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NikkolasKing posted:How is this any different from following civic law? True, we have Anarchists on the Left but by and large I think most people agree a State is necessary to some extent. There absolutely is. A functioning State claims its power to enforce laws based on the consent of the populace to be governed, and has a duty to work in the best interest of those governed. A religious authority claims its right to enforce its laws based on divine revelation, and supposes a duty to force those governed to comply to its dogma for the good of their immortal souls. How stringently they enforce that dogma varies on sect and what the surrounding secular government will allow.
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Mar 7, 2017 09:42
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Mr. Wiggles posted:Lo, I have been summoned. On a more telling note, has the Church's teaching on transubstantiation of the Eucharist changed substantially within the last couple decades? Because if not, as a faithful Catholic, you are professing to a true and honest belief in literal magic as a core part of your faith.
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Mar 7, 2017 17:55
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Brainiac Five posted: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. 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.
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Mar 8, 2017 05:42
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CommieGIR posted:Ehhhhhhhhhh....kind of. Leaps of Faith in science still assume an evidentiary result at the end, or are often based on at least some minute level of evidence to begin with. Its not really the same as a 'leap of faith' i.e. a Religious level of faith. If you take a leap of faith in science and get no tangible results at the end and no evidence to support your leap, it was for naught. Sure, you should publish the negative result, but if you were taking the leap without using the scientific method to SUPPORT taking that leap in the first place, people are going to be very wary of your paper. Versus, a leap of faith in the religious sense can be just dismissed regardless of the outcome as 'God works in mysterious ways'. Science seeks a consensus because results that are not repeatable prove nothing. If you had enough time and materials, you could derive the entire canon of scientific knowledge by replicating the experimental data yourself. The only real problem with it is that it would take far longer than a human lifetime at this point to re-prove everything from foundational principals. Edit : autocorrect hates me this morning. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 15:53 on Mar 8, 2017 |
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Mar 8, 2017 15:47
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TomViolence posted:To put another slant on things, the scientific worldview used to mean acknowledging all things are possible, these days it seems it's been appropriated towards whittling away the very idea of possibility itself, narrowing our imaginative horizons and banalising the world to promote a paralysing, pedantic sociocultural stasis. For this reason the left should be more hostile to the turgid scientific (or, more properly, science-fetishist) chauvinism of the new atheists and more open to religion, because at least religion posits an alternative vision of the world beyond the stagnant, exhausted cultural landscape of the early 21st century. Is this one of the themes you explore in your 80,000 word Wallace and Gromit fanfiction?
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Mar 9, 2017 12:47
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Brainiac Five posted: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. 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. Luckily, most people of that belief system avoid the mainstream educational system and prefer to attend institutions that share their beliefs.
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Mar 9, 2017 13:59
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Brainiac Five posted: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? I'm sorry you can't parse a direct answer, should I have worded it as a koan?
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Mar 9, 2017 14:20
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Brainiac Five posted:Your answer was irrelevant to the actual question, but I see you're just a snivelling little child. Brainiac Five posted:Should university programs in the natural sciences ban religious people from enrolling, or should they be required to undergo indoctrination? Liquid Communism posted:To the extent that those religious people outright believe that said natural science cannot be valid? Yes. 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.
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Mar 9, 2017 14:42
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Brainiac Five posted: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. Show me on the doll where the mean atheist touched you. I'm not going to make the argument that you're desperately baiting for, that there should be an absolute ban on people of religious faith in STEM fields. Build your own straw men.
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Mar 9, 2017 16:41
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Avalerion posted:Who's calling for religious delusions to be treated? So far as I can tell, Brainiac is. I haven't really seen anyone else go there, he just keeps pushing the envelope further in hopes someone will try to defend the arguments he's trying to counter.
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Mar 9, 2017 17:11
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I think we may need a flowchart here, as I'm not really getting what exactly it is about not agreeing to your ridiculously overblown parody of an anti religious position that makes Cingulate a hypocrite either. Edit: autocorrect autocorrected Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Mar 9, 2017 |
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Mar 9, 2017 18:50
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Avalerion posted:I'm not going to try disprove "religion" because I think people much better equipped to do that have already argued the point convincingly countless times before me. You're stepping in the poo poo. Do not let Brainiac put you in the position of trying to prove the negative of an unfalsifiable belief. Between this and the claims of hypocrisy whenever someone won't take their argument to the extremes that Brainiac desires for purposes of taking potshots at strawmen, I figured it was pretty obvious that they're just trolling by now.
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Mar 9, 2017 22:26
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Brainiac Five posted:No thank you, I have no intention of slamming my foot on top of a landmine just because you're asking me to. Hell, your incompetence at using the quote function has somehow made me less likely to do so. Is the shocking lack of self-awareness in your posting normal? You might want to step away and breathe for a minute, and maybe come back in a better state of mind for discussion.
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Mar 9, 2017 23:37
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Brainiac Five posted:Civility is the hobgoblin of little minds. I'm fairly certain that the only one in the thread who is insinuating that religious people are crazy is you.
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Mar 9, 2017 23:52
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Brainiac Five posted:Maybe you should learn to read, and then apply this skill you have learned to determine what "delusional" means, and then consider what it would mean to suggest that being religious is to be inherently delusional. I think you're projecting a little there, friend. The only one I've yet seen bring up delusion in the context of religion is you. The strongest thing I've said, and which I stand behind, is that a sincere belief in physical transubstantiation is effectively a belief in magic.
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Mar 10, 2017 00:10
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Confounding Factor posted:Hey misery loves company. Yes his posting is abrasively odious, I agree with you but if we can get past the tone what do you find objectionable that religion (maybe in the narrow sense) can never be deemed either true or false? What if instead religions are meaningful in how they relate to our existential condition? I think particular religions can be a fruitful inquiry into who we are and who we should become. This might sound reductionist but I'm not privy to evaluating religions purely on factual merits. I'm not sure that matters. I consider it this way. So long as religion does not make empirical claims about the physical universe, there is no conflict. Scientific thought really doesn't have any reason to try to disprove the existence of the soul, or of an afterlife, because in both cases they are trying to prove a negative in arenas where empirical evidence is not possible. Sadly, religion (specifically American Evangelical Christianity) really likes to make outlandish empirical claims about the physical universe, so there will be argument there. Back to the main topic of the thread, I would suggest that a lot of leftists are also uncomfortable with the social claims of some sects of the Abrahamic religions, especially as relates to the 'proper' place of women in the world, homosexuality, and the like.
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Mar 10, 2017 09:40
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TomViolence posted:Explain what you mean by "best" societies. When I look at the secular liberal west I don't see a gleaming city on a hill, I see one whose ostensible greatness is built on a foundation of corpses. The west boasts the "best" societies because it's made much of the rest of the world a great deal harder to live in, to suggest that we have better lives because we're relatively secular puts the blame for this squarely on the victims of our own imperialism, painting them as regressive bumpkins doomed from clinging to their retrograde beliefs. See, this is why I say religion is a nexus of resistance to capital's overreach, often it's the only thing left to those it butchers, exploits and discards. All civilization is built on a pile of corpses. Such is the nature of human history. The only moral thing we can do about it now is to try and produce less of them.
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Mar 10, 2017 16:12
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Bolocko posted:Nah, there's major sexual asymmetry here: there's no equivalent of this procedure for a man if he was suspected of straying. On the other hand, if found "guilty" by this procedure she'd not still be sentenced to capital punishment, but only shamed and, likely, divorced. (If CAUGHT in the act of adultery, man and woman alike were due death.) 'Only' shamed and likely divorced in a society where women were property, and could not own anything nor do paid work. So at best she would spend the rest of her life as an unpaid drudge for whatever male relative felt like maybe feeding her sometimes. Even slaves have value in that they can be sold, a woman who has lost her 'purity' is less than worthless in that society.
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Mar 13, 2017 10:14
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NikkolasKing posted:How can you change a person's self-definition? This reminds me of a video I saw of a fellow speaking at the UN, praising how young people today will no longer be held down by the myth of race. Because even older and wiser people like himself, who understand racism is wrong, are still shackled by being brought up in a culture that places such an emphasis on it. Programming. See conversion therapy and 'boot camps'. It doesn't work very well, but if you don't care about the suicides then you can get a person who can superficially fit the shibboleths of a given society until the PTSD eventually cracks them.
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Mar 13, 2017 13:51
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Loving Life Partner posted:It's hard to overstate the extent of which false consciousness has permeated American thought, the "American Dream", belief in a 'just world', etc. America's nickname as THE GREAT SATAN is one apt cherry I love (from a line of leftism I mostly don't), I feel like we're uniquely in the history of the world a capitalist society the likes of which would have been Marx's nightmare final boss for the prole revolution.The conditions of our founding, expansion, the restructuring of the South IN A BIG WAY all have created this hellbeast of class blind angry exploited people who can't imagine or reach for much beyond vague tribalism and faith based reflexes Not a big enough way. We should have given Sherman six months and as many torches as he could carry. A huge part of our present political problems stem from being insufficiently firm with the boot that was on the South's neck after the Civil War.
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Mar 14, 2017 07:24
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Cingulate posted:I remember, and prefer, the left that believed it was suffering and oppression that created reactionary ideologies, with the hope that people, ever malleable, could be uplifted, with adequate nutrition, health, love and support, and education into the humanitarian and cosmopolitan spirit. Yeah, well, as we say to Libertarians : "on the other hand, recorded history"
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Mar 14, 2017 10:34
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zh1 posted:Are we really stuck on "without god what's to stop us from doing whatever we want"? How old is everyone here? Hey, we haven't gotten to the Problem of Evil yet. 
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Mar 14, 2017 11:28
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Cingulate posted:I believe that is what Libertarians like to say to Communists ..? It's really applicable to both. I'm mostly using it here as a rejection that, historically, radicals are uplifted via education. As is very relevant to the thread topic, it is very difficult to argue someone logically out of a position that they never talked themselves into logically. Indoctrination and bad cultural norms are incredibly powerful, and historically are only broken by forceful intervention into the culture that produces them.
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Mar 14, 2017 13:17
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Who What Now posted:How do you know free will even exists? Determinism is a pastry of an entirely different flavor, and not a pleasant one at that. Either way, it's a bum rap. The Problem of Evil still exists, and was enough to break my faith. If anything, in a fully deterministic universe the Problem is worse, because it means that all evil is actively chosen by God.
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Mar 22, 2017 05:16
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The Kingfish posted:That's simply not true. A society that doesn't know how to wage war would be a moral society than our own. The knowledge of how to wage war is inherent in man. From the moment we raise a stick to kill a predator, we understand that the same can be done to that annoying rear end in a top hat across the valley who keeps stealing all the good rocks.
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Mar 23, 2017 13:46
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Who What Now posted:If it's completely arbitrary and up to god then what does it matter that we're in the "age of the church"? That's one of the many, many hangups about an omniscient and omnipotent god. The Church can talk a lot of poo poo about how you should behave, but God could do literally anything at any moment, no matter what they say.
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Mar 24, 2017 13:24
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Shbobdb posted:The criticism is that religion, in general (though Christianity in America in specific) transmits awful morals. Even without criticizing the framework, Christian morality in particular is at odds with secular morality at the level of base assumptions of reward. The goal, for secular morality, is that moral behavior is rewarded with a happy life. Christian morality, on the other hand, is still focused on its founding as a Roman death cult, where one should bear all sorts of privation and unhappiness in life in exchange for a reward in the afterlife.
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Mar 29, 2017 05:08
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CountFosco posted:Are those really the hills you want to die on? Besides, there are secular arguments and atheists against abortion. A minority, sure, but what are you going to do about them? Tell them to gently caress off. I'm not a huge fan myself, but I'm a man. My reservations do not loving matter unless the child in question is mine, and I do not have any right to force a woman to carry a child to term just because I want her to.
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Mar 30, 2017 05:58
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