Daniel–My ex-FIL was a convenient example, who happened to be both massively insecure about his innate intelligence and correct in his assumptions about what I thought about it, even in circumstances where (and here’s where the parallel to Xians on he SD comes in) it doesn’t matter what I think of his intelligence because I;m discussing something entirely else: in his case, whether I may open a window (which draws the non-sequitur “SO–you think I’m stupid, huh?”); in the case of Xians, whether their belief in an entity whom I have yet to shown convincing evidence for entitles them to force me to show their beliefs a nominal respect greater than that I would show to anyone else holding equally unsupported beliefs (which draws the non-sequitur “So–you think I’m stupid, huh?”) I may have made the error of responding, out of frustration, “GAWD, Yes, you are too stupid to live!!!” (although I actually don’t remember making that argument explicitly) and have at least implicitly allowed the non-sequitur to stand as a summation of my feelings about Xians’ intelligence, which I’m trying to correct here.
I don’t think Xians are stupid, plain and simple. Some Xians are colossally stupid, far to stupid to live, and it amazes me that someone like Zoe, who can’t distinguish between my honesty (which I refuse to let Brian take potshots at outside of the Pit) and my beliefs (which continue to be open to anyone’s criticism) is able to function in society (if she in fact does), but there are stupid atheists as well. As i say, Xians hold no patent on stupidity–someone like Polycarp is obviously a highly intelligent fellow, able to hold forth knowledgably on many subects, some in my own field of expertise, where I often judge his comments to be thoughtful and based on broad and insightful reading. Why would I need to lump their intelligence levels together to be able to argue with Polycarp’s position, with which I usually strongly disagree? That just opens up an avenue for a hijack that I find distracting, irrelevant, personally distateful, and completely unproductive. I opened this thread to articulate those judgments, and I’d rather pursue Mangetout’s or Kalhoun’s points than keep making the same simple point I started with, which should be understood by now.
Instead of pursuing those areas I find interesting, I have out of politeness, responded to Brian Ekers’s insistence that my opening this thread was itself a hijack (of what, I have no idea) and thoroughly dishonest, which it is not. I am sincere in my rejection of the entire concept of the relative stupidity of Xians and atheists, and I’m done defending it in this thread. I wish Tom, in his even handed dispensing of justice, would view Brian’s personal attacks on my honesty as Pit-worthy and consign him there, but in any case I no longer wish to discuss my motivations for opening this thread. I want to discuss the issues it raises.
I think that’s fair enough - reinforcement of common thought patterns seems quite likely in any group and I would think is all the more likely in tightly-knit groups, and more still in groups where many of the common themes are emotive rather than rational/intellectual.
Both mean ‘you don’t know shit’. It’s disingenuous to pretend otherwise.
OK. I’m trying this for one last time.
Kindly furnish proof that ‘love’ exists. And I want an answer, here. Where can you put your finger on ‘love’? Show me the gauge that measures it. Same set of questions for ‘thought’. How about ‘kindness’. And then try ‘truth’.
Point being you live in a world full of things for which there is not one shred of proof and not one piece of corroborating evidence but you accept them because they are part of your experience. You even accept things that are not part of your experience, like schizophrenia (I’m assuming). Do you realize this? Our world is not 100% empirically provable. A world that was would be bleak and featureless and, really, the world we used to inhabit before our brains developed.
I’d like you and PRR to not just gloss over this post and answer my questions.
Picking out Xians as being stupid is a little unfair. The Muslims Jews and any other sect that blindly accepts dogma .show the same ignorance. We program our children in our religion from a vulnerable age into our faiths. I think to not program them at all and to encourage them to pick their own religion when they are of age would be best. It is propaganda and taking advantage of the young. If we really believe that ours is right then let them find it by themselves. Except it would be bad in a business sense. They are in competition for the religious dollar. Expansion that’s the ticket.
In my experience with the catholic church ,we all winked at brutal nuns and priestly pedophiles. The church moved them around the country to avoid conflict instead of eliminating them, It was inexcusable and was an anti religious stance. So I think any one whom accepted this as ok was being stupid. It is too fundamental a wrong to simply continue. The cover ups and pressure the church exercised was too grievous to let slide.
I don’t, and never claimed to believe that “love”, “kindness” or any other personal interpretations of emotion “exist.” They are thoughts and interpretations of real activities that vary so much from person to person as to be meaningless with regard to their “existence.”
I’m not talking about proof here. I’m talking about evidence. While there is evidence that my husband loves me, there is no evidence Jesus loves you.
C’mon! One clearly means “You don’t know shit, and are incapable of ever knowing shit”, and the other means “You don’t know shit, but you could be taught”
Stupid =/= ignorant.
If you’re ignorant of the clear and generally agreed upon distinction between the two words, then I hope MrDibble’s last post gave some insight into correcting your ignorance, and you can now engage in this discussion more fully equipped.
But if you’re just too stupid to see that distinction, you will continue to take offense at my deliberate use of two synonyms to have infuriating different connotations.
And if you cannot remember that you chose to place this thread in GD, where personal insults are forbidden, then perhaps you should have opened it in the Pit to begin with.
(And please do not respond with more complaints regarding your exchange with Bryan Ekers. There has never been a time in the 7 2/3 years since this site opened that challenging one’s opponents’ honesty was not permitted in GD. OTOH, claiming that one’s opponent is “too stupid” to recognize a point has always been against the rule.)
I use the word ignorant in the restricted sense of “not knowing” (which is why I consider the idiotic claim that opposing belief is “fighting ignorance” to be silly). I do not use the word as a pejorative to indicate foolishness and in the specific case over which you have spilled so many electrons, it was simply descriptive: you made a claim regarding a group based on a limited knowledge of that group’s behaviors. I never claimed that you were incapable of learning, only that your declaration of “fact” demonstrated a lack of knowledge regarding the group outside your experience–an experience that I have never challenged your honesty in describing.
I claim that Milli Vanilli won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984. That’s ignorant. If someone shows me who actually won that year, I’ll almost certainly cede the point.
I claim that astrology really works. Someone shows me that it doesn’t, but I insist that they don’t understand what I mean, or that their evidence is faulty, or that they’re harshing my mellow, or something else. That may be pejorativable, but it’s not ignorant. I KNOW what your arguments are, what your evidence is; I just find it unpersuasive.
It’s unhelpful to conflate the two. The first is a condition that is neither shameful nor difficult to correct. The second may or may not be shameful (for example, if I ascribe to Christian Identity beliefs, that’s shameful), but it’s much more difficult to alter.
If you’re having a discussion with someone who holds to different beliefs and who finds your evidence unpersuasive, you can of course each call the other person ignorant. I don’t think that gets you very far; all it does is piss off the person you’re talking to.
prr, thanks for your last post to me. I think I see the distinction you’re drawing now. I hope you can see that the language you’re using sometimes looks disrespectful to other folks, even when that’s not the impression you intend to convey.
And if you can’t see the distinction between a hypothetical, and a declarative statement, then maybe you should recuse yourself from moderating threads where personal animosity leads you to make statements that blur the line between obnoxious posts and moderation.
Are there no other moderators in GD anymore? Are you guys really telling me that Tom is doing an excellent job of moderating GD without personal biases here? (That’s a rhetorical question–no answer required. Or I’ll supply it: “Yes, we all love Tom’s excellent moderation, particularly where you’re concerned, you asshole you. Consider yourself suspended for a month.” Jesus wept!)
And please don’t peremptorily moderate the posts you think I’m going to make, wile hiding behind your moderator skirts. Have the decency to wait until I do something that you consider over-the-line and then bitchslap me, okay?
I find ignorant insulting. Stupid is organic. Born that way and without enough candlepower to see the light. However ignorant means unaware of basic knowledge. I really don’t believe that 50 years ago my training was unique. I also resent inculcating children and think it is is unfair to them. Everybody thinks their religion is correct. It is the training not the compelling evidence that wins in the end. That is true for all of them. Religion is stupefying and propagandistic. I no longer understand the appeal of religion. sorry I do not think it can even be defended as a greater good. The scale for world and psychological damage has long ago been tipped to the bad.
Hypotheticals that rely on insults are still insults as anyone who had ever paid attention to this Forum would know. Hiding behind “I said IF…” doesn’t cut it.
As to personal animosity: it is a one way street. You have hurled numerous charges against me, some overt, some less so, and aside from a couple of smart-assed rejoinders in the Pit, I have not really gotten into your whole “hate” schtick. You’d be amazed (or disappointed) how little I worry about you or how little energy I expend in harboring bad thoughts about you.
This is silly. You already snuck in an insult at me, several posts back, with your attempt to pretend that I was failing to be even handed by not slapping down Bryan Ekers for an exchange that was well within the rules. I’d have ignored it completely, except that I knew that as soon as I admonished you for your flagrant violation of the rules, you would come back and whine about some perceived bias.
If you have a problem with my Moderating, take it to the Pit, (preferably bringing a tiny bit of evidence, this time, instead of the dozen or so wholly unsupported charges you have launched so far).
So, the score in this thread:
1 whiny complaint that I did not take action on a point that was not actionable.
1 whiny complaint that you thought you had successfully eluded the rules with your transparent “hypothetical.”
1 additional whiny complaint that I am being biased against you for doing my job (while you ignore my effort to keep your thread civil).
0 evidence (once again) that I am guilty of the pernicious deeds of which you accuse me.
Go back to your thread. Mind your manners. Move on with your life.
So clearly, you were ignorant of the fact that you happened to have been taught at a place that was not representative of the whole church. What word better describes your lack of knowledge?
Note that I have never challenged what you were taught. I have never accused you of ignoring church teachings or of inventing things for which to condemn the RCC. I explicitly noted that you probably correctly identified what was taught you in your parish.
However, you did not say “in my experience…” or “in my parish…” or “at my school…” You simply claimed that the church (unqualified except by date–indicating the whole church in the 1950s) “fostered ignorance.” You made that claim without taking the trouble to discover that many places in the church, both at the same time as your education as in my case and 30 years earlier as in the case of my parents, provided a much broader and better education than you received. I do not believe that you were unique or had an isolated experience, but you made a sweeping generalization about the church based on your ignorance of differing qualities of education in the church at the same time and I really do not know another word that identifies your lack of knowledge on the subject.
I have no problem with you attacking religion, in general, or the RCC in particluar. There is a lot there to attack. However, if you are going to make statements that are factually in error, either by being explicitly wrong or by generalizing from one experience to the universal condition, you are going to get called on it. That is just how the SDMB works.
I knew you would say that. I do not accept your st6ance. I have no reason to think 50 years ago that was not the Catholic Churches stance. The evidence on your side is you say so. On mine I have asked several people of my age and all said they had that experience. Ps I will keep asking because I want to know if I am right or not.
Maybe you can collect the $1M from Randi and the JREF?
My life is my cite!
Seriously, I am not challenging your experience. Mine was different. (And we are not that far apart in age and I, too, grew up in Metro Detroit. My parents grew up in Indianapolis.)
I’m not sure what your point really is. Do you think that by finding a few more people who were taught in the way that you were it will wipe out the experience of my parents? My experience?
I am not denying that the educational structure within the church was uneven. Most educated Catholics of our era could clearly distinguish between the veneration of the saints and the worship and adoration of God. OTOH, I certainly knew a lot of Catholics who pretty much treated the saints as a minor pantheon–contradicting church doctrine, but well ensconced in the belief of many individuals. That misunderstanding, however, did not represent what the church actually taught about the saints.
In similar ways, I am sure that many individual priests and sisters and brothers in many parishes and schools refused to provide information about the beliefs of other people. However, those are not the teachings of the church and it is an error to confuse one’s personal experience with the whole of reality.
I will note that “the church” does not worship saints–not in its teachings, not in its liturgy. I would never claim that “no Catholic” worships saints, because clearly, many, misunderstanding church teachings, do worship saints.
Find just as many folks as you can to recall having an education similar to yours. That will not, somehow, render nonexistent the experience I had. (And if I begin calling up old schoolmates and getting them to recall the same experience that I recall, would you think that that would render your experience nonexistent?) I fully accept that you had the experience you describe. However, you wish to reject my experience simply because it differed from yours. For that assertion, I would choose a word other than “ignorance.”
My belief about if and how God speaks is not the point, although I’d be willing to discuss it.
My point to you is that you stress “obvious horse shit” for people believing something without one shred of evidence, while spouting your own unsupported belief. There seems to be a popular sentiment rising among atheists that people with more liberal beliefs are somehow tacitly supporting the extremists. So where’s the evidence for this particular doctrine? Do you just accept it because you heard it somewhere and it appealed to you emotionally? Did you read it in a book and it just felt right so you concluded it must be true? Is there some reliable scientific study on this that I missed? If you don’t really have any solid evidence for that belief and it just “makes sense” to you because it appeals to you emotional dislike for spiritual beliefs in general, then it seems reasonable that you should apply your own standard to your own unsupported belief.
So, do you have and realistic solid evidence or is it {using your own standard} obvious horse shit?
Well, for starters, I said nothing about “horse shit” although I believe someone else in the thread did. However, my statement stands. If god speaks to some people, some of those people could be the ones who crash planes into buildings. I don’t understand how this could be anything but feasible to a believer. Or do you have information to the contrary? Did god come down and give you a list of who he specifically *won’t * speak to?
I never said the “good” believers supported the “bad” believers, per se. However, unless you’re prepared to say you know who god chooses to speak to, it could be any of us. There are millions of people who don’t envision the supernatural being the same way you do. Are you saying they’re wrong and your vision is the only one that counts? Are yousaying you know what god says to all the people who claim to have had an experience with him?
