Nothing you say is obvious to most people. Magic’s intuition at basketball was the result of countless hours of practice and study of game film in addition to his own extraordinary talent. That doesn’t have much to do with atheism or religion, nor does it follow that everybody has different types of intuition. It also has nothing to do with revelation, which you said was just as valid as intuition and empirical evidence.
Plus, I think he was trying to denigrate Michael Jordan.
In a way, it sounds like you would generally favor reflexive responses over cognitive analysis.
Metaphors are useful when someone doesn’t cannot grasp the structure of your argument, but you seem to be trying to use them to establish the facts upon which your argument rests.
Trouble is, they’re no good for that. I think everyone gets what you’re driving at, they just don’t accept that you are factually correct in your claims. Additional metaphors will not improve this predicament.
Well…I suppose you would do the reverse. We’ve gone through this before, even with the same evidence in front of our noses, people will put different weight on various aspects of the evidence. Probably some of you guys will say that intuition isn’t that reliable. That argument probably has been made.
His intuition got tested all the time. If it had been proven incorrect, he wouldn’t have scored as many points and would not have been as famous - or even a pro. So this is very different from untested intuition.
Anyhow, much of it is physical ability, not just intuition. It turns out that Bill Bradley has amazing peripheral vision. When he passed to a teammate it sometimes seemed like he did it out of intuition, but it was actually because he could tell that the teammate was there.
Some of the physical skills may transfer to baseball, some may not.
But none of this has anything to do with religion - except that if Magic always missed the pass he could say religiously “it was God’s will.”
Do you believe intuition is always reliable? How do we know when it’s reliable and when it isn’t?
You need to understand, that irregardless of what Marley says. It was difficult to make the transition from “religion is the opiate of the masses” to believing in God. Believe it or not, at one time I wanted to major in math and I would have been the one insisting on clear definitions on this Board.
However, I’ve moved a long distance since those days. I’ve come to the point from thinking the Bible is irrational to these guys that wrote the Bible were just using “fuzzy logic.” Although some of you guys may say that when a minister says, “…hear the Word of God as it’s written in…,” that phrase by itself is dishonest. I disagree, it makes a lot of sense in historical context.
Also, there’s nothing dishonest about redefining words as long as I’m trying to be upfront about it. In my very first post, I said that Intelligent Being means the same as God. I told you upfront that you may not understand what I meant by intuition.
Also, the linguists among you probably also understand that for certain words that are important to a society or a segment of society, there may be many variations of a word. For instance, they say Eskimos recognize 7 or 8 different types of snow. I’m sure that they don’t do this to purposely confuse people.
(bolding mine)No.
The next time you mean to say something, could you please look it up in a thesaurus and/or dictionary and use the right word?
When people say “irregardless,” the ghost of Noah Webster kills a puppy.
I thought you said it wasn’t a major change in your beliefs.
What is fuzzy logic?
It’s not necessarily dishonest, no, although you have not always been upfront about it. What it is is pointless, annoying, and wrong.
That’s because you refuse to explain what you mean. Why is that? Why is it like pulling teeth to get you to stay on topic?
That’s not really true, but if it were, it would be the exact opposite of what you’re doing. The point of having lots of words for snow and using different words for different types is being clear and specific. You are assigning new and arbitrary meanings to words everyone else understands to cloud your meaning.
It’s what a logician does when he’s drunk?
It is the lolgic of cats. When a religious leader has difficulty with a biblical passage, he searches cheezburgr for insight and inspiration.
Yeah, the upfront part is not happening.
It is, by definition (ha!), difficult to impossible to communicate your point to anybody else if you are deliberately using words differently from everybody else without telling them how you define them.
They also define what each means, and everybody gets to know those definitions. Nobody is confused because everybody uses the words the same way. Funny how that works.
So, no, that doesn’t absolve you of YOUR responsibility to tell everybody EXACTLY how you are defining words. Your own example unintentionally shows that well.
Tricky… Religions tend to be “organized systems of thought,” or “systematic philosophies.” I’m not sure if we should expand the word “tool” so broadly.
Also…many religions claim to embody definitions of morality. Judaism and Islam have lots of laws and prohibitions; Christianity depends on the concept of sin. It’s hard to say that these ideas about morality are, themselves, amoral.
I do agree that history provides examples of both good religions and evil ones. But this, too, differentiates them from tools; can one really point to an evil tool?
It’s largely unnecessary to redefine words. It’s most unlikely that you are creating a constant stream of brand new concepts for which we currently have no appropriate words.
Instead of redefining words on the fly, then being misunderstood, just use the right words to describe what you mean.
The further you get from ‘tools’ meaning physical objects that perform mechanical functions, the tougher it is to say for sure that they’re amoral. A hammer is amoral, a sword is probably amoral (it’s the swordsman that imposes a moral context), even an instrument of torture is arguably amoral as long as it’s just sitting there idle. It’s the activity that makes it not-amoral.
But once the definition of ‘tool’ expands to include immaterial things like methodologies and belief systems, it may already include activities. Propaganda is a tool, but often not an amoral one, for example.
Mathematics is an organized system of thought that serves as a tool. Every tool has rules. You use the teeth of a saw to cut, not the handle or the back edge. You blow against the reed of a saxophone and operate its stops according to musical theory. You operate an airplane in a specific way. Misuse or abuse of these rules can lead to unpleasant or “evil” results. Much the same could be said of religion.
You might think a mace is an evil tool (rules: you hold it by the handle and swing the heavy pointy bit at another person’s most vulnerable part), but if your family is being set upon by the Mongol Hordes, its evilness suddenly becomes a force for good. In that respect, the ultimate definition of “evil” becomes a matter of who is defining it.
Religion is more of a virus than a tool; it uses people at least as much as they use it. It’s not some passive thing you pick up that does only what you want; it permeates your thoughts and beliefs, changes your behavior for its benefit. People harm and destroy themselves and those they care about because of religion all the time; that’s them being used by religion, not them using it.
Agreed. Math and logic are “tools” – sort of. But they also sort of aren’t.
Obviously, an instrument of torture is a tool. But is torture itself? I do not feel comfortable expanding the boundary of the word that far.
Agreed. The “memetic” model is obviously flawed, and yet it has some useful metaphoric value. Some ideas sometimes do “take over” the people who carry them.
(And a metaphor is one of those things you talk through to make your voice louder. 
)
Mom always taught me that people find it easier to ignore you the louder you talk – whispering makes them pay attention.