MSD

Over the years, I observed the conditions surrounding each of those mythical creatures, and found evidence directly contradicting the claims made about each. Since the advent of religon in nomadic tribes of early humans, religion and the actions of so-called "Gods" were used to explain the unexplainable. Over time, the postulations of these belief systems have been proven unnecessary as formerly unexplainable processes were categorized as observable phenomena with observable, logically consistent causes.

I suppose my "faith" lies in science, which I firmly believe will be able to observe and explain all natural phenomena given a long enough time line for the development of adequate technology and understanding of that which we have already learned.
I believe that based on the trend of scientific discovery, we will eventually discover for certain that our understanding of the universe leaves no need for supernatural explanations of natural phenomena. A Unified Field Theory/Grand Unification Theory will be the eventual scientific categorization of all observable phenomena and will therefore explain the organization of the universe and largely replace the concept of "God" and the necessity of that concept in the human mindset. Unfortunately, I don't expect that such a theory will ever be universally accepted, given the refusal of evolution and basic biological science by so many.
This is where I experience my strongest cognitive dissonance. I do not dispute the right of others to believe what they want to believe. I believe in tolerating others' opinions with which I disagree, whether innocuous or hateful. On the other hand, when it comes to allowing something to guide your life when it is so obviously wrong to me on both intuitive and lolgical levels, such as belief in religion or disbelief in evolution, I feel that I should say something, yet I bite my tongue in the name of tolerance. Should I do as Galileo did and challenge the majority opinion because I feel that my stance is enlightened and will eventually become widely accepted, or should I just tolerate the other guy's faith that he is one of the invisible man in the sky's chosen people and is better than me?

Here's the part where I get inflammatory. If you choose to hate me based on this, I acccept that, but I have to get it off my chest.

I believe in intelligent discourse, yet my opponnents believe unwaveringly that the ultimate truth is contained in a single anthology written over the course of thousands of years, mostly the few hundred years after the alleged life and death of a man who allegedly turned water into wine, cured lepers, and rose from the dead, none of which make any sense based on rational scientific thought. I base my arguments on provable data, they base theirs on blind faith in a bunch of hearsay that managed to make it onto paper, and even worse, they think that because it's blind faith in something unprovable, that they are better people than me. I honestly don't feel contempt for most religious people because of this, I feel pity.

pig

Mr.Self,

I can understand your position, but I think you have to ask yourself who is negatively affected when you become inflammatory? You very likely win no one over to your side, you probably further polarize the situation, and furthermore you're the one expanding all this energy over what you perceive to be someone else's ignorance.

As my friend used to say, albeit about women and not people in general, but I still like it: "if you can't fuck 'em, fuck 'em."

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Xera

I will freely admit that I did not read all four pages of posts here. theres just to much for a noob to go through. Intolerance is intolerance. Superiority is superiority. What is being done with this "new atheism" is not much different IMHO than what pro-lifers do with their cause when they blow up an abortion clinic. Tell me your more tolerant because you don't hate a musslim just for particular book he reads, but that you are better than him because he chooses to read that book and believe what is written in and you dont and you are saying that your way is right and other ways are wrong. I really don't see the difference. I don't want to offend anyone, that is always the last thing I want to do. Please if you can really tell me how it is different for you to say that your better than someone else because you can back up what you believe with facts than for me to say that I'm better than someone else because I can back up what I believe with faith and commitment to that faith? Either way the statement is being made that, "my way is the best way because <insert claim here> and any other way is ignorant."

I'm hearing the exact same words used to support both religion and atheism. And the words are "Because I'm right."

Thank whatever that we don't all have to believe the same thing. thank whatever that we have the option of choosing for ourselves how we want to think. I don't even want to do the research to find out exactly how many people over the last 250 (minus a few) have died so that we could be that way. Noone has the right to tell me that I cannot believe lin fairies and unicorns if I want to. I DO want to. I'm a little to logical to actually be able to, but I try whenever I can . Noone has the right to tell me that I can't. I just pray to all the unicorns in Avalon (might be getting my myths mixed up there, don't want to take the time to research it) that they never will have that right.

filtherton

That was a good read.

mixedmedia

Well, I would argue that those Christians who are not extreme are not ignorant nor are they hypocritical, but then we know that already, lol.

And as far as fantastic literature goes, you would necessarily have to include Judaism, and would also want to include Hinduism and Buddhism.

I find your attitude here to be just as dogmatic as a fundie Christian talking about Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, etc.. And this attitude is the crux of my opposition to your views.

I edited this from "you" to "your views"...I don't oppose you, KM, eh-heh...

I agree, I do not want anyone's religious beliefs dictating how I may live my life.

This is not an accurate observation. Christianity and Islam, through their various sects, are the only religions with a history of widespread proselytization. Marginal subsects such as Krishna Consciousness, not withstanding. Most religious groups believe people would be better off practicing as they do but, Jews and Buddhists and Hindus, for example, are perfectly content to let the faithful come to them.


Yes, I can see that the Bible is fictitious in many respects. Just as I don't believe there are deities with elephant heads or that Buddha was birthed walking and talking from a lotus flower. But I think if you base all of your "proof" of the non-existence of god, gods, or godlike phenomena on religious mythology then you are deliberately overlooking a much vaster realm of possibility - just as those do who take literally every example of metaphysical grandeur in their religious texts.

Well for crying out loud then, why are you qualifying it to me? You seemed to be taking my statement out of context.

I understand this because you came back and qualified your statement. The term "philosophical bullshit" could be interpreted different ways dependent upon the user's own general attitude towards philosophy. I think it is quite understandable that your use of term on this thread was initially interpreted the way it was.

History then? I don't recall that exchange about education being made on this thread. I apologize for jumping the gun.

Well, I don't disagree with most of this. We will come to understand much more than we do now, but I am skeptical that any measure of science and technology will ever explain the essence of existence. Although, I understand more fully now the quality of not believing in or not needing that explanation. Still, I don't think the pull towards transcendence that exists in the majority of the planet's inhabitants can be so easily dismissed. How does science explain that phenomena?

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PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

roachboy

pigglet:
interesting. responses....

i am not really arguing a straight relativist kind of line. i realize it looks that way as a function of the emphasis (in terms of length at least) in what i have posted on framing matters. part of that has to do with the multiplicity of addressees in this thread, really---the stuff about pascal was a riff based on stuff that knife missle had posted, which refered to the "wager" in general--so i took off from that.

but things are not so simple.

1. we can know things about the world. it is not the case that we simply see the image of the world implied by the frame of reference, as if that frame was wholly self-enclosed and self-enclosing---but what we can know is ALSO conditioned by these frames because they enable the production of knowledge---background assumptions, ideological and/or philsophical assumptions lay behind the definition of objects of inquiry, how they are posited, what linkages there are between these objects and surrounding phenomena; they shape observation/experimentation at the level of definition of variables (again), procedures within experiments and (particularly) the way in which the results are generalized etc.

it may be that it is because there is information that gets generated about the world that the roles and power of framing assumptions tends to disappear in "normal science"--or in routinized interrogations of the world more broadly. well that and the way in which different modes of thinking are separated from each other in the states in particular (a function of reification, or the bureaucratization of knowledge...at one level unavoidable, at another unavoidable but with conequences)

there is where the references to atlan come in, and here these references also function as a shorthand for a much larger body of work...anyway, the basic claim he makes concerning the question of fit between phenomena that are observed or modelled at one scale and phenomena that are observed to modelled at, say, what appears to be an adjacent scale follow from implicit philosophical assumptions--the easiest way to see them in general is as following from a determinist ontology--that is for something to be, it must be deterimate---like a thing---the predicates that define it inhere in the object itself---if you are talking about a system, the default assumption that links to this is that systems are self-enclosed and self-enclosing and are their functioning is primarily a question of repetition of internal characteristics. the counter is that (a) biological systems are not accurately characterized in this manner at all scales and if that is the case then it follows that (b) a determinist ontology cannot simply be assumed in orienting interrogation of the world simpyl becauseon its basis one is inclined to impose criteria that hobble that interrogation so:

(c) it makes sense to reconsider the framing assumptions--and here i start to move into a broader area (there are tons of references i could give if you like--like the work of francesco varela on "chaotic systems" (a term i dont like particularly, but which functions) and the brain activity that underpins cognition or the work of cornelius castoriadis (who studied with for a while))---anyway, it makes sense to consider a partial determinacy model at the ontological level rather than defaulting to a determinist ontology as folk in general do. partial determinacy opens up space for thinking about the processes whereby meaning is fashioned in ways that determinist ontology does not--partial determinacy is about the processes of bringing-into-being as the bringing-into-meaning of phenomena, such that you really cannot separate the objects defined from the processes of definition. this is the kind of stuff i work on in 3-d...but mostly with reference to social-historical phenomena---my stuff moves this framework in other directions than does atlan. anyway, there we are.


(2) conversation about this kind of stuff in the context of a thread like this is necessary quite abstract, and the topic is pitched such that if you want to move from area to area--which you would do because you want to link something about the tendency to believe in some god to features of how we tend to understand the world more generally--you need to be even more abstract than usual.

so the linkage back to this religion thing would go this way:

you could say that humans operate through a vast range of frameworks and that these frameworks can be differentiated by the status, density and complexity of feedback loops provided them by the way in which they bring themselves into contact with phenomena that are beyond themselves.

all them are conditioned by effects generated by the language they use, the rules that condition their relation to that language etc...a version of the previous point is simplest here: the extent to which these structuring relations carve up information generated varies with the type of feedback loop, or with the type of observation or processing being done.

(as i am writing this, i am getting bothered by restricting this to language as i am doing--the only reason for it is that i am trying to explain something about this view in a messageboard...it is a constraint. work within the constraint. it is irritating, this constraint, and a messageboard provides no space for breaking because it IS the constraint)

christianity seems to me oriented entirely by assumptions particular to inherited ontology and the metaphysics that is of a piece with it. it seems to me to be entirely about the structuring characteristics of naming---for example, the universe is singular because the noun "universe" generates that singularity. there is a single god because the name god entails singularity. that god is the inverse of ourselves--we die and so are finite, so god is eternal and/or infinite. we of course have no idea of the contents of the infinite, but act as though we do because we operate through a space carved up by the implications of the words we use.

that's why if i were to be a christian i would be a nominalist. people believe in a world of names, because thre are names, because one of the things we do is naming...pascal was a nominalist, nietsche was a nominalist....the categories that structure christianity are generated via processes of semantic inversion, they refer to the processes that generated them, not to anything outside them.

the notion that the world is fully knowable is an illusion that is a function of inherited ontology. now to say that is not to claim that we know nothing--that is part of the same logic, just turned on its head--rather we know the world as we frame it, and these frames do not and cannot result in certainty--BUT they can and do result in knowledge----BUT that knowledge is not and cannot be complete, any more than a formal language system can be complete (this could slide into related matters concerning how and why formal systems are not groundable, are not closed and cannot be---problems of the relation to axoims to the proofs they enable for example, or the effects of stuff like godels theorem for mathematical systems--but no matter)

we DO know something of the world, and we CAN know more and know it differently and over time probably will know it differently.
we can organize data, we can work out criteria that let us arrive at judgments, we can develop criteria that enable us to come to agreements about that knowledge across particular frames of reference--but that agreement is about the power of the arguments, not about certainty.
what we know is provisional, really.
this does not mean that we know nothing.
it just means that interrogatin should not stop--and that philosophical interrogation is of a piece with other types, and also should not stop, simply because philosophy gives *one* route to isolating the macro-scale assumptions that orient how local systems operate, what they produce and how they produce it.)

we MAKE the meanings that we think we find. a view of these processes shaped by a partial determinacy model would prevent you from making any strict separation between information about the world and the procedures through which it was generated.

criminy. another long fucking post.
once again, i am not sure how clear this all is simply because it is done within a constraint that i do not find particularly generative.
this is why i generally do not go in this direction in tfp-land: i dont think the format allows for it. this is not about the community, but about the form the community assumes to operate.
this is also one reason i do not use caps--it reminds me not to go here in this context by keeping my voice informal.

maybe now you see why.
i dunno.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Leto

Ah but there's the rub, Knifemissile's protestations aside, anything that doesn't stand up to empirical evidence, must ipso facto be accepted on lack of evidence (faith - even that is common sense).

Is god metaphysical? We don't know. Up to know, as a race, we have been unable to take a measure of God. Nor can we even determine if there is no God. Does the fact that we have been unable to do this make God metaphysical? Beyond our physics perhaps, Utlraphysical? who knows.

So to further elaborate on Knifemissile's gravitational behaviour analogy, we can prove consitantly that objects with mass will be attracted to gravitational forces. But there is a starting point in accepting the science of this. This is the faith in the scientific method, and its repeatability. The monsters, remote controls, cokes etc are all red herrings.

You may not need to believe in God, but that doesn't make you an atheist, because you are not stating that you believe that there is No god. Rather, it makes you an empiricist, a scientist and therefore an agnostic.



And... this is my contention. Since you are not looking for proof/ evidence what have you, you are happy to take the existance of God on faith. Yes scientists have faith in the scientific method, but you said it yourself, the intent of that method is to provide a working model, until something else can replace it (if possible). Faith in the details of the theories is not required or demanded. Repeatable, observable experiments are what are required to substantiate the theories. Again, the mosters, and gravity are red herrings when taken against the grand scale.

MSD

I don't care about winning people over anymore. If they want to have a rational discussion and present evidence, discuss evidence, and draw conclusions, that's great. I'm sick of people treating me like a fucking leper when I say that I don't believe in God and I want to vent about it. With enough evidence out there and enough education on the scientific method, I think that people will be able to draw their own conclusion at some point and until then it's pointless to challenge blind faith.

pig

roach,

i'm cogitating and taking care of mindless tasks in meat-space. for now, this threads needs a little

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pig

roach et al Ok - just a little something quickly in response to the bit on objectivity, relativism, and meaning in the way we perceive the world.

it seems to me that we have to separate the subject matter at hand. the first part is the world the way it "really is." this world is beyond our ability to comprehend, understand, or truly analyze and grasp. what we are left with is the second part - the world as we perceive and interpret it. in this sense, i think i agree with what you posted above. i despise what i consider to be the relativistic position, in that it seems to desire to attribute everything away to useless semantics, and in the end there is no knowledge, only feelings and desires. i think this is a criticism with merit on our interpretations of reality, but not of reality itself. and while it has merit, i suppose i see it as something of a winnowing process, whereby the danger is in throwing away the projections of reality as if they had no use, when i believe it is more a question of being aware...of what you think you are aware of. in as far as we agree that we create intepretation and meaning, which i suppose is inherent in our naming processes - and not the things we are attempting to actually name, then i hold a similar position to your own, as far as i understand it. some naming conventions would seem to be be better than others, in the sense that they seem more consistent - but this doesn't make them true. they are only as good as we can do, at the present, given what we think we know. that "given what we think we know" is always the stickler, i suppose.

i can also understand what i'm guessing (and it is guessing) is the root issue of the work of atlan. essentially, what if we had cut it up differently to start with? or what if we moved the different scales we've been trained to perceive to new cutting point now, and see which part of the intepretations hold, and which don't. unfortunately, i can also see how this might very easily come to involve essentially "reinventing the wheel," as the way we have discretized phenomena at this point is firmly grounded in the assumptions we made to start with. at the end of the day, a part of me wants to simply go to "does it work?" i'm guessing atlan is looking at systems where it may not be "working." i would guess that in the biological systems he is interested in, there is not such a clear distinguishing line that affords clear boundary conditions to disparate models. this happens in non-biological systems too - but i think frequently its exploded. at many material interfaces, there is a clear boundary at the scale of cm -> micrometer. but if you build up to the scales of an entire working system, such as a building or a factory or an integrated chemical system - the question of where you draw your boxes becomes much more artificial, in as far as i can tell. same thing when you go down to sub-picometers and such.

i think this moves over to my personal criticism of most religions, in that they are so slow to incorporate new knowledge - they are so inflexible. i think this is at least partially a result of them having been originally formed in times where information generation and communication mechanisms were inherently slower. a slow reaction to new information was probably pragmatic at a time when information itself was slow. this is no longer seemingly the case - and while there is certainly something to be said for not bouncing around too much in the message at hand in your religion or philosophical stance, modern theological positions still seem to me to be tied down too much to stagnant belief systems and accepted common "knowledge." i don't personally care if my interpretions, on a philosophical stance that might approach "spiritual" are correct, but only if they seem to work "enough" for me. As I said, when it comes to such things, embracing the knowledge that I don't know anything provides something of a conduit to try to skip interpretation, but that's a much murkier thing. Probably bordering on psuedo-philosophy

that might be interesting: do you think its possible to go beyond "knowledge?" is the reality that these forms of knowledge try to capture capable of being interfaced, or even appreciated, in a way that might set a framework for spirituality - or for understanding analogs of what religions most likely evolved from? does our desire for knowledge destroy our ability to appreciate the constant process of the evolution of reality and the trailing process of creating meaning in a spiritual sense?

i guess what i'm saying is that i don't have any problem with what i think the guys who must have started these religions were doing. they were interested in deep questions, and they grabbed ahold of what knowledge they had, wrestled with it until they felt they had pinned it down as best as they could, and they spread their interpretation. what i have a problem with is the notion that we have to hold on to these messages as anything other than another perspective, and the tendency we have to recite passages of knowledge that we really have no way to accurately interpret as though we didn't create whatever interpretion we're pulling out of them. it just seems pointless to me, ergo why i can't do any theistic approach i've been exposed to.

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