Posted on 07/26/2018 9:24:33 AM PDT by edwinland
Imagine you’re the president of a European country. You’re slated to take in 50,000 refugees from the Middle East this year. Most of them are very religious, while most of your population is very secular. You want to integrate the newcomers seamlessly, minimizing the risk of economic malaise or violence, but you have limited resources ... What do you do?
Well, you make your best guess and hope the policy you chose works out. But it might not. ...
You can, however, experiment like that with virtual people. And that’s exactly what the Modeling Religion Project does. An international team of computer scientists, philosophers, religion scholars, and others are collaborating to build computer models that they populate with thousands of virtual people, or “agents.” As the agents interact with each other and with shifting conditions in their artificial environment, their attributes and beliefs—levels of economic security, of education, of religiosity, and so on—can change.
...
The other models raise similar concerns, he said. “The modrn model gives you a recipe for accelerating secularization—and it gives you a recipe for blocking it. You can use it to make everything revert to supernaturalism by messing with some of those key conditions—say, by triggering some ecological disaster. Then everything goes plunging back into pre-secularism. That keeps me up at night.”
...
“We’re modelers, sociologists, philosophers—we’re academic geeks, basically. We’re never going to convince them to trust a model.” But he believes that policy analysts, acting as bridges between the academic world and the policy world, will be able to convince the politicians. “We’re going to get them in the end.”
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
So . . . what was the point of this? Trying to find ways to sell atheism? Communism without the forced atheism? Religion bad, atheism good but only unpopular? And why does the word “atheism” appear absolutely nowhere in the article?
Utter clickbait.
!!
Thanks edwinland. Yours is first.
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