Once upon a time, four blind men were walking in the forest, and they bumped into an elephant.
Moe was in front, and found himself holding the trunk. “It has a tentacle,” he said. “I think we have found a giant squid!”
Larry bumped into the side of the elephant. “It’s a wall,” he said, “A big, bristly wall.”
Curly, at the back, touched the tail. “It’s nothing to worry about, nothing but a piece of rope dangling in the trail.”
Eagletosh saw the interruption as an opportunity to sit in the shade beneath a tree and relax. “It is my considered opinion,” he said, “that whatever it is has feathers. Beautiful iridescent feathers of many hues.”
The first three, being of a scientifical bent, quickly collaborated and changed places, and confirmed each other’s observations; they agreed that each had been correct in the results of their investigations, except that there wasn’t a hint of feathers anywhere about, but clearly their interpretations required correction and more data. So they explored further, reporting to each other what they were finding, in order to establish a more complete picture of the obstacle in the path.
“Tracing the tentacle back, I find that it is attached to a large head with eyes, fan-shaped ears, and a mouth bearing tusks. It is not a squid, alas, but seems to be a large mammal of some sort,” said Moe.
“Quite right, Moe — I have found four thick limbs. Definitely a large tetrapod,” said Larry.
Curly seems distressed. “It’s a bit complicated and delicate back here, guys, but I have probed an interesting orifice. Since this is a children’s story, I will defer on reporting the details.”
Eagletosh yawns and stretches in the shade of a tree. “It has wings, large wings, that it may ascend into the heavens and inspire humanity. There could be no purpose to such an animal without an ability to loft a metaphor and give us something to which we might aspire.”
The other three ignore the idling philosopher, because exciting things are happening with their elephant!
“I can feel its trunk grasping the vegetation, uprooting it, and stuffing it into its mouth! It’s prehensile! Amazing!”, said Moe.
Larry presses his ear against the animal’s flank. “I can hear rumbling noises as its digestive system processes the food! It’s very loud and large.”
There is a squishy plop from the back end. “Oh, no,” says Curly, “I can smell that, and I think I should go take a bath.”
“You are all completely missing the beauty of its unfurled wings,” sneers Eagletosh, “While you tinker with pedestrian trivialities and muck about in earthy debasement, I contemplate the transcendant qualities of this noble creature. ‘Tis an angel made manifest, a symbol of the deeper meaning of life.”
“No wings, knucklehead, and no feathers, either,” says Moe.
“Philistine,” says Eagletosh. “Perhaps they are invisible, or tucked inside clever hidden pockets on the flank of the elephant, or better yet, I suspect they are quantum. You can’t prove they aren’t quantum.”
The investigations continue, in meticulous detail by the three, and in ever broader strokes of metaphorical speculation by the one. Many years later, they have accomplished much.
Moe has studied the elephant and its behavior for years, figuring out how to communicate with it and other members of the herd, working out their diet, their diseases and health, and how to get them to work alongside people. He has profited, using elephants as heavy labor in construction work, and he has also used them, unfortunately, in war. He has not figured out how to use them as an air force, however…but he is a master of elephant biology and industry.
Larry studied the elephant, but has also used his knowledge of the animal to study the other beasts in the region: giraffes and hippos and lions and even people. He is an expert in comparative anatomy and physiology, and also has come up with an interesting theory to explain the similarities and differences between these animals. He is a famous scholar of the living world.
Curly’s experiences lead him to explore the environment of the elephant, from the dung beetles that scurry after them to the leafy branches they strip from the trees. He learns how the elephant is dependent on its surroundings, and how its actions change the forest and the plains. He becomes an ecologist and conservationist, and works to protect the herds and the other elements of the biome.
Eagletosh writes books. Very influential books. Soon, many of the people who have never encountered an elephant are convinced that they all have wings. Those who have seen photos are at least persuaded that elephants have quantum wings, which just happened to be vibrating invisibly when the picture was snapped. He convinces many people that the true virtue of the elephant lies in its splendid wings — to the point that anyone who disagrees and claims that they are only terrestrial animals is betraying the beauty of the elephant.
Exasperated, Larry takes a break from writing technical treatises about mammalian anatomy, and writes a book for the lay public, The Elephant Has No Wings. While quite popular, the Eagletoshians are outraged. How dare he denigrate the volant proboscidian? Does he think it a mere mechanical mammal, mired in mud, never soaring among the stars? Has he no appreciation for the scholarship of the experts in elephant wings? Doesn’t he realize that he can’t possibly disprove the existence of wings on elephants, especially when they can be tucked so neatly into the quantum? (The question of how the original prophets of wingedness came by their information never seems to come up, or is never considered very deeply.) It was offensive to cripple the poor elephants, rendering them earthbound.
When that book was quickly followed by Moe’s The Elephant Walks and Curly’s Land of the Elephant, the elephant wing scholars were in a panic — they were being attacked by experts in elephants, who seemed to know far more about elephants than they did! Fortunately, the scientists knew little about elephant’s wings — surprising, that — and the public was steeped in favorable certainty that elephants, far away, were flapping gallantly through the sky. They also had the benefit of vast sums of money. Wealth was rarely associated with competence in matters elephantine, and tycoons were pouring cash into efforts to reconcile the virtuous wingedness of elephants with the uncomfortable reality of anatomy. Even a few scientists who ought to know better were swayed over to the side of the winged; to their credit, it was rarely because of profit, but more because they were sentimentally attached to the idea of wings. They couldn’t deny the evidence, however, and were usually observed to squirm as they invoked the mystic power of the quantum, or of fleeting, invisible wings that only appeared when no one was looking.
And there the battle stands, an ongoing argument between the blind who struggle to explore the world as it is around them, and the blind who prefer to conjure phantoms in the spaces within their skulls. I have to disappoint you, because I have no ending and no resolution, only a question.
Where do you find meaning and joy and richness and beauty, O Reader? In elephants, or elephants’ wings?
What about chocolate rumballs or stuffed porkchops?
Stanton,
No, I don’t think miracles exist in the minds of chocolate rumballs or stuffed porkchops ;-)
You can be hopeful, and even see your hope be realized, without god. I notice you compare the end of slavery and the success of the Civil Rights movement to the physical impossibility of resurrection of the dead. are you seriously saying that equal rights were a physical impossibility? are you really failing to see that equal rights were achieved by human struggle, not by magic?
or are you saying there’s something magical about the feeling of hope in hopeless situations, in-and-of itself? because that strikes me as a somewhat ignorant position. after all, a species that’s capable of remembering past suffering, imagining future suffering, and knows what death is would not be very viable, since every prolonged crisis with no change in sight would produce suicides too massive to sustain a population. hope, while probably not well understood at all, is an essential part of our survival instinct. or, to put differently, those who are irrationally optimistic about their future are more likely to survive long enough to have and raise children than those who rationally assess that their lives are shit and will likely always be shit.
and since humans like being able to explain things, and yet this “hope against all hope” seemed unexplainable for most of humanity’s existence, magic led itself as a sensible explanation; and voila, the birth of religion. or, as a smart man once said: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions”
on the other hand, of course, religion has been often used to suppress the fight against suffering by focusing those hope on the afterlife (“pie in the sky when you die”), and thus has actually stalled the fulfillment of the hope for better lives.
I have never regarded or treated my atheism as a religion. I resent religion even being mentioned in the same breath as atheism. To me, atheism represents the epitomy of rationalism, which is used to ascertain the non-existence of things that just don’t exist and the brain’s refusal to even consider the likelihood without proof. Religion is insanity and bullshit run amuck and which threatens all rational thought and behavior.
@ #486 Rudy – actually I remember looking at the number of nonbelievers at the NAS, and at least there biologists are even more atheist than physicists. But it’s something like 96% vs 93% roughly speaking. Still it’s one thing we physicists can’t feel all superior about hehe. I’m guessing it’s those quantum gravity/string theory people who are at least half-mathematician bringing us down.
On the other hand mathematicians were somewhere in the 75-ish% if I remember right. Way behind all the natural sciences.
A Libertarian…
Brilliant!
They had faith, not in things seen, but as Paul puts it: “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” When Rev. King believes in “a way out of no way” it’s exactly as this.
I wonder if this is part of the problem for those who believe and are absolutely appalled by those who don’t–the idea that since people sometimes feel the same thing at the same time there’s some Magic Power that makes it so.
Hope for something better is a pretty constant part of the human condition. Why would we need a great conductor in the sky to create it?
Thank you, pdferguson.
Classic engrish or something more? http://engrishfunny.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/engrish-funny-elephants-safety.jpg?w=500&h=375
Thorn,
That’s at least the third time that link has appeared in this thread.
Yes, but this hope can only be experienced by contemplating the torturous death of an alleged savior. Or so I am told.
(And told, and told, and told…)
Yes, stories about hope and salvation can inspire people. But that’s not religion, that’s art. I’m inspired by narratives too, but I don’t go around calling myself a Han Soloist.
It would make a great childrens book.
I love it. So beautiful a story.
PZ, I agree we each have criteria for assessing “love”, or “justice”, or maybe “sinfulness” :) But there’s a sense in which they don’t exist as empirical phenomena, the way that evolution certainly does.
We couldn’t find two people to agree on what criteria to use, though there would be a family resemblance between their views. There’s no “Zero-th” law of love, or justice, similar to the Zero-th law of thermodynamics. Temperature exists, in the sense that we can get everybody to agree on how to measure it. Evolution is more abstract, but we can get rational people to agree (OK, you know better than me how fraught the “get” part is) on how it occurs and the evidence for it.
Derrida somewhere talks about the impossibility of justice, that any concrete judgment necessarily involves a compromise that destroys the ideal. Any number of country songs make the same point about love. We just don’t see examples of pure justice that we can use as criteria, we see injustice, and compromise, and failure. And yet we still imagine justice as an (immaterial) ideal.
p.s. The Christian cliche is “God is Love”. In Islam, God is also compassion, mercy, and 97 other nice things. Personally I don’t care if people think about God, as long as they think about the 99 or 100 nice immaterial things, or at least a couple. I’ve always thought that a god that requires belief from us is pretty self-centered.
Cara #508 wrote:
I think that’s part of it, yes. Religious people are also encouraged to reify abstractions: Love, Hope, Liberty, Virtue, and Goodness are all supposed to be thought of as things which exist, even though you can’t see or hold or touch them. God, then, is like that: it exists that way. It’s all part of the same continuum.
If you approach values and ideals from this angle, then someone who doesn’t believe there’s a God (because He can’t be seen or held or touched) will be considered conceptually backwards, a simple, primitive thinker who only believes in what’s actually physically before them. That leaves the atheist with no ability to accept, access, or understand intangible things like Love, Hope, Liberty, and so forth. So emotionally-laden abstractions don’t just have to come from a Magic Power; they’re magic powers in themselves.
Of course, part of the problem people who value faith have with atheists is that they frame everything Good in terms of their faith, leaving suicidal despair as the default mode, “absent God.” It’s not just a problem with religion, though religion brings the tendency out. There are fanatics in all sorts of areas who can’t imagine that anyone would or could have a normal, reasonable, enjoyable life without whatever the heck it is that “gives life meaning” — for them, and therefore for everyone.
rudy, “justice” and “sinfulness” are man-made abstractions, so of course they don’t exist anywhere outside the realm of human social interaction, the same way “religion” does. “god” is not an abstract concept that describes aspects of human interactions though; it’s an anthromorphization of abstract concepts, and as such is not only man-made, but is also an unnecessary embellishment on existing phenomena
Don’t forget your snorkeling gear.
Wouldn’t oxygen tanks be more appropriate?
Jadehawk @ 517,
But that’s begging the question. It’s far from clear that they are “man-made abstractions”, and don’t exist outside human social interaction (does that mean we’ll have whole new words we can’t imagine yet, for our dealings with intelligent aliens? Ok, that’d be cool).
In the Abrahamic religions, at least, our dealings with each other mirror the idea relationship God has with us. (In trinitarian Christianity, and maybe analogously in some nominally polytheist religions, our relationships mirror God’s with Herself).
Unnecessary embellishment? Well, what criterion would we use to establish that? If we get along for a few centuries without the idea, and things go ok… I think that your case would be established. If everything goes to hell :) would your idea be falsified?
And you miss the point don’t you. We speak of love in non-scientific terms all the time. If you wife were to ask you why you loved, and you expounded on the biology of it, she’d probably slap you.
I’m guessing someone married to a bio prof would be used to it. I know my girlfriend wouldn’t get too pissed at me for talking like that. Actually, the biology of love is fascinating and, to me, more romantic and meaningful than “it’s like the angels meant us to be together”.
Unnecessary embellishment? Well, what criterion would we use to establish that?
likely the same criterion one would use to determine that the entire idea of the abrahamic god was unnecessary to begin with.
Of course, hindsight being what it is, it’s easy to say that now. Deistic/theistic imaginings are simply unnecessary to explain anything, nor are they actually required for any real social purpose (take countries/cultures that are largely absent of such drivel as examples).
However, who knows how fucked up this bunch of loonies were thousands of years ago that they might indeed have “needed” to invent this story for some sort of social or political cohesion at the time.
If we get along for a few centuries without the idea, and things go ok… I think that your case would be established.
consider that experiment to have been done several times in recorded history, most recently and notably in many Scandinavian countries.
so, it’s established.
But that’s begging the question.
funny, I don’t see how the post you are referring to is using circular reasoning.
Why’d you get the scientist to leave the room? It’s like letting Uri Geller choose his own cutlery.
Sastra: I think that’s part of it, yes. Religious people are also encouraged to reify abstractions: Love, Hope, Liberty, Virtue, and Goodness are all supposed to be thought of as things which exist, even though you can’t see or hold or touch them. God, then, is like that: it exists that way. It’s all part of the same continuum.
I’ve noted that about certain kinds of political radicals, like Libertarians. They seem to me exactly like the most primitive kind of pagans, worshipping Love, Virtue, Freedom as deities of some kind, rather than as simple recognition of generalities.
It may be one reason why in old texts (including the Bible), they never translate the names of the people/entities — which are almost always names of the sort. “The Power of God said to the Love of God so-and-so” or “The Father spoke to Love…” — guess which traditions those are from?
It would make the reification too obvious. It’s funny, because so many of these traditions ban reification, only to recreate it in new form.
If we get along for a few centuries without the idea, and things go ok… I think that your case would be established.
There was this thing called the Age of Enlightenment, mostly associated with its roots among the humanists during the Renaissance. Reason and logic has other applications apart from rationalizing Catholic dogma. Science, as an occupation and enterprise thrives in the absence of religious dogma.
NASA just launched a team of astronauts into orbit to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, whose Galilean predecessor priests refused to peer through. I’m rooting for the fruits of observation and empiricism, which trumps Ecclesiastical Eagletosh, a barren and backward enterprise.
Suppose a scientist uses a time machine to go back to some random 1st-century wedding feast at Cana. He tests the water jars. They contain water.
He leaves the room.
Jesus, being a fictional character, does nothing.
Scientist goes back and tests the jars again. Yep, still water.
Based on his observations, the scientist has no comment whatsoever to make on what occurred.
What’s odd is you can profess to see the sawdust in the eyes of other, and fail to see the log in your own.Weird. Scientist gets a time machine, and uses it to visit a Jewish wedding?
Not that there is a log, but a log can be moved, or light may refract around it’s edges. Sawdust in your eyes causes lots of fucking pain and sticks. It makes you jam your eyes shut and scream like an idiot if it’s bad enough. It is more difficult to get it out of your eyes, and the process can be uncomfortable, but worth it.
Weird. Scientist gets a time machine, and uses it to visit a Jewish wedding?
You, Prof PZ, have not been keeping up with Family Guy.
no, the abstractions are definitely human-made. the underlying biological/evolutionary/etc. causes are not, but the abstractions are. similar to how “love” is a social abstract concept, but attraction to certain persons is based in our evolutionary development, brain chemistry etc.
I suppose we could say they’re “intelligence-made” if we wanted to be inclusive of non-human intelligences, but this is fully hypothetical, since with a set of one it’s really hard to figure out whether such concepts as “justice” are even particularly common to intelligence. conversely, if we encountered an alien intelligence similar enough to us to even make any kind of dealings possible, we’d most certainly have to make new words to describe their own abstract social concepts, as well as social concepts for the interaction with them. this has already happened with intercultural encounters; it can only get more drastic with inter-planetary ones.
you’re confusing “unnecessary as an explanation” with “unnecessary as a tool”. the Noble Lie can be useful, it’s still not true though. “god” has proven to be quite the useful tool to a lot of people; but as an explanation or useful concept for things it is utterly useless, and thus unnecessary.
also, you seem to confuse the usefulness of society-building myths with the necessity of existence of gods
…belief that the peddling of the image of a child gazing at the stars, will heal the world.
No, it won’t “heal” the world. I happen to subscribe to a less marred version of this philosophy than the one you describe. The little boy won’t heal the world in the same way avoiding fights doesn’t heal a wound, if we’re speaking in allegories and such. If more people are like curious, stargazing children, rather than bellicose, deranged thugs, the world may have a little chance to let the wound scab over and the bone to set.
…he’s held back from seeing life is so gloriously beautiful with it’s ponds and houses made of gold.
They’re platinum and jade, ya fuck.
Piltdown, even if it was verified by a time-travelling scientist that Jesus did turn water into wine, how does that prove your god exists? It proves magic exists – why does that have to mean your specific god exists? There are a lot more links in that particular chain.
Rudy, it’s abundantly clear that “justice” and “sinfulness” are man-made abstractions. “Justice”, “good”, and “evil” only have relevance to humans and only exist in the minds of humans. That doesn’t degrade their importance, it only puts them in the proper perspective. The universe doesn’t care if people suffer or are happy, if people love or hate. We certainly care, and those feelings, and the behaviors they inspire, are important to us. It’s when we start to think they have meaning outside of humanity that we run into trouble.
Yawn. Yet another ‘we accept abstractions; therefore the specific Christian god must exist’ parrot. I really don’t understand how one leads to the other; there’s just too much space in between.
I’m new to the term, so I’ll ask – would it be accurate to describe that reasoning as a ‘category error’?
@windy
Whatwhat? I forget which thread that was in, but we weren’t trying to.
Sorry, my comment was way too obscure; I didn’t mean to accuse you of anything. You certainly weren’t making me the bad guy but David was, and I just gave a hint for understanding how — it’s about singling out one person for what many do. You said David’s comment was about him understanding me where PZ doesn’t, but David presented what he portrayed as PZ’s thoughts, but they were David’s own thoughts, a characterization of my posts in that thread, and it’s that characterization that I objected to. But that’s over and done with; I’ve got more important things to attend to.
Glad you’re OK.
Thanks.
I have to ask, what is the woo capital of California? SF?
Ojai.
I’ve got more important things to attend to.
I’m on the other side of the Pacific now, but I did my undergrad at UCSB and have many fond memories of SB.
what’s the current status?
Ojai indeed. I saw Krishnamurti speak under the oaks at Ojai in the seventies. A good friend had an aunt who lived in and managed one of the big deal “retreats” up on the hill top there, so we got first class digs for the event. I liked seeing the big K in his shirtsleeves, bapping away at the acolytes who were asking, “Who is God” and getting only “Who needs to know?” in response. It’s a beautiful setting, used in at least one of the filmed versions of Lost Horizons as a stand-in for the valley of Shangri-La.
California is woo-suffused. Esalen in Big Sur is full of it, there’s a new book I’d like to get with poetry from Zen Center’s Gary Snyder about circumambulating Mt. Tam as a spiritual practice. It isn’t so much that woo originates anywhere, it’s more like people bring it with them to various vortices of woo. Ojai, I suppose, is as close as CA gets to Glastonbury levels of woo, minus the cool concerts.
The Awe… it weights heavy on me, yet it give me wings, opens up my mind, and lets me see the wonders of the world, unclouded, in my own poetic sense, and not that was written in stone.
eagletosh is LEGALLY blind, maybe, but he can see shadowy outlines when he squints.
he saw the elephant’s ears and thought they were wings. he doesn’t know as much about elephants as the other men, sure, but he does know something they don’t.
Yes, “begging the question” was probably the wrong phrase. I just meant to point up that whether love, justice, etc. were man-made was at least partly the issue.
Ken, the Enlightenment was just as fully responsible for “racial science” (Kant viewed Africans as practically subhuman) as it was for views we think of as progressive, now. Early on, the only intellectual opposition to racialist theories came from theologians like Thomas Reid. (The innate superiority of one group, based on biological descent, was a new notion. Romans thought of themselves as superior, because of their civilization, but had no problem with an African emperor, as long as he was a Roman citizen.)
We can look back and say, well, they were obviously wrong, because we can track gene frequencies (a la Cavalli-Sforza) and see that there is no such thing as race. But this is a remedy for a disease that the Enlightenment caused. (I don’t mean that ethnic hatred is new, of course. There is more than one disease in the book. Nationalism is a another new disease caused by the Enlightenment, one that we haven’t found a cure for yet).
I have to add that the Enlightenment brought along new religious forms as well a new skepticism; George Fox and Pascal as well as Descartes and Spinoza.
One poster pointed to Scandinavia as an indication that we can do without religion. Well, it hasn’t exactly been a couple of centuries, there, has it? :) If nanobots save us all from old age, we’ll see whether Death Metal bands from Sweden destroy the planet…
I’m not sure how to fairly carry out the comparison though: if < stands for "less pleasantly civilized", North Korea < U.S. < Sweden, but both North Korea and Sweden are less religious than the U.S. As China gets more modern, affluent, and at least way more open than under Mao, it has also gotten considerably more religious, with Christianity growing extremely quickly. This isn't a counterexample of course, but maybe just a sign that religious attitudes are more uncoupled from social attitudes that anyone here including me, thinks. No, the "existence" of abstractions isn't a proof of the existence of God. The original point was about the existence of "immaterial" entities. God may or may not exist in the same way. Google "weak ontology" for the most extreme theological view of this. Mathematicians have agreed to sort of ignore problems about the existence of Platonic entities, but I have to disagree with the poster who thinks it is completely irrelevant to mathematical practice. It was just the issue that stopped Cantor's ideas dead for a while, and also was behind the constructivist critique of "standard" mathematics. (I'm not sure the status of this now, with categories giving a new view of the whole debate about foundations).
Ack, my comment about N. Korea got chopped off because I used angle brackets in the sentence, I guess. I was just commenting that it’s hard to compare, as Sweden and N. K. are both less religious than the US. So which one counts?
we’ll see whether Death Metal bands from Sweden destroy the planet…
the rest of what you say is so generalized as to be fairly meaningless, but that statement reminded me of this:
um… the one that’s a democracy? you can’t compare dictatorships with democracies and then talk about the effect of religiousness. (unless you’re attempting to corelate how common each of the four possible combinations is). if you want to see effects of religiosity on a society, you have to chose subjects that are as close together as possible, to eliminate as many extraneous variables as possible.
so: you can compare religious dictatorships to secular ones; and you can compare secular democracies to religious ones. and THEN see where that gets you. and the trend you get is that the less religious a society is, the healthier it is, with the exception of societies where religion is simply replaced with another totalitarian belief-system.
and this STILL deals with “god” as a tool, not an explanation. as an explanation for anything, it’s still an unnecessary embellishment on reality.
Jadehawk, your comparison seems reasonable. So you are saying that within groups, the less religious the better? Let’s try that with
some dictatorships:
Cuba (more religion) vs. N. Korea (less): Cuba wins.
Mainland China (more) vs. N. Korea (less): China wins.
Burma (more religion) vs. N. Korea (less): hard to call.
On water to wine:
Since no reliable confirmable measurements were made, it is foolish to believe that such an event occurred.
If such measurements were made, scientists would offer hypotheses to explain them … e.g., Jesus used sleight of hand. “A miracle happened” is equivalent to “I don’t know how” and thus is not a candidate hypothesis.
We could conceivably allow “a miracle happened” if we had a theory of miracles that carefully characterizes miracles and provides guidelines for what sorts of miracles occur under what circumstances with what frequency; like all scientific theories, this would be predictive and could be falsified if the evidence doesn’t fit the predictions. The absence of a causal mechanism for miracles would not be a stopper because scientific theories often precede the determination of a mechanism.
Even given such a theory of miracles, “miracles are caused by god” would not be a valid inference, any more than “quantum mechanics is caused by god” — “goddidit” is equivalent to “I don’t know how” and thus is not a candidate mechanism.
“A god that exists only between peoples ears is a worthless bit of delusion that gets in the way of appreciating reality.” It’s weird when the critics of religion, the godless type, engage in peddling superstition all the time, without ever noticing it, like PZ belief that the peddling of the image of a child gazing at the stars, will heal the world. Or you belief that there’s something appreciative to all in reality.
Careful; you’re equivocating. There’s a difference between “appreciating reality” in the sense of *recognizing* reality accurately, or as accurately as possible (and Nerd of Redhead’s point is that this is much easier in the absence of superstitious beliefs about reality), and “appreciating reality” in the sense of *having a positive opinion of* reality.
(posted all wack for busted blockquotes)
Oops, I meant to add a tendentious democratic matchup:
Canada (more) vs. Japan (less): hard to call.
Cuba (more religion) vs. N. Korea (less): Cuba wins.
Mainland China (more)…
This is interesting, because most religious folk call China non-religious (which is pretty true) and say that they are oppressive against the religious (yeah, the Cultural Revolution was overkill, but that’s because the destruction of history is always shitty). Now you try to say they are religious?
Rudy, North Korea has a religion, with their political leader at the godhead. False comparison.
Ojai indeed. I saw Krishnamurti speak under the oaks at Ojai in the seventies.
I like Krishnamurti. He gets a bad rap for “infecting” David Bohm with “Spirituality”; although, I don’t know how much there is to that. And it’s true, he wasn’t a scientist and he often talked in flowery language, and he often gets hijacked shamelessly by New Agers whose views are actually contrary to his, but he understood the underlying nature of religion and belief and the desire for belief quite well, and he expressed his views eloquently. Reading him was a real eye-opener for me when I was young, and afterwards there was no way I could ever go back to belonging to a religion—of any kind. To this day he is one of the few people who really makes sense to me in certain areas of thinking, and he was far deeper than he is often given credit for. He said things like this:
I agree with him.
Hithesh, you are a deluded fool.[…] You don’t like being called deluded, then quit presenting your delusions here, and just go away.
Nerdy i don’t really care what you call me, it doesn’t even offend me, i get a chuckle out of it. It’s like guy on the other forum, who called me an awkward kid with no friends. I’m guessing if the allegation were true, or if they had some basis in reality, or if they were a sore spot, than I guess it would mean something.
To me it sounds like, Ken Ham calling Richard Dawkins an idiot because he accepts evolution.
Your brand of RRS like Atheism, that goes around calling the Dostoevskies, the Reinhold Niebhlur, the Rev. Kings, the Desmond Tutus, the Nelson Mandela of the world delusional, doesn’t really get too far, and most reflective people (atheist and theist alike) look upon you guys not much differently than the fundies you so despise.
No one takes u that seriously dude, except a few choir boys, that when you go around calling people deluded doesn’t really amount to much at all. So you might as well just can it, you’ve already spent several post pointing out that you believe I’m deluded already. We got that point already. Would you like a cookie for that?
Is there no beauty in elephant poop? My artichoke plant would disagree.
Rudy,
your comparisons at 543 are completely nonsensical.What criteria do you use to decide who “wins” or “loses” ?
Rudy, IIRC, North Korea isn’t religious in the sense that its people follow a religion like Christianity or Hinduism – but don’t they treat their leader like some sort of deity? It’s not ‘religion’ per se, but it’s significantly different from China or Cuba and can’t really be compared the way you’re comparing them.
But that’s begging the question. It’s far from clear that they are “man-made abstractions”, and don’t exist outside human social interaction (does that mean we’ll have whole new words we can’t imagine yet, for our dealings with intelligent aliens? Ok, that’d be cool).
You might as well say that it’s far from clear that shaking hands doesn’t exist outside of human social interaction because there might be intelligent aliens that shake hands. The point is that the meaning and significance of humans shaking hands — as with human concepts of justice, sinfulness, love, etc. — flows from humans and their institutions, not from external agents like “god”. To attribute these human concepts to external agents, or even to suggest that it isn’t clear that they shouldn’t be attributed to external agents, is to commit a major category mistake — a misapplication of attributes to something that isn’t of the sort to have those attributes. (I contend that all Platonism involves a category mistake, including mathematical Platonism, which attributes “existence” to deductive derivations from axioms.)
If North Korea and Cuba are religious,then the communist==atheist crowd is in real trouble !
LOL
Don’t worry hithesh, you will remain deluded until you show physical evidence for your imaginary deity. Evidence, what separates the men from the boys, and the rational from the deluded. You just picked the wrong side of the evidence.
splendid. you’ve just proved that in communist dictatorships, when their power isn’t absolute(i.e. they have to share with religion), the situation can be usually try to purge it: it gives them more control
now, just to be fair, let’s mix and match this a bit more, since you simply picked NK from the bottom of the barrel and compared everything else to it.
Mainland China vs. Cuba: more religious wins
Burma vs. China: less religious wins
Burma vs. Cuba: less religious wins
now, if you throw Vietnam with it’s 85% of secular buddhists into the mix, which has a better quality of life than all of the above except cuba, what you get is 5 wins for more religion, one draw, and six wins for less religion
and if we actually bothered to do this right, included all communist dictatorships and some accurate, or at least verifiable measures for both religiosity and quality of life, we might get a different result yet. cherrypicking your datapoints is not cool.
also, why have you picked communist dictatorships specifically?
shorter hittesh @550:
blah blah blah… argumentum ad populum, argument from authority, blah blah blahitty blah-blah.
Your are right Ichthyic, godbots like Hithesh talk a lot, but remove the vapid illogical arguments, and there is nothing there.
er… first sentence was supposed to include “the situation is usually marginally less bad because they have to share, which explains why they…”
I like Krishnamurti…. he often gets hijacked shamelessly by New Agers whose views are actually contrary to his
Quite. From Wikipedia: “He claimed allegiance to no nationality, caste, religion, or philosophy”. He completely rejected the idea of gurus and spiritual leaders: “All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing. Leaders destroy the followers and followers destroy the leaders. You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary.”
Cara: “Hope for something better is a pretty constant part of the human condition. Why would we need a great conductor in the sky to create it?”
Who said anything about needing a great conductor in the sky to create it? I wish individuals spent a little more time carefully reading. First of all I’m not making a case for God, or making a claim such as since such hope exists, there is a god. I’m providing a psychological analysis of the belief, one that I would make no differently if i was an atheist.
Secondly, just because certain beliefs are a pretty constant part of the human condition, that doesn’t mean that some of these beliefs are not absurd. Self-deception in certain animals has an evolutionary advantage doesn’t make self-deception any less irrational. Hope in hopelessness may have had a tremendous affect on humanity, but it’s still absurd.
“the idea that since people sometimes feel the same thing at the same time there’s some Magic Power that makes it so.”
What are you talking about?
Let’s break what’s been into even more basic blocks, in hopes that individuals here can finally comprehend what’s being said.
When we have hope, it mean that we faith in the eventual realization of that hope. We have faith in whatever force of power can bring that hope into realization. A non-absurd hope, is one that we have reasons for, it involves a faith in something in reality, such as soldiers, the government, family, friends.
Hope in hopelessness such as the hope of slaves, is an absurdity, a superstition, it has no basis in reality, it has no reasons for it, no evidence in support of it to convince anyone to believe. The slaves don’t have faith, in the physical strength and will of their fellow slaves, or faith in grand white saviors, or in politics. It doesn’t involve any sort of faith in reality, reality has only given them reasons to be hopeless.
But just as any other sense of hope, it involves a belief in force or power that can bring their hope into realization. But for slaves this is unseen, a grand mystery, it’s a faith in power transcendent to reality, since reality itself doesn’t do it. And the name given for this empowering is God.
Hope is not a belief contained in itself, it involves other conditions of possibility, to have hope, implies we have faith it what can bring it to realization. The slaves hope in hopeless, his spiritual hymn, and belief in God don’t equal two, it’s a unifying part of that belief, an inseparable notion of it, as if they are one and the same thing.
hithesh, hope doesn’t need god. We keep telling you that. Learn something. Otherwise, you just sound like a delusional fool.
What the hell? How come we only get the worst sort of second hand christian here?
Where are the True Christians , the ones that know humans are made by gawd, in gawds image? The ones that believe GOD walked and talked with Adam and Eve in the garden?
What a bunch of back peddling, bed wetting sissies.
Let’s break what’s been into even more basic blocks, in hopes that individuals here can finally comprehend what’s being said.
For that to happen, you would have to learn to write (and think) coherently.
hithest wrote:
Maybe the problem isn’t with the reader but the writer. Perhaps you should focus more on coherence and actually making points rather than writing wafty twaddle like this:
‘Hope is not a belief contained in itself, it involves other conditions of possibility, to have hope, implies we have faith it what can bring it to realization. The slaves hope in hopeless, his spiritual hymn, and belief in God don’t equal two, it’s a unifying part of that belief, an inseparable notion of it, as if they are one and the same thing.’
I’ve gone over this a few times and I still can’t make it make sense – and your odd comma usage isn’t helping.
Yep, that’s classic Krishnamurti. He always did make me smile.
I’m providing a psychological analysis of the belief, one that I would make no differently if i was an atheist.
you have a strange understanding of what “psychological analysis” means, then.
I would lean towards describing your posts as more “personal opinions for the justifications of belief” instead.
When we have hope, it mean that we faith in the eventual realization of that hope.
this, right after describing self-delusion as “absurd”.
if you want to make this statement coherent, you need to remove “faith” and substitute “evidence”.
because otherwise, faith without evidence is self-delusion.
It doesn’t involve any sort of faith in reality, reality has only given them reasons to be hopeless.
it’s a ludicrous example, but OK, let’s run with this. Then by that logic, there should be no religions at all, unless they are all based on self-delusion.
funny, but isn’t that essentially what’s already been said by others here to you?
Ichthyic: “if you want to make this statement coherent, you need to remove “faith” and substitute “evidence”.
Please, i know atheist get quite sensitive when the “f” word gets passed around, not allowing it to be applied in it’s common usage, as we would in saying I have faith in my wife or my child, or faith in scientific hypothesis. You can have faith with or without evidence, i.e. “i have faith that assumption made by the evidence is right.”
I suggest you go back and reply again with this in mind.
does not compute.
Main Entry:
1faith Listen to the pronunciation of 1faith
Pronunciation:
ˈfāth
Function:
noun
Inflected Form(s):
plural faiths Listen to the pronunciation of faiths ˈfāths, sometimes ˈfāthz
Etymology:
Middle English feith, from Anglo-French feid, fei, from Latin fides; akin to Latin fidere to trust — more at bide
Date:
13th century
1 a: allegiance to duty or a person : loyalty b (1): fidelity to one’s promises (2): sincerity of intentions
synonyms see belief
2 a (1): belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2): belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (1): firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2): complete trust
3: something that is believed especially with strong conviction ; especially : a system of religious beliefs
— on faith
: without question
if you want to make this statement coherent you need to remove “faith” and substitute “evidence”.
I don’t think that helps (in fact it would make it even more incoherent). Even if we make his statement coherent by adding the missing letter (“s”) and word (“have”), it remains false: when we hope for something, We do not have “faith”, or even an expectation, that it will occur. “I hope that X” means approximately “X is possible and I desire X”. Consider: “I hope my friend’s house didn’t burn down”, “I hope the economy improves”, I hope my favorite team wins” … these have nothing to do with faith, expectation, or evidence; they express a preference for one outcome over others.
I suggest you go back and reply again with this in mind.
I suggest that everyone recognize how fruitless it is to debate with someone so muddled in his thought processes and so poor at communicating them.
faith |fāθ|
noun
1 complete trust or confidence in someone or something : this restores one’s faith in politicians.
• a strongly held belief or theory : the faith that life will expand until it fills the universe.
Are scientist incapable of suggesting a hypothesis they have complete trust in confidence in, that it would be proven right? Faith only conveys how confident we are about an expected result, and it can just as easily be applied to a scientific hypothesis.
because otherwise, faith without evidence is self-delusion.
If one takes “faith” to mean “trust”, it would be not just delusional but incredibly foolish to trust without evidence (there’s a word for that, but it’s not in the dictionary).
Ohhh,not this one again !!!
Are scientist incapable of suggesting a hypothesis they have complete trust in confidence in, that it would be proven right? Faith only conveys how confident we are about an expected result, and it can just as easily be applied to a scientific hypothesis.
The degree of confidence is a function of the strength of evidence that supports the hypothesis. But the only scientists who have complete confidence are stupid and incompetent.
you fail at understanding how science works. for one, the whole point of hypotheses is that scientists aren’t supposed to have such blind confidence in their own ideas. and two, science doesn’t “prove” things; it either disproves things, or provides evidence for things.
Posted by: nothing’s sacred:
“I suggest that everyone recognize how fruitless it is to debate with someone so muddled in his thought processes and so poor at communicating them.”
Well, you ever think the problem is not that my thoughts are muddled, but rather you’re just too stupid to comprehend it? You, like a creationist go around calling ever argument made for evolution muddled, rather than asking questions to help clarify their confusion. This says more about you than it does about me.
P.S. Why would anyone have complete confidence that a hypothesis will be proven right if it hasn’t been proven right? Anyone who does that is bad at science.
Well, you ever think the problem is not that my thoughts are muddled, but rather you’re just too stupid to comprehend it?
I have thought of that, but it’s obviously false.
You, like a creationist go around calling ever argument made for evolution muddled
Uh, no, I only called yours muddled, as it obviously is.
I suggest that everyone recognize how fruitless it is to debate with someone so muddled in his thought processes and so poor at communicating them.
And here I’ve gone ahead and done it myself, sigh. Goodbye to this thread.
No Hithesh, your writing is vague incoherent, rambling, and nonsensical. The problem isn’t with us, but with you. Those who think so vaguely tend be delusional, and you keep proving you are with every post. You have no real idea of how science is done. I am a 30+ year practitioner of science, so I know of what I speak.
Since you can’t coherently state your ideas, get some sleep and try again tomorrow. But I suspect you will have the same problem then.
Jade: “and two, science doesn’t “prove” things; it either disproves things, or provides evidence for things.”
You’re right science doesn’t “prove” anything, I should have replaced it with “shown to be right”.
“you fail at understanding how science works. for one, the whole point of hypotheses is that scientists aren’t supposed to have such blind confidence in their own ideas.”
Who said a hypothesis is based on blind confidence? The hypothesis itself in based on some degree of evidence, some sort of observance or what else, that serves as the reason for why the hypothesis was made in the first place. I can be quite confident that when further testing and analysis is done, that my hypothesis will turn out right, and there’s nothing that prohibit a scientist from having such confidence in their assumptions like that. Or anything inherently wrong about this.
And just become I have a complete trust that an assumption of mine will turn out right, doesn’t mean that I have an absolute confidence in it. Having complete confidence, doesn’t mean that if my assumption turns out wrong, that I’m incapable of accepting it.
I’m sure you understand that every hypothesis a scientist makes is not treated with the same degree of confidence, they might be less confident about some of them, and more confident about other ones.
wait, before you go, what’s happening in SB?
It’s hard to get much detail over here.
See, if every time you try and explain something, every single person who responds has misunderstood you, that usually means you are failing to communicate.
Take a step back, gather your scattered thoughts, and give us a single paragraph — a couple of sentences, no more than 5 or 6 lines worth — to clearly and succinctly explain whatever the hell it is you’re trying to get across.
Don’t go for flowery prose. Don’t phrase it as a mangled reply to someone else, let your comment stand on its own for once. And for chrissake don’t bring mention the bloody child-staring-at-the-stars crap again; if you can’t say something meaningful independent of that, you probably don’t have anything worth hearing.
are you having problems with English comprehension, too? “having blind confidence in X” != “X is based on blind confidence”
as a the point is not to have such great confidence even in ideas for which there’s some evidence, before those ideas have even been tested.
What?
I have 50 years as a True Bible Believing christian, and even I can’t understand this hithesh character.
Damn Dollar Store trolls. *snort*
Hithesh, still no physical evidence for your god. Science is all about evidence. Put up evidence (no talk, something physical), or just shut up about it. Welcome to science. And those who can’t put up but can’t shut up are delusional fools.
wait, before you go, what’s happening in SB?
See http://www.countyofsb.org/ceo/dept0.aspx
You’re right science doesn’t “prove” anything, I should have replaced it with “shown to be right”.
that’s not the function of science, either.
hypotheses are tested for problems, not for confirmation.
It’s my job as a scientist, after constructing an hypothesis, to construct experiments designed to try and tear it down, not build it up.
We don’t use “shown to be right”, instead we say “supported by experiment until it isn’t”.
As a person, I can say that some things have been tested by experiment and prediction to such an extent that it’s simply no longer plausible to think they will be rejected entirely by any new information.
However, as a scientist I say things like “the current theory of evolution is supported by the fact that it has survived tens of thousands of attempts to reject it, and has accurate predictive value”
Who said a hypothesis is based on blind confidence?
nobody except you. You seem to have misread what you responded to.
I can be quite confident that when further testing and analysis is done, that my hypothesis will turn out right, and there’s nothing that prohibit a scientist from having such confidence in their assumptions like that. Or anything inherently wrong about this.
the problem comes when you apply “confidence” as “faith” and suggest that there is nothing wrong with confidence based on no evidence whatsoever.
In fact, I think you will find that a scientist’s personal confidence in the outcome of any given experiment is based on a LOT of already known information.
it’s not faith, it’s more of a probability estimate based on already known information.
NOT the same thing at all.
I’ve grown weary of your conflation and misrepresentation (or misunderstanding) of terms and definitions as you ramble ever onwards.
And just become I have a complete trust that an assumption of mine will turn out right, doesn’t mean that I have an absolute confidence in it.
Muddle.
No, the problem really is that your thoughts are muddled; that’s perfectly clear. Embrace coherence just a little and we might actually be able to work out what you’re saying and respond to it.
Nerdy: “No Hithesh, your writing is vague incoherent, rambling, and nonsensical. The problem isn’t with us, but with you. Those who think so vaguely tend be delusional, and you keep proving you are with every post. ”
Well, buddy I’ve been on forums long enough to know how rare few individuals accuse me of being incoherent. But when ever we’re anaylzing or expounding on a complex phenemonem such as religion, you’re not going to get any sort of cookie cutter, easy to chew explanation. You’re not going to find that “sesame street” shit here.
I’m sure when you read humanist Pyscholonalyst Erich Fromm “Psychonalaysis and Religion, you’d be far more muddled by it, if my break down of Fromm’s argument here puzzles you.
But I want to test this. Here’s summary of Fromm’s work, by an atheist who does understand it:
“Human beings, lacking the power to act at the behest of instincts alone while possessing the capacity for self-consciousness, reason and imagination, require a frame of orientation, a world-view and object of deviation in order to survive and unfold their potentialities.
Without a structured and coherent map of our natural and social world, human beings, according to Fromm, would be confused and unable to act purposefully and consistently, because there would be no framework for orienting oneself, of finding a fixed point that allows one to organize all the impressions that impinge on the individual.
….Religion is one of those maps or frames of orientation created by humans, and despite its several weakness, fulfils its psychological function.
[…] we lack total instinctive determination of our behaviour, and we have a complex brain that permits us to think of many directions we can take.
Consequently, we require an object of devotion a focal point for the convergence of all our strivings and the fulcrum of our emotional and rational values.
As Fromm maintains “we need such an object of devotion, in order to integrate our energies in one direction, to transcend our isolated existence with all its doubts and insecurities, and to answer our need for a meaning to life.””
Do you understand this? Is it muddled to you? Is it a bunch of goobly-gook? If you can comprehend it, and expound on what’s being said coherently, than we might actually be able to have an intelligent conversation, rather than one that resorts to childish name calling.
“I am a 30+ year practitioner of science, so I know of what I speak.”
Haha, well i doubt your 30+ years of science makes you anymore of an expert on religion, than it does on politics, or art, of whatever else have you.
And i tend to agree with Chomsky here:
“On the ordinary problems of human life, science tells us very little, and scientists as people are surely no guide. In fact they are often the worst guide, because they often tend to focus, laser-like, on their professional interests and know very little about the world.”
And scientist such as PZ Myers, Dawkins, Sam Harris, sure do help endorse this view.
Saying that your thinking is muddled is not “childish namecalling”; it isn’t even about you, really, but rather about the claims you’re making. That Chomsky quote, OTOH, is 100% ad hominem.
He’s not your buddy, friend.
Anyway, I’m guessing it’s because they ignore you, preferring not to wade through the textual equivalent of molasses to bother finding anything to engage with.
Either that, or the forums you frequent are dominated by people with a similar penchant for content-free waffling and are too afraid to admit it for fear of having their own rambling drivel skipped over.
So does fascism. The point isn’t that religion provides a “frame” or “map”, but that such map is wrong — it doesn’t actually reflect the real world. A map that is wrong is worse than useless, as it can lead to terrible errors (such as driving off the road or the Crusades).
“In fact, I think you will find that a scientist’s personal confidence in the outcome of any given experiment is based on a LOT of already known information.”
I can tell you what I believe the problem is here, you believe that faith means a belief without evidence. But I haven’t used faith with that implication. The gripe some one took with my use of faith in previous post, was a use of faith, no different than saying I have faith in my wife.
“it’s not faith, it’s more of a probability estimate based on already known information.
NOT the same thing at all.”
Let’s try this:
faith |fāθ|
noun
1 complete trust or confidence in someone or something
Can a scientist have a complete trust in a belief “based on probability estimates and already known information.”?
Thank you, PZ…thank you, thank you.
I didn’t have the time to read all the comments, but I made the time. This has been a stellar thread.
All the talk of Fatima & Cana, etc. made me wonder: what if the stories that were incorporated into the Christian Bible were once the Onion articles of their time?
he could, but he wouldn’t be a very good scientist if he did. please note that complete trust/confidence is misplaced in science.
“And just become I have a complete trust that an assumption of mine will turn out right, doesn’t mean that I have an absolute confidence in it.”
Posted by: nothing’s sacred | May 11, 2009 11:36 PM
“Muddle.”
Let’s see:
Absolute confidence in something being right: It’s going to be right, there’s no way it can be wrong, no evidence can arise to reveal that it’s wrong. My wife didn’t cheat on me no matter what anybody says.
Complete Confidence: I’m pretty confident that my assumption is going to be right. i believe it’s unlikely that further analysis is going to reveal my assumption to be wrong. But in the unlikely hood that evidence comes in contrary to my assumption, I can accept that my assumption was wrong. I have faith my wife didn’t cheat on me, I’m completely confident that she didn’t, but if you have solid evidence, and reason to doubt that she’s faithful I can accept it that perhaps she did cheat on me.
If it’s still muddled than God help you.
A scientist can read the relevant journal articles and research and – significantly – perform the same experiment themselves. The trust a scientist has for other scientiest is based, at least in part, on them all following the same procedures to reach their conclusions.
If one scientists makes claims that other scientists can’t follow and replicate, those claims are thrown out.
lol… #600 actually reminds me of how DnD ranks sizes… because of COURSE colossal is bigger than gargantuan. :-p
quoted for awesomeness of garbling. and because now I want an unlikely hood (that, too, sounds like something form DnD)
“he could, but he wouldn’t be a very good scientist if he did. please note that complete trust/confidence is misplaced in science.”
Only if complete trust means 100% certainty right? If it means less than that, then it doesn’t say much about if he’s a good scientist or not?
Do you have anything in your life you would say you have faith in, like faith in your wife, or children, or fellow human beings? Do you have faith that your wife is not cheating on you, or that your best friend isn’t an ax-murder? If so, are you a 100% certain of this?
lol, yes. I have “faith” that my best friend isn’t an axe-murderer. exactly the same “faith” that all the best friends of actual axe-murderers had before being proven wrong.
Yes, you unhinged twit. In this context the word ‘complete’ means 100% – to everyone other than you at least.
Newsflash: just because you want words to mean certain things doesn’t mean they do. If you can’t argue your points beyond prattling on about whether ‘complete’ can mean the same as ‘absolute’ then you’re wasting your time and ours.
“quoted for awesomeness of garbling. and because now I want an unlikely hood.”
:)
Oh shit, instead of “unlikelihood” i wrote “unlikely hood” and it was so fucking garbled, that our 30+ year scientist couldn’t figure that shit out.
If that kind of shit bat shit confuses you, no wonder you have comprehension issues.
now he’s confusing me with Nerd?
dude, stop talking, you’re making it worse.
Complete Confidence: I’m pretty confident that my assumption is going to be right.
I’m pretty confident that you’re an idiot.
Sometimes, it is too much fun to just sit back and watch the regulars vivisection a troll.
Can’t even tell the deference between Jadehawk and Nerd. This muddled and garbled thinking and communicating is such great low comedy.
Another possibility is that he’s drunk off his ass. That would explain why he can only occasionally remember to enter his name. But even if he is drunk off his ass, I’m still pretty confident that he’s an idiot.
I know I always get confused by shit bat shit :)
Seriously, dude, don’t huff and blog. It’s hilarious for us, but I’m of the opinion you can’t really afford to lose any more brain function.
Damn, I can’t stop giggling at that gem.
@#607 – “unlikelihood” would still be garbled, at least grammatically. “Unlikely event” makes sense there, but you really need to respond to #606 – when used as an unqualified adverb, “complete” is a perfect synonym to “absolute”. The accusations of incoherence leveled at you are perfectly justified, because your use of English is demonstrably incorrect. If you cannot use the language properly, it is absolutely, completely your fault that your thoughts are not understood by your audience.
All of a sudden, I want to figure out how I can shit bat shit while wearing my unlikely hood. I have faith that I can do it.
dude, stop talking, you’re making it worse.
Yup. His moronic claim that “complete trust” is not only different from “absolute confidence” but is the same as “pretty confident” takes him even further from his point, which was some strawman about whether scientists have “faith” … an equivocation, a word play on faith as trust (which is usually based on evidence) and faith as unfounded belief.
“Yes, you unhinged twit. In this context the word ‘complete’ means 100% – to everyone other than you at least[….]If you can’t argue your points beyond prattling on about whether ‘complete’ can mean the same as ‘absolute’ then you’re wasting your time and ours.”
No, you fucking moron. Do a google news search for “complete trust”. In our everyday usage we don’t use the term literally, to mean we are 100% certain. In everyday usage we imply it to mean the entirety of one’s trust (the most trust I am willing to give).
In a claim such as “I have complete trust that my wife won’t cheat on me,” what’s not meant by this is that I’m 100% certain that she won’t, that there’s not even a infidecimial chance that she won’t. That no evidence can ever be presented to make me belief otherwise. If “complete trust” was used in such a strict fashion as you purpose, than it would hardly ever be applied to anything.
All these sentences in the google news search, would be absurd:
“I have complete trust in the America that voted Obama ”
“She was known in the campaign for her ability to resolve conflicts and for having Obama’s complete trust. ”
“Ruta says investors need to be actively engaged in their money management even when they have complete trust in their advisers.”
#593:
No, no, no. One paragraph, remember? Short and sweet.
Tell you what, let’s make it even simpler — summarise whatever your position is in one sentence. Make a bald assertion, you don’t even need to support it (we can always follow up). Just make it specific.
But no, so far instead you’ve quoted a vague snippet of someone else rather than just stating your position:
I was originally going to say “no, just vapid and meaningless”, but now that I read it again… yeah, some of it really is gobbledy-gook. I mean, “focal point for the convergence of all our strivings and the fulcrum of our emotional and rational values”? Come on.
Read that last sentence of Fromm’s again.
To paraphrase: “People need to focus on something they feel gives them meaning, because it makes them feel better and answers their need for meaning”. He’s just begging the question.
Regarding “Religion is one of those maps or frames of orientation [that] fulfils its psychological function”:
I could draw you a map to Candy Mountain, and while it might comfort you to know that (if you could just figure out how to read it) the map can guide you to the “Mecca of love”, it’s still complete bollocks. It’s not “guiding” you in any meaningful sense; you still don’t know where you’re going, you’ve just stopped thinking about it.
So, is that your point — Religion guides us, somehow? Well, maybe not guide per se, but at least it gives us meaning? Okay, not meaning meaning, but it makes people feel nice?
And is therefore necessary?
…
As for your later comments:
Protip: “complete” and “absolute” are synonyms.
If you mean “pretty confident”, then why say “completely confident”?
And you’re sure no-one has trouble understanding you on other forums…?
… vivisection a troll. Can’t even tell the deference …
Caution: your keyboard appears to have been taken over by a spell checker.
infidecimial
Is that an attempt at coining a word? If Google points to it, it’ll be here first.
So, is that a lot, or a little? I mean, context is usually a guide, but I’m afraid I don’t have a lot of trust in my capacity to glean intent based on what I’ve read so far.
No, you fucking moron. Do a google news search for “complete trust”. In our everyday usage we don’t use the term literally, to mean we are 100% certain. In everyday usage we imply it to mean the entirety of one’s trust (the most trust I am willing to give).
entirety = 100%, MORON.
@#616 Stop with the gormless equivocation. If you do a google news search for “absolute trust” you get results that are semantically equivalent to those given by a search for “complete trust”. Aside from some very specific technical contexts, complete and absolute both mean the same damn thing.
vivisection a troll. Can’t even tell the deference
Is there a vas deferens between trolls before and after they’ve been vivisected?
I don’t think the scientist needs to leave the room between testing the water/wine. In the South Park episode Jesus just asked everyone to “turn around for a second.”
i see; this is merely another case of a moron not understanding that colloquial and incorrect use of words does not magically make those words actually conform to the misapplied meaning.
if I hiss at my boyfriend that he never does the dishes, and actually mean that he does them too rarely for my taste, that doesn’t suddenly mean that “never” is synonymous to “rarely”; it merely means I’m using hyperbole for dramatic effect.
“absolute/complete trust” is used the same in social context; science is not a social context, so your ramblings and equivocations about “faith” “complete trust” and “absolute confidence” are completely and utterly misplaced.
“when used as an unqualified adverb, “complete” is a perfect synonym to “absolute”.
You’re right, but this is not how we use it when we refer to terms such as “complete trust” or “complete confidence”. You can clearly see this from our everyday usage of the term, that this is not what’s being implied, that we’re not speaking in absolute terms.
If the extent of my confidence is “pretty confident”, or if I am only willing to afford at the most 99% certainty towards anything, whatever I afford this extent of trust to, get’s my complete trust. It’s not inconsistent of me to give my absolute trust to anything, and yet give my complete trust to something. Because complete trust in our everyday usage means the entirety of one’s trust, not that the entirety is absolute.
It’s not rocket science here, we speak of having faith (complete trust) in our children, in our wives, in our government, even to certain ideals, but we rarely if ever mean this to be an absolute sort of trust, in infallible, can never be proven otherwise sort of way.
Hithesh, I wouldn’t say you’re incoherent, and you may not often be accused of being so, but that may tell us more about fora you habitually frequent than it does about the quality of your prose. Some of your paragraphs are cogent, while others are so poorly written the meaning is difficult to apprehend, and prompt me to wonder to myself (and not for the first time) whether English might not be your native tongue. No offense meant.
The Chomsky quote is ludicrous in this context. It’s true in the only sense that it can be true: Science doesn’t have much to tell us about how to live our daily lives. I can eat a meal, open a door, and conduct a relationship without having to know the physics and biology of it all. But so what? As Nothing Sacred said, the quote is pure ad hom. The same criticism could be leveled at some meaningful proportion of people in any number of professions and vocations, the clergy not least of all. Consider how most American Catholics ignore virtually everything the Pope has to say. Why? Because this great moral leader of billions is so hopelessly out of touch with reality, it would be foolish, even reckless, to follow his instructions.
Look, idiot, competent scientists do not have “complete trust”, whether that is 100%, or 99%, or any other of your alleged “everyday usage” in their hypotheses, unless they already have overwhelming evidence in support of it. So just STFU, because you’re too boring and stupid for this place and you have no friends, supporters, or anyone whom you’re going to sway.
@#625 No, you don’t get to use the hard literal context for “absolute” as opposed to the social, hyperbolic context for “complete” without some very specific signaling that you are changing contexts. In post #583, the phrases “complete confidence” and “absolute confidence” are semantically identical despite your attempt to contrast them. That is why people are correctly accusing you of incoherent use of the language.
@Kseniya
hithesh wrote in #562
Let’s break what’s been into even more basic blocks, in hopes that individuals here can finally comprehend what’s being said.
And I responded
For that to happen, you would have to learn to write (and think) coherently.
Take a look at his “even more basic blocks” in #562 and see if maybe I didn’t have a point.
i see; this is merely another case of a moron not understanding that colloquial and incorrect use of words does not magically make those words actually conform to the misapplied meaning.
I asked you to clarify how you were applying the term. If you were using “complete” trust in meaning of it everyday usage which it seems you are well now is not affording 100% certainty, or in a stricter form for where it does. I didn’t tell you had to apply the term this way or the other, i asked you to clarify how you were applying it.
So you tell me whose the moron that didn’t understand the question?
Regardless I’m done arguing about “complete trust”, I made my case that the term “complete trust” in our every day usage does not imply 100% certainty, you seem to agree with this, so I don’t know what else is left to argue here?
Holy crap, that is possibly the most ridiculous sentence I’ve yet read in the Pharyngula comments (and there has been some stiff competition). Is there a font even more goofy than Comic Sans?
You’re trying to defend the indefensible. If someone says “I have complete confidence in Bob”, or says “I have absolute confidence in Bob”, they’re saying the same thing. In colloquial use like that, no one ever means it literally. Get over it.
Stop, take deep breath, and start again.
In a single sentence, what are you actually trying to tell us?
@#630 In everyday usage, the term “absolute trust” does not imply 100% certainty either. It is equivalent to the term “complete trust” in both the hard literal sense AND the everyday, colloquial sense. There’s nothing left to argue, all that’s left is for you to admit that your communication abilities are at best, imprecise.
In post #583, the phrases “complete confidence” and “absolute confidence” are semantically identical despite your attempt to contrast them.
And his justification for this contrast is a complete non sequitur:
Neither “complete trust”, “absolute confidence”, nor “complete confidence” in any way implies that one is incapable of accepting that one was wrong.
See http://www.countyofsb.org/ceo/dept0.aspx
thanks, that’s the ticket.
@Anonymous/hithesh/troll/moron
I’m done
One can only hope (without confidence or faith).
Because complete trust in our everyday usage means the entirety of one’s trust, not that the entirety is absolute.
that one goes in my WTF?? file.
thanks, though it seems to be getting a little full of late.
for my last turn at this game, I’ll guess that the writer is trying to create some sort of artificial qualitative vs. quantitative distinction between “entirety” and “absolute”. Haven’t a clue which is intended to be which.
conclusion: the person who wrote that line likes to reinvent words for fun and to waste time.
nice job trolling the thread, though.
n.s.:
Oh, I’m totally with you on that one. It was eerily similar to #435, in which he also lays out some unusual arithmetic involving God, belief(s), and the number two.
I don’t know why this guy has been called a discount troll. I mean, come on. He obfuscates, he equivocates, he prevaricates…
If this guy had any more features RonCo would be selling him for $19.99.
(The intent of my my prior comment was to say that he’s not completely, absolutely, or entirely incoherent.)
*smirk*
It was eerily similar to #435, in which he also lays out some unusual arithmetic involving God, belief(s), and the number two.
What I got from that is that he thinks that hoping to achieve political change is irrational because the only thing that can make that happen is “God”, which is unconditional love. In addition to the incoherence, there is the denial of the hard work that it took to end slavery (especially since he apparently includes all of Jim Crow and institutional racism in that term). In #562 he contrasts such “absurd” hope with “A non-absurd hope, is one that we have reasons for, it involves a faith in something in reality, such as soldiers, the government, family, friends” — as if none of those had anything to do with ending slavery/institutional racism. Compared to those posts, hithesh’s comments about the entirety of complete but not absolute or 100% trust are the model of clarity.
It is even worse than that, this is what happens when a poor speller uses spell check.
No, incoherent-loon-of-many-names, please don’t go! You’re providing us all with no end of entertainment. I’m almost certain I’ve never read anything more unintentionally funny than your line about the confusing power of ‘shit bat shit’.
“You’re trying to defend the indefensible. If someone says “I have complete confidence in Bob”, or says “I have absolute confidence in Bob”, they’re saying the same thing. In colloquial use like that, no one ever means it literally. Get over it.”
You’re right. I erroneously treated “complete confidence” in it’s colloquial use, and didn’t take into consideration that “absolute confidence” is used in the same way, that there’s really no distinction between the two terms, in that they both can be used in a formal and informal manner, while I erroneously tried to distinguish one as formal and the other as informal.
good shit :)
Hey now, be fair. The really good bat shit isn’t nearly as confusing.
I must say, his approach would probably be an awesome trolling technique in real life at parties. Walk up to a group having a conversation (could be about anything, it doesn’t matter) and whine at them “No, no noooo… you’ve got it all wrong, YOU’RE DOING IT ALL WRONG!“. Latch onto some random comment from someone and harp on it at intervals, but otherwise be as incomprehensible as possible. Throw in the occasional relevant word or two to keep people hooked in.
I doubt I could come up with enough gibberish material, or keep a straight face for very long though.
@HiTesh. You wrote:
I can see no reason for making a semantic difference between “absolute” confidence and “complete” confidence. Absolute means total and something is only complete if there is nothing missing. If you allow room for possible error then, by definition, your confidence is not complete. In other words, both of these terms means 100% confidence.
All the non-exact sciences (mathematics is the only exact science with chemistry following closely behind) there is a degree of uncertainty about every finding. Our results are reported in levels and degrees of certainty based on the mathematics of chance.
To give you some relevant examples:
On the basis of what I know about my husband’s whereabouts during the day I estimate that there less than one chance in 50 that my husband is cheating on me right now (that’s a confidence level of 98%).
On the basis of what I have read of your writing I think that there is less than one change in 100 that you have an education which includes biological, physical or statistical sciences at International Bacchelaureate level of higher (that’s a confidence level of 99%) and even less that you have mastered the elements of psycho-metrics or critical thinking.
Please note that in neither case can I say that I am absolutely or completely (=100%) confident. There is the rare possibility that my husband is sneaking out of the house for 3am sex with another woman. There is a remote possibility that you have an American Bachelor level degree with a major in statistics but have forgotten the lot due to carbon monoxide poisoning or near drowning.
From my perspective as a psychologist, Fromm’s illustrative paradigm is a “bunch of goobly-gook”. Fromm was a theoretical psycho-anlyst, not an empirical psychologist. His theories are untestable and unfalsifiable which makes them the equivalent of religious doctrine, not science. In terms of PZ’s parable, he is painting elephant wings in the air.
@PZMyers:
It surprises me that no-one has yet recognized that Eagletosh was uttering prophecy, not talking about events which can be experienced in the “now”. The man was obviously possessed of sufficient vision to predict that gene manipulation will progress to the point where elephants will join pigs in the air.
Great! Glad we got that cleared up.
Now… you were saying?
(As an aside, I can reliably guess when you’re posting — about 2 minutes before me, while I’m typing. This message is hopefully short enough to break that pattern…)
“A non-absurd hope, is one that we have reasons for, it involves a faith in something in reality, such as soldiers, the government, family, friends” — as if none of those had anything to do with ending slavery/institutional racism. ”
No, they all had an influence in ending slavery, but none of them were the reasons for a slaves hope in his eventual freedom.
I can be hopeful that one day the meek shall inherent the earth, the poor will be fed, there will be no more war, that people would turn their tools of destruction into tools of cultivation (swords beaten into plow shares). That the Jew and the Arab will one day sit at a table and break bread together.
Can you see why such a hope is absurd? Nothing about reality conveys that this form of life is possible, in fact reality seems to suggest other wise. That’d I’d have a better chance of winning the lottery seven day consecutively than having this sort of hope realized.
When we have no reason, no evidence, no basis in reality for hope, our hope is absurd.
It doesn’t matter if somewhere down the line, what I hope fore miraculously comes to fruition, at the time I held it, it was no less absurd
The hope of many slaves was not much different that this sort of absurdity.
AM i still be confusing for you? If so show me what needs even more clarification
@#643 – Thank you. Now that that’s cleared up, we can go back to #583 with some hope of communicating clearly. With respect to the following statement:
“I’m sure you understand that every hypothesis a scientist makes is not treated with the same degree of confidence, they might be less confident about some of them, and more confident about other ones.”
“confidence”, as you are using it here, cannot correctly be applied directly to a hypothesis. A hypothesis is provisionally -assumed to be true-, and a prediction is made based on the assumed truth of the given hypothesis. An experiment is then performed to determine if the prediction was correct. If the experimental results invalidate the prediction, the hypothesis is discarded. If the outcome of the experiment corresponds to the prediction, then the hypothesis is retained.
Now, a scientist (as a human being) will obviously have some expectation as to what the outcome of a given experiment will be, and this is what “confidence”, in the sense that you are using it, applies to. This confidence in an expected result has even quite probably aided in the selection of a useful hypothesis, i.e. one that provides the opportunity for experiments that will expand the scientist’s knowledge about the world. However – and this is a big however, btw – this “confidence” has absolutely no bearing on or relevance to the validity of the hypothesis. Only the actual results of experiment can provide any confidence in the validity of hypothesis in the scientific sense, never the scientist’s expectations or “confidence” in his predictions of experimental outcomes.
When you’ve demonstrated that you understand this distinction, perhaps we can clear up your conflation of two exclusive definitions of “faith”. If that goes well, then we can maybe, possibly, discuss whatever the hell it is you mean by “hope”.
“His theories are untestable and unfalsifiable which makes them the equivalent of religious doctrine, not science. In terms of PZ’s parable, he is painting elephant wings in the air.”
Ah, so you’re comparing Erich Fromm to the Eagletosh character? If so, how do you distinguish Eagletosh, from writer such as Dostoevsky, or Thomas Mann who reflect and expound on the human condition in their own mediums?
did you seriously just attempt to compare art to science and say that if we don’t accept unsupported speculation in the latter, that we shouldn’t accept it in the former…?
@#647 – Never mind, I get it now. What you’re describing is a -wish-. Have you considered the possibility that people just sometimes want impossible things, or things that at the time are assumed to be impossible? No god is required for this desire to occur, nor does this desire itself necessarily equate to god.
@#649 – I don’t make any distinction. Dostoevsky and Mann primarily wrote fiction. God and elephant wings are also simply fiction. Of course, some fiction is better art than other fiction, but that’s entirely beside the point.
@#647 – Never mind, I get it now. What you’re describing is a -wish-. Have you considered the possibility that people just sometimes want impossible things, or things that at the time are assumed to be impossible? No god is required for this desire to occur, nor does this desire itself necessarily equate to god.
@#649 – I don’t make any distinction. Dostoevsky and Mann primarily wrote fiction. Similarly, god and elephant wings are fiction. Of course, some fiction is better art than other fiction, but that’s entirely beside the point.
Twin “If that goes well, then we can maybe, possibly, discuss whatever the hell it is you mean by “hope”.”
Well, I believe I’m using hope in the normal sense of the word, the only notion of it I’m excluding, is when we say things like I hope the underdog team wins tomorrow, or I hope i became a billionaire. These are notions of hope with out any real faith in what I hope for coming true at all.
Compared to say I have hope, or I’m hopeful, meaning that I do have faith in what I hope for coming true, or being realized.
The other distinction that I made was between absurd hope, and non-absurd hope.
Reality can present us with promising conditions, hopes based on these conditions are not absurd– Hope in hopeful conditions. If we have such hopes, we can give the reasons for them, what evidence and such leads us to be hopeful.
Reality can also present us with unpromising conditions, hopes based on these conditions are absurd–Hope in hopeless conditions. This sort of hope, has no reason for it, no evidence that lead us to be hopeful, nothing in reality to believe in that can make it happen.
“When you’ve demonstrated that you understand this distinction, perhaps we can clear up your conflation of two exclusive definitions of “faith”.
I’m not sure what you mean here?
@#647 – Never mind, I get it now. What you’re describing is a -wish-. Have you considered the possibility that people just sometimes want impossible things, or things that at the time are assumed to be impossible? No god is required for this desire to occur, nor does this desire itself necessarily equate to god.
@#649 – I don’t make any distinction. Dostoevsky and Mann primarily wrote fiction. Similarly, god and elephant wings are fiction. Of course, some fiction is better art than other fiction, but that’s entirely beside the point.
Erk, sorry for the double post. As long as I’m here, the two definitions of faith that you’ve conflated are:
1. confidence or trust in a person or thing
2. belief that is not based on proof
These are (mostly) exclusive – #1 implies some evidence to support the confidence or trust, whereas #2 specifies that there is no evidence. You’ve used “faith” literally dozens of times in this thread, sometimes to mean 1, sometimes to mean 2, and you’ve resisted others’ attempts to draw a distinction between these contradictory definitions for the sake of simple clarity.
W/r/t absurd hope, or hopeless hope, the very apogee of such a thing in the human heart is REGRET, the wish or hope that things could have been other than what they were. Wanting the past to change is the epitome, model and prototype of the phenomenon you describe, and the past never changes. Therefore, the god you posit is shown to be reliably impotent where and when it counts most – meaning that, for all human purposes, it does not exist, does not matter.
Twin: “Never mind, I get it now. What you’re describing is a -wish-. Have you considered the possibility that people just sometimes want impossible things, or things that at the time are assumed to be impossible?”
People can want all sorts of impossible things, I want a lambroghini to fall out of the skys, but i’m not hopeful that one will though.
We can all desire all sorts of ends, like world piece, and yet be fairly sure that it’s never gonna happen.
Now, let’s just exclude the God belief for now. The distinction between wishing something and be hopeful about something is this: Both want a desirable end, only hopeful (or saying you have hope) implies that you believe that such an end will come about.
The slave singing a hymn claiming that he’ll be free, is not only expressing his desire for a freedom, but his belief that he will eventually be freed. A wish to be free, doesn’t include the later.
Do you understand this better now?
“No god is required for this desire to occur, nor does this desire itself necessarily equate to god.”
Well, I’ll leave the god question on the side line for now, until we’re somewhat on the same page, as to what it being implied by being hopeful.
tiny ” Wanting the past to change is the epitome, model and prototype of the phenomenon you describe, and the past never changes. ”
No, again, I think the last post should have clarified this, I made it a point in my other post to exclude the use of hope in the sense that you’re replying. In the way I’d tell her gf I just broken up with, that “I really hoped that things would have worked out differently.” As an expression of regret for the past, or as a wish.
I’m speaking of hope, as in hopeful, where it’s forward looking, a faith in a change in the future of a present condition, is not regret dwelling, but optimistic.
That’s just silly. Faith adds nothing to hope beyond a validation of a delusion. Faith is a nothing mental condition, and it’s the beliefs validated by faith that give people hope. If someone believes in God, it isn’t the faith that gives them hope but the belief in God. Faith adds nothing to the human condition, so your whole point about faith giving hope is one huge red herring.
@#656 Okay, Let’s review:
A) A person strongly desires outcome “X”
B) To the extent of their knowledge, outcome “X” is absurdly unlikely or even outright impossible.
C) However, they have faith that outcome “X” will obtain, either in the absence of evidence to support said faith or even in spite of strong evidence indicating that outcome “X” cannot happen.
Right so far? I hope so.
Now, at any time there are three possible eventualities with respect to outcome “X”.
1) Outcome “X” happens.
This merely demonstrates that the person with the absurd or hopeless hope was wrong about the likelihood of outcome “X”, or in other words – the hope was never absurd or hopeless, they merely thought that it was.
2) Events progress to the point where Outcome “X” can never obtain, e.g., the person has the hopeless hope that their child will recover from an incurable terminal illness and then the kid dies.
This merely demonstrates that faith without evidence can be easily misplaced, and that the person was wrong in their belief that outcome “X” would obtain.
3) Outcome “X” has not yet obtained, yet has not been definitively eliminated as a possibility.
In this case, we simply haven’t waited long enough – but we can be assured that we’ll hit 1) or 2) if we do. This is usually the gap that god is stuffed into by Christian theology, especially w/r/t eschatology – as an aside, I can tell you that the vast majority of adherents to such beliefs would take serious offense to categorizing the resurrection of the dead on Judgment day as an absurd or hopeless hope – they see it as a promised hope, and absolute certainty. However, even if we don’t have time to wait and we want to keep hoping, the very fact that we cannot definitively eliminate the possibility that outcome “X” will obtain means that B) is not true! We know that “X” is merely very unlikely, not impossible, because we’re not at result 2)!
Sorry man, there’s no room for god in this argument. I looked everywhere.
“People can want all sorts of impossible things, I want a lambroghini to fall out of the skys, but i’m not hopeful that one will though.”
You are confusing hope with expectation. I am capable of hoping something will happen without expecting that it will.
“I’m speaking of hope, as in hopeful, where it’s forward looking, a faith in a change in the future of a present condition, is not regret dwelling, but optimistic.”
Could you be more incoherent? How does your quibbling on semantics help your case? What is your case in the first place?
The closest thing I can see to an argument in your posts is that belief in god is warranted because people sometimes think things will change even if they have no evidence for that belief. Not that you back this up or explain it in any way.
You also seem to think that scientist reach conclusions the same way- by being really confident or something. I really don’t know. You make my head hurt.
Please explain what exactly you believe in and state the reasons that support that belief.
When will hithesh/anonymous grasp that _wishing for things does not make them true_? It’s a simple concept that many five-year-olds can cope with but some adults seem to get stuck on.
Belief in the healing powers of homoeopathy may give someone a hope that they can beat terminal cancer, while someone who is on the latest knowledge of cutting edge medicine would not have that hope. But so what? Homoeopathy is still complete garbage even if it does give people hope. Same goes for a belief in God, it may be that because they believe in a universe where magic happens (known to them as a miracle) they have hope for the impossible. It doesn’t make God any more or any less true.
And by taking this approach, one must concede that it’s not even faith in God that gives hope, it’s a belief in anything that promises the miraculous. What do people need religion for when there are a million other things out there that fill that same gap? It’s conceding a belief in belief, and doesn’t make the case for God (or homoeopathy) in the slightest. No evidence for your God = delusion.
Can we please get a Hithesh-to-English dictionary?
I have to go with pretty much everyone here and say that your thoughts are muddled. Maybe the thoughts in your head make some sort of sense in there, but after they have been typed out they don’t.
Honestly, when you write something like:
can you understand why people have trouble reading you?
Even when we try and break things down to agree on basic terms you remain baffling. “Absolute confidence” is taken literally but “Complete Confidence” isn’t?
Now you say :
No, no one uses those terms like that. Have you ever heard phrases like “I hope you die in a fire” or “I hope I win the lottery”? Did you really think that when people say “I hope X” they always, or even most of time, believe X will happen?
Please take some courses in linguistics or statistics or any courses in the sciences. Anything to develop your critical thinking and communications skills.
That’s backwards. Windows wins because the people who write the software you use only support it. And they will continue to do so until their customers demand otherwise.
Ah, inertia.
Wins a prize for stupidest comment.On this thread,anyway.
True, but to deprive myself of the software I use for some hypothetical software support in the future is just plain silly. While I feed the system, there simply is no other way around it.
It was an honest reflection of the reality of the situation. I’ve used linux before and even now on Windows I still use a lot of open source software that runs on different platforms. Hell, even for development I use a unix emulator on my PC. But quite simply I play too many games that run on Windows-only, that ties me to the operating system. Because in the end, what matters when you use a computer is what you can do with it. I would prefer to use linux, but there isn’t the software support to be a gamer under linux. So before you say it’s a stupid comment, consider what role an operating system plays with the software above it. The software I use is only supported on Windows so because of that I use Windows, pure and simple.
Kel,
sorry,seems i plugged the comment out of context.
As to gaming,I have an XP partition in a virtual machine that does my gaming for me,i guess if youre serious about online gaming etc that doesnt do,well,same with my online soccer needs,those chinese hackers just dont want to code for Unix lol…..
Other than that,I hate to use the Xp partition,just too dangerous and fault-ridden !
Windows is as big of a pain in my ass as anyones, but the truth is it is still the most used OS in business and because of my job and the amount of work I do not sitting in my office I have to use windows. Because of that I’m not spending the cash to get a MAC (though I would if I had extra cash lying around) so I can run Photoshop, Lightroom and a host of other photo tools (and the occasional game though that’s less and less important). I don’t think GIMP is nearly as good as photoshop so that is a problem. But I use linux servers where ever possible at the office. Weaning users off windows to linux desktops is not worth the trouble as most of our users are idiots as it is.
Where we really should be focusing our rage is at people who put ketchup on their hotdogs.
No, you still haven’t shown physical evidence for your imagainary deity, so he doesn’t exist. That has been my point all along.
A philosophical god that doesn’t interact with the world is simply a personal belief. That appears to be your god. Now, simply because you choose to believe in your imaginary god, why should we? You have presented no physical evidence to convince us of that, just vague imbecilic meanderings. You are deluded, and we choose not be share your delusions. What part of that are you having trouble with?
I hope you will stop torturing the English language. I don’t expect this hope to be fulfilled.
Back in 2007 when I left uni and entered the workforce, I ha every intentiaon of going dualboot. I always have the latest Kubuntu system lying around somewhere. What I found was that I spent almost all my time in Windows (because of games and chatting facilities) and because windows needs to be formatted so often that setting up a dualboot is more hassle than it’s worth. Maybe I should go back to a dualboot system, I want to try out KDE4. If google talk lets me voice chat in linux, then I may spend a fair bit of time there – away from the temptation of games which means I might get some coding done.
Well I’m lucky in that because I’m in IT every single person I knows asks me if I want their old PCs when they are done with them so I usually have about 10 or so in the office or server closet at my house. I have a few servers running and always have a pc or two trying out new distros, but it’s just easier to go back to the Windows PC because it will do anything I need it to and honestly I rarely have issues. But that’s just probably because of my knowledge / experience / career.
I will tell you I’m ready for Windows 7 to come out because Vista is a fucking resource hog.
I knows?
(a) I use a Windows laptop for presentations and logins and do all my serious work remotely on Linux systems.
(b) I hope this ticket will win the lottery but I don’t really expect it to.
(c) hithesh isn’t really trying any more.
The “N.Korea” religion thread is hundreds back, so there’s probably no hope of picking it up again, but just to respond:
Yes, N.K. (like other stalinist states) has a cult of personality around its leader. That is *sort* of like a religion, though I think that idea’s got some problems, like no one expecting him to be immortal, or that the Leader created the world, etc., and similar cults existing around dictators in other places, Saddam Hussein, say, with no one confusing that with the actual religions of Iraq. Cuba certainly makes a big fuss about Che but people would laugh at you if you told them they worshiped Che.
For the poster who asked about China, yes, China is more religious than NK. Religion is very popular there right now, though some groups that are considered politically dangerous like Falun Gong get repressed.
The fact that posters can argue about which countries are more and less religious, and all the reasons why we shouldn’t count certain countries, etc. really proves my point, that there is no real correlation between religiosity and social progress.
Note that the correlation between “highest standard of living” and “least religious” is also belied by looking at smaller cultures: the Piraxa in Brazil are probably even less religious than the Swedes (there are a few religious Swedes, I’ve met one), but their “standard of living” in a material sense is very low. I should note, the Piraxa are reportedly very happy.
Regarding China: I took Chinese language lessons in a college in Missouri, USA. The instructor was born in mainland Communist China. He said that Communism, in China, *was* a religion. He said that he had to declare his belief in Communism, do rituals and read the correct books.
That was one man, one time, but he came up with the comparison, himself. Which leads me to think that the Chinese are pre-loaded by their current Communist culture to be susceptible to “other” religions, rather than being atheistic or seeking out free thought.
This whole “faith as trust” and “faith as belief without evidence” discussion is just a bait-and-switch. As has been pointed out, the scientists’ trust in the scientific method or confidence in a hypothesis is empirical, in that we have plenty of evidence that the scientific method works, and the hypothesis is not invented from no where, but is already consistent with a large amount of observed facts.
If you want to call that “faith” then ok, but don’t pretend that it is at all comparable to “faith in god” which is based on nothing but wishful thinking. Again, it is the distinction between evidence or no evidence. This “faith in God” is without any evidential foundation at all. So if you want to talk about faith as “trust” or “confidence,” it still comes down to the difference between belief based on evidence or belief based on no evidence.
The bait-and-switch comes in the ever changing usage. Theists bait, by saying, “You have trust in the scientific method. Since faith means trust, that means that you have faith _just_ _like_ _christians_ _do_.”
And there is the switch.
Good point, Pablo.
What about the much more successful Marx brothers, one of whom once quipped :”This morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas — How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know!”
“You are confusing hope with expectation. I am capable of hoping something will happen without expecting that it will.”
We use hope in two different ways, one in which we hope without expectation, and in a way in which you do with expectation. The Christian use of the term hope is always with the later not with the former. Saying you “have hope”, or are hopeful, implies it as well.
Here, lets read the wikipedia entry on Hope:
“To hope is to wish for something with the expectation of the wish being fulfilled.”
As you can that I’m not confusing anything here.
I would prefer to use linux, but there isn’t the software support to be a gamer under linux.
We can discuss the relative merits of the XBox, the PS3 and the Wii all day long, but my choices are constrained if I want to play Super Mario Galaxy. I’ll use Linux if I want to build a wall of rendering stations to crunch animation frames, but if I want to play Crysis or HL2 or UT3, and/or use the available development tools to make mods, it won’t be on linux. I’m told Eagletosh’s Holodrome is the best, but then I’m just another knucklehead.
New Language Discovered on Blog
MINNEAPOLIS, Minn- Linguists today announced the discovery of a new language found in the comments of the popular science blog, Pharyngula. The new language has been named Hithish, in honor of its only known speaker, Hithesh.
While Hithish may superficially resemble English there are many key differences. For example, while in English ‘absolute’ and ‘complete’ are synonyms in Hithish they are antonyms, with ‘complete’ having its opposite meaning in English. Also, the phrase ‘child gazing at the stars’ in Hithish means ‘a child being left alone in a room with a Catholic priest’. This comes as a relief to many commenters who thought Hithesh was launching a bizarre, inexplicable campaign against an innocent image.
In fact, there was much confusion during the thread. “The way he put words together just didn’t make sense,” said one commenter. “I mean, it got to the point where we had to get him to define every word he used. It was then we realized he simply didn’t use those words like we did.”
“To my knowledge this is the first case of a new language having been discovered on the internet” offered Dr. Syntax, a professor of linguistics at MIT. “While Hitish often appears semi-grammatically correct semantically it is meaningless. Take this for example: ‘When we have hope, it mean that we faith in the eventual realization of that hope.’ I mean no native speaker of English would write something like that.”
Linguists have begun analyzing comments from Hithesh. The work so far has included various obstacles. “It’s hard work,” explained Dr. Syntax. “How Hithish words have changed from their original English meaning is quite arbitrary. At times they appear to be quite similar, at other times they have acquired their opposite meaning, and yet at other times they mean something completely different. It will be years before we are able to translate paragraphs of text.”
Your evidence for this assertion is what?
Feyn “No, no one uses those terms like that. Have you ever heard phrases like “I hope you die in a fire” or “I hope I win the lottery”? Did you really think that when people say “I hope X” they always, or even most of time, believe X will happen?”
Catholic Encyclopedia:
Hope, in its widest acceptation, is described as the desire of something together with the expectation of obtaining.
Britannica:
hope
Christianity
Main
“in Christian thought, one of the three theological virtues, the others being faith and charity (love). It is distinct from the latter two because it is directed exclusively toward the future, as fervent desire and confident expectation.”
Wikipedia
Hope: “To hope is to wish for something with the expectation of the wish being fulfilled”
So what where you saying that no one uses hope in that way again?
So what was that about no one uses the word hope like that again?
I’m curious, so you see no difference in saying “I have hopes for the future, of us living in a peaceful world.” and “i hope we leave in a peaceful world”, You don’t see that one use comes with an expectation of obtaining, while the other use doesn’t?
Another bait-and-switch.
If you want to say you “use it differently” then darn it, recognize that you are using it differently and don’t pretend that it is similar to or has anything to do with how others use it.
Taking a theist approach and giving it the same label as something different does not make them the same.
Another bait-and-switch.
No, i’ve said this from the get go:
“For the slave and Rev. King, what was being spoken about is Hope. Hope is an assumption that believes that what’s hoped for will be realized. ” (#475)
“Well, I believe I’m using hope in the normal sense of the word, the only notion of it I’m excluding, is when we say things like I hope the underdog team wins tomorrow, or I hope i became a billionaire. These are notions of hope with out any real faith in what I hope for coming true at all.
Compared to say I have hope, or I’m hopeful, meaning that I do believe in what I hope for coming true, or being realized.” (#653)
Hope: “To hope is to wish for something with the expectation of the wish being fulfilled”
Fine, then. I hope your religion expires along with every other so people’s hearts and minds may no longer be subjected to its toxins; that our children may gaze at the stars in the hope of reaching them.
Ugh I really wish PZ would have the SB nerds remove the ability to comment anonymously. Make people use a name. ANY name to separate all the different people commenting on all the threads.
maybe they can do that when they fix the blockquote formatting disaster.
Hitest probably doesn’t want to click on my name lest he be offended by the image.
“Fine, then. I hope your religion expires along with every other so people’s hearts and minds may no longer be subjected to its toxins. That our children may gaze at the stars in the hope of reaching them.”
Good for you, I see the peddling of a faith here, that when religion is out the picture, children will gaze at the stars and hope for reaching them. Of course, it doesn’t follow logically why this would be so, and is no different than a superstition.
I see the peddling of a faith here
You’re hallucinating. I want your religion and all others to expire, and I will work toward that end. Because I’m well aware of the power of deceit and self-deception, I have no confident expectation that my wish will be fulfilled.
@#$% blockquote fail…
… Testing. Page sane again?
Good for you, I see the peddling of a faith here, that when religion is out the picture, children will gaze at the stars and hope for reaching them. Of course, it doesn’t follow logically why this would be so, and is no different than a superstition.
That is where you would be mistaken. If those children are able to follow their hopes and desires, it will because they worked hard enough and learned enough to make it happen. It will be tangible. It will not be as the result of asking for supernatural help.
Or are you implying the the ability to imagine possibilities and acting on it is, in it’s roots, a supernatural activity?
Ken Cope: “You’re hallucinating. I want your religion and all others to expire, and I will work toward that end. Because I’m well aware of the power of deceit and self-deception, I have no confident expectation that my wish will be fulfilled.”
And you’re deluded, not because you doubt that you expectation will be fulfilled, but what you expect will come about if the verse of the John Lennon’s song came true “imagine no religion”.
You’re deluded, by your belief in the magical power of disbelief, that a world without religion, a world where atheism runs rampant makes for a better world, and appeals as a utopian fetish.
This is not a view supported by science, or even coherent reason, and is not much different than a superstition.
I still don’t get how having faith that a desired outcome will obtain while simultaneously believing (on evidence) that said outcome cannot obtain demonstrates anything other than the ability of human beings to think irrationally. It certainly doesn’t demonstrate any form of transcendence – at the very most it shows that a -belief- in god can lead to doublethink or outright denial of reality, and that in some cases such irrational beliefs can augment a person’s ability to maintain optimism in the face of severe adversity.
And you’re deluded, not because you doubt that you expectation will be fulfilled, but what you expect will come about if the verse of the John Lennon’s song came true “imagine no religion”.
I had no idea that Hithesh had the ability to peer into the intertoobz, look into people’s heads and see where people got their ideas.
In order to make Hithesh’s musings even more funny, I imagine them being said by Hesh of Sealab 2021. It is the perfect voice for such ramblings.
Hithesh, quit talking about science, which is obviously a topic your are ill informed on. I speak as the 30+ year working scientist. Science does not use hope, faith, or god. It uses physical evidence. Something you are unfamiliar with.
Humans don’t need religion for hope. Only deluded/stupid fools think they need religion for hope. We know that. Why can’t you see it? Too tied up in your woo to see reality?
Twin: “It certainly doesn’t demonstrate any form of transcendence – at the very most it shows that a -belief- in god can lead to doublethink or outright denial of reality, and that in some cases such irrational beliefs can augment a person’s ability to maintain optimism in the face of severe adversity.”
::facepalm::
:), and you speak of me not being incoherent?
Tell me how you reconcile the above with this:
“I still don’t get how having faith that a desired outcome will obtain while simultaneously believing (on evidence) that said outcome cannot obtain demonstrates anything other than the ability of human beings to think irrationally.”
optimistic |ˌäptəˈmistik|
adjective
hopeful and confident about the future :
How is it not irrational according to your logic, to be optimistic about a good future, that all the evidence reveals is not coming about? Why would we rationally maintain optism in the vase of a severe adversity, rather than pessimism, when we perceive the odds not being in our favor.
Hithesh, you must show using physical evidence that hope can only occur with a belief in god. If we can show hope can occur without a belief in god, which we have already done, you will be/are already refuted.
Show, with physical evidence, where god allows something to be done that cannot be done without your imaginary deity. Until then, you have nothing, just like you have at the moment. Nothing but your delusions.
Hithesh, I never said that the optimism was rational. It might be desirable or useful or conducive to lower stress levels, but none of these things imply rationality or correspondence with reality. In fact, the whole point I was making was that the optimism in question had its foundation in irrational thought, doublethink, denying reality, what have you. It seems you’ve got problems with reading comprehension as well as with clarity of expression.
Posted by: TwinIonEngines | May 12, 2009 11:59 AM
Hithesh, I never said that the optimism was rational.
You’re right, I read your post wrong, and I apologize.
Instead, we have a world where archbishops excommunicate people for giving nine-year-old rape victims abortions, where fundamentalists want mythology to replace science, where gays are denied rights because “God thinks what they do in bed is icky, and pedophiles are given a free pass by their church. That’s so much better than a religion free world.
And you’re deluded, not because you doubt that you expectation will be fulfilled, but what you expect will come about if the verse of the John Lennon’s song came true “imagine no religion”.
First of all, I demonstrated how foolish it is to use the word “hope” in the manner Hitest prescribes, because its meaning cannot be so exclusive. So, for Hitest to take what I wrote:
and change its meaning this way:
is both dishonest, and leaves Hitest arguing with something I didn’t say.
And thank you very much AJ Milne @694 for expanding on what we both understand the issue to be. My children will not need to spend as many years as I did unlearning nonsense. For Hitest to sputter about my presumed superstition would be ironically funny, were it not for the fact that Hitest’s language usage is so peculiar that what he meant by “superstition” might very well have been, ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!'”
Hithesh, still no physical evidence for your imaginary god. Bad troll.
Twin: “It certainly doesn’t demonstrate any form of transcendence – at the very most it shows that a -belief- in god can lead to doublethink or outright denial of reality, and that in some cases such irrational beliefs can augment a person’s ability to maintain optimism in the face of severe adversity.”
I’m not demonstrating any form of transcendence, but that such beliefs of hope in hopelessness are beliefs in transcendence, not that what’s being believed is true or not.
Secondly, I wouldn’t say having hope in hopelessness is always a denial of reality, since I can be hopeful and yet be well aware that reality gives me no reason to be hopeful. Sort of like how I can believe I’ll survive my fight with cancer, and yet be well aware that the odds are against me. I’m well aware of what the reality of my situation is, that i’m unlikely going to win here. But I won’t allow the odds to lead me to despair, or the grimness of reality to have such power over me.
I believe in what can make this possible, that can turn the odds in my favor, such as Rev. King believe in what “can make a way out of no way”. These are beliefs in transcendence: “existing apart from and not subject to the limitations of the material universe.”
Do you concede this much?
Re #705, you’re welcome.
And I’d note generally (again, and as has been noted so many times) that this will generally be the nature of arguments with liars of this p[articular streak. Twisting and turning and sliming their way past and through whatever tiny chink they hope they can open through liberal and convenient misinterpretation of what they’re facing, the ‘complex theologian’ will always play this game, as ultimately, it’s the only one they can hope a partially disinterested audience might view as legitimate. Thus the notion that it is somehow ‘faith’ to hope the reduction of superstition might lead to a saner world–or at least that it is likely to be a sensible long-term goal if only for the more immediate likely effect on would-be adherents–will be expanded to appear a very thesis. As opposed to 90 percent wilful misinterpretation of a varied and complex view on the part of opponents who may or may not always have stated it terribly clearly. And 10 percent trollish chest-thumping.
Quite seriously, that very behaviour is one more argument as to why I’d be happy to see these systems’ influence reduced: the faint hope of a little less time wasted on neosophist idiot savants whose only actual talent is talking in increasingly tiny circles around any significant points which might be so unfortunate as to come anywhere near their person.
Ken Cope: “I hope your religion expires along with every other so people’s hearts and minds may no longer be subjected to its toxins”
Here, let’s allow your own words to be your noose.
You hope my religion expires, what do you expect will happen if it did? Do you believe the world be made better by it if it did?
We concede nothing to your pile of bullshit. That is all you are presenting, piles of incoherent bullshit. When you arrive at a lucid, cogent argument, we will tell you. Try losing the need to justify your imaginary deity. It would help your clarity of thought.
Hithesh, of course I concede that some people believe in transcendence. That’s never been at issue. It’s the inferences you draw from that fact, and from your own belief in transcendence, which are being disputed.
Here, let’s allow your own words to be your noose.
I had you pegged as an exuberant proponent of crucifiction, although the pointy white sheet you’re wearing does not surprise.
How about we just gaze up at the stars instead?
Yes, the less stupidicious nonsense like your religion in the world, the better off the world will be. We know that.
Our two weapons are conflation and obfuscation. And incomprehensibility. Our three weapons are conflation, obfuscation, incomprehensibility, and a fanatical obsession with a dead man on a stick.
I’ll come in again.
Have you seen the stars tonight?
Nerd of Redhead, why don’t you just run along dude, I know you’re dying for attention but sheesh, you would think after all these times of me ignoring you, you would have moved on already. I would hate to see how you act when a gf breaks up with you, or a chick you met the other night doesn’t return your phone calls.
And stop projecting dude, I doubt Twin needs you to be his/her spokesperson. I didn’t ask you anything, I asked twin, and I’m sure he’s capable of responding on his own, and doesn’t need you to do it for him.
Translation: I don’t want to argue with you. I’m currently more interested in trying to troll someone else. So I’m gonna try to misrepresent that specific dishonesty as some kind of authority, here, in some hope it’ll piss you off. Which might amuse me a little, anyway.
/Obvious troll is obvious.
Here, let’s allow your own words to be your noose.
What an arrogant little douche you are.
You hope my religion expires, what do you expect will happen if it did?
Fewer wars. A less divided society. Better education. How many would you like?
Do you believe the world be made better by it if it did?
Yes. Counter-question: what good does religion do?
Hithesh, you are the one who needs to run along. You keep presenting some type of inane presupposition argument that makes no sense to us sciency types. You cannot clearly state your premise is just a couple of sentences. You will get nowhere here until you do. You also present no physical evidence for your imaginary deity. Total failure on your part to date. And I am going nowhere.
By the way, I have been married to the Redhead for 30+ years. Learn to read. I am an old fart.
… also, since your statement is too direct, too clear-cut, and playing with the gaps in it the way I intended to with Ken is gonna appear way too obvious, that’s not gonna work for me nearly as well, here. So go ‘way. Please.
/Adds notch to ‘theotroll conventions’ counter…
Tiny: “Hithesh, of course I concede that some people believe in transcendence. That’s never been at issue. It’s the inferences you draw from that fact, and from your own belief in transcendence, which are being disputed.”
What inference of mine is being disputed? Is transcendence being disputed? Or belief in God based on a belief in transcendence being disputed?
All I’ve been arguing so far is that a belief in the transcendent and a belief in God are rarely if ever two separate beliefs. A belief in the transcendent, is also a belief in what can make the transcendent possible (God).
Wrong again. Philosophy without evidence is sophistry. You can substitute god for philosophy with the same result. Put up the physical evidence for god, or you have nothing. Just as I have been saying all along.
A belief in the transcendent, is also a belief in what can make the transcendent possible (God).
Whoop-dee-doo. So? What is your point? Belief in the transcendent is the entire problem. Most of us here have none; it seems safe to assume from your confused, muddled troll-vomit that you do.
Do you have anything to back up such a belief?
Nusubito @ 493:
* Instant fail.
If Jesus is, as claimed and believed, the Most Supreme, Most Holy and Most Blessed Christ, the Son of the Most High, the Bright and Morning Star, Redeemer of the World, Almighty Saviour, Highest Judge, Chief Priest, the Son of David, Lily of the Valley, Lord of all Lords and King of all Kings, Ruler of Heaven and of Earth, you don’t coax Him into doing owt.
Hithesh, suppose that I grant that belief in transcendence is largely congruent and overlapping with belief in deity. What does that imply, according to you? What, in short, is the fucking point? I know that people believe things. Are you aware that people believe things that are not true?
Now that you’ve spent thousands of words to assert that A) people believe in transcendence, B) people believe in deity and C) people believe that transcendence is deity, I want to see a payoff – or at least a punchline.
Also, if you’re going to abbreviate my name, I prefer TIE. (Not Tie, TIE)
Don’t worry Pilty, you are still wrong. Your record is intact. You still haven’t shown physical evidence for your imaginary god, just like Hithesh, so your bible is a work of fiction and your dogma even worse fiction. We know that. The day you recognize those facts is the day you intellectually grow up.
Piltdown Man, you can be banned for godbotting. Go pray or something useless like that.
Hithesh, you’re a babblin’ idiot. I just needed to say that.
Great stuff. Long-time fan of Blows, here.
Ken@714
Thanks for returning me to one of my all time favorite albums (my copy is so played out that it’s almost nothing but vinyl fuzzy buzz-how many hundreds of times can you play a vinyl record until it gets incomprehensible-let’s find out!).
Let’s see if I’ve got hithesh’s “argument” down:
“Atheists have not delivered a perfect, universal, free, instantaneous, simple, prepackaged solution to every single problem in the world, therefore my version of god (and no other) exists, and is not in any way obligated to provide the aforementioned solution. In fact, it is sacrilege to even ask for such a thing, though it is perfectly acceptable to make absurd demands for prefect solutions of random atheists on the internet based on a willful misrepresentation of a blog post. The very thought that anything could be different in any way is an explicit acknowledgement of the reality of my version of god, because I say so, and any atheist who denies this is a filthy liar, because words mean what I find it convenient for them to mean, and nothing else. Because I’ve lived such a pitifully hard life, oh woe is me, everything I say and do MUST be correct, and anyone who disagrees with me MUST be an ivory-tower elitist born with a silver spoon in his mouth, the actual facts are irrelevant, the calamity and woe of my horrible, horrible childhood give me a special omnipotent insight into anything and everything, much like Jesus Christ. I, and I alone, determine what everyone in the world believes, no matter what anyone else thinks. And because everyone believes in my god (because I say so), my god must be real. Reality is what I want it to be, your pitiful requests for evidence fall on deaf ears.”
Or even if he wasn’t all of those.
Because I, God, absolutely hate, despise, loathe, and utterly reject all honest inquiry, reasoned analysis, controlled experimentation, and any and all attempts to find truth and falsity in the physical universe and avoid the deception of self and others.
I mean, really. Where would I be if I allowed that sort of thing?
Big “if” there, Pitly. Big, BIG “if”.
(And you forgot “Shepherd of the Sheep”.)
Speaking of “instant fail,” did you really have to quote nearly 50 lines of text to make a point about a phrase in the second sentence? Sheesh.
By the way, I think you’re wanted on the Maine thread.
“Hithesh, suppose that I grant that belief in transcendence is largely congruent and overlapping with belief in deity. What does that imply, according to you? ”
Well, this all started around post 465, where someone couldn’t get this, why my holding of a transcendent belief in the power of love is congruent with my belief in God. They couldn’t figure out that these beliefs are overlapping. That they are not two separate beliefs, but one.
There really hasn’t been much else implied by me, beyond this.
KI:
Eighth grade was a big year for music. ;-)
KI, it is available on CD, you know. My copy has all the original artwork (reduced, of course) which isn’t terribly common for obscure reissues like that one.
James Sweet@413 has a “pet theory” which isn’t necessarily a bad thought but, haven’t you learned anything from PZ about what a theory is?
And, you were “fated” to be together with your wife and you “literally believe this”? What mystical force is driving this fate that you literally believe in?
PZ and many that post comments here don’t believe in woo. I suppose that might be what is causing the tension that you have expressed experiencing not because there is some conspiracy to dislike ex-mormons.
Hithesh, lying troll for jesus:
Bullshit. You’ve been deliberately misrepresenting other people’s words, creating a new and incomprehensible language, and whining about how your horrible childhood makes you automatically right and everyone else automatically privileged and out of touch, regardless of reality.
And even if it were true that the above is all you’re implying (and it clearly isn’t), you’ve made no effort whatsoever to support your claim with evidence, and it’s a meaningless load of crap anyway.
There was a famous theologian who said that Reason was My greatest whore, wasn’t there?
I suppose that would make Me an ontological panderer, or an epistemic pimp, perhaps.
“Pssst! Hey, check out the sweet lemmas on this syllogism! Sexy, right?”
There really hasn’t been much else implied by me, beyond this.
Well, other than that there is an abstract concept of love, that there is a God, that everyone here is stupid, and many, many more things.
Back to what has been asked of you many times: what do you have to back up either/not two/whatever the hell you decide to call it, before you go off on another peyote-like sidetrack… what do you have to back up your belief(s)?
Then we’re back to Santa Claus and leprechauns, because whatever distinctions one attempts to draw between the idea of such entities and the idea of transcendent deity/deific transcendence don’t matter with respect to the truth of said claims.
In other words, whatever category distinctions separate leprechauns from transcendence do not apply to the beliefs held in either the former or the latter. A belief in leprechauns is epistemologically equivalent to a belief in transcendence – there may be a difference in how these beliefs make you feel, but not in what knowledge they can be used to acquire.
Hell, maybe there are some people who get the same emotional benefit from believing in leprechauns that you do from believing in transcendence. It doesn’t actually have meaning, despite any qualia of meaning or fulfillment that you may be experiencing. It’s your brain making itself feel good.
I am so adding those to my CV.
/Yes, it’s padding. But y’know. When in Rome…
Watchman@733
Yep, I know that, but after all the years of it slowly getting murkier and murkier, the sudden digital crispness shocked my ears and it’s taking me a bit of time to get used to hearing it as it was recorded.
“Let’s see if I’ve got hithesh’s “argument” down:”
Woah there buddy, that’s a shit load of projection. Let’s see what if we can one up you:
“Any theist who misapplies the use of words, even when he admits that he mistakenly did, is claiming that words mean what he wants them to mean. That the theist use of the definition of Hope including an expectation, backed up by three different Encyclopedias, is him presenting an obscure version of it, a version of in betrayal of the english language.
Any theist pointing out the silliness of a certain atheist’s conclusion, is the theist claiming he has the solution for everything. But when an atheist points out the silliness of a theist belief, he’s not claiming that he has the solution for everything.
A theist pointing out that 1+1 doesn’t equal 3, is claiming he has empirical evidence for God. A theist conveying why other people believe, is him trying to convince you to believe in his God. A theist saying he doesn’t find the image of a child gazing at the stars meaningful, is him claiming what you should find meaningful.
All theist are fundies, if they’re not fundies they’re those dang godless liberals who believe in a “nebulous humanism”. If religion is not portrayed in the way PZ Myers, and Richard Dawkins present it, it’s a distortion. If scientist who actually study the phenomena, such as those who study the behavior of suicide terrorist (Scott Atran, Robert Pape), and claim that arab terrorist are not motivated by religious reason, they’re full of shit. If they claim that religion does not have the power to do what Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers claim it can do, they’re fucking lying.
A claim that a world will be made no better if we all were disbelievers, is a claim that we’d all be made better if we were believers. Just as we’d all be be blue, if we weren’t yellow. ”
maybe there are some people who get the same emotional benefit from believing in leprechauns
Actually, many people get nutritional benefits as well.
Hithesh,
I was brought up as a Christian, and until quite recently I was an active and practising believer. Over time, I have gradually become an agnostic.
My non-belief is not the product of an intentional choice or preference. Nor do I have any desire to wipe out religion; other people can believe and practice what they wish, so long as they don’t impose it on me. Rather, my non-belief is the simple acknowledgement of this fact: there is insufficient evidence in support of any particular theological belief system to justify adopting that belief system. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; all revelatory religions make extraordinary claims, and none of them adduce extraordinary evidence in support of those claims.
Christianity rests on the belief, inter alia, that Jesus of Nazareth was a divine being who performed miracles and was physically resurrected from the dead. There is, however, very little evidence for this. In fact, we know next to nothing about his life; all we have are four pseudonymous accounts, of uncertain date and provenance, which were almost certainly not written by eyewitnesses.
Of course, I can’t prove that it isn’t true; and I don’t doubt that you will concede, as most intelligent Christians do, that reason alone cannot compel the adoption of Christianity. Rather, a belief in the tenets of the Christian religion is said to require faith. But the problem with “faith” as an epistemic method is that, once you abandon the requirement that a claim be supported with evidence before you are willing to believe it, there is no coherent way of distinguishing between those claims which you deem worthy of belief and those which you do not.
Why do you accept the claim that Jesus was the Son of God, while rejecting the claim that Mohammed was God’s final prophet, or that Joseph Smith transcribed the Book of Mormon from golden plates given to him by the Angel Moroni, or that Zeus impregnated human women in ancient Greece, or that (as David Icke claims) most world leaders are part of a reptilian alien conspiracy to take over the world? Like Christianity, all of these are claims which have been believed by many people, but which are not backed by solid evidence. You need, therefore, to show me your epistemology; how do you know that Christians are right, and that Muslims, Mormons and neo-pagans are wrong? If you rely on faith in lieu of evidence, how do you discriminate between the true and the untrue?
You correctly point out that faith provides inspiration and comfort to many people in their darkest times. That is true. But the fact that a belief enhances some people’s lives doesn’t make that belief right. This is the case from any perspective. People have drawn inspiration and comfort from any number of different beliefs, ranging from Islam to Mormonism to Marxism – and many of them have died as martyrs for their beliefs. Yet these beliefs cannot all be right, for many of them contradict each other; Muslims and Christians, to take a stark example, cannot both be right about the nature of God, since Muslims view the idea of Jesus as the “Son of God” as blasphemy against monotheism. So I would have to reject the notion that a belief is any more valid because people – even great people – draw their inspiration from it.
Simply put, you’re making an argument from consequences: “a belief in X has beneficial effects, therefore X must be true.” This is no more objective and meaningful than “I want X to be true, therefore X must be true.” It’s not a valid form of objective epistemology. There is a big part of me that would love to embrace Christianity, the religion of my family and many of my friends; and indeed I was significantly less depressed about my life when I was a Christian. But, as Jefferson said, “…the opinions and beliefs of men depend not upon their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds.” I can’t choose to believe a lie simply because I wish to believe it. Neither can anyone who pays even the slightest attention to the demands of intellectual honesty.
Sorry for the rant.
Walton… if you could just let go of your libertarian delusions, you’d be a shoo-in for a Molly. That wasn’t a rant, that was beautiful.
Libertarian or no (and, Tory or no), I totally intend to put Walton up for the next Molly after that. Apart from him having earned it, if we Mollify Walton it will annoy the hell out the other libertarians who won’t be able to say “WAH you ignore my brilliance because you’re all sheeple and bigoted against libertarians”.
Nicely said, Walton.
I’d like to add a bravo for Walton, nicely put.
I have never doubted Walton’s intelligence. It’s his disconnect from others, callous disregard for the disadvantaged, and ignorance of history and economics that annoy me. Oh, and his self-loathing.
“As you can that I’m not confusing anything here.”
This is from a while back, but anyone else find this sentence particularly hilarious?
Probably everything I’m about to say has been covered, and better than I’m about to do it, by the usual suspects :) , but the only way to find out would require hitting “refresh”, and that could take years and cost millions of lives, so….
anonymous (presumed to be hithesh) @ 700:
Because we may not have all the evidence, or we may be misinterpreting the evidence we do have. Because the odds may not be as we perceive them to be. Because, even if we do have all the evidence currently available, the conditions of the “test” may change. To use your slavery example, when society condones slavery, considers it to be a natural state for some groups or individuals, the slave may indeed have a hopeless hope of freedom, and the conditions would suggest that it would never be possible. Then, society’s acceptance of the rightness of slavery changes (as it has, in much of the world, though gradually), and the hope becomes possible.
You’re trying to pin the word “hope” down to meaning only what you want it to mean. It’s perfectly possible for me to hope to win the lottery tomorrow, without any expectation that it will happen (based on my current understanding of the odds), and that be a perfectly valid use of the word “hope”.
The best I can make of your attempts to differentiate between absolute and complete is the difference between “I have absolute faith that my husband is not cheating on me right now, because I can see him from where I’m sitting, and to the limits of my senses, he is not cheating on me”, and “I have complete faith that my husband is not cheating on me right now because, although I cannot directly confirm that he’s not cheating on me right now since he is in another room, I have reason to believe that no-one else is in that room with him, hence the chances that he is cheating are vanishingly small; though it is hypothetically possible that there is someone with him that I don’t know about, and he is cheating with that person”. *deep breath* I don’t think anyone else is drawing this kind of distinction, in common usage of the words.
In short, it is possible to be completely, absolutely, unequivocally certain…and still be wrong. The quality of the certainty does not affect the degree of wrongness. It may be ignorance of the evidence, it may be innocent misinterpretation of the evidence, it may be conviction without any evidence, it may be willfully ignoring the evidence, and still be as confidently believed…and still be as wrong.
Now, to hit “send” in a hopeful spirit, in the confidence that this will post. Eventually.
(But I could be wrong.)
KI:
I hear that. It’s especially jarring on CDs that haven’t been remastered – the high end is overly bright, sometimes harsh, sometimes brittle.
Coincidentally, just last night I pulled out an old Hot Tuna disk – vinyl LP, that is – and gave it a spin on the old Dual ‘table. It was my first attempt at playing vinyl in well over a year. I was pleasantly surprised at how good it sounded. Crisp? No, not even close – but not murky, either. It was quite listenable, and a nice return to a decades-old LP I hadn’t heard since… well, never mind that. ;-)
Walton, I had the same emotional experience going other direction. I was definitely happier as an atheist, and have mentioned that fact to (bemused) friends. Also my recent religious turn doesn’t really help me with my (extended) family, as they are way more mainstream, and it doesn’t help with my friends, who are by and large all atheists, except for the ones I met through Quaker Meeting.
Hearing that you made a similar difficult choice makes me feel a little less alone.
It’s possible to be religious, and not be bothered by the plurality of different religions; they all have part of the truth. Fundamentalists don’t like this idea at all, but I really don’t care what they think about it (they must have part of the truth too, but it’s not that part). Atheism has a great lesson to teach us too; that it’s all up to us, God is not going to come down and fix it for us.
There is a story by Rabbi Kook that makes this point. A student asks him, “Why good does atheism do? Can God make anything good from it?” He answers with a story about various religious types ignoring a homeless man, saying “God will provide” or “It’s God’s will”, and an atheist stopping to feed the man, thinking “there’s no one who can help this man but me.”
Walton:
I hear that, Walton. Letting go of faith can be saddening and difficult, but it’s a transition, not an end. At the other end of the tunnel you will find not only liberty, but clarity.
Rabbi Kook? Didn’t PZ make up that name for one of his fables?
Yes children, and that’s how God, through inaction or nonexistence, gets credit for the dangersous, selfish atheist’s act of compassion. Let that be a lesson to you.
Hithesh, more verbal salad with nothing beyond you don’t like atheists. We don’t care if you like us. All we care about is that you quit trying to convert us. If you want to covert us, show us the physical evidence for your imaginary deity. Philosophy, which is all you have presented to date, won’t cut the mustard. Why? Philosophy without evidence is sophistry. You, Hithesh, are a sophist. Which means you have false arguments. Which we have been telling you for days.
Well, I commend the tone walton.
And I do not believe that your non-belief is product of choice or preference.
Walton: “I was brought up as a Christian, and until quite recently I was an active and practicing believer. Over time, I have gradually become an agnostic.”
Well, I was also brought up Christian, with fundamentalist parents and community, and it was easy to abandon the belief i grew up with, and accept disbelief to the large portion of my adulthood. I know the no true scots man fallacy people like to apply here. But I consider my years of disbelief, a highly reflective period, and it because of this and not because of my theism I tend to be repulsed by certain not so reflective expounders of atheism. The God Delusions would have been as silly to me than, as it is now. As it is to many other atheist, such as John Gray, or Theodore Dalrymple.
I feel there are compelling cases for disbelief, but you’d hard pressed to find them in the PZ Myers of the world.
“Christians do, that reason alone cannot compel the adoption of Christianity. ”
I agree, reason alone doesn’t compel anyone to adopt christianity, but reason alone doesn’t compel much else either. Reason alone cannot compel us to be moral, in fact reason really has little influence at all on our moral behavior.
“Why do you accept the claim that Jesus was the Son of God, while rejecting the claim that Mohammed was God’s final prophet.”
When we speak of such things as divinity or terms like Son of God, in order to understand why I accept them requires that your understand what is meant by them.
“Son of God” is title of kingship, or in attributing it to Jesus is title of ultimate sovereignty, a title that was even afforded to Caesar. To say Jesus is the Son of God, is to say that I have no king, but Jesus, no ideal worthy of my servitude than his, no one else worthy of following than him, no life better to set as one’s ideal than his. That God’s reign, is not distinct from Christ’s own.
The reason why I reject other religions, is for the same reason I reject humanism, the same reasons many of us reject the ideals of liberalism, or conservatism, in their assessment of the world, and it’s solution.
I find christianity to be the most accurate depiction of my condition, and the condition of most of the world, that at the heard of the human condition there is in fact a sense of depravity, a tragedy, and yet there is still a dignity. That even in the face of misery, the cruelty symbolized by the cross, there is still hope.
I’m a christian, not because of my parents, or church, I rejected their faith a long time ago. But because I find in the Gospel narratives my doubts and hope, a depiction of disbelief and belief. If I was to be a disbeliever now, I could not accept the dewey eyed humanism of Dawkins, Ted Turner like, but it would be tragic humanism symbolized by the death of an innocent, a man of good intentions, and endearing hope, yet crushed. Though I would no longer empowered by the Christian Hope, it would still be a cross haunted world.
The reason why I accept christianity over any other religion or worldview, is because I find the questions at heart of the narratives, shared by the writer and the community surrounding Jesus Christ, to be my own as well, and the answers that are claimed, to be the most profound one’s I know. The reason for why I find my worldview as true, and others as not as accurate or false, is for the same reason you find yours true, and others not so true.
The reason why I hold Jesus is God, is because I see him, as the way, the truth, and the life, and these beliefs are indistinguishable for me from a belief in god. I perceive in his way and means of life, the way I should live mine, i find the direction that he points in to be the direction I’m compelled to follow, I perceive the truth he claims of human of existence, as a call to love even if we have to suffer for it to be a truth i hold as well. The image of Jesus Christ is indistinguishable for me from any image I could hold of God.
PZ Meyers can find the image of a child staring at the stars to be meaningful for him, an image that inspires him, it just doesn’t do it for me. I’m a Christian because I find the Gospels profoundly meaningful, and inspiring, in it’s depiction of humanity at his worst, and humanity at it’s best. I reject what PZ myers finds meaningful, no differently that how he would reject what I find meaningful.
I’m a christian not merely because I’m compelled by reason, but because I’m compelled by conviction
Hithesh, we don’t give a shit about your illogical and unreasonable opinions. We reject your belief. We reject your god. We reject your opinions on those subjects. You want us to be reasonable with you, you have to quit godbotting, which is a crime against Pharyngula, and will get you banned. Your choice.
If you’re repulsed by atheists why are you here fuckwit?
So basically you’re a Christian because you have a strong emotional response to the drama and pathos of Christian mythology.
“The reason for why I find my worldview as true, and others as not as accurate or false, is for the same reason you find yours true, and others not so true.”
Sorry, this is incorrect. Our reasons could not be more different.
SHitesh why don’t you go suffer somewhere else. There is no gawd, you are delusional.
Another example of how shallow hithesh is. If you have an emotional basis for morality then, whenever your mood changes, your morality could change as well. Or is his morality based on “The Big Guy In The Sky will smack my pee-pee forever if I’m a bad boy”?
If I was to be a disbeliever now, I could not accept the dewey eyed humanism of Dawkins, Ted Turner like, but it would be tragic humanism symbolized by the death of an innocent, a man of good intentions, and endearing hope, yet crushed. Though I would no longer empowered by the Christian Hope, it would still be a cross haunted world.
Aaaaand BINGO, I had it right way back at #499… you were lying through your fucking teeth about being a “disbeliever” — you don’t even know what it is.
Your arrogance is pathetic — and decidedly un-Christian.
Hithesh, you are rejecting other viewpoints _because you don’t want them to be true_; whereas we are rejecting yours because _there is no evidence it is true_. Grasp the difference, please.
Part of being an adult is accepting that just because you really, really want something to be true, that doesn’t make it so. You’ve taken your own emotional response to a story and mistaken it for proof that the characters in the story are real.
Stu, I believe Hithesh has consistently claimed to be a believer who was, for most of his life, an unbeliever.
Was. Not is.
Was an unbeliever. Is a believer.
My question is, what span of time accounts for “most of” his adult life? Two years? Forty?
Tis Himself”Another example of how shallow hithesh is. If you have an emotional basis for morality then, whenever your mood changes, your morality could change as well.”
Shallow huh?
Let’s put this through the ringer:
Do you believe there is correlation between moral reasoning and proactive moral behavior? Do you deny that in most recent studies no correlation has been found or at best a small correlation?
Do you deny that morality is more correlated with emotion and self-control?
Stu #762
The vast majority of people who claim “I used to be an atheist” never were atheists. Many of them were rebelling against their particular religion, or had fallen away from the religion they were brought up in but hadn’t found an acceptable substitute yet, and some of them are just liars. I suspect Hithesh got disenchanted with whatever sect Mommy and Daddy followed and, for a few years, didn’t find some other cult that suited him better. Now he’s fallen in love with a denomination and he’s all happy again.
To Stu, Matt Heath et al.: thank you. I appreciate it.
Tis Himself:
For the first part, thank you.
As to “disconnect from others and callous disregard for the disadvantaged”, I will admit that I have some difficulty in understanding and caring for other human beings. My natural empathy is extremely deficient, as are my social skills.
However, in my defence, I would like to point out that this week I stood up at a college JCR meeting and spoke out against the college’s plan to dismiss several of the cleaning staff in order to cut costs. I pointed out that in the current economic climate they’re unlikely to be able to afford further employment; and I said that, for my part, I would be glad to accept a bigger rent increase next year rather than throw some of the college’s most vulnerable employees out on the street.
Why did I act against my own self-interest in this way? I don’t know. It just seemed like the right thing to do at the time. I realise that this doesn’t make me some sort of hero; but I’m just trying to demonstrate that I don’t despise the poor.
Nor am I unaware that I am extremely privileged, compared to the vast majority of people in human history, to have three meals a day and a roof over my head without really having to work for it. Indeed, I frequently feel guilty that I was granted this unearned privilege and, so far, have achieved nothing whatsoever in life to merit it.
Self-loathing I will admit to – but I won’t discuss it further, as I have an unfortunate tendency to derail threads with my personal mental health issues.
No, they all had an influence in ending slavery, but none of them were the reasons for a slaves hope in his eventual freedom.
First, wrong. Second, hopes are preferences and preferences don’t need reasons to be held.
I can be hopeful that one day the meek shall inherent the earth, the poor will be fed, there will be no more war, that people would turn their tools of destruction into tools of cultivation (swords beaten into plow shares). That the Jew and the Arab will one day sit at a table and break bread together.
Can you see why such a hope is absurd?
No. It’s not absurd, your claims are absurd. The last one is particularly so, since Jews and Arabs sit at tables breaking bread together every day. Not just Jews and Arabs, but Jews and Palestinians (not all of whom are Arab). If you’re talking about the political conflict between the state of Israel and the Palestinian refugees trapped in the West Bank and Gaza, we know from history that all political conflicts eventually end.
Nothing about reality conveys that this form of life is possible, in fact reality seems to suggest other wise.
You’re wrong and ignorant (see, for instance, Steven Pinker’s “The History of Violence”), and even if you were right the hope still would not be absurd or “irrational”. In fact, it is a category mistake to claim that a hope is irrational, since hopes are not beliefs or expectations or actions, they are merely desires about outcomes … with the exception of hoping for the truly impossible, such as gods answering your prayers. But none of the things you mention are impossible, and certainly the end of slavery wasn’t impossible, since it happened. And it didn’t happen through a miracle, it happened as a result of things “in reality”.
That’d I’d have a better chance of winning the lottery seven day consecutively than having this sort of hope realized.
When we have no reason, no evidence, no basis in reality for hope, our hope is absurd.
Probability is Bayesian, a measure of ignorance. The probability estimates of an utter ignoramus such as yourself are worthless. Taking into account all available evidence, the probability of there eventually being peace in the Middle East is nearly 1.
There is hope for you yet. And no, I am not being facetious.
Whether Hithesh was or was not a believer is irrelevant. His trying to force his testamony upon us now is all that is relevant. We reject his irrational testamony. Now you can go away, never to bother us again Hithesh. Further attempts to testamony will be considered proselytation, which is an immediate banning offence. Your choice.
What friggin’ nonsense. There’s no evidence any of them have even the slightest “part of the truth”.
That’s the problem with religions, they all make loud, forceful claims on “the truth”, elevating it with a capital “T” to give it an air of authority, making their claim exclusive of all others. It’s an integral part of the sales pitch (which Hithesh apparently fell for.) But that’s all it is, a sales pitch, nothing more. All religions have to sell are smoke and mirrors, neatly wrapped in nice shiny wrapping paper, imprinted with “The Truth” in cursive script.
Religion is comprised of mythology, superstition and fables designed with one goal–power and control. The way they achieve that is to conflate their mythology with “The Truth”, distorting the meaning of the word to the point it loses all meaning. In fact, they turn the word upside down. The moment someone starts a sentence with “According to God’s Truth…”, they’re lying to you. Whenever someone claims the only way to “know the Truth is to accept Jesus”, they’re lying to you. When someone says the Bible (or the Koran, or the Book of Mormon) is the “word of God”, they’re lying to you. In religion, truths, with or without a capital “T”, are lies. It really is that simple.
The truth is, they can’t handle the truth. That’s why evolution (and before that, geocentrism) pose such a dire threat to religion, it upsets the carefully scripted sales pitches they spent centuries refining. It exposes religious “truths” and those that spew them for what they are: frauds and liars.
Well, I believe I’m using hope in the normal sense of the word, the only notion of it I’m excluding, is when we say things like I hope the underdog team wins tomorrow, or I hope i became a billionaire. These are notions of hope with out any real faith in what I hope for coming true at all.
The things you are excluding are the normal use of the word.
Compared to say I have hope, or I’m hopeful, meaning that I do have faith in what I hope for coming true, or being realized.
“hope” has no such connotation.
P.S. In fact, “hope” carries a connotation of doubt, often coupled with worry. I hope I get the job (there’s a good chance I won’t). I hope he’s ok (I fear he isn’t).
“Hithesh, you are rejecting other viewpoints _because you don’t want them to be true_; whereas we are rejecting yours because _there is no evidence it is true_. Grasp the difference, please.”
Well, let’s keep in mind a worldview is an all encompassing sort of frame work.
Here’s a summary of my worldview: To love all, even our enemies, to live life not in pursuit of materialism but in serviture and love towards others, : “to steward rather than pillage the earth, to distribute rather than to hoard her gifts, to serve rather than to rule, and to give life rather than to take it. ” To not engage in violence, but creative non-violence, that hate cannot conquer hate, only love can.
To speak truth to power, to confront injustice were ever it lays, even if it means we suffer and die in such pursuits.
And at the heart of this worldview is a conviction that makes it possible, and a hope that such pursuits are never in vain.
How do you deny this worldview is true? anymore than yours is false?
Fair enough, and I understand your point of view. But you have to understand that what you have detailed above is an intensely personal, subjective set of visceral reactions. I acknowledge that your personal emotional connection to Christian imagery and symbolism is no doubt very meaningful for you, and I’m not asking you to reject, or even reconsider, your faith. Rather, I’m just trying to explain that your personal emotional reaction to Jesus and the Gospels does not constitute objective, testable evidence, and is not going to convince anyone other than yourself that your faith is the correct one.
I apologise if this sounds harsh. You’re certainly far more intelligent and reasonable, and express a much more nuanced and realistic view, than a lot of the believers who post here. But the fact is that your personal religious feelings are not sufficient to demonstrate, objectively and to the satisfaction of a dispassionate observer, that the truth-claims made by Christianity are factually accurate.
This is, indeed, the most common answer that intelligent believers give me when I challenge them on their reasons for believing. They usually admit that they can’t adduce objective evidence to support their creed; but they typically explain that they have a “personal relationship with God” and have felt the “presence of God in their lives”, and that this is sufficient reason for them to believe. And that’s fine. But that kind of “evidence” is inherently personal and subjective; to an outside observer, there’s no way of distinguishing between that and mere delusion or wishful thinking.
I can say, for myself, that in all the years I was a fervent believer and attended church regularly, I never felt the “presence of God in my life” – despite desperately wanting it. So such claims – high-minded as they sound, and real as they no doubt feel to those who experience them – are not going to convince me, in the absence of solid evidence. Ultimately, Christianity makes a claim of fact – that Jesus was a divine being, performed miracles and was resurrected from the dead – and I will become a Christian if, and only if, someone unearths compelling historical evidence for the truth of that claim.
Hithesh:
That sounds interesting. Do I “believe” or “deny” any of this or that? No, not yet. Cites, please?
“Emotion and self-control” … what do you mean? There’s a contradiction lurking in that phrase. Which emotions? Anger? Rage? Compassion? Delight? If a man gives $1,000 to an orphanage on a whim, does he lack self-control?
+ + +
For now, we have an anecdote from Walton that supports Hithesh’s claim:
Hmmmm!
Walton – Sincerely, congratulations on taking a giant step in the right direction. Well done.
The slave singing a hymn claiming that he’ll be free, is not only expressing his desire for a freedom, but his belief that he will eventually be freed. A wish to be free, doesn’t include the later.
But this is not a case of hope, it’s a case of expectation or even certainty. You muddy your already muddy ideas by misusing words and making bogus distinctions (like between “complete” and “absolute”).
Do you understand this better now?
What I understand is that you are as confused about the English language as you are about everything else.
sHitesh – You are prostelitizing. That is a bannable offense here. PZ does not suffer this foolishness for long.
Your god is bullshit.
Hithesh, your opinion means nothing to us. You can believe in your god, but we don’t have to. And we won’t given your inane arguments and lack of physical evidence. We don’t want to hear more of your proselystation. Time to pack up your posts and fade into the bandwidth.
Oh, no no, Watchman. Sure, that’s how it’s done in sane discussions actually directed at getting to the truth of something. State your cites upfront, explain your conclusions therefrom, let your critics have at both…
This is not that world. Here, the troll merely implies he has supporting material, and waits for someone he intereprets as hostile to make a statement he thinks he can contradict with whatever he might have on the spike. He plays the hand only if he thinks he can make it play in his direction. And the interpretation allowing him to do so will, of course, be his–allowing him to remain on the attack almost regardless of what is said and what he has…
See, the other way, he has to defend an actual thesis. And that’s no good. That would require him to have one that’s actually (a) coherent, and (b) defensible. As opposed to stroking his own ego with small tactical, rhetorical gains against an enemy that doesn’t even precisely know exactly what it is he’s defending.
Also, more or less the method of ‘complex theology’.
/Ref #765. See also ‘chum, you don’t even have a ringer. Just a spin cycle.’
Wins a prize for stupidest comment.On this thread,anyway.
I doubt that Kel has ever made the stupidest comment on any thread. Not so for you, Clinteas/Rorshach. Hell, I’ve been programming since 1965, was a UNIX systems programmer for years, have run Linux since 1994, and I still keep a Windows box around to run the numerous apps that require it.
And where the fuck does Bronze Age mythology come into this? What does any of this have to do with your ancient book of superstitions? Why do you need Jesus, a cartoonish superhero on a stick, to validate your views?
Inquiring minds want to know…
Walton:
“Rather, I’m just trying to explain that your personal emotional reaction to Jesus and the Gospels does not constitute objective, testable evidence, and is not going to convince anyone other than yourself that your faith is the correct one.”
Well, walton I never attempted to present my beliefs otherwise. I find it ridiculous to argue for God like we would in arguing the correctness of a mathematical equation. I believe for entirely subjective reasons, for the same reason that I love my mother for entirely subjective reasons, or find a painting or poem meaningful. I couldn’t give you objective reasons to find a poem as meaningful as it is to me, or objective reasons to love my mother as well. I may be able to articulate why I believe what I do, but lets not confuse that with me trying to get you to believe what I do.
I only expound on the subject because you asked, not because I felt that after expounding that I would convince you or anyone else here to believe in God.
In the Gospel the projection of christian life is marked not by giving other objective reasons to share in one’s belief, but compel by living it–the “and they’ll know you’re christians by your love.” It’s call to be a light unto the world, that reveals the darkness in the lives of others, and the conviction to turn from it.
It’s only by the empowering sense of life, i find in the Gospel that I am made to believe, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Windows wins because the people who write the software you use only support it. And they will continue to do so until their customers demand otherwise.
It will continue to do so as long Windows dominates the market. Software vendors aren’t so stupid as to waste their resources supporting low-market-share platforms just because a minority of their potential customers “demand” it.
Walton, you wrote a version of that post a while back in a similar situation. That previous comment wasn’t bad. This one was quite good. I rather enjoyed reading it. Well done. You’re seasoning nicely.
“Hitesh – You are prostelitizing. That is a bannable offense here. PZ does not suffer this foolishness for long.”
This is kind of comical, Walton asked why I believe Christianity to be true, why I believe Jesus is the son of God, i expounded on why, now individuals like yourself and Nerdy accuse me of proselytizing?
It’s probably a good way to get rid of theist you don’t like, ask them why they believe, and when they give you an answer, accuse them or proselytizing, and then try and get that accusation going, and scare them that that big bad boogey monster known as PZ Myers is going to ban me for this.
I don’t know, if I did get banned for this, whether I should be offended, or laugh at the absurdity.
Silly rabbits, tricks are for kids.
hithesh, do you understand why the wish to live your life in a certain way (because you think the Big Kahuna told you to) is not in any sense evidence for the existence of the Big Kahuna?
If your “god” is just an idea in your head, and you know that, fine. Run along. If you claim otherwise, evidence please.
Stop the damn preaching!
Walton, you shouldn’t play with boys like him. It will ruin your somewhat improved reputation.
Read it again. A funny thing about Wikipedia: anyone can edit it, even people as confused and mistaken as you are. That claim was not supported by the given dictionary citation, and the reference to unrequited love was absurd (that has nothing at all to do with hope) so I’ve removed it. That’s just the beginning of the problems with that article, which is marked with “Citations missing” and “Inappropriate tone” tags.
Have to add my thanks to Walton for the long post, not to mention the good deed. I love seeing intellectual and moral growth in people.
hithesh #774
Words fail me. The only question I have is: How do you keep your halo from getting too tight?
That sums it up well.
Hithesh, we are still waiting for the physical evidence for your imaginary god. Until you show that evidence, you are a delusional fool, like we have been saying all along.
nothing’s sacred:
Impressive. I wrote my first program (in FOCAL) at age 12 in 1969, but didn’t even begin to get serious until college (mid ’70s) and didn’t earn a paycheck from it until ’82. I’m in the *NIX world now, but am still recovering from having been a VMS guy for years. (That’s OpenVMS for you youngers.)
hithesh:
The description you’ve posted can’t be evaluated as either true or false. What you’ve done is itemize characteristics of the way you’d like to live your life, and the way you’d like to see others live their lives. Are they admirable goals? Sure. Do they require “conviction” that God and Jesus are real? No. Are they “true”? I don’t know; is vanilla ice cream true, or false? How about chocolate pudding? Or fried grasshoppers? Do you prefer baseball to football? Is a preference for one more contain more truth than a preference for the other? If my worldview includes socialized medicine, is my worldview true, or false?
What was your point again? That only through Christ can we achieve morality, compassion, love, and hope? Or that only through Christ can You achieve morality, compassion, love, and hope?
Walton, this is not the first time you have earned my admiration. Your flashes of humility and recognition of your flaws — as when you commented recently to the effect that you might not know what you were talking about and often don’t — provide you with a form of cognitive power, the ability to reevaluate your beliefs and incorporate additional evidence. They also encourage a certain trust in your sincerity and your willingness to listen. (Now if only that would extend to discussions of AGW …)
So… just to clarify: you don’t believe in God as an actual person; a hairy thunderer or a cosmic muffin that is out there in reality somewhere, but rather as an set of ideas inside of your own head? What you call a “worldview” is just that: a subjective and personal set of ideas and interpretations that you have absorbed from the New Testament canon and call “Christianity”, with no regard or even real interest as to whether any of the narrative of the person called Christ happened as actual events in history?
(Now if only that would extend to discussions of AGW …)
Ah, I just saw your
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/05/idiot_america_new_and_expanded.php#comment-1626541
Good on you.
Simply beautiful, PZ. May I suggest you give up on biology to become a poet?
I’m glad I’m not the only one with so much fondness for Blows Against the Empire. When I get home from school I’ll have to dig up the story told by Frank Drake, about his visiting Tim Leary in San Quentin with Carl Sagan, who both had to break it to Tim gently that “kidnapping the starship,” at least anything buildable with 1960’s technology, wasn’t going to get anybody very far, interstellar distances being what they are.
“The world continues to deteriorate. Give up.”
All this tosh about hope and transcendence and no one has mentioned today’s Jesus and Mo? Hithesh may want to see this.
Apologies if I missed a link to this in the comments between work (and pub) and home.
I would also like to add my voice to those speaking in praise of Walton.
Walton, you have come a long way in your intellectual development. Keep it up, and remember, dogma in any form (religious of otherwise) can be dangerous.
Walton,
I disagree with most of what you write, but I believe in giving praise where it’s due. Comment #743 was excellent. I don’t say this merely because I agree with it (though I’ll let you be the judge of that). You articulated your thoughts well and showed a commitment to reason and evidence.
If we are harsh to some of your comments it is because we know you are capable of better.
Please keep it up.
NS,
I misread,thought it was someone else’s post,and apologized to Kel straight away.Fail to see what the big deal is.
Walton @ 775,
very nicely said.This “argument from personal relationship with god and special emotional connection to Jesus” is one of the most annoying and silly,and you hear it all the time.
Rudy and Hithesh,
in case you missed it,our junior just wiped the floor with you.
Rorsarch, Walton didn’t seem to be addressing anything I said (though I did make some remarks prompted by his 775. If by
“junior” you mean Walton?
His 775 seemed reasonable to me. Is this whole thread just about winning and losing to you, Rorsarch?
in case you missed it,our junior just wiped the floor with you.
Yep, another good reason I’m glad I brought a (previously) transparent tarp down here for the cheap seats. After Walton’s patented “flying pinwheel of doom” finishing move, it was transubstantiated Kensington Gore everywhere, as gibbets of “this is my body” flew amid geysers of “this is my blood.”
It needed doing.
incorrect. while the belief in dieties usually demands a belief in the transcendent (i.e. magic), a belief in magic doesn’t require a belief in dieties.
that’s because they ARE two separate things. more precisely, they are two different degrees of abstraction. “love” is a term we humans use for the complex, bio-chemical reactions that occur when confronted with certain people; it’s a social abstraction of a real phenomenon. gods are the result of anthropomorphism of those abstractions (and, more directly, of various natural phenomena); in other words, they’re wholly made-up embellishments on reality.
your god as you describe him in this thread is the anthromorphization of love. congratulations, you are worshiping a male version of Aphrodite.
also, I’m going to have to jump on the bandwagon and congratulate Walton both on his lucid explanation of agnosticism, and for standing up for the disadvantaged. :-)
lastly: rudy, you were certainly right that the conversation about countries and atheism is now over. I thought I explained to you that you can’t pick from widely disparate social situations and meaningfully compare them on the basis of a SINGLE aspect. I even thought you got the point when you picked only a small subset of countries. but since you then jumped ahead with some small indigenous tribe, you clearly STILL don’t understand how to compare things for a single variable.
unless of course you think anyone here claims that religion is the SOLE variable in determining standard of living, which would be a strawman.
also, “standard of Living” is not a game of “he who dies with the most toys wins”; actual wealth is part of it, but social stability, freedom, health, happiness, level of oppression of parts of the society etc. are very much part of that, too. so simply saying that a non-theistic tribe has less wealth than a somewhat theistic western society is meaningless in the context of standard of living. it is also meaningless in the context of religiosity, since there’s too many other variables to consider
until you stop cherrypicking your data, and comparing apples to oranges, any further discussion with you is worthless
J-hawk:
Perhaps you mean this fellow.
Nice comments, by the way.
I misread,thought it was someone else’s post,and apologized to Kel straight away.
Ah, right, it was only the stupidest comment in the thread if someone other than Kel made it. You’re such a pathetic coward.
Fail to see what the big deal is.
I made one small comment on it; no big deal for me, but obviously one for you.
thanks
well, I never considered Eros as a god of all kinds of love… if I remember correctly, Greek pantheons had the main god, and then godlings for the different aspects of what the main god stood for… kind of like Ares had the godlings Phobos and Deimos… anyway, I always thought of Eros as the god of EROTIC love, so maybe not quite appropriate here (unless I got my interpretation wrong :-p )
the eros and psyche story also involved jealousy though… so maybe a bit more fitting for the jealous OT god, heheh
@ 811,
Way to twist what I wrote.I dont care,really,if it makes you feel better,twist away.
This is a brilliant story and all, but I just have one question:
What kind of freaky elephant lets itself be felt up by three creepy blind dudes?!
Because yours has a magic man and a blood sacrifice of said magic man at the centre of it. All you have is belief in belief, your beliefs however they make you act do not verify the truth of said beleifs. I deny your worldview is true because you believe in worshipping a god whose stand-out feature is impregnating a woman to give birth to himself so he could partake in blood sacrifice in order to redeem the sins of allegorical ancestors. Even if your beliefs lead to what people would consider noble and admirable characters, they are still based on the same falsehoods as those who use those came beliefs as an excuse for malevolent actions.
I dont care
Lying coward.
“So… just to clarify: you don’t believe in God as an actual person; a hairy thunderer or a cosmic muffin that is out there in reality somewhere.”
Well, other than besides a few fundies, I don’t know any christians who view God as a hairy thunderer or a cosmic muffin.
“but rather as an set of ideas inside of your own head? What you call a “worldview” is just that: a subjective and personal set of ideas and interpretations.”
Well, all religions are worldviews, this is no different if you’re a fundie, orthodox theist, or a liberal one. It’s through the lens of Christianity that a christian looks at the world. For a fundie, beliefs that the tainted nature of humanity is caused by a man eating an apple a couple thousands years ago, the world is a couple thousand years old, and has an appearance of intelligent design, are all perspectives of the world they live in, even if they’re all false, and not all of it is subjective, such as the view that the world is only a few thousand years old is not a subjective claim.
“that you have absorbed from the New Testament canon and call “Christianity”, with no regard or even real interest as to whether any of the narrative of the person called Christ happened as actual events in history?”
Sure, i have an interest in the history behind the text, how was it was formed, what ideas went into it. I have an interest in Jesus Christ being an actual historical person, who was actually crucified, and that there was an actual resurrection experience. It would be quite difficult to reconcile the meaning of the gospels without such things.
But do I have an anachronistic belief that the Gospel accounts, or biographies written in the greco-roman world are written like modern biographies for the sake of conveying what actually happened, and the order in which event took place? No, I don’t. The Gospel’s like any other greco-roman biography of a religious figures, are written to convey the meaning of that person, the meaning of his teaching, and the meaning of the events that surrounded his life.
Hithesh, you seen to think we care about what you say. We don’t. You are a woo filled fool, and we are less than interested in such nonsense. You need to pull the plug on your posts.
Rorshach: “Rudy and Hithesh,
in case you missed it,our junior just wiped the floor with you.”
Judging that all Walton pretty much did was ask a few questions about my faith, you have to be pretty deluded to assume he wiped the floor with me.
It’s like me asking why are you an atheist, “why do you think that atheism is true and not paganism. The problem with atheism is that you can tell the difference between one truth and the other, like what makes a child gazing at the starts a better signifier for the human condition than a suffering innocent? What makes love your neighbor any more significant than brushing you teeth, yada..yada..yada.” And then some clown claiming that by me asking these questions, is a roundhouse kick to the face o my opponent.
When I responded to his questions, all he said was:
“Fair enough, and I understand your point of view.” And then when on to state that all I’ve presented was subjective reasons for my belief, and not objective reasons to convince anybody else to believe. He only repeated something that I’ve said all along, something I already confessed. That its out of a conviction that I became a christian, just like for walton it was out of a conviction that he spoke out on behalf of the soon to be unemployed janitors
And I don’t care if some atheist take gripes with this, or in their shallowness claim that I should only be believing out of objective reasons, when I myself feel that the God they’re looking for, the one that waves a large flag and yells, “yo dudes here i am.” Is a pointless god, and a distraction from the purpose he tends for his creatures. Such believers becomes obsessed like some fundies are, creating creation science museums, and the discovery institute, rather than pursuits of agape love, tending the least of the world, following a god who desires mercy over sacrifice, the pursuit of justice, and not servitude towards him alone, but servitude to him seen in our servitude toward others.
You may claim that such a god would be the only meaningful one for you, just like PZ can claim the star gazing child is meaningful for him, but they are meaningless to me. The God that the village atheist demands to be convinced of, is not my own, and would only be a distraction, from what is wanted out of our conviction.
So you must be fairly delusional, to take this as wiping the floor with me? I doubt even Walton feels that.
Hithesh, until you are ready to present physical evidence for your imaginary deity you have nothing cogent to say to us. You have no logic, just woo woo woo. The neighbors dog has a more coherent message than you do.
Nerd: “Hithesh, you seen to think we care about what you say. We don’t. You are a woo filled fool, and we are less than interested in such nonsense. You need to pull the plug on your posts.”
Nerd I know you’re stuck on this “we” delusion, but I doubt anyone here wants to make you their mouth piece. So have the intellectual honesty to say you’re speaking for yourself, and you really don’t have a clue what each and every other atheist on the forum feels. Rather than “we” say “I” or even “me and patricia”. Could you at least get this my little dimwit?
Judging that I’ve only been responding to questions asked of me. It sure seems like some people care, at least enough to be asking them in the first place. So how much more fucking detached from reality could you be?
In the words of PZ Myers “you’re a pathological nutcase.”, just go home dude, and quit the whining, and the threats. You’re just embarrassing yourself, not me.
Hithesh,
Nerd is welcome to speak for me. You don’t seem to understand, Walton did indeed wipe the floor with you.
Your reasons to believe are basically inside your head, and have no basis in reality. Walton told you that. Now go away, and keep your hallucinations to yourself.
Hithesh, you are a pathological nutcase. Quit bothering us. We don’t want your woo. You have physical evidence for your imaginary deity, which would be the only thing we are interested in, and we have demonstrated your religious belief is irrelevant to leading a good life. So you have nothing to offer. Go away.
*headdesk* second sentence in #824 should read: You have no physical…
hithesh:
I find it pretty funny that a believer in the supernatural should address an atheist scientist so.
Hint: Nerd is not using the royal ‘we’.
“I have an interest in Jesus Christ being an actual historical person, who was actually crucified, and that there was an -actual resurrection experience-.”
That’s the sticking point, Hithesh. There are no good reasons to believe that there was an actual resurrection experience, period. All that you can establish is that you have reason to -want- a resurrection to have occurred.
To back up a little:
“The reason why I accept christianity over any other religion or worldview, is because I find the questions at heart of the narratives, shared by the writer and the
community surrounding Jesus Christ, to be my own as well, and the answers that are claimed, to be the most profound one’s I know.”
As people keep telling you, wishing doesn’t make it so. You have said that you believe for “entirely subjective” reasons, as you might “find a painting or poem meaningful” – but no subjective motivation provides any reason to believe in historical actuality of the resurrection event – only to desire it.
This isn’t an anachronistic detail, this is the center of the Christian faith. No resurrection means no sacrifice, no sacrifice means no grace. And you can’t even demonstrate that -you- should believe that it happened, because it depends upon a physical event in the material world. Objective reasons are required, and all you have (by your own admission) are subjective ones.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Kel: ” I deny your worldview is true because you believe in worshipping a god whose stand-out feature is impregnating a woman to give birth to himself so he could partake in blood sacrifice in order to redeem the sins of allegorical ancestors. ”
Judging that I don’t believe in any of this, and you just made that shit up that this was my beliefs, I don’t know how well your argument holds up.
Judging that the message of the “reign of God” is at the heart of the gospels, and you completely annexed that from your supposed assumption about my beliefs, we could guess how stupid the assumptions are in reference to the text as well.
I’m going to take a page from NoR’s book here. hithesh, your God exists purely between your ears. You have done nothing in this thread to demonstrate your beliefs have any validity. Instead you’ve justified belief in belief and that has no bearing whatsoever on the truth behind the beliefs themselves. Your emperor has no clothes, we can see shriveled genitalia and are calling it as such. If you want to demonstrate that your beliefs have any validity, please stop engaging in “belief in belief” arguments and start showing evidence for the belief itself. Until such time, people can and will call you out on you espousing credulous nonsense.
Yes or no answers:
Is Jesus God-incarnate?
Did Jesus sacrifice himself to redeem the sins of mankind on the cross?
Do you believe in original sin?
If you answered no to any of those, then what makes you a Christian?
Why isn’t heddle here? He keeps on denying that cafeteria Christians as embarrassingly clueless as hithesh exist; it’s unfortunate he’s not he to be proved wrong.
hithesh, can you write that stuff about how confusing shit bat shit is again? That was brilliant.
The reason my country comparisons were all over the map, was to make the point (not clearly I guess) that there are way too many variables involved to make the kind of comparison people wanted to make.
Just the fact that the US crushed its labor movement, and Sweden did not, is enough to make a welfare comparison between them difficult; just becuase they are both “democracies” doesn’t mean that you can go ahead and say, “well, we’ve controlled for that variable, now let’s compare their religiosity”. Haiti and the US are both capitalist countries, India and the US are both democracies, Vietnam and NK are both Communist. These categories are just starting points in a discussion, not “variables”.
I can understand that different Christians choose different aspects of their religion to emphasise. But really, those issues seem core to Christianity (well ever since the Nicene Creed.) While not supported in the oldest of gospels, the notion of Jesus being God-incarnate has been central to Christian thought for over 1600 years. And what else was the sacrifice for but to atone for original sin? I can see that he may object to the terms I used to describe the events (they are absurd to I framed it as such) but really those seem to be the underlying beliefs of Christianity. That God is a trinity, composed of the father, the son and the holy spirit. Jesus came to earth to atone for the sins of mankind, and by dying on the cross was able to give his followers a path to God.
John 14:6 “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” – really, if hithesh is going to deny that these are the basic parameters of his belief in God, then what does he have left to call himself a Christian? It’s redemption through Christ at it’s most basic. This isn’t about being a Cafeteria Christian, it’s about the basic tenets of the religion. If hithesh doesn’t subscribe to the belief that Jesus is God, then what is he?
“That’s the sticking point, Hithesh. There are no good reasons to believe that there was an actual resurrection experience, period. ”
Well, even historians agree there was a resurrection experience, though they’re not sure of what it was comprised, whether it be visions or whatever else not.
Jesus was crucified and died, and rather than meeting the fate of every other crucified and killed messiah at the time, abandon, and forgotten, something happened after his death, that instead of diminishing their hope, renewed it. What ever this experience was it was as real to them as touching wounded flesh.
This stands regardless of if I want it to be true, or not.
“You have said that you believe for “entirely subjective” reasons, as you might “find a painting or poem meaningful”
Well, if it wasn’t for subjective reasons we wouldn’t be compelled to believe anything at all. We just wouldn’t care to believe. As I said in a previous post I would still find the christian perspective as the most accurate worldview, as a form of tragic humanism, even if I was a disbeliever, I just wouldn’t be empowered by the Christian hope, there for I wouldn’t be a believer (a Christian).
It’s only by being compelled, by being convicted to follow, that I’m believer, without that even if all the facts were true, I wouldn’t be a christian at all.
Ahhh, the experience is subjective card. Someone talking to someone else and someone rising from the dead, it’s all subjective right? Nevermind that millions of people die each year and none rise from the dead. Nevermind that mythology is littered with god-men conquering death. All that matters is that a couple of eyewitnesses said Jesus resurrected and all sense of scepticism is thrown out the window. After all, when Christianity had to compete with pagan God-men, what reason would it’s followers have to say that Jesus is just as powerful as the gods they are trying to displace?
I submit that human resurrection is an extraordinary claim, and thus a claim that requires extraordinary evidence. If all we have is eyewitness accounts (which we don’t even have but that is besides the point) then is that extraordinary enough evidence to support the belief? Do we take the words of millions who have seen UFOs and thousands who have been abducted to mean that aliens are among us? If the answer is no, then why is it any better for Christianity?
What a fucking crock of shit. They might agree that a person roughly equating to the Jesus of the bible existed based on the documentation available; that says nothing whatsoever about whether they believe in the ‘resurrection experience’.
The two are vastly different, and require completely different forms of validation. Support for the existence of Jesus the man ≠ acceptance of Jesus the god.
You’ve worked on your writing with some success; now try working on your thinking.
Twins: “I can understand that different Christians choose different aspects of their religion to emphasise. But really, those issues seem core to Christianity (well ever since the Nicene Creed.)”
Well, I don’t really care what you think the core of Christianity is. Judging that most atheist here portray fundamentalism as the core, we could only imagine what they think the core of the Christian faith is. I consider myself an orthodox theist, a mainline christian. The outline Eagleton paints for the mainline Christian beliefs, i find to be accurate. Its only PZ Myers and crowd who believe such christianity such as that belongs to the fringe.
But to prevent you from running off with what you believe are the tenets of orthodox theism are, and what they mean. I suggest we leave the battle with an interpretation of text themselves, and not an interpretation of the creeds of the Christian church. If you want to speak about original sin, I want it to come from the new testament text, not because you heard it out of the mouth of Pat Robertson.
“While not supported in the oldest of gospels, the notion of Jesus being God-incarnate has been central to Christian thought for over 1600 years. ”
Well, i already said that I believe Jesus is God, the Truth incarnate.
“And what else was the sacrifice for but to atone for original sin? I can see that he may object to the terms I used to describe the events (they are absurd to I framed it as such) but really those seem to be the underlying beliefs of Christianity.”
I believe Jesus died for the atonement of sin, but I rejected your framework for it, you’re version of what atonement means, or even what original sin is, a version annexed from the entire gospel message, and even the Pauline epistles. I reject a notion of atonement, that portrays it a legalistic event, an event annexed from the events that led to his death, a betrayal to the text itself, or says it has something to do with magic blood, rather than the change of heart.
“That God is a trinity, composed of the father, the son and the holy spirit. Jesus came to earth to atone for the sins of mankind, and by dying on the cross was able to give his followers a path to God. ”
And I whole heartedly agree with this.
“John 14:6 “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
I whole heartedly agree with this too
“I can see that he may object to the terms I used to describe the events (they are absurd to I framed it as such) [….]really, if hithesh is going to deny that these are the basic parameters of his belief in God, then what does he have left to call himself a Christian? It’s redemption through Christ at it’s most basic. This isn’t about being a Cafeteria Christian, it’s about the basic tenets of the religion. If hithesh doesn’t subscribe to the belief that Jesus is God, then what is he?”
Well, its good to know you confessed your absurdity, and that’s exactly what I rejected, not the basic tenets of the christian faith, which as you can see from this post, I confessed to believing in, not rejecting it.
Imagine if I asked you if you believe in PZ’s image of the star gazing child as an inspiring symbol of the human condition, then went on to interpret it as an image that claims that the literal stars have some sort of supernatural power that leads us to be more moral, live better, etc… You may believe the image to be inspiring, but yet reject my absurd interpretation of what it means.
I accept that Jesus died for the atonement of sins, I just reject what you believe that means.
“Well, even historians agree there was a resurrection experience”
This is an objective claim. Support it.
“something happened after his death”
As vague and weasel-worded as this is, it’s an objective claim. Support it.
Time to shit or get off the pot.
I don’t listen to the likes of Pat Robertson. He represents an extreme ideology that is at the far right of Christian values and as such is not very relevant to anyone who isn’t a fundamentalist Christian. Rather I tried to define Christianity in the broadest possible sense because I don’t think that it’s appropriate to play the “no true scotsman” gambit – especially on a religion I don’t adhere to.
Then just what of my characterisation are you objecting to? It seems you are disagreeing with me for the sake of taking an objection, trying to characterise my interpretation as a fringe view of Christianity by which you can dismiss out of hand and not object to.
I don’t believe it means anything, it’s nothing more than a ritual designed to cleanse oneself from responsibility. I’m still calling your beliefs absurd as you belief that Jesus is God. You asked why we deny your worldview as true and the core of my answer was that you belief that God came down to earth in manform, i.e. Jesus. What I characterise as the purpose of that sin is irrelevant, but what I’ve been told by countless Christians of all different schools of thoughts is that Jesus died for our sins and that Jesus is God. I called that absurd and thus denied your worldview that has that as the centre. Now that you agree that you have that at the centre of your worldview, surely you can agree that my point sticks and you were wrong to dismiss it as me not understanding your worldview.
I’ll reiterate, you believe in God, a manifestly false belief. And since God is at the centre of your worldview, I will call your reality as absurd until such time as you demonstrate that God really exists. For reading material, check out former preacher John W. Loftus’ “outsider test for faith” and see whether your religion can pass it. If not, then stop acting as if you have any validity to your delusion.
Well, the Nicene Creed might be part of institutional Christianity, but for all we know might in 2,000 years be considered an aberration that got fixed sometime near the end of the 21st century… it’s useful to keep a perspective on these things.
The “atoning for original sin” thing is not the only orthodox (or heterodox…) interpretation of the the Crucifixion. A more appealing one is the theologian Girard’s idea that it represents God’s exposure of the “scapegoating mechanism”, the social dynamic that looks to innocent victims to blame for social disorder; Jesus’ death then is interpreted as fulfilling the movement against sacrifice that the Hebrew Prophets started.
That is, the crowd (mob, whatever) demanded the sacrifice of a victim, but this victim, being the Incarnated Deity, was obviously innocent (stay with me here) and made it impossible for the scapegoat mechanism to be used after that without guilt or self-consciousness, the way it was before. (He uses this to explain, for example, the ferocity with which the Nazis tried to “Germanify” the Christian story to one in which Christ’s death was just the fall of a hero, in order to evade this moral.)
On the Resurection thread:
A rather famous atheist, the Dalai Lama, has no trouble believing in the Resurrection, and says that the Apostles may have seen Jesus’ “Dharma Body”. Just so you know. :)
I did not confess that I wrote an absurdity, just that I framed your beliefs in the absurd manner to which they sound to anyone who doesn’t follow those beliefs. Discern the difference you fool!
It means you’re a clueless sucker; your rejection of the fact changes that not at all.
Think about it; why, exactly, did Jesus need to die? Why was your god’s power so limited that the only option he had was to come to earth in human form and then be tortured and executed before he could ‘forgive’ us?
What was preventing your supposedly omnipotent god from just forgiving humanity?
How anyone with even a modicum of intelligence can buy into this blatant attempt at a guilt trip is beyond me; it’s just too stupid for words. And let’s not even start on how utterly ridiculous it is for an omniscient, omnicognisant being to judge and condemn his creations for how they acted.
Having your nonsensical god judge us is like turning on the tap and then demanding to be allowed to punish the water for coming out.
and?
Hithesh, the correct answer is: “I do not have any reasons for believing in the historical actuality of Jesus’ resurrection, instead I accept it to be true as a matter of faith.”
You have only two options, and no others – either concede that you accept the claims of your religion by virtue of faith and that you have no evidence, or you MUST provide objective evidence to support the historical actuality of the claim. Anything else is flat-out insulting and will demonstrate once and for all that you have zero respect whatsoever for anyone here.
Hithesh and Rudy, still no physical evidence for your claims, either for jebus or god. Just mental wanking and word salad. As TwinIonEngines says, it is time to shit or get off the pot. Show your physical evidence or go away, and do your mental wanking elsewhere.
Wowbagger: “They might agree that a person roughly equating to the Jesus of the bible existed based on the documentation available; that says nothing whatsoever about whether they believe in the ‘resurrection experience’.”
I suggest you go read up on the views of the Jesus seminar, concerning the resurrection.
But let’s get something straight.
I have a friend, who sometimes when she sleeps she wakes up to demons attacking her, she was made paralyzed and couldn’t move, while the demons would choke her, and do whatever else. If you watched the night line debate, on the existence of Satan, you’d find the emotional theist woman, confessed to having similar experiences.
I have no doubt that my friend and this woman experienced this. Very few of us with a little thought, and few questions to them, hardly would deny this.
They experienced exactly what they said they experienced.
Where we disagree, is what was the cause of it. They may believe it was caused by literal demons attacking them. But for me, and for most of us here the cause was sleep paralysis.
A historical analysis of the ressurection experience would be like this, if the early followers of Jesus felt they saw a ressurected Jesus what would the experience be like, what would happen to them by it, from what we do know of the early followers do they portray the behavior we would expect from such an event? What was the expected result of a community witnessing their supposed messiah crucified be? why did the followers of Jesus defy that expectation?
There’s plenty of reasons, from these questions alone, to reasonably hold that the early followers of Jesus had a resurrection experience. Historians even on the far left of the equator concede this much (the jesus seminar).
Hithesh, more verbal salad, but no hard evidence. You appear to be terrified of hard physical evidence. The only conclusion I can draw is that there is no physical evidence whatsoever to back up your claims, and you know it. Which makes you a woo infested delusional fool.
Help! I keep going around and around!
Paging heddle… paging heddle… hitesh v. heddle, this afternoon, ten paces, with KJVs…
By nature, people are imaginative, highly suggestible, credulous as all get out, and really poor interpreters of subjective experience, traits that amplify themselves in groups united around religious leaders. For you to turn that around and tell us that what people believed, gleaned from stories written in a style of mystery-fable that was dripping with miraculous and portent-filled tropes, tells us more about something that must have really happened rather than telling us something about people, doesn’t tell us anything very impressive about you.
There’s plenty of reasons, from these questions alone, to reasonably hold that the early followers of Jesus had a resurrection experience. Historians even on the far left of the equator concede this much (the jesus seminar).
Sure, and the proof of these early followers having such an experience is…
(Knock it off with your pathetic “Jesus Seminar” argument from authority. It’s transparent, sad, mendacious and stupid.)
No, we (I’ll lump myself in with Hithesh this time) haven’t provided any physical evidence for God’s existence. The few theists posting here have said, over and over, that their particular notion of God rules out this evidence.
If you can see it, it’s part of the Creation, not part of the Creator.
Hithesh, who is more orthodox than me, will disagree with my next statment, but I think God is greater, as a great idea, than as a great being. Sort of kicking the ontological argument up a notch.
Brian Aldiss (I think) once wrote a novel where God appears on Earth, as a large insectoid alien, and proceeds to issue cryptic commands. Clearly to the reader, but not to the narrator, this God is just an alien parasitizing human religious emotions.
If God seems to show up, as a human avatar, and starts giving terrific sermons (J.C.) or playing the flute to milkmaids (Krishna), how do we know for sure that we aren’t just in a scenario like Aldiss’ novel above? I don’t know. I think you have to, as J.C. remarks, consider the fruits.
I just brought up the Dalai Lama to show that There Is More Than One Way to Look At All This, and for fun. Not every post here has to be about persuasion, or winning an argument, I hope.
I have a friend, who sometimes when she sleeps she wakes up to demons attacking her, she was made paralyzed and couldn’t move, while the demons would choke her, and do whatever else. If you watched the night line debate, on the existence of Satan, you’d find the emotional theist woman, confessed to having similar experiences.
I have no doubt that my friend and this woman experienced this. Very few of us with a little thought, and few questions to them, hardly would deny this.
They experienced exactly what they said they experienced.
I would say that they experienced something but their interpretations of the events are way off. So, hithesh, to you think mental illnesses are the results of demon possession?
Wowbagger: “It means you’re a clueless sucker; your rejection of the fact changes that not at all.”
Oh shit you called me a clueless sucker! That’s a fight in my neighborhood. :)
“Think about it; why, exactly, did Jesus need to die?”
I went over most of this in comment #379 of this post: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/05/the_eagleton_delusion.php.
So i’m not going to repeat everything I wrote there again. But you’re more than welcome to comment here on it.
“Think about it; why, exactly, did Jesus need to die?”
To reveal a way of life, not by words but being an example of it, and by being the source of the conviction for others to follow him as well. In the Gospels the claim is not that Jesus died so we didn’t have to, that the cross is only reserved for him, but that the cross waits all those who follow him. As Herbert Mccabe would sum it: “If you do not love your dead, and if you love they’ll kill you.”
Jesus doesn’t claim that his followers because of his suffering will be able to avoid the same fate, in fact he tells them the exact opposite, in their lives they’ll go through trials and suffer for being his followers, but to fear not.
Atonement, at it’s most basic, regardless of which version one adheres to is, is the cause of a change of heart, that causes a steering of an aimless life, or life one felt wasn’t lived in a good way, to one that is. Its not an act that causes atonement, but the conviction the act produces that does it.
It’s by a theist reflection of his own depravity, fraility, cruelty and indifference that we see symbolical represented by the cross, by a murdered innocent who loved us regardless, are we redeemed, and moved to be better.
[quote]Why was your god’s power so limited that the only option he had was to come to earth in human form and then be tortured and executed before he could ‘forgive’ us?”[/quote]
Well, its your view that Christ willful death, is a testament of God’s limit. It’s the option that God choose, and I find it to be a profound one. I don’t find it to be a testament of God’s limit, but a testament of God’s infinite wisdom. I don’t believe any other way would have been better, that’s your belief, not mine.
That hithesh would try to use subjective impressions of followers who needed to collectively deny the death of their leader as compelling testimony, in the same breath as he characterized the subjective experience of a woman who interpreted her sleep-paralysis experiences as demonic, is self-sabotaging. Meanwhile, among the religious believers with whom hithesh vaguely allies himself (at least moreso than with atheists, as a defining characteristic of Christians appears to be that no two can agree upon what it is they should believe and why, and that any of us former Christians never describe Christianity properly at all, no matter whether it’s hithesh or heddle), tales of demons and hellfire and possession and exorcisms are lapped up by suggestible people who would both sincerely fear eternal punishment and reject science. We’re to be persuaded by hithesh that a tortured man is a sublime image of contemplation, while an image of a child contemplating the stars is contemptible superstition, when children are crushed to drive the demons out of them by well-meaning Christians.
“I would say that they experienced something but their interpretations of the events are way off. So, hithesh, to you think mental illnesses are the results of demon possession?”
I already confessed what I believed the cause of the experience was, I suggest you go back and read it again. And no, i do not believe that mental illness is caused by demon possession, I don’t even claim that my friend suffering from those demon visions is mentally ill, anymore so than a friend who suffered a similar sleep paralysis where with Lex Luther standing over him, is mentally ill.
It’s by a theist reflection of his own depravity, fraility, cruelty and indifference that we see symbolical represented by the cross, by a murdered innocent who loved us regardless, are we redeemed, and moved to be better.
News flash: we’re not all as fucked up as you, and therefore do not need God as a binky.
“Sure, and the proof of these early followers having such an experience is…”
Well, history nor science gives you proofs, so you’re barking up the wrong tree here.
Here let’s let you lead yourself.
Historical facts: Jesus was crucified. The early followers unlike followers of other messiahs who met their untimely death, continued to believe in him, even more fervently so, as the writings of the community portray.
And the question for you is, what was the cause of this? Why the unexpected result?
Fine, so it is a demonic attack instead of demonic possession. You still have jack squat about the proof of demons. And my charge remains, they experienced something, it is just now what you are claiming it is.
Rudy, if your deist god can’t be proven with physical evidence, why not keep it to yourself? Any philosophical god incapable of interacting with the real world is a worthless git, not worthy of being respected, much less worshiped, since it only exists a persons mind. Physical evidence should be present for any god who does interact with the real world. Defending an idea with no physical evidence is not the smartest thing to do at Pharyngula.
Ken, you write,
[as a defining characteristic of Christians appears to be that no two can agree upon what it is they should believe and why]
Why is this a problem? And how is it “defining”, as this would seem to be true of any label that covered a large group
otherwise you would have to agree with all the views of the Dalai Lama [Rudy pauses to dodge a well-thrown brick, then resumes] or any number of nontheist UFO enthusiasts. Sure, you can say that well, they at least all agree that there is no God, no waffling or dancing around the point, but you know, Christian is a little more specific than “theist”, with more complex attributes.
That’s like complaining that Buddhists don’t all agree with each other, though they are all atheists (or at least don’t consider gods important, even if some think they exist in theory).
Or complaining that you can’t get string theorists to agree with each other, so they must just be BS’ing. (OK, people *have* written books saying that….)
And the question for you is, what was the cause of this? Why the unexpected result?
What was unexpected about this result? Cults around dead and resurrected gods were a dime a dozen for centuries, both all around the Mediterranean and all along the Silk Road. Oh, and if you see the Buddha coming down the road, kill him.
Stu:
“News flash: we’re not all as fucked up as you, and therefore do not need God as a binky.”
Get over yourself dude, you like your buddy over there Nerdy, suffer this delusion, of always perceiving a “we”, I was talking about myself, and other Christians, there was no you in that dipshit.
What was so fucken hard about understanding what I wrote: “It’s by a theist reflection of his own…..” doesn’t include Stu the dimwitted atheist.
Tell me was that so obscure for you? Was it written in some sort of mystery tongue, that you couldn’t comprehend that much?
Rudy, if you’ve now conceded that god is just an idea people had, not an entity that actually exists, congratulations; you’re an atheist.
Rudy,
Why is this a problem?
Hint: it isn’t a problem for atheists.
Or complaining that you can’t get string theorists to agree with each other, so they must just be BS’ing. (OK, people *have* written books saying that….)
When string theorists get to the point where their rich conjecture becomes in any way scientifically confirmable or discomfirmable, there won’t be much for reasonable people to disagree about.
Well, history nor science gives you proofs, so you’re barking up the wrong tree here.
So Shithesh lays out his own facts that we are supposed to accept at face value. (Like his tale of his friend with the night time demonic attacks.) Sorry, Jesus being crucified is not a historical fact. As for having a growing number of followers, amazing how that can happen when christianity become the official state religion of the Roman Empire and the other competing religions are either outlawed, suppressed or absorbed.
Shithesh, you are an easily misled simpleton. Also just a bit shit bat shit insane.
And hithesh, way to go with that Christian charity and cheek-turning, man. I think your guy had something to say about those who call their brothers, raka, thou fool; I think dipshit probably counts? dimwit, pretty clearly… yup, hithesh has damned hisself again. Or would have, if his beliefs were true.
Ken Cope:
“What was unexpected about this result? Cults around dead and resurrected gods were a dime a dozen for centuries, both all around the Mediterranean and all along the Silk Road.”
Supposed messiah claimants were a dime a dozen, after their untimely death, none of them developed into such a cult. The expected result of when supposed Jewish messiah claimant dies, is that his followers abandon their beliefs in his messiahship, or at least reveal a diminished sort of faith in him (as it was for Sabbati Zevi, though it wasnt death that was the unexpected event).
What happened with the Christian community as conveyed by their writings, is that they reveal a very vivid and entrenched sense of hope, I would like to know what possibly caused that conviction.
I already said that I believe that they had a resurrection experience, that they’re experience of Christ still living, was as vivid and as real to them as touching wounded flesh.
I don’t care if you believe otherwise, but i would like to see you argue that this view is not reasonable for me to hold.
Hithesh, you are a proven liar and bullshitter. Therefore, your testament is worthless. What part of that don’t you understand? We are trying to get you outside of your mind for verification of what you say, preferably with physical evidence. And you fail miserably each and every time. What part of that do you have trouble with?
Ken, well, if (and it’s a big if) the mind is immaterial, then God interacts with us through our minds.
Or, to put it the way I think about it myself, if meaning is immaterial God speaks through the meanings of things, the way a Van Gogh painting is physical but has a (hard to grasp) meaning also.
I don’t think this whole humongous thread started because theists were wanting to prove they were right through physical evidence, but because PZ’s story misrepresented their story. Or at least it mispresents mine, and I guess Hitesh’s and eric’s (can’t recall any other theists who posted).
Christians also think God intervenes in history, but I would argue, in the same way you or I intervene in history. If Jesus was in fact also an avatar of the Deity, he still just talked, and “healed” (I’m skeptical of the miracles, as physical healing, Hittesh probably isn’t), and died. Resurrection, which if it happened seemed physical to its witnesses, left no traces for us except people’s writings.
But I don’t think that’s important to think about for non-Christian theists.
“It’s by a theist reflection of his own depravity, fraility, cruelty and indifference that we see symbolical represented by the cross, by a murdered innocent who loved us regardless, are we redeemed, and moved to be better.” – hithesh
Doesn’t seem to have worked with you. Or… is it possible you were once even more obnoxious and conceited than you are now?
Stephen, no, you’re wrong. I’m not an atheist; I know the difference. I think your idea of what a theist is, is too small. (Again, Google “weak ontology”.) As I said earlier, though, I don’t think She cares, She loves you anyway.
(Rudy dodges again).
Being an idea is a good thing. Ideas are not all imaginary, or at least, She isn’t.
(Rudy dodges again)
Damn but that Rudy likes to show off his belief that the cruel masses are out to persecute him.
Rudy, the only thing that will convince a majority of us is physical evidence for your imaginary deity. Otherwise, it is just a personal belief on your part. Why not keep it personal then?
“Historical facts: Jesus was crucified.” – hithesh
Far from established, of course, since the gospel accounts are from several decades after the supposed event, and there are no reliable accounts from elsewhere.
“The early followers unlike followers of other messiahs who met their untimely death, continued to believe in him”
Joseph Smith’s and L. Ron Hubbard’s followers still believe in them, despite the abundant proofs that they were liars and frauds. Jehovah’s Nuisances continue to believe in their prophecies, despite several dates for the end of the world passing without event. Human credulity is limitless. Perhaps that’s what you are here to demonstrate?
Janine, that was supposed to be a joke; “God loves you anyway” is a cliche’ that atheists get told a lot by earnest religious types, and I guess I felt as though I had to put scare quotes of a sort around it, like a vaudeville joke. I’m sorry it didn’t work.
If I directed a pun at someone here, I would (virtually) dodge too.
No one has called me names on this thread, and I don’t feel persecuted – but are the 20 or so posters here really “masses”? I’ll hold my tongue regarding the “cruel” part :)
but I sympathize with Hittesh holding his tongue, uh, keyboard as long as he did, with all the trash talk going his way. (As soon as he gives it back, he’s suddenly a hypocrite. That is sophmoric, people.)
Historical facts: Jesus was crucified.
Any proof of this? The Bible does not count, as it was written (way) after the fact by people with a vested interest in it being so.
What happened with the Christian community as conveyed by their writings, is that they reveal a very vivid and entrenched sense of hope, I would like to know what possibly caused that conviction.
Asked and answered, moron: it became the official religion of the most powerful state at the time.
Get over yourself dude, you like your buddy over there Nerdy, suffer this delusion, of always perceiving a “we”, I was talking about myself, and other Christians, there was no you in that dipshit.
So we agree: you need your binky because you are, in essence, a depraved asshole.
but I sympathize with Hittesh holding his tongue, uh, keyboard as long as he did, with all the trash talk going his way.
It would have helped if he hadn’t dodged, preached and lied for a few hundred posts, Rudy. Besides being vague, long-winded and dumb as a sack of hammers, that is.
Even if it were a “historical fact” as you say, that some 30ish year old man named Jesus existed at all and was crucified around the time people claim he was, that is far from being important.
The important part is what is claimed next. Without the resurrection, Christianity means exactly zero.
And there is absolutely no evidence of the resurrection let alone anyway to show there was one.
Every year thousands of blind people are killed while fondling elephants. Thank you PZ.Myers for taking on this issue that no one else seems to be willing to discuss.
Hitesh,
I know you’re busy trying to respond to multiple people, so I can understand if you miss this, but I am just curious.
Do you believe/have faith in/(insert appropriate term) that Jesus was born of a virgin?
Do you believe(etc.) that Jesus was born somewhere around December (or at least during the winter season)?
Nerd, I’m not trying to convince, I’m trying to explain. I’ve tried to make it interesting, and writing stuff down at least helps clarify my beliefs to myself.
If this thread was just about “is there physical evidence for God”, then I guess my posts would be OT, but the discussion seemed to range around more than that. PZ’s story was about more than that (though the Moe, Larry and Curly aspect – the mundane, dull work of science that nonetheless gets to the truth – only got a few brief nods, and I didn’t notice it for a while. I liked that part too.)
If you think my beliefs are just BS, at least you know they are a different brand of BS than the brand on offer at the Creation Science Museum. Is that fair enough? I don’t have to go on anymore about them.
I don’t care if you believe otherwise, but i would like to see you argue that this view is not reasonable for me to hold.
I don’t care if you believe otherwise, but based on your behavior in this and other threads, you wouldn’t recognize reason if it walked right up and bit you on the ass.
You believe that your belief is reasonable and that my disbelief is not, but you won’t admit that you believe either out of need (for Stu’s binky) or desire. For whatever reason, you behave here as if you’ll feel better about your belief if you can convince yourself and others that your belief is reasonable.
My concern in participating in these online discussions is in checking with my neighbors about our experiences and challenges in learning how to avoid fooling ourselves, because we’re curious about our nature and the nature of the world, in order to build accurate models and representations against which we can measure new observations and evidence, and determine how well they correlate with predictions based on our models, so that our models can be revised, as a means for a deeper understanding of ourselves and our world. This process is rather less foundational, and more like a nautical running fix.
As part of the discussion among people who understand this endeavor, various people persist in claiming that they are not fooling themselves, and that we are fools for not believing things which, to my knowledge, nobody has ever claimed to be able to objectively verify beyond reasonable doubt. I have a lot more respect for people who believe things and are willing to admit that they do so because they fucking well feel like it and if I don’t like it I can go fuck myself, than for people who torture reason and evidence and English and honest human interaction in order to shriek at the wind that they’re right and I’m wrong, goddammit.
YMMV
oh whop-dee-doo: one woo-addled old man is able to fit your magic into his own magical world view. newsflash: he’s only an atheist because his religion doesn’t require belief in god.
it isn’t. dualism has been disproven. gods actions on a person’s brain would be visible as “unnatural” brain-activity. while prayer and meditation do stimulate the brain, there’s noting supernatural about the activity, merely a self-stimulation (think of it as the brain masturbating)
meaning is human-made. Your god then is the anthropomorphzation of thoroughly human-made thing. still nothing than an embellishment on reality, and one even less “real” than hithesh’s.
Rudy,
if (and it’s a big if) the mind is immaterial, then God interacts with us through our minds.
You probably know that such a premise is not attractive to an audience of physicalists. The world would be a lot different than it appears to be if our bodies were merely tranceivers for psychic woo, or transcendent unexplainium, or whatever hand-waving pixie dust you’re asking us to accept is indistinguishable from non-existence. I’m not inclined to cede the possibility of its existence in order to help you prop up your magic sky pixie.
The minute you come up with any evidence for the non-locality of mind, and any resultant communication with phenomenal cosmic Powers, James Randi has a million bucks waiting for you. Good luck with that. I’m glad that the discipline of neurophysiology is less than sanguine about your otiose hypothesis.
something like this, perhaps
http://www.pixeladdiction.com/Contest_entry.php?id=14653&cad=1658&type=u
oh awesome. your friend suffers from something that sounds suspiciously like debiliating anxiety attacks, something that is fully curable with therapy, and all you can do is say OMGZ, DIMONZZZZ!!!!!one!!, instead of suggesting to your friend that she might be ill and that if she got help, she could get rid of the attacks…?
at least I hope you’ve refrained from “spiritual warfare” on your poor friend’s demon :-/
Jadehawk, I think saying “dualism is disproven” is a bit of a reach. In any case, I’m not sure what “unnatural” brain activity would mean.
Take for example, Case 1: After long research, I suddenly solve a long-standing conjecture in algebraic topology. Case 2: After long prayer, I suddenly realize that God wants me to give up eating meat.
Would my brain activity be detectably different in these two cases (supposing that our poor subjects could concentrate while in the machine)? Could someone, even in principle, tell that I was even thinking about algebraic topology?
Ken: I am SO stealing “unexplainium”. Pure win.
Could someone, even in principle, tell that I was even thinking about algebraic topology?
Yes.
Rudy, Isaac Asimov, the prolific author, and atheist, would on occasion get stuck in his writing. His method to get past the block was to attend an action movie that had enough car chases, explosions and the like to keep his attention, but didn’t have a deep enough plot to totally absorb his mind. By the time his subconscious worked on the problem for a while, he found the solution to get past his block. I’ve used his technic a time or two with success. Your AHA moments you describe come by the same process. Deities are not required.
Well, hithesh is right on one thing. There almost certainly were resurrection experiences. Since even Paul had one, years after some others and far from Jerusalem and Galilee where (most of) the others seem to have occurred, we can be pretty confident that they were distributed in space and time, and seem to have resembled garden-variety religious experiences accompanied by evangelizing zeal. Then, 40 to 60 years later, we have these elaborate narratives detailing the earthly career of the figure who supposedly was the object of these experiences.
The problem here is the long history of reading this record backwards. Just because a new kind of Jewish piety arose is Judea and Galilee in the early first century, accompanied, as religious fervors often are, with powerful subjective experiences, doesn’t mean that the contextualizing of those experiences done by later generations accurately reports the situation on the ground prior to those experiences. The gospels were written for their own time, not the time of the experiences, and they invented a historicized figure as their focus, where such a literalization would have, I am convinced, utterly missed the point as far as those original ‘experiencers’ would have been concerned.
hithesh said
I have an interest in Jesus Christ being an actual historical person, who was actually crucified, and that there was an actual resurrection experience. It would be quite difficult to reconcile the meaning of the gospels without such things.
The situation with the gospels is quite the reverse. It is impossible to reconcile the gospels with their contradictory claims and divergent theologies if there were any actual, historical truth to the claim that this figure existed and was crucified at the time and place the gospels specify. The figure was invented to make the resurrection experiences relevant to later generations of Jews, and new groups of gentiles who had been getting into the act, after the religious fervor had died down and the vague claims of the (now dead) forebears no longer satisfied (not least because they were dead, though they had believed that the they would live to see the kingdom).
By the mid 2nd century, all of this context was lost, and most Christians have been clinging to some version of the historicized figure ever since. Fundies, of course, buy the whole thing; ‘sophisticated’ Christians like our hithesh, aware of the mythical character of most of the gospel stories, lay claim to only the minimal core. Doesn’t matter. The whole thing was invented to make sense of an early 1st century Jewish religious revival, and none of it is any more relevant to the modern world than Abraham’s views on child-rearing.
Stu, be my guest. If I didn’t steal it, I applied the form after hearing a friend of mine in IT describe a second monitor I’d requested as “being made of unobtainium.”
Unexplainium is what Mysterians (after ? and The, per Dennett) say that consciousness is made of.
the brain activity is different for those two activities; however, if an actual God was involved, the activity would be different in a way that would be inconsistent with self-stimulation (what exactly that would entail is a question for actual neuroscientists, so I’m not gonna speculate here).
also, you seem to be confusing detection of specific brain-activity with thought-reading…
#890: hah! I completely forgot about that one… I guess we ARE one step closer to though-reading! :-p
[puts on Karnak turban]Jadehawk @895, you were thinking of the letter “t” weren’t you?
also, I always get a giggle out of the claims that there must have been SOMEthing to the resurrection if so many people believed in it… because, you know, those thousands of people who believe that Elvis Lives! also have SOMEthing to go on: namely their pathological need for it to be true :-p
Ken: lol, indeed
Ken, it’s a nice result (stare at big ol’ N on screen you can pick it up in visual cortex) but doesn’t really take things that much farther than McCulloch and Pitts did in 1968, except for the nicer tech. (Google “What the frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain”, there’s a PDF online). Even dualists think the brain DOES something (it’s breaking down visual patterns, in this case.) I don’t have a strong leaning towards dualism, as far as consciousness is concerned, it’s the meaning of the world that’s its spiritual aspect.
I admit though, in principle you might pick up some signs that someone is visualizing something (a fuzzy commutative diagram, or something) which would give you hints as to what they were thinking about. I think I made my claim too big for the point I was trying to make, which actually went the other way: that you wouldn’t expect anything “unnatural” when a person thoughts were influenced by God, any more than it’s “unnatural” when a person gets an idea from a book.
Nerd, I’ve seen that same technique suggested for ADHD folks. I’m not surprised that it helps jog the ol’ synapses loose.
Wittgenstein liked to watch American mysteries and Westerns.
Therefor, God’s influence is indistinguishable from that of a book.
Parsimony, parsimony, parsimony.
right, the same way a hurricane supposedly sent by god is indistinguishable from a natural hurricane.
if your god is indistinguishable from non-supernatural events, it is an unnecessary embellishment; to say that your thoughts are influenced by god is as scientifically accurate as saying that the muses have inspired you to create a piece of art: it’s an unnecessary (from an explanation-POW) embellishment on reality, sicne reality can be explained just fine without it. I’ve been trying to explain this since you’ve come into this thread, except you then took it on that silly “religion is socially necessary” tangent, which is a separate topic.
I don’t have a strong leaning towards dualism, as far as consciousness is concerned, it’s the meaning of the world that’s its spiritual aspect.
Apart from its conditional status as the antecedent for the consequent that your preferred spiritual meaning of the world could be accurate, what do you suppose we’d need to learn before scientists began to prefer dualism to physicalism?
What evidence would compel any reasonable person to abandon physicalism for dualism?
Got any?
Still more testy goodness.
and another involuntary(?) admission that the whole spirituality thing is man-made, since “meaning” is man-made
for “meaning” to be non-human-made, it would have to be extraneous… and if there’s only a singular source of this extraneous meaning (i.e. god), “meaning” would have to be universal. it is not. “meaning” is completely and utterly subjective, and even socially “meaningful” things vary greatly from culture to culture. nothing that I can think of right now has the same “meaning” to every culture, or even to every person within the same culture.
Ken Cope @#885
Dr. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at U.C.S.D.. Excerpt from article by John Colapinto in the May 11, 2009 issue of The New Yorker:
Um, Jadehawk, I don’t remember saying “religion is socially necessary” – are you thinking of the subthread involving Swedish heavy metal bands and North Korea? There are too many posts to look back through, but I thought I expressed agnosticism on that idea. I thought that was clear enough when I said we’d have to wait a couple of centuries to see how Scandinavia turned out.
Someone else *did* claim that religiosity and social quality were inversely correlated, and I tried to find counterexamples there (but the thread was too fragmented for me to make a good case, I lost the thread of my argument a few times.)
Watchman, they don’t call them “People of the Book” for no reason. All these religions have inspired books – Christians, Sikhs, Hindus, Zoroastrians, just about all the big ones. You read the books to get inspired too, just the way you would read and think about a science paper or a novel.
The point is what the book means, and here I’m back to saying that the meaning is the point, not the physical embodiment. Books are about as immaterial as you can get, and still be something you can hold in your hands.
Jadehawk, the muses are a good example, thank you. I’ll have to think about that one for a while.
Ken said “the non-locality of mind.” So-called mirror neurons are being investigated as the mechanism by which we construct representations of other minds. You might as well call the primary visual cortex “non-local,” since we can see things outside our own skulls.
Ramachandran’s a fascinating guy, and that New Yorker profile is fantastic, as usual. But he tends to wax a little poetic about potential breakthroughs in neuroscience. Hyperbole notwithstanding, there’s no comfort for dualism in mirror neurons.
Yes, I was thinking about that subthread. When I said that “god” is an unnecessary embellishment in my original answer to your claim that “god” is similar to “justice” etc, your answer was this:
“Unnecessary embellishment? Well, what criterion would we use to establish that? If we get along for a few centuries without the idea, and things go ok… I think that your case would be established. If everything goes to hell :) would your idea be falsified?”
which is an answer to whether it is “socially necessary”, not to whether it is necessary as an explanation for anything.
“And hithesh, way to go with that Christian charity and cheek-turning, man. ”
Hypocritical cowards don’t get much sympathy from me. I find it quite annoying that some hypocrite of an atheist has the nerve to tell me to be more Christian like, and are too cowardly to tell their fellow atheist to modify their behavior.
If PZ Myers and company, and fellow atheist endorse, and advocate the manner in which I address people like Stfu, when atheist are talking to theist, than I’m going to return the favor, I really don’t care if you don’t like it, or feel that I’m not living up to Christian values. I have my reasons for it, and I’m going to stand by them.
I sure don’t talk to every atheist like that, when someone’s like Walton knows how to be respectful, i return the same respect back. If that’s the sort of conduct you want from me, than demand it of yourself, and don’t be so cowardly that you won’t demand it of you friends.
mirror-neuron experiments
First I’ve heard of those, although at least a decade ago I remember reading about studies that suggested that people who watched athletes performing, or even looked at posed statues, had measurable activity in the motor cortex, as if internally going through the motions of how the observer would adopt the pose or perform the activity, which would go some way toward explaining responses to porn, at least.
Ken Cope:
Ken: “You believe that your belief is reasonable and that my disbelief is not,”
Really Ken, did I go and claim that your disbelief is not reasonable? I think atheism is a reasonable position to hold, so I don’t knew where you get the idea that I think atheism is unreasonable. I sure didn’t think my atheism was unreasonable when i was a disbeliever, what reason do I have to judge yours any differently?
I suggest you quit with the matryr complex, and stick with what’s true, not some pulled out your ass assumption about me not based on reality at all.
Jayhawk, oh, that’s what you meant. OK, I see what you mean, I was too offhand with that. I think that I meant to suggest that “unnecessary embellishment” would be unfalsifiable, but then I went ahead and suggested a way to falsify it, and then went ahead and quibbled about the details when other people suggested that had already happened… at least that’s what I think I was thinking. My brain hurts, and my mind, soul, spirit and psyche along with it.
And I wasn’t even responding to the right sense of your words. I’m sorry, and mortified.
Hithesh, what is your point for your continued posting here?
hithesh: What’s odd is you can profess to see the sawdust in the eyes of other, and fail to see the log in your own. There’s magical thinking at it’s best.
That’s not exactly what I would say is a prime example of magical thinking. Unless they literally think they see sawdust and logs!
I suggest you quit with the matryr complex, and stick with what’s true, not some pulled out your ass assumption about me not based on reality at all.
I’m going to have to add “delusional” to my list of hithesh attributes in post @883.
I sure didn’t think my atheism was unreasonable when i was a disbeliever
Did reason have anything to do with your purported abandonment of disbelief when you decided to describe yourself as a believer, or would you claim that your belief is a leap of faith, which is of more importance to you than reason?
Jadehawk @ 897:
The very example I was going to bring up! Not only are there many who believe Elvis is still alive, evidence to the contrary, but many claim to have actually seen him. I would argue that the big E is potentially in the process of deification—he has his priests (the flocks of Elvis impersonators, a congregation of celebrants of the Mysteries (the die-hard fans who study the minutia of his life and collect all the memorabilia), even temples (most obviously Graceland, but also the smaller “shrines” by private individuals, displaying their collections of the memorabilia), icons (often painted on black velvet) and sacred music (made known to the faithful by E Himself!). Just give it a hundred years or so….
Janine: “Jesus being crucified is not a historical fact.”
Knockgates:
“Far from established, of course”
Stu:
“Any proof of this? ”
Oh brother, i should have known that we were going to get some quasi-mythicist coming out. So you three doubt Jesus was crucified? Do u also doubt that there was a historical Jesus that gospels writers based their accounts on?
Sorry to break it you, contrary to whatever delusions you hold, the Jesus being crucified is a historical fact, and if you had a clue as to how historical facts are determined you would know this already.
I may not know all that much about science, but very few people know as much about the historical method, and anaylsis than me. But do I really have a desire to go through all this for the sake of you three–three individuals who hardly listen.
The best I’ll do for you guys is link you to few of my countless debates on the subject with individuals such as Rook Hawkins, and you can chew on those. If you really want to learn that is.
I like Icons on velvet, especially when they’re painted in pixels by my friend Trici.
The best I’ll do for you guys is link you to few of my countless debates on the subject with individuals such as Rook Hawkins, and you can chew on those. If you really want to learn that is.
Gosh fellas, look! Hithesh is doing us all a favor! He’s gonna link us to some place where he believes he was coherent and won the day in a debate! Isn’t that swell? We’re all going to be disabused of our ignorance by a real, honest to gosh historicyst!
I’m breathless with antici
I sure didn’t think my atheism was unreasonable when i was a disbeliever, what reason do I have to judge yours any differently?
Stop lying. You never were one. You don’t even seem to understand what atheism is.
Oh, by the way, you can be as mean to me as you like. You’re obviously out of cheeks, right?
So you three doubt Jesus was crucified?
Yes.
Do u also doubt that there was a historical Jesus that gospels writers based their accounts on?
Since there’s zero contemporary references to him, and outside of the gospels only a few sideways references by Joshephus of all people, yes.
Sorry to break it you, contrary to whatever delusions you hold, the Jesus being crucified is a historical fact
Like hell it is. Argument from assertion. Look it up.
and if you had a clue as to how historical facts are determined you would know this already.
Hoo boy, this is gonna be good. Do tell how you have determined this.
I may not know all that much about science
Yes…
but very few people know as much about the historical method, and anaylsis than me.
Well, such method would be pretty damned useless unless it were scientific, which you admit to being ignorant about.
Also, care to back those credentials up? Got a degree from a university other than Google?
I’ll tell you what Stu, Janine, Knockers, who ever else. If you guys seriously want to have a discussion on the historical Jesus, if you would actually like to learn, we can do it. But I prefer to do so on a forum, a forum of your choice. Because it’s be very annoying and harder to follow in this comment section.
If you’re serous about it, and not looking to waste my time, I’ll do it, just tell me what forum you prefer, and start a thread in it, and we can have such a discussion.
Yawn, Hithesh is such a bore. And keeps saying nothing cogent despite of repeated posts. In order to say thing interesting, he needs an original unrefuted thought, which seems beyond his capability. And he doesn’t get the need for hard physical evidence, which is what separates the truthtellers from the fictiontellers. At the moment, Hithesh is on the side of the fictiontellers, as he is without any evidence to substantiate his claims.
By the way, hithesh…
Sorry to break it you, contrary to whatever delusions you hold, the Jesus being crucified is a historical fact, and if you had a clue as to how historical facts are determined you would know this already.
I may not know all that much about science, but very few people know as much about the historical method, and anaylsis than me. But do I really have a desire to go through all this for the sake of you three–three individuals who hardly listen.
The best I’ll do for you guys is link you to few of my countless debates on the subject with individuals such as Rook Hawkins, and you can chew on those.
This is known as the Courtier’s Reply. We’ve seen it before. We are not impressed. But hey, if you have laid out extensive evidence for Jesus somewhere else, by all means, bring on the links. I could use a good laugh.
So, hithesh, before you run away… is this you?
http://debate.atheist.net/showthread.php?t=637&page=11
See, I’m an economics major, and I deal with measuring certainty.
Economics major AND the bestest biggest expert on history? Where do you find the time?
When one reads the gospel, when one reads the Book of Acts, we see clearly that writers of these various books are trying to portray a figure that did exist.
This alone, separates the story of Jesus from the story of Hercules, of Remus and Romulus, and other myths.
Gotcha. All other religions are just pretending to believe that their idols exist, right?
Dude, if that’s you, let’s not bother trying to debate. You actually throw out the Argumentum Batmannium: people wrote about him, he must have existed.
Gadzooks, hitesh is a bore. Makes me long for kenny.
Hitesh, not only do I doubt that there was a real jayzus, I am not even sure you exist and there is more evidence for your existence than there is for your saviour on a stick. I am not a scientist either, but I was trained as a historian, and the bulk of evidence of there being a real jc would not convince a jury if you called him ET instead of the founder of xtianinanity.
Oh, cicely, you reminded me of my favourite ever Elvis painting, on black velvet, day glo paint, Elvis as jc on the cross…still wish I had bought it. It defined bad taste.
Ciao y’all
Would my brain activity be detectably different in these two cases (supposing that our poor subjects could concentrate while in the machine)? Could someone, even in principle, tell that I was even thinking about algebraic topology?
Obviously not, because thoughts are magical and have no causal relationship with physical brain states.
If you think my beliefs are just BS, at least you know they are a different brand of BS than the brand on offer at the Creation Science Museum.
Right, the BS at the Creation Science Museum is about believing things based on misinterpreted evidence, whereas your BS is based on believing things for no reason at all. The former is more creditable.
Watchman, parsimony is not the only game in town.
I actually like all the big, complicated religions with lots of statues, mandalas, rituals that take days and days… even though mine is the exact opposite, and I like theologians and philosophers who write unfathomably dense prose, even if I can’t follow them, sort of the way I appreciate that proof of Fermat’s last theorem takes several long books to explain all the way (depending on where you start of course, and if there were a one-liner that’d make me happy).
The meaning of a big, complicated universe should be big and complicated. Of course, I like Maxwell’s equations too, no reason we can’t have it all. And the easiest philosopher of all, William James, was all in favor of a “pluralistic universe” with lots of levels of explanation and meaning. A universe with Beethoven’s Ninth in it is way more implausible and interesting than a big empty one, even one filled with frothing quantum foam.
This isn’t an argument by the way, just a personal observation.
jadehawk, I looked back and see I’ve left your questions hanging more than once. I’ve got to make supper but I promise to get to at least the “muses” one later on.
hithesh, did you read my #892? In it, I present a sketch of an alternate account of Christian orgins that does not posit an actual, historical figure crucified in the time of Pilate. It’s based on a not-inconsiderable amount of research on my part into the subject, so I consider your bluster about being a world leader in understanding historical method and analysis somewhat laughable. Arguments from authority are impoverished enough; never mind arrogant appeals to one’s own dubious authority.
Explain what’s wrong with my account.
The point is what the book means, and here I’m back to saying that the meaning is the point, not the physical embodiment. Books are about as immaterial as you can get, and still be something you can hold in your hands.
We all ready dealt with this foolish equivocation over “immaterial” with Eric. Information is “immaterial” in a very different sense from elephant’s wings and gods. Information is “immaterial” because it’s composed of relationships, and thus can be embodied many ways in material objects such as books. Elephant’s wings and gods are “immaterial” because they don’t exist — they are just stories. It’s the difference between “Tom Sawyer” the novel and Tom Sawyer the person; the former exists, “immaterially”; the latter doesn’t exist at all.
Watchman, parsimony is not the only game in town.
Indeed, there are also fairy tales.
sort of the way I appreciate that proof of Fermat’s last theorem takes several long books to explain all the way (depending on where you start of course, and if there were a one-liner that’d make me happy).
The current proof is most parsimonious one known.
The meaning of a big, complicated universe should be big and complicated.
Duh. Do you have even the faintest idea what the word means? Here’s Einstein’ parsimonious description: “as simple as possible, but no simpler”.
Watchman, you asked, what would make scientists abandon physicalism for dualism?
Well, I’m not sure they need to. I don’t have a strong attachment to dualism. But let’s see, if they were competing scientific theories, instead of philosophical positions, we would look for an experiment that would falsify one or the other.
I suppose that building a conscious AI would falsify dualism, though if the AI was too complicated to understand (say, built by the umpteenth iteration of genetically programmed nanobots) we’d be back to trying to decide whether a mind snuck in there somewhere…
If I can’t think of an experiment that would falsify physicalism, in principle. doesn’t that point to physicalism not being a scientific position? I mean, just getting confirmations (visual cortex readable, check; mirror neurons, check) just gets us back to the problem of induction. Of course you’re getting confirmations because you set up your experiments in that framework. If they couldn’t see a fuzzy letter N on the screen, would that have disproved physicalism? Of course not.
Thank you, Mr Myers! Your story made my day :)
it’s only tricky to think of because things that would falsify physicalism seem silly and impossible: people remembering things from periods of brain-death (not coma); zombies; switching bodies (without the full-body transplant [aka brain-transplant]); evidence for incorporeal minds such as ghosts;
there’s a whole bunch, but we relegate most, if not all, of them into the realm of fiction, because they simply have never happened anywhere except in fiction.
I can’t think of an experiment that would falsify physicalism, in principle.
Any controlled experiment that confirmed the existence of any of the phenomena commonly referred to as ESP, like telepathy, “remote viewing,” precognition, or psychokinesis, would falsify physicalism.
You’re confusing “not falsified” with “unfalsifiable in principle.”
Buddhism != atheism. The Dalai Lama is a reincarnation of a Tulku, using him as an example of an atheist is like using Joseph Smith as an example of a Catholic.
Given what we do know about consciousness, about how our brains developed and how other animals have subjective experience, how can anyone still support dualism as a model? It’s absurd. A physical mind is the only model that makes sense, that is compatible with our origins, that explains what individuals in this species and in non-human species experience. We can directly link brain injuries to change of function in experience, therefore physicalism has strong evidential support. The fact that the brain makes decisions before we are consciously aware of them really is a nail in any dualist coffin.
There’s nothing quantatively unique about the human brain, only qualitatively. We are just another permutation of the animal kingdom – a successful permuation given the reliance on memes for survival, but a permutation nonetheless. A dualist has to demonstrate that the mind is separate from the body, which could be done in many ways. It’s just that when it comes time to test such things, all the anecdotal support isn’t matched by empirical evidence.
Watchman, you asked, what would make scientists abandon physicalism for dualism?
No, Rudy, I’m the one who asked that one.
if they were competing scientific theories, instead of philosophical positions
What, you think the place to look for an understanding of the nature of consciousness is in the philosophy department (and if you were talking about the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, then I’d be tempted to be OK with that), with nothing for scientists to do but throw up their hands in fear of stepping beyond the rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty? Wouldn’t want the Magisteria to Overlap now, would we…
we’d be back to trying to decide whether a mind snuck in there somewhere
Speak for yourself. You’ve filling your head with too much woo from the Dalai Lama. You think somebody not yet free from the Wheel would incarnate in some gears? What need would an immaterial mind have for a transistorized substrate? What need would an immaterial mind have for a biological one, for that matter?
If I can’t think of an experiment that would falsify physicalism, in principle.
Argument from ignorance, check.
How about some good old-fashioned ESP? Some bi-location, some remote viewing? How about somebody like Terry Schiavo recovering from her vegetative state with nothing much more in her head than enough water to keep her head inflated? Come on, you should be able to do better than than a shoulder shrug for ways in which physicalism could be falsified, even if it’s only by channeling your spirit guide.
JeffreyD @926, did you see my Elvis link @918?
I suppose that building a conscious AI would falsify dualism
You had better talk to David Chalmers, the banner carrier of modern dualists, about that. See, e.g., http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-13834.html
though if the AI was too complicated to understand (say, built by the umpteenth iteration of genetically programmed nanobots) we’d be back to trying to decide whether a mind snuck in there somewhere…
Wait … so, because people have minds, they are demonstrations of dualism? And didn’t you just say that the AI is conscious … which implies that it has a mind? You’re very confused, and have things quite backwards. If we built a robot controlled by a very simple program of a few lines, perhaps simply a “while(true) {}” loop, and it displayed complex behavior on the order of a human being, that would falsify physicalism — or at least we would have a heck of a time sustaining it. But nothing can falsify dualism, because a “mind” — as you conceive of it as something independent of physical processes — can always “sneak in” by mere assertion.
Any controlled experiment that confirmed the existence of any of the phenomena commonly referred to as ESP, like telepathy, “remote viewing,” precognition, or psychokinesis, would falsify physicalism.
I don’t think so; we would have to rule out the possibility that human brains exert unknown physical forces somehow — a popular conception about “parapsychology”. A better example would be if we lived in the land of South Park, with talking turds and people who continue to act normally (well, the South Park version) after their heads have been blown off.
hithesh @922:
Asking you to justify your dubious assertions doesn’t imply either that the subject is itself of interest, or even of any relevance.
This is an unsubstantiated and highly dubious claim.
Perhaps, rather than telling us of your erudition, you could show it to us.
I expect that would be a highly amusing spectacle, so I encourage you to do so.
I have to echo John. The combination of the two quoted passages does nothing to boost your claim of knowledge.
Are you planning to show us a .jpg of your MENSA card next.
And again, the historicity of Jesus as claimed in the bible doesn’t mean anything without substantial evidence for the resurrection (none) and various other things.
And the historicity of Jesus and his actions as described in the bible (and which version?) is a highly suspect notion.
The only sources for Jesus that exist outside the Bible are Josephus and Tacitus.
There is good reason to think that the passage in Antiquities of the Jews that mentions Jesus was a forgery written by a Christian apologist to provide historical evidence of Jesus’ existence. There are a couple of arguments against authenticity: Parallel sections of Josephus’ Jewish War do not mention Jesus; and some Christian writers as late as the third century, who quoted from the Antiquities, do not mention the passage.
As for Tacitus, quite likely he was writing what the Christians in the year 116 believed, and is not therefore an independent confirmation of the Gospel reports. Richard Carrier writes:
As Charles Guignebert notes “So long as there is that possibility [that Tacitus is merely echoing what Christians themselves were saying], the passage remains quite worthless.”
Ken, sorry about the misattribution.
By “wondering if mind snuck in” I just meant that if the AI were too complex to understand, we would be in the same exact position that were are now, with respect to our own brains.
You reading my post in a pretty hostile manner, to think that I literally meant that if “I” couldn’t think of a way to do it, it couldn’t be done. I would be happy to see some proposals, and I see that you and a few people have suggested such. (I actually thought of ghosts while away from the computer picking up a family member, but I wasn’t really sure how to do an experiment involving one… and it’s not really clear to me how a physicalist explanation of ghosts could be ruled out. Creatures from the id? Ghostly but quite physical aliens? Someone else already pointed this problem out, with respect to ESP.
Nothing’s Sacred’s post started me thinking about dualism = independent of physical process. While I don’t think that it’s possible for a mind occur without a physical process (and I don’t think dualism requires this… we haven’t said *which* version of dualism we’re talking about here… ), if we built a physically correct simulation of a human brain (down to the molecular level, let’s go for the gold) and it couldn’t pass the Turing Test, that might falsify physicalism.
Just as a cultural note, most U.S. Christians seem oblivious to the traditional Christian view that the mind and the body are inseparable, and imagine themselves as ghosts after death floating up to heaven. I guess we can all agree that they are wrong. :)
(The standard solution, as though anyone here were interested, is that we get new bodies, sort of like rebooting a Sim.)
Nothing Sacred, my thought experiment involved completely understanding the construction of the AI, so that we could see that everything going on was completely, utterly physical. That’s why the spooky nanobots had to come in later, to muddy the water so that we couldn’t see that anymore.
Nothing’s Sacred, I assumed that Wiles’ proof was the best known. Thank you for confirming that.
I think I do understand what parsimony means. I thought that was clear from my remarks about Maxwell’s equations. As I said, my personal preference, not Einstein’s. Seeking parsimony is a good rule of thumb for science.
Now, imagine two books on Beethoven’s Ninth: One (“The Dummie’s Ode to Joy”, 100pp.) is short, to the point, and tells you why it’s so great. It “explains” the symphony. The other (“The Ninth in Nine”, 9vol., 20000pp) has the complete score, every critical review ever published in a major world language, pictures of every musician and singer at the first performance… you get the picture. They both (it’s my story) sell for the same price. Is the shorter one necessarily a better book? Parsimony just isn’t relevant here. Since Beethoven’s Ninth is part of this universe, parsimony doesn’t apply to every phenomenon in the universe.
Jadehawk, the muses: I think people still “think” muses, even if they don’t “name” them; Stravinsky said that he was just a vehicle for the Rite of Spring, and artists search for “inspiration”. It’s just as mysterious as ever, but we use different (still not physical) language about it. It’s easy to say that we don’t need the idea of muses, but our substitutes are just as cryptic. It might be relevant that artists tend to be more religious than scientists, based on a small set of personal observations, not a scientific survey; and I do know a nonreligious artist. Just like I know one religious Swede :)
Kel, are you quite sure that the Dalai Lama is a reincarnation? I’m a little skeptical about that myself. I know they do tests and all…
Rudy, there is still no need to posit your imaginary deity for anything. You appear to be trying to find a hole for one to exist. There isn’t one. All gods either need physical evidence or they exist only in peoples minds. If you want to believe in a deistic god, fine. We don’t have to. And you nee to quit pushing your belief upon us.
well, in comparing godly inspiration to inspiration by the muses, I was addressing specifically the tendency of humans to anthropomorphize things, and that those anthromorphizations are fictions, metaphors for things we do not have better ways of describing. But there’s non-anthropomorphic metaphors as well (thopugh I suppose one could argue that Stravinsky, by saying he was a vehicle for his work, is giving a life and a personality TO his work, thus anthromorphizing not the inspiration, but the creation (pygmalion etc…).
Artistic inspiration, when perceived subjectively, is such a feeling of something we cannot really put in words; and the greater our creation, the more unbelievable it seems to us that *we* are the creators of it. So we abstract, externalize, and even anthropomorphize such experiences. And even when we DO have an accurate way of describing it, the sciencey descriptions of love, inspiration etc. are emotionally not very satisfying, so we stick with the more poetic versions. That’s human nature, and it’s ok. But what we do need to keep in mind (heh) is that those are inventions of the human mind; nothing more, nothing less. As long as we remember they’re fictitious, they’re art; the moment we take them seriously, they become religion and can become a hindrance or even dangerous
“Perhaps, rather than telling us of your erudition, you could show it to us. ”
I’ve seen quite enough of it, thank you very much.
By “wondering if mind snuck in” I just meant that if the AI were too complex to understand, we would be in the same exact position that were are now, with respect to our own brains.
I know what you meant, and pointed out how it reflects confusion about such concepts as minds and falsifiability.
Nerd, I’m really at a loss as to why you are so upset. But I think I’ve responded to everybody, and I don’t like making people mad, so I’ll sign off this thread. Thanks for all the food for thought. (Nothing Sacred, thanks for the Chalmers link, I hadn’t run across this argument of his, though I leafed through one of his Consciousness volumes a few years ago.)
So, hithesh, before you run away… is this you?
Ah, yes, that post is quite old, he’s a more recent one, in an encounter I had with Rook Hawkins:
http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/14997#comment-187747
Rudy, you don’t get it. We don’t need your god. Period. End of story. You trying to make room for one is just obnoxious to real atheists. If you want to believe, fine. Just stop trying to push you personal belief upon us. How do you do that? Easy, just don’t talk about it.
Yawn, not interested Hithesh. Boring godbotting git. You have nothing to offer we have seen a hundred times before. Just in a more boring package.
Ah, yes, that post is quite old, he’s a more recent one, in an encounter I had with Rook Hawkins:
So not ready for prime time.
Bored now.[/Willow]
Rudy appears to realize he’s out of his league and is scarpering, Hi-test can’t take a hint to save his life. It’s almost worth getting one of those greasemonkey scripts for firefox so I can say “plonk” but it really isn’t worth the effort.
What if it was packaged in a porkchop?
Or wrapped in bacon?
While I don’t think that it’s possible for a mind occur without a physical process (and I don’t think dualism requires this… we haven’t said *which* version of dualism we’re talking about here… )
I didn’t say “without”, a physical process, I said “independent of” — the sort of independence supposedly demonstrated by Chalmers’ zombie thought experiment, wherein there are two physically identical worlds, the inhabitants of one of which are conscious while the inhabitants of the other aren’t. Dualism being the sort of unfalsifiable mental masturbation that it is, highly adept masturbaters like Chalmers can always posit consciousness as something whose content perfectly tracks physical processes without being caused by them, and then conjuring magical “psycho-physical bridging laws” to “explain” this. You should just love that sort of unparsimonious crap.
if we built a physically correct simulation of a human brain (down to the molecular level, let’s go for the gold) and it couldn’t pass the Turing Test, that might falsify physicalism.
Which human brain? There are human brains in comas that can’t pass the Turing Test. Heck, there are human brains in former Presidents of the U.S. that can barely be considered able to pass the Turing Test. We do not have nearly enough understanding of the construction of the human brain to identify the causes of these differences, so how could we possibly know that the reason the brain we built wasn’t able to to pass the TT was because some magic hadn’t been added?
See, you’ve got (at least) two major conceptual failures here. First, you’re making a category mistake, applying an attribute — a precise molecular makeup — of an individual extant entity (some human brain) to a class of entities, human brains. Second, you don’t understand falsification. It’s about a proposition, or set of propositions, entailing, as logical necessity, something that doesn’t actually occur. But physicalism does not predict that, were we to build a human brain, it would necessarily pass the Turing Test, because there are many purely physical ways in which that could fail to happen, and it would always be more plausible (and parsimonious) to assume that we had made some mistake in construction than to assume that we had left out some magical Turing dust.
OK, I have to delurk for a second. Geez, Ken Cope, I had thought better of you. The damn thread gets up to 956 (at least) and I’m “scarpering” off scared? That’s right, I always give up before 1000. I’m a coward that way.
Nerd craps on me for staying, Ken for leaving.
Nothing Sacred, yeah, I’m a sucker for that stuff! Thanks again for the pointer. I don’t see why the particularity of the human brain is a problem, just don’t pick a President to simulate. Your point about falsification is more subtle and I’ll have to think more about it. I don’t think I should post any more on this thread though.
Which human brain? There are human brains in comas that can’t pass the Turing Test.
Let me elaborate on my point. These brains in comas once weren’t. So even if you create an exact physical duplicate of the brain of someone able to pass the Turing Test, how do you know that it didn’t immediately go into a coma because you haven’t given it the sort of physical environment it needs to function? Perhaps it isn’t passing the Turing Test because it is silently screaming in agony or isolation because you didn’t hook up the sensory nerves properly, or because the motor nerve connections are screwed up. Of course you can extend the premise of the thought experiment to include getting everything right, but it just is a thought experiment, a question begging one — the premise can never be established. And since what you are attempting to falsify is “no magic needed”, you would need complete confidence (heh heh) that you got everything right to warrant the conclusion that magic is needed.
As I said, this is going about falsification bassackwards. You don’t show that magic is needed by building a complex mechanism and then asserting that it should have displayed complex behavior, you do it by having some simple mechanism unaccountably display complex behavior — e.g., remove someone’s brain and if they still pass the Turing Test, then we can reconsider physicalism. (Here’s where the IDiots have it over you — they argue that you can’t get the complexities of biological organisms out of “unintelligent” processes. They’re wrong, but at least they’re lookng in the right direction.)
From the screed that hithesh proudly points to as evidence of his erudition and masterly command of the historical method:
Why would the writer of Matthew write against accusation of stolen body, if he was writing about person he intended to be treated as fictional rather than historic? What’s the point in arguing against such a claim, if Jesus didn’t exist at all?
Matthew is revising Mark. The accusations were against the empty tomb pericope as it stands in Mark, unadorned. The author of Matthew felt no need to respect the tradition as he got it from Mark; these stories were freely revised throughout the late first century, just as we would expect in a situation of legendary accretion in a mythmaking tradition, and not of accounts constrained by a historical core of reliable information.
As for “intended to be treated as fictional,” you don’t really understand what “mythmaking” means at all, do you, O great and wise historian for the ages?
The damn thread gets up to 956 (at least) and I’m “scarpering” off scared? That’s right, I always give up before 1000. I’m a coward that way.
Strange Interlude[/Groucho Marx]
I don’t think I should post any more on this thread though.
I don’t see why the particularity of the human brain is a problem
I anticipated that (reasonable) objection in #958.
Nerd craps on me for staying
Nerd is a very simple and predictable mechanism whose capacity to pass the Turing Test is less than that of Weisenbaum’s Eliza; I wouldn’t pay it much mind.
The lengths to which Christians go to rationalise the contradictory aspects of the gospels is fascinating. ‘Oh we’ve got stories that don’t match on key points; it must be because they’ve been mistranslated, or because the literary style at the time allowed for people to intermingle fact with fiction – and only we are allowed to determine the writer’s delineation of which is which.’
The far better – and more intellectually honest – explanation for the stories is that they weren’t written by anyone with any knowledge of the event as a historical occurrence; rather, they were the stories different people created after they heard the basic storie (hence the things they all have) and chose to elaborate on it.
It’s also good to remember that the contents of bible was decided upon by committee, rather than being a compilation of all the material pertaining to Jesus’ life. For all we know there may have been dozens of even more wildly speculative accounts of what happened; it would make sense that the early chuch picked only those which they could explain away using the same equivocations that Christians trot out today.
Rudy, you’ve chosen to enigmatically go to lurk mode, when you could’ve chosen either to defend your contentions or to admit they were refuted.
What inference is to be drawn from this? ;)
“So, hithesh, before you run away… is this you?”
Ah, yes, that post is quite old, he’s a more recent one, in an encounter I had with Rook Hawkins:
http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/14997#comment-187747
Dualism being the sort of unfalsifiable mental masturbation that it is, highly adept masturbaters like Chalmers can always posit consciousness as something whose content perfectly tracks physical processes without being caused by them, and then conjuring magical “psycho-physical bridging laws” to “explain” this. You should just love that sort of unparsimonious crap.
Wow. I thought I hated Chalmers and his stupid FCCing pzombies. I’m not worthy. Chalmers grosses me out almost as much as the sight of Chalmers sycophant Jaron Lanier, the Rastafarian Hobbit, consuming a mountain of Dim Sum nearly as large as he was, by himself, in Sausalito. Alas, virtual reality.
Hi John. Thanks for defending me in conversations with SC when I came back as NS. I wanted to thank you at the time but was avoiding all metadiscussion.
I like Chalmers; he’s fun at parties. Lanier disgusts me.
Still not interested Hithesh. You are boring, and your posts are inane. Try some physical evidence. Works much, much better than talk for convincing this group. But then, all you have is talk, right?
[OOT]
NS, no worries, and may I say I prefer the new incarnation.
Nerd,
To be charitable, I’d say mediocre rhetoric, which is a touch better.
John, I’ll bow to your better words…
Rudy wrote:
This is one of those things I love about the religious. ‘Everyone else’s woo-beliefs are nonsensical – even though every claim I make for mine is no more valid than theirs.’
Here’s a hint: if you’re practicing skepticism without a mirror, you’re doing it wrong.
I like Chalmers; he’s fun at parties. Lanier disgusts me.
Chalmers at least archives arguments and is an online resource, while Lanier is a parasite who has apparently never experienced anything but praise for presenting nothing more substantial than a full potty rather than a full diaper; in his case, no doubt, a transitory skill. When they couldn’t get enough Chopra on the Huffington Post, there was Jaron.
I once had the privilege of watching Lanier lose track of his virtual saxaphone in performance at a SIGGRAPH electronic theater, when he had inadvertently negated a Z value so that everybody but him could see it on the big screen behind him, fixed behind his head instead of visible in his big Amiga VR goggles. As he spun about, gesturing frantically with his power gloves and wondering where his instrument had gone just when he required it for his virtual noodling around like a genius solo, nobody in the audience thought to stop laughing and volunteer to let Lanier know where his saxaphone had gone.
Ack, regarding the post itself, I think it’s a keeper, in that select category of biting allegories that I reckon should be part of a book one day, or be the basis for animated fables, or the like.
Good one, PZ.
CJO: “By the mid 2nd century, all of this context was lost, and most Christians have been clinging to some version of the historicized figure ever since. Fundies, of course, buy the whole thing; ‘sophisticated’ Christians like our hithesh, aware of the mythical character of most of the gospel stories, lay claim to only the minimal core. Doesn’t matter. The whole thing was invented to make sense of an early 1st century Jewish religious revival, and none of it is any more relevant to the modern world than Abraham’s views on child-rearing.”
Yes, I’m well aware of how this sort of argument goes, I’ve heard it before. It goes something like Paul didn’t believe in a historical Jesus , and since the Gospels were written later they took off from here.
First and for most, Paul epistles are written to communities of believers, not to unbelievers, or for sake of winning over new converts. Paul’s epistles are written to address the pressing question of the early Christian believers “How do we understand the meaning of Jesus death, and his messiahship”. He is developing a Christology, an activity that even today theologians still engage in. If you were to pick up a copy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Christ and the Center, it would read not much different than the Epistles.
Secondly, the Gospels incorporate facts and fiction, but this is the nature in which biographies were written in the Greco-Roman world, where the concern for readers, and the early hearers wasn’t our age of science desire to know literal history, the order in which events occurred, but for the sake of conveying the meaning of events. When you read accounts of the life of Hillel you get all sorts of elaborate fictive elements. “In the Poetics, Aristotle argued that poetry is superior to history, because poetry speaks of what must or should be true, rather than merely what is true. This reflects early axial concerns (good/bad, right/wrong) over metaphysical concerns for what “is”. Accordingly, classical historians felt a duty to ennoble the world”
Like the life of the Buddha the life is Jesus is told to convey their message. And this is the elephant in the room that mythicist and like tend to leave out.
Individuals such as yourself try to portray the life of Jesus as doing just magnificent feats, walking on water, turning water into wine, etc.., ignoring the fact that it wasn’t the miraculous that was the most profound attribute of Jesus, but his teachings, it’s the reason for why Jesus is proclaimed as God’s wisdom incarnate. He amazes the Pharisees by responses to their questions, they ask where the heck did he get such wisdom from. In the non-historical portrayal in Luke, of his youth, he appears among in the temple among the religious leaders who were portrayed as amazed by his understanding and wisdom. And even today the admiration among various religious groups, and persons, as diverse as the Dalai Lame, Thomas Jefferson, Richard Dawkins and Spinoza is Jesus the teacher. It’s not a fictive character at the heart of the Gospel, but the teacher who taught and spoke these things. Here’s the elephant in the room, that everyone else notices, but somehow vanishes in the mythicist arguments. I mean they belong to somebody, they just didn’t magically appear out of thin air.
We have teachings, like that of going 2 miles when forced to do one, putting roman soldiers using the angaria law in a bind, and turn the other cheek which forced those who back hand their slaves, and those they deemed as inferior, to hit them with an open palm, rather than back hand them, a gesture reserved for hitting one’s equals, not inferiors. Or when someone takes a poor debtor to court and demands their tunic, hand over you cloak as well, reducing the debtor to nakedness, which in the jewish tradition brings shame on the viewer. And recalls to mind the verse “clothe the naked when you see them.”
Who spoke all those parables that took on this style of irony, reversal of fortune, and frustration of expectations, such as the parable of the Good Samaritan?
This teacher is at the heart of the Gospels, this teacher is the historical person the Gospel accounts are based on. So amuse me, try and give me a coherent mythicist argument that actually takes into account the elephant in the room.
“It’s based on a not-inconsiderable amount of research on my part into the subject.”
If you spent a significant amount of time to coming up with your conclusion, I pity you.
Shorter hithesh: People can’t be smart, only gods incarnate can, and Jesus was Jesusier than anybody could ever have Jesused before or since. The end, Amen.
That’s all you’ve got?
Piss off, hithesh, you demented fuckwit.
hithesh:
I’ve lost count of the times self-proclaimed Christians have claimed the reason to believe is the Resurrection, this being utterly contrary to your claim.
Thus, I disbelieve you.
turn the other cheek which forced those who back hand their slaves, and those they deemed as inferior, to hit them with an open palm, rather than back hand them, a gesture reserved for hitting one’s equals, not inferiors.
whoop-de-doo.
I’m not sure how that’s supposed to work, either, unless the slappers only had one hand.
Yeah, it’s amazing how, after the cleverer people don’t fall for lies, the liars try to claim that gaining from those lies wasn’t their intent.
Obviously, Paul knew a thing or two about lying…
You join the long list of those who try to use the ‘genre defence’ to explain away why vast sections of the bible can be ignored and other sections must be taken seriously – with no consistency whatsoever beyond it suiting your arguments. You have no idea what the author’s intent was; claiming that you know for sure which sections – if any – were meant to be factual is utterly ridiculous and blatantly dishonest.
If some of the gospels are fiction, how do you determine which parts aren’t? It seems to me – and anyone else with an ounce of intellectual honesty – that this is simply a convenient way for you to ignore the fact that things just don’t add up.
windy: “I’m not sure how that’s supposed to work, either, unless the slappers only had one hand.”
“At the time of Jesus, striking someone deemed to be of a lower class with the back of the hand was used to assert authority and dominance.[2] If the persecuted person “turned the other cheek,” the discipliner was faced with a dilemma. The left hand was used for unclean purposes, so a back-hand strike on the opposite cheek would not be performed.[3] The other alternative would be a slap with the open hand as a challenge or to punch the person, but this was seen as a statement of equality. Thus, by turning the other cheek the persecuted was in effect demanding equality (wikipedia). ”
Rudy,
I don’t think you understand what parsimony really means. It’s not a synonym for simplicity or brevity. Others have already posted about this, but the point seems to have escaped you somehow. Read Nothing Sacred’s #932 again. The basic clues are right there.
@981:
Fool of a theist, if you can’t be bothered to take the care to identify yourself as anybody other than “anonymous” while citing FCCing wikipedia in support of a claim, don’t expect anybody here to rouse themselves to give you the sound slapping about the head and face you deserve for such thoughtless effrontery.
“If some of the gospels are fiction, how do you determine which parts aren’t? It seems to me – and anyone else with an ounce of intellectual honesty – that this is simply a convenient way for you to ignore the fact that things just don’t add up.”
Well, perhaps by asking questions, and examining each part. You’d be hard pressed to find single historian in the pre-modern world who didn’t incorportate facts, and fiction into their accounts, if we didn’t have some methodology to determine which events are more probable than not, than we’d be fairly clueless.
I mean even if we had a contemporary historians mention Jesus, how would u determine if he didn’t make it up?
#981: since of course everything Jesus said must be reverse engineered to make sense afterwards. Apologetics is fun! (And why would the superior be so worried about using the unclean hand on the inferior?)
“Here’s the elephant in the room, that everyone else notices, but somehow vanishes in the mythicist arguments. I mean they belong to somebody, they just didn’t magically appear out of thin air.”
Having the wisdom magically appear would be the theistic explanation. You know, the one that requires transcendence. The parsimonious explanation is that human beings invented the teachings of the gospels. This would be entirely unremarkable because they would then have the exact same origin as every other text known to exist.
“This teacher is at the heart of the Gospels, this teacher is the historical person the Gospel accounts are based on. So amuse me, try and give me a coherent mythicist argument that actually takes into account the elephant in the room.”
At least one person (but more probably many people) did some thinking about life and human nature and invented some parables. Other people found value in these teachings, recorded them, and passed them on. Nothing more than this is necessary for the explanation.
If you wish to claim that there is an “elephant in the room”, you assume the burden of proof and must demonstrate that it exists. All you need to do in order to fulfill this burden of proof is to show that any small part of the Gospels or other Christian thought cannot have been created in a purely mundane fashion. If you can demonstrate that a single sentence of the New Testament is divinely inspired, then this is a valid argument. If you cannot, it’s nothing more than argumentum ad populum.
Why is it so difficult for you to admit that you’re making a leap of faith? I thought that was kind of the point of the whole exercise.
Hithesh to Wowbagger:
Not much of an answer, that.
Asking questions of whom? Do you mean rely on established authorities? – after all, the protagonists are all long-gone.
As to examining each part, that’s either hopelessly vague or a vapid truism, it doesn’t answer the question either.
Tsk.
“Fool of a theist, if you can’t be bothered to take the care to identify yourself as anybody other than “anonymous” while citing FCCing wikipedia in support of a claim.”
Well bitch I could have pulled out the book “Politics of Jesus” , and manually wrote it out myself, or refrenced Walter Wink, but the wikipedia article on the subject was good enough, and convient, as well as cited.
“don’t expect anybody here to rouse themselves to give you the sound slapping about the head and face you deserve for such thoughtless effrontery.”
Well, i doubt some dweeby atheist is going to slap me on head and face, but yea you go ahead and keep believing that.
I wanted to repost here wheatdogg’s post #284 from the “Death by religious ignorance” thread:
Well bitch I could have pulled out the book “Politics of Jesus” , and manually wrote it out myself, or refrenced Walter Wink, but the wikipedia article on the subject was good enough, and convient, as well as cited.
Oh, gosh, I didn’t know it was the esteemed historicyst hithesh was posting as “anonymous.”
“bitch?”
Are you sure your name isn’t Cartman?
Do you have a ouija board handy? Because the only person who can tell your their intent is the writer. Anything else you can provide is likely to be incredibly biased and therefore invalid.
Though I believe there were plenty of answers to those questions which didn’t lead to the conclusion of the literal existence of Jesus and the bad performance art that your lot call the crucifixion/resurrection. Sadly, the church decided very early on that those answers weren’t correct, and that not accepting their ruling on what things meant was a somewhat serious offence – to the point where they killed thousands of people for the ‘crime’ of heresy.
Yeah, but none of them are trying to justify their belief in the otherwise unverified supernatural that is the basis for an institution founded on credulous self-delusion.
If it turned out that historians were wrong and Julius Caesar didn’t exist? Bad, but not life-changing. Shakespeare’s play would still be brilliant.
It turning out that Jesus, on the other hand, didn’t exist? The collapse of the entire Christian religious industry. Not to mention a whole lot of non-Christian people – I’d imagine the Jews in particular – experiencing the most profound sense of schadenfreude you can possibly imagine.
“Well bitch I could have pulled out the book “Politics of Jesus” , and manually wrote it out myself, or refrenced Walter Wink, but the wikipedia article on the subject was good enough, and convient, as well as cited.”
Is he the one to blame for that blatantly moronic post-facto rationalization? It doesn’t bear a moment’s scrutiny. Turning the other cheek does absolutely nothing to prevent an aggressor from hitting you in the face with the back of his right hand again, bitch.
Maybe Mr. Wink has some sort of disability that impairs his ability to visualize simple spatial relationships. What’s your excuse?
(wikipedia)
The model of a bad Wikipedia entry. Under WP policies, it should have said “According to Walter Wink, …”, leaving it to the reader to evaluate the validity of the claim after reading that “Prof. Dr. Walter Wink (born 1935) is Professor emeritus at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City. His faculty discipline is biblical interpretation”. Heh heh.
Secondly, the Gospels incorporate facts and fiction, but this is the nature in which biographies were written in the Greco-Roman world
Thank your for admitting that the Bible is equivalent to the Iliad. I think we’re done here.
I mean even if we had a contemporary historians mention Jesus, how would u determine if he didn’t make it up?
You, yourself, in another thread I linked, said that you dealt in comparative probabilities of things being true (paraphrased, you encased it in a metric fuck-ton of apologist diarrhea).
And then you say this? And expect to be taken seriously?
You are a joke. I am done with you.
Well, perhaps by asking questions, and examining each part. You’d be hard pressed to find single historian in the pre-modern world who didn’t incorportate facts, and fiction into their accounts, if we didn’t have some methodology to determine which events are more probable than not, than we’d be fairly clueless.
And by applying that methodology, it is clear that you are clueless and your claims are BS.
I mean even if we had a contemporary historians mention Jesus, how would u determine if he didn’t make it up?
This is of course a bassackwards and grossly dishonest question. If contemporary historians had mentioned Jesus, he might not have existed, but that there isn’t any such mention makes it much more likely that he didn’t exist.
Dan Dennett talks about the parallel between memes and the fluke that invades ants’ brains, takes them over, and makes them limb up grass stalks where they can be eaten. Here we have a laboratory where we can observe the function of the religion fluke in specimens like Cartman.
In this case, we can observe Cartman being crushed under a loud, feculent load of elephant dung, from Curly’s end of the post that started this thread.
I don’t believe it, but that’s the tibetan buddist belief. I was distinguishing between an atheist and a buddhist by virtue of believing in magic. You called the Dalai Lama an atheist, to which I protested.
On the historicity of Jesus:
Does it really matter if there was a historical figure who started the process? All that does is validate that there is a historical figure at the start of the process. That Jesus is God does not follow in any aspect of reality or even in logic. God cannot be Jesus and still be a separate entity. A can’t simultaenously be B and not-B. All accounts of Jesus are anecdotal (at best) and it’s on the anecdotal evidence that we believe that someone walked on water, miraculously healed the sick, rose the dead, turned water into wine, and then conquered death himself? It’s one impossibility after another and the best evidence for it is a few tales?
And this is being generous, there’s no reason to assume that there is a single eyewitness account in the gospel, that the testimony of the resurrection was added to the earliest gospel centuries later, that the earliest secular historian had his writings tampered with, and that each gospel author has his own agenda in the way they write about Jesus. It simply doesn’t matter though because the kinds of evidence are not strong enough to support Jesus being God even if we had thousands of independent witnesses all writing exactly the same thing. After all, we don’t believe that aliens are abducting humans despite the millions of UFO sightings and the thousands of independant abduction reports where people who have never communicated are reporting the same kinds of experiences… oh those aliens love to probe us.
Does it really matter if there was a historical figure who started the process?
It’s hard to maintain that there are elephant wings in the absence of an elephant. This operates on a different level than the fact that elephant wings are inherently absurd.
(Ha … #1000)