Ok then, skip the word nation. Who’s rights is Osama fighting for?
The right of muslim nations to be theocracies.
A protocol could easily be set up where you could abort an experiment in the middle. The only no-no would be seeing the results, and then saying you weren’t centered. Falsification means nothing if there are alternative explanations for a failure - so I’d be rooting for you, in a sense.
Those who claim scientists are biased against this sort of stuff don’t understand that true evidence of it would be earth-shattering. The track record has been so bad that you can’t really complain that many have been disappointed once too often.
The reason science is advancing so quickly now (and engineering too) is that better understanding of a field cuts down the search space, which means that discoveries are not so much by accident any more. Do you think the neutrino was discovered by accident?
You don’t have to be a scientist to use critical reasoning. You don’t need calculus, you don’t need to memorize the periodic table, you don’t need to know any of that stuff. I think the major thing is that instead of worrying about how to prove yourself right, worry about how to prove yourself wrong. If you try really, really hard to demonstrate that your new idea is a pile of crap, and fail, then you really have something. Of course it helps to be able to laugh about suceeding.
You’ve just proven my point. You say you are right, and if you are totally convinced of this, there is nothing I can say to convince you otherwise. Have you read how the fundamentalists account for contradictions in the Bible? You’d do the same sort of stuff. If you got science, you’d start trying to prove yourself wrong. There may be no physical evidence, but you should be able to learn something you didn’t know otherwise from being in contact with whatever you’re talking about. Could you learn something about the past from them, then look it up to see if you are right.
The reason I participate in relgious discussions is that I’m trying to falsify my atheism. (I’ve failed miserably so far at doing this.) I’d be happy to do an experiment with you that could falsify my materialist outlook.
You can only prove your view of the world by trying to disprove it, and the impetus for that can only come from within you. When you learn this lesson, you will no longer be tone deaf.
Not nations. Remember, Muslim nations are the creation of the West. The golden age of Islam consisted of an empire that destroyed the kingdoms of the time. I’m not sure that is what Osama is fighting for, but it seems more likely than that he is fighting for a particular nation.
Well, what he said was not that he is right, but that he is not wrong. In the mswas universe of discourse, this does not mean that he is right.
Embrace contradiction - it’s so liberating!
Liberation is slavery. :eek:
Ah, but slavery is freedom, you see.
Then sign me up to be a slave! 
I knew a guy from the ME who was Muslim in High School. He pointed out to me, at some point, in political discussions that Saudi Arabia, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the Shaw regime in Iran are all considered kingdoms and abhorred by Muslim fundamentalists as the worst form of government, which happen to be supported by the US (in addition to Israel). It must be very similar to the Christian fundie and Hebrew Fundie drive to, literally, hate governments that do not derive their authority from their own religous figures.
That said, I also had a good friend in ‘Desert Storm’ who told me that when he left his camp around Riyadh and took a taxi through town, everyone watched him like he was the devil… and when his taxi driver decided that he was not an immediate aggressor, he started verbally attacking my friend. I got the feeling that the mass of Saudis were angry we were there, while the infinitely wealthy royal family suppressed them to keep the US presence. Eventually those buildings were bombed, I’m sorry to say… but that’s the revolutionary-fundie way.
No actually what I am saying is that they are interpretations of one’s own subjectivity, and that to try and falsify them by science is flagellating science for one’s own subjective ends, and is junk science.
What I am saying is that sometimes what it comes down to is that the argument is purely about semantics, and that people won’t admit that they dont’ know what the other person is saying.
When I say Fairies you have no idea what I am talking about. I am pretty certain of that. So for you to scoff at the existance of Fairies is ludicrous, it even violates the rules that Voyager is proposing. Again he thinks that I do not understand it, and that I am tone deaf. If I were tone deaf I would NEVER get it, because I would lack the ability to interpret the sensory input.
What I am saying is that people have different lingual formats by which they interpret what is going on. You might think that someone is speaking the same language as you are, but they aren’t, and scoffing at them for believing in fairies is like scoffing at a frenchman who hasn’t mastered English. Now I come here to fight my own ignorance, in that I come here to understand the western materialist mindset better, and how to interface and communicate with western materialists. What I am hoping is that one day you’ll understand that everything you’re attacking me for in my inability to communicate illustrates my point as effectively as any words that I actually type.
Here I’ll coin a term for you. We’ll call it “Semantic Drift”. Every one of us has our own interpretation of what a word means, and it’s slightly different from what another person feels that it means. So if you get someone who is far enough away in the spectrum of the overall culture from yourself, then you will see this drift as being much more dramatic than someone who is closer to you spectrally. So say that atheism and theism are diametrically opposed. If I were a straight theist then I would be diametrically opposed to a straight atheist. So our semantic drift would be very far away from one another, and we’d be using the same words but not saying the same thing. So when I use the word “God” I am using it to describe something that I have experienced, something I know to exist. So when I use the word “God” I am describing something that truly does exist, so asking me to prove it is not the right question, because you don’t even know fully what it is I am trying to describe.
The thing is, I am not trying to say Science is not good, I have every faith in science. I accept science as a good way to interpret the universe based upon faith because it’s the most internally consistent method of falsification I have experienced, and it’s the best tools I am availed with. However, I do know that all that I experience is based upon faith, including science, because the first thing I have faith in is that I exist. I take it for granted that I exist. “I think therefore I am”. I wouldn’t be here to ask the question of whether I exist or not if I didn’t exist. So the Faith that this is true, and that I can trust this to be true is then what informs upon every other belief I hold.
So for me the belief in God is a belief that there are intelligences that experience this universe from a different centerpoint than my own. I take this on faith, for you all might just be figments of my imagination, or an attempt for me to see things from another perspective, or both, or neither.
Erek
At this stage in your career, you could say “bread” or “rock” or “baseball glove” and I would not be at all sure I knew what you were talking about.
I think most on this board will admit we often don’t know what you’re saying.
This is news?
Here is an example of a word you’re using differently. I would say that you have evidence that you exist, not that you take it on "Faith ".
Is it just me, or is mswas heading down the Time Cube road?
It is self-evident just as the existance of God is self-evident. I have more evidence to support the existance of God than I have to support your existance. God is everpresent, you flit in and out of existance to help me figure something out. You are merely an idea, words on an internet message board. You are saying things I have heard before, and will hear again. You are a variable, God is a constant.
tomndebb I’d be willing to wager that you don’t know what anyone who believes in Fairies is talking about when they talk about fairies because you have a preconception of fairies as not existing. What I am arguing is that they are icons for archetypical concepts that the person is confronted with. This is why children interact with them more than adults, because children haven’t established a firm grip on the archetypes that form their personality. You require a stable and rigid meaning by which to judge the universe, and you cannot understand what another is saying, without their tacit acceptance of that stable and rigid interface.
Different religions, even atheism vs theism are semantic arguments. The semantic drift seperates people, and yet behavior between sects is very little different. I see people proclaiming science and yet still adhering to rigid dogmas. Even the simple concept “Absence of Evidence =/= Evidence of Absence” eludes most people. They will formulate an opinion and even argue that it is true based upon an absence of evidence. This is contrary to science, and yet people who will argue this position claim that it is I who is tone deaf to science. I am not tone deaf to science at all. I have been arguing semantics, not science, this entire time.
A practical example of what I am saying. Islam vs the United States. Both sides cite the abhorrent treatment of women as evidence that the other culture is inferior. However, both societies treat women fairly equally. In America we objectify women as the ultimate representation of beauty, and yet it is this same objectification that turns the majority of women into whores of one sort or another. Whereas in Islam they have harsh rules for women and do not allow them certain rights but this is born from a belief in the purity of women. Both societies have a preconception of the feminine archetype and punishes variation. However, in both cases, if the women did not play their role, then the societies would not exist as they do. Men and Women are equals in all societies, and always have been. The perception to the contrary is a major source of denial.
Our semantics and our view of a word lead to our biases. Kind of like how people like Der Trihs can convince themselves that ‘religious people’ are the source of all the world’s ills. What he is saying is that the vast majority of people are responsible for the world’s problems and he by being an atheist is an innocent victim. He is one of the small percentage of the enlightened. How is this different from any religious belief? It’s different in some intellectual ways, but in behavior it’s quite similar. I point this out, and yet somehow I am creating a strawman atheist, even though Der Trihs says a lot of these extremist things that I then quote. Not every atheist is Der Trihs, something I am aware of, but many of his extremist views are shared by other atheists, including other atheists on these boards, but only Der Trihs is Der Trihs. To me Der Trihs and a Fundie Christian are different only in which team they are rooting for. Both sides are more than willing to invent new gibberish to support their case.
So back to Fairies and Greek Gods. They are the personification of archetypal memes. The person experiencing them is creating an iconography around a program that they are running in their consciousness. We all do this however, and what the ‘rational scientists’ are doing is merely making fun of people who have a different archetypal framework than they do. This results in it’s own sort of rationalist inquisitions, while still allowing them to feel better than other religions for their own persecutions. For instance the way that the psychiatric industry ‘helps’ schizophrenics. They lock them in hellish boxes and restrict their ability to move physically whether it’s by a strait jacket or by some sort of drug. The drug war is a great example of this. The western political establishment can very easily circumvent the ideals of the nation now that the drug war is in place. We must ‘fight’ drugs. However, many of the drugs they are fighting became epidemics when doctors were prescribing them for every perceived ill they possibly could, and not because people were going out aquiring them on their own. This is true of amphetamines and cocaine. The medical establishment, and the pharmaceutical companies via the medical establishment are able to control the access to which drugs you have access to. And yet we don’t recognize the infringement upon personal liberty that this is. We don’t understand the violation of religious freedom that this is, and we don’t understand the overarching authority that we have given private corporations to control our personal lives. Yet drugs that we get legally by prescription are killing people or adversely affecting their health just as often as the illegal drugs. What makes one drug legal and another illegal? Well a semantic fiction that we like to call ‘the law’. Why is one psychoactive drug superior to another psychoactive drug? Well, it’s because of patents, and control. Some researchers who did field tests into both LSD and MDMA found what they saw as legitimate medical uses for them, and yet they are still illegal. So our schizophrenic friend is going out and playing with LSD, he gets caught, has his LSD taken away, put into a sanitarium, locked in a cage, tied up in a strait jacket, and pumped full of psychoactive drugs. As a friend of mine pointed out to his therapist regarding his paranoia, “My worst fear is being locked into a cage and tied up, and yet that’s what you do to me in treatment, and you keep acting like my paranoia is unfounded.”
Crazy is how far you diverge from the status quo, little more than that. The entire society is crazy, and yet it’s easy for the majority consensus to point at the minority, even though the majority consensus derives much of it’s power from moderates who are afraid of being labelled as crazy themselves, and don’t want to stand up for the ‘loon’ lest they be guilty by association.
So you might not understand me, but hopefully every post that you read chips away a little bit at the armor around your biases that cause you to continue to support horrors such as the “War on abstract concepts”. (poverty/drugs/terror) In order to make any difference in this world at all, the best course I can see is to go straight into the root of people’s consciousness, and find where their most fundamental semantic biases are, and make them question those. Remember, I am not trying to convince you that they are wrong, I am only trying to erode your certainty. Believe me I am not tone deaf to science, I understand it quite well, I am not trying to provide answers, I am trying to get people to question their most fundamental beliefs. This is why I am not attempting to front as a scientist at all. People are often afraid to question those fundamental beliefs and so they react violently to such an attempt, but the thing that most people forget is that just because you reask the question, doesn’t mean you won’t arrive back at the same answer.
In response to Voyager’s statement about questioning his atheism. I don’t question my theism as to whether or not God is real. I question whether or not my conception of God is accurate. I am trying to discover exactly what God is, and that changes from moment to moment, therefore it is a continuous experience. I experience the spiritual realm as fully as I experience the material world, both are equally real to me. So my answer to “How do you know that God exists?” is always going to be “How do you know the world exists?”, because I am not seperated from God in the same way most people appear to be relating to me that they are.
Erek
The phrase is “I think, therefore I am,” not “I think, therefore you are.” If you understand Descartes’ argument at all, it is that personal existence is the one thing we do not need faith for. He specifically did not start with believing in the existence of other people. He tried to prove god and others starting from this base, but that is different.
I understand at last. Folks, Erek is living on DiscWorld. That’s the place where memes get physical reality, like Death and various Small Gods. I didn’t realize the High Energy Magic Lab had an internet connection!
That explains the rock thing also - they’re not rocks, they’re trolls.
I’m glad we’ve finally cleared that up. 
Umm…
Eh, never mind.
And he thought that “I Think Therefore I am” proved the existance of God. What I am saying is that the existance of God is self-evident, just as my existance is self-evident. An opinion that Descartes and I would seem to share.
saoirse Hey, I’m just pointing out something that Osama bin Laden has said straight up is one of his gripes about the west.
Which, to the very limited extent that there might be some tiny portion of truth to this statement, (but there is not much), it still misses the point, which is that you constantly throw out words that have accepted meanings in odd ways that ignore the actual meanings on which people agree, then run and hide behind semantic games pretending that you are exposing some [vibrato] Gra-a-a-a-a-and Tru-u-u-u-u-uths [/vibrato] . Forget the fairies; I still doubt that I could reliably understand your idiolectic meaning if you spoke of a baseball glove.
The point that you claim to be making is worth consideration. Unfortunately, your method of approaching that point does nothing to establish it.
This isn’t entirely correct. Americans may scoff at women that don’t fit the mold, but they’re certainly not punished. Women are free to work as scientists and engineers, wear blue jeans, not wear makeup, not have children, not get married and there’s no community stoning.
Of course, there are fundamentalist on both sides, but I see a difference in how women are treated in the US compared to Iran.
How so? Do you mean non-conservative dress, or are you referring to something else?
You have got to live in rich-fucker-wannabe-ville, filled with models and trophy-wives. I haven’t known very many people (closely) that objectify women like you say - Don’t get me wrong, I know they are out there somewhere, but maybe (in more recent years) I’ve separated myself from people like that. You must live among hard-core hollywood and/or Judeo-Christian religious mainstreamers. *** :jab: Besides, you keep saying that objectivity doesn’t exist anyway :).
Well, these “religious people” are certainly no better than those in many of the other systems, ethically or morally.
What’s funny is how strictly rational thinking can do that between atheists without actual physcal or communicative association… while most of the religions I’ve ever heard of strictly need of word-of-mouth in order to spread. I think there’s room for philosophical expansion here – a form that passes between people without physical association – maybe ‘atheism’ IS God (only partially joking).