You believe your god will “save” you. I believe that F=MA is True. We can prove who is right when you step in front of a freight train travelling at 70kmh….
Anyway, M27Holts, the people who claim that a god looks out for them and protects them, still look both ways before crossing the street. There’s no real faith, except from the schizophrenic. But there’s plenty of sanctimonious lip service.
Please…don’t say that you *believe* in science. Rather, say that you *think* that science provides objective truth. And describes the universe around you.
“I *think* that Earth is 4.5 billion years old. There are hundreds of thousands of data points from the fossil record and elsewhere that support this view. Apart from your 4000-year-old book written by nomads and goat herders, and edited dozens of times over forty centuries…what objective evidence do you have that it’s only 6000 years old?”
I’ve pushing a distinction on the basis of whether an assertion is properly refutable.
For example, I can’t levitate objects with my mind, but however sound that belief is, it could in principle be refuted by someone who could teach me how to do it – because I formed my belief from sources in the factual domain – even if I have no direct facts about this phenomenon, the absence of any facts is compelling.
On the other hand, if I held that belief on the basis of something like “I know stuff like that can’t work because Zoroaster said so”, as long as we can assume Zoroaster really did say so, the matter is not in the ordinary factual domain, but rather in the Zoroastrian domain. This distinction is important to the meaning of “believe.”
I’m not bandying semantics…Believe/think is the same is it not. I “know” that standing in the path of several thousands of tonnes of machinery travelling at 70kmh will terminate my existance…
How can somebody teach you to do something that is impossible due to the laws of physics? Like Douglas Adams stated “It’s easy to fly (without the aid of technology) you just throw yourself at the ground….and miss…🤣
M27, The best that can be done is to change the meaning of the “do something”. Example, again, is flying. The initial desire was to fly like a bird, unaided. (Remember the myth of Daedalus and Icarus? That expressed the human yearning.) Aircraft allowed air travel, but changed the definition of “flying” from what was done before to something different and possibly, arguably, better.
The general rule would be: when presented with an impossible goal, find an engineering solution that changes the definition of what was desired in a way that makes it possible. Solve a related problem that is solvable, and that meets the initial goals by redefining them.
The Jesus myth has him raising the dead. Medical tech allows doctors to revive people whose hearts have stopped provided their brain function isn’t too badly damaged. He supposedly cured blindness, leprosy, fever, and paralysis. We do that in many cases with medical innovations. I keep hearing that companies are working on artificial eyeballs that will restore sight to many.
We live in a world that a human from antique times would see as full of miracles Only they’re not performed by a god. We changed the definition. We stopped thinking of these things as miraculous and take them for granted.
Absolutely. Any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic to the primitive mind. But how can sombody teach you to communicate brain to brain with clearly no reference to time or space which suggests that the two brains have their entire sub atomic structures quantum entangled…
M27: implantable cell phone tech, plus a very developed neural interface between the cell phone tech and the speech and auditory areas of the brain. All of it is of course currently beyond our ability. And simultaneity isn’t achieved, but it would certainly be planet-wide or nearly so. Tech telepathy is difficult, but I believe it could be possible.
There are many companies right now working on neural interfaces. Probably the first applications will be to restore mobility to people with spinal cord injuries. Eventually though, I think cellular level biotech will surpass electrical and computational solutions for normal human functions like mobility and sight.
On another note:
I see the rubbish candidate won the Clacton by-election. Too bad Count Binface lost.
There is no real distinction between “believe” and “know”, other than degree of certainty. I believe/know it is impossible to levitate something with one’s mind, because I have never seen anyone do it, I know of no trustworthy reports of anyone doing it, and according to my world-model (orthodox Western science) it should be impossible to do it. But if I ever saw anyone doing it — or even better, if they taught me how to do it! — then that would invalidate my world-model, and I would have to look for a better one. The only things I can really be certain of are logic and math, e.g., 2+2=4. And even there, there is always the problem of Descartes’s Demon…
Descartes Demon has morphed into the matrix. I like to imagine the multiverse in which due to vagaries of infinity, I have existed as every living organism in the universe…
Paradoctor…that is the genius of Adams…of course you need “escape velocity” to miss the Earth, but without the lift provided by wings and air pressure sufficient to keep you aloft. Jumping at the ground will get you sore and looking foolish which is what Adams is getting at Religion makes you look foolish or it would if religion was righltly laughed out of town….
I like Piet Hein. I remember something of his, that I read when I was a child: “Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by hitting back.”
Certainly on a macro scale, there is cause and effect. Even people who don’t believe in cause and effect still look both ways before crossing the street. Just like people who believe a god protects them.
Below are two of mine.
Not as pithy as Piet’s.
You can look up Wabi-sabi in Wikipedia.
Verses
order versus chaos
creativity versus loss
age of the universe versus ages of life
laws of the wise versus rule of the cruel
careful steps or apotheosis of fools
the unforgiving mechanization of art
or the coursing of blood in the brain and the heart
what is understood versus what is believed
evolution and science versus Adam and Eve
I dreamt of a time in the future
when people would not have to die.
I dreamt I was working,
because those who didn’t
would not have access to extension of life.
I dreamt that in the future,
freedom was narrowed to a nub by Necessity,
and afforded to some, what is barely Sufficient,
but slavery for the majority.
Reckoning price, and ignoring the cost.
Improvements are made,
something precious is lost.
Whatever is special, whatever you bring:
time. erases. every. thing.
**********
Wabi-sabi¹
Wabi-sabi, kemoosahbee,
that’s where my thoughts are now:
a pot of soup smell in the air.
When does wood become a chair?
When do molecules in soup
lose their chicken-ness, become
my legs and arms, my nose, my bum?
Was the chair a chair, when still a tree?
Was that chicken really me?
Everything is something.
and everything is something else.
Distant molecules are me.
You’re a chair and I’m a tree.
Meet a quark. (“Charmed, I’m sure.”)
It’s both a particle and curd.
Some things happens with no reason.
Some things happen with only a pretext.
We’re as ignorant as chickens,
not knowing what fresh hell comes next.
It might fairly be said that I have ‘faith’ in evolution as the truly factual explanation for life on Earth. But my enormous certainty of this still doesn’t qualify as religious faith, because I can easily imagine discoveries or circumstances which would make me change my mind – “fossil rabbits in the Precambrian!”
I think that capital -F Faith, religious Faith, can readily be ferreted out by asking the believer what would or could make them give up their belief. If they reply “nothing!” then usually it’s not worth trying to discuss it any further with them.
Paradoctor, I think that sort of refusal to even consider the possibility their beliefs might be in error has more to do with fear, rather than pride. If your whole worldview is built on sand, not the Rock of Ages- understandably even thinking about that must be bloody terrifying to most religious believers.
Plus most religions actively discourage that sort of honest analysis by their followers, from early childhood. Brainwashing like that is damned hard to overcome, as so many of us here can testify.
The Buddhists have a word, ‘ditthupadana’, which means ‘clinging to views’. Look at how many times over the years that J&M have demonstrated that! And the cause of that desperate clinging is a deeply repressed fear. It’s why we see so few believers coming here trying to convert us.
I don’t know if Buddhism manages to coast along without faith, but I sure doubt it.
You can’t really understand what we’re up against, if you treat faith like a misguided opinion that people cling to out of fear or unwillingness to admit they’re wrong. It’s a fundamental type of belief that serves some real need that people seem to have.
Religious faith is whole-heartedly accepting a proposition that is clearly preposterous. The more preposterous, the stronger and more compelling it is. I couldn’t make a religion out of sun worship, because it’s esssentially valid – sure, the sun is the source of everything we care about, but unfortunately that’s just mundane fact.
Until religion is rightly ridiculed and clerics made to dress up as the clowns they clearly are we will have the situation we have now, where blasphemy laws are just remamed as “Hate speech”…
Donn, have you heard George Carlin’s skit advocating sun worship? I’m sure there’s a YT video if you want to look for it.
Carlin also may explain religious faith. “Think about just how fuckin’ stupid the average person is – and half of ’em are even stupider than that!”
:/
Oh, and I think some schools of Buddhism might qualify as philosophies for living, like Stoicism or Confucianism, rather than religion. Somewhere in the voluminous Buddhist canon Gautama Buddha stated that the existence or nonexistence of gods, demons, and the supernatural was simply irrelevant to the human quest to transcend suffering; I’ve read arguments that he may have qualified as an agnostic.
Jesus & Mo (the characters) are absurd, blinkered, and oddly very sweet. J&M (the cartoon) is brilliant: sharp, delicious, irresistible. Salman Rushdie
Jesus and Mo cartoons are wonderfully funny and true. Richard Dawkins
Jesus and Mo make the world a better place, bless their little hearts. Ophelia Benson
In a world defined by outrage and offence and liberal spinelessness, Jesus and Mo is a treasure, whose value we should never fail to recognize. Read them. Laugh. And think. Kenan Malik
The brilliant, celebrated, freaking hilarious atheist comic strip ... Greta Christina
...rays of sanity in a befuddled world. Keri Hulme
The liveliest depictions of Muhammad currently available... Malise Ruthven
J & Mo is the funniest and most consistently thought-provoking cartoon strip on the Net. In a saner world, it would run in a major newspaper. Nelson Jones, Heresy Corner
Consistently amusing, frequently thought-provoking and often heart-warming. New Humanist
Jesus & Mo is one of the most wonderful things on the internet.. JT Eberhard
Wittily captures much of the absurdity of religious apologetics. Mano Singham
I love jesusandmo.net cartoons - witty and sharp! Katha Pollitt
Often hilarious, frequently wry, these cartoons do what all the best cartoons do: they tell the truth through humour. Terry Sanderson, NSS President
...a wonderfully acid British cartoonist... Nick Cohen
I love the scrappy mockery of Jesus and Mo. Freedom of speech
includes the freedom to mock any person, any thing, any activity, and
any belief -- and J&M stands up for this unflinchingly Richard Stallman
...empowering, important and deeply progressive, not to mention hilarious... Council of Ex-Muslims
February 12, 2014
“Science adjusts its views based on what’s observed. Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved.” – Tim Minchin
But it sounds good.
You believe your god will “save” you. I believe that F=MA is True. We can prove who is right when you step in front of a freight train travelling at 70kmh….
Hominem/homonym… funny.
Anyway, M27Holts, the people who claim that a god looks out for them and protects them, still look both ways before crossing the street. There’s no real faith, except from the schizophrenic. But there’s plenty of sanctimonious lip service.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1EXBqoRsYk/
Please…don’t say that you *believe* in science. Rather, say that you *think* that science provides objective truth. And describes the universe around you.
“I *think* that Earth is 4.5 billion years old. There are hundreds of thousands of data points from the fossil record and elsewhere that support this view. Apart from your 4000-year-old book written by nomads and goat herders, and edited dozens of times over forty centuries…what objective evidence do you have that it’s only 6000 years old?”
I’ve pushing a distinction on the basis of whether an assertion is properly refutable.
For example, I can’t levitate objects with my mind, but however sound that belief is, it could in principle be refuted by someone who could teach me how to do it – because I formed my belief from sources in the factual domain – even if I have no direct facts about this phenomenon, the absence of any facts is compelling.
On the other hand, if I held that belief on the basis of something like “I know stuff like that can’t work because Zoroaster said so”, as long as we can assume Zoroaster really did say so, the matter is not in the ordinary factual domain, but rather in the Zoroastrian domain. This distinction is important to the meaning of “believe.”
I’m not bandying semantics…Believe/think is the same is it not. I “know” that standing in the path of several thousands of tonnes of machinery travelling at 70kmh will terminate my existance…
How can somebody teach you to do something that is impossible due to the laws of physics? Like Douglas Adams stated “It’s easy to fly (without the aid of technology) you just throw yourself at the ground….and miss…🤣
M27, The best that can be done is to change the meaning of the “do something”. Example, again, is flying. The initial desire was to fly like a bird, unaided. (Remember the myth of Daedalus and Icarus? That expressed the human yearning.) Aircraft allowed air travel, but changed the definition of “flying” from what was done before to something different and possibly, arguably, better.
The general rule would be: when presented with an impossible goal, find an engineering solution that changes the definition of what was desired in a way that makes it possible. Solve a related problem that is solvable, and that meets the initial goals by redefining them.
The Jesus myth has him raising the dead. Medical tech allows doctors to revive people whose hearts have stopped provided their brain function isn’t too badly damaged. He supposedly cured blindness, leprosy, fever, and paralysis. We do that in many cases with medical innovations. I keep hearing that companies are working on artificial eyeballs that will restore sight to many.
We live in a world that a human from antique times would see as full of miracles Only they’re not performed by a god. We changed the definition. We stopped thinking of these things as miraculous and take them for granted.
Absolutely. Any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic to the primitive mind. But how can sombody teach you to communicate brain to brain with clearly no reference to time or space which suggests that the two brains have their entire sub atomic structures quantum entangled…
M27: implantable cell phone tech, plus a very developed neural interface between the cell phone tech and the speech and auditory areas of the brain. All of it is of course currently beyond our ability. And simultaneity isn’t achieved, but it would certainly be planet-wide or nearly so. Tech telepathy is difficult, but I believe it could be possible.
There are many companies right now working on neural interfaces. Probably the first applications will be to restore mobility to people with spinal cord injuries. Eventually though, I think cellular level biotech will surpass electrical and computational solutions for normal human functions like mobility and sight.
On another note:
I see the rubbish candidate won the Clacton by-election. Too bad Count Binface lost.
There is no real distinction between “believe” and “know”, other than degree of certainty. I believe/know it is impossible to levitate something with one’s mind, because I have never seen anyone do it, I know of no trustworthy reports of anyone doing it, and according to my world-model (orthodox Western science) it should be impossible to do it. But if I ever saw anyone doing it — or even better, if they taught me how to do it! — then that would invalidate my world-model, and I would have to look for a better one. The only things I can really be certain of are logic and math, e.g., 2+2=4. And even there, there is always the problem of Descartes’s Demon…
😂😂😂 funny this one
I “expect” that F = ma. I “suspect” that string theory is useless. I “believe” that 2+2=4. The last one by definitions of 2, +, =, and 4.
M27Holts:
Orbiting is precisely falling towards a gravitating object, and constantly missing, due to sideways motion.
Ignatz Pseudonym Laripu:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
So by symmetry:
Any sufficiently understood magic is indistinguishable from technology.
But on the other hand, Piet Hein jested:
We glibly speak of natural laws
But do things have a natural cause?
Black earth into yellow crocus
Is undiluted hocus-pocus.
Descartes Demon has morphed into the matrix. I like to imagine the multiverse in which due to vagaries of infinity, I have existed as every living organism in the universe…
Paradoctor…that is the genius of Adams…of course you need “escape velocity” to miss the Earth, but without the lift provided by wings and air pressure sufficient to keep you aloft. Jumping at the ground will get you sore and looking foolish which is what Adams is getting at Religion makes you look foolish or it would if religion was righltly laughed out of town….
Paradoctor, just call me Laripu. Or Larry.
I like Piet Hein. I remember something of his, that I read when I was a child: “Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by hitting back.”
Certainly on a macro scale, there is cause and effect. Even people who don’t believe in cause and effect still look both ways before crossing the street. Just like people who believe a god protects them.
Below are two of mine.
Not as pithy as Piet’s.
You can look up Wabi-sabi in Wikipedia.
Verses
order versus chaos
creativity versus loss
age of the universe versus ages of life
laws of the wise versus rule of the cruel
careful steps or apotheosis of fools
the unforgiving mechanization of art
or the coursing of blood in the brain and the heart
what is understood versus what is believed
evolution and science versus Adam and Eve
I dreamt of a time in the future
when people would not have to die.
I dreamt I was working,
because those who didn’t
would not have access to extension of life.
I dreamt that in the future,
freedom was narrowed to a nub by Necessity,
and afforded to some, what is barely Sufficient,
but slavery for the majority.
Reckoning price, and ignoring the cost.
Improvements are made,
something precious is lost.
Whatever is special, whatever you bring:
time. erases. every. thing.
**********
Wabi-sabi¹
Wabi-sabi, kemoosahbee,
that’s where my thoughts are now:
a pot of soup smell in the air.
When does wood become a chair?
When do molecules in soup
lose their chicken-ness, become
my legs and arms, my nose, my bum?
Was the chair a chair, when still a tree?
Was that chicken really me?
Everything is something.
and everything is something else.
Distant molecules are me.
You’re a chair and I’m a tree.
Meet a quark. (“Charmed, I’m sure.”)
It’s both a particle and curd.
Some things happens with no reason.
Some things happen with only a pretext.
We’re as ignorant as chickens,
not knowing what fresh hell comes next.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi
It might fairly be said that I have ‘faith’ in evolution as the truly factual explanation for life on Earth. But my enormous certainty of this still doesn’t qualify as religious faith, because I can easily imagine discoveries or circumstances which would make me change my mind – “fossil rabbits in the Precambrian!”
I think that capital -F Faith, religious Faith, can readily be ferreted out by asking the believer what would or could make them give up their belief. If they reply “nothing!” then usually it’s not worth trying to discuss it any further with them.
The religious knob-rots “believe” that Satan has buried simulated fossils to invalidate their ludicrous holy books…
Jobar:
If nothing can change your mind, then it’s not faith, it’s pride.
Paradoctor, I think that sort of refusal to even consider the possibility their beliefs might be in error has more to do with fear, rather than pride. If your whole worldview is built on sand, not the Rock of Ages- understandably even thinking about that must be bloody terrifying to most religious believers.
Plus most religions actively discourage that sort of honest analysis by their followers, from early childhood. Brainwashing like that is damned hard to overcome, as so many of us here can testify.
The Buddhists have a word, ‘ditthupadana’, which means ‘clinging to views’. Look at how many times over the years that J&M have demonstrated that! And the cause of that desperate clinging is a deeply repressed fear. It’s why we see so few believers coming here trying to convert us.
No looking underneath the skirts of your mistress….
I don’t know if Buddhism manages to coast along without faith, but I sure doubt it.
You can’t really understand what we’re up against, if you treat faith like a misguided opinion that people cling to out of fear or unwillingness to admit they’re wrong. It’s a fundamental type of belief that serves some real need that people seem to have.
Religious faith is whole-heartedly accepting a proposition that is clearly preposterous. The more preposterous, the stronger and more compelling it is. I couldn’t make a religion out of sun worship, because it’s esssentially valid – sure, the sun is the source of everything we care about, but unfortunately that’s just mundane fact.
Until religion is rightly ridiculed and clerics made to dress up as the clowns they clearly are we will have the situation we have now, where blasphemy laws are just remamed as “Hate speech”…
Can anyone here give me a good reason as to why we can’t make clerics put on a red nose and size 45 shoes?
M27Holts, because that would be cruel.
Donn, have you heard George Carlin’s skit advocating sun worship? I’m sure there’s a YT video if you want to look for it.
Carlin also may explain religious faith. “Think about just how fuckin’ stupid the average person is – and half of ’em are even stupider than that!”
:/
Oh, and I think some schools of Buddhism might qualify as philosophies for living, like Stoicism or Confucianism, rather than religion. Somewhere in the voluminous Buddhist canon Gautama Buddha stated that the existence or nonexistence of gods, demons, and the supernatural was simply irrelevant to the human quest to transcend suffering; I’ve read arguments that he may have qualified as an agnostic.
M27Holts, if you can figure out how we could enforce that policy, I would immediately go into the rubber nose & huge shoe business!
😀