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RasperFat posted:Except that the paper itself contradicts that claim in the next paragraph. The religious people give more to secular causes number was a result from an article from a charity networking group, Independent Sector, while actual researchers at the University of San Fransisco found that there wasn't a difference in secular charity giving. They only found that to be true for Californians, and most importantly, they didn't find that there was no difference, they found that when you controlled for other variables the difference disappears. Which is consistent with the argument of the paper overall that what matters is less the ideology of the particular organization and more the level of social integration and opportunities for charity available. Which neatly explains why this relationship might exist nationally but not specifically in California- there are large parts of the country where religious organizations are the primary means through which exposure to charitable organizations occur, including secular ones, but this is not as true for the most highly urbanized parts of the country.
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Mar 8, 2017 00:11
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I always like the whole "religion is literally magic" line of attack because of how transparently rigged it is. After all, what is "magic", in this context? The inclusion of a supernatural phenomenon? Then science is a religion right now and has been off and on one for as long as it has existed. The veneration of a supernatural phenomenon? That leads into the question of what "veneration" is, and you'd have to create quite the twisted definition to include all religions in it. But perhaps magic, since transubstantiation is magic but not other parts of Catholicism, apparently, simply refers to attributing symbolic natures to objects, in which case magic is everywhere. In the end, "magic" in this context is simply "religious claims we find unlikely" and thus it is tautological.
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Mar 8, 2017 00:21
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team overhead smash posted:The left isn't hostile to religion, but it is wary of it like a person with a mental illness who carries a gun. Right, it's a rigged proposition. If there was proof for religion, it would thus no longer be religion and so religion is that which is inherently unbelievable for many atheists. That is, if they were to encounter an asura, many atheists would assume that Buddhism and Hinduism are thus no longer religions, but instead branches of science. But the point is actually that there are concepts like quantum gravity which are outside of scientific understanding and operate by laws that are not understood, which would be "supernatural" in the first definition I offered and the one you offered. Clearly, this is not a good definition. I do enjoy you immediately leaping to an uncharitable slander, though, really sets the tone of the conversation, lol.
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Mar 8, 2017 00:39
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team overhead smash posted:It's not a rigged definition so much as it is the basic definitions of the concepts we are talking about. Here you concede that religion inherently contains magical handwavy bullshit and cannot contain proof - yet in your previous post you are defensive over the suggestion that people might actually point this out. Make your mind up which side you are arguing. Ah, so now we're defining religion as the unprovable. So now a significant fraction of political science and philosophy is now religion. Your definitions are not very good at defining things in such a way as to quarantine religion safely into a place where it can be destroyed at your whim and religious people continue to exist on sufferance. And your defense of the proposition that your previous definition was a good and rigorous one is that religion doesn't offer any explanations for the observable world. Which is contemptibly false. Like, I assume most of the people insisting religion is evil are clash-of-civilizations motherfuckers like TheImmigrant or suffering evangelical-induced trauma like zh1, but you seem to have never actually encountered religion even on the level of movies with devout characters. loving Blues Brothers represents a greater, infinitely subtler grasp of religion and theology than you have, and you propose that your opinions on the subject are worth anything.
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Mar 8, 2017 04:32
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rudatron posted:The fundamental assumption of religion is the 'leap of faith', i.e. the adoption of a non-parsimonious assumption in your knowledge base, because of 'divine revelation'. The fundamental assumption of science is universal skepticism and the application of parsimony to all beliefs (to state it more rigorously - minimize the total entropy of all beliefs). They're not equivalent, but you have to go beyond theories/knowledge into the process of deriving beliefs/knowledge to tell the difference. But it exists, and so for the purposes of this discussion, you can proceed from that assumption. Science is not universally skeptical or else it could not proceed. All knowledge ultimately must proceed on certain fundamental axioms, and the basic process of science as it is actually done relies on further, non-fundamental axioms which are nevertheless necessary to avoid producing a mindless glut of pointless data with every experiment or field observation. This definition is once again useless.
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Mar 8, 2017 05:10
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Religions are hierarchical? I guess all religions are just a branch of Catholicism then.
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Mar 8, 2017 05:18
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rudatron posted:Correct, but the only fundamental axiom would be parsimony. All theories have a given mathematical complexity, you justify that complexity against the explanatory power of the theory vs. data. Even something like physicalism/materialism actually ends up falling out of that assumption of parsimony - the assumption of an unseen universe is an assumption with an incredible amount of complexity that, more often than not, offers no explanatory power. Wrong. You are relying at least on the axioms that you are capable of acquiring accurate data and interpreting that data correctly, and that that data is meaningful. You need to be able to trust the information you have in order to be parsimonious about it. I appreciate that you tried to bulldoze over the problem of induction without the slightest acknowledgement that it might exist, but unfortunately you're not competent to do so.
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Mar 8, 2017 05:25
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Liquid Communism posted:I'll grant religious belief equal standing as an explanation for natural phenomena when it is falsifiable and testable. Otherwise, your 'but what if none of us are capable of accurate perception of anything at all, doesn't that mean <insert magic here> could be real?' argument is uselessly absurd. That's not an argument for religion being true, motherfucker. I'm attacking rudatron's definition of what religion is. Can you avoid jumping to loving conclusions for one single thread about religion? twodot posted:What religion are you think of where many denominations don't make empirical claims? I think almost all Christian denominations claim Jesus actually physically existed. Are you going to argue for non-historical Jesus in this thread?
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Mar 8, 2017 05:44
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twodot posted:No. Are you going to argue "Jesus was definitely a historical figure" isn't an empirical claim? If your argument against non-overlapping magisteria is a transparently tendentious argument that believing in the existence of historical figures of the religion is an empirical claim that violates the magisterium of the sciences, then you are just making the non-historical Jesus argument in sheep's clothing and there's not much point in further discussion, now is there?
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Mar 8, 2017 05:49
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twodot posted:So you are agreeing that basically all of Christianity makes at least one empirical claim, that a person named Jesus existed in a particular time and place? Can you get to the point?
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Mar 8, 2017 05:55
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twodot posted:Pellisworth claims it's unusual for religions to make empirical claims, but this is trivially false. Don't butt into conversations you don't understand. Why does this disprove the central thesis of the argument for non-overlapping magisteria? You're assuming everyone has your deformed lawyer's brain and if you can offer trivia that contradicts a broad statement you have destroyed the statement, because you have a brain that is, so far as I can tell in reading hundreds of your posts in thread after thread, incapable of interpreting meanings beyond the denotative. That is, any religion will make trivial empirical claims but those are generally irrelevant to the content of the religion. The claim that a particular Shinto shrine exists does not make Shinto's claims about the ideal emotional state for human beings empirical ones.
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Mar 8, 2017 06:00
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twodot posted:Can you make up your mind? There's no contradiction between "many do" and "most do not".
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Mar 8, 2017 06:07
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twodot posted:So given that magisteriums don't overlap, science is totally incapable of showing a person named Jesus didn't exist in that time and place, regardless of what evidence science might produce? This is so incredibly stupid it justifies burning down all law schools and going back to teaching law the way it was taught in the early 19th century, because clearly they have failed, by producing a mind like this. RasperFat posted:I like how you take commonly accepted ideas, even among theologians, and paint them with a crazy brush. So if I have faith in a general belief that the universe is moral, it is only actually faith if the universe behaves in immoral ways? That definition is once again tailored to conclude that religion is necessarily false. Religion offers meanings for events. If we wish to see the world as simply a chain of unconnected events, you can try, and I hope you do because it will stop you posting, but if a religion claims that the basic order of the universe is towards justice, that is a claim about the nature of the connections between events, which is a statement about the universe although it exists in the woolly world of emotion and thought that many atheists find uncomfortable, possibly because of how feminized it is in our culture.
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Mar 8, 2017 06:24
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twodot posted:Suppose someone invented a time machine and performed a census of that time and location, would you still think science couldn't show a person named Jesus didn't exist in that time and place? Suppose the moon was made out of green cheese, would you like a slice? Suppose you made points that were relevant instead of lovely efforts at indirect approach?
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Mar 8, 2017 06:28
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twodot posted:So you are fine with overlapping magisteria? You've agreed the existence of Jesus is both the domain of science and the Catholic Church in this thread. Oh my god, and there are ethical practices in psychological and biological experiments too. These obviously contradict the point of the article in its entirety instead of being pointless nitpickery to say "religious people must be crushed" without actually saying it at any point. RasperFat posted:You're playing a semantic game with faith. Religious faith is specifically defined as believing in the face of difficult evidence. Believing that your friend will pay you back that $20 is not the same as having faith that I am going to heaven. What exactly is the evidence against an afterlife which distinguishes "I believe there is life elsewhere in the universe" from "I believe in an afterlife", that is, evidence which is not based on probabilistic claims? Your entire proposition here is that religious faith is different from other kinds because it is inherently stupid, and that seems to be rigging the game- if someone has faith based on their empirical subjectivity, it is no longer religious because they have reasons to believe it. You seem to have taken a statement like "I believe because it is absurd" and concluded that all religion depends on it. What are these fundamentally wrong ideas about humanity? Like, Islam doesn't claim any particular primacy for humans as intelligent life. Neither does Buddhism. And that's just off the top of my head. Dude, I was making a general claim, and if you decide to take it personally, I hope you use the opportunity to work on presenting your opinions in a clearer way. Brainiac Five fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Mar 8, 2017 |
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Mar 8, 2017 06:43
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RasperFat posted:Empirical evidence of an afterlife is completely non existent and based off of wishful thinking. The probability of life existing elsewhere in the universe is essentially 100%, as we have already discovered extinct microbes on mars. We have evidence that stimulus such as lightning can cause the formation of lipid layers, like cells use, when striking nonorganic carbon materials. There's a myriad of other ways that organic materials can be created by natural phenomenon, giving us good cause to think life can form in the right conditions anywhere. The idea that there is probably life elsewhere in the universe is based on testable claims, while the idea of the afterlife is based off of zero testable claims. This is not a difficult distinction. We haven't actually discovered microbes on mars, dead or alive. There's hints but no proof, as it were. See, you're ignoring the point about probability. It is very unlikely that life exists in any particular location, so far as we know, and the Fermi paradox offers some substantial evidence that life must be rare or limited in the universe. But there is no direct evidence against either life or the afterlife, there is simply unlikelihood of varying degrees. Which is not disproof. Now, you could bring up Russell's teapot, and that would be a good argument against basing many decisions on the hypothetical afterlife, but that's not really relevant to its existence. Why are those ideas fundamentally wrong? In Islam, Mecca is important because of historical reasons, not because it alone in the universe has divine mana. I really don't know where to start with your understanding of Buddhism. I really just don't. There are some really fascinating implications that come from the nonexistence of the soul, but I don't think you'd be willing to discuss them. I mean, if I have faith that someone loves me, I can never actually prove it to be true because I can't peek inside their heads and I seriously doubt an MRI or PET scan will ever allow us to determine whether someone actually loves another person or not (and there are good reasons to believe so) so therefore belief that parents love children is now religion. This definition is useless.
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Mar 8, 2017 07:30
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RasperFat posted:There isn't definitive proof of microbes yet, but hey look there is physical evidence we can examine and explore more in the future. We can get answers if we keep digging. So now that you've admitted you lie and plan to continue lying out of your sheer contempt for someone daring to disagree with you, is there any point in further discussion? I clearly cannot trust anything you write from this point onward to be honest. You also seem to not understand what proof is. You cannot prove anything much about the state of another person's mind. There are limits to absolute knowledge of that. The relative probability of something does not constitute proof of its existence, as the case of black swans should show handily. For someone sneering about how other people don't understand science, you don't seem to have a good grasp on what can and cannot be proven.
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Mar 8, 2017 13:53
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RasperFat posted:Holy poo poo you're insufferable. You never engage any actual arguments I'm making. Why am I a liar? Because I got a detail wrong on something? You said that your error was caused by the need to talk down to me, motherfucker. Don't whine and whimper when someone hits back. My reason for believing positive proof of a state of mind beyond simplistic ones is unlikely to ever be possible is the ability of the brain to function with severe damage and the extent to which thinking appears to occur at a higher level of organization than simple nerve cell activation, which suggests a receding infinity of unfalsifiability more than a successful effort to prove the mind can be manipulated. The evidence against black swans existing was that none had been observed until they were discovered in Australia. The "proof" was a probabilistic claim, not an absolute statement that black pigmentation was impossible for swans to have. Which is immediately applicable to your confusion between making positive statements and pointing out unlikelihood is not disproof. For example, it is, to understate things, unlikely that consciousness continues after apparent death by the state of consciousness being replicated on other substrata by chance in such a way as to produce continuity of experience, but there is no strong evidence that this cannot happen either. To say that this is disproven would be a false statement, even though it is an unlikely statement.
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Mar 8, 2017 16:51
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It is interesting to note that trying to exterminate religiosity isn't apparently "hostility".
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Mar 8, 2017 21:03
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MaxxBot posted:It's also "hostile" towards fundies for me to have the gall to exist in society as a gay without being murdered. ? I'm talking about twodot's claim that every religious person is delusional and must be corrected. That's different from hating evangelical Christians for being dogshit bigots.
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Mar 8, 2017 21:07
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RasperFat posted:I said that because you keep intentionally using bullshit parallels. The claims about probability of alien life are not analogous to claims about consciousness surviving past death. They are not equatable in the way you keep insisting they are. They are, in fact, equatable as claims about reality and your argument makes it clear that you have taken it as a prior that any claims which you process as spiritual are inherently false no matter what. Which is to say that you have designated the truth-value of certain statements as false regardless of evidence. This is not a bad thing, but it is not a scientific thing to do, unless you have a grasp of logic that is purely binary, in which case I suggest returning to these questions after you graduate from high school.
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Mar 8, 2017 21:26
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Avalerion posted:Not sure how you can argue religion is not a delusion of sorts, belief in something without proof is the whole point of faith, it's the definition of both. If belief in something without proof is insane, then we are all insane. Furthermore, this definition of religion is extremely focused on Protestant Christianity to the exclusion of all other religions, so it's useless.
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Mar 8, 2017 21:59
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Who What Now posted:What evidence is there for the spiritual? What even is "spiritual"? That's not really the point. The point is that the scientific attitude towards the existence of things which are unproven is ideally an agnostic one, and that dismissing it out of hand is not scientific. That doesn't mean that it's wrong to do so, but it corrupts scientific reasoning by demanding that you reject certain premises a priori, and the natural end result of it, indeed the goal of people like zh1, is to annihilate all religiosity between anti-intellectual religious groups and anti-religious atheism.
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Mar 9, 2017 00:52
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The fundamental issue is that there are a great many people who become atheists from being raised in a bigoted religious environment like evangelical Protestantism without ever abandoning the ways of thinking it produces, so they end up latching onto something as the absolute truth which must push out all "competing" beliefs because they are necessarily wrong, and since this is usually the sciences they become quick to insist that science crushes religion and must destroy it. They do manage to put up a pretense that they have "no problem" with religious people so long as they're not bigoted, but their actions make it clear that their endgoal is to annihilate religion and religiosity.
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Mar 9, 2017 00:57
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RasperFat posted:You've been ping ponging between semantic games ad absurdum and false dichotomies so let's define things more clearly. "Supernatural" is not a meaningful term here, because before the discovery of nuclear fusion the means by which the sun gave off heat and light was supernatural, since the sun could not, by any known means, have given off sufficient heat and light to warm the Earth for long enough to be consistent with the fossil record. So if we had good physical evidence for the soul, it would not be supernatural anymore. The argument is rigged.
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Mar 9, 2017 05:23
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RasperFat posted:Escaping to semantic bullshit again? These are a lot of words to repeat what you've already said, which is that "supernatural" does not actually mean "beyond what is natural/known" but really means "something I have concluded is impossible a priori". You will undoubtedly respond that your definition is actually "anything which involves magic", never defining "magic", placing the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot and other cryptids firmly in the realm of the natural, alongside UFO encounters. What we have here is more or less a fetishized science, where whether you can see yourself loving a test-tube in relation to something is what's really important.
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Mar 9, 2017 13:17
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Fetishization of scientific aesthetics is anti-science, because if we understand science as being a family of processes of inquiry, treating science as being about lab coats and pith helmets degrades science into a magical process where ritual vestments are what gives it authority and power. But many people cling to science as, in the words of the hymn, the solid rock on which they stand, all other ground being sinking sand and so this mythologization is in a sense inevitable.
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Mar 9, 2017 13:23
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Cingulate posted:I think in this world, fetishization of science ranks pretty low on the "list of actual problems for science sorted by how much of a problem they actually are", and religion ranks much higher. Could even imagine it has a net-positive effect in that it allows people who don't actually understand science to appreciate science and scientists. And a lot of good scientists are really insecure and need that validation. Okay good luck re-educating religious people then Cingulate.
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Mar 9, 2017 13:53
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Should university programs in the natural sciences ban religious people from enrolling, or should they be required to undergo indoctrination? After all, they are an existential threat to the program, according to at least some of the people in this thread.
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Mar 9, 2017 13:55
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Liquid Communism posted:To the extent that those religious people outright believe that said natural science cannot be valid? Yes. I can't imagine, for example, that a devout Young Earth Creationist is going to have much to offer a paleontology program, and is rather likely to serve as a distraction and disruption in other students' learning. So you refuse to answer the question and just offer a tawdry deflection. According to a number of people in this thread, science and religion cannot coexist and so religious people, by extension, cannot be good scientists. Shouldn't they, as a group, then be banned or forcibly deconverted, then?
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Mar 9, 2017 14:03
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Liquid Communism posted:I'm sorry you can't parse a direct answer, should I have worded it as a koan? Your answer was irrelevant to the actual question, but I see you're just a snivelling little child.
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Mar 9, 2017 14:29
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Liquid Communism posted:Does that help your abysmal reading comprehension, or are you just here to be a smug pedant? If you are 'actually' asking a different question, then use your words. Your answer is irrelevant to the question of whether people are willing to put their money where their mouth is with regards to "religion is incompatible with science" and "religious people are inherently insane". That is, if you believe that religious people are inherently delusional, then surely they must be treated like any other person with delusions and medicated or otherwise treated into being irreligious. If you believe that religion is incompatible with science, religious people cannot be scientists without corrupting science. If you don't believe those things, your nitwit opinions are irrelevant squeaking that does nothing but hamper the process of forcing New Atheists to confront the consequences of their sick owns on idiot godhavers.
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Mar 9, 2017 16:29
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Liquid Communism posted:Show me on the doll where the mean atheist touched you. I wasn't specifically addressing you at first, "Liquid Communism", although I'm grateful you decided to make a child molestation joke and shriek about how I'm strawmanning you. It seems the guilty really do flee when no one pursues.
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Mar 9, 2017 16:43
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Avalerion posted:Who's calling for religious delusions to be treated? Since religiosity has a history of leading people to self-harm (Vietnamese monks burning themselves alive as a means of protest), I should think it would be obvious that drugging people into atheism would be necessary if we characterize religiosity as insanity.
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Mar 9, 2017 17:57
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I do like the confession of immorality implicit in "religion is insanity, but don't treat the insane."
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Mar 9, 2017 17:59
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Idk dude, if someone gets taken by paramedics for a suicide attempt they get treated even if they're depressed, so this libertarian-individualist approach to medicine seems to be your ideal rather than a description of reality. Really, you guys want to be able to chuckle about how the Jewish faith is so stupid and will be destroyed in the ever-receding future without committing yourself to doing anything. While I would prefer you to get over your inferiority complexes, idiotic crusades to annihilate religion would at least leave you free from the stain of being whiny little babies begging for a messianic figure to do all the work for you.
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Mar 9, 2017 18:16
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Cingulate posted:I can't connect this to anything here. I get you're angry and/or afraid, but I don't understand what you're talking about. Maybe if you reformulate it, I will be able to see what you're concerned about? Cingulate, you'd need to have a brain that wasn't riddled with wormholes to understand that the way you talk about religion is to fantasize about its imminent nonexistence but you are unwilling to take any action to exterminate the madness that is religion, retreating into insisting that it's harmless. That is, either your statements about religion are just a form of extended masturbation, or you're unwilling to take action to make your desires reality, but either condition is one you all must be liberated from.
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Mar 9, 2017 18:26
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CommieGIR posted:Cool, let's just trample on Freedom of expession then. Hmm?
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Mar 9, 2017 18:30
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Cingulate posted:This is a bit confusing and vague (what statements of mine?..), but maybe it will help you see where I'm coming from to consider that there are many things in this world I wish were different, but where I think I have no rights and consequently no intentions to demand or induce change. E.g. I wish all people would agree that I'm a super nice and cool person and give me back rubs and bake me cookies, but I don't think I have a right to steal other people's cookies or rub my back against their hands like a mad cat, or demand that they like me. I have opinions, but I'm usually not in a good position to decide for others. So, in other words, you wish to be hypocritical and for no one to work on making you not so. Well, I got freedom of speech to tell you you're a hypocrite over and over, buddy.
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Mar 9, 2017 18:42
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Cingulate posted:I don't understand what you mean. I know you don't.
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Mar 9, 2017 18:46
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