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Irony Be My Shield posted:So in other words the OP is correct and biblical scripture is irrelevant, since it just tells you whatever you want it to? I get this same feeling with a lot of apologist arguments - yeah you can entirely dodge consistency and evidence based criticisms by making your position more vague, but it serves to completely undermine the purpose of making your argument in the first place. The fact that religion is becoming less relevant in the (American) political sphere is obvious. But that isn't because we suddenly gained the ability to read verses out of context.
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Mar 3, 2015 03:16
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CommieGIR posted:LESS Relevant? How so? Its been pushed into the public sphere and political sphere even more in the last decade, despite the decline of religion in the population. During the 20th century, creationism left public schools, and birth control, blasphemy, and no-fault divorce became legal. In what ways do you think the trend is reversing? 
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Mar 3, 2015 03:54
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CommieGIR posted:It'd be nice if the Gallup poll had some bearing of the sheer amount of Right Wing theological dumbassery that gets voted in by a vocal minority What exactly are you dealing with now?
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Mar 3, 2015 04:04
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Who What Now posted:That's great if you just want some hippy feel-good philosophical security blankets, but it's awful if you actually care about truth. What is truth?
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Mar 3, 2015 18:00
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Who What Now posted:That which most accurately describes or comports with reality. 49% of Americans have had a religious experience: http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-number/mystical-experiences/ Is that collective enough?
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Mar 3, 2015 19:27
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Who What Now posted:Considering that very few line up with any significant regularity, no, not at all. Find me 49% of Americans that have had the same religious experience and can accurately describe what, exactly, it entails then you'll be on to something. Until then a warm and fuzzy feeling doesn't mean poo poo. If I did that the claim would shift to "they're just copying what they heard from others" (see also: alien abductions). Anyway, even discounting the fact that collective reality can only be interpreted through the lens of the individual, "truth" could refer to either one's individual reality or a collective one. Why is the latter better?
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Mar 3, 2015 20:00
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Who What Now posted:The latter is better because we don't live in isolation. You have to live and interact with other people and it's in everyone's best interest to operate with the knowledge that most accurately represents all individual perceptions of reality. If in your reality you believe that Jesus will literally take the wheel and allow your car to speed through intersections without you driving it then you're going to end up killing yourself and people around you. Or do you really think God is going to safely guide your car through traffic for you? I'm talking about morals. If someone claims to have had a religious experience and that everyone has a moral obligation to speed through intersections (or do anything else), that's an unfalsifiable claim. Most other people won't be happy with our lawbreaker, and they would be right to be angry in their own moral framework. But that doesn't make the would-be prophet objectively wrong.
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Mar 3, 2015 20:15
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Irony Be My Shield posted:So in other words your "individual realities" that aren't based on any kind of external evidence can directly endanger other people and we must be able to challenge them? Being religious doesn't directly endanger other people. Who What Now posted:There's no such thing as objective morality, so that's a complete red herring. But if we go by some very simple a priori criteria (that life is preferable to death, not pain preferable to pain, health preferable to sickness; with exceptions for almost all of them) that almost everyone already agrees with then we can gauge which kinds of morality are better than others. And, shockingly, morality that basis itself on shared reality tends to do better than morality based on unsubstantiated beliefs. Not so shockingly religions co-opted these morals and tried to claim they came up with them first. If someone is led to a morality based on shared reality because of religion, and said religion makes them feel better about their life, who gives a poo poo? Secular humanism and religion with equivalent morals lead to the same result, so what does it matter if it's caused by a love of humanity or the love of a deity?
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Mar 3, 2015 20:48
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Who What Now posted:Partially because people who dont have a moral system based on shared reality use other people in the same religion as a shield from criticism, especially when they are actively harming people. Just look to all the kids who die every year because their parents try to pray away the diabetes, or evangelical home schooling. And? Look at all the kids each year who die because people think vaccines are a plot to impurify our bodily fluids. The common factor between vaccine conspiracies and prayer healing, and not religion, is that they're falsifiable. You can make moral arguments based off of shared reality evidence, but the axioms that underlie the morals are arbitrary.
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Mar 3, 2015 21:30
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CommieGIR posted:Please identify how prayer is falsifiable. Thanks in advance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studies_on_intercessory_prayer
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Mar 3, 2015 21:38
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CommieGIR posted:Just because someone conducted a study does not make prayer falsifiable, and the results were either no effect or inconclusive. I'm suggesting that you can do RCTs on "praying for other people will help them beyond the placebo effect", and that the studies that have done so have mostly found no effect.
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Mar 3, 2015 21:44
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CommieGIR posted:That doesn't make prayer falsifiable. You obviously can't falsify the efficacy of praying for yourself. But I was responding to "their parents try to pray away the diabetes," which has been falsified.
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Mar 3, 2015 21:49
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Irony Be My Shield posted:In the majority of cases, yeah. But if you put up a barrier and say "you can't question someone's unfalsifiable beliefs, it's true to them!" then you're helping to protect people with harmful unfalsifiable beliefs, be they religious or otherwise. To use a more real-world example, how about those who think their children should not receive blood transfusions because they think it goes against god's will? We make a moral decision that the child's physical health is more important than the parent's impression of their spiritual health. CommieGIR posted:Its has to be empirically verifiable to even be considered falsifiable. Prayer is not quantifiable. The relaxation found in prayer can lead to affects that directly influence stress, but that does not mean prayer was effective as a health treatment. Okay? I've been saying prayer, to the extent it can be falsified, has been.
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Mar 3, 2015 22:11
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