Battleground God

Untrue. I believe in what's real. Science, reason and logical deduction. And no, sorry to say, I shall never keep quiet about it. I feel it's my mission in life to remove the shackles that have been far too long attached to society. That sort of farcical nonsense has held us back as a whole for millennia. It's time for it to end.
Has any one took the time to wonder why so many scientific advances have taken place over the last 40 to 50 years? They are moving in an exponential rate compared to all the centuries beforehand combined. Why might you ask? Because people are finally ridding themselves of all the illogical claptrap that has cast a shroud over rational thought. It's nice to see it happening but if we still want to be able to reach for the stars and stop being fucking retarded and killing each other over fairytales then it's got to happen completely and sooner much better than later.
 
Darth Kur said:
Untrue. I believe in what's real. Science, reason and logical deduction. And no, sorry to say, I shall never keep quiet about it. I feel it's my mission in life to remove the shackles that have been far too long attached to society. That sort of farcical nonsense has held us back as a whole for millennia. It's time for it to end.
Has any one took the time to wonder why so many scientific advances have taken place over the last 40 to 50 years? They are moving in an exponential rate compared to all the centuries beforehand combined. Why might you ask? Because people are finally ridding themselves of all the illogical claptrap that has cast a shroud over rational thought. It's nice to see it happening but if we still want to be able to reach for the stars and stop being fucking retarded and killing each other over fairytales then it's got to happen completely and sooner much better than later.

although I agree with you about religion etc, dont you feel it may be going too far? That we indeed are, and may become total slaves to our machines? perhaps we need some sort of fairytales or political power to balance science?
 
Darth, i too believe in what i see as real. and i too shall never keep quiet about it because it is my charge as a believer to strike down falsehood spoken about it. you're free to believe whatever you want, but to spread lies as facts is something i won't let slide without rebuke.
 
TaylorC said:
I had a couple problems with those questions. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, because we'd seen no proof of the duckbilled platypus until its discovery in the last few centuries. That didn't stop it from existing. Still, I can understand why some would say it does not exist, but why make such misinformed, "factual" statements about something we had so little knowledge of to begin with?

Secondly, I don't see why so many people believe the concept of God must be purely rational. Any deity who is above our level of existence will probably think in higher ways than we do, especially if you consider him/her to be omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, etc. I also don't think such a question denies any possibility of being able to discourse about God in a rational method. Human logic can only take us so far when we discuss the metaphysical, because we obviously do not understand all of it.

hehe Berkeley & Hume!
reminds me i need to go buy the three dialogues of Hylas and Philonous
 
Seraphim Belial said:
hehe Berkeley & Hume!
reminds me i need to go buy the three dialogues of Hylas and Philonous

Well my views are not entirely empirical, as I do believe in universals or axioms. I haven't read all of Three Dialogues, but I am familiar with Berkeley and Hume, and I find their extreme relativism and skepticism to be a bit too much. I only use that basis of my arguement to support when I say that the smartest man still has only a tiny sample of knowledge. There's no harm in learning for the sake of knowledge, and by all means, we should inquire into the things beyond us too, but I'm just saying that we will never really know with absolute certainty until it is revealed to us after death.

There's so much to cloud our perceptions and create illusions before our eyes that it's possible to doubt everything these days, but there are still absolutes such as mathematics and some of the scientific world. How those might function outside our own mentality is a completely different story though, one which we cannot conceive of or answer to, since it would require us to "step outside" our own minds. Damn, I've painted a pretty obscure & abstract picture again, lol.
 
Darth Kur said:
Untrue. I believe in what's real. Science, reason and logical deduction. And no, sorry to say, I shall never keep quiet about it. I feel it's my mission in life to remove the shackles that have been far too long attached to society. That sort of farcical nonsense has held us back as a whole for millennia. It's time for it to end.
Has any one took the time to wonder why so many scientific advances have taken place over the last 40 to 50 years? They are moving in an exponential rate compared to all the centuries beforehand combined. Why might you ask? Because people are finally ridding themselves of all the illogical claptrap that has cast a shroud over rational thought. It's nice to see it happening but if we still want to be able to reach for the stars and stop being fucking retarded and killing each other over fairytales then it's got to happen completely and sooner much better than later.

so why do you have a fucking thor hammer as your avatar? Metal dorkness?
 
Silent Song said:
i don't see how choosing not to believe in God is any less a matter of faith than choosing to believe in him

...but it is. God is a conjecture; something as ethereal as God is clearly more a matter of faith than something that can be shown to exist through observation. God, by his/her/it's very nature cannot be shown to exist empirically. The material world can be sensed and apprehended empirically. That is, everything we come close to knowing about the material world is based on research, experimentation, and observation. Now this says nothing about whether or not God exists but I hope you can see my point here.

both are based on evidence and testimony of countless people.

Excuse me? Evidence for the existence of God? Where? And "testimony" doesn't mean a thing.
 
you miss my point. first of all, the "evidence" for God rests in that which science may never explain, such as what was "before" the "big bang" if it even occurred, why life begain in the first place, and what people testify to as "miracles" otherwise unexplainable. you may not believe in these things, but many people do. the evidence *for* God is even with the evidence *against* him. in that way, this debate has survived thousands of years because neither side can PROVE the other wrong.

beyond that, my point is: to choose to believe in God is based on faith (which should be based on evidence) that he exists. choosing not to believe in him is based on *faith* based on evidence that he does not exist. since neither side can conclusively destroy the other's argument at present time, no matter your choice, it is a matter of faith, unless you never come to that decision.
 
I thought the test was fairly well written, although it had its faults.
For one, it uses terms as holding a sort of absolute meaning when in actuality you could use these particular words to mean many different things. Also, I thought it was plain wrong in a few cases, take this for example:
"It is justifiable to believe in God if one has a firm, inner conviction that God exists, even if there is no external evidence that God exists."
The answer to this is irrelevant for me, for existence itself for me is evidence for God's existence, therefore in order for me to examine the question in order to answer it I would have to remove myself from existence. This question is not good.
One thing that I thought was good about the test was that it tested how rationally your belief's held together, not how rational they were in actuality. That's a very good thing, because faith obviously does not come from rationality, but rather a sort of irrationality is a very important part of faith. However, it is also good that your beliefs that come from faith are rationally consistent with each other. Therefore I thought the test on the whole was good, it just could use a few improvements.
Also, I thought this whole rational view of the world was dead, but apparently we still have some people that ascribe to it here. The reason why I say that is modernism was generally viewed as a faliure a long time ago, that is why we are currently in the "postmodern" period of philosophy. The idea that we have to prove everything empirically/rationally died out in the philisophical world long before we made any huge jumps in technology.
 
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You took zero direct hits and you bit 1 bullets. The average player of this activity to date takes 1.39 hits and bites 1.11 bullet. 268901 people have so far undertaken this activity.

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The fact that you progressed through this activity without being hit and biting only one bullet suggests that your beliefs about God are internally consistent and well thought out.
Bit a bullet on q #15. I was still consistent in my beliefs:
Bitten Bullet 1

You answered "True" to questions 7, and 15.

These answers generated the following response:

You've just bitten a bullet! You are consistent in applying the principle that it is justifiable to base one's beliefs about the external world on a firm, inner conviction, regardless of the external evidence, or lack of it, for the truth or falsity this conviction. The problem is that it seems you have to accept that people might be justified in their belief that God could demand something terrible.

This is something many religious people are willing to accept. For example, Kierkegaard believed that it is precisely because Abraham had to contravene established morality to follow God's will and attempt to sacrifice his son which made his act the supreme act of faith.

But as Kierkegaard also stressed, this makes the act incomprehensible from a rational point of view. The rational alternative - that people should require more than such an inner conviction to justify such a belief - is more attractive to most people, but you reject this alternative and bite the bullet.
 
LDGuy said:
1 bullet, no hits. But i still reckon if God was clever enough he could make 2 + 2 = 72 (logic, shmlogic!)

Of course he could, provided he's omnipotent. He's not bound by the rules of logic just like he's not bound by the rules of physics. Which is paradoxical.
 
Hmm I took this test almost two years ago, before ever reading any true philosophy and bit two bullets and had no direct hits. Now I'm a philosphy major and I take one direct hit and bite one bullet... go figure. I totally disagree with my bit bullet which was on the 2+2=72 thingy. How in the fuck is logic above an omnipotent god (which is how I defined a god, if one did exist).
 
Cythraul said:
...but it is. God is a conjecture; something as ethereal as God is clearly more a matter of faith than something that can be shown to exist through observation. God, by his/her/it's very nature cannot be shown to exist empirically.

Except the problem is that, by most faiths, God isn't a thing; it's an organizational principle.

Thus you don't stumble across God on your way to the bathroom in the morning any more than you run face-first into string theory in the kitchen... you get the picture, fo' shnizzle.