Jim Henderson wrote:
>>> Exactly.  There's no dictum that states that humans have to be 100%
>>> rational 100% of the time.  Some scientists (and quite well known
>>> scientists, at that) believe there may be a higher power.
>>>
>> And, all of them would have a century ago. This doesn't mean much.
> 
> I don't understand what you're trying to say here.
> 
Just that argument ad populum is all you are talking about when 
discussing how "some people believe in blah". It doesn't make the belief 
valid, or supportable. Yet, its too often presented as, "Some of group X 
believe the absurd, and nearly all of group Y, so we should treat it as 
a valid view point."

>>> Some also consider that there might have been a "creation" event, but
>>> that evolution is the means by which life progresses.
>>>
>> Both of which are meaningless, since they don't provide anything at all
>> useful. The arguments are not even "made", except as a means of keeping
>> alive the more specific, and far less plausible, idea that this same god
>> made up a bunch of rules to follow, and following them right means you
>> get to spend eternity drinking mead and.. oh, wait, wrong mythological
>> gibberish.
> 
> That's only true if one holds the point of view you hold.  In order to 
> understand it, you have to step out of your own frame of reference and 
> look at it from a different perspective.  That can be very difficult to 
> do, admittedly, but it's not impossible.
> 
No, its true from the evidence. Viewpoints are **opinion** not fact. 
Facts rise or fall based on what works, and is feasible. Opinions rise 
and fall based **solely** one how many people hold them.

>>> I'm not saying I agree with any of these things, but there are ways to
>>> interpret things that do not make these two ideas incompatible.
>>>
>> True, but again, they are almost totally pointless interpretations,
> 
> See my above comment about stepping out of your own frame of reference.
> 
No, I can see how they come to those conclusions, I just can't agree 
with them. It requires lending credence to unsupported assertions, so as 
to shoehorn together things that "don't really fit". Its also a popular 
argument for those that "support" such ideas that someone hasn't "looked 
at" their frame of reference. Unfortunately for them, most of the people 
they claim this about "started" from the frame of reference they are 
referring to, and eventually concluded that it was total BS. Point of 
fact, in the US, I would have to say that its ***virtually 
impossible***, to not, at some point, be confronted with that frame of 
reference, at an early age, to at least consider it, if not fall for it, 
and to not have to "to some degree" struggle with the realization that 
it is simply not supportable.

>>> Could be, but it seems to me that the idea of Apollo pulling the sun
>>> across the sky in his chariot is an explanation that was used for quite
>>> a long time - so there are likely some who took it seriously.
>>>
>> And, such people, when they find their ideas being sidelined, get really
>> pissy about it, 
> 
> That happens even with rationalists, too.  The "punishment" tends to be 
> ridicule rather than more the extreme punishments you outline for the 
> "modern fundies", but the reaction is quite similar.
> 
That is because, quite frankly, discussion has been *tried*, and its 
either been undermined, often with the complicity of the people 
supposedly providing the forum of discussion, usually against hard 
liners from the other side, who are "impervious" to factual information, 
and moderates, of the sort that "might" be swayed either a) refuse to 
see how ridiculous the people they defend make **them** look, or b) 
don't think the issues matter enough to do anything about them.

When your only opponents always show up the equivalent in clown suits, 
use water pistols to derail the argument, and all the "moderates" stand 
around saying, "Yes, well, its traditional dress, so you need to be nice 
about it!", at some point you don't have a choice but to just stop 
trying to correct all their fallacies and point out their errors, and 
just start pointing out how unbelievably stupid the whole thing is. 
ridicule is the most effective weapon to use when the other guy refuses 
to play by *anyone's* rules, other than their own, and will use anything 
you say to either make you look even worse than you are trying to make 
them, or falsely bolster their own position. That moderates get caught 
in the crossfire has more to do with the fact that they *insist* on 
ignoring "why" someone is being ridiculed, instead fall for the claim 
that its about anti-Christianism, or the like, then intentionally stand 
in between the combatants. And, quite frankly, that makes them look like 
bigger idiots.

But, the biggest issue is the prevalence in the US of people to promote 
the idea that someone has an agenda to undermine their "faith", coupled 
with a completely irrational dislike of things that are not clear black 
and white, and the presumption that they "must" pick sides between those 
promising imaginary certainties, because their belief system shares the 
same "name" as the wackos, vs. people that offer only, "Well, most of 
the time things happen like X, except when Y and Z."

In other words, in the last half century we have gone from trusting, or 
at least semi-respecting the first person in the following linked comic, 
and now would rather hand the last one in it a TV show, like Oprah, and 
peddle tin foil hats, because opinion is king, feel good gibberish is 
better than statistics, and you can trust a multi-billion dollar 
business called "the church", or "homeopathy", more than an underpaid 
scientist trying to work out how the brain really works, or the FDA's 
vetting of real drugs.

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd051809s.gif

>>> And yet it seems that many who don't believe in a deity point to
>>> Christianity and the related religions and say "one thing in this is
>>> ridiculous/provable to be incorrect, therefore the whole thing is" -
>>> and then go on to ridicule those who believe any of it.
>>>
>> Umm. Hardly. 
> 
> I've seen it time and again in various religious discussions, so please, 
> don't tell me it doesn't happen.  It does.  Maybe not every time, but I'm 
> not outlining something that happens in every discussion, just something 
> that in my experience happens a lot of the time in the discussions I 
> participate in.
> 
Well, if/when it happens, its probably someone fed up with the need to 
point out all 50,000 things that fall into that category. At the least, 
some places won't let you post more than one of them.

>> Hmm. Yeah. Met some of the extremists on my side the other day. I think
>> they laughed at someone, then bought a copy of Skeptical Enquirer. It
>> was horrifying! lol Seriously though, this isn't entirely accurate. The
>> problem here is delusional thinking, not specifically religion, and the
>> "extremists" on the side against religion tend to trade belief different
>> gibberish for what "would have been" religion.
> 
> Again, I've seen extreme positions taken on both sides of the debate, 
> from the self-proclaimed rationalist side, this tends to take the form of 
> extreme ridicule rather than the proclamation of something like a 
> fatwah.  But it does happen, and again, I've seen it over and over in 
> discussions I've participated in over the years.
> 

Again, there is a reason for using ridicule. Its the last resort when 
dealing with people you realize will **never** play fair, in the hopes 
that embarrassing them enough will get them to rethink their position. 
Mind, this is hardly needed, since all you have to do is look at 
interviews by people like Casey Luskin to realize that they embarrass 
themselves more than we ever could. The problem though is, from the 
perspective of most of the people "inside" such groups, wearing a red 
nose and floppy shoes **isn't** ridiculous, though they know, on some 
level, that other people think its silly, and we keep having to point 
out to people that, "In fact, while they try to hide it, here are a 
dozen cases where they forgot the remove the nose, or the shoes, and a 
dozen more, while talking to their own members, where they didn't just 
wear them, they added baggy, pokadot pants too."

We are dealing with people that want to be seen as a) legitimate, b) 
scientific, c) fact based, and d) defenders of the faith, but are a) 
paid shills, b) don't even understand the science, c) dogma based, and 
d) make their own religion look even more absurd than it does without 
them. And, most of the US population a) think religion "is" a legitimate 
answer to almost any problem, b) think that science means "make a guess, 
then if it seems to work, call it science, even if you can't reproduce 
the result, c) think that anecdotes and personal experiences are 
evidence and d) are Christians, so... pretty much by definition, presume 
that someone, someplace, is "supposed to be" persecuting them.

How would you suggest dealing with the radicals who, over the last 50 
years, have grown in size, influence and power, while the rationalists 
opted to use discussion, science publishing, and catering to the 
"moderate allies", to fight back? The old way lost us ground. And the 
key reason is that the middle grounders may, this week, insist that 
there isn't anything wrong with evolution, but there **is** some huge 
problem with cosmology. Next week, as soon as we imagine that is cleared 
up, some other moderate we get as an ally turns out to be a firm 
defender of astrophysics, but thinks Intelligent Design is a plausible 
replacement for Evolution. Such "allies" have, in the past, done nothing 
so much as stick a foot out to trip the scientific world, even while 
holding out a hand to "help them" with some other issue. All the while, 
radicals got to say and do what they wanted, so as not to offend the 
"allies" by ridiculing any of the "religion" those radicals used to 
support all their insane BS. And, invariably, even when the arguments 
against them have "attempted" to be couched in terms of facts, instead 
of ridicule, its been "implied" that the only purpose of such arguments 
has been to either ridicule or undermine them anyway.

So, if the guy in the clown suit screams, "Heh, stop taking about how 
silly my shoes are!", every time you point out that squirt flowers don't 
explain plate tectonics.. What is the point of not just saying, "OK, 
have it your way. Not only are you wrong about your squirt flower 
theory, but those shoes make you look like an idiot!"

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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