Atheism on the Decline; Paganism on the Rise

[Provost Harrison]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
well, how about love

people thought (and many still do) that that is not subject to science

and how can you be sure that everything that is, is subject to science..

I have (as a physicist) huge doubts that everything in nature, even everything that we can theorize about, can be probed and experimented on

Jon Miller
(to use all the mechanisms we know of, to show whether string theory is right or not, most physicists thing we would need an appartus the size of the universe)

Well there is the issue of Heisenberg, but apart from that you can't just make things up, although you can attempt to predict with extrapolation. I don't see theism as a logical extrapolation.

And love, well love is a state of mind, and as Whaleboy has said, is governed by neurology and neurochemistry. That we don't understand the precise mechanisms doesn't mean it is mystical. Once upon a time we didn't know the underlying mechanisms behind fire or evolution - we know those now...

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Whaleboy
The "feeling" of love however, as the "feeling" of faith, or emotion as I used earlier, is a different matter. Can I communicate with you the experience of colour? Of anger? Of course not.

Maybe one day we have brain scans advanced enough that, if I show you a scan of me being angry, you would recognise it.

[Whaleboy]

Of course, we'll know what it looks like, we might be able to develop some device that gives a complete emotional profile of someone at that point in time, but the individual experience of that emotion is something that could not be replicated... think of it as a singularity.

[Mr. Nice Guy]

Originally posted by Asher

Does that correspond to the rising rate of HIV infection, especially in Africa?

Wasn't it the Christians there condemning condom use and poking holes in them before distributing them?

What a sick cult.

Originally posted by Asher

Exactly. Christians showed their true face there -- they showed up with truckloads of aid, dangled it infront of people's faces, then denied it to them unless they converted to Christianity.

And then notable Christians on Apolyton defended these actions.

Christianity.

You certainly do have a way of being very bitter and cold-hearted, don't you Glonkie?

[chequita guevara]

Are bitter and cold-hearted your new words on your learn a new word a day calander?

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Mr. Nice Guy
You certainly do have a way of being very bitter and cold-hearted, don't you Glonkie?

People no doubt become cold-hearted towards Christianity after seeing these True Christians^TM in action.

[Mr. Nice Guy]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
People no doubt become cold-hearted towards Christianity after seeing these True Christians^TM in action.

And I tend to wonder why the moderators on this board don't stand up and do something about it. There is a lot of bitterness and cold-heartedness on this message board, btw, and it's not just against Christians.

What's the matter mods? Have you just become desensitized to this kind of stuff?

[Seeker]

Well I guess the issue is, do you believe there can be such things as subjective truths?

If I saw, for example, a dragon, or Krishna, or whatever, why should I take the word of a scientific/professional consensus, which is shifting and fluid and is built up in the end of other individuals sense impressions, that it was a hallucination?

I've never seen a convincing arguement why a groups observations are better than any one individual at a basic level.

I mean, if you see the emperor with no clothes, should you believe you are hallucinating even if a crowd of people with degrees assure you that it's all a chemical imbalance in your brain? Even if you look really hard...rgrghhh...still can't see clothes?

Now, that's not a basis for knowledge of course, if we're going by 'a justified true belief' because you can't be certain that it is true, but then you can't be certain it isn't true either.

Do you see what I'm saying? There is a dividing line between beliefs that enter into the empirical arena, that can be cross checked, and fitted into a Great Crossword Puzzle, and between beliefs that are non-empirical by nature, like Fairies that go and hide when adults come.

People should only deal with, use, and interact with ideas from the empirical arena, but that doesn't me that in the personal, subjective, non-communicable sphere that you have to tell yourself "I am hallucinating. There is no X".

We cannot, as humans, enter into another humans subjective experience. It's utterly closed off to us.

Thus we can say, for example, 'the literal God of the Bible is bunk', because the bible makes many empirical claims that are demonstrably false...but we CANNOT say to the believer who claims to 'feel God in his heart' (or equivalent statement) that he is wrong, incorrect, because we cannot enter his subjective experience of reality.

We CAN stop him short from making positive knowledge claims in 'interactive' (non-personal subjective unviverse claims) like, 'An angel of the lord told me to ask you to give me your money', because subjective evidence is inadmissable outside the subjective sphere.

About non-communicateable subjective experiences like God, Nirvana, Tao, etc we cannot make claims like 'True' or 'False', we can only admit to a fundamental lack of knowledge (a-gnosis), compartmentalize such beliefs as interesting but irrelevant to our main human business, which is interacting with other empirical beings and empirical objects out.

So that, in a nutshell, is why all religious debate is ultimately futile. We should all admit a fundamental lack of knowledge and proceed with the empirical process while acknowledging that there are unanswerable questions.

Feel free to join your local agnostics chapter!

[Whaleboy]

I've never seen a convincing arguement why a groups observations are better than any one individual at a basic level.

As far as the individual is concerned, an objective argument has the benefit of some kind of verification, the subjective argument cannot be communicated or replicated, only described with varying degrees of vagueness.

Thus we can say, for example, 'the literal God of the Bible is bunk', because the bible makes many empirical claims that are demonstrably false...but we CANNOT say to the believer who claims to 'feel God in his heart' (or equivalent statement) that he is wrong, incorrect, because we cannot enter his subjective experience of reality.

However one gets suspicious of people who have entered into a pre-fabricated biblical faith, whereas I might be more likely to accept that people who have some kind of revalatory experience have better subjective grounds, if still nonetheless bull****.

We can make objective true/false claims with absolutely no problem, but to someone of faith they are irrelevant. They only become relevant when he attempts to assimilate others. Thus we have religious debate, whenever faith treads on the lawn of science and reason.

[monolith94]

It never fails to amaze me how people could possibly confuse paganism with satanism. One is a viable set of spiritual beliefs, the other is adolescent faux-rebel posing.

[Agathon]

It never fails to amaze me how people could possibly confuse paganism with satanism. One is a viable set of spiritual beliefs, the other is adolescent faux-rebel posing.

Yeah. As a satanist, I've always been annoyed by the teenybopper pagans.

[Whaleboy]

It never fails to amaze me how people could possibly confuse Satanism with adolescent faux-rebel posing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanism

It (by which I mean LaVeyan Satanism, some others and their derivatives) is a perfectly valid, peaceful philosophy not unlike a kind of hedonistic Buddhism. It is not 15 year old goths licking tomato ketchup from each other's necks while watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Mr. Nice Guy

There is a lot of bitterness and cold-heartedness on this message board, btw, and it's not just against Christians.

What's the matter mods? Have you just become desensitized to this kind of stuff?

As bitter and coldhearted as those Christian proselytizers refusing aid to non-Christian Indian tsunami victims if they didn't 'convert' ?


As bitter and coldhearted as the Catholic churchman lying about the effciacy of condoms, as bitter and coldhearted as the Pope urging Bosnian rape victims to bear the fruits of the crime and violation to full term ?



As bitter and coldhearted as those goodly church people in 1950s America denying civil rights to people on the grounds of who their parents, grandparents and ancestors were ?



Or as bitter as the churchmen, theologians and congregations of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa who used the Bible as support for their revolting system of apartheid ?

[Agathon]

It is not 15 year old goths licking tomato ketchup from each other's necks while watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Ooooohhhhh

[Whaleboy]

Was it a painful adolescence, Agathon?