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Originally Posted by filtherton
Like I said before, it would be disingenuous if I didn't believe what I was saying.
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I don't think you believe what you were saying in the sense that there wasn't really anything to believe in. I'll expand on this later...
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I would be happy to guess, provided you go back and clarify this last paragraph. Right now it seems like you're trying to discount everyone who tries to understand the world in which we live.
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My reaction at that time was that you seem offended at attempts to understand the world and would rather have people settle for an "anything can be true so lets just believe anything" sort of attitude. This is such a fantastic position that I don't actually believe that you hold it so I was hoping you'd clarify what your position really is...
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Here's where you get caught up in silliness. Has anyone here offered up any sort of "theory of ghosts"? No. Did you know that a theory about the existence of ghosts isn't the same thing as believing in ghosts? Unless you mean "theory" in some sort of general sense, in which case, you're even wronger.
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I don't know what you mean by "theory of ghosts." People here have theorized that ghosts do, in fact, exist. While people may present theories that they don't personally believe in, the theories themselves assert claims and I may disagree with these. This has been the case in this thread...
I otherwise have no idea what you're talking about in this paragraph...
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No, they actually aren't. The world would cease to function if people only relied on testable "theories" in during their day to day activities.
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This is untrue in several ways.
While it's true that people couldn't live their everyday lives testing every hypothesis that comes their way, they do run their lives almost entirely on theories that are
testable. They don't bother to test them 'cause not only do they not have the time but, as it so happens, the vast majority of what we tell each other just happens to be true so things run as smoothly as they do.
Furthermore, while we can spend a great deal of time and energy discussing and even doing things motivated by untestable theories, the theories themselves don't describe anything that has anything to do with reality and, in that sense, are worthless. In other words, untestable theories may motivate us to do things and, in that sense, are worth something but the actual details of the theories don't convey any information that relates to the world we live in, in effect saying nothing at all.
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You're confused about what constitutes evidence, both scientific and nonscientific. This is evident in your seeming overreliance on wikipedia.
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Please detail this. What does my use of wikipedia links say about my opinions on evidence? How does my use of links to it even constitute any sort of "reliance?"
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I don't care if I win anything. What would I win?
That's why I didn't respond to your last post. I don't care if you think I'm wrong. We've had this discussion an unbearable number of time and you've never demonstrated the ability to understand what I'm saying. Normally, this would probably mean that what I'm saying doesn't make any sense, but the fact that other people understand what I'm saying, and that some of them even agree with me seems to suggest something different.
The only reason I'm responding to this post is that you pretty much called me a liar, and I wanted to point out that the implication that your inability to grok my perspective make me a liar is silly. It's unbecoming of someone who seems to be so in love with evidence-based belief.
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Only in the most narrow sense can my comments be construed as an accusation of lying. My last post to you isn't even a result of my inability to understand you. In fact, it's quite the opposite of that. It's important to note that all I
can understand about you is what you write. What you wrote was:
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Originally Posted by filtherton
It only speaks volumes about the probability that there exists credible evidence of the existence of ghosts.
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If evidence of ghosts or lack thereof
only speaks about the
evidence of ghosts and not of ghosts themselves then what does say anything about ghosts? To say that the evidence for ghosts only speaks about the evidence of ghosts is a
tautology. What do you think this link indicates now?! You didn't actually convey any meaning in this post but you posted it anyway, as if it did. What's up with that? My response was an expression of how I feel about this and my attempts to understand how this happens. You were free to clarify and I had hoped you would. All you did was frantically defend some vague accusation of lying and call me unreasonable. Well, I've been using nothing but reasoning. Come join me!
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Right. Speaking of disingenuous...
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Explain the disingenuity. I welcome opportunities to see people's opinion of me...