If you’re really curious, my recent debate with Hendricks is now online as a video, with the full Q&A. It’s a cell phone video, so not great quality, but the whole thing is there.
But I want to talk about another problem with doing debates: it stirs up the crazies. I’ll give you some examples. This is an email I got the other day.
For what science and religion, not to mention the rest of us, thought impossible has now happened. History has its first literal, testable and fully demonstrable proof for faith and it’s on the web.
The first wholly new interpretation for two thousand years of the Gospel
and moral teaching of Christ is published and on the web. Radically
different from anything else we known from history or tradition.
Redefining all primary elements including the very nature of Faith, the
Word, Law, Baptism, the Trinity, the Holy Spirit and especially the
Resurrection, this new moral teaching is predicated upon the ‘promise’ of
a precise, predefined, predictable and repeatable experience of
transcendent omnipotence and called ‘the first Resurrection’ in the sense
that the Resurrection of Jesus was intended to demonstrate Gods’
willingness to reveal Himself and intervene directly into the natural
world for those obedient to His Command, paving the way to confirm and
justify, by faith, to the power of divine Will, Purpose, Law, covenant,
and the absolute certainty of ultimate proof!Thus ‘faith’ becomes an act of trust in action, the search along a defined
path of strict self discipline, [a test of the human heart] to discover
His ‘Word’ of a direct individual intervention into the natural world by
omnipotent power that confirms divine will, law, command and covenant,
which at the same time, realigns our flawed mortal moral compass with the
Divine, “correcting human nature by a change in natural law, altering
biology, consciousness and human ethical perception beyond all natural
evolutionary boundaries.” This is the discovery of the ‘true self’ and
thus is a man ‘created’ in the image and likeness of his Creator.So like it or no, and most won’t, a new spiritual teaching offering a
testable, predictable, moral wisdom not of human intellectual origin,
transcending subjectivity, wholly testable by faith, meeting all
Enlightenment criteria of direct, evidence based causation and definitive
proof now exists, and carries all the implications that suggests. Nothing
short of an intellectual, moral and spiritual revolution is getting
underway.Links on request.
I did not request a link.
I think this is a guy trying to stir up interest in his peculiar Christian cult. I made the point before that these debates are often a conflict between certainty and doubt, and here comes someone offering the absolute certainty of ultimate proof!
No thanks.
Here’s a fun YouTube comment. Try and figure this one out:
Unfortunately its 2 archytypical minds at work in believers & non believers. In both camps this gets in the way often.
And you must understand current concesus science was authorativly imposed through actvist judges and politics it did not win over the arena of thoughtful science. It violated America’s main rule that we would never impose physical prescriptions upon each other because they was a aware of newtons infinite sums of approximating probability and was very aware of how hard it is to tell where physicalism begins and ends. Interpretations are not hurtful but physical prescriptions are damaging to society and nations.
Its the wrong question, this is typically only formulated by a chaldean mind or thought.
What isn’t God ,is the correct formulated question to ask.This is hard for a Babylonian deterministic quantitative evolutionary mythological Euclidean mind to think of because its dictated by a radicalized environment governed by these extreme physical lawism structuralisms.
It rather stay in platos cave granting unification & simplicity in the top of the higher archy even if its made up , it needs to connect dots and force the evidence to fit the grand theory of everything to fill in missing links.
It rather live in complexity of many different disciplines cults within cults. Its unaware of its triality navagating this dualistic system.War time powers of Ww2 & the modernization act traps America back under this chaldean mind model because the classical American mind triality recognized such necessary evil structuralism must give the unity & simplicity to the top so that 18 year old troops deal with Entropic turn over of infinite sums of approximating probability & complexity .
This type of believer says God is universe big bang with math & time is his actual fingertips and through mult verses he chose this one here etc etc etc.
The classical American mind is the only one to ever escape the chaldean mind or platos cave.
It state man made language, time & maths are inspired by god, only by his grace do we have a mind that can read his left over fingerPRINTS that’s legable.
This mind follows the evidence where it leads it knows the human dashboard can never removed from the system thus this system is the proper place to unify individual systems .
God is not in a rock or under a rock he was separated from his creation at different points but through us thy will be done. Through Jesus salvation the unification of tripartite nature of man past present and future. It is the grand unification of objects physica cause l,subjective secondary effect & idealogical minds. Mind body and soul. You know whole deal ,father ,son holy spirit represents the 3 natures of our reality .
What kind of archytypical
mind do you have, a chaldean mind
, a Babylonian deterministic quantitative evolutionary mythological Euclidean mind
, or a classical American mind triality
?
Yeah, but if it’s testable then it’s no longer a matter of faith. I guess deep down they really, really do want it to be REAL!
Excessive Capitalization is the Mark of the Loon.
Reading that Youtube comment leaves me with a rather confused mind!
Also interesting how the author seems to think scientific consensus is defined by the US court system. I believe we here are all happy this isn’t the case!
I thought that was Mormonism, the JWs, or the Seventh Day Adventists.
His sense of time and history isn’t all that good.
It seems like there is a “wholly new interpretation for two thousand years of the Gospel
and moral teaching of Christ” every few months or so.
Lately many of them involve jesus coming back Real Soon, killing 8 billion people, and destroying the earth in an Apocalypse.
Which explains why we have 42,000 different xian sects with more being formed every year.
There isn’t even a shred of truth to this statement.
Science is worldwide and those mythological activist judges don’t have any legal powers outside of the USA.
Those mythological judges very rarely deal with science and sometimes these days are right wingnuts who ignore science or just make something up to support their rulings.
Jeezus, Mary and Joseph… what a hodgepodge of gobbledegook, all to say “Faith, not works!!11!!!” And why IS it that they all want desperately for science and reality to Prove! Yes, Prove! their theological maunderings? Why isn’t “faith” ever enough? They’ve been doing this for 2000 years, and still have never gotten nearer the goal. What a waste of brain power…
Well, the first has the very first new idea in 2000 years, which is to be released four times per month, with new and improved ideas released four times per week and it’s all brand new, unique, never before thunk of and the only new idea ever in the history of man.
Or something.
You know, each zany asshole originates some new, never before notion, another does the same and different, but saying largely the same shit, rinse and repeat and still have tons of crap that’s piled up and utterly unfit to line the parakeet cage. But, it’s all new…
The second, apparently, judges machine gun nuked all of the faithful if they didn’t embrace technology and they’re all extinct. This is surprising, given their extinction, how loud the assholes are.
And apparently, we should abandon all technology in favor of faith, sticks and stones.
Or some other nonsensical blather that simply rewrites history, hand waves and justifies forcing everyone to believe as they do our they’ll use their god nukes on everyone or something hand wave.
Oh, and god gave man language, ignore that whole Babel thing in the holly bauble.
And 18 year old troops have to deal with complicated hand wave blather that’s simply word salad, to match the rest of the blather that makes chatbots look good.
And I simply ask, “Do hand me the gun and tell me some more”, because both are delusional, but the second is concerning. The last time I heard that kind of drivel, that individual became physically violent and defending it spiritually, which the judge didn’t buy.
Hopefully, they won’t mind that I hid the firing pin…
“moral teaching of Christ”
If they only practiced what Christ preached, we might not mind them. Instead, they want the rest of us practice Christ’s teachings while they take command and control of everyone.
Both responses sounded like a desperate attempt to prove a point that can’t be proven. Using fancy words strung together in a twisted fashion that a would boggle the average mind they work diligently to make a point of the pointless. Damn, think I’m starting to sound like them.
“It’s the wrong question, this is typically only formulated by a chaldean mind or thought.
What isn’t God, is the correct formulated question to ask.”
Since God is fictional the answer is everything. Turning things inside-out and upside down does not create a logical narrative.
Boy, I come in today to get my daily dose of FTB. You have this, and Marcus has the video of James Burke. What a contrast.
That second one would be more convincing if it was printed on, say, a bottle of liquid soap. I would at least give it a second read.
Is clarity of thought the spawn of Satan? Just trying to understand why so many descriptions of Christianity and belief are impossible to understand.
This kind of text is what ChatGPT is getting trained on….
And why IS it that they all want desperately for science and reality to Prove! Yes, Prove! their theological maunderings? Why isn’t “faith” ever enough?
Because, those godless scientists use big words and complicated-looking blackboard scribbles to cast doubt on faith, drawing the believer away! They have to show the world that the “logic and reason” of the atheistic scientist is flawed, lest more souls be lost to Satan.
Whoops! That first paragraph should be in block quotes and attributed to evodevo @ 6.
I’m still trying to figure out what a “chaldean mind” is supposed to be and why it’s bad?
The references to chaldeans makes me recall an episode of God Awful Movies with a film chock full of gobbedygook about Marduk etc.
I considered linking to it as the listernes to the review are spared exposure to the film itself, but just listening to a summary made me go “THE STUPID…IT HURTS!”
…this new moral teaching is predicated upon the ‘promise’ of
a precise, predefined, predictable and repeatable experience of
transcendent omnipotence…
I guess that means everyone who follows this new moral teaching is gonna go to Hell, for the same reason John Constantine would have.
As for the second comment, that’s way too much word-salad for one meal. At least it doesn’t have Russian dressing on it.
I think I’ll add
Babylonian deterministic quantitative evolutionary mythological Euclidean mind dealing with Entropic turn over of infinite sums of approximating probability & complexity
to my Mastodon bio.
When I feel game, I like to throw the same back at them.
E.g. “The question isn’t what is or isn’t God. The question is ‘Why is God?’
It’s like completely removing the control rods from a nuclear reactor.
Then leave quickly before his (it’s always a man, right?) “mind” goes critical.
@ 6
<
blockquote>…what a hodgepodge of gobbledegook, all to say “Faith, not works!!11!!!”
<
blockquote>
Yeah, the more and more I dig online to translate this fool’s screed, the more and more this looks like some Protestant wacko raging about the Papists. “Babylon” is often used by the Protestant Right as a dog-whistle for Catholicism, and the Chaldean’s are a largely Catholic minority in Iraq.
Look, having been raised by father devoted to the Church of Rome, I’m all for being anti-Catholic. My question is, after all the verifiable atrocities’ and insanities the Roman Catholic Church is provably responsible for, why dwell on this religious conspiracy theory bullshit?
Here is a newage bullshit generator
https://sebpearce.com/bullshit/
which could be the author.
.
Ed Peters @ 19, the problem is, remove their control rods, they’re prone to going violently prompt supercritical.
stuffin @ 8, in my experience, when considering some items, substituting another item in its place to see if the concept makes sense helps. So…
“It’s the wrong question, this is typically only formulated by a chaldean mind or thought.
What isn’t bacteria, is the correct formulated question to ask.”
So, defining bacteria by examining viruses will properly describe bacteria and hand wave.
And if substituting God/bacteria with car, one can only define a car properly be examining a rock.
I’ll start with the light rocks in the writer’s head.
I am sure if I tried to read through that again that my IQ would drop to the point that I might adopt the kkkhristian faith, so I am going back to the lab bench and try to get back into a proper mindset.
Wzrd1 @ 22 should win some kind of prize… only I don’t know what it should consist of. “Clockwork orange” is already taken.
I’m going to agree with #12 bcw bcw and #21 chigau
Maybe I’ve seen too much AI bafflegarb. To me, there isn’t anything recognizably human-generated about either response. I didn’t read past paragraph two for either of them, in the same way I didn’t listen to that four-hour video you posted.
The mind of this commenter has been touched by Nyarlahotep.
@mordred
Fact! Because, as PZ recently noted, our courts don’t even care what the scientific consensus is. That said…does it even matter if they define it or not? In other words, if they’re going to interpret law by what they think the consensus should be as opposed to what it actually is, isn’t that almost the same as if they just defined it themselves? I suppose the big, and very important, difference is that we can then lose confidence in our court systems as we can see this conflict and then maybe, just maybe, we’ll do something about fixing it! Good luck with that, though!
They both are in the camp that believe words are real things that by combination make a force that compels.
They don’t seem to understand that what the words attempt to describe is the subject.
Bah.
Everyone knows in their heart that the Triple Goddess is the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone.
My search for a unique phrase from that first quotation’s penultimate phrase proved that it is, indeed, unique: nothing found but this post.
So if this screed is “on the web” (besides here), it must be on that notorious Dark Web – which means it’s so true that They don’t want you to find it!
(However, for three easy payments of only $59.99 apiece, …)
birgerjohansson @ 24, bowl of pasta reasoning process? That was what I was shooting for.
As usual, with blanks…
Pierce R. Butler @ 30, Google returned results, as did Yahoo.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22a+new+spiritual+teaching+offering+a+testable%2C+predictable%2C+moral+wisdom+not+of+human+intellectual+origin%2C+transcending+subjectivity%2C+wholly+testable+by+faith%22&
https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%22a+new+spiritual+teaching+offering+a+testable%2C+predictable%2C+moral+wisdom+not+of+human+intellectual+origin%2C+transcending+subjectivity%2C+wholly+testable+by+faith%22&fr=yfp-t&fr2=p%3Afp%2Cm%3Asb&ei=UTF-8&fp=1
@29: You forget the One True Stooge Trinity: Moe, Larry, and Curly.
[OT]
Google once had operators. So did other search engines, but it had the best indexing algorithm and needed no manual curation.
+ forced a term, “” made a term a literal, – excluded a term, that sort of thing.
Other logical operators, other lexical operators, was nice (NEAR, . It worked well.
In fact, here: https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/
Now? Now it’s worse than it was in AltaVista days.
A search inquiry is basically a suggestion of what to promote for Google, and most fucking certainly the operators no longer operate properly.
I suppose the operator skill element is now back into play; one can do sideways searching type of stuff and the like to still get results. I pity the poor, ordinary punter, but.
Nathaniel, :)
Every now and then I try to understand what the loonies believe and why. And always there is something where I just don’t get why they’d say something. And every now and then I realize something I take for granted they just don’t believe. (Until 2016, I assumed it was obvious that everybody hated bullies and when I realized that, actually, many people actually LOVE and admire bullies … so much suddenly made sense.) And sometimes I think, you can’t really believe that because that would require believing something very weird. ANd today:
Oh! People actually believe stuff like courts and politicians are enforcing science beliefs. And of course they have to believe that because otherwise the universal consensus of every single scientist in the world and every student with access to all knowledge out in the open all independently reach an entirely different solution than the crazy stuff you’d have to realize that you aren’t actually right and they are…. unless courts for immoral and political reasons are forcing science to say what it does.
And people actually believe that. Okay, some things now make sense…. Not all, but more.
Well, those commenters certainly have, umm.. words, Not matching ones Not complete comprehensible sentences but words. What the!?
StevoR, I entirely agree with you, but can’t help but note your closing, um, phrases seem a tad ironic:
“Not complete comprehensible sentences but words. What the!?”
Babylonian refers to the ancient Babylonians or metaphorically as #20 Akira MacKenzie noted sometimes alludes to Catholics according to some Xn sects. Deterministic ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism) refers to the philosophical set of beliefs about events being caused by previous causes. Often as opposed to people having free will. As the wikipage notes it comes in a number of varieties : Causal / Historical, Nomological, Necessitarianism, Predeterminism -which I’m guessing muight be the one they ar ethinking of here with its religious God planned everything view, Biological, Fatalism, Theological (ok maybe more this one but also seems to be covered by Predeterminism too -a sub-set of it.), Adequate, Many Worlds (huh, wasn’t expecting thyat oen there) etc ..
Already vauge and not really matching up since certainly ancient Babylonian beliefs with their pantheon of anthropomorphic dieties and arguably many schools of Catholics with God moving in mysterious ways don’t match determinism and the writer reallyneeds to pick one or the other -twice -either Baylonian or Catholics and either one of those adjectives or simply determinism or better yet a specific form of determinism eg Theological for clarity.
Then quantitative (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative ) so gathering numerical, statistical data I guess & evolutionary which sorta matches a bit better but has nothing really to do with philosophical / theological determinism. Next Mythological Euclidean which usually refers to Euclidean geometry as a field of maths I guess. Maths and mythology not usuallya great match esp when in Xn mythology Pi = 3 which, no it doesn’t. Why Euclidean specifically not Riemannian geometry or Bolyai-Lobachevskian geometry or just topological or something? I dunno. How does fields of geometry match with determinism and quantatitive evolution here? Again, separate things that don’t seem to gel well.
Mind you we then get “mind”a steh noun making all those into adjectives which is .. confusing and not clear at all. A type of mind or way of thinking that is specifically Babylonian / Catholic deterministic quantitative / mythological / evolutiona(ãry?) / Euclidean or some blend of all these? Mythological clashes with quantiative, Euclid was a real mathetician and not a myth and Euclidean geomtry is a field of study not a myth. I’m not sure where mythological is meant to fit there at all. Ditto quantiative, ditto, Euclidean. What is meant to be modifying or adjectival to what here? Mythological Euclidean mind? Well, Euclid definitley had a mind – one good enough to invent a field of study – and wasn’t myth. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid )
Most people don’t think of Euclidean geomry that often, teachers and studenst in the field aside. How is that relevant to the existence of god? The mythological part aside. Referring to clashing Babylon and Catholic mythologies unless they meant only the Catholic one which would make more sense given few now believe in the Babylonian ones but if they did mean Catholic why not just say so? Why code it with obscure Christianist euphhemism?
Determinist mind that believes in quantitative .. analysis? Mythology? Babylonians? Euclid? Evolution? I guess you could (wrongly?) argue that Evolution is deterministic or that it is probabilistic (quantative, subject to quantitative analysis) in some senses but .. huh? These words, they all just do not go well together.
Trying to make sense of what is being said and meant here is exceedingly difficult other than to think the writer is throwing words at the wall or doing fridge magnet haikus badly.
Hmm.. will context help?
Oh fuck off!
Balance is the knowledge of science, and of us. To follow the path is to become one with it.
You may be ruled by suffering without realizing it. Do not let it eradicate the richness of your myth.
John Morales @ 33, I completely agree. Worse than AltaVista days, largely due to search engine optimization inputs, paid advertisement placement and well, removal of the conditional operator options.
Google’s now my third fall back option, right before Bing, which also quite sucks.
And should someone gin up a superior offering, like a proper working Google again, they’ll just buy them and bury the product.
I am reminded of this famous speech (from one of my favorite plays) when ever I hear or read this kind of thing
Doesn’t that latter comment amount to “stop being so literal?”
Weren’t the Chaldeans supposed to be diviners and magicians . That’s the only meaning of that ridiculous screed that makes some sense
@ ^ brightmoon : Dunno. Maybe?
FWIW. Chaldean was racehorse and a neighborhood of Detroit, Michigan apparently :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaldean
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaldea#Ancient_Chaldeans
They also featured in the
second3rd series of Mysterious Cities of Gold* with SPOILERS flying machines which ..no idea if any reason to think that was other than totally fictional but...* See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Cities_of_Gold_(2012_TV_series)#Season_3
Is this speech to text? I mean “higher archy”?
Or just so poorly educated as to be utterly ignorant of the word hierarchy. Or using the shittiest speech to text engine in current non-usage, as better is bundled with many, if not all operating systems.
wzrd1, heh.
cf. https://pharyngula.fandom.com/wiki/Memes#Raisin_Date
Or maybe it was a reference to something Archie said after becoming a higher being…?
Bong, Raging Bee. Not apotheosis, stoning.