2101. Fleas on the Horizon: In Defense of God

Comment #138420 by Bonzai on March 4, 2008 at 9:32 am

Does any body know what is Stenger's reputation as a research scientist?

2102. Fleabytes

Comment #138417 by Bonzai on March 4, 2008 at 9:28 am

Max Tegmark is fun. A bit "way out", but he comes up with exciting ideas.

Fun is all that counts at the frontier of cosmology, No body has any certain knowledge,--with the usual caveats for science in case the philosophers want to be pedantic,-- beyond and including the big bang. String theory has not a shred of evidence. No commitment is required for any of these, it is all just toying with ideas,--a fishing expedition as Jesus used to say. So I say, let the speculations begin.

2103. Fleabytes

Comment #138395 by Bonzai on March 4, 2008 at 9:04 am

The problem is people always have to believe, if not religion then it would be something else. People need answers and certainty.

Even atheists take this for granted, you have to believe in something, maybe the speed of light doesn't change, logic is true etc.(come to think of it why must the speed of light be constant? It is just taken as an empirical fact in relativity, One can prove that a limiting speed exists and it is universal without mentioning light, but that would require other assumptions which essentially lead to the formula for adding velocities in relativity)

When I see philosophical "proofs" for God's existence and non existence I have to laugh my ass off.

How can we be so certain either way. The only things I am fairly certain of are that 1. God is not a very well defined concept, a nebulous, really "big" God "outside our space and time" who intelligently designed the universe is not really a meaningful concept because all its descriptions are just hot air and word games. Asserting that something exists but failing to describe its attributes in a meaningful way,--it doesn't have to be precise,-- is not really an existence claim at all IMHO, though some people may disagree. 2, There are plenty of evidence against the existence of Gods endowed with particular deeds and attributes like the Abrahamic God and 3. The sacred text of the Abrahamic faiths tell such stupid stories that they should be rejected just on aesthetic ground, if there is a God it has to have better taste then to send us its words in such trashy novels and poems.

Beyond that I don't know.

Well I don't have any belief if in the absolute sense. I have working assumptions and degrees of certainty about different things, that is it, in the end everything we know can be wrong,

God may exist but not in the way theists think, maybe we are just figments of God's imagination, along with our science and logic. We are all a dream in ITS head,--figuratively speaking as I am sure if there is a God it won't have body parts, this is my belief. When IT wakes up and drinks ITS morning expresso we'll all be gone. Then God discovers that it is all alone and kills itself because it can't bear the loneness.

BTW, complexity may be an illusion. The information content of the universe may have never changed and it is close to zero.

http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9603008

2104. Church exhumes Padre Pio

Comment #138373 by Bonzai on March 4, 2008 at 8:46 am

This is grotesque. It is not even a Christian thing to put a corpse on display so that people can worship and pray to it (except maybe for the representations of that one special corpse but even that is debatable, most protestants think that is wrong too)

2105. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #138371 by Bonzai on March 4, 2008 at 8:42 am

I take the phrase "getting medieval on your ass" to new levels - I do it with footnotes!

Hey, we don't need to hear about your kinky fetishes.

:-)

2106. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #138359 by Bonzai on March 4, 2008 at 8:27 am

The fear of guns same as the fear of gays.

Excuse me?! When was the last time someone uses a gay man as a lethal weapon? Now a gay man with a gun would be a different story.

2107. Please Call Earth. We Still Haven't Found You.

Comment #138110 by Bonzai on March 4, 2008 at 12:34 am

What's the difference between dedicating your life searching for Jesus, and spending your life searching for aliens?

Difference is searching for Jesus would be in vain but alien may actually show up and squash us like cockroaches or breed us in farms for meat and anal probing. Be careful of what one wishes for,

2108. Richard Dawkins' US Tour begins this week

Comment #138100 by Bonzai on March 3, 2008 at 11:39 pm

Some of you people sound like a bunch of groupies, get a hold of yourself. It is embarrassing just to watch you.

I am sure you all know Dawkins' arguments so well that you can probably regurgitate them better than he himself. So I am not really sure what you will learn from his talk that you haven't known already.It seems that the fan boys and girls just want to admire their idol up close so that they can chatter for days on how handsome and well spoken he is.

I don't think this kind of mini personality cult is healthy for supposedly rational people.

I am probably going to be blasted for blasphemy.

2109. Darwin's dangerous idea

Comment #138090 by Bonzai on March 3, 2008 at 10:27 pm

If you have ever visited an internet sex chat room you may realize that it is not very difficult to write a short program that would pass the Turing test if the judges are a bunch of horny men.

I went to an AI talk last year and the speaker sheepishly admitted that he had been fooled.

2110. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #138019 by Bonzai on March 3, 2008 at 6:40 pm

Goldy

Reach down, you'll find, under the penis, a sack containing two pride and joys, two wee grapes that must be protected, the beans in the pod.... sorry, I'll stop

Also called balzac. Oh shit are you calling me names? Opps, maybe I misspelled something...

2111. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #137983 by Bonzai on March 3, 2008 at 5:34 pm

Jay

Was that fruit reference intended

It was. Originally I wrote "oranges and bananas" but then I changed it, thinking that it might be a bit too distracting. :)

2112. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #137914 by Bonzai on March 3, 2008 at 3:20 pm

"fag" denotes a choiceless sexual orientation. Pinko Lefty denotes a thoughtless political position. I am sure you can see the difference.

So what if I choose to be a homosexual for some very strange reasons? Does it make it somehow bad?

I know it is a fashionable dogma that sexual orientation is born. I think this is actually very simplistic.

First of all, sexuality is not a binary switch as history and anthropology have demonstrated amply, it spans across a whole spectrum. IMO sexuality as an *identity* is a social fiction stemming from the modern fetish to classify and measure everything in order to appear "scientific". Even though we often have no clue what these labels and numbers truly represent, but hey, they are reassuring. Secondly, there are other possibilities besides born and choice, for example conditioning.

Politically I also think it is a bad move to argue for gay rights by "blaming it on the genes". The true homophobes can still say, "so what if it is born, it is still a genetic disease and you are still a freak!" So no, I don't think "sexuality is born" is a very compelling argument for equality.

No one is forced to defend his preference for oranges over apples by saying that he was born that way. For the same reason no one should have to explain the origin of his or her sexuality. There is nothing wrong with having same sex desires, whatever the reason may be and we need to make this point loud and clear.

Sorry, Al. This is not primarily directed at you. I am just using your quote as an excuse for a tangential rant.

Now back to normal programming.

2113. Christopher Hitchens on Real Time with Bill Maher

Comment #137490 by Bonzai on March 3, 2008 at 1:48 am

Mitchell Gilks

Bonzai, that criticism doesn't just work on drug testing, but on all of science. We observe, test, and hypothesis. We don't really know why a lot works, we just know that it does.

You are confusing science with technology.

Selective breeding of crops and animals is a technology, the theory of evolution is science.Farmers knew how to selectively breed crops and livestocks thousands of years before Darwin and Mendel, they learned that through trial and error without knowing why. The science of evolutionary biology tells us why.

Science is not just a catalogue of facts and procedures that 'somehow work'. Science is a way of knowing. To have any explanatory power science has to have a coherent narrative and a conceptual structure into which facts fit logically. This is what theories do.

For thousands of years medicine has been a technology. Through trial and error people found out how to cure many diseases without knowing what caused them in the first place. Today many areas in medicine are still just technology even though the trial and error process is more refined and better controlled. Double blinded experiments may show that a schizophrenic drug actually helps patients with HIV, but this is not qualitatively different from ancient medicine if there is no explanation of why it works even though we do better trial and error now,

As for reductionism, I find the criticism that it is "vulgar" to be plain silly. That is by no means an intellectual objection, and it sounds more like a creationists dislike of evolution because they find the idea of being related to monkeys to be "vulgar".

If you read me carefully I didn't use the word "vulgar" to express my personal aesthetic. I used the word in a very specific sense,-- I didn't mean reductionism is always vulgar.This particular kind of reductionism is vulgar because it betrays a very simplistic understanding of what science is and the kind of questions it answers. This simplistic view ignores the fact that you can ask questions about the same phenomenon at many levels and the scientific answer doesn't always address the question at the right level. People normally don't treat their children as just meat bags carrying their genes, even though at some "lower" level this is the fact, The vulgar reductionists are saying that your children are meat bags carrying your genes and nothing more because that is what science tells us.

What I think you are missing is that it is a two way street, although as you say a reductionists take on something may be techincally true, but then what follows is unnecessary, or even wrong. Do you really think that a reductionist can't think that it is both? Just like the non-reductionist? That musics is soundwaves that resonate within the inner ear, causing certain brain states, and is a beautiful masterpiece of human talent?

I don't believe anyone in real life would actually subscribe to vulgar reductionism consistently,--including the vulgar reductionists. So no, I don't believe that a reductionist cannot see "the big picture", that's exactly why I think their view is untenable.

Just to be clear, I am specifically against inappropriate reductionism which insists science is always the answer even though the question may have nothing to do with science, The typical way a vulgar reductionist argues for this position is to deny that there is any question which would have nothing to do with science and when you give him examples he would say they can be "reduced" to science after all, even though my whole point is that the reduction is inappropriate for those questions.

I am not against reductionism per se. It all depends on what kind of question we want to answer, In some context, it is indeed appropriate to say music is sound wave impressing on the ear drum, in other context this completely misses the point, it depends on what the question is. What I am against is the insistence that music is sound wave hitting the ear drum which generates certain brain patterns and that is the only, most relevant truth because this is what science tells us.

2114. Christopher Hitchens on Real Time with Bill Maher

Comment #137289 by Bonzai on March 2, 2008 at 3:48 pm

Have you ever taken a class on behavioral neuroscience or psychopharmacology?

It doesn't matter. It answer the wrong questions in the context I am making my point, It is like saying we know everything about digestion, What does it have to do with the art of cooking?

Also, there is always a big gap between science and technology. You may know a lot in some purely scientific sense, it doesn't have to translate to drugs given to people.

2115. Christopher Hitchens on Real Time with Bill Maher

Comment #137273 by Bonzai on March 2, 2008 at 3:33 pm

ungodlystheist

Emotions we know are chemical states - to say that to treat emotions through chemicals is wrong, is to imagine that emotions are seperate too and different from these chemical states.

Two answers.

1) To fuck with the brain without having a very good understanding of all the processes involved is not "scientific". Moods are chemical states all right, but it doesn't mean we know their detail working. Many drugs have horrible side effects and are highly addictive even under the supervisions of doctors.

"Scientific drug testing" which is much hyped on this site, answers questions like "Does drug A have effect B?" using statistical methods (double blinded experiments etc). But it doesn't answer "How does A cause B?" or more importantly "Why is B the desirable outcome for someone afflicted with C?"

In the absence of a good theory of how these "chemical states" are connected and activated in the brain and what they do, the empirical method of drug testing is just systematic trial and error. This is often the case for drugs that are supposed to treat mental conditions. No one knows why they "work", they just "work", I put "work" in quotations because it just means producing the clinically expected effects, which may or may not be helpful in a broader sense.

This brings me to the second answer

2)Certain mental states are brought on by external conditions, To treat these as "imbalances" with chemicals without addressing the conditions that bring them on is just treating the symptoms, even if the "treatments" are successful (and without other side effects)

Science works best when you can isolate a phenomenon and study it, but often life is too complex for that. You may try to come up with clean, testable hypotheses, but you may end up answering a different question, which may not be the "right question".

I am not saying that all drug therapy used for treating mental conditions are bogus, but I sense a superstition for drugs and anything that has a "scientific aura" to it in this site. I think there is some need for balance.

Conciousness is no less consciousness just because it as a physical basis and is a physical phenomanon, just as the prism of light is no less miraculous because it to is physical.

Who says it is not physically based? But just saying that consciousness is physically based is hardly a scientific explanation. Where are the details? The testable models? If you have one the AI people would want to know I am sure.

My point is that lacking a scientific understanding doesn't lead us to deny our consciousness because we experience it. Experience is primal, it precedes explanations. So it is not correct to say that science is all that there is to life.

We are physical beings, conciousness has a physical basis and is a physical experience - there is no evidence of csness without the physical form that make it necessary.

No one is denying that. But this is like saying Bach's concertos are just vibrations of air which hit the ear drum and create certain brain wave patterns. True at the physical-physiological level, but it is really off target for the music enthusiasts, It is not wrong, it just answers the wrong question if the purpose is to appreciate the art of musical innovations of Bach and enjoy the music. To say that the scientific answer is the only right one amounts to saying that the art of music has no legitimacy, It is stupid and offensive.

I am sorry to say that it is this kind of vulgar reductionism that gives rationalism and science a bad name. It is a very poor caricature of the scientific spirit, which is actually much more circumspective and modest.

2116. Christopher Hitchens on Real Time with Bill Maher

Comment #137246 by Bonzai on March 2, 2008 at 2:57 pm

Is Buddhism a "belief"? Why do you all assume that a thought system must be meant to provide answers? Socrates just asked questions.

2117. Christopher Hitchens on Real Time with Bill Maher

Comment #137138 by Bonzai on March 2, 2008 at 12:09 pm

AtheistJon,

Name one item in life that is not touchable by scientific ideas?

You can know everything about sport physiology and still be lousy in playing real sport. On the other hand, great athletes rely on experience and instinct and don't need to know anything about physics and physiology to play a good game. Knowing (or knowledge in the third person like science) and being (knowledge in the first person) are two separate issues,

There are other things which we know through experience, but "science" either has not investigated them or hasn't reached the level of maturity to explain them.

We all experience consciousness even though science has yet been able to explain it, maybe it will in the future, but not for now. No one would deny his own consciousness simply because current science doesn't have a good understanding of it,

Most people have inner lives,--for lack of a better word. Their preoccupations are not just scientific riddles like whether the cosmological constant is zero or the latest technological gadgets,

There are other, more mundane questions like knowing oneself, dealing with regret, despair, desires and disappointment, etc and how to find one's place in life... We are sentient beings and cannot divest ourselves from emotion, we do define ourselves through first person experience rather than third person data and statistical averages. We can't divest ourselves from our emotion to become some robots, neither is it desirable.

"Science's" answer--if I can call it that,--to many of these problems is pills, pills and more pills which often just amounts to chemical lobotomy.

It's my entire understanding of the universe. You consider Einstein's General Relativity to be just a soundbite? Or evolutionary biology?

How does that help you in understanding yourself and the people who surround you? Very little in my experience.

EDIT

On a more pedantic point. Because of chaos and nonlinearity even knowing the science behind something may not be of any help in guiding one's action. To say that all you ever need is "science" is very simplistic. As I said, it is just a soundbite.

2118. Christopher Hitchens on Real Time with Bill Maher

Comment #137110 by Bonzai on March 2, 2008 at 11:08 am

Science also "actually" encourages people to explore to finding the right path.

Well, not everything in life reduces to "science', for example, first person experience.

Also, you are probably not involve in any real science research so science is just a soundbite to you.

Science is most successful when dealing with phenomena that can be easily isolated and disentangled to study,. There are actually very few things in everyday life that are simple enough that we can formulate as scientifically testable hypotheses. You can see that by looking at the quality of quantitative research papers in social science journals, they only answer very simple questions, many aren't even that interesting. Even if this can be done, the cost to actually carry out the empirical study may be prohibitive. On a day to day level we don't always rely on "science" to guide us around, we use our instinct most of the time.


BTW, I am not a Buddhist. I just like exploring ideas.

2119. Christopher Hitchens on Real Time with Bill Maher

Comment #137097 by Bonzai on March 2, 2008 at 10:48 am

AtheistJon,

Why should independent people finding "the way" themselves without any influence from an overlord priest all come to the same conclusions that lead them on the same path, for example, all wearing the same orangish garb, all shaving their heads, and all (as far as I understand it) believing that women cannot be Buddhist leaders? I remember my sister telling me that they have signs in Bali telling women that if they are menstruating, that they are not allowed to enter the Buddhist holy shrines. What about this is not religious in the perjorative sense of the word??

There is nothing in Buddhist philosophy which says that there is only one path to "truth" and you must follow it. Exactly the opposite, Buddhism actually encourages individuals to explore to find their right path.

As a result, rather unlike the Abrahamic faiths, which impose their doctrines on the ambient cultures, Buddhism blends in, a down side of it is that it can easily get bastardized by other folk beliefs.

It is not a Buddhist doctrine that you must shave your head and wear a yellow robe or burn incense in your basement apartment, These are all expressions of human conformity,--as you would expect from social apes. There is nothing in Buddhism that tells you to build big statues of the Buddha and pray to them in temples, but humans have a tendency to turn anything into dogma and object of worship. The "communist" regimes could turn an atheist and rationalist like Marx into something like a living god; even "rationalism" can become a religion with its high priests judging from some of the posts on this site.There is probably an evolutionary explanation for why humans have this tendency.

2120. Christopher Hitchens on Real Time with Bill Maher

Comment #137088 by Bonzai on March 2, 2008 at 10:33 am

Rational G

Wrapping up useful ideas in cosmic nonsense is not my idea of seeking and promulgating the truth.

Only if you insist on reading words like a Christian fundamentalist, which Buddhism actually teaches against.

2121. Christopher Hitchens on Real Time with Bill Maher

Comment #137083 by Bonzai on March 2, 2008 at 10:27 am

. I have my theory that it is because Buddhism is a religion not the different in its structure from the 3 big monotheisms

Then obviously you don't know anything about Buddhism. You are just projecting.

Those who consider themselves umber "rationalists" should keep in mind that it is not "scientific" to generalize without any data.

2122. Christopher Hitchens on Real Time with Bill Maher

Comment #137076 by Bonzai on March 2, 2008 at 10:13 am

Again, consider that it is a revealed religion with a prophet, the Buddha. The Buddha has a special intimate knowledge of something that ONLY he can teach you

That is not true. According to Buddhism, Buddhist teachings are not "revealed" from above by God or some gods, it is something that everyone must discover for himself or herself. The "original" Buddha was merely a teacher to point you to the path, he was not a god. Also, Buddha merely means "the enlightened one" so everyone can in principle becomes a Buddha. When one says "the Buddha" it is merely a historical reference to the Indian prince Gautama, nothing supernatural is implied.

I am also not aware that Buddhism demands "faith". Indeed for some Buddhist sects one is encouraged to be skeptical. As the saying goes, "If you meet the Buddha on your way, kill him" That is actually very Buddhist in spirit.

The word 'Religion' is a fairly imprecise term. It is often used loosely to refer to a wide range of belief systems and philosophies. We should be careful not to reflexively view all 'religions' through the lens of the Abrahamic faiths and especially "Christianity" ( basically American evangelicalism for many here)

From an anthropological and historical point of view, "religion" encompasses a vast range of cultural expressions and perspectives, the Abrahamic religions are by no means a universal model, one should not *assume* what others believe in based on his experience with bible thumpers.

2123. Fleabytes

Comment #136343 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 11:06 pm

Steve,

Most of my aquaintances are Anthony Head fans....

Huh??!! The librarian guy? I must say people in your circle have weird taste. :)

The evil Spike was sooo sexy, but he became lame after falling in love with Buffy,

2124. Fleabytes

Comment #136265 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 3:55 pm

JuxtaMonkey

found an interesting video

But check this out.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation/bal-te.fadlallah10feb10,0,1051014.story

Excerpts

BEIRUT, Lebanon - The ayatollah has a simple piece of advice for any Muslim woman abused by her husband: Hit him back.

"A woman can respond to physical violence inflicted on her by a man with counter-violence as a self-defense measure," Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Lebanon's senior Shiite cleric, wrote in a fatwa late last year that shocked conservative Muslims around the world.

2125. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #136173 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 1:51 pm

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

So a Militia in the sense of the second amendment is sort of a state army. So how does that translate to right to bear arms by individual citizens who are not in any militia?

2126. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #136164 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 1:47 pm

Cartomancer.

Would you like to borrow Cecil from me Steve?

Based on this I wouldn't have thought of Cecil as anything else but an artifact.

2127. Fleabytes

Comment #136112 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 1:15 pm

Flying goose,

I didn't mean you :)

2128. Fleabytes

Comment #136099 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 1:11 pm

I notice there are a few new names on this thread, all Christians, all post only on this thread in a hit and run fashion.. I am thinking either this is the same person with different handles, or more likely, we are being raid by a group of young Christians, possibly Robertson's minions who have to fill some quotas.

What do you think?

2129. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #136042 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 12:40 pm

I never advocated everyone be able to carry a gun.

So you are for gun control then. Right now in the U.S. it is indeed almost the case that any idiot can get a gun.

Edit You invoke your Constitution to argue that bearing arms is a "right". By definition a right is available to all, so what are you advocating if not everyone be able to carry a gun?

2130. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #136036 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 12:38 pm

Al,

Or organized Jewish resistance may have been a 5th column for the allies...

This is the right to bear arms against tyranny argument again. See the above.

To run a successful resistance against Nazi Germany you need a lot more than guns, bombs would be one thing you needed. Should home made bombs be made legal as well on that ground?

2131. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #136024 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 12:26 pm

Steve

In almost all cases I can think of, those who are threatening my life will be far better armed, and far more willing to use those arms, that I would be.

In fact, my posession of a firearm may well provoke them into ending my life sooner.

You beat me to it.

Some idiots were saying that the Virginia shooting would not have occurred if the campus allowed gun.

If that was the case maybe this particular shooting would not happen, but I can imagine a shoot out every time when a disgruntled student arguing with his professor for 10 marks in a test or boys getting drunk and fighting over girls.

And when a nut does go on a rampage and the police arrive how are they supposed to identify the culprit in split seconds when everyone is having a gun?

2132. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #136015 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 12:21 pm

Carto,

I generally hunt attractive young men with all the wit, charm and good looks available to me. As you can see, I don't seem to have nearly enough firepower to do the job...

Hey may be your biggest enemy is your self defeating attitude. I think there is certainly a market for a thoughtful, well read young man like yourself. I would skip the Latin love poetry though.if I were you, too nerdish for my taste. ;-)

2133. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #136011 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 12:18 pm

The argument that you need gun to hunt for food only applies to the rural population. If you live in a city how often do you go boar hunting for your bacon and egg? C'mon now that is silly.

2134. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #135999 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 12:09 pm

I can actually seen no good argument against the right to bear arms as a defence against tyranny and as self-defence.

The argument for the right to bear arms as a defence against government tyranny is bogus, having guns doesn't do much good against tanks and fighter helicopters. If it is a genuine argument U.S. citizens should be allowed to own dirty bombs and missiles because that is the only way that they can realistically overthrow a tyrannical U.S. government.

If Americans are really concerned about government turning tyrannical they should work to strengthen their democratic institutions through education and activism.

2135. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #135989 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 11:57 am

Smoking, junking food and alcohol "cause death" only in a statistical sense,--unless you drink and drive and hit someone,--many people smoke and never get lung cancer or whatever that is attributed to smoking, ditto junk food. But gun death is much more solidly established and guns, --at least hand guns,-- don't have any other purpose but to kill people. The analogy doesn't hold.

2136. Fleabytes

Comment #135976 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 11:47 am

Flying goose,

I was just trying point out that arguments about god's existent are not very interesting.

I actually agree.

Sorry for misunderstanding your tone.

2137. Fleabytes

Comment #135967 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 11:37 am

flying goose,

No need to be so sour, we can have intelligent discussions on a lot of things even though we disagree on the existence of God. I can't say for others but I do enjoy reading many of your posts. But hello is making an dishonest attempt to convert using extremely poor logic. We are not mean spirited but we do have standard, you know.

2138. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #135956 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 11:27 am

I am sure, in his time, cartomancer has probably been called many things by many people. (I would expect it would include terms like "intelligent" and "erudite").

Yeah, I'm beginning to find him very sexy. :-)

2139. Fleabytes

Comment #135943 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 11:16 am

I am not referring to individuals, but to whole communities of people.

Whole communities is nothing. Believing in Zeus changed a whole civilization in the sense that Greek civilization would have been very different if they believed in Buddhism or Scientology.

Does that prove Zeus was real?

2140. Fleabytes

Comment #135936 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 11:09 am

You can only get to know a person by interacting with them.

Only if the person actually exists. Otherwise you are talking to an imaginary friend which in many cases, is your own alter ego.

2141. Fleabytes

Comment #135929 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 11:02 am

Perhaps you'd like to read a book of someone's own experiences. Try "The Cross and the Switchblade" by David Wilkerson.

Someone's subjective feeling is not evidence for cosmological claims and the existence of deities, it is just a testimony of his mental state and the effects that mental state has on him.

How can a philosophy major commit that kind of conceptual error?

2142. Fleabytes

Comment #135923 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 10:57 am

Steve,

Discussing whether or not anyone will drink the wine of God's fury requires the truth of the claim that God exists.

In summary, he is worshiping an idol which personifies human idiocies and bad temper.

2143. Fleabytes

Comment #135915 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 10:52 am

Who is the beast? Some sayit is the RC Church,

How can you punish someone if the law is not even clear what is the offence? It is idiotic and immoral.

2144. Fleabytes

Comment #135903 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 10:38 am

Even in our own societies we consider it just to punish people who break the law. Surely you are not against that?

You can make a law that flogs people 100 lashes for naming a toy Mohammad, or sending people to hard labour for giving the finger to the Great Leader's portraits. In short a despot can make a law to criminalize anything and dish out severe punishment for it.

So the question is whether the law is just in that the "offense" should be a crime and whether the punishment fits the crime if it is indeed a crime, not whether it is just to punish people who break it,. This should be apparent to anyone who has a brain, let alone someone who claims to have studied philosophy.

You ask others "where did you get that idea of God from", as if they were wrong that God sends people to hell for disbelieving, your response here "that it is fair to punish those who break the law" seems to confirm that they were right all along.

I have the feeling that you are being extremely dishonest in your argument

2145. Fleabytes

Comment #135895 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 10:30 am

Oops, guess I am wrong.

2146. Fleabytes

Comment #135894 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 10:29 am

I think Hello is probably gone. He went to the confession and his penance is to post X number of posts on Dawkins' site and now he's done.

2147. Fleabytes

Comment #135865 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 10:01 am

We might be experiencing a raid by Robertson's minions.

2148. Fleabytes

Comment #135853 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 9:49 am

, but make sure you choose a live church who believe in the power of God. It may just surprise you.

In other words a fundamentalist cult where people cry , jump up and down and pray in tongues as if they are high on acid,--er , I mean the Holy Spirit. They give you big hugs and tell your their personal stories in testimonies. The whole display caters to the emotion and nothing else.

See what I said, the guy is a soap opera junkie.

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Comment #135839 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 9:41 am

No, not at all. I believe in God because I have seen the difference He has made in people's lives.

So that is evidence for the power of belief,--which can also turn some people into and witch burners and suicide bombers. How is it evidence of God's existence?

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Comment #135813 by Bonzai on February 29, 2008 at 9:26 am

Paula,

Well, I agree, but Kairos doesn't. He thinks it's boring to just see the universe as it is - it needs a bit of supernatural magicking before it's interesting enough for him. Maybe he just hasn't learned enough about the universe as it is to understand just how deeply thrilling it really is.

Kairos - have you read Unweaving the Rainbow? If you haven't, please do. It's not about religion, it's about the universe and how fascinatingly, mindblowingly, poetically beautiful it is - as revealed by science.

Religious people think science is boring because they are not given a special role in the cosmos, They prefer a universe specially designed for them and cares about their feelings. They feel bored when they are not able to dump their touchy feely emotions all over the universe like diarrheas.

In short they are soap opera junkies, they want some kind of cosmic soap that they can project themselves to get entertained. There is no use to tell them there are more uplifting art forms than day time TV and gossipy talk shows, otherwise no one would be watching that crap long time ago, I think you are trying to persuade Oparah fans that they should all tune to the National Geographic channel instead. Good luck.

EDIT Did Dawkins pay you to promote his books? :-)