Not you, Czarcasm who brought up Norse and Greek myths.
Are you the end all and be all of knowledge? If something has not been verified TO YOU, does that mean that it hasn’t been verified, or if not that it is functionally irrelevant TO YOU, whether or not it has been verified?
Did you read my statement about being vs doing? The Tao is a state of being. It is a matter of the cultural metaphorical system of achieving that state of being. In the west, that state of being is a ‘thing’. In the east, that state of being is an activity. You have to understand the metaphorical descriptions for an idea that is bigger than all language, before you can really work on debunking them, no?
It seems to me that you have a specific idea of what God is, that you have decided does not exist. Before we can discuss this idea of whether or not he/she/it exists, we need to come to an understanding that we are even talking about the same thing. I need to know that you understand what I am talking about before we can argue the merits of what I am saying.
Congratulations on entirely misrepresenting my position in what I can only imagine is a desperate attempt to ignore the weaknesses in your own. I spent a long time trying to compose a response to your glurge, but the repeated mocking distortions and misrepresentations of my position and the continuous accusations of my supposed impenetrable bias have pissed me off beyond the ability to tolerate.
So I’m not going to bother. If you want to build strawmen and topple them with ad hominems, more power to you. It’s not worth my effort to argue with somebody so dedicated to soiling the debate.
(I hope that’s brief enough for you.)
You’re correct that I’ve referred to those various terms. You don’t mention what you think I mean by them, so I have no idea whether your understanding of the terms is aligned with mine.
As for credibility (from m-w: )
Main Entry: cred·i·bil·i·ty
Pronunciation: "kre-d&-'bi-l&-tE
Function: noun
1 : the quality or power of inspiring belief <an account lacking in credibility>
2 : capacity for belief <strains her reader’s credibility – Times Literary Supplement>
When speaking of credibility as a continuum that levels of belief aka certainty reside on, I’m using definition 2 - it’s the range of possible levels of belief within the mind of the believer. So it’s the same continuum.
(Believe it or not I’m not trying to be tricky or sneaky here, nor is this intended to be an overly elaborate of complicated model. One continuum, with marks on it for the confidence you deductively ought to have, and one for the confidence you actually have. If you have more confidence then is merited by the evidence, then that additional confidence = faith.)
(Oh, and that use of the variable X simply generalizes the statement to any specific level of certainty; in other words if you do not believe something more than is merited by the facts. There is nothing particularly scientific about it, it’s just a way of specifically saying that the two belief levels referred to are the same, without restricting the specific level(s) being referred to to a specific example case.)
A rational analysis of the evidence is one where all conclusions are based on a careful and considered calulation of the of the evidence, and the total credibility assessed from the combined set of all evidence is the level of belief assigned to the proposition.
For the sake of argument, the assessment is assumed to be without error. If there is error in the analysis, then it’s still a rational analysis, just one with an error. Such erroneous analyses are (of course) wrong and will likely yield a different level of belief than a non-erroneous one; this difference is not based on faith though, so we can safely ignore it when defining what faith actually is.
The exception to the above paragraph is the case where the error was caused by the inclusion of unjustified assumptions (that is, ones based in faith) as evidence in the assessment. Such an argument my have the form of and be in most particulars similar to a rational analysis, but since unconfirmed premises make an argument unsound, any belief derived from the analysis will be similarly unjustified, and belief based off their result is faith. (An example of such an argument would be “There’s a rock here, and becuase God made everything, I know this rock was made by god.” Because ‘God made everything’ is a faith-based belief, the results deduced from it are also faith-based beliefs.)
The amount of support that the set of evidence can provide to a given belief depends on what the evidence is, how it can be combined, and how any combinations thereof relate to the belief under examination. For specifics of how this should probably be done, you would be better off reading up on debate and/or logic than asking me. How a given person does assess evidence varies from person to person, of course. Some people are aware of more rules of deduction and inference than others, and everyone has their own set of known-about evidence and reasonably justified beliefs to deduce based on. For example “Time-tested assertions of science relating to the natural world tend to be correct” and “Rush Limbaugh is pretty biased” are statements that can be deduced from available evidence (assuming you have had the opportunity to compare the arrestions of science and Rush Limbaugh with reality), and which thereafter can be used as a basis for further analyses. A lot of people also make decisions based on beliefs that can be or have been shown not to be justifiable from available evidence, like “Anything my mommy says is true.” Such preconceptions are based in faith, and as noted above anything concluded from them is subject to the same objective doubt as its basis statements.
Is should be noted that one should theoretically incorporate all available evidence into the argument, from your shoe size to the atomic mass of xenon. To not do so would technically be an analytical error. However in most cases there is no discernible relation between aribitrary piece of knowledge X ( ) and the conclusion you’re trying to draw, and the inclusion or exclusion of such irrelevent pieces of evidence makes little difference to the result. So, large swathes of evidence this is beieved to be unrelated to the question is generally ignored in the hopes of finishing your analysis and making a decision sometime this century.
You’re not supposed to ignore relevent evidence however, and to do so in an error. Sometimes this is done deliberately to defend once’s certainty in a belief, this is called ‘being in denial’. If you’re in denial then you’re clearly not making a proper analysis, so your belief level is almost certianly is higher than the evidence (including the denied evidence) will support, so faith would be present. This will commonly occur if you start with a reasonable conclusion based on a limited set of evidence (“Everything mommy says is true”) and cling to beleif in it in spite of later acquiring evidence to the contrary (“Mommy was wrong about my that expression freezing my face”).
Oh, and I mentioned “rational or otherwise non-faith-based analysis of the evidence” Such an anaylsis could include as as premises (or the entire argument) statements that are not deduced from evidence, but are also not drawn from faith. Reasonable statements of this type are limited to statements about one’s own thoughts and emotions. “I am happy” does not need to be deduced. “I like strawberries” can be trivially deduced from an analysis of how you happiness level has fluctuated in relation to your interaction with strawberries; such an analysis includes as a large component of it non-observed evidence.
Analyses such as “I feel strangely happy right now” + “my feeling strangely happy must be caused by God’s presence” => “God is here, God is real” of course do not get a free pass, since though the first premise may be safely asserted based sheerly on one’s mental state, the second premise is certainly an unsupported faith statement, and therefore the conclusion is a faith statement as well.
I’m looking at the two evidence/proposition sets you provided, and am noting the incredibly small amount of evidence you’re restricting us to. While one occasionally can draw a conclusion based on a single piece of evidence, I think in both these cases significantly more evidence would be required to arrive at a conclusion.
I mean, given only the motion of the Sun across the sky, you cannot exclusively conclude that the Earth revolves around the Sun, so far as I know. It was my understanding that the additional evidence of the observed movement of other planets was what eventually led us to a heliocentric understanding of the solar system. Absent such information or other equivalently compelling evidence on the subject, I don’t think the conclusion can be drawn.
Given only a gun as evidence, I have a hard time imaging how it could tell us anything. Now, if you allow us to also know that you have a specific set of fingerprints, and the gun has your fingerprints on it, and you have a bullet from the body of the victim, and you can determine that the bullet had been fired from that gun you have, then you might have the start of a case for your having murfered somebody. But without the bullet or the fingerprint records, I don’t know that the gun can tell you anything.
By the way, I noticed a few things about your post that leads me to believe that you think my notion of faith is somehow flawed, intrinsically. (“I knew the patient was ill”, “the start of the problems with your definition”.) I can understand if you’ve found me confusing; I can be very confusing. But if you’re going to get yourself all convinced that my position must be wrong independent of my explanations, there’s probably no point in bothering futher. I can’t do anything other than continue to explain and expound upon what I think.
It was never my intention to misrepresent your posts. I have tried to respond honestly. It’s certainly possible I misunderstood or missed the point you were trying to make. Perhaps you could consider that same possibility about your take on my posts.
I gave you an honest assessment of what I perceive to be bias. My intention was to be frank and direct not insulting. As far as mocking goes you might remember where my directness started.
after this dismissal
So while you casually dismissed my arguments as having no statistical credibility you continued to assert your own without offering any meaningful statistics.
There’s also this
Perhaps I overreacted but that seems awfully presumptuous to me, implying that your view is in line with reality and mine obviously isn’t.
Although my tone was abrupt and perhaps sarcastic, noting bias is not an insult. We all have it to various degrees. An awareness of our own is essential to an honest exchange. IMO you repeatedly dismissed and minimized my arguments while offering nothing more than a lengthy unsupported opinion.
I have no need to make desperate attempts to cover any weakness of my argument. I come to these boards to help me clarify my own while understanding others. I’m always glad to learn something. All I ask is that those who decide to exchange posts with me, give my posts some sincere consideration or just say “I don’t agree” and move on. I didn’t sense that with you. Your use of “strawmen” here seems to confirm it. You obviously don’t agree with me but to think your arguments are based in reality and mine are strawmen strikes me as flattering yourself.
Honestly, without intending to be mean spirited, you can make your points with a lot fewer words. I’m a wordy guy myself and I understand the discipline it takes to practice brevity.
If you simply don’t care, fine.
No malice intended fellow doper. See ya round the boards.
This is a distraction. It doesn’t matter what has been verified to me personally, nor have I ever claimed to be the end all and be all of anything. It’s the scientific community specifically and the world generally that matters. Rather than bother verifying anything, you just take cheap shots.
Shrug, so what? Are you claiming that the Tao is real? That the Tao is god?
No, I have examined claims of god’s existance, many of them, and found them all to be without justification. I don’t claim that a specific god doesn’t exist, I’m not making a claim. I conclude that there is no reason to believe in any of them.
You give me evidence of one, and I’ll acknowledge it’s existance. Until then, it can be put back up on the shelf with the ultimate truth and the unstoppable force and perfect beauty.
That would be called word twisting. Maybe you should try to understand what I wrote.
The Yin/Yang concept is espoused by Taoism, yes. So what?
I don’t. I don’t make any claims about god at all. If someone else wants to define god, I’ll have a look and see what evidence is given. Up until now, no god I’ve heard about has sufficient evidence to conclude it exists. I spent some time trying to get you to define what you mean by god, but you seem to be sticking to this very general ‘Supreme Being’ thing, which could mean just about anything, so I dismiss it.
I think that your *definition * of faith is intrinsically flawed. Specifically, this definition from one of your previous posts:
Anyway, back to your most recent post:
I think that your *explanation * of your definition is confusing, especifically the way that you conflate certainty and credibilty.
I wasn’t aware that I was asking you to do anything other than explain and expound on what you think.
Okay, maybe you’re right: You *are * confusing …
Okay.
But you are implying a way of measuring X. What method do you propose for doing so?
Who determines what is “careful and considered” and who assigns the “level” of belief? Is it done by the same person?
“objective” doubt? Is that the same as “margin of error” or “statistical level of confidence”?
Why is it an error?
Who “discerns” the relation?
Who ignores relevant evidence? Who determines what is relevant?
Is that a psychological term or an epistemological one?
Who determines (clearly?) whether you’re “making a proper analysis”?
As opposed to what, “all the evidence”, or “all the relevant evidence”?
Seems like you’re assuming *your * conclusion here.
I wasn’t aware that I was restricting you. I merely offered two choices. You’re free to reject both, modify one or the other, or present your own choices.
That was the point in presenting my examples.
So, what specific evidence did you use to determine the truth of the heliocentric model?
I agree. But, is there any faith in the interpretation of the evidence? According to your definition, isn’t the level of faith, in practice, always greater than zero?
Also, it’s unlikely that you, yourself, would be able to analyze the bullet or the fingerprint records. You would rely on “expert” testimony, right? On what basis would you believe an expert? And would you take into account the testimony of other witnesses? How would you evaluate their credibility? And, finally, do all intelligent, informed observers of the case agree on the verdict? What is each observer’s level of faith?
Your definition implies an objective analysis of faith, but, it fails, unless you can formulate and stipulate the objective standard for X on your “continuum”.
I don’t know about frankness or directness (those don’t bother me, so I don’t give them particular notice), but your rudeness and strawmanning started with post #277. Please allow me to give you a tip: lampooning an argument by sarcastically and inaccurately rephrasing it is perhaps not the best way to avoid accusations of strawmanning. (Or rudeness, for that matter.)
As for the dismissal of your "most people are religious, so <insert some conclusion here>"argument, I dismissed it because I honestly don’t see how you can conclude anything from the percentage of people who are religious, except perhaps how popular religion is. You provided no quite literally no data about the different groups (religious/nonreligious) aside from the ratio between them. If you had some data about the different populations, like if we knew that 99% of charitable deeds were done by that 90% of the populace that was religious, we might be able to conclude something about the effect of religion in the generous inclinations of people. Absent such data, though, there is no argument here.
Though perhaps theres something about this 90-10 thing that I’ve missed; feel free to restate your point if you feel that to be the case.
As I already said, I don’t dismiss your argument about there being good in the world done in the name of religion. Clearly religion and other faith-based beliefs have provided some amount of motivation to motvate and justify good behavior. The question is, how much?
Y’see, there’s no real reason to believe that the people who do good things would not do so without the impetus of faith, were a purely secular avenue to donate and a similar amount of purely secular encouragement present. To believe that faith is wholly or even mostly responsible for persons deciding to donate time and/or money, you’d have to assume that atheists are predisposed against donation; that atheists are just evil and selfish naturally. (If you like I can quote some somewhat disturbing passages from #277 which strongly suggest you believe this to be the case. Though you may just have been presenting things that highly biased way in order to provide a little extra unjustified support for your position.)
The reason I don’t believe my position to be subject to a similar question of motivation on the part of the individuals involved is because I have strictly limited myself to examples where the motivating or justifying power of faith is blatantly obvious. The inquisition. The crusades. Terrorist suicide bombers. The KKK. Slavery. The persecution of Jewish people throughout the centuries but notably by a certain group which shall not be named. (All praise Godwin!) In all of these cases the perpetrators probably were motivated by and certainly used faith-based beliefs to justify their actions to themselves and those around them.
I would say it takes significantly more bias to claim that the inquisition was not faith related, than to wonder if people are really incapable of generosity absent faith
(It should be noted that I consider racism to be obviously based in a secular faith assumption, that members of the other race are inherently inferior or evil. You have not yet contested this position but are free to if you wish.)
You realize that for me to honestly believe that in reality faith tends to do more harm than good, then I must believe that reality is biased in favor of my position, right? I was just referencing the humorous phrase “The facts are biased” (by Stephen Colbert), and I qualified the heck out of it to boot. Even so it apparently causes a firestorm. That’s what I get for trying to be funny, I suppose.
You did not merely note bias, you pretty much stated that I was either severely dissociated from reality or deliberately arguing dishonestly. Maybe those aren’t insults where you come from…
But on the other hand, your #277 includes several statements that sound individually and collectively incredibly biased; specifically having an anti-atheist bias. Also your behavior in making slanting rewrites of my statements in order to inject a bias which I contend is simply not present in the original text smacks to me of extreme bias on your part, to the degree that you’re willing to deny reality to protect your preconceptions. So I think you have bias too. In fact, there was so little debate content in#277 that the only thing in it to respond to was your apparent bias, and your ad hominems of bias in me.
And I am not going to get into an argument that has devolved to “You’re biased.” “No, you’re biased.” “No, you’re biased!” “No, you’re biased!!” I have better things to do - almost anything would qualify. :rolleyes:
Actually I called “strawman” because:
Is precisely not at all in any way what was stated or implied by the argument of mine that you were lampooning with it. That is pretty much what a strawman is all about.
Given that your ‘brief paraphrases’ seem to invariably make significant changes to the content and meaning of my posts, I’m not convinced that I can make my points in a lot fewer words. Somewhat fewer, yes; I do tend to ramble and repeat myself. But some of these arguments are actually complicated, and don’t fit in a soundbyte.
I regret how quickly I resorted to sarcasm. My rephrasing of your posts was sincere. That’s what I was hearing. I understand your reasons for dismissing the 90/10 point even though I don’t agree. My point all along was that those like yourself who assume as obvious fact that faith has had an evil effect on society aren’t really considering the data either. You were offering lengthy thoughts that contained mere opinion rather than data. I tried to express that in the post you linked when I said
If I said 90% of the worlds population was black what would the chances be that most of the babies born would be black?
I don’t think what people might do under different circumstances is at all relevant to the discussion. Perhaps thats part of the confusion. I’ve been speaking specifically of the impact of faith from our earliest recorded history to date. What has actually happened. Does that help clarify?
This is a false dichotomy. No one wouldn’t have to assume anything about atheism’s morals to examine the effect of faith. Furthermore I haven’t implied any such thing. By all means, please show me specifically where I have and lets see if it’s me or just your false assumption.
Here’s what appears to be bias to me. When I offer examples of the positive effects of faith you claim it’s probably not faith, or enough faith. You assert that people are motivated by other factors and those factors must be considered. I’ll grant you that. But here when offering your own examples you claim immunity from the same standard. It seems totally unfair and unreasonable to me, so the only conclusion I could come to was bias. It seems to be a double standard to me.
I accept your regret as an apology; however I will note that your rephrasing of my posts consistently failed to capture even the gist of my points. Clearly I’m failing to communicate. While some of this is probably your bias filtering my posts, odds are good that I’m not making myself clear. Normally this would be a problem solved by explaining myself in further detail, with longer and more wordy posts, but that honestly doesn’t seem to be helping in that case. Hmm, what to do…
I also will note that there is no data, or if anybody here has some, they’re playing it close to the vest. Even you have provided no evidence that “The fact is without any serious question and requiring little imagination, faith based charitable work such as the ones I mentioned and more, involve hundreds of thousands of people over generations affecting millions of lives, and even tens of millions.”
The absence of hard data on all sides validates arguments about the levels of support and validation that faith provides to acts of varying morality, as well as arguments about the direct effect faith has on people, absent actual knowledge of the specific frequency of real-world occurences. If you had hard data that only 5000 were ever killed or enslaved in the name of faith, and that 150 trillion significant charitable acts had been unambiguously done due to faith in the same amount of time, then I would be left with only the options of equating one death to 30 million charitable acts, bringing in other negative effects of faith to help tip the balance, or conceding. But such data has not been forthcoming, so speculative arguments are admissible.
An analogy: I don’t have statistical data that most people who are hit by cars going over 30mph suffer injuries, either. I would argue that to be the case though, due to the probable effects of a fast-moving car on the human body. Would you reject that conclusion due to lack of clear statistics of actual collisions?
Extremely good, because we know that a couple both being black strongly suggests that their children will be black (plus a little bit of statistics indicating that in a 90% black population you would expect around 81% of couples to be both-black, or more than that if people tend to seek out same-color mates or are not evenly distributed, which seems to be the case).
However there’s no indication that if a person is religious, they are likely to be more moral or ‘positive-value’ contributors than atheists, and you’d need to know or assume that sort of relationship between religion and positive value before you could draw any conclusion at all. Which is to say, the statistic-less 90-10 argument assumes its conclusion.
That you present this analogy of faith->value with black parents->black babies implies a powerful bias, where you are as certain of the positive value of faith as you are of the power of genetics. Which probably explains why you see the 90-10 thing as a compelling argument, and why you subconsciously edit the arguments out of my posts before comprehending them.
(Scary, really. Mark it down as another negative consequence of faith.)
Well, the value of faith is the effect it had. It is necessary to consider what would have happened absent faith to even recognize the impact faith had. There is no other way to even assess it.
But you missed the point of my argument (again). My point is, that in the real world, we don’t know that a person who donated did it because of faith! Even if he gave to a church organization; even if he donated while sitting in church, you can’t conclude that faith even had a hand in their decision to donate! There are a myriad of other possible reasons, peer pressure being a likely one. (You don’t want to be the only person not donating, after all.) The person also might be naturally generous, and donating because of that! They might gain self-esteem by donating, and do so because they know it’ll make them feel good. They might know that they’ll feel greedy or selfish if they don’t donate, and do so to avoid those feelings. You can quite easily have entirely non-faith reasons for donating, in which case it would be an error to give faith credit for it.
Yes, there are some people who donate because of some faith belief. But there are some, probably a lot (based on my interactions with religious people) who do so entirely for other reasons. Which is why I don’t think “hundreds of thousands of people over generations” counts for as many pro-faith votes as you think it does.
Unless you have some evidence that most people who donate actually do do it because of faith?
You mean “no one would have to assume”, right?
The stronger the correlation you draw between faith and charitable acts, the less generosity you attribute to atheists. This should be obvious; there’s only so many charitable acts done, after all. The fact is that theists almost certainly do many charitable acts for non-faith reasons too, there’s even less for atheists to do. If 90% of people are theists, then you would reasonably expect atheists to have done only 10% of *non-*faith-inspired charitable acts, and you seem quite confident that the vast majority of charitable acts are faith inspired. Which leaves the atheists a rather non-charitable lot indeed.
But depending on the minute, you don’t merely draw a strong correlation; sometimes your true feelings on the matter leak through:
Hence, no atheists ever assist in soup kitchens or low-cost health facilities. None, ever. Wow, they must be uncaring, selfish bastards, huh?
The fact is, your use of charitable acts as an argument for faith’s value relies on atheists not doing their share of charitable acts. If atheists pulled their weight, then being faithful would demonstrably be no impetus to do charitable acts, and no value would be there to find.
(Your periodic statements asserting that all contributors are doing so due to faith go above and beyond necessity, though. Though of course, given your total lack of stats, perhaps denial of reality is necessary to defend your position, lest people notice that we really can’t tell how much charity is faith-induced. Possibly very little, even.)
It’s my understanding that surveys have confirmed a prevalent bias among theists against atheist people; they think that faith is good, so persons without faith or who reject it must therefore be less good. Such a conclusion is inherent in the belief that religious faith induces good behavior. You can’t have one belief without the other, unless you’re into the whole ‘internal contradiction of beliefs’ thing as well.
(If you include non-religious faith as a significant element in your analysis, as Scylla did, then the target of your prejudice would shift to from atheists to rational people. (Which would be quite odd, in my opinion.) However your frequent reference to religion and churches (plus your infamous 90-10 example) pretty clearly state that you think of faith primarily in its role in religion. So your bias would be an anti-atheist one.)
It’s entirely possible (if not probable) that an entirely atheistic and non-faith-entertaining world would still have a respectable population of charitable works and recovering alcoholics. I have explained how this could work, by pointing out how many probable common motivations for generosity aren’t faith based.
However it’s not entirely possible that there would be have been institutionalized and popularly accepted slavery (notably in the american south) without the support of a widespread and well-recorded belief in the inferiority of black people. It’s not entirely possible that medieval knights and other pillagers would have begun a war with a country hundreds of miles away without the religious cause. (They would have instead done minor-scale local pillaging, like they usually did.) It’s not entirely possible that jews would have been imprisoned, tortured, and executed absent the belief in them being evil and/or inferior. (The war would probably still have happened, though.) It’s not even slightly possible that random people would have been burned as witches without the fervor of religion and superstition feuling and promoting the situation, regardless of which little girls had it in for who. And you’d have to be literally insane to think that the explicitly religious persecution known as the inquisition would have occurred had there not existed varying religions to persecute, nor the motivation of the instigating religion to inspire the actions in the first place.
You have to start with a bias the size of a buick to even pretend that faith didn’t directly cause these events. Sure, in some cases greed or hatred fueled the fire that faith had begun. (In one case, the witch trials, faith turned otherwise impotent (and I mean totally impotent) spite into a deadly force.) But we’re not assessing the effects of greed, hatred, or spite here. We’re assessing the effects of faith. And without faith, none of these events happen. Even in reduced quantities. Just, poof gone.
If you disagree, if you think that all these people merely pretended to be following the dictates of their religions as they understood them, and would have been able to carry the acts out even without the pretense of faith, then that’s a bizarrely outrageous claim for any of my examples. Please bring evidence, or drop these ridiculous attempts to equate my examples with yours.
Too-late correction of above post: Please mentally replace “However it’s not entirely possible that there would be have been institutionalized and popularly accepted slavery (notably in the american south) without the support of a widespread and well-recorded belief in the inferiority of black people.” with “…without the support of a belief in the inferiority of black people.” In the process of editing my document I shifted my own goalpost; if we’re not talking about the american south specifically, then the motivations are not well-recorded and probably not against blacks, if they’re not the one’s being enslaved. Also, in some other cases (notably societies where slaves were considered fair spoils of war), the faith-based belief in question changes, sometimes to simply “it is ethically okay to enslave people.”
Sorry for the double-post, but it is necessary for my position for me to be accurate here.
Since we don’t seem to be getting each others meaning very clearly I’d rather not approach another subject for now.
I do realize that and accept that you were trying to be funny. I overreacted.
I don’t see where I came on that strong but I accept that you read it that way. Perhaps you didn’t see yourself as casually dismissing my arguments but that’s how I saw it. I also was frustrated by what I saw as an obvious double standard. My examples of faith being positive didn’t really count for various reasons but that same thinking shouldn’t be applied to your examples. I guess you were sincere but how would you expect me to react? How would you react in my position?
When It happened repeatedly I began to think it was on purpose. I know some posters come to the boards to discuss and share ideas but a few come to “win” a debate. {whatever that means} I began to suspect that you were doing that. Minimizing my examples and asserting your own just to gain some imaginary debate victory. I’d be glad to discover I was mistaken about that.
I’ve already stated that we all have some bias. I’m included in that. However, anti atheist bias? Nonsense! You’re reading something into it that isn’t there. I barely spoke of atheism at all. Please point out what you thought was an anti atheist statement. Be specific.
FTR I value people by the content of their charecter period. I don’t judge an atheist to be any better or worse than I judge any believer to be until their words and actions reveal their charecter to me. I’ve been around long enough to learn that there are fine people and dickheads who are believers. There are fine people and dickheads who are atheists. And a whole lot of us in between.
I was sincerely trying to point out how one sided your argument appeared to me. I was also reacting to what I thought was irrelevant points that were also distractions from the point being discussed. Thats why I reacted to this comment by you
with
a point which you never responded to.
I’m not trying to deny reality. I’m trying to dismantle what I see to be an a popular but inaccurate meme about religion and faith. I just reread 277 and there seems to be plenty of content there.
Neither am I and I said as much several posts ago.
I looked it up and discovered I had somewhat misunderstood the term. I think it’s misused a bunch on the boards. Wouldn’t a strawman mean that I was intentionally misrepresenting your argument in order to easily refute it? That’s not what happened. Aside from the sarcastic tone the posts represents IMHO an honest assessment of what you were saying. My examples of positive faith don’t really hold up while your examples aren’t subject to the same standard . That is what you actually said, isn’t it?
Honest friend, from one who struggles with brevity as well, if you could present your point more concisely it would a lot less likely that I would misunderstand.
My own rambling examples on this board have only confused the issue rather than clarified my position. Capturing the point with brevity is really an interesting discipline once you start trying it. I ain’t that good at it yet myself but I find it’s worth the effort.
A word cannot be proven to exist. We make up words to describe things, and give them definitions. This is essentially done by fiat. We could make up any word at all and define it as ‘the ubercategory’, then we can discuss. However, since you seem to have missed the part where you have to establish solid definitions before you can get down to the matter of proving things, I feel that we have reached the limits of our ability to discuss abstractions.
I should’ve known to cut my losses when you dismissed Spinoza as ‘Handwaving’, while not having anything of depth to actually say about what you found disappointing in his work.
So, uh, what do you think is wrong with it? This isn’t a guessing game; you’re allowed to tell me what the specific problems are, and we can discuss them. It’s really quite hard for me to guess what it is you’re going for based on ‘twenty answers’.
Didn’t we already cover this? My specific word choices in this post don’t alter the defintion that I’d been using before or since.
Sigh. If you like, just menatlly search/replace “credibility” with “certainty” for every example where I am specificially referring to the plausibility of a specific piece of evidence. (Not the belief or continuum learned from the evidence.) That might make a few sentences syntactically incorrect, but it should put this little communication problem to rest.
(sigh.) Just copy-paste…
Wha? Where was I saying you could crack somebody’s head open and put a ruler up next to their beliefs? Just because there is a difference doesn’t mean it’s measurable. Not even if we can know it is there.
Nobody assigns it, any more than somebody assigns that zebras are striped. This are descriptive terms. It’s hard to tell from the outside at a fine level if someone has been careful an considering, though if they announce that they haven’t been, that’s usually a pretty good clue.
The person doing the thinking concludes how much belief is inspired by his analysis. He doesn’t get to redefine “careful” and “considered” to mean “ignored most of the obviously relevent evidence”.
No. “Objective” doubt: doubting done outside by anyone, including persons not the original thinker. Anyone can conclude that a person who says “I can rationally determing that God made this rock, because I believe that God made everything” is actually employing faith and therefore can’t claim to have the credibility a rational argument grants you.
Because you might overlook something important. Baby with the bathwater, so to speak.
The thinker. He may be wrong, and might have to change his views if the overlooked relation is later pointed out to him (or else become “in denial”).
Lots of people ignore relevent evidence, notably lots of faith believers. Most creationists flatly dismiss fossil and various other kinds of scientific evidence, and/or the historical demonstration of science’s tendency to be accurate about long-held beliefs.
And whether a given fact or piece of evidence or not is a function of reality; things that are related are related; things that are not are not. Each thinker makes their own assessment about what reality is, but outside observers need not be impressed with these assessments (especially if they’re driven or founded in faith beliefs).
No, it’s a definitional one: I’m telling you how I’m going to use the phrase in the rest of the arguement. The definition is intended to closely align with the common english definition.
Anyone who hears your argument can try to, including yourself. Ususally it’s hard to tell, but if you’re obviously in denial, then it’s easy: you’re wilfully disregarding the evidence so your conclusion can’t be trusted.
As opposed to “evidence available in the present”. Young children can draw rational conclusions from the limited worldview they are exposed to, which are rational then, but cease to be rational when contrary evidence is encountered later and they cling to the belief nonetheless.
How do you figure? Are you sure you understood me? What are you thinking? (I can’t guess it! My long-range mindreading powers have failed me!)
Well, if I use one of these examples, then I am obliged to use the level of evidence specified in the example, no? And these examples provide very little evidence.
??? I’m not parsing this properly; I don’t get what you mean.
Me personally? I had by the time I heard it observed countless cases where scientific study had yielded results which were accurate, useful, and relevent to the real world. (My TV works, for example.) So when I heard that the sun rising and setting had been determined by sicence to actually be us standing on the surface of the ball watching a (relatively) stationary sun, observed that the description made rational sense, I noted the lack of contradicting evidence, and I rationally noted that long-established science is a reasonable source (and heliocentrism is long established). So, it’s rational for me to believe when they say that the solar system is heliocentric. I could be wrong, (I don’t have absolute certainty), but I doubt it, based on then available and presently available information.
No. If you don’t give evidence more credit than it deserves, then no faith is employed in assessing it. It’s a little hard to tell sometimes if a person is being reasonable in assessing their evidence, but sometimes it’s easy (when they’re clearly granting more credit than is meritied based on known facts).
Expert testimony is only faith if you have unjusitified faith in the source. I would believe an expert based on his credentials, history, and earlier performance, and the relation of the question to his field of experience. I would assess witnesses similarly (and most of them are not expert observers with credentials and long histories of verified accurate observing). And no, not all intelligent, informed observers agree on the same verdict (not necessarily, anyway). They often bring varying knowledge to the table, and many of them will bring faith beliefs and employ them in making their decision.
And I don’t know what each of their levels of faith are? What do you think I am, a mind reader?
Err, by definition implies an objective definition of faith, as all definitions must be. Most real-world faithing is actually done behind closed doors (skulls, whatever) and cannot be observed until it is announced and/or otherwise demonstrated.
I have no problem admitting to some bias, but I honestly don’t think I’m missing your point. Evidently I’m failing to communicate my own because your responses seem to address something else.
It does seem obvious to me if we apply the same standard to both sides. Looking at people of faith and not considering the question of whether they were motivated by faith it seems obvious that charities sponsored and supported by churches and other organizations such as AA have literally helped millions of people over the decades. I don’t see how anyone could could deny it.
I appreciate you stipulating that there is no data. We’re just exchanging opinions and trying to explain our reasoning. Not successfully, but trying all the same.
I suppose thats all we’re doing.Speculating. It would be impractical to go into too much detail. Let’s suppose you really think it takes 30 million charitable acts to one death. What next? We argue the value of different charitable acts or bad acts on some kind of rating scale? No point to that. You may believe that the number of faith related deaths far outweighs all the charitable acts but since we have no data we’re bacj to my original point. There’s no real way to measure and I don’t believe that popular meme is nearly as obvious as others seem to think.
No because experience and reason tells me it’s pretty much a given. I don’t believe the evil effect of faith is nearly as obvious.
Once again. I’m not making *any *reference to atheists at all. If we’re discussing the plus or negative value of religious faith then we’re only dealing with those with religious faith.
I realize my analogy is flawed. Over simplified like your car example.
Here’s my thinking in a nutshell considering people of faith without considering each action and whether or not faith was the primary motivation.
Since recorded history 90% of humanity have been believers.
With all it’s problems humanity has managed to move forward and improve, We’ve taken steps toward equality, against racism, abolishing slavery, and other issues.
If 2 is true then the 90% must have contributed toward that progress.
If faith has more of a negative effect than positive it seems impossible for humanity to progress with 90% of humanity having a negative cumulative effect.
If indeed the meme of religious faith is negative for humanity is true and so very obvious with a cursory look, how is it possible that we have made advances with 90% of the population having that negative faith.
Asign any figure you like to what percentage of their motives are faith but apply it **equally. ** If only 50% of there good deeds are faith motivated then only 50% of there bad deeds are as well. See what I mean? Still the cumulative result is positive. Though religious faith must bear the scars of the Inquisition and the Crusades if also deserves much of the credit for moving beyond that behavior to where we are now. In a current example though Dobson, Falwell, and their ilk work to oppress gay rights other religious leaders and believers, like myself, oppose them.
Sigh!! Haven’t I said repeatedly that I’m not arguing that faith is obviously positive. My point is that the popular meme on this board that faith is obviously negative is not well thought out and inaccurate. I’ve stated several times that I think it’s really impossible to judge it accurately. Now here you are stating my position inaccurately. Perhaps you should consider the possibility that in your zeal to explain your position {which I think I understand} you are not really considering mine.
I believe this is completely incorrect. That is muddying the water with side issues that may be somewhat related. So would an examination of the good or bad contributions of the non believing 10%. To make a reasonably fair assessment of whether faith has been overall negative or positive we only need to examine the real world actions and consequences of faith based beliefs. Whether people can have a positive effect, or even a more positive without faith is another argument. question 1. Has religious faith in the real world been positive or negative? Question 2. Can we be as or even more positive without faith? Two separate questions. Since you pointed out faiths historical failings, I thought we were discussing question 1.
No no and No I have **not ** missed this point. I accept that not all good deeds done by people with faith based beliefs are done because of their faith. My objection is and has been that you do not apply the same principle equally to your side of the proposition. In fact you stated that your arguments were immune to the same application which I could only read as completely unfair and unreasonable and interpreted as bias. Do you really need me to give you a detailed list of all the possible non faith motivations for bad deeds done by people of faith? It shouldn’t be necessary. You are intelligent and have enough imagination to figure them out. If you think it’s acceptable for you to offer alternative motivations for good deeds then it must be acceptable to apply alternative motivations to the bad deeds as well. Doesn’t that seem fair and reasonable to you? This factor seems to support my original contention. Since we can’t realistically judge which and how much of the good deeds and bad deeds were actually motivated by faith it’s impossible to make a realistic assessment. If it is impossible then the popular meme is inaccurate. Thats my point.
I meant No, one {as in anyone} wouldn’t have to assume anything about atheism’s morals to examine the effect of faith. I am separating the two groups and discussing the group with faith based beliefs. In doing so I am making no comments about atheists as a group.
Faulty reasoning. I’ve explained that I’m separating the two groups and discussing only one. This intterpretations of my posts is entirely your own.
Again your interpretation. I had already specified that I was discussing faith based charities. That group. This sentence you’ve pulled out of context meant, every person in the group I am talking about. Perhaps I should have specified it again but I thought it was understood. Who knew you could assume that I would readily make such an outlandish and unreasonable claim as you just described.
No it doesn’t rely on that at all This is more faulty logic and incorrect conclusions
Once again, I’m not assuming anything. I am generalizing for the sake of brevity. What I insist on is that whatever principle, and questions about motivation you apply to the positive effect of faith, you apply equally to the negative examples.
The section I bolded is one more example of a false conclusion. It is true that many theists have little understanding of atheism and in their ignorance hold some false negative impressions. That does not have to lead to your conclusion. Can believers think atheists can be nice but unsaved? Of course. Can some believers be non judgmental as they are taught to be. as in “this is the path I’ve chosen for me and I don’t judge yours” of course. Your assertion here is false.
No it wouldn’t be since I’m not talking about atheists.
It is possible and its irrelevant to our discussion. I’m talking about the real world as we know it.
We seem to be arguing two different questions. You seem to be discussing a comparison of faith vs non faith. I’ve been discussing the cumulative effect of faith in the real world. Has it had a more negative or positive effect?
Again here I think you apply your own principles unevenly within your own argument. How much of slavery was about economics, or just the tribal bigotry that exists in man? The fact that they used religion to try and justify their bigotry makes it religion’s fault? How much? A little? A lot? Do you realistically think that without religion there would have been no other possible justification?
The question is, as *you * have applied it to the positive side, how much of a role did faith play, and to borrow another of your own arguments, is it possible for these things to exist outside of faith? You’ve completely failed to apply your own principles evenly to both sides and I’m sincerely sorry that you can’t see that.
Think of McCarthyism and that era. Compare that to the Salem witch trials. Is it possible that motivations other than faith were involved? Since a very similar thing happened that was non faith related, I’d say yes. How about you? Now tell me again how it goes poof.
I’ve just done that. Shall we discuss communism? Using your own principles of argument, since horrific deeds can be motivated by things other than faith, how do we know that the horrible things done in the name of religion weren’t done by alternative underlying motivations.
Isn’t that basically the same method you used to negate my positive examples?
I really don’t have time to devote to these epic posts. I find that you have applied your reasoning completely unequally to the discussion at hand. Thats how you get the slam dunk in your favor. I’ll assume you are completely sincere and unaware that you are doing that. However, until you can apply the arguments evenly, and we can deal with one question instead of blurring several. there’s no point in us going over this.
It doesn’t help me understand your defintion of faith, but it helps me understand how you defend your position.
I’ll pick just a few of your comments, for your review:
Your comment about cracking open somebody’s head was off base, as was your comment about faith being unjustified faith. (You imply that *justified * faith isn’t faith. )
And, in the last quote, are *you * part of the group of thinkers who make their own assessments about what reality is, or are you an outside observer who is not impressed with these assessments? Would another “outside observer” be impressed with your assessment? (Is being “impressed” the standard for distinguishing faith from non-faith?)
Your definition of faith assumes an objective, “outside” assessment of the “relevant” evidence, but you don’t provide an explicit source for that outside assessment, other than to say that is “a rational or otherwise non-faith-based analysis”. So faith is different from non-faith, and non-faith is the opposite of faith. We can’t measure the "difference, but we know it’s there.
Are you sure? Because I’m pretty sure the words I’m typing exist. Exactly what definition of ‘proof’ are you using this time?
Why should you just make up a word and give it the definition ubercategory? Shouldn’t have a reason to believe that such a thing might exist first? I’m not talking about the abstract here, I’m talking about the real. You speak as if god exists and all we have to do is define it, and I insist that there should be some kind of reason to think it exists before we start arguing over whether he has long or short hair.
Maybe you should try to respond to the argument I did give rather than just ignoring it and pretending it doesn’t exist.
We are apparently talking past each other, I am bored. You will not accept a definition long enough to actually determine where our disagreement is. You think I’m ignoring your argument, and that’s precisely how I feel about you. The conversation has worn down my interest with very little benefit. We might continue it later after we’ve read more of each other’s posts, but the moment you start the game you played here will be the moment I start scrolling past your posts in the next thread.
Considering the post I just left concerning you ignoring two direct challenges from me to defend something you said, I find this kind of hilarious that you would say this to someone else.
) and the conclusion you’re trying to draw, and the inclusion or exclusion of such irrelevent pieces of evidence makes little difference to the result. So, large swathes of evidence this is beieved to be unrelated to the question is generally ignored in the hopes of finishing your analysis and making a decision sometime this century.
)