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Originally Posted by Yakk
Testing what happens after you die is easy -- so easy that the majority of the human race has done it (as of about 2000 AD). Nobody has reported back with any reliability, however.
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Okay, pretend instead of testing i said predicting.
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Note that so long as I don't go into the kitchen, the rabid wolverine hypothesis can't be disproven. And even if I do, it might be hiding and waiting for the the right time to attack -- so I should get out of there as soon as possible.
This is a ridiculous belief. About as ridiculous as most religious beliefs, really.
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But you can go into the kitchen, rather easily i would suspect.
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So are you talking about social acceptance more than anything else?
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Nope.
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Based on what we know about life and death of living organisms, when something dies the pattern ends. Thinking that the pattern that is the person continues really flys in the face of what generally would be expected. When enthropy happens, it is very very unexpected that it spontaneously unhappens in a magical strange way.
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I presume you mean entropy, unless you're talking about the "hardcore" french record label. Well, if we're talking thermodynamics you must be aware that, like the existence of god, the second law can't actually be proven either. The 2nd law has never been contradicted, though, and it seems to be a pretty useful idea. I personally wouldn't try to find the exception to the rule, but i don't begrudge those who would. No doubt you would disagree.
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Now, if you are talking about social acceptance, that is a different matter. I'm willing to grant that religion is currently socially accepted.
Fixing this will require effort.
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I'm sure once science has the answers to all the questions people have been wondering about since the dawn of consciousness you'll have achieved you goal. I wouldn't expect that to ever happen, though.
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Did you read the details of that belief? It was an attempt to reflect a possible belief pattern for jack the ripper.
I'm pointing out that religion is ridiculous. I am holding religion and those who believe in it up to public ridicule. I believe that religious belief is mainly held together by social rules and acceptance -- so by pointing out that religious beliefs are ridiculous claptrap, I can undermine the acceptance of religion, and (mostly) cure it.
One way of doing this is taking an accepted mode of thought with a proven track record (science) and bashing religion over the head with how wrong it is, based off of things we know.
If you don't think repeated ridicule of action can work to correct behaviour, you obviously haven't seen teenagers interact socially.
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So you're saying that your plan for recuiting people to the cause of atheism is to target teenagers or other people with adolescent emotional intelligence? Let me know how that works out.
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And yes, if you believe in most religions, I think your beliefs are ridiculous, silly, and stupid. Note that I am pretty confident that I hold some ridiculous, silly and stupid beliefs -- for the most part, I don't know what they are yet. Having ridiculous, silly and stupid beliefs does not make you unredeemable. It simply means you haven't redeemed yourself yet.
I have different beliefs. I believe you are wrong. You have different beliefs. You believe I am wrong. Isn't duality wonderful?
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Sounds good to me.
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So I will bother to point out how ridiculous many religious beliefs are, because I think humanity as a whole would be better off if we all realized how stupid religious beliefs are.
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I disagree about the better off part. There is definitely a lot of good shit that religious people have done. Ghandi, MLK, soup kitchens and all that.
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So I won't coddle their sensibilities. Now I won't do this all of the time -- I'm a greedy git sometimes, and there are other things I consider more important than pointing out you are a fool.
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I bet many of them wouldn't want to be coddled. They would probably just be grateful that you could come down to their level enough to point how flawed they are.
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That is a silly claim to make. Theism/spirituallity once attempted to cover everything. From the geography of the world, to the history of the world, to the origin of humanity, to the arrangement of the heavens, to the cause of lighting, to why the rains came, to the cause of disease -- and it came out wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong again.
The world wasn't created in 7 days. Humanity and the world are older than 4000 years. Lighting is not the arrows of the Gods. Mt Olympus is not where the Gods hang out. The world is not made out of the skull of a Titan. Pi is not 3. Noah did not place 2 of every animal on the ark. Jesus did not rise from the dead. Nobody turned to salt by looking over her shoulder. No diety justified the mass murder of babies.
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You'd think a proponent of science would appreciate a belief system that can adapt to emerging understanding.
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The claims that Religion and Spirituality make, every time humanity has gained the ability to check them, have turned out to be utter and complete claptrap. The remaining claims are more and more tenuous and further and further removed from the present day -- but when something makes you 100 promises, and then provably renegs on 90 of them, do you trust the last 10 just because you can't tell yet if he broke them?
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I guess some people do. I can't claim to understand why. I think for some folk, religion is more about finding meaning than explaining some things. I don't see why it bothers you so much.
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What is happening right now is you are saying "other than the millions of ways which Religion and Spirituality have been proven wrong in the past, there are some statements that haven't been shown to be claptrap".
So far, Reality has been giving Science high-fives of insane quantities of information and accuracy, and has been very uncooperative to Religious beliefs.
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Millions? Really? That's an interesting number to pull out of thin air. How many times has science turned out to be wrong?
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Why isn't a chicken a dog?
I don't understand. Why would Rational not meaning perfect, correct or predictable mean that theistic belief was rational?
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I guess i missed the point of what you said. Having looked up the definition it would seem that theism does fit the bill, though.
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Your "so" seems to indicate that there is some connection between my observation that you don't have to be able to perfectly predict reality in order to be rational, and your question about "why isn't theistic belief rational?"
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Sorry, i got my atheists mixed up.
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Above and beyond the problem that your above statement is wrong, it is also irrelivent to the statement you are replying to.
The only way it could hold is if you put the cart before the horse, and claim "all atheists are actually fanatical hyper rationalists who accept no other justification for any action". If you want to make that claim, I'll laugh and disagree. If you don't want to make that claim, then I don't see how your above arguement is relevent to what you responded to.
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Well, i was talking with this guy named willravel up above and a large part of his position seemed to be that theism should be dismissed on the basis of its irrationality. I thought we were still talking about that idea, since, you know, that's what i was talking about originally when you started rebutting me. What were you talking about?
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You said "most christians", not "some christians". Have you met most christians? What evidence do you have that "most christians" are think that their beliefs claim nothing about the nature of the pre-death universe?
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What makes you think that the pre-death universe had anything to do with what i was saying right there. All i was claiming is that most christians are aware of the fact that their faith can't be justified scientifically. I don't have any evidence, just something i suspect.
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Note that as societies become less insular (say, larger cities), church attendance drops off rapidly. This could be correlation and not causation, I suppose...
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Does it? All the churches in my neighborhood look like they're full come sunday morning. Is this another one of those things that you suspect?
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I don't want to burn theists at the stake, if it makes you feel any better about atheists.
Some people are stupid at math, other people are stupid at theism. I'm stupid at spelling and memory.
I think that theists have some stupid beliefs. You can be a smart person and hold a stupid belief. One way to have such a belief is to not think about it, or you could have a blind spot.
And pretending to hold a stupid belief for your own advantage is dishonest, but not always stupid. I suspect many "theists" are in this category -- I have mimed theistic actions (bowing heads during grace, etc) in order to reduce social friction in the past, and when I was a child I felt compelled to go through the motions regularly.
I suspect I have stupid beliefs. Maybe one day I'll figure that they are stupid and change them. 
And I believe that many theists think my belief that organized religion is an evil is wrong. I can accept that they think I'm wrong.
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I agree with you here.
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Yes. And then as you gain information, you can check, correct and discard your incorrect beliefs.
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I imagine that theism will cease to matter once the subjects it speaks to are spoken to better by other things. Until that happens i can't imagine that atheism as a movement will have much of an effect. Especially since any movement born out of a feeling of oppression seems to stall as soon as it's members stop feeling oppressed. If you're goal as a militant atheist is to eliminate religion, i would suggest you make some lemonade and take a seat on the porch, because you've got a whole lot of waiting to do.
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Why yes, liberal christians tend to believe in less of the religious claptrap than conservative christians.
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I don't know about that. I think they tend to believe in more inclusive religious claptrap.