Write4U
Valued Senior Member
If I started believing in God today, what would change for me? Any ideas? I haven't a clue.
Religious Nonsense
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If I started believing in God today, what would change for me? Any ideas? I haven't a clue.
With us animals being within that 70% BUT the only animal which can break into the bee/flower marrage with a fine haired paint brush
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
A good thing it is. As I understand it, China is facing a crisis in certain areas where the honeybee has disappeared, and all the fruit orchards now need manual pollination.With us animals being within that 70% BUT the only animal which can break into the bee/flower marrage with a fine haired paint brush
So this thread, like most, if not all, Religion threads, is derailed. The derailing posts tho demonstrate the point of the thread.
Theists present nonsense with no evidence & no explanation & try to criticize atheists for not accepting it.
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Theists present nonsense with no evidence & no explanation & try to criticize atheists for not accepting it.
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Only to the degree I am responsible for introducing the notion of God.
If you or others want to run around with square pegs you achieve nothing by pointing at round holes in atheistic delight at the impossiibility at the task you have set before yourself, I don't own that.
.... So if you think its a case of the truth being the truth because of the truth ....etc etc
To say the least, the world would be extremely dysfunctional if for some mad reason everyone decided to rigorously apply your standard for knowledge.
To be fair, you offer some reprieve from global madness with your bit in bold.
And to be fair again, it appears you are just playing with the semantics of knowledge. Does "to know" require the need to control (absolutely or fully) or the need "to apply" .. or perhaps even a mix of both (which would reduce the "control" factor down a substantial notch or two)?
If a qualified doctor asks us to take a tablet, in order "to know" in that situation, do we have to develop a knowledge base over probably a dozen vocational fields (to know not only the field of medical practioning, but the field of pharmacy, chemistry, etc to personally verify and test everything is what they say it is and does what they say it does, from the Dr.s advice to the tablet etc etc that all above board?) ... or simply that all the said parties involved in delivering the goods are working with my best interests at heart?
Or to put it another way, if a lay person is complaining about some shortcoming about being at the receiving end of a medical service, what, more often than not, does the complainant generally field as the solution for nipping the problem in the bud?
They also concede if that trend becomes more prominent on a global scale, we are colossally fucked.
Human civilization requires pollination of grain crops, at its core.
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
That is a misleading and fatally flawed statement. I demand no such thing.
I demand that the theist write a rational justification for using the name God as that rational alternative. I don't find that rational at all. In fact I find that highly irrational, in view of the flawed scriptural evidence and no physical evidence at all for an extra-dimensional God.
Somehow we have come to believe that God wrote the bible. That is utterly false, all three Abrahamic scriptures were written by men. The three scriptures abound with inconsistencies, assumptions and outright misrepresentation, which is completely understandable.
The scribes all heard God say the same thing but in a slightly different accent, and here we are 3000 years later and we still have not managed to combine all religions into a single consensus religion. Isn't that odd? You know why?
Because each religion claims exclusive rights to teach the ways of the true God.
That part stands out.
Here's a conundrum:
We might wonder if the problem resolves to be that he is somehow incapable of not lying?
One of the reasons we need to guard against holding any of these inadequate individual performances against "atheism" in general is the number of times they end up reading like provocateur routines intended to discredit atheists. Seriously, if we take the attitudes prevailing in atheistic representation about this thread toward any indicative, suggestive, or significant collective manner, no wonder atheists would be offended. As a collective performance, we see open disdain for rational discourse, and favor for vice much similar to what they complain about. Clearly, these individual atheists offer no insight into atheism as a human-collective phenomenon within community structures.
To wit, if we just try this discussion one more time, this will be the time it goes different. It's kind of like that bit in baseball when a poor or struggling hitter pulls yard, and everyone comforts the pitcher with those three bullshit words, "He was due." Sure, something about it can be argued psychologically, and it's more dynamic than the one in two probability of a coin flip compared to the odds of flipping obverse consecutively over an extended period, but, sure, he was due inasmuch as we all doubt a twenty-five year-old slugging superstar has achieved his last base hit, but, no, we would be more accurate to suggest the pitcher was due to hang his hammer or miss his four-seam.
• • •
If you say so. After all—
—you're extraordinarily believable, aren't you, especially when you're lying.
Tell me another.
(Also, y'know, if you've had at least thirty years on this, you should have learned at least something. Or is that too much to ask in rarified circles near to royalty?)
See, the problem is that you don't actually know how to discuss these fallacies, because in your thirty-some years of serving the community after having been accosted by "religion", you haven't even learned how to tell the difference between "religion", "a religion", and "religious people".
So, basically, you're presuming to change the subject.
Are you, then, arguing that people presenting ostensible advocacy of atheism are free to lie and argue fallaciously? Because that's the function of what you're saying compared to TCS' retort.
• • •
You're being too dualistic on this point. "Empiricism only allows us to know what we know": True. "There is no evidence that we possess faculties that allow us to aquire knowledge by any other means": True.
Now, then—
• "We have the capacity to engage in speculation based on our empirically acquired knowledge, but that isn't in itself knowledge until it's empirically validated."
—this part also has another appication relevant to where Musika is going. Empiricism applied can still be faulty despite being validated. Empiricism is human.
I've tried following this part back several days, and now we're back into the part where some people decided to play ... no, really, I don't know what they were thinking, there. But like I was telling Bob, it should be harder to lose this argument. Okay, if I go back to Friday afternoon, it gets even weirder. If I follow it to Thursday, it's a disaster; I knew I should have smarted off to Bob↑ a second time right then. Running this all the way back to the three and a half day break↑ is fascinating.
To the other, the reason people lost the argument about meaning is because it was derived from one or another fallacious construction pretending religion itself is the actual cause of wars.
Take that thesis down to the Politics forum, for instance, and put it up against economic causes; you'll find it won't work.
Karen Armstrong's Fields of Blood (New York: Random House, 2014) really is the sort of book that ought to be accessible to people in this discussion. From James Fallows↱, for instance, explained in review:
Just after finishing Karen Armstrong's new book, I happened to hear a discussion on television about the latest outbreak of violence in the Middle East. "We have to hope that this disagreement stays on the political level, rather than becoming a religious dispute," one of the experts said. "Political differences can be resolved. Religious ones cannot."
"Fields of Blood" can be thought of as a long, wide-ranging and overall quite effective rebuttal to the outlook expressed in that comment. "In the West, the idea that religion is inherently violent is now taken for granted and seems self-evident," Armstrong says on the book's first page. It follows that the main hope for peace is to keep faith and statecraft separate.
Armstrong, a onetime Roman Catholic nun and the author of several influential works on religion including "A History of God," argues that this is an incorrect diagnosis leading to a flawed prescription. The page-by-page detail of the book is much of the reason to read it, but if you reduced its complexities and tangles to their essence, they would amount to these three points:
First, through most of human history, people have chosen to intertwine religion with all their other activities, including, notably, how they are governed. This was "not because ambitious churchmen had 'mixed up' two essentially distinct activities," she says, "but because people wanted to endow everything they did with significance."
Second, this involvement with politics means that religions have often been tied up with violence: Crusaders, conquistadors, jihadists and many more. But—a point Armstrong cares about so much that she makes it dozens of times—the violence almost always originates with the state and spills over to religion, rather than vice versa. This, she says, is because any governing body, democratic or tyrannical, peace-loving or expansionist, "was obliged to maintain at its heart an institution committed to treachery and violence," and because "violence and coercion … lay at the heart of social existence." The earliest states required force to maintain systems of agricultural production; mature ones found that the threat of violence—by police within their borders, by armies between them—was, sadly, the best way to keep the peace.
Third, citizens thus face the duty of confronting and trying to control violence carried out in their name by the state, without blaming religion for it or imagining that the solution lies in a cleaner separation of church and state. This extends to understanding the roots of violence or terrorism directed against them: "As an inspiration for terrorism … nationalism has been far more productive than religion." And religions face the dilemma of whether to accept the protection of a state, and the threat of violence that necessarily entails, or to live in hermetic isolation.
___________________"Fields of Blood" can be thought of as a long, wide-ranging and overall quite effective rebuttal to the outlook expressed in that comment. "In the West, the idea that religion is inherently violent is now taken for granted and seems self-evident," Armstrong says on the book's first page. It follows that the main hope for peace is to keep faith and statecraft separate.
Armstrong, a onetime Roman Catholic nun and the author of several influential works on religion including "A History of God," argues that this is an incorrect diagnosis leading to a flawed prescription. The page-by-page detail of the book is much of the reason to read it, but if you reduced its complexities and tangles to their essence, they would amount to these three points:
First, through most of human history, people have chosen to intertwine religion with all their other activities, including, notably, how they are governed. This was "not because ambitious churchmen had 'mixed up' two essentially distinct activities," she says, "but because people wanted to endow everything they did with significance."
Second, this involvement with politics means that religions have often been tied up with violence: Crusaders, conquistadors, jihadists and many more. But—a point Armstrong cares about so much that she makes it dozens of times—the violence almost always originates with the state and spills over to religion, rather than vice versa. This, she says, is because any governing body, democratic or tyrannical, peace-loving or expansionist, "was obliged to maintain at its heart an institution committed to treachery and violence," and because "violence and coercion … lay at the heart of social existence." The earliest states required force to maintain systems of agricultural production; mature ones found that the threat of violence—by police within their borders, by armies between them—was, sadly, the best way to keep the peace.
Third, citizens thus face the duty of confronting and trying to control violence carried out in their name by the state, without blaming religion for it or imagining that the solution lies in a cleaner separation of church and state. This extends to understanding the roots of violence or terrorism directed against them: "As an inspiration for terrorism … nationalism has been far more productive than religion." And religions face the dilemma of whether to accept the protection of a state, and the threat of violence that necessarily entails, or to live in hermetic isolation.
Notes:
Fallows, James. "'Fields of Blood', by Karen Armstrong". The New York Times. 10 December 2014. NYTimes.com. 16 August 2018. https://nyti.ms/2Pej1O1
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
A doctor has some eight years of medical practical scientific knowledge under his belt.
And he has to buy malpractice insurance to the tune of millions of dollars, in case he screws up.
Gets a second opinion from a licensed specialist who has had 20 years of theoretical/practical knowledge in the field.
The days for praying for recovery are long past. No more demons to exorcise.
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No, but there is something perversely supernatural about humans making things up like Snoop Dog or Keeping up with the Kardashian in order to assert their worth.
Legal ceilings and philosophical ceilings .... best not to mix them unless you are a sitcom writer or something.
I missed the part where the bees of the world decided to broker a legal deal for their greater good and give the hairless apes a fighting chance on the side.
How else are they going to gain followers and more importantly the money they put in the collection plate?
NT News newspaper Darwin Australia news about the Bridge collapse in Italy
Headline to the article
Didn't work
How much more nonsensical can you get?
Then you have the research that goes into pharmacy, the logistics of distribution, quality control, etc
All the more interesting that the legal machinations of society appear to "encourage" medical practitioners to operate from the position of being "trustworthy" by propping legal guillotines over their heads.
I said "nip the problem in the bud".
If the second (or 3rd, or 4th etc) professional is found wanting in the same manner of unprofessional or possibly unethical dealing, what is the common quip?
If you need a hint, try reading any of the maybe 10 billion one star google reviews of medical clinics, to see what common themes arise.
Geez.
I'm not trying to corner you in a foxhole during an ordinance strike.
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
Then why are you showing me one?
It's not me that is bringing it.
When I first read your comment about "praying for health" I was at first puzzled and was going to quip about the equivalent potential folly in getting car repair advice from a doctor. Then I laughed as I realized you were trying to "race me to the red herring" or something.
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
That's the problem with theism. Nature is no longer used as the teacher. The bees and the flowers don't give a damn about you. If you do not respect the moral example of this symbiotic relationship, you will eventually learn by its physical impact on the natural environment when the bees disappear.
This misplaced trust that "God will provide", may become the death of us all.
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Arh I see where you are mistaken
God will provide you mistakenly thought food or good life
What is going to be provided is death
And death is non discriminating, everybody gets a equal measure
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
You do know that there was a time when religion ruled that illness was equated with demon possession, no? I believe that era was later named the "Dark Ages". I wonder why?
Why do you think garlic has been used for millenia? It was to ward off demons which had or would invade the body of the one "possessed".
The first recorded labor strike in history was due to a pharaoh's cutback on the daily garlic ration of the Pyramid builders. Not because the workers would miss a day taking a healthy medicinal supplement, but strictly out of fear of demon possession.
I could make it more sensational.
Vampires hate garlic, that is, the smell and medicinal properties of garlic.
They don't care about crosses, that is, the idea of martyrdom behind it, not if they are about to martyr you.
Is that why my fanged girlfriend left.
Thought she was just like the other girls and garlic breath put her off
Now you tell me she had a extra reason
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
Actually it is not. It is a natural law, a cosmic constant.
Greed is an extreme expression of the principle of "movement in the direction of greatest satisfaction" and is foundation of the 7 deadly sins, each sin being an extreme example of "movement in the direction of greatest satisfaction".
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