As I said when I posted the link, I’m not advocating civil religion – I was offering it up as an interesting sidelight on some of these issues.
I think I understand your position. I agree in a limited way. I’ve thought about the very slow progress and the relationship between myth, which reflects in some way our desire to know the unknown, and real discovery. It takes generations for something to go from discovery to widely available and generally accepted public knowledge. I see specific evidence changing the details of belief. I don’t see a lack of evidence as having much effect. Still Myth and tradition fight to stay alive as if they were. Strange. As you know, I think certain beliefs about the nature of God need to challenged and done away with, and I’m glad to say I see us headed in that direction. Over the next several generations I see the belief in an inerrant Bible fading away. The evidence against that belief is overwhelming. Still, I don’t consider it illogical or irrational to believe if we understand that we are still in the process of refining our beliefs through study and experience. You mentioned emotion. It’s very difficult to separate the emotion that religious beliefs evoke from the objective facts. I tend to agree with Polycarp. It seems futile and incorrect to me to judge religious beliefs from a purely scientific standard.
Right. If I felt I had experienced a telepathic message from ET. A very moving and powerful experience, I would be much less easy to convince. Someone would say. You’re deluded, you imagined it, or you’re wacko. I’d say, that’s possible, but I had the experience not you so I’ll draw my own conclusions thanks. You should understand that for those of us moved by subjective experience it isn’t usually one experience that convinces us and then we cling to our definition of that experience forever. It’s several experiences and continued reinforcement in many subtle ways. I understand you would define my experiences differently. Since they’re mine,…it’s up to me to do so.
The SDMB has had significant influence on me in refining my belief and prompting me to do research in various areas. As I said before, specific evidence against something is different than simply a lack of evidence one way or the other. You may think it irrational for people to believe in water into wine, healing the sick, or resurrection from physical death. I understand that. Perhaps that is indeed an emotional attachment rather than a logical one.
Guff? Me to you? Not my intention at all. I’m only saying in that in the general population it’s obvious people do accept as fact things that have the weight of being accepted without question by the people they know and trust. I don’t see that as irrational. Just part of the human experience. There needs to be some reason to challenge those beliefs. Controversy being brought into the dialogue is one way to do that. That’s why I’m all for it.
It has nothing to do with accepting or rejecting subjective evidence. The subjective experience just is. It’s a fact that it happened. The question is how we analyze the experience and what conclusions we draw from it. I am not the kind of person who claims, yes that definitely was the voice of God speaking to me. I’m not comfortable with people who feel certain about their experiences when it comes to affecting the lives of others. “God wanted me to tell you this” I do claim the right to define my experiences for myself and go forward on that belief knowing that new experiences will help me to understand even more clearly.
IMHO there are no non spiritual experiences. {I purposely chose to not use your term} so there are not different standards. The only standard is the one I’ve described repeatedly. Our interaction with others. If my conclusions about the experience helps me to live a more positive life in my relationship with others, then I take that as reinforcement my conclusions are correct.
Concerning your aliens. It seems obvious to me that people will use use all sorts of tools to draw attention, or money to themselves. It’s horribly widespread in religion. Does that mean none are sincere? I assume that most people describing alien abduction are attention seekers. Does that mean I see it as impossible? Nope. It just count for much on my radar.
I wanted to comment on this.
I think it’s implied when a public figure speaks about Americas religious belief he is speaking in general. Obviously he realizes that not everyone is Christian.
I am supportive of the separation of church and state but also freedom of speech and freedom worship. How do we reconcile all three. Should politicians be able to openly talk about their beliefs? I think so. Should a Christian Senator be able to ask for Christ’s blessings on America? Why not? Should A Muslim representative utter “As Allah wills it” at the end of a speech? If he wants to.
That doesn’t mean they don’t respect others rights to different beliefs.
I agree with you that some Christians seem to think their religion has dibs on America. It doesn’t and they need to be corrected.
Other than that what specifically is the outrageous behavior you speak of?
Well, I’m forty and I believe those mushrooms really are poisonous. So am I an idiot? My point was, I believe the mushrooms are poisonous, so I tell my daughter the mushrooms are poisonous, and she accepts my word uncritically, and I’M RIGHT, the mushrooms ARE poisonous.
She could disprove my assertion by eating one of the mushrooms, if she lives I was wrong, if she dies I was right. But she doesn’t even think that I might be mistaken, she knows for sure that the mushrooms are poisonous because I told her, and I’m right, in my opinion. If you want to eat the mushrooms and prove me wrong, I’ll watch and see what happens.
Thing is, I have no direct evidence that the mushrooms are poisonous, any more than she does, because I’ve never in my life seen anyone die from eating those so-called “poison” mushrooms, much less eaten one myself. I’ve just read a lot of mushroom books and read some newspaper stories where it was claimed that people die from eating wild mushrooms that they misidentified. Does that make me stupid?
And so I indoctrinate my child that wild mushrooms are poison. It sure seems to me that my indoctrination of my child is fully justified, and you probably agree in this case. But I could be wrong. And the people that indoctrinate their children about YHWH or Jesus or Zeus do so for the same sorts of reasons that I indoctrinate my child about mushrooms.
We have enough evidence to reject out of hand certain types of supernatural claims. We can firmly reject Biblical literalism as disproven, just like we can disprove the claim that tomatoes are poisonous simply by eating one in front of the claimant. And there’s definately something odd going on in the mind of someone who would continue to claim tomato poisonousness even after evidence to the contrary was presented. But consider this. There are people who believe all kinds of nutty things about diet. All dairy products are poison. Meat is poison. Carbohydrates are poison. Canola oil is poison. Genetically modified food is poison. Salt is poison. Why aren’t these people convinced when they see millions of people eating this so-called poison and not dropping dead?
It’s not stupidity, or if it’s stupidity it’s stupidity of a very specific type that doesn’t seem to correlate with stupidity about other things. So calling it stupidity doesn’t make sense, because we can’t correlate the belief that Canola oil is poison with, say, illiteracy. Take a look at the gigantic quack medicine/“health”/snake oil industry. And religion thrives for many of the same reasons, and lack of clear logical thinking is one of them…but smart people can and do fail to consistently think clearly and logically.
The belief in Gods used to be to explain weather, illness, fate, etc. and some still use it that way to some degree. It also speaks to other questions. Is their a purpose to our being here? Are we more than these physical bodies? Does something of me continue after my body ceases to function. What meaning does life hold and is there a good reason for efforts to make it better?
IMO that’s what separates belief in God from belief in unicorns, fairies, FSM and the like. Is it possible to answer those questions without God belief. Of course. That’s not my point. It’s the association between God belief and those questions that I’m speaking of.
What a sad piece of arrogance this is. And you have the nerve to refer to believers as clueless.
Strictly speaking when it comes to religious belief “You’re not one of us” is neither negative nor inaccurate. As a citizen it is up to us to be aware of our differences but to try and focus on our common interests. If either an atheist or believer chooses to focus on us vs. them, it’s their own dam fault.
I fully support separation of church and state. In God we trust should be off the money. One nation under God should be out of any state sanctioned pledge. That being said, the idea that public officials shouldn’t speak of their religious beliefs seems like bullshit to me. It’s ludicrous to think any speaking official can somehow remain completely neutral and unbiased. Assuming that any reference to “our faith” as a nation excludes you as a citizen seems like self pity to me. As our country becomes a more varied culture I think it’s smart of any public figure to recognize that fact and acknowledge equal citizenship to all beliefs and promote tolerance and understanding.
Oh, come on now. You’d prefer that atheism not fit with the observed facts? And he said fit, not explain. Clearly, atheism does not explain anything.
But atheism does have fairly good predictive ability. It predicts that the world will not be Raptured tomorrow. It predicts that no gods will come down from the sky next week. It predicts that historical and archeological research will continue to turn up errors and inaccuracies in the holy books of most religions. It predicts that miracles will not happen.
Your passage seems to be more applicable to the religious view, actually. It can “explain” anything, though the explanation, as we have seen, is that God works in mysterious ways. Just look at the explanations of the problem of evil. A few theists are honest enough to say they don’t know the answer, and the problem is disturbing, but most ascribe it to the actions of our mythical ancestors.
I don’t have a faith. How does a reference to “our faith” not exclude me? If GWB made a reference to “every American’s right to scratch his scrotum,” would that not explicitly exclude our scrotumless citizenry?
They could always buy a scrotum and scratch it to their heart’s content.
This needs a whole cartload of distinguos to make sense.
I support the rights of parents to provide for their child’s education as they please, including home schooling – so long as they meet the state requirements for curriculum and content.
I believe that God created all things as they are, as part of His Plan. I believe that that Plan involves the Big Bang, the early inflationary universe, the nucleosynthetic suite, abiogenesis, and evolution as modernly understood, including speciation by punctuated equilibria. I do not believe that substitution of one’s interpretation of the Bible for well-constructed theories founded in the relvant data is a legitimate mode of teaching.
I happen to be acquainted, via the Internet, with a single parent who is a freelancer, and also a conservative Christian with a strong interest in science, and who raises his two boys by using home schooling in lieu of the less-than-competent local public school system – but what he teaches matches the state curriculum or goes beyond it. (The boys, “tween” in age, understand much of natural science at a high school level, because they are bright, interested, and taught individually by someone who cares about both them and knowledge.)
You mean that you won’t object to what we do in private, but we should not exit the closet and flaunt it publicly? :eek:
Right. Temporal lobe activity only gives another explanation for the experience, it does not prove that the experience is only physical. Now, while God is not physical, if he interacts with the universe he must leave physical evidence. Though the aliens are physical, if they are clever enough to disappear they would only leave evidence also. There is no physical evidence in either of these cases (all the supposed physical evidence for aliens turning out to be bogus) but there is subjective evidence in both cases.
So you claim Jesus appeared to you, and an abductee claims that a gray appeared to him. You say that there are a lot of people and history backing your claim, the abductee points out that he is not alone, and that a lot of people have reported very similar experiences. How am I to distinguish them? Maybe your life improved after the experience, but maybe the abductee’s life got worse. How can we tell?
Sigh. Science doesn’t do tests either, scientists do. Doing science involves both. Do you push a theoretical physicist who will never test anything outside of science? The people who predicted the neutrino were doing science, as were the people down in the salt mines collecting neutrinos. And of course coming up with a falsifiable hypothesis is not prognostication, which claims truth. A seer says “X will happen.” A scientist says “If hypothesis Y is correct, then X will happen, and if X does not happen Y is incorrect, but X happening does not prove Y is correct, since X may happen by chance or be caused by an unaccounted for factor Z …”
“But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father who is in secret, and thy Father who seeth in secret, will reward thee openly.”
And good luck with that.
Seriously, Poly…stating your views in a public forum? You should be ashamed. What do you think this is, a free country?
I hope you realize I don’t object to people voicing their views on the SD where you can choose to read a post or not, and you’re not speaking for anyone other than yourself.
You can, of course, always opt to misstate if that’s your preference.
I hope you realize that this is not what you said.
What was misstated?
I’d like to draw a distinction from the validity of a belief and the validity of holding that belief. On a strictly scientific basis, we certainly “believe” in things that will later be proved to be incorrect, but if we do so on the best available evidence our believing is valid. If someone believes in reincarnation, say, because it is comforting, who is to say this isn’t a valid reason to have this belief, even if you think reincarnation is poppycock. And, as we both agree, the test for validity is weaker if the belief only affects oneself. If this person wanted me to kill myself in order to go onto a better life I might ask for a bit more proof than I would if she only believed to feel better.
But data from the subjective experience can be tested. If the ET tells you he lives on Rigel 2, but you look up the star and find that it is of a type unsuitable for life, then you might have reason to conclude that your telepathic message did not come from an ET. Someone - either Clarke or Sagan, complained that these aliens only talk about love or truth or beauty, and never give answers to interesting scientific problems. If your ET tells you something that you couldn’t know which turns out to be true, then you’d have something. I have started to ask those who chat with Jesus to ask him if P = NP.
You are hardly the first to equate the lack of personal experience of God with lack of personal experience with Australia. There are a bunch of other common ones, such as there is as much evidence for Jesus as for Julius Caesar (not true) . I should make a list someday.
I don’t think so, at least not of the Mack variety. They have had real, and frightening, subjective experiences, and went to a believer, who regressed them and encouraged them to believe they truly got abducted. These people are not crazy or irrational - it appears that they are interpreting a true experience in the light of today’s culture. It is the same effect as that which led to belief in incubi and succubi.
Thank you for the reply. It sounds like we are in agreement. I think home schooling and private schooling is fine if the kids are receiving at least state minimums.
Lemur866, I like your analogy. I was trying to talk about the indoctrination component of religion overriding the intelligence of many of the devout earlier and you made the case much more eloquently than I could have hoped to.
Jim
I’d be willing to certain scrotumless members of scociety scratch mine 
Because you have enough brains to understand that he is speaking in general about the citizens rather than addressing the specific beliefs of each group. Of course I’m assuming that with very little evidence and it may be irrational for me to think it. He may even be generalizing in a way that expresses his own belief, which I believe he has every right to do.
I would assume a scrotum remark was a metaphor of some sort, much like a woman saying to to another, you don’t have the balls, being a metaphor for nerve.
Our faith in justice, might serve better but you might be determined to feel left out and claim “That bastard ! I have no faith in justice, I’m being excluded”
The fact is, good bad or somewhere in between, you live in a nation populated by believers in the overwhelming majority, so you’ll probably hear about Christianity from time to time. Personally I don’t give a shit one way or the other how a public figure says he believes. There’s no correlation I know of to their ability to serve the public.
Why do you have to? Nobody has to unless the other persons experience spills over and affects their life in a way that requires response.
If someone wants to kill me because I don’t believe the right beliefs, or someone wants to kill me to rob me and buy drugs, does it matter to me? Is one worse than the other?
I understand the distinction. As I’ve said, actions. We see that belief and non belief are only part of the equation and IMHO don’t offer any insight into the values of an individual. A person with God belief may be a great boon to their friends and family or a zealot prick. Same for the non believer. Inevitably our belief system does affect others.
So do we agree? Any belief or non belief, must be questioned and judged on the basis of how it affects others.
Sure. I might misjudge the meaning of a subjective experience. I have. Then, other evidence comes into play and I reevaluate my position. That’s how we weed out what is relevant and meaningful from the superficial.
Concerning the bolded bit. For myself that’s one of the most profound things about one particular experience. I had a vision in the face of extreme emotional stress. After the vision I had a feeling of peace more profound than I had ever felt before. So much so that a freind, who knew nothing of the vision, commented that I was almost glowing. I can understand that the body might react to extreme stress with some chemical that calms you down or even brings joy. For me it was the profound insight into the human conditon and our interactions with each other that accompanied the vision that amazed me. An insight that allowed me to take what had been an extremely stressful and sad situation and face it with profound understanding and even joy. So, for me, I was told something I didn’t know moments before. Something completely relevant to me and the situation I was in.
Okay. I didn’t think it a profound insight. I actually sincerly asked for your thoughts on it, only in realtion to the process humans have for accepting unproven beliefs and how that relates to the term irrational.