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sempervirens
climber
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Jan 24, 2018 - 12:23pm PT
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Then make an argument against faith.
I have done so repeatedly, Werner complained about my iterations but you ignored them. Note that I wrote, "blind faith", not faith.
If people can be convinced that they must believe words written by humans (e.g. the Bible, Vedas,...) or spoken by humans (e.g. the Pope, Billy Graham, L. Ron Hubbard) and these words are beyond reproach then the believers are willingly manipulated. If the sacred words were altruistic I'd have no problem with those words themselves. But I'd still have the problem with the blind faith because the believers would believe the words regardless of altruism or evil intent. See they have blind faith in religion and therefore are willing to believe both beneficence or malevolence. They need not distinguish between the two and rather allow religion to dictate.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jan 24, 2018 - 12:49pm PT
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This characterization of life being "brutal and short" -- as compared to what?
Well this is exactly the issue: as compared to what might be, compared to an imagined
potential in which suffering doesn't exist or at least exists less. There are hints of this in the realization that some suffer less than others. I don't buy this sort of post-structuralist notion that apori inhere in the polarities of a dialectic as in there can't be pleasure without pain or good without bad. Suffering is suffering and it resonates as one of the convincing experiences of what it is to be human much more so than say "gladness." It's elevation in religion is ubiquitous as in the buddhist notion that all life is sorrowful because of suffering's primacy over something like love and as those other human experiences become irrelevant in the face of suffering. Old age is an exception in the natural mammalian world and I suspect the same for Paleolithic humanity. The idea that the Paleolithic diet is somehow healthier or Paleolithic man had good teeth seems a bit of Romantic nonsense.
Criticizing religion because of associated violence is like criticizing love for the same thing.
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sempervirens
climber
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Jan 26, 2018 - 11:35am PT
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Again, common sense tells us there are many more faithful practicing their faith peacefully than not. To think other wise is absurd.
That quantification does not account for all the evil religion has done over thousands of years: holy wars, slaughter of American Indians, deliberate dividing of the faithful and the heathens in order to control them, brain washing children, abuse, etc. How can you quantify all that? Don't the millions of the faithful who send their money to the leaders bear some responsibility for the atrocities committed? So, although I do agree that most religious people practice (faithfully)peacefully (I meant peacefully not faithfully) that doesn't relieve their responsibility. Without the blind faith they could question these terrible actions, with the blind faith they cannot.
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sempervirens
climber
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Criticizing religion because of associated violence is like criticizing love for the same thing.
This is the apples and oranges type of logical fallacy. Love and religion are not directly comparable. Example: If someone you love were to say, "I love you but I need to have sex with others too", you can question that and decide for yourself if its acceptable. Religion does not allow for that questioning or decision. The holy scriptures dictate. Religion dictates: you must believe.
Science differs from religion in that it demands questioning. By definition any scientific conclusion invites attempts by anyone to disprove it.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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"Academia has become increasingly oppressive, shaming into silence anyone who dares to defy its left-wing political agenda and denying faculty positions to anyone who expresses conservative sentiments."
Sad but true of some institutions.
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Word of the day: Proselytize
Def. Convert or attempt to convert someone from one religion, belief, or opinion to another
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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"Academia has become increasingly oppressive, shaming into silence anyone who dares to defy its left-wing political agenda and denying faculty positions to anyone who expresses conservative sentiments."
As someone who has spent the last 30+ years in academia from the university level to the community college level and at seven different institutions, I'd say the notion of the dominance of political correctness or a left wing agenda to the detriment of conservatives
(of course this is only my anecdotal observation) is greatly exaggerated. And the beneficiaries of such an exaggeration are guess who? The sweetness of victimhood!
Peterson is a brilliant teacher and I would support his notion of using pronouns completely.
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Ergo
climber
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Feb 11, 2018 - 09:37pm PT
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Human life is nasty brutish and short, isn’t it? Objectively so, relatively so. All of the other options that I can imagine are better than this one. And my common sense tells me that all the other options I can imagine are all the other options that exist.
But still, sometimes I look out my window and imagine what life as a bird must be like. Out there in the rain in the night, no feather pillow to rest their heads on. My common sense tells me that I can see their suffering in their beady little eyes.
It makes a good story anyway, so I believe it. Common sense rules!
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Ergo
climber
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Feb 11, 2018 - 10:00pm PT
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I imagine she’s probably thinking how good you have it in your comfy home. I imagine that she probably lacks our exceptional common sense of realizing how bad she has it in her blindingly red flower. She probably doesn’t even have the common sense to realize how beautiful that flower is, objectively speaking. But I’m glad we’ve convinced ourselves that we do.
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Feb 12, 2018 - 07:48am PT
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DMT, Thanks for lightening it up around here.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Feb 12, 2018 - 08:00am PT
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Happy Darwin Day!
...
Imagine looking through her eyes!
I imagine... she was appreciating you... from a nectar high... at the empty awareness stage... through the set of "frequencies" manifesting the Universal Consciousness... that the Enlightened Ones grok... you know the ones that TC's been banging on about. ;)
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Feb 14, 2018 - 10:25am PT
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Out from behind the paywall:
The Intellectual War on Science:
It’s wreaking havoc in universities and jeopardizing the progress of research
Steven Pinker
https://tinyurl.com/ycm7tour
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Not just in higher education either... teaching kids at an early age that science shouldn’t be trusted corrupts future learning.
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Scientists no longer consider whether theories are "true."
This sounds vaguely familiar.
"...many historians of science [amongst others] consider it naïve to treat science as the pursuit of true explanations of the world. The result is like a report of a basketball game by a dance critic who is not allowed to say that the players are trying to throw the ball through the hoop."
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Feb 14, 2018 - 11:19am PT
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Not just in higher education either... teaching kids at an early age that science shouldn’t be trusted corrupts future learning.
-----
Science should and is trusted per our physical (objective) realities, otherwise we'd still be living in caves and there's be no social media and people living cyber lives.
The challenge is to nurture an appreciation for the fact that life is more than an exercise in data collection and processing, killing the silly fiction that if we only got the facts right, harmony, peace, wisdom and good tidings will be forthcoming. Believing as much is (IMO) itself a kind of superstition as grievous as staking your hopes on virgin births and a heaven full of virgins.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Feb 14, 2018 - 11:34am PT
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The challenge is to nurture an appreciation for the fact that life is more than an exercise in data collection and processing, killing the silly fiction that if we only got the facts right, harmony, peace, wisdom and good tidings will be forthcoming. Believing as much is (IMO) itself a kind of superstition as grievous as staking your hopes on virgin births and a heaven full of virgins.
Whoa, that's well put. What it is to be human is so much more than mechanics, algorithms and data.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Feb 14, 2018 - 11:38am PT
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I think a healthy distrust of all forms of truth-seeking are in order, until otherwise repeatedly vindicated.
Science, in the aggregate, consists of theories and experiments, in the thousands at any given moment. It would be folly indeed, absurd even, to give onto this aggregate one's undivided and automatic trust. But if instead science assumes the facial likeness of a political ideology, then the issue of trust becomes de rigueur.
On the other hand:
The challenge is to nurture an appreciation for the fact that life is more than an exercise in data collection and processing, killing the silly fiction that if we only got the facts right, harmony, peace, wisdom and good tidings will be forthcoming. Believing as much is (IMO) itself a kind of superstition as grievous as staking your hopes on virgin births and a heaven full of virgins.
Getting the "facts right" is not to be so easily dismissed, nor so easily dressed-up in the yeoman garb of mere "data collection and processing."
This makes anyone interested in facts or their acquisition nothing less than a data collection bot. Remember , such a bot really has no beliefs-- certainly not convictions deliberately brought into question that purport to answer the usual suspect existential riddles, such as harmony, wisdom, peace, etc..
Imagine, if you will, some intrinsic nature inherent in sterile data collection leading somehow to an on-going superstitious quality of mind.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Feb 14, 2018 - 02:11pm PT
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Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now (2018), on the subject of Progress (Part II), quoting Barack Obama...
"If you had to choose a moment in history to be born, and you did not know ahead of time who you would be—you didn’t know whether you were going to be born into a wealthy family or a poor family, what country you’d be born in, whether you were going to be a man or a woman—if you had to choose blindly what moment you’d want to be born, you’d choose now." -Obama (2016)
Ain't that the truth.
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re: "...more than an exercise in data collection and processing..."
Did anyone check out the War on Science link by Pinker? It's as if he directed his article to a few posters here...
"Resisters to scientific thinking often object that some things just can’t be quantified. Yet unless they are willing to speak only of issues that are black or white and to forswear using the words more, less, better, and worse (and, for that matter, the suffix -er), they are making claims that are inherently quantitative. If they veto the possibility of putting numbers to those claims, they are saying, "Trust my intuition." But if there’s one thing we know about cognition, it’s that people (including experts) are arrogantly overconfident about their intuition." -Pinker
https://tinyurl.com/ycm7tour
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Norton
climber
The Wastelands
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Feb 14, 2018 - 02:22pm PT
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nice quote, Fructose
thanks
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