A Request Directed to Sciforums' "Atheists"

[spidergoat]

Faith is a better word.

 

[(Q)]

You don't believe that the universe is subject to the laws of physics?

Like I said, I hold no such beliefs, but I do understand the universe is subject to the laws of physics.

I don't have a great deal of understanding of what kind of things(?) the laws of physics are, or how human beings can even know that everything that exists in the universe is subject to them. I'm inclined to treat the idea of the universal applicability of the laws of physics more as a methodological and heuristic assumption than as metaphysical truth.

I'm even less sure how to understand the meaning of claims that nothing supernatural exists, or that nothing above or beyond nature exists, let alone understanding how human beings could ever know that those propositions are true. They look like metaphysical beliefs to me.

I think that the evidence is that we often believe things that we don't fully understand.

And conversely, we might understand many things that we don't believe. Historians of science understand the old geocentric cosmologies quite well, while no longer believing in their literal truth. Many scholars in religious studies and comparative religion have a great deal of understanding of religious philosophies that they don't personally believe in.

It's like anything else, when beliefs are prominent and evidence and facts come along, it usually shatters the beliefs.

 

[(Q)]

Because I'm the Linguistics Moderator and you have committed an error in the use of language. One which, if uncorrected, could greatly muddle this discussion.

And yet, it is clear YOU have made the error, hence the discussion gets muddled.

Bigots hate ideas, not people.

Yes, that would be your error:

Bigotry is the state of mind of a bigot: someone who, as a result of their prejudices, treats or views other people with fear, distrust or hatred on the basis of a person's ethnicity, evaluative orientation, race, religion, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, socioeconomic status, opinion, or other characteristics.

I'll let it go with an informal warning this time, but that is a violation of the SciForums rules. Do it again and you might find yourself taking another little vacation. I wonder how many of the members will miss you.

Really? You are free to insult me as you please without any consequences whatsoever and now you threaten me with a "little vacation" because of YOUR error.

You need to resign, pal. You have been so corrupted, it isn't funny. I can't imagine how you can actually look at yourself in mirror. Stunning hypocrisy.

 

[(Q)]

Q's idea that while it might be 'bigotry' to hate people, it isn't bigotry to hate abstractions or generalities, doesn't appear to me to have very much merit. If people are members of an abstract class, attacking the set to which they belong is essentially the same thing as attacking the set's members.

That is entirely false, you can attack an ideology and it has nothing to do with people, regardless if they follow the ideology. If that were not the case, everyone would be a bigot and the word immediately becomes pointless, because if everyone is a bigot, then no one is a bigot.

 

[(Q)]

I have no problem with it at all, just pointing at that there are pros and cons when it comes to religious organizations and that for every bad religious org you can dig up I can dig up a good one.

I seriously doubt that. There are few if any pros to religious organizations, they are a blight to humanity and all things reasonable, logical and rational. They offer no value, no morals, no ethics, but instead, commands to worship and praise the particular despot... sorry, the god in question.

 

[Kittamaru]

Your intellectual dishonesty is simply appalling (Q)... no wonder you couldnt hack it in a position of responsibility here

 

[(Q)]

Your intellectual dishonesty is simply appalling (Q)... no wonder you couldnt hack it in a position of responsibility here

Making up more lies or are you just projecting your own flaws?

 

[Kittamaru]

Making up more lies or are you just projecting your own flaws?

So you deny you were, at one time, a moderator here until your blatant bigotry and harassment of another mod and the membership resulted in your demotion? Or was the shame so great you have repressed that memory?

Take your lies elsewhere hypocrite. Nobody capable of free rational thought is buying them.

 

[(Q)]

So you deny you were, at one time, a moderator here until your blatant bigotry and harassment of another mod and the membership resulted in your demotion? Or was the shame so great you have repressed that memory?

Take your lies elsewhere hypocrite. Nobody capable of free rational thought is buying them.

More personal attacks and lies by moderators. Are you stalking me now?

 

[Kittamaru]

More personal attacks and lies by moderators. Are you stalking me now?

You know the truly sad part (Q)? Judging by your attitude, I can only conclude that you have managed to convince yourself that the lies you continue to spew are actually true. You are not even capable of being honest with yourself anymore. I pity you, truly I do.

 

[(Q)]

You know the truly sad part (Q)?

Yes, you are still a moderator.

Judging by your attitude, I can only conclude that you have managed to convince yourself that the lies you continue to spew are actually true. You are not even capable of being honest with yourself anymore. I pity you, truly I do.

Said the pot to the kettle.

 

[Kittamaru]

Yes, you are still a moderator.



Said the pot to the kettle.

And yet you are the one shielding yourself with lies and slander. A quick journey thru your history shows the truth... like any good blight it will be cleansed by its contact with the light, and so you hide in the shadow of dishonesty

 

[Kittamaru]

Fucking hilarious. The queen of stupidity strikes again.

They would go wherever they wanted to go because they would BE FREE!!!!



Are you so stupid as to believe people want to be owned by other people, even if that's what they were born into?



That is a bald-faced lie, and you know it.

A blast from the past for ya (Q)... or is this another "lie" I have fabricated?

 

[(Q)]

And yet you are the one shielding yourself with lies and slander. A quick journey thru your history shows the truth... like any good blight it will be cleansed by its contact with the light, and so you hide in the shadow of dishonesty

:roflmao:

 

[Kittamaru]

:roflmao:

Indeed you are rolling around, no doubt because nothing you say can hide the dishonesty and holes in your posts any longer.

EDIT - i see you have been spending some time now searching the forums, no doubt looking to dig up some old transgressions of mine.

Allow me to beat you to it - the sci fi forum, namely the Star Trek vs Star Wars thread, when dealing with TW Scott (who refused to even acknowledge evidence from still-frames of the very show he so adored) and ricrery (who's capacity for intellectual dishonesty exceeded even your own)... I often sank to their level in frustration when they would attempt to hand-wave away simple facts that were spoon fed to them from the very movies deemed "high canon" in the franchise.

James R talked to me on several occasions (including two yellow-card warnings) to calm me down. Ultimately, the truth prevailed - TW Scott left in shame, and ricrery was banned due to his inability to carry on a conversation without insulting everyone with a dissenting view.

More personal attacks and lies by moderators. Are you stalking me now?

I apologize for the delay - it was hard to search the forums on my cell phone:

So, as we can plainly see, back in 2004 you were, in fact, made a moderator. Given that you are no longer, it is self-evident you were removed; I will continue to search for the resulting thread.

The lies are plainly YOURS, (Q)... the slander and libel WILL stop, as will your continued crusade against anything and anyone of religion... you have been at this since the days of your quabbles with S.A.M. and Proud_Muslim...

 

[Kittamaru]

Further evidence to my claims that you are a bigot and a bully:

(The entertaining bit - this was directed at another mod, with virtually zero provocation)

If anyone is wondering why I've gone full pit-bull on this and am not letting it go - intellectual dishonesty is one of the quickest and surest ways to destroy any modicum of scientific debate or progress. Worse than faith in the unproven, worse than a dislike for a topic, and worse than a desire for progress... intellectual dishonesty will let someone go to any and all lengths to try and "win" the argument, regardless of the facts.

I will not stand for this... this is NOT a forum for such activity... it is supposed to be a place of, above all, science. Some people seem to take offense to the fact that theology and its study is, in fact, a science, and as such use the religion sub-forum as their personal stomping grounds to go around and belittle those with differing opinions.

That is going to end. Today. PERIOD.

As for (Q)... he has had YEARS to improve his attitude; he has not done so. He has been shown exceptional leniency with the infraction system and the rules; that leniency is, as far as many moderators, including myself, appear to be concerned, considered used up.

Cluelesshusband asked why we didn't simply get rid of the "bad eggs" in the forum... you know, perhaps it is time that happens... but it will be done within the established rules and boundaries of this site.

HOWEVER, I do have one clarification to make: I stated Q was removed from the moderation team; this is inaccurate, and for that, I publicly apologize. He resigned and requested to be removed.

For that error, (Q), you have my apology.

 

[Randwolf]

You [Fraggle] need to resign, pal. You have been so corrupted, it isn't funny. I can't imagine how you can actually look at yourself in mirror. Stunning hypocrisy.

Making up more lies or are you [Kitt] just projecting your own flaws?

Are you trying to get banned Q? I mean, WTF?

 

[Kittamaru]

Are you trying to get banned Q? I mean, WTF?

I think the problem is that (Q) is used to considering himself above the rules... much like his counterpart in Star Trek, he will quickly find that even the omnipotent have rules in the Continuum.

 

[Yazata]

I'm inclined to treat the idea of the universal applicability of the laws of physics more as a methodological and heuristic assumption than as metaphysical truth.

It's not an assumption. It's the fundamental premise of all science that the natural universe is a closed system, whose behavior can be predicted by theories derived logically from empirical observation of its past and present behavior. This is the foundation of the Scientific Method.

In other words, it's a methodological and heuristic assumption. You seem to be agreeing with me, while denying that you're doing so.

What science does is assume that natural events have natural explanations. It can't actually know that's always true, rather it's a working assumption. It tells scientists how they should proceed in trying to answer questions in natural science.

The scientific method is recursive, and this premise has been tested exhaustively, often with great hostility, for half a millennium. And no evidence has ever been discovered to falsify it.

There's no way that human beings have observed every event in the universe and conclusively accounted for every one of them in naturalistic terms. What we actually do is observe some very small subset of events, events that are observable from our spatio-temporal perspective to beings with faculties like our own. Many of those events have proven to be consistent with our current understanding of what we believe is the cosmic order, but some events inevitably remain anomalous and/or as yet unexplained. And obviously the cosmic order itself, from natural 'law' through mathematics to logic, remains fundamentally mysterious and unaccounted for. (It isn't even clear how one would go about explaining those things without circularity.)

As time goes on our understanding does seem to get better and better, but we are still a long way from omniscience. I question whether we will ever achieve that. I think that there will always be mysteries and that our understanding will always remain an ongoing work-in-progress.

I'm even less sure how to understand the meaning of claims that nothing supernatural exists, or that nothing above or beyond nature exists, let alone understanding how human beings could ever know that these propositions are true. They look like metaphysical beliefs to me.

We don't claim that these things do not exist.

Who is "we"? I think that lots of people make that claim.

But we do invoke the Rule of Laplace: Extraordinary assertions must be supported by extraordinary evidence before we are obliged to treat them with respect.

Ok. So when people start pontificating about what, if anything, exists outside or beyond the observable physical universe, they will need to produce some account of how they know what they claim to know. That applies to those who believe in supernatural beings, but it applies equally to those who insist that the observable physical universe is the only reality there is. Both claims would seem to go way beyond what the existing evidence will support.

(The most defensible position to take on matters like that is probably agnostic.)

I think that the evidence is that we often believe things that we don't fully understand.

No. It just seems that way to people who don't have PhDs and 20 years of laboratory experience in physics, chemistry, biology, etc. The folks who derive the theories that comprise the canon of science really do understand them.

So the only people with beliefs are scientists with PhDs? That's ridiculous.

And even if we restrict our discussion to scientists, they will typically admit that they and their colleagues don't always fully understand the things they are studying, but they still have beliefs about those things. For example, scientists often have beliefs about mental phenomena arising from brain-function, without being able to fully explain how it happens. Most scientists believe that the origin of life occurred naturalistically, despite their inability to fully explain life's origin at this point. Scientists have beliefs about the big-bang and about quantum mechanics, things that remain mysterious. And just about everybody assumes that the universe behaves in accordance with logic, despite their inability to fully explain what logic is and what accounts for it.

Unfortunately for the supernaturalists, the derivation of the scientific method did not merely elaborate on their theories of the behavior of the universe. It completely destroyed them.

Some of them haven't gotten the message yet.

The point that I was making is simply that it's possible to have great understanding of things that we nevertheless don't believe are true. Just as it's possible to believe in the truth of things that we don't as yet fully understand (and maybe never will).

 

[Trooper]

Yazata, wasn't St. Anselm of Canterbury the originator of that argument? It purports that since you cannot conceive that God does not exist, it is self-contradictory to deny that there exists a greatest possible being. While there are several different versions of the argument, it's still the same ole shit, different day.