I’ve been wanting to start this thread for probably a year now, but I could never form it into enough of a rant to justify it. The difference is that now you are invited to add your own mini-rantlets. Go ahead! It’s fun and it’s fat free!
So here is the question: What sorts of mother fucking bass ackwards illogical shite do you hear woo woos spouting that drives you absolutely batshit? Here are a few of mine:
“Science holds dogmatically onto ideas and isn’t interested in differing views.” Funny, jizzforbrains, that sounds an awful lot like a bunch of religions I can name.
“Evolution is only a theory, just like ID, so they should be given equal weight in schools.” Listen, you mental colossus, maybe the first thing they should teach in school is what a theory is, as you seem to know fuck all about it.
“Everything you see, hear, and feel is an illusion. The truth is beyond our senses, but science refuses to acknowledge this obvious fact.” While I’d bet that your intellect is largely imaginary, I dare you to step in front of an imaginary bus.
“I believe in determinism. Everything we do is preordained. Free will and consciousness are nothing more than chemically induced delusions.” Ok, maybe that’s true; I don’t know. It’s certainly a possibility. But I do know one thing: you don’t believe it. Oh, you do? Okay then, see that guy over there? Kill him. Go ahead, kill him. Why the hell not? If you do, you were going to do it anyway, and since you have no choice in the matter, you certainly shouldn’t feel guilty about it. Oh sure, you might be punished for it, but you’d only care about that if you were conscious of it, and consciousness is nonexistant. Besides, if you choose not to kill him, then you’ve made a choice, which you’ve already postulated that you can’t do. Gee, you seem awfully determined not to kill him, so I suppose you’re claiming that not only does fate exist, but also that you know what it is. Must be pretty cool, knowing the divine plan for the course of reality.
Determinism may well be the case, but it’s impossible for anyone to truly believe in it. If consciousness and free will actually are delusions, they’re powerful enough to prevent all attempts (rational or otherwise) to reject them. People who claim to be fatalists piss me off. No, you’re not. Shut up.
I recently sat through JFK I had been avoiding it for years knowing it would upset me.
Good lord I wish I hadn’t finally been curious enough to check it out when it was on HBO. Every stupid half assed moronic arguement is presented even worse the film doesn’t just change a few facts for artistic license it takes the facts burns them to ash pisses on them then shovels them aside and makes up lies in their place.
And of course, the ever popular “I’m an atheist. Religion is stupid because we don’t know the origins of the universe and human attempts to explain our existence are ridiculous at best. Furthermore, any given religion has an obscenely high probability of being incorrect. Therefore, I don’t believe in God at all.” Okay, genius, let me get this straight. Nobody knows anything about the creation of the universe…except YOU, who are infinitely wise and thus know for a fact that God does not exist. You put down the religious for claiming to hold the answers, while putting forth an equally ridiculous claim yourself. Given that, by your own admission, we do not (and cannot) have any data on which to base beliefs of this nature, a claim that God does not exist is no more or less valid than Christianity, Judaism, Norse mythology, Voodoo, or whatever the hell it is that the Hare Krishna believe.
You don’t believe in God? I don’t believe you know what the fuck you’re talking about. So shut up.
If I ask a computer for all the passwords and userIDs it contains, and yet it REFUSES to do so, does that mean the computer has free will? After all, OTHER computer systems have ways in which sometimes, you can push them over the edge and they will give you dangerous information. I guess the first computer has the true will to power :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
“The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it!” Well, thank you for using that brain that God provided for you. Even the Bible says to test everything. That includes the Bible, genius.
…followed by six (count 'em, six!) rolleyes smileys. A personal record, and thanks for the honor. Now, as to your argument: What?
First of all, how do you ASK a computer for passwords and userIDs? If you mean running a search for files containing that information, it will let you, unless it’s secured, in which case it won’t. If you manage to bypass the security system, then it will. Whatever the case, the computer has no choice in the matter; it’s just following the letter of its programming. You haven’t “pushed it over the edge”, whatever that term might mean in regards to a computer. Attempting to form an analogy between human thought and computer command proccessing is enough of a stretch as it is, without throwing vague psychological terms in the mix, as they become entirely meaningless in that context unless specifically defined.
I certainly hope I do not need to further explain why computers are not considered to have free will. And because they aren’t, any discussion of determinism does not relate to them in the least. Computers are deterministic. We know that to be true. Humans, arguably, have the ability to make choices. If you’re going to argue (and I’m going to have to go out on a limb here to guess at what your argument actually was, since your attempt to mask it with bad sarcasm was entirely successful) that humans are no more capable of arbitrary decision than computers, you should at least formulate a more plausible scenario than “asking it for passwords”. In the meantime, I’d lay off the rolleyes.
I hope you’re merely referring to hard atheists that claim that god cannot exist.
I don’t believe in god. Same as I don’t believe in bigfoot. The burden of proof has not been met to my satisfaction. New evidence comes along I’ll rethink but for now there is no god. I don’t see any reason for me to be agnostic in this position.
I’ll never understand the rift between agnostics and atheists. I never saw it before coming to this board yet I see it over and over here.
I hate it when people say they believe in psychic phenomena because ‘they’ have experienced it. Heck so have I. The only difference is I can think of many rational answers for what happened they assume it was a form of magic.
Similarly I hate it when people believe in psychics themselves because 'they were so dead on! They knew all sorts of things they COULDN’T POSSIBLY KNOW!" I have a cousin that calls a psychic line for advice on running her business! I tell her to record every prediction or guess the psychic makes and keep track of the accuracy and she steadfastly refuse. “But she KNEW the shampoo would sell!” oh yeah? What about the silver bracelets she told you she had a good feeling about but didn’t sell any? What about oh never mind…sigh
Shit. I’m sorry. I say that all the time. I didn’t know it made me an asshole.
I just know how difficult it is to work with public employer beauracracy and I get sick of sitting around twiddling my thumbs, waiting for a problem to work itself out because I’m s’posed to go through channels and get approval from 19 people just to resolve a problem I could take care of, autonomously, in about five minutes. When I get frustrated with the red tape, I take matters into my own hands, mutter my mantra as quoted above, and prepare to get my ass chewed out later. Meanwhile, my client is happy that I didn’t hold up their deadlines.
My sincerest apologies for being an asshole. Lucky for me, I only behave this way at work because I believe in doing whatever is necessary to get the job done, get it right the first time and to get a “Wow, Thanks!” from my clients/customers.
What makes me absolutely insane is when the woo-woo freaky mofos just make up evidence out of thin air to support their claim, and then it gets passed on eternally from mush-brained believer to mush-brained believer.
“It has been proved that Atlantis was destroyed by volcanic eruptions 7000 years ago.”
Really? How do you know?
“Ummmm, astral projection—but scientists have proven that there was a period of massive geological upheaval 7000 years ago!”
Really? What scientists? Working at what institution?
“Ummmmmm . . . I don’t know. But here’s three webpages that say so!”
Uh, yeah. They do all say the same thing, but none of them give the names or institutions of the scientists, or say what their evidence for this supposed cataclysm was, or, well anything.
“Hey, man, I just gave you three webpages with scientific proof. If you won’t accept it, that just proves how close-minded you are.”
“The civilian deaths caused by our bombing during the invasion of Iraq have to be viewed in relation to the amount of people who were killed under 28 years of Saddam’s rule”
Um…no, dumbfuck, they don’t. We can’t say with any certainty that our intervention has improved the situation for the Iraqi people until we know that the new regime we plan to install is more egalitarian and less bloodthirsty. We do not know this yet.
Since we have absolutely no idea whether or not we’ve made a positive difference (and I hate to put a pin through the bubble of righteous indignation currently surrounding your head and cutting off the oxygen supply to your brain but there are far worse things than rule under Saddam Hussein and for all we know, rule under the new Iraqi Government riddled with corruption and easily assailable by religious fanatics could easily be worse) we have to judge our actions without factoring in the assumption that Iraq’s future is rosy. Once we do that we can see our actions for what they are, free from the panglossian liberation sheen applied by the media and our respective Governments and they don’t look pretty.
Essentially, we have taken it upon ourselves to “liberate” an entire people without letting them give their conformed consent to take the risk. For the Iraqi dead, the solution was worse than the problem and we did not have the right to make the decision to put them in harms way on their behalf.
On an unrelated note, I predict this thread will go down in history as the biggest multitopic clusterfuck in the history of the internet and I’m honoured to have been there at its inception.
That’s exactly what I’m referring to. Sorry if I didn’t make it clear enough. I forget sometimes that not everybody shares my own definition of “atheist” as opposed to “agnostic”. The only self-termed “atheists” with whom I take issue are those that deny the existence of God outright, thereby professing the same level of knowledge that they ridicule the religious for claiming. This is the literal definition of atheism as I understand it: a definite belief that there is NOT a God.
This is why the rift you mention between agnostics and atheists exists. Agnostics such as myself find pure atheists every bit as pretentious and insufferable as those they decry, and perhaps even moreso since they’re claiming superority over the very same ideas they themselves uphold (albeit to the opposite effect). I don’t have a problem with anybody holding any particular belief. I realize now that I may have given a false impression with my last statement in the previous post. If you believe that there is no God, that’s fine with me. Just don’t proclaim your ideas as superior to anyone else’s, and don’t pretend you have concrete knowledge of this “fact”. That’s the same entreaty I make of the religious, to the letter, so I’m not playing favorites. You can hold whatever belief you feel to be correct, as long as you don’t think you’re better than anyone because of it.
As for myself, I, like you, have not seen sufficient evidence to believe one way or the other, nor have I had a particularly “religious experience” that has given me cause to believe. So, to reword my previous closing: whatever it is you believe, if you go around telling other people that they’re stupid because you’re right and they’re wrong – shut the fuck up.
