1. Richard Dawkins' secular army must be stopped. God is behind some of our greatest art

Comment #162111 by middle miriam on April 16, 2008 at 7:13 am

That was one of the oldest arguments in the book. People use it to justify any amount of brutality and idiocy "yes, we could wipe out poverty, but then we wouldn't have art" is another one of its many uses. What people don't seem to realise is that firstly, there is no logical connection between suffering and/or religion and art, no really there just isn't; it's just that people have said it so often we are all starting to believe it; and secondly, whatever emotions you are dealing with whether religious or agonizing, if society is not feeling those emotions at present then you don't need art to validate them e.g. if there was no suffering brought about by poverty then we simply would not need paintings to allow us to make sense of or relieve those emotions. Similarly, if we do not have a religion then we do not need art to help us make sense of those emotions. We will just use whatever ability we happen to have to produce paintings about those emotions that are being stimulated at any given time. Finally, the beauty of nature is greater than anything an artist could have or ever will produce. I saw a bizarre celestial phenomenon that was amazingly beautiful on no less than an open university advert! If an advertisement can capture the beauty of whatever that thing was then actually seeing it through a telescope must be breathtaking.

2. Two More Fleas

Comment #145840 by middle miriam on March 18, 2008 at 7:59 am

Apart from the idiocies and arrogant assumptions in the first flea books questions, how can you justify stating your conclusions before your argument?

3. Hinduism and Buddhism offer much more sophisticated worldviews (or philosophies) and I see nothing wrong with these religions.

Comment #117544 by middle miriam on January 29, 2008 at 4:48 am

Zbob; I think Einstein thought that time was relative, due to the fact that he came up with the theory of relativity not absoluteness. Plus that was the only way he could get rid of the concept of the ether. Technically this is off topic though so I shall end here.

4. All worldviews are merely paradigms, narratives having no more inherent value than any other narrative.

Comment #117173 by middle miriam on January 28, 2008 at 11:24 am

I don't quite understand this timing lark since it seems to have posted my comment earlier on this morning, when I was in bed?

5. All worldviews are merely paradigms, narratives having no more inherent value than any other narrative.

Comment #117170 by middle miriam on January 28, 2008 at 11:15 am

Hello everybody, nice to meet you/see your mouth words. As this is my first post it verily be long and professional, later posts may be more sloppy if I keep this hobby up.

Firstly I will prove that there is an objective as opposed to a subjective reality. I can get lost. That may not seem important; but if reality were merely due to our interpretation of events then where I thought my destination was would genuinely be where my destination was. This does not happen, which suggests to me that reality is something not dependent on my personal opinions, emotions, grievances, convictions etc. The metaphysical absurdities increase logarithmically the more you think about it e.g. if I hypnotized you to believe that France was two seconds walk away then if everything was a matter of subjectivist conviction you would surely arrive there in two seconds, do stupid people live in a more simple world? Do vain people have bigger penises? The list goes on and on.

I will now employ Occams Razor; it goes roughly like this 'if an explanation is sufficient then it is uneconomical to make any unnecessary additions'

e.g. If I said 'life came from evolution and natural selection' you could not say 'but what if god started evolution' because evolution stands alone without any tinkering.

This said let us compare cultural relativism in its most extreme form (as in the topic debate heading) with the view that reality is objective but some people are more in possession of the facts than others; if it were true that reality was a matter of opinion and not a matter of fact then how could two people who disagreed communicate with one another? If man A thought that Henry VIII had four wives and man B thought that he had six wives, these opinions would influence their respective realities and they would clearly be living in alternate historical time lines. Thus a third medium would have to be postulated for them to communicate through; even given the existence of such a medium we are still riddled with difficulties, for example; given the wide diversity of presumptions, misconceptions and misunderstandings prevailing in a difficult science such as physics it is reasonable to assume that if man A said so much as 'hello' to man B anything could happen. Man A's words could transform into an elephant when they reached man B's reality, thus killing him! Well, maybe not precisely that, but you take my meaning I'm sure. Thus a mechanism would have to be thought of that could reconcile these difficulties satisfactorily and interact successfully with the aforementioned third medium. Technically this is all based on the concept of an outside objectivity but the first part of my argument proves that such an objectivity does indeed exist.

If, on the other hand, reality was objective and truth gathering depended on accurate, empirical fact all that would be needed to be postulated would be A the existence of a reality and B the existence of sentient beings living in that reality who were sufficiently able to gather fact.

Therefore an objective reality is far more economically sound as an explanation than a purely subjectivist one.

Given the existence of an objective reality it is obvious that some people must be closer to perceiving or understanding it than others. Therefore all is not narrative and there is such a thing as right and such a thing as wrong.

I think that will do for now.