I'm afraid of religious people, and I've realised I'm getting more afraid, untrusting and skeptical of them as time goes by.
This became apparent to me when I read this article on the BBC website. My first reaction is, "well of course, why would you trust any person who is so misguided?" Then, then I started thinking if this is a healthy way for me to go about my life. There are plenty of religious people who I have known, many of which have been otherwise trustworthy people.
I think I don't trust religious people for 2 reasons. Firstly, there is no limits to what a person will do if they are following the word of their god. They will go against all the other rational alarm bells which tell other people that what they are doing is crazy. I really fear this.
Secondly, I fear that someone who has come to what I consider such a highly irrational conclusion as believing in a god (no matter how rational you may think it is), makes me wonder what other kind of highly irrational conclusions they may reach in the future.
Of course people are free to believe whatever they want. But on the other hand when my life or the lives of those close to me are in such a person's hands (like a doctor, or police officer or teacher) I am really concerned about how they think and what they might do. Needless to say this also applies to the leaders of our countries, though this impacts me less immediately.
Not sure why you think leaders are religious. The pursuit of power is a highly competitive field. Arguably the most competitve one. I am sure that anyone who succeeds is extremely rational.
Other than that, most people defer to some authority over observation and rational analysis. And even those who claim to be rational in principle often fall short in practice. Religion is just one example and it might not even be the most common one by now.
Be weary of people on an individual basis. Your fear of religious people can almost be described as dogmatic [Dogma: Characterized by an authoritative, arrogant assertion of unproved or unprovable principles]. And even if you could prove that you should be more scared of religious people, your fear is still irrational because odds are they're not dangerous despite the increased odds. Should I be afraid of you because of your irrational paranoia?
No one acts in a completely rational fashion, and rationality cannot be defined in a completely objective fashion either. Some people have irrational beliefs; some people have irrational fears of religious people. Being irrational in one way, does not usually lead to being irrational in a professional function.
And I'm afraid of you and your belief in the manmade god.
Frankly, after even further deliberation, I don't know what the fuck to believe anymore - but I know one thing - and that is: you can believe whatever the fuck you want. If you think that a person's beliefs impact their character - then it is the CHARACTER that you should judge, not something as fickle as a belief.
FIRSTLY, there's no limit to what a person will do when his mind breaks - when he rejects his own personal delusions, when his scaffolding of logic and rationality collapse and he begins to realize that everything in his world is an irrational construct. He might kill people. He might kill himself.
SECONDLY, I fear that someone who has come to what I consider such a highly irrational conclusion as believing in the utter superiority of man, the existence of nothing and of nothingness, the man-made god and the constructs of the machine (no matter how rational you may think it is) , makes me wonder WHAT OTHER KIND OF HIGHLY IRRATIONAL CONCLUSIONS YOU MAY REACH IN THE FUTURE.
You claim you believe in nothing? Prove it. Question everything - even your own misguided, irrational beliefs. Question yourself until your scaffolding crumbles. Destroy yourself.
No man believes in nothing. You can delude yourself again and again, you can lock such thought away, but if you claim to think as you "do," then you wouldn't be writing about the "irrational, misguided beliefs of religious people," and how you fear them.
You wouldn't even be writing this blog. You wouldn't believe in atheism. A stronger, more valid belief which is closer to neutrality would be to believe in everything. But how can you do that? It's too hard for a mortal mind to comprehend. So we pick sides. Because we are fundamentally irrational beings.
I liked this. It was similar to venting. Good job OP. We both vented today.
When you say you are scared of religion you say that you are scared of irrational people, because they can be more impulsive and they can rush to illogical conclusions which might put you in danger.
But isn't it rational when someone is afraid of death and fells purposeless in life ? Isn't it rational to seek something to "protect you" from this fear ? Does any field of science talk about "life after death", about "every action you did on Earth metering" or about a "soul, which is the real you which non can harm"
Of course not, actually all scientific discoveries that are related to death and purpose in life basically state that "a)Death is death, the brain stops, deal with it" and "b) at some point the universe as we know it will end, there is no way to stop it and life has mp real purpose". That's a real bummer... that doesn't make you fell good, might as well jump of a fucking bridge is life has no meaning at all.
So quite frankly id say that out of the two, religious people are the happier and more rational on a primitive level, id rather expect a very scientist to be mad than a very smart priest.
The problem is that most of the time religious people are also very stupid, because being intelligent will generally force you to admit to science being right and religion being bollocks, hence why you fell like religious people are more dangerous... because stupid people are generally more dangerous and more hazardous in their action but that doesn't make all religious people dangerous it only makes someone dangerous more likely to be religious.
And the whole " The bible/Koran/BS" tells you to kill and be bad might as well be out of the discussion, because quite frankly around 95% of the people that uphold a religion haven't read them, so if we were to go to "religious people that read those books and are still religious" we would be talking about a whole different demographic and a whole different level of insanity.
On September 27 2013 14:17 itsjustatank wrote: you realize the height of irony is that your fear of these people is irrational in and of itself, correct.
That's why I am deeply afraid of the OP. There is no telling how far he may go to defend his belief that religious people are irrational.
One should consider that only a tiny fraction of people who claim to be religious are actually seriously into it. From my science-chair I´d say, less than 1%. Most is just culture.
I´m afraid of Americans because they obviously cannot control their gluttonous impulses and eat themselves to death. It´s highly irrational really, to ruin your body like that. How can I trust someone with my life, when he´s probably planning on eating me already?
Put it this way. I wouldn't let someone... who genuinely believed that we are servants of an alien overlord race.... baby-sit my child. Even if the person is a kind friendly person, I just wouldn't and I doubt many people would.
On September 27 2013 19:29 deathly rat wrote: Put it this way. I wouldn't let someone... who genuinely believed that we are servants of an alien overlord race.... baby-sit my child. Even if the person is a kind friendly person, I just wouldn't and I doubt many people would.
In which case I say you are no friend to children, for childhood is the opportunity we take to project the limitless freedom of our own psyche unto a boundless world. This belief that anything is possible is as close as most of us will ever come to the miraculous, which, in our age of mental and physical conformity, is increasingly the only state of life in which we are really human.
On September 27 2013 19:29 deathly rat wrote: Put it this way. I wouldn't let someone... who genuinely believed that we are servants of an alien overlord race.... baby-sit my child. Even if the person is a kind friendly person, I just wouldn't and I doubt many people would.
In which case I say you are no friend to children, for childhood is the opportunity we take to project the limitless freedom of our own psyche unto a boundless world. This belief that anything is possible is as close as most of us will ever come to the miraculous, which, in our age of mental and physical conformity, is increasingly the only state of life in which we are really human.
I'd be open to my kid being told crazy stories but if the person genuinely believes something like that I would be worried. My earlier post was based on acceptance - there are many religious people, most of them believe in one thing which I believe to be crazy, but then again organized religion is very persuasive.... The alien overlord race thing is a bit worrisome to me and I'd be worried for my child's safety.
It's about the coarsening of the mind by building artificial barriers to thought. I think Chesterton explained this concisely in Orthodoxy:
Spiritual doctrines do not actually limit the mind as do materialistic denials. Even if I believe in immortality I need not think about it. But if I disbelieve in immortality I must not think about it. In the first case the road is open and I can go as far as I like; in the second the road is shut.
Of course, the mind which contemplates the incredible doctrine is superior to one which can only believe in credible doctrines, just as the eyes which can see an object on a foggy night are superior to those who can only see it in the clear daylight.
Even allowing for the rather remarkable prejudice against alien-worshipping nannies on an intellectual level, the truth is that the alien-worshipping nanny is probably just a man-child akin to Dickens' Mr. Dick, and therefore understands your child better than you possibly could.
That's actually not true. I do fear for people who irrationally reject the holy and righteous message of the One True God. And to some degree I am wary of those people. I would never vote for an atheist, for example. I would never seek out an atheist for moral or spiritual advice. Not because I think they are capable of doing terrible things (everyone is capable of doing terrible things), but because their beliefs and morals do not reflect my own and thus are incapable of relating to me on any meaningful level.
I would allow an atheist to babysit my children, and I wouldn't even necessarily disallow them from discussing it (in an appropriate manner). Some of my cousins are atheists (I think), and they are, by far, better people than myself. More successful, harder-working, more accepting, and more charitable. Shit, one of my cousins once took off her brand new shoes and gave them to a homeless person. That was, at it's heart, a better example of the Christian faith than any protestation or prayer that the most devout person could give.
Learn to recognize the good in people and to accept the bad. You'll be happier in the long run and they will be more likely to respect your own point of view.
On September 28 2013 01:26 blubbdavid wrote: What's the notion of rationality?
I don't care to define it but people who use the words "One True God" unironically aren't into rationality, at least in that area of their life. I mean there's "true" in the damn phrase just to make sure it sounds dogmatic as fuck, you don't need to be a genius to see the person is rocking some serious confirmation bias.
I'm a "non-believer." I also live in the Southeastern United States, so I have a lot of "religious" (I use the term loosely) friends, coworkers, etc.
What you'll discover are a few things. First, they (the "religious") don't behave, in a day to day fashion, in way which is consistent with what they "believe" (which is a good thing). They still look both ways before crossing the street. They still go to the doctor. They do "rational" things like everyone else. If you ask them seriously, they will acknowledge that they believe in some deity that is all powerful and all knowing and has a "plan" for everything. But they don't act like they believe it. If they truly believed in such a deity, they wouldn't take any "rational" action, because it would be irrelevant. If god wants you dead, you will die (and vice versa). No need to go to the doctor, or make sure a car isn't going to hit you. But they don't actually act like that.
Of course, if pressed, they will mumble something about "free will" and how god also gave them that. How "free will" squares with the "divine plan" of an all-powerful being is beyond me. And frankly, it is beyond them, and they will usually say as much. It is generally better not to ask.
Ultimately what I'm getting at, is that most "believers" don't actually live their day to day lives in sync with what they claim to believe. That would be crazy (but there are some people that actually do this, "Christian scientists" and such, but I don't know any of them). So, you don't really need to worry about most "believers."
So, while we don't have an exact definition, we now know at least partly what rationality is/contains in the area of spiritual beliefs: Not using the words "One True God" is rational. Great, we are already one step closer to solving the puzzle.
On September 28 2013 01:49 blubbdavid wrote: So, while we don't have an exact definition, we now know at least partly what rationality is/contains in the area of spiritual beliefs: Not using the words "One True God" is rational. Great, we are already one step closer to solving the puzzle.
I figured that telling you to look for a definition would be boring for you and instead I decided to give a pretty good example why he'd obviously be incompatible with "rationality" in that regard. I think even he would admit that he didn't come off as particularly rational when he used that label.
Frankly, I would argue that you're insulting your own intelligence with your cheap rhetorical questions. I mean, many religious people themselves admit that their religion is outside of the real of rationality anyway. It's faith-based, they know it and they express it. The admission that their faith is not rational shows that at least they're intellectually honest.
Belief can make otherwise good people do very evil things. Religion has been a prime offender in this regard since recorded history. I don't think fear of belief that puts itself beyond question is unwarranted.
I think that it's fair to assume a certain percentage of religious people are scary, and that percentage is probably similar to the percentage of all people that are scary. For that reason, I think it's better to judge people on a case by case basis rather than having a sweeping generalization. Most religious people I have met have been perfectly decent people. If we were to disregard everyone who had any sort of belief or sway with something irrational, then we're gonna have to include fortune cookies, horoscopes, personality tests, superstition, etc. In the end, probably >90% of all people would be considered feared at that point. That would also include me. FEAR ME!!! MWAHAHAHHAHAA
On September 27 2013 12:11 hypercube wrote: Not sure why you think leaders are religious. The pursuit of power is a highly competitive field. Arguably the most competitve one. I am sure that anyone who succeeds is extremely rational.
Other than that, most people defer to some authority over observation and rational analysis. And even those who claim to be rational in principle often fall short in practice. Religion is just one example and it might not even be the most common one by now.
really? just because its the most competitive field anyone who succeeds is extremely rational? really???
where is your 1st grade logic? or just your ability to read history past and present...regarding leaders. you are actually contending that leaders and the competition to become a leader is a MERITOCRACY....ROTFL.
if most people are religious, and hes contending that religious people are irrational, then leaders can gain power by also being irrational.
i do agree that most humans, religious or not, are irrational. but that is a different point to be made.
It just occurred to me that I've probably read someone bashing religion on the internet nearly every day for the last five years. Some people even put that shit in their signatures, there's just no avoiding it!
"Look at me, I don't believe in religion! Look, I'm so smart! Look how dumb these other people are!" Ugh, I need a drink.
I also fear religious people, at least in theory, but there are no Muslims around where I live, and Christians here aren't religious at all; they go to church on Sundays and don't give a flying fuck about the ten commandments (or the rest of the bible for that matter) for the rest of the week.
It's really about people's rationality; the only difference between people who actually believe in a god and those who believe in e.g. horoscopes is that the former have a whole crazy worldview, while the latter only have limited and disjointed crazy beliefs. Unfortunately, there's a lot of those irrational/crazy people, and while I wouldn't say I'm afraid of them, I'm definitely wary of them and would never trust them with anything important. They also tend to be very susceptible to other crazy worldviews such as Anthroposophy, Scientology, Gnosticism, etc.
Of course you can be an atheist and be just as irrational. Rationality isn't about what you believe, but why you believe what you believe. It's just that proportionally, much more theists than atheists are irrational, because all theists are irrational.
For anyone who's not familiar with the concept of rationality, espially those who think of it as some kind of subjective and arbitrary thing that can be defined this or that way: Rational behaviour is about being influenced as little as possible by cognitive biases, and applying Bayesian reasoning to arrive at objectively correct conclusions. If you haven't heard of either of those before, but are pretty sure you're pretty rational already, this is most likely a typical case of the bias blind spot and introspective illusion.
On September 28 2013 09:41 And G wrote: I also fear religious people, at least in theory, but there are no Muslims around where I live, and Christians here aren't religious at all; they go to church on Sundays and don't give a flying fuck about the ten commandments (or the rest of the bible for that matter) for the rest of the week.
It's really about people's rationality; the only difference between people who actually believe in a god and those who believe in e.g. horoscopes is that the former have a whole crazy worldview, while the latter only have limited and disjointed crazy beliefs. Unfortunately, there's a lot of those irrational/crazy people, and while I wouldn't say I'm afraid of them, I'm definitely wary of them and would never trust them with anything important. They also tend to be very susceptible to other crazy worldviews such as Anthroposophy, Scientology, Gnosticism, etc.
Of course you can be an atheist and be just as irrational. Rationality isn't about what you believe, but why you believe what you believe. It's just that proportionally, much more theists than atheists are irrational, because all theists are irrational.
For anyone who's not familiar with the concept of rationality, espially those who think of it as some kind of subjective and arbitrary thing that can be defined this or that way: Rational behaviour is about being influenced as little as possible by cognitive biases, and applying Bayesian reasoning to arrive at objectively correct conclusions. If you haven't heard of either of those before, but are pretty sure you're pretty rational already, this is most likely a typical case of the bias blind spot and introspective illusion.
I contend that your points are rendered invalidated because cats.
On September 27 2013 12:11 hypercube wrote: Not sure why you think leaders are religious. The pursuit of power is a highly competitive field. Arguably the most competitve one. I am sure that anyone who succeeds is extremely rational.
Other than that, most people defer to some authority over observation and rational analysis. And even those who claim to be rational in principle often fall short in practice. Religion is just one example and it might not even be the most common one by now.
really? just because its the most competitive field anyone who succeeds is extremely rational? really???
where is your 1st grade logic? or just your ability to read history past and present...regarding leaders. you are actually contending that leaders and the competition to become a leader is a MERITOCRACY....ROTFL.
Sure, the guy who manipulates the voters and his opponents best becomes the leader. That's not what people usually mean by meritocracy but it is a competition.
To be fair some countries have more open competition than others. In Britain the aristocracy retains a great deal of wealth and power despite their obvious genetic disadvantage (as Eddie Izzard said it's a bad idea when cousins marry). But people like Putin or Harry Reid weren't born into power, they got there by being the best at playing the system.
if most people are religious, and hes contending that religious people are irrational, then leaders can gain power by also being irrational.
Or you can have the best of both worlds by lying about it. As they say: "What they don't know, can't hurt you."
You accuse me using 1st grade logic but I think you're just not cynical enough.
On September 28 2013 03:37 Mothra wrote: Belief can make otherwise good people do very evil things. Religion has been a prime offender in this regard since recorded history. I don't think fear of belief that puts itself beyond question is unwarranted.
I respectfully disagree. In my opinion, it is government that has been a prime offender in all recorded history. Government (a King, a dictator, or otherwise) has used religion to make believers do very evil things. Government has used ideology, which is very akin to religion in terms of dogmatic beliefs, to make otherwise good people do very evil things. The amount of individual human lives that government has killed throughout the span of history far exceeds the victims of violent religious conflict.
Government isn't a "thing", it's a denominator for people with certain political power. Historically, the vast majority of people in government positions were also deeply religious. It's not the government that makes people do "evil" things, it's religion (or in late modern history its replacement, ideology) that makes "government" and other people do "evil" things. A few examples: - Flower wars and other human sacrifices - Witch hunts (traditionally a grassroots movement, check out the Malleus Maleficarum, it's a fascinating read) - Inquisition - Crusades and other so-called holy wars - Castes and slavery Also, a lot of atrocities can be attributed to missionary efforts. You can also add the holocaust to the list, as Hitler was religiously motivated (he also persecuted atheists).
And these are just the coordinated, grand-scale atrocities. There's a plethora of atrocities committed on a smaller scale, such as parents refusing medical help for their children, persecution of scientists, destructive censorship, terrorism, female genital mutilation, forced marriages, indoctrination of children, persecution of homosexuals, and so on.
Pretty much everything "evil" that can be attributed to ideology was invented by religion.
Farvacola, he did specify that ideology is the culprit a lot of the time. Stalin and Mao had ideologies which made them do atrocious things much in the same way religion could have.
I also agree with him when he says that religion is responsible for a bunch of bullshit on the small scale like the refusal of treatment. Ideology can be responsible for the same kind of human idiocy - like the refusal of vaccines because of some shit that Martha Stewart has said, and somehow pop culture supersedes medicine and science in part of the collective minds and certain people are now stupidly afraid of getting their kids vaccinated.
Ideologies and religions can act as catalysts for dumb decisions.
That said, none of it justifies being afraid of ALL religious people, but I think it's fair to question their judgment in some cases.
You're young. You'll learn. We're all just people. Fear of zealots and manipulators is justified, but it's unfair to jump to this judgment merely by the fact that someone is a "believer."
On September 29 2013 04:45 Djzapz wrote: Farvacola, he did specify that ideology is the culprit a lot of the time. Stalin and Mao had ideologies which made them do atrocious things much in the same way religion could have.
I also agree with him when he says that religion is responsible for a bunch of bullshit on the small scale like the refusal of treatment. Ideology can be responsible for the same kind of human idiocy - like the refusal of vaccines because of some shit that Martha Stewart has said, and somehow pop culture supersedes medicine and science in part of the collective minds and certain people are now stupidly afraid of getting their kids vaccinated.
Ideologies and religions can act as catalysts for dumb decisions.
That said, none of it justifies being afraid of ALL religious people.
All of those problems with society have roots that go beyond religion though; "religion is responsible for bad things" is a flashy red herring that is quite fashionable to hone in on these days. Unfortunately, nothing is so simple, and the attitudes that underlie vaccine denial and the like, while certainly oftentimes present alongside some sort of religiosity, are not a religious phenomena.
On September 29 2013 04:45 Djzapz wrote: Farvacola, he did specify that ideology is the culprit a lot of the time. Stalin and Mao had ideologies which made them do atrocious things much in the same way religion could have.
I also agree with him when he says that religion is responsible for a bunch of bullshit on the small scale like the refusal of treatment. Ideology can be responsible for the same kind of human idiocy - like the refusal of vaccines because of some shit that Martha Stewart has said, and somehow pop culture supersedes medicine and science in part of the collective minds and certain people are now stupidly afraid of getting their kids vaccinated.
Ideologies and religions can act as catalysts for dumb decisions.
That said, none of it justifies being afraid of ALL religious people.
All of those problems with society have roots that go beyond religion though; "religion is responsible for bad things" is a flashy red herring that is quite fashionable to hone in on these days. Unfortunately, nothing is so simple, and the attitudes that underlie vaccine denial and the like, while certainly oftentimes present alongside some sort of religiosity, are not a religious phenomena.
I think it's disingenuous to dismiss the connection just by calling a red herring. Sure you can say the world's more complex than a one-liner explanation of why religion has been responsible for bad things but if you try to be a realist for a second you'll be willing to make that concession.
Religion has played a role in many events and just general occurrences that most people would qualify as bad. Sure, it's part of a bigger more general thing that anthropologists could have a field day with, but that doesn't mean that we can't try to point out how religion influences people and/or their actions, sometimes negatively.
I mean let's take a very direct type of influence on the micro scale. A little village has a church and a bunch of people go to it, they have something in common, a sentiment that they belong there. The church authority decides to suggest that people be charitable. It's entirely possible that the people of the town will take up on that moral guidance or whatever.
Now if the same church says you should hate the fags, or you shouldn't wear a rubber because it's bad, it's hard not to dismiss the causal link when religious people have more of a tendency to dislike homosexuals and less people used condoms in a bunch of African countries after the pope said not to use rubbers some years ago which led to an increase in the numbers of cases of AIDS.
These are just examples but still, religion and ideologies, like many other things, are factors which can influence people to be shitty when they otherwise wouldn't be. It's kind of like that crowd psychology thing that said people in a crowd can tend to be dicks. It can have a vile snowball effect. Slap to that the fact that religions are generally tied to old scripture with an outdated sense of morality, and you have an influence which can easily be bad.
On September 29 2013 04:45 Djzapz wrote: Farvacola, he did specify that ideology is the culprit a lot of the time. Stalin and Mao had ideologies which made them do atrocious things much in the same way religion could have.
I also agree with him when he says that religion is responsible for a bunch of bullshit on the small scale like the refusal of treatment. Ideology can be responsible for the same kind of human idiocy - like the refusal of vaccines because of some shit that Martha Stewart has said, and somehow pop culture supersedes medicine and science in part of the collective minds and certain people are now stupidly afraid of getting their kids vaccinated.
Ideologies and religions can act as catalysts for dumb decisions.
That said, none of it justifies being afraid of ALL religious people.
All of those problems with society have roots that go beyond religion though; "religion is responsible for bad things" is a flashy red herring that is quite fashionable to hone in on these days. Unfortunately, nothing is so simple, and the attitudes that underlie vaccine denial and the like, while certainly oftentimes present alongside some sort of religiosity, are not a religious phenomena.
I think it's disingenuous to dismiss the connection just by calling a red herring. Sure you can say the word's more complex than a one-liner explanation of why religion has been responsible for bad things but if you try to be a realist for a second you'll be willing to make that concession.
Religion has played a role in many events and just general occurrences that most people would qualify as bad. Sure, it's part of a bigger more general thing that anthropologists could have a field day with, but that doesn't mean that we can't try to point out how religion influences people and/or their actions, sometimes negatively.
I mean let's take a very direct type of influence on the micro scale. A little village has a church and a bunch of people go to it, they have something in common, a sentiment that they belong there. The church authority decides to suggest that people be charitable. It's entirely possible that the people of the town will take up on that moral guidance or whatever.
Now if the same church says you should hate the fags, or you shouldn't wear a rubber because it's bad, it's hard not to dismiss the causal link when religious people have more of a tendency to dislike homosexuals and less people used condoms in a bunch of African countries after the pope said not to use rubbers some years ago which led to an increase in the numbers of cases of AIDS.
These are just examples but still, religion and ideologies, like many other things, are factors which can influence people to be shitty when they otherwise wouldn't be. It can have a vile snowball effect. Slap to that the fact that religions are generally tied to old scripture with an outdated sense of morality, and you have an influence which can easily be bad.
It's a red herring because religion is no different than any other ideological apparatus in terms of how humans are liable to use and misuse its constituent message. National identification of the masses, "progress", the appearance of science among a host of other ideas are all at play when large groups of people make poor judgments, but none are responsible in and of themselves. There is a reason why people who write blogs like this are totally unaware of how much charity and do-gooding comes about as a result of religious influence; the world is a much scarier place when no one thing is essentially "bad" or "good".
On September 29 2013 04:45 Djzapz wrote: Farvacola, he did specify that ideology is the culprit a lot of the time. Stalin and Mao had ideologies which made them do atrocious things much in the same way religion could have.
I also agree with him when he says that religion is responsible for a bunch of bullshit on the small scale like the refusal of treatment. Ideology can be responsible for the same kind of human idiocy - like the refusal of vaccines because of some shit that Martha Stewart has said, and somehow pop culture supersedes medicine and science in part of the collective minds and certain people are now stupidly afraid of getting their kids vaccinated.
Ideologies and religions can act as catalysts for dumb decisions.
That said, none of it justifies being afraid of ALL religious people.
All of those problems with society have roots that go beyond religion though; "religion is responsible for bad things" is a flashy red herring that is quite fashionable to hone in on these days. Unfortunately, nothing is so simple, and the attitudes that underlie vaccine denial and the like, while certainly oftentimes present alongside some sort of religiosity, are not a religious phenomena.
I think it's disingenuous to dismiss the connection just by calling a red herring. Sure you can say the word's more complex than a one-liner explanation of why religion has been responsible for bad things but if you try to be a realist for a second you'll be willing to make that concession.
Religion has played a role in many events and just general occurrences that most people would qualify as bad. Sure, it's part of a bigger more general thing that anthropologists could have a field day with, but that doesn't mean that we can't try to point out how religion influences people and/or their actions, sometimes negatively.
I mean let's take a very direct type of influence on the micro scale. A little village has a church and a bunch of people go to it, they have something in common, a sentiment that they belong there. The church authority decides to suggest that people be charitable. It's entirely possible that the people of the town will take up on that moral guidance or whatever.
Now if the same church says you should hate the fags, or you shouldn't wear a rubber because it's bad, it's hard not to dismiss the causal link when religious people have more of a tendency to dislike homosexuals and less people used condoms in a bunch of African countries after the pope said not to use rubbers some years ago which led to an increase in the numbers of cases of AIDS.
These are just examples but still, religion and ideologies, like many other things, are factors which can influence people to be shitty when they otherwise wouldn't be. It can have a vile snowball effect. Slap to that the fact that religions are generally tied to old scripture with an outdated sense of morality, and you have an influence which can easily be bad.
It's a red herring because religion is no different than any other ideological apparatus in terms of how humans are liable to use and misuse its constituent message. National identification of the masses, "progress", the appearance of science among a host of other ideas are all at play when large groups of people make poor judgments, but none are responsible in and of themselves. There is a reason why people who write blogs like this are totally unaware of how much charity and do-gooding comes about as a result of religious influence; the world is a much scarier place when no one thing is essentially "bad" or "good".
Just because it's no different doesn't mean it's a red herring. For all intents and purposes you're trying to stall the discussion by trying to suggest that there's a bigger, wider discussion which could be had on the same topic.
This is more specific and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Not all conversations need to be taken from the most general standpoint. I mean you could make the same point you're making about just about any topic and the only thing you'd end up accepting as a discussion topic would be like "Social sciences: discuss".
And to make it worse you then go straight into criticizing some semantics stuff. So yeah you're stalling a perfectly genuine topic, even though I'd say that OP's wrong.
@farva We are usually polar opposites, but in this case I agree completely with your points. Another way of putting it is that religion isn't the cause of behavior such as vaccine denial, it is merely correlated with other factors which lead to such behavior, such as a lack of education.
On September 29 2013 04:45 Djzapz wrote: Farvacola, he did specify that ideology is the culprit a lot of the time. Stalin and Mao had ideologies which made them do atrocious things much in the same way religion could have.
I also agree with him when he says that religion is responsible for a bunch of bullshit on the small scale like the refusal of treatment. Ideology can be responsible for the same kind of human idiocy - like the refusal of vaccines because of some shit that Martha Stewart has said, and somehow pop culture supersedes medicine and science in part of the collective minds and certain people are now stupidly afraid of getting their kids vaccinated.
Ideologies and religions can act as catalysts for dumb decisions.
That said, none of it justifies being afraid of ALL religious people.
All of those problems with society have roots that go beyond religion though; "religion is responsible for bad things" is a flashy red herring that is quite fashionable to hone in on these days. Unfortunately, nothing is so simple, and the attitudes that underlie vaccine denial and the like, while certainly oftentimes present alongside some sort of religiosity, are not a religious phenomena.
I think it's disingenuous to dismiss the connection just by calling a red herring. Sure you can say the word's more complex than a one-liner explanation of why religion has been responsible for bad things but if you try to be a realist for a second you'll be willing to make that concession.
Religion has played a role in many events and just general occurrences that most people would qualify as bad. Sure, it's part of a bigger more general thing that anthropologists could have a field day with, but that doesn't mean that we can't try to point out how religion influences people and/or their actions, sometimes negatively.
I mean let's take a very direct type of influence on the micro scale. A little village has a church and a bunch of people go to it, they have something in common, a sentiment that they belong there. The church authority decides to suggest that people be charitable. It's entirely possible that the people of the town will take up on that moral guidance or whatever.
Now if the same church says you should hate the fags, or you shouldn't wear a rubber because it's bad, it's hard not to dismiss the causal link when religious people have more of a tendency to dislike homosexuals and less people used condoms in a bunch of African countries after the pope said not to use rubbers some years ago which led to an increase in the numbers of cases of AIDS.
These are just examples but still, religion and ideologies, like many other things, are factors which can influence people to be shitty when they otherwise wouldn't be. It can have a vile snowball effect. Slap to that the fact that religions are generally tied to old scripture with an outdated sense of morality, and you have an influence which can easily be bad.
It's a red herring because religion is no different than any other ideological apparatus in terms of how humans are liable to use and misuse its constituent message. National identification of the masses, "progress", the appearance of science among a host of other ideas are all at play when large groups of people make poor judgments, but none are responsible in and of themselves. There is a reason why people who write blogs like this are totally unaware of how much charity and do-gooding comes about as a result of religious influence; the world is a much scarier place when no one thing is essentially "bad" or "good".
Just because it's no different doesn't mean it's a red herring. For all intents and purposes you're trying to stall the discussion by trying to suggest that there's a bigger, wider discussion which could be had on the same topic.
This is more specific and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Not all conversations need to be taken from the most general standpoint. I mean you could make the same point you're making about just about any topic and the only thing you'd end up accepting as a discussion topic would be like "Social sciences: discuss".
And to make it worse you then go straight into criticizing some semantics stuff. So yeah you're stalling a perfectly genuine topic, even though I'd say that OP's wrong.
When those conversations diagnose a problem incorrectly, saying so is not some slight against the good spirit of Online Forum Discussion. The OP literally says that he is afraid of religious people, and the according discussion, barring a few exceptions, revolves around posters variously diagnosing many of society's deficits in reasonable, moral thinking as religious in nature. I am saying that that is a misdiagnosis that misses the forest for the trees; moving forward in hopefully reducing the amount of, for lack of better words, "bad" thinking is going to require that folks get past their obsession with finding a nice, concrete target with which to make their impassioned arguments.
Yes, religious thinking is a definite harm when it comes to something like Catholicism's opposition to contraception or the ultra-conservative African Protestant anti-gay shit, but what does saying so get us? Are we going to ignore the millions upon millions of dollars of charity that churches pour into Africa to remain consistent? (many of which are the most effective charities, I might add) Just go to any refugee camp in the world today and tell me who is doing the most work helping, treating, educating, feeding, and the picture suddenly becomes a lot grayer.
Perhaps it is not the "religion" that we ought to be focusing on so much as what might be running into religion and turning it into something despicable or intellectually dishonest. In the US, for example, religiosity has been highly politicized in the way it folds into a number of the tenets of both conservatism and progressivism, and there can be no doubt that for many citizens, their religion and their politics are quite entangled. Add in the incredibly inconsistent quality of education and one can see how various demographics might congeal out of a bad combination of blind spirituality, educational shortcoming, and confirmation bias. We won't help these people nor ourselves by getting hung up over the fact that they name God in all that they do; it would be much better to focus on education and how it is that selfishness and judgementalism became such fashionable standards. Keeping in mind the power of religion to motivate humans to great charity and cooperation, I think the church just might be the best place to win these people over.
On September 29 2013 05:55 TheOneWhoKnocks wrote: @farva We are usually polar opposites, but in this case I agree completely with your points. Another way of putting it is that religion isn't the cause of behavior such as vaccine denial, it is merely correlated with other factors which lead to such behavior, such as a lack of education.
I understand where you're coming from and there are underlying causes which can't be explained solely by looking at religions as the problem, but I think you're wrong if you don't see that religion itself carries a shitload of bad ideas. Certainly gullibility and whatnot doesn't stem from religion but it may be (I dunno) more present in religious people and we're not looking at that here, but religion IMO has direct influences too.
On September 27 2013 10:33 deathly rat wrote: Secondly, I fear that someone who has come to what I consider such a highly irrational conclusion as believing in a god (no matter how rational you may think it is), makes me wonder what other kind of highly irrational conclusions they may reach in the future.
Oh man it really gets under my skin when people say something like this. Simply because they themselves are incapable of justifying other people's views, they deem it illogical. When it basically comes down to the fact that the person him/herself is not intelligent or educated enough to see things from a different perspective. The world would be a much better place when people would stop doing this.
On September 29 2013 06:04 farvacola wrote: Perhaps it is not the "religion" that we ought to be focusing on so much as what might be running into religion and turning it into something despicable or intellectually dishonest.
We aren't focusing on religion, we're focusing on religious people. Religious people are scary because of the combination of irrationality and crazy beliefs. Whether lack of education leads to religion or religion leads to lack of education or there is a positive feedback loop there is completely irrelevant. That only some religious people have certain negative attributes doesn't mean anything because the amount of people with those attributes is disproportionally high in relegious groups, which is a good reason to generally be wary of religious people you don't know well. And crazy beliefs are much more common in religious people than in your average confused Sunday morning Christian, and religious people are more likely to act on them even when e.g. social norms tell them otherwise. That's what makes them scary, and the question what the underlying causes ultimately are doesn't matter at all.
I don't even hate him, nor do I feel like I'm particularly opposed to what he says in most of his posts, but I think he's going at this from the wrong angle.
On September 29 2013 07:21 koreasilver wrote: posts like Djzapz in religion threads wouldn't exist if everyone read Nietzsche even just once.
I've read plenty of Nietzsche but apparently not the part that invalidates my posting, please feel free to enlighten me if you've got more than cheap one liners in you... I don't see why it's completely wrong to look at these things from a bottom up perspective and no passive aggressive bullshit will change that. Drop some knowledge at me and don't just try to insult my intelligence without adding anything to the thread.
At this point I'm pretty much persuaded that my critics either fiddle with semantics, try to be politically correct or simply don't understand what I've been saying, possibly because I'm not expressing myself correctly.
As far as I can tell, Favra's posting calls the topic a red herring solely because he thinks religion is a subset of ideologies. I agree that it's a subset, but this fact doesn't make it a red herring, it's just limited in scope which is not inherently wrong. Being dismissive of a topic because it's too focused by calling it a red herring is to completely misunderstand what a red herring is.
I don't know how you've lasted so long on this forum with that bullshit Koreasilver, it's so irritating. I hope that you're at least going to grow a spine and try to enlighten me. Fucking name-dropping. Seriously is this 4chan.
Nietzsche points out that everything fundamentally has its own logic, so in the grounds of it you don't accept or dismiss certain ideologies off of whether it is "rational" or not since there isn't a one totalizing rationality that points to the "real". Your posts in these religion threads is such a pain because the fact that each and every discourse has its own internal logic is just completely lost on you, so you carry on this classic liberal attitude that everything can be homogenized under one language. But it isn't really so - thus Adorno argued that art has its own logic that is apart from political overseers; thus Schmitt shows us that politics has its own central axioms that are utterly different from moral and economic categories; thus Heidegger shows us that theology is a science insofar as it goes about its object of study through a scientific methodology. The main problem is that you, due to your incompetence in the substance of these religion threads, like hundreds and thousands of other posters besides you on this forum, are just unable to understand the epistemological independence each of these fields have - most importantly, you are blind to the fact that rationality is a method within a structure. You just can't read Nietzsche and then go on to constantly imply that there is Truth and Reason in a classical liberal way that is pretty much just a secularized reflection of Christian moralism. It's just way beyond being cringeworthy.
But I guess some people just need a boogeyman to make the world sensible to them, be it communism, religion, science, capitalism, etc. etc.
You're strangely pretentious for someone who continuously drops names and concepts and summarizes shit without explaining your own thoughts.
First, you misunderstand my posting if you somehow manage to see a totalitarian opinion in my posting. I believe that everything I've said is perfectly reasonable despite your list of thinkers and concepts, and the only thing I've done is I haven't agreed with farva when he tried to dismiss an entire topic of discussion with a shoddy argument.
And frankly, I don't even know which part of what I said you're even arguing with because your first post was a one liner and this new post is a list of shit you learned when you got your philosophy major at some university. It's clear that you haven't mastered any of it because you've failed to synthesize it in a coherent fashion, but worse than that, you haven't made any effort (or simply don't have the competence) to link the thoughts of the various authors to the actual points you were trying to make. If you cannot explain yourself in plain English, perhaps you don't know what you're talking about.
Your post reads "grocery list" of thoughts written down by a new university student who reads a lot but doesn't know how to write and it's really annoying because now you can try to turn this around and say that I have reading comprehension issues. I'll attempt to take your stuff point by point. Please try to enlighten me with your superior intellect, once again, in a comprehensible fashion, by tying what you write to actual issues that you have with what I've been saying. STOP DROPPING NAMES AND CONCEPTS WITH NO EXPLANATIONS. And although you've been insisting that I'm an idiot, I really am not, and I'm doing my best effort to read and understand what you're trying to clumsily express but you're going to have to do better.
ONE
Nietzsche points out that everything fundamentally has its own logic, so in the grounds of it you don't accept or dismiss certain ideologies off of whether it is "rational" or not since there isn't a one totalizing rationality that points to the "real".
Rationality doesn't necessarily lead to truths, I agree. Not contrary to anything I've said. It seems to me like this is the point you were trying to make and everything else is filler/fluff.
That said, you need to understand that punctuation changes the meaning of a sentence. You're very difficult to read, especially when you say shit like "so in the grounds of it". What is that? Is that some kid of mid-sentence "Basically"?
TWO
Your posts in these religion threads is such a pain because the fact that each and every discourse has its own internal logic is just completely lost on you, so you carry on this classic liberal attitude that everything can be homogenized under one language. But it isn't really so - thus Adorno argued that art has its own logic that is apart from political overseers
Help me unscramble that fucking mess a- My posts are a pain because b- Every discourse has its own internal logic is completely lost on me (incoherent) c- thus, Adorno that art has its own logic (does not follow, is that an example?) [This part of your text gets a 0, incoherent argument]
The "thus" is especially confusing because you're essentially saying: The logic is lost on me and AS A RESULT OF THIS Adorno (says something). Now, I'm pretty fucking sure Adorno doesn't know who I am, and his argument about art having its own logic has nothing to do with my supposed inability to understand the internal logic of a given discourse...
THREE
thus Schmitt shows us that politics has its own central axioms that are utterly different from moral and economic categories
You still haven't made any tangible links with what I've said. What is this about?
Heidegger shows us that theology is a science insofar as it goes about its object of study through a scientific methodology
Sure, it's a social science basically. That's what I do in life. Explain the relevance of this because at least I don't follow.
FOUR
you [...] are just unable to understand the epistemological independence each of these fields have - most importantly, you are blind to the fact that rationality is a method within a structure. You just can't read Nietzsche and then go on to constantly imply that there is Truth and Reason in a classical liberal way that is pretty much just a secularized reflection of Christian moralism. It's just way beyond being cringeworthy.
Which part of what I've said specifically shows a misunderstanding of the epistemological independance of the fields of economy, morality and politics?
My diagnosis here is that you're a pseudo-intellectual who's very good at making lists but you can't be bothered to write on your own. Also, you have a very rigid understanding of certain concepts, which keeps you boxed in and exceedingly narrow minded.
So once again, I don't even know what you're even arguing against.
But I guess some people just need a boogeyman to make the world sensible to them, be it communism, religion, science, capitalism, etc. etc.
I think that if you read my posts you'll be hard pressed to find any harsh criticism of religion. I said things which were true, but I was criticized for having not necessarily looked into every underlying cause of why these things were true. This is very much like pretty much every paper ever written, though... we're not all writing massive encyclopedias every time we want to explore a certain phenomenon or a topic. We just talk about it, being fully aware that an exhaustive study of every component of any given issue cannot be completely understood. I maintain that most topics in social sciences are discussed like this and the only reason why people are opposed to it in this case is because of their personal beliefs. They want to shut this down.
I would like for you to post again but try to make an effort this time around. I think your second post was very reminiscent of the first in that its purpose was essentially "I think these people say you're wrong and therefore you're wrong".
When you write an argument, make some effort to directly refer to the thing you're arguing with. Your argument doesn't live in a vacuum, regardless of how angry you are. Now if a better man than I cares to explain what koreasilver was going for, please feel free to hit me up. French is my first language so maybe that's part of why I'm having trouble with his post. I'm legitimately trying to figure this out.
On September 29 2013 09:48 koreasilver wrote: Nietzsche points out...
See, this is what I was hoping to avoid; all this "how presumptuous of you to use logic and reasoning when discussing beliefs that endanger people's lives" bullshit, followed up by the traditional "there can be no objective truth so don't you ever criticise anything again" stance.
Apart from that nothing in your post has anything to do with the topic of religious people, it would also be nice if you could tone down a bit on the ad hominem.
On September 29 2013 09:48 koreasilver wrote: Truth and Reason in a classical liberal way that is pretty much just a secularized reflection of Christian moralism
You seem pretty confused about the whole truth concept, so maybe this will help you: The Useful Idea of Truth
On September 29 2013 10:39 Djzapz wrote: You're strangely pretentious for someone who continuously drops names and concepts and summarizes shit without explaining your own thoughts.
First, you misunderstand my posting if you somehow manage to see a totalitarian opinion in my posting. I believe that everything I've said is perfectly reasonable despite your list of thinkers and concepts, and the only thing I've done is I haven't agreed with farva when he tried to dismiss an entire topic of discussion with a shoddy argument.
And frankly, I don't even know which part of what I said you're even arguing with because your first post was a one liner and this new post is a list of shit you learned when you got your philosophy major at some university. It's clear that you haven't mastered any of it because you've failed to synthesize it in a coherent fashion, but worse than that, you haven't made any effort (or simply don't have the competence) to link the thoughts of the various authors to the actual points you were trying to make. If you cannot explain yourself in plain English, perhaps you don't know what you're talking about.
Your post reads "grocery list" of thoughts written down by a new university student who reads a lot but doesn't know how to write and it's really annoying because now you can try to turn this around and say that I have reading comprehension issues. I'll attempt to take your stuff point by point. Please try to enlighten me with your superior intellect, once again, in a comprehensible fashion, by tying what you write to actual issues that you have with what I've been saying. STOP DROPPING NAMES AND CONCEPTS WITH NO EXPLANATIONS. And although you've been insisting that I'm an idiot, I really am not, and I'm doing my best effort to read and understand what you're trying to clumsily express but you're going to have to do better.
Nietzsche points out that everything fundamentally has its own logic, so in the grounds of it you don't accept or dismiss certain ideologies off of whether it is "rational" or not since there isn't a one totalizing rationality that points to the "real".
Rationality doesn't necessarily lead to truths, I agree. Not contrary to anything I've said. It seems to me like this is the point you were trying to make and everything else is filler/fluff.
That said, you need to understand that punctuation changes the meaning of a sentence. You're very difficult to read, especially when you say shit like "so in the grounds of it". What is that? Is that some kid of mid-sentence "Basically"?
Your posts in these religion threads is such a pain because the fact that each and every discourse has its own internal logic is just completely lost on you, so you carry on this classic liberal attitude that everything can be homogenized under one language. But it isn't really so - thus Adorno argued that art has its own logic that is apart from political overseers
Help me unscramble that fucking mess a- My posts are a pain because b- Every discourse has its own internal logic is completely lost on me (incoherent) c- thus, Adorno that art has its own logic (does not follow, is that an example?) [This part of your text gets a 0, incoherent argument]
The "thus" is especially confusing because you're essentially saying: The logic is lost on me and AS A RESULT OF THIS Adorno (says something). Now, I'm pretty fucking sure Adorno doesn't know who I am, and his argument about art having its own logic has nothing to do with my supposed inability to understand the internal logic of a given discourse...
you [...] are just unable to understand the epistemological independence each of these fields have - most importantly, you are blind to the fact that rationality is a method within a structure. You just can't read Nietzsche and then go on to constantly imply that there is Truth and Reason in a classical liberal way that is pretty much just a secularized reflection of Christian moralism. It's just way beyond being cringeworthy.
Which part of what I've said specifically shows a misunderstanding of the epistemological independance of the fields of economy, morality and politics?
My diagnosis here is that you're a pseudo-intellectual who's very good at making lists but you can't be bothered to write on your own. Also, you have a very rigid understanding of certain concepts, which keeps you boxed in and exceedingly narrow minded.
So once again, I don't even know what you're even arguing against.
But I guess some people just need a boogeyman to make the world sensible to them, be it communism, religion, science, capitalism, etc. etc.
I think that if you read my posts you'll be hard pressed to find any harsh criticism of religion. I said things which were true, but I was criticized for having not necessarily looked into every underlying cause of why these things were true. This is very much like pretty much every paper ever written, though... we're not all writing massive encyclopedias every time we want to explore a certain phenomenon or a topic. We just talk about it, being fully aware that an exhaustive study of every component of any given issue cannot be completely understood. I maintain that most topics in social sciences are discussed like this and the only reason why people are opposed to it in this case is because of their personal beliefs. They want to shut this down.
I would like for you to post again but try to make an effort this time around. I think your second post was very reminiscent of the first in that its purpose was essentially "I think these people say you're wrong and therefore you're wrong".
When you write an argument, make some effort to directly refer to the thing you're arguing with. Your argument doesn't live in a vacuum, regardless of how angry you are. Now if a better man than I cares to explain what koreasilver was going for, please feel free to hit me up. French is my first language so maybe that's part of why I'm having trouble with his post. I'm legitimately trying to figure this out.
After reading this post I feel like I just watched the bar scene from good will hunting.
Boy the blog sure is euphoric. you might say op is enlightened by his own intelligence. Frankly I'm much more afraid of anyone who sees the world this black and white, because them vs us where one side is right and the other is mentally ill, has lead to some really scary shit.
That's kind of the point. When you're rational, you tend not to resort to those extreme measures that are endorsed by many religious scriptures, regardless of what you personally think of someone else's opinion.
Somewhat related quote:
Some responses to Lotteries: A Waste of Hope chided me for daring to criticize others' decisions; if someone else chooses to buy lottery tickets, who am I to disagree? This is a special case of a more general question: What business is it of mine, if someone else chooses to believe what is pleasant rather than what is true? Can't we each choose for ourselves whether to care about the truth?
An obvious snappy comeback is: "Why do you care whether I care whether someone else cares about the truth?" It is somewhat inconsistent for your utility function to contain a negative term for anyone else's utility function having a term for someone else's utility function. But that is only a snappy comeback, not an answer.
So here then is my answer: I believe that it is right and proper for me, as a human being, to have an interest in the future, and what human civilization becomes in the future. One of those interests is the human pursuit of truth, which has strengthened slowly over the generations (for there was not always Science). I wish to strengthen that pursuit further, in this generation. That is a wish of mine, for the Future. For we are all of us players upon that vast gameboard, whether we accept the responsibility or not.
And that makes your rationality my business.
Is this a dangerous idea? Yes, and not just pleasantly edgy "dangerous". People have been burned to death because some priest decided that they didn't think the way they should. Deciding to burn people to death because they "don't think properly" - that's a revolting kind of reasoning, isn't it? You wouldn't want people to think that way, why, it's disgusting. People who think like that, well, we'll have to do something about them...
I agree! Here's my proposal: Let's argue against bad ideas but not set their bearers on fire.
The syllogism we desire to avoid runs: "I think Susie said a bad thing, therefore, Susie should be set on fire." Some try to avoid the syllogism by labeling it improper to think that Susie said a bad thing. No one should judge anyone, ever; anyone who judges is committing a terrible sin, and should be publicly pilloried for it.
As for myself, I deny the therefore. My syllogism runs, "I think Susie said something wrong, therefore, I will argue against what she said, but I will not set her on fire, or try to stop her from talking by violence or regulation..."
So to begin with, you refuse to actually define what you mean by "rationality". To be fair, sc2superfan's post is beyond reasonableness in the sense that it has no scientific content in methodological rigour.
On September 28 2013 01:26 blubbdavid wrote: What's the notion of rationality?
I don't care to define it but people who use the words "One True God" unironically aren't into rationality, at least in that area of their life. I mean there's "true" in the damn phrase just to make sure it sounds dogmatic as fuck, you don't need to be a genius to see the person is rocking some serious confirmation bias.
On September 28 2013 01:49 blubbdavid wrote: So, while we don't have an exact definition, we now know at least partly what rationality is/contains in the area of spiritual beliefs: Not using the words "One True God" is rational. Great, we are already one step closer to solving the puzzle.
I figured that telling you to look for a definition would be boring for you and instead I decided to give a pretty good example why he'd obviously be incompatible with "rationality" in that regard. I think even he would admit that he didn't come off as particularly rational when he used that label.
Frankly, I would argue that you're insulting your own intelligence with your cheap rhetorical questions. I mean, many religious people themselves admit that their religion is outside of the real of rationality anyway. It's faith-based, they know it and they express it. The admission that their faith is not rational shows that at least they're intellectually honest.
But regardless of how much of bore sc2superfan's post is (like most of his posts), and no matter how obvious it may seem that there are real conceptual problems with problems are, if you can't define what you mean by rationality (no, simply saying that it would be a bore is not an adequate answer) then there's a conceptual disconnect. If you can't describe your methodology then there's no scientific content to it and it's not very useful except for asserting truisms. This is the source of irony in your posts in this thread. Now given our collective TL.net history with sc2superfan's posts, I don't think it would be much of a stretch to imagine that he thinks and will continue to think so for god knows how long that his posts are perfectly rational. And it can be "rational" insofar as it may be internally consistent under its foundational axioms.
Whether or not there are any reasons to take the axioms as a given is beyond the question (but for the sake of disclosure I will say that I personally do not think so) as "rationality" is not so much about Truth in the sense of being judged for its object of inquiry or end-product as it is about the application of consistency - it is about method. I don't know blubbdavid so I can't say what his purpose was in asking that question, but it isn't just a "cheap rhetorical question" (this deflection is just a dodge) - it's forcing you to define your terms and your methodology which you have refused to show. The recurring theme is that you continue to imply a set standard for the meaning of what reason is, how it operates, and by what standard - and by this logic you are able to say a sentence such as "The admission that their faith is not rational shows that at least they're intellectually honest". The implication is that for you "rationality" is univocal. The purpose of my Adorno, Schmitt, and Heidegger examples was to question that. Especially in the case of Schmitt, realpolitik would be nothing but absolute nonsense if you were unable to understand that the political operates under its own axioms so that even if political action was "irrational" by moral, aesthetic, and/or economic standards, it could still nevertheless be absolutely rational within its own processes. So I would ask, "What rationality? Rationality by what measure? Rationality for what purpose?". You don't offer any real explanation and simply saying that it is "obvious" and the such just doesn't cut it. It doesn't matter if we might agree completely on this point if there is no methodological rigour. Any idiot could believe in the "right things". Method is everything. Relying on truisms is nothing.
On September 29 2013 04:45 Djzapz wrote: Farvacola, he did specify that ideology is the culprit a lot of the time. Stalin and Mao had ideologies which made them do atrocious things much in the same way religion could have.
I also agree with him when he says that religion is responsible for a bunch of bullshit on the small scale like the refusal of treatment. Ideology can be responsible for the same kind of human idiocy - like the refusal of vaccines because of some shit that Martha Stewart has said, and somehow pop culture supersedes medicine and science in part of the collective minds and certain people are now stupidly afraid of getting their kids vaccinated.
Ideologies and religions can act as catalysts for dumb decisions.
That said, none of it justifies being afraid of ALL religious people, but I think it's fair to question their judgment in some cases.
So here's a point where you just don't understand the point farvacola is trying to make. The first main problem, which is very common in the West, is this understanding of religion as something that is of its own category that can be viewed apart from the rest of society. This is something that you do constantly by abstracting "religion" as having its own kind of pure agency and autonomy in reality. This is a Protestant ideological import where there is a secular/religious divide in society and the individual thus "religion" can be viewed as something private, personal, and a privation of the secular and the "rational". This becomes all the more apparent when anthropological studies show that the concept of what "religion" is very, very different in cultures that are otherwise to the Western, Christian, Eurocentric world, but I digress. You cleanly separate "ideologies" from "religions" without much explanation. What makes "religion" so structurally different from "ideologies" that it isn't one? God knows.
On September 29 2013 04:45 Djzapz wrote: Farvacola, he did specify that ideology is the culprit a lot of the time. Stalin and Mao had ideologies which made them do atrocious things much in the same way religion could have.
I also agree with him when he says that religion is responsible for a bunch of bullshit on the small scale like the refusal of treatment. Ideology can be responsible for the same kind of human idiocy - like the refusal of vaccines because of some shit that Martha Stewart has said, and somehow pop culture supersedes medicine and science in part of the collective minds and certain people are now stupidly afraid of getting their kids vaccinated.
Ideologies and religions can act as catalysts for dumb decisions.
That said, none of it justifies being afraid of ALL religious people.
All of those problems with society have roots that go beyond religion though; "religion is responsible for bad things" is a flashy red herring that is quite fashionable to hone in on these days. Unfortunately, nothing is so simple, and the attitudes that underlie vaccine denial and the like, while certainly oftentimes present alongside some sort of religiosity, are not a religious phenomena.
I think it's disingenuous to dismiss the connection just by calling a red herring. Sure you can say the world's more complex than a one-liner explanation of why religion has been responsible for bad things but if you try to be a realist for a second you'll be willing to make that concession.
Religion has played a role in many events and just general occurrences that most people would qualify as bad. Sure, it's part of a bigger more general thing that anthropologists could have a field day with, but that doesn't mean that we can't try to point out how religion influences people and/or their actions, sometimes negatively.
I mean let's take a very direct type of influence on the micro scale. A little village has a church and a bunch of people go to it, they have something in common, a sentiment that they belong there. The church authority decides to suggest that people be charitable. It's entirely possible that the people of the town will take up on that moral guidance or whatever.
Now if the same church says you should hate the fags, or you shouldn't wear a rubber because it's bad, it's hard not to dismiss the causal link when religious people have more of a tendency to dislike homosexuals and less people used condoms in a bunch of African countries after the pope said not to use rubbers some years ago which led to an increase in the numbers of cases of AIDS.
These are just examples but still, religion and ideologies, like many other things, are factors which can influence people to be shitty when they otherwise wouldn't be. It's kind of like that crowd psychology thing that said people in a crowd can tend to be dicks. It can have a vile snowball effect. Slap to that the fact that religions are generally tied to old scripture with an outdated sense of morality, and you have an influence which can easily be bad.
Nowhere in here do you actually deal with the the simple problem that farvacola offers to you. Given that, as you say yourself, that religious organizations are both capable of doing "good" and "bad", by what conceptual method do you show that religion in itself is inherently problematic? Nevermind the fact that you still haven't shown how "religion" is structurally different from "ideologies" as a whole, the only thing you've shown with this entire post is that religion can influence people in good and bad ways. There is no method here. You say this as if there is something that cannot be abused.
On September 29 2013 04:45 Djzapz wrote: Farvacola, he did specify that ideology is the culprit a lot of the time. Stalin and Mao had ideologies which made them do atrocious things much in the same way religion could have.
I also agree with him when he says that religion is responsible for a bunch of bullshit on the small scale like the refusal of treatment. Ideology can be responsible for the same kind of human idiocy - like the refusal of vaccines because of some shit that Martha Stewart has said, and somehow pop culture supersedes medicine and science in part of the collective minds and certain people are now stupidly afraid of getting their kids vaccinated.
Ideologies and religions can act as catalysts for dumb decisions.
That said, none of it justifies being afraid of ALL religious people.
All of those problems with society have roots that go beyond religion though; "religion is responsible for bad things" is a flashy red herring that is quite fashionable to hone in on these days. Unfortunately, nothing is so simple, and the attitudes that underlie vaccine denial and the like, while certainly oftentimes present alongside some sort of religiosity, are not a religious phenomena.
I think it's disingenuous to dismiss the connection just by calling a red herring. Sure you can say the word's more complex than a one-liner explanation of why religion has been responsible for bad things but if you try to be a realist for a second you'll be willing to make that concession.
Religion has played a role in many events and just general occurrences that most people would qualify as bad. Sure, it's part of a bigger more general thing that anthropologists could have a field day with, but that doesn't mean that we can't try to point out how religion influences people and/or their actions, sometimes negatively.
I mean let's take a very direct type of influence on the micro scale. A little village has a church and a bunch of people go to it, they have something in common, a sentiment that they belong there. The church authority decides to suggest that people be charitable. It's entirely possible that the people of the town will take up on that moral guidance or whatever.
Now if the same church says you should hate the fags, or you shouldn't wear a rubber because it's bad, it's hard not to dismiss the causal link when religious people have more of a tendency to dislike homosexuals and less people used condoms in a bunch of African countries after the pope said not to use rubbers some years ago which led to an increase in the numbers of cases of AIDS.
These are just examples but still, religion and ideologies, like many other things, are factors which can influence people to be shitty when they otherwise wouldn't be. It can have a vile snowball effect. Slap to that the fact that religions are generally tied to old scripture with an outdated sense of morality, and you have an influence which can easily be bad.
It's a red herring because religion is no different than any other ideological apparatus in terms of how humans are liable to use and misuse its constituent message. National identification of the masses, "progress", the appearance of science among a host of other ideas are all at play when large groups of people make poor judgments, but none are responsible in and of themselves. There is a reason why people who write blogs like this are totally unaware of how much charity and do-gooding comes about as a result of religious influence; the world is a much scarier place when no one thing is essentially "bad" or "good".
Just because it's no different doesn't mean it's a red herring. For all intents and purposes you're trying to stall the discussion by trying to suggest that there's a bigger, wider discussion which could be had on the same topic.
This is more specific and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Not all conversations need to be taken from the most general standpoint. I mean you could make the same point you're making about just about any topic and the only thing you'd end up accepting as a discussion topic would be like "Social sciences: discuss".
And to make it worse you then go straight into criticizing some semantics stuff. So yeah you're stalling a perfectly genuine topic, even though I'd say that OP's wrong.
I won't comment on whether or not your series of posts in here have been red herrings as that's a different discussion altogether, but the one that is stalling and stifling the discourse is you insofar as you don't actually have a self-conscious methodology. There is a greater discussion to be had, especially with understanding the role of realpolitik that cuts through the ideological veils (yes, you too have a particular ideological interpretation throughout your posts). So for someone that accuses others of stalling, semantics, etc., the one who has been deflecting questions throughout this thread is you. You've been doing it from the very beginning, no less. You've been relying pretty much entirely on implied truisms that beg the question. Nowhere have you shown exactly how "religion" is separate from "ideology" or even the rest of society, so the only way you could possibly say that carrying on the discourse to see the context of where religion is situated in is "stalling discussion" is if you can really prove that religion can be utterly abstracted. How this is "realism"? God knows. I can only imagine that rationality operates under the same mode of thought where a paragraph can be broken into sub-sentences to be examined. Surely one could pore over what the writer may be meaning not by reading the paragraph as a whole but by dissecting it into little broken fragments that are incomprehensible without context.
And as a footnote, lets all remember how pathetic it is to accuse another of being "pretentious" or a "pseudo-intellectual" - this isn't an argument; it's just a weak false-humility. If you can't read and if you aren't familiar with an area of study, then perhaps defer yourself? Imagine how comical it would be if the author of that "progressive faith" blog went up to an evolutionary biologist and just said "Nah, all this scientific jargon - it's just pretentious, I can't understand it. You're a pseudo-intellectual."
On September 29 2013 14:55 koreasilver wrote: So to begin with, you refuse to actually define what you mean by "rationality". To be fair, sc2superfan's post is beyond reasonableness in the sense that it has no scientific content in methodological rigour.
I've been made aware of the kind of stuff you post on these forums and my suspicions are founded, so I'll try not to spend too much time here.
I don't refuse to define rationality. I use a loose definition of rationality, a common one. Most people should be familiar with the idea of rationality. It's about using sound reasoning to reach a conclusion that's based on evidence. The belief in a God occurs without evidence, and is therefore irrational. That does not make it wrong, and it doesn't mean that God doesn't exist. Rationality doesn't lead to truths, and irrationality can lead to truths (someone could just happen to be right about the earth being spherical without evidence - it would be irrational but true).
I don't know blubbdavid so I can't say what his purpose was in asking that question, but it isn't just a "cheap rhetorical question" (this deflection is just a dodge) - it's forcing you to define your terms and your methodology which you have refused to show. The recurring theme is that you continue to imply a set standard for the meaning of what reason is, how it operates, and by what standard - and by this logic you are able to say a sentence such as "The admission that their faith is not rational shows that at least they're intellectually honest". The implication is that for you "rationality" is univocal. The purpose of my Adorno, Schmitt, and Heidegger examples was to question that. Especially in the case of Schmitt, realpolitik would be nothing but absolute nonsense if you were unable to understand that the political operates under its own axioms so that even if political action was "irrational" by moral, aesthetic, and/or economic standards, it could still nevertheless be absolutely rational within its own processes. So I would ask, "What rationality? Rationality by what measure? Rationality for what purpose?". You don't offer any real explanation and simply saying that it is "obvious" and the such just doesn't cut it. It doesn't matter if we might agree completely on this point if there is no methodological rigour. Any idiot could believe in the "right things". Method is everything. Relying on truisms is nothing.
This is interesting because it's getting increasingly clear that you're a new university student (sorry if I'm wrong). I do the same thing with my students and I tell them to be sure to define their concepts to make sure we're all on the same wavelength. This is important, especially with new students, so they don't just start bullshitting their way through papers. That's why they'll preface their text by explaining what they mean with various terms, including widely understood concepts such as rationality. And yet when discussing things with people, we don't define those words unless we're trying to talk about a very specific thing.
You've drifted far, far away from reality when you start asking a man to explain his methodology on a forum, due to a perceived disconnect with a term which you should, in all likelyhood, know yourself. You would have grounds to ask for a proper definition if you had any reason to be confused about what I was saying, but I'm reading myself and they can understand what I mean if they know what people mean when they use the word "rationality". Which one of my claim is so outlandish that it needs a methodology?
Now if I understand correctly, you're asking me to define how I come to the conclusion that belief in God is irrational. When I made this affirmation, I didn't intend to make it look like a truism but I'll admit that it seems self evident to me. It's also evident to the Christians I know who admit completely that their religion is about faith. You have to make a leap of faith to believe in something which cannot be proved by the scientific method or any rigid method of acquiring evidence. Why believe in the Bible? You have to have faith. It doesn't make you wrong, but it certainly makes you irrational (for that matter specifically) by any reasonable definition of what rationality is. I want to stress that "irrational" is not an insult. I'm irrational all the time, and you're irrational when you try to force me to elaborate a methodology to talk about rationality.
So here's a point where you just don't understand the point farvacola is trying to make. The first main problem, which is very common in the West, is this understanding of religion as something that is of its own category that can be viewed apart from the rest of society. This is something that you do constantly by abstracting "religion" as having its own kind of pure agency and autonomy in reality. This is a Protestant ideological import where there is a secular/religious divide in society and the individual thus "religion" can be viewed as something private, personal, and a privation of the secular and the "rational". This becomes all the more apparent when anthropological studies show that the concept of what "religion" is very, very different in cultures that are otherwise to the Western, Christian, Eurocentric world, but I digress. You cleanly separate "ideologies" from "religions" without much explanation. What makes "religion" so structurally different from "ideologies" that it isn't one? God knows.
You say I don't understand but I understand perfectly every setting of what's being said here. The issue I have is that you're both wrong about this and the reason for it is very simple. You're trying to say that religion is indissociable from the society it inhabits, which is true. The part where your argument falls apart is that, there's nothing that prevents us from talking about specific parts of society.
Everything about social sciences, from language to form of government, is indissociable from the rest of society. And yet papers are written, largely in a vacuum, about languages and dialects and forms of governments and transitions or consolidation of certain forms of governments toward others. Everything is part of a larger system and everything is affected by every other part of the system. We're aware of this. Knowing this, we can SELECT the pieces of the system that we want to study. It doesn't mean that we're ignoring the interractions between the different parts of the system. It doesn't imply that religion or religions are autonomous and separate from society. This is true of every social question ever - they have roots that go EXTREMELY far. It doesn't mean don't ask those questions.
by what conceptual method do you show that religion in itself is inherently problematic?
I made no such comment, and if I did it would be personal belief which is not illegal.
Nevermind the fact that you still haven't shown how "religion" is structurally different from "ideologies" as a whole, the only thing you've shown with this entire post is that religion can influence people in good and bad ways. There is no method here. You say this as if there is something that cannot be abused.
I have openly said that religion are akin to ideologies, I don't know why I would want to prove otherwise. You've clearly shown that you don't understand what I'm saying
In the last two quotes you have assumed 1- That I said religion is inherently problematic. I didn't say that, nor would I be able to prove it. And any method to try to prove it would have to be extremely arbitrary. 2- I don't think religions are particularly different from ideologies, I don't know why you demand of me that I prove something which I don't believe to be true. That said, even though they may not be hugely "structurally" different, it's still possible to focus on religions, which are different in some ways, otherwise we wouldn't have two different terms.
You've been relying pretty much entirely on implied truisms that beg the question. Nowhere have you shown exactly how "religion" is separate from "ideology" or even the rest of society, so the only way you could possibly say that carrying on the discourse to see the context of where religion is situated in is "stalling discussion"
You're now accusing of stalling but the last part of my post showed one thing... you've been arguing with a strawman.
And as a footnote, lets all remember how pathetic it is to accuse another of being "pretentious" or a "pseudo-intellectual" - this isn't an argument; it's just a weak false-humility. If you can't read and if you aren't familiar with an area of study, then perhaps defer yourself? Imagine how comical it would be if the author of that "progressive faith" blog went up to an evolutionary biologist and just said "Nah, all this scientific jargon - it's just pretentious, I can't understand it. You're a pseudo-intellectual."
You are pretentious, you are a pseudo-intellectual, and you are a joke and I'll also add that you're a hypocrite, having insulted my intelligence countless times despite the fact that all you've done is dropping garbage. You criticize me, you call me "pathetic" for my little attacks at you, after having tried to diminish me with your cheap fucking one liner and philosophers that you keep in your pocket because you can't have thoughts of your own.
You misunderstood what I said, you've made assumptions, and you've distorted what I said, perhaps maliciously. And you don't seem to know what humility means...
NEVER FORGET, this is the kind of person you are. This isn't an argument either:
On September 29 2013 07:21 koreasilver wrote: posts like Djzapz in religion threads wouldn't exist if everyone read Nietzsche even just once.
In conclusion, I want to say that the youtube video posted by omnic does justice to this situation. You're that guy who's trying to impress by citing other people because you can't have a thought of your own, and you try to make other people look dumb with your "jargon" (actually just simple words that you don't even know how to use). At best, you fool uneducated people.
And I'm not just gratuitously trying to insult you. You're the one who went at me by cheaply dropping Nietzsche name. Your behavior is shameful as fuck.
You wouldn't even be writing this blog. You wouldn't believe in atheism. A stronger, more valid belief which is closer to neutrality would be to believe in everything. But how can you do that? It's too hard for a mortal mind to comprehend. So we pick sides. Because we are fundamentally irrational beings.
I liked this. It was similar to venting. Good job OP. We both vented today.
You don't "believe in atheism" (or you can, but it makes as much sense as believing in a deity). You don't believe, that's what being atheist means.
On September 29 2013 14:55 koreasilver wrote: So to begin with, you refuse to actually define what you mean by "rationality". To be fair, sc2superfan's post is beyond reasonableness in the sense that it has no scientific content in methodological rigour.
I've been made aware of the kind of stuff you post on these forums and my suspicions are founded, so I'll try not to spend too much time here.
I don't refuse to define rationality. I use a loose definition of rationality, a common one. Most people should be familiar with the idea of rationality. It's about using sound reasoning to reach a conclusion that's based on evidence. The belief in a God occurs without evidence, and is therefore irrational. That does not make it wrong, and it doesn't mean that God doesn't exist. Rationality doesn't lead to truths, and irrationality can lead to truths (someone could just happen to be right about the earth being spherical without evidence - it would be irrational but true).
I don't know blubbdavid so I can't say what his purpose was in asking that question, but it isn't just a "cheap rhetorical question" (this deflection is just a dodge) - it's forcing you to define your terms and your methodology which you have refused to show. The recurring theme is that you continue to imply a set standard for the meaning of what reason is, how it operates, and by what standard - and by this logic you are able to say a sentence such as "The admission that their faith is not rational shows that at least they're intellectually honest". The implication is that for you "rationality" is univocal. The purpose of my Adorno, Schmitt, and Heidegger examples was to question that. Especially in the case of Schmitt, realpolitik would be nothing but absolute nonsense if you were unable to understand that the political operates under its own axioms so that even if political action was "irrational" by moral, aesthetic, and/or economic standards, it could still nevertheless be absolutely rational within its own processes. So I would ask, "What rationality? Rationality by what measure? Rationality for what purpose?". You don't offer any real explanation and simply saying that it is "obvious" and the such just doesn't cut it. It doesn't matter if we might agree completely on this point if there is no methodological rigour. Any idiot could believe in the "right things". Method is everything. Relying on truisms is nothing.
This is interesting because it's getting increasingly clear that you're a new university student (sorry if I'm wrong). I do the same thing with my students and I tell them to be sure to define their concepts to make sure we're all on the same wavelength. This is important, especially with new students, so they don't just start bullshitting their way through papers. That's why they'll preface their text by explaining what they mean with various terms, including widely understood concepts such as rationality. And yet when discussing things with people, we don't define those words unless we're trying to talk about a very specific thing.
You've drifted far, far away from reality when you start asking a man to explain his methodology on a forum, due to a perceived disconnect with a term which you should, in all likelyhood, know yourself. You would have grounds to ask for a proper definition if you had any reason to be confused about what I was saying, but I'm reading myself and they can understand what I mean if they know what people mean when they use the word "rationality". Which one of my claim is so outlandish that it needs a methodology?
Now if I understand correctly, you're asking me to define how I come to the conclusion that belief in God is irrational. When I made this affirmation, I didn't intend to make it look like a truism but I'll admit that it seems self evident to me. It's also evident to the Christians I know who admit completely that their religion is about faith. You have to make a leap of faith to believe in something which cannot be proved by the scientific method or any rigid method of acquiring evidence. Why believe in the Bible? You have to have faith. It doesn't make you wrong, but it certainly makes you irrational (for that matter specifically) by any reasonable definition of what rationality is. I want to stress that "irrational" is not an insult. I'm irrational all the time, and you're irrational when you try to force me to elaborate a methodology to talk about rationality.
So here's a point where you just don't understand the point farvacola is trying to make. The first main problem, which is very common in the West, is this understanding of religion as something that is of its own category that can be viewed apart from the rest of society. This is something that you do constantly by abstracting "religion" as having its own kind of pure agency and autonomy in reality. This is a Protestant ideological import where there is a secular/religious divide in society and the individual thus "religion" can be viewed as something private, personal, and a privation of the secular and the "rational". This becomes all the more apparent when anthropological studies show that the concept of what "religion" is very, very different in cultures that are otherwise to the Western, Christian, Eurocentric world, but I digress. You cleanly separate "ideologies" from "religions" without much explanation. What makes "religion" so structurally different from "ideologies" that it isn't one? God knows.
You say I don't understand but I understand perfectly every setting of what's being said here. The issue I have is that you're both wrong about this and the reason for it is very simple. You're trying to say that religion is indissociable from the society it inhabits, which is true. The part where your argument falls apart is that, there's nothing that prevents us from talking about specific parts of society.
Everything about social sciences, from language to form of government, is indissociable from the rest of society. And yet papers are written, largely in a vacuum, about languages and dialects and forms of governments and transitions or consolidation of certain forms of governments toward others. Everything is part of a larger system and everything is affected by every other part of the system. We're aware of this. Knowing this, we can SELECT the pieces of the system that we want to study. It doesn't mean that we're ignoring the interractions between the different parts of the system. It doesn't imply that religion or religions are autonomous and separate from society. This is true of every social question ever - they have roots that go EXTREMELY far. It doesn't mean don't ask those questions.
by what conceptual method do you show that religion in itself is inherently problematic?
I made no such comment, and if I did it would be personal belief which is not illegal.
Nevermind the fact that you still haven't shown how "religion" is structurally different from "ideologies" as a whole, the only thing you've shown with this entire post is that religion can influence people in good and bad ways. There is no method here. You say this as if there is something that cannot be abused.
I have openly said that religion are akin to ideologies, I don't know why I would want to prove otherwise. You've clearly shown that you don't understand what I'm saying
In the last two quotes you have assumed 1- That I said religion is inherently problematic. I didn't say that, nor would I be able to prove it. And any method to try to prove it would have to be extremely arbitrary. 2- I don't think religions are particularly different from ideologies, I don't know why you demand of me that I prove something which I don't believe to be true. That said, even though they may not be hugely "structurally" different, it's still possible to focus on religions, which are different in some ways, otherwise we wouldn't have two different terms.
You've been relying pretty much entirely on implied truisms that beg the question. Nowhere have you shown exactly how "religion" is separate from "ideology" or even the rest of society, so the only way you could possibly say that carrying on the discourse to see the context of where religion is situated in is "stalling discussion"
You're now accusing of stalling but the last part of my post showed one thing... you've been arguing with a strawman.
And as a footnote, lets all remember how pathetic it is to accuse another of being "pretentious" or a "pseudo-intellectual" - this isn't an argument; it's just a weak false-humility. If you can't read and if you aren't familiar with an area of study, then perhaps defer yourself? Imagine how comical it would be if the author of that "progressive faith" blog went up to an evolutionary biologist and just said "Nah, all this scientific jargon - it's just pretentious, I can't understand it. You're a pseudo-intellectual."
You are pretentious, you are a pseudo-intellectual, and you are a joke and I'll also add that you're a hypocrite, having insulted my intelligence countless times despite the fact that all you've done is dropping garbage. You criticize me, you call me "pathetic" for my little attacks at you, after having tried to diminish me with your cheap fucking one liner and philosophers that you keep in your pocket because you can't have thoughts of your own.
You misunderstood what I said, you've made assumptions, and you've distorted what I said, perhaps maliciously. And you don't seem to know what humility means...
NEVER FORGET, this is the kind of person you are. This isn't an argument either:
On September 29 2013 07:21 koreasilver wrote: posts like Djzapz in religion threads wouldn't exist if everyone read Nietzsche even just once.
In conclusion, I want to say that the youtube video posted by omnic does justice to this situation. You're that guy who's trying to impress by citing other people because you can't have a thought of your own, and you try to make other people look dumb with your "jargon" (actually just simple words that you don't even know how to use). At best, you fool uneducated people.
And I'm not just gratuitously trying to insult you. You're the one who went at me by cheaply dropping Nietzsche name. Your behavior is shameful as fuck.
Let's put aside the finger of shame and pretentiousness for a moment. As I previously asked, what does your suggested line of inquiry yield in terms of insight? It is abundantly clear to most with a head for this sort of thing that religious thinking can indeed bring about some very negative attitudes. What now? What does saying this get us? The essence of my and koreasilver's posts is that there is no meaningful segue here that does not address the possibility that religion is, in and of itself, not really the culprit here. I mean, come on, you are getting incredibly huffy while defending the sanctity of a discussion begun by "I'm afraid of religious people, and I've realised I'm getting more afraid, untrusting and skeptical of them as time goes by. " If anything, this thread is full of evidence that regarding religion as a culprit has already brought a number of people beyond the pale of reasonable consideration, so when myself and others come in and say, "Hold on guys, this might not be the right way to think of things.", to immediately take offense on your part seems incredibly silly and rather suspicious. Are you harboring some sort of fear of religious people you want to talk about or something, or do you legitimately think that that is a good starting place for a discussion?
Imagine thinking there is "thoughts of one's own" - this is just textbook liberalism that actually thinks you can think in a purely abstract way that is free from context. You might as well return to a Cartesian transcendentalism and say that it's actually defendable because that's pretty much what you're saying. How in the world you are even able to say something like that as someone who does social science is beyond me given that such methodologies are comically outdated and would be laughed at by any serious scholar of the social sciences today. The fact that you're even in a position to teach or guide students is an embarrassment to the disciplines that fall under our category. And if we're going to resort to dick waving, I'm a graduate student at one of the largest religious studies departments in North America (it's a secular department) that is the largest department in the university's social sciences. Your posts are just beyond comical because absolutely nowhere have you shown at all that you have any real awareness of recent scholarship on this topic. It's just astonishing how you could write so much empty nonsense with the pretense of holding the discourse sacred when you don't even know the scholarship. And you're the one that's teaching new students? That's just desperate.
I use a loose definition of rationality, a common one. Most people should be familiar with the idea of rationality.
You truly are a rigorous, enlightened man. What a waste of time.
On September 30 2013 00:45 3772 wrote: You don't "believe in atheism" (or you can, but it makes as much sense as believing in a deity). You don't believe, that's what being atheist means.
If you're an atheist, you have a strong belief in the non-existence of god-like beings. This can make sense or not, depending on why you believe that. If instead you refuse to form a strong belief on that matter, you're an agnostic.
I don't know what Rekrul means by "people who believe in nothing", but having fear of those people only makes sense if you're talking about nihilists, and I don't think I've ever met anyone who is a real nihilist.
On September 30 2013 00:34 Djzapz wrote: I don't refuse to define rationality. I use a loose definition of rationality, a common one. Most people should be familiar with the idea of rationality. It's about using sound reasoning to reach a conclusion that's based on evidence. The belief in a God occurs without evidence, and is therefore irrational. That does not make it wrong, and it doesn't mean that God doesn't exist. Rationality doesn't lead to truths, and irrationality can lead to truths (someone could just happen to be right about the earth being spherical without evidence - it would be irrational but true).
Seems like you're talking about epistemic rationality, which is the the common definition as used by pretty much anyone except those who only use the word "rationality" in sentences like "rationality is arbitrary and cannot be defined". This definition hinges on the definition of evidence, as religious people of course see e.g. religious scriptures as evidence for their belief in gods or reincarnation or whatever. The important word here is Bayesian evidence, which, in simplified terms, is any observation that has a different likelihood depending on whether the hypothesis for which it is evidence is true.
Religious scriptures are very, very weak Bayesian evidence, as there are tons of them that all reject each other. So if you believe in a god because of a religious scripture or because other people told you about their close personal relationship with that god or whatever, you're not being rational.
Now can we please put the issue of rationality to rest...
On September 30 2013 03:17 koreasilver wrote: You truly are a rigorous, enlightened man. What a waste of time.
You dropped a one liner, and then you continued to ask for methodology behind an informal discussion, and tried to act like I really badly need to define rationality in order to proceed with this informal discussion. And when I gave you a perfectly fair explanation of what I meant by "rationality", you mocked me, again because you want a straight definition rather than a practical and workable explanation.
You artificially limit this discussion to your understanding of how to write a cheap 1st-year undergrad philosophy essay. (I don't mean this as an attack on your person, it's a legitimate observation and I believe it to be strikingly accurate)
How in the world you are even able to say something like that as someone who does social science is beyond me given that such methodologies are comically outdated and would be laughed at by any serious scholar of the social sciences today. The fact that you're even in a position to teach or guide students is an embarrassment to the disciplines that fall under our category. And if we're going to resort to dick waving, I'm a graduate student at one of the largest religious studies departments in North America (it's a secular department) that is the largest department in the university's social sciences. Your posts are just beyond comical because absolutely nowhere have you shown at all that you have any real awareness of recent scholarship on this topic. It's just astonishing how you could write so much empty nonsense with the pretense of holding the discourse sacred when you don't even know the scholarship. And you're the one that's teaching new students? That's just desperate.
If I were you, I would at least try to correct the part where you were wrong about things I said instead of just dropping your credentials and trying to insult my intelligence for the 6th of 7th time in complete despair.
Feel free to contact McGill and tell them not to give me my masters degree, and you can also contact UQAM where I teach so I'll lose my job which I'm too dumb to have .
On September 29 2013 14:55 koreasilver wrote: So to begin with, you refuse to actually define what you mean by "rationality". To be fair, sc2superfan's post is beyond reasonableness in the sense that it has no scientific content in methodological rigour.
I've been made aware of the kind of stuff you post on these forums and my suspicions are founded, so I'll try not to spend too much time here.
I don't refuse to define rationality. I use a loose definition of rationality, a common one. Most people should be familiar with the idea of rationality. It's about using sound reasoning to reach a conclusion that's based on evidence. The belief in a God occurs without evidence, and is therefore irrational. That does not make it wrong, and it doesn't mean that God doesn't exist. Rationality doesn't lead to truths, and irrationality can lead to truths (someone could just happen to be right about the earth being spherical without evidence - it would be irrational but true).
I don't know blubbdavid so I can't say what his purpose was in asking that question, but it isn't just a "cheap rhetorical question" (this deflection is just a dodge) - it's forcing you to define your terms and your methodology which you have refused to show. The recurring theme is that you continue to imply a set standard for the meaning of what reason is, how it operates, and by what standard - and by this logic you are able to say a sentence such as "The admission that their faith is not rational shows that at least they're intellectually honest". The implication is that for you "rationality" is univocal. The purpose of my Adorno, Schmitt, and Heidegger examples was to question that. Especially in the case of Schmitt, realpolitik would be nothing but absolute nonsense if you were unable to understand that the political operates under its own axioms so that even if political action was "irrational" by moral, aesthetic, and/or economic standards, it could still nevertheless be absolutely rational within its own processes. So I would ask, "What rationality? Rationality by what measure? Rationality for what purpose?". You don't offer any real explanation and simply saying that it is "obvious" and the such just doesn't cut it. It doesn't matter if we might agree completely on this point if there is no methodological rigour. Any idiot could believe in the "right things". Method is everything. Relying on truisms is nothing.
This is interesting because it's getting increasingly clear that you're a new university student (sorry if I'm wrong). I do the same thing with my students and I tell them to be sure to define their concepts to make sure we're all on the same wavelength. This is important, especially with new students, so they don't just start bullshitting their way through papers. That's why they'll preface their text by explaining what they mean with various terms, including widely understood concepts such as rationality. And yet when discussing things with people, we don't define those words unless we're trying to talk about a very specific thing.
You've drifted far, far away from reality when you start asking a man to explain his methodology on a forum, due to a perceived disconnect with a term which you should, in all likelyhood, know yourself. You would have grounds to ask for a proper definition if you had any reason to be confused about what I was saying, but I'm reading myself and they can understand what I mean if they know what people mean when they use the word "rationality". Which one of my claim is so outlandish that it needs a methodology?
Now if I understand correctly, you're asking me to define how I come to the conclusion that belief in God is irrational. When I made this affirmation, I didn't intend to make it look like a truism but I'll admit that it seems self evident to me. It's also evident to the Christians I know who admit completely that their religion is about faith. You have to make a leap of faith to believe in something which cannot be proved by the scientific method or any rigid method of acquiring evidence. Why believe in the Bible? You have to have faith. It doesn't make you wrong, but it certainly makes you irrational (for that matter specifically) by any reasonable definition of what rationality is. I want to stress that "irrational" is not an insult. I'm irrational all the time, and you're irrational when you try to force me to elaborate a methodology to talk about rationality.
So here's a point where you just don't understand the point farvacola is trying to make. The first main problem, which is very common in the West, is this understanding of religion as something that is of its own category that can be viewed apart from the rest of society. This is something that you do constantly by abstracting "religion" as having its own kind of pure agency and autonomy in reality. This is a Protestant ideological import where there is a secular/religious divide in society and the individual thus "religion" can be viewed as something private, personal, and a privation of the secular and the "rational". This becomes all the more apparent when anthropological studies show that the concept of what "religion" is very, very different in cultures that are otherwise to the Western, Christian, Eurocentric world, but I digress. You cleanly separate "ideologies" from "religions" without much explanation. What makes "religion" so structurally different from "ideologies" that it isn't one? God knows.
You say I don't understand but I understand perfectly every setting of what's being said here. The issue I have is that you're both wrong about this and the reason for it is very simple. You're trying to say that religion is indissociable from the society it inhabits, which is true. The part where your argument falls apart is that, there's nothing that prevents us from talking about specific parts of society.
Everything about social sciences, from language to form of government, is indissociable from the rest of society. And yet papers are written, largely in a vacuum, about languages and dialects and forms of governments and transitions or consolidation of certain forms of governments toward others. Everything is part of a larger system and everything is affected by every other part of the system. We're aware of this. Knowing this, we can SELECT the pieces of the system that we want to study. It doesn't mean that we're ignoring the interractions between the different parts of the system. It doesn't imply that religion or religions are autonomous and separate from society. This is true of every social question ever - they have roots that go EXTREMELY far. It doesn't mean don't ask those questions.
by what conceptual method do you show that religion in itself is inherently problematic?
I made no such comment, and if I did it would be personal belief which is not illegal.
Nevermind the fact that you still haven't shown how "religion" is structurally different from "ideologies" as a whole, the only thing you've shown with this entire post is that religion can influence people in good and bad ways. There is no method here. You say this as if there is something that cannot be abused.
I have openly said that religion are akin to ideologies, I don't know why I would want to prove otherwise. You've clearly shown that you don't understand what I'm saying
In the last two quotes you have assumed 1- That I said religion is inherently problematic. I didn't say that, nor would I be able to prove it. And any method to try to prove it would have to be extremely arbitrary. 2- I don't think religions are particularly different from ideologies, I don't know why you demand of me that I prove something which I don't believe to be true. That said, even though they may not be hugely "structurally" different, it's still possible to focus on religions, which are different in some ways, otherwise we wouldn't have two different terms.
You've been relying pretty much entirely on implied truisms that beg the question. Nowhere have you shown exactly how "religion" is separate from "ideology" or even the rest of society, so the only way you could possibly say that carrying on the discourse to see the context of where religion is situated in is "stalling discussion"
You're now accusing of stalling but the last part of my post showed one thing... you've been arguing with a strawman.
And as a footnote, lets all remember how pathetic it is to accuse another of being "pretentious" or a "pseudo-intellectual" - this isn't an argument; it's just a weak false-humility. If you can't read and if you aren't familiar with an area of study, then perhaps defer yourself? Imagine how comical it would be if the author of that "progressive faith" blog went up to an evolutionary biologist and just said "Nah, all this scientific jargon - it's just pretentious, I can't understand it. You're a pseudo-intellectual."
You are pretentious, you are a pseudo-intellectual, and you are a joke and I'll also add that you're a hypocrite, having insulted my intelligence countless times despite the fact that all you've done is dropping garbage. You criticize me, you call me "pathetic" for my little attacks at you, after having tried to diminish me with your cheap fucking one liner and philosophers that you keep in your pocket because you can't have thoughts of your own.
You misunderstood what I said, you've made assumptions, and you've distorted what I said, perhaps maliciously. And you don't seem to know what humility means...
NEVER FORGET, this is the kind of person you are. This isn't an argument either:
On September 29 2013 07:21 koreasilver wrote: posts like Djzapz in religion threads wouldn't exist if everyone read Nietzsche even just once.
In conclusion, I want to say that the youtube video posted by omnic does justice to this situation. You're that guy who's trying to impress by citing other people because you can't have a thought of your own, and you try to make other people look dumb with your "jargon" (actually just simple words that you don't even know how to use). At best, you fool uneducated people.
And I'm not just gratuitously trying to insult you. You're the one who went at me by cheaply dropping Nietzsche name. Your behavior is shameful as fuck.
Let's put aside the finger of shame and pretentiousness for a moment. As I previously asked, what does your suggested line of inquiry yield in terms of insight? It is abundantly clear to most with a head for this sort of thing that religious thinking can indeed bring about some very negative attitudes. What now? What does saying this get us? The essence of my and koreasilver's posts is that there is no meaningful segue here that does not address the possibility that religion is, in and of itself, not really the culprit here. I mean, come on, you are getting incredibly huffy while defending the sanctity of a discussion begun by "I'm afraid of religious people, and I've realised I'm getting more afraid, untrusting and skeptical of them as time goes by. " If anything, this thread is full of evidence that regarding religion as a culprit has already brought a number of people beyond the pale of reasonable consideration, so when myself and others come in and say, "Hold on guys, this might not be the right way to think of things.", to immediately take offense on your part seems incredibly silly and rather suspicious. Are you harboring some sort of fear of religious people you want to talk about or something, or do you legitimately think that that is a good starting place for a discussion?
Well see when you put it that way (in bold), it doesn't sound unreasonable to me. You bring up a question. I would admit that perhaps there are better angles to explore this question. My issue stems from the fact that you were not merely suggesting looking at this from another angle. Rather, you outright dismissed the direct approach by calling it a red herring and suggested that a more general approach would be better.
Now I understand your concerns and I even admitted that, as with all things, taking a step back and looking at the big picture can always help because it allows to process more information and more tangents. However, none of these things can serve to dismiss the topic in its infancy because this is true, like I said, with every topic ever. Everything in life is incredibly complex so you can always take a more general approach, but you have to start somewhere.
I also understand that the OP's approach makes the direct look at religion as a source of "evils" look bad, because clearly he's misguided. However, his irrational (scary word here) outlook does not mean that the approach of focusing on religion is fundamentally flawed. Certainly, we could look at religion, ideologies, beliefs more generally - but where does it stop? We could also look into psychology, branches of psychology, the various ways in which our brains can be influenced through interaction with other people or groups of people... We can stretch it out forever.
My contention is that for the sake of a thread, it's perfectly fine to limit the topic to religion and the ways religion affects the actions of people. And certainly it's fine if it bleeds out of that frame because it's always interesting to also talk about why ideologies are similar in many ways. But I see no convincing reason to pull back the frame solely because there are examples of people misusing it.
To summarize, your position can be defended and I admit that it has its virtues and serious advantages, but at the same time if you broaden the scope too much, the topic becomes unworkable for a casual discussion between us forumgoers. My issue comes from the outright dismissal of the religion-focused approach, which is by no means inherently wrong.
On September 30 2013 03:27 And G wrote: Seems like you're talking about epistemic rationality, which is the the common definition as used by pretty much anyone except those who only use the word "rationality" in sentences like "rationality is arbitrary and cannot be defined". This definition hinges on the definition of evidence, as religious people of course see e.g. religious scriptures as evidence for their belief in gods or reincarnation or whatever. The important word here is Bayesian evidence, which, in simplified terms, is any observation that has a different likelihood depending on whether the hypothesis for which it is evidence is true.
Religious scriptures are very, very weak Bayesian evidence, as there are tons of them that all reject each other. So if you believe in a god because of a religious scripture or because other people told you about their close personal relationship with that god or whatever, you're not being rational.
Now can we please put the issue of rationality to rest...
If anything, this thread is full of evidence that regarding religion as a culprit has already brought a number of people beyond the pale of reasonable consideration
Actually, this thread would profit from a re-reading the parable of the Pharisee and the publican:
Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican.
The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican.
I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess.
And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.
I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.
The pharisee is of course our very own rationalists. The irony of the parable is of course the pharisee prays, and performs all the ritualistic acts of piety, but he does not have a connection to God; his piety is egocentric. He sanctifies himself and makes himself righteous. Because he is only capable of looking into himself, he cannot even see himself, not to mention everything else of which he makes himself the supreme judge. In the same vein, our rationalists have but a superficial relationship to the truth of which they claim to be the servants: they cannot see themselves in the light of the truth, they can only see the truth in the light of themselves.
The secular mind has lost something significant in recoiling from the Platonic hierarchy of being. On this forum, everyone is his own little God, letting all the lesser Gods know what stultifying, irrational beings they are. The truth about the paradoxial nature of man (to teach he must be a learner, to be merciful he must beg forgiveness, to be rich he must be poor) which is hinted at throughout the gospels is something that is lost to our age.
On September 30 2013 20:17 MoltkeWarding wrote: The secular mind has lost something significant in recoiling from the Platonic hierarchy of being. On this forum, everyone is his own little God, letting all the lesser Gods know what stultifying, irrational beings they are. The truth about the paradoxial nature of man (to teach he must be a learner, to be merciful he must beg forgiveness, to be rich he must be poor) which is hinted at throughout the gospels is something that is lost to our age.
I understand what you're saying although I don't agree that the secular mind has 'lost' anything, because I don't think people previously had anything desirable in that respect, but wouldn't you agree that whatever it is you're talking about would also be lost by many of the 'religious' people who now believe in God but don't actually do anything about it? Because it seems to me like many of the religious people around me, most of whom are Catholics, now have this kind of belief in God in the back of their mind sometimes, but they otherwise demand the same level of evidence for everything else. They live largely like myself, using morals that they've derived from their surroundings - some of which have roots in their religion, others have roots in the greatness of drinking and fucking and other unholy business.
Also, I'm not super familiar with the Plantonic hierarchy of being, but doesn't that thing say essentially nobility is better than simple plebs and whatnot? I've read The Republic some 3-4 years ago and I've got to say that there's a lot of self-love in there
Anyway maybe some of the essence of your post was lost on me, it seemed a little preachy and haughty. In a sense it's a bit sad when you really think about it... most atheists look down on the religious, praising 'our' 'superior' ability to be rational and smart, and religious people will look down on atheists, calling them immoral beasts who are somehow lesser humans because they're missing that great piece of humanity that is the ability to have faith or something.
That many Christians treat God like a golden idol whom they only bring out of the closet at opportune times merely illustrates the point: it doesn't matter what you call yourself or what you say you believe, and it doesn't even matter what you do, except in a truthful relation to the interior essence of that thing. Here we see the difference between the worship of God, and the instrumentalisation of God. The latter will feed the mouth of famine, and cure the blight of disease, and to the extent that God can help with these noble tasks, one's relationship to him becomes a secondary virtue.
Yet, however many he will save by his actions, he still cannot save himself, and therefore cannot ultimately save anyone else: man cannot improve the world beyond his own limitations, and he cannot improve beyond his own limitations because he is himself the standard by which he measures everything (and everyone) else. The secular man can only stoop down, he cannot rise up. He may stoop down to share his virtue in so many ways: he may be the champagne socialist who is calling for the redistribution of property, he may be the sociology professor expounding a greater consciousness of white guilt, yet ultimately what is he doing, apart from playing the pharisee? Without becoming a better man himself, his call to others to become better men produces a hollow ring.*
The path of the religious man is not there to put him in a certain place, it is there to show him where he must go. Some people acknowledge the path but don't walk very far along it, what of it?
*There is presently a debate going on in the General Forum over the issue of Public masturbation, yet I cannot believe that a majority has voted against such acts of gratuitous self-satisfaction in public, since most people here are addicts of moral/intellectual masturbation: an act of egocentric ecstasy which leaves you feeling futile and depleted as soon as you've hit the post button.
Can we please get from the general topic of religion back to "are religious people scary"? And I don't quite understand why religious people are even posting here, since obviously few people would agree with the notion that a group they willingly identify with is scary.
I mean, if you want to know whether Koreans/nazis/clowns/vegetarians/anarchists are scary, you don't ask Koreans/nazis/clowns/vegetarians/anarchists, right? Or am I missing something here?
On September 27 2013 12:11 hypercube wrote: Not sure why you think leaders are religious. The pursuit of power is a highly competitive field. Arguably the most competitve one. I am sure that anyone who succeeds is extremely rational.
Other than that, most people defer to some authority over observation and rational analysis. And even those who claim to be rational in principle often fall short in practice. Religion is just one example and it might not even be the most common one by now.
On October 01 2013 00:27 And G wrote: Can we please get from the general topic of religion back to "are religious people scary"? And I don't quite understand why religious people are even posting here, since obviously few people would agree with the notion that a group they willingly identify with is scary.
I mean, if you want to know whether Koreans/nazis/clowns/vegetarians/anarchists are scary, you don't ask Koreans/nazis/clowns/vegetarians/anarchists, right? Or am I missing something here?
On October 01 2013 00:27 And G wrote: Can we please get from the general topic of religion back to "are religious people scary"? And I don't quite understand why religious people are even posting here, since obviously few people would agree with the notion that a group they willingly identify with is scary.
I mean, if you want to know whether Koreans/nazis/clowns/vegetarians/anarchists are scary, you don't ask Koreans/nazis/clowns/vegetarians/anarchists, right? Or am I missing something here?
That's exactly what you should do.
Already did, but some people keep going off on tangents, and it's difficult having a discussion alone.
On October 01 2013 00:06 MoltkeWarding wrote: Yet, however many he will save by his actions, he still cannot save himself, and therefore cannot ultimately save anyone else: man cannot improve the world beyond his own limitations, and he cannot improve beyond his own limitations because he is himself the standard by which he measures everything (and everyone) else. The secular man can only stoop down, he cannot rise up. He may stoop down to share his virtue in so many ways: he may be the champagne socialist who is calling for the redistribution of property, he may be the sociology professor expounding a greater consciousness of white guilt, yet ultimately what is he doing, apart from playing the pharisee? Without becoming a better man himself, his call to others to become better men produces a hollow ring.*
The path of the religious man is not there to put him in a certain place, it is there to show him where he must go. Some people acknowledge the path but don't walk very far along it, what of it?
I still don't understand by what standards you determine that only religious people have something more than that, though. I believe that none of us, religious or otherwise, can improve the world beyond our own limitations. There are people who improve the world in their own ways - selfishly or selflessly.
Religious people are bound by the same kind of limitations as the secular people. They can use whatever tools they have at their disposal to improve the world, and they can try to 'save' other people according to the settings of their religion... But are they really 'rising' above me?
They may believe that their 'spiritual' contributions are more relevant than my worldly contributions, but why would that make his better? After all, maybe they're worshiping a false idol.
My point is, you argue that secular people are missing out. I argue that hands stuck together, idling in prayer, don't contribute to anything that actually exists. A secular fellow might grab a hammer and build a school. (And a religious man could also grab a hammer and build a school). I say the only things that we know to exist, this universe, is the only one that we (for all intents and purposes) know we can affect.
You can believe otherwise, of course - but my issue is that 'holier than thou' vibe that you give off. It makes me sad that my good deeds are irrelevant to you . It seems to me like your beliefs, that you assume to be truthful, are making you look down on a whole bunch of people.
On October 01 2013 01:47 And G wrote: Already did, but some people keep going off on tangents, and it's difficult having a discussion alone.
I just got back from holiday and there are a lot interesting and amusing posts here.
On September 28 2013 01:26 blubbdavid wrote: What's the notion of rationality?
I don't think my view of this would surprise anyone. It's a standard scientific one of hypothesis supported by observed evidence. Suggesting a hypothesis without observation or one which has an observation which critically contradicts the hypothesis is illogical. Observations are then held up to scrutiny as to their validity. It's pretty standard.
On September 29 2013 05:55 TheOneWhoKnocks wrote: @farva We are usually polar opposites, but in this case I agree completely with your points. Another way of putting it is that religion isn't the cause of behavior such as vaccine denial, it is merely correlated with other factors which lead to such behavior, such as a lack of education.
It's an interesting idea. I don't believe it because of the hatred which is universally present in the main religions. Also, for example the catholic church actively preaches against homosexuality and the use of condoms which promotes hatred in the first and death and suffering in the second.
Anyway, this isn't really the point I was making, though I guess it is related.
On September 27 2013 10:33 deathly rat wrote: Secondly, I fear that someone who has come to what I consider such a highly irrational conclusion as believing in a god (no matter how rational you may think it is), makes me wonder what other kind of highly irrational conclusions they may reach in the future.
Oh man it really gets under my skin when people say something like this. Simply because they themselves are incapable of justifying other people's views, they deem it illogical. When it basically comes down to the fact that the person him/herself is not intelligent or educated enough to see things from a different perspective. The world would be a much better place when people would stop doing this.
Sometimes other people's views are unjustifiable, but that doesn't mean they haven't been considered.
On September 29 2013 07:46 And G wrote: Oh dear, Nietzsche. Please let's not drag this discussion down to that level.
Indeed. If you are going to argue that each argument can have it's own logic, then soon you'll be arguing about a world which is completely irrelevant to the one in which we live. If we can discuss the content, whilst keeping it relevant to things we can actually observe then we won't devolve into you shouting "Nietzsche!" and me shouting "Dawkins!" and you shouting "Kant!" and me shouting "Russell!"
To be honest when people quote ancient philosophers, it really makes me wonder if times haven't moved on from building philosophical houses of cards. Don't we understand the world significantly better now than we did a hundred years ago?
On September 29 2013 13:38 Jaaaaasper wrote: Boy the blog sure is euphoric. you might say op is enlightened by his own intelligence. Frankly I'm much more afraid of anyone who sees the world this black and white, because them vs us where one side is right and the other is mentally ill, has lead to some really scary shit.
I really don't think my OP was boastful. In fact I think I said it might be an unhealthy way of looking at things. So, no, like any good scientist I am open to peer review!
On September 30 2013 00:45 3772 wrote: You don't "believe in atheism" (or you can, but it makes as much sense as believing in a deity). You don't believe, that's what being atheist means.
If you're an atheist, you have a strong belief in the non-existence of god-like beings. This can make sense or not, depending on why you believe that. If instead you refuse to form a strong belief on that matter, you're an agnostic.
I don't know what Rekrul means by "people who believe in nothing", but having fear of those people only makes sense if you're talking about nihilists, and I don't think I've ever met anyone who is a real nihilist.
I think it's really an argument of semantics. Of course by the true definition of the word almost all atheists are agnostic, but we don't like this term because it is abused by religious people who say "haha! so you don't really KNOW! We do know, we have the answers, come to us all those who are looking for the truth!" It's a basic rhetorical flaw in the scientific method that it is open to this kind of purposeful manipulation of what it is. So we say atheist because we believe in God the same amount as we believe in anything else that has absolutely no evidence supporting it.
If you're an atheist, you have a strong belief in the non-existence of god-like beings. This can make sense or not, depending on why you believe that. If instead you refuse to form a strong belief on that matter, you're an agnostic.
Well agnostic means you don't think something is provable either way, because of the limits of our knowledge. It's still a strong belief (that the bible is not enough proof, that the human knowledge of the world is incomplete). Unfortunately, if you're a philosopher you can be agnostic about nearly everything that isn't cogito ergo sum. Are you really another person? Well I can't possibly know that. In this way agnostic is not a particularly useful description, since it applies to so much.
Atheist on the other hand is only mildly more decisive. It's not a conviction that there's no god, it's just a belief there is no god. Not that different from believing there is not motor oil in your fridge. There's a lot of reasons to believe there's no motor oil in the fridge. It's quite reasonable. It doesn't mean you deny that it's possible, and that someone could have put a bottle of it in your fridge, but it's downright unlikely given a few assumed premises about your reality. The limit of one person's knowledge may suggest we can't know whether or not there is a bottle of motor oil in the fridge, and that's technically agnostic, but most of us don't live our lives questioning every facet of our reality. We just work within the reality that presents itself to us and decide what to believe given what's presented to us so far.
Belief in god is merely taking the aspects of your reality, maybe your whole family believing in god, the whole institutions of religions, the massive churches, etc etc. and saying these things make me think it's likely there's a god. As the world has become more globalized and information has become more accessible, and science has advanced further, that's where we gain our skepticism of these institutions. When they claim 'god did it!' but now we have a scientific answer too. When fossil records contradict the history told by the bible. When we don't get called heretics for not believing in god, and when we can easily find other people who don't believe in god either because of that freedom to admit it. Evidence keeps piling up that what we thought only God could explain now doesn't need god, and we all have access to that evidence. And that's what an atheist is. An atheist could admit that there is a limit to human knowledge and that an agnostic belief is valid, but the atheist says that perceived reality is our only way of living and interacting with the world, so in the same manner they believe other human beings exist, they don't believe god does.
On September 28 2013 01:26 blubbdavid wrote: What's the notion of rationality?
I don't think my view of this would surprise anyone. It's a standard scientific one of hypothesis supported by observed evidence. Suggesting a hypothesis without observation or one which has an observation which critically contradicts the hypothesis is illogical. Observations are then held up to scrutiny as to their validity. It's pretty standard.
Religious people are crazy, I have been around my fair share of them. It is okay to have your beliefs but there are some people who take it too far. I believe in a higher power but most people only believe in a god just because they fear going to the mystical realms of hell. Really makes me feel sorry for those people who live in fear there entire life.
EPT
. It seems to me like your beliefs, that you assume to be truthful, are making you look down on a whole bunch of people.
