Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Mon, 03 Dec 2007 20:15:55 -0800, Darren New wrote:
>> Here's the other thing: Atheists can generally provide a long list of
>> "here's things that would convince me to be religious."  Theists can
>> rarely provide a single answer to "what would convince you you're
>> wrong?"
> 
> Well, that's proving a negative (after a fashion, perhaps), which is not 
> generally regarded, AIUI, as a valid scientific approach.

Errr, not at all. Of course you can prove a negative in the scientific 
sense. "This drug does not cause cancer."

I can provide a long list of things that could happen that would very 
quickly convince me that I am wrong about the non-existence of God.

I have never met an theist who could give a single example of anything 
that would convince him *his* religion is wrong. (Note: there have been 
such theists in history - people conquered by christians, for example 
who decided that meant the christian god must be stronger than their 
own.)  I guess you could call the original christians such theists, and 
probably the original muslims, mormons, etc. On the gripping hand, 
they're all followers of JHVH, so it's not real clear this was actually 
changing their minds.

Hence, all the arguments that "atheism is just another religion" is 
wrong, because atheism, not being based purely on faith, is open to 
change via argument or evidence.  At least mine is.

(There's actually a number of interesting SF books I've read wherein 
God's existence is scientifically proven.)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     It's not feature creep if you put it
     at the end and adjust the release date.

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andrel wrote:
> That is not ethics, that is culture. You learn ethics by finding out why 
> the universe exist and what it's ultimate goal is. ... At least that is how I did it


Wow. Fill me in. How did you figure out the purpose of the entire 
universe and its ultimate goal?

Seriously. I want to know. I'm not mocking you.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     It's not feature creep if you put it
     at the end and adjust the release date.

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Joel Yliluoma wrote:
> Saying that he is malevolent because of that is just ignorant,
> and neglects the possibility that God's reasoning can be
> something no human can even comprehend.

Sorry. We've eaten of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The only 
difference between us and God is that we haven't eaten from the Tree of 
Eternal Life.

Hence, your claim that good and evil is too complex for us to understand 
is, based on the very part of the Bible that Ken Ham built a whole 
museum around, incorrect.

Thanks for playing, tho.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     It's not feature creep if you put it
     at the end and adjust the release date.

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Patrick Elliott <sel### [at] rraznet> wrote:
> Blind faith tells you what an outcome
> *must* be, then demands that you not only reject evidence of the
> contrary position, but also implies that the very idea that you might
> test it, or seek evidence is invalid, by definition, since it would no
> longer, at that point, be *blind*.

I know my faith isn't blind.  It's based on personal subjective spiritual
experience about my surroundings.

I'm pretty sure all those countless old lines of sacred scriptures from all
religions in the world came from similar experiences by people from all ages
getting in touch with the inner truth.  It's not a matter of blindly accepting
what old shepherds told us, but of sharing the same gut feeling about what
constitutes reality and our role in it.  I'm just following my instincts and
reaching to about the same point that many other people.  could it be all just
chemical reactions or quantum side-effects causing mass delusion?  Yes, but I
have faith it's actually God's plan at work.

and before you ask, no, I don't believe God created Adam out of clay at about
6000 years ago or that God's days are the same amount as man's days.  He had to
oversimplify things to get his message across the early believers.  If He talked
to Einstein rather than Moses we should get a far more technically detailed and
accurate version of how things came to be.  Instead of an exciting and highly
poetic and concise Creation account that came to us, we'd have boring math
formulae all over and a few diagrams trying to get it across.

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nemesis wrote:
> I know my faith isn't blind.  It's based on personal subjective spiritual
> experience about my surroundings.

I, personally, have no problem with faith based on this sort of thing. 
If God spoke to you personally, that's cool with me. But don't try to 
convince me that because God spoke to you, I should follow your rules, 
is all. :-)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     It's not feature creep if you put it
     at the end and adjust the release date.

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Joel Yliluoma wrote:
> > Saying that he is malevolent because of that is just ignorant,
> > and neglects the possibility that God's reasoning can be
> > something no human can even comprehend.

> Sorry. We've eaten of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The only 
> difference between us and God is that we haven't eaten from the Tree of 
> Eternal Life.

  This gives us the same reasoning powers as God has. Right.

  I have to say, you usually act all scientifical and logical, but it seems
that when your motivation is to attack religion, you put logical thinking
to the side and use whatever convoluted argument you can come up with (or
which you have read somewhere) regardless of how logical or relevant it is,
just for the sake of argument.

  Of course I'm not surprised. The vast majority of people who otherwise
are logical and rational become irrationally fanatic when the topic is
religion.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> I, personally, have no problem with faith based on this sort of thing.
> If God spoke to you personally, that's cool with me. But don't try to
> convince me that because God spoke to you, I should follow your rules,
> is all. :-)

AKA "the rebel teenager atheist". :)

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On Wed, 05 Dec 2007 09:09:04 -0500, Warp wrote:

> The vast majority of people who otherwise are logical and rational
> become irrationally fanatic when the topic is religion.

I think "exasperated" is the word you're looking for here, Warp.

Those of us who fit that "otherwise logical and rational" description get 
frustrated when the counter to logical and rational points is "because 
God said so" or "because God made it so" or "Because it's God's will".

That doesn't leave room for logical or rational debate, leads to 
frustration, and ultimately is going to result in a facetious comment 
being made.

Logically, rationally, the next step for the religious fanatic is to come 
back and say "Gee, where's your logic now?", which is quite infuriating.

Jim

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On Wed, 05 Dec 2007 00:21:31 +0100, andrel wrote:

> What prompted the culture remark is that I think it is debatable whether
> e.g. 'chew every mouthful at least 5 times' or even a rule that a man
> should leave the elevator as soon as there is only him and a female left
> is an ethical rule or just a cultural. 

Well, to me, that's an easy one - both are cultural (for some definition 
of cultural).  The former may be due to past restrictions on food 
availability - chewing it a certain amount stretches the meal out, and 
generally speaking, if you take longer to eat, you'll feel full sooner 
(so I'm told - the average American takes < 20 minutes to eat a full 
meal, and there has apparently been research done to show that that might 
lead to obesity; on the other side, the French apparently take a really 
long time to eat, but often will eat portions of similar size to 
Americans, yet are much thinner.  It's largely anecdotal from what I can 
see, there may be an aspect of *what's* eaten as well, but when your 
frame of reference is limited, then you do what you can within that frame 
of reference).

As for the latter, also I'd say cultural, but suggested at that level in 
order to avoid the appearance of an ethical conundrum.  But I also have 
to admit that this sort of cultural conditioning really doesn't send a 
positive message about the male's ability to control themselves, either - 
the assumption being that if a man is alone with a woman, the man is 
going to get up to no good is a very negative cultural message.

But within the framework of that culture, I can understand the idea of 
leaving no question about whether or not the man has acted ethically in 
that situation.  I even see that sort of thing here in the US often - I 
work on a team made up mostly of women, and most of them will not close 
the door in their office if we're having a private conversation about 
something work-related.  It's not because I'm not trustworthy or 
honourable, but just because that's the cultural conditioning for them.

> Most countries and families have
> strange rules that are incomprehensible for an outsider because there
> seems no moral ground for it other than that is the way they do it.
> Patrick's definition would include all those as well. I'd like to
> reserve the concept of ethics for more important and more general rules,
> but that may be me.

It's been my experience that most people have a very difficult time 
putting themselves in someone else's shoes.  It isn't an easy thing to 
do, I'll grant, but it is possible to do it.  I'll occasionally do it 
myself when I'm trying to understand a point of view - and I often find 
that if I do that, I understand a lot better where someone's coming 
from.  I don't have to agree with their point of view in order to do so 
(which also seems to be a difficult thing for many people to do - look at 
things from a view they don't agree with).

Often times, I'll see debates along the lines of:

"So imagine that you were in the situation of keeping guns in the house 
for skeet shooting; wouldn't you want to have your kids trained on gun 
safety?"
"No, because I wouldn't do that activity."
"Well, yes, but they are, so imagine you are them, wouldn't you want..."
"No, because I wouldn't keep guns in the house"

And so on.  The question in the above hypothetical situation isn't about 
whether the person would engage in skeet shooting, it's about whether or 
not they think gun safety education is an important thing for those who 
do.

Some people will take this sort of approach to derail the conversation, 
but it seems that a larger portion really truly are not able to put 
themselves in the shoes of someone that does something they're 
fundamentally opposed to doing, even as an exercise in understanding why 
they behave the way they do.

To borrow a quote from Douglas Adams "You cannot see what I see because 
you see what you see.  You cannot know what I know because you know what 
you know.  What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and 
what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it 
replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace 
you yourself."

Or there's the man in the shack (also from H2G2):  "I only decide about 
my Universe.  My Universe is is what happens to my eyes and ears.  
Anything else is surmise and hearsay."

Jim

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Well, it's the same sort of thing as "Trust but verify" (or rather, my 
description of faith - be it blind or not - is along those lines).

I would tend to agree that those with strong religious beliefs (and I do 
live and work around some who have very strong beliefs - I do live in 
Utah, after all <g>) tend to trust without verification.  And for many or 
most of them, that seems to work for them.

My mom also has a fairly strong faith; the Lutheran church (which I was 
brought up in) convinced me that organized religion was largely bunk 
because I saw the infighting between the pastoral staff (I worked the 
sound booth, and a lot of time when they were around those of us doing 
the sound, they were very unguarded in their comments).  When you see 
clergy acting like "normal people", they lose their mysticism (if it can 
be called that).  I also saw a lot more of the financial side than I 
probably should have - and here in Utah, it's hard to ignore the large 
section of local (and larger) businesses that are not merely LDS-owned, 
but owned by the LDS church.  TIME magazine did a story a few years back 
on the church's financial holdings, and the number and types of 
businesses they own is truly staggering.

Not to mention that the head of the Department for Alcoholic Beverage 
Control is run, IIRC, by someone high up in the church.  And we sure do 
pay a significant "sin tax" on "drinks of boozy goodness" here as a 
result - and that money goes almost directly to the chruch.

Yet at the same time, I cannot ignore the things the church has done to 
help her through some pretty difficult issues.  So for her, her faith 
works and has made her happier.  Who am I to argue with the result?

If I were to have a logical debate with her about the church or religion 
(or my father-in-law, who is an LDS Bishop), it no doubt would lead to 
anger and frustration, because I'd be challenging something that's 
working for them.

It's easy to sit back and poke at religions - I do it all the time in the 
spirit of good-natured debate, even with friends I work with (and even 
with a few who are LDS - but they've got to be people I've known for 
years before I go down that road, and they've got to know that I'm not 
begrudging them their beliefs, just that I'm interested in understanding 
more about the people around me and that any attempts to poke holes in 
their faith are part of my way of understanding more fully).

But like I wrote to Andrel a few minutes ago, I also can (and do) debate 
from both sides of an argument.  This does frustrate some who debate with 
me because they don't know if I'm debating from what I personally believe 
or if I'm exploring my own beliefs by challenging them to answer 
questions related to what I believe.

Ultimately, though, I believe each of us is entitled to our beliefs, up 
to the point that they infringe upon another person's well-being and/or 
sense of self.  (Basically, your religion stops at my nose - 
figuratively, not literally).  The local LDS ward houses know not to send 
missionaries over here, even though my stepson is still on the rolls; he 
identifies more Buddhist than anything, and they've gotten to know if 
they come round looking for Ken and he is here, he'll give them quite an 
existential debate and ask them some very challenging questions that they 
might not (or rather, will not) be prepared to answer.  The reason they 
will not be prepared to answer the questions Ken asks is because their 
life's experience has been limited by the church to the point that they 
haven't looked at why other people believe differently than they do.  
That sort of examination isn't - I don't think - forbidden, but rather it 
just never occurs to anyone at the ward level to try to understand.  They 
just come out and sell the church (which is really what the typical 
missionary from the LDS church is doing, at least in my experience).

The approach is two-fold - first, it's providing literature, but also 
just being good neighbors.  And that latter part is really cool, I have 
to admit.  I wish it didn't take a religious organization to say "you 
should be good to each other and help each other out if you are able to", 
but that's one thing I've observed out here - people help each other with 
stuff.  I'd see it in other parts of the country, too, but not to the 
extent I see here.

A friend of mine drove 45 miles (with a small trailer) to come and help 
us move, for example - and another drove his horse trailer up (after 
cleaning it out) so we wouldn't have to rent a truck.  Oh, and the first 
one?  It was his daughter's birthday - so he felt bad that he could only 
make one trip with the trailer, but most other places I've been, it 
would've been "I'd love to come and help, but it's my daughter's birthday 
that day."  I would have understood that as well - in fact, after he came 
up and told us that he could only do that, I told him he should've said 
something, and he said "it's not a problem - really, if it had been, I 
would have said something."

Yet at the same time, just culturally, we are outsiders (not LDS), and we 
did live one place where that was clearly obvious - very few people 
talked with us because we weren't part of their ward.  It's a weird 
dichotomy.

Jim

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