Culture War - Religious cannot win a debate so they start a war.

Great Debates
21

The definition of “Liberty” is the very freedom to hold these beliefs.

There are 6 billion people on this rock, and trying to get them all to agree on religion, music, or a good taste in clothing is going to be harder than herding cats.

Calling on someone to “justify” their philosophy (religion, in this case) is as bad as forcing someone to your own brand of religion, especially when I get the sense that you have already made up your mind. (And hence, not “open minded” about different lifestyles and world views.)

Some folks don’t want porn or drug use regulating (citing personal lifestyle choice), but they want religion stamped out as unprovable. Sigh.

22

(BTW, I agree that in cases where ignorance is causing negative results, the problem should be addressed in some way. However writing off entire slabs of the population as nuts and forcing ‘re-education’ on them or whatever is probably not a good approach to the situation. You are overreacting.)

23

[QUOTE=Ammonius Saccus]
Do you really think Kary Mullis is a serious person?
[/QUOTE]

Yes? What does that mean? I think he’s very serious about what he believes, and I take him seriously in his beliefs. I just evaluate them individually. Insofar as he’s won a Nobel Prize and everything.

You’re absolutely right! The fact that Kary Mullis invented PCR does not mean that he’s not a nut. However, I propose that the fact that he also has one silly belief also does not mean that he is a nut. Does that make sense?

24

[QUOTE=begbert2]
And I’d get back a response that makes perfect sense to them; at least as much as my (fallacious) arguments from authority do.
[/quote]

So you think all beliefs are equally justified? You think the Young Earth Creationist is just as justified as the college educated person who believes in evolution and a very old Earth because of his research in science classes but has not done first hand reasearch? You think those beliefs are equally justified?

Part of the beauty of science is that it is done is an open manner where the evidence is independently examined and tested through peer review and continued experimentation and available to any who seek it. Of course there is always the possibility that there is a conspiracy or that all the scientists are wrong, but that is extremely unlikely. This is just not the case with faith beliefs. There is no open presentation of the evidence. There isn’t even any real evidence to speak of.

25

If we can’t expect people to justify their beliefs, how can we have any sort of debate about the reality of the world? The beliefs of science are not on the same level as those of religion. They are not in the same ballpark and they are not even the same sport. There is no jstification for any of these beliefs.

If there was really some way to cabin-off unjustified religious beliefs from how people interact with each other there would not be much of problem. But when we refuse to say that unjustified belief is crazy we end up not being able to attack the truth of unjustified belief.

Right now in the US unjustified belief gives us:

laws agaisnt gay marriage
laws against sex education
laws against stem cell funding
bad science education
hate crimes
etc
etc
etc

Instead of just attacking the consequences of unjustified beliefs or the unjustified beliefs that have consequences we don’t like we should attack unjustied belief itself.

No rational person can believe a cracker becomes God.

26

[QUOTE=Ammonius Saccus]
So you think all beliefs are equally justified? You think the Young Earth Creationist is just as justified as the college educated person who believes in evolution and a very old Earth because of his research in science classes but has not done first hand reasearch? You think those beliefs are equally justified?

Part of the beauty of science is that it is done is an open manner where the evidence is independently examined and tested through peer review and continued experimentation and available to any who seek it. Of course there is always the possibility that there is a conspiracy or that all the scientists are wrong, but that is extremely unlikely. This is just not the case with faith beliefs. There is no open presentation of the evidence. There isn’t even any real evidence to speak of.
[/QUOTE]
Darnit, I got on a tangent and threw out an easy target, which I now get to defend. Oh, well.

Not to let this become a hijack, but I was trying to point out to you that, yes indeedy, evidence is in the eye of the beholder, and that no matter how many times you tell me that I think religious folk are nuts, that that’s not how I view it, and that’s not even a useful way to view it. You are not going to convince these people that they are insane, especially if you’re right! This browbeat/steamroll/suppress approach you seem to be espousing is certain to shoot you in the foot. You will convince nobody and in fact solidify their opinion that the beliefs you hold are held by the enemy, and therefore evil and wrong.

You trust in science because you have seen your evidence and think it rational to do so. They have done the same thing. Their life experiences have led them to entertain their crazy beliefs in God or love or fate or whatever, and if they’re rejecting your science, it’s because it’s rational for them to do so, based on their perceptions and understanding of the world. This does not make them lunatics; it means that they are working with a different set of axioms than the ones you work under.

In theory some of these people can be ‘re-educated’ by gently showing them the errors in their belief system, and be enticed to something better, like Buddhism or Wicca. (Or ‘hard science’, I suppose, if you insist.) But going in all hack-and-slash, take no prisoners, is pointless. You can’t force somebody to change their mind.

[QUOTE=Ammonius Saccus]
No rational person can believe a cracker becomes God.
[/QUOTE]
No, no rational person can believe that solid matter is made almost entirely of empty space, amongst which are widely scattered particles that exist reliably, which are entirely composed of particles that don’t exist reliably.

“Because Mommy said so” is not an irrational reason to believe something. Not even if there are better reasons to believe other things.

27

[QUOTE=Ammonius Saccus]
If we can’t expect people to justify their beliefs, how can we have any sort of debate about the reality of the world? The beliefs of science are not on the same level as those of religion. They are not in the same ballpark and they are not even the same sport.
[/QUOTE]

You are correct. And worrying about the infield fly rule in a soccer game is as irrational as calling offsides on the Yankees.

Therefore, rational people treat them as the different things they are, judging their appropriateness according to whether or not they deal with their actual scope properly. Complaining that religion isn’t as rigorous and objective as science is like complaining that daisies aren’t as structurally sound as I-beams – save it for the people who want to build skyscrapers out of wildflowers. The things have different purposes, work in different fields, and have different goals; of course they function differently.

28

[QUOTE=begbert2]

You trust in science because you have seen your evidence and think it rational to do so. They have done the same thing. Their life experiences have led them to entertain their crazy beliefs in God or love or fate or whatever, and if they’re rejecting your science, it’s because it’s rational for them to do so, based on their perceptions and understanding of the world. This does not make them lunatics; it means that they are working with a different set of axioms than the ones you work under.

[/QUOTE]

In other words the people that flew planes into the WTC were rational, sane, and justified in their beliefs that God wanted them to kill all those people they just work under a different set of axioms than you and me.

29

[QUOTE=RaftPeople]
Because it is fresh in my mind I will use a spider’s web as an example. The spider knows it must build the web, and it knows how to build the web, even though it lacks the knowledge as to how that information exists within it’s brain. As human’s we may someday determine exactly how that information is coded genetically, but for now it’s just an educated guess.

So it’s possible people can have accurate information with no apparent logical source based on what we know today.
[/QUOTE]
Are you sure of that? The spider “knows”? Is the spider even aware it is building a web? If so, can you provide a cite for this? If it is not aware, how can it possibly “know” what it is doing? Is it not much more likely that the spider is just engaging in a complex instinctive behavior, and that it has no *idea *at all *how *to build a web?

How do you justify the leap form spider bahavior to human knowledge?

30

[QUOTE=Lilairen]
Complaining that religion isn’t as rigorous and objective as science is like complaining that daisies aren’t as structurally sound as I-beams – save it for the people who want to build skyscrapers out of wildflowers. The things have different purposes, work in different fields, and have different goals; of course they function differently.
[/QUOTE]

Both science and religion make claims about how the world really is. Science actually gives us a method to do this; religion does not.

31

[QUOTE=Ammonius Saccus]
In other words the people that flew planes into the WTC were rational, sane, and justified in their beliefs that God wanted them to kill all those people they just work under a different set of axioms than you and me.
[/QUOTE]
Yep. Sucks, don’t it? Of course, the axioms they were operating under were probably in large part fed to them with the specific purpose of making them able to be used to that end, or one like it.

Kind of like how sometimes you can program hardware to destroy itself. It doesn’t mean the hardware was malfunctioning when it followed the program; it means the program had negative results.

[QUOTE=Ammonius Saccus]
Both science and religion make claims about how the world really is. Science actually gives us a method to do this; religion does not.
[/QUOTE]
It sure claims to; the difference is effectiveness of predictive power. Religion seems to compensate for that difference pretty well with various (occasionally hamfisted) explanations, regardless.

32

[QUOTE=Ammonius Saccus]
Both science and religion make claims about how the world really is. Science actually gives us a method to do this; religion does not.
[/QUOTE]

I disagree with your claim that religion “makes claims about how the world really is”.

Religion organises subjective perspectives on the world – ‘The world is fundamentally flawed’, ‘The world is fundamentally okay and requires maintenance’, and so on, all matters of perception. None of these are questions of objectivity; they are organisers on perception. They are not a total set of perception-organisers that exist, but they are popular ones. They are, similarly, not the only cohesive systems that suggest particular action-sets as positive ones, but, again, are popular.

The idiots who are out there trying to build skyscrapers out of wildflowers – who take their religion as a system describing objective reality – are a small, vocal minority. They confuse their perceptions and filter-sets with objective reality; this is irrational.

Facts just are, and this is the realm of science – finding them, testing them, systematising them. Interpretations of facts – what they mean, what to do about them – lie in a more subjective realm, and religion is intended to provide tools for answering those questions.

Mendel’s research was motivated by a desire to better understand the nature of his god by developing a better factual understanding of the world he believed that god created. The meaning of his research to him is utterly irrelevant to the usefulness of genetics.

33

My friend Ammonius Saccus, is it your view that any view that is not (or cannot be) scientifically proven is therefore irrational? Tell me, how would you go about designing an experiment to prove that murder is wrong? Mind you, to do it scientifically, you must rely solely on science, so no “first principles” are allowed as assumptions.

I’ll wait.

If you cannot, I suppose the assumption that murder is wrong is an unjustified belief, and that anyone who believes so is irrational.

(This is not to say that Atheists cannot have morality, or that belief in God gives someone a moral compass. I’m just saying that “right” and “wrong” don’t really have a scientific basis, at least not yet.)

34

[QUOTE=Contrapuntal]
Are you sure of that? The spider “knows”? Is the spider even aware it is building a web?
[/quote]

All depends on the definition of “aware.” Probably more aware than a worm and less aware than a human.

Scientists are still trying to figure out if fish feel pain (really), and you want a cite for the inner workings a spider’s brain? I must say I do not have a cite for anything related to spider brains.

Why make a distinction between stimulus/response neural activity that is coded genetically vs acquired through experience (or some combination of both)? Is there really a qualitative difference? If I duplicated my brain in a new creature, do I have knowledge because it was gained but the other creature does not because it started with that brain state already?

Maybe it’s not the best word to use, but I’m not sure which word describe “the state of being such that neural activity results in positive movement towards an end goal.”

I subscribe to the following philosophy:

  1. Human brains and other animal brains work on similar principles
  2. Human awareness is merely a consequence or side effect of the complexity of our brain possibly coupled with specific structures that support this specific attribute
  3. Whether activity is instinctual or based on “knowledge” gained from experience, it is still just stimulus response. The fact that the brain structure was gained vs hard coded does not mean there is a fundemental difference once functioning
35

[QUOTE=aclubs]
My friend Ammonius Saccus, is it your view that any view that is not (or cannot be) scientifically proven is therefore irrational? Tell me, how would you go about designing an experiment to prove that murder is wrong? Mind you, to do it scientifically, you must rely solely on science, so no “first principles” are allowed as assumptions.

I’ll wait.

If you cannot, I suppose the assumption that murder is wrong is an unjustified belief, and that anyone who believes so is irrational.

(This is not to say that Atheists cannot have morality, or that belief in God gives someone a moral compass. I’m just saying that “right” and “wrong” don’t really have a scientific basis, at least not yet.)
[/QUOTE]
cg

First, since we are friends can you give me a ride to the airport on the 23th?

The problem is that you are equating rules of action with facts. We do have a moral intuition . I suggest you look at the work of Marc Hauser (he calls it a moral grammer).

There is no need to say that murder is wrong. All we need to do is say that we have an intuition that has evolved in us that we do not like murder at least in our own group.

Our entire “moral system” can be constructed by taking our individual intuitions and working togehter with individuals to create a rules of action. We may be individually selfish, but since we have to balance our own selfish desires against other individual desires the best strategies will invovle cooperation. Cooperation has both been hardwired into us through evolution and game theory shows that cooperation will help the individuals who use it the proper way (cooperation plus punishing defectors).

I don’t think it is at all controversial that humans have some desires hardwired into us by evolution. Morality is just a flawed way of meeting these desires. There is no reason to say murder is wrong objectively. Murder is just something we have an intution against. The problems come about when out moral intuition is perverted by unjustified beliefs.

This is what leds people to say that the suffering of AIDS spreading in Africa is not as important as preventing condom use. This is a totally fucked up idea that would not exist with up some crazy beliefs that are unjustified.

By if you ask begbert2, he (or she) will say that the Catholic Church is completely justified is creating more suffering in Africa by working against condom use (the Catholic Church even opposes condom use by married couple where one partner has HIV). He would even say that this action sane even though the Catholic Church’s whole view is based on dogma.

36

Well, your condeming religion, in it’s entirety, because it has bad aspects to it. A lot of things humans do have both good and bad aspects to it.

The key is to try and emphasise the good, and discourage (or disallow) the bad.

In the case of religion, the “good” aspects to be rewarded or emphasised are charity, “goodwill toward all” (to me means no stealing, no murdering, even from/to strangers), having strength and hope for the future in rough times, giving others the strength to get through rough times, for example.

The bad ones to be discouraged: Using god to justify the pursuit of selfish goals and power, using your brand of faith to “judge” others as unworthy (which is a form of arrogance and ego building).

So you trust these moral codes because they come from “moral intuition”, but don’t like it when they come from the moral code of religion?

So, may I paraphrase thusly?

Well, what if your gut is wrong? What if your gut has no opinion?

How much of this “moral grammer” is intuition (which I see as hardwired, like instinct), and how much is learned from the society we grew up in?

In my opinion, intuition can be as flakey as any other aspect of humanity…

I never went to church. I do have a sense of right and wrong as taught to me by my parents. It seems wrong to me to dismiss folks for having a spiritual side to them as nutjobs, and religion as a whole, because of the imperfections that exsist in all of us.

I do believe (hope?) that we can all find a happy middleground somewhere.

37

Let me say that I am an agiraffetic. I do respect the benighted opinions of people who believe that animals called giraffes exist. But I’ve never seen one myself, and there’s no rational purpose behind them existing. So I cannot accept them as something “real” – and I believe that people who do should really get help, to cure their delusion.

Notice anything about that rather tongue-in-cheek paragraph? I’m defining the world by my own experience and my views of what’s rational.

Ammonius Saccus makes a series of assertions about various religions in his opening post. He arrogates to himself the right to decide what’s rational. He redefines the Catholic term dogma, in post #35, to what he wants it to mean.

That’s his privilege. But as far as I’m concerned, he can talk to the wall. The Catholic Church used to do just what he’s doing – insist that all terms be defined, arguments excluded, and opposing views caricatured and ridiculed, in such a way that they were the automatic winners of any discussion, because they set the rules. Saccus is doing just that. It was wrong of them, and it’s wrong of him.

38

[QUOTE=Polycarp]
Let me say that I am an agiraffetic. I do respect the benighted opinions of people who believe that animals called giraffes exist. But I’ve never seen one myself, and there’s no rational purpose behind them existing. So I cannot accept them as something “real” – and I believe that people who do should really get help, to cure their delusion.

Notice anything about that rather tongue-in-cheek paragraph? I’m defining the world by my own experience and my views of what’s rational.
[/quote]

That is not a fair comparison. There is plenty of evidence that giraffes exist. This evidence is open to anyone. It can be examined tested. The existence of giraffes is subject to falsification through testing.

Where is the similiar evidence that Yahweh exists? Or Allah? Or that Jesus is God become flesh?

I am sorry. Is the Catholic Church’s opposition to condom use based on something other than dogma? What is the special type of irrrational unjustified belief do they use to oppose using devices that could save hundreds of thousands of people from unnecessay suffereing?

39

[QUOTE=mlees]

Well, what if your gut is wrong? What if your gut has no opinion?

[/QUOTE]

Wrong in relation to what?

Are you asking about people that have radically a radically different intuition than most other people? There are obviously people that have bad intuition. Just like there are color blind, there people have no moral intuition or radically different intuition. That is why the cooperation of individuals in so important. They can set up systems to get at those who defect.

40

What is come down to is that are two different types of views about the world. One is based on rationality and evidence. The other on faith.

The faith view brought us:

The Inquisition
Islamic terrorism
The crusades
Nazis
Communism

The rational view based on evidence brought us:

Medicine
Atomic Theory
Chemistry
Electrincity
Agriculture

It should also be pointed out that even those with faith view us it quite selectively. Most people with the faith view use it only for one small area of their life. They would not get into a plane that was build on what someone had faith would work. They would want evidence that the builder knew what he was doing and that the builder used the applied science in building the plane. That would be crazy.

And if I met a person of faith at resturant and told him I could turn the table made out of wood into bacon if I said some magic words over it, he would not accept my views on faith. He would demand that provide evidence that I could do it. And if I then said some magic words over the table and it still looked like and felt like wood he would not believe it was really bacon because I said so.

And if he did, you would he was crazy (or massively stupid). But if he was Catholic and believed similiar things about a cracker becoming the flesh of God he would get a pass.