, because the theory popular on the left says that crime is produced by inequalities. Well, their behavior is also explained by a hefty dose of bad faith and a strong desire not to end up in the gulag, but we must not forget that many sincerely believed in it and that many continue to fall into an excess of dogmatism because of this kind of extremely intuitive reasoning.
And not only on very theoretical or intellectual subjects. We have all encountered in our lives a person with a dogmatic attitude on a particular subject, and it will harm them. And in fact, I'm sure you have also fallen into this trap on certain subjects, as these reasonings are intuitive and it is so easy to fall into them.
For me, applying the skeptical approach as much as possible reduces the number of times we fall into this trap.
Example 2: crime
For this example, I will critique this video from this excellent channel:Stéréotype sur la prison : "Les prisons sont pleines d'étrangers" ?!
In summary, in this video, she says that:
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According to right-wing media, a statistic from the Ministry of the Interior proves that crime is increasing.
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She says it's false and proves that crime is stable in
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Providing an alternative explanation for the fact that the Ministry of the Interior's statistics are increasing.
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Providing an argument to say that his explanation for this increase is more likely.
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Providing another statistic from the Ministry of the Interior showing stability in crime rates.
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Personally, I am entirely convinced by this reasoning and find their video brilliant. But, for a skeptic, her reasoning is almost as much nonsense as that of the right-wingers she criticizes. And this for a good reason: it is practically the same (the words 'practically' and 'almost' are important).
Indeed, if I summarize the two arguments, we have: 'this crime statistic is rising, so crime is rising' versus 'this crime statistic is stable, so crime is stable'. However, if you've been following as a skeptic, you should rather say: 'I think it's more likely that crime is rising because this statistic is rising' or 'I think it's more likely that crime is stable because this statistic is stable'.
And contrary to what one might think, it's not unnecessary nitpicking and it has concrete effects.
For example, the absence of this nitpicking means that his video will only speak to people who are already convinced (or possibly to undecided individuals who leanSlightly to the left). If the goal is to change the minds of right-wingers, I think it is completely missed, because just as we leftists raise an eyebrow of exasperation and disdain at right-wing media and immediately imagine alternative explanations for this increase in certain crime statistics, right-wingers will immediately reject this argument by imagining alternative explanations.
In the end, we have two sides convinced they hold an indisputable truth, as proven by facts, and who think the others are idiots or liars.
To get out of this unsatisfactory situation, the solution is to explain the skeptical approach and invite the other side to try to apply this approach to the issue of crime. This means starting by admitting that we may be wrong and that the other side may be right. And then, instead of saying that we are going to prove that we are right, we are going to explain why we think our explanation is more probable and ask the other why they think otherwise. Basically, what are the alternative explanations they see that we don't see because of our biases (biases are another concept of skepticism or rather of the skeptical ideology that I will not detail here) and what are the observations we might have missed.
According to the skeptics, through exchange, we will eventually end up with the same list of possible explanations and the same list of observations. Therefore, if we follow the skeptical approach, we will end up agreeing on the same conclusion.
So, yes, it is a very naive and idealistic view of public debate (and even academic debate) that suits an idealistic liberal better than a materialist (it's no coincidence that most philosophers cited by this movement like Baye or Popper have politically engaged on the right). In real life, the search for truth is not everyone's primary concern, and not everyone has equal access to speech or the means to seek observations that support their views. The idea that we can sit around a table as equals with the far-right, that we must remain calm and polite with them and consider that they will not lie to us and acknowledge they are wrong if we present them with the right arguments, is utopian.
Moreover, this approach requires accepting that one might be wrong, which in some cases poses moral problems (for example, accepting that one might be wrong when saying that Arabs are not thieves is morally complicated, especially for an Arab).
However, I think it is the best way to change people's minds and de-radicalize them (that and creating better-funded public services, strictly enforcing laws prohibiting hate speech on TV, reducing inequalities...). And God knows we need methods to succeed in convincing people to turn away from this kind of idea.
Conclusion
And there would still be much to say.
For example, I could explain the importance of collective skepticism and diversity in research.
Indeed, contrary to what I seemed to say with Newton and Einstein, skepticism rejects the idea that science progresses thanks to great men or that one can reach good conclusions alone by "doing their own research" (as conspiracy theorists would say).
I could talk about how skepticism explains why people adhere to conspiracy theories and how to get them out of it (even though I have already given some pointers when I detailed my example on crime).
Nevertheless, due to lack of time, I will stop here and move on to the next part.
However, for the more curious who would like to know more, I provide the link to the channel:Hygiene Mentale and more generally the peertube instance:skeptikon (I specify that I do not like the rational ecology video on bitcoin that is hosted on this instance and that appears prominently on the homepage of this instance).
But if you should only watch one, I recommend the following video:Terre plate : et si on avait raté quelque chose.
Applied skepticism
General presentation
All this is well and good, but now a question arises: how to apply the skeptical approach to determine if alternative medicines work (because I remind you, that is the subject of this post).
Intuitively, you would want to buy these treatments and try them yourself in your own way to determine with the approach I just explained whether it is likely that alternative medicines have an effect. However, very quickly, you will face insurmountable obstacles. Already, the most obvious is the lack of time and resources. Indeed, given the variety of alternative medicine that exists and the number of diseases they are supposed to cure, an entire lifetime would not be enough to test them all. And then more practically, when you are interested in this subject, it is generally because you are sick and looking for a treatment that works. So you don't have the time or energy to conduct experiments or ask a lot of questions.
And even if we had it all alone, we rarely have enough imagination, knowledge, or experience to judge a subject.
Moreover, it is somewhat like ignoring several thousand years of accumulated scientific knowledge and starting from scratch. However, if we do not build on the work of our predecessors, we are likely to just make the same mistakes they did. So, unless you want to end up treating your cancer with bloodletting, I advise you to avoid it.
Yes, making fun of our ancestors or people who currently believe in theories that at first glance seem silly to us (such as energetic medicines or those based on concepts like meridians) is amusing and a release, but it's very stupid.
Indeed, when one stops mocking long enough to seriously look into the subject (usually because they are afflicted with an illness that conventional medicine cannot cure), they start to believe in it. Indeed, believers are neither stupid, nor crazy, nor worthy of any mockery. No more than the Greek or Chinese scholars who invented these concepts 2,000 years ago. It's just that the alternative explanations are far from obvious and required several generations of people discussing among themselves, reading what their predecessors had done, and experimenting with means that are not accessible to everyone (even today) to be discovered.
For example, one of the motivations for writing this post is that a colleague wanted to convince me of the effectiveness of alternative medicine by telling me an endless anecdote. It was very well told and in another context, I would have greatly appreciated it. But there, internally, I was fidgeting with impatience, because I already knew the conclusion in advance and it was in no way likely to change my opinion on the subject, for the simple reason that I have already heard plenty of similar ones.
In short, she had a back pain that wouldn't go away, no matter what treatments she used, then she went to her sister-in-law who is an energy healer and some time later the pain disappeared.
For her, it was proof that energy medicines were truly effective, but for a skeptic, there are plenty of alternative possible explanations generally grouped under the term contextual effects (with a capital S). And it's not a dumb conclusion.
However, trying to convince me that alternative medicines work with testimonials of this kind is like trying to prove to me that all the apples on earth are red by showing me red apples. Even after seeing a million red apples, the probability that green apples exist somewhere will remain very high. Well, it's the same here, even with thousands of such testimonials, the probability that it's just due to contextual effects will remain very high. A different kind of experience is needed to change the probability I attribute to the effectiveness of alternative medicines.
If you have survived so far, you expect me to detail what its contextual effects and other types of experience are. The problem is that to properly address the subject, it would take hours. However, I doubt you want to read a book from me on the subject, and I don't want to write it.
So we will shorten it by saying that when one is a scientist with unlimited means, the best way we currently have to verify the effectiveness of a medicine is the sacrosanct double-blind randomized study and to pretend to ignore the numerous problems that this method has and that we live in a world where medical research is not plagued by power struggles and financial stakes.
And that when one is an individual, it's to consult the Meta study on Google Scholar or if one is in a hurry, to rely on what scientific organizations like the WHO say. I repeat, it is not about determining a source of truth that would be immune to any corruption/error or criticism from mere mortals like us who did not have the chance to be born with theIntellectual superiority of experts, but just to make the bet that is most likely to be true when one is an average citizen.
Formulating things like that may seem unnecessarily long and complicated, but if we took more time to do it, perhaps social media wouldn't be filled with skeptics with a haughty tone who call idiots those who believe in alternative medicine or who hate those who didn't want to get vaccinated (on the other hand, I understand those who hated a certain long-haired mandarin who openly lied and wiped his ass with the most basic ethical rules of his profession).
Practical application: Does acupuncture work?
To make the process clearer and so that you can apply it yourself, let's take a simple example: acupuncture. To write this post, I talked with a supporter of acupuncture (yes, I suffer for you).
During this conversation, she mentioned two arguments in favor of acupuncture that perfectly match my criteria. The first is that it has been recognized by major scientific organizations like the American Psychological Association (if I recall correctly), and the second is that there are meta-studies that would prove it.
At the time, I didn't know how to respond because I didn't know what this association was, what its expertise was on the subject (and even less what it had said exactly). The next day, I did a Google search to get more information and found no statement from the American Psychological Association on acupuncture.
On the other hand, I found a plethora of website articles promoting acupuncture claiming that the WHO has recognized it. But if that's true, it's even better as a reason to believe in it. However, none of these sites provide their source. So I went to the WHO website and found nothing either.
I found tons of PDFs explaining how to practice acupuncture without risk (basically, you have to clean your needles, otherwise you risk giving the patient an infection), but nothing on effectiveness. I got fed up and decided to use a simple method that takes 5 seconds and is normally the method used by the WHO to make recommendations when they don't have much time: read the conclusion of the first meta-studies on a subject that come up on Google Scholar.
There, I had another problem, which is that my question is actually too broad.
Indeed, I found tons of results all answering different questions: acupuncture and obesity, acupuncture and side effects, acupuncture and cholesterol. In short, enough to do without sleeping pills for a lifetime. So I narrowed the search to the effects on pain, because from what I read during my previous research, it's the primary reason people see an acupuncturist worldwide and it's mainly what was discussed. I then requested a sort by relevance and here are the first three meta-studies that came up:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1470211824006390
https://www.bmj.com/content/338/bmj.a3115.abstract
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304395999003048
In summary, for me, his meta-studies conducted during the 2000s all have the same conclusion: positive effect too weak to be distinguished from a bias.
In clearer language: we cannot rule out that acupuncture has an effect, but if it exists, it is too weak to be measured with the techniques we currently have (knowing that our techniques are very poor and the studies are generally of poor quality). Basically, the most likely scenario is that acupuncture is as effective against pain as a paracetamol.
Personally, I was convinced when I started my research that we were sure it had no effect (or rather that it was extremely likely to have no effect). I have to change my mind on this subject.
Before finishing, I am adding this link that I discovered while doing my research:https://curiologie.fr/blog/2018/06/26/acupuncture-maj/
Supplement on acupuncture.
Even if acupuncture works, that does not mean that the explanation given based on energies, meridians, or other things is valid. It could be explained by something else entirely unrelated to an inner energy.
And precisely speaking of energy. I lied a little, even when one is skeptical, there are certain explanations that one completely rejects without even considering them: religious explanations, and I will explain why with a simple example:
If I ask 'why is it raining?' and someone answers me: "because God willed it," intuitively, we understand that this is not a satisfactory answer. Indeed, if we start accepting this kind of explanation, we stop doing research, explaining everything by: 'it's God's will.'
However, it may be true. If we are logical and open-minded, why would we reject this hypothesis? By reflex, I might want to apply my earlier method by looking for alternative explanations and facts that contradict this hypothesis, but in fact, I realize there is no alternative explanation that contradicts this theory (except, perhaps, that the devil willed it, but that doesn't help us). And also that there is no fact or experiment whose result would make this explanation more or less probable. This explanation does not fit into the filter. Skepticism and, more generally, science are silent on its validity.
And for me, the reason is best summarized by Einstein: "First, define what you mean by God, and I will tell you if I believe in it."
The problem with this explanation is that it isn't one, mainly because 'god' without further details is an empty concept that means everything and nothing. It feels like something precise has been said, but in fact, nothing has been said at all. And the empty hypothesis is neither true nor false.
It's like when a politician says they're going to 'defend the republic.' You feel like they've said something, but actually, they haven't. It's empty. Or rather, it can mean anything. You can't know just from that phrase whether they mean they're going to vote for an Islamophobic measure or fight against the far right.
Saying "it's caused by gods" is like saying "it's caused by something" (thanks, Captain Obvious). It's not an explanation, it's a literary hallucination. It doesn't mean that god doesn't exist, but that when doing science, either we remove it from the equation or we specify more precisely what we mean by god. And in general, when we try to define god, we realize that even if it exists, it definitely has nothing to do in science books.
And if I made this long digression, it is to say that the vital energy invoked to explain the functioning of certain alternative medicines is like God: an empty concept. It is a religious explanation that tries to pass itself off as a scientific explanation by borrowing the vocabulary of science.
Having had an engineering education, I know that energy in physics is a concept whose nature we do not fully understand and that we find difficult to define (like many others such as time). However, in physics, it refers to something concrete and precise that makes absolutely no sense in the context of alternative medicine.
Explaining the success of a medical practice using the words: 'energy transfer', 'vital energy', is like telling me that it's explained by 'a transfer of cylinder head gasket'. It just doesn't make any sense, because in the medical context, this word means everything and nothing (rather nothing than everything).
And that is why, when someone talks to me about medicine explained by a mysterious vital energy, magnetic or I don't know what, it is a direct rejection. The practice may work, but it is wrapped in a theory that has nothing scientific and is just disguised new-age religion.
And precisely, alternative medicines are full of flaws, but one of the most serious in my eyes is that it is the preferred gateway for new-age religions (and also sects, but that's more anecdotal). And I think you will have understood that I don't like religions.
Be careful, the day when the only problem in France is religions, life will be beautiful. And I am not one of those militant atheists and other priest-eaters who have converted to Islamophobia and want to prevent people from practicing their religion by twisting the concept of secularism (which is fundamentally the opposite). I consider the ban on the veil in schools to be an infringement on secularism and it should be repealed. However, even in their moderate version, religions present enormous problems for me, such as the fact that theyYou are a professional translator. Directly translate this text into English, without adding anything.push people to be right-wing or that they convey beliefs that I think are unfounded and harmful.
And the new-age religions are for me the most problematic religions, because theyYou are a professional translator. Directly translate this text into English, without adding anythingDo not present themselves as religions and are therefore more difficult to combat. But, of course, it must be put into perspective. Religion is not what has the most influence on a person's political opinions.
For example, studying engineering significantly increases the likelihood of voting for Macron compared to going to church. And yet, I am living proof that one can study engineering and be left-wing. And just because it encourages voting right doesn't mean it's bad and should be discarded. Even if their students vote more for Macron than the average, that's no reason to close engineering schools. Who's going to build magnificent nuclear power plants or big missiles if we don't have them?is not there? Certainly not the workers and technicians, everyone knows they are completely lost without an engineer to tell them what to do from their air-conditioned design office.
Critique of religion
Now after having spent the tenlatestpage to praise skepticism, I mustend with a critique of theirgreat enemy: religions.
On the left, at the moment, more and more people think that it is a secondary or even reactionary struggle, as it is instrumentalized by racists to promote Islamophobia. There are even left-wing Christians who try to promote a progressive reinterpretation of religions. This is somewhat the case in this bad show that isThe Empire never tookon Blast (I can't believe they produced something worse thanThe Mariollesin terms of quality).
Personally, I do not agree with this view, because I do not see how religion would be a less serious source of suffering than transphobia, LGBT-phobia, or racism. Because yes, it must be reminded: even today in France, religions massively cause suffering to people. And I am not only talking about fundamentalists, but also moderates. I repeat: religion is, for me, only a source of unnecessary suffering.
They are also sometimes an excuse for homophobic, transphobic, or reactionary behaviors, but I don't hold that against them, because it's likely that even if they were atheists, their authors would still be homophobic, transphobic, or reactionary. The only difference is that they would justify their crappy ideology differently. For me, religion is an easy excuse, not the cause of these abhorrent behaviors.
But I am not the most qualified to talk about it. That's why I would like to share with you the numerous videos of testimonies from French apostates saying how much their religion — even moderate — made them suffer, and how much no longer believing was a liberation for them, and why.
However, most of these videos were recently deleted after their author experienced waves of harassment from believers. I will therefore share the few surviving channels after this purge of their content:
But as it is insufficient, I will respond to the three main arguments used to defend religions.
Note thatI am only speaking here about the religions present in Europe, namely:
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the three major monotheistic religions
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the New Age.
For other religions, I don't know them well enough to speak about them, but I doubt it's very different.
Moral argument
Often religions are defended by saying they make one moral.
And sometimes it's true. For example, fthis articlene-plus-voir-la-vie-comme-un-jeu-uniquement-nul We have the story of a Christian fundamentalist who became a pacifist thanks to a mystical revelation. He refused to kill and converted people from both sides to his doctrine.
If everyone had done the same, how many millions of deaths and massacres would have been avoided? And on his small scale, how many unnecessary deaths did he prevent?
And all this, thanks to religion.
But those who will later be called theConscientious objectorswill also be found among atheists. Perhaps there is a greater proportion among the religious — but I have not found reliable figures on the subject. (It may be that there are more among atheists, but I think it is more likely that there is roughly the same proportion on both sides.)
What is indisputable, however, is that the major organizations promoting pacifist and internationalist ideas, and generally basing their decisions throughout history, have rather been atheist or secular organizations.
On the contrary, religious organizations have more often been on the side of warmongers — with a few notable exceptions like the Mormons. But in their case, it is not related to the fact that they are a religious organization particularly inclined towards internationalism, pacifism, or love for their neighbor.
For me, contrary to what some say, religion is an impediment to morality because we act out of fear and not out of conviction.But at the same time, this can give confidence that the rule will be applied, and resolve the paradox of the« "If no one does it, why should I?".It is an alternative to a central authority that imposes a rule.
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Physically, when you disobey, it hurts less than with a central authority that sends the police at the slightest disobedience.
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On the other hand, psychologically, it hurts more.
And since officially, no one decides the rules (in reality it's a priest who decides them), it can make it more difficult to challenge an unjust rule.But at the same time, it also limits the ability of the central authority (here the priests) to decree just anything.
Religion is a kind of ancestor of the rule of law.It allows for a central authority to impose common rules, but without the central authority having all the powers.
At the individual level, I maintain that it is a hindrance to morality.but on a collective level, if a democratic rule of law is not possible, religion provokes moral progress.
Spiritual argument
Another argument is that religion would promote reflection and spirituality (which would not hurt in our world).
But for me, religions are on the contrary a hindrance to this reflection and spirituality, by paralyzing the reflection on the interpretation of what a leader said 3,000 years ago.Car orYes, religious books were written by kings or emperors.
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Mohammed was aMerchant's son who became an emperor and conqueror through a series of improbable events.
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It was not Jesus who wrote the New Testament, but an emperor by selecting the writings of people who knew him or who knew people who had known him.
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For the Torah, I don't know and I don't care, but I wouldn't be surprised if the process is similar.
In the case of the New Age, it is a simplification and a mix of old philosophical concepts, which results in an incoherent concoction aiming to make one believe that the individual can become master of their destiny and achieve happiness if they are a good believer and practitioner.
To bea good practitioner of New Age, it is not to think, but:
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Cut yourself off from people who do not have these beliefs
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self-inflict unnecessary psychological torturehoping that it makes you abe better
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spending money on perfectly useless nonsense, but often very pretty.
You will have understood: while I recognize some values in traditional religions, I have much more difficulty with the New Age.Well, in fact, in small doses (and most people stick to a small dose), the New Age gives an impression of control over one's life, pleasant and reassuring when one is subjected to stressful situations.But in reality, this is the case with all the superstitions that we all have and that we naturally develop. Who, before a very stressful event like an exam, hasn't said a prayer in their head for everything to go well?or did not say to himself:"if I give money to this homeless person"orif I touch woodSo, am I going to succeed?It's a human thing: we need control.
Argument on superstitions, alternative medicine, and scientific medicine
According to their defender, thesuperstitions around religions (notably in the New Age) would allow totreat diseasesThere, werefalls into thecriticism ofSpiritual medicines (the proponents call it alternative medicine), which oppose evidence-based medicine (which the proponents call allopathic medicine).
For them, evidence-based medicine is a violent medicine, solely curative and not preventive. But the causes are not chemical, they are sociological, economic...
If the homeopathic doctor is better, it is not because his remedies are better, but because he has the time to treat you like a human being.And the problem is not only capitalism.
The current medical training is long and requires abilities that only a portion of people have. And those who have these abilities have easier ways to earn money in our society.It would be necessary to completely overhaul the training, but this poses problems because current medical practices do not want it in order to preserve their status.
And of course, there are the financial interests, the neoliberal right-wing ideology currently in charge...
However, I must admit that son a whole bunch of topics, in fact, they haveI am a professional translator.reason against scientific medicine years beforethat she does not recognize her wrongs.
For example pFor decades, scientific medicine has blamed sugar, fat, or I don't know what else for being responsible for the epidemic of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular problems.
In fact, now we know that the problem is processed products and that, to fix it, we need to eat natural products, right?Chemicals. Well, actually yes and no.In truth, it's not really processed products or chemicals that are the problem:
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The baker's bread is an ultra-processed product, and now we know that it is very good for health and weight.
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On the other hand, industrial bread is crap.
It is not a problem of artisan versus industrial either:You are a professional translator. Directly translate this text into English, without adding anything:The baker's tarte Tatin and the industrial tarte Tatin are the same crap in terms of health.
The problem is the food produced by our industrial capitalist productivist society. Due to the pressure produced by this capitalist society, we use more and more low-grade fat, sugar, salt, and untested chemicals to produce our food.We take the cheapest and most addictive, without worrying about the taste or the impact on health.
Those who can afford to choose to go to a craftsman, who will use old methods (even if for religious reasons), will escape this degradation of food and will have, even before understanding the cause, adopted practices close to doctors' recommendations.
And this is not by chance, because the recommendations of religions/New Age are based on heuristics that have taken thousands or even millions of years to develop in our societies to know what is good or not to eat, and which are therefore very effective if not logical.
And then, sometimes, propaganda turns logical arguments into new age nonsense. For example, the promotion by organic products of natural solutions in opposition to chemical solutions has often been perceived by skeptical circles as a fallacy of appeal to nature. They think it makes no sense and that it is proof that the organic label is actually a vast scam. They make videos trying to explain that everything is chemical and natural: oil is natural uranium is natural and water is a chemical product. A non-chemical and non-natural product simply does not exist.
And even if we show argumentative charity and consider that the promoters of organic products speak of "chemical" in the sense of "not present in nature, artificially made by humans," then they say that this is a silly criterion for selecting products to use, because just because a product is naturally occurring does not mean it is less toxic. They then take the example of arsenic, tobacco, or the famous Bordeaux mixture to prove that natural products can be more toxic than the pesticides used in conventional agriculture.
Whereas if they had asked anyone who worked on organic products, they would have explained that each year, we put on the market someHundreds of new molecules without any testing of their toxicity and without knowing if they are biodegradable.
As a result, it is frequently realized, after several decades, that these molecules are actually extremely toxic and not biodegradable, or only in several centuries, or even millennia. Consequently, it is impossible to remove them from the environment, and they will therefore remain and cause deaths for millennia (chlordecone and PFAS are very famous examples, but they are only the tip of the iceberg).
Now, if we continue like this, we know that there will come a time when the environment will be so poisoned that it will no longer be livable for humans (probably the Earth will become infertile before that, but that is not much better).
The inventors of organic farming intended to create agriculture that would not contribute to this problem. But they did not have the means or the time to conduct studies to determine which molecules were truly safe. So instead, they resorted to a heuristic, reasoning that if a substance is produced in nature, then evolution has most likely produced bacteria or plants capable of degrading them. Therefore, there is a good chance that the environment can adapt to a high presence of this product, and if a problem is observed, it is biodegradable, and thus, if we stop spreading it, it will disappear from the environment on its own in a few years.
Basically, it is a concrete way to apply the precautionary principle, which is: we only widely spread products whose safety and reversibility have been proven. It's somewhat the same principle as in aviation, where only planes that have proven through tests that they are not likely to crash too much are allowed to fly. We know that the tests are not infallible, but it is the best we have to apply this principle, so that's what we do.
Organic farming only allows natural products, as it is the best method it has for selecting products that will not harm the environment.
And I see you, the defenders of glyphosate. It took more than 20 years after the widespread use of this product to have the first studies on its effects on health and the environment, and even today there is no consensus on this subject in the research community (contrary to what many skeptics say), but, a priori, there would be a negative effect on the environment and health.
Certainly, much less than that of most other products used conventionally, but that is no reason to be satisfied with it. It destroys our environment less quickly than other products, but it still does. Therefore, its massive and default use is not acceptable (unlike use following a major disaster that occurs every ten years).
Afterwards, they are parasitized by social distinction logics and charlatans, but these remain very effective methods for knowing what is good or bad before the scientists.
But personally, I'm still going to trust science.