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Originally Posted by shakran
But look at it from the perspective of someone who has been raised all their life to believe in god and the teachings of the church. You can have the smartest person in the world, but if they're raised from day one to believe in something, even if it's not true, it's going to be awfully hard to convince them otherwise.
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And that is their problem, not mine.
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No, not at all, and I'm not trying to establish credibility for any religion here. However, that history speaks to the likelihood that people will believe in it. The flying spaghetti monster wouldn't last very long as a religion because no one believes in it. Unless you're prepared to say that everyone that ever lived who believed in god was a moron (and that, by the way, includes Einstein, Hawking, Newton, Jefferson, Franklin, and most of the other great thinkers of history) then you have to acknowledge that it is *understandable* that people might believe in their religion.
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Yes, it is understandable that people have stupid and ridiculous beliefs. I am aware of the many ways people can gain such ridiculous beliefs. It doesn't mean I find the beliefs any less ridiculous.
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If you want to reason with someone, it is not wise to start by insulting them.
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I'm willing to reason with people who hold ridiculous beliefs. I've even said that I don't always tell people that their beliefs are ridiculous. But reason clearly isn't enough. So long as religious belief is held up as a virtue, people will pretend to have it and/or seek to have it.
It isn't a virtue. It is a flaw.
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No, as I already explained, their religion tells them to preach the gospel. English teachers are instructed to teach english. That does not mean they have to come to your house and ram it down your throat, and it does not mean they have to get laws passed saying you MUST use proper grammar. You can preach the gospel without hindering anyone's life.
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So they preach the gospel, and tell me that I'm going to hell. I say that their beliefs are ridiculous. Under their belief system, they think I deserve to be burned for eternity.
So, why again is my attitude the problem?
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If you want to get into the comparitive jackass game, it's a pretty easy one to play. I can kill someone and claim it's not that bad because at least I didn't pull a Dahmer and eat them.
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But if your kill is Dahmer, your comparative jackass game works.
Hmm. Random question: do you value truth, or your own well being, higher?
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1) I'm not trying to convince the UFO believers that there aren't any UFO's.
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But you don't seem to have any problems insulting their belief system. Is this correct? You find it acceptable to consider the "whackjob" UFO cultists to be whackjobs?
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2) I'm not asking you to respect the christian belief. I'm asking you to respect the individuals who believe it.
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Respect is earned and lost. If they have done other things that would earn them respect, they get respect for that. If they have a christian belief, they lose respect for that.
I can respect a christian without respecting her beliefs. I can even respect the christian LESS because of her beliefs, and still respect her.
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Do you want to be right, or do you want to win?
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Win? You mean, elimiate all religous belief? But I thought "you are not trying to convert UFO cultists"... Hmm.
Are you saying that "I want to destroy and eliminate the power of religion, I just don't want to say that, because I think telling people that will reduce my ability to destroy and eliminate the power of religion"?
I'm sorry, but I value truth more than I value this particular victory.
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You can be a jerk about it all you want (and calling their beliefs stupid is being a jerk about it) but approaching it that way is not going to convince very many, if any, people that you're right and religion is wrong.
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I'm well aware that many if not most religious people will hold onto their ridiculous religious beliefs in the face of anything short of severe trama.
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I would ask the same of you. Please stop insulting people just because they're religious.
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They are wrong because they are religious. Their wrongness is a not-good thing that takes away some of my respect for them. What again is the problem with this?
Ad homeium attacks are when you say "this person is a git, therefor they are wrong". Saying "you have a ridiculous belief" is
not an ad homeium attack.
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But see that's my point. It may be a crazy belief from your perspective, but it certainly isn't random. They didn't just witch this idea up out of the back of their minds one day. There's absolutely NOTHING random about people in society believing in religion.
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My use of "random" is colloquial. As in "a sample of for which the distribution and details of the object don't matter".
There are many different crazy beliefs -- which one you hold (flying spagetti monster, UFO cultists, pentacostals) doesn't matter to me. They are equivilent.
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You didn't use that term. but you do have faith in the nonexistance of god. Since you can't prove god's nonexistance, you must take it on faith that he does not exist.
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Prove that one must have faith to believe that god does not exist.
I don't believe in the existance of God. You don't believe that I have a million dollar gold-plated chair in my apartment, but saying that you have faith in that belief is a pretty broad use of the term "faith".
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But until that evidence arises your faith has not been proven or disproven and is therefore in the same boat as religion.
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No, it is not.
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No, it means you can toss in this idiotic spaghetti monster crap all you want and it won't change the fact that you're being rude to the religious people.
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You consider the spaghetti monster belief to be crap?! My god, you are being disrespectful of a ridiculous belief system!
Know how you would feel about someone who believed in the spaghetti monster? I suspect I find people who believe in the christian diety a bit less ridiculous than that.
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I do not agree with those beliefs. I feel those beliefs are wrong. But I, apparently unlike you, understand that if you have been taught, or if you prefer brainwashed, since you learned to talk, that these things are true, that it is quite understandable that you would believe in them.
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Sure, it is understandable that they hold that ridiculous belief. Where in the world did you get the idea that I didn't understand
why people have stupid and ridiculous beliefs?
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If you could, and you got that information out to the people, then yes, I wouldn't have a particular problem with you saying it's ridiculous for people to believe in that which has been proven wrong. I don't have a problem with someone saying members of the flat earth society are ridiculous. It's been proven conclusively time and again that the earth is round.
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The flat earth theory has not been proven wrong, not in any absolute sense. All it would take is something ridiculous, like space warps, some turtles, and an invisible pink unicorn, and the earth can be flat.
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Now, take up the challenge. Prove the catholics are wrong, or stop ridiculing them.
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What are your standards of proof?
Absolute? Mathematical? Scientific? Implicative?
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All of these acknowledgments merely prove my point. While the actual belief may or may not be stupid, it is understandable that people would believe in it, and it does not necessarily mean they are stupid for doing so.
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You don't have to be stupid to hold stupid beliefs. I have claimed this
multiple times, yet you keep putting words in my mouth that I am not claiming and I am not saying.
I can understand why someone would commit rape. It doesn't make the act any less evil.
I can understand why someone would hold religious beliefs. It doesn't make the belief itself any less ridiculous.
Understanding does not mean acceptance.
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No, it couldn't have. They eliminated that possiblity with the way their experiment was designed.
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No, they did not elimiate all such possibilities. The pattern of aether movement required would be ridiculously complex to generate the observations. But for any observation, there is a ridiculously complex explaination for it -- and there are simpler explainations.
Under the standards of science, when you have a simpler explaination and a ridiculously complex explanation, you assume the simpler explaination unless the complex explaination provides more predictive power.
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As long as they're not harassing or hurting me, they can believe in anything they want. I really don't care.
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I was asking you a particular question. Do you consider religious belief to be ridiculous? Do you consider UFO cultists belief to be ridiculous? When you insulted the beliefs of UFO cultists, what exactly did you mean by the insult?
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Nice try, but that isn't science quality at all. Get that peer reviewed and you'll be laughed out of the room.
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Sure, it needs fleshing out. And no journal worth it's salt would be stupid enough to accept a paper that disproved the existance of God.
Btw, when you speak about Science, what are you referring to? Kuhnesque or Popperesque?
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In the first place your b section is faulty. The implications of a deity are many, not the least of which is the possibility that we will continue to exist in some way after we die.
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None of those implications exist within the experimental bounds (the universe).
If it makes you feel any better, let's do the IPU hypothesis.
Hypothesis: All physics is at the whim of the Invisible Pink Unicorn.
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In the second, no true scientist would consider a hypothesis disproven simply because he couldn't think of something that would be effected by its truth.
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I was implying I could prove there are no implications. A diety of infinite knowledge and power can do anything, so any observation whatsoever is consistent with the dieties existance.
Do you agree with that? That if a God as described exists, anything you observe is consistent with that Diety's existance. The Diety could be ineffibly making it
look like she doesn't exist.
Accept that, and then the existance of God has no implications.
If the existance of the Diety implies X, that means "Not X implies not Diety". But, as noted, the diety is consistent with any observation, thus
the existance of the Diety implies nothing at all.
"There is a God", in it's broadest sense, is as meaningful as "The Quork is wibble wabble."
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Otherwise I could hypothesize that the sky is blue, and if I were unable to come up with any implications of that hypothisis, you would then declare that the sky is not blue. Rather silly, don't you think?
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Can you prove there are no implications to your hypothesis? If so, then you should declare that your hypothesis is wrong.
Every such hypothesis about God that has been tested has come up with "the God hypothesis is an unnessicary complication" when a serious attempt is made on it. It isn't nessicary to explain anything -- so, scientifically, the hypothesis is disproven.
You do understand that for any observation or set of observations, you can build an infinitely complex system that is consistant with the observations. Every observation can have a new tacked-on modification.
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Plus keep in mind that you do not love gravity
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I actually hate gravity. It keeps me down!
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What I see doesn't matter. It's what they see that does. Religion is not just something they read about and maybe accept as truth like you would a science book or a political essay. Religion is part of them. Their entire being is deeply intertwined with religion. Insult religion, and you insult them.
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Not everyone is that far gone. There is very little chance that people that far gone will manage to free themselves, regarless of what I say. There is statistical evidnce that most people who identify with a religious belief don't hold it nearly that strongly.
If all I managed to do is reduce the religious believers to a small splinter sect, like UFO nutjobs are today, that is a start.
I understand there are many causes that lead one to be a UFO nutjob, or a believer in the Christian God, or a believer in Akido ju ju, that the FBI has bugged your molars, or many other delusions.
But the beliefs are still delusional and ridiculous. It is sad that people are infected by these ridiculous delusions. I wish, for their sake, they found the strength to free themselves of them.
Those that have the worst cases are nearly hopeless -- as I've mentioned, it would take some quite serious trama to give them a chance to shake free. Those with weaker strains of religious belief infection might be able to break free with less trama.
If they break free, that makes me respect them more than if they stay infected.
While the causes behind why someone has a certain mental beliefs and habits can be understood, understanding does not excuse your beliefs. You are responsible for your beliefs. If you have evil beliefs, that is your responsibility. If you have ridiculous beliefs, that is your responsibility. I have no obligation to respect your evil or ridiculous beliefs.
Neither is it my responsibility to remove evil or ridiculous beliefs from your belief system.
I do feel an obligation to let people know which beliefs I think should be considered evil, and which beliefs I believe should be considered ridiculous.
I have no expectation that this will cause all of the misguilded folk in the world to throw up their hands and accept my one true belief. I fully expect many people to hold on to their ridiculous and evil beliefs. This is acceptable, but they are still responsible for their own beliefs.