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how loving christians are!

Started by doorknob, October 06, 2016, 11:03:24 PM

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Blackleaf

Quote from: popsthebuilder on October 29, 2016, 12:52:19 PMThey are both positive claims.

I claim that the existence of GOD is true.

You claim that the absence of GOD is true.

I claim that dinosaurs danced to disco music.

You claim that dinosaurs did not dance to disco music.

Obviously, this is a silly example. I use examples like these to highlight how broken your logic is. Now, if you think that my example is somehow not equal to your own, and therefor not a fair comparison, please enlighten me. How is this any different than what you're doing?
"Oh, wearisome condition of humanity,
Born under one law, to another bound;
Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sick, commanded to be sound."
--Fulke Greville--

doorknob

#196
Ok let me clarify something.

I claim that dinosaurs danced to disco music and have no evidence to prove that they did.

You DON"T BELIEVE dinosaur danced to disco music because there is no evidence to suggest they did. No further need for proof on this end.

popsthebuilder

#197
Quote from: Blackleaf on October 30, 2016, 01:03:22 AM
I claim that dinosaurs danced to disco music.

You claim that dinosaurs did not dance to disco music.

Obviously, this is a silly example. I use examples like these to highlight how broken your logic is. Now, if you think that my example is somehow not equal to your own, and therefor not a fair comparison, please enlighten me. How is this any different than what you're doing?
You can claim anything you want. But if I want to know the truth of it I would do unbiased study on my own. I wouldn't take your word for it even if you said you experienced it in person, given the fact that I haven't heard of or seen such.

They are the same.

Good thing I don't go around telling people to believe there is a GOD just because I say so huh.


Your example is different from mine because I don't make a claim that GOD exists and all should believe me based on my words. Do you see the difference? I wouldn't ever want or expect anyone to simply take my word on anything unless they actually knew me to be both trustworthy and truthful. That goes for the claim for the existence of GOD to a group of people that have never actually met me.

Peace

Baruch

#198
For me, nobody can be trusted, even if you are a childhood friend.  Ape people are untrustworthy.  I also know that even my own experience is untrustworthy ... so for me, I consider trust and truth to be meaningless.  These are social and rhetorical assertions, not epistemological status of statements.  Most people here are epistemologists ... they play with sentences, and the relationship between sentences, but not deeper.

What is communication?  If you have gone fishing and I have gone fishing ... then we can talk in a reasonable way about fishing.  What happens in speech/writing is we are sending semaphores triggered by your memory, to act as triggers for my memory.  Unless we fished together, these are two different memories.  The content of "fishing" isn't in the semaphores.  Epistemological mutual abuse over the content of the comm channel, is a distraction.  These people don't know what they are saying, if they speak of something they have no experience of.  Now a former theist, who is now an atheist, they might be able to speak of it, maybe even better than someone who has always been a theist, because they have broader experience.

So if we talk about fishing and we have both fished, I can tell semantically, not logically, that you know what you are talking about and vice versa.  That is the test .. not if I can trust you.  If I haven't ever gone fishing, and you talk about yourself going fishing ... yes, I can trust you ... but I have no basis for that trust (other than social and rhetorical assertion).

So let me say something, that you probably don't have direct experience of (or maybe you do).  I know a friend, we studied Hebrew together.  He has gone to Jerusalem on pilgrimage twice.  I made a good will offering both times to help defray his costs (my mitzvoth).  The last time he went, a minor Biblical miracle happened (he said) while he was in the square next to the Western Wall (Temple platform).  I wasn't there.  He told me about it after he got back.  Two years after he got back, I received an interpretation of that supposed event in my mind, out of nowhere, while discussing religion with someone else (a Jewish non-believer).  Nobody accepts my interpretation (I didn't expect they would) nor would I expect my friend to accept it, even though he was there.  So as per the prior outline about communication, what is going on?  I trust that something happened to my friend, even though he has mental problems, and that on the face of it, he is describing a factual sequence of events (including what his interpretation is).  His interpretation (a minor miracle) is his.  My interpretation is different, it isn't his.  So I can't prove any of this.  It is possible, if a TV camera had been rolling, that it would record the event in Jerusalem ... it isn't something physically impossible (as demanded by both atheists and Pharisees).  But his interpretation and my interpretation, only exist in our heads.  To a certain extent, but only because we are both theists, I can understand his interpretation.  That is what successful communication is (and doesn't often happen here between theist and atheist, but does between atheist and atheist).  I don't think he can understand my interpretation (I haven't shared it) because of his modesty.

But it is a free world ... if people want to lay out propositions like Aristotle and argue about the rigorousness of the deduction, or the plausibility of the axioms ... then they are just being Euclid as well.  And these same people will claim that they are completely independent of ancient Greek culture (or at least of ancient philosophers and mathematicians) because they think diachronically, not synchronically.  This is also a part of their individualism, otherwise they would join the group think and be Southern Baptists or Roman Catholics.  But one can be bohemian either way, as theist or non-theist.  People here and I have something in common, it isn't theism, it is bohemianism.
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

Cavebear

Quote from: doorknob on October 30, 2016, 01:01:18 AM
my experience wasn't negative. It wasn't till after i became an atheist that I realized all the problems religion causes, especially the Abrahamic religions.

putting that aside I do not believe there is a god. There is no evidence let alone not enough evidence to believe in one. And I can't really think if a good reason to believe in one either. God is an abstract concept that humans invented. Nothing more.

Now when I read a bible it looks like a child wrote it, or some one with a very childish understanding of the world. The lessons (if you could even call them that) seem empty and hollow to me now. Nothing profound in that book.

The only way I can make any sense of the bible is how a bunch of primitive people shifting from nomadic foragers listed the rules they had learned to keep peace among themselves.  Don't covet, don't murder, don't steal from neighbors. The deity stuff was just an attempt at enforcement.  And maybe to give everyone a day off work as a sort of afterthought.  ;)
Atheist born, atheist bred.  And when I die, atheist dead!

doorknob

Quote from: Cavebear on October 31, 2016, 04:20:18 AM
The only way I can make any sense of the bible is how a bunch of primitive people shifting from nomadic foragers listed the rules they had learned to keep peace among themselves.  Don't covet, don't murder, don't steal from neighbors. The deity stuff was just an attempt at enforcement.  And maybe to give everyone a day off work as a sort of afterthought.  ;)

Yeah a free day off worshiping god doesn't sound much fun.

Baruch

#201
Quote from: doorknob on October 31, 2016, 05:25:41 PM
Yeah a free day off worshiping god doesn't sound much fun.

So, you prefer working 7 days a week, for your slave masters?  This is why Jews are always persecuted, by the slave masters.  And why it is an abomination for a Jew to keep slaves.

"God is an abstract concept that humans invented. Nothing more."  Electrons are an abstract concept that humans invented.  Nothing more.  Thinking they already existed, and people discover them, is Platonism.  Take that Thales ... and those numbers, us innumerate people refuse to believe in those either.  Pythagorean harmonies are just tyranny by musicians who have a better ear for music than I do.
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

doorknob

Can't we have a day off with out god?

I want to become a pagan they love to celebrate and have oodles of holidays. Any thing to get drunk and have a party. That sounds more like my type of worship any way.

Sal1981

Quote from: Baruch on October 30, 2016, 08:47:30 AM
For me, nobody can be trusted, even if you are a childhood friend.  Ape people are untrustworthy.  I also know that even my own experience is untrustworthy ... so for me, I consider trust and truth to be meaningless.  These are social and rhetorical assertions, not epistemological status of statements.  Most people here are epistemologists ... they play with sentences, and the relationship between sentences, but not deeper.

What is communication?  If you have gone fishing and I have gone fishing ... then we can talk in a reasonable way about fishing.  What happens in speech/writing is we are sending semaphores triggered by your memory, to act as triggers for my memory.  Unless we fished together, these are two different memories.  The content of "fishing" isn't in the semaphores.  Epistemological mutual abuse over the content of the comm channel, is a distraction.  These people don't know what they are saying, if they speak of something they have no experience of.  Now a former theist, who is now an atheist, they might be able to speak of it, maybe even better than someone who has always been a theist, because they have broader experience.

So if we talk about fishing and we have both fished, I can tell semantically, not logically, that you know what you are talking about and vice versa.  That is the test .. not if I can trust you.  If I haven't ever gone fishing, and you talk about yourself going fishing ... yes, I can trust you ... but I have no basis for that trust (other than social and rhetorical assertion).

So let me say something, that you probably don't have direct experience of (or maybe you do).  I know a friend, we studied Hebrew together.  He has gone to Jerusalem on pilgrimage twice.  I made a good will offering both times to help defray his costs (my mitzvoth).  The last time he went, a minor Biblical miracle happened (he said) while he was in the square next to the Western Wall (Temple platform).  I wasn't there.  He told me about it after he got back.  Two years after he got back, I received an interpretation of that supposed event in my mind, out of nowhere, while discussing religion with someone else (a Jewish non-believer).  Nobody accepts my interpretation (I didn't expect they would) nor would I expect my friend to accept it, even though he was there.  So as per the prior outline about communication, what is going on?  I trust that something happened to my friend, even though he has mental problems, and that on the face of it, he is describing a factual sequence of events (including what his interpretation is).  His interpretation (a minor miracle) is his.  My interpretation is different, it isn't his.  So I can't prove any of this.  It is possible, if a TV camera had been rolling, that it would record the event in Jerusalem ... it isn't something physically impossible (as demanded by both atheists and Pharisees).  But his interpretation and my interpretation, only exist in our heads.  To a certain extent, but only because we are both theists, I can understand his interpretation.  That is what successful communication is (and doesn't often happen here between theist and atheist, but does between atheist and atheist).  I don't think he can understand my interpretation (I haven't shared it) because of his modesty.

But it is a free world ... if people want to lay out propositions like Aristotle and argue about the rigorousness of the deduction, or the plausibility of the axioms ... then they are just being Euclid as well.  And these same people will claim that they are completely independent of ancient Greek culture (or at least of ancient philosophers and mathematicians) because they think diachronically, not synchronically.  This is also a part of their individualism, otherwise they would join the group think and be Southern Baptists or Roman Catholics.  But one can be bohemian either way, as theist or non-theist.  People here and I have something in common, it isn't theism, it is bohemianism.
I've had a discussion on the AF.org forum about the nature of concepts and if they are real. Like, if the number zero was more or less real than a positive integer ala mathematics.

I'm an epistemologist in the classical sense and I think the best way to understand the world is in those terms; where the main epistemological tool is reductionism (take something apart, understand its constituent parts and try and reassemble it again). For such a meta-Meta as trying to reduce "concept" into constituent parts you invariably come down to semantics and finally to material<->mind .... stuff. For me, at least, there is no real distinction between making a concept, and the reductionist way of what a "concept" in a brain is. They're just placeholder noises (in this case black pixels on a screen) of us making abstractions of This Experience (to lend a solipsistic term) or whatever you want to call the stuff we think is outside of our sensory organs.

Since we can through scientific tools such as a fMRI scanner see a thought arise in a brain, it's very clear to me that this is part-and-parcel of the Real. So much so, that we can disrupt consciousness directly with an electrode or take drugs to alter it. The drugs are real as far as we can tell, and we have a good understanding how specific drugs alter our specific Experience. But try and explain this to a solipsist, and you'll get the ol' tried "but you can't explain concepts as part of reality" or "abstractions are 'special'". Yeah right. I can reduce abstractions to real physical phenomena and an idea and concepts as existing part-and-parcel of the physical brain. It's just that it isn't what it seems.

There's a small electric and chemical storm in my brain through the neurons and synapses in my brain to produce this sentence, the problem for a solipsist is the unintuitive distinction from the inner workings of a brain to the result of language in the form of coherent (I hope) arrangement of pixels on a screen.

I have Theory of Mind(s). It's an incomplete and rather simplistic theory, but it works - and that's what matters to me.

Baruch

Quote from: doorknob on October 31, 2016, 10:03:59 PM
Can't we have a day off with out god?

I want to become a pagan they love to celebrate and have oodles of holidays. Any thing to get drunk and have a party. That sounds more like my type of worship any way.

Slavery is a universal human condition .. Lincoln not withstanding.  So no, you can't have the day off.  Get back to work!  Yes, pagans had holidays ... on average every 8 days .. no way to synch with the 7 day cycle of the monotheists (except once every 56 days).  These were also gifts from gods.  Seculars see no reason to ever take time off, unless of course they are independently wealthy, then like their fellow plutocrats, if a plutocrat moves their fat ass, has work been accomplished?
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

Baruch

Quote from: Sal1981 on November 01, 2016, 06:33:47 AM
I've had a discussion on the AF.org forum about the nature of concepts and if they are real. Like, if the number zero was more or less real than a positive integer ala mathematics.

I'm an epistemologist in the classical sense and I think the best way to understand the world is in those terms; where the main epistemological tool is reductionism (take something apart, understand its constituent parts and try and reassemble it again). For such a meta-Meta as trying to reduce "concept" into constituent parts you invariably come down to semantics and finally to material<->mind .... stuff. For me, at least, there is no real distinction between making a concept, and the reductionist way of what a "concept" in a brain is. They're just placeholder noises (in this case black pixels on a screen) of us making abstractions of This Experience (to lend a solipsistic term) or whatever you want to call the stuff we think is outside of our sensory organs.

Since we can through scientific tools such as a fMRI scanner see a thought arise in a brain, it's very clear to me that this is part-and-parcel of the Real. So much so, that we can disrupt consciousness directly with an electrode or take drugs to alter it. The drugs are real as far as we can tell, and we have a good understanding how specific drugs alter our specific Experience. But try and explain this to a solipsist, and you'll get the ol' tried "but you can't explain concepts as part of reality" or "abstractions are 'special'". Yeah right. I can reduce abstractions to real physical phenomena and an idea and concepts as existing part-and-parcel of the physical brain. It's just that it isn't what it seems.

There's a small electric and chemical storm in my brain through the neurons and synapses in my brain to produce this sentence, the problem for a solipsist is the unintuitive distinction from the inner workings of a brain to the result of language in the form of coherent (I hope) arrangement of pixels on a screen.

I have Theory of Mind(s). It's an incomplete and rather simplistic theory, but it works - and that's what matters to me.

Metaphysician says ... yet another reductio ad absurdum by the epistemologists ;-)
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

Baruch

Quote from: doorknob on October 31, 2016, 05:25:41 PM
Yeah a free day off worshiping god doesn't sound much fun.

It wasn't ... in Puritan New England, you sat at church for the whole day on Sunday.  Today, sermons only last 15 minutes, if you are lucky ;-)
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

Sal1981

Quote from: Baruch on November 01, 2016, 07:26:13 AM
Metaphysician says ... yet another reductio ad absurdum by the epistemologists ;-)
Fallacy fallacy.

Baruch

Quote from: Sal1981 on November 01, 2016, 02:49:49 PM
Fallacy fallacy.

Double negatives are not allowed in English, but are allowed in other languages, for extra negative emphasis, or an ironic way to affirm.
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

Sal1981

Quote from: Baruch on November 01, 2016, 06:30:10 PM
Double negatives are not allowed in English, but are allowed in other languages, for extra negative emphasis, or an ironic way to affirm.
I don't make the rules.