Everything I touch turns to shit. I’m like the anti-Midas.
A “nob” is a rich person. Perhaps he thinks you’re a vagrant who towels down people like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett*?
As has already been said, we don’t really have a large woo-woo contingent around these parts. IMHO and FWIW, none of them argue the woo particularly well (some of them are notably bad, such as our good friend Ivan who has chosen to grace us with his presence in this very thread).
Assuming this thread is on the up and up and you really are just curious (benefit of the doubt and all that), my suggestion is to just start participating in discussions and forming your own opinions about individual posters. Having people tell you who THEY think are good (or bad) posters is an exercise in futility. Hell, there are posters who I think are very good on some subjects but who, on others I just roll my eyes when I see them weigh in, and posters who I immediately formed a dislike for because I saw their posts on a certain subject but who, later, I saw posting on other subjects who I found myself nodding or at least liking more. It’s a pretty contentious community, with a lot of buried (or not so buried) animosity or rancor, since there have been some fairly brutal threads where people just went off…so, asking for opinions is probably not the best way to figure out the ropes here. Just my own take, again FWIW.
If you are looking for a more science oriented or at least skeptically oriented message board, then this is a pretty good one, since I think the majority of the board is on a similar page, but we still get periodic CTer or religious hard cases that are either members or just want to drop in to put some fresh chum in the waters.
-XT
Apology not accepted. Your response was great, and I shall take no apologies.
Where I’d disagree is that I have a similar distaste for snake oil that I do religion, because I think religion is just as harmful, if not more so. It may not harm every single participant equally, and for some the greatest harm may be that they live pleasant lives but aren’t logically consistent, but I believe it hurts the bulk of them in far less innocuous ways, and is a cancer on the world overall.
But enough about that. That has little to do with the point that I want to address about your post, plus having a religion isn’t necessarily the same thing as thinking loved ones are capable of communicating with you after they’re dead.
I did not report Diogenes the Crazy, but not because he shouldn’t have been reported. As a rule, reporting doesn’t even occur to me. If I read something I think is stupid, I think to myself “That’s stupid,” and keep reading. That’s just a personality thing, I guess. If my response to that thread didn’t betray my opinion, I will say right now, explicitly, that I think the idea is completely absurd. I did not, however, launch the Reason Brigade, and harp on everyone repeatedly about their beliefs. What-the-fuck-ever, dude, if someone thinks hubby is sending messages from beyond the grave, as murderous-of-logic as I find that contention, I am not going to throw acid all over sharing time and go “WRONG! WRONG!”
Yes, I think this messages from zombies bit is unfortunate and foolish, but I have no particular compulsion to shit on everyone’s (benign) parade, and people who do are fucking cocks. If you really want to address something so badly, and think a line of reasoning is such a fucking affront to your universe, start a discussion about it, instead of crapping all over an existing one. Yes, I’m aware of the GD thread that now exists, but no courtesy points are being awarded since he had to be strong-armed into it.
It is unfortunate that no one can say “I keep my grandpa’s pocket watch with me for good luck” without the Logic Gestapo going, “There is NO scientific reason to believe a dead man’s watch is altering reality!!!” All right already, go fuck yourself. Yeesh.
I have no particular dog in this fight; I’m just saying what I’ve seen here.
Not likely, since I’m not fond of absolutes.
Yes - this is what I’m talking about - the Logic Gestapo. It’s not enough for them to believe one thing, but they won’t rest until they’ve thoroughly browbeaten everyone else.
I thought that was Fundies.
Funny thing is a think the world would be a better place were it rid of superstition, belief in faeries and gods, faith, and all that other bullshit. That said, I also don’t think it’s always appropriate whenever someone brings up luck, magick(s) or whatever other gris gris they believe in, to continually drop a Logic Gestapo deuce in the middle of their discussion. I will admit that I feel Hitchens-level hostility toward religion, and I often bite my tongue when people say things like they prayed (great, I clicked my heels twice - that has just about the same effect on anything), but not everything is the correct avenue for your objections.
Now when someone says they keep crystals on their counter for good vibes, or they think their dear aunt Sally is talking to them from beyond the grave, whatever. Stupid, but if I don’t shout down people every time they talk about prayer and religion, which I find to be horrible, I am so not going to start a fight about why keeping your fingers crossed doesn’t change anything, or that your deceased relatives aren’t sending you smoke signals.
This is not to say I will not, or that you should not, challenge people’s statements about gods or crystal balls, but you do not have to start a Great Debate and dust up every single time, no matter what, in whatever context, these things are mentioned. You don’t. It’s true.
Yah. Pick your battles. If you don’t choose them wisely, speaking up against something that nearly every single human being on the freaking planet engages in is worse than whistling in the wind; if you choose the wrong time and method, you can make the person defensive and even more entrenched in their superstition as a result.
All right! Finally some folks around this joint agree with me. I’m going to the bar. No wait, it’s last call. Well then I’ll grab some gin from the freezer.
You know, it’s a little frightening how much the Science as God fundamentalists resemble religious Fundamentalists.
Physical laws are not prescriptions. They are descriptions of what we have observed to occur in the universe, expressed as precisely as possible and preferably in mathematical language (necessary for precision’s sake). But there’s no conceptual reason to think that any given law is inviolate; and the fact that an omnipotent & omniscient deity violates the laws we understand could be explained away as our understanding being inaccurate, imprecise, or incomplete.
Understand that I don’t believe there to be any real evidence for the existence of God or gods. But the God-violates-the-laws-of-nature argument won’t hunt. It’s as silly as when–for instance–some persons say that airplanes “break” the law of gravity. No, they act in accordance with it.
I don’t believe this. He is smart enough, IMO. The dumb part is his beliefs and childish way of non-defending them. He won’t waste time trolling when he could be fighting the good fight (in his mind).
it’s an irregular plural tense of ‘pobe’. American english is funny that way.
This is a classic from the Woo Dimension.
It’s curious that those who take things on faith and via testimonials apparently feel that labeling evidence-based thinkers as being like themselves is a deadly insult. :dubious:
The fundie comparison falls flat however, since people who respect the scientific method are willing to change their minds on the basis of evidence. Wooists typically never discard any brand of woo no matter how discredited and debunked it is (for example, when’s the last time you heard of alt med enthusiasts giving up on any of the vast array of quack cancer remedies, from Essiac to Hulda Clark’s Zapper?).
Maybe we should coin a new term - woo-damentalists.
You are comparing the average evidence-based mind to the entrenched faith-based mind. Both sides have a vast spectrum of viewpoints.
It’s not silly at all; it’s standard procedure. We all the time call something impossible because it violates physical law. Such laws are normally treated as inviolable, unless and if there’s some actual evidence of them being violated, then we rewrite the laws. There is no such evidence about gods, or souls, or magic.
Going by your rules science would be impossible, because any question would just be answered with a shrug and “eh, it just must not obey the laws of physics”.
There’s no such thing as “science as God fundamentalists.”
There wer woos who argue well, but not about woo. It is impossible to argue woo well because it’s an attempt to argue for things that are patently false and absurd.
I don’t necessarily count religion as “woo,” by the way. I only become annoyed when people try to make religious, or any other magical explanations for anything happening in the physical universe. I don’t care, and don’t think it’s bad if people want to believe that Jesus telepathically communicates with them, just don’t tell me that Jesus put his face on a taco, or that Jesus made the world in six days.
What you are seeing is an expectation that people making extraordinary claims should be able to back them up. Calling that “intolerance” is just whining. The whole raison d’etre of this board is fighting ignorance, not “tolerating” bullshit so we don’t hurt people’s feelings.
In the same thread on the same subject too. You weak-minded fool! It’s an old Jedi mind trick!
It’s ironic that in the very thread that likely inspired Cat Whisperer’s remark about skeptical “intolerance” (the one about so-called “liberation treatment” for MS), the OP mentions that a cardiologist skeptic has been “blocked from posting” (i.e. banned) from multiple sites that discuss the treatment.
That’s a common occurrence on alternative medicine boards and in forums devoted to woo in general. The very people who gripe about how their views are suppressed are eager to silence those who employ rational thinking that leads to different conclusions.
One may feel uncomfortable on the Dope when one’s woo is challenged by most posters, but I’ve never seen a wooist banned just for expressing unpopular beliefs.