Me neither. And if you scroll down that page with the Venn diagram, there’s another one with a FIVE-circle Venn diagram. Although I didn’t take the time to study it closely, to see if it creates all the possible intersection combinations.
Is there some limit to how many circles can be drawn on a plane surface, that can be drawn to have all possible intersections areas?
Is this related to the problem of drawing lines on a plane, such that each new line divides in two each other region (created by previous lines) in the plane? What are the limits of that problem?
Hm, looks like the 5-circle one is still good. Or at least, it certainly divides the plane into 32 regions, as it should. The symmetry makes it look like that scheme should be generalizable to an arbitrary number of regions, though I’m not sure if that necessarily works. I’ve a hunch that you’d need non-convex circles, at the least, and possibly non-connected intersection regions.
And once again, someone fighting for rationality makes it nearly completely unusable by including Christianity in the mix. Same reason I can’t recommend Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality to anyone who I think could use it. It doesn’t matter if you think Christianity is false, including it in your lists is just going to hijack your message.
It’s certainly possible and very “straightforward” to draw Venn diagrams having n binary variables using n-spheres in n-space. That is nothing more than a n-binary-variable contingency table, which is topologically equivalent.
It’s not included on the list because the author thinks “Christianity is false” - it’s included because religion is irrational. There are plenty of things that are false that aren’t irrational. Religious folks may try to take offense at someone pointing out that their beliefs are irrational, but it’s just a fact. Besides, isn’t it supposed to be a selling point of religion that it requires faith (by definition the opposite of a rational choice)?
Also, I would point out that the Venn diagram does not include Christianity by name. It lists numerous religious things, some of which are directly from Christianity or a specific flavor of Christianity (e.g. The Trinity, transubstantiation, the Bible Code), but most of the religious items it includes could be relate to any one of several different religions (e.g. miracles, religious fundamentalism, prayer, holy relics, angels).
Also, I get the distinct impression that BigT is only offended by the references that relate to Christianity. I highly doubt that he is upset by the religious items included that could only relate to other religions, since he didn’t mention them in his post (e.g. reincarnation, karma, occult, voodoo, Scientology). It seems like he doesn’t have a problem pointing out the irrationality of other religions - he’s only clutching his pearls and warning about how we don’t want to run the risk of offending and “hijacking” the message when it comes to Christianity.
Personally, I think that the message is categorizing different types of irrational thinking. Deliberately excluding certain categories of irrationality (ie. religion in general), or cherry-picking what specific items to include in the category (ie. not including references to Christianity since it’s currently popular) would both be a massive mistake.
I think that there are some religious people who may intellectually understand that atheists exist, but the whole idea of truly not believing there is a god is so foreign to them that they can’t wrap their brain around it. For them, god existing is the default state and them don’t really grok how someone can feel that there is no evidence or need to god to exist. Hence you get things like portrayals of “atheists” on tv shows or in movies who are “angry at god” about something bad that happened to them. Whereas in actuality atheists are not angry at god - you can’t be angry at something you don’t think exists. If something horrible happended to me, I’d be no more angry at the Judeo-Christian god than I would be angry at the Norse gods, or wondering if my karma from a past life caused the bad thing to happen.
Since some religious people have a hard time really getting that atheists truly don’t think there is a god/any evidence for god, and that atheists don’t privilege current or locally popular religions over other ones, that’s why I think it’s good to include religion in things like this Venn diagram of Irrational Nonsense. I think it’s actually a good idea to include religion on a list of irrational things like homeopathy or remote viewing or hollow earth or feng shui. Because then it demonstrates to them that really and truly, if you look at if objectively, there is no more rational evidence for one than the other.
Well, irrational Trinity-bollocks-believer chiming in here, but you don’t have four circles there. You can make more-variable 2-dimensional Venn diagrams using Jordan curves, which are topologically equivalent to circles, but if you’re using true circles, three is indeed the upper limit.
I’ll just take my irrationality (and my mathematics degree) out of this thread now.
I can’t read their minds, but there are certainly religious believers who insist that they don’t believe in atheists, that “everyone knows that there is a God” and that people who claim to be atheists are lying.
I’ve been told this. I was talking to a Muslim and he asked what religion I belonged to, and when I said I was an atheist he replied ‘No, you cant be, everyone believes in god.’