The God Delusion

[Whaleboy]

Perhaps a book might give you data or a viewpoint that
affects the way you see things. It might make you rethink
the way you regard an issue...

It can do more than that. If you are an intellectually honest person, and you read a book which utterly refutes your views, you are obliged to reject your position in favour of the better argument.

The only thing that gets in the way there is our pride, or dishonesty. If you can honestly turn round and say that no book could make you change your mind, then you're not basing you views upon reason and logic, but (for want of a better word) faith. You cannot come to an unshakeable view which allows for no doubt, and no room for disproof by means of logic alone.

But I cannot see how a book can completey overthrow
a person and make him change his worldview totally....

Then I pity you.

Unless the person has been cut off from differing views
for the entire span of his life.....

What? It requires exposure to different opinions to encourage an honest approach to forming your own. If you're surrounded by dogma and an unshakeable will to be correct all of the time, and damn the evidence or superior arguments, I'd have thought you'd be more likely to adopt that bad additude yourself.

I never mentioned these forms of enforced conversion either.

Apologies. I misunderstood your original post to mean showing a book = evangelising or forced conversion.

That is for that person to decide.

My point was that you cannot overthrow a persons ideals
by force and just expect them to adopt the new order.

No you can't do it by force but where in this thread has anyone used “force”? The book doesn't unleash an army of metaphysical “Word Warriors” into your brain which forcibly change your neurons. It demonstrates a logical structure which, if stronger than your own, you yourself adopt. You still choose whether or not to do so, but for some people that choice has more to do with (dis)honesty than the strength of the argument itself, which is wrong.

I think the only way your argument could possibly make any sense is if you're saying a book forces you to change your views in the same manner as a torturer, instead of the manner in which a judge is forced to consider a defendant guilty in the presence of sufficient evidence.

[beingofone]

Whaleboy:

A leaking gutter?

Gee; I never thought to look up.


Of course the car was parked on the side of the road but I guess when reaching for any other explanation then what we want - any will do.

You could always say all four of us are deluded so you can continue to live in the flat earth society.

Of course the rain with no clouds could be explained through jet stream and fancy physics. The only problem is it was pouring rain straight down and there were multiple eyewitnesses - I guess we might as well tag another half dozen as deluded so we can continue to maintain a strong grip on what may overturn our pet beliefs huh?

Open your mind and heart and let a little light in there Whaleboy. The universe is in a state of infinite momentum and there is more for you to experience than you could possibly imagine. But not if you continue to cut yourself off from your own heart.

Shalom

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by Whaleboy
How is it a troll thread? I was asking a quite reasonable question.

You were asking if it is OK to tell your parents that you think them to be dangerous children. How is that not a troll?

[Whaleboy]

Of course the rain with no clouds could be explained through jet stream and fancy physics. The only problem is it was pouring rain straight down and there were multiple eyewitnesses - I guess we might as well tag another half dozen as deluded so we can continue to maintain a strong grip on what may overturn our pet beliefs huh?

You'll need to do better than that .

Life is full of little incidents that have an absense of data. Are they repeatable and something that can be demonstrated?

You see, you have an absense of evidence, why are you attributing what you have seen to God. What reason can you give to make that assumption, other than "I can't explain it, ergo it must be a miracle"? Unless you claim to have seen the Almightly relieving his bladder on the roof of some random car, you have no reason to attribute what you have seen to God, and no reason to reject a rational explanation.

Since I was not there, nor have any knowledge of what happened other than that which you have told me, I can't comment on it further. If you produce a link or reference to an article, that would be interesting to read.

You were asking if it is OK to tell your parents that you think them to be dangerous children. How is that not a troll?

That makes absolutely zero sense. Read the OP.

[DinoDoc]

I did.

[Whaleboy]

Open your mind and heart and let a little light in there Whaleboy. The universe is in a state of infinite momentum and there is more for you to experience than you could possibly imagine. But not if you continue to cut yourself off from your own heart.

Since you don't know me, I don't think you're particularly able to talk about my heart. I'm open to religion, and I will not say with absolute certainty that God does not exist. I do not think that God does not exist, I "judge" that God does not exist, and I have argued accordingly. Why should I accept that God exists through my heart?

Your argument is a convenient little shortcut that avoids the rigours of intellect and critical enquiry. "Since reason will show God doesn't exist, ignore reason". No thanks .

[Whaleboy]

I did.

Then I worry about your skills of comprehension.

[DinoDoc]

It's just fine.

[C0ckney]

i really enjoyed the parody of that unbearable tosser dawkins in yesterday's observer

[Arrian]

Whaleboy, if you don't see how your OP was trollish, you're beyond dense. I can only assume you are playing dumb.

-Arrian

[Provost Harrison]

C0ckney, as ever, the great intellectual. Care to elaborate?

[Jon Miller]

Originally posted by Whaleboy

Why Hawking? I think you could have happily mounted a good argument as a criticism of Descartes, and that wouldn't answer Epicurus way back in the B.C.

But there was no scientific exlpanation for the universe's existence preHawking.

JM

[C0ckney]

Originally posted by Provost Harrison
C0ckney, as ever, the great intellectual. Care to elaborate?

recently, for the first time ever, you actually posted something which didn't bore me ****less (that divorce thread), and then you go and ruin it.

anyway it was by armando iannucci and pretty funny. it's probably on their website.

[Caligastia]

I looked on his website and youtube but couldn't find it.

[Elok]

Originally posted by Whaleboy
I think we're having very similar thought processes about the same thing; yours has lead you to man's fallen nature, and so has mine in a similar sense. I consider morality to be emotive in nature, perhaps originating as a result of our evolutionary history. It is society with its marvellous perversities which presents us with the moral conflicts, the misfiring of natural biological tendencies to produce "immoral" acts, and the conflict between these pressures and our evolutionary biology.

This is a far more satisfactory explanation than one which evokes the supernatural, which I think begs far more questions than it answers.

Also, you criticised GePap because he went from prescriptive to descriptive. All that needs to be done at this point, remember, is describe the basis for a naturalistic moral system (and remember you're not limited to my emotivism, you've got Kant's duty-based imperative not to mention the myriad versions of Utilitarianism/Consequentialism). I don't think you can expect us to sit here and magically induce a Ten Commandments Sans God. That would be far too easy!

I'm sorta busy (between classes as I type this), so I can't answer in much detail...Kant's imperative fails to answer "why should I?" as does every version of utilitarianism I've encountered. Plus we have to face the fact that, in some cases, evil actions have a definite utility to them, at least for the individual. If crime didn't pay, nobody would do it, so to speak. I don't understand the reason for following your emotivism, whatever it is. Is it about acting morally to avoid feeling guilt from the conscience afterwards?

I don't buy the idea that society causes moral dilemmas any more than I buy the "evil, evil religion" scapegoat. Ideas come from people, as do societies, so one way or another it's still ultimately our fault that we're so screwed up. To blame society is to blame ourselves, only collectively so as to dilute the stigma.

I don't expect any Ten Commandments, but the idea of morality is so idiosyncratic--that a being should act in interests other than, and often contrary to, its own--and yet so thoroughly ingrained (and strongly so) in our being, that a system which can't explain it is worth diddly to me. It's as though all humans felt an overwhelming compulsion to wear our underpants on our heads, and you were claiming that said urge existed for no reason. Or for a bad reason that doesn't make sense if you think it through. And this underpants-hat thing has been too influential throughout human history to dismiss it as a freak accident, like a memetic appendix.

GePap: I've heard you make too many normative judgments to believe that you're so free-and-easy about it. Not that I blame you; even Sartre made ethical statements which are nonsensical in his context, apparently without realizing it.

EDIT: Now I've got more time. What I was trying to say (continuing with GePap here) is that moral judgments of the absolute type are too embedded in us to be shrugged off and rewritten by a feat of understanding, as Nietzsche predicted. It's been what, a century since Nietzsche died? And how many forms of new values have been created which do not follow the absolute-value religious type? I can think of only a few: LaVeyan Satanism, and other ideologies of a similar nature. And perhaps Rand's Objectivism, but I don't know what the hell to make of that.