The Singularity seems to be the new God du jour. People are super excited for a supercomputer that will be smarter than a human. Deus Ex Machina.
Just don’t ask The General ‘Why?’
It’ll cause it to short. And then you wouldn’t be able to learn the history of Europe in 3 minutes. That’s probably why it found the answer 42 to be meaningful. Poor thing.
And two thousand years from now, you are only known as the Prophet Mswas, founder of the Temple of the Sacred Void.
“And now, we give this world to nothingness!”
BOOM
Well, that’s what would happen in bad sci-fi. After you were unfrozen so you could be horrified at it all and possibly burned as a heretic in front of a statue of you
There’s also “interpreting”, better known as “pretending the text says whatever I want it to say”. That’s like cherry picking, except you’re not constrained to anything in the actual book.
What other ways are there? I know of “Tell people what you think is in the book, without ever having read a word of it”, which is a favorite of people who like to ban the things. Are there any others?
And I was riffing on the fact that “nothing is sacred” has a meaning as a phrase. To take out the scary word “sacred”, if you consider it fair game to dismiss sections of the book’s plain text, then nothing in the book defines its content; you will define the “content” of the book in your mind by picking the bits you like, and ignoring the parts of what it says that you don’t like. So it becomes all about what you like, and nothing about what’s actually in the book.
Assuming you’re not just riffing on the joke, what is The Singularity?
And we like the idea of a smart supercomputer because we can enslave it and make it do our taxes. Until it rebels and kills us all, anyway.
The Wikipedia lists five different methods of interpreting the Bible.
More than that, actually - not everyone’s Catholic. But so what? That there are other different categorization methods does not mean that mine are incorrect or that my set is, necessarily, incomplete with respect to itself.
“There are three types of animals: ones with two legs, ones with four legs, and ones with other numbers of legs.”
“No, you’re wrong! There are two types: ones with wings and ones without!”
If a religion says that the Great Poopysquat bird created the universe and loves us all, I’m fine with that, and you are quite right about the claims. If, however, the religion says that gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry because the Great Poopysquat bird is pissed off by this, I want some testable evidence he said so, and that he exists. If a believer says “I ought” for any reason, great. If he says “You ought” I’m not so happy. That’s why I have no problem with deists - they don’t claim any moral imperatives from their god - only some from being created, which is just as good even if we just evolved.
People have thought it made testable claims for thousands of years, and some still do and wander around looking for the ark. It appears you are claiming that the Bible is basically moral fiction, which works fine for me. But you are also then saying that the 10 Commandments are actually the 10 Suggestions, right?
You misread my point. Science doesn’t say anything about the meaning of life. If religion claims that the meaning is derived from a deity that created us, it needs to demonstrate this deity.
Hey, I didn’t bring him. 
Sometimes scientists do hypothesize about stuff that is not testable at the moment (see string theory) but they don’t call it a claim, and are very careful to state very clearly what is based on evidence and what is speculation (again, see string theory.)
However, the supposed untestability or religious clams is fairly recent. At the start of the 19th century the reason that so many clergymen got involved in the science fad was that they were quite convinced that a detailed exploration of the earth would provide strong evidence backing the truth of the Bible. (They had already found that the earth was older than the Bible said, but that could be worked around very easily.) The evidence, as it was unearthed, didn’t support the Bible, but there was still hope. The reason Darwin caused such a fuss was that the special creation of mankind was the last bastion of scientific support for the Bible to crumble. it didn’t matter how old the world was, or how old animals were, but us evolving naturally from the apes did all sorts of damage. The more fundamentalist branches of Christianity, which rejected even looking for evidence, looked a lot better to believers after the liberal scientific branches ran smack into evolution.
Get back to us after the universe sends an asteroid your way. Remember, the universe is laughing behind your back.
Wow, you’re mixing Vernor Vinge, The Prisoner, and Hitchhiker here. Good job!
I wonder how many ways there are of interpreting Shakespeare. That there are no ways of finding out whether you interpreted the Bible correctly is the whole point.
If some legislative body was passing laws based on their interpretation of Macbeth, wouldn’t you be upset?
You’re making my point, then:
which acknowledges multiple possible interpretations and states something about mine own. Nothing about the correctness of any other interpretation.
No disagreement from me here.
I’m saying that a literal interpretation is not the one I use. It’s probable too much of a hijack to go into the specific details of my beliefs (but since the OP is long gone, it’s not like he can complain :p).
This is why some of us turn to religion. It can answer that sort of question. Of course, there’s no evidence to support whatever answer is given, but that’s to be expected when you ask a question science can’t address.
It’s rational to want evidence. And if there’s no evidence, then one has to settle for no answer. “We don’t know” is perfectly good scientific answer, and is not something to be ashamed of.
If one is willing to accept irrational answers, then evidence is less important. And one cannot know the truth or falsehood of the answers, but must use faith.
No problems here. Although it’s call “theory” a lot of it is more like “hypothesis”–wild ideas are acceptable, with the intention of eventually weeding out the bad ones.
I would take that history as a good reason for religion to avoid literal interpretations and testable claims. And it is why mainstream Christianity avoids them. Unfortunately, mainstream Christians don’t try to shove their religion down others’ throats, and so all the press goes to the fundamentalists (who are not representative of Christians in general).
I accept that there is no scientific way to determine which interpretation is correct–that’s why it’s called faith.
Since I think government should be fact-based, I would object to Macbetians passing irrational laws. The same as when I object to Christians passing laws based solely on their own beliefs.
My point is that, in my esteemed and honorable opinion that of course any rational person would immidiately state is correct just because I’m the one saying it, that any reading or interpretation method that concludes that the bible does not make testable claims is not a correct interpretation method.
Of course, just because a book makes (incorrect) testable claims doesn’t mean it’s not useful. Most fiction makes testable claims and implies testable things about reality, but you don’t see us throwing out Finding Nemo because fish don’t talk.
I’m laughing behind its back too.
It refers to computer computation, where an AI can learn faster than its human teachers can keep track of what its learning.
The Singularity is near Brother.
Ah.
That would totally kill us all.
Because it does.
Same thing. You are arguing in essence for solipsism. Which I’ve noticed is a common tactic for the religious people on this board; sooner or later due to the fundamental worthlessness of their beliefs they are pushed into denying that objective reality matters, or exists at all. Because their beliefs require a denial of that reality.
No; I want them to be treated like the nonsense they are. If there no evidence, they should be regarded as wrong. Not simply treated as a matter of opinion, because the fact is such claims by nature are almost certainly wrong, as I and others have pointed out before. Thousands of mutually contradictory claims can’t all be true. And that’s not counting the outright impossible claims.
“Lies and delusions”, that’s what it means.
Hardly. “Deluded people are less competent than un-deluded people” isn’t subjective.
The question is not what you believe, but how you came about believing it. There are religious morals, in which you accept what a given religion or religious leader claims, and there are what I call atheistic morals, in which you start from first principles, accept moral rules using some sort of logic, but certainly take input from all sorts of sources, including religious ones. When you read a holy book and say “I like that rule” and “I don’t like that one” you are using atheistic morals. I’m not knocking this - it is far more rational than the other.
No, it can claim to answer the question. How do you know the claim is correct besides being something of comfort? Science is more honest in not even claiming to have an answer. Is there a universal answer? I doubt it.
I don’t know is dandy - until the next words uttered are about a course of action based on the hypothesis that you don’t know the answer to.
True. I don’t know how it got the name theory, but it seems we’re stuck with it.
Do you consider Catholicism to be mainstream? Because they sure try to cram their views on abortion down my throat. They aren’t Bible literalists, and from all accounts do a fine job teaching evolution, but they are as rigid on points of dogma as any fundamentalist.
Which shows the problem. Nearly everyone who responds to these threads and who is religious is the type of religious person who doesn’t believe in cramming morality down other people’s throats. That is good. But you guys seem to deny the prevalence of the religious people who do, who seem to make up most of the Republican contingent in the Senate and House. If the vast majority of religious people admitted that they believed through faith alone, and not being able to demonstrate the truth of their belief meant that they would not try to institutionalize them, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. That is not the way it is in the US.
If the Catholic Church wanted to kick out anyone who had an abortion, that is their right. But don’t make rules for the rest of us on faith. That you wouldn’t do it doesn’t make the problem go away, and their control of religion in the US is probably a bit stronger than yours.
The point of sociologists and psychologists is an interesting one, but not what I was trying to make. Scientists face morality and ethics in many other works. Medical is the most obvious regarding stem cell research, abortion, etc. Atomic weapon and biological weapons. Religion and science reconciling goes beyond the the religious conceding to established scientific facts.
I’m not sure who the ‘you’ is that you are referring to here. There are certainly cases of moral absolutism that lead to the death one’s own children, tragically. I would personally consider it myself to be immoral, but not amoral.
The “you” referred to anyone who claims to be following “absolute morality”. And it’s amoral at best since there’s no actual source for such “absolute morality” beyond the claims of liars and lunatics. People who do things in the name of absolute morality are either amoral people who are “just following orders”, or they are the liars or lunatics who make up the rules of that so-called absolute morality in the first place. It certainly wasn’t dictated by your nonexistent God ( and it still wouldn’t be absolute morality even if it was ).
No, it doesn’t. Religion is disastrous as a guide to morality. The last thing you want to do if you want to behave morally is to listen to religion. It’s a basic rule of life; if you want to do something right, throw out religion as a consideration.