Makaze

My lover's idea.

Restated, "if you take away the power to be violent, they aren't as violent". If religion is a beast such that if it has power, it will abuse it, then it is the nature of the beast to abuse power even if it is never granted that opportunity. This is a non-point. ... but that point doesn't make sense in this conversation. One reader might think you mean that we should accept a worse atrocity because we accept lesser ones, which is ridiculous. Another might think you mean that we should accept lesser atrocities because we accept worse ones, which is just as ridiculous. No matter which order they interpret, the reader must conclude that you mean that we must accept all atrocities or give up completely. Where is the option to cull harmful ideas? Where is the option to promote less harmful alternatives? Do you see the problem here?

If government without religion is statistically less violent than government with religion... It stands to reason that religious dogma is more violent than secular dogma. I'm not sure what you disagree with. The stats, the conclusion, or what. The original point doesn't stand. When you say that religion isn't inherently bad, I'm not sure what kind of nature you're referring to. Actually, it doesn't matter. If you mean the promotion of good will in some areas, that promotion would have to be in contrast to something. Since secularism promotes good will in some areas for the same reasons as religion, you'd be saying "Religion's good point is that it does something that all ideological institutions do". Imagine selling yourself to a company with the line, "My selling point is that I work as hard as everyone else." Pretty meaningless in context. If you mean the professed intentions of the religion, then the religion has to live up to those intentions in a meaningful way for them to be worth something, and they simply don't. If you mean the professed intentions of religion in general, then it scales. The same problems that apply to professed intentions of specific religions must apply to religion in general. If most religions do not fit the feel-good, philosophy-based "theme" of the dictionary definition, then the thing we can call "religion" as the dictionary knows it does not exist in a meaningful way. At the least, sticking to it means that most of the things we call religions should not be called religions at all; after all, they do not fit the description. You can't defend religions that actually exist by holding up some lofty purely hypothetical religion as a symbol of what religion inherently is. On top of not really meaning anything, it's like appealing to the "No true Scotsman" fallacy to defend the people you just said were not real Scotsmen.

Imply, but yes. It was.

Unrelated?: A phase keeps coming to my mind, but it's not my own. "God is dead, and I have killed him." A recurring thought. I get these sometimes. Almost always something dramatic and dogmatic.

"The professed intentions and philosophy of a religion do not pardon it of the brutal truth of its actions."

I love that feeling when you turn a good phrase and know it.

Do not speak of the atrocities in the past tense. We can see what happens when religious groups gain power in many places in the world today. Could we reasonably expect the religious of the West to seek peace before violence if the West were a theocracy? The answer is undeniably no. While governments have innate violent tendencies, it is undeniable that religious governments are even more violent and, far more importantly, irrational than secular ones. So, why can you speak of the atrocities of religion as "the past"? Because religious groups do not have power where you happen to live. Because their evil is mitigated by the influence of secular forces; call it the lesser of two evils.

I feel compelled to point out that your mocking point is a reasonable question, not a refutation. What are governments for? Judged by true intent, it can be reasonably argued that the most prominent function of a government is initiating and reciprocating violence to varying degrees. Its professed intents to establish order for the sake of order, to protect freedom for the sake of protecting freedom, to be the arm of the people for the sake of the people, do not match the reality. The professed intentions and philosophy of a religion do not pardon it of the brutal truth of its actions. In your opinion, at what point do an institution's actions warrant doubting its true purpose? How many lives does it have to take before you question whether it meant it when it said it was there to save lives?

amazing

Can you clarify your position here? I can't tell if you understand my point and are trying to refute it or are sidestepping it unintentionally. It is possible that humans could be born with senses that are completely different from the ones we have. If no one is ever born with those senses then we cannot get so far as imagining what they would be like, but we know that if they did exist, it is possible that they could reveal new knowledge. After establishing that base case, imagine that we unlock 1,000 new senses and gain all of the knowledge that they give us access to. Does that 1,000 cover all possible senses? We can't know. What about 1,000,000 senses? What about 1,000,000,000? My peace of mind comes from my ability to improve. Stagnation, even if complete, cannot be known to be complete. Therefore I cannot be at peace with a particular set of knowledge. I can never be truly certain of anything but logical proofs. I can only be at peace with the flow of it. The ultimate conclusion of what I've been saying is that there can be no such thing as "true knowledge". When you say that you gain knowledge, you are not gaining facts. You have knowledge of what a unicorn is -- but unicorns don't exist. It is not a "fact" of unicorn physiology that they have a horn -- it's a definition. We say something exists when we have knowledge of our definition of the concept and we have knowledge that we experienced something fitting the description. The second one is a fact, but both are knowledge. You have no way of knowing whether to apply one definition or to apply another definition that would have the same results. You don't even know if there are other possible definitions you haven't thought of. It goes deeper than "there are some things you don't know". You don't know even that the facts you're relying on in your everyday life are true. It is rational to rely on them because the probability of their truth is high, but that probability is never actually one. Making the claim "this table I am touching exists" is practical but inaccurate because it implies the false premise "I can know that the table I am touching exists". We can get so far as "this is how a table would behave if it existed, therefore it doesn't matter if it doesn't". This is how we come to the conclusion that something exists meaningfully. It may in fact be a mass delusion, but if it acts like a table, it is a table for all intents and purposes. Non-existence is looked at in a similar same way à la "this is how things would act if it did not exist, therefore it doesn't matter if it does". Science can only prove practical existence and practical non-existence, not true knowledge of either. However, a presence can only have limited definitions to describe it while an absence can have infinite definitions. If I told you that there were an unobservable teapot orbiting between Earth and Mars and someone else claimed that there is an unobservable god in the universe, we would both be pointing to the same data set (known presences) to support our widely varying claims -- and so anyone is free to assume that infinite unobservable things exist, which is not meaningful in any way. That is why the burden of proof should always lie with the one who claims a presence but the claim of an absence is assumed true until proven otherwise. It simply doesn't matter unless it makes a practical difference in the data. There's no polite way to say this: What you're saying doesn't jive with your beliefs. Embracing uncertainty requires letting go of faith in all claims, including empirically evidenced ones. It requires being purely pragmatic. Seeing the inherent uncertainty in an unfalsifiable claim and still having faith it is true is not embracing its uncertainty, it is double-thinking of the form "This is both uncertain and certain at the same time." It is misleading to say that you are holding out for more knowledge if you know that true knowledge cannot be attained by any means. Edit: TL;DR my entire position - Believing in something despite it being practically untrue is a direct contradiction of scientific principles.

No matter how much knowledge we gain it is impossible to know that which you do not know; that includes how much you do not know. Therefore it will always be impossible to prove that something does not exist. By extension, it is impossible to know the difference between obtaining all knowledge and reaching your own finite capacity for knowledge. Even if our knowledge becomes complete we cannot know that it is complete. We will always have room to wonder if there are things we simply cannot observe. At some point we have to come to terms with that and decide how to filter the possibilities into a model to apply to reality. The scientific approach is to decide that something is valid if and only if its existence has observable features distinct from its non-existence; if it has meaning outside of the hypothetical. Religion is a concept that people create to fill the void of the unknown instead of embracing it. This problem will not go away until people change into rational beings that can embrace uncertainty without despairing. The question of whether god exists may become more remote and esoteric, but the problem is such that if he exists we can stop wondering, but if he does not exist then we will wonder forever. The believer tends to ask the question "Can you prove that God does not exist?" precisely because it is tilted in favor of their belief.

I'm curious to see if you have thought about this before. If I did not exist, how would you prove it? (My position is that such questions shift the burden of proof like Russell's teapot.)

The bolded statement blatantly ignores the examples Phoenix gave in his post. We have already agreed that philosophical causes and science do not contradict. You are conflating religion with religious philosophy whether you think you are or not. Firstly, religion is not definitively restricted to non-empirical claims. Secondly, religion as we experience it begins and ends with faith in empirical claims. That is to say, the bolded statement is true if and only if religion and faith categorically stay away from describing empirical events. They do not. On the eclipse situation: eclipse didn't say anything revolutionary about your approach, feplus. I said the same thing she did, albeit with a more respectful tone: Your response to her proves her point. "This post is passive aggressive and shows disrespect." "It's not proper to call an opponent passive aggressive." Denying the claim while ignoring the reason for making it is disrespectful. Despite many claims that your behavior disrespects other posters, you have not claimed to be respectful. You're more concerned with calling them out for bringing it up. If they say "you are being insincere, sarcastic and defensive" instead of calling you passive-aggressive, can we reasonably expect you to respond to that? The evidence says no. If one person lays it out without using obviously offensive language and one uses offensive language, you will only respond to the one who used offensive language, critique them for using offensive language, and consider the points the more polite person brought up to be refuted along with them. I gave you the benefit of the doubt but you've played right into expectation. As far as I and anyone else can tell, eclipse has you pegged.

Additionally, it can be argued that because the methods for reaching conclusions are incompatible, the ideas that result will also be incompatible. The probability of two opposing types of research--one using direct testing while ignoring outlying data (faith in the hypothesis) and the other using indirect testing while accounting for all data (doubting the hypothesis)--coming to the same conclusion is practically nil.

Absolutely.

You're right. My bad. Back to dondon's critique. I suggest you read it over and address his reasoning because he did better, and you poking holes in my faulty argument won't make his go away.

Your thought experiment does assume the conclusion within a premise. The conclusion to be reached is that something can't be explained with science (the definition of a miracle). One of the premises is that something is a miracle (definition: it cannot be explained with science). When you just deny the claim "your argument is circular" without addressing dondon's reasoning for that conclusion it sends a message. The message that you aren't interested in reasons and methods, just conclusions. I suspect this is the root of the problem; forgoing the reasons for claims and criticizing the claim as if it was made in a vacuum.

How do you ask, with a straight face, how science has helped people when they still need medical help?

The combustion engine that powers the bus, the physics behind its overall design, the medical equipment at close clinics, the power that runs that medical equipment, the knowledge of what a certain medical technique or substance will do the body... All results of scientific research. Giving medicine as an example of how useless science is... There aren't words.

Actually that proof states that not all two dimensional things are two dimensional. I had a feeling I was doing something silly though I couldn't put my finger on it. Probably the difference between -> and ==. What is the observable difference between the non-material and the non-existent? You've said that there are natural causes and supernatural causes. In what way is a "natural cause" like conservation of energy material?

A corollary of my above post is that if science can say something about a natural cause, it can say something about a supernatural cause. If it cannot say something about a supernatural cause, it cannot say something about a natural cause. In either case your thought experiment adds nothing we did not already know. No, I'm not referring to a supernatural cause. The use of supernatural implies there can be a meaningful distinction between them. A philosophical cause is the best way to put it because it covers everything. Any existence that cannot be observed is meaningless. I've been over this. Let's express it in mathematical terms. Let e be existence, !e be non-existence, m be manifest, and !m be not manifest. If e = !m and !e = !m then e = !e Alternately, if e = m and e = !m then m = !m By deduction, manifestation and existence are identical and science does apply to existence generally because something that only exists hypothetically does not exist at all -- it's a misuse of the term.

It couldn't. That's the point. It's an unfalsifiable claim. The bigger point is that their equivalent value makes such unfalsifiable claims meaningless. I was hoping you would catch on to this but I'll have to come out and say it. In a scenario where the common occurrence is a result of a philosophical cause, the philosophical cause and nature are literally the same thing. Calling something an "absolute except" doesn't make it less natural than the rest of the data. There is no reason to call the tendency of energy to grow "natural" and god's destroying it "supernatural" because neither philosophy, nor science, nor anything can determine relative value between them. There is no meaningful distinction between "it happened because that's just how things work" and "it happened because god did it". If god is a part of the rules that bind existence then god and nature are the same thing. If science can explain nature, then science can explain god. If science can't explain god, then science can't explain nature. There is no purely rational reason to differentiate them. You need to come to terms with the terms you're using.

A meaningless distinction. All exceptions work this way. If you don't believe me, remember my proposal from earlier. Suppose it is a "natural law" that energy grows infinitely, but a god is constantly destroying it. Now imagine that he chooses not to destroy it, just once, and only once, and it appears that energy is created. We could rewrite the law of conservation as "energy grows infinitely, except when it doesn't." Do you object? If so, on what grounds? The grounds that energy remains constant more often than the alternative? In that case, the only reason to call the rarer instance the miracle is its rarity. How rare does an occurrence have to be to be considered miraculous? [Arbitration] If not, then any philosophical claim can be considered equally valid leading to infinite contradiction and uselessness. [indecision]